9 May 1992, Saturday - Erased

Opening her eyes wide, she looked at the clock. She had overslept and would be late for her breakfast with Mark. She rushed to the bathroom, splashed some water over her face, rubbed it with a towel. She tried to think of the fastest way to get to their meeting point. A taxi might get stuck in traffic, so she decided to run. As she unlocked the door, her gaze fell on the bicycle.

* * *

“I’m sorry, I only fell asleep toward morning...” she greeted him.

“It’s all right. I was a little worried.”

“But not enough to not have your breakfast?”

“Hey, I have few talents, but one I do have is being pragmatic. My meeting starts in...”

He looked at his watch.

“Twenty minutes. You can order something, or we can just have coffee? Or tea?”

“Coffee.”

He looked at her attentively.

“Tea, you are breastfeeding. You said yourself.”

“I am breastfeeding into a plastic bottle.”

“We are working on making sure that it’s not for long.”

“He will chicken out, the presenter, he won’t do it!”

“You said he promised to put you on the show.”

The waiter asked whether the food was satisfactory. Mark nodded and ordered coffee.

“And for the lady?” he asked Zala.

She hesitated.

“Tea, herbal tea, please.” She finally made up her mind.

Mark and Zala smiled at the same time.

“I am determined, some would say stubborn...” she said, “but sometimes I need some outside support.”

“We all do,” he nodded.

“Who is your support?”

“God is,” he said.

She looked at him with astonishment.

“I never asked you... Do you mean to say you believe in an old man with a white beard sitting on a cloud?”

“No. But...”

He placed his finger on his lips.

“Psssst... I am an American. Everyone says how easy it is to get along with us and is amazed when they go to a cocktail party and leave with an olive on a plastic toothpick and the childhood traumas of at least three people they met there. But we never talk about religion. It’s taboo.”

“Do you think there’s a force somewhere that will...”

“It will,” he nodded.

She looked at him, befuddled.

“Admit that you’re just trying to make me feel better! Because you know that by evening and the TV appearance, I will have bitten my nails right to the quick and without you, I would drink so many coffees that I would not dare open my mouth, in case my heart popped out. You’re trying to comfort me, aren’t you?”

“No. Everything will work out fine.”

A soreness in her eyes was instantly followed by tears rolling down her cheeks. She touched her face with her fingers and stared at the wet tips.

“Thank you,” she said. “I had almost forgotten that one can be moved to tears.”

The waiter brought the coffee and the tea, noticed the tears, threw Mark a reproachful look. Mark didn’t notice and asked for the bill.

She didn’t dare ask further, not wishing to discourage the hope that she had finally once more managed to awaken in herself.

“It’s a shame we never talked about this before...”

He looked at her from under his brow, his eyes sparkled , “We didn’t have time.”

She remembered his scent and the heat of summer evenings, his sweat dripping on her, salty and warm. “Sorry!” he had said, with the first drop, but she had rolled him over and licked his armpit. He didn’t apologise again after that. One morning, he had still been asleep when she went to the bathroom. Abetted by his light snoring, she took his wallet and found the photograph of his family. Covering his wife’s face with the tip of her thumb, she stared at the children for a long time. The photo must have been old, since he had told her that they were adults now. What was he like as a father? How did he go about solving their problems?

All of a sudden, her entire body longed painfully for him, this man on the other side of the table, after three months of being together that had meant occasional evening meals and secret meetings, and in between, a ten-day holiday on the islands of the Adriatic. It had been his suggestion and he had presented her with a list of places his colleagues went on holiday – a blacklist that was to be avoided. She didn’t dare ask him how he came by it; had he asked them directly or found out in a roundabout way, in between meetings? As far as she was concerned, it made no difference. There was no island, however remote, where she could avoid meeting at least one Slovene. As they mass migrate from towns on the weekends through the rest of the year, so they mass migrate out of the country in the summer. She showed him a newspaper interview with a Slovene pensioner, who had bought a railway ticket to Split in Croatia, and despite the railway company trying to explain that it was dangerous, that he was entering a war zone, he stubbornly insisted, until they put on the scheduled train. They attached a single carriage and he and the conductor had played cards all the way to their destination.

She wasn’t exactly sure when she had become pregnant, but she chose the night when they had carried the blanket to the highest point on the island and watched the meteorite shower. The brightest of the decade, the media had been announcing. Her nostrils filled with scents of the Mediterranean, lavender and juniper, and salt.

She found the disparity between his rational problem solving and the animal she awoke in him attractive. He said she was the only one and she hoped he wasn’t lying. His eyes darkened and his fingers clenched the edge of the table so hard his veins stood out.

Simultaneously, they realised that they were leaning toward each other, breathing slowly and heavily in synch.

“I wanted to warn you about something,” he began, tearing himself out of the enchantment. “The TV show... you do know what you are doing?”

“Yes.”

She moved back and straightened herself. Fishing the tea bag out of her cup, she wound its string around it, squeezed it out.

He rubbed his forehead . “This will sound tough, but I am an analyst. Are you ready?”

“Fire away!”

“Firstly, establishing the situation: what are you? You, me, anyone, it’s not important. Nothing but a tiny speck of litter in the system. One of many, not exactly vital for how the system operates, at least not as an individual. The problem would only be real if a great number disappeared at the same time. OK?”

“Yes.”

“And this system rolls along on our backs, these tiny insignificant grains, without even noticing us. What is your aim? Basically, you want to change shape. You want to become a thorn or become large enough to chafe the system. A slight feeling of unease to start with, then a prick, continuous discomfort, rubbing against it. Do you agree?”

“Yes, of course.”

“You went and saw the editor and, perhaps, I don’t know, after the meeting he picked up the phone. The writer, you said yourself, was afraid. He also made a phone call. Those who brought in the law are still in power. Now they know that someone is going around asking questions and causing problems. The TV show with its airtime is a problem. You can accept something called “Law on Foreigners” because everyone thinks of someone like me, for example, as a foreigner. But at this table, you are the foreigner the law talks about, and after the TV show people will find out about it. I checked the data and it is television that is the media in Slovenia. The news is watched by everyone, particularly after last year and the Ten-Day War. And what do they do after the last news bulletin of the evening? Get ready for bed. And as they do so, they will hear your story. They will listen.”

“I hope.”

“Thorns are usually extracted, you know?”

She nodded.

“I must go. Walk with me?”

They stood up, Mark counted out the money onto the bill and weighed it down with the ashtray, despite there being no fear of it blowing away inside the room.

He opened the door, Zala stepped out into the road and bumped into a policewoman.

“Sorry!” The woman in uniform smiled apologetically. Zala turned pale and the woman stared at her, as Mark opened the door wide and spoke in his Slovene with an American accent.

“ Izvolite , after you!”

They waited for the policewoman and her partner to go inside and then hurried down the street.

“Come to think of it, one of the reasons I left you was because I was fed up of hiding. OK, what was it you wanted to tell me?” Zala said.

“Before I am sent to a new country, I always read up on it. You had Communism, but you were lucky that your dictator, Tito, was a bon vivant. A dictator can only rule in two ways: through force or with gold. He can either terrorize or bribe his subjects. Tito began heavy-handedly like all his eastern colleagues. But then, perhaps affected by his love of luxury, pleasure, who knows, or maybe the credits we supplied you with, not wanting to lose you, the same credits being supplied by the Soviet Union for exactly the same reasons... In short, he began to hand out money. Everybody got something. To me, as a foreigner from a country where everyone can succeed if they work hard, one of the most unbelievable trips I can afford is cycling round Slovenia. No car, a bicycle. You ride along and see all the huge houses, the size only rich people have in the States. You stop here and there, people are kind, they offer you food and drink, you ask them what they do for a living, and they say: I’m a teacher. A butcher in a factory. A bus driver. One of them was even a rubbish collector. In this country, everyone has made it. This is the country where I have one of the smallest houses, especially considering it is my only one.”

“Mark,” she said and touched his hand for just a brief moment. It wasn’t discretion, she didn’t dare hold it for longer because she wasn’t sure she had the strength to let it go again,

“Thank you!”

“For what?”

“For being quite unlike you today. You’ll be late for your meeting, you talk and talk, all in order to console me. Thank you, but you can go now. I’ll survive until the evening.”

They reached a new building that some rich man with no taste had ordered from some architect with no talent. He looked at his watch.

“This time I’ll be a little late. I really did get lost on my way here, but there is something I must tell you. The problem is that politicians cannot just say, oops, sorry, a mistake, and return your citizenships to you. People have lost their jobs, their homes. They were sent across the border and perhaps some have even died as soldiers in an army they had nothing to do with. The people who are in their jobs and in their homes are, however, voters, something you are not. For as long as you do not exist, you cannot sue them for damages.

Yes?”

“You mean I’ll get run over by a car? Disappear into the night?”

He looked at her for a long time.

“Yes. If you become a large enough thorn, those who you are picking at will want to get rid of you. They will weigh their options. Pleasant ones or ugly ones. The problem is that right now I can think of a thousand ugly ones and not a single nice one.”

Involuntarily, their bodies began to move closer again.

“Thank you,” she said. “There is one thing I ask of you. Whatever happens, look after the little one. And note down all the good things about me if you can remember any, so you can tell him when he grows up.”

“OK.”

“And go and see him, as soon as possible. Hold him in your arms, so he will not be just a word for you.”

“I will do. When my two were born, I was there and it was different.”

“He too is yours.”

“I know. It’s just...”

“I know.”

Without thinking, she held his hand, their fingers entwined and they leaned toward each other. Mark stopped and quickly glanced left and right, and Zala moved her hand away.

“I’m sorry.”

“One more thing. Don’t console yourself with the fact that you are erased. They did not destroy the information. They simply moved it elsewhere and took note. So they know where you live and after the show they’ll probably start bugging your phone. Perhaps they are already doing that anyway.”

“Do they know about you?”

“Of course. The State has all this information anyway. Our salvation is in that there is too much of it. But when you draw attention to yourself, it turns its attention to you.”

“I’m sorry.”

He checked the time.

“Hold in there tonight! Go through the side entrance, just in case. Perhaps also sleep somewhere else tonight?”

“Leave it! Rush off to your meeting! Don’t worry about me, as you said, everything will be all right.”

She left and deliberately didn’t turn round, though she could feel his gaze on her. She bent over the bicycle and began to unlock it.

“That’s her! Arrest her!” a young woman shouted, in a broken voice bordering on the hysterical. Zala jumped up to find herself between two policemen.

“Ambush!” the youngish woman continued, crackling above the capacity of her vocal cords, and looked around wildly in all directions, so that her thick brown hair waved about, as if she were part of a shampoo advert. Every item of clothing was a prestige brand, tiny logos and brand names, nothing too loud, unlike their owner. “I saw her when she arrived! On my bike! Daddy’s graduation present! My bike!”

Clearly, she had called the police and they had sent two young cadets, who were now becoming annoyed by all the shouting and wanted the whole business over and done with as soon as possible.

“Madam, your documents please,” the blond one said.

“I bought it at a flea market,” Zala tried to explain.

The second policeman joined in. “We will clear it all up. Your documents, please.”

He scratched his neck and when he felt the plaster he had stuck on after his morning shave, he immediately moved his finger away.

Zala opened her handbag and began rummaging through it. She kept sneaking glances in all directions, as much as she could see. Uniformed legs to the left and right, patent-leather heeled shoes in the middle. Behind her, the bike and a wall. No exit.

“How much did you pay for it?” the owner asked, her curiosity returning her to a quieter, though no less high-pitched tone of voice.

“Twenty thousand tolars.” Zala looked at her and didn’t know why she had chosen such a price.

The young woman’s face was totally uninteresting and, had it not been made up to the last eyelash, also totally unremarkable. Her skin was completely smooth and soft, as if it had been covered by a protective cotton wool wrapping all her life.

“What?! For a bike like this? That’s an insult to my graduation!” The woman returned to her louder self.

“Madam, calm down! We will sort this out,” the badly shaved policeman said, and turned to Zala, renewing his request. “Your documents, please.”

“Some drug addict steals and sells it for his next shot. They should all be shot!” The owner was outraged.

“Madam, please, you are hindering the procedure.” The policeman with the plaster was paying attention only to her now. Zala saw how his legs moved, but not enough. What if she made a run for it...

She raised her head. A semicircle of onlookers had gathered around them. Mark was standing behind them.

Their eyes met.

She saw that he was solving the problem. The left part of his upper lip was lively as ever.

She tried, unobtrusively, to nod to him.

“Madam...” The policeman was becoming impatient.

“Sorry, I seem to have misplaced it somewhere, just a moment.”

The desperation of being trapped lignified her fingers. Even if she could slip away from the policeman, she would not be able to get through the circle of onlookers.

She would not appear on the show this evening.

Marko would get another name.

She flinched with horror. She had given the baby a name, despite vowing to herself not to.

“Madam, if you have no identification, we need to go to the station,” the policeman said. “It appears I really have forgotten it.” She lowered her head.

The policemen flanked her and the presence of their bodies prepared her to make the first step forward.

‘The end. This is the end of everything.’

“Let’s go, madam, bring the bicycle along,” the policeman said to the owner, who concurred without objecting.

The circle opened up and Zala stepped through the crowd with her head down. Suddenly, there was a loud cry on the right that changed to a prolonged groan. Everyone turned around.

Mark dropped his briefcase, letting it fall onto the road, he grabbed his chest and cried out loudly. He began to stagger, fell to his knees, rolled over onto his side and shouted, “Heart! My heart! Help me!”

The owner of the bicycle was the first to leap forward. With renewed strength in her voice, she shouted at the policemen, “Help him! What are you staring at!? He needs the Heimlich Manoeuvre! Get a move on!”

The policemen ran up to Mark and looked rather at a loss. Eventually one of them grabbed the wireless and started shouting down the line. The other shook his hands above Mark, as if he was trying to heal him with bioenergy and then pressed his hands against his chest and pushed with all his strength. The circle of onlookers slowly shifted. Only a moment earlier, it had stood around Zala, now she was standing alone, staring at their backs.

The bicycle had fallen to the ground and she wondered whether she should grab it and ride away. Only for a moment, then she looked around her once more in astonishment and ran.

* * *

She sat with the phone in her lap, wrapped in a dressing gown, a towel around her head. The flat red body of the device and the black receiver sitting on top of it, its cord curled like the hair of ladies in historic films. She wanted to go to the bathroom but didn’t dare let go of the phone. She had been covered in sweat when she came running home, had taken a shower, had been waiting ever since.

Mark was pretending, of course.

(wasn’t he?)

The problem solver is waiting until he is alone again and can smile.

(or is his face turning stone cold in a deathly spasm?)

If he was dead, if his heart really had betrayed him, and she hadn’t run to him, how would she live the rest of her life?

She lowered her head and lifted the receiver slightly.

Beeep. Beeep.

It worked.

What if he had tried to call just as she lifted the receiver?

(they tried to call?)

A crippling sadness: she wasn’t the person they would call if something happened to him. Who would even tell her when nobody knew about her? Was this an event for the media: man dies of heart attack? Probably not. Would they write elderly man? Not at fifty. When she still used to read the newspapers, it was the road accidents section that she was always curious about, though the patronizing tone of the journalists put her off: little old lady run over by car. Particularly older people were described too condescendingly in a language nobody would use in everyday conversation.

Perhaps the phone isn’t working? What if she lifted the receiver again, just briefly?

No!

This continued, as the afternoon embraced its softer colours and a more diffused light. It had not rained for a whole week and the pollen had begun to form small piles that the children had fun kicking to scatter the yellow dust, though their mothers immediately scolded them.

The ringing made her jump and she barely managed to catch the phone before it crashed to the floor.

“You escaped,” Mark said.

“You’re alive!”

“They cracked a rib when they were resuscitating me. I couldn’t call earlier, I’ve only now been brought to the room.”

She laughed.

“You were so good I didn’t know whether you were acting or whether you really did have a heart attack.”

“They say it was nerves, the heart is healthy.”

“At least now I know you have one.”

What started off as a laugh on the other end of the line turned into a groan. “I can’t laugh, it hurts.”

“Thank you.”

“No problem. It was the only thing I could think of. I can’t talk. I will stay here on observation overnight. I asked a colleague to bring me a portable TV. I want to see you on the show. Go, make it hurt.”

* * *

Zala followed two men through the outer door of national TV. The men knew the doorman and they joked about something Zala could not make head nor tail of, probably a daily routine. The first guy produced a card from his pocket and swiped it across the electronic reader; the machine beeped and the door clicked open. He held it for his friend who, wanting to save the effort of extracting his card, swiped the flap of his coat across the device as if trying to clean it. The doorman behind the counter grinned, revealing a gold tooth at the top right of his mouth. He was one of those merry individuals who laugh at every triviality, perhaps because it was the only way to show off his oral assets.

Zala had arrived far too early anyway, so she patiently waited for the pranksters to get moving and the doorman to conceal his gold. She looked at herself in the glass front: the blouse she had been saving for a special occasion, though she never expected that a TV appearance would be its premiere. Double nursing pads in her bra to prevent milk from seeping through. A black skirt that had taken the longest to find in her wardrobe. At points, she had stopped, hanger in hand, and said to herself in the mirror, “You are going to fight for your child and here you are, trying on clothes for over an hour!” She had applied a little makeup, though, here too, a tiny calculating voice had said it would be better if she was dishevelled and torn and not try to hide the bags under her eyes. Perhaps. It didn’t persuade her and she had carefully finished the stroke of eyebrow liner.

“Yes, Madam?” said the doorman. He was a bony guy and looked exactly like the man who sold watermelons in Bitola.

“Good evening, I am here for the talk show Night Conversations.”

“Ahmm!” he nodded, “they did say, yes. ID please!”

Everything stopped: motion, breathing, thought.

The doorman noticed and tried to help. “It can be any other document with a photo, a passport?”

“I don’t have one.” Her own voice sounded alien. She was afraid of its helpless sincerity.

“Those are the rules.” He shrugged his shoulders and put on an overly sympathetic face.

Zala got over the shock.

“I mean to say, it must be in my handbag. I’ll check.”

“Please, go ahead.”

She stepped aside and began rummaging through the contents of her bag, every detail of which she knew. A few more people entered and waited in line. A robust woman opened the inner door with her card, three young men came for the shooting of some programme and the doorman collected their identity cards. Zala followed his every move:

1. Guest hands over ID.

2. Doorman takes it with his left hand and with his right hand gives them an entry card. He never checks the document and if it is turned the wrong way up, he does not turn it around.

Once they were alone, she approached him.

“It appears I’ve left it at home. You can get the presenter to vouch for me.”

“Madam, I know, but even he cannot get past this. Rules are rules. Your backup act is a gentleman who teaches parrots to talk like people. He came a whole hour ago. Do you really not have any other document with a photograph? Do you live far away?”

“No.”

“Go and get it. I’ll tell them that you’re here. You have another half an hour.”

She wanted to tell him the truth, to explain, but then it dawned on her that she was standing before a state institution: a tiny piece of the system. This guy was told to collect people’s ID cards and hand them entry cards in return. He was doing his job with the least possible care or effort, but he was still doing it.

She noticed his wedding ring that shone brighter even than his tooth, so he had a wife at home, probably also children: they needed to eat and he couldn’t risk his job. He was left with the freedom of a small screw in a machine: he couldn’t move left or right; all he could do was tighten or loosen. Even now, he was juggling with the ID cards as loosely as could be. Any looser and he would fall out, something he clearly wouldn’t want to happen.

“OK, I’ll go and fetch it,” she said. “Thank you!”

Her forehead hit the outer door. There was a flash before her eyes, her arms flapped, she almost fell, the doorman rushed out from behind his counter.

“Madam! Are you all right?”

“Yes, yes I am!”

She leaned against the glass with her right hand, onto her own reflection, and didn’t know how she could have missed it. She could not recall the moment just after turning around; had she thought that another woman was approaching? Another woman, free to present herself as neat or untidy, just because in her handbag she carried a piece of plastic with her photograph on it, a few lines of information, and a couple of numbers.

“I’ll be right back,” she said to the doorman, who was standing by the counter looking at her doubtfully. She didn’t dare smile, because it felt as if she was stretching a piece of rubber rather than her lips.

She stepped into the night. The streetlamps were already on and the light from TV screens flickered in the windows of people’s homes.

(without her!)

A pair of teenagers on shiny BMX bikes came cycling by, shouting something at each other. Her brain was too slow to make any sense of it.

She set off along the pavement and stopped outside a bar. The light coming through the windows illuminated the pavement so that it matched the colour of the beer glass sign hanging above the door. The bar was full: a large group of people had joined all the tables together and were toasting in bursts of laughter, trying to outshout one another.

Zala approached the glass and leaned on it with her open palm. She would enter if she could, these faces seemed so attractive. Open mouths, everyone shouting above everyone else, toasting, and most obviously carefree. So unconstrained that their facial expressions veered toward vulgarity with drops of saliva flying under the lights in long silky streaks through clouds of cigarette smoke.

(like the stars that night)

Faces.

People.

How she would like to be one of them. Even if it were that fat, old man waggling his head about so much he had to re-wind his sparse hair around his bald patch every time he took a sip. Or the woman with the bulging eyes, ugly by any criteria, frog-faced, groping a young man under the table, while he raised his glass so he could also stare at her her wrinkled breasts, overflowing her bra. At the opposite end of the table, a neat woman lovingly looking at the bony man sitting beside her, the personification of boredom, from his suit to his light bulb-shaped, grey-featured head. ‘What does she see in him?’ Zala thought, and remembered the time she had asked herself the very same question during a meal on one of the islands. With Mark, she’d been observing a similarly incompatible couple and Zala had begun a long discussion about how love connected people and balanced out any opposites, how people who found each other were like pieces of a puzzle falling into place, missing halves complementing each other... all of which Mark had listened to patiently, before saying, “a) he is rich, b) he is her boss, c) both.” She had felt foolish, particularly because she knew he was right, she had been carried away by the moment. She had never even asked Mark about money. He didn’t waste it, and he didn’t buy expensive gifts. He did want to pay for the holiday, but she had insisted on paying her share, even if it meant reaching for some of her savings. She remembered looking through the tourist brochures and his translation of what they were offering: “a traditional feel” = “the rooms haven’t been redecorated for a long time”, “romantic atmosphere” = “cobwebs in the corners and burnt-out light bulbs”. After a few pages, she had fallen about laughing with Mark looking slightly confused as to exactly why. He simply saw the language of advertising as something that needed to be decoded, something the advertisers expected him to do; to him there was no such thing as complaints or refunds, just mistakes in the interpretation of the original message.

Faces, shouting and satisfied.

All because each one of them had a state confirmation of their identification. I am so and so and this is proof that I exist. I have a piece of plastic, therefore I am.

Then she saw them – the handbags – flung across the backs of chairs and lying on the floor, some of them left carelessly open.

Handbags.

She entered and the waiter drawing a beer behind the bar looked at her with surprise. She worried she might be told to leave since this was a private party, but she pushed her way past the revellers in the narrowest part and reached the tables near the wall. A woman’s handbag in the middle of the row hung across the back of the chair by one strap only – the other had fallen to the floor.

The black zip awaited her.

At elementary school, some of the girls had once competed to see who could steal the most from the local shop. Zala had managed only once to come away with a single apricot. She had come out of the shop in such shock she could not even remember where or how she had grabbed it; the usual targets were packets of chewing gum. She had quickly discovered she was not the right person for stealing and perhaps this had to do with Father and her fear of his anger. So she had never tried it again, at least not directly. (Communism reeked of laws that forced even virtuous people into cheating and smuggling. Coffee drinkers had to become smugglers or buy it on the black market. The fact that everybody did it made it easier for her, but still not easy. She always had butterflies in her stomach.)

They had promised a new era, yet adopted new laws that would force her to steal an ID card in the next twenty minutes.

She was still checking the time as she sat down. How fast the seconds hand was moving.

The waiter leaned over so far that she at first thought he was picking something up from the floor, but then realised he was turning his ear toward her.

“Half a pint!” she said into it.

The group next to her continued to shout. They had become a mass of voices, a kind of sponge-shaped form with small volcanoes of cigarette smoke blowing from it.

Half a metre to the handbag. The zip was already half open, there were some papers sticking out of it.

She began shifting her chair to the right.

The waiter brought the beer and said something to her.

Zala moved the glass to the edge of the table and then moved herself after it.

She peeked into the handbag. An ID card returned the glance.

It was stuck in the inside pocket. The woman burst into such an animated laughter that Zala was afraid the ID card was about to slip away. She tried to calm her heart by pressing her hand on her chest.

‘I must breathe! Calmly! Count! Something! Anything!’

Fifteen minutes.

She sipped the beer. She only saw the waiter when he brought in the drinks, the bar was in an area around the corner. She bent down as if to tie her shoelaces, though she was wearing patent-leather two-inch stilettos.

She scratched her ankle and the handbag swayed in front of her eyes.

The watch on her left wrist reminded her: ten minutes.

She dropped her own handbag to the floor and pretended to be looking for something inside. She waited for the waiter to take his orders and leave.

Now.

She extended her arm, hoping nobody had noticed how suspiciously she was acting , bent over like this, scared and trembling. She touched the zip, pulled at it slightly, nothing, tried again, the handbag swayed, she thought perhaps too much, as if it were calling for help, she held it with her left hand and unzipped it right to the end.

Her own fingers appeared foreign, tipped with transparent nail varnish – she hadn’t wanted to overdo it for the TV appearance – reaching toward the identity card, her thumb rubbing along the edge of the plastic, when...

“Hey!”

A hand grabbed her right shoulder. Her heart stopped, she could swear she saw it jump up inside her chest.

“Are you feeling ill?” a male voice asked.

She looked up.

Nikola.

“Are you going to vomit?” He bent over her worriedly.

She could not speak, she groaned some kinds of half-sounds that Nikola could not hear because of the noise.

“Don’t do this to me! Don’t do this!” she cried out and straightened. He pulled a chair from the next table and leaned toward her.

“What is it? I saw you from outside as I was walking past, you seemed odd. I thought you were waiting for someone but then you doubled over, so I came in to see. What’s wrong with you?”

“I only have a few more minutes. I’m a guest on a TV show. To tell the truth about me, about you, about us all. And they won’t let me in without an ID card! I totally forgot about identification, I didn’t think!”

“You need an ID card? Why are you sitting here then?”

Zala motioned with her head toward the handbag. Nikola bent over a little and she envied him for the natural and unsuspicious way he did everything, while she felt as though she had a bright red neon sign flashing on her forehead.

“Oh! That! You need a pro! Why didn’t you say? Watch how it’s done!”

He winked and at the same time stuck his tongue out.

‘Please,’ she thought, ‘please let him manage to do it instead of me!’

He took off his anorak and hung it over the handbag. The woman was cackling at some joke she probably, with all the noise, could not even hear properly.

He bent over and undid the shoelace on one of his trainers.

“You must be as natural as possible.” He straightened and winked again, as if to contradict what he had just been preaching.

He sank beneath the table. Zala could only see his hair falling slightly forward and his hand dropping the shoelace, then, as if performing a glissando on a piano, it moved toward the left and disappeared under the anorak.

It took a long time.

Moving the handbag made the anorak waver, a bulge appeared and disappeared, only to appear in another place.

The noise in Zala’s ears fused into a cacophony drilling away at her brain.

Nikola froze but did not raise his head. Zala felt some movement and looked toward the woman in the chair who now turned around toward her with her eyes wide open.

She said something that Zala could not hear and then shouted, “HE’S GROPING ME!”

She leaped up, the jacket fell, Nikola was holding her wrist. He lost his balance and fell toward her. She began to scream and a young man from the head of the table came running, as if he had been waiting all evening for the opportunity that he knew was coming. He hit Nikola, who bounced off the wall and leaped at the attacker. The woman screamed something about maniacs.

Zala covered her face with her hands.

The end.

Shouting, noise, someone bumped into her, so her chair moved and her hands fell to her side. By her shoes lay a piece of plastic bearing a woman’s nasty expression.

* * *

“First, we’ll talk about general things: you are a nursery school teacher because you like children and children like you. And when you had your own child...” the presenter said. A suit and tie transformed him from a cake glutton into a media personality. Zala saw him as her redeemer and wanted to look him in the eye to thank him, but the make-up artists kept telling her to look at the ceiling or close her eyes.

“Right,” she wanted to agree, at least vocally, but the make-up brush tickled her under the nose so she almost sneezed.

There was a knock at the door.

“Yes?” the presenter said in an irritated tone.

“There.” The make-up woman nodded, removing the protective cape.

A uniformed security guard opened the door, again one of those for whom there must be a production line somewhere in the Far East, in a factory making plastic supermen. Zala looked with disgust at the muscles, the shaved head, and the gaze that, were it not for the glasses he was wearing, would almost certainly be moronic. ‘They’re probably fake,’ she thought and was reminded again of her bad relationship.

It had come to a head at the time of the Ten-Day War. When the first alarm had sounded, they had gone to the cellar. All the residents from the building had been there, pale with fear. They sought support from each other, but any jokes sounded forced, too loud. The second time, some kept silent from the start, others didn’t even come or just said that, since there had been nothing on the previous occasion, there would be nothing this time either, and returned to their apartments. After the butchery that followed later in other parts of Yugoslavia, she was astonished at how naïve they had been. A war after Tito’s death had been predicted decades ago, but clearly no one had believed it, not even the Yugoslav Army, that ‘mighty giant’ as Father used to call it, which mostly just shifted its weight from one leg to another in Slovenia, unsure of what to do with itself. Things only got out of control in Vukovar and by the time they had arrived at Sarajevo, it had become crazy. By then, Slovenes had come to see these places as parts of other countries, ones in which they were no longer interested.

They had sat in the cellar, listening to the portable radio from which someone had pulled the antenna too fast, so it had been stuck back on with Scotch tape, when she noticed how her man naturally slipped toward the worst drunkards on the block. All of a sudden, he was sitting among them, philosophizing stupidities and passing the bottle around. She was unable to distinguish any difference between him and the others and at the same time felt guilty that she had kept him away from her group of friends for so long. Next time, she hadn’t gone to the air raid shelter at all. The sight of him repulsed her, his lies and all his unfulfilled promises mocked her. Even so, she still cared, so she picked up the glasses he had forgotten on the table, about to take them to him, thinking the poor man would be sitting half blind in the basement something she had done a number of times, only on this occasion, she had looked through them and realised they had plain glass lenses. She threw them in the bin.

After the all-clear, a neighbour had rung her doorbell, bringing a message from her future ex, that he would be staying in the basement a little longer, because they were right in the middle of a creative debate and not to worry.

She hadn’t.

Over the following days, he had occasionally returned to the apartment, until eventually, the revellers from all the apartment blocks in the area had decided to take some old mattresses down into the basement and extend their stay in the shelter into a continuous bout of drinking for the duration of the rest of the war. From time to time, a neighbour knocked at the door with a message for her to bring beer or wine to the cellar. She never did but, clearly, they must have had another source of booze, because he never came to ask why her supply had ceased.

The Brioni Declaration was signed, the war ended, and a day or so later, her ex had also returned from the basement. Two large suitcases and the smaller case of his orange Unis typewriter awaited him outside the door. In her mind, she had argued the whole of the week. She’d gone over one scenario after another: he’d say, then I’d say, then he’d say, then I’d... endlessly. She was so full of things she had missed before and needed to finally say to his face, that she had had no room for food and had only managed to eat a tiny bite or two every now and then. For the last few days, she hadn’t even gone to the bathroom much. When he had finally rung the bell, she had opened the door with a wealth of prepared sentences, but he hadn’t said anything. He had stared at her pathetically, like a stray puppy, asking for a safe home, where he might continue his parasitic existence. Deep down in his helplessness was the knowledge that his host had seen through him, and, at least in Zala’s eyes, this made him comical. She slammed the door in his face. She could hear him shuffling about outside the door, speaking only once, after a few drawn out sighs, “You’ll regret it when I’m famous, in a year’s time, I’ll be so famous you’ll show off with the mere memory of me.” He sounded ridiculous and he didn’t dare press the button again. Toward the evening, he had left. It wasn’t until she had met Mark that she rid her mind of him.

The most difficult thing about her bad relationship had been admitting that Father had been right. When, at the beginning of the relationship, she had proudly described her man to him, Father had roared, as if someone had stuck a piece of charcoal in his throat and spat out a long sentence. “An intellectual, eh? A man who will talk hop-hop-hop-hop-hop-hop and then perhaps even jump a little, eh?” There had been plenty of hop-hops in eight years, but they had never resulted in even the slightest jump. When she had tried to refute her father’s words, by telling him that her man was writing a novel like no other, he had commented that one needs a very small bag for big promises, another of those folk proverbs she hated so much.

‘Fake glasses!’ She stared at the security guard and realised that this dumb bodybuilder wasn’t to blame for anything. It was only the object on his head that had, to her, become a symbol for lost years, and her hatred was of course not directed at him.

“Sir, a phone call for you. It’s urgent, they say,” he said to the presenter and examined Zala from head to toe.

‘Male chauvinist pig!’ she said to herself and could have scratched out his face. But at the same time, part of her knew that she was only being pushed by the fear that something might go wrong.

“I’ll be right back,” the presenter said and left the room.

The security guard smiled and closed the door as they left.

A moment later, it opened again and an elderly gentleman walked in with a long, round nose that looked as if someone had placed a teat from a cow’s udder in the centre of his face, hastily sticking the remaining features around it because they were so unimportant.

For his TV appearance, he was wearing his best suit, bought ages ago; on his left shoulder, a green parrot with a white crest and yellow patches on its wings perched petulantly.

“Sir, sit down please,” the make-up girl said and not even the bird could rouse her from her bored indifference.

“Go away, old bag!” the parrot replied.

* * *

The parrot shrieked occasionally and the man kept giving it pieces of something that it held with its claws in an almost human way, examined, and then ate. Zala stared at the floor, fearing the man might try to talk to her, but most of the time he just stared straight ahead, grinning.

The presenter returned and the expression on his face made Zala’s heart jump into her throat.

He gulped before he could speak.

“I have been ordered... the Chief Executive does not want you on the show. The subject matter is not appropriate, he says. He said the security guard is to escort you out of the building straight away.”

He stepped aside to reveal the security guard’s huge body just outside the door.

“I am sorry,” he added, staring at the floor.

Zala could not move, only her eyes searched for a way out.

There was none.

The security guard entered the room and walked toward Zala, who began to move backward.

“Escort her out of here,” the presenter told him. “Use Corridor E. Careful she doesn’t slip away.”

The security guard nodded, Zala ran, but he grabbed her arm and stopped her.

She tried to kick him, but he sidestepped it and twisted her arm behind her back.

“Madam,” he said, “let’s go. No point in resisting, it’s only going to hurt.”

She did not give up and tried to tear away from his grip a few times, but it really did hurt and there was no point.

“Those of us who wear glasses,” he said, “need to master a few self-defence moves better than others.”

“Pig!”

He led her down the corridor.

“Erased, eh?” he said. “I know a few, too.”

She tried to turn her head so she could at least spit at those fake glasses of his, but he was holding her tightly, painfully pressing her wrist and elbow whenever she veered off course or tried to stop. Effortlessly, by exerting only the slightest pressure, he led her along toward the exit.

They went past a heavy door that looked like something from an air raid shelter, with the sign ON AIR illuminated above it.

“Psssst, quiet now,” he said, “This door leads straight to the studio.”

Zala was astonished that he was even bothering with such trivialities – was he trying to appear human instead of just a persecutor? She wished for a single shot at him or a scratch with her nails across his stupid face. This uniformed gorilla had become a symbol of the stupidity and cruelty of the State she was wrestling with.

The security guard pushed the door at the end of the corridor open with his foot and they stumbled back into the foyer. The doorman sighed and stepped out from behind his counter to open the door leading to the street.

The evening air flowed across Zala’s face. They stood outside the entrance, and the security guard began speaking somewhat lethargically. It took a while for his words to make their way through Zala’s rage and desperation.

“Don’t take this personally,” he said. “This is my job. And the presenter also has his job to do. He likes his even more than I like mine. There are many of us who do. Politicians too. They want to get into the European Union now and don’t want to see anything that might jeopardize it. Just like I don’t see anything if my glasses fall off.”

He let her go and leaned his head towards his left arm, smiling meekly. Finally, she realised her hands were free. It took her a further few seconds to make sense of his words, to gaze beyond the spectacles and see the blueness of a compassionate look through the convex lenses of someone with severe myopia.

With a wide sweep of her arm, she slapped him so his glasses flew off his face into the night.

“Thanks!” she sighed and ran.

“Fuck! I can’t see anything! Close the door! Hold her!” the security guard howled, as Zala rushed back past the doorman, straight to the door that the guard had told her led directly into the studio.