“‘Far away,’ Peter said, ‘far away in the past,’” Pavel added.
“I didn’t want to risk asking any details, you never know what can of worms you’re opening up. But that one question alone was too much, or maybe it was the madness with the gulls or simply the alcohol. He’d been hitting the white wine hard. And grappa, there was also home-brewed grappa. Then suddenly we took off, a sharp turn around the bow of the steamer, gulls scattering every which way. Peter was now driving a lot faster than before, and not back home but toward the south. At first it was actually fun racing through the water and being tossed around by the waves. We pulled on our jackets and held on tight. The sinful part was how close he shot by past other boats. All we saw were shocked faces, and in the next moment enraged faces. He sped right for other boats like a kamikaze pilot, and only turned away at the last second—”
“I tried,” Pavel said, “to work my way forward to him—”
“I didn’t think that was such a good idea,” Ines interrupted. “And Peter, maybe because he saw Pavel coming in his rearview mirror, went into such a tight curve that I was sure Pavel would be thrown overboard.”
“I just bumped my head.”
“‘Just’ is good,” Susanne said.
“Yes, ‘just’ is good, because it could have turned out a lot worse,” Ines said. “So we hunkered down, with the Croatian flag behind us — and then suddenly it was over. At first I thought the motor had quit or we were out of gas, but Peter had just pulled the throttle back and was chugging along now in wide curves. I yelled at him, and Pavel yelled at him. I couldn’t think of anything better to say than ‘We want to live! We want to live!’ I don’t know how many times I shouted it. Peter just waved me off in disdain, real disdain, and snapped his thumb and middle finger and roared, ‘It’s like nothing, like nothing!’”
“No, ‘Life is nothing,’ is what he said. ‘Life is nothing!’” Pavel corrected her.
“He said, ‘It’s like nothing,’ and said it with a snap of his fingers.”
“Yes, he snapped them, but he said, ‘Life is nothing,’ because otherwise it might have meant his speeding was like nothing at all.”
“Who the hell cares?” Boris said. “At any rate he was a nut case. You should have demanded your money back, whether it was ‘like’ or ‘life.’”
“It was so unreal,” Ines said. “First the kamikaze bit, and then nothing, as if it was all in our heads. We putt-putted home, it took an eternity. From the water there’s nothing special about Zadar, not like Greifswald or Stralsund. At first I thought it was Anja waiting at the dock, at least there was someone there with a white helmet and a red motor scooter. But once she saw us, she was off in a cloud of dust. Well okay, and then came the moment that had me scared shitless — saying good-bye to Peter. I wanted to give him a piece of my mind. By now I was embarrassed at screaming, ‘We want to live!’ I wanted to tell him how outrageous it was to put people in that situation. Except I didn’t know how to say it in English. Pavel can never get his mouth pried open for stuff like that, it’s always up to me. We tied up, Peter jumped ashore, we groped our way forward. Peter was standing with one foot in the boat, the other on the dock, he held out his hand to me. I grabbed it, and I looked at him, directly into his bad eye — a ghastly dead eye, not even a glass eye, just a socket. I could smell the alcohol on him. Bracing me under my elbow, Peter pulled me up, and I jumped ashore.”
“That eye shocked me too—” Pavel said.
“We stood there like pillars of salt, watching as Peter cast off the line, jumped back in the boat, and started the engine. He waved at us and called out, ‘Ciao, ciao.’ He had put his sunglasses on again. But the most remarkable thing about the whole story is that somehow it came as a relief, I mean his eye—”
Boris burst into laughter.
“Not the way you think — sure, when I consider how he had no depth perception and was speeding like a bat out of hell, but I mean it was good that we at least had that eye, that there was something visibly wrong, some hint. Maybe it sounds perverse, but when I saw that sewn-up eye socket, I calmed down — it was a kind of explanation even if I haven’t a clue what was up with that eye — it could have been an accident, didn’t have to have anything to do with the war.”
“Wait a sec,” Pavel said. “The way you tell it, nobody’s going to understand it. Zadar was under siege for two years, bombarded, for two years. The Yugoslav army left its barracks and headed for the mountains, and then fired down at the town from up there — at everything, houses, churches, libraries, everything. And the people in town, they had nothing, at least to begin with, but nobody talks about that, or almost nobody. Roman told about running with his little brother on his back and not knowing if they would make it or not. And when he got home, his mother was washing windows. She had forbidden him to fight, even though she’d been on the front herself, as a doctor. And when he said that he didn’t want to have anything to do with this war, that he knew of no earthly reason why he should fight, she threw him out of the house. Even though she’d forbidden him to fight, understand?”
“And Anja?” Lore asked. “Was she still together with this Peter guy?”
“In some way, yes. At least she spoke of him as her husband. But she never spent the night with him. She came at eleven and then headed off somewhere.”
“How could you live with someone like that?” Susanne said.
“And what if someone said that about you?” Fred asked. Susanne leaned back and pretended that Fred had addressed his question to everybody.
“Sometimes you can’t help it,” Fred said. “Just as maybe your Peter couldn’t help it. Something happened to me once, nothing to do with war, of course, but it can happen so quickly — you tell a stupid joke, lose self-control, do something raunchy, that’s all it takes.” Fred paused as if he wasn’t sure whether to go on or not.