Heritage of Smoke Page 8

  Now, you had to admire Hodzic’s shots, even though they didn’t go in. I think there should be a different scoring system, whereby each hit on the crossbar should count as half a point. Three crossbar hits would have amounted to 1.5 goals, and Dinamo would have made it. Anyway, the crowd was in a wounded state, throwing crackers. In the stinging smokescreen, anything could go, and it did. Many of us jumped over the fence, and right in front of me, I saw a man with a machete. Another grabbed the referee, a Dutchman by the august name Rembrandt, pushed him on the ground, on his knees, and the first one brought the machete down, beheading him. Somehow it looked normal at first…easy. The head fell and rolled and ended up sideways in the grass, stopped by the hooked nose.

  I followed another group of hooligans, who got hold of Dinamo players, beating them systematically. Somebody knocked Hodzic down, and several people kicked him, shouting insults, scumbag, good for nothing, they bribed you, didn’t they, fucking whore…

  One of them said, I have a better idea, let’s take him to the zoo.

  I think I’d had a whole bottle of Hennessy during the game, and instead of sobering up upon seeing the beheading, I went along with the hooligans. Hell, I was one of them. I must admit, I even gave Hodzic a kick, somewhere in the kidney area, and I was one of the guys carrying him to the zoo. There were five of us, like pallbearers.

  The zoo had modernized recently. It used to have barred cages, but now, with Croatia being members of the E.U., the zoo had to become more humane, and tigers got a bigger cage, an acre of land with trees to sharpen their claws, with a little pond to drink water from and bathe in, and these were new Siberian tigers, Putin’s present to Croatia. Putin had just retired in Croatia, having bought the island of Ugljan.

  Anyway, we tried to toss Hodzic over the fence into the cage, but the fence was too tall, and Hodzic fell out of our hands onto the pavement. He shrieked.

  Oh shut up, you should have kicked that ball a little lower, we shouted. Why go that high with it, freaky ass.

  Let’s take him to the grizzlies, someone proposed. These august creatures were a political present too, from Obama, delivered by John Kerry, the foreign affairs minister, when he visited a couple of years ago. Croatia had proven to be a faithful peon of NATO, starting with smuggling arms for the Syrian rebels, sending peacekeepers into Egypt, etc.

  There’s a long tradition of presents in the form of animals. Indira Ghandi gave Tito elephants, Mao Zedong panda bears—so now we had grizzlies as well, named Bill and Hillary. Anyway, these guys were massive, male probably 800 pounds, female 450, even bigger than the Siberian tigers.

  We had to climb the fence to throw him down, and he landed on the rocks, a little island. Bill and Hillary jumped to the island and sniffed Hodzic. We shouted, Tear him, eat him, but the bears merely sniffed him all over for a while and then licked his face. They did not bite him. Hodzic didn’t move, sprawled and loose like a rag doll. Bill roared at us and jumped at us on the fence, but the fence was ten yards removed over a chasm, so he fell into it, climbed out, and growled at us, and jumped again. This time he managed to reach the fence and climbed it, and knocked down one guy and snapped his neck.

  I ran. He bit my right calf and tore it right out. I pissed in terror and ran out of the zoo and into the streets, and a cab driver gave me a ride to the Rebro hospital. I bled richly and groaned until they cut off the circulation to my leg and gave me the shots to stop bleeding, and morphine. At first it had hurt less than I imagined it should—shock is a natural painkiller—and that’s how I had managed to run for my life.

  At the hospital, I passed out from loss of blood and the morphine. When I woke up, I was in horrifying pain. I stayed in the hospital for days. The surgeons patched me up, but without these muscles, it was clear I would limp for the rest of my life. At least I had the rest of my life. I wondered how Hodzic was doing.

  Online, I found a report that Hodzic had a broken spine, a concussion, broken ribs, and a ruptured kidney. He was in critical condition at the Rebro hospital. Thank God we hadn’t killed him. I swore I would never watch another soccer game, and I would never root again for any team. Croatia—both individual teams and the national team—was banned from international competition for four years anyway.

  If I hadn’t been there, the same thing would have happened; there were enough hooligans without me. Maybe I shouldn’t feel terribly guilty, but of course I should.

  When Hodzic recovered enough to go around in a wheelchair, I volunteered to take him places, and we became fast friends. I took him to Gradska Kavana every morning for a macchiato. Because of spinal cord damage, he’ll never walk again unless medicine improves.

  And what do we talk about? Anything but soccer.

  For a whole year, I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that I was one of the thugs, but one day, we were relaxing and in a particularly fabulous mood.

  Let’s go to the zoo, he suggested. I want to say hi to Bill and Hillary. You know, she saved my life by licking me and nursing me. I think I was clinically dead—I saw my dad and mom in Heaven, and we ate baklava together. I think there’s life after death.

  We took a cab. On the right side was the Dinamo stadium. He turned away from it.

  I helped him get out of the cab with his electric stroller, and we went past the Siberian tigers to the bears. I had no reason to be glad to see them, but Hodzic shouted, Hello my friends! Both bears stood on their hind legs and made strange noises, something between a growl and a roar, but a couple of octaves higher, the way they would talk to a cub.

  Beautiful, aren’t they, he said. See, they remember me. Next time I am going to bring them some trout.

  You aren’t supposed to feed them.

  I can do what I want. You’ll help me get here?

  Of course.

  What would I do without you?

  You know, Bill ate my right calf. I am not eager to feed him. I already did.

  I know. I’ve read the articles.

  You knew it all along? That’s crazy. Why would you talk to me?

  I saw the pictures, security camera pictures, and I could tell that one of the silhouettes was you. And then there were articles about the bear, how he killed two hooligans and tore up your leg.

  And you don’t blame me?

  Of course I blame you, you ass, but I understand. You were a fucking hooligan. You weren’t the ringleader anyway.

  Generous interpretation.

  Not generous. Let me show you something. He leaned over, opened his jacket, and I could see he carried an Uzi. Guess what that is for.

  Security?

  No. I am waiting for the other two. You are okay—you suffered, and I got to know you, and Bill avenged me, but when I see those motherfuckers, off they go.

  Wow!

  It’s vow, not wow. So when can you come back to feed Bill and Hill with me?

  As I stared at him, looking kind of like Stephen Hawking in his wheelchair, with thick glasses and a proper black jacket, with a red tie, I imagined I was seeing him for the last time. But am I stuck with him? If I quit seeing him, will he put me on the list of people to shoot? With thoughts like these, we couldn’t be friends anymore.

  Adios, my friend! I said, and turned my back to him, my hard-sole leather shoes crunching the sharp gravel, and a chill crept down my back, as though a bullet would go through me any second.

  ACORNS

  While the JFK Terminal 1 loudspeakers announced the last call for the nonstop to Frankfurt, John hugged his wife, Ana Tadic, burying his nose in her black hair. It smelled of her shampoo, chamomile and menthol.

  “Are you really sure you want to go?” he said. “Dozens of journalists have been killed there.”

  “No interpreters, as far as I know.”

  His moustached lip slid past her mouth, brushing her cheek.

  Ana slid out of his embrace. “Don’t forget tuna for Leo!”

  She walked through the gate. Her steps thudded on the walkway. She sat next to a woman wh
o was on her way to join her husband, a Baptist missionary, in Tirana.

  “But most Albanians are Muslim,” Ana said. “You want to convert them?”

  “There are quite a few Christians among them. Are you trying to convert me to not converting people?”

  “Touché.”

  Meanwhile, a curly-haired child insisted, “Read bookie!”

  Ana envied the intimate joy emanating from the mother and child, and she resented herself for being such a poor sport. Now, at the age of forty-four, she wanted children. She and John had avoided procreation for a decade, as there were too many or phans in the world. Now she felt like an orphaned woman whenever she saw mothers.

  One day later, Ana rode to Banja Luka, Bosnia, in a UN convoy. They ran into mudslides, passed houses smoldering in smoke, and checkpoints where they waited as the drivers and officers smoked with Serbian soldiers, giving them gasoline and cartons of cigarettes. That’s what a love of languages has got me! she thought. In Cleveland, in the old ethnic neighborhood on the East Side, her father had taught her Croatian in the evenings when he wasn’t too exhausted from factory work. He’s died of lung cancer just around the time that Joe Eszterhas had moved from LA to Cleveland—with throat cancer from cigarette smoke—in a quest for healthy living.

  Through a hazy dusk, Ana looked on as the mayor of Banja Luka and Colonel McGinnis toasted.

  “What am I to translate?” she asked.

  “Nothing for now,” said the Colonel. “At least I know how to toast.”

  “Oh yes,” the mayor said. “Tell him I’m inviting him to a local ballet performance.”

  Ana translated that while the mayor tiptoed, mincing his steps and wiggling his buttocks.

  “Ah, that’s all right,” said the Colonel. “I’m not a great fan of the ballet.”

  “This is no ordinary ballet,” said the mayor. “It’s progressive, interactive. You get to meet the ballerinas, you participate.”

  Ana went along with them in a UN jeep.

  The mayor said, “We won’t need your help anymore. You stay out here and wait, until Petrushka is over.”

  Through crooked windowpanes, Ana caught glimpses of a dozen naked girls moving listlessly to quasifolk Serbian music— Ceca, Arkan’s wife, was singing—blared distorted through the loudspeakers. A woman fell down the stairs outside the building. Ana walked over to her.

  “Don’t touch me!” the woman said.

  “Come on! I’m trying to help you.”

  The woman couldn’t keep her balance, and her thin blue lips twitched. Ana wrapped her leather jacket around her, found out her name (Alma), and tried to keep her talking.

  “They said it was a ballet performance,” Ana said.

  “You can see it for yourself what kind of ballet.”

  “Why did you join?”

  “How can you ask?” Alma sighed, and then told her story.

  In the spring, her husband was invited to a birthday party. He asked her, “Do you think I should go? I think I’m the only Muslim invited.” She thought perhaps he should; maybe if he stayed friends with the Serbs nothing would happen to them. But he never came back from the party. When she went to the Serb’s house to ask about him, the host invited her in for a cup of coffee. He acted surprised that her husband hadn’t come back. He made a couple of phone calls, asking whether anybody had seen him, and then he offered her a meal of rabbit paprikash. After she’d eaten some, he asked her how she liked it, and she said it tasted great. She hadn’t eaten in days. “Do you want to find out how I raise bunnies?” he asked. He opened a freezer with human body parts. She thought she recognized her husband’s hand, but she didn’t have much time to look. The man knocked her down from behind and, when she came to, the “host” was driving her to the bordello, which catered to the UN soldiers.

  Ana managed to say, “We’ll get you out of here. Just stay with me.”

  “Nobody can get me out of here.” Alma pointed toward her

  belly.

  The Colonel came back with a driver and a bodyguard; he combed his disarranged hair and said, “Let’s go!”

  They all climbed into an armored vehicle, accompanied by several camouflaged transport trucks.

  “Who is this?” The Colonel pointed at Alma in the backseat.

  “A rape camp captive,” said Ana. “We’ve got to get her out of here.”

  “Oh, don’t be melodramatic. Every hooker could make the same claim, of being a prisoner of bad fortune. She’s all right here, she can make a living.”

  “Look at her! Let her go.”

  “Your job is to interpret, not to make judgments. Driver! Stop the car.”

  “If you throw her out,” Ana said, “I’m quitting.”

  The Colonel ordered two soldiers to drag Alma back to the “dance club.”

  “In that case, give me a ride as well, to Split,” Ana said.

  “If you are that touchy, it’s all for the best that you get the hell out of here.” He chewed bubblegum, clicking his tongue. Ana glanced down his smoothly shaved, fleshy cheeks, purple with broken capillaries. The back of his neck was covered in curly gray hair. Thanks to his chewing, he resembled a partly shorn and fattened ruminating ram.

  In Split, Ana waited for a couple of days in a hotel among many Bosnian exiles, who stared out the windows to the ships apparently sinking beneath the ever-so-slightly curving horizon.

  Her neighbor on the flight from Split to Zurich was a pale woman in a black miniskirt. During takeoff, she whispered, “Bozhe pomozi!” Lord, have mercy!

  Her name was Fata and her teeth were brown, some cracked. What a contrast—such delicate fine skin, big dark eyes, neat eyebrows, and then those terrible teeth.

  “What takes you to Zurich?” Ana asked.

  “The Devil himself.”

  When they ate, Ana noticed that the woman was missing her ring finger. Instead she had a red stub. The woman caught her noticing and said, “The chetniks couldn’t get my wedding ring off because it was too tight. They took my husband to Omarska and said I wouldn’t need the ring anymore.”

  Air turbulence made the plane suddenly sink, and the two women levitated above their seats for a second, kept from flying off by their seatbelts. Soon Ana dozed, but her ears popping woke her up again. Alma’s teeth were chattering. She clutched Ana’s hand. Ana wondered whether Alma was like a cat that, in cold weather, will curl up next to almost any strange creature, even a dog, for heat.

  At the Zurich airport, she invited Alma to lunch, but Alma declined and took the escalator down to the train station in the basement of the airport. As she sank away from sight, Ana experienced sorrow and love for the afflicted young woman. Ana’s dejection amounted to more than compassion; it was a sort of sickness at heart, and she recalled the Latin religious term that reminded her of that, misericordia; although it meant mercy, its roots were in the poverty and sickness of the heart. The beauty of the word made her shiver, as though she’d heard a stirring harmony of chords.

  She walked to the ticket booth and bought airfare to Zagreb instead of New York. The brilliant Swiss organizers had arranged that the gate for the flight to Zagreb be right next to the one for Belgrade. Two groups of people eyed one another across the aisle malevolently and disappeared in the communal cigarette smoke, fed by both sides equally. While waiting, she called John in New York, waking him up.

  “I’m so happy you’ve called! Are you safe?”

  “Yes, I’m in Zurich.”

  “Your mission was so brief?”

  “I quit the job in Bosnia.”

  “Really?”

  “You told me to quit. But don’t worry, I didn’t quit because of what you told me but because of what I saw—how the UN works. The UN is a bunch of sex tourists and vultures. Now that I’ve had time to think about it, I must go back to gather evidence.”

  “You aren’t coming home?”

  Ana got a ride with a UN truck that was on its way to Omarska to deliver humanitarian aid to the local S
erbs. From the town center, she walked to the outskirts, to the camp, a scattering of one-story barracks and storage spaces surrounded by barbed wire.

  At the entrance a policeman in blue, with a red star on his cap, asked her where she was going, and she said she wanted to interview the camp director about the distribution of humanitarian aid. Looking at her lips and neck, he said, “I’m sure he’d love to talk with you.”

  Soon she was seated in the director’s office, drinking muddy coffee. Through the windows she could see tall mountains in the distance, which were blue as well. She remembered that Leonardo da Vinci was the first to observe that all objects appear blue in the distance.

  “Lijep pogled, zar ne?” A beautiful view, isn’t it? She addressed him in Croatian, attempting to establish a casual tone, to ease the tension that made her knees tremble and her throat as dry as if she’d smoked pot, even though she hadn’t done that since her college days.

  “Yes, it’s overwhelming,” he said in an unusually high voice. “Often I just sit here and stare at the mountains. I wish I was a poet like our president, Karadzic, so I could put all this beauty into words.” He smiled, with tears in his eyes. “So, you work for

  the UN?”

  “As an interpreter.”

  “Oh, another writer.”

  “I said interpreter. But yes, possibly a writer as well.”

  “So I wasn’t wrong. You know that all the leaders in this country are writers. Karadzic is a fabulous poet. Izetbegovic is a lousy Muslim historian. Tudjman writes boring history books full of lies. Cosic, the president of Yugoslavia, was nominated for the Nobel prize several times, and if we didn’t have this war he’d probably get it. Well, only Milosevic doesn’t need to write. He has other ways of expressing himself. Oh, I admire writers. They have done so much good for this country. And you probably think I am a dumb peasant, don’t you?”