David Szalay - All That Man Is

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Murray tells him. ‘We’re going to Osijek tomorrow. We’ve got minibuses to look at.’

‘Okay,’ Hans-Pieter says, turning back to his table of drunk, elderly friends. ‘I just heard he was in Germany.’

‘Who told you that?’ Murray almost has to shout over the loud, tuneless singing.

‘Someone told me. I don’t know. They said he’s got a job there. He’s not coming back. They said. I don’t know.’

Hans-Pieter is being encouraged to take part in the singing, which he now does, in a shy mumbly way.

Standing out in the raw night, Murray tries the number. Not even voicemail — a woman’s voice telling him something in Croatian. He tries the number again. Same thing. Same message. Number doesn’t exist. Something like that.

She does not speak English. Her daughter is there to translate. There is something wrong with her, the daughter. She needs help walking. Her voice is slurred. She looks weird. It’s hard to say how old she is. Maybe twenty.

Her mother — Vletka, Murray has been told her name is — instructs him to sit.

‘Please, sit down,’ the daughter says, with a sweet smile. She has a very sweet smile. Among strands of lank black hair, her ham-pink scalp is visible.

Murray, nervously, sits on a green velvet sofa.

There is something dead about the light in the room. It all arrives at one end, where curtains of yellowing lace half-hide a balcony hung with clothes-lines.

At the other end, facing the window, this velvet sofa, in which Murray now feels trapped, his feet hardly touching the brown carpet, stuff looming all around him. The place is low-ceilinged, oppressively so. Along one wall, there is a large sideboard. He catches sight of himself in a convex mirror, looking hideous. Vletka is lighting candles. The daughter smiles at him from where she is sitting at a small table placed against the wall opposite the sideboard. Next to her head, in tapestry, a tearful Jesus. Porcelain dogs clutter a shelf.

Vletka, lighting candles, says something snappishly.

The daughter translates, smiling: ‘Do you want some tea?’

‘I’m okay,’ Murray blurts, uneasily feeling the soft velvet with his hand.

The place wasn’t easy to find. It’s in a part of the town he doesn’t know, a twenty-minute taxi to a whole nother world of weather-stained estates, solemn cuboid structures separated by parked cars and dreary parks, hard paths under sad trees, deserted playgrounds, an electricity substation garlanded with barbed wire. Each of the buildings has a name — some Croatian hero. Murray was looking for Faust Vrančić House, number eleven.

He punched one-one into the entryphone and waited while crackly electric pulses sounded. Then a voice. ‘Da?’

‘It’s Murray,’ Murray said. ‘I’m here to see, uh, Vletka?’

The fizzing voice said, ‘Tko je to?’

‘Murray,’ Murray said again, louder. ‘I’ve come to see Vletka. Murray.’

A more high-pitched electric noise, insistent, and something happening in the door, a heavy metal door with safety-glass panels. Murray fought it open.

A pungent stairwell.

He was shitting himself.

She sits down on the sofa, Vletka. She’s in a dressing gown. A solid, surly woman, she seems to Murray. Like someone who sells you a train ticket to Zagreb, frowning at you through the perforated glass as you try to explain what it is you want, while the queue lengthens. Short hair. Little buds of gold in her earlobes. Breath that smells of cigarette smoke, bacteria.

She says something to Murray in a sharp, imperative voice.

‘She says you should relax,’ is the translation.

Murray’s mouth: strange munching movements. A fixed, terrified smile. She has taken one of his hands now.

He has this weird fear that she’s going to ask him to strip.

She doesn’t. She is staring into his eyes, though, which is almost worse. Her own eyes are greyish-brown. Her eyelashes are short and unfeminine. She has no eyebrows.

When Murray looks away, she snaps something at him.

‘Please, you should look into her eyes,’ the daughter tells him, more softly.

Murray does so.

Those fucking eyes. The stress of the stare is like some terrible sound that just won’t stop, a squealing scraping of metal…

She’s still holding his hand, all damp in hers.

The stare softens perceptibly. She says something. Her voice sounds dry and detached.

‘She says you are in a very bad situation,’ the daughter says.

Murray, still holding the stare though it’s making his head hurt now, says, ‘Yeah?’

The room is hot. He is sweating. It’s not just the heat. It’s the sense that some sort of invasive procedure is taking place.

The daughter translates a brusque instruction: ‘Shut your eyes, please.’

He does.

Her mother’s hand is now on his face. The whole situation is so odd that this seems okay, sort of.

‘Is this about some curse?’ Murray asks, feeling safer with his eyes shut.

The daughter translates. Vletka answers.

‘She doesn’t know what it is,’ the daughter tells Murray. ‘Just that you are in —’ the same phrase — ‘a very bad situation.’

‘What does she mean by that?’ Murray says, his eyes still shut. Vletka’s hand has taken hold of his skull, the front of his skull, and is squeezing it quite hard.

The daughter translates.

The mother answers, sounding exasperated now, squeezing Murray’s skull still harder.

‘She says it is like a poison,’ the daughter finally says, after some follow-up questions in Croatian, while Murray waited, the strong points of Vletka’s hard fingers starting to hurt his head.

‘Poison? What’s that mean?’ he wants to know.

Vletka loudly shushes him.

An instruction arrives via her daughter’s polite voice: ‘Please, do not speak.’

The fingers are starting to properly hurt. It’s as though some metal instrument is being tightened on his head.

Suddenly, it stops.

He opens his eyes, tentatively, just in time to see the slap flying at him.

He feels the numb shock of it in his face. Then the heat arrives, intense, a moment later.

‘What the fuck was that for?’ he shouts, his hand at his stinging face.

Vletka is speaking at him angrily in her own language. Her hand is on his forehead now, applying pressure, or holding his head in place.

Then she slaps him again.

‘Stop doing that!’ Murray yells, trying to stand up. She snatches his arm, while he is still off balance, and pulls him back down onto the sofa.

‘Sh, sh, sh,’ she says, as if to a small child, stroking his face.

‘Stop doing that,’ Murray says again.

‘Sh, sh.’

‘ Zatvorite o č i ,’ Vletka says.

‘Please, shut your eyes,’ her daughter instructs him.

‘Is she going to hit me again?’

‘Please,’ the younger woman says softly, ‘shut your eyes.’

Vletka is still stroking his face in a way Murray finds he quite likes. He shuts his eyes. She is all soft-voiced now, and holding his hand. Singing something, holding his hand, stroking it. The singing stops. He is aware of her weight moving, leaving the sofa. He opens his eyes to find her on her feet, extinguishing candles.

‘Are we done then?’ he asks.

The daughter translates for him.

Vletka shakes her head. She says something and indicates the table where her daughter is sitting.

‘Please, sit down here.’

‘What happens now?’ Murray says.

Vletka just tells him to sit at the table again. So he does, sitting opposite her daughter. And then Vletka joins them too, having taken something out of a drawer. A pack of cards.