Mike Downey

ISTRIA BLACK

Outside, the holiday mood was changing. A couple of arrests had been made and the chanting in the crowd became uglier and angrier.

Marco and Zvonko had tried desperately come up with various solutions to get into the cathedral but couldn’t think of anything.

‘We need to create a diversion of some kind,’ said Marco, ‘and I think I know what we can do. Bonkers. Take off all your clothes.’

Zvonko and Damir looked at Marco as if he was mad.

‘Come on,’ said Marco, pulling at Dalrymple’s old duffle coat. ‘You are going to be the diversion.’

Zvonko began to catch on: ‘A stripper. An old man stripper. This will be a good decoy for the police.’

‘You’re all mad,’ said Damir. ‘I’ll have nothing to do with it. It’s the last thing we need.’

‘No, Marco is right,’ said Dalrymple. ‘Come on, help me get my kit off. Streaker is the word you are trying to think of, Zvonko, old boy.

Streaker. Just like at the cricket. A cricket match back in the eighties wasn’t a proper match without a streaker, with all the security guys chasing him all over the pitch. It was a farce. We can do the same here.’

By this point Dalrymple had stripped down to his underwear and was ready for the off. ‘Come on, Marco and Damir, lift me over the barrier.’

By now quite a crowd of protestors had turned to notice the little old man in his underpants being lifted discreetly over the metal railings dividing the protestors from the cops. Dalrymple, on his spindly legs, walked slowly and was invisible in plain sight. He managed to get halfway across the square before a cheer went up from the crowd and the police realised what was going on. Twenty uniformed policemen, some in riot gear, started to chase the old man around the square trying in vain to catch him. Dalrymple was fast. And tricky, changing direction, speeding up and slowing down, dodging the men in full riot gear as they lumbered after him. It

was like a scene from a Monty Python movie as performed by the Keystone Cops. The crowd were in paroxysms of laughter as the local television cameras caught Dalrymple as he point turned around, took off his pants and threw them derisively at the rapidly arriving gang of coppers. The chase was on.

It was at that point that Marco and Zvonko took their chance, hopped the barrier, and made their way unnoticed inside to the porch.

‘Here,’ said Marco, giving Zvonko one of his Airbuds, ‘we’ll pretend we are security. Do up your jacket and finger in ear. OK.’

‘Fine,’ said Marco and walked into the cathedral.

The bishop finished his sermon by taking the extended concept of ‘Bleiburg’ to also cover the sufferings of the entire Croatian people after the war. He announced the famous Catholic hymn, ‘Stabat Mater Dolorosa’, which dwelt on the sufferings of the Virgin Mary at the Crucifixion, drawing a direct parallel between the Mother of Christ and the mothers of the dead soldiers. Just as the priestly choir began the lugubrious opening lines, Emina took this as her cue to slip out of the pew and head up the back stairs to the organ gallery.

The organist bashed out Rossini’s rather bombastic version of the piece which, Emina thought, perfectly complemented the choir whointent on massacring the Italian maestro’s campish operatic version. As she reached for her umbrella, she picked a spot away from the organist’s field of vision and installed herself in a corner of the balcony. Below, Marco and Zvonko began their search for her in the main body of the cathedral.

The pair made convincing bodyguards as each took a side aisle and walked slowly and in parallel down the north and south aisles. The ‘Stabat Mater’ came to an end and the music transitioned into Mozart's ‘Ave Verum Corpus’ as the communion liturgy was introduced.

Marco and Zvonko hovered unseen by the congregation just in the last side chapel where the bay met the transept and looked around for Emina.

The congregation began to gather for communion. The bishop stood before the altar, holding the Body and Blood of Christ, as the leaders of the mass, the gentlemen from the cathedral in Poreč and the Hotel Bristol began to line up as a kind of rogue’s gallery in contrast to the bishop, in all his ecclesiastical finery before them. The altar sparkled with all its riches, gaudily decorated in Grisignana marble, all presided over by a particularly enormous and gruesome crucifix and backed by four small columns of red Tyrolean stonework.

The bishop stepped forward, flanked by two acolytes carrying his communion paraphernalia.

‘This is the Body of Christ,’ said the bishop to his first customer, a senior member of the Croatian parliament.

At that moment a massive crack rang out from somewhere up in the organ loft, and the next thing anyone knew there was blood everywhere.

The bishop fell to the ground, his robes incarnadine. Just as the bloodied people were recovering from the shock of the bloody scene, another shot rang out and the 24 priests in their brilliant whiter-than-white surplices occupying the first six rows of the cathedral pews were all drenched in gore and blood. Carnage. Utter carnage.

Three more shots rang out. Then the coughing started.

A photographer from the local paper was present in the congregation to record the event for his readers. He moved to the centre of the cathedral as his Nikon whirred and clicked away and captured for posterity one of the strangest events to happen in the cathedral in its 140-year history. There was also a TV cameraman. Both he and the photographer wore masks.



Zvonko and Marco quickly reacted and ran to the back of the cathedral just as a little old lady came running at top speed down the rear steps and into the porch.

‘OK, you two,’ said Emina, ‘I don’t know what the fuck you think you are doing here, but you are going to take me by the arm and we are going to slowly walk out of here and into the crowd. No looking back.’

Still in shock, that is exactly what they did.

No one took any notice of them as what looked like a grieving old lady and her two sons left the cathedral and walked out into the massed crowd of 5,000 anti-fascists who, curiously enough, all seemed to be taken up with another spectacle at the other end of the square.

A little old man with long grey hair, spindly legs, wearing only an aluminium foil blanket and a cheeky grin, was being led over to an ambulance and taken into custody. A second before he was escorted into the ambulance he turned to the gathered multitudes and took a flamboyant curtain call. A great celebratory cheer of support went up.

Gabriela Babnik

NOSTALGIA FOR THE FUTURE

Frenk thought that in Ljubljana, Iva was known more for her sharp tongue than for her work. An intelligent and audacious fighter, she was quick to notice their mistakes.

In a city populated by newcomers from everywhere, who hid fox-bites beneath their cheap nightshirts and began every sentence with I—or, better yet, this is mine—convinced that this would inspire love in the person they were speaking to, she felt suffocated.

Sometimes she even said that she could not breathe.

Even the awards she might have received on this periphery, where people were constantly rushing about on their petty errands, always busy, always on the move, yet incapable of creating anything truly great or important, meant little to her. She was proud only of the Venice Biennale and the Paris Salon. In Ljubljana she did not socialize much; at times she even let slip that she no longer believed in communities. Perhaps that was why the malicious began saying that up in Gorenjska she was living with some noblewoman and drawing children in the fetal position.

That time, when she returned from Paris, she was wearing a wide skirt cinched at the waist and an embroidered blouse. Her shoes were worn down, which bothered Frenk, but he took her by the chin anyway and looked into her eyes. He was looking for the Iva who claimed that impotent artists bored her, and for the lover who had turned her own deprivation into a rain of gold.

She still sat on a chair with that free-spirited ease. She lifted her skirt slightly so that he could see the pink skin just above her ankles. He wanted to tell her to take her clothes off, to wash herself, so they could begin again, but he knew Iva would resist—or else surrender her body to him merely to satisfy a routine. Frenk did not want to humiliate her or take what was his simply because he could. He had expected her to return from Paris more self-assured, almost like her Parisian self. Instead, etched across her face were the profiles of all those women who had been unable to cross through misery and mental anguish.

All the little local gods waiting for her to fall would laugh, but Frenk knew that fear also emanated from their laughter. They were afraid that Iva would fill their little aquarium with cosmopolitanism. And this meant more than simply that she knew how to transform the iconic images of her surroundings into magnificent women gazing at letters written at the other end of the world. It meant that, when senseless attacks came, she knew how to retreat into a hollow and wait there for the storm to pass.



This was not a sign of weakness. In there, she redrew motifs that would, admittedly probably only much later, come to life in reality. Iva was not a woman who would burn only briefly, nor was she a woman who would calculate her own future and prostitute herself to some bald, fat industrialist, cooking him lunch. She wanted to explore—first of all, herself.

Iva slowly rose from the chair, walked over to Frenk, and reached her hand all the way down to his underwear. He recoiled. This new coarseness in Iva startled him. Apparently, in Paris she had been keeping company with fallen angels for whom sex was routine, while he still believed it was magic, something that had to happen as if by miracle.

Iva told him to lock the door and take off his shirt. He obeyed, calmly, politely. He wanted to preserve the memory of the Iva she had once been, not this woman who now seemed like a tool in the hands of gods he neither understood nor knew whether he wanted to meet. He did not know where any of this was leading, or how it would end—above all, for Iva, who had begun pacing back and forth across the room, lit a cigarette, and stared out the window. Frenk moved closer to her so that he could see better—not so much the scene itself as what was really happening. Once again he looked down at her shoes and noticed her shoulders beginning to shake. This was not weak, suppressed crying, but an animal cry, born of anger. It lasted a long time, until a fly crossed the engraved leaf on the glass, and Frenk realized that the rage came from a tiny crack: from trying to tell someone something, only to have them reject your argument and even accuse you of madness. Because of this anger, Frenk was not afraid for Iva.

Blaze Minevski

TWO VERY YOUNG WOMEN

(from „If Some Feelings Are Born“)

Here I am.

I am holding a plastic bag with a loaf of bread in one hand, and a shopping bag with a watermelon in the other one. The bus that comes to our neighbourhood passes only when the shadow of the buildings falls on the right side of the street; the driver does not have to put a towel under his collar.

This time only two women are waiting with me.

Two young women.

Two very young women.

One of them keeps pulling her dress that sticks in the crease between her buttocks, and the other one is standing under some air-conditioner, waiting for the drop to splash on her breasts. Then she tiptoes, as if hunting the drop with her cleavage, as if wanting to push it as low under her shirt as she can. And the bus is still not there. I am wiping off my sweat with my forearm and then with the other one, lifting the loaf of bread and the watermelon just as much as I should, to run it along my face as if a bow. If there were a shadow, a small tree, so that the sweat did not run down my eyebrows, now I would not be looking through my eyelashes as through broken glass, I am saying to myself staring at the shaft bars in front of me. I would be seeing clear, as man.

If only the bus comes before I die, I am saying to myself and I replace the shopping bag and plastic bag in my hands. Now my right hand is a bit more relaxed, the loaf of bread is lighter, I am quickly wiping off the sweat spraying from my face as mineral water. I will remain without a face, my face will go down the drain, I am thinking, and under my arm, under my armpit, I am peeking at the woman in the dress; she pulls it out of the crease on her behind, she is pulling the panties, and the elastic slaps, it splashes as a stone in shallow water. It’s in vain, the dress immediately sticks again, as if being sucked inside her. I am thinking that maybe I should approach, nod politely, present myself: “Petko, a writer for my own sake, glad to meet you”, but she is looking at me a bit adversely, unfavourably, like a common shadow on the wall. The other one is still hunting the drops condensating from the air-conditioner, following them with her eyes just to the height of the air trembling like grains before the harvest. Every drop shakes her body, and her breasts slap against each other, as if applauding.

I am thinking of lowering the watermelon on the asphalt, putting it against the metal post with the bus line, but I am immediately giving it up, I realise that the shopping bag will stick to the asphalt, and I won’t be able to take the watermelon home. Now, I am swinging it in my hand like a church lamp, I am even cooling it a bit, I am preparing it for eating. The bus is still not at sight from around the curve; as if it has given up coming before the sun drops from the balcony antennas. I am wiping off my forehead, I am turning a circle around myself, I have turned another one, and then, all of a sudden, I freeze. What will I do, I say to myself, if I die; the loaf of bread will roll down to the garbage can; and the garbage can is empty, the litter is all around it. All garbage cans are used so that you know where you should not throw the garbage, actually to throw it next to them, not to make a mistake; they are there so the area around them is marked, the litter area. And the watermelon will roll down, it will fall on the street, it will stop at the pedestrian crossing. I can hear the wheels wheezing on the asphalt like an iron; they are ironing the street as they prefer. The watermelon is in the indent between the two lines on the pedestrian crossing like in a see-saw, and I am lying here, flat next to the metal post with bus lines that pass here, and I am quiet. I am lying, I am quiet and I am watching; the woman with the dress that can not stand air underneath is holding a book pressed against her breasts.

Now, if death looks like what I have seen in the movies, my eyes are probably open, my mouth is gaping a bit and my stare is moved to the left for a third. Before running to the passage of the building, before running away from the spot, the woman with the behind, the one with the dress sticking in her crease, will probably notice that I miss two left molars and a right on my upper jaw, and she might even see the greys inside my nose. I have been cutting them every morning, and they stick again, they have grown as I was waiting for the bus going to the Revolution Square and back. Besides, my shirt has not been properly ironed; it is wet under my arms, sticking to my back. Of course, you can not see the back, but still it is unpleasant. If I had a wife, she would be the one to blame. Like this, it is my own fault that I have not ironed it properly. My trousers are darker too, a bit soiled above my knees. When I sit, I have the habit to rub my hands just above my knees, as if lowering my trousers down my legs. And my palms always sweat; I am always ashamed of something and I sweat. I can not even remember what underwear I put this morning. I only know that I went to the cadastre; they would not legalise my balcony hanging above the street, they wanted some evidence about the air under it. I think that I have put on the blue or the red ones. When I have some business with the government, I always put on seamless underwear in colour; I wear them on purpose, in rare occasions. That is why I think that they must be the newer ones. Only that I have frequently put on underwear in colour these last months. I hope that they are not the ones with loose elastic; they’ll drop together with my trousers when they put me on the autopsy table. I am moving my legs, I am slightly shaking my butt, I am bending my knees, I am closing my eyes and I realise that they are without legs; I have been wearing them since the transition started. I used to wear only the ones with legs and a pocket, with two buttons on the front. Sometimes I would button it up between the buttons by mistake. In any case, these are transition ones, the newer, so I won’t embarrass myself, they won’t laugh at me.

And I know, death is a shameful affair, and I am only afraid of shame, I am thinking looking through some fog into the woman who hunts the air-conditioner drops. What will I do if I die, I am telling myself as I am approaching the woman with the behind, the woman with the stuck dress. She is only looking at me, she is frowning and turning to the other side. She must be disgusted with death, I am thinking, many people now are disgusted with death, they will leave you alone to be embarrassed on the asphalt, they’ll turn their heads aside. They might even vomit, unless you warn them they you are dying, that you are dropping dead. The one with the drop is not even looking; she is cooling herself, waiting and enjoying. What shall I do if I die, I’m asking myself once again, looking at the watermelon that swings in the shopping bag.

The next moment, the bus roared from the curve, jumped over the concrete garbage can and hit the metal post with the bus lines, and I have only managed to see the dress shoved in the behind, and the book that fell on the shaft bars; the title was “Destiny and Comments”. I could not see the name of the author. I saw the watermelon between the two indents on the pedestrian crossing. I did not see the bread, and I did not see the woman who hunted the drops of the air-conditioner hanging from the balcony above her. My eyes were turned to the left for a third. Where am I, I thought, persistently looking for myself in the area that I imagined to be alive.

Translated by: Elizabeta BAKOVSKA

Diana Çuli

ARMED ANGELS

March 9, 1944
MANDATE According to the outcomes of the process that the Assault Brigade Vetetima prepared against the partisans Dorothea Gjika, Commissar of the First Unit and Aleks Lazari, Commander of the same Unit, with the accusation of breaking the Moral Code of the War, the General Council of the Brigade declares as follows:

• The partisan Dorothea Gjika is discharged from the position of the Commissar of the First Unit of the Assault Brigade Vetetima and is sentenced to death by firing squad.
• The Partisan Aleks Lazari is dismissed from the post of Commander of the First Unit of the Assault Brigade Vetetima of the Albanian Anti-Fascist Army and remains at disposition to the Military Command of the district of Vlora.

Order to be executed as soon as received.

Leon Nasta’s guide knew the night and the shortcuts, perhaps better than the young courier, who was not from those parts. Leon Nasta clung to this small advantage like a drowning man who catches sight of a lifeboat on the horizon. The mules were not moving fast enough, or so it seemed to him. He did not dare ask the peasant, whose name was Lame, to hurry them along, for fear of offending him. …He had to get there in time and prevent her from being shot. Nothing else mattered. Nothing. He would not allow himself to be poisoned by jealousy while Dorothea’s life hung by a thread. He simply had to hurry.

There was no moon; the sky was covered with rain clouds.

He had been wrong to let her go, he thought, with the anguish that was now driving him to rush to her rescue. With his own hand he had sent her towards death, all because of his vaunted tolerance! She was still inexperienced, still so young, whereas he was older, more mature, with more experience.

She had come straight from the Women’s Institute of Tirana, while he had already been involved in the war for some time. He had left her alone, in winter, in the mountains and the snow, to face the Germans’ brutal offensive, to fire a weapon and risk being killed in battle at any hour, while he himself had remained at Headquarters, occupied with plans, strategy, and theories about the future.

“You have to stay,” she had told him. “My dear Leon, you have to stay. Your mind is needed more than your hand holding a gun.”

There had been a special radiance in her face that day. Her white neck tilted slightly to one side, and her intelligent blue eyes looked at him with the gaze of a mature woman. Their conversations were not those of carefree young people. They would talk for hours about the political books they were reading, about what the world would be like without property owners and private ownership, and about equality. She asked him questions and he answered them. To her, he was the man who knew everything, the man who could never be wrong.

Leon Nasta smiled bitterly into the darkness. If only she knew the doubts that gnawed at him! If only she knew his misgivings, his hesitations, his retreats, the abysses into which he plunged! He had never wanted to dampen the force of her enthusiasm, an enthusiasm that often swept him up as well.

The mule snorted, and Leon tore himself away from the memories of that night.

There was no point dwelling on the past; he had to race against the minutes. Suddenly, the landscape changed. Beyond the forests and snow-covered trails, through the darkness that swallowed the chasms and cliffs, the sea flashed into view for an instant. He had always dreamed of sailing the southern seas, and now his wish had come true only because he was rushing like a madman to save the life of the woman he loved.

He dug his heels angrily into the mule’s flanks.

Was Dorothea still his beloved? She had never truly been his, not even on the one night they had slept beneath the same blanket. He tried to picture the attractive peasant she had loved instead of him. He could not imagine the two of them talking about the books they had read or reciting Dante’s poetry in the original. It seemed to him that her voice echoed in his ears, speaking of Quasimodo.

No, the peasant Aleks was not a learned man, but he was a great commander. He was the commander whose fame had stirred the entire Coast into rebellion. Surely he had not slept on the night they had been discovered embracing in the cave, when they had been seen naked, passionately entwined in each other’s arms.

The abyss yawned beneath Leon’s feet, black and terrifying. Lame’s mule moved silently ahead. The mountain smelled of wet stone and rain-soaked trees, of clouds and mist whose scent resembled smoke.

Suddenly Leon felt an icy chill spread through his back and legs, the cold of a merciless winter. He had to reach her, whatever price he himself, or she might have to pay.

He pushed aside the romantic fantasy of the moment when he would save her from the firing squad: rifles raised, Dorothea astonished and grateful, throwing herself into his arms and kissing him with lips wet from tears.

He shook his head uneasily.

He had to save her and disappear. That was all. Nothing more. In fact, he would have to turn back at once, retracing the road he had come by.

Hristina Radulovic Andric

RED ROVER, RED ROVER

Mother gets out of bed, groggy and messy-haired, in a long, loose white nightgown, she moves about the house eerily, like a ghost, with the thin white cloth floating about her. Nura Nuh is sitting on the floor in her room, poring over the open twelfth-grade History of philosophy and logic textbook; wringing her hands, anxious and afraid. The teacher will surely call on her; she can’t put it off anymore. It’s been a month, maybe even two, since she’s been trying to muster courage. And courage is mustered like sand with a sieve, grain by grain each day; it is a long and arduous task. Mother passes by without a word, her left eyebrow raised halfway up the forehead, and says: Why are you sitting on the floor? You’ll go to bed dirty after. Take a shower and change. Nura Nuh swallows and opens her mouth, but no words come out. Mom, please... Go to sleep, you have school tomorrow. Mother’s voice is deep and steady, much more terrifying than the voices of mothers who shout, yell, scream. It leaves no room for thought, for response, for debate, for objection. Nura Nuh fidgets, gets up and goes after her mother. Mom… wait, please. I want to ask you something, mom. Mother turns around, holding the doorknob of her bedroom door, staring at her blankly, Nura is trying to catch her breath, as if the whole room shrank into a single point, she looks at her hands and fingers which feel strange, as if they belong to someone else, as if some unknown force controls them, making them twist desperately around one another. She already knows what her mother will say, but she still hopes that maybe she won’t. Nura lowers her eyes and gazes at her and her mother’s feet, facing each other; hers smaller, narrow, in yellow socks, and mother’s large, bare and rough. “Mom, you know that I have a boyfriend now, it’s already been five, almost six months. Soon I’ll be 18. But until then... All my friends... they also have boyfriends… longer than me… much longer. And they... Their moms took them to see a gynecologist. I would… You know…” Nura stares at her fingers, purple from squeezing one against the other, index over thumb and thumb pressing against the pinky finger, all of them clenched, knuckles white. “If you would help me… I mean… soon… before… maybe… If maybe you... could tell me… or if you’d take me… to see a gynecologist… just to talk… maybe get some information…” While Nura is looking at her hands, the door slams right in front of her yellow-socked feet, almost touching them.

The next day mother is asleep when Nura leaves for school and she is asleep when Nura gets back home; she sleeps until the evening, and she sleeps all through the night. When they finally meet in the kitchen, several days later, mother throws her an angry glance, gets up without a word and pointedly goes to her room, Nura can hear the crinkle of shiny foils and papers, she’ll swallow the pills and read, which means that she’ll soon fall asleep once more. Unloved and with a constant feeling of guilt, Nura would love to step into that parallel life, that enticing and irresistible, often extraordinary, sometimes perfect, glorious, lately touched by a small but soft cloud of infatuation, brilliant, angelic life, with drawings of giraffes and cliffs by the sea, the park gate which only the bravest dare to climb, swings and concrete benches where, late in the afternoon, after the classes, the sun feels especially warm and cozy, with the classrooms and the children, sports gear with new sneakers and the music room with a great black concert piano, with birthdays and movies, walks and popcorn, cats and dogs and a bird or two. But her other leg is tied to the ball and chain in her mother’s arms. And as her mother laughs, pulling at the chain, Nura feels shame and regret, she doesn’t sleep and she doesn’t eat, she bites her nails and waits for the restlessness and tension and weakness and fatigue to pass, she waits for this constantly increasing danger which threatens from somewhere nearby, behind her back, and whenever she would turn around, the danger would still be behind her back, skin crawls on her neck, right under her hair, her breath is short and her palms sweaty, like any culprit awaiting execution. Her heart skips a beat, and her head is thrumming like fire in a stove, she has dizzy spells, headaches and nausea, then numbness and, at the end of the day, under the covers drawn over her head, sadness and despondency. Bitterness and desperation carry on into her dreams; she sleeps lightly and wakes up innumerable times until morning, when the day starts to the sharp sound of the alarm clock which rouses the ball inside her gut, making it bounce against the stomach wall, trying to break out.

What a shame, grumbles the mother pacing about the house in her nightgown, and takes a sick leave from work where she almost doesn’t even show up anymore. Mother avoids her, doesn’t talk to her and doesn’t look at her, and Nura feels as if she doesn’t really exist, she’s just an observer as her mother is getting ready and saying: you’re going to take care of it. Nura is paralyzed; she looks out the taxi window at life going on idyllically and gloriously in some other places, on the lawn of the park which the snowflakes turned white here and there; they are large and falling slowly, floating left and right as the pigeons peck at breadcrumbs and ruffle their wings, at the bus stop where a boy and a girl are kissing, unaware of others, on the way to school where girls with colorful caps on their heads and backpacks on their back are giggling.

In the hospital, the halls are cold and smell of ruin, the elevator is even colder; one more mother and daughter stand in it, also dejected, and Nura stares at the elevator door, waiting to get out of the metal box in which all the horror of sin and guilt and shame is now doubled. In the corridor, the horror is multiplied innumerable times, women are quiet, with their eyes cast down, sitting and wringing their hands or tapping their feet in front of the door.

The only thing cutting through the silence are the clicking heels of the nurse who walks through them, paying them no mind she rushes on, same as the mother who went to submit the health card. Nura feels sick and wants to throw up; she wonders if they are feeling sick too and she feels guiltier than ever, so guilty that all this unthinkable dread is now completely obsolete. Thick, black, relentless guilt is taking up the entire hallway, the whole waiting room where there’s no air even though it’s winter, there’s a snowstorm outside and the windows are open at the far end of the hallway. Soon the women begin to enter, one by one, nurses take them to separate bays, handing each one a nightgown and a pair of slippers. They change in silence and, holding the bags with the clothes hastily shoved inside sticking out of them, they are then taken into a spacious ward with beds lined up against long walls, and they obediently take them up in order, one by one, they lie down shoving the bags in the lower end, by their feet. Two nurses come in, one leads a woman out and the other one pushes the bed behind them, the entire bed vanishes and now there’s an empty space in the room, a hole, and all the other women are lying on their backs and staring at this void.

Nuri thinks they’re bringing them back very fast, in the same beds, pale, with their eyes closed, and they stay like that, laying on their backs, with their eyes still tightly shut even though they have been awake for half an hour or an hour, or maybe even two hours, as time is irrelevant in this cold, spacious ward, with glossy, light-green paint peeling from its walls. Someone whispers: How was it? The woman that has just been wheeled in doesn’t open her eyes; she says: Fuckit. Nurses bring them more blankets as there is no central heating, restrictions are in effect across the country, the maternity ward must have it, babies and mothers cannot be cold because mothers made love, that is how children are born, and they must be warm. And they, who fucked, they should be cold. They are guilty and must be punished. They are guilty of being uninformed in times with no sexual education, no open discussion of intimacy, they are guilty of not getting more educated, of not educating their partners as well, of not handling the situation, keeping themselves and others under control. They are guilty of being naïve and inept, ignorant and careless, of being wanton and easy, frivolous and pliant, and most of all they are guilty of refusing to be mothers. All this was floating in the air of the cold ward full of tired women who would need more than twenty lifetimes to repent for all their sins. They take Nura away too, she walks clumsily in brown plastic slippers three sizes too big, the nurse hurries her along.

A large hall, even more sterile and cold; the smell of disinfectants, sharp and pungent, fills the space. Nura lies down, and the nurse, very beautiful and wearing a lot of makeup, sits next to her; she sticks a thick needle into the vein in the crook of her elbow and secures it with tape, saying: Count backwards from ten, and Nura counts, slowly, she gets to three and cannot go on. She is aware of everything around her, but she cannot feel her body; the nurse lowers her head down onto the bed. Would you like me to hold your hand, she asks, even though she’s already holding it, gently, almost imperceptibly. It’ll all be over soon, she says. Don’t worry; and Nura is completely calm, she’s been waiting to hear those exact words all these cold days, and the days before, only now she is hearing them from the wrong woman. Or maybe she isn’t.

Nikolay Terziyski

STARS UNDER THE EYELIDS

Martina started dying on a late August evening, in her mother’s childhood home in Bansko.

No one could explain why. Nothing had visibly happened to her. She had been lively until evening, hiding the sorrow in her eyes from everyone. But today she was lying in bed on the second floor of the old house. It had come out of the invisible, this unexpected illness had washed the color from her face and turned her into a still portrait.

Her grandmother Marga – the same woman whose husband had been killed as an “enemy of the people,” while she herself had been sent to Dryanovo with her three children – that grandmother was still alive and well, and so she had howled over her granddaughter and then dashed away, not to fetch a doctor, but to visit the church, which turned out to be locked.

The poor child’s eyes were rolling back in her head. God had to help her. Who else? Yet how can we explain the fact that a woman who had lost her husband so young and had been thrown out onto the street with three children in tow still believed in God? But there you have it – for people like Grandma Marga misfortune deepens faith, just as absence deepens the feelings of those who truly love each other. But Grandma Marga didn’t know that her granddaughter was in love with a married man with two sons. And that’s for the best. If she did know – how could she light a candle and cross herself before the icons

In her haste, Grandma Marga did not notice the man in the gray suit at all.

Martina’s father Kostadin, that blue-eyed Party secretary who despised Bansko and his mother-in-law’s house, did not see him, either. He had gone to fetch a doctor, but as he was hurrying down the street, tears began pouring from his eyes. His child was in a bad state, she was dying. He didn’t even dare think that terrible word, especially not now when his other child Simeon had just escaped from the clutches of the People’s Militia by some miracle. He wouldn’t have been able to save him, since the Party did not forgive such intransigence, but for unknown reasons, the Blagoevgrad militia had let him go free. If he had realized that the man in the gray suit was to thank for his son’s freedom, would Kostadin have paid him more attention?

The man was already standing in front of the house when that very same Simeon, whom he had saved, came out of the gates. Simeon, however, also did not know who had helped him. But the man, of course, recognized him. And so, he stopped him: “Excuse me, comrade” – he purposely emphasized comrade – “you’re Simeon, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” the young man said, breathing heavily and hardly glancing at the man.

“Is your sister Martina here?”

“Yes, she’s here... But she’s dying… I’m in a hurry.”

Those last words were said with his back turned, as the young man rushed up the street.

During that time, Martina’s mother Angelina was staying by her daughter’s side. She had grown up in a monastery cell, she sometimes went into churches, but she had never truly believed in God. Thus, she couldn’t pray, not even now, in the face of death. Yet she placed her hope elsewhere.

She had told Simeon to run to her cousin’s place on the next street over, he was sickly and didn’t touch alcohol, but he had a Moskvitch, so he could drive her son to Razlog. For what? To find Zhana, the seeress. Angelina knew that only a seeress – and not just any old seeress, but namely Zhana, who wandered between the worlds – only she could set this business right.

Martina herself had fallen somewhere on the border. Between the worlds. Just a short time ago her eyes had been open and rolled back, showing the whites, but now her lids had snapped shut. Her breath came in sudden, jerky gasps. Her body did not respond to touch. She did not hear their moaning. She did not smell the scent of her mother’s sweat, nor the taste of blood from her bitten tongue. She didn’t move.

But she could see.

Another world.

There, under her eyelids.

Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel

Dragan Velikic

VIENNA NOVEL

Four days after the arrest, thanks to the lawyer’s intervention, Andrej managed to see Pavle. At the prison entrance, they took his temperature, he passed through security control, and found himself in the visiting room. All the booths are empty except for the last one in the row, where his son is sitting. Like some kind of prey.

Andrej approaches with a firm step, refusing to let the look of confidence slip from his face. It is the only thing he can offer at this moment, in a situation beyond his experience - one he still wants to believe is merely a terrible dream.

Those few minutes of confrontation through the glass partition will be etched forever into Pavle’s consciousness. Preserved within that scene will be an entire future past that he will build over his seventy days of captivity.

Both of them smile. Andrej remains standing until Pavle signals with his hand for him to sit. At the same instant, they pick up the receivers.

“Do you see?” Pavle says.

Andrej knows it is not a question; his son is merely stating something Andrej had refused to see for so many years. Ever since the eve of Yugoslavia’s collapse, when he chose Vienna for his future life.

Whenever they speak through the glass wall over the next two months, images of a distant time will surface - a family pluperfect housing their former lives.

Those thirty minutes Andrej spends talking to Pavle every Monday replay night after night. He wakes abruptly from a light sleep, deprived of those few moments of merciful unconsciousness when he doesn't know where he is, who he is, or what is happening. He is denied that buffer between waking and sleeping. Reality, bounded by prison walls, inescapable and unyielding, crashes down with all its weight, filling every corner of his mind.

At times he surrenders to an infantile rage, randomly asking questions that have no answers. Who is to blame for the hell he has found himself in? To whom should the bill be presented? It is impossible to tally every item from the past work of bad decisions, starting from the moment he first saw that white bundle in the maternity ward of Vienna Central Hospital. That is the beginning of the story that would bring his son behind bars twenty-seven years later.

Andrej craves oblivion. To take a long time waking up, recognizing neither himself nor his surroundings. To sink into the monotony of the everyday, into the grayness of non-events. What used to be his life has receded forever. He was consumed by helplessness, unable to aid Pavle.

And so every Monday, Olga and he walk through the deserted streets of Neuburg. How much easier it would be if he were alone, without that silent woman beside him who has held the status of a stranger in his mind for years. Yet now, her presence reminds him of his former life. That life drags behind them through the empty streets of this Austrian backwater, threatening to re-establish itself, to reign over the days, weeks, perhaps months of uncertainty. Both sense what the other is thinking, what is happening inside the solitary cell of the mind. And it matters little what they say along the way; what matters is what they leave unsaid. With words, they bury the only thing worth speaking—to stop measuring the other's guilt, to admit the meanness of one's own strategy.

“Do you see?”

Pavle’s voice. The syncope of a question hanging in the air while, in the aquarium of the visiting room—always in that last booth, number eight—their son sits like some wretched schoolboy.

Seventy days of captivity. Seventy mornings when the guard’s voice echoed down the corridor: “Standeskontrolle!”

A roar preserved in the distant capillaries of genetics, the roar Grandfather Lovro woke up to after being interned in the spring of 1943 from the Grand Hotel on Lopud—a temporary camp for Dubrovnik's Jews—to Auschwitz.

A significantly modified roar echoed seventy-seven years later in the reality of his grandson, Pavle. Pavle made up nothing during those days and nights of captivity. The images in his consciousness were a legacy from his ancestors, a genetic inheritance.

“Do you see?”

You see nothing, Pavle thinks to himself when Andrej appears in the visiting room with that plastered-on smile of confidence, trying to cover an entire worldview that had become invalid overnight. Where was the omniscient narrator who had unerringly dictated the sequence of moves, asked the questions, and immediately provided the answers? Outside those boundaries, nothing else existed. He always had an alibi for his own egoism, masterfully disguising his decisions, presenting them as logical, as the only possible way forward. Pavle had been forced into obedience so as not to threaten his father, whose insecurity he intuitively sensed. He yielded to his choices without asking whether he truly wanted any of it himself. He never rebelled.

For the first time, Andrej has nothing to offer, left without answers to a whirlwind of questions rushing past one another—unspoken questions that nevertheless exist, unyielding like prison walls. And he stands speechlessly in that vortex, unable to grasp what happened. Driven by the sheer wish that this is merely a bad dream, he waits for the horror to pass, for a miracle to occur, so he can finally wake up and carry on as before along well-worn paths of dodging responsibility. But there is no waking up without confrontation. How did Pavle end up in prison? Not this one, where the hyenas from the Central Hospital shoved him, but the one he built himself—a construction in which Andrej played no small part.

How had he failed to notice that Pavle hadn't been well for a long time? Why did he see only what he wanted to see, turning a blind eye to what Monika had been telling him for years? That he was imprinting himself upon his child in a insidious way; that whether he did so consciously or not was beside the point; that he was suffocating him with redundant warnings and prohibitions. He had to grant him the freedom to decide for himself. And to finally grow up.