We Trade Our Night for Someone Else's Day

who was cozying up to whom. The abuse had now acquired a new dimension, and he answered automatically, grateful for each new question. Olivera served the brandy and arranged the delicacies on a platter. Her careful arrangement of the smoked meats she’d sliced so artfully at an angle seemed pure madness in such a place. She kept sneaking glances at the prisoner while holding the slicing knife, and with a wry grin she went over to him. Knife in hand. He shut his eyes, gulping dried spittle with air, knowing the day would come when he’d pay for all the answers he’d given to the men who were asking. Then he felt the woman’s moist lips on his. The red strawberry of her tongue. He didn’t dare open his eyes. Silence in the room. He felt her hand slipping down between the elastic waistband of his tracksuit and his gaunt belly. She pulled out his dick and sat on it. He sobbed and moved his pelvis; she kissed his cheeks, knife in hand. “I like you,” she whispered in his ear. Then he orgasmed and sank away. She laughed. She pulled up his tracksuit and turned the volume on the transistor back down. The Tiger fighters came back in. “Did you cut it off?” they howled. “There wasn’t much,” she quipped coyly. She came to him another three times, brought cigarettes, warm socks, underwear. Then her father, Predrag, had Ante exchanged, damn him, out of shame that his crazy daughter had the hots for an enemy fighter. The space around him and his warm socks in the barn was now empty. He missed her later and, later, he also wanted to kill her. Olivera spent the next year and a half at her aunt’s in Mladenovac, in Serbia.

Then she returned to the city, single mother, by then, of Dejan Vujanović—later Kristina’s student in the junior class of the high school where she taught—a tall, bright-eyed boy who sat near the back of the room. When he was assigned an open-ended essay, he wrote about the poems of Delimir Rešicki for his Croatian language class, and about Branko Miljković’s poems for his Serbian class. A boy who mostly smoked by himself on the school grounds, absorbed in his music and poetry; he organized interviews for the school paper and drew wry comic strips. He listened attentively to Kristina in class and gave her that rare pleasure in teaching she’d found now and then among junior-year students, which made up for all the dimwits who were waiting only for the next soccer game so they could brawl. Little Dejo was Kristina’s neighbor in her apartment building, and she still remembered him from when he was a child, when she and Ante first moved back to the city. He never made trouble. Once, long before, a few years back, she heard him through her open window when he was playing with the other children on the street, and she’d never forget it. He was about ten, living in a neighborhood where there were very few other Serbian kids, and he called out: “Whoever wants to be on my team, raise three fingers”—and then he added, in a singsong voice, “or two . . .”. This moment of his sensitivity to the fact that Serbian kids responded by raising three fingers while Croatian kids raised two was something that would have been almost impossible to explain to anybody, especially anyone who wasn’t from the city. Every so often his mother would pick on someone and harass them, and now Kristina’s turn had come. And all because of that thoughtless comment she’d posted to Facebook about the Thompson concert. She wasn’t even a fan; Thompson was no Bruce Springsteen, but Ante was the spokesperson for the veterans on the city council and he had tickets for VIP seats, so she was going. Though this seemed pointless to her, especially now, when one group was putting up signs in Serbian Cyrillic all over town and another group was tearing them down.

3.

Moving toward

they say

they don’t recognize me

now (fall 2010)

Her first interviewee that morning lived on Švapsko Hill, along Republike Austrije Street. She hadn’t made an appointment; it was more effective to show up unannounced. Despite everything being nearby, Nora hadn’t made sense of what the receptionist-in-training explained to her on the map with its tangle of one-way streets. “Go straight, and at Kruna Mesara turn right,” he said, but Nora was bad at following maps. She was never entirely sure where she was, where she was walking from, where she was going; in short, her position in her mind and her position on the outside did not necessarily coincide. She realized she could easily waste the entire morning, so off she went to the bus station, close by, hoping to find a cab. She spotted an Opel Corsa in a parking lot along the way, but when she got to the terminal, there were no cabs. Just as she’d made her peace with setting out on foot and stopping someone every so often to check if she was going in the direction of Kruna Mesara, the cab driver from the night before stepped out of a small store. Nora was the one, now, who walked up to him. He gave no sign that he’d ever seen her before. She stood in his path.

“Taxi?” she asked with a wary smile.

This threw him off. He looked at her, surprised, and then, as if only then recalling that he drove a cab, he said:

“I’m not driving just now, sorry; I’m busy, in something of a rush.”

“But last night you were here. You offered me a ride, remember?” Nora wasn’t backing down. She was surprised he didn’t remember. What else was going on? The night before, he’d really wanted to be a cab driver. Nora didn’t think of herself as a particularly memorable person, but she didn’t expect to be so completely ignored. At thirty she could still pass