My wife always cleaned my soccer cleats after a game, she’d clean them and I’d lie down for a snooze. That’s the way things should be. He peered over at Magda, happily slurping his stew, flushed from the hot peppers and a kind of internal warmth that washed over him every time Magda sent apologetic glances to the women at the table. Magda didn’t give a thought to revealing that she’d never even laid eyes on those damn cleats, because then she’d ruin their game, and the game was more important to her than Nešo’s friends and their wives, who were as wild as two lynxes, kicking their husbands under the table. At the door, one of them, Nataša, said we’re never coming here again! Her husband bit his tongue; showing your anger like this was bad form. Nešo was his friend, and besides, he had a different take on the story about the cleats. It’s just what people are like: They court their lovers in all kinds of ways, and Nešo courted his with chauvinistic he-man stories.
But Nataša was right about one thing: They never came over to the apartment again because soon the apartment was no more. It went up in flames in one of the first bombardments of the city. Friendships got caught in the flames too, the remnants rare late-night telephone conversations, unreliable snippets of news traversing seas and oceans, news that contained but one verifiable fact: Everyone who had eaten fish and hot-pepper stew at Nešo’s that last Sunday before the war was still alive. Once they had lived within a forty-five-minute tram ride of each other, but today, even the fastest supersonic jet couldn’t round them up in that time.
Nešo lived with Magda in Toronto. He worked for an Italian in a little place that made spaghetti and fanatically tried to make new friends. He wanted people whom he could show himself and Magda off to, for someone in the big wide world to notice and say, look, those two are together; he wanted their love recorded the way it was in some of those burned books in their abandoned city. If you’ve already lost your life, at least you don’t have to lose your love, he thought, huddling down under the duvet, gripping Magda’s ankles with his feet, and speaking words that he later claimed he couldn’t remember because as Nešo would have it, you only uttered true words of love in your sleep. One Sunday he invited three work colleagues and their wives over for fish and hot-pepper stew. They were taken aback by the invitation but accepted it all the same. Having lunch at someone else’s place seemed a good way to save some money, and they had the feeling Nešo was inviting them to a kind of exotic ritual from some distant land, a ritual one really had to experience for oneself, like going off on a package tour somewhere.
A pack of deep-frozen fillets didn’t exactly amount to fish and hot-pepper stew, but Nešo didn’t care. He tried the steaming broth, huffing and puffing, slurping up his noodles, oblivious to Magda clinking her spoon on the edge of her plate in admonishment. She frowned, her heart pounding like crazy; God, just as long as he doesn’t start, just as long as he doesn’t speak, she thought. The women were eating quietly and smiling broadly, the men chatting away, Nešo lying in wait for his moment. Magda said Nešo!. . What? He looked up, she shook her head, don’t!. . What don’t?. . Don’t, please. . What?. . Don’t, just be quiet. The others fell silent; they didn’t understand the language but sensed it didn’t bode well.
Nešo put his spoon down, wiped his face and hands, and not taking his eyes off Magda for a second started with the story about his soccer cleats. Completely still, Magda returned his gaze, not paying the guests any mind. They ate, never looking up from their plates. The women raised their eyebrows pointedly, certain they would never be coming back here.
One of us has to go, said Magda. Why?. . Because this life isn’t the same as the one where you could roll out your soccer-cleats story. . Why isn’t it the same?. . If you don’t know that yourself, I’m not telling you. I want you to go, or else I’ll go. . Where would you go?. . Nešo, I want you to go, and I want you to go right now. . Where would I go?. . I don’t know, you’re the he-man aren’t you?
She shouldn’t have said that; he went straight to their room, took a suitcase from the wardrobe, and half an hour later slammed the door behind him without saying goodbye. He didn’t think for a second where he was going, or even where he could go in a city in which he had no family, where friendships developed so slowly that there was no hope of a saving grace, of a bed even for just the night. He walked for a time, and then rested his suitcase on the sidewalk and sat down, making like he was waiting for someone. He was angry and hurt; he didn’t know what had just happened or where the exit was that might get him out of this story. He felt so awfully betrayed that his joints were going to jump out of their sockets, every bone racing in its own direction. Once he had been afraid of catching Magda with another man or that one day he would come home to a letter on the kitchen table, but those fears paled in significance compared to what had actually happened. Instead of just taking herself from him, Magda had taken everything he had left in his life. The how and why didn’t matter, nor the where and when; to him it seemed she had taken everything except the suitcase on which he had parked his rear. There was one thing he was sure of: He would never go back home, he would never knock on Magda’s door, and he would never see her again. Maybe Nešo would change his mind by the morning, but how and where to live until the morning? He thought about the friends he’d cheated when he didn’t die of leukemia: Sitting here on the suitcase was the price of that distant betrayal.
It was comforting that the news of what had happened to him would reach them, his sitting down on a suitcase in the middle of Toronto and waiting. Nešo couldn’t imagine what it might end up sounding like, but it gave him some release and he already felt a little better. He closed his eyes and wished that everything would come to pass as soon as possible and that he would find out from them what had happened.