Brigita Arsovska had moved to the city from Zagreb not long after the peaceful reintegration, when an opportunity for a position came up in an at-risk school, with all the associated privileges. But even with the benefits package to sweeten the deal, a person had to have a strong stomach for work in the city. It had taken twenty-seven excavators trundling through the streets to clear away the rubble from the ruins of buildings, sometimes mixed with human bones. Her father, a retired officer of the Yugoslav People’s Army, had moved the family to Zagreb from Macedonia. She and her mother and father lived in an apartment in New Zagreb, and their day began early, at 5:00 a.m., with Pavle Arsovski’s hacking coughs. While her mother polished his boots, Brigita served her father breakfast in the early-morning gloom, as she’d done as far back as she could remember. He was always silent, sometimes more aggressive, sometimes less. He demanded submission, discipline, and quiet. And his only daughter often failed to meet these three demands. Her mother noticed very early on that Brigita was wont to steal away and lacked respect for authority, so at least for that she appreciated Pavle’s fierce parenting. When Brigita was in the eighth grade, she’d load her pockets up with eye shadow and eyeliner she’d shoplifted and go out for a walk through the Travno neighborhood. Under her woolen sweater she’d wear a close-fitting T-shirt she’d borrowed from a classmate. Once, her father saw her sitting on a park bench with a group of kids who were guzzling Badel cognac. He said nothing, but she jumped up and walked three steps behind him to their apartment. By the time she reached the elevator she’d already wet herself, and she didn’t go to school for the next five days.
A few years later, Pavle began coughing harder, louder, more often, until tiny red droplets became an everyday sight on the white bathroom tiles. The cancer advanced quickly; Brigita slept in until 9:00 a.m. the morning after the funeral, waking up more rested than she’d ever felt. The day was sunny. When she came into the little dining room where her mother served breakfast, she met her mother’s lost gaze.
Brigita wanted everything, but more than anything she wanted money. Good hard cash, full of promise, money that could grant her wishes, money that didn’t discriminate, that forced people’s true nature out in the open; from the bottom of her heart she wanted money. And with it, she wanted fun.
In 1991, just as the war was breaking out, she enrolled at the Zagreb Teacher Education Academy; she knew she’d need some sort of higher education if she was to live up to her ambitions. That very evening she went right across the street from the academy to the swanky InterContinental hotel. This was one of the many casinos in the capital city with an elite clientele and the requisite massage parlors. Brigita’s plan was to study by day and work as a croupier by night. She landed the job there and then. She was nineteen and a striking beauty with slightly exotic, Grecian features, long black hair, a slender face, and dark, almond-shaped eyes. Her petite, hooked nose only enhanced her charm, and she was quickly put in charge of the tables with the high rollers. She was eloquent, even seductive, and though she didn’t sleep at night and slept only two to three hours during the day, she had the kind of bounce that always gave her an arresting appeal.
It was only a matter of time before she found herself a boyfriend with a pistol tucked in his belt. Schweppes showed up in her life in 1992. He was the Boss’s sidekick, and five years later, during the flurry of revenge killings among the kingpins of the underworld, Schweppes, who’d surfaced here and there in the war zones, vanished altogether.
The existence of the criminal network was never proved, and the rest of the gangsters cleaned up their act and forged a legal footing for their businesses. In the corner of the casino with the best view of the tables sat the Boss, whose favorite pastime was smacking croupiers with a baseball bat whenever one of them began to lose. He kept it by the table leg in a gilded umbrella stand. Those first war years were the most exhilarating. Organized crime flourished, hand in hand with the emerging state. The criminal underworld, with the casino as its outlet, rose to the surface with the blessings of the highest echelons of government. The relationship was reciprocal. While the gangsters dressed up as army generals by day, plundered diamonds that had been locked away in safes, and dabbled in matters of state over coffee, the army generals unclasped their medals by night, pulled on their balaclavas, and went underground. Not long after the new powermongers consolidated their positions, bloody clashes erupted, and there was a savage reckoning—for humiliations never forgotten, the festering insult. Blood was the color of the 1990s. What with all the decomposed bodies, holes in heads, sundered limbs—there was nowhere to go. Killing was the only option left.
ÄÄÄ
The real world around me
I reach out
I touch things
A soft knock came through the thick office door padded in quilted leather. Brigita quickly slipped the tape recorder into a drawer and sat down at her desk. Professor Kristina Gelo scanned the room to see if the principal was alone.
“May I?” she asked from the doorway.
“Come right in. Sit down, please. Is class out?”
“Yes.” Kristina smiled and dropped her hands with their carefully manicured nails into her lap. “But this high-pressure weather system is more than I can handle. My head’s throbbing; there are no seasons anymore.”
“You’re so right about that; I never know what to wear,” agreed Brigita, and then she coughed and went on, a little
