Black Rock White City

JOVAN UNROLLS ONTO THE LONG CHAIR, almost horizontal, drifting towards sleep quickly in the minute-long wait. He’s wearing the sunglasses they gave him and he opens his mouth when they say good morning. His jaw is forced to its limit. The needle that pierces his gums sends numbness up the side of his head and does nothing for the teeth themselves, now shooting bolts of pain straight to the centre of his brain. The second injection doesn’t take either. It only makes his cheek feel warm and it’s back to drilling and suction and his heart goes into palpitations, sweat popping out over his face. His body becomes rigid, as if it’s being executed in an electric chair, cell by cell.

He apologises to the dentist. To the assistant. “I must be stress,” he tries to explain around the fat white pellets in his mouth. He unravels words in his mind to calm himself as the other side of his jaw begins to scream white-hot shock. Maroochydore and Mooloolaba, Noosa and Coolum. He thinks about the Glass House Mountains, and the stars out there at night, between those compass points in paradise.

The sunglasses in this room are for the overhead lights above his face. Jovan keeps his eyes closed and thinks about the way the hills rise just beyond the beach, a clear Noosa green in the sparkling Australian light. Going below the buoyant blue, crystal clarity in every drop of water dripping from him when he rises again. Suzana on the sand, napping in the sun. For the first time in years sleeping naturally. Without the pills; letting the various prescriptions lapse in Queensland. Jovan walks through the waves, across the long stretch of damp sand and up onto the hot sand to her, the seawater from his body waking her before his body weight.

They talk about other things and he never finds out what dreams she had that woke her up smiling like a girl. An inversion now, his dentist and the assistant looking down at Jovan, as though desperately worried he might fall asleep again. Using torture to keep him awake. “What a strange dream,” he intones with tongue and throat, when they pause in their work for the suction hose to stop him from drowning in his own saliva. They understand as few of his words as before when he attempted to mumble around the cotton pellets.

The dentist told Jovan a story while they waited for the second needle to take effect. “I had a patient once who refused the anaesthetic. It was a root canal, and I told him I didn’t think I could do it—cause that much pain without giving him at least something. The man must have been a believer in meditation. I’ve heard experts in that kind of thing can walk over hot coals and hang with hooks through their flesh.”

Jovan has his own mantra yet now he’s thinking about that man who refused anaesthetic for a root canal and he decides his dentist is probably wrong. It’s not likely that the patient was a master of mind control. It was more believable that he was a recovering addict; that the fear of physical pain was secondary to the fear of succumbing again to addiction and disintegration.

Jovan finds those words again, silently chanting them: Maroochydore and Mooloolaba, Noosa and Coolum.

Afterwards Jovan is told to floss every day. He says, “No problem.” He’s never been one for flossing and, despite the dental torture, he’s not sure he’ll be able to commit to cleaning his teeth that thoroughly. They pencil him in for another appointment in six months and he nods again, feeling the pain still ringing through his mouth and his head, thinking about when and how he and Suzana might get back up to the Sunshine Coast, whether they’ll have time, and how they can afford that kind of trip, especially with these dentistry bills.

It’s got to be soon now, he’s thinking as he walks down the stairs. He passes people sitting and waiting to see his dentist or the GPs that work in this centre. An old man with a walker, who brings along a small tank of oxygen the way some bring a bottle of drinking water. The two sixty-year-olds in matching tracksuits, assuring the five women of the reception that they are careful to look after themselves with diet and exercise. The child that drapes himself over a chair, moaning about how bored he is, coughing his head off in minute-long fits.

Jovan stumbles outside into the bright light, thinking soon, because a child will keep both of them near one of these purgatorial medical rooms for two or three years. Even if a new child turns out to be not as sickly as Jovan’s other children had been, it will be difficult getting around. He wants to drive, and that would be crazy with a baby, yet without a car to explore that wondrous Queensland landscape, he can’t see the point of going. Neither he nor Suzana are the kind of people who can loaf on a beach for hours on end every day. So it would have to be soon if they want to get up to the Sunshine Coast again. Suzana had been all for it. In the last week or two she’s been saying she wasn’t so sure anymore. The Coultas family needs her. Jelka is having a crisis as well. Then there’s all the scribbling in her black books. It’s the writing that makes Jovan desperate to find a way to free them for a trip up north.

By the time he gets to his white panel van, his head is swimming. He reaches into his pocket to fish out the keys. Pulling them out, he fumbles the keys to the ground. He leans over and feels he might tumble onto the asphalt of the car park after them. Rust along the bottom edge of this van, that he has sanded back once already, puttied and painted over. Yet there it is again, beginning to bubble beneath the paint and eat at the edges. The metal was old. You couldn’t patch it a million times. Eventually it gets to a point where there’s nothing left to work with.

A young woman is talking to him before he realises someone has approached and is catching up while she’s halfway through already; he opens his thick mouth and attempts a smile through lips that feel made of rubber. “Yes, hospital. I work in there.”

“I thought, since I needed to get down there as well, maybe you could give me a lift? Public transport from here to there is a bitch. It’d be a tram and a train, a ten-minute walk or a bus, and it sucks when you have to go from point A to point B, just so you can get to point C, and then finally to where you need to get to. You know what I mean? Point fucking K or something.”

Jovan wishes he could tell her in one facial expression that the long explanation isn’t necessary, and all she needs to do is tell him they work in the same hospital, and they would already be on the road by now. His nodding doesn’t stop any of it, and eventually he’s able to mumble, “No problem. We go. Get in. Point K. Direct.”

She gets into the cabin of the van, though first she’s got to be told it’s alright to shove the paper and Melways, the jumper and cap and smelly boots to the floor. To push his lunch box aside while Jovan returns to the dentist for the sunglasses he’s only now realised he left up there. His own sunglasses, the ones he swapped for the dentistry sunglasses when he lay back on the seat.

So it’s past the old man with his little bottle of O² again and the child that was now pulling on his mother’s arm to go now, can we go now please!!! Back to the annoying Janusz who is the dental receptionist upstairs and his Polish-style ultra-camp flouncing and fluffing over every detail of his cubbyhole of an office and its eternally running, locked-on-soaps, five-inch television.

“Oh yes I have the sunglasses for you. But you left them here on purpose. You must be desperate to come back already. To see Janusz again. Don’t forget, that I will see you again on the Fourth of July. Maybe we should celebrate with fireworks. I will call you, to remind you,” Janusz says through his flavourful Polish accent.

Jovan blinks through all this, thickly says, in his blockish English, “What?”

“You know, American day. When the Americans celebrate themselves. You won’t forget again at least.” It baffles Jovan what he means by forget again. As it was, for this appointment Janusz had called him three times during the week to shift it around by half-hour slots, and there was certainly no possibility of forgetting when Janusz called once more this morning.

When Jovan gets back to the car, the girl is scribbling in her book. Maybe technically she’s a woman and old enough to be a nurse. She’s the kind of petite woman who stopped growing at about age fourteen and will continue to look like a teenager for the next ten or twenty years. Jovan will go on feeling as though he’s clocking in as an octogenarian. Dentures not too far away now. Having a child certainly isn’t going to be a remedy for that.

She’s talking again as he starts the loud Ford which makes birds in a nearby tree leap for open skies. Has to gun the thing so that it doesn’t stall. Gives her a misshaped smile by way of saying, sorry, I have to do it, and seriously, this car isn’t a hot rod in anyone’s imagination. The anaesthetic is making the right half of his head feel like the aftermath of a stroke.

He’s not listening to what she’s saying while he navigates the heavy crate through the busy traffic. She goes on talking and he’s prompted to correctly say “yes” or “no,” “why,” and “I understand,” which is enough to keep her going happily. Talking and drawing in her sketchbook. Jovan drives raggedly today, getting beeped at twice, almost crashing into an ice cream van because of his bad brakes, which makes the nurse laugh so hard she has to wipe tears from her eyes.

Buoyed by her goodwill, Jovan tells the nurse that the van is an old love that will continue to need to be seduced even when she’s ninety. That doesn’t make her laugh again. She smiles and nods at Jovan because now she’s the distracted one. By the time they get to the hospital she has drawn a portrait of Jovan in pencil. The nurse asks for his name and writes it above the image. Romance of the Crash, she adds below his face.

“My name’s Leni by the way. Thanks for the lift,” she chirps. Leni gives him a playful peck on the cheek and leaves the sketch on the seat beside him. Jovan doesn’t know what to do with it. He folds it and pushes it into the overfull glove box. He crushes the image to make it fit. There’s a lot of stuff in there he knows he’ll never need. Inside that compartment is also sunscreen Suzana used on those beaches up north. He can feel the kiss through the fading numbness of the anaesthetic.

“DON’T KNOW WHY, but I never think of you as a refugee. But you are, aren’tcha mate?”

Jovan is pulling up his overalls in the hospital’s change room, his jaw still sore on both sides. Bill’s a janitor that works in the hospital with Jovan. He says he is Greek because he’s the son of immigrants, yet besides the stockiness, hairiness, and olive skin, there’s nothing about him that Jovan sees as actually Greek. He’s Australian, whatever the accent.

“When you think refugee, you think black, brown, or Asian. Skinny and small, because there’s never been a lot of food. But look at you. Raised by basketballers. Smiling like a fucking wood duck. Usually. Not today though, hey? You’ve got your refugee face on this morning.” Bill throws a can of Coke he’s been drinking at a bin. He misses. They both watch it roll away.

“You’ll be walking around with that stupid fucken smile soon enough, hey? Maybe later on today I’ll see you walking along the halls with that little smile that tells everyone everything is OK. ‘No problems.’ I don’t know what you’ve got to fucken smile about. I hate this shit. Had to fucken clean up an old man’s vomit in the lobby this morning. But maybe that’s why you go on smiling. Being a refugee, you seen all kinds of shit, hey? What’s an old man’s vomit when you’ve seen old men gunned down? Happy to be in the land of the fucken free!”

Jovan finds it difficult to think when Bill’s in this mood. Bill likes to rant every few days and all Jovan can do is let him go on for a few minutes. The fading anaesthetic and the general discomfort he feels make it that much harder for Jovan to deal with Bill today.

“You want go back to Greece?” Jovan says. “You say this sometimes. Freedom there, even if your parents run from their islands, give everything away to make it to over here. Doesn’t make sense to me. Things get worse in Greece. Not better, since your parents leave there.” Jovan sits on a bench and puts his feet into his boots. Pulls the laces up and begins to tie them with hands that feel clumsy.

“Fuck yeah. They know how to live over there, man. We waste all our time working here. They know what Life is over there. You know what I’m saying? We have to plan to fit it in. Save up for years, and then go over for a few weeks. Call it a holiday. Fucking hell, man, what do we call the rest of this fucking life here?”

“It is easy to make picture cards of places.” He regrets even saying this much. Smiles at Bill closed mouthed—a “wood-duck.” There’s no point talking to Bill. Jovan usually walks out on him, mid-rant. Jovan doesn’t know where he gets this idea of life. A holiday that never ends is the daydream of a spoilt child.

“You mean postcards.” Bill kicks his locker shut. From the way he’s behaving, Bill might have been on this same job for thirty years. His father, Tom, had done just that, and retired recently. Bill hasn’t been a cleaner for a year yet.

Bill says, “No Bosnia postcards, that’s for sure. Fucking Muslims, fucking up their own shit, and then they come around fucking up everyone else’s. Acting as though not eating pork is gonna mean shit to God or the devil.”

Bill leaves the change room thinking he’s offered Jovan a pat on the back, as though to share a hate is to share a love. Tossing Molotov words with his eyes closed. The type of thing you lob around a football ground during a rival match. A flare and nothing more. Not something that could set the air alight—a kind of napalm that would keep burning for generations.

Jovan feels the fluttering, and then he’s within the feathers and claws of the black crow. He makes it to a toilet cubicle and is able to close a door. All he can do is place his head in his hands and breathe while the crow crashes his brain with adrenaline and fear. Promise himself that it will pass. Sit and wait. Close his eyes and press his palms into his face. He knows it will pass. Curl his shoulders over and bring up his thighs until he’s above the balls of his feet and on the edge of the toilet cover.

Someone enters the cubicle beside Jovan’s for a long piss. Music erupting from his ears in long stuttering beats and jack-hammering trills. Jovan can hear it clearly though the speakers are plugged directly into the man’s head. Drilling his brain with this ceaseless roar of sound. Words are barely made out in the noiseless grappling of thoughts in Jovan’s brain. The graffiti on the walls of the cubicle around him is as black as disease and threatens him with the noxious penetration of the shit-stained fingers that wrote it, reaching through his skull, even with eyes closed and hands over ears.

Graffiti that talks about sucking someone’s dick, or fucking some woman in the arse that works in the hospital, or drawing out images of sloppy cunts and dripping cocks. Everywhere this same kind of toilet graffiti and its puerile assault on decency, as though it’s written with one omnipresent hand everywhere in the world, scribbling these insults to thought for the last two thousand years.

Maybe it is only fifteen minutes. In the cubicle, his elbows pressed hard into his knees, he allows himself a moan that is soft—brings it back within himself as soon as he can. He’s afraid of it, and what it might become. He knows it’s a spark, and if it’s given fuel, it will rage and burn everything he has, from memories to bones…and then it begins to release him. He breathes and raises his head to breathe again.

Must have been the dentist, his drills and needles. Must have been Bill and his Molotov muttering. Must have been everything finding a moment to burn again. Silently and imperceptibly.

He washes his face and wishes there was a way he could wash any of it clean. The crow has settled, sitting on its perch in the cage of his chest. There’s no way for it to ever get out again now that it’s in. Jovan’s last breath will be to cough up one final black feather. He looks at himself and sees none of this. He looks calm. In the mirror, he looks fine.

He dries his face with a powder-blue hand towel he keeps in his locker. Bill’s boots aren’t placed on top of his locker, they’re abandoned on the floor. Someone else’s problem. Jovan picks them up and does it for him. He’d rather throw the boots into the trash yet he places them together, heel to heel, on top of Bill’s locker.

Old men gunned down, as Bill said. And women and children as well. Regular clean-shaven men, fathers and sons of those other victims, destroyed by Jovan and his kind. Is this what Bill thinks? Jovan wasn’t only a refugee, he was responsible for the war. Because he is a Serb he is responsible for a decade of mutilation and death. There’s no conversation. Nothing can change a mind made in ignorance, but Jovan wishes he could speak anyway. To explain that there had been lots of ordinary people with ordinary religion, who started killing each other, for reasons less and less clear as more and more people died. He doesn’t want to think of what the Serbs did to the Muslims, and can’t think about what the Muslims did to Serbs. To his friends and family. To him. To Suzana.

Bill doesn’t know a lot about hate, and not a lot more about love. He thinks he hates a boss or a politician or someone at his local pub but he hasn’t seen hate turn into fire, free-floating and exploding throughout a city, and then materialising again into a blistered red monster more real than any creature children imagine in nighttime terrors. Moving from city to city, and village to village, blazing across a whole country, uncontrollable and annihilating. Breathing fire around Jovan, and murdering before his eyes, raping and maiming all with a dying grin never quite dead.

Elementary as much as elemental. When it rises from the ground, reeking of sulphur, war is hard to disguise as anything other than the devil himself. Turning mailmen, barbers, greengrocers, electricians, and taxi drivers into dismembering demons. Burning up entire generations of men as if their souls were made of hay. The devil was never a comic book character, with a red face and small horns protruding from his skull—he is a force as real as gravity, raging through the minds of men with the fires of hell.

It does not restore faith in God for Jovan. If he puts his hands together, and he does that most nights, it is to bring the cool and quiet closer to his face. To enfold himself in silence, and find some kind of peace in it. He prays because prayer itself is as close as he can come to containing the devil. Pressing him, if only for the space of a few breaths, between the palms of his hands.

Jovan takes his face out of the clean hand towel, which still smells fresh from the lavender detergent Suzana uses, and puts it back into his locker. A lavender smell she used in Bosnia as well.

He feels it all recede again, back into the postcard images of places he’s been to. Places people pass through. Everything he’s felt, reduced to the few lines dashed off for disinterested people never likely to go to those places themselves. Enough for them to contemplate a few images and a few words and dream themselves visions that had nothing to do with those actual places. Because a postcard from hell is a joke. Hell isn’t real. The devil is as frightening as the graffiti, or cartoon, of a man with a pitchfork, painted on toilet doors, or on children’s television. No, this thing we’ve been talking about for thousands of years, this farcical fire imp, doesn’t really exist. There’s nothing to fear from him, because the choices men make are all their own, even when they decide as a nation to burn everything down to the ground.

It’s better to think of places like Maroochydore and Mooloolaba, Noosa and Coolum. To hang on to postcards from those places. Let the words entice the mind back to the azure waters and sun-gold beaches of Maroochydore and Mooloolaba, Noosa and Coolum.

He clicks each metal button of his overalls closed. He opens his locker again. Takes the hand towel and breathes in its lavender one more time before returning it and locking the narrow metal door.

JOVAN IGNORES THE messages on his pager that direct him to the hospital’s dentistry suite. In less than an hour, Tammie has found him in the kitchen, mopping the floors. She plays at wandering through casually, looking for something to nibble on. A slice of fruit from a tray on a bench brought back in after lunch and covered by Glad wrap. She peels back the plastic and lifts a long piece of pineapple and places it in her mouth. Pretends she doesn’t see or feel Jovan looking at her. When she does look over, she turns on her one-hundred-watt smile. For everything Jovan can say about Tammie, he’ll give her the sincerity of that grin. He can’t help but return the smile.

She does love this, even if this is a sideshow to her life. This is dessert after the meat and potatoes. It only requires a bit of moral flossing after each meal, and that gets easier every time she allows herself to indulge. This sneaking around with a janitor, a brutish foreigner who can barely speak the language yet who fucks as if fucking is vital, as though it comes up from the bones, as much about marrow as semen, and not the distracted lovemaking of a lawyer husband who is never off the clock. Never really present. Simply turns over his body to necessary duties. The half-swallowed moan at the end of it as much a sigh of resignation as of satisfaction. Not that she actually sees Jovan. He’s more a part of the now of her imagination than he is a man with his own history and his own future.

Jovan kills the smile on his face with his palm across his mouth as though he was crushing a cockroach that had snuck out from behind his ear. He doesn’t know if he can help himself. Tammie’s smile is an offering, a reminder of a sweet place; a deep, rich, black oblivion. Already a taste in his mouth as she begins to move towards him again, pausing at the edge of the wet floor he’s mopping. Then proceeds as though daintily stepping, naked, into a cool, wooded lake.

Suzana’s whisper across his pillow, “I saw you smile at her Jovan.” Pretending to be asleep.

Tammie doesn’t speak. She takes ahold of the handle in his hands with a firm grip. As though she’s taking ahold of him. Waits for Jovan to respond, a slight swaying through her body. Ready to sink below the water with him again and to feel the weight of his body and the pool of trivial bliss that he will always be surrounded by for her. Holding on to the long wooden handle of the mop. The smooth grain of it, which in this moment, seems to possess the solidity of a tall ironbark reaching up for a blistered-red dreamtime sky swimming with crocodiles. With eyes already closing to slits as she lets herself move into the corner of her brain that generates these fluid, running daydreams. Made by memories and stories she heard when she was a child, swagging out under the hurricane of stars, spinning and opening up to gather the infinite black into a storm of light, with her father, their backs to the ground, listening to his stories at night. Never mentioning God, but God at the centre of everything he told her out there, as though he felt the beginnings of cancer even then, a different kind of storm brewing in a soul only he could believe in. The smooth feel of his axe in the crisp crystalline mornings. The handle almost too heavy to lift. For her father, it was as light as a switch. The axe head red, and shiny sharp blue steel at its cutting edge. Later watching him swing it up high, hanging in the air, using all its heavy momentum to cut down through a fallen boab. Feeling as small and helpless within the space of Jovan’s breath, swaying above her and massively broad, and wanting him now to lift her up with the same kind of vast power and safe strength planted into the stream of her blood so long ago out in the Kimberley. Wanting Jovan to cut through her until she can spill out with all these rushing incantations and all this vaporising desire.

Jovan pulls the mop out of her hand with an angry jerk. The force of it shudders through her whole body, almost dislocating her shoulder. He dunks the mop head into the water and brings it out and down again at their feet. The dirty, foamy water splashes across her lovely, professional shoes, her stockings, and flecks her charcoal skirt with black and foam. Satin-top French stockings complete with garter belt visible in hints below the tight, hip-hugging skirt. No underwear below the garter belt. He’s seen the outfit once before. Jovan’s never known a woman to wear a garter belt or these kinds of elaborately elegant costumes before. He can’t help feeling the appeal of its ornate seduction, vicious in its gathering power. He might want her in this instant more than he’s ever wanted Suzana. Maybe that’s true. The blood has a way of rushing through the brain, surging with those kinds of lies. He can’t do anything else right now, shove her away when the only other option is to demolish her with desire.

Kitchen staff are beginning to trickle back from their lunch breaks, and she must know how apparent all this would be to them. So she steps closer to Jovan and raises a finger slowly to his mouth, pulls back his cheek, and examines his teeth.

“Looks as though they were rough,” she says, her face pretty with all its perfectly applied makeup.

Jovan is already mopping again as she begins walking away across the now dry, clean kitchen floor. He’s thinking about what she said long after she’s left, and can’t understand what sounds so seductive about those words, Looks as though they were rough. He lets the black water from the mop bucket run down the drain of the kitchen sink.

THE CHANGE ROOM is busy with people leaving or coming in for their shifts. Voices fill the room with the traffic of conversation. Everyone passes through this room—an intersection with busted lights.

Robert Sewell sits down to put on a fresh shirt as he asks Jovan whether he remembered the cleanup in room 302. Jovan nods. Says, “No problem.” Nods again as Mr. X-Ray sings a bar of Hey Joe for the first time in weeks. There are two Indian men chatting in their language by a locker, their words interlaced as they seemed to talk almost at the same time, shoulder to shoulder. Offering him no smile today, Jovan walks by bare-chested Bill.

The “Greek,” who struts at a standstill, turns on his heel. Picks up a can of deodorant, waving it under his arm as he goes on talking, now into his cream-coloured metal locker, plastered with images of over-exposed pneumatic women screaming in pink, vanilla, and blond. With bodybuilders glowing cherry red with high-tension tendons and well-oiled muscles.

A newspaper has fallen on the floor and the hospital handyman walks across its pages as he says goodbye. Nobody notices, and from the way he says it, he himself isn’t expecting acknowledgment. Steps over images of a city being bombed from the air, at nighttime—the explosions are like the flashes of fireworks illuminating the buildings from below.

Bill has been explaining that Australia is full. Bill says that he went to the supermarket last night, and he was surrounded by Indians. A brown invasion. Customers and check-out people. “What the fuck is going on, letting so many of these people in?” Talking out to the two Indians who go on with their interlaced conversation across the room, though speaking ostensibly to Robert Sewell, who is trying to clarify with Bill whether the toilets on the second floor were cleaned as requested, and whether a problematic toilet, prone to blockage, was operational again. Sewell has been asking him all day. Bill’s also directing his thoughts at X-Ray, who is leaning up against a locker not even pretending to listen as he flips through the pages of one of Bill’s pornographic magazines. “Look at these wobble heads,” Jovan hears Bill saying as he passes through. “Why do we need these clowns?”

Jovan is in his own head. He’s taken his boots off. His feet and legs are tired and heavy, so he’s very slow about it. Removing his overalls and then sitting back down on the bench as though to catch his breath. Suzana is spending more of her time scribbling into her notebooks. The only place safe for her in the time since Bosnia, was somewhere buried underground. Coming to the surface isn’t going to be easy. What he can do to assist, or impede, isn’t clear. Perhaps what he should do is look at what she’s been writing. So far he’s operated on an idea of honouring her personal space. If he can make a decision today, it’s that he can’t afford to do that—let this thing run its course when the destination is likely to be underground again. And this time he will be left with a mouth full of dirt and worms.

“Are you fucking listening to me?” Bill takes a step towards his manager. “I’m trying to say something. Everyone is pretending it’s like this, when it’s like that. Even here, between a group of fucken guys who get shat on by pretty much everyone. We supposed to pretend to enjoy the taste of it as well? That’s what those clowns do. They come over when it’s already fucking hard enough as it is and make enjoying the taste of shit part of cleaning up after the giant arsehole over our heads.”

Jovan goes on thinking about Suzana and the notebooks and the hours of scribbling that was going into them, and wonders what should be done, knowing that there’s nothing he can do. Not about the tossing and turning he feels from her side of the bed, the sweat-drenched nightgowns she leaves hanging in the bathroom most mornings now, or the babble that is beginning to emerge from her mouth as she sleeps, or the unconscious scalp scratching and hair tugging as she writes in those black-skinned books. Nothing he could do about it last time in Belgrade and nothing he can do about it this time either.

Truth is, Jovan always fails Suzana. When she asked whether it’s a good idea to leave Sarajevo, in 1990, and live in Belgrade with Ana and Dejan, and maybe look into the possibility of teaching in London, he laughed. Teaching what? he asked her. Who cares about Yugoslav literature, and what else can he offer anyone? And why would he want to live in London, packed in a concrete box with over six million strangers who will never be anything other than strangers as long as he lives, ants streaming from hundreds of thousands of other concrete boxes. So, no to an exit from Bosnia, in 1990, when an exit was still possible.

A few years later, there’s a bathtub with a ring of red. There are towels soaked in blood left lying around. Open doors and windows. A tap in the kitchen still half on. The water running in a quiet, empty apartment, as loud as any alarm he’d ever heard in his life.

In the bathroom. In the bathtub. And there’s nothing he can do in Belgrade to stop it or to get her going again afterwards. She’d done a lot of writing then as well. She stopped after getting out of the hospital, and when she says maybe she and Jovan can go and live in Australia, because she has an uncle living in Melbourne, this time Jovan says yes. Let’s go to the other side of the world. He doesn’t want to fail Suzana again.

Jovan walks into a toilet and swings the door shut behind him as he takes a piss. Thinks these thoughts. All of them thought through, beginning to end, the same way as he had a hundred times before. Millions of times, back in Belgrade, after Suzana opened up her veins as easy as bathtub taps. Saved by her sister, visiting on the off chance Suzana was home. Jovan would have come home a few hours too late, to the corpse of his wife in the bathroom.

When he turns he notices new graffiti on the door. Sprayed red over the other graffiti going on about cocks and cunts. Graffito’s work. Jovan puts his finger to the paint. It’s almost dry. There’s a slight stickiness.

A river of Waste

Just below Your skin

your Bones rot in

history’s flowing Shit

The sharp smell of paint, so this went up a few minutes ago. This is the same door that he saw at the start of his shift. He might have passed Dr. Graffito in the change room or hall.

Rushing out into a red steam that has risen from the concrete floor, Jovan shouts, “Who put words on the door of toilet?”

“What the fuck?” Bill turns around from his locker. Shirtless with his singlet in his hand. “Made us jump mate. Slamming that fucking toilet door.” Bill talks in a customary bellow. Bill spends a lot of time in the gym. The muscles are packed onto his squat Greek frame—seeming to cluster and crowd beneath the skin. “Calm, the fuck, down, Wood Duck.” Starting to grin, Bill shakes his head. “And maybe you should wash your hands after going to the toilet.”

He’s looking for laughs from the other two men as Jovan moves towards him in three quick strides across the room, and has one massive tarantula hand wrapped so far around Bill’s dwarfish throat that his fingers press around the sides towards the spine.

Bill can do no more than half grunt the word “fuck” in response. Stunned. Unable to reach out his short arms along the long outstretched limb of this sudden Goliath. Bill gurgles.

“This red words on door?” Jovan asks again. All three of the men in the change room are quiet. “You talking about shit. The graffiti words talking about shit. Did you read? Or did you write?”

Robert Sewell lays one hand on Jovan’s shoulder and the other in the small of his back. “Hey,” he says, “Mr. Brakochevich, please.” There’s no strength in Sewell’s arms to pull him off. One of the Indian men has come over and he is hauling at Jovan’s shirt so hard it’s beginning to tear, yelling, “Hey! Hey!” as though he doesn’t know any other words.

“This isn’t good,” Sewell says, attempting to do his duty and respond to what is happening in the change room between two of his employees. “Please, Mr. Brakochevich.”

None of these men have paint on their hands and all of their faces show surprise or fear. Jovan moving into the room so rapidly. Attacking Bill. Such a drilled movement.

Bill’s eyes are swelling. His lips move uselessly and it won’t be long. It’s easy to turn someone off. Jovan can feel the switch just below his fingertips. Is that true? Is it that simple? One way to find out. Do it. Squeeze that fucken dwarf throat. He never need hear another poisonous word from this toxic mind. There would be some silence when the body slumped to the ground and for that moment everything would be perfect.

Jovan releases Bill. Turns to the two other men as if he might attack either one of them next. “He must learn to keep his mouth closed. Or do we learn to walk in his shit?” Jovan says.

Bill has stumbled away towards the toilets, taking air through a throat that must feel half crushed. His shoulder bounces off a wall as he attempts to get away from his assailant. He is disorientated for a second—gets a grip of a basin and gathers his wits. Splashes water onto his face.

X-Ray shakes his head with a smile at the locker room scene and makes a quiet exit. Robert Sewell walks to the toilet to have a look at the new graffiti. When he returns Jovan is putting on a denim jacket and is about to leave for home.

Bill begins swearing at Sewell for employing madmen. Bill punches and throws his shoulder into the lockers as he watches Jovan walk to the sink and wash his hands. Bill swears at Sewell again as he watches Jovan use his special, soft, powder-blue hand towel from his locker. Sewell says he doesn’t hire hospital employees and asks Bill to calm down, explaining that no one wants any more violence today. He gets shoved away brutally for his troubles as Bill begins to yell abuse at Jovan and to all Serbs. Jovan leaves the room as he entered it. As though everything around him has nothing to do with him, yet the words in the toilet are for Jovan. Of course they are. It’s simple. No surprise in it at all. Dr. Graffito knows Jovan in the same way as he knew the optometrist.

He walks to the break room a door down the hall to get something to eat. Suddenly ravenous. Slices of soft white bread in a plastic bag. The television has been left on. There’s no one else in the room. A host is offering up some news about two men attempting to circumnavigate the world in a hot air balloon. They have set an endurance record. In the air for 233 hours and 55 minutes. Their names are Colin Prescot and Andy Elson. Jovan assumes they’re English with those names, but they could be Americans or Australians. He stuffs a second slice of bread into his mouth and looks up at the screen to see the balloon, thinking it can’t be one of those jaunty balloons with vivid stripes of colour seen on advertisements for Kodak film or some such brand. It’d have to be a more impressive balloon, denoting adventure. An expedition, not a joyride. Emphasis on endurance rather than pleasure. Jovan gets a brief glimpse of something silvery and NASA-like, then it’s back to the host signing off for the day. A commercial comes on, advertising a television set that will give its prospective owners a new world of experience, entertainment, joy. Jovan walks out of the break room before the ad has finished extolling the virtues of the new technology involved in the product. Jovan calculates it was almost ten days in the air for Prescot and Elson, and wonders whether they got bored with their Everest views and turned on their portable television to a new world of chatter and trivia.

Jovan’s new world began with two suitcases, and Christmas in summer, living in a bungalow at the back of Suzana’s uncle Mirko’s house in St. Albans, Melbourne, with the novelty of “footy” and cricket on the television, and English in Australian accents. A little over forty hours of flight for Jovan and Suzana. That’s how a world begins, and because it comes with different newspapers and street names and currency, the old world can be packed into a box, and left to gather dust, and be rarely seen. More and more rarely as the years pass. The two worlds drift further and further apart.

Of course, the box doesn’t disappear. It will always be exactly where it always was—in the centre of their lives. It is made of the thinnest sheets of porous material, the most fragile membrane, leaking without warning at any point. The two worlds appear far apart. Sarajevo is across the seas, and as time goes by, the separating waters seem ever broader to Jovan and Suzana, yet the box, which they cannot open, and cannot close, contains their Sarajevo lives. Nothing within it is dead, though they both often think otherwise. They will sit in their Frankston home watching television and not notice the Australian accents anymore. They allow themselves to think fondly of Christmas snow rather than the December heat of Melbourne. Weeks and months pass and the seasons here have a way of offering easier transitions from year to year.

Yet an odour remains, the sickening smell of melting flesh from the heat of a radiator. There are sounds, Suzana’s voice as it murmurs pain in solid thumps. Vanishing a moment later.

The war didn’t start everywhere at the same time in Bosnia. It was part of the civil wars of Yugoslavia, yet where it petered out quickly in other parts of that federation of states, in Bosnia, it grew into something far worse and protracted. It was fought from village to village, town to town, and in cities, street to street and building to building. It was resisted for long periods in some quarters of the state, as it raged full gore in others. It was fought by peasants who had known each other for generations and had often celebrated weddings together, or Yugoslavia’s victories in sport, or mourned the deaths of locals, Muslim and Christian alike. Which should not suggest a paradise of brotherhood. The war, however, was fought by policemen turned generals. By sports stadium hooligans turned sergeants. It was fought by high-school children, trained up to then by PE teachers. In short, it was fought by loose groupings of people organised by no grand plan, leader, or movement.

Muslims vowed to Serbian neighbours that atrocities committed in another town wouldn’t be perpetrated here. Yet they were. Of course, that was also true the other way around. Serbs made promises of decency that they didn’t keep. Promises are part of a currency, and as long as there is an idea of social economy, then these notes can be traded on. A society can become bankrupt through various causes, and all parts of the world have witnessed these collapses of a moral economy.

Jovan and Suzana were part of a group of teachers at a university that insisted that their institution should provide a beacon of understanding in the rapidly rising, murderous idiocy all around them. They hadn’t yet seen more than images on television broadcasts, which as horrifying as they can be, are only ever images as one might see in a film. They don’t penetrate and become one’s own. They excite passion, and then fade away. If they had known the difference, they would have packed those same two suitcases, and walked out of Bosnia, into Serbia, or through to somewhere else. They would have taken a bus or train anywhere—wherever it was going.

At their university there had been students who continued attending classes even as their courses became absurdities. Jovan still had a handful of pupils coming to read and discuss the merits of Mesha Selimovich’s masterpiece Death and the Dervish, drawing contrasts with Ivo Andrich’s monumental Bridge on the Drina, with Milosh Tsernianski’s Migrations, or Danilo Kish’s Garden, Ashes, irrespective of which author was a Jew or Muslim, Orthodox or Catholic. He still gave these desperate, delusional students assignments, which they completed. He graded them and made his comments, and returned them to his students. Until none of them came at all, and his books became truly useless. He couldn’t read them himself anymore. And still he didn’t leave. Their flat in Sarajevo was taken and they began living in the university. Jovan walked around the university in a daze that wouldn’t lift for a second. A head full of bees is how he described it to Suzana. He couldn’t understand what bees were at times. The world was full of insects erupting from people’s mouths. She didn’t say anything, but even with Suzana’s mouth closed, he could hear humming.

They had already sent Ana and Dejan to Jovan’s parents, who lived in a village outside Banja Luka, where the war was not an immediate threat. Jovan and Suzana understood the danger well enough to protect their children—not well enough to protect themselves. Losing their home had not convinced them that they had lost their city and were soon to lose their country as well. They flattered themselves, thinking they were fighting for what remained of their culture, before it went up in flames in the general conflagration of their society. They were unable to let go of their lives; had not accepted a more basic existence, beyond what they had lived for, in their devotion and belief; beyond even children and a future. Pure existence. Bodies in the world, breathing and blinking because bodies kept breathing and blinking beyond reason.

There’s the smell of sweat burning on a radiator, that sickening smell similar to arm hair burned above a gas flame on the stove top during a rushed dinner preparation. The radiators in the university were industrial strength, screwed onto the walls. When they were fired up they stayed on most of the harsh Bosnian winters. During brutal blizzards students didn’t leave their university. They crawled under tables into sleeping bags. In the morning woke to whatever classes were scheduled by teachers who were also sleeping there. The radiators kept running, for weeks and months, the oil within them staying molten the whole time.

When they were turned on for Jovan it was late autumn, and still warm during the days, and cool in the evenings, not quite requiring gloves or scarves. They asked Jovan to remove all his clothes before they turned them on. Used bicycle chains to bind him to the cool surface of a radiator. Turned it on to full, and sat at a desk to play a card game called Tablichi. A game children play. These men weren’t far removed from such playful years.

It was pain Jovan could smell. Is that the smell of pork frying? one of the young men asked. Is it Saint George’s day? another asked. The Serbs must be celebrating a slava somewhere near, because another one is sure he can smell pig on a spit. The jokes about pork went on. Funny because it was practically the only thing that differentiated them from the man they had bound to the radiator, though they’d eaten pork themselves often enough. They went on playing Tablichi.

Jovan was not an extraordinary man. The pain was terrible. He tried to be quiet. His wife was hiding in the ceiling and if he cried out he knew it would be worse for her. Oddly, the words that kept running through Jovan’s mind were ones that would never make sense again. This is necessary. This is necessary. This is necessary. Jovan didn’t know what sense it made even then. He went on saying those senseless words.

Bored with the game, one of the young men stood up, and walked to Jovan with an American gun he held sideways as he’s seen gangster rappers do in video clips. “I think I’m going to give you an F, Mister Teacher. That’s fair isn’t it? You remember giving me an F don’t you. I got punished for that F, Mister Teacher, you know that? I got a caning with a branch from a birch tree. And I wasn’t a child anymore either. But there’s respect and my father’s a peasant and they don’t understand F. I don’t know what it meant to him. It must have been like something coming down from on high. An F, he kept telling me. Crying as he was beating me with that birch branch. Like I’d told him I was a faggot, and brought eternal shame to the family name. I let him beat me. I was too big to be beaten like that, but I let him anyway. My peasant dad. I felt ashamed of him, as much as he felt ashamed of me, so I let him beat me one last time. For old times’ sake. An F, he kept telling me. An F. An F. How could you! And do you see how little it matters now, Mister Teacher. But my F is going to matter. You will remember it. Tell Porky Pig down there in hell that I gave you an F. Tell his brother, Jesus Christ, as well.” And who knows if young Zlatan would have pulled the trigger on his gangster gun? It was enough to make Jovan close his eyes. Enough to whimper in the last moment before feeling the bullet.

Suzana didn’t let that happen. She pushed the white square of a ceiling segment aside. Announced herself to the four young men below. Who asked her to come down. Who did not need to discuss what would happen next. Who did not need to think about what would happen next.

Do not visualise the details. Do not try to imagine what husband and wife may, or may not, have thought or felt. As those images on television broadcasts could not fully penetrate the minds of Suzana and Jovan, or anyone watching anywhere else at the time, so no one will ever know anything of this experience. Which wasn’t unique to this husband and wife in anything other than the particulars. It can only excite brief feelings, in the way something might from a film, one of Jovan’s books, or the poetry that he used to put to paper and publish in various literary journals around Yugoslavia.

Outside, on the university grounds, Jovan would find the four bodies of these young men a few hours afterwards while Suzana slept under sedation. Shot down by Serb militia. Not because they were rapists. Because they were armed Muslims. And Jovan did not feel relief. Did not feel the hatred for them consummated in this violence. Maybe it was because they looked young. Young enough to still be his students. Young enough to be anything they wanted to be. No longer young. They had no age now. Hate would have been easier. Jovan searched for hate, and wanted to find it. Easier than the obliteration he actually felt.

The demolishment he still feels, even here in Melbourne, Australia. A different world altogether in which what happened in Bosnia was some kind of horror show where monsters killed other monsters. A place with no heroes, and therefore of little interest to anyone he talked to, except as far as they looked at him and wondered whether he was possibly another one of those Balkan monsters. Jovan smiles at people in the hospital, blokes like Bill, and assures them all he’s not to be feared. He’s just a cleaner in this world. No problems. There are no problems here that can’t be cleaned away.

He walks down the hallway, away from the change room and the noise of Bill kicking in metal lockers. Jovan moves down the busy hospital halls, patients making their way along to rooms for examinations or rest, with doctors and their purposeful faces and others, similar to himself, heads full of directions, moving here and there, looking to keep it all running. Everything going on as it should in this fully functioning moral economy. The hum of a healthy hive, audible through every wall, at least to Jovan’s ears.

That hum had been harder to hear ever since Doctor Graffito had emerged, his mind breaking out across the walls, a rare, exotic disease that was yet deeply familiar as well. As common as a cold. The cough and the frustration. As basic as hate. The venom from a wound, sucked up, spat out. Had Jovan been fooling himself about his own hatred? Enough of that poison and a man becomes toxic, the walking wounded, more dead than alive.

Outside radiology, he stops for a drink from the new watercooler. The white plastic cups are small, child-sized, so Jovan refills his cup and drinks again. The water is slow and he thinks of Graffito’s Origin of the Species oil. Leni walks along the hallway and pats his elbow lightly as she passes, absentmindedly says, “Hey, Jovan,” pronouncing it correctly. Returns after a few steps because a thought has occurred to her—for a brief chat with him at the watercooler. It’s one of those social phenomena, people talking at the watercooler, but he hasn’t seen it often and he’s never been part of that kind of conversation. It’s a small thing, yet it lets the toilet graffiti slip away from his mind as nothing more than the spat-out madness of Dr. Graffito.

Jovan walks through the hospital feeling as though these people belong to him. As if the halls and rooms were in a home he owns. A feeling he used to have in the university. He knows them all in brief moments. He wants them to find their way with as little confusion and pain as possible. The grid pattern of the plastic floors along the way pleases him; the three tones of a comforting grey. So clean you can’t see a scuff mark or bit of rubbish all the way out to the car park.

When he puts his key into the lock of the panel van, he thinks, Maroochydore and Mooloolaba, Noosa and Coolum, and wishes he could find a way to free them both for another drive up to the Sunshine Coast. They bought a pile of postcards while they were up there and sent them to no one. Jovan collected them at different service stations along the way.

There was a place called Cotton Tree. They spent a month there. Every day so bright it dazzled the brain all the way into evening. A gold-flecked heat, that blasted without blistering—the water freshening the air whenever it began to feel heavy. A place where he felt for the first time that they might actually survive Sarajevo.

Cotton Tree doesn’t rhyme with the rest of his Sunshine Coast names but it’s the centre of a useless compass he carries around with him in Melbourne. Jovan drops into his car seat and feels the shock travel up his spine and jangle up into his teeth.

He drives out into the homeward-bound evening traffic and doesn’t mind the push and pull of the metal river around him, the long stops, crawling along for sections of the road home. It gives him time to think about Leni. The conversation about her art. Asking him to be her subject.

He laughs out loud now, because back at the watercooler, he had thought she meant she wanted him to stand in a room for her—naked. Just him and the pretty girl. Had she noticed him blush? Had he actually blushed? His face wouldn’t have flushed, yet she was watching closely. There were almost invisible signs. The pupils dilating. A blush response in his eyes? Jovan brakes for a cyclist pushing out into the lane because of a parked car up ahead. She must expect that reaction when she asks someone to pose for her. Wouldn’t most people stumble on the idea of their own nudity? Not a brief nakedness, as it was most of the time, or part way. Fully nude, an hour or two, for the careful scrutiny of canvas. All of the people she’s asked, laughing with the same kind of embarrassed shift of warmer blood in their faces. He passes the cyclist and admires the fixed attention he gives the road ahead. The way the cyclist leans forward, poised and very still but for the perfect rhythm of his legs pumping up and down. “Almost killed you,” Jovan murmurs. Shakes his head in the rear-view.

X-Ray walked past the watercooler, stopped to see what the laughter was about. Impossible to explain and Leni laughed harder when Jovan attempted to describe the misunderstanding—what she asked him and what he had assumed. X-Ray walked away as if he was angry at both of them. Especially Jovan. He couldn’t help laughing at X-Ray’s confusion as well.

Jovan had looked back at Leni, enjoying her laughter. Might he have been persuaded to pose nude? He knew that, had he wanted to reveal himself, he wouldn’t be able to. Nothing showed in the mirror. Suzana said there were a few marks across his back. The sharp radiator fins had put a vague pattern into his skin—even those industrial-strength Bosnian radiators couldn’t melt flesh. They weren’t quite as hot as an electric iron. Was that why a demented mind needed to explode across hospital walls in graffiti? Spell out every vague wound pattern inflicted on a man’s mind.

He could wear his overalls, she said. In fact, the overalls were good. Wear the overalls, she told him, though he hadn’t agreed to be her subject. The clothes were a part of the world they both lived in yet she would be looking to draw him out of it. There would eventually be a kind of nakedness anyway, she said.

When he parks the van in his driveway the lights are on in every room of the house. The curtains are pulled aside. He doesn’t see Suzana walking from one room to another as he has in the past. Or he might see her sitting at the dining room table over her books, her spine as rigid and straight as her writing arm is relaxed and serpentine. Not at the table either tonight, though her books are there.

Isn’t this a kind of nudity as well? They were never this careless before. Maybe there were children to protect and privacy was part of that function. Now their furniture is always second- or third-hand anyway and there’s nothing to steal or protect. The open blinds and lights would confirm it for anyone walking past the house.

It reminded Jovan of an ant farm they built in a science class when he was young. Prayers for Cracks in the Glass—the title of a poem he wrote back in those school days, where he used those ants and their compressed, exposed world, as an elaborate metaphor for his own petty high-school frustrations.

He pulls the latch and kicks open his car door. Walks towards home. There’s a small slab of concrete in front of the house that serves as a step to his front door. He looks up and there are no clouds tonight. There are few stars—random dots of light which have managed to struggle through the city’s light pollution. He finds a scrap of poetry as he walks towards his illuminated house.

Jovan doesn’t open the front door. Charlemagne, on a chain, barks from Silvers’s yard. Rosellas squabble on the power lines along the street. Cicadas roar from the eucalyptus tree in his yard. A neighbour’s truck coasts home along Reservoir Road—a few houses down the street. Silence beyond the door. Jovan’s keys are in his pocket but he can’t move his arms. He turns away and faces the street. He stands there, breathing and blinking. Pure existence. That phrase drifts through his mind, connected to nothing.

Jovan remembers the sketch Leni made of him when he drove her to work in the morning. The Romance of the Crash. Suzana might find the drawing. The portrait would hurt her. Wouldn’t it be clear a woman had drawn it? Might he seem a philanderer? Jovan walks back to his van and opens the passenger-side door. He leans in for the glove box. Pops it open. The compartment is empty other than for a small parcel. On the front of it are the printed words

This is a Bomb

Jovan picks it up and knows he’s meant to open the package. Graffito wants him to feel a jolt of fear that his car has been broken into. Anger that there has been a theft. The doctor is directing the janitor to read another message within the small box, carefully prepared for him.

Jovan walks the parcel to the green wheelie bin. Changes his mind. He doesn’t want to be tempted later on by a curiosity that will be sure to grow. Given enough time it will be irresistible to know what Graffito had to say in a personal message to Jovan.

This is not a game Jovan can win since it can only be played on a madman’s terms. No doubt what’s in it. Harm. Pain for Jovan. An invitation to torment. He shakes the package as he walks towards the street and feels a weight within. So it wasn’t words today. The toilet door was enough, thinks Jovan, as he bends down. He drops “the bomb” into a storm-water drain that will sweep it away to Port Phillip Bay.

He walks back up to the front door of the brightly lit house and notices the dim, flashing lights of his television. The set is turned away from him. He can’t see what’s being televised. It’s illuminating his wife. She’s sitting on the carpet before it, as he’d seen his children do when watching a show. They were captivated in the same way at times. Tears running from an immobile expression of fascination on her face. Mesmerised—a woman who almost never watches television. Suzana doesn’t look like she’s crying. Jovan can see her wet face as television light plays across it. She’s childlike, arms wrapped around her legs, watching. Doesn’t notice Jovan through the front window, three metres away, until he knocks on their front door. And then she flinches as though slapped.

FIVE