Infidelities Read online

  I wondered why this man trusted me and let me pull the tie. I felt a sudden impulse to strangle him, inexplicable but tempting. Instead, I let go of the tie and loosened it. He panted with his mouth open, baring his teeth, and again he kissed my neck, and bit it, perhaps playfully, but still that shot a wave of fright through my blood. I bit his ear. We kept biting each other, as though we were two wolves, steadying each other in the playful grip of teeth. Our lust affected our bones, and came from our bones, and flesh was in the way. The bones of our love made us both sharp, not dreamy and sleepy as I used to be in lovemaking, not floating in the delicacy of sensations, but aggressively alert. It was as though we wanted to destroy each other—and that did result in a sensation, the kind you have when your life is in question, jumping off a cliff into a deep azure bay, skiing downhill and hitting a bump that suspends you in the air.

  There was an extraordinary undercurrent of hatred in our sex, and it shocked me. I was shuddering, at first I thought in the premonition of an orgasm, but no, from the cold fright. He let go of my neck, and his tie tickled my stomach and breasts as he rocked back and forth. I was nearly strangling him again, holding on to his tie, like a friar to the church bell, while he was smashing his pubic bone into mine in the rhythm of a church bell, and I did indeed hear the ringing in my ears. If the bones were to break, I wasn’t sure it would be mine that would give first. Love and lust aren’t synonyms, as everybody knows, and hate and lust aren’t antonyms, as I found out. Love is usually safe, someone there who can help you, who can spread his arms to keep you from falling, and in that sense, it’s antithetical to that sensation of total collapse and abandon that the most intense orgasms are made of. Hatred, however, helps along that delicious sensation of destruction and self-destruction. That is what I realized as I was coming in this sea, not of joy, but terror. I would not have thought like that if we had not been making love and hate in our sex, and if hate had not prevailed.

  I slid my hands under his shirt, and touched his stomach. His stomach twitched like a horse’s flank when bitten by a horsefly. His skin was smooth and soft. That surprised me because his neck’s hairs stuck out above the collar of his shirt. When my hands roamed further, he gripped them and put them back. That tickles, he said.

  So? Tickling is good. You can tickle me, if you like.

  I touched him again, and he twitched, and lost his erection. That was just as well; we had survived several hours of passion, and both of us sighed perhaps with relief, perhaps with the contemplation of the unsettling nature of our collision.

  Even after he was gone, I sat in amazement at what had transpired and the animosity which hung mustily in the air as a war of different body vapors, his sweat and my sweat, his garlicky, mine olivey, his sugary, mine salty.

  After he was gone, I wondered why he had kept his shirt on, and that is how I went to sleep. I woke up, certain I had had an enlightening dream, like that biochemist who had a vision of a snake eating its own tail, which was the solution for the circular structure of benzene or whatever it was and is forever, of course. Now, in my dream, Dragan appeared in a black T-shirt. I asked him, why don’t you take it off?

  I can’t.

  I will make love to you only if you take it off.

  I’d rather not.

  So I undressed and teased him, and when he took off his T-shirt, I saw a brown scar on his left side, under the ribs, in the spleen area. The scar paled, then blushed, and became angry red. Drops of blood slid out of it and went down his flank. Give me back my shirt, he said, right away! I had thrown it behind the bed. I don’t know where it is, I said.

  Find it! He said. Blood now gushed.

  By the time I took mercy on him, though I thought I had no reason to do it, and wanted to hand him his shirt, he fell on the floor, in an oily red puddle. Blood kept coming out of him, and furniture floated, and my bed turned into a sinking boat. I shrieked, and woke up with the echo of it, from the attic and the basement, the whole house was empty with the aftermath of my shriek.

  I went to the bathroom. The floor was dry. I brushed my teeth. My gums weren’t bleeding. I looked into my eyes. They weren’t bloodshot.

  I had believed in my dreams, but I also doubted them—I had had all sorts of dreams, in some I had lost all my teeth and when I woke up they were still fast in my jaws.

  We were supposed to meet again the following evening after my work. I dreaded it. I would not answer the door. I would turn all the lights off and pretend I was not there.

  When eight o’clock approached, I grew terrified that the man would not come, that he would know I had figured him out.

  SUDDENLY THREE POLICE CARS screeched to the house, their lights flashing. Ha, I thought, they must have the evidence. Once they got him out in handcuffs, I would run out and tell them what I had to add. I put my Nikes on and tightened them, remembering that Nike comes from Greek for Victoria, female winner. Soon the cops escorted the familiar bald silhouette, which wore green. It was the poor pretend-doctor. The nephew showed up on the doorstep and smoked a cigarette. Of course, it was possible that he yawned because he’d had too much sex. Still, why wouldn’t he at least talk to the cops, why wouldn’t he be upset? Maybe he liked it this way, maybe he’d even turned his uncle in, to have more space to himself. Now he wouldn’t need to buy a house. But what did I know what had happened there? I went back to the kitchen and prepared some cappuccino, letting it hiss and spit like an angry cat, although it would be hard to imagine a cat being that angry with milk.

  Soon the doorbell rang. I let Dragan in. This time he was not formal; he wore a black T-shirt, just like in my dream. He brought in red carnations and a bottle of Eagle Peak merlot. I turned on the music, Mahler’s Fifth. Some of the funeral chords in Mahler’s music give me chills, so this was masochistic of me, in all the redness and blackness to have these jarring notes in minor keys.

  You like that music? he asked.

  Love it.

  Why not play some real folk music?

  Later. This is good for a slow start.

  We have been anything but slow and we are way past a start.

  I’ve never heard a man complaining about getting to bed too quickly.

  I’m not complaining. But then, maybe I could if you let others sleep with you so quickly. How many were there before me?

  Oh, nobody else has been so special to me. (My voice sounded more cynical than I wanted. Yes, indeed, nobody was so special, I had to admit to myself. And, I went on talking.) Poor uncle of yours. Why did they take him?

  How do you know?

  I am the good kind of neighbor, I look out the window.

  God spare us from watchful neighbors. Seriously though, my uncle is totally insane. He went around the kidney ward, injecting morphine into the patients. He kept repeating, There’s too much pain in the world, too much pain.

  He’s right about that. That’s kind of charming.

  It would be if the drugs weren’t an additional stress on the kidneys. If he’d done it in the orthopedic ward, maybe nobody would have complained, but what he did was dangerous, criminal. I am ashamed of him.

  But he meant well, and probably the patients were in pain, and felt better afterward. Maybe he knows better about it all than we and the cops do. I think it’s touching.

  He chuckled. That gave me the creeps. Or maybe a particularly well-placed dissonance in Mahler gave me a chill, and if it didn’t, it catalyzed it. As though he understood precisely what went on in my spine, he repeated, You sure you like that music?

  He smiled, sitting in a slouchy posture. He didn’t look dangerous, but almost amiable, low-key, not like an alpha dog, but a beta, sitting at a fireplace with his tail curled.

  Above his T-shirt and inside it, he massaged his pectoral muscle, slowly, sensually. It seemed strange to me that a man would caress himself like that—it was surprising and slightly erotic.

  Out of nervousness, I drank half the bottle, and soon we were kissing on my queen-sized bed. I grew
excited, partly because this had a forbidden quality to it: I had forbidden it to myself, and now I was transgressing. I had of course planned to get to bed, to check out his scar, but I had not wanted to be aroused, and here I was.

  Under the pillow I had a kitchen knife, just in case. I know, that sounds like some praying mantis kind of thing, and if so, maybe the man should have his last wish, without knowing it was his last, to make love. I didn’t mind the idea; in a way, I almost wanted him to become aggressive and dangerous so I could do it. Not that I wanted to do it, but the temptation flashed in my mind.

  As we made out, I slid my hand under his T-shirt, to his navel.

  He pushed my hand away, and said, I’m ticklish.

  Yes, I know you said that, but you don’t mind being touched elsewhere.

  Only my feet and my stomach are ticklish.

  I touched his neck and slid my hands downward, but the T-shirt was too tight from my angle to go further.

  What are you trying to do? He asked. You like collar bones?

  Collar bones are my weakness. Why won’t you take off your shirt?

  Out of vanity. I don’t want you to see how my stomach sags, how my chest hairs are getting gray, and how deep my innie is.

  Now that you have told me all that, what’s there to hide? I know what to expect, it can get only better. Let’s fully undress. Isn’t it funny, we haven’t been naked yet. We have screwed each other’s daylights, and haven’t seen each other naked.

  All right, but turn off the light then.

  I thought about that. I wanted the light to examine him. But I could examine him anyway, I would let my fingers do it. I turned off the overhead light.

  Good, that will be romantic, I said. I’ll light the candles then.

  I took out half a dozen candles and lit them.

  He pulled off the T-shirt, his red underwear, and his soccer-style socks, which went almost to his knees. For his age, he was in good shape; his stomach didn’t sag. He had lied. I had candlelight coming from all the corners of the room, and bathroom light came through a crack and spread wider and wider on the floor onto the wall, but that was not enough to see his scar. So as he lay down, I put my hand on his flank. He shrank, and his stomach twitched.

  Just let go, I said.

  All right, I guess you know a technique.

  I felt all around, touched his ribs, below them, and I could not believe my fingers. There was no scar. What? Could my dreams have been wrong? It was horrible to think that I had found that man and that he was under my fingertips, but suddenly it was more horrible to think that this was not the man, and the other one was at large, who knew where, if he was not dead. How would I find him? Why should I want to find him? Why didn’t I feel relief? I could’ve been overjoyed to be with a man who made love so vigorously—I could have a boyfriend, maybe even a new family, that wouldn’t have been outlandish at my age, midthirties.

  I was in such a state of shock that right away I quit the foreplay. I can’t do it, I said.

  Why not?

  Dark thoughts have crossed my mind and they won’t go away.

  What are your dark thoughts?

  And I told him, in detail, the attempted rape, and how I fled, except I didn’t tell him about the knife and the wound. I said I knocked the guy down with a candelabra.

  That is admirable, that you had so much courage to do that, he said. But why would you think of that right now?

  Why admirable? What choice did I have?

  Do you know what happened to the guy?

  No, and I don’t think I want to know. Do you?

  Why would I? What a question!

  I have no idea.

  Did you think that even before?

  I did not answer. I decided not to worry about anything. (I could worry; yes, I was tempted. It flashed in my mind that if this was not the first man, this could be the second man, the one who went to the basement to drink wine. But then, how did I know that one drank wine? Simply because he grew quiet? Well, this one certainly liked wine. But then, what’s so unusual about that? Oh, no, I decided, I shouldn’t keep having paranoid thoughts. They had to stop somewhere. I was wrong once, I could keep being wrong.) We drank more Eagle Peak; he’d brought two bottles, it turned out, and kept one in his laptop briefcase.

  Let’s shower together, I said. Maybe we’ll make love, maybe not, but let’s shower.

  He obeyed and followed me. I soaped up our bodies, and so in foam, in hot water, we washed, our hairs dripping, our eyes stinging from soap, gasping from exhaustion and lack of air in the steamy cubicle, in the trapped cloud of our own making. He tried to grip me, and I clasped him, but we kept slipping out of each other’s hold; the evasive slipperiness of our bodies made me lose the sense of balance so much that I enjoyed the illusion of exquisitely falling through the clouds.

  The Stamp

  I sought vengeance, and now I dream of forgiveness. My friends, let me explain how this came about. I want to lay it all out. I hope this last journal of mine will reach you, so you can be with me, with my thoughts, as long as it takes you to read it, and I can be with you as long as it takes me to write it, and beyond, though I am not sure there is much beyond.

  On St. Vitus Day, a sunny day early in the summer, it was muggy, with all the steam and coal smoke from trains sitting in the valley. I sweated as I rushed to a photo shop so my friends and historians would have an image of me after I was gone; maybe it was vain of me to imagine they needed anything like that, but on the other hand, I had friends and a sister who loved me, so who was I to think that they would not want my photo? It would be selfish of me not to leave them a part of myself. I paid extra to have the picture done in an hour in several copies; it was expensive, but soon I would not need money, so I didn’t care. I marveled that it could be done so quickly. Who knows what else soon could be speedily done in this world of ours—I regretted getting ready to depart it without seeing the technological miracles to come. Maybe one day letters would be sent without our having to lick stamps. Now I chuckled as I licked the backs of the dull images of sagging Franz Josef with mustaches fit for a walrus for the letters and humorless Franz Ferdinand for the postcards. Sure, soon there won’t be any need for these images one way or another, I would help that. I sat down at a park bench a few blocks away from the river Miljacka and wrote to my friends—and I wanted to say good-bye to my sister, Jovanka, and to a girl I loved, Jelena. I varied what I said; to my sister I wrote, I must go far away. Good-bye. We will never see each other again. I wept when I wrote that.

  To a friend I wrote: Tomorrow I will not be alive anymore; I am dying of an unspeakable pulmonary illness. I loved our walks. (I hadn’t imagined at the time how true that would be; I thought I was lying when I wrote that about the illness. I had expected execution, maybe being shot on the spot without a trial, but here I am, while recalling all this, afflicted with a bloody cough, shivering from TB, but let that not distract me from recalling that day.) I had not imagined I would be so emotional about saying good-bye. My dog, Vuk, followed me everywhere as though he knew we wouldn’t see each other again. I petted him, even pulled out a fat dark tick from his ear and crushed it with my leather sole on the cobbles, and heard it pop. He licked the reddened cobblestone, finding his own blood tasty, and then he licked my chin. Although I would have preferred a different sequence, first my chin, then the tick, I let him. I did not need to fear disease now, and why be disgusted? I was not a Viennese or Parisian noble or burgher to indulge squeamishness, though I was tempted to yield to it, such is the power of culture and slavish indoctrination that we provincials adopted. Vuk gave me the last lick and then shadowed me down the street. I shouted at him to go back, and he pretended to, after curling his tail, but when I rounded the next corner, there he was. I carried him back, and as I was closing the wooden gate, he still managed to get out, so I pushed him back in and kicked him hard in the chest. I could hear him even a kilometer away, howling. I felt miserable. I was tempted to go back and g
ive up the business of making history. What good would a place in history books be compared with the real life and love of such a creature as a German shepherd? I didn’t blame him for being called a German, though I hated everything German; he had nothing to do with them, he only had that name, poor soul, they managed to colonize even animals. Now I didn’t like the idea of never again. But no, this would not be the matter of personal feelings, I should be able to transcend those.

  I had expected crowds to throng along the river boulevard, Appel Quay, awaiting the archduke’s parade, and they did, but where I stood, next to a gas lamppost, there was plenty of space. In my sagging jacket, my hands were getting clammy and cold, and the grenade metal was warmer than they were. I wished I had a Browning like the rest of them; that would have been more straightforward, but I proved to be such a bad shot, and I skipped practices. My hand always trembles a little, which makes it hard to concentrate. Now, that is not a problem when I swing something like a stone or a grenade. As a child in Trebinje I loved throwing stones. I could do it for hours, aiming at trees and lampposts, and I was the best thrower in my street. Even now as an adult in late-night walks in Belgrade in Kalemegdan Park, I would for no reason at all pick up stones and throw them at lampposts. I was an atheist, yet I admired the story of David and Goliath. After reading it in my grandmother’s crumbly Bible in Cyrillic, I walked out and filled up my pockets with stones, and challenged the biggest bully in the neighborhood. He ran after me. I turned around, and aimed at his head, released the stone, and hit him in the middle of his forehead. For years later he had the scar. I feared that one day he would beat the hell out of me, but he did not. He had ceased to be a bully. So I chose the grenade, thinking I would be a kind of David, but all of a sudden my hand shook too much. Actually, I should have felt privileged to have the bomb. A couple of days before, when I chatted on a train with strangers, Gavrilo, who thought I was being indiscreet, took my bomb away. I could have strangled him for that; I was no doubt stronger than he, but he had the support of our group, and they all gave me hell for talking too much. Only a few hours before standing in the street did I get back the bomb from my arrogant and bossy friend, in a sweets shop. We didn’t drink, but we all loved cream pies. I don’t even know how I managed to still consider him a friend.