After sixteen years of walking with his head down, speaking in a low voice, looking away, or smiling dully by way of showing obedience, it had all come to an end that morning when he glanced over his shoulder as he entered the bus. Fugitives don’t have the luxury of prolonged farewells. For the first time, he’d felt something besides mere indifference toward his persecutors. They had cut short his sinister smirk as he observed the station where a dozen buses were puking up all those people in patched coats hauling nylon bags. Beneath the veneer of a well-lit façade and flowers planted geometrically, the place reflected the soul of the city. Quelled differences, marginalized newcomers, a crude mass pouring in too hastily and too suddenly, clogging the bloodstream, threatening to surge out of glutted nearby streets and insulated neighborhoods, to spill across the well-maintained belly of the town’s core. Jek Rom majcra, one Rom less, he shifted in his seat so he could sink more comfortably into that pleasant thought. And here was a horde of new intruders. The worst kind. His own. A couple hundred people, just that morning, and only him headed in the opposite direction.
The city he left behind was a frightful mass of bodies tangled together in the morning and afternoon rush. And yet he hadn’t managed to disappear into the crowd. It was one thing to digest the failure to make something of yourself, be someone, stand out. But how was he to swallow his failure to become no one—ordinary, faceless, invisible? The city was to blame, of course, since he had nothing else to wash down the bitterness. A city which vehemently insisted on sameness, and in which he’d never encountered two similar faces, let alone identical ones. But his allegations were pointless, unable to yield even a small handful of rage. Rage required an excess of strength and willpower. He was an undigested clot, an unwanted morsel. Although he’d spent sixteen years in that city, and those close to him along with others like him had been there three times as long, an organism undergoing a convulsive struggle for survival lost its sense for nuance. Now he had no strength for anger, nor peace to fall asleep in his seat.
At every moment and in every situation, it was clear where he belonged. Everyone around him knew, and he’d come to realize it for himself now that he’d left the city. Plinarsko Naselje. A settlement of dilapidated wooden shacks that leaked light, wind, and water; tin sheets patched together with no rhyme or reason; marginally better constructed one-story homes embellished with scrapped goods; all of it hemmed in by a windowless wall and the three hushed rear walls of the adjacent facilities, situated between two major thoroughfares. Nothing malicious, nothing planned, a natural barrier akin to a river dividing two countries. In that cauldron of helplessness and indignation, the smell of traditional dishes like cicvara and popara, made of cornmeal or old bread, bubbled to the surface together with curses, threats, laughter, and the occasional malediction. Everything became compressed together like the damned leftover popara on your plate the next day. Always lively and warm from the sheer number of makeshift chimneys, tin pipes that directed some of the soot upward while letting the rest seep through poorly fitted flat roofs. This entire network of pipes, tangled given the overly dense assemblage of shanties, maintained the timeless flow of misery materialized in the soot. To feed the fire in the range because of humidity, because of bare feet, because of clothes being steamed on the hot plate, because of pests creeping in through cracks, to never stop feeding the fire, even in spring and summer, as though the entire settlement would be extinguished were a single pipe clogged.
In those days, when he was forced to spend the night in one of the hovels, which he never learned to call home, or čher by another name, the same maggot wormed into his nightmares. On that patch of saturated earth, where human waste spilled out of bungled septic tanks, exposed cables perpetually sparked, sodden paths snaked between premises, he dreamed of one night being swallowed whole by the waterlogged ground. Such a dream usually ended in one of two ways. Either he would be buried alive in all that mud, his every jerk pulling him deeper into the vacuum of insatiable earth enraged by the misery oozing over its surface. Or he would somehow pull himself out of the mud and stumble among people who, with disgust on their faces, moved out of his way. Then he would start scraping the mud off of himself, scratching away at it with his nails until, horrified, he realized that he hadn’t removed a single layer, that the mud wasn’t a hardened matter on his skin, his morchi: it was his morchi.
And while he was tormented with insomnia by night and headaches by day, the others wheeled their carts, clattered pots from one end of the settlement to the other, rattled spoons from door to door, dragged enormous nylon bags brimming with containers, biked back from a night shift in the pristine city whistling ornate melodies, tugged at the sleeves of brats who wouldn’t cry when spanked, quarreled with a God they knew not how to address because they’d forced their own del to mate with Allah, Yahweh, and whatever else . . . Everything proceeded from the satisfaction, incomprehensible to him, of reconciling oneself to life. A reconciliation without ceremony or haste, strong feelings or grand gestures. A person simply to discover this life in tow and continued living, unaware of the new antibody, inoculated against the need for change, for something different and better. It never happened to him. And in the end, he turned out to be the only failure who hadn’t experienced a single moment of peace or pleasure. Not even on that bit of sodden earth they’d so generously reserved for him.
“ . . . nis.”
For years he’d practiced, when reconciliation had become an impossible feat. With a sigh, without, swallowing, stuttering, deliberately opening his mouth insufficiently, muffled.
“ . . . enis.”
If they insisted, he would say the damned name again, the bengeko alav. Which rarely happened. But it did happen.
“Enis.”
A two-syllable word of which he only enunciated the second half. The first was the one that counted. His entire life rested on that utterance. The name Enis unmistakably placed him in colorful mosques, harem pants, Ramadan celebrations. Coupled with his physiognomy, his name moved him further down a rung, into one of countless neighborhoods the world over that resembled Plinarsko Naselje. Adding just one sound to the name—Denis—freed him from those chains and assimilated him into the mainstream, a group of people who, given one trait, seemed beyond reach though there were doubtlessly hundreds of other differences. That trait boiled down to the fact that, unlike him, they were unacquainted with shame, with lađavo. Because of this lađavo, he became quite adept at swallowing the first syllable of his name—’nis—to protect himself from being cast out or being accused of encroaching. “Say again?” It rarely happened that he’d have to repeat himself, so he would place greater emphasis on each syllable while still muffling the first: Enis. “Sorry, I didn’t hear that!” Sometimes his interlocutor was persistent, forcing him to betray the vacuum left by the missing sound, but at that point any hope would be lost of reaching some sort of understanding or rapprochement. He hadn’t chosen that name—his alav. Others wrote and rewrote his alav, others associated it, placed it, sealed it, defined it, and none of that had anything to do with him. People swallowed words, whole sentences, left feelings unspoken, they swallowed a whole chapter of their lives, simply passed over it . . . Yet he couldn’t be forgiven for swallowing a single letter so he could be Denis instead of Enis the Muslim.
The morning faded into full day, and the sun settled in on his side of the bus, its rays, intense for spring, stung the exposed flesh of his forearm. He winced and moved into the shade, being reminded of the one thing he couldn’t change. His morchi. It had taken days and days, after rather frequent bouts of insomnia, of him staring in the mirror under the flickering light of a bulb hanging from the ceiling by a cable, to shake off his doubts. Yes, it was clear, from any angle, that he’d inherited his facial features from his father, a Gadžo—what Roma called anyone who wasn’t a Rom. His cheekbones were defined, his jawline chiseled, unlike the rounded fleshy cheeks and accentuated ears typical of the brats running around Plinarsko Naselje. He consoled himself, with a visage like that and a complexion a few shades lighter, he could cross all but unnoticed to the other side. The one he was entitled to through his dad, still using the Romani word to refer to his father. It was why he always fled from the sun, from outdoor social events, school playgrounds, daytime walks . . . He sought out the worst night jobs. The night tram was unreliable, so he would walk to work, his gait easy and spirited, fantasizing about how that darkness could evaporate the blackness of his morchi, like a pumpkin long forgotten in some basement. His kali morchi—his dark skin—remained, his only gains the habit of daytime sleep, insomnia, difficulty concentrating and speaking, and a digestion ruined by scorching and tasteless pastries from the bakery at the tram terminal. The job of a waiter—keeping vigil at the bar for four local drunks and their eight watered-down wines—fit perfectly into his routine.
He itched the spot on his arm where the rays had fallen and wondered how even this scratching failed to leave a trace even a hint lighter. So deep was the cursed blackness in his flesh.
Rom Romeha, a o gadžo e gadžeha, his late bibi Seniha would repeat to him. Rom with Rom, Gadžo with Gadžo. Only in her time was the smell among the shacks at all tolerable. But what about those who were mixed, the haminenca? He yearned to dig her back out of her grave and ask. What about those who were considered dirty by both Rom and Gadžo? For years he was answered only by dead silence, similar to the one blanketing Bibi Seniha’s grave in a secret Rom cemetery that overlooked Zagreb’s Dubrava neighborhood. Being mixed was supposed to be to his advantage, an undisclosed ticket to two performances in which he could play dual roles. Now it seemed he could play neither acceptably. This feeling of incompleteness paralyzed him like a physical disability. So, if they were pursuing him now as some twisted criminal, that was something in itself. At least it made him special in some way.
*
The sign for Novska was made redundant since the road merely extended to an intersection decorated with some twenty houses. They parked on a slab of concrete embossed with a faded yellow number two in front of three covered bus service kiosks and an adjoining post office. The aroma of cataclysm blew into Enis’s face, and he brightened; the imminent catastrophe would enmesh them all equally. He was no longer alone. Disaster was now the natural course of this world. His feet adapted to the trembling of the ground beneath him. Every display of chaos—the erratic quick pace of passersby, the neglected animals, the hunched bus drivers frantically banging on the door of the post office to be let in—made Enis even lighter. He sat on the sidewalk, leaned against the wall of the building softened by weeds protruding from the cracks, and took a deep and serene breath. Now he could rewind the tape once more.
His ten earlier attempts had been unsuccessful; the recording of the fateful previous night remained a uniformly chaotic series of disconnected fragments. This latest rewinding also yielded a deafening clamor.
“You want to ruin everything over a few bills? Huh?”
“All up to you—decide! You’re the only one who knows how to get in and where everything is!”
“You really think anyone would notice?! You think they’d bat an eye at some missing change?!”
His face receded into the background, retreated like a snail into a nonexistent shell, but the white faces refused to stop. They stood out in the darkness and each voice was three times louder than they realized. You can’t do this, not to people who let me . . . And then his mantra was interrupted by something more powerful than a blow, more painful than a cold weapon: You’re one of us, who else are we going to ask? With a hand on the shoulder, friendly, soft, but phari sar o moliv—heavy as lead. He couldn’t speak, but he didn’t need to; so harrowing was that tacit agreement which, like a comforter, muffled all the questions, objections, and remonstrations on the tip of his tongue. He knew. The city was asleep, the sidewalks empty, and the world awaited the tragedy that was now all but inevitable. Still, he had taken that first step.
All of a sudden, Enis was standing in front of the low single-story building, hypnotized by the flickering of the letter “T” on the overfamiliar Three Palms bar sign. The two green arms of the letter, made to resemble palm leaves, hadn’t lit up even five years ago when he’d stood in that very spot for the first time, determined to beg, not for bread, but for work. Money tossed out of guilt into a hat on a sidewalk solved nothing but short-term hunger. And so, under those very palms with their blown fuses, he came to discover his own oasis of satiety and a shelter that blocked vermin or wind from seeping in.
All the lights were off, the nearest street lamp obstructed by trees. Nevertheless, he knew the arrangement of all the tables by heart, with the long bar counter and the two cash registers on top of it (one worked exclusively during their Gadžo holidays), the stairs leading from the back room to the second floor, to his familiar and beloved little room, and then at the end of the hallway Dalibor’s slightly more spacious room, close enough that Enis heard the hollering each morning: Dado! Dado! Breakfast! Dado, your stuff’s on the stairs! Dado, I found those cookies you like! Dado, are you sleeping . . .
In the next frame, the green lights of the Three Palms sign transformed into a colorful blaze. It began as a faint flame on the soaked surface of the bar counter, which quickly grew into a dancing, winding blanket over its entire length. In a flash, he climbed the decorative laths and grabbed hold of the upper shelf with the jiggers. He heard the others scrambling and calling out to him from the front entrance, but he was held back by the uncertainty of where Dalibor could be. Maybe he was with Anica away at the cabin, which she rarely left during her time off? But if he was with her, how had she managed to get Dalibor out of the house? Did she know he didn’t get out of bed without his beloved faded blue tracksuit with the three side-stripes?
He stood there amidst the blaze as it licked the frame of the display case, the wallpaper, the path to the stairs, racking his brain over Dalibor’s stupid pajamas which were actually threadbare striped sweatpants left over from his high school football days when he was—as Anica would say, looking blankly off to the side while wiping down a glass dried long ago—very different.
He was forced out of the burning bar by an explosion of broken bottles. Once he heard the siren in the distance, he ran until he couldn’t possibly run anymore. No matter how far he ran, cutting through ditches overgrown with shrubs to avoid busy roads, he could see the flashing lights. They merged with sneering white faces and a neon sign in flames, sending his corneas reeling as though from staring at the sun. And there it stopped.
*
It had started with an ordinary party on an ordinary Friday, a day that under normal circumstances would follow with another, then another, but now stood at the tail end of a life, a small meripe in which he’d buried so many people. Even though he’d liked them. Even though they were Gadžo and so their skin was white. Or maybe precisely because of that. Had they liked him? He had no time to dwell on that. Nor did he want to admit to himself that he’d tried so hard to be liked. Were they really that different? They were the same, see, it was Friday, in a dark neglected covert, glasses of cheap wine laid out on little stools, no future in sight, in harmony as they vomited up all the sedimented acid and songs full of choked aggression. And somewhere off in the center of the brightly lit, glossy surface, high leather bar stools and a young man fetching their coats . . .
Their faces were twisted by a swelling vigor as they searched for purpose. The world was theirs that night; it ruptured and writhed to make itself as supple as possible in service of their urges. All one had to do was make a wish, take the first step. Powerlessness changed forms, the heat turned the quagmire to vapor, to pressure, to a force that could send any lid flying. They hugged him roughly, slapped him on the back, almost like friends would. He’d known them some time, but moments like this were rare. And he never learned to gauge how much mockery and how much genuine affection was hidden in those gestures. Then the alcohol had run out. Someone was maniacally plucking the wrung-out three-liter bags from their cardboard casings. Desperation. And someone’s miscalculation—Enis couldn’t remember whose. Who was at fault? Who thought six liters would be enough, when they’d already run dry by midnight? They had looked squarely at him and, he remembered it well, it was ultimately the only thing he clearly remembered, they’d said:
“Denis!”
Yes, he’d heard it clearly. Down to every letter, none of them imagined.
“Denis!”
The Three Palms was a place for those who’d been defeated, insulted, and humiliated. Particularly those who had no will for resistance and no courage for suicide. People who were capable only of enduring, alongside a short macchiato or a Turkish coffee sitting untouched for hours. Enis fit perfectly into such an environment. As though hopelessness was the only prerequisite that qualified him to appear before Anica, the owner of the bar. What initially seemed like a good foundation—a steady wage, accommodations, the chance to leave Plinarsko Naselje for good—was revealed to be a sinkhole that slowly swallowed him.
In the half light Enis still knew how everything in the Three Palms was arranged, down to every glass. He would have known even with his eyes closed. He knew the key to the cash register was taped on the roof of a drawer, and he knew which drawer. It was a key that could only be felt around for and not seen. He knew that Fridays brought in the most cash, knew that it wouldn’t be taken to the bank until the next morning since the neighborhood had no night depositories. He knew that there had to be at least four five-hundred-note advances plus five times that from the daily turnover in banknotes of ten, twenty, and fifty. And that an additional three thousand lay under the inside plastic that functioned as a false bottom—a remedy for emergencies in case their supplies ran out. And of course, he knew how all the drinks were organized and that valuable bottles of whiskey were tucked under the bar counter, masked by rows of cheap wine and warm beer.
Besides Anica, Enis alone knew all this. And one other thing. That that night was destined for đungalipe. That nothing good could come of their adventure. Was it his false sense of brotherhood that drove him? A sense that let him cultivate the belief that nothing bad could happen while they were together? Now, some ten kilometers outside the town of Bosanska Kostajnica, on a flat wasteland at the close of a new day, the dust of disbelief settled and made way for an uncomfortable realization. He wished for a tragedy, an unraveling that could finally unloose the knot within and put things in their place. Wished and feared all at once. And then they called out his alav—“Denis!”—and his fear disappeared . . .
*
The front page of every newspaper, the bold headlines scattered throughout, the body of the texts—all were dominated by one name. Short and effective, it conveniently fit next to an accompanying photograph placed in the corner of a page—to avoid drawing too much attention—with the two-syllable name running across the empty space of the picture. The name was everywhere, from dailies to weekly magazines, tabloids to crime reports to political news. In fact, the name appeared in whatever came out of the Vjesnik printing press off Savska street. From midnight on (when issues were finalized), the rigid iron presses, those colossal printers, sealed Enis’s fate, stamping it onto pliable paper that, come morning, would be picked up by an army of vans that would then disseminate the verdict.
Those headlines had it all: witnesses who chose to remain unnamed, experts, jury members, the judge. The public was entreated only for the sake of approving the already pronounced verdict. And the sentence was not imprisonment or a beating, but a call for collective hatred, for racism. A confirmation of what was on the tip of everyone’s tongue, only no one dared to utter it. Well, my God, everyone knows that there are some things that have been found to be true since time immemorial. And such things never change, don’t tell me they do. It doesn’t take a genius.
“Zagreb’s Gypsies Burn Living Man!”
“Witnesses Claim Young Rom Last Seen Running from Burning Building!”
“Arsonist’s Name Revealed: Enis Selmanić.”
“Plinarkso Naselje Harboring Cold-Blooded Killer!”
“Material Damage, Lives Ruined, Fugitive Loose!”
“Police Ask Public for Information. Rom Wanted.”
“Gypsy Business—Arsonist E.S., Undocumented Ghost!”
“Barbarism in Central Zagreb. Rom Starts Blaze, Victims Reported!”
Included under the front-page headline was either a panorama of Plinarsko Naselje, a close-up of something in the settlement (for example, a shanty), or a portrait of an unnamed Rom from the street (like a teary-eyed child next to a door—well, my God, they’re all the same anyway), or, and most often, Enis’s school photograph that journalists dug up by way of a teacher at his beloved School of Hospitality. What a ridiculous misunderstanding: a place where food and drinks were served, where one handled plates with their bare hands, where strict cleanliness and etiquette, tidiness and trust were cultivated—a Gypsy allowed to enroll there?! How ridiculous! They heckled Enis and nudged him in the hallway. Then they invented a new game: two would hold his arms, two grab the band of his underwear and pull it up to his navel, his chest, his neck until the band cut into his flesh and snapped. They would say maybe now he would finally change out his underpants for a clean pair. Then the two who’d grabbed the band would put on rubber gloves while the other two continued to hold him in place, and they would rub his scalp until it felt hot and on the verge of splitting open. And then they would tell him they’d done him a favor, that he wouldn’t have to bathe now, given that he clearly disliked water.
The journalists and teachers had Enis’s high school portraits from all four grades. But all agreed that the one from first year went best with what was being written about him. His photo had been taken immediately after the underpants and scalp episode. His hair disheveled, clothes torn, the dirt on his face smeared with tears that he’d wiped away, dusty from his struggle on the floor. An expression full of hatred and stifled rage. Such a picture went well with the headline “Plinarsko Naselje Harboring Cold-Blooded Killer.” The two had practically fused. Just as the words killer, barbarian, monster, and arsonist would live forever alongside Enis’s name.
The deluge of witnesses—on whose testimonies the hunt by police and the trial by media had been based—were always named collectively. Witnesses confirm that the perpetrator fit the profile of a Romani man. Witnesses confirm that the person in question was the last one seen leaving the burning building . . . And there were multiple witnesses—two, in fact: a retired man from the ground floor of the building next to the Three Palms, and a middle-aged woman from an adjoining neighborhood who walked her dog at night on that stretch. The lady saw three silhouettes running around a corner and a young man whose Romani features—she insisted they were Romani features—were illuminated by the fire coming from the bar. The other three she didn’t manage to see as well, but she was sure, of course, my God, as if it could have been any different—these were her exact words to the journalists, who’d left them unchanged—they were definitely Roma. The retired man had been napping in his armchair by a window and resting his eyes on the empty street when the fire broke out. He caught sight of Enis’s profile in the moment when Enis had turned in the direction of a scream coming from the floor above the bar. In his testimony, the retiree surmised that the person screaming must have been familiar to the perpetrator, that it was at that very moment that his conscience had perhaps been triggered or that his thoughts began to rush, that he deliberated how he could go back and set things right. This slight hesitation had exposed the young man’s visage to the street light and the retiree’s gaze. When the retiree’s curtains moved ever so slightly, the young man recoiled and bolted. That horrified look of a person all too aware of his crime but too much of a coward and scoundrel to go back—that look was etched in the memory of the old man, who had no trouble describing every detail of that figure and assisting with the facial composite. Everything flowed smoothly after the first article. The only thing left was to ride out the wave of scandal to the end without restraint.
