Love and Obstacles

Everything

Before I opened my eyes, I listened: Against the sound wall of a clattering train, two male voices; one of them was mine-deep and spoke with a southern Serbian accent; the other was mumbly and uttered words with the inflections of a Sarajevo thug, the soft consonants further softened, the vowels stuck in the gullet. I wasn’t sure what they were talking about, but there was gurgling in the bottle neck, the crackling of a burning cigarette.

“France,” the Sarajevan said.

“Refused entry.”

“Germany.”

“Refused entry.”

“Greece.”

“Never went.”

“Refused entry.”

“Got me there,” the Serbian said, and chortled.

The train slowed to a stop; I heard the doors opening. One of the men got up and stepped out of the compartment; the other followed him. I opened my eyes; the doors slid shut. They pushed the window down and were smoking. A man and a woman ran toward the train, each with a couple of suitcases banging the sides of their calves — there was a gash in the woman’s leg. I contemplated escaping from the compartment: I had a bundle of money and my life to worry about. But my fellow travelers pressed their butts against the door, the Y-crack peeping out of the pants of one of them. The train lurched and started moving; they flicked their cigarettes and came back in. I closed my eyes again.

“Did you know Tuka?” asked the Sarajevan.

“No.”

“How about Fahro?”

“Which Fahro?”

“Fahro the Beast.”

“Fahro the Beast. His nose was bitten off?”

“Yes, that Fahro.”

“I didn’t know him.”

“Which cell block were you in?”

“Seven.”

“Rape?”

“Burglary.”

“Burglary was Six.”

“Well, I was in Seven,” the Serbian said, peevishly.

“I was in Five. Manslaughter.”

“Nice.”

“I was a little drunk.”

“Life is death if you don’t have a little drink every now and then,” concluded the Serbian wisely, and chugged from the bottle. They fell silent, watching me. It was not unreasonable to believe that they could smell my fear and were just about to cut my throat and take the money. When I sensed one of them shuffling his feet and moving toward me, I opened my eyes. They were staring at me with bemused expressions.

“The child’s awake,” the Sarajevan said.

“Where are you headed?” the Serbian asked me.

“Zagreb,” I said.

“What for?”

“To visit my grandfather.”

“If Grandma had balls, she would be Grandpa,” said the Sarajevan, for no apparent reason.

“Do you have a pretty sister we could be very nice to?” the Serbian asked, and licked his lips.

“No,” I said.

My grandfather was dead, and when he was not, he did not live in Zagreb; I had a sister too. The truth was, my destination was Murska Sobota, I had a wad of money in my pocket, my mission to buy a freezer chest for my family.

Some weeks before I set out on this journey, my father had summoned a family meeting. “There arrives a time in the life of every family,” he had said in his opening words, “when it becomes ready to acquire a large freezer chest.” The ice box in the fridge was no longer spacious enough to contain the feed — meat, mainly — for the growing children; the number of family friends was so large that the supplies for an improvised feast had to be available at all times; “the well-being of our family requires new investments,” abundance demanded more storage. My father used to like meetings like this, the family democracy game. We often had to sit through such a congress so we could vote on a decision he had already made. There were no objections this time either: my mother rolled her eyes at the rhetoric, even if she wanted a freezer chest; in the usual seventeen-year-old manner I made sure I was visibly indifferent; my sister was keeping notes, much too slowly. She was thirteen at the time, and still invested in the perfection of her handwriting.

But to my utter surprise, I was unanimously elected to be the purchaser of the freezer chest. Father worked in mysterious ways: he had tracked down the biggest chest — the six-hundred-liter model — available in the lousy market of socialist Yugoslavia; he somehow discovered that the best price was in Murska Sobota, a small town deep in Slovenia, not far from the Hungarian border. I was to take the night train to Zagreb, then a bus to Murska Sobota; I was to spend a night at the hotel ambitiously called Evropa; the next day I was to deliver the money to someone named Stanko, and that was where my mission ended. Stanko was to arrange the shipment, and all I needed to do was come back home safely.

The Sarajevan looked at me intently, possibly deciding whether to do me in because I obviously lied. He wore a suit and a tie, but his shoes looked shitty, the soles peeling off. Blinking very slowly, as if his eyes were counting time, he asked me:

“Do you fuck?”

“What?”

“Do you fuck? Do you use your dick the way it is supposed to be used?”

“A little,” I said.

“I love to fuck,” the Serbian said.

“There is nothing sweeter than a fuck,” the Sarajevan said.

“Yeah,” the Serbian said wistfully, and rubbed his crotch. He had tattooed knuckles; he wore a leather jacket and shoes so pointy that it seemed he had sharpened them so they could easily penetrate the skull.

Despite her voting for my deployment on the freezer-chest mission, my mother had worried about my traveling. I was excited: Murska Sobota sounded exotic and dangerous. This was the first time I would be away alone, on the road by myself, my first opportunity to live through experiences from which many a poem would spring. For I was a budding poet; I had filled entire notebooks with the verses of teenage longings and crushing boredom (always the flip side of longing). I equipped myself for the expedition: a fresh notebook; extra pencils; a book of Rimbaud’s — my bible (As I was floating down unconcerned Rivers / I no longer felt myself steered by the haulers. .); packs of Marlboros (rather than the usual crappy Drinas); and a single contraceptive pill I had gotten in exchange for Physical Graffiti, a double Led Zeppelin LP that I no longer cared about, as I had moved on to the Sex Pistols.

I was an unwilling virgin, my bones draped in amorous flesh. Consequently, I held a belief, not uncommon among adolescent males, that beyond the constraining circles of family, friends, and prudish high school girlfriends lay a vast, wild territory of the purest sex, where the merest physical or eye contact led to copulation unbound. I was ready for it: in preparation for the journey, I had tested a number of scenarios in my hormone-addled mind, determining that the crucial moment would be when I offered her the pill, thereby expressing my manly concern and gentlemanly responsibility — no female could say no to that.

“You look like a smart kid,” the Sarajevan said. “Let’s see if you can figure out this riddle.”

“Let’s hear it,” the Serbian said.

“It has no head, but it has a hundred legs, a thousand windows, and five walls. It is never the same, but it is always almost the same. It is black and white and green. It disappears, and then it comes back. It smells of dung and straw and machine oil. It is the biggest thing in the world, but it can fit into the palm of your hand.”

The Sarajevan watched me, wistfully stroking his three-day beard, as though remembering himself when he used to be my age, before he boarded the drunken boat of adulthood, before he knew the answer to the riddle.

“It’s a house,” the Serbian said.

“No house has a hundred legs, you stupid fuck,” the Sarajevan said.

“Don’t call me stupid,” the Serbian said, and rose to face him, his hands rolled up into fists.

“All right, all right,” the Sarajevan said, as he stood and embraced the Serbian. They hugged and kissed each other’s cheeks several times, then sat down. I hoped the riddle was forgotten, but the Sarajevan would not let go; he poked my knee with his shitty shoe and said: “What is it, kid?”

“I don’t know.”

“An elephant,” the Serbian said.

“Shut up,” the Sarajevan said. The Serbian leapt up, ready for a punch; the Sarajevan got up; they embraced and kissed each other’s cheeks; they sat down.

“Respect,” the Serbian muttered. “Or I will crack your fucking skull open.”

The Sarajevan ignored him. “What is it?” he asked me. I pretended I was thinking.

“Everything,” the Serbian said. “It is everything.”

“With all due respect, brother, that is probably not the correct answer.”

“Who says?”

“Well, everything usually does not work as an answer to any riddle, and it does not disappear and come back.”

“Says who?”

“Everybody knows that doesn’t happen.”

“I say it does.”

“Everything cannot fit into the palm of your hand.”

“I say it can,” the Serbian said, and got to his feet, his fists clenched as tightly as ever. The Sarajevan stayed in his seat, shaking his head, apparently deciding against smashing the Serbian’s face in.

“All right,” he said, “if it is that important to you, it is everything.”

“Because it is,” the Serbian said, and then turned to me. “Isn’t it?”

The blazing clarity of dawn: light creeping from beyond muddy fields; a plane leaving a white scar across the sky; drunken soldiers howling songs of love and rape in the next compartment. The two men had quieted down, exhausted by their babbling, and I dropped off. When I woke up, they were gone, leaving the stench of sweaty mindlessness behind. I checked my pocket for the money, then wrote down the conversation and the riddle as I remembered them, and there were many other things to note. On this trip, I was happy to experience, everything was notable.

In Zagreb, I boarded a bus to Murska Sobota. The quaint hills of Zagorje, the picture-postcard houses and occasional fairy-tale castle mounted on a hillock; a healthy, well-dressed peasant leading a herd of healthy, fat cows across the horizon; chickens picking worms in the middle of a dirt road. I voraciously scribbled it all down — it seemed someone had cleaned and prettied up the land for my arrival. The man sitting next to me was invested in a crossword puzzle; he frowned and refrowned, fellating his pen. His cuffs were threadbare; his knuckles bruised; his ring stone was turned toward the middle finger. Many of his letters stretched beyond the little squares of the puzzle, the words curving up and down. At some point he turned his impeccably shaven face to me and asked, as though I were his assistant taking notes: “The biggest city in the world?” “Paris,” I said, and he returned to the puzzle.

This happened in 1984, when I was long and skinny; my legs hurt, and I could not stretch them in the dinky bus. Pus accumulated in my budding pimples; there was an arbitrary erection in progress. This was youth: a perpetual sense of unease that made me imagine a place where my discomfort would be natural, where I could wallow in my wounds, in heavy air and sea. But my parents believed that it was their duty to guide me to a good, pleasant place where I could be normal. They arranged spontaneous conversations about my future, during which they insisted I declare what it was that I wanted, what my plans for life and college were. I responded with the derivations of Rimbaud’s rants about the unknown quantity awakening in our era’s universal soul, the soul encompassing everything: scents, sounds, colors, thought mounting thought, et cetera. Naturally, they were terrified with the fact that they had no idea what I was talking about. Parents know nothing about their children; some children lead their parents to believe that they can be understood, but it is a ruse — children are always one step ahead of their parents. My soul soliloquies often made Father regret that he hadn’t belted me more when I was little; Mother secretly read my poetry — I found traces of her worried tears staining the pages of my notebooks. I knew that the whole purpose of the freezer-chest project was to confront me with what Father called “the laundry of life” (although Mother always did his laundry), to have me go through the banal, quotidian operations that constituted my parents’ existence and learn that they were necessary. They wanted me to join the great community of people who made food collection and storage the central organizing principle of their life.

The food — bah! I forgot to touch the chicken-and-pepper sandwich my mother had made for me. In my notebook, I waxed poetic about the alluring possibility of simply going on, into the infinity of lifedom, never buying the freezer chest. I would go past Murska Sobota, to Austria, onward to Paris; I would abscond from the future of college and food storage; I would buy a one-way ticket to the utterly unforeseeable. Sorry, I would tell them, I had to do it, I had to prove that one could have a long, happy life without ever owning a freezer chest. In every trip, a frightening, exhilarating possibility of never returning is inscribed. This is why we say good-bye, I would write. You knew it could happen when you sent me to the monstrous city, the endless night, when you sent me to Murska Sobota.

I had never checked into a hotel before going to Murska Sobota. I worried about the receptionist at Hotel Evropa not letting me in because I was too young. I worried about not having enough cash, about my documents’ being unexpectedly revealed as forged. I ran over the lines I was to deliver at the reception desk, and the rehearsal quickly turned into a fantasy in which a pretty receptionist checked me in with lassitude, then took me up to the room only to rip her hotel uniform off and submerge me into the wet sea of pleasure. The fantasy was duly noted in my notebook.

Needless to say, the receptionist was an elderly man, hairy and cantankerous, his stern name Franc. He was checking in a foreign couple, attired for traveling convenience in sneakers, khakis, and weatherproof jackets. They wanted something from him, something he wasn’t willing to concede, and from their open vowels and nasal whining I recognized they were American. I didn’t know then (and still don’t know now) how to assess the age of human beings older than I, but the woman looked much younger than my mother, perhaps because of her smooth, unworked hands. Her husband was shorter than she, his wrinkles rippling away from his eyes, a dimple in his chin deep enough to put a screw in. He had both of his knuckly hands on the reception desk, as if about to mount it and charge at Franc, who was proudly bent on not smiling under any circumstances. As the woman kept shrilling, “Yeah, sure, okay,” the receptionist kept shaking his head. He had a thin mustache closely tracing his upper lip, like a hair sediment. On his neck were parallel sets of sinister fingernail scratches.

I remember all this, even if I didn’t write it down, because I spent an eternity waiting for the Americans to complete their check-in. I began imagining a conversation I would have with the woman, should we happen to share an elevator ride, while her unseemly husband was safely locked up somewhere in a distant reality. In my high school English, I would tell her that I liked her face flushed with pilgrimage, that I wanted to hold the summer dawn in my arms. We would stagger, embracing, to her room, where we wouldn’t even make it to the bed, et cetera. Her name, I chose, was Elizabeth.

“Thank you,” she finally said, and stepped away from the desk, her husband closely following her, as though blind.

“You’re welcome,” Franc said to their backs.

He had no interest in me, for I presented no challenge: he could speak Slovenian to me and not care whether I understood (I did); he could easily disregard any of my pipsqueak demands (he did). He took my ID and money, and gave me in return a large key attached to a wooden pear with “504” carved in it.

Elizabeth and her husband were still waiting for the elevator, talking in whispers. They glanced at me and did what Americans do when they make unnecessary, unwanted eye contact: they raise their eyebrows, roll their lips inward, and brighten up their face so it can bespeak innocent indifference. I said nothing, nor did I smile. On the pear that Elizabeth held I saw the number of their room, 505, and so when they stepped out, I followed them. My room was directly across from theirs, and as we entered our respective rooms, Elizabeth turned toward me and flashed a splendid smile.

It was in Murska Sobota that I truly confronted the ineluctable sadness of hotel rooms: a psyche with a notepad nobody had ever used to write; the bed cover with infernally purple flowers; a black-and-white picture of a soulless seaside resort; a garbage basket lined with crumpled paper tissues suggesting a messy quickie. The window looked over a concrete garage roof, in the middle of which was a vast puddle, shimmering like a desert-lake mirage. There was no way I was going to spend a night alone in this cave of sorrow. I needed to find places with a high density of youth, where comely Slovenian girls stood in clusters, steadily rejecting the clumsy advances of Slovenian boys, conserving their maidenhead for a pill-carrying Sarajevo boy, his body a treasure to squander.

The main street appeared to have been recently depopulated; only an occasional empty bus drove by, the lights in it dimmed. There were no cafés or bars or young people I could scout, only the windows of closed stores: stiffened mannequins, their arms opened in an obscure gesture of welcome; towers of concentric pots looming over families of pans; single shoes lined up closely on a rack, so different in sizes and shapes that each one of them seemed to represent a missing person. And there was the store I was to visit the next day to purchase for my family an entry into an abundant future. In the window, a humongous freezer chest glowed as if in a heavenly commercial.

I decided to explore the side streets and found nothing but a slumbering row of houses, the nightmarish murmur of television sets passing through a thousand quiet windows. Here and there, the sky was stained with stars. A neon sign in the distance announced the name of a bar called Bar, and there I went.

There was nobody in Bar except for a bearded, frog-faced man, whose chin was about to touch the brim of his beer stein, and a cloud of smoke hanging thick as a ghost. Without lifting his head, the man looked at me intently, as though he had been expecting me to arrive with a message of some sort. Message I had none, so I sat as far away from him as possible, close to the bar attended by nobody I could see. I lit a cigarette, determined to wait for female beauty to walk in.

The man lit up a cigarette too; he exhaled as though letting his soul out. I began thinking up a poem in which the main character walked into a bar as empty as this one, smoked and drank alone, thinking up wisecracks, and then, when he wanted to order another beer, discovered that the bartender was dead, slumped in a chair behind the bar, his left hand reaching for a stein of still-foaming beer. I had left my notebook in the hotel, so I could not write the poem down, but I kept thinking about it, kept coming up with rhymes, kept drinking my beer, kept not looking at the man. Most human lives perish without other people’s ever noticing, and I recognized that it could happen to me too, tonight. They would find an uncomfortable corpse with a stack of cash and a mysterious pill and they would ask themselves: Where were we when he needed us? Why didn’t we deflower him before he perished?

The man stood up and tottered toward me. The shoulders of his jacket almost reached his elbows, as though he had shrunk abruptly; a purple tie grew out of his shirt; he wore a little hat with a mangy feather stuck in its ribbon. He sat right across from me, mumbling a greeting. In the center of plum-colored circles his eyelids moved slowly, as though he was deciding each time whether to open his eyes at all. I turned back toward the bar, pretending to be looking for a bartender. The man grumbled and gibbered, pointing toward the bar, and I nodded understandingly. The sounds gradually attained the shape of complete sentences, punctuated by an occasional snort or a hand slamming the table. I could not figure out whether he was pissed or glad about my presence in his lair.

A waitress planted two large, foaming steins between us. She put a hand on my shoulder warmly, asking apparently if I was okay. She was voluminous, her face seemed upholstered, her biceps doughy; she smelled of cakes and cookies. The drunk raised his stein and held it in front of me for a cin-cin until I complied. We drank and wiped foam off our lips with the back of our hands. He sighed in approval; I exhaled; we drank in silence and smoked.

More beer came. The man decided to open up to me: he leaned forward and back, he waved his hands in unintelligible derision, he pointed his finger in various directions, and then he started crying, tears streaming down his cheeks webbed with capillaries.

“Everything is okay,” I said. “Everything will be fine.” But he just shook his head, as there seemed to be no hope or relief. The waitress came over, unloaded more beer, and wiped his face with her dishrag; she appeared to be used to cleaning his tear-crusted cheeks. The man’s tie was wet with tears; the beer parlor was dark and empty; I was drunk, muttering occasionally: “Everything will be fine.” The waitress listlessly wiped glasses behind the bar; time passed in silence. What will become of the world when you leave? Rimbaud wrote. No matter what happens, no trace of now will remain. Then I started crying too.

I did not know how long it had all gone on, but when I left Bar, my sleeve was wet with tears and snot. I could recall the waitress wiping my face at least once with her rag stinking of rancid dishwater. I gave her what seemed to me a large chunk of the freezer-chest money and she locked the door behind me. The man stayed behind, his head carefully deposited on the clearing in the forest of steins — he probably lived there. And as I stepped out on the vacant streets of Murska Sobota, a wave of euphoria surged through me. This was experience: I had possibly lost my head and experienced a spontaneous outpouring of strong emotion; I had just drunk with a disgusting stranger, as Rimbaud surely did in Paris once upon a time; I had just said Fuck the fuck off to the responsible life my parents had in store for me; I had just spent time in the underworld of Murska Sobota and come out soaked with sweat and tears; I had a magic pill in my pocket. I needed somebody to love me tonight.

I found myself in a park infused with the dung-and-straw smell of budding trees and fledgling grass. At the center was a copper-green statue of a partisan with a rifle pointed toward the obscure treetops. A man in a fur hat held a leash under a weak light, while his Irish setter ran in circles with an imaginary friend, stopping every so often to look up hopefully at the man. The fur hat was the same auburn color as the dog, and for a moment I thought the man was wearing a dead puppy on his head. Just beyond the reach of light, a couple was groping, their hands stuck deep into each other.

I was giving up my hope of finding love, but across the empty street stood two young women, arm in arm, neatly clad in long coats. Their heels clacked as they crossed the street toward me; they giggled and chattered, their faces made up, their hair dewed with sourceless glimmer. One of them had a long narrow chin, the other had big dark eyes. They cut across the park at a brisk pace, avoiding the unlit edges. When they reached the brighter side of the street, I followed them, sticking to the dark side. They left the park and got on the main street, down which a cistern truck crawled, two men in tall rubber boots with snaky hoses in their hands washing the street. The asphalt glistened tarrishly, the women scuttering across the border between the wet and the dry. The strong stream from one of the hoses rushed toward my shoes and soaked them, so when I entered the dry territory, I left wet footprints behind.

Abruptly the two women stopped in front of the appliance store and examined my freezer chest, stolid and lit up. The narrow-chinned woman turned and looked at me, and in panic, I faced a travel agency window and a faded, crude collage of various exotic African landscapes, all photographed from high above. The women went on walking, quickening their pace until it matched the beating of my heart. It was impossible to stop now, for we were bound in this absurd pursuit. They turned the corner and I ran after them, feeling we might be reaching our goal.

Around the corner, they were standing with a man, all in denim, his large shovel-shaped hand comfortingly on their shoulders as they pointed at me, speaking to him with angry alacrity. He smiled and called me over, and for an insane instant I thought they were inviting me to party with them, but then he started unambiguously sprinting toward me. I took off at the speed of fear toward the hotel; I charged down the main street, splashing through puddles. Lighter than a cork, I danced forth on the waves. I did not dare turn to see where my pursuer was, but I heard his big feet hitting the ground steadily behind me. Those feet would hit me just as well if he got hold of me. Oh, the horror of your body’s not living up to the intensity of your fear — no matter how fast I wanted to run, my feet moved slowly, slipping a couple of times. I had visions of his pointed shoes breaking through my skin and skull and ribs. He abandoned the pursuit eventually, but I kept running.

Hotel Evropa emerged before me on a wholly unfamiliar street. Soaked to the bones, I savagely pushed and pulled the entrance door, until Franc, dreadfully hateful in the middle of his twenty-four-hour shift, unlocked it for me. I crept past him, focusing on each of my steps so as not to appear drunk. I pressed the elevator button and waited patiently, while my center of gravity rode the surf of my inebriation. I would have waited all night, for I did not want to exhibit my wobblibility, let alone ascend the eternal stairs to the fifth floor, but Franc barked at me that the elevator was already there — indeed, the door was wide open. I stepped into a sweat-tinged cloud of perfume and went up inhaling like a firefighter taking in oxygen.

The key would not enter the lock, no matter how hard I tried to push it in. Everything was wrong: I kicked the door with my knee, and then with my foot, and then again and again. Need I say it hurt? Need I say that the pain made everything much worse? Need I say that I was terrified out of my wits when I heard the lock turning and the door opened and there stood Elizabeth, loosely wrapped in a peignoir, pulling its flaps together to cover her uncoverable breasts. Her skin glowed of slumber, her tresses ruffled, she smelled of dreams. “How can I help you?” is what she probably said. I probably said nothing or just groaned. Her husband was snoring so loudly that I thought he was faking it, the pitiful coward. She looked straight into my eyes; at the bottom of her eyes there was love, the only antidote to this vile despair. I wanted to hold her hand with rings like bejeweled palaces, I wanted to kiss her, I wanted her to leave her stertorous husband, deflower me, and cultivate me in the garden of my youth. All I needed to spark a conflagration of our heated bodies was the right move, the right word. So I said:

“Pill?”

“Excuse me?” she said.

I excavated the pill from my change pocket and offered it to her on the palm of my hand — it was tiny in the cut-out piece of packaging. She looked at it, baffled, then turned around as if to check whether her unwitting husband was still asleep.

“What is it, honey?” the husband cried. I quickly put the pill back in my pocket, as the husband was coming to the door. Elizabeth could see that I was mindful, that I was a considerate gentleman, young though I was. She flashed a barely perceptible smile and I understood we were in it together now, so when the husband came to the door, his pajamas baseball-patterned, his hair disheveled, I said, as innocently as I could, “Maybe you have pill? For head?” I pointed at my head, lest there be any confusion whose head we were talking about.

“No, I am sorry,” Elizabeth said, and started closing the door, as I kept saying, “Maybe aspirin? One aspirin? Aspirin. .”

She shut the door and locked it twice. Clearly, I had not said the right word; I was very drunk and had not considered this outcome. I thought that we had connected, that the electricity had started flowing between our trembling bodies. Swaying before the cruelly and unnecessarily closed door, I raised my hand to knock and clarify to Elizabeth that, yes, I was in love with her, and that, no, I didn’t mind that she was married. I didn’t do it; the door was closed as closed can be. I heard them murmuring conspiratorially, like a husband and wife, and I recognized that love was on the other side, and I had no access to it.

But the beauty of youth is that reality never quells desire, so when I unlocked my door I left it open, in case Elizabeth wanted to put her dull husband to sleep and then tiptoe over to my frolicsome den. Every now and then I peeped out, hoping to see her door slowly coming ajar, to see her lustfully scurrying over to me. Thus I was peering out when Franc strode out of the elevator, stopped at Elizabeth’s door, gingerly knocked, as my jealous heart sank, and when she opened it, exchanged whispers with her. She pointed at me — for the last delusional moment I thought she had called him up to ask about me — and there I stood in the crack, grinning like a happy dog.

Franc charged over and pushed my door open, before I could lock it. With a flashing swing of his hand from his hip up to my face, he slapped me. My cheek burned, my eyes filled with fiery tears. I retreated toward the bed, until I stumbled and fell on the floor. Franc kicked me and kept kicking me: his shoes were pointed, and I felt the point sinking into my flesh, my buttocks and thighs, then hitting against my ribs and coccyx. I shrimped up and covered my face and head.

There was too much pain at that moment, my body numb and squandered; Franc’s exertions and kicks were hysterical, therefore funny; the floor stank of machine oil. He didn’t kick me in the face, as he could have done. He didn’t spit on me, but on the floor next to me. He didn’t yell at me, just snarled and growled, because the rapid fire of kicks was not easy on him; when he stopped, he was panting. Leaving, he calmly told me that if he were to hear a peepest peep from me, he would beat me to a pulp and pull me by my ears out onto the street, let the police have fun with me all night long. He was a good, if unpleasant, man, Franc was. He even slowly, carefully, closed the door.

I lay in the darkness, unable to move, until I fell asleep. The neon lights in the hall hummed; the elevator thudded going up, coming down. I dreamt of war, of might and right, of utterly unforeseeable logic. I woke up wishing I were home: there would have been the smell of French toast and my father’s aftershave and the banana shampoo my sister liked to use. There would have been the weather forecast on the radio (my parents liked to know the future), my sister pouting because she couldn’t listen to her music show. I would have walked in and derisively submitted myself to my mother’s kiss. Breakfast would have been ready.

I stood up — the pain beginning to set in — and unpacked my mother’s chicken-and-pepper sandwich; it was stale, the pepper mushy and bitter. I turned on the lights, found my notebook, and after biting into the sandwich and staring at the blank page for a long time, wrote a poem that I titled “Love and Obstacles,” the first lines: There are walls between the world and me, / and I have to walk through them.

The following morning I woke up to find my body encrusted in dull, bruisey pain. I went to the store and delivered the money to Stanko. He had a scrubbing-wire beard, veins and sinews bulging on his hands as he counted and recounted the money. I was short a few dinars and told him that I had been robbed on the train; two brazen criminals had emptied my pockets, but had failed to find the rest of the money in my bag. Stanko stared at me until he believed me, then shook his head, appalled by the world that stole from its children. He made a note on the form before him, then showed me where to sign. He shook my hand earnestly and heartily, apparently congratulating me. When he offered me a cigarette, I took it and asked for another one. We smoked examining the freezer chest. Stanko seemed proud of it, as though he himself had created it. It was impressive: enormous, blazing white, and coffinlike in its emptiness; it smelled of clean, subzero death. It should come to us in two or three weeks, he said, and if it didn’t, we should call him.

I slept on the bus and I slept on the night train, waking up only when my stomach started growling, when my body stiffened and started hurting again. I had no money to buy food, so I kept reliving the chicken-and-pepper sandwich and its beautiful smell. Dawn was descending upon earth; my compartment was freezing cold. I saw a horse grazing alone in a field, inexplicably wrapped in nylon; a copse of trees like toothpick tombstones; clouds on the horizon filled by an eternity of tears. When I arrived home, begrimed with having been away, breakfast was waiting.

The same day, Mother washed the denim pants I had worn in Murska Sobota, with the pill in the change pocket disintegrating — nothing was left except a nugget of foil and plastic. The freezer chest arrived after seventeen days. We filled it to the brim: veal and pork, lamb and beef, chicken and peppers. When the war began in the spring of 1992, and electricity in the city of Sarajevo was cut, everything in the freezer chest thawed, rotted in less than a week, and then finally perished.