We Trade Our Night for Someone Else's Day by Ivana Bodrozic (books to read to improve english txt) 📗

bottle over a washbasin in the basement to ease her bedsores. They were all maddened by the siege, the shooting, the lack of sleep, the reek of burning buildings, the feces, the blood, and the corpses. There was no longer any clear rhythm of day and night, the whole place lived at the unnatural pace of the shelling, bombing, dying, drinking. No one was able to leave or enter the city. This evil was bound to implode. Then Marko was ordered to organize excavation backhoes to prepare several mass graves in fields just outside of town and arrange for trucks to bring in the people who’d do the digging. He didn’t fire a single shot the night of the massacre; the next night he broke into Velimirović’s bedroom and defiantly jammed his pistol up into the roof of the man’s mouth. The first night following what the Serb forces were calling liberation, which Marko and his mother had been hoping finally to spend in their apartment after three months of crouching in the basement, he went down to carry his sleeping mother upstairs to her bed. He slipped an arm under her tiny, frail body and felt the stiffened, chill resistance of her thighs. All he could hear after that was the buzzing of bees. In late 1991, he went through a long bout of depression, and he didn’t pull out of it until 1997. After that he hadn’t left the city, feeling he deserved to live there amidst it all and with what had survived inside him. He was resolved to stay there for the rest of his life, blaming himself for each and every victim. From that time on he worked only at physical jobs and drove the taxi, reading everything he could get his hands on. Recently he’d been able to obtain almost everything over the Internet. This was the only thing that did him good for a spell, helped him feel alive and gradually pulled him up out of his deep hole. As did music sometimes, mostly dark, dark jazz. Until this evening, when, while circling around town, he’d met Nora. He nearly drowned in her eyes. He knew her so well; she was everything this part of the world was that could never be explained to anybody from someplace else. The river water which compelled him though he couldn’t bear to look at it, and the honey, and the bees, and the gardens, and all the blood that had soaked deep into the ground for miles around, knives gripped between teeth, sabers strapped to thighs. He knew everything, and he saw that she, too, sensed much of it, but what she sensed didn’t come close to the unspeakable things he knew. He felt like standing out in front of the hotel till the end of his days, kneeling at her bedside in case she opened her eyes. He stepped into the little elevator in his building, and, deep in thoughts about the warm place under his arm where he still felt the glow of her hand, he chanced to look at the mirror in the neon light. With a surge of nausea he hastily looked away.

12.

Cold

time is no longer a problem for me

I know no better way, actually,

to spend it

now (fall 2010)

He moved noiselessly around the dark apartment. The front door wasn’t locked, which implied that the man inside was desperate or no longer cared about what would happen next, all because of his frantic obsession with revenge. He froze in the corner of the bedroom and listened to the man’s breathing in the dark, how he shuddered and moaned in a fitful half sleep. Only five paces to the bed. He cocked the pistol, muffled with a silencer, and inched toward the moans. He hadn’t been doing this for a while; two steps from the bed he tripped over the electric cord for the bedside table lamp and nearly lost his balance. Nevertheless, he rested the pistol precisely on the man’s temple and grabbed him by the throat to keep him from shouting. He waited a few seconds for the man to wake, allowing him only to breathe. When he saw the man was aware enough to understand what was happening, he asked him softly and distinctly:

“Where are the pictures?”

The mayor spluttered, fighting for air, his arms flailing. Schweppes relaxed his grip slightly.

“There are no . . . no pictures . . . I just heard about them.” He confirmed with desperate sincerity what Schweppes had assumed—he’d been bluffing. Which did not mean that they didn’t exist in a secret dossier kept by the former boss of the underworld. With a voice full of mercy he asked once more:

“Certain?”

“I swear,” answered the mayor with a sob. Schweppes moved back a few inches and tilted his head ever so slightly to the side. Two seconds later, the hole was symmetrical and round, lacy only on the edges and gray as mold. For the last time, his eyes swept the room to be sure he was leaving behind no traces. For years now he’d been caught up with other things, mostly smuggling, and once Croatia’s membership in the European Union had become a certainty, people had become the hottest commodity. There were wagonloads of desperate people, and their numbers were unlikely to diminish. They swam, crawled, sprinted through woods, grabbed barbed wire with their bare hands, and the blood on their palms was the color of freedom. All he had to do was wave the EU circle of yellow stars and they were ready to give him every cent they had. And there was always something, dollars, euros, all he did was clear the way, he knew the Spačva route backwards and forwards after his time spent in the field during the war, as well as several other routes, and he was on good terms with local police chiefs. He never exposed himself to danger; the kids he recruited were the ones who