Heritage of Smoke Page 15

  “It’s not pop psychology, you brat. You just can’t talk like that!”

  “Leave my cat alone!” Neda crawled to the cupboard whispering, “Mitzzz, mitzz,” but Mimi hissed and spat and growled from the narrow space between the tiled floor and the plywood of the furniture, perhaps saying in her language, I’ve had enough of this shit, I am going back to my tree, next time don’t bother to look for me. I’ll eat sparrows and mice, and that will be better than the crap you feed me.

  Marko picked up the bit of bacon and threw it out the window to the dog, the furry devil, who welcomed the tidbit with a snap of his jaws.

  Marko laid out the bacon on the cutting board and sliced and ate it raw, and chewed with his jaw clanking loudly. “You disgusting pig,” his wife said.

  “Oh, lovely to hear your voice,” he said. “And what pig are you talking to? It’s dead and not disgusting! And what is this? In this family, only the dog likes me.”

  The stranger had stopped whispering in Aramaic. Marko offered him bacon, and Mom said, “Do we have to explain again that it’s against his religion?”

  “And what is his religion?”

  “Ich bedauere, dass ich Englische besser nicht spreche” Mom said to the stranger.

  “Oh, dass ist alles in Ordnung” replied the stranger.

  “Warum sprechen Sie Deutsch? Wo haben Sie die Sprache gelernt?” asked Marko.

  “It’s easy for me. It’s basically Yiddish.”

  “You grew up among the Jews?”

  “So I did.”

  “Who is your father?”

  “I have no idea. My mother says he disappeared in the Six-Day War, and he left her pregnant with me before she got a chance to find out who he was.”

  “So where did you grow up?”

  “In East Jerusalem, near Herod’s Gate.”

  “And how did you join this band of refugees?”

  “Who says I joined anything? Neither a follower nor a leader be! By the way, do you mind if I have another glass of wine?”

  “Not at all.”

  The stranger drank half of it, topping it off with water.

  “You behave like a regular Dalmatian,” said Marko. And he kept slicing bacon and chewing it, while the stranger drank wine contemplatively.

  Marko drank more Šljivovica, stepped out to smoke, came back, chewed more bacon with white bread, grew red in the face, gasped, and fell off the chair, which splintered into pieces. He made croaking sounds on the floor.

  “My God,” shouted Mom. “He’s having a heart attack!”

  “Do something!” shouted Neda. But neither she nor Mom could move, shocked by the sight.

  Pretty soon Marko stopped moving, probably dead. Foam appeared in his nostrils, reddish. A breath came out of him, like the last air of a flat tire, and he grew still.

  “Call an ambulance, for God’s sake,” said Neda.

  Mom shouted, “Oh my God, my God!”

  “Yes?” answered the stranger. His lips were red from wine, all the cracks of skin healed by the redness.

  “Yes, what?” Mom said.

  “God is a good idea,” said the stranger, “especially now. You don’t need an ambulance, there’s not enough time. By the way, sometimes I talk to the Heavenly Father. You may think I am crazy, that I suffer from the Jerusalem syndrome, as many visitors of our beautiful city do. I think the Father will help us here.”

  He kneeled on the ground, turned Marko onto his back, and pumped his chest with his palms. Then he leaned over and did CPR for a minute.

  Marko groaned, inhaled deeply, coughed, and sat up. “What happened?” he asked, and stood up with the stranger’s assistance.

  “You’ve had yourself a little heart attack. But you’ll be all right, old sport,” said the stranger, and gave Marko a slap on the shoulder. “I think you are better off drinking red wine,” he said, and poured more of it. “Maybe that’s how you’ll remember me when I am gone.”

  Mom said, “How did you manage that? Are you a doctor? A Jewish doctor? I heard they were good.”

  They kept drinking all night long, listening to the stranger’s stories, fell asleep, and when they woke up, they remembered not a single word of these stories, and both the stranger and Mimi were gone, not a trace of them. Neda found Mimi on Brothers Wolf Street, atop the weeping Christmas tree, which had shed even more resin tears overnight for the sorry world, so that Neda’s jeans got all sticky climbing it. As for where the wandering Jew was, Mimi couldn’t offer an answer in a language Croats would understand.

  IDEAL GOALIE

  Davor traveled from Frankfurt to Eindhoven by train. He was exhausted from the long hours of work on construction sites as a Gastarbeiter—a guest worker—from Croatia. He cursed himself for not studying more at school and not becoming a doctor. But how could he study? Soccer was everywhere, games were always on, and he played pick-up soccer with his friends. Despite Yugoslavia being a poor country that couldn’t retain its players for very long before they all emigrated abroad, where they usually played better than they did at home, one of its clubs was in the final round of sixteen.

  It was his favourite club, Hajduk. Davor blushed a little to think he’d collected signatures to vote the Hajduk goalie as the most handsome player in the league. He was eleven when he did that, and the Belgrade newspaper, Tempo, published the votes that he’d mailed in from his hometown, Omis, near Split. He had forged half of the votes, and Vukcevic came in third. Bjekovic from Partizan was first, but that simply had to do with the fact that Partizan had more fans than Hajduk. Now he laughed at himself for the childhood naiveté and the terrible waste of time.

  He watched the plains while on the train. It rained, and the rain made the window look like old glass, distorting the soggy landscape of hops plantations and stuccoed houses, each one of which displayed a row of red or yellow aspidistras in the windows. He longed for his native rocky beaches and fig trees. Fresh figs, green on the outside but purple and brown on the inside, tasting heavenly, slippery, and sweet in the sun. Lizards crawling under the stones.

  Outside his compartment sat a Kosovo man on a huge disk of cheese, which he must have brought along from home—his capital to deliver to a restaurant. It looked better and more reliable than currency, and was probably pretty comfortable to sit on. At the Dutch border, the man was ordered off the train, and the police interrogated him about his cheese. Because he had long hair, Davor was harassed at the border too, and even his toothpaste was squeezed out in search of illegal drugs.

  “Why is it that the only two people ordered off the train are from Yugoslavia?” Davor asked in German.

  “It’s just a coincidence.”

  “Why don’t you bother Germans and Englishmen?”

  “We don’t bother anybody, we are simply doing our job,” was the reply.

  Davor made it to Eindhoven and walked into a bar to fortify himself with some Grolsch before the game. He popped the patented beer cap and drank from the green glass.

  At the stadium, he was surprised to see some of the old players on the Hajduk team: Jerkovic, Vukcevic, Holcer, along with some new ones such as Buljan, a tall, bony, thuggish player who could stop anyone and who could run through a defense in a straight line. Davor drank whiskey and shouted, “Hajduk, Haj-duk, samo naprijed!” Forward, Outlaws!

  A powerful wind blew away the Hajduk cap he’d had for years. Newspapers, umbrellas, flowers, they all flew across the stadium, carried by violent gusts. Davor felt a bit asthmatic. That damned cement dust was probably turning his lungs into a wall, and any change in the availability of oxygen affected him.

  His idols ran out onto the field. What tall and powerful men! Raised in Split, in the sun, eating small fish with the bones, they’d grown up to be bony, strong, with an aura of vigor to them. Vukcevic came out last, and he was a bit pale and greenish in the face, as though he wasn’t feeling quite right. Davor imagined what must have been going on in the man’s head— maybe Vukcevic had enjoyed himself too much the ni
ght before?

  Vukcevic stood unsteadily in front of his goal. The night before, the team had stayed up a little too late, excited by the Dutch hospitality. He’d made love without a condom to a boisterous girl, and now he had an itch, and he wondered whether it came from too much rubbing or some disease. How will I go back to my wife? I’ll have to use condoms at home if I don’t abroad. Why did I do it? Sure it was nice, somehow very slippery, more so than at home.

  The whole trip had thrilled Vukcevic. Just as he had imagined, the wind moved picturesque windmills in the country outside of Eindhoven, and lifted many miniskirts downtown. After taking a walk, he’d had a hard-on like an adolescent. The skirts shook in the wind like an invitation, and a girl on a bicycle chatted him up. “I’ve seen your picture,” she said. “I hope you won’t defend your goal too well.”

  She lifted one of her legs and planted the other on the pavement. Her thigh was long and graceful and it glistened.

  “I hope you won’t defend yours,” he said.

  “Mine, what?”

  “Your…well.”

  “Is that like a proposition?”

  “If you are going to answer yes, it is.”

  Now he wondered whether she had been sent by Dutch soccer fans, or even the club managers. A pretty good strategy—get the goalie wasted, keep him up all night, get him to smoke hashish and drink wine and beer, and then send him into the field.

  He fought a gag reflex full of Grolsch fumes and burped, and the wind beat back his burp and filled him with air. He felt bloated and weak; the wind could pick him up and he’d fly out of the stadium like a balloon.

  He stood some ten paces in front of the goal when, totally unpredictably, the wind carried the ball from a midfield kick from the opposing team and missed his net by a few feet. That would have been totally embarrassing if the Dutch had scored like that.

  He kicked the ball out as hard as he could, high in the air, but the wind brought it back to him like a boomerang, and the Dutch, who seemed to understand playing in the wind, were all in Hajduk’s half. A ball that didn’t look like a hard kick accelerated and suddenly changed direction. Instead of his catching it with his hands, it hit him on the head and he fell to the ground. He stood up like a boxer after a knockout.

  At one moment Buljan knocked down a player, who had passed nearly the entire Hajduk defense, in the penalty zone. An eleven-meter kick was assessed. That would certainly be a score for the Dutch. Vukcevic tried to read where the ball would go by the angle of the striker’s feet. It looked like it would be a low shot to the right. Instead of flying to catch the ball, as he’d usually do, he stood in the same spot. The ball went straight at him and hit him in the chest, bounced, and he jumped forward and caught it as the Dutch player rushing the goal leapt to avoid hitting him.

  The stadium burst into screams. It looked as though the goalie was brilliant for not letting himself be faked. Every goalie took a chance to fly based upon a read and, if a fake was even a bit decent, it was sometimes easiest to strike in the middle of the goal. Most experienced and self-confident penalty kickers occasionally chose to do that. Thanks to total inertia, he’d made a save.

  That was that—now he couldn’t ask to be replaced. The hard ball hitting his rib cage had knocked the air out of him, and he was even dizzier than before. Luckily, a couple of balls flew by him and the goal post, and it simply looked as though he was a good reader of shots.

  Then there was another penalty kick. He had no time to move and the ball was in the net, in the very top corner. A minute later, another ball somehow landed in the net. He hadn’t noticed how that had happened, but it clearly had. Still, it wasn’t all that bad because Hajduk had scored as well.

  It was the ninetieth minute. Hajduk had won 1-0 in Split, and if the score stayed 2-1 for Eindhoven PSV, Hajduk would go on because scoring on the opponent’s turf counted for more than scoring at home. So, Hajduk had basically won. The players were kissing and hugging each other, and Vukcevic was biding the time, placing the ball on the sixteen-meter line to kick out, then changing his mind. He rolled the ball, put it down again, and picked it up. The referee warned him that the game would be extended if he kept it up.

  Vukcevic tossed the ball and wanted to run at it but slipped and almost fell. His gag reflex came back. Had he indulged in oral sex as well? What would happen to his gums? It was the wrong moment to think about that. The referee extended the game for one more minute and gave Vukcevic a yellow card for avoiding active play.

  He’d managed to burn at least twenty more seconds anyway, and if he kicked the ball far enough, into the jungle of players, everything would be all right. He tossed the ball in the air and kicked as hard as he could. The wind shifted the ball’s trajectory, so that instead of kicking with the tip of his shoe, he connected with the roof of his foot. Nevertheless, it was a fine and strong kick and the ball went high up.

  He had an incredible itch, and so he scratched his groin and didn’t follow the path of the ball. When he lifted his gaze he was amazed to see that the ball was flying back above him. Another gust of the wind brought it down, right under the goal post.

  The crowd exploded with jubilant screams. The Croatian players sank to their knees. The score was 3-1 for PSV. The goalie had scored against his own team, or more precisely the wind had, but since he was the last one to touch the ball, he was the human agent of self-destruction.

  He apologized to his teammates, but none would talk to him. A long line of Dutch fans, mostly blonde women, awaited his autograph. Auto-goal was enough, he would not autograph. Their faces blurred in his mind, and they all looked like the woman from the night before. He tried to spit, but his mouth was dry.

  Outside the stadium, as he walked to the bus, he heard Croatian Gastarbeiter screaming obscenities at him. Yes, it was terrible that he’d let them down like that. But he did save a penalty kick. Sure, these workers lived miserably abroad and wanted a little bit of joy. But was it his fault that they were such losers, that they had nothing else to live for? The world was a big place, full of opportunities, and if you couldn’t find any other source of hope than a stupid game, you deserved no pity. Or you deserved pity, but wouldn’t get any of his sympathy. He flashed the international go-fuck-yourself sign and turned his back on his compatriots.

  Davor saw Vukcevic’s fuck-you sign. After all those trips, hard-earned tickets, to see his idol behave so arrogantly!

  Two weeks later, Davor took a night train to Split for a brief vacation, unpaid leave. He’d been drinking steadily since Haj-duk’s loss. At one point, he’d twisted his ankle, and now it was swollen. He wrapped it up in a shirt, which he kept soaking in cold and salty water. Once he got home and soaked the foot in the Adriatic, he would recover fast, his foot anyway, but he would still grieve for his soccer club, and even more for all those years he had followed soccer, eagerly awaiting games, listening to the radio, and all those mornings and evenings he spent discussing the previous night’s soccer match with his friends, and the games yet to be played. He had remembered all the games, all the moves, all the players.what a waste! Who would compensate him for all that garbage in his head? He could have learned the names of all the trees and medicinal plants and mushrooms, and even all the fucking stars in the heavens, but now he had a headful of soccer stats. In a few years, nobody would remember these arrogant boys who had made the nation breathless, nervous, always awaiting victories that rarely transpired. There is no greater unhappiness than that of a fan of a relatively good, extremely talented club that somehow never makes it.

  He was in a compartment with a German tourist going on vacation. When she leaned down to remove her water bottle from her backpack, her breasts swayed, unfettered by a bra. The train conductor came and made love to the tourist. Davor pretended to sleep but the noises made him too excited.

  When the conductor left, the tourist still lay there with her skirt pulled up.

  Davor came over and touched her knee. She slapped him, hard.

>   “What’s that for?” he asked. “Don’t you want to do it?”

  “Get lost or else.”

  He was ashamed. How come she wanted the train conductor and not him? Maybe they’d had a soulful conversation, maybe the conductor forgave her a fare, and what could Davor offer her? Neither soul nor fare. He went back to his side of the compartment and stretched out. He couldn’t sleep all night.

  In the morning, in Split, he drank some coffee in the first café he could find along the walls of the Diocletian Palace. He certainly didn’t miss the flavour, but nevertheless he drank the espresso that must have come from the dregs, a second or third run through the same grind. Suddenly he noticed Vukcevic several tables away, drinking with a beautiful brunette in a white tennis dress, probably a model. So, you bastard, he thought, you can still be happy. You give us heart attacks when we watch your games, and here you are, relaxing, happy, adored.

  He even had the gall to emanate charisma. He looked very well, somewhat plump, his black hair shining, with strong eyebrows and a twinkle in his eyes, as though he’d just come up with a clever joke, and he probably had.

  Davor noticed there was a souvenir shop, and he walked over to it. He bought a hunting knife with the Hajduk circle-of-wheat emblem engraved in the imitation ivory handle, and then jauntily strolled toward Vukcevic. He visualized lifting the knife and shouting, “For Eindhoven!” The knife hit the shoulder blade and went through it, partly, but stopped. Davor left the knife sticking in the bone and turned to run. He’d forgotten about his ankle. It twisted again, turning outward, and he fell.

  The part here that was not imagined was that he fell with the knife in his hand just as he was shouting “For Eindhoven,” but the knife was still in his hand, and clearly he hadn’t stabbed Vukcevic, although he did have a momentary blackout during his fall. He wasn’t sure whether it was before the fall or after that his mind blanked out.

  A couple of young men got to him and lifted him to his feet.

  “You wanted to stab Vucko?”