The whole sordid affair—his unethical pursuit of her, his suspiciously quick emotional attachment—filled him with shame. He was grateful she had had the common sense to end it, as he doubted he would have been able to do it himself.
He ate his lunch and paid, walked a block and couldn’t remember what he’d eaten. He was in a narrow street heading upward. Someone at the hotel had said there was a palace and church on top of a hill.
When Saskia dropped him he spent two weeks in such anguish that it disrupted all his work. It was fortunate the semester was over. He remembered the resolution he’d made in his twenties, after two relationships came and went in quick succession, to avoid entanglements. They were too unpredictable and painful. Smart people were supposed to learn from experience. He saw that he was in danger of continuing to repeat this folly if he didn’t address the underlying cause. He had hidden from Susan’s death the way he hid from everything uncomfortable. Bubble-boy had become bubble-man.
He had had the excuse, when she died, that the place where it happened was too dangerous to visit. (Her body was shipped home and his mother identified it. Mark saw nothing but the box, later the urn.) But the area had quieted down after some political agreement was signed in Washington this past March. You could be granted access, and even transport, provided you had a compelling reason, such as the death of a relative who had worked for the UN. So Saskia dumped him in June, and after he picked himself up off the floor he started calling people. And here he was.
At the top of the hill. He looked at the church. He looked at the palace. He went back to his hotel. He spent the rest of the afternoon catching up on colleagues’ recent research, then dined in the hotel restaurant. Heavy curtains, silver-plated claptrap, Central European fare: wiener schnitzels and the like. He wasn’t hungry, but he ate a cutlet in a brown sauce with those doughy wet white things whose name he couldn’t remember. He usually didn’t drink, but he had a glass of red wine.
His last conversation with Susan had been over dinner in New York City. That was March of last year. She’d just spent a number of months in the Netherlands. She’d originally gone for pleasure, a stay with old friends, but while she was there she got caught up with the plight of the Bosnian refugees who’d recently washed up in the country. There was as yet little structure in place to help them, so Susan, Susan-style, merely showed up where the refugees were being housed and volunteered to do whatever was needed. Within six weeks she was able to speak and understand elementary Bosnian, and since she also knew Dutch, she accompanied refugee families to welfare bureaus, rental agencies, school offices, and so on, serving as an interpreter. Some of that work brought her into contact with officials at UNHCR in The Hague, and eventually she decided she could be more helpful if she went to Bosnia. But first she returned briefly to the US.
“To put your affairs in order?” Mark remembered joking uneasily, during their dinner. She was in the city for only a day and a night. She had called him out of the blue all of six hours ago, expecting to catch up with him by phone, but by chance he was in Manhattan for a conference. They met at a cheap Indian place she knew in the East Village.
“Well, sure,” she said (or something similar). She still had some stuff in storage in Cleveland, and wanted to pick up a few things, also visit friends. She might be gone for a while.
How long since he had seen her? He had to think for a moment. More than two years. She’d dropped by their parents’ house briefly for Christmas in 1990. Seeing her now, he thought she looked great, but he always thought she looked great: capable, full of ideas and energy. She was tall like him, nearly six feet, broader-shouldered than he was. She had their father’s build. Her hair, which she kept short, was ashy like Mark’s, but thicker and wavier. Strong chin, strong nose. When she was still in her twenties, she would turn her face profile and say, “hatchet,” then turn it back forward and say, “shovel.” But that was just a joke.
Now she was thirty-eight. She’d spent her twenties bouncing around the world. She ended up in Cleveland—Mark didn’t know why, there were a lot of things she kept to herself—doing some kind of work (gofer? researcher?) for a legal aid firm. After she’d established Ohio residency, she went to Kent State and majored in Peace and Conflict Studies. Turns out, she told him, the Kent State program was one of the oldest in the country. They’d started it after the Ohio National Guard came for a visit and shot those four
