In the next compartment Aldo and Marco tried to laugh, Gianni performed a pantomime for Azra. He played a man building a house, but the bricks kept falling down, then a man trying to change a light-bulb, then a man doing something else, he tried everything, but Azra just watched him, the nausea had passed and she didn’t want to cry, she was in wonder at this mute world, seemingly at peace with it. In this mute world there was no Nana and no Bistrik, but neither were there people who lived their whole lives in foreign languages.
Like a little girl and an old dog
The sky above Surčin is low and heavy. Drunken angels have installed themselves on the clouds somewhere high above and are now celebrating, oblivious that they’re sinking lower and lower, that they’re about to hit the ground, among the plowed fields, where the Vojvodina plain begins and forgotten pumpkins freeze. The plane has just broken through the clouds, and here it is, growing, bigger and more real than when the story began. In a few seconds it’ll touch down, the landing gear has long been extended, and the captain just needs to say those few words of signing off, of welcome and the weather, the hoping we’ll see you again.
Marina is sitting in a fourteenth-row window seat looking out. Her gaze is empty; she can’t see what she was wanting to see, nor can she even remember what it was she’d wanted. Marina is on her way home for the first time in three years. Actually it’s not home, it’s just where her parents live and where her things are, things she doesn’t need anymore or perhaps never needed, things not for junking because wherever they are means you’re home. She’s never lived in Belgrade apart from the several months between their leaving Sarajevo and her leaving for Canada. But still she tries to recognize the ground beneath her, the runway expanding like it might swallow the plane, the screech of the wheels as they touch ground; she searches for the code to a former world, to which, as the story goes, she belongs.
It’s cold outside, she inhales, catching on the air the faint scent of petrol and a hint of frozen winter grass, but this is all. Nothing she knows, nothing that after so much time would make you say hello again, I’m back, take me in again for a little while.
They don’t know her time of arrival. She couldn’t bring herself to tell them; who could have handled a meeting in the airport terminal, voices echoing to eternity, thousands of eyes rubbernecking at scenes that are none of their business, a situation where you have to stand, hug, wave your arms, wipe away tears, swallow pounding hearts, no sitting or lying down, no way, no cushioning your head, because it’s an airport, people spit on the floor, you can’t sit or lie down, crying’s no good in a place like this, what would everyone think, each with his own opinion and explanation of the spectacle. When in the hour of greatest weakness and vulnerability, in the midst of sorrowful joy, people find themselves under a stranger’s gaze, in a stranger’s imagination, they risk spilling like water, their fates draining down into whatever strangers have dreamed up for them.
On the bus she closed her eyes, wanting to sleep the exact duration of the journey. She opened her eyes every few minutes, in fear of a stranger’s touch or that someone might think her unwell and want to help her the way people do here when you’re unwell — with a series of kindnesses and offers of assistance that make you feel even more unwell. Every time she opened her eyes she’d see something different. Apartment towers at the city’s edge, women at an improvised market, one of them holding a box of matches and smiling, yellowed buildings and a poplar, young guys smoking in front of a movie theater, a house with a sign saying “Kolobara.” It wasn’t necessarily a single city. It could have been ten different cities, one for each opening of her eyes. Each was equally unfamiliar and unknown and only a queasy childhood premonition told you that in some way, distant but real, you belong to this scene; this same premonition reminded Marina of her anxiety when she used to go into a supermarket where a bitchy check-out woman, without asking, would give her a piece of bubble gum in place of her small change, at least until Marina was old enough to fire back lady, what do you think, is this appropriate behavior, but the premonition might have easily reminded her of something else, not that it mattered; Marina just didn’t want anyone touching her or talking to her. Ideally your entrance into such worlds would be invisible, and you would stay that way, not uttering a word until you had established possible connections to your past. Spoken in such places, words disappear into dark spaces where you’ve never been in your life, or where you were once but have since departed, and then those words return when you want them least, to a world where you really are, and wound you.
She got off the bus and still hadn’t said a word, but she would have to speak to the taxi driver. He’s a little guy, stumpy and greasy-haired. Marina said Senjak and showed him a piece of paper with the name of the street written on it. She coughed, surprised by the tone of her own voice. The taxi driver was silent, a city full of people passed by, strangely making their way through the dust clouds, as if they were the clouds upon which those drunken angels sat perched over Surčin. In the coming days Marina will watch the dust, turbid and impenetrable, and when they speak on the phone, she’ll tell Him that covered in dust Belgrade looked like Macondo in the final chapter.
Before the taxi gets to Senjak, it’s probably a good time to explain who He is. She hasn’t seen Him since leaving Sarajevo, and at the time, He was her boyfriend. Today she doesn’t know what He is to her, but they are in touch from time to time, presumably because they never said their goodbyes and so have endured like baffling chronic illnesses endure, the ones that don’t kill you or cause you pain but hang around until you’re dead all the same. They could meet, but probably won’t — although they want to — they’ll probably never see each other again. If they passed each other in the street they wouldn’t recognize each other. Marina doesn’t know why things are the way they are, perhaps because sometimes people can become destroyed cities to each other.
Her father’s name was written on the door. She raised her finger to the bell and then paused. Between her finger and the round red button was a space barely wide enough for a piece of paper, but she didn’t press down. How does this go, she used to say aloud when she had an unsolvable math exercise, easy as pie, said a voice she was no longer sure was her father’s. She heard footsteps inside, and what she thought was the clattering of plates, she could have been standing there for hours, her index finger pointing at something, if only that would have been the end of the matter, if only something painful or deathly hadn’t clattered from the other side of the door, beckoning her back into a life she had sloughed off.
The bell didn’t sound like a bell. It squealed like a little computer with an empty battery, the doors burst open; her mother, wrinkles, wrinkles, wrinkles, a face that had fallen like a sail at half-mast, the voice still the same, her words ones that once annoyed Marina, arms enfolding, arms holding tight, Marina says wait and smiles, her smile broad and painful, her father white and gray, her father huge like the tallest tower of cards, his face firm like the face of a father should be, always firm, that’s how he thought he should be. Just don’t talk about yourself, just ask stuff, smother and drown them in questions, admit nothing because anything you say will hurt them. They’ll talk, they talk in stops and starts, they don’t know how to talk to a daughter after three years, you don’t learn that sort of thing anywhere, who would’ve thought they’d need to know something like that, if they’d known they would have learned, there must be a way to do it, there must be a manual somewhere, people know about this stuff, they have to, why are you so skinny, her mother’ll ask her, there she goes, leave her alone, her father says, he’s proud of his young daughter as if she were a son, because he doesn’t have a son, hence the leave her alone.