fashioned illusion about her life into chaos. She seldom allowed herself moments of introspection, but this autumn morning, after she’d given the order to have somebody murdered, she dared call things by their true name. She hadn’t lied to herself with the story that she’d change, nor did she genuinely want to change, although at times she’d stare out the kitchen window with a muted melancholy when her life began to feel ordinary, proper—like when her son was born, or when she picked sour cherries along the edge of her yard to make cherry cordial, or when her husband told her about his problems at work. She felt pricks of grief up and down her spine when she wished the illusion were real, and she felt them again—as she tried to hold on to her life’s harmonious, middle-class façade—when it all bored her. She’d think back on herself as she was before, on her younger years: the zing of a vodka and juice, the fragrance of mornings as they dawned—and now she merely woke up each morning and juggled, split between her external and internal life. She was capable of handling everything, though most of the time she teetered on the edge and could tell that it was only a matter of time before she’d go over it. A part of her knew there was no turning back now that her pure drive for survival was the strongest part of herself. Edgily, she kept refreshing her cell phone screen; the morning was early yet and she was sitting in the garden, drinking coffee, waiting for someone to alert her to what had happened and summon her to an emergency meeting of the city council. She’d almost forgotten about the meeting with the journalist from Zagreb who was writing about the incident with that teacher, Kristina; she couldn’t remember why she’d even agreed to the meeting. This was the last thing she needed now. Within an hour, two at most, all hell was going to break loose. She needed to shake off the journalist. She tried to foresee all possible ways this could play out. She had never doubted Schweppes: if anyone could do it with the truth never coming out, he could. Now she needed to work on the crossword puzzle of the city. The president of the municipal branch of her political party and future candidate for mayor had been positioned for this only recently. He was an inarticulate young technology teacher who’d be easy to manipulate, with modest intellectual potential but highly developed brownnosing skills. The real challenges were the more seasoned figures: freewheeling, self-centered Ilinčić on the one hand and murky Velimirović on the other. With them, her imperative was to create a sturdy but invisible coalition so she could realize part of her plans. One such part was a seat at the head of the port’s supervisory board—not some ordinary membership from which she’d barely get enough to cover her son’s after-school activities—and along with this a directorial position which would allow her to set up her own office and, through it, a tight-knit, trustworthy network. That would do for starters. While she worked on her plans, she thought she could hear sounds coming from the house. When she turned, as much as her curled-up position allowed, she needed a few seconds to connect what she was looking at to her thoughts: a child’s bare feet, unexpectedly white on the gray concrete. She found herself hypnotized momentarily by the purity of skin, which was out of place in this yard and in the world, one of the feet rubbing the other, hopping, until the boy said something. She didn’t understand a word.
“Darko, what are you doing here? Why are you barefoot?”
“Mama, mama . . . Pasha—look at him.” She could hardly tear her eyes from her son’s feet, and when she finally did look up at his hands, she saw a large mound of limp, gray fur and jutting, stiff paws splaying awkwardly around the boy’s nose. The red muzzle was covered in parts by a thick, partially caked foam, and tears were streaming down the boy’s face, shining, mixing with spit, as if he were bedewed with pearls. She leaped up off the chair and ran over to him, trying to push her hands under the animal’s heavy carcass.
“Somebody’s killed him . . .” whimpered the boy, wrestling with her over the dead cat and shoving his nose into the dense fur. Brigita began to shake when she managed to wrench the animal from the boy’s embrace.
“Go into the house!” she barked, so loudly that at first he flinched and stared at her with blank, bloodshot eyes, and then slowly turned to the terrace door and went in. She was left alone with the limp carcass in her arms, shocked and furious, unable to fathom who could have done such a thing. She went into the garden shed for a shovel, and then noticed a big plastic bag in the corner full of leaves and twigs. She grabbed it in one hand, juggling so as not to drop the cat in the other, and went on to the edge of the yard, which dropped steeply off to the river. She set the cat on the ground and shook the leaves and twigs from the bag. Crumbles of tiny dried slivers flew up in the air and got under her clothes and into her nose while she first pushed the head into the bag, then bent the back, breaking it, and, in the end, tucked in the stiffened paws. The bag tumbled down the slope after the twigs and leaves, and after some five feet it snagged on something. She tried to reach it with her foot to kick it off, but when she realized she wouldn’t be able to, she turned to look for help. There were no branches left, but her eyes were caught by the flower beds, edged with round white stones. She
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