The Making of Zombie Wars (9 page)

“You know Bega?” she asked.

“We're in the same screenwriting workshop.”

“What is workshop?”

“Oh, we share our work with others and then talk shop about it.”

“Nice,” she said, in a way that suggested that she understood what he was talking about. Kimmy claimed that the workshop format had emerged at the same time as group therapy, but she hadn't experienced Graham's workshopping, which was as far from healing as can be.

In the small kitchen, there was a man taking up half of the space. A cleaver in hand, he was dismembering what appeared to be a whole lamb stretched on a plank, its eyes about to pop out in roasted surprise. Whenever the man brought the cleaver down, everything on the counter leapt up and the lamb raised its head. Barbed wire was tattooed in a circle around the man's neck, as if to keep his head and body segregated.

Ana said something to the man, and he revolved to give her an angry look, responding with a word that, to Joshua, sounded gutturally ugly. The man did not look at Joshua once, waving the cleaver around as he was getting wound up about something. Ana stood between Joshua and the door, blocking off the retreat route, so he looked around the kitchen with feigned interest: a calendar from a butcher shop on the wall; a cuckoo clock with weights and an unmoving pendulum; the spice rack, spiceless. He nodded, as if to show his admiration for the simple, human ambition of the kitchen. The Levin syndrome: always seeing himself from someone else's point of view, as if in a movie.

Finally, mercifully, Ana said: “This is Esko, my husband.”

“Pleasure to meet you, Esko,” Joshua said. “I'm Joshua.”

Esko moved the cleaver from his right to his left hand, as if considering shaking Joshua's hand, still saying nothing. His jaw was wide and not only unshaven but layered with unshavenness; a big, blackish wart protruded from the depths of his hirsute cheek. Joshua understood at first glance that Esko disliked him.

“I'm Ana's English teacher,” he said, unnecessarily.

“Good,” the man said and returned the cleaver to his right hand. A scene presented itself to Joshua: Esko grabbing his right hand, carelessly offered for a shake, then swinging the cleaver and slicing it off, the blood spraying the kitchen walls. Instead, Esko went back to dismembering the lamb, the splinters of meat flying about excitedly.

“My husband was born in boat,” she said.

“Oh really?” Joshua said. “That's fascinating.”

“That's what we say in Bosnia when somebody doesn't know how to be nice.”

“That's okay,” Joshua said. All of his utterances felt wrong, as if English suddenly were a language foreign to him. Esko placed the lamb's head on the board, complete with its grotesquely googly eyes, and split it in two with one powerful blow. He picked up a piece of the brain with the cleaver and licked it off the blade. Born in an abattoir, more likely.

“It is not okay. He was not really born in boat. He is from good city family.”

She was upset, he realized.

“He is my second husband,” she said, which Joshua elected to understand as
not my first choice
. She was grinding her teeth, snorting instead of breathing. He had an urge to put his arms around her and squeeze her hard, just to see how strong she was. She made choices: she was strong. But there were no dimples in sight.

“I like your place,” Joshua said, helplessly.

“Go look around,” she said.

He slipped past her out into the hallway, but there was little to look at. He could hear Ana speaking to Esko with restrained fury, riddled with hard Eastern European consonants. Obediently, he opened the first door and it was the bathroom: towels, mirror, moldy dampness. He opened another one and it was their bedroom. The bed was unruly, as if sex had just been had in it; chairs covered with clothes; the smell of married bodies. A tower of books stood to one side, on top of which was
Let's Go, America! 5
. On the closet door handle, there were her bras, bundled like scalps. As a kid, Joshua had thoroughly searched his parents' bedroom whenever they'd gone away: he'd frisked his father's inside suit pockets, finding condoms; he'd looked through his mother's dresser drawer, dug through her bras and underwear; he'd gone through their documents: bills, bank statements, letters to lawyers. He'd kept tabs on them; he'd found out unmentionable things. He'd known well before Rachel that Bernie had been fucking Constance on the sly. He closed the door.

“It's crazy messy,” Ana said, right behind him. There was only one more door to open: a handwritten sign on it said “Welcome to Hell!”

“Room of Alma. My daughter,” Ana said, but she didn't open the door for him, and he didn't insist. What could've been in there? Script Idea #62:
A secret door in a teenager's closet leads to an alternate universe, where she is the heiress to a powerful empire, her life endangered by her evil stepfather
.

*   *   *

Ana placed him at the head of the table, so that everyone now regarded him with expectation, as if he were supposed to conduct a workshop, or affirm his authority by delivering a salutation of some sort. No authority, however, was affirmed except for Ana's, as she went around the table introducing all of her guests. Their names consisted entirely of unpronounceable sounds, therefore incomprehensible and impossible to remember. When she got to Bega, he said something that made her laugh.

“We go way back,” Bega said in English and winked. The woman sitting next to Bega was Ana's boss, it turned out, and she was Russian. She had coal-black hair and biblically dark eyes, which made her appear very young. Joshua hadn't even known Ana worked but he refrained from inquiring. Everyone at the table was now quiet, still waiting for Joshua to say something, and he couldn't think of a single word to utter. Everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.

In the meantime, Ana packed a plate and set it down before him. “Little bit of everything,” she said. When Esko walked in with a pile of lamb on a platter, she picked a boneless piece for Joshua and dropped it on his plate, to which everyone responded with an appreciative “oooh.”

“What do you want to drink?” Bega asked. “There is everything.”

“I like wine,” Joshua said, before he saw what was on the table. There was little doubt he looked like a snob.

And thus he drank some overoxidized wine and it was vile, but people talked at him and he could not fend off their foreign blather without alcohol, and he drank a lot of it, oxidation be damned. Ana was seated next to him, their thighs rubbing. It seemed that she was looking for ways to touch him surreptitiously, and mind he did not. She refilled his glass with the dreadful wine, while she sipped Johnnie Walker. Esko came in occasionally to bring more food or another bottle of booze, but he pretty much spent the evening in the kitchen. There was a cloud over his head, and everyone quieted down whenever he came by. “He doesn't like parties,” Ana told Joshua by way of explanation. “Because he doesn't like people.”

“Earth is populated with reasons not to like people.”

“He is wild man.”

“I think I ran into your daughter on my way in,” Joshua said, mainly to change the subject.

“Yes, Alma. I am worry about her,” Ana said. “Drugs, sex, crazy people. I don't know her friends, where is she going. I think we maybe must go back to Sarajevo.”

“She'll be fine,” Joshua said. “Teenagers have a lot of energy.”

“Energy is not good for mother,” Ana said. “Mother gets tired.”

Joshua arranged an empathetic face to signal he understood. The arrangement required raised eyebrows and lips rolled in; he could feel his forehead muscles straining. The easiest thing would be just to hug her or hold her hand. Kimmy liked to snuggle up and put her head on the side of his chest to listen to his heartbeat; he often worried she could smell his armpit.

“You are too young to get tired.”

She laughed: “How old you think I am?”

“Thirty,” Joshua ventured. Thirty-five or thirty-seven, really, maybe even forty, but he knew better than to say it.

She pressed her hands against her cheeks and said: “I can kiss you for that.”

Bega was ranting forcefully about something in Bosnian, occasionally sitting up to loom over the table, while everyone except Ana's boss and the Ponomarenkos convulsed in laughter. Joshua's plate defeated him with its demanding foreignness—apart from lamb, bread, and tomatoes, he did not know what any of those things were. Some were yummy, some bitter, all confusing in their combination of unfamiliar tastes.

“What am I eating?” he asked her. She pointed at things and named them in Bosnian and he kept trying to repeat the words. There was no hope—Bosnian sounded like Hebrew spoken by someone with a debilitating speech impediment—but he enjoyed watching her mouth. The lips that could make those sounds must be very soft. Those lips were certainly not forty, but younger, much younger.

Their naming game kept them apart from the rest of the table. Joshua could see Bega glancing over, even in the middle of his performance, and he made sure his body was at an angle in relation to hers that prevented their circle from completely closing. He considered calling Kimmy and reporting as if from a far-off land about all this: the strange language, the strange food, the strange people—all this, that is, except Ana's body. In any case, as far as Kimmy was concerned, he was at the movies, watching
Touch of Evil
yet again. His throat narrowed around the returning lump; he took in her jasmine smell and her overmanicured nails (Kimmy gnawed on hers) and watched the veins on her hand and her long fingers and imagined kissing it all. No one can desire to be blessed, to act well and to live well, unless at the same time he desires to be, to act, and to live, that is, to actually exist. Whenever Ana's husband reappeared, Joshua tried for eye contact with him, so as to exhibit his honesty and innocence, thereby covering up his humming desire.
I can kiss you for that
, she'd said.

*   *   *

Right after Ana blew out the candle—her lips immaculately pouted—on the chocolate happy-birthday cake, the Ponomarenkos left, then some other consonant clusters departed, and then Joshua had to stand up to let Ana's boss out. Her name was Zosya, he found as she thrust her limp, cold hand into his. She owned a chocolate shop and was Jewish, Ana told him, as if those two things were connected. Joshua showed interest, but couldn't go as far as to own up to his Jewishness—somehow it demanded complicated, fine-tuned qualifications—though he did own up to liking chocolate. Ana walked her out and Joshua could see Zosya stroking her cheek before kissing it goodbye. Now there was more space at the table, and when Ana came back she sat a little farther from Joshua.

Bega seemed to have started a new story. He spoke slowly at first, taking sips from another Corona, but then he sped up and raised his voice until he was shouting, banging the table with his hand. The more commandingly he talked, the more his audience laughed. The skinny, gray-haired man at the far end fell off his chair laughing, and was now on his knees, holding his stomach. Ana was clapping her hands as she laughed, throwing her head back, thrusting her bosom out.

“What is he talking about?” Joshua asked her. He deployed a nonspecific grin so as to participate in the general merriment, waiting for her to regain composure, but Ana could not stop laughing. Finally, she said, still chuckling:

“Very hard to translate.”

“Come on,” Joshua pleaded.

She looked at him as if trying to decide whether he was worth the effort.
I can kiss you for that
. Joshua held his breath. All the dubious flirting, all the body positioning, all the surreptitious touches—the reality and the value of it seemed to depend presently on whether she would try to translate the joke.

“Come on,” he said.

“Maybe,” she said, “maybe it will not be funny.”

“Let's just give it a shot,” he said.

“Okay,” she said. Bega stopped talking. The skinny man got off the floor and reclined in his chair. They all wanted to see how Ana would do, how Joshua would react to her translation.

“One old man in Bosnia,” Ana said. “He liked his mobitel—”

“Cell phone,” Bega said.

“—cell phone so much,” Ana continued, “that he asked his son to go to grave with it when he dies. So old man dies and his son respect his wish. But his grandson steals SIM card—”

“Cell phone chip,” Bega said.

Shut up! Joshua thought.

“—before funeral and puts it in his phone. So they put him in the ground, they cover him with earth.”

Bega and the others seemed rapt—they kept nodding in approval, encouraging her. Joshua was all ready to laugh, so eager for the rendition to work out. Ana giggled and took a nervous sip of Johnnie Walker.

“But grandson sends text to his father. Text comes, it looks like it comes from old man and it says: I arrived to other world. His son goes crazy! Text from other world!”

Joshua chortled, hoping this was not it. Ana seemed out of breath, as if she had been running. This was not unlike an exam for her; she had stage fright. He had seen it before: her stuttering, the rise at the end of a difficult word, as if she was reaching for it, the thought in her eyes as she parsed the possibilities, her dramatic breath intake. He realized he was attracted to her striving, to her struggle to survive.
I can kiss you for that
.

“But then”—Ana inhaled and exhaled—“best friend of old man dies. His name is Fikret and he has funeral. Before the funeral, grandson sends text message to his father: Please send phone charger with Fikret.”

Everyone laughed, but nowhere near as much as when they heard it in Bosnian. The skinny man certainly didn't fall off the chair. Joshua laughed too, but his laughter was devoid of the abandon he'd witnessed in the Bosnians. Ana didn't laugh at all; she just shrugged, as if to say that she'd done her best and it wasn't her fault. She finished her glass of whiskey.