The Journey Prize Stories 22 (15 page)

KreÅ¡o grimaced as she prodded him. “They're reconstructing one of those office buildings, to think, after letting them be for so long.” His tone stopped mocking wonder, softening. “Looks like work for me.”

Dragana knew this to be a lie. He hadn't worked regularly in nearly fifteen years. “KreÅ¡o, you haven't a clue about building things. There you are reading a blueprint upside down and scratching your head.”

“Well, what else? My life's as exciting as lumpy yoghurt.” KreÅ¡o put his shirt back on as she took her earrings off in front of the mirror. She was forty-two but could have passed for ten years younger. She wanted to change before he could, she would get away from this city once and for all. They talked often of each moving somewhere else. Yet of course she would never leave. How stupid life was! Everything that seemed urgent one day would be forgotten the next. KreÅ¡o lifted her long black hair and kissed the back of her neck. Pigeons burbled away outside on the balcony. “By the way, I decided to humbly donate my talents to your cause, if you wish.” Last week she had told him she wanted to risk it, have a baby – she was already well old for that. But her life without a child now appeared solitary, full of second guesses. She hadn't told him that a father hanging around wasn't in the picture she held in her mind. But this day she didn't want a baby either, just a quick lay. “Forget all that,” she said flatly, rolling her eyes. “You're too generous.”

They went back to the sofa bed and exercised their marriage rights in that dreamlike light, as if they were a functioning husband and wife. To Dragana this exercising was peppered with nostalgia, grief for an imagined existence they once almost had. When Krešo had come home injured and burnt just before the fall of Vukovar, Dragana was already at a place for refugees near Zagreb with her mother. Krešo then waited the war out with some relatives in Hungary, telling Dragana by letter that he was through with her. His wedding
band had been blown off with part of his hand so he wouldn't be sending that back either. They had been married for just over a year. Dragana left her devastation alone during those months away, and when she returned to her town she acted the only way she saw fit. By then Krešo's comrades from the 89th battalion had returned too, but that didn't stop Dragana from telling her mother, stumbling into the kitchen drunk one afternoon – and by way of her mother the neighbourhood – that Krešo was missing and probably dead. When Krešo reappeared living and breathing six months later to stay, Dragana felt that she had tempted fate by lying about death when there were so many dead, her own father among them.

Now, once they finished on the sofa, she needed to go. It was Festival week and she had to help her mother get the house ready for a dinner. KreÅ¡o passed her a Kleenex from the coffee table and she wiped off her stomach. He quickly resumed work on the spaceship puzzle and sang a folk tune in loud falsetto, slapping his knee with his three-fingered hand: “Amer-ika, Amer-ika, don't go there unless you have to!”

At the bottom of the apartment stairs Dragana opened the door and then paused. She rifled her hands through roping, sweaty hair. A man carrying a black duffle bag walked on the road, about ten metres away, his feet making a faint crunch on the gravel. Dragana froze with her hands on her head and hairpin between her lips. Something was familiar about the man. After a moment she realized it was like a vision from her youth. Back in 1985, a Canadian boy she had been with for a few days, though she hadn't travelled to him in her mind for many years. But she must have been seeing things, for those years had barely touched him.

In the moment, the spectre had not registered her presence, looking straight forward, like celluloid film projected onto the street, a cut-out from another decade. It moved with purpose. A delivery truck pulled up and parked in front of the building, obscuring her view. She shook herself into motion and walked out onto the street. The spirit had disappeared, like it was never there; a man could not have vanished so quickly. She looked back to where it had come from. The train station stood silent at the head of the intersection down the way. Do ghosts travel by rail? She unlocked her bicycle from the lamppost and began to walk it home.

Sander woke up late in the new city and looked out of the hotel room window at the cloudy morning and street below. Three old men on the sidewalk talked with hands in their pockets. A young man entered an electronics store as cars meandered back and forth. Would Sander know her if he saw her? The day before, his assignment complete, he had boarded the return flight from Sarajevo, but at the stopover in Zagreb he didn't get back on the plane. It was early evening when he arrived in the small Slavonian city from Zagreb by train. He secured a hotel and found the woman's number in the book. In a cafe, he drank two beers and, with only minor confusion, understood that the waiter had never heard of the woman. Before sleeping he'd been satisfied with the progress made – her name in the directory was a promise that she still lived there after all – but as he stood at the dreary hotel window that morning, bewilderment flooded in and it staggered him. He tried to focus. It had been two weeks since he left Canada. He picked up the phone from the nightstand and called to update his son
on his whereabouts. There was a long pause, familiar to both men. “You're supposed to be in Toronto tomorrow. I mean today,” David warned, sleep still in his voice.

“You're right,” Sander spoke softly. “But I need to, well, take care of some stuff.”

“It's real early here, Dad. Four o'clock early.… Appreciate you calling but this probably could have waited. I've got things tomorrow. Today. Got university.”

“It couldn't wait. It seemed like the thing to do, you know, let you know.”

“Well, now you have,” said David, collecting himself, sounding truly tired.

“I just popped up here, to Croatia. Sort of a whim, really.”

“How long, Dad?”

“You can call me Sander if you want, like when you were younger. Angrier.”

“Holy fuck. Happy? You never used to pull this nonsense.” Sander heard an exasperated clicking. The connection, or the sound of a son whose mother has been dead for two years, he thought. It was true that the only reason Sander could put foot in front of foot in this other country was because of his wife's absolute and total absence. It was a nagging equation, but one that had bothered him less and less. He took a long breath, irritated, wondering why a child thinks a parent could be so incapable of change.

“Don't worry. Don't keep tabs on me, David. Just keep an eye on things there.”

Air was audibly forced out of his son's nostrils in a long stream of disapproval. Or disappointment. “The phone's been ringing a lot. Your office keeps leaving messages.”

Sander flipped channels on the hotel room television and waited for him to say something else. He came across an ad for a new hotel at a beach on the Adriatic. “If you need me back tomorrow,” said Sander, distracted.

“What a colossal joke this is,” David said, just warmly enough that Sander knew he was off the hook, that he could let the conversation drift into some dark corner in the back of his mind and not trouble it.

The next day Sander stumbled upon a piece of luck. He had woken early and set out walking the town for the second day, inquiring at various shops and kiosks on the surrounding streets, navigating concentric circles around his hotel. With no results, he resigned himself to go back to the hotel, stopping at a bakery on the way. “I know a Dragana Petrić,” the woman behind the counter said in English. “She is a teacher at the gymnasium where my daughter goes.” He got directions and bought pastry filled with a soft, mild cheese which he ate on a bench in the town square. He sat beneath the marble war memorial and silently sounded out the columns of the dead, noticing that one man shared the girl's – the woman's – last name. It started to rain, lightly. In his personal and professional life he'd grown sick of the slick meaninglessness of words, but a list of people who died on a monument held, at least, some sort of accuracy. There is nothing diplomatic about death, Sander thought, then groaned. He looked around the square. He once imagined the girl's home town to be a dusty, backward place, but only the prevalence of red-tiled roofs supported his clichéd guesswork. The facades of stores, café bars, and tenements could have been in any
European destination, and there seemed to be only a few condemned, half-skeletal buildings or empty lots of rubble left over from the previous decade.

Later, mid-afternoon, Sander arrived at the gymnasium and waited by the fence at the edge of the field in front, hoping she would exit through the front doors. He felt a little foolish, but didn't know how else to get to her. He'd already tried both Petrić numbers from the book, in his prepared, broken attempts at Croatian which relied on the pan-Slavic basics of Russian. Both tries yielded quiet old women who asked what, or said sorry, to his repeated forays of garbled phrases and questions. The second one hung up.

He'd thought seriously about looking her up while in Sarajevo, remembering that summer through his memory's grainy lens. This was nearly twenty years earlier. He had been abroad the last few months before he married; he prepared for his career and polished his Russian in Leningrad. He then travelled southern Europe for a month. There was a woman he spent the night with in Italy, another in Ljubljana he fooled around with, and in Croatia there was another still, Dragana, with whom he became entangled for ten days on the Adriatic coast. When they met she had been holidaying with friends and he was alone. They would walk around talking half of the day and at night she would reappear at the café bars with her friends to dance. He remembered being with her at the beach, the sea clean and clear as glass, their heads above its window pane, and their bodies wrapped around each other below. The girl's expression seemed for a moment so open and honest, excitable, before returning to a perfected coy look that made him wonder if the alteration
had occurred at all. Had that really happened? Kissing her huge eyes. They feverishly stripped and then tested the bare surfaces of each other one afternoon in a room with curtains drawn, then every night until he left. He'd said something about the next summer. “You have been so great,” she had said before he left. After, there were two postcards sent each way over the Atlantic during the next year – one he disposed of before his new bride might see – and then nothing. Before long came the nineties and the girl's country declared itself and war broke out.

Now, as he watched the gymnasium doors and pondered those final moments, he believed that there had been two of him. One stayed there, on the brink, and saw the generosity of what was possible. The other returned home and didn't waver throughout the years as husband, didn't flinch as father. Students began to emerge from the school, first a trickle, then a crowd of dozens. None seemed to register his presence as they made their way to the street. Then for two minutes nobody came through the doors. The sun appeared, intense for late September. He had begun to approach the school when three young women came out. The one on the left seemed to have Dragana's dark eyes, spaced wide apart – he wondered if she could have remained so youthful. He realized the impossibility of this as he stopped a few metres from them. The other girls talked on cellphones; none of them took note of him. He asked the unoccupied one in her language, “Does it have in there, the teacher, Dragana Petrić?”

She turned her head. “Where are you from?” she answered in English, her eyes holding him. When he replied she said the teacher probably had left already. “I have to go.” She
looked anxiously at her friends, who walked ahead and seemed to joke about the foreigner into their phones.

“But, the teacher, Miss Petrić,” he said. “Do you know where I can find her?” She stopped, looking annoyed at his intrusion. But after a moment she sighed and produced a cellphone from her purse and called the operator, getting an address. He tried to appear good-natured, shrugging with his hands in pockets. She stared at him then, in that way that professes or pretends to know what was at the heart of the other. She yelled at the two girls to go on without her.

“I know where it is, it's not far from my house.”

“You're sure she isn't at the school?” he tried again.

She shook her head. “You can follow if you want, I guess.”

Sander introduced himself and held out his hand; she hesitated, then shook it. “Vesna.”

They walked down the street, further from where he'd come, away from the city centre, past tenements in various states of disrepair and tiny old houses. She asked how long he was staying in the city. He didn't know. She looked up at him and politely smiled but didn't say anything else. “Is she your teacher?” he tried.

“She was, once. She is a good woman. All the students like her.” Vesna was blushing and seemed self-conscious now that they were walking together, alone. They went on in silence for some time and then stopped at an old apartment building. The girl waited while he pressed the buzzer beside the teacher's name many times with no reply coming from the little speaker. “Nothing,” she said. “What can you do?” Sander pulled out his cellphone and tried calling, looking up at the
balconies of the top floor. Vesna looked at his feet, the slightly scuffed black boots. “Well, I live just further, on the edge of town,” she said to him when he shook his head and put the phone back in his pocket. “Come have coffee with me and my father if you like, only a little while, and then you can come back and she'll be here.” They started off again and quickly reached the end of a street where there were no more houses beyond and the road became gravel. Soon they were walking beside fallow fields. He suddenly had the notion she might be Dragana's daughter – it was unlikely but perhaps they merely didn't live together – her eyes were so distinct and similar to those he remembered. There was something older in them. They looked at him as if he was an equal, not a man probably three times her age.