In Zagreb, I boarded a bus to Murska Sobota. The quaint hills of Zagorje, the picture-postcard houses and occasional fairy-tale castle mounted on a hillock; a healthy, well-dressed peasant leading a herd of healthy, fat cows across the horizon; chickens picking worms in the middle of a dirt road. I voraciously scribbled it all down—it seemed someone had cleaned and prettied up the land for my arrival. The man sitting next to me was invested in a crossword puzzle; he frowned and refrowned, fellating his pen. His cuffs were threadbare; his knuckles bruised; his ring stone was turned toward the middle finger. Many of his letters stretched beyond the little squares of the puzzle, the words curving up and down. At some point he turned his impeccably shaven face to me and asked, as though I were his assistant taking notes: “The biggest city in the world?” “Paris,” I said, and he returned to the puzzle.
This happened in 1984, when I was long and skinny; my legs hurt, and I could not stretch them in the dinky bus. Pus accumulated in my budding pimples; there was an arbitrary erection in progress. This was youth: a perpetual sense of unease that made me imagine a place where my discomfort would be natural, where I could wallow in my wounds, in heavy air and sea. But my parents believed that it was their duty to guide me to a good, pleasant place where I could be normal. They arranged spontaneous conversations about my future, during which they insisted I declare what it was that I wanted, what my plans for life and college were. I responded with the derivations of Rimbaud’s rants about the unknown quantity awakening in our era’s universal soul, the soul encompassing everything: scents, sounds, colors, thought mounting thought, et cetera. Naturally, they were terrified with the fact that they had no idea what I was talking about. Parents know nothing about their children; some children lead their parents to believe that they can be understood, but it is a ruse—children are always one step ahead of their parents. My soul soliloquies often made Father regret that he hadn’t belted me more when I was little; Mother secretly read my poetry—I found traces of her worried tears staining the pages of my notebooks. I knew that the whole purpose of the freezer-chest project was to confront me with what Father called “the laundry of life” (although Mother always did his laundry), to have me go through the banal, quotidian operations that constituted my parents’ existence and learn that they were necessary. They wanted me to join the great community of people who made food collection and storage the central organizing principle of their life.
The food—bah! I forgot to touch the chicken-and-pepper sandwich my mother had made for me. In my notebook, I waxed poetic about the alluring possibility of simply going on,
into the infinity of lifedom,
never buying the freezer chest. I would go past Murska Sobota, to Austria, onward to Paris; I would abscond from the future of college and food storage; I would buy a one-way ticket to the utterly unforeseeable. Sorry, I would tell them, I had to do it, I had to prove that one could have a long, happy life without ever owning a freezer chest.
In every trip, a frightening, exhilarating possibility of never returning is inscribed. This is why we say good-bye,
I would write.
You knew it could happen when you sent me to the monstrous city, the endless night, when you sent me to Murska Sobota.
I had never checked into a hotel before going to Murska Sobota. I worried about the receptionist at Hotel Evropa not letting me in because I was too young. I worried about not having enough cash, about my documents’ being unexpectedly revealed as forged. I ran over the lines I was to deliver at the reception desk, and the rehearsal quickly turned into a fantasy in which a pretty receptionist checked me in with lassitude, then took me up to the room only to rip her hotel uniform off and submerge me into the wet sea of pleasure. The fantasy was duly noted in my notebook.
Needless to say, the receptionist was an elderly man, hairy and cantankerous, his stern name Franc. He was checking in a foreign couple, attired for traveling convenience in sneakers, khakis, and weatherproof jackets. They wanted something from him, something he wasn’t willing to concede, and from their open vowels and nasal whining I recognized they were American. I didn’t know then (and still don’t know now) how to assess the age of human beings older than I, but the woman looked much younger than my mother, perhaps because of her smooth, unworked hands. Her husband was shorter than she, his wrinkles rippling away from his eyes, a dimple in his chin deep enough to put a screw in. He had both of his knuckly hands on the reception desk, as if about to mount it and charge at Franc, who was proudly bent on not smiling under any circumstances. As the woman kept shrilling, “Yeah, sure, okay,” the receptionist kept shaking his head. He had a thin mustache closely tracing his upper lip, like a hair sediment. On his neck were parallel sets of sinister fingernail scratches.
I remember all this, even if I didn’t write it down, because I spent an eternity waiting for the Americans to complete their check-in. I began imagining a conversation I would have with the woman, should we happen to share an elevator ride, while her unseemly husband was safely locked up somewhere in a distant reality. In my high school English, I would tell her that I liked her face flushed with pilgrimage, that I wanted to hold the summer dawn in my arms. We would stagger, embracing, to her room, where we wouldn’t even make it to the bed, et cetera. Her name, I chose, was Elizabeth.
“Thank you,” she finally said, and stepped away from the desk, her husband closely following her, as though blind.
“You’re welcome,” Franc said to their backs.
He had no interest in me, for I presented no challenge: he could speak Slovenian to me and not care whether I understood (I did); he could easily disregard any of my pipsqueak demands (he did). He took my ID and money, and gave me in return a large key attached to a wooden pear with “504” carved in it.
Elizabeth and her husband were still waiting for the elevator, talking in whispers. They glanced at me and did what Americans do when they make unnecessary, unwanted eye contact: they raise their eyebrows, roll their lips inward, and brighten up their face so it can bespeak innocent indifference. I said nothing, nor did I smile. On the pear that Elizabeth held I saw the number of their room, 505, and so when they stepped out, I followed them. My room was directly across from theirs, and as we entered our respective rooms, Elizabeth turned toward me and flashed a splendid smile.
It was in Murska Sobota that I truly confronted the ineluctable sadness of hotel rooms: a psyche with a notepad nobody had ever used to write; the bed cover with infernally purple flowers; a black-and-white picture of a soulless seaside resort; a garbage basket lined with crumpled paper tissues suggesting a messy quickie. The window looked over a concrete garage roof, in the middle of which was a vast puddle, shimmering like a desert-lake mirage. There was no way I was going to spend a night alone in this cave of sorrow. I needed to find places with a high density of youth, where comely Slovenian girls stood in clusters, steadily rejecting the clumsy advances of Slovenian boys, conserving their maidenhead for a pill-carrying Sarajevo boy, his body a treasure to squander.
The main street appeared to have been recently depopulated; only an occasional empty bus drove by, the lights in it dimmed. There were no cafés or bars or young people I could scout, only the windows of closed stores: stiffened mannequins, their arms opened in an obscure gesture of welcome; towers of concentric pots looming over families of pans; single shoes lined up closely on a rack, so different in sizes and shapes that each one of them seemed to represent a missing person. And there was the store I was to visit the next day to purchase for my family an entry into an abundant future. In the window, a humongous freezer chest glowed as if in a heavenly commercial.
I decided to explore the side streets and found nothing but a slumbering row of houses, the nightmarish murmur of television sets passing through a thousand quiet windows. Here and there, the sky was stained with stars. A neon sign in the distance announced the name of a bar called Bar, and there I went.
There was nobody in Bar except for a bearded, frog-faced man, whose chin was about to touch the brim of his beer stein, and a cloud of smoke hanging thick as a ghost. Without lifting his head, the man looked at me intently, as though he had been expecting me to arrive with a message of some sort. Message I had none, so I sat as far away from him as possible, close to the bar attended by nobody I could see. I lit a cigarette, determined to wait for female beauty to walk in.
The man lit up a cigarette too; he exhaled as though letting his soul out. I began thinking up a poem in which the main character walked into a bar as empty as this one, smoked and drank alone, thinking up wisecracks, and then, when he wanted to order another beer, discovered that the bartender was dead, slumped in a chair behind the bar, his left hand reaching for a stein of still-foaming beer. I had left my notebook in the hotel, so I could not write the poem down, but I kept thinking about it, kept coming up with rhymes, kept drinking my beer, kept not looking at the man. Most human lives perish without other people’s ever noticing, and I recognized that it could happen to me too, tonight. They would find an uncomfortable corpse with a stack of cash and a mysterious pill and they would ask themselves: Where were we when he needed us? Why didn’t we deflower him before he perished?
The man stood up and tottered toward me. The shoulders of his jacket almost reached his elbows, as though he had shrunk abruptly; a purple tie grew out of his shirt; he wore a little hat with a mangy feather stuck in its ribbon. He sat right across from me, mumbling a greeting. In the center of plum-colored circles his eyelids moved slowly, as though he was deciding each time whether to open his eyes at all. I turned back toward the bar, pretending to be looking for a bartender. The man grumbled and gibbered, pointing toward the bar, and I nodded understandingly. The sounds gradually attained the shape of complete sentences, punctuated by an occasional snort or a hand slamming the table. I could not figure out whether he was pissed or glad about my presence in his lair.
A waitress planted two large, foaming steins between us. She put a hand on my shoulder warmly, asking apparently if I was okay. She was voluminous, her face seemed upholstered, her biceps doughy; she smelled of cakes and cookies. The drunk raised his stein and held it in front of me for a
cin-cin
until I complied. We drank and wiped foam off our lips with the back of our hands. He sighed in approval; I exhaled; we drank in silence and smoked.
More beer came. The man decided to open up to me: he leaned forward and back, he waved his hands in unintelligible derision, he pointed his finger in various directions, and then he started crying, tears streaming down his cheeks webbed with capillaries.
“Everything is okay,” I said. “Everything will be fine.” But he just shook his head, as there seemed to be no hope or relief. The waitress came over, unloaded more beer, and wiped his face with her dishrag; she appeared to be used to cleaning his tear-crusted cheeks. The man’s tie was wet with tears; the beer parlor was dark and empty; I was drunk, muttering occasionally: “Everything will be fine.” The waitress listlessly wiped glasses behind the bar; time passed in silence.
What will become of the world when you leave?
Rimbaud wrote.
No matter what happens, no trace of now will remain.
Then I started crying too.
I did not know how long it had all gone on, but when I left Bar, my sleeve was wet with tears and snot. I could recall the waitress wiping my face at least once with her rag stinking of rancid dishwater. I gave her what seemed to me a large chunk of the freezer-chest money and she locked the door behind me. The man stayed behind, his head carefully deposited on the clearing in the forest of steins—he probably lived there. And as I stepped out on the vacant streets of Murska Sobota, a wave of euphoria surged through me. This was
experience
: I had possibly lost my head and experienced a spontaneous outpouring of strong emotion; I had just drunk with a disgusting stranger, as Rimbaud surely did in Paris once upon a time; I had just said
Fuck the fuck off
to the responsible life my parents had in store for me; I had just spent time in the underworld of Murska Sobota and come out soaked with sweat and tears; I had a magic pill in my pocket. I needed somebody to love me tonight.
I found myself in a park infused with the dung-and-straw smell of budding trees and fledgling grass. At the center was a copper-green statue of a partisan with a rifle pointed toward the obscure treetops. A man in a fur hat held a leash under a weak light, while his Irish setter ran in circles with an imaginary friend, stopping every so often to look up hopefully at the man. The fur hat was the same auburn color as the dog, and for a moment I thought the man was wearing a dead puppy on his head. Just beyond the reach of light, a couple was groping, their hands stuck deep into each other.
I was giving up my hope of finding love, but across the empty street stood two young women, arm in arm, neatly clad in long coats. Their heels clacked as they crossed the street toward me; they giggled and chattered, their faces made up, their hair dewed with sourceless glimmer. One of them had a long narrow chin, the other had big dark eyes. They cut across the park at a brisk pace, avoiding the unlit edges. When they reached the brighter side of the street, I followed them, sticking to the dark side. They left the park and got on the main street, down which a cistern truck crawled, two men in tall rubber boots with snaky hoses in their hands washing the street. The asphalt glistened tarrishly, the women scuttering across the border between the wet and the dry. The strong stream from one of the hoses rushed toward my shoes and soaked them, so when I entered the dry territory, I left wet footprints behind.
Abruptly the two women stopped in front of the appliance store and examined my freezer chest, stolid and lit up. The narrow-chinned woman turned and looked at me, and in panic, I faced a travel agency window and a faded, crude collage of various exotic African landscapes, all photographed from high above. The women went on walking, quickening their pace until it matched the beating of my heart. It was impossible to stop now, for we were bound in this absurd pursuit. They turned the corner and I ran after them, feeling we might be reaching our goal.