Chapter 2

I t was Gojko who brought me there.

We’d spent the whole day walking, from Bistrik to Nedžarići, but all the same I let him drag me out with him that night. Fog swirled around us. The Miljacka was milky pale, like colostrum. It was my last night in Sarajevo.

Italy won the gold in the luge race and there was a celebration. Sports journalists and athletes who should already have been sleeping in the Mojmilo Olympic Village were dancing on the tables and downing slivovitz.

“Come on, I’ll introduce you to the Italians.”

I end up squashed in between strangers with smoke-bleared eyes and sunburned faces. The bar is a warren. Stuffed heads of brown bears and chamois decorate its low archways. Flags dangle from the vaulted ceilings. I’m sitting below East Germany.

He isn’t there. He’s already said goodbye and gone for his coat, but he can’t find it among all the snow-covered parkas and overcoats in the coat check and the coat-check girl is off getting a beer. He comes back to look for her.

I see a long thin back in a colorful Peruvian wool sweater. Gojko calls out, “Hey, Diego!”

Diego lifts his hand to the nape of his neck as he turns. He has a wispy beard and hollow cheeks like a thin little boy’s. Later he’ll tell me that his head was pounding, his eyes burning after a day in the path of fast-moving sprays of snow. He walks toward us. Later he’ll say that he came over to speak to Gojko even though his eyes hurt, even though he was tired, because he saw me and was attracted like a bull to a red flag. I watch him come toward us. One can never say what it is, exactly, that connects two people—some kind of membrane, a prison from the start. Another life has traveled a great distance toward our own. We’ve felt the wind as it moved, breathed in the scent when it paused. The sweat and toil of that life have always been inside us. Its every effort has been for us.

We’re still for a moment, listening to that simultaneous rhythm of so many things. My cheeks are red. There’s too much smoke, there’re too many elbows, too many voices. Then there’s nothing else, only the colored splotch of that sweater moving toward me. In a second my eyes burn the contours of his flesh; it seems I can feel his soul. That’s it.

He reaches our table. In the meantime, the coat-check girl has given him his stiff blue jacket. He puts it on and stands there all bundled up and sweating. Gojko leans forward to hug him across the table of dancing revelers. “Are you leaving?”

The pom-pom on the woolen cap dances as he nods.

“This is my friend Diego. Remember? I told you about him.”

I don’t remember.

Diego puts out his bony hand. It burns as it lingers in mine. Already, it’s Pietro’s hand. Time rends time. A body stands before you, young and strong, and yet another body is already taking its place, the son already in the father, the boy within the boy.

The son will be the memory, the child who will carry the flame.

I slide over to make room for him, a couple of inches for him to fit himself into on the bench. We laugh because we’re sitting so close. I don’t remember what we talked about. There’s a strange singsong to his voice that makes me think of the sea.

“Where are you from?”

“Genoa.”

He hasn’t even taken off his cap. Drops of sweat roll off his forehead and fall into his eyes.

“You’re sweating.”

“Let’s go outside.”

We get up and leave, just like that, the two of us together out past the tables and the dirty glasses, the bear heads, the people pushing their way into the restrooms. Gojko doesn’t say a word, just lifts his hand like a traffic cop ordering a car to stop. Later he’ll say he saw it right away, that a blind man would have known what was happening. He’ll say that lightning strikes and kills the poor cat as it lies in wait for its prey.

 

Diego walks beside me in his blue jacket that looks like part of a navy uniform. He seems very young. I wonder how old he is.

“My plane tomorrow morning will probably be crammed full like the one coming over.” He’s here for work, he says.

“What do you do?”

“I’m a photographer. It was hot in there.” He smiles. It’s a gentle smile.

I tell him about my thesis and about Gojko, who’s been so generous, who’s made me fall in love with the city.

“Why are you up so late?”

“I was waiting to hear the bells ring and the muezzin’s call to prayer.”

He tells me we can wait together. We’ll climb up to the old railway station; the minarets down below look like lances piercing the sky.

How far will we walk tonight? A sanitation truck follows us for a while. When it stops the street cleaners pick up empty beer bottles and sodden leaflets. Long black brooms rustle over the pavement. The chilled and weary men sweep and gather, climb back up on the truck, stop to sweep and gather again. We wouldn’t have noticed the mess if we’d been left alone. We’re used to dirty cities. Instead, it’s as if we were in a spell; the streets are being cleaned for us as we go along.

“Are you here with a newspaper?”

“No, I’m freelance.”

He spent days lying on the ground with his chin in the snow at Bjelašnica and Malo Polje while bobsleds and ski jumpers splattered him with snow. He says he’s fucked up his eyes.

“Why didn’t you wear sunglasses?”

He laughs and says that would be like making love with your clothes on; nothing should come between the eye and the lens. He looks at me.

“Do you think I’m photogenic?” I tilt my head, showing him my best side, like a teenager.

“Are you with someone?”

I’m about to get married. I don’t say so. I say I’ve got a long-term boyfriend. “And you?”

He spreads his arms and smiles. “I’m free.”

We sit on the edge of the frozen Sebilj Fountain. There’s a half-frozen bird walking on the ice. It lets Diego approach. He picks it up and shelters it in his two hands and lowers his mouth to blow in warm air.

“Come with me.”

“Where?”

“To Brazil. I’m going to photograph the children in the red mines of Cumaru.”

 

Lit cigarette in hand, Gojko appears from behind a market stall in his fur jacket, as if he’d been waiting for us. “I promised the young lady I’d take her up into the hills to see Sarajevo from Andrić’s window.”

“Who’s this Andrić?”

“A poet, but don’t worry. Gemma doesn’t like Bosnian poets. They’re smelly and they drink too much.”

His presence protects me from the embarrassing torment of emotions I feel. We can pretend to be three friends, three innocent siblings out for a walk.

The gelid wind moves the gaunt trees. Gusts of sleet burn our faces and settle in our hair.

We look down on the city, the bony points of the minarets among the snow-laden roofs. Sarajevo looks like a supine woman. The streets are the lines of a wedding gown.

My own wedding gown awaits me back home, a stiff satin swirl like a calla lily, a motionless flower.

Night is departing. The electric lights below us dance in the dawn like candles on the sea. Gojko stretches his arms wide and yells in German, “Das ist Walter! ”

“Who’s Walter?”

“He’s the main character in a propaganda film they showed us at school, a partisan hero. The Germans spend the whole film trying to find him, without any success. At the end, the SS officer looks down on the city and says, ‘Now I know who Walter is. This is Walter. It’s the whole city, it’s the spirit of Sarajevo.’ It was a crappy film, but it made us cry.”

We sit on the ground beneath a canopy at the old station. Gojko pulls a bottle of rakija out of his jacket.

“Ladies first.”

It’s like lava going down. Diego takes a sip after me. He looks at me as he puts his mouth where my own had just rested. It’s our first erotic exchange. Sweat pours down my back despite the cold.

“Damn.”

“What?”

“I wish I had my camera.” He wants to take a picture of my reflection in a frozen puddle between the tracks.

Gojko drains the rest of the bottle as if it were water and then throws it into the snow. He blathers on in his crumbling voice about the future, the poems he’ll write, the new toy he wants to import, a magic cube, a puzzle that’ll make him rich. We let him drone on. It’s like nighttime radio. Every once in a while Diego says something, anything, so it’s like we’re a trio of friends enjoying the night. When Gojko lights another cigarette, Diego elbows him. “Careful with that lighter. You’re so full of rakija that we’ll explode if you burp.”

“I see you’ve learned something about Bosnian humor.”

I laugh even though my jaws are paralyzed with cold. Gojko looks at me and I can tell he’s angry. He shakes his head, gestures that we should go to hell and turns over on his side in the snow. “Let me know when you’re done making out.”

He’s completely wasted, but he doesn’t want to leave us alone. He stays there like a guard dog pretending to sleep. Diego takes my hand.

“And so ...”

I wait for him to finish. His breath is white in the air.

“... you’re you.”

“What does that mean?”

His voice goes hoarse. “Don’t go. Don’t leave.”

He lowers his head, buries his eyes in my hand and breathes there like the frozen bird at the fountain. I run my fingers through his hair.

“Do that some more.”

“I’m getting married in forty days.”

He looks up brusquely. “Who to? The old flame?”

 

I pull myself together, stand up and brush the snow off my rear end. I say it’s freezing and that I have to go finish packing. I prod Gojko with my foot. “Get moving, Walter!”

We go back toward the hotel. No one talks and none of us mind. We’ve gone too far and now we’re tired. Now I don’t like this thin, intense boy walking beside me. His mood is defeated like Gojko’s, black like the night. All of a sudden I can’t stand either of them. I’m surrounded by stupid men, gloomy admirers. Dawn curls itself around the furtive city like a big gray cat. I scold myself. Why did I stay up all night, drink so much, get so cold? Taking advantage of Gojko’s bulk, I squeeze his arm. Diego slinks along ahead of us, close to the wall like a dog. Gojko runs his hand up and down my back, glad to warm me. He senses the change in Diego’s mood, can tell something happened while he was sleeping. Now it’s his turn again. He doesn’t mind my fickleness. He picks up a piece of wood and tosses it at Diego. “Hey, photographer!”

Diego starts, slips on the sleet and falls. Gojko didn’t mean to hurt him. He didn’t think he was so floppy.

“Are you okay, my friend?”

Diego pulls himself up, brushes the snow off his pants and says he’s fine. All of a sudden I feel sorry for him. All of a sudden I realize I’ve hurt him.

“See you in the airport.” Waving listlessly, he limps off without turning around.

 

It takes Gojko’s full weight on my suitcase for me to zip it closed. I bought too many trifles, piles of embroidered tablecloths for my new home. We drive past the Eternal Flame. For the last time I look at the boulevard, the brand-new buildings and Vucko the wolf, the mascot of the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics, beside an enormous image of Tito. The sky is white. My stomach is upset from not sleeping. I ask Gojko to put out his cigarette.

At the check-in counters there’s a crowd, journalists, television crews, tourists. A group of Finnish fans follow a girl in a gold parka and leather miniskirt. She’s waving an inflatable snowman.

He’s not there. My head doesn’t move a fraction of an inch as my eyes scan the crowd. I buy an English tabloid. Princess Diana, her firstborn on her lap, is on the cover with her heavy blond hair and red cheeks.

His plane was supposed to leave an hour before mine, so he should be here. Maybe he slept through his alarm. I bet he’s one of those boys who sleeps too much and wastes time.

I’m wearing a cowl-necked angora sweater with a straight skirt that falls just below my knees and camel-colored boots. My big sunglasses are pushed back on my head. I look slightly older than my age. I started dressing like a grown-up when I finished college. I open the first button of my jacket and breathe beneath my composed chest, cross my legs, set my purse down beside me. In a sense, I’m playing a role, like we all do when we’re in public. It’s like a dress rehearsal for the woman I’d like to be. To be honest, the only thing I know about myself is that I don’t like to suffer. The world I grew up in was comfortingly horizontal, with no highs or lows.

In the end, it seems, Sarajevo will leave me with a trace of sadness. Even the opening ceremony of the Olympics, impeccable and sumptuous as it was, was cloaked in metallic sadness that the graceful movements of the baton twirlers and the jumps and twirls of the skaters did little to dispel. There was a military gloom, shared by all the Eastern Bloc athletes. You got the feeling they had never once had fun during a training session. I remember a little boy I bought toasted hazelnuts from outside the Zetra Stadium. His eyes could have belonged to a mouse. I caressed his cheek, gave him a tip. He didn’t move a muscle, a child of stone.

Gojko’s still here, though I told him he could go. He’s shuffling around the airport, making deals. He comes over and blows smoke on me, then spots my magazine.

“Who’s that?”

“The wife of Prince Charles of England.”

“Is she Bosnian?”

“Of course not. She’s English.”

“She looks just like my mother.”

I stuff the magazine into my bag.

“Actually, my mother’s more beautiful.”

I’m so sick of this presumptuous Bosnian who thinks that this armpit of a place is the center of the universe. He never gives it a rest. The border between Orient and Occident . The Jerusalem of Europe . A crossroads of ancient cultures and vanguard movements . Now his mother is more beautiful than Lady Diana. Go to hell.

The city is freezing cold in the winter, sweltering in the summer. The people who live here are depressing, arrogant, ridiculous. The women are either covered in makeup or utterly faded, while the men stink of onions, rakija and sweaty feet in cheap shoes. I’m sick of pita bread and ćevapčići, I want salad and grilled fish. I’m sick of you, Gojko. Your jokes aren’t funny. Your poems leave me cold. I think of Andrić and smile to myself. If I had to tell you in a single word what drives me to leave Bosnia it would be: hatred.

“My mother’s in the hospital.”

“Really? What’s wrong?”

“She’s having a baby. She’s been there a week. The baby is taking its own sweet time.”

“How old is your mother?”

“Forty-four. She had me when she was seventeen. Now there’s going to be another baby after all this time.”

“That’s a wonderful thing.”

“That’s life.”

 

Why aren’t they announcing any flights? The departures boards haven’t changed for ages. “Is there a strike?”

Gojko bursts out laughing. He can’t believe I’ve said such a stupid thing.

The airport is starting to feel like a station at rush hour. The smell of cigarette smoke is unbearable. I stand up and walk toward the windows at the end of the terminal. I want to see the runway, see whether or not any planes are taking off. I press my nose against the glass and can’t see a thing. Everything’s white. It’s snowing.

I hear a sound, the vibrating chords of a guitar. I turn. Diego is sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall in a corner between the window and a service entry. Head bent, he strums his guitar.

“It’s snowing.”

“Yup.”

“A lot.” “A lot.”

 

I lean against the white blizzard, my destiny. Now I realize that all I wanted was for someone else to make the decision for me. I run a finger over the glass, drawing a wavy line, a thought, in the condensation left by my breath.

“You hurt my feelings.”

What’s he going on about? Why does he talk about us with such intimacy?

“Come sit here.”

I sit next to him on a bench. Not on the floor. That would be too much in this skirt. I’m a good girl resigned to a benign life without highs and lows, without sorrows, without desires.

“Do you like Bruce Springsteen?” He starts singing. You never smile, girl, you never speak... Must be a lonely life for a working girl... I wanna marry you ... “I’m in love with you.” He smiles at me, pushes his hair behind his ears.

Once again my attraction wanes. He’s either scary or an utter dolt. “Are you always like this?”

“Like what?”

“Racing ahead, imagining things all on your own.”

“I want to do everything with you.”

“I don’t even know you.”

He tells me his entire life story in bursts. His father was a port worker and died young. His mother is a cook at the Gaslini Hospital, she’s always brought him food in aluminum tins. The building he lives in looks like social-realist architecture even though it was the Christian Democrats who built it. On the ground floor there’s a photo studio and that’s where he got started, by going down and busting their balls every day.

The snow keeps falling. A scratchy voice says that all flights have been canceled for the moment.

Diego stands and grabs his guitar.

“It couldn’t be better! We won’t lose our tickets and they’ll pay for the hotel. Shall we get connecting rooms?”

“I’m waiting in the airport.”

“Didn’t you hear? They’re closing the airport. You’ll be here all by yourself.”

I think about my bags, about Fabio, who’s planning to get me at Fiumicino Airport, about my mother, who will have bought fresh tagliolini. I see my life covered with snow, erased by the snow. Come on , I think, there’s nothing to be afraid of. This goofball will become another little brother, just like Gojko. That’s how it goes. I was quite the success on my trip. I picked up two losers, a Bosnian poet and a photographer from Genoa. Fabio will laugh. He’ll say the world is full of crazies and that I’m a little crazy, too, which is why he likes me. He’ll look at me in that way he has when he’s about to jump on me, happy like a dog about to rub himself over a turd in a field. Why am I saying this? Why am I spitting on my life? Who is this boy beside me?

“I’d be fine staying here in the airport, just the two of us inside and all the snow outside. Anything is fine with me.”

He jumps around with his hands in his pockets. “I’m a lucky guy.”

“Oh, really?”

“Very lucky.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-four. How about you?”

“Twenty-nine.”

He smiles and says he’d thought worse, that I look thirty. He curls up his whole face and shows all his teeth. I look at that smile, too big for his little face.

 

I’m finding you again on this first night in Sarajevo after all these years, shovelfuls of life one after the next. My white skin is more than fifty years old now. More than fifty years of thoughts and actions. Would you still want me, Diego? Would you like the loose skin on my arms? Would you still love me with such a carnal passion, such joy? Once you told me you’d want to lick me all over even when I was old. You said it and I believed you. What does it matter that time didn’t let us try? Somewhere, the two of us did grow old together. Somewhere, the two of us are still rolling around and laughing. The window is dark. I can’t see Sarajevo. I see nothing but a street, an anonymous view. This city is a pita bread stuffed full of the dead, innocents torn away from innocence. Your son Pietro is sleeping, Diego.

 

There’s a long line for the pay phones. Gojko cuts in front of everyone, hollering that there’s an emergency. He glues one ear to the receiver and sticks a finger in the other. He speaks in a loud voice, then hangs up the phone and yells, “My mother had the baby! It’s a girl! It’s Sebina!”

He throws his arms around our shoulders and drags us along. We must get to the hospital as quickly as possible to see the baby. So what if the snow is as high as the doors? He has chains for the tires. We have to toast to his mother and Sebina! He’s glad it’s a girl because there are only ever boy babies in their family. What luck she was born today—those born during a snowfall have a long and sweet life. He hopes she takes after his mother, who is so beautiful and cooks the best meat soup in all of Bosnia. He kisses and hugs us. He’s so happy he’s almost crying. Before you know it we are, too; six damp eyes looking at each other like stupid fish.

In the car we sing along to the songs on the radio without knowing what we’re singing. The snow is deep, the sky dense as plaster. Cars creep forward with their headlights on. A snowplow leads the procession. Once again, someone is cleaning the road for us.

Everything is white and deep. Gojko stops to buy something for our toast. Sinking into the snow one step after another, he walks toward a neon sign. Diego turns to me. “Are you happy?”

“Yes. I’ve never been in a blizzard before.”

He extracts my hand from my pocket and holds it. “I want to take your picture. I’m going to take your picture all day long.”

Gojko comes back as snowy as a sled dog and opens a bottle of bubbly wine. “It’s Austrian. It costs a fortune.”

My life is buried in a distant garden beneath a slab of ice. The headlights move through the white. Those long fingers weave themselves through my own. They speak to me, vowing everything, and that’s enough, right now, the hand of this boy I don’t know tearing me from the stagnant solidity of my body. It’s like a child’s hand, a hand from a long time ago, the hand of a little friend at nursery school, a little boy who wanted to be with me all the time. I wipe a tear from my eye, the gesture so small it’s invisible.

 

It’s cozy warm inside the hospital, almost too warm. The maternity ward has a homey smell of pans on the stove, clothes hung to dry. The room is big but almost all the beds are empty. Gojko’s mother is sitting, her back against the pillows, looking out the window at the falling snow. Gojko bends over her and hugs her tight. We hang back a few steps. He gestures for us to move forward. Mirna says, “Hvala vam .”

“My mother thanks you.”

We ask what she’s thanking us for. Gojko shrugs. “For giving me work.”

I’m astonished. With her stately neck and fragile face that stretches across her cheekbones like cloth over a loom, his mother really does look like a more beautiful version of Lady Diana. Her eyes are indigo, her hair golden.

So there we stand beside the bed of a new mother as beautiful as a queen. A long shiver runs through me. Maybe the photographer from Genoa is feeling the same thing. He’s taken his cap off as if he were in church. Life is mixing up the cards and crowing, like a rooster, the dawn of day.

The baby appears, swaddled in a scrap of white cloth. She’s homely, with slightly square cheeks and a pointy chin. She doesn’t cry. Her eyes are open as if she already knew everything. Mirna’s mouth opens when she sees her, as if it were the mother who sought food from the baby. Tears as big as seeds roll down Gojko’s cheeks. He takes the baby’s hand in his own and studies her. Allow me to introduce myself, young lady. I’m your brother Gojko. I will be a father to you.

Gojko’s father died of cancer a few months earlier. Fortunately, his mother has a good job teaching in an elementary school. She’s a Croat from Hvar, very Catholic, and she never once thought of aborting the baby.

Now she’s yelling in a cracked voice that clashes with her beauty. She doesn’t want her son to touch the baby before washing his hands. Gojko goes to the little sink hanging from the wall and returns with dripping hands. He jumps around with his little sister in his arms, kisses and smells her. He stays next to the bed while his mother nurses her, resting his head beside theirs on the pillow. He stays there almost without breathing, like a dog afraid of being chased away.

Diego loads his camera and snaps a picture of the nativity scene. Embarrassed, Mirna shields her breast with her hand. The woman in the next bed, who hasn’t given birth yet, makes dark, bitter-tasting raspberry tea on a little electric burner and offers it to us in glazed iron cups. When Mirna pulls up her leg to scratch one of her feet, I see that her legs are covered with red spots. She notices my gaze and smiles, embarrassed. It’s eczema. She got it while she was pregnant.

I rummage in my bag for the arnica lotion I always carry for my constantly chapped elbows. I ask her if I can put some on her legs for her.

She shakes her head but I insist. Her legs stiffen. She lowers her head and sniffs as if she were worried she might smell. She has the solid calves of a woman who spends a lot of time on her feet. Her dry skin drinks in the lotion. I smile up at her and she smiles back at me. She makes it clear that she already feels better, that the lotion is miraculous. I tell her she can keep it if she wants, though I’m sorry that it’s half empty.

Mirna says something. “Hoćeš li je? ”

“What did she say?” I ask Gojko.

“She wants to know if you want to hold the baby.”

Mirna holds out the newborn still warm from her womb.

The woman who made the tea is telling a funny story and everyone is laughing. For a moment, they forget about me.

The newborn wears the smell of her voyage, a smell from the bottom of a well or a lake. I walk to the mirror beside the sink to see what I look like with a newborn in my arms.

Diego joins me and takes a picture of my reflection in the mirror.

“Do you want kids?”

“What about you?”

“All I want is kids.”

He’s serious, almost sad. He knows I don’t believe him.

 

It stopped snowing for a while and then started up again. In the Baščaršija there’s a sort of white trench along the side of the little streets where the shopkeepers have shoveled in front of their stores. At six in the evening, when darkness swallows up the snow and the smell of wood smoke comes down from the hills, the muezzin climbs the stairs of the minaret to pray. We’re already tipsy.

Gojko drags us along to a designer friend’s fashion show. The lighting is miserable. The models look like multicolored birds with their raptorlike hairstyles and sequin-covered clothes. They move forward half naked to a soundtrack of Slavic disco music, their skin spotted with cold in the freezing room that looks like a provincial dance hall. The members of the audience seem to have been dragged in off the street. Their shoes are covered with snow, their umbrellas dripping. Gojko’s friend is plump and hairless. He’s wearing a black wide-knit T-shirt with big holes like a spider web. When he comes out at the end to thank the audience, he bows to the ground like Maria Callas.

Out on the street we laugh like kids on a school trip. Imitating the frozen models, I sway in the snow. Diego throws himself at my feet to take my picture as if I were a star and yells that he wants a spider shirt, too. Gojko says we are two krastavci , drunken pickles. He’s angry. We’re acting too complicit, too stupid. He’s getting upset again. He walks ahead of us, tough and ill tempered in his cat-fur jacket.

We glide into a club frequented by the Sarajevo underground, and if it weren’t for the slivovitz, it could be London. Artists with long white hair tinged yellow by nicotine circulate alongside spectral swaying girls with closed eyes and black-shadowed eyelids that shine like mussels. The lights come and go. The music seems to come from the bowels of the earth. Like an earthquake, it makes the tables tremble, the ashtrays, the empty glasses no one takes away. Gojko introduces us to Dragana, who works for the state television, and knows how to do voices—she does a Smurf voice for us—and to her boyfriend Bojan, a mime and actor, and then to Zoran, a lawyer whose pockmarked face wears a serious expression, and to Mladjo, a painter who studied at the Brera Academy in Milan. We lose Gojko. He’s swallowed up by his friends.

Diego kneels beside me. “What do you want, little one?”

“I don’t know. What should we get?”

I’m in a daze. I haven’t been in a club in ages. Everyone’s half dressed. They’re all dancing. I’m wearing an angora sweater and a stiff skirt. I feel clumsy and out of place.

I manage to grab a seat on a slippery couch. Diego comes back with a big cup of ice cream, just one for the two of us. “There wasn’t anything else.”

Ice cream, with all that snow outside? But it’s just the thing. It melts as it slides down into my flaming body. We eat from the same spoon. He puts a spoonful in my mouth and watches me. Then instead of the spoon he brings his mouth to my mouth and lingers there without kissing me right away, his breath on my cold lips as if he were waiting for final approval. He moves into the kiss very slowly. He may be cleverer than I thought. Maybe he’s one of those sensual boys with a lot of experience. It’s a long soft kiss. Our tongues are snails crossing a city square.

 

What if he hadn’t trusted me that night? Instead, it’s all he wanted to do. Our mouths were like a single mouth. Pietro turns over in bed, mutters something, moves all of a sudden toward wakefulness and then dives down again, like a devil ray coming up to the surface and then returning to the dark depths. It’s been years since we last slept in the same bed. I’d forgotten about his loose nerves like guitar chords that snap all of a sudden. He’s never wanted to hear about his father. Pietro puts up defenses , Giuliano said. He’s a kid, and kids are always afraid of getting hurt .

I always talked to Pietro about his father with levity. I told him about how funny Diego was, told him about his stork legs and the wispy beard he grew so he’d seem older. I told him about the time his father came home saying he’d done the best photo shoot of his life only to realize he hadn’t loaded the camera and about how Diego’s pants fell when he walked because he was too thin, like you , I told him, and he didn’t remember to put on his belt, because he was absentminded, like you . Every time, I swallowed my tears and laughed.

Giuliano didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he said, Your pain is what he’s perceived.

It’s true. I’ve looked anxiously for signs of his father every day of his life.

One night at dinner Pietro got angry with me because there was no ice cream in the fridge. I told him to sit back down because we weren’t finished eating. I said he was spoiled and selfish. Giuliano laid his hand on mine and said he’d get some ice cream from the café downstairs. I told him that it wasn’t any help for him to let Pietro treat him like a doormat. He went out and left us alone. Pietro was standing in front of Diego’s picture on the fridge. He turned toward me. What in the hell are you talking about? I’m nothing like him. He looked at me with the eyes of an adult, a stranger. I’m not like anyone .

 

That night there were kisses, one within the next. Diego sat on me on the leather couch among the fluttering colored lights in that den of smoke and voices.

“Am I heavy?”

“No, you’re fine.”

Curved over me with his smell, his breath, the sweetest words. Like a snake devouring a little beast, swallowing it slowly. I’m suffocating down here.

I get up and dance. I need to move, to go wild. I raise my arms and legs, pick them up off the ground and move back and forth like seaweed. Who cares that my skirt is stiff, or that I don’t know how to dance? I dance like I used to dance in high school. Diego watches me, his eyes half closed in the dark. I’ve already made my wedding list. Fabio and I spent an entire afternoon in a store downtown with the saleslady beside us making lists. A crystal saltshaker with a silver cap, its companion pepper shaker. What will I do with them? Where will I scatter the salt? On the salad, or under the bed to get rid of the ghost of this bonehead who’s watching me as if I were Bo Derek?

Nothing will happen, nothing will come of it. I tell him it’s late. We have to go. He studies me as I put my scarf on. I don’t look at him anymore. I look at my feet.

The hotel for the passengers on the canceled flights is on the outskirts of town. The last tram left some time ago. Gojko invites us to sleep at his house. There’s room because his mother’s in the hospital. It’s a big housing block with a courtyard that makes me think of a prison, but inside it’s nice. The overhead light shines on a welcoming home with an upright piano, a Turkish carpet, two rows of books on the wall, puffy curtains like little white sausages. Gojko gives Diego his room. “The sheets are clean. I’ve only slept on them a few times.”

I’m to sleep in his mother’s room. Gojko shows me how to turn on the light on the bedside table and clears some stuff off a chair so I can put my things there. Beside the bed stands a little crib, all ready, half an egg made of wicker.

“It was mine. Now Sebina will sleep there. My mother made a new mattress and embroidered the sheets.”

I’m enchanted by the lace, by a bit of hanging ribbon.

 

We stay up talking for a while in the living room. Gojko doles out the remains of a bottle of his mother’s homemade pear kruškovača. A framed picture of Tito hangs among the others in the kitchen as if he were a member of the family.

Gojko starts talking about his father, who managed to save himself on the Neretva when the Marshal blew up the bridge to trick the Germans.

I stand and say good night. Diego stands, too, and follows me for a few footsteps. “Can I come visit when the partisan is asleep?” His face is like a beggar child’s. I shake my head like an angry mother.

I hear them talking for a while, then the buzz of the television. I hear Diego say, I’m going to bed, I don’t understand a fucking thing . Gojko says, It’s true, you don’t understand a fucking thing.

I’m calm. I read. Tonight Andrić’s woman from Sarajevo doesn’t leave the Hotel Europa. The words don’t sink in. They hang in the air, useless as clothespins on an empty clothesline. There’s something gracious about this bed, about this room with its gauze curtains and beige cotton rug. It’s clean, the room of a humble woman. I get up and look in the closet: a flowered dress, a suit, two men’s jackets and below piles of blankets, sheets and towels. Two neckties and a red patent leather belt hang from a wire on the inside of the door. I go to the bathroom and wash my face and under my arms.

The toothpaste gets rid of the taste of those kisses. Gojko is sleeping on the couch, his arms abandoned, his hands swollen like a child’s. The room smells of feet and of lingering cigarette smoke.

Diego calls me, Psst , ciao . He’s standing in the doorway to his room in a yellow terry-cloth jumpsuit. He smiles. “I found it under Gojko’s pillow.”

I smile and say good night again.

“Are you sleepy?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“You’re such a liar.”

We’re shy in this intimacy that doesn’t belong to us, and Gojko asleep is more formidable than Gojko awake.

Diego stands there in those pajamas like a duck suit, his hair long and wavy like an angel’s. He twists his mouth like a cartoon. “I’ll close my door, so you won’t hear me cry.”

I tell him to go to hell.

Then something happens. Gojko lets out a long full-bodied fart, a sort of little anal symphony. Diego makes a very intense face and nods. “Nice poem, Gojko. Congratulations.”

I cover my mouth and laugh.

Diego laughs, too. I turn and take a few steps toward the room where I’m destined to sleep if I can manage. Diego picks me up off the ground as if he’d never done anything else, like a mover with a rolled carpet.

We fall onto the bed, next to that empty crib. In a second Diego’s shucked off Gojko’s pajamas and there he is in nothing but a pair of absurd red underpants. I laugh. He doesn’t. He has thin legs and a frail body like a child’s.

“Do you think I’m ugly?”

“No.”

I see pieces of us, my limp hand hanging out of the bed, one of his ears, dark like a well, the point where our two torsos stick together. Before he enters me he stops and asks permission, like a child. “May I?”

It’s a root going into the ground. He stays there, looking at me, looking at the miracle of the two of us together. He puts his hands around my head like a crown, looks at my hair while he rubs it. “Now you’re mine.”

 

Afterward there was that bed and the empty crib where Gojko slept when he was a baby and where his little sister would now sleep.

I lie with one arm under Diego’s head. I feel calm, sated. I think about the phenomenon I’ve just witnessed, this boy who sensed instinctively what I wanted as if he hadn’t done anything else his entire life.

The blizzard has been over for a while. Voices rise up off the street, drunk kids. We get up to watch them from the window. Diego hugs me. I cover myself with a piece of the curtain. They’re big guys who speak English, athletes who’ve lost their way. They stay there for a while throwing snowballs, then go.

We go back to bed. This night will pass drop by drop.

Diego touches one of my nipples, small and dark like a nail. He touches the sadness that will come when he thinks of me. I feel no fear, no regret, no embarrassment. No recognizable feeling intrudes. Regret is a tired old man who can’t climb over the gates we build.

Diego picks up his guitar and starts playing, his legs bent, his chest bare, his eyes lowered over the chords.

“What song is that?”

“ ‘I Wanna Marry You.’ Our song.”

We sleep for a while, a deep blind sleep. I open my eyes to the smell of his body. His nose is stuck in my hair as if he stayed there to breathe in my smell. Day is dawning, small and livid. There’s time to make love one more time. His elbow pulls out some of my hair. It hardly matters. I get up, and it’s the hardest thing I’ve done all night long. He watches me while I bend to put on my underpants and gather things here and there.

“I’ll miss you my whole life long.”

We meet in the kitchen. Gojko’s made coffee and bought milk and sweet pitas. He must have passed his room, must have seen the unused bed. He watches us have breakfast together in that kitchen with its dove-gray cupboards, the lamp that looks like an upside-down mushroom. He plays with the crumbs on the table, watches my hands on the cup handle. He doesn’t make jokes. We’re neither happy nor sad, only lost.

I get my bag and open my wallet. I want to pay Gojko for the hospitality, the food, the sheets that need washing. He looks at the money, all I have left. He’s broke, as usual, but he brushes me away with a decisive gesture.

I tell him he’ll have to come visit Rome. He can stay with me.

He watches us, breathes in that air of agony. “Why do you have to leave?” I go to brush my teeth. I cry. My mouth is a cesspool of white foam that I can’t close. I rub off the makeup beneath my eyes. I go back to the kitchen with my bag. Diego is playing with a yo-yo. Gojko turns, bends over the little sink and throws the cups into it. There are tears in his voice. “You’re just a couple of bakalar s, two cods.”

 

Twenty-four years later I’m having breakfast with my son in a low-ceilinged basement breakfast room lit with fluorescent lights. A few of the tables around us are already dirty. Others are occupied by some of the men who were talking in the lobby last night. Many of them are already smoking. Pietro complains about the smell of smoke and about the food.

“Don’t they have anything normal here?”

“What do you mean by ‘normal’?”

“Like a pastry, Mom.”

I stand up to get him some butter for his bread. I peek into the sad metal containers and find a yogurt and a piece of cherry cake for me. All things considered, I’m hungry. I butter Pietro’s bread and tell him the honey here is very good. The girl from the kitchen comes over to the table. She’s wearing a uniform: white shirt, black skirt and little apron. Pietro looks at her. She’s young, barely more than a child. She has an oval-shaped face, almost transparent, and big yellowish eyes. She asks if we want a hot drink. I ask for tea. Pietro wants to know if they have cappuccino. The girl comes back with my tea and a big mug of darkened milk for Pietro. She smiles as she sets it down in front of him. She has little pimples on her forehead. Pietro looks at the watery liquid without a trace of foam and tries to say something but stops partway through because he doesn’t know how to say “foam” in English. The girl smiles at him and in a second—maybe the tray is wet—the teapot slides onto the ground. It doesn’t break. It’s made of metal. But the spurting tea hits Pietro’s white jeans.

He jumps to his feet like a crazed man because his leg is burning. He jumps in the air and pulls the boiling cloth away from his skin. The girl is shocked. She says she’s sorry, that she’s only been working there a few days. She speaks English with a slight Slavic accent. Pietro unzips his jeans and slides them down to his ankles. He sits there in his underpants, blowing on his thigh. He grumbles in Italian, Moron, klutz . But because he’s a coward, he says in English, Don’t worry, it’s okay.

The girl continues apologizing. She bends to pick up the teapot. In the meantime a hefty woman in an apron has come out of the kitchen. She speaks quickly to the girl. We don’t understand a word of what’s being said but it’s clear she’s being taken to task. Her cheeks are flaming red. Pietro has pulled his jeans back up. He taps the fury on the shoulder and says, “It’s my fault. The girl is very good, very much good.” He adds a pointless “indeed” for good measure.

The woman leaves. Pietro sits back down.

“You don’t say ‘very much good.’ ”

He complains that I’m always on his case, always, even when he’s being good.

I smile. This time he’s right.

I watch his white crooked teeth tear at the bread. The little Sarajevo waitress thanks him with a tiny bow.

 

We said goodbye at the airport. We leaned against the wall, close together. Diego put his hands under my coat, seeking the heat of my flesh. I let him. Everyone had already boarded. We stood without moving beside the row of empty seats. Then I turned and went away. I saw him knocking like a little bird with its beak against the glass. I had been crying but he was yelling to me that I should smile, that I should be happy no matter what, even without him.