I find it less painful to feel like a stranger here than in my own country,” Mirjana said.
Rico nodded, thinking about what Mirjana had just said. She was good at finding the right words when she spoke. Not that it made any difference to the mess human beings had made of the world.
According to Mirjana, there were about six thousand Bosnians scattered around the world. Most of them children of mixed marriages. They ended up in whichever country they could get to. Some were lucky, some found happiness, others didn’t.
She had closed her eyes for a moment, and Rico had a sense of something somber behind her eyelids. The war, he thought. But the word was meaningless. It was only an abstract term, which didn’t convey the tragedy of the situation, the reality of separation and death. The deaths of loved ones. The deaths of friends. The deaths of neighbors.
“There isn’t a Bosnian suffering, a Serb suffering, a Croat suffering,” she said. “It’s the same suffering, Rico, can you understand that? . . . The same suffering . . . Common to everyone. The same pain . . .”
The sun was beating against the windows of the café. For a moment, its rays lingered on Mirjana’s hair and surrounded it with a halo of light.
“But from what I’ve been able to gather, the predominant feeling in Bosnia now is one of hatred. Everyone feels obliged to hate the other communities in order to preserve their own . . . I don’t want to live like that. I don’t want to have to ask myself, when I’m walking down the street and meet someone, whether I should say hello to that person or spit in his face . . . I don’t give a damn about being a Bosnian or a Serb. Or a Croat. What I want . . .”
She raised her eyes and looked straight at Rico.
“What I wanted was to be happy.”
Mirjana had taken Rico to a little bar on Rue des Carmes. It was only just ten o’clock. When they had left the shop, the street was relatively deserted, probably because the mistral was still as cold and strong as ever. The sky was a pure blue.
“What a light!” Rico had exclaimed.
And he had stood there, like a boy, in the middle of the road, dazzled by the light tumbling from the sky, which forced him to blink.
The light of the South.
A strong icy gust had blown him a few yards off course. He had started laughing, and with his arms open had greeted the next gust by twirling around.
“Are you coming?” Mirjana had cried.
She had caught him by the arm and dragged him to the end of the street.
“You’re crazy!”
“You have no idea! It’s been months since I saw a sky as blue as this. And the sun . . .”
As they walked, Mirjana had taken Rico’s hand in hers. He had given her a sidelong glance, but she had carried on walking as if nothing had happened, her head down against the wind.
The first thing Mirjana had done when she got up that morning was to gather her hair under a large red beret and put on a calf-length gray coat over her tracksuit.
“Let’s go out for a coffee.”
Standing there, with her hands in her pockets, she looked like a schoolgirl who has grown up too soon. Rico had felt a gentle warmth suffuse his body. All she needed was a pair of glasses, he had thought, with a smile.
“What is it?” she had asked.
“Nothing . . .”
How to tell her what he was feeling? How to express the emotion he felt, deep inside? Rico had forgotten about these things, which belonged to a world of feelings. The words “I love you” and all the other sappy, infantile phrases people invent had gradually become threadbare. They evoked only memories. Fragments. Over the years, the flesh had decayed off those words, leaving only the bones. What did loving mean without the kisses, the caresses, without the pleasure two bodies can give each other until both are exhausted, until both reach that secret innermost point at which the word is annihilated in a cry and tears flow? “We’ve forgotten how to cry with happiness,” Julie had murmured, the last night they had spent together.
Rico had wanted to say that to Mirjana. Just that one thing. But standing there in front of her, with his hands deep in the pockets of his parka, he couldn’t utter a word, couldn’t even tell her, quite simply, that he thought she was beautiful.
“Nothing,” he had said again.
Rico had woken late. Mirjana lay with her face turned toward him. The room was dimly lit. He lay there for a few moments, looking at her face. Even in sleep, it betrayed all the tension inside her. She was asleep but not at rest. He had wanted to put his hand on her forehead, to calm her. But he had done nothing. For fear of waking her. There was no hurry. For her, as for him, the days were probably quite long enough already.
He had settled with his back against the wall, not far from the open door of the toilet, through which a little light filtered. He’d had a beer, smoked a few cigarettes, and leafed through Mirjana’s book, stopping whenever he found a passage underlined in pencil.
The night opens a woman to you: her body, her safe harbors, her shore; and her previous night where all memory lies . . .
Once again, Saint-John Perse’s poetry had dazzled him. Even if he couldn’t grasp his meaning, even if it was beyond him, its music had unsettled him. He had repeated the phrases one by one. He had whispered them to himself, as if he wanted to learn them by heart. And as he recited them, he had been sure that Mirjana had savored each phrase in her mouth. And that, on her lips, the poet’s words had become hers. At some point in her life, they must have found their meaning. In her.
Then Rico had thought again about what Mirjana had told him the previous evening. She hadn’t said much about herself, about her life. But there had been so much anger in her words. So much despair. When you get to a certain point, Rico had thought, you can’t turn back. Because you’ve seen things no one has seen, lived through things no one has lived through. You’re condemned.
Condemned. Maybe that was the only response. The response to everything. Not wanting to return to that society wasn’t a sign of powerlessness. Only of being weary of life after so much misery. Titi’s death. Dédé’s tempers. Félix’s silences. What was the point of coming back to the surface of things?
When Mirjana had opened her eyes, Rico was holding the book on his knees, looking at her pensively. He’d been like that for a while, watching her sleeping, drinking another beer and slowly smoking.
“Oh, you’re here,” she had said, as if relieved to see him.
“Yes,” he had replied. “I’m here.”
And now he was listening to her.
The reason she had that book of poetry was because she had been a student of French literature. She had written a paper on Saint-John Perse. That book was her most precious possession. A lifeline she had clung to since the day she had been forced to flee Sarajevo.
“Those poems are the only reason I still have the strength to live. I know some of them by heart.”
Mirjana took her purse out of her coat pocket. From it, she extracted a dog-eared color photo. The right-hand side of it had been cut off. She handed it to Rico.
“That was the last time we were together as a family. The next day, the Serbs started shelling the city.”
She leaned across the table and pointed at the people in the photo.
“These are my parents. Manja and Miron. That’s my aunt Leopoldina. This is my brother, Mico. And this is Selim. We were engaged. He’d just asked me to recite a poem, that’s why I’m standing. It was Mico’s wife Haidi who took the picture . . .”
Rico stared at the photo, as if hypnotized by the happiness that emanated from it. The image reminded him of other images, other family meals. His fingers started shaking.
“That’s all I have left of the old days. This photo, and the book.”
That was yesterday, Rico thought. And today nothing exists. Nothing will ever exist again. Not for her, not for me. The world dissolves, but not the evil that rules it.
Mirjana leaned even closer toward Rico, until she was almost lying on the table. She raised her dark eyes to him and gave him a look full of pain. Her lips almost against his, she started reciting, almost in a whisper:
I know you, O monsters! Here we are again, face to face, resuming that long debate where we left off.
And you can advance your arguments like muzzles low on the water: I shall give you neither pause nor respite.
On too many visited shores my feet have been washed before dawn, on too many deserted beds my soul has been delivered to the cancer of silence.
For a long time, they looked into each other’s eyes. Then Mirjana slowly moved back, without taking her eyes off Rico.
“My parents were killed three days later. January 6th 1993. The Serbs came to our apartment that evening. We were living in Skenderia, in the heart of old Sarajevo. They refused to leave, so they . . . They were dragged outside, and . . . ‘You can’t transplant old trees,’ Miron liked to say. My father would never have left Bosnia. And my mother would never have abandoned him . . .”
“But why? Why?”
“Why?” Mirjana shrugged. “All those things . . . They don’t matter now. The Bosnian Muslims did the same kind of thing themselves later on . . .”
She lit a cigarette. Rico did the same. They smoked in silence. Sometimes their eyes met.
Finally, Mirjana went on. “Selim enlisted on the first day. I think he may have done terrible things too. Like so many people in Bosnia. Everyone was prepared for the worst, after the nationalist parties won the elections in 1990 . . . Such madness! I’ll never understand it. My father often said that things happen for reasons we can’t work out. It annoyed me when he spoke like that. I thought it was out of cowardice, complacency. But now I understand what he meant. You can’t do anything against things you don’t understand.”
“What about your brother?”
“He took refuge in a chalet we owned in a little village called Pazaric, on Mount Igman. Mico was stubborn too. He wouldn’t leave. Wouldn’t try to get away. That was where they arrested him. They imprisoned him in a gymnasium. For eight months . . . Then they released him. Since then . . . Even Haidi hasn’t heard from him.”
“Is she still there?”
“No. In Croatia. Haidi’s parents are Croats. I spoke to her on the phone at Christmas. She seemed O.K.”
She gave a little smile.
“I called her from a booth. She talked so much, I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. ‘Come . . . Come . . .’ she kept saying. I saw the units getting used up, and then suddenly, nothing . . . Silence. I just stood there, staring at the receiver and crying. We didn’t even get a chance to say Happy Christmas . . . Haidi . . .”
Abruptly, Mirjana stopped speaking and looked around her. As if surprised to be there, in that bistro. The place had filled up, and now smelled pleasantly of anis.
“Do you want to eat something?” Mirjana asked. “A sandwich? A croque-monsieur?”
Rico wasn’t hungry. What he really wanted was a pastis.
They sat there talking and drinking—she drank coffee, he drank pastis—until Mirjana decided it was time to go to work. “Turn a few tricks,” as she put it.
“I have debts. You can’t imagine how much it costs, escaping, crossing borders. The most expensive part was getting to Italy . . .”
For the first time, something in her voice didn’t ring true.
“I need the money. There are these Albanians I owe it to . . .”
Rico didn’t know anything about all that. The traffic in illegal immigrants. But what he did know was that that no one ever gave anything on credit to someone in trouble. He wanted to say that to Mirjana, but changed his mind. Another question had occurred to him.
“Who is it you want to kill?”
“Dragan. My father’s friend. He led the Serbs who came to the apartment.”
Mirjana took her face in her hands. Rico thought she was crying, but it was only weariness. The weariness of pain.
“The only time I don’t think about all that . . . is when I’m being fucked . . . I look at the guy sweating, trying to come, and I tell myself his life must be even worse than mine.”
“And when you give him a blowjob, what do you think then?”
He had blurted out the words without thinking, and immediately regretted them. But it had revolted him that Mirjana could think such things. He could never find any excuses for the people who were always bugging him—the cops, the ticket inspectors. He could never forgive them for the way they behaved. That sounded too much like Christian charity. And it was a long time since Rico had last given a shit about charity.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Mirjana’s eyes had blazed with anger. Then they had turned from dark blue to gray-blue.
“You know, I’ll never forget that moment. When the shots rang out . . . I was just coming home. I saw Manja and Miron against the wall. The neighbors advancing. I cried out, ‘Dragan! No! No!’ . . .”
She lit another cigarette, puffed at it nervously, then searched in the pocket of her coat, took out a pistol cartridge, and held it out to Rico.
“I picked one up . . . Just one.”
Her voice was ice cold. She placed the cartridge on the table, between them.
“They can’t humiliate me more than I already have been. All the rest of it . . . The guys who fuck me are fucking a corpse. Never forget that, Rico. I died too. You know, Dragan was my godfather.”
“Is that why the photo’s been cut? Did you cut it?”
“Yes.” She pouted in disgust, then flicked the cartridge so that it rolled across the table toward Rico. “But I can’t get his face out of my head.”
Back in the shop, Mirjana went to the toilet to put on the clothes she had been wearing the night before. They hadn’t said a word to each other since leaving the café. When she came back into the room, with her make-up on and her hair brushed, Rico was rolling up his sleeping bag.
She looked like another woman. He couldn’t help giving her the once-over. More closely than he had done the night before, in that sinister bar. But with different eyes. Loving eyes, if the word still had any meaning for him. And he didn’t like this woman.
She put on her jacket.
“You like me like this, don’t you?”
“No, not really . . .”
“Oh? Why not.”
“You should keep your beret on. I think it suits you.”
“Oh, do you?” she said, surprised.
“Yes, I do.”
They were both embarrassed now.
“Will you stay another night?”