which describes human resourcefulness and falling cows, while a butcher tells us his tale of cold and loss
The line of cars was finally starting to move. I drove past the market and the suburb of Nova Mahala before heading down the narrow streets towards the Port. The thousands of people who’d been packed together like sardines on the beach that June day were now fleeing in panic. Every few seconds, one of them would bash into the side of the car. A few moments earlier they’d been putting on sun lotion to get a better tan, and now they left greasy pawprints on the windscreen when they tumbled over the bonnet. I stopped and looked down at the beach. I saw a family encamped under an umbrella: a man, a woman and three small children. Tourists from Kosovo have the custom of taking woollen blankets to the beach. The older members of their thirty-head immediate families lie on them all day, smoking and drinking çaj rusit, their heavily stewed black tea, which they sip out of small glass cups like a designer hybrid between a schnapps glass and a Turkish coffee cup. Now the blankets and the hot tea will come in handy. How could I not have noticed before: they have a panoply of beach/mountain gear good for both summer and winter outings. This pile of things in their PVC bag means they’re equipped for all climatic conditions, from – 50 to +50 degrees. The family under the umbrella sat huddled in the blankets and stared towards the left-hand end of the beach. In the wind-shadow of the headland where Hotel Jadran used to stand, a group of beachgoers were splashing around and playing volleyball in the shallows. They can only have been Russians.
I stepped on the gas a bit and drove round to Hotel Galeb, which was demolished a decade ago. The town council promised to build a new luxury hotel complex in its place, but today there are only eerie ruins with no function except perhaps a sentimental one: to remind the small Jewish community, which has settled not far from here and bought houses from the old-timers, of all its demolished temples and houses in their original homeland over the sea.
I continued on and came to the monument to the fallen fighters of the Second World War. This memorial, located just above Mala Plaža, the cove and the Old Town, hovers with outstretched wings like an oversized dove of peace and victim of radiation. Although a white dove, it doesn’t seem peace-loving: it strikes me as an animal trained to carry bombs instead of letters, as if the sculptor’s chisel caught the very moment when it was preparing for indiscriminate bombing. The monument has been decaying for decades, but the town councillors don’t dare to have it demolished and sell the site to one of the local tycoons. If they did, they know they’d be shot by one of the former Partisans, who might need a walking stick to get around but still have a sharp eye and a steady hand.
I needed all of half an hour to get through the throng and make it home from the monument – a drive of one or two minutes under normal circumstances, without people running about in the snow in their swimming trunks and flinging themselves in front of the car. But the last and biggest obstacle of the day was still ahead of me.
At the last bend before my modest home, a cow was lying on the road. I got out of the car, lit a cigarette and went up to my neighbour who was standing beside the animal and scratching his head. I asked what had happened and he replied with a candid, if somewhat rambling description of the events which had led up to one third of his assets lying here on the carriageway. Of all that he wanted to explain, the only important thing was made clear to me by his pointing finger: the concrete wall on the right-hand side of the road. I knew all the rest. A good four metres high, the wall was built to prevent rockslides from hitting the road. As far as I know, there are only two species on the planet capable of climbing near-vertical slopes: the Himalayan chamois and its predator, the snow leopard. Now the neighbour’s cow had tried to graze on that near-vertical hill. It was driven by hunger because people in our region keep hundreds of cows which they don’t feed. Every morning they let them out of their sheds, and herds of the stressed animals – the nightmare of every respectable Indian – roam the town until dark, feeding on the sparse grass in the parks and scavenging among the garbage which farmers leave at the market when they close their stalls. The cows are thus forced to climb over stone verges, like goats, and to use the roads, like people. The eternally hungry bovines have already browsed off all the fig bushes, grape vines and gardens in the neighbourhood. The only grass within several kilometres grows up on the hill above the retaining wall. Where many cows do not venture, one will boldly go. And that cow fell. The poor animal tried to land on its legs but the bones broke from the impact and were jutting out of open fractures on its legs. A bloody trail led from the place of the fall to where it now lay at the end of its tether, with no more strength to move.
In the meantime the neighbour’s family went in action. They hopped around the cow like Lilliputians around Gulliver. His mother carted up a wheelbarrow, his youngest daughter brought a set of rusty knives and the eldest arrived with an axe in tow. Finally his son appeared, brandishing a chainsaw and full of enthusiasm about the impending massacre. When you live alongside other people you get used to all sorts of things, but slaughtering an animal in the middle of a main road still seemed a bit extreme even by our standards.
‘What else can I do?’ the neighbour whined in his defence. ‘She’s too heavy to move, and I can’t just leave her here for the dogs. We’ll have to cut her up, take the pieces back in the wheelbarrow and put them in the freezer, there’s no other way. The butcher will be here any minute. I called him because this cow was my favourite – I can’t kill her myself. I’m afraid, and my hand will tremble,’ he said.
‘I know this is a difficult time for you, but I won’t stay. Don’t take it amiss. I haven’t had a proper drink yet today,’ I apologised.
I glanced in the rear-view mirror as I was driving away and saw the lumbering figure of Salvatore, the butcher, arriving with his slow gait at the place of execution.
When I finally made it home, I hastily knocked back the double Cardhu I’d decided to treat myself to. I threw myself into the armchair and turned on the television. Snow in Ulcinj in summer hadn’t made the headlines because it was hindered by other, even greater wonders of nature. CNN reported a rain of frogs which had blighted Japan. The reporter was standing under a fly tent next to some Japanese who were calmly eating sushi. He tried to interview them, but they didn’t share his fascination with the event. I hope the frogs stop falling soon – my lunch break ends in ten minutes, one of them muttered between two mouthfuls. It sure is hard to fascinate the Japanese, I thought. Even if Godzilla emerged from the ocean dressed in a white shirt, black miniskirt and little white socks like a schoolgirl, with its eyes bound with pink lace knickers, Nipponese passers-by would hardly bat an eyelid.
The news then took me to America, where people still appreciate a good miracle. A devastating earthquake had hit Los Angeles. Footage from a helicopter showed a bridge broken in half. Desperate people were clinging to a twisted steel framework and paramedics were trying to pull them up. Just as it looked as if the valiant rescuers would succeed, the ground shook again. A red pick-up rolled backwards, hitting another car. And, seconds later, dozens of vehicles came crashing down on the paramedics and their desperate rescuees like an avalanche of metal.
‘Los Angeles is in flames and people are trying to flee the city in panic,’ the anchorman said.
A new report followed with another human drama. A residential building was ablaze and firefighters were trying in vain to climb up to a group of occupants who’d sought refuge on the roof. Rescuers on the ground held a safety net and called out to the desperate people to jump. They threw themselves off, one after another, and were caught down below by evidently well-trained Californian firefighters. But an old lady refused to jump. Although the CNN cameraman was filming from his shoulder while running through the crowd of onlookers, I could make out in the unsteady footage that the lady was holding a tiny dog in her arms. In the end she finally jumped, but fear had a hand in things – she came down hard on the lawn, a good five yards from the safety net. The camera zoomed in on her crushed body. A Scottish terrier slipped from her arms, which would never move again. One of the firefighters triumphantly held aloft the little dog, like a shaggy trophy. ‘It’s alive!’ he shouted. The bystanders clapped, and the camera closed in on the bewildered animal licking its paw.
Fox News showed images from New York. Manhattan woke up to find itself under water: experts couldn’t yet explain why, but the sea level had risen dramatically. Whereas the CNN reporters focused on the despair which the abrupt and violent acts of nature had driven people to, the right-wingers on Fox News emphasised the optimism of their born-again viewers. The preacher in a megachurch in Texas announced euphorically: ‘We told them and they didn’t believe us, but now the End has finally come, rejoice, O Christians!’ and behind him a gospel choir of fat black ladies blared Jesus is coming, hallelujah! In a student dorm in Iowa, two boys from respectable Wasp families sang It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine accompanied on acoustic guitar by a stoned, raven-haired Tanita Tikaram lookalike.
MTV reacted promptly and to the point: Strummer roared London is drowning and I live by the river, while an autocue at the bottom of the screen advertised the upcoming MTV Apocalypse Awards.
A stuffy Euronews correspondent reported from a mountain peak in Switzerland on avalanches which had buried villages in the valleys. I also learned from him that Holland had been struck by a tsunami. The information coming in spoke of hundreds of thousands of dead. Their correspondent in Russia reported about a doomsday sect, breakaways from the Orthodox Church, who saw the dreadful cruelty of nature as a sign of the Second Coming of Christ. Emaciated-looking Ivans and Natashas with colourful headscarves, who were obviously doing their best to look like matryoshka dolls, were hurrying to hide underground. Their reading of the Bible seemed to be that only those who buried themselves alive would survive the end of the world. Be it because of the rush or out of laziness, these God-fearing folk didn’t dig their own holes but hid in one which turned out to have been excavated by Gazprom as part of a new gas pipeline. When the believers refused to leave the company’s land, the Russian president sent in the army, who mowed them down and threw them into another pit which wasn’t Gazprom’s. The reporter openly voiced his revulsion at this inhumane act of the Russian authorities, but it seemed to me that the believers had achieved a significant symbolic and practical victory. They were under the ground, so they’d got what they wanted.
I turned off the television because there was a knock at the door. It was Salvatore.
‘Please forgive me for coming unannounced like this, I know you don’t like visitors,’ he said and extended me his right hand; in his left he was holding a butcher’s knife. ‘Your neighbours are waiting for me down at the cow. I told them I needed some knives from your place and would be straight back. I know we’ve never had much to do with each other – we’ve hardly ever spoken. But I hope you’ll understand: I just need a little of your time.’
Salvatore had the stature of a serial killer from a horror film but the manners of an academic. I invited him in because I have a soft spot for politeness, which is a rare virtue in this mountainous and uncultured country. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that I’d left the gate to the property open in the rush to get to my drink. One careless moment and people invade your world, I thought: and not just anyone, but people in bloodstained butcher’s aprons!
‘Life is harsh,’ Salvatore said when I’d poured him a drink and sat him down on the couch. He’d never been shown mercy, nor did he expect any. Whoever counted on mercy came to a bad end – he’d seen it many times. Today he sat and drank with me. There was no respite. Whatever happened, life always had to go on. One month earlier he’d suffered a great tragedy, one which would’ve destroyed most other people. But even as a boy he’d learned to live with loss: to mourn for a moment, and then soldier on. The dead can bury the dead, right? And before long he was back at work. If people don’t have work they delve around in their past until life caves in on them. But he wasn’t one to philosophise, he said.
He wanted to tell me about his tragedy. He arrived at the shopping centre in Bar at six o’clock each morning. The parking lot was empty. For years he’d been the first to arrive at work, although he had to drive there. He got out and leaned against the car, lit a cigarette and looked up at the bluish slopes of the Rumija mountain range. After years of looking, one glance sufficed to tell him what time of year it was.
He liked to watch the slopes burning in the summer light. The midsummer glare is merciless. It’s different in September, when the days are shorter and morning comes later. Then the light is velvet, as if everything is shrouded in haze. In September the world looks like the old pictures which they write about from time to time in the paper. The people in those pictures are usually naked and have a sleepy look. He thought he looked like that too when he examined his face in the rear-view mirror of the red Zastava, he told me.
Salvatore’s eyes were bloodshot and dull. He watched films until late at night and also drank, but only a little more than moderation, he emphasised. A man had to have an outlet sometimes. His wife and children were asleep when he returned from work; he didn’t disturb them. He wasn’t one of those men who got drunk and maltreated their family, he said. He sat in front of the television and thought about things. Different things. He had a few beers. It’d been like this for fifteen years since he’d been working at the shopping centre. At first he only worked one shift. But then their second son came along, the eldest started school and life became ever more expensive. He began working weekends, but that didn’t bring in enough extra income. Then he agreed with his boss that he work two shifts: from seven in the morning till ten in the evening, seven days a week. His children lived like all the others: modestly but without want. He knew his life wasn’t like that of other people, but that was the price he had to pay so his children could have a normal life. That’s just the way things were. His father, too, had slaved away from dawn till dusk to raise him. People struggle and then die. That’s just the way things are, he said.
He never rang when he came home. He made sure the door and the lock were well greased so they wouldn’t squeak when he opened them, sneaked into the hall and locked them again. He turned the television down low so only he could hear it. When he went to the fridge or to the bathroom, too, he was careful not to wake the family. Over the years he learned to go without being heard. He even managed to get into bed without waking his wife. When he went to work in the morning, they were still sleeping. He opened the door of the children’s room a little and looked at his sons. Dragan was already thirteen and resembled him. Mirko was still small. Children at that age look like their mother.
‘When I drive to Bar, I imagine their alarm clocks ringing,’ Salvatore said. He pictured Dragan, half-awake, stumbling towards the bathroom. After him Mirko came running, complaining that he needed to go urgently. Mirna, his wife, was already in the kitchen frying eggs. She’d contracted chronic arthritis as a young woman and every movement caused her pain. But she had a normal life with a husband and children. Like every other woman.
‘When we got married I told her: “As long as I’m alive I’ll make sure you can enjoy a normal life. You’ll be able to live like all other women,”’ he said. He imagined them eating, going to the fridge and taking out the jam and milk he’d bought the night before on the way back from work. Breakfast was over; now the boys got dressed and ready to leave for school. Before they left the house, Mirna gave them a euro each. ‘This is from your Dad,’ she’d say, and they’d run off cheerfully down the street. ‘I see all that while I’m driving,’ he said.
He’d smoke a second cigarette. In the distance he heard a Lada and knew it was the cleaning lady being brought to work by her husband. Like every morning, they’d say a polite hello and she’d unlock the front entrance. Then he’d go to the cold room and she to the cleaning storeroom, and they wouldn’t meet again until the next morning.
As he prepared the meat for the day he heard the other shopping-centre staff arriving, through the cold-room door: Mirjana from the fruit and vegetable section, who was now engaged and spent the days making plans for her marriage; Zoran from the purchasing department, whose wife had been diagnosed with cancer and who wandered from doctor to doctor, getting deeper and deeper into debt, searching in vain for a cure; Branka from the health and cosmetics section, who had problems with her alcoholic father; and Aida from the bakery, who had a mute child.
He also heard the voices of the regular customers. For example, there was a lady who they knew by her first name, Stela, whose son had moved to Canada. He married a black woman there. Stela objected, but he didn’t listen. Even as a child he’d been obstinate, she said. She begged him not to get hitched to that woman. Now he was punishing his mother by not getting in touch for years. Every morning Stela would buy her two croissants and then rush home: ‘I have to get back – just imagine if he rings while I’m out!’ she fretted day in, day out.
Although Salvatore spent most of the day in the cold room, he knew everything about those people. It was as if he listened to a radio programme about their lives all day. They chatted, argued, bitched and rejoiced about things, and he listened to it all just as if he was out there with them. At first it’d been hard to get used to the chill and isolation of the cold room, but over time he realised that it didn’t matter. When he heard how hard other people’s lives were and how they struggled, he was ashamed that he’d complained about his life so much.
Every morning, first thing, he sharpened the knives. He took his time and did it meticulously. ‘You can see yourself in my knives like a mirror,’ he said. He couldn’t stand blunt knives. The blade had to pass through the meat without resistance. The cut had to be straight and clean. He was horrified when people mangled meat instead of cutting it. Some almost seemed to hate the meat they cut. It was as if they let out all their frustration on the pieces of veal and pork they got their hands on. One look at the cuts a butcher made would tell him what sort of person he was. An angry, resentful person was easiest to recognise. Butchers like that always made more cuts than necessary. They cut and realised it was wrong. Then, in their rage, they cut wrongly again. They ended up rending the meat like a wild animal. He’d seen butchers like that: if their wife had offended them or their children didn’t respect them, they stabbed the meat and tore at it. There were ones who bellowed as they cleaved the meat. Some made a real mess in the butcher’s shop: they dragged the pieces of meat across the floor, stamping on them and kicking them. But not him: he left all his problems at the cold-room door. When he finished work, he left everything spic and span. It was as clean as in a hospital, he said.
Until noon, when he had his first break, he made sausages with lots of garlic; then he prepared burgers and three sorts of meat patties. Next he marinated meat in oil, salt, pepper and herbes de Provence – but not paprika because it would dominate the taste. He filleted pork, cut beef for soup-making, and set aside prime-quality fillets and rump steak. It was like that in the summertime: however much you prepared, the café owners bought it all.
He would take a bottle of beer out of the fridge and sit down on the bench behind the butcher’s shop in the shade. He smoked two cigarettes and watched the cows and sheep tottering about the meadow, torpid from the heat. Mirjana would come and sit next to him. She would bum a cigarette like she did every day.
‘What are you up to?’ she asked one day.
‘Watching the animals. I could watch them for hours. I grew up with animals: we had cows, sheep and goats at home,’ he told her.
‘I don’t like animals – they scare me,’ she said. ‘When my husband and I have kids and they’re a few years old, maybe I’ll get them a dog. I’ve read that dogs are good for kids. Children who grow up with dogs become better people because a dog has the traits of a good person. The dog brings them up to be good, in a way. A dog is OK, but I’d never let a cat into the house. I’ll invite you to my wedding. Will you come – you and your family?’ she asked. Then she threw away the butt and returned to work without waiting for a reply.
He glanced at his watch: twenty past twelve. He had time for one more cigarette. He stared at the cows which were now lying in the meadow. They didn’t move or give any signs of life. He was musing on how they looked almost like rocks, when he was roused from his reflections by a voice calling his name. Turning, he saw two police officers standing beside him. Come with us, was all they said.
When they were driving in the police car he tried to find out where they were taking him, and why. The men in uniform said they were under orders not to tell him any details. The car pulled up in front of the mortuary. ‘Even then I didn’t know, even then I didn’t think,’ he said. Only when he’d set foot inside the mortuary did he notice that he still had his apron on. He’d been working all morning and the apron was blood-smeared, as was the cap which he kept on all day in the cold room. They’ll think I’m a psychopath, he thought. He was relieved when he saw the mortuary was empty and no one could be intimidated by his appearance. At the end of the corridor he saw Mirna. She ran towards him, all in tears, and threw herself into his arms. ‘Dragan’s dead,’ she howled, ‘someone’s killed our son,’ she screamed and dug her fingernails into her cheeks. The blood mixed with her tears and she smeared it over her eyes and hair in her anguish.
Then the doctor appeared. He also had a bloodstained white apron and a cap. The only difference between them was the gloves the doctor wore, Salvatore said. The doctor instructed the police officers. One took Mirna to the toilet so she could wash and calm down, the other accompanied Salvatore and the doctor to the autopsy room. On a metal table in the middle, illuminated by a neon lamp, lay his son.
‘Twenty-nine stab wounds, probably made with a knife, and three slash wounds: two short ones on the chest and a long one which tore his stomach,’ the doctor explained.
‘It was a blunt blade – an ordinary kitchen knife like you can buy at any market,’ Salvatore told him.
‘How do you know?’ the doctor asked.
‘You can see I’m a butcher,’ Salvatore said.
He asked the doctor and the policeman to leave him alone with his son.
Through the door of the autopsy room he heard Mirna crying and the voice of the policeman trying to console her.
‘I know how you must feel: I also lost a child. But you have to calm down. If I’m not mistaken, you have another boy? You have to settle down and keep going for his sake,’ he said. Their voices receded – they’d probably gone outside for some fresh air.
He sat down on the bench in the corner and looked around the room. It was clean and everything was in its place. The sharp implements were neatly arranged on a long table. The panes of glass in the door were immaculate, without the fingermarks which are always a tell-tale sign of negligence. The floor tiles had been polished. The only stain on them was a little puddle of blood from his son’s right arm, which hung down from the autopsy table.
Salvatore got up, raised the boy’s arm and laid it alongside his body, parallel to the arm on the other side. ‘That was how Dragan slept: stretched out and flat on his back,’ he said. He pulled up the white sheet to cover his son’s body. On the shelves he found some paper towels. He wiped the blood from the floor and shone the tiles with a moistened towel. Then he sat down on the bench in the corner again.
It was cold in the room. He could see the steam of his breath. ‘For a moment I thought I was back in the cold room and everything was alright. As if it was still morning and the whole day lay ahead,’ he said.