“What do you want? Don’t come trampling on the dead bones of my Ante,” the old woman said tartly, in lieu of an answer.
“Ma’am, I can’t begin to imagine how this has been for you, but if you could spare me a few minutes, it would mean a lot to me.” Her eyes drew even more to a slant. This was the moment when Nora really gazed into another person, trying to understand, and her gaze did, indeed, shake the old woman, but only for a moment.
“Leave me alone—what do you want to know? All I ever had has been slaughtered, burned, driven away, and now my beloved boy’s been killed. Prison is not enough for that whore . . . I saw what a snake she was.”
“Kristina?” She tried, with every ounce of her urgency, to keep the conversation going, at least in the doorway.
“I told him then, ‘Why couldn’t you find a normal woman, one of ours, who’d look after you, who’d bear you children! And not this teacher; did you need that?’”
“What do you mean, ‘one of ours’?” The word “ours” immediately burned in Nora’s ear; she knew what “ours” and “theirs” meant around here.
“Ours! That Chetnik bitch’s father fled the city way back at the beginning, and she and her mother went around telling everyone the poor man was shot, who knows by whose bullet . . . Damned half-breed.” The woman’s eyes filled with tears, and her sparse, pure-white hair was swept by a draft at the open door. This information about Kristina’s father’s background was new to Nora, and she wasn’t certain she could trust it. Just when she was about to ask for clarification, the old woman seemed to come out of a hypnotic trance and shot her a piercing look.
“Leave me alone, and don’t you come back here again!”
Nora was still holding her breath, feeling the warmth wash over her through the doorway and rise to her ears, which were, by now, beet red. She stood for a few minutes at the slammed door before she breathed again, and then she turned, trying to remember which road the cab had come along to bring her there. The streets on Švapsko Hill were steep and zigzagging. The best idea was to go downhill, following the slope, and keep her fingers crossed that this would bring her to a place she’d recognize. The conversation hadn’t given her much. The old woman, seared with fury and pain, had nothing left to hope for. Nora wondered how she spent her days alone in that house—how she woke up each morning and how she got up out of bed. It would be so much simpler to stay burrowed under the covers. And was there, when the old woman first opened her eyes, that moment when the memory of the horror hadn’t hit her yet? That state of floating into consciousness that lasted maybe two or three seconds, when the body, brain, heart haven’t yet adapted to reality, horror still hasn’t etched itself in the body’s DNA, and reality is only gradually settling? Nora could still summon that feeling at times. Every single day, at least one random event bolstered her conviction that her decision never to have children was the right one. Nobody won. Things were set up in such a way that something always happened, whether to the child or the parent. And after that, the remainder of one’s life was reduced to memories, waiting, repeat.
Walking toward the center of town, Nora jotted down a few notes on her pad: Chetnik bitch, children, Kristina’s father. On her way down the hill, she decided to find a place where she could order a decent meal. She’d skipped the hotel breakfast that morning and could no longer remember when she’d last had a proper dinner. Her next appointment was set for some yet-to-be determined time in the afternoon, at the Hotel Lav café.
She chose a table with a view over the Danube. She had her back to the entrance, so all she could see in front of her was the fat, murky green river, which she loved to watch flowing by. As a little girl, she’d been horrified by the sight of uprooted trees swept along in the currents. They traveled so slowly, but their shapes were still difficult to see clearly, changing in the watery mists. The branches jutting from the tree trunks reminded her of the arms of a drowning person waving to attract attention, but though they held their branching arms high the whole time, nobody seemed to notice. A hand appeared suddenly on the table next to her notebook, cell phone, and pens. A man’s hand, with a gold signet ring on the little finger. The owner of the hand was standing over her, his other hand across the back of Nora’s chair, watching her with tiny, watery blue eyes, a thin nose, and barely noticeable lips. His face looked as if it had been sketched by a six-year-old, with no color, details, or affect. When the straight lip line moved, he spoke—“The lovely lady is dining alone?”—and it spread into something like a smile. Nora turned, caught short by the question.
“Yes; I mean . . .”
“May I join you? I, too, am dining alone, and we could keep each other company,” he wheedled, reminding her of one of the characters from the Topalović family and their funeral parlor in the cult film—what was it called? From the old days of ex-Yugoslavia. She thought she remembered the words “marathon” and “family” in the title, but wasn’t sure. Yet this man seemed to be a character straight out of that film, right there in front of her, snapping his fingers to signal to the waiter that his place setting should be moved to her table.
“Godnar.” He extended his hand,
