The President Shop, page 13
He was down in the shelter, with Robinson and The Invention. Robinson was wearing his woolly cap and blue boiler suit, and was surprisingly agile on his feet. Ruben was wearing a beautiful lambskin coat and matching hat; he had seen these on the President, he later recalled. He felt luxurious. Robinson was fidgeting around The Invention and explaining things to Ruben in a slow voice, but Ruben had difficulty grasping what language Robinson was speaking. He could not understand every word, and what he did understand made no sense. Robinson’s long cigarette seemed even longer now, and Robinson looked at Ruben, from behind bogglingly thick goggles; his eyes appeared miniscule. “I’ve made more filters, now I’m also using oats and bamboo,” he said, suddenly comprehensible, raising his cigarette into the air and putting it into his mouth. He turned away again and stood, motionless for a while, the long cigarette hanging from his lips. Standing like that, Robinson reminded Ruben of a gray heron standing by the side of a pond, motionlessly watching the water. Is a heron expecting to see where the fish are, Ruben thought. Where the flies are? What is Robinson doing?
“I was speaking Esperanto, boy!” Robinson suddenly said.
This was when Ruben decided that he wanted to get out of the shelter, for he found the smell of the oil suffocating and he didn’t want his beautiful jacket and hat ruined by the stench, and The Invention and Robinson were quite disturbing, and here he was, in his dream, openly regretting and admitting to himself that he was regretting bringing Robinson into the family home. As if his troubles with Diogen weren’t enough! Ruben wanted to get up and leave the shelter, but he realized, with great horror and surprise, that he had been tied to a chair. With the remainders of the pigeon cage! Had they dismantled it? He could not recall. He said, “Robinson, why have you tied me up?” Robinson said, with a small and perfectly evil laugh, “Because you will now see into the future. You will see all the hell that will unfold.” And he started to turn on The Invention. It appeared alive. An evil ally to evil Robinson, Ruben thought. It emitted a great light onto the wall and wagged its metal tail with an abundance of joy. Images started to flood the wall, there was Mona and Rosa and Diogen and Ruben shouted, “No! No!” and shut his eyes and then felt the cold fingers of Robinson upon his face, saying, “Don’t worry, I have something that will help you keep your eyes open.”
Ruben opened his eyes and shuddered a yawp. His heart was galloping. He was on the train. He was drenched in sweat. It was moments before he could get a grip on reality, the train, the man next to him eating a sausage and smacking his lips. “There is no horror film of the future,” Ruben said to himself, “no film, no film at all, it was just a dream.” The train had stopped at a station. People were getting on, bringing in the fresh air and different smells. Ruben tried to collect himself and root out the terror from his heart.
Chapter 36
ROSA’S HEART WAS like that of a hunted doe that morning. She could hear its pounding in her head. After Ruben had gone, she went home, changed into her Civil Protection clothes, which included a pair of waterproof olive trousers, under which she put on a pair of thermal tights—keep warm, the instruction booklet for helping civilians had told her—a thermal shirt, a waterproof, windproof jacket, big bulky boots, a hat, and ear warmers. Rosa was fully dressed, and ready in her soul. She left a note for Mona: There is lunch on the stove for you and Robinson, just warm it up. I won’t be back until after dark. Kisses, Rosa. To Robinson she gave the same message, verbally, but the old man was too engrossed tending to his pigeons; he was tying a small piece of wood to a pigeon’s leg. The bird flapped its wings against Robinson’s thick grip.
“Samuel has broken his leg again,” he said, not looking up. “Poor thing, he never learns.”
Rosa went to the garage. No car. No one really ever used the car, and now that she needed it, it wasn’t there. Diogen must have taken it. But where had he gone? What a thing. She wondered what to do. Vlatko, the frame maker, opened his door after she rang the neighbor’s doorbell.
“Good morning, Vlatko.”
“Good morning Rosa, how are you? Why are you dressed like that?”
Rosa said, with a nervous laugh, “Oh, I need to go to the village to help my sister with something outside and these are the only bad weather clothes I have.”
There was no sister in the village, but Vlatko didn’t know that and she didn’t feel like telling him the truth.
“Oh,” said Vlatko.
“I need a favor.”
“Yes?”
“Diogen’s taken the car. I thought he’d be back by now, and I need to go to the village quite urgently. Can I borrow yours?”
“Yes of course, just make sure you pour the antifreeze in at night, it’s so cold outside.” And he gave her the keys to his Lada.
“Thank you Vlatko, you’ve really saved me.”
She went into the garage and got into the shiny Lada, which was as cold as a grave. Rosa rubbed her hands together, started the fitful engine. She drove out of town. The road was slippery, her pace slow. The town went past her, covered with snow. People’s faces crimson with the roughness of the wind.
“The Nation is freezing,” said Rosa.
She turned on the news. The signal was creaky. She made out, through the fussing, that there had been no progress in the search for the twin sisters. She had brought all the materials, in case they were found.
“Who knows what the police have, they’re normally quite useless,” she said out loud to herself.
If Ruben had been there, he’d have told her not to say that about the police, he’d have said that they were doing their best. But Ruben was not there. Rosa found out, when she reflected slightly, that she was relieved that he was not there. Was she being disloyal? She thought not. He was away, doing what he loved best—serving the President. And Rosa felt that perhaps she could finally do something useful, rather than just run the shop. She had put up the CLOSED sign. Perhaps if Diogen returned soon, he’d reopen. Where was he? Where had he taken the car?
The village of her birth was 15 kilometers out of town. The road was winding, and Rosa drove carefully. Trees were pointing at the gloomy sky, interrupted by pine trees that stood in resolute triangles. The countryside was covered in snow that reached up to the knees; Rosa hoped with all her heart that the poor girls were alive. Magpies made a cricketing, rattling noise, that hacking cough cry of theirs; they sat on the frozen ground together with the crows, pecking with their strong beaks, trying to find dead things in the snow.
Rosa arrived at her old house, a dead place where now no one lived. She looked up at the three pines that were planted when some of her brothers and sisters were born. One had grown to the sky, the other two had remained dwarfish. The tall one had been planted when her sister, Nada, was born. Nada suffered from ill health all her life, and died early. Rosa always thought that perhaps it was the tree sucking up her life energy, but of course, this was irrational. She walked around the house. The walls had fallen in. The house of the family of the missing twins was at the back. Rosa walked through the snow, called out “Heeya!” as was customary. No one responded. She knocked on the door, and soon enough Anka answered.
“Praise be to Jesus.”
“And to Mary,” answered Rosa.
Anka looked like hell.
“I’ve come to help search for the girls,” said Rosa.
Anka motioned her to come in. She was home alone. Her husband was in the fields, searching, Anka said.
“Sit down.”
Rosa sat. Anka brought out coffee and grape brandy. The women drank the brandy first, straight down.
“When my mother died,” Anka said, “she cursed me. I had left my first husband. He was beating me. I had bruises the size of summer plums on my face. He’d come home and drink and go straight for me. The twins had to watch it all. So I left him, I left the village. I was married off in the neighboring village.”
“I remember,” said Rosa.
“I came home, but she wouldn’t look at me. Father let me stay, said my husband was a beast. I came back with the girls. It was a disgrace, my mother said. To be a wife who was discharged, that’s what she said. Now no one will ever have you. But I went and got a job, and that’s where I met Ante. That bastard never gave me a divorce. But then he died. There is a God in Heaven, I tell you, and I married again. It was scandalous in the village, but we thought, when people see that we are decent hardworking people, they’ll forget.” She paused, scratched the fabric of the tablecloth a little with her fingernail. “But my mother cursed me. She said happiness will never be yours. Those were her parting words from this world, aimed at me. I’d only just remarried. Father had died the year before.”
Rosa saw the black and white picture of the old pair. The mother had a slight moustache, the father a large one. They were both serious.
“For years everything was okay. Ante is a good man. We work the land, live off what we make. The twins grew up in a peaceful home. And now this. It’s my mother, from somewhere, working that curse.”
Rosa said, “Come on Anka, you know that sort of stuff doesn’t exist. We’ll find them. All sorts of dark thoughts come to one in a time of crisis. We’ll find them. Tell me what happened the day they went missing.”
Anka said that the girls had gone out, probably to go into the next town, which they sometimes did on foot. It wasn’t so cold that day. She thought they were with Ante, pulling up cabbages. When Ante came home and found they were not there, he asked where they were and that’s when they realized that they had not returned. They waited and waited, but the girls did not come, not in the morning, not the next evening. Then they called the police.
“But the truth is, the police are doing little. It’s the hunters and people from the village who are out searching,” Anka said, looking right at Rosa. “I am sure it’s your own grief that makes you understand mine.”
Rosa had to swallow hard.
“I am grateful for anyone willing to look.”
Anka didn’t cry, as such. Her eyes were two permanent pools of grief, her head in a scarf. She too was like Mary, watching her crucified son.
Rosa walked across the flat snowy plains that stretched behind the village. There was a distant barking of dogs. The wind was cutting. The snow fell into her eyes and chilled them. Rosa had been deemed “exceptional” as a Partisan. She was known for her incredible dexterity, logical thinking, and endurance. Also her memory. And here she was, in the middle of the field, binoculars on, her back straight. She was a huntress, a Diana. She felt like she understood it all. The deer tracks, they led into the woods; the hooves of a singular boar, covered by snow. She remembered everything from when she was a child; the way they used to go tracking, understood where each animal lived and how it behaved and when it came out in search of food. She remembered everything from the war. There were wolves when she was small; there were wolves in the war. There were wolves now; they came down to get the sheep and the chickens in the night. Jackals, too.
She tried to spot the others, saw several black figures in the distance, walked toward them. The land was flat, and in the summer the fields were busy with mosquitoes, dragonflies, crickets, grasshoppers, frogs. The reeds tall, swaying this way and that. Now everything was white, like the surface of the moon, and Rosa was a lonely explorer, an olive dot on the horizon, moving forth. She administered her fluorescent armband, to be visible from a distance.
When she reached the search party, she saw that they were volunteers from the village, and a couple of policemen who were mostly ill equipped. The villagers, all men, were the hunters. They had rifles, tall boots, and squinting eyes; theirs were the rough faces of men who bore the elements. Several dogs ran around. And Ante, of course. Looking lost, repeating, “Oh dear, they must be so cold, wherever they are,” his breath a storm of vapor. They had been looking for three days. Nothing. Rosa found out what areas they’d covered.
“There are some pits over to the north, let’s try there,” she said.
“The abandoned mines?”
“Yes.”
So they went north, and they searched. The day was short, and they searched until nightfall. The snow fell and fell. Their boots creaked. No one talked. Every so often, they yelled “Marina! Ana!” to one side, “Marina! Ana!” to another side, “Marina! Ana!” to the ground, “Marina! Ana!” to the sky. No one answered, save the echo of their voices.
Chapter 37
AFTER ROSA HAD taken the keys to Vlatko’s Lada, he panicked. Does she know, he wondered, does her husband know? Jesus God, why did I say yes?
The day before, Boris Pavlovich, the painter, and a group of his friends—whom Vlatko had thought intellectuals and men of certain social standing and socialist thinking, in line with the President’s thinking—had come to his workshop, which occupied a large room at the back of Vlatko’s apartment, and asked him, no, told him, to hide a stash of shotguns for them. Vlatko had heard rumors about rebel groups starting to form in the country, but he had no idea that Boris or anyone he knew might be involved. Vlatko tried to refuse, but Boris said he knew that Vlatko’s stroke had been caused by the stress of owing money to the gambling chief in the Gypsy quarters, where Vlatko had, admittedly, gone for some months and spent all his earnings in his attempts to forget all the failings of his life; he had lost so much money that he and his mother had to sell most of their belongings to return it, and Vlatko had gotten himself into a considerable amount of trouble, and was still chipping away at his debt.
“We’ll pay back the rest of your debt. You keep this here and keep your mouth shut. If there is ever a leak, you can be sure you will be served a main course of death, with a starter of torture,” said Boris lyrically.
Vlatko felt he had no choice. Plus, clearing the debt was an attractive proposition. The men, with Boris at the lead, came to Vlatko’s house daily, occupied the kitchen table and spoke of how they might organize the rebellion. They spoke of being sick of the state of the economy, the single-party system, the way their national symbols were not allowed to be displayed—for why not put an eagle or a cross or a crescent moon just as you might put a star—and they said they wanted power back. They discussed how best to connect with other rebel groups, which, according to Boris and his men, existed all over the Nation.
Vlatko, who was now spending quite a lot of time peering out of the frame of his window rather than framing pictures, had noticed men in parked cars trying to look inconspicuous and he was sure that it was the secret police, staking out his apartment on an anonymous tip about weapons and rebels. Vlatko was sweating with nerves, was hot and prickly all over and scratching himself. Oh dear God if I had only not gambled then I would not have been in debt and then these stupid bastards would not have been able to blackmail me, dear God, what to do now? Vlatko remembered his uncle, who had been a great lover of that old Soviet with a large moustache, as was fashionable at the time, and how he had been arrested for loving him, and love him he did, had a great big photograph of him on his living room wall, and refused to take it down. “They are our brothers!” he’d said every day. “They helped us when we needed it most.” Vlatko’s uncle ended up arrested and thrown onto that ghastly big island that had not a single tree on it and where everything was bashed either by the deadly sun or the maddening wind, its inhabitants terrorized nonstop. Vlatko shuddered, thinking about his options, either be killed by those stupid bastards or be arrested and thrown into prison, or worse, by the secret police, or maybe he could just move, run away, something, but then they’d find the weapons here and then it would look suspicious. Spiraling into anxiety, Vlatko decided that he’d suffocate and that he should go out for a walk to get a grip on himself, and as he walked he thought he saw that old car move, with the men inside, who he had seen sitting and watching.
Chapter 38
DIOGEN HAD DRIVEN for eight hours. His eyes burned. He looked, and felt, deranged. He arrived in the small town at midnight, and checked into Hotel President. Before he went in, he looked in the trunk, at the rifle. It was safely wrapped in its blanket. The hotel stood in the shape of a beehive, with lozenge amber windows. The focal point of the lobby was a six-foot tall photograph of the President in his famous white uniform. Diogen went upstairs and collapsed without taking his clothes off, a dead man. Before drifting off to sleep, he noted that he stank.
He dreamed of old Fatima saying, “There’s a darkness ahead, dear Diogen. Beware of this darkness.” Diogen had been so desperate and lost as to what to do, that he’d visited Fatima, in the oldest part of town. Fatima read the future and relieved curses. Everyone knew of her and many went to her in precisely the desperate state that Diogen was in. He knocked on the wooden gate on a cold afternoon and Fatima appeared, a tiny lady with crooked legs that were shaped like an “O.” She nodded at him and said, “Come on in, don’t worry about the dog.” Diogen followed her across the yard, into a shed. The dog, an ancient St. Bernard, sat heavily on the ground, trying to peer through sagging, limp eyelids. Inside, she told him to sit, and without asking any questions, threw a pink blanket onto Diogen’s head and said, “Bismillah rahmani rahimi,” and carried on with the Islamic prayer, while also lifting a pot toward Diogen’s head. He watched her through the blanket. She lifted the pot to the head, the heart, and the knees; finally, she took off the blanket, holding the pot in her wiry fingers. “There’s a darkness ahead, dear Diogen. Beware of this darkness. Someone you love is descending into darkness.” Diogen woke up with a start.
He knew where the barracks was, he had checked the map. He showered, dressed, and shaved. He descended the stairs. The President stood there, watching him with a benign expression as if to say, Upon your own free will, dear Diogen, do what you wish, choose your own actions. Diogen’s stomach was heavy. He drove to the barracks, parked, walked across the rail tracks, and entered a small cement shed with REPORT HERE above a round window.
