“Up off your ass. The mayor’s been murdered.” He thought he must be dreaming; he didn’t know where he was. He leaped to his feet. “Oh, fuck this life; everyone has gone crazy!” He splashed himself with water in the men’s room and then went out to see yet another corpse, and then he grabbed a cup of coffee before he’d give the single sentence at the press conference that applied to both: “No comment at present; our investigation is underway.”
17.
The ghetto
fog combs a lock of hair on the street
a cold breath from the west
now (fall 2010)
Every morning he bought four editions of the dailies in the two alphabets; he’d get into his car, drive to the bus station; sometimes he’d have an espresso at the counter in the bistro, and then he’d read the papers till noon if there were no customers. At this time of year the city was a mecca for cemetery tourism. Retirees, groups of hungover soccer fans, nursery-school children who were brought here in training to become society’s future victims, professional patriots, foreigners: every fall they came pouring into the city to visit the massacre sites. They sniffed the air as if expecting to smell the blood, surveyed the lay of the land to gauge what the topographical difference was between an ordinary meadow and a mass grave, scowled with suspicion at the greenery of the grass, examined spots where the ground was bare. On their faces one could read gratitude for their own better fortune, mingling with the excitement of observing without participating. With a gasp they saw the geometrically arranged white stone crosses planted in the green grass as in American movies, and like mesmerized children they shook their heads in awe, admonishing one another with wagging fingers and umbrellas, reading aloud from the memorial plaque: the youngest victim was six months old, the oldest one hundred and three; a pregnant woman was shot in the belly, shot in the belly . . . in the belly, uh . . . rang out like an echo reverberating from the wobbly double chins and waterproof rainjackets purchased for just such excursions. At first he drove his taxi from mass grave to mass grave but refused to take tours to the pit. Until one morning when he spotted two young women speaking in English at the bus station. This was just when the site of the pit was being turned into a war memorial, and when Marko had only twenty kunas to his name. He needed another thirty if he was going to tank up on gas. The place was on his mind every day, and he knew he would have to go back there sooner or later. He went over to the women and inquired, discreetly, if they needed a lift. One of them didn’t understand his question, presumably a foreigner, while the other said yes and asked how far to the pit. When he heard this he shook his head, thinking to beg off, but there was something in her eyes—something elusively dark and dry, so lost that it couldn’t be more lost, something which gave him the feeling that he owed her and himself the trip to the pit. He sensed there was something that bound the young woman to that place, even if she’d never been there; he sensed that everything in the world depended on her going there. He could tell that it had to be him, that the moment had come.
“If you have thirty kunas, I’ll take you. I’ll have to stop at a gas station along the way,” he said, eyes fixed on the ground. The woman took out a fifty and pushed it into his fist without waiting for change. Her foreign companion merely followed the transaction with animated eyes, only intuiting that something serious was going on here, such as, for instance, that somebody from the family of a person who had possibly been a victim at the pit was paying someone who had possibly been an executioner, a former reservist, to take her there. Not knowing, observing the taxi driver’s attempt to redeem himself while knowing there was no way he could. When they got out of the taxi at the makeshift parking area, he stayed in the car, indicating with a glance that he’d wait for them. They walked away to a spot about a hundred feet from where he was parked. He watched the back of the foreign woman in her green jacket and stole glances at the face of the other woman. Between the two of them were about three feet of dirt and 250 dead bodies. The face of the young woman shattered into a thousand pieces while she shrugged her shoulders, doing what she could to answer questions in foreign words about something that couldn’t be explained in her own words. Through the clouded windshield he could see in her eyes a pit filled with embarrassment and the desire to get through this as soon as possible. He froze that image in his mind, and in a ritual that night before he fell asleep he hammered it into the inside surfaces of his eyelids.
That morning he went right by the newsstand near his building without buying the papers, passed his car, and walked on into the center of town. He hoped he’d run into Nora somewhere; he wanted to call her, though he knew he never would. It had taken less than twenty-four hours for her face to start appearing before him no matter where he looked. He stopped at a newsstand in the center of town to buy his papers.
“Yes, neighbor?” asked the vendor with her frizzled yellow hair, peering out through the little window and looking at him only briefly. He piled up the
