Infidelities Read online

  Fragments of the neighbor’s bones were found under the stones and bricks, mixed with fragments of cat bones, and one would have needed a forensic expert to sort out man and cat. So the math teacher’s relatives and Marko gathered the bones, and placed them in a little coffin for an infant, and since the cemetery on the hill was too close to Serb positions, it took considerable courage from them to bury the box in the ground. Serbs in the hills could mistake them for Croat soldiers setting up a cannon. Not having much time, they dug a shallow hole, and left the box there, with yellow soil and rocks over it, to await peace, when it could be placed deeper in the ground, and when the mathematician’s picture could be found, to be set into a gilded oval frame—like a chick back into its egg—and placed on the glazed tombstone over the bones of man and cat. But for now, nobody had his picture, and there was no time for glazing the stones. To everything there’s a season, a time to love, and a time to hate, a time to work, and a time to rest, and now was the time to blast stones, not to glaze them. And now was no time to linger and walk slowly, but to run.

  The following night, there were air-raid sirens, but no air raids occurred.

  “Let’s leave the town,” suggested Dara in the dark, and her voice came to Marko together with the fluorescent hiss and firefly luminosity of the electronic clock.

  “No way. I’m not going to give up everything I have here. Who is going to give me a shop elsewhere? And who could I sell my shop to now? Now it’s worthless.” Still, all he could see was the limy clock light, and he spoke to it, as if to a single ray of reason placed in the dark history.

  “But let’s go to safety,” Dara pleaded. “This is horrible.”

  “Where, to Serbia? No, not after this close call.”

  “How about Hungary?”

  “Hungarian is not even an Indo-European language. You want to live in a place where you don’t understand anybody?”

  “Yes, that would be wonderful! What did all this soulful understanding here get us? Here all of you have been bragging about big Slavic souls for decades, drinking yourself into blackouts to prove how chummy you were, and where are your chums now? Knifing each other. So yes, Hungary sounds great to me.”

  “You can’t look at it objectively now. We’ve had a lot of fun, no matter what, in this damned federation of ours. Turn on the radio, let’s see what the world says.”

  “Surely not that we are having fun.”

  But before the news came on, they both fell asleep, and then woke up when Danko screamed. He crawled in bed with them, and although he’d been weaned a long time before, he probed with his hands to find breasts, and by mistake, he attempted to suck on Marko’s nipple, but neither of the males found that comforting, and so Danko groped for Dara’s breasts. “What did you dream, sweety?” she asked, but he wouldn’t answer.

  In the morning, they found out on TV that there was a truce worked out by the United Nations and Cyrus Vance and by the British Lords talking in fine lispy baritones about how unbecoming it was for small nations to wage wars, how tribal and primitive and savage, while at the same time the British Lords supported various air raids of their own in far-flung regions, and while their own enforcements of unity at home resulted in quite a bit of discord and bombing.

  And, after the truce, for several days, people walked in the streets, unafraid of mortar fire from the hills. Marko took the advantage, despite the cold November weather, to replace the tiles on his roof, and he got the glass for his windows, and even patched up the stucco.

  Passersby teased him, seeing him work like that. “Boy, you are an optimist?”

  “What did you say, optometrist? A kind of visionary, you mean? Yes, you’re right.”

  One dusty morning, Marko drove to Hungary, where groceries were much cheaper. He couldn’t go straight north to Hungary, but had to deviate west, to Bjelovar, from where the roads north were clear. He envied the Hungarians—all over the place there were loud and bright ads for American and German companies, the roads were freshly asphalted; women bravely wore extremely short miniskirts, despite the cold weather and feverish men’s eyes. That could have been us, he thought, if we knew how to get along.

  He drove into Pecs, and after buying sausages, cheese, canned goulash and hot peppers, and many other popular items for his store, he took a walk down a fashionable street, and ran into a bar, Playboy Club. He walked in, and five women in bikinis swarmed around him, offering him flutes of champagne. He retreated suspecting they would take his money, basically mug him. Still, where were the men? Well, why would they need the clubs when their women were undergoing a sexual revolution?

  On the way back, when he crossed into Croatia, it was dark, and although he thought he knew the roads well, at one point he wondered whether he had crossed into Serb territory. Now, he shouldn’t fear, he thought, he could tell them he was a Serb, but he had no papers to prove that. His ID would state that he lived in Croatia. He ran into a ramp barring train tracks, and wondered whether to wait. Perhaps it was an ambush. And then the train passed, brightly lit, with not a single passenger visible on it. Where were they? Lying on the floor, so snipers from the woods wouldn’t shoot them? Where were the engineers? Perhaps it was a blinding ghost train barreling across the Balkans like a smart bomb. After the train, the bell clanged and the red-and-white-striped ramp lifted. Was there anybody observing the crossing and seeing him?

  He kept driving west on small roads without edge markings, and several times he almost slid off the road. Only when he hit the major roads going to Zagreb, which, despite the war, emanated a pink aura into the foggy sky as though advertising its Eros, did he find his bearing and orient himself enough to go toward the Orient.

  When he got home, he slammed the car door and turned on the flashlight to go in through the front, and he saw red graffiti written on the pavement in front of his house, Serbs Go Home. Next to the graffiti were new grenade markings, resembling a large flower, with one bulbous hole and scars emanating straight out—away from the hills from which the grenade was lobbed—like petals. He wondered whether his family was all right, and he rushed inside. They were all playing dominoes in the candlelight.

  The pavement sign depressed and scared him even more than the grenade scars. The following day he didn’t go to work, but stayed in bed, drank tea, and went to the bathroom to shave (as though that would clean all the trouble out of the way), which he did three times that day (his beard was strong, but one shave per day would do), and he brushed his teeth a dozen times. During each cup of tea, he urinated several times, as though all the icy anxiety in him could be melted and dissolved and pressed out and drained, down into the subterranean traffic of filth and offal, to flow far away. There was no bombing that day, and he got several calls from his customers, mostly Croats, who were wondering whether he’d keep his store open. Most stores were closed, and it was hard to buy food, so they begged him to stay open. And yet, he was not sure whether they really begged him or gleefully and luridly tempted him into a trap, or whether they waited for him to lose his nerve and to flee, so there would be one less Serb in town, which eventually, he was sure, they all hoped would be purely Croatian.

  Still, many people indeed needed groceries, and while starving, they would not worry about his Serbdom. And so, in the morning, the next day, he went to work and opened his shop. He had record sales. Although most people frowned, and without saying a word, bought their goods, some expressed their appreciation for his staying open. And some even told him jokes. Branko, his old friend—so old that Marko now remembered how in fifth grade they measured their penises together to see whether they were normal and exchanged basic know-how about masturbation—told him this one: “A Serb, a Croat, and a Bosnian are the only survivors of a shipwreck. They are holding onto a wood plank and freezing. A gold fish swims up to them, and the Bosnian catches it, but it slips out of his hands, and then the Croat and the Serb catch it together, if you can believe it, one holding the tail, and the other the neck, if a fish has a ne
ck. Goldfish says, Fine and gentle people, please let me go. Ordinarily I do the three wish routine, but there are three of you, so each one gets one wish. The Serb says, Oh, please put me in the middle of a tavern, dancing kolo, with accordion music and a gravel-voiced pevaljka. Done, said the fish, and the Serb vanishes in the wind, straight to a Serb tavern with a wild female singer. The Croat says, Oh, put me on an Adriatic beach, with a jug of bevanda, and make the winds blow from the south. And the fish says, I can’t guarantee about the winds, because it’s the second wish, but I’ll put you on your beach. He disappeared in a wind and landed on a nude beach in Croatia, where he was disappointed that there were no naked German women. And the Bosnian says, I’m so lonely. Could you please get both of them back here? Sure, said the fish. Done.”

  And the whole day passed in good cheer, as though there was not a worsening war taking place. The next morning, Marko walked to his shop, whistling cheerfully. He passed by an old stuccoed house, which in the rains had lost some of the sandy layers, and now, a sign from 1945, in insistent red, appeared, Comrade Stalin Great Friend and Protector of Small and Oppressed Nations. And on a new bank emerged the sign, beneath bullet riddles, Life We’ll Give, but Trieste, Never! Again in red. Of course, Tito gave Trieste back to Italy in exchange for Western protection against Stalin. Comrade Tito Loves Flowers and Children. Marko had never noticed these signs before; perhaps the buildings were painted frequently enough to hide the slogans, but now, the unwashable history lurked and jeered. Marko smiled, finding the old printed signs next to graffiti-like crooked and jittery ones—Long Live President Dr. Tudjman and Croatia for Croats—irrepressibly ridiculous.

  But he did not smile for long. In front of his shop lay heaps of shards. Perhaps a bomb hit the pavement and the windows were shattered? But when he came closer, he realized that was not the case. Inside the shop, all the shelves where shattered, the merchandise gone. Plum jam jars lay shattered on the floor with jam splashed, dark red, and gluey, like spilled brains. The cash register was gone. He’d taken the money along with him the night before, but the register was worth a lot. The door leading to the storage room was smashed, and splinters lay scattered on the floor.

  He kneeled, with his knee bleeding on a small shard, but he didn’t mind the pain. He wept. Damnation! This is the end. What’s the point? It would be better if they’d killed me, at least I wouldn’t have to suffer.

  What should I do, what should I think that I should do? How could I think? What’s there to think? You can think only if there’s something to believe in, something to strive for, a goodness, a value, a gauge for all matters. But here, I can’t believe in anything, and I can’t think of anything.

  But still, he wondered, Who did it? Well, Who didn’t do it? Serbs destroyed the town from the outside, Croats demolished it from the inside.

  He walked home slowly. On the way, he noticed another shop, also Serb-owned, totally demolished. A work copied out of history books, Kristallnacht.

  At home, he told his wife what had happened.

  “Jesus, even the Croats are insane.”

  “What do you mean, even?”

  “This is it, we got to leave!”

  “Where would you go? In a world like this, what difference does it make where you go?”

  “It’s not like this in Germany and Austria.”

  “With our luck, as soon as we got there, it would be like this. They’re sick of foreigners, exiles, Southerners; if I had a shop there, they’d firebomb it, I’m sure. Or they’d find some kind of exile camp, more or less a concentration camp, in the outskirts of Vienna, to keep us in for years on cheap sausages and water.”

  “You are a pessimist.”

  “Realist. A realist resembles a pessimist because life always leads to death. Life unavoidably ends in the worst-case scenario—disease and death. So how’s one to be optimistic?”

  “At least we have each other, and we have our kids, and we are all healthy!”

  “You call this healthy? I’m sure I have ulcer, cancer, and if I don’t this very minute, it’ll grow in me. All this explosive cancer all around us can’t stay only outside, it will creep in, has crept in, and it’s eating me. Don’t talk about health.”

  They didn’t tell the kids anything.

  AT NIGHT, there were more sirens, and they went back into the basement and sat on crates of sugar and salt.

  Danko said, “I hope they drop a bomb on my kindergarten.”

  Marko slapped him over his mouth with a backhand.

  “What did you do that for?” asked Dara.

  The boy cried and wailed.

  “I’m sorry,” Marko said. “That was an awful thing to say, I couldn’t control it.”

  “He’s just a kid.”

  “I know. I am sorry.”

  “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “Okay, enough of that.” He picked up Danko and wanted to cuddle him, but Danko bit him and wouldn’t let go. Marko pinched him until he did. Marko’s forearm was covered in warm son-spilled blood.

  “See, evil has crept into all of us,” he said.

  “Oh, now the universe is responsible for your bad temper.”

  “Precisely.”

  “I’m hungry,” said Danko.

  “You have no excuse to hit our lovely child.”

  “Don’t talk. Feed him if you want to prove a point.”

  At least that wasn’t a problem. Marko had stored quite a few supplies in the basement, but he didn’t have the can opener handy so he climbed up the stairs, to get one, and as he climbed he vaguely remembered that he shouldn’t take risks. What if there was an explosion now? Well, now he’d welcome it. God, please, let there be one!

  He brought along spoons as well, and so the whole family feasted on refried beans and pickled peppers. They stayed in the basement until dawn, which brought light even into the dusty basement—not enough light for Marko to see the particles of dust drifting, but enough to realize that the night was over. And indeed, there were no more explosions, from the aircraft or from the hills. By now everybody was asleep, the attackers and the attacked, perhaps even God, but that did not prevent the light from growing its indigo blue into a gray haze.

  Marko and Dara carried their sleeping children upstairs; Marko the older one.

  “Time to sleep,” Dara said.

  “Yeah, right. I have a day off. Maybe a life off. Plenty of time. I don’t even need to sleep. How about sex?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Well, yeah, survival of the species is in question. Besides, the kids are asleep.”

  “Let me think about that.”

  “About what?”

  “Sex.” She yawned.

  “You’ll fall asleep.”

  “Let me at least take a bath. I haven’t had one in days.”

  “I haven’t either. How could it bother us now?”

  “Well, it bothers me. You better take a bath, too.”

  Later, in sex, he quickly ran out of breath, gasped, and rolled over, thinking he was having a heart attack. Damn, can’t even do that anymore! Soon however, he regained his breath, and, after she merely touched his abdominal muscles with her nails, his abdomen twitched and his erection came back. He renewed his efforts, and tried to recall a Hungarian in a windblown miniskirt, any Hungarian, but he remembered no images, only concepts about images. His wife could appear overweight, but she didn’t seem so to him; he found her proportionate, fleshly, voluptuous, and he liked her wild frizzy hair tickling his neck and ears and even back while he clasped her. His amorous efforts didn’t last more than several heartbeats, and he rolled over and panted again. He was tempted to be embarrassed, but what would be the point of shame? In his heightened sense of threat, his body didn’t wait for anything, in digestion, sex, breathing—everything was heightened. He didn’t measure his blood pressure, but was sure it would be at least 200 over 120. Ten minutes later, he measured his pulse, and it was over a hundred, as though he were an astronaut ju
st landed on the Moon, and he might just as well have been one, on a moon of blossoming craters, the dark side of the Moon, which the Earth did not see, and did not bother to see, for where was that Earth with its global villages to stop the current accelerated disasters?

  Dara moaned, and he wasn’t sure whether she was having a nightmare or whether she had stealthily continued to stimulate herself, to make up for his lapse.

  Still, after all the sexual twitchings and gasps and contemplation about various pressures, he grew calm and breathed slowly, feeling safer and safer, or more and more indifferent to whether he was safe, and so he fell asleep, with images from wakefulness dancing in various colorful forms, with falling leaves becoming schools of yellow fish, swimming deeper and deeper, and this sinking sensation was for a time comforting and pleasant. Sleep, wonderful sleep! Marko was aware of welcoming and praising his fuzzed-up consciousness. But not for long—for he was not safe, not even in sleep, where his dreams ambushed him in a kaleidoscope of blood and jam through which he tried to swim, to extricate himself, toward light, but the light turned into shards that cut into his eyes, spilling them. He woke up, sweating and shivering, relieved that it was all just a bad dream—nothing was cutting into his eyes, except the light from the window. He wasn’t glued by his blood to the shards of his shop. The pleasure of waking up used to consist in some subliminal awareness that after a nightmare there would be the bright sunny denial—the rays of daylight would melt away the ghosts. He’d frequently had bad dreams, but even amidst them, he was somehow aware that all he needed to do was to wake up, and he’d be safe. And now waking up didn’t help, for the more alert he was, the more he realized that the actual threats were perhaps bigger than he had imagined. What if he stepped out in the street and was killed by a Croat soldier? Maybe they’d start shooting civilian Serbs. Who’s to say that stealthily they couldn’t take them into the woods and shoot, massacre, burn, bury? What if, after he took several steps, a grenade fell, lobbed from the mountain from his own compatriots. What if…and it was not much if, to his mind now, but more likely, when. What will happen when a grenade falls….