No one, however, opened the door. And just as he was starting to wonder what to do and to pity his unfortunate fate, someone tapped Joso Rakita or Ilija Soldo on the shoulder.
“Sorry, sir!” Mento Josef Konforti, the postman, no taller than a seven-year-old and equally timid, introduced himself. “It’s been days since Mr. Ajzler has opened the door. Everyone thinks that something has happened to him.”
In the dream he didn’t have to go down the stairs and climb again to the fifth floor with the notary Dušan Marković, an ill-tempered, fat, middle-aged man who was the spitting image of the minister of foreign affairs, Cincar Marković (who Ilija Soldo only knew about in his dream), along with two more colleagues from the police, the aids and witnesses for his investigation of Hinko Ajzler’s apartment. The repeated ascending and descending of stairs in dreams, as in a good story or novel, is an unnecessary detail that the consciousness censures. This fact provided Joso Rakita with a sense of relief.
He pulled the pick out of his pocket and easily opened the shoddy lock. He was hit with the stench of urine, gravy, and some sort of chemical. The stench was more real than anything he’d ever experienced in real life. Inspector Joso Rakita was seized with terror, as was the chief of homicide investigations for the Zagreb police, Ilija Soldo. He approached the bed on which, gray as the wall behind him, lay a balding man with a clothesline tied in a sloppy noose around his neck. On the nightstand by the bed there were two empty bottles of the phenobarbital Luminal, a sedative once made famous in Hollywood movies, which is still used today as an antiepileptic. But Joso Rakita hardly noticed the bottles of Luminal, because more interesting to him, as to Ilija Soldo in whose head he resided, was the amateurly-tied noose. He couldn’t have hung himself like that, he thought, and then it seemed to him that the man was alive, staring bug-eyed at the low ceiling.
Along Ajzler’s right eye, below the yellowish iris, crawled a small black ant, sliding across it as if on ice.
Rakita moved to pluck the ant from Ajzler’s eye with his fingers.
And then something happened which could hardly be translated from dream to reality. Suddenly the person lying there was no longer Hinko Ajzler, and the fingers did not belong to Joso Rakita; instead the ant was crawling across Joso’s wide-open eye and Hinko’s fingers went for it. He could feel the ant moving but he couldn’t blink or move his eyeballs.
At this point, he awoke with a scream. He grasped his neck, but there was no noose. Underneath him, his halfway-expelled shit was smeared across the hotel bedsheets.
This should have been the greatest fright in the life of the Croatian war veteran and esteemed policeman Ilija Soldo, the inheritor of the most beautiful villa in Senjak.
But this was just the beginning.
For the next ten nights upon returning to Zagreb, Ilija Soldo couldn’t sleep. He lay in bed staring at the ceiling, devoid of any thoughts. He said nothing to his wife, nothing of his trip to Belgrade instead of Budapest, nothing of the considerable wealth he had inherited, nor of the dream he’d had the last time he’d fallen asleep. Over time, his silences and lies multiplied.
On the eleventh morning he got on a bus to Belgrade. He called in sick to work and told his wife that he was traveling to Vinkovci, out toward Serbia, where a few days earlier a thirty-year-old railroad worker had smothered his two children and then disappeared. He’d left a short note for the mother of his children, who in the police report was listed as his “domestic partner,” where he wrote that he had smothered the children because she had been cheating on him with a waiter from the railroad station café. He was suspected to have escaped across the border to Serbia.
As awake as Ilija had been over the past days and nights, he rode east on the empty highway. When they crossed the border and entered Serbia, he closed his eyes, thinking he’d be able to sleep now. But no. The world was just as clear, real, and awake as on the other side of the border. What doesn’t sleep in Croatia will not sleep in Serbia either!
Those words, as if regimented, were drilled into his head: What doesn’t sleep in Croatia will not sleep in Serbia either.
He quickly glanced across the endless flat land in the direction of Sremska Mitrovica and Ruma, following the perfect geometrical shapes of the black, freshly plowed earth, and he tried to think about something far away from what his life was mutating into, away from the villa in Senjak and Aunt Smilja’s inheritance, away from the lies which he was guarding himself from the world or from himself with, away from insomnia which, he was sure, was caused by that strange, terrible dream in the Hotel Majestic. And that’s how he came to the case of the crazy switchman from Vinkovci, who had smothered his nine-month-old daughter and a three-year-old son with a pillow, and then wrote to his wife that this was how he was punishing her and promised that if she mended her ways, he would give her new children. He was crazy, but really, should police be the ones dealing with crazy people? How could he conduct an investigation against a disturbed mind? He thought about it, and then by association, through those mysterious and inexplicable trips that a person takes as they transition from one thought to the next, from thinking about the world to thinking about themselves, it occurred to him that what he was currently going through was also a criminal case in need of further investigation. The fact that the crime had happened in his dream, or perhaps it wasn’t a crime but a suicide, didn’t change anything. Or it changed only the fact that now he couldn’t go to the police, neither in Belgrade nor in Zagreb, and report his suspicions of murder; now he had to investigate the case himself.
All kinds of nonsense occur to you while riding the bus from Zagreb to Belgrade. Especially if you’re a police detective who hasn’t slept in ten days.
It was late afternoon, almost evening, but the main hotel entrance on Obilićev Venac was still bathed in light. The other side, the entrance on Maršala Birjuzova, was surely dark. Was it Ilija Soldo who thought that? Later he’ll be sure it was. And maybe it really was.
Luckily, there were rooms, as there would be in ten, twenty, thirty days, whenever Soldo came back on his regular future trips to Belgrade, when he would depart every eleventh day, after not having slept for the past ten nights. This will go on for six months, and each time it’ll happen according to that fatal identical scenario, which would probably make a good twelve-hour experimental film that wouldn’t be shown in regular theaters, but maybe in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But the story about a case, which Ilija Soldo, the chief of homicide investigations for the Zagreb police, finds himself in the middle of, requires that all those nights at the hotel be told in the same breath, and that the reader or listener bears in mind the unbearable and frightening repetition, the monotony of terror that our unfortunate Ilija endures.
The receptionists get to know him. He lies, saying that he is a traveling salesman; he isn’t going to tell them that he’s a police officer. They look for the best room for him, he’ll even sleep in the presidential suite, where Marshall Tito and his minister of police in Communist times allegedly held meetings with the many heads of their secret police — regular citizens had no idea how many there had been; he agrees to all this only to avoid appearing suspicious to the receptionists. Then he enters the elevator, and once in his room, he gets undressed, lies on the bed, and five or six hours later wakes up to his own scream. The same dream repeats itself without any variation, only each time he finds out more and more about himself, about Inspector Joso Rakita, a Croat from Lika, serving in the Belgrade police at the beginning of April 1941. He already knows as much about him as he knows about the other one, supposedly his actual self, Ilija Soldo, who in his dream exists alongside Rakita. He is, however, unable to change anything in his dream, like not breaking into Hinko Ajzler’s apartment, or not attempting to pluck the dead ant from Hinko’s dead eye, or not turning into the dead Hinko, who he still knows nothing about.