We Trade Our Night for Someone Else's Day

board. Below his photograph and the announcement about the award ceremony there were notices of labor-union discounts available to library staff for the purchase of bedding and Zepter cookware. This seemed somehow pitiful, somehow tawdry, somehow unfair. He couldn’t imagine why everything around him had suddenly gone so rapidly downhill, why people had no teeth or souls; there was something false in everything around him. That very thought momentarily appalled him. Like the many others who were wandering around with him, there was no mobility to his neck, and his gut was hard as a rock. He’d never stopped to look left or right, never back, only forward, avanti, ahead, straight into the fragmented stupidity which allowed no forward movement. He had no soft core, only a terrible, rigid, stonelike gut, preventing him from crouching, squatting, down to the point where everything begins. All he knew to do was to march onward, especially over those who couldn’t stand, and from the heights he couldn’t hear the joints snapping and the flesh rotting. He had no past, he knew nothing of it; all he had were images, until he simplified them to the point that they became comprehensible, ordinary, and comforting. Climbing the steps to the great hall, he stared at the thick, heavy curtains that had enshrined the vast windows for almost forty years, inscribed with writings from the gospels. He remembered his grandfather, Miroslav, and an incident when he and his grandfather had been traveling by train while he was still a very small boy. The train had stood for a whole eternity between Ruma and Šid when a woman poked her head into the compartment to ask whether they knew what had happened and why they were standing there so long. The old man said nothing at first, but when he exhaled a cloud of reeking smoke from his endless mouth, staring out the window, he simply said: runover. Without a blink. Things like that were always happening everywhere. Godnar strode into the hall; the people rose to their feet and applauded.

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The special session, open to the public, had been scheduled to start more than a half hour before. The journalists and camera operators were buzzing around in the hallways, and the deputy to the mayor who’d been killed the night before—more recognizable for being the only person in a gray suit than for anything else—was seeking, with his gaze, the support of at least some of the members of his political party on the council so he could call the session to order. Almost all of them, at least in the first rows, stared at the floor or straight ahead. In a shaky voice he called on those present to hold a moment of silence. The hall was filled with the noise of metal chair legs scraping on the parquet floor, until all the representatives were standing. The week before, when the mayor had shown up at a session unannounced, at the moment the municipal budget was voted down by one vote, they’d also averted their eyes. At the time he’d been on sick leave, waiting for the state attorney’s office to initiate proceedings, and then he’d ended up having a surgical operation that was presented by the opposition as the most ordinary sort of excuse spun to the press. As the meeting was about to get underway, he’d come charging into the hall, tripping over the camera cables and microphones, and torn off his suit jacket. His voice had cracked as he unfastened the buttons on his shirt, ripped away the bandages and gauze with trembling fingers, and displayed the fresh scar from his recent heart operation, when he’d had a pacemaker implanted. There were sutures—as black as disease—protruding from the swelling, blistering skin, and to the council members, until only yesterday colleagues and friends, he’d offered to pull his heart from his body so as to cut short the speculation in the media about him feigning illness. Ashen and rumpled, he’d glared straight at Brigita, who was sitting in the first row, while she fixed her gaze on the pile of papers before her. Soon after this performance, the decision was adopted to hold new elections, costing the city—with one of the highest rates of unemployment in the country—another thirty million kunas. Now again she fixed her gaze in front of her, while all she could see before her eyes were Darko’s bare feet and the foam from the cat’s snout dripping down them.

“Please take your seats,” announced the mayor’s deputy after a full minute of silence. Nobody needed to be asked to be quiet; they were all waiting for him to speak, in hopes that they wouldn’t have to.

“First”—he coughed, visibly shaken and smoothing his thinning hair across his head toward his ears—“may I express my grief at this indescribable tragedy, and then my sympathies to the family, friends, and colleagues of our late mayor. I hope the police will do their job as quickly and efficiently as possible so we can bring stability back to the city.” The councillors nodded in sympathy. The deputy paused, drumming his fingers on the table and swaying slightly in place, and did what he could to gain control over his voice. “Until then, we can’t do much, can we, under these extraordinary circumstances. Over the next days we’ll set the date for the new election, and until then technical matters will be handled as usual. Allow me to dissolve the council in its current form, and thank you all for your service.” He nodded and sat back down. The councillors soon started fidgeting, turning to one another and whispering. None of them were in any hurry to vacate their positions, either literally or metaphorically, though judging by the recent developments and imminent election, it was inevitable that some of them would be leaving their seats on the council. Just as it was clear that what with the growing poverty and upsurge in nationalism, the next election, after