Vletka, lighting candles, says something snappishly.
The daughter translates, smiling: ‘Do you want some tea?’
‘I’m okay,’ Murray blurts, uneasily feeling the soft velvet with his hand.
The place wasn’t easy to find. It’s in a part of the town he doesn’t know, a twenty-minute taxi to a whole nother world of weather-stained estates, solemn cuboid structures separated by parked cars and dreary parks, hard paths under sad trees, deserted playgrounds, an electricity substation garlanded with barbed wire. Each of the buildings has a name — some Croatian hero. Murray was looking for Faust Vrančić House, number eleven.
He punched one-one into the entryphone and waited while crackly electric pulses sounded. Then a voice. ‘Da?’
‘It’s Murray,’ Murray said. ‘I’m here to see, uh, Vletka?’
The fizzing voice said, ‘Tko je to?’
‘Murray,’ Murray said again, louder. ‘I’ve come to see Vletka. Murray.’
A more high-pitched electric noise, insistent, and something happening in the door, a heavy metal door with safety-glass panels. Murray fought it open.
A pungent stairwell.
He was shitting himself.
She sits down on the sofa, Vletka. She’s in a dressing gown. A solid, surly woman, she seems to Murray. Like someone who sells you a train ticket to Zagreb, frowning at you through the perforated glass as you try to explain what it is you want, while the queue lengthens. Short hair. Little buds of gold in her earlobes. Breath that smells of cigarette smoke, bacteria.
She says something to Murray in a sharp, imperative voice.
‘She says you should relax,’ is the translation.
Murray’s mouth: strange munching movements. A fixed, terrified smile. She has taken one of his hands now.
He has this weird fear that she’s going to ask him to strip.
She doesn’t. She is staring into his eyes, though, which is almost worse. Her own eyes are greyish-brown. Her eyelashes are short and unfeminine. She has no eyebrows.
When Murray looks away, she snaps something at him.
‘Please, you should look into her eyes,’ the daughter tells him, more softly.
Murray does so.
Those fucking eyes. The stress of the stare is like some terrible sound that just won’t stop, a squealing scraping of metal…
She’s still holding his hand, all damp in hers.
The stare softens perceptibly. She says something. Her voice sounds dry and detached.
‘She says you are in a very bad situation,’ the daughter says.
Murray, still holding the stare though it’s making his head hurt now, says, ‘Yeah?’
The room is hot. He is sweating. It’s not just the heat. It’s the sense that some sort of invasive procedure is taking place.
The daughter translates a brusque instruction: ‘Shut your eyes, please.’
He does.
Her mother’s hand is now on his face. The whole situation is so odd that this seems okay, sort of.
‘Is this about some curse?’ Murray asks, feeling safer with his eyes shut.
The daughter translates. Vletka answers.
‘She doesn’t know what it is,’ the daughter tells Murray. ‘Just that you are in —’ the same phrase — ‘a very bad situation.’
‘What does she mean by that?’ Murray says, his eyes still shut. Vletka’s hand has taken hold of his skull, the front of his skull, and is squeezing it quite hard.
The daughter translates.
The mother answers, sounding exasperated now, squeezing Murray’s skull still harder.
‘She says it is like a poison,’ the daughter finally says, after some follow-up questions in Croatian, while Murray waited, the strong points of Vletka’s hard fingers starting to hurt his head.
‘Poison? What’s that mean?’ he wants to know.
Vletka loudly shushes him.
An instruction arrives via her daughter’s polite voice: ‘Please, do not speak.’
The fingers are starting to properly hurt. It’s as though some metal instrument is being tightened on his head.
Suddenly, it stops.
He opens his eyes, tentatively, just in time to see the slap flying at him.
He feels the numb shock of it in his face. Then the heat arrives, intense, a moment later.
‘What the fuck was that for?’ he shouts, his hand at his stinging face.
Vletka is speaking at him angrily in her own language. Her hand is on his forehead now, applying pressure, or holding his head in place.
Then she slaps him again.
‘Stop doing that!’ Murray yells, trying to stand up. She snatches his arm, while he is still off balance, and pulls him back down onto the sofa.
‘Sh, sh, sh,’ she says, as if to a small child, stroking his face.
‘Stop doing that,’ Murray says again.
‘Sh, sh.’
‘Zatvorite oči,’ Vletka says.
‘Please, shut your eyes,’ her daughter instructs him.
‘Is she going to hit me again?’
‘Please,’ the younger woman says softly, ‘shut your eyes.’
Vletka is still stroking his face in a way Murray finds he quite likes. He shuts his eyes. She is all soft-voiced now, and holding his hand. Singing something, holding his hand, stroking it. The singing stops. He is aware of her weight moving, leaving the sofa. He opens his eyes to find her on her feet, extinguishing candles.
‘Are we done then?’ he asks.
The daughter translates for him.
Vletka shakes her head. She says something and indicates the table where her daughter is sitting.
‘Please, sit down here.’
‘What happens now?’ Murray says.
Vletka just tells him to sit at the table again. So he does, sitting opposite her daughter. And then Vletka joins them too, having taken something out of a drawer. A pack of cards.
She sits at the table, taking the seat facing the wall, the histrionic Jesus tapestry. On her left, her daughter’s oversized, smiling head. On the other side, Murray, asking if he can smoke.
He can.
He lights up while Vletka shuffles the cards.
And in fact she is smoking too, letting a cheap cigarette hang whorishly from her lip — the mid-afternoon dressing gown is part of the effect as well — as she skilfully shuffles the old pack. The air in the room, already somehow grey and dim, is soon harsh and blue with smoke.
She puts the pack face down on the tabletop. Then, with a single practised movement, spreads it into a perfectly symmetrical fan.
The instruction arrives, as always, via the daughter: ‘Please, take one.’
Murray looks furtively at Vletka. She is looking the other way, drawing tiredly on her fag, waiting for him to take his card. His hand ventures out into the middle of the table. It hovers for a moment over the fan and then his index finger lands on a card and tugs it free of the others. As if she is in a hurry, Vletka snatches it up and looks at it. ‘Prošlosti,’ she says, placing it face up on the table.
‘The past,’ the daughter tells him.
The card shows a man, seated, facing out, hugging a large coin. He also has a coin on his head — as well as something that looks like a simple crown — and his feet seem to hold two further coins in place on the floor. His posture is hunched, tense, defensive. He is staring straight out of the card and his expression is grim. There is something about him that suggests exhaustion. Blood-saturated eyes, strangers to sleep. Behind him, some distance away, is a city.
‘Please,’ the daughter translates, smiling at Murray across the table, showing him her large yellow teeth, ‘take another one.’