9

LIGHT SNOW SWIRLED gently, swept up from the ground by a quiet force from above. The day would be clear, dry, one that would sober you up as soon as you stepped outside.

The mountains were sharply visible. Black forests with patches of snow. He knew they were green, but from here they looked like a moth-eaten wool sweater on the body of a big black woman. Like the black forest of Germany, he thought. Whoever came up with that name must have seen forests like these from afar.

Was anybody there? If so, they certainly had quite a view. He would be very calm, he felt, if he were up there, watching.

He looked toward the road.

The mailman had encountered a man with a dog; they were all standing by the side of the road while the dog was bounding around the mailman’s feet, apparently trying to play. But the mailman didn’t even look at the dog; he just stood there like a soldier frozen at attention.

The mailman looked as if he wanted to hand something to the man with the dog. The man with the dog raised his hands as if he were encountering a glass barrier.

The mailman was holding something; an envelope, or was it a package, or a bomb, and the man with the dog stepped away, hands raised.

Now the dog was barking at the mailman, you could hear it through the double-paned glass.

Then the man went his own way with the dog, while the mailman stood there, his head slightly tipped.

Nikola watched all of this from his window.

A cutting north wind quietly swirled the dry powdery snow that had fallen during the night.

Gone . . . Gone . . .

The thought, gone, wouldn’t leave him.

He thought about Šeila. He wondered if the miracle was starting, when your spirit is charged with blood and you’re so physical yet virtual, so much a part of life. Was this what he was leaving for the younger generation?

The first night he met her they barely spoke—Erol hovered around her, and from the sidelines, Nikola watched Erol mark a space around the young woman with his body, tell her something with his lively face and laughing eyes—he was clearly trying his luck with jokes—by speaking close to her ear, and how in time he went from enthusiasm to more insecurity, until he eventually gave up, though she didn’t move away from him and she smiled, but apparently not in the right places. He watched the slow crumbling of an alpha male’s performance through the eyes of another alpha male, without a trace of solidarity. Erol’s face cooled, he scratched himself behind the ears, and then, after a time, he stopped fencing her in, so even Branoš was within reach, while Erol moved away to the bar as if he needed to catch his breath, not far from Nikola, who said, “Beautiful, huh?”

“Yes,” said Erol. “But not for me.”

Nikola looked at him, and even felt sorry for having rooted against him.

“How can you tell?”

“I just can . . . You know when a burly boxer like me spars with a person who has long arms and fancy footwork,” said Erol, scratching himself behind the ear.

“Wha?”

“You end up missing a lot is all.”

Nikola had no chance to talk to Šeila that night because while Branoš was trying his luck, the museum director showed up at the Blue Lagoon bar with her taut face and a look that said she was afraid she’d left something behind on her way out the door. She planted herself right next to Nikola and soon he had to think of ways to cool her mood, because she tended to turn any inkling of mutual understanding into ha ha euphoria. It’s awkward when your mission is to sour someone’s mood. It usually takes a while—until the other side decides you’re a bore, but the road there is a long one, especially when you’re dealing with skittish yet persistent women who, like the museum director, at one point say, “Oh, I see I’m boring you.”

They came to this, however, only after the conversation turned to the local chess club. Earlier, he’d tried with local soccer, more specifically by talking about the local team, known as the Turbines. But when Šeila was on her way out, his sad gaze followed her.

“Damn, what were we talking about?” he said just then.

“Ha ha, you sure are distracted! The Turbines are in the third league, as far as I know,” said the museum director.

The conversation went on.

He handled the subject well because people from the club had already hit him up for money, no doubt since the soccer club had been named after the factory. So Oleg shelled out for the sponsorship and Nikola was invited to a game where, standing next to the club president, he witnessed awful soccer. Even the whiskered president shot occasional glances at Nikola, arching his eyebrows and gesturing in despair. What can you do . . . The coach . . . Embarrassed, maybe a little overdoing it, the president shrugged as if seeing all this for the first time.

What can you do . . . All my life, I’ve . . . I’ve worked. But the entire system—the players . . . and the coach . . . and even the league—it can’t be done. No way . . . Impossible, trust me . . . When you think about it, where has my life gone? For what?

Nikola consoled the gentleman.

He noticed, however, that, despite everything, the club had a surprisingly large group of supporters known as the Turbos who mixed turbo-folk culture with hometown pride, creating an inextricable amalgam of depression and the waving of arms in the air. At one moment he thought he’d misjudged them because they came alive when they sang a song in which seven shots of Jäger were mentioned multiple times, and the chorus was—If my daddy could see me nowww . . .

“Is this an anthem of some sort?”

“Nah,” said the club president, before yelling, “Where are you going . . . Where?”

If my daddy could see me nowww . . . If my daddy could see me nowww . . .

Getting wasted, getting wasted . . . Seven shots of Jäger . . .

There was also a marginal group watching it all from their own corner, gathered around a band called Turban-Rap. When one of them heard Nikola’s question they explained how the chant had been taken from a viral Internet video of a young woman explaining how she celebrated the holiday of Bairam by drinking. Later they gave Nikola an MP3 of the song and asked for his sponsorship, so Oleg gave them some money. He listened to it and memorized the chorus:

Wound, salt, corrida, bull,

My team’ll never get a goal.

He mentioned some of this during his reluctant conversation with the museum director and asked impersonal questions about the club, keeping the conversation as far from their personal lives as possible, hoping he’d seem boring. But Tanja the director turned out to be a steadfast fan of the Turbines; she even knew that the seven shots of Jäger and the chorus with daddy came from the viral video.

“From her statement?”

“Yup. In a survey.”

“The song comes from a response to a survey?”

“Yes, yes,” laughed the director.

This even sounded interesting, but as he had to prove to the museum director that he was boring, he instantly switched to chess.

Because, apart from the disaster that was the local soccer club, an incomparably better chess club had also survived in the small town. Yes, Oleg sponsored them as well; chess was widely played, maybe because the game was suitable for long stretches of unemployment. People were training their minds and maintaining their self-esteem, and there were men in town who looked like bums but sported the title of Candidate Master.

Clarifying this with Tanja and apathetically gazing at the bar, Nikola talked about the sudden drop in interest in chess after the Cold War, about this being the game of a bipolar world, about the absurdity of the black and white pieces, the inertia of the king, the pointlessness of chess in the digital age, and pointlessness in general. He mentioned the twilit showdown between the computer and Kasparov, thinking this would bore the director to no end and she’d finally decide to talk to Erol, for instance, or maybe the entrepreneurial owner, Rafo, who was also there.

But then she said the infamous, “Oh, I see I’m boring you.” With a question mark.

“Oh, no you’re not. I’m boring you,” he said.

“I am. I’m boring you.”

“Look, I’m boring you!” he said a little sharply.

“What was that?” she asked with an intent look.

“Nothing, I feel kind of . . . lousy.”

“Just relax,” she said.

He felt a little foolish having the museum director tell him to relax.

Then he asked himself, All right, all right, what do I owe her? There’s nothing between us, nothing, zilch. I just thought about sex out of desperation, but then I changed my mind and gave up.

We could have a normal conversation if only she’d stop staring at me like that. This isn’t just a crush. It’s a full-fledged infatuation . . .

It’s a relationship.

When someone has a crush on you yet you had nothing to do with it, that’s a special feeling. And when someone looks at you like this, with a crush, you’re ripe for Xanax.

What would have happened if we’d actually hooked up?

“I’m sorry. . . . Don’t be angry, I’m not in the mood for conversation today.”

She looked at him and said, “What does that mean?”

He looked at her, wondering what does she mean by, “What does that mean?”

“Well, it means that . . .” he started, but stopped. No, he couldn’t say something and then explain what it means. This could go on ad infinitum.

He wasn’t lying when he said, “I’m feeling irritable.” She looked at him intently. Then, to ease things, he said, “But it has nothing to do with you.”

After a pause, he added, “Other stuff. My bad.”

“Hmph, my bad.” She found his slang irritating.

“Pardon me, apologies, I’m sorry—whatever,” he said, thinking about how poisonous his irony was.

“All right, see you tomorrow,” she said, pursing her lips and picking up her handbag.

See you tomorrow. That actually surprised him.

Erol was laughing at him, he thought.

Nikola exhaled deeply and looked around to make sure the room was still there.

Then, he remembered that the interesting young woman had left and they hadn’t even had a chance to talk. He consoled himself by thinking she was too young anyway—still in her twenties.

He asked Sobotka, “How old is the woman you introduced me to?”

“Šeila?” Sobotka was trying to gauge how old his Jasmina was and was a little shocked by what he came up with. Jasmina had started school a little earlier, so Šeila could be “around thirty-three, thirty-four.”

The next day, Nikola talked with Branoš at the Lagoon about reorganizing tasks once the repair stage was finished. In various meetings over recent days Nikola mainly nodded sagely, while Sobotka proposed old experienced workers as managers of the production departments. The department teams were formed and the suggestions Sobotka made were readily accepted, with some reassigning here and there. For a few younger and more capable people like Branoš, a special department was established, and Sobotka filled them in on the engineering details. There was also something they called the “plant commission,” whose members were elected and whose function was to oversee “everything.”

Nikola formally rubber-stamped all of it, but, in truth, he’d be lying if he said he knew how it all operated on the inside. He thought to himself that it was all a jumble, but he didn’t want to interfere too much, nor did he have anything constructive to say. They all knew each other, and they knew the substance at hand better.

“All right, so if Sobotka were to catch the flu tomorrow, is there anyone who could control the process instead?” Nikola asked Branoš.

“It wouldn’t be easy, but we’d manage,” said Branoš. Then, what Nikola feared most happened: Tanja, the museum director, walked in and parked herself beside him at the bar. Branoš, considerate gentleman that he was, immediately moved away, thinking Nikola and the museum director should be left alone.

She smiled like the six o’clock news anchor and said, “How are you today?”

Nikola rose to his feet and said, “Busy, gotta go!”

He felt both miserable and furious for having to evade the museum director, but he had already tried the boredom ploy and felt that every counterattack would lead to complications in their relationship.

Fleeing was the only option. She sighed, “Where are you going?”

“Busy.”

As he walked away, he imagined himself in a brief flash of self-pity as a cartoon character running from a boot with kitten heels.

On his way out, he heard her saying, “Now that is not gentlemanly.”

As soon as he set foot on the street, his mind was singing the song: If my daddy could see me nowww . . . If my daddy could see me noww . . . He couldn’t get it out of his ear. He strode along, slightly shaking his head. Getting wasted, getting wasted . . . Seven shots of Jäger . . .

He bought six beers on his way home, sat in his rented living room, drank in silence, and mournfully checked Facebook. He realized that, since he’d stopped posting, he felt like those people who go out but don’t drink: you just watch everyone else drinking and having fun while mildly embarrassing themselves.

He turned on the TV.

He caught a report about the oldest resident of this or the neighboring county, he didn’t quite understand. “Old Hajra is one hundred and three years old, she had ten children and a total of ninety-three direct descendants,” he heard.

He still had the “TV professional” disorder, so an image of the tedious office meeting where this report was approved came to mind for a moment.

He watched: a village, a cottage, a meadow, and all the living relatives gathered for the shoot. They were standing like a huge team in front of a shanty, with Old Hajra in the middle.

Old Hajra had a wizened face and sunken mouth, and couldn’t have been taller than five feet. She said something into the outstretched microphone, but Nikola couldn’t catch it, so he thought he must already be drunk. Still, he doubted he’d understand her even if he were sober, which gave him enough reason to frown and protest the reporting technique. “Everyone says Old Hajra was never a woman of many words, but she has great results under her belt,” said the reporter. The camera pulled back and the assemblage of offspring stood in front of the cottage. Old Hajra moved forward toward the meadow, closer to the camera, she slowly sank to her knees and Nikola thought she might be about to strike a yoga pose.

The moment felt as if there’d be an unexpected outcome.

“And even at one hundred and three years of age,” concluded the reporter, “Old Hajra prostrates herself in prayer with ease!”

Nikola was finishing his fourth beer and the remaining two seemed less than enough. He thought he definitely wouldn’t live to be Old Hajra’s age.

Then he imagined what that would be like—to bury his whole generation and a few of the younger ones? How lonely.

We’re all going to die soon, he thought.

But then, getting his fifth beer from the fridge, he thought how, in a way, he had so far lived his life as though he’d live forever.

What am I doing?

Luckily, the gas station was open. Suddenly, Nikola wanted to drink Jäger.

He sank into a depression for the next few days. He avoided the Blue Lagoon, going only to the factory, where trucks full of parts and materials, which Oleg was sending to them according to Sobotka’s instructions, frequently arrived.

When he entered the Lagoon for the first time in ten days, he expected to see the museum director parked and waiting for him, but Šeila was standing in the very same spot by the bar.

Delighted, he approached her directly and said, “Now this really is a pleasant surprise!”

Then, he realized she couldn’t have followed his train of thought and he might’ve been approaching her too aggressively.

For a second, she seemed to be staring at him as if seeing him for the first time. Still, she answered with a smile, “Nice.”

He realized this made him look more relaxed than he really was. Sometimes people perceive you as more relaxed than you really are and that’s a help: the whole thing starts running more smoothly. He was asking ordinary questions and getting ordinary answers (“Waiting for someone?”—“No,” etc.) but there was something in the overall tone of the answers that made him feel so alive, as if he had a reason to be there. He looked at her and thought that she shone.

Shining, something he hadn’t hoped to find here. “Now, everything looks better,” he said after a pause that wasn’t awkward.

“What?” Again, she was sizing him up as if she weren’t quite sure what she was looking at.

“You know, like with TV back in the old days. When you moved something and the reception improved.”

“Oh,” she smiled, “you’re looking for an antenna.”

“Don’t move.”

• • •

He watched Šeila sleep on the sofa bed in his house. This town looked better covered in fine snow, he thought, maybe the last snow before spring.

They hadn’t made love. As the saying goes, “nothing happened.”

He’d asked her to come over for a nightcap that night, and she did, with no sexual drama, the usual test signals, the hemming and hawing, with no fear of him, she just said, “Okay, we’ll talk and that’s all.” It wasn’t exactly clear what Šeila did for a living. She’d tried her hand at all sorts of things, she said. She had even been a manager once, but in an illusion, which sounded like thinking back on failure. She didn’t say any more about that, so he realized she was still looking for her place under the sun. It hit him that he might have gotten slightly carried away. Maybe he said too much about himself, maybe he should have painted a better picture and not talked about how he was riding on Oleg’s coattails, even though he tried to pass this off as a joke. Never mind. He would have told the story differently in his hometown; he would have played the game and tried to cover his position. He would’ve circled, twisted everything around until eventually even he wouldn’t know what he was talking about or who he was representing—himself or a version of himself for public consumption. As if you’re fulfilling other people’s expectations of who you’re supposed to be until, he thought, even you yourself don’t know who you are: you’re only throwing yourself into the web we weave for each other. Why continue the charade in front of this woman who shines, he thought, here at the end of the world? Why not just talk, and then even caught himself off guard with what he was saying; exploring a whole new story, the world created when two people really talk.

She seemed to feel the same way about talking with him because, laughing, she said, “I had a love affair that, you know, disoriented me. After that I didn’t know who I was anymore, or who I was when I was in love, I didn’t know who I was, see? I’m still not sure, but maybe I was what people call a gold digger.”

When he heard this he realized she wasn’t afraid to talk.

“It’s the relationship, I realize, the ‘who are you’ stuff . . . It’s not just you. It’s many relationships. But there’s always one that stands out, something always stands out and takes you far away. And if that something abandons you, you’re disoriented like a soldier after a war.”

“Damn it if this country doesn’t look as if the war abandoned it,” he said, half-drunk.

“But even you don’t know what to grab on to. I see you don’t like being at home. Look, here you can become someone else.” She laughed.

“And who might I become?”

“Well—you!” she said, through her laughter.

“Ah, my you,” he said, using a local phrase he’d picked up, and they both laughed even more than the humor deserved. The way a man and a woman laugh, using the excuse of a joke.

He thought about the conversation.

Through the window he watched the postman striding along officially from front gate to front gate. The man walked as if he were at the center of the world, the deputy of the state: the postman, who still believed—you could see this on his face—that somewhere there, at the center, the system was up and running.