Belgrade Noir

When did she and Aleksandar actually start drinking coffee separately, in separate rooms, in their own worlds? She was reluctant to think about it in more detail: she would always stop herself as if sitting in front of a closed door that she didn’t want to open out of fear of what was behind it. She saw him at home in the evenings, when he returned from work and continued to program until late into the night. She was reserved with him because she felt she should behave this way, not because she could remember the right reason. She looked at the apartment and the things they owned as though she was seeing them for the first time, even though she knew when they had bought most of the things — decorations, paintings, or pieces of clothing and furniture — together or on their own. And the mirrors were another story: every time she looked at her reflection in her bedroom, bathroom, hallway, even in the corner of a windowpane, it was as if a shadow was present at the very edge, her shadow where it couldn’t possibly be. Soon, she began to avoid mirrors altogether and used them only when she absolutely needed to.

Then one night she opened the lower drawer in her bureau in the bedroom — a bedroom with a queen bed that she slept in by herself — and pulled out a box.

It was made of wood, decorated with abstract patterns, lacquered, rather heavy. She set it close to her feet. She felt an irresistible desire to open it; she also felt fear. She stood there indecisively for a long time, aware that the sense of division — duplication — would continue to bite at her more and more mercilessly, all the more insatiable if she didn’t do anything about it.

She lifted the lid.

Mina.

She closed her eyes and felt dizzy, thinking that she’d lose her balance.

The door opened. And behind it was a wave that swept across her whole being, filled up all the voids she had felt, uncovered everything buried deep under the mud of nonsense.

Mina.

A pink rabbit with a ripped left ear, where the old yellowish filling was spilling out. Zeka-Peka, funny bunny, the one she slept with, the one who still smelled like her, Mina the baby. A green woolen vest that Marija’s mother knitted when Mina was six months old and a pair of socks of the same color, from the same wool. Photographs — from the hospital, after childbirth; also from the hospital, four years later. A lock of hair in a decorative ring with a label and a date. She remembered when she’d cut off that lock — Mina was almost two years old and just getting used to sleeping without a pacifier.

Eighteen months later, Mina had no hair. And she got used to sleeping with a plastic tube in her esophagus.

The pain was enormous, unbearable. Marija thought at one point that she wouldn’t be able to breathe again. The pain was gray, tough, and impenetrable, the pain was a wall that grew from tragedy, from the meaningless death, for them the greatest tragedy in the world. The wall grew, forcing her and her husband, the parents who had done nothing wrong — their child had been genetically cursed — dividing them forever and bringing silence to them heavier than any cry, sharper than any scream.

As she lowered the cover of the box it seemed to her that the duplication was real — the one that she felt in the shadows of the mirror — stronger than ever before, like Warhol’s pictures of runners on skates with discordant colors and contours. She rose and moved away from the box. She placed a fist in her mouth to swallow up the mute scream that leaped from her stomach: she’d realized that it had been years since she’d visited Mina’s grave. That she had found a solution to pretend that all of this had never happened. That she had cut her ties, as much as she could, with her own parents, with her father-in-law who lived outside the city and whom she hadn’t seen even once since the funeral.

With Aleksandar.

She found him in his study in front of an open laptop.

She approached him silently, walking barefoot on the thick carpet, so that he didn’t have the chance to close the computer screen, to not let her see the photo of a skinny child with a bare scalp covered with blue veins, with big chestnut eyes and an absurdly happy smile, with a beloved pink bunny pressed against her cheek.

When he felt her presence behind him, he quickly reached his hand toward the laptop, as if he was ashamed of looking at that photograph himself, but his hand halted in the air halfway and loosely dropped. When he turned his face toward her, she saw that it was covered with tears. Just like hers.

Without a word, he embraced her and pressed his head into her waist. When his shoulders stopped shaking, she lowered her hand to his forehead, and gently touched him.

How much time has passed since our last embrace? she wondered. How long since we last made love?