Željko, play dead! he thundered. Željko put his tail between his legs and his head down and began, as if ashamed and not knowing what to do with himself, to turn in a circle in the middle of the room. Željko, play dead! he yelled again, pushing the dog to the floor. The dog looked at him confused, and was then even more confused when Pehar gently patted him, turned to Rajna, and in a somewhat more restrained command, as if addressing a sergeant in front of a regular soldier, said: Rajna, biscuit! Rajna handed him a dog biscuit in the shape of a bone and Pehar gave it to Željko, who was already beside himself with surprise.
That night they skipped the homeowners’ association meeting, but Željko had learned the first thing in his life: to play dead and get a biscuit for it.
Rajna and Kosta repeated the Željko, play dead! game over and over.
The dog quickly understood that the game gave his masters incredible pleasure. Later, whenever he sensed Rajna was sad or that Kosta had come home from work a bit uptight, he’d lie down of his accord and play dead. He knew it would cheer them up.
It was a Sunday, a week before Christmas, when Rajna’s condition deteriorated. The nausea started in her stomach, spread through her body, and settled in her thoughts and head. Everything’s messed up, she said just before her head slumped over.
Kosta ran to the telephone, the dog paced around the room, out of sorts and whining. The ambulance was there in ten minutes.
In the morning, Kosta was there standing in front of a hospital room holding a plastic bag full of oranges. They didn’t let him see Rajna. She’s sleeping now, said the nurse. How long’s she been asleep, Kosta asked. The nurse didn’t answer him.
The doctor was tall and blond. Like a German in a Partisan film. Except he had sad eyes, and neither Germans nor doctors have sad eyes.
An aneurysm, he said. . She’s asleep?. . No. Your wife’s not asleep. . She’s awake? The doctor shook his head and lowered his gaze. She’s alive?. . Yes, she’s still alive.
On the way home he didn’t know what to do with the oranges. He had to dump them somewhere because he thought someone, some angel, might be betrayed if he should simply carry them in over the threshold. The oranges.
He went into the post office, people were busy filling in their payment forms, he put the bag down on the counter and walked out. He didn’t have to run, Kosta was already invisible to them.
V
He sat in the armchair and smoked. Night fell, and the things in the room disappeared one after the other, but Kosta didn’t turn the light on. At the other end of the room sat Željko, watching him. One needs to believe in God, thought Kosta. I’ll tell Pehar that tomorrow. He has to believe because he knows God exists. I can’t because I don’t know that. The cigarette had burned down between his fingers. He tried to pull himself together and decide what to do. To turn on the television, turn on the light, go to the kitchen, to the bathroom, wherever, to give Pehar a call, take Željko to the park, to do something, anything. . Everything he thought of dissolved before his eyes. He looked at the glow of the cigarette, which had already completely burned down. He stubbed the butt out and started to cry. He knew the telephone would ring any minute now. No one had to tell him that.
Željko came over in near silence, as if every strip of parquet felt the pain of his footsteps, and then at Kosta’s feet he collapsed like a dead dog. He looked at his friend out of the corner of his eye, expectantly awaiting a smile. At that moment nothing in the world was more important than his smile.
The second kiss of Gita Danon
I’m going to tell you about Lotar. You don’t have to remember the story, there’s no life wisdom to be had, it’ll be of no use to you, you’ll never meet such a man and then know how to handle him, I’m telling you about Lotar because of the woman who loved him, she’s real, maybe you’ll meet her, her or a woman like her, maybe you’ll fall in love with her, maybe she’ll stay with you for a lifetime, or maybe you’ll just pass by her, see her in the supermarket and say good morning, Gita, how are you, Gita, but she won’t answer, because Gita doesn’t answer, Gita is deaf to every greeting.
In those years Lotar was the strongest man in the city. That’s what people said, though no one ever really thought about testing it. He lived alone with his mother, Miss Edita, who had a shop where she pleated skirts. No one knew anything about his father. The story went that he had been a German officer, apparently his name was Otto, and that it had been a great love. He would secretly visit Miss Edita at night and stay until the dawn. No one ever saw him, as their love could only be in the time of the curfew. Otto, so the story goes, didn’t want to retreat with the rest of his army in April 1945, so he deserted and hid out in the forests above Sarajevo for two years. Every Saturday and Sunday Miss Edita would go and collect mushrooms, strawberries, raspberries, always returning with an empty basket. Dear God, you know I only go up there for the fresh air and the scenery, she told the neighborhood women, but they knew she went because of Otto. Lotar was born in the fall of 1946: it’s a child I wanted, not a husband, said Miss Edita, and no one ever inquired further. In an exception to the usual ugly custom, the neighborhood kept her secret and no one ever called Lotar a bastard. This was probably because he was an exceptionally placid and quiet child, always bigger and stronger than his classmates, but he never got into fights. It was as if every belligerence in his bloodline had been expended and exhausted before he was born.
One Sunday in the early summer of 1947,Miss Edita took the child into the hills. He needs to learn from a young age, she said to old Mrs. Džemidžić, who kissed her and the child: you just go, sweetie, and hold tight to what you’ve got while you’ve got it. They came back in the early evening. That was the last time Miss Edita went up into the hills, and people said that after that Otto had set off for Austria on foot, and then on to Germany. He’d waited to see his son, and then he’d gone home forever.
Lotar graduated high school and as a star student enrolled to study medicine, and right when you would have thought that everything in his life was going to be like it was in those stories about happy and healthy children, in his third year of college he met Gita Danon, a pharmacist’s daughter, two years older than him. Gita studied a little, but spent most of her time hanging out and breaking men’s hearts, all over Sarajevo, drunk and wild, as if she were breaking beer bottles until the morning came to clear her head. But the morning never did come for Gita, nor did she ever tire of her strange game. She would draw a man slowly to her, toy with him until the first kiss, and then she’d push him down the street, letting him roll to the end, to his shame and the horror of others who hadn’t yet felt Gita’s charms but knew their turn would come and that they too wouldn’t be able to resist her. The men would get over Gita after a time, wouldn’t mention her for a while, but sooner or later lips that had once tasted her kisses would say Gita was a whore. The only one who never got over Gita, who never spoke an ugly word about her, was Lotar, and both she and this reticence would change him and his life.