No-Signal Area Read online

  NO-SIGNAL AREA

  Robert PerišiĆ

  Translated by ellen elias-bursaĆ

  Seven Stories Press

  New York • Oakland

  Copyright © 2014 by Robert Perišić

  English translation © 2020 by Ellen Elias-Bursać

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Seven Stories Press

  140 Watts Street

  New York, NY 10013

  www.sevenstories.com

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Perišić, Robert, 1969- author. | Elias-Bursać, Ellen, translator.

  Title: No signal area / Robert Perišić ; [translated by Ellen

  Elias-Bursac].

  Other titles: Područje bez signala. English

  Description: [New York] : [Seven Stories Press], [2019] | Originally

  published as Područje bez signala in 2015. | Translated from the

  Croatian.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019025284 | ISBN 9781609809706 (paperback) | ISBN

  9781609809713 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PG1619.26.E683 P6413 2019 | DDC 891.8/3354--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025284

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  The first translation of No-Signal Area was the result of a class assignment for a group of twenty-five students in the English department of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. Their professor, Alex Hoyt, submitted their translated excerpts to the Zagreb publisher, who passed them on to Seven Stories Press. I was grateful for the students’ substantial efforts when I later translated the novel.

  —E.E.B.

  NO-SIGNAL AREA

  1

  HER VOICE WAS breaking up. How . . . our relationsh . . . on’t kn . . . was thinking . . . whose . . . The words were surfacing, crackling, like a person drowning in the waves. “Must be a no-signal area,” he said. . . . eep appearing and disapp . . .

  He glanced at the phone. The only remaining signal bar blinked, then vanished.

  The Japanese SUV had good shocks, so he was able to browse the newspaper he’d bought early that morning at a newsstand near the border. Sometimes he liked reading the newspapers in countries that had been socialist. There was a magical-thinking feel about them, part real and part unreal. Feeble recall, an addled mind, vestiges of defunct policies. A little like places out in the sticks marked by roadside plastic flowers or crosses.

  They drove by the occasional roofless house mired in the dense weeds that had been flourishing since the recent war. On the charred walls one could still make out the signatures of those who’d ransacked it, the symbols and names of the army units, flaunting their misdeeds.

  The poor blew up the poor. The poor took their revenge against the poor, and the poor became even poorer.

  Spiral poverty, he thought. Perhaps I, too, had a hand in this.

  Was spiral poverty even a phrase? Had he made it up? He couldn’t remember. Not that it mattered. He toted his language along with him wherever he traveled and used it as he pleased.

  In front of them again stretched a dip of a valley surrounded by sharp peaks and a cramped small town—a place they would have traversed speedily had they not been stuck behind a school bus that spewed greasy smoke, filled with kids.

  On the back seats of the bus a crowd of teenagers played an old game. A kid with big ears was staring through the smudged window at the Japanese SUV. Somebody slapped him on the ear and then everyone threw their hands up, like, who? me? He was supposed to guess who. And he couldn’t.

  Big-Ears stared, distracted, at the SUV’s tinted windows and foreign license plate, bracing for the next slap.

  From the SUV, Oleg looked at the boy’s dazed eyes. The eyes of the people, he thought.

  “That bus has been creaking since the eighties.”

  “Like everything else here,” said Nikola.

  But, surprise, Big-Ears guessed who. So now it was his turn. They switched seats. A zit-faced kid was next. Big-Ears slapped Zit-Face, but—not like that, man, patience, patience—he was busted right away.

  “You’re definitely weak in the strategy department,” said Oleg; Nikola shot him a glance.

  “Not you,” Oleg told him.

  Again Big-Ears was slapped. The mounting frustration was written all over his face. Oleg suddenly wanted to let him know whose hand slapped him, but no, the kid wouldn’t understand the gesture anyway if he tried. While he was getting slapped the kid stuck out his tongue at them, a little risky: he easily could have bitten it off.

  “Pass the bus.”

  “It’s a solid line. And there’s a speed limit.”

  Big-Ears was now showing his friends the car and the foreign plates, so all the kids started showing them something along the lines of a national symbol. Oleg knew more or less what they were shouting at them while making faces.

  “Big-Ears spotted a foreign threat,” Oleg said to Nikola.

  “What?”

  “Pass them already, fuck the speed limit!”

  • • •

  On they drove, and put off stopping till they reached a roadside café on the first floor of a deserted two-story building; the sign said STRADA.

  They sat down inside.

  But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die . . .

  “Hey, someone in here’s listening to Johnny Cash.”

  “Well, looks like nobody’s around.”

  From behind the bar stepped a slim, long-legged young woman in knee-high black boots, a cigarette dangling from her mouth.

  “Greetings, God b’with you, praised be Jesus, As-Salaam Alaikum, what’ll you be having?” she bent over between them, cheerfully oblivious of her cleavage, and wiped the table. Just then the long plug of ash on the cigarette between her lips dropped onto the table. She quickly took the cigarette from her mouth, scooched down, and puffed at the ashes. “Theeere you go!”

  When she brought the drinks she asked, “Where are you off to?”

  Oleg said they were going to the town of N.

  “Oh? Why there?”

  “Business.”

  “Heh, heh, good one!”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “I’m from there.”

  “Want to hitch a ride with us?”

  “Can’t you see I’m busy here?” she said, walking toward the bar.

  He looked around the bar.

  “What’s your name? I’m Oleg, this is Nikola.”

  “Lipša.”

  “Funny name.”

  “What’s so funny about it?” she said.

  “How about the cell phone number of one of your girlfriends? We’ll need a guide.”

  She waved away the smoke and measured him up. “You mean an escort?”

  “No, we’re good boys,” said Oleg. “We’re bringing in foreign capital.”

  “Take my number, then. And give me a buzz me when you lose your way out there in the big city.”

  They wanted to get to N. before dark, so they finished their drinks.

  “Three-fifty,” said Lipša.

  Oleg gave her a twenty and turned to go. “Keep the change.”

  She ran after him with his change, calling, “Come on, man, that’s, like, money.”

  As Nikola was starting the car she watched them from the doorway
, a cigarette in her teeth, her arms folded, under the broken STRADA sign.

  A few feet away a long car was covered in snow, possibly a Volvo, with a flat front tire.

  Through the leafless trees, there were clouds the color of ash floating in from the west, and distant, soundless lightning.

  “That’s one fabulous woman,” said Oleg when they got going.

  Nikola sighed, as if he were thinking about something he wasn’t in the mood to share. But then he said, “That’s no woman.”

  “What, then?”

  “Woman is a serious concept.”

  Oleg burst out laughing. From the heart. “Now, that’s more like it!”

  “Like what?”

  “You’ve been so glum since this morning. But you can be fun.”

  “I meant that.”

  “I know.”

  This conversation is such a crock, thought Nikola.

  “You’re the most romantic guy I know.”

  Nikola considered denying he was romantic. What about his life was so romantic? What does romantic even mean?

  What was Oleg getting at—that Nikola was a fool, a wimp, what? Maybe he was a romantic, but there was no point in talking with Oleg about this.

  Still, he said, “So what’s so romantic about my life?”

  “Dunno,” said Oleg. “I wasn’t claiming a romantic can actually pull off romance.”

  “Aha.”

  • • •

  “There was this thing in Siberia, near Tobolsk.”

  “Near what?”

  “Tobolsk. Well, I mean, nothing’s near there, but Tobolsk was the nearest . . .”

  “Wow, so helpful.”

  “You haven’t heard of Tobolsk? That’s where Križanić published his treatise on grammar. In 1665!”

  “Who knew.”

  “I know, I’ve been there.”

  “How did we get onto this?”

  “I don’t know, we’re driving in the middle of nowhere so that reminded me.”

  “Of what?”

  “Right! You interrupted me. I was saying. In the place near Tobolsk, a town there, even more backwoods than this, a man, listen to this, he told me that for a million bucks he could get me a bomb.”

  “What kind of a bomb?”

  “Atom.”

  They drove over a sizeable pothole and were shaken up. Now they were driving along a deep gorge by a river. There was a light drizzle of sleet.

  “Only a million?” said Nikola, with a firm grip on the wheel.

  “That’s what I asked the guy. Only a million?” He blew out some smoke while looking down at the riverbank below, where there were countless plastic bags, snared, mistletoe-like, on the brambles. He’d expected pristine nature here, so he scowled at the plastic bags.

  “Know what he said to me?” Oleg asked.

  “Mmm?”

  Oleg looked at Nikola, letting the swirl of smoke in the car serve as a dramatic flourish.

  “So I tell him: Only a million? And you know what he says?”

  “Come on, what?”

  “He says, ‘Yes. It’s only a small bomb.’”

  Oleg stubbed out his cigarette and lit another.

  After some time, Nikola asked, “Do you think he was actually serious?”

  “Listen, I didn’t pursue it . . . Russia was a mess . . .” Oleg thought for a moment and then added with a chuckle, “Either he was serious, or he was screwing with me.”

  “Fuck, man, that’s not so funny.”

  “What can I say? I didn’t pursue it. My grand contribution to humanity.”

  “Such a hero.”

  “Hey, what do you think? What if I had brought a small bomb to the geniuses here, how far would it have gone?” Oleg chuckled again.

  Damn his sense of humor, thought Nikola. In the gorge only the white plastic bags still flashed from the brambles by the dark river. Then the roads branched and the SUV began a long climb.

  Oleg sank deep into thoughts: the weird night in that hotel near Tobolsk, where he ended up with a stunning black-haired belle, a Russian-speaking indigenous woman. She’d turned up next to him by the bar at a sleazy nightclub during the evening, and he hadn’t known whether or not she was a hooker—he hadn’t solicited her, which didn’t mean someone else hadn’t, because the people he was working with had their own, sometimes unconventional, forms of hospitality. He talked up all sorts of drivel, said he was a sea captain—though the sea was very far away, and frozen to boot—he told her he was from Krems in Austria, though that, too, was very far from the sea, but none of this bothered her. He was wondering: was she a hooker he was being set up with, or did she find him amusing, did she trust him? She had a look in her eyes as if she were really attracted to him, it was maybe even a naively in love kind of look, which could possibly have been genuine since she desperately wanted to ditch where she was and go somewhere else, to the world he stood for and she gazed at, enthralled. He wondered about this, downing vodka after vodka, telling her about the seas he’d sailed, the rigging on his boat, and something he’d been through on a tropical isle, lacing into his ramblings the plot of Mutiny on the Bounty, which was based on a true event, but he relied only on the movie, telling her of the island’s native women, beautiful like her. This was where he lost track of the plot and launched into babble about the upsides of the culture there, which, he said, didn’t frown on free love, it was, he said, an altogether different world, a world he’d come to know and become a part of, and the whole time he kept wondering if she truly believed him or was just putting on an act. But as time passed, many vodkas later, he wondered less and less, so they ended up at a hotel and had magnificent sex—though he had no condoms on him, but he couldn’t resist. Besides, he’d assumed (still thinking she might be a hooker) that she’d have condoms, but she didn’t. They kept drinking from the minibar, and she, as he remembered it, said she was of Mansi lineage or some such thing, an ethnic group from there, so he revealed his true identity, at which she flinched, saying she’d had a child with a compatriot of his, and used the word Mantyer, and at first he thought this was a name, or maybe her ex’s surname. Mantyer, Mantyer, she kept repeating as if he were supposed to know what this was, and eventually he figured it must be Monter, a company from back home that was also doing business there. Damn it, all she knew was the name of the firm. She was probably messing with him. She was probably a hooker who made up silly stories to match the silly stories he told her. Or maybe she was a particularly romantic hooker, who kept forgetting she was a hooker so she had unprotected sex with a fellow national of his who had a name she couldn’t pronounce, and only remembered the name of his company? Or she was so dense that her mind-set went beyond stupidity to a whole other way of life, like the movie he was telling her about, so he was beginning to feel he was one of the sailors from the movie, which was very different from the role he played in real life, but he liked it so much that he could fall in love with her, and—what with one thing and another—he made love to her again, like a man head over heels in love. But dammit, what was he supposed to do with these feelings for a hooker, or romantic hooker, or otherworldly soul who had a child with a Mantyer in a town where he’d been offered an atomic bomb? So maybe that was why he got so drunk that he no longer knew who she was or who’d sent her to sleep with him, or whether someone had sent her at all, or whether she was crazy, because at one point, when they were already extremely drunk—they’d emptied the minibar—she wrapped her arms around him and sobbed, telling him he was the love of her life and she knew he was going to go and leave her behind, and that wasn’t fair, and he should think again, and he’d see wrong from right. But he was already so sozzled that he couldn’t think, he just kept smiling and nodding, he was probably sobbing, too, yes, yes, he probably was, and furthermore he kept thinking all night about the little bomb, the little bomb he event
ually decided not to mention to anyone, though he was told always to tell everything, to report on every offer, and he was told this in a serious tone, backed by serious consequences. Nikola didn’t know any of this when he said “Such a hero,” but there was no point in explaining it all to Nikola, just as there was no point to how, the next morning while she was sleeping, he’d packed his things and taken off, leaving her some cash, a lot of cash if she really was a hooker after all, or not much cash at all if she wasn’t, or even if she was a crazy hooker who kept forgetting she was a hooker, but he didn’t know any of this and he was afraid of finding out about it, sober, just as he was afraid of finding out about the little bomb. So he paid up for the room, and after seeing the receptionist reach for the phone, he stormed out of the hotel and into a cab, and told the driver to step on it and raced all the way to Tobolsk in a panic that was probably overblown, especially since he wasn’t altogether sure just what it was he was running from, but running he was.

  2

  WASHED-OUT REDDISH rooftops and a battalion of square-shaped buildings stood on the plateau at the foot of a mountain rising into the fog like a big hand reaching for help. A creaky iron bridge, slush on a narrow sidewalk, a man stooped by the weight of a shopping bag. An empty seesaw in a playground stripped bare, next to it a man with a dog. The man was staring at them as if they were something new. He probably knows every car in town, thought Oleg.

  Then a small square intersected by a road, and a snarl of flags on the three-story town hall, and three kids out in front of a bar, standing with their backs hunched in the cold, in short jackets, with their hands stuffed in their pockets, scheming. Oleg felt as if he knew them, as if he were watching the rerun of an old TV show with fresh eyes.

  He couldn’t hold back the memories: he’d grown up in a place exactly like this.

  He knew the limits of this life. Old feelings of familiarity welled up inside him.

  The feeling of being far away from everything, yet penned in.

  Nature all around you, yet you don’t see it.

  Isolated—that’s the word. Nowhere, yet trapped.