Crumbs (6 page)

We walked side by side to the bus station. I felt that any moment now he would say something, so I stayed. My presence didn't seem to disturb him.

From time to time I caught him opening his mouth and moving his tongue.

Nothing but unrecognisable semivowels came out. And even those only occasionally and very quietly.

We got on the bus. Sat down. Selim paid for my ticket as well as his. The radio was playing old Italian
canzones
, which were dusting the air with sugar.

Halfway through one of the songs, the conductor announced a ten-minute break. The driver switched off the engine and got off with the conductor for a smoke. Three passengers followed them, ten were either asleep or too drunk, or simply didn't have the will to move. Selim still wasn't saying anything.

I remembered a walk home. From school, when I was quite a few years younger, in the dusk, with a school friend. We both had images of our first loves constantly twinkling before our eyes, the girls for which you had to fall heroically. Silence, when each of us really wanted to talk about our own girl, but hesitated for fear of being teased by the other one. But you talk, sooner or later, all longing. You just can't keep the words to yourself. Selim was staring in front of him as if the screen was still there.

Somebody threw up. A sour stench spread through the bus.

I looked at the driver and the conductor. They hadn't heard anything. They were talking lazily, shuffling and swaying in the cold spring night. The old man didn't show any sign of life.

‘Selim, give me your jacket.' I tugged at his tatty denim jacket. He looked at me with surprise. Not so much because of my demand but because of the realisation that I was there, next to him. I repeated my request with an impatient, demanding voice.

He did what I asked.

I ran out. The driver looked at me with surprise. The conductor was pissing in the corner of a closed bar. I rushed down the street. The church bell struck midnight. I didn't have a plan. One of those moments when I felt like an observer. From somewhere else, I was watching my body doing its own thing. Down the avenue of trees to a cinema. On the wall, a row of illuminated display cases proclaimed COMING SOON. I wrapped the jacket around my right hand, jumping along the row of posters. I came to the right one and smashed it. The sound of glass breaking followed me as I ran up the avenue with my trophy in my hands. The bus was waiting with its engine on. I jumped aboard. The door closed behind me.

I felt like a bank robber.

Selim was looking at me with surprise over the back of his seat. Out of breath, I sat next to him and shoved the poster onto his lap. He straightened it and looked at Nastassja fastening her stocking with her leg raised. He was over the moon. In heaven. I could already feel beer sliding down my throat.

I unwrapped the jacket from my hand. Fragments of glass fell to the floor.

I removed the bigger fragments embedded in the
material and threw the jacket onto his lap.

‘Thank you,' he said. An outburst of gratitude.

‘Any time,' I nodded manfully. Leaned back as if it had nothing to do with me. I went to sleep for half an hour and left Selim on his own.

We stood at the bus station, looking at the foundry buildings snaking in front of us. The bus disappeared into the night.

He invited me in with him.

The dormitory was in darkness. The warden was dozing by the turned-down radio in his hut. He had no fingers on his right hand and one leg missing.

I waited outside.

Selim greeted him politely. The warden muttered something unfriendly and looked at Selim's jacket to see if any of the pockets held anything in the shape of a bottle.

Selim deliberately walked up the stairs noisily. He unlocked his door and closed it. Then he tiptoed back down and opened a window in the corridor.

He pulled me up. We crept to his room. Something stank. He switched on the light. There was a made-up bunk next to the wall on the right, obviously his. In the other bunk, under the window, Selim's roommate slept, fully dressed but with no shoes.

‘I'm finding it hard to get used to him,' he complained, looking at the socks sticking out from under the cover. The source of the stench. ‘I've been alone in the room for a year and a half.'

I took a good look at the sleeping man. The light didn't bother him, at least he didn't move. He was thin and bony, quite a bit younger than Selim and me. Wearing what was probably his grandfather's suit, or at least his father's. New fodder for the foundry. I looked at Selim, who was still
shaking his head, and immediately forgot the novice's face. I took another good look at the sleeping man's face, looked away, and again forgot it immediately. I repeated the whole procedure a few more times; the game was quite entertaining. His face was so forgettable.

‘When did he arrive?' I asked.

‘I don't know, he wasn't here in the morning.'

We sat down on the bed.

‘Wait,' he said and crept out into the corridor. I heard him knocking next door. A sleepy, angry voice could be heard together with his. He came back with a bottle of schnapps.

I was already holding one in my hands.

He looked at me with surprise.

‘The novice had it in his bag.' I pointed to the blue satchel, lying next to the bunk.

We took a sip first from one then the other bottle. The one that Selim had brought was immediately put aside. It contained some mass-produced malodorous brew of the worst quality.

‘Ibro's bottle is full of homemade stuff,' I explained.

I had to tell him how I knew the newcomer's name. I got up and turned the bag so that the front was showing. In the middle, under the fly, there was a nametag written in pencil: ‘Ibro Hadžipuzić, Dolnje Vrbopolje.'

‘No house number,' said Selim, as if that explained everything.

I sat back down.

‘At least he'll be able to tell you what Mecca's like.'

‘A Muslim,' said Selim quietly, shaking his head. ‘He'd have been better staying where he came from than coming to croak in this foundry.'

The schnapps was superb. Smooth and gentle while
running down your throat, but a real explosion of heat in the stomach. I switched off the light. The floodlights at the foundry gave off enough light. Slowly, we sipped the schnapps. The uninterrupted rattling of the trolleys loaded with iron ore covered our silence.

The night became red. They'd opened a furnace.

Selim got up, searched for a key in his pocket, and unlocked a wardrobe by the bed. There were three pairs of jeans and a denim jacket hanging inside. And nicely folded T-shirts and underwear. He looked for another, slightly smaller key on a ring, bent over, and unlocked a drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe. The room was still completely lit up. In the drawer there was a bundle of letters in a clear plastic bag. At the bottom there was a poster, folded so that Nastassja's face was at the top, and on top of that a pistol. A German Walther from the Second World War. He reached for the poster for
Maria's Lovers
. He folded it, lifted the pistol, put the poster at the bottom of the drawer, and covered it again with the black metal.

He locked the drawer and closed the wardrobe.

Sat back down. Took a sip from the bottle.

‘My father took that gun from an SS officer. He didn't have anything else to give me when I left for here.'

The bottle was in my hands again. The night was fading

I got up and opened the window. He nodded encouragingly. The room was filled with fresh air and the noise of the machinery.

A crane was moving under the foundry roof.

‘I knew somebody else would come. Mehmed went home the day before yesterday. Thirty years he'd been here.' He was speaking slowly, as if he was reading a bedtime story to a child. ‘I looked at him when he was leaving and I said to myself, You'll be like that. Dried out
from the fire, bent over, and unwell. And then some Ibro will come to replace you. Fuck, is that all that's left?'

This rhetorical question was pronounced louder. Ibro turned in his bed and murmured something.

It didn't sound like an answer.

‘And then I went to the cinema,' added Selim, and the story was finished.

We emptied the rest of the bottle without talking. The schnapps went to my head. I leaned out the open window and spat. There was a small radio on the table. I switched it on. I started singing in time with a woman's voice from the little box. Quietly first, then louder and louder. Selim was staring at something in front of him and didn't care.

I was bellowing.

‘Ah those sleepless nights, they break my heart in two yodel-e-hu-hu yodel-e-hu-hu…'

It was beautiful. Ibro shot up. He crouched on all fours in the middle of the bed looking like a sheep. He didn't have a clue what was going on.

He'd get used to it.

Something came flying at the wall. Somebody shouted in the next room, ‘Shut up motherfucker. I've got work in the morning.'

He was right. There's always work in the morning.

Selim was sitting motionless, cradling the empty bottle in his lap. I stepped outside. Closed the door behind me. Ibro was still foul-mouthing.

Frankie was singing
Strangers in the Night
on the radio. If I had a voice like Frankie I'd do nothing but sing all my life. I wouldn't think at all.

Just sing.

The corridor window I'd got in through was open.

I jumped out as if I had a horse parked below. It didn't
hurt too much.

I rolled in the dust, shook it off my clothes, and pressed my hands on the wall.

I looked at my palms.

They were red.

 

 

 

3

Sunday morning is made for a bit of music. And for food. I rummaged under the bed for the cassette player and put it on the table. Searching for the only cassette took much longer. I found it in the bathroom, behind the toilet. For the life of me I couldn't remember when I'd put it there.

The on button was a bit stiff and resisted the pressure of my finger. I turned it on with a well aimed karate chop with the edge of my palm.

There were times when I'd always carry that cassette with me, in my top pocket, and record a piece that I liked at the time, while visiting a girl or an acquaintance. I'd record over the things I didn't like anymore. Because of the different lengths of songs, the whole tape consisted of short fragments, usually beginnings and ends of different pieces of music. If I got really tired of it, I'd sell it as a special edition in celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of rock'n'roll.

I took a shower. I shook and squeezed the Cartier bottle. Nothing at all came out. I put on my underpants and moved the door on the wardrobe.

It'd had broken hinges even when I first got it. Inside, there were two nails, and on them, two hangers. I hung the
combat jacket and my trousers on the empty hanger and took my Sunday suit off the other hanger and put it on.

The suit consisted of blue overalls with a jacket: the foundry-workers' uniform, with an emblem consisting of a gold hammer sewn onto the breast pocket.

The road was empty. Folk Muzak of different nationalities and the smell of wiener schnitzel, chips, and mixed salad floated through open windows. A spring Sunday. When you'd like to be somewhere else. Anywhere but here. And when you're there you want to be somewhere else again.

Anywhere but there. And so on.

I looked around for the guard and climbed over the fence.

I avoided factory halls, jumping over tracks, trying to avoid trolleys with red hot ingot moulds. Workers poured out of one of the buildings. I joined them. Became one with the crowd.

Here I am, all yours. Oh, motherland!

For the next hour.

They were all women. Mainly older, ugly, and fat. Rough and revolting. From behind, you couldn't distinguish them from men. Women without womanhood.

We formed a line along the wall of the canteen, each holding a tray in our hands. Quite a bit further along, almost at the counter where the food was handed out, I noticed a girl's face. It stood out from the others in the line so strongly it hurt me. I felt real physical pain in my eyes. I'd never seen her before. She must've been a newcomer. She took her tray to a table and sat down. There was an empty chair next to her. I started to push the mighty back in front of me impatiently, but nothing could speed things up. When I got my portion of the bean broth, the chair was
already taken. I took a thick wad of lunch vouchers from my pocket and paid for the food with one of them. Happy that at least for these I wouldn't have to go into action for a while. I sacrificed another voucher for a bottle of beer.

I sat at the row of tables next to hers. Broke a slice of bread. We looked at each other. For longer than an ordinary look of two faces passing in a crowd. I was wondering whether to smile or not. I moved the muscles around my mouth. Too late. She was already down at the steaming bowl. A group of her noisy colleagues surrounded me and separated us. I couldn't see her anymore.

Had I had a newspaper with me I'd have read it. I was eating the sort of food that didn't need any attention. Whoring sort of food. You satisfy a physical need, then you go. There's no foreplay with a bite, no loving lick of the spoon, no gentleness or pleasure.

I stared at the menu for the next day. Today a bean broth with sausage, tomorrow pork ribs in sauce. Which meant they'd put some ribs in this broth and stew it again. On Tuesday Hungarian ribs. They'd add some hot paprika to the leftovers of the broth from Monday, boil it, and dish it out.

That's the way the story goes.

I left the sausage in the bowl. I still wasn't so desperate that I could eat fragments of fat, gristle, bones and other rubbish wrapped in a condom.

I stretched my neck and looked between the two people sitting opposite. The girl was still eating.

I stayed seated and amused myself by looking at the woman in front of me. She was of an indeterminate age, one of those women who are never really old or young, whose only wish in childhood, it seems, is to grow up to look like their mother as soon as possible. She was toothless
and terribly hungry. She was attacking a sausage, trying to tear off a piece. The rest of the sausage was sticking out of her mouth, dangling about.