Diary of Interrupted Days (21 page)

Silence.

Finally she said, “I’ve always liked that you decided to leave, how you didn’t want to take advantage of the situation.”

“Do you love me, Sara?”

Silence.

“Do you?”

“Sometimes I do. But it all gets blurred. You, me, Johnny, the war, Toronto, Belgrade, all of it.”

He kept silent for a while. Then he said, “Well, that’s probably the best I can hope for.”

She heard something in his voice, something that nobody else would, and put her palm on his shoulder.

“This snow will cover the whole world,” he said.

It was only a pattern on some silver foil, green salted with white schematic flakes, just a roll of cheap wrapping paper that she saw in the window of a drugstore, but it was enough to trigger Sara’s usual December melancholy. When she was a child, her parents would start bringing home presents long before the New Year’s tree would be standing in the corner of their living room. They would buy something on their way home from work and wrap it up in their bedroom before adding it to the pile. Her parents communicated most of the time in short, economic outbursts—this needs to be done tomorrow, you have to finish your homework by seven, we are going to Dubrovnik
this year—as if too many words were a sign of bad manners. Thus, never sure what the others wanted, they never went for a single present.

When they were at work and the housekeeper was going about her usual chores, Sara would sit on the floor of the living room, staring at the stack of presents wrapped in colourful paper, spending hours trying to guess what was in each one, who bought it and who it was for. She knew early on that there was no Santa, but that only made her love the holidays more. Her parents’ usual fits of arguing would abate towards New Year’s Eve, and her family would enter some sort of ceasefire, where small errors would go unnoticed and the bigger ones, the ones that would normally prompt hours of quarrelling, would be noted but not addressed. If this wasn’t love, it was as close to love as they could muster.

After her parents had separated, Sara lived with her mother in their old apartment and—although the tree would still be positioned as usual—the whole magic of guessing was gone. Sara was eighteen when her grandmother died and she moved into her now-empty apartment on her own. Every December she would get two large parcels, one from her mom and one from Munich, where her father lived with his new wife. The boxes continued to arrive after she emigrated to Canada, always in those few working days between Christmas and New Year’s. Although her parents continued to pack many presents into their boxes, collected into a single package it felt like a one-time affair.

“They could parachute their parcels as well,” Sara once said to Boris. “Love Aid.”

This December was not helping her mood at all. Nothing bad was happening in their life, but the city was gloomy under heavy skies that always promised but rarely delivered the virgin white coat. She read somewhere about a special sun lamp, made for curing the sadness of dark winter days, but she could not bring herself to imagine that a small light bath would trick her brain into feeling chirpy again. The Canadian winter started too early, was too harsh, lasted too long, and covered all the beautiful bodies for months, making everyone a puritan. She could cope with cold, sunny days, the ones that—when they came—lifted her to a mountain in her imagination, or maybe to the porch of her father’s cottage back home. The sky of molten lead was dangerous for her.

She tried sex as a cure. One week in particular: she shaved her pubic hair, walked naked around the apartment, sucked the whole space into her vagina and put it out like a juicy summer fruit, stroked and sucked Boris a few times a day, fucking to find a path to the other side of gloom, but it did not work well. The more he filled her with his dick, the less strength she had to defend against emptiness.

One day in mid-December, walking in the underground streets at Yonge and Bloor, she ran into her old colleague, the Romanian clerk from Mr. Satt’s video store. She told Sara that Luz was in hospital, but she did not know which one. It was rumoured that she had attempted suicide. This was not a revelation—anyone who had met Luz knew suicide had always been there as an option—but it contributed to Sara’s fund of sad thoughts. She thought of calling Mr. Satt and asking him where his wife was, but
rejected the idea as too insensitive. Calling hospitals one by one? Not practical.

Unusually early, two days before Christmas, Sara got a parcel from Belgrade. It contained several presents, and she almost missed the envelope lying at the bottom, half-hidden under a flap of the box. She found three pieces of paper inside. The first one was a letter from her mother. It was not long: her mother was fine, she was going to travel to Slovenia with her current boyfriend to meet old friends for New Year’s. It ended with a question: did Sara recognize anything from this strange letter that she attached? A clumsy police inspector had brought it to her, asking for her help. He did not have much hope, but thought he’d ask, an international request, he said. He thought that Sara should see it because it mentioned certain events Sara had helped organize. Can you imagine that? They actually have records of your moves and dare to admit it? Really. However, the police would appreciate it if Sara could help in any way, because the poor man who wrote it had amnesia from a blow to the head, and they did not even know his name.

Sara unfolded the other paper. It was a facsimile, two pages, with an additional faded stamp registering it as from the files of the Belgrade police. She recognized the tiny, dense handwriting immediately.

A few days after I arrived here, I walked into a café that sat where the ocean meets a canal. There were no other customers there. The girl at the bar made me an espresso and I sat outside, on a balcony, looking at the ocean foaming in Amsterdam harbour. It was a grey, windy day, and the surface was of steel and anger.

I couldn’t take my eyes off it. After all the summers I had spent on the coasts of Montenegro, Dalmatia, Greece, Spain, soaked and choked with the coconut smell of sunscreen and postcard villages, I suddenly realized I craved grey seas, dramatic skies, and imposing ocean liners.

Strange: I expected that peace would be in order. I expected to be drawn by a monastery, a vow of silence, strings of words handwritten on parchment, and here I was, struck by this rage and thunder. It was law and anarchy in one, beauty and horror, salvation and danger. This was not a lascivious, senseless, naked sea. This was a partner, a philosopher. This was life.

I sat there thinking, wouldn’t it be great to sail this ocean? To remove myself from the stolid solid ground, and go where everything floats, and rises, and falls, go where the wind makes the streets and sharks mark the numbers?

Now those streets are between us. Now I am on that ocean and, look, everything floats.

I could not call you directly, you do understand that. Boris probably has told you everything about my being at war, so you must have known that they would tap your phone, trying to get me. For the same reason,
I could not call him. Instead, I contacted my old drummer, and dictated a letter for you and one for Boris. I hoped that at least one of the letters would find its destination, and that you would come to Budapest.
My drummer told me you never picked up your phone, that he was certain you had moved
. He
also
told me that he left a message in Boris’s mailbox. Boris must have read it. I told him I would be in the Mátyás Hotel after two o’clock on March 7. I was there from ten in the morning. Instead of flying in that day, I could not wait, came to Budapest by train the night before, and took a room near the station, usually rented for short loves and long regrets.

It was a chilly day, with fog that cloaked the morning and made it very secretive. It was not Budapest anymore, it was Casablanca—then again, every city with the sounds of war in the distance is Casablanca, my dear Ilsa.
When coming to Budapest I was daydreaming on the train. I saw you and me alone on a deserted street, back to back, the two of us against everyone. After all that had happened, I was certain that you would be the one to understand, that you would be on my side no matter what. The more people I met on my journey, the more I loved you. As the sea of ugliness expanded, you became a taller island.

Around two, the fog cleared.
Around two you were married to my best friend
.

There is nothing I can do now, except send you this letter. You have chosen, and you’ve chosen well. I knew that Boris was in love with you. He never told me that
,
but I knew the way we know it’s going to snow by the way the air smells.

That there was a woman with me in the apartment when I came to pick up my stuff and run, you probably know by now. She saved my life, I saved hers, and then we went our separate ways. I don’t have an explanation. There is always something you can say to defend yourself, but I stand naked before you. There was a war, there were people dying, there was death waiting for me as it waited for all of us there, but still I am not saying that death explains everything. Fear is an umbrella, fear is collapsible.

After I played that concert that you and Boris organized, in the Square of the Republic, my life became a heap of twisted metal. I was still inside, sitting among blood and rust and sharp edges, trying not to make a move. Then I realized I was dead anyway, and decided to get out. I was not sure what to do, except try to talk to you.

I did not belong in that room by the station. A long love and not a single regret.

Love often flies like that, imperceptibly over the evening and into the night.

I wish the spring in your heart to remain alive. I wish you to succeed without me.

Sara and Boris celebrated New Year’s with the Fridians and two other couples at Lila and Nenad’s house south of the Danforth. All was fine. They watched Das Neujahrskonzert from Vienna on January I, as always. All was fine. Sara flew
away from Toronto the next day on a plane to Amsterdam. Boris was still asleep when she locked the door behind her. On the table in the living room, she left a copy of the letter her mother had forwarded.

Sara’s mother had tracked down the hospital through the inspector who had given her the letter. As soon as Sara’s train arrived in the heart of Amsterdam, she took a cab there. The driver, a man with a turban, kept talking quietly in a foreign language through the headset plugged into his mobile phone, and she was grateful for his lack of curiosity. She had been to Amsterdam a long time ago, travelling with her friends on an InterRail ticket, and she had good memories of the city. She watched the crowded streets while the driver fought to get to the ring road. When he sped up she leaned back.

What would she say when she saw him? She did not think about it during her eight-hour flight. Before boarding the plane she took a sleeping pill, and she did not even remember takeoff. They woke her twice, once for dinner and once for an early breakfast, and then they landed. Still sleepy, she had an espresso in an airport bar with tropical palms, but it wasn’t enough to wake her up. Never mind, she loved this strange state of consciousness, between dreams and reality, behind worries, ahead of sorrow.

When they stopped, the driver did not disrupt his telephone conversation. He pointed his finger at the number on the meter and she gave him a bill.

The winter day in Amsterdam was a joke compared to what she had left in Toronto. She flew out of minus twenty-seven Celsius and landed in a balmy plus four. She pulled her suitcase behind her through the hospital entrance.

“I’m here to visit your patient Johnny Novak,” she said at the reception desk. “He has recently been moved from intensive care. You might have him as Milan Novak.”

“Are you related to him in any way?” asked the nurse.

“I am his girlfriend,” Sara said, and quickly added, “If it’s him.”

The nurse looked at her. “He’s in 1013, that’s ward 10 West. Follow the yellow signs. If you recognize him, you can confirm his name, okay?”

Sara nodded. The woman took the details from Sara’s passport and showed her the way to the elevator.

The door to room 1013 stood open. Sara paused in front of it, brushed the hair from her face, and entered. The room was in semi-darkness. The blinds were drawn, and the Amsterdam sky was gloomy. She leaned her suitcase against the wall by the door and waited for her eyes to adjust. She did not dare look straight at the man’s face. The whole installation around the bed made her shiver. Wires and tubes hooked into different parts of the body: a puppet. The strings around the figure lying motionless will go live any moment and the being will sit up. The Mistress of Solitude clenched her fists and slowly went towards the bed.

His skin was colourless. His eyes had shadows around them. The stubble on his chin made him look helpless. His hair was still long. She reached out and touched his hand lying on the blanket.

“What are you to him?” said a quiet voice from the door.

Sara flinched. “His girlfriend. I used to be, that is,” she whispered back.

“So you know who he is?” the man asked.

“Yes. His name is Milan Novak, but everyone knows him by his nickname—”

“Johnny. Finally. I told them who he was, but they didn’t believe me.” The man came into the room. He wore a nurse’s uniform. “My name is Tomo,” he said.

“How is he?”

“He’s better than he looks,” Tomo said. “But let’s talk outside. He won’t be waking up soon. They are still stuffing him with medicine.”

“There is nothing about him that interests us, other than the missing persons part,” the inspector said. “His name is not in our database. There seem to be no suspicious circumstances related to his injury, so we’re closing the case. In short, he’s not a criminal, and this was not a case of revenge.”