The Journey Prize Stories 22 (16 page)

“Do you like it here?” he asked as they approached a house on a large, fenced-in plot of land populated with plum trees.

“It's okay,” she said. “Eventually I'll be in Zagreb, but for now this is fine.”

The thought recklessly flickered in his mind that if she did in fact belong to Dragana and she was just the right age, well, she could be his too. “How old are you?”

“I'm nearly nineteen,” she said as if it was a burden. “Older than my friends. My father didn't have me in school until after the war and I was eight. But before long I'll be finished at the gymnasium. I'm thinking about being a lawyer after.”

He listened to their feet on the small stones beneath. “And your mother? This sounds stupid, but I thought maybe the teacher was your mother. And you were taking me home to her.”

“I have no mother,” she said matter-of-factly.

The house was very old but well-kept. Vesna directed Sander to sit down on a couch in the front room and then went into the kitchen. She returned with a sixtyish man, conversing rapidly with him, and Sander began to feel foolish for accepting her offer. He couldn't understand them but heard the man mention Dragana Petrić twice and nod his head. Vesna sat down beside Sander. “This is my father,” she said. The man shook Sander's hand and smiled pleasantly. He went into the kitchen and reappeared with a plate of cookies and a tumbler of homemade plum brandy. From the bookshelf he retrieved a roughly sketched diagram on draft paper. It had lines and numbers on it, a misshapen house in the middle and a river at the bottom. He placed this on the coffee table directly in front of Sander. Vesna rolled her eyes and spoke harsh words at the man. “Don't pay him any attention,” she said. “He's always trying to make some deal.” He held up the piece of paper.

When he left over an hour later, Sander's face burned from the strong alcohol and a tint of anger, the piece of paper folded into his back pocket. The man had wanted to sell him the property directly next to them and the house on it for a total of twenty thousand euros. From what he understood, a Serbian family had rented there before the war and hadn't returned after. The price was cheap, but the land hadn't been officially cleared of mines yet. He thought it possible that the girl had taken him all that way to make a sales pitch – it seemed likely that they needed some money. Others had gone over the land and found nothing in the way of anti-personnel
explosives, the man had said, forcing Vesna to translate. Eventually Sander began to suspect that the father was meaning to say Vesna would be more helpful with Dragana if he helped them with their money problems. Being a diplomat, the idea of blackmail normally put a wry grin on his face, but just then he felt foolish to be there. All that land would be his, the father had been saying in broken English. “Leave him alone,” Vesna ordered her father. To keep him quiet she occupied Sander with many questions about Canada.

When he felt it was time to go, Sander thanked them for the hospitality and accepted the diagram, to pacify the man. “Dragana Petrić,” the man had said again, by way of goodbye. “Yes, of course.” Wishing him good luck, Vesna had put her hand on his shoulder just before he rose off the couch, and her eyes, and the idea of Dragana, held him again for a moment. Now, as he walked off of their property, another phone call to Dragana produced nothing. It was dark and he was getting nowhere. He kicked at the gravel as he turned onto the road.

The last day of the fall festival had been full of anticipation. Her small city hosted the huge week-long cultural festival every year, attracting people from all over the former Yugoslavia, as well as Italians, Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, and others. The last night featured the finale concert, and celebrations spilled out from the town square. Dragana waded through the crowds with her mother, who wanted to find Krešo at his volunteer security post and give him some baking. Dragana had brushed off the webbing of last night's dreams of ghosts that had clung to her most of the day. One ghost, that
young man she thought she'd seen in front of Krešo's, doing card tricks on the beach in 1985. The determination in his brow when he taught her one, holding her wrists to show her hands what to do. Another spirit in a different dream, her father, spooning cascades of sugar into her tiny cupped hands. As if extracting from Dragana's unconscious, her mother had spoken earlier of her father's pension – as she often did – but also of a foreign man who'd telephoned yesterday, and she'd only understood that he was looking for Dragana. She thought her mother must be mistaken.

It was past midnight when they ran into her former student, Vesna, who insisted she show Dragana something, her eyes pleading. Dragana relented and left her mother talking with her uncle and followed the student's back through the surging crowd that had already filled the main square. A traditional Slavonian band with mandolins shared the stage with a rock group, playing ballads and lively anthems in succession. Dragana and Vesna approached the Gradska Kavana cafe on the edge of the square. Most of the tables had been taken away to make room, but one remaining held a man alone, smoking with his back to the wall. Vesna told her she had found him at the square and told him to wait a few minutes for her return. She had a way of gaining trust, making one feel on the inside of a conspiracy.

Dragana saw the man's head slightly bowed, completely disengaged from the festival. She'd never seen anything so solitary. As they got closer she saw that he had a kind face. His cellphone rang but he watched the two of them approach and silenced it without looking. His eyes widened as he rose from the table and made two awkward steps. “I didn't know ……she
was going to.…” He gestured at Vesna with a crooked finger before letting his hand drop.

Dragana realized then he was the same man as the one from the vision days earlier. She faltered as she was about to speak. Instead, she turned to the student, looking at the schemer suspiciously, and told her to run and tell her mother that she would be a few minutes. And then Vesna was gone.

In English, she asked him if he was in fact the Canadian she had known once. “I think I saw you walking the other day.” The music was so loud that her words were barely audible to him. She opened her eyes wide to him and he laughed. He walked forward and raised his arms a little. Dragana reluctantly stepped in between them and let him hold her. She liked his smell, a freshness she associated with manliness. People began to dance in giant circling lines behind them, a snake uncoiling. They straightened out of the embrace and she asked him what he was doing back in Croatia.

“I was actually in Sarajevo on business, but then thought I would come find you.”

“Oh,” she said, trying to hide her unease.

“The name of your city has been kicking around my head ever since …” his voice trailed off.

She didn't quite understand what he meant. The music and crowd made it hard to capture everything said. At that moment she reluctantly said farewell to the ghost of him, that notion of an old spirit reviving an exact past. In its place was something unsettling, incomprehensible. This man had thought to seek her out.

“It's, well, such a surprise to see you. You haven't grown much older looking,” she said.

“You neither,” he interjected, smiling. “You haven't changed.”

The absurdity and boldness of the statement struck her. She had in fact changed, irreversibly. That other person he presumed to know was a mere fraction of her self. “Maybe we can go somewhere quieter,” she said, “so we can hear.” As they walked down the first street, she was startled to see KreÅ¡o under the canopy of a crowded bar and wondered if he had seen her too.

A few blocks away, they found themselves walking along the river under the light of the moon, which was nearly full. A cluster of teenagers drank spirits on the bank opposite, and a young couple were beneath a tree further down.

“Do you have a family?” she asked.

“A son,” he said.

“But you're not married?”

“I was. Are you?”

She wasn't sure which answer would be the most honest, which the best, and if those were the same thing. “I was. I mean, I once thought he was gone for good, but he lives here, in town, on Jelačić.” She knew Sander couldn't possibly know street names.

“My wife had an aneurism and died quite suddenly.”

“I'm sorry,” she said, wondering if it was recent. “How terrible.”

“No, I'm sorry.” He shook his head. “I don't want to impose. Don't even know what I'm doing here.”

She grabbed his hand to comfort him, but then felt disingenuous, and quickly dropped it. “How long will you stay?”

“Well, that depends. On things.” He looked at her but she was focusing on something in the distance. They caught up on
the generalities of life for the next few minutes as they walked. She had never been to Sarajevo so he told her about visiting the Tunnel of Hope, the city's only link to the outside world when it was under siege for three years in the nineties. He said that to get to it you had to go down into the basement of a house, that the original tunnel's 800 metres were dug entirely with a pick and a shovel. He also mentioned the assassination museum, precisely at the spot where Franz Ferdinand was shot. How he had stood for a long time in front of the museum's storyboards, pictures, and artefacts, the gun and the killer who pulled the trigger. How the pants the man – a boy really, no older than his own son – wore that day were encased in glass right in front of him.

At her suggestion, they started walking back the way they came. “And what about your son?” she asked. “Don't you worry about him?”

“He's a man now – what about him? Listen. I've been thinking about you so much the last week. Too much, probably. That summer on the coast.” He kept slowing down and turning towards her, almost stopping. Each time she continued walking, looking straight ahead. “I want to reinvent myself.” He seemed to be concentrating hard on the words.

“Hmm,” she said, unsure. “Such high expectations!” She needed to lighten the conversation. “I really don't think that people invent themselves. Moments do, conflicts and catastrophes do. Other people do.” She wondered how he thought he could have control over such things. The novelty of their reunion had begun to wear off.

“The diplomat in me might agree,” he said. He stopped, clasping her elbow, but she kept moving so that he had no
choice but to keep up. Back at the square, fireworks went off above them. He invited her to his hotel. He'd bought some wine that afternoon and they could drink it. She needed to get back though. And she couldn't very well bring Sander to her family and try to explain; she wasn't sure she wanted to. “They're expecting me. I don't know what to say. Another time.”

He began to raise his hands, as if to embrace or run them along her cheeks, but instead stretched his arms above his head and made an exaggerated yawn. “Come to me tomorrow, will you?”

“Yes,” she said. “It's a good idea.” They agreed on a time, both smiled, and when they hugged she practically bounced off of him, and then hurried into the crowd.

The next day there was no knock on his hotel room door at the arranged time. Two hours had passed. When he called she answered and in a formal tone told him something had come up. She had to look after her mother and it was a bad time, many term-end papers to mark, but it was good to run into him after all these years and she hoped he was having a nice stay so far. She said it was a shame that he would have to leave soon. He tried sounding natural, saying, “Yes, we'll have to squeeze in a visit before then.”

Dropping his cellphone onto the bed, following it with his body, Sander laid himself open to agony tempered by drink. Three litres of homemade wine were half gone by early evening. Everything was confused. He was on the other side of the world. The room was starting to fade in and out. He saw his wife's face. He saw Dragana. He wasn't one to go looking
for punishment, but thinking about his wife he endured a sliver of guilt. She had moved out of the world never suspecting he strayed from her. In the bathroom he stripped naked and splashed his face, saying aloud, “Grief is a currency I refuse to deal in.” He laughed at this, and then caught his toe on the doorframe, howling. He grimaced and hopped back to the bed. There was a sleight of hand, in a backroom somewhere: even the most natural, easiest bonds of intimacy would dissolve when one wasn't looking, and there would be no proof, ever, that they truly existed in the first place. It was stupid, dangerous, to go looking for them. He slept face down on the hotel room carpet.

The next morning, still drunk, toe throbbing, he heaved himself up and made it to the small table in the corner of the room. His whole being leaned on the table. His forehead rested on his forearm and his heart beat through his forehead and rocked his arm so that the table quivered slightly. His heart ran dry, sputtering. He thought he might die, but in the next moment there was a knocking, and it wasn't his heart. He limped over and peered through the peephole. When he opened the door, Vesna walked past him and sat on the edge of the bed. She shrugged happily as he stood staring at her. “I just asked for the foreigner's room.”

At noon they were at the front edge of the abandoned property, one lot over from Vesna's house. It was raining again, and cold. Sander had looked Vesna's father in the eyes and shaken his hand. Minutes later he was on the phone, moving money around so that he could get at it with ease – he knew bankers everywhere. Twin curtains of black nothingness were slowly being drawn over everything Sander saw,
spoke, heard. Yet, just looking at the property, he was already attached somehow to the wild-looking field and its empty little house. Vesna translated back and forth between the men. Sander wanted to know whether they had flails to clear fields in the region yet, the big chains that would circle through the soil and trigger anything still there, even the plastic-shell mines that many handheld metal detectors would miss. The
UN
teams used them. They also used special dogs. Vesna said that they had neither, too expensive, and without a tank the flails couldn't be operated anyway. But they did have an old handheld left temporarily at the property, part of some old equipment paid for by a philanthropic American couple through an adopt-a-minefield program. Vesna's father angrily emphasized that both lots had been checked thoroughly and nothing had been found. The rain lifted a bit. There was a yellow sign down the road with a red skull and crossbones on it that said
NE PRILAZITE
. Vesna's father handed Sander the keys to the old house.