David Szalay - All That Man Is

‘My situation? What situation?’

‘Your…Your life situation.’

‘What’s that mean?’ Murray looks at Damjan, who is watching the football. ‘What’s this about?’

‘Damjan thinks,’ Hans-Pieter says. He stops.

‘What’s he think?’

‘He thinks that maybe…Maybe…’

‘Maybe what?’

‘Maybe you are cursed,’ Hans-Pieter says.

Murray emits a strangled laugh. ‘What?’

Hans-Pieter appeals to Damjan, who is still staring at the TV, Real Madrid against someone. ‘Don’t you think that?’

‘Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe,’ Damjan says, still following the match.

‘You had a similar problem, I think,’ Hans-Pieter says to him.

‘Yes.’

‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ Murray asks.

Hans-Pieter has some sympathy for this point of view. ‘It sounds weird.’

‘I was victim,’ Damjan says, ‘for five years. Victim of curse.’

The fact that it is Damjan saying this — Damjan , the tyre-fitter, a man even now unable to tear his eyes away from the football — prevents Murray from dismissing the whole thing out of hand as total fucking shite, as he undoubtedly would if it were Hans-Pieter alone putting the idea to him.

Still, he says, ‘This isn’t some kind of wind-up?’

Damjan turns to Hans-Pieter, who doesn’t know what a ‘wind-up’ is either.

‘You’re not taking the piss?’ Murray says. ‘This isn’t a joke ?’

‘It’s not a joke,’ Hans-Pieter says.

Solemnly, Damjan explains. ‘I tell you, for five years I am victim. Okay. Everything is fuck up for me. Then I go to see lady. Powerful lady.’

Murray has a question. ‘What fuckin’ lady?’

‘Here, in the town.’

‘She is quite famous here, I think,’ Hans-Pieter puts in.

‘I hear about her,’ Damjan says. ‘I go. I see her. I pay to her five hundred kuna. And she help me. She take away this thing.’

‘Ah, bollocks,’ Murray scoffs. ‘Five hundred kuna?’

Damjan seems unwilling to joke about this, or treat it lightly in any way. He seems to find Murray’s attitude disrespectful. ‘Is not expensive,’ he says, ‘to take away this curse.’

‘It’s not so much,’ Hans-Pieter agrees. ‘Fifty euro?’

‘Who was it cursed you, then?’ Murray wants to know. ‘Who cursed me?’

Damjan just shrugs. The question doesn’t seem to interest him. ‘I don’t know. Impossible to know.’

Real Madrid score a spectacular goal.

‘You really believe this?’ Murray asks him.

‘I believe it, yes. I believe it.’

Damjan has noticed that something has happened in the football and is watching it again.

‘Smoke?’ Hans-Pieter suggests.

He and Murray stand outside, under the wet awning. The square is dark and dripping. The fountains are switched off. Pigeons huddle on the facades, high up, over unlit windows. There’s one other smoker there, a small furtive man with a trim beard who spends even more time in Džoker than Murray does. They exchange nods.

‘This is bullshit, isn’t it?’ Murray says.

Hans-Pieter’s hands are in the pockets of his enormous jeans — they seem to be made of various different shades of denim, stitched together haphazardly. The cigarette hangs wagging from his lip. He shrugs. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Damjan doesn’t think so, I suppose.’

Weird that, that Damjan , of all people, takes shite like this seriously. Turn out he does fucking yoga next. Murray says, ‘I mean, honestly…’

‘Maybe it’s worth a try,’ Hans-Pieter says.

‘It’s just shit, isn’t it?’

‘It’s only five hundred kuna.’

‘Only five hundred kuna! Fuck’s sake.’

‘Maybe she can help you…’

‘Do I look like I need help?’ Murray asks.

Hans-Pieter says nothing.

‘Fucking mumbo jumbo. Does she even speak English, this woman?’

—

Sunday. The last, dark Sunday of October. Even the rain has stopped. There is nowhere to hide on a day like this. Streets. Murray walks down them. Days and days he has spent in the flat, among the daguerreotypes, the old lady’s decrepit stuff — dresses still hanging damp in that huge wardrobe, funereal woodwork, moths moving on ancient fabric, eating at the velvet padding of mildewed hangers. The desolate atmosphere of musty, discolouring lace.

A few people, here and there, in the streets. Sounds, at least, of life. He will stay out until it is dark, he says to himself, just walking — though he has started to feel an unfamiliar, frightening stiffness in his joints this autumn, more and more as the weather gets wetter. In the mornings his hands hurt. His knees needle with pain on the stone steps of the house, in the vast silent stairwell. He has to stop, halfway up. Lean on the wall, working incandescent lungs.

A few people, here and there. The air is heavy with moisture. The trees are black with it. Leaves plaster the twisting streets near the main square. Unlit windows.

He feels totally desolate. It is something he notices, at a particular moment — that he feels totally desolate.

He is looking down at the wet leaves at his feet.

It is almost dark.

He takes out his phone and stands there for a minute. Then he does something he has never done. He phones Hans-Pieter.

‘Hello?’ he says. ‘Is that you?’

His voice sounds quiet there, under the empty trees.

‘It’s me — Murray. What you doing? Fancy a drink?’ He says, ‘Nowish? Okay. Okay. See you there.’

He puts his phone away.

Hans-Pieter said he was with ‘some people’. Who these people are, Murray has no idea. However, that Hans-Pieter now seems to have some sort of social life, as well as a woman, only deepens his sense of desolation.

They turn out to be Dutch pensioners, loads of them. They live permanently in the area, have taken over one of the villages a few kilometres outside town, and they appear to have adopted Hans-Pieter. They have just finished a lunch which went on all afternoon and when Murray joins them everyone is fairly tipsy, the wine-flushed Netherlanders shouting and laughing in their own language. Hans-Pieter is fully involved in this jolly scene. Stuck at the end of the long table, wedged in where there isn’t really space, more or less ignored even by Hans-Pieter, Murray does not feel very welcome.

There seems to be no possibility of the party ending soon — another mammoth drinks order has just been fulfilled by the waitress — so he leans over to Hans-Pieter, at whose elbow he is lurking, and says, ‘Look, I’m off, okay?’

Hans-Pieter has just shot a slivovica , the plum stuff they make here. His eyes are watering. His face is all mottled and hot. He does not try to persuade his friend to stay. He just says, ‘You sure?’

‘Yeah, I’m fucking sure,’ Murray tells him.

He has been sitting there for an hour without speaking to anybody.

‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘I’ve got to go to Osijek tomorrow.’

‘Osijek? Why?’

‘To look at these minibuses,’ Murray says. ‘You know.’ He has spent a lot of time, the last few months, telling Hans-Pieter about this investment, about how the transport sector in this part of Croatia is underdeveloped, about the opportunities thus presented for a man like himself. ‘With Blago,’ he says.

Hans-Pieter seems surprised. ‘With Blago?’

‘Aye, with Blago.’ Murray notices Hans-Pieter’s expression — something odd about it. ‘Why? What is it?’

‘Nothing,’ Hans-Pieter says. A song has started up among the drunken Dutchlings, a noisy singalong. ‘It’s just I thought Blago went to Germany,’ Hans-Pieter says.

‘What you talking about?’

‘Someone told me…I think Blago’s in Germany or something. A job there,’ Hans-Pieter says.