“I don’t have much; I bring it along and if it doesn’t sell, at least I’m out and about with other folks,” said a man with gnarly hands like grape vines. “Take it, go ahead; you needn’t pay me if you’re just passing through.” His voice was in total contradiction to his appearance, pure and soft, almost shining. Nora looked at him for a long time, then asked for two pounds . . . no, four. He picked up a paper bag, and only then did Nora see the bad tremor in his hands; the grapes that spilled over when he tried to shovel them into the bag. His eyes were watery, as if about to pour out of their sockets. She didn’t have to imagine him. She looked down at the ground. This part of town was the only part of the city that had been renovated after the city was “liberated.” The rest lay in rubble for years, as if the authorities were afraid to rebuild what had been ravaged this way, so the marketplace area shone in contrast to the rubble. She’d seen the photographs: yellow façades, kitschy brick, red roof tiles, straight out of “Hansel and Gretel.” Soon after peaceful reintegration, word got out that there was yet another mass grave right there under the marketplace. They tore the whole place down again. Undoubtedly there were bits and pieces still down there, gold-chain necklaces and the like. The grapes rolled off over the ground, and when she stepped on one, it squished and went from black to red. Nora took the paper bag, overpaid, and thrust in her fingers. She scooped grapes into her mouth, closed her eyes. As soon as she turned the nearest corner, she tossed the rest into a trash can.
16.
People from the cities
blue light on blue faces
and a blue voice from the blue box
now (fall 2010)
He hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours. They’d roused him the night before around midnight, summoned him to the station just as he was starting to drive home, figuring that with so little traffic he’d be in bed in twenty minutes max. At the edge of town he swerved, cutting across double solid lines, and raced to Gundulićeva Street. His colleagues had secured the area and were holding anyone who might have seen something. A few tipsy kids had found the body. In a ditch, not far from the Serbian consulate, a man lay on his stomach, his face in the mud. They’d figured he was “dead drunk” when they spotted him stretched out like that and walked over to him, hooting and swigging booze. All they’d planned to take were his cigarettes; that’s what they kept saying. Digging through his pants pockets and the inside of his jacket, they thought he was breathing. Using a cell phone as a flashlight, they saw that the mud on the man’s temples was mixed with clotted blood. Then they panicked and fled, but the one who’d gotten blood on his hands decided it would be better to go to the police. The two others cursed his mother because they still weren’t home when the police came knocking at their doors that night, and their shocked parents nearly fainted dead away. The police soon rounded up all three kids and brought them back to the scene of the crime to question them. Inspector Grgić arrived to find quite a crowd, so he parked at the entrance to the consulate. There were clusters of people scattered throughout the courtyard, like dark magpies descending on a meadow. Death was nothing new in the city, but it was associated more often with massacres than with this sort of intimate affair; people found this variety more difficult. About a hundred feet away, across the road, stood a group of his colleagues led by the coroner. A little farther on, the father of one of the boys who’d found the body was having a heated dispute with a policeman, with allusions to an attorney and trauma. Grgić, without a word of greeting, addressing his colleagues with only a nod, strode over to the ditch and crouched by the lifeless body. A small spotlight shone on the bloody hair and the pale, mud-splattered face of Nikola Vrcić, junior reporter. There were gobs of saliva and half-digested food around his mouth, and his right arm, though still attached to his body, looked as if it weren’t his, or as if somebody had slapped it on as an afterthought, backwards, to his shoulder. Even a quick glance showed the death had been violent, but the cause wasn’t easy to pinpoint. A nasty blow to the head, bloodstains on the pale concrete of the freshly laid curb some five feet from the ditch, the battered body and probably a fractured arm. Traces of vomit on the face. Once the larger spotlights were set up, they could see skid marks. The inspector paced slowly around the scene of the crime, making larger and larger concentric circles and checking the night sky more often. It was dark and pierced by stars, at once clear and black, as deep autumnal nights sometimes are. Steam rose from his nostrils and mingled with the smoke from the cigarette he’d pinned between his fingers. He wasn’t supposed to be here at all; he should have left years ago. He’d seen everything at least once before—time was all that was needed for it all to be revealed. Over the last five years that Grgić had worked
