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Murray does.

When he has pulled it free of the fan, Vletka turns it over and says, ‘Prisutna.’

‘The present.’

A tower against a black sky. A huge zigzag of lightning has just struck the top of the tower, violently dislodging the crown that was there. Flames leap out of the broken summit. Two figures tumble down through the dark air, as if the force of the explosion has thrown them out of their tower, which seemed so secure. Their faces are open with terror. One of them is wearing a crown.

The daughter tells Murray to take another card.

He presses his cigarette into the notch of the ashtray and does so.

Vletka adds it to the other two and says, ‘Budućnost.’

‘The future.’

Murray, having reclaimed his cigarette, is staring at the three cards.

The guy hugging his coins.

The shattered tower.

The greybeard with his lamp.

The final card shows an elongated figure in a monkish habit. Hooded. White-bearded. Holding in one hand a lit lamp, in the other a long staff. His head is bowed and his eyes might be closed, even though he is holding the lamp up as if to illuminate something. He seems to be standing in a frozen or snowy wasteland. There is, anyway, nothing there.

Vletka studies the cards for a minute, finishing her cigarette. Then she stubs it out with a few gentle, thoughtful movements. She seems bored, actually. She says, indicating the first card, ‘Ovo je tvoja prošlost.’

‘This is your past,’ the daughter says to Murray, who has taken a position with his hands knitted on the table in front of him, his shoulders slumped. He feels tired. ‘Yeah?’ he says.

Still indicating the first card, Vletka starts saying words. It sounds like a list. Her daughter translates, her words overlapping with her mother’s. ‘Materialism,’ she says, ‘acquiring material possessions, only interested in wealth, power, status, winning your share, and keeping what you have, ownership, jealousy, wanting to impose your will, denying weaknesses.’ She is smiling at Murray. She is always smiling, despite the fact that most of her hair has already fallen out, and her voice sounds slurred and stupid, and she needs help to walk even a few steps. She says, ‘This is your past.’

‘If you say so,’ Murray says, with some sarcasm. His mouth makes those strange munching movements. His eyes flit fearfully between the two women.

With her finger on the lightning-struck tower, the shattered phallus spilling fire, the plummeting victims, Vletka is now telling Murray about his present.

‘This is your present,’ the daughter says. ‘Upheaval, turbulence, plans destroyed, disorder, pride humbled, humiliation, violence even…’

His eyes narrowing, Murray unknits his fingers to find his cigarettes.

The daughter says in her silly voice, ‘The destruction of a way of living. The impact of things over which you have no control. The final end of a…a part of your life. This is your present.’

With the lighter that is there on the table — a souvenir lighter from a Macedonian health spa or place of pilgrimage or something — Murray lights his cigarette.

Vletka’s finger moves to the final card.

‘This is your future,’ her daughter says.

And Vletka says sternly, ‘Ne — to može biti vaša budućnost.’

‘This might be your future.’

‘Moguća budućnost.’

‘A possible future.’

‘Moguće,’ Vletka emphasises.

‘It is possible.’

Vletka starts on the final list, and her daughter says, still with a stupid smile on her face, ‘Solitude, introspection, stillness, quiet, seclusion, withdrawing from the world, silence, submission, meditation…’

Fuckin’ wonderful, Murray thinks.

‘That it then?’ he asks.

‘That’s it,’ the daughter says, still smiling at him.

He is putting his jacket on. The daughter, leaning on Vletka and on a walking stick, has lurched out of the room in her old woman’s knitted shawl. It’s like one of her legs is six inches shorter than the other, Murray thinks, pretending not to notice, finishing his cigarette at the table on his own.

The cards are still there.

He ignores them.

Still, the stuff she said about his present wasn’t so wrong.

Fuck though, she knew he was in a bad way — people only show up here when they’re in a bad way.

And his past?

The smouldering end of the cigarette crackles, the cheap tobacco, as he inhales strongly.

Ah, bollocks.

That was everybody’s past, what she said. We all think we’re special — we’re all the fucking same.

That’s how they operate, people like her.

Five hundred kuna. Fuck’s sake.

He is putting on his jacket, looking forward to leaving, when the women are there again. The daughter is holding a plate of sticky-looking cakes.

Murray is just shrugging his shoulders into his jacket — a sensible thing with a hood, elasticated wrists, lots of pockets.

‘You would like a cake?’ she says, smiling as always.

He looks, for a moment, at the things on the plate — lumps, each with a layer of sugary frosting. They are misshapen, sad-looking.

‘A cake? Uh…Yeah, okay. Thanks.’

He takes one. They are watching him as, after a pause, he lifts it to his mouth. In his other hand the cigarette is still going. He puts the cake into his mouth. The first thing is: it hurts his teeth. A lot. It’s shocking, how much it hurts. Sharp lines of pain lance down into his jaw, up into his skull. He forces himself not to wince, his miserable teeth working on the stuff. It has a weird texture — it seems to melt away in his mouth, melt into something sandy, muddy almost. It tastes of sugar, and something else, something foul. They are still watching him. The daughter still smiling, her upper lip downy, her lower lip glistening. He tries to smile back as he swallows, his Adam’s apple forcing the thing down. ‘Nice,’ he says. ‘Thank you.’

She lifts the plate up towards him, offering him another.

‘No. Thank you,’ he says. ‘No.’

Ushered through the dark, narrow hall — past hanging coats and hats, and a mirror that tells him nothing — he finds himself in the stairwell again.

The door of the flat closes and he starts down the stairs, spurning the besmirched lift. The cement stairs are darkly shiny, polished by decades of footfall so that they look wet even though they aren’t. At each landing there is an island of light from the window, and a line of communal pot plants — rubbery leaves, dead leaves, crusty soil. At the bottom, metal postboxes with little nameplates. A metal thing set in the floor for scraping the mud off your shoes. Some notices on the wall, a slew of junk mail. The heavy door with its two panes of safety glass, the lower one spider-webbed with damage.

He stops there.

For some time he stands there, in the dim daylight.

A strand of cobweb waves in the air over a radiator. He is looking at it, waving in the rising heat of the radiator. Everything is perfectly still, except for that strand of cobweb, waving.

He stands there, watching it.

He is still standing there, watching the cobweb, weirdly absorbed in the way it moves.

Then he shoves through the heavy front door, makes it screech on its hinges.

He shoves through it, out into the world again.

7

Two and a half hours it takes, to drive to the sea. First the flat land, then the limestone hills, then mountains. Sparse vegetation. The motorway, which starts at Zagreb, is empty. It is a Wednesday morning in early November, that might be why. And now Hans-Pieter has switched on the windscreen wipers — a slow, intermittent setting. They sweep, and stop. They sweep, and stop. Each time with a little squeak. Drizzle obscures the distances of flat farmland in the early part of the drive. The wipers sweep, and stop. Deserted villages, strung out along the road. Dark fields of stubble or ploughed soil. The landscape undulates slightly, is the most that can be said for it.