No-Signal Area Read online

  I’d have lost my mind if I’d stayed, thought Oleg. Then he thought, no—in reality, I probably would have been careful and made sure not to lose my mind. Lowered the bar. Taken the shit. Fallen in love with a bimbo.

  Well, maybe not a bimbo—a nice girl, one who would’ve had a therapeutic effect on me.

  The skeleton of a factory loomed in the distance. Amid landscape sloping slowly toward the mountain, the industrial plant looked like an abandoned fortress from another era.

  He mused about how socialism had evolved in the sticks where he grew up. Then abruptly he could envision his parents’ home in the late seventies when they panicked over the “situation” and kept track of all the symptoms, the little signs cropping up on TV. What’s going on in the center of the country?

  How’s the president’s health? It had been—he remembered the feeling well—nearly impossible to imagine the president dying.

  Funny, but such a thing had felt like the end of the world.

  And then, later, the world did end.

  They drove up to the house they’d rented by phone ten days earlier; a man who worked in Germany had built a vast manor, his dream house.

  Some people dream of their houses and all the architect does is tspoil their vision.

  In addition to a few domes, the house had pointy gables, archways, and round balconies, a balustrade of white pillars with miniature lions at the corners, and a remote-controlled gate out in front of a patched-up driveway.

  Oleg stared, and thought the house looked as if a very modern witch lived inside. Then he said, “This is our fairy-tale castle.”

  The man who welcomed them, Isa, the dreamer’s brother, said, “Nice way of describing it.”

  The house looked out over a turquoise gas station keeping guard by the main road.

  “Open till midnight,” said their host. “This is the last place to fill up within a sixty-mile radius.”

  “Terrific,” said Oleg. “Are kids buzzing around here till late?”

  Isa looked at him as if wondering how he knew, then said, “Well sort of. The ones on scooters. But the noise isn’t too bad.”

  They were expecting to pay the rent right away, but Isa insisted they only take care of business after a little drink. This was the custom. He invited them to try some homemade quince rakija in his somewhat more modest abode across the road, where they entered a dark, wood-paneled dining room and sat down at a massive, newly built round table. A boy spreading margarine on a slice of bread didn’t respond to the guests’ greetings, but glanced at them sideways, as if he’d already heard bad things about them. Then he slipped out to kick a ball around with a bareheaded friend in a roadside patch of grass: little goals with rocks as goalposts. The offsides—frozen snow.

  Nikola watched them out the window; he saw puffs of their breath in the winter light, feeling at an arm’s length from it all, distant, at which point anxiety started inching from his gut upward toward his head, grabbing him by the throat.

  He went to the bathroom, rummaged through his pockets, and took a Xanax.

  The mirror had a gold-plated frame.

  The door didn’t creak on his way out.

  Oleg asked their host if he knew any of the engineers from the old factory, and the host mentioned a Sobotka. Isa wasn’t sure where the man lived, but he did say Sobotka could be found around town.

  As he was sitting back down, Nikola realized he’d neglected to wipe the sweat from his forehead. He dabbed at it with a tissue.

  Two empty shot glasses and one, Nikola’s, full of rakija, were on the table, with all the light shining only on them, and Isa shot him a diagnostic look, like a doctor or a mechanic (“What? something wrong?”).

  Nikola downed his shot. Oleg said, “Thanks for the rakija, superb! But we must be going!”

  • • •

  He walked through the old town center with small steps.

  A small town can be ruined if you pace through it with too long a stride; you sense this without thinking and your pace shrinks till you’re nearly standing in place. He walked along the cobblestone street where the two old empires had rubbed elbows, reluctantly, both as if they were losing momentum: they’d come this far, many miles from home, and were beginning to wonder what the point had been to all the adventure. There they stayed, forced by the other empire to dig in, and they’d been facing off ever since, centuries later, giving an inch now and then, a step here, a step there, bumping up against each other like two heavyweights staggering in a stranglehold, aching for the bell, almost cronies in their desperate exhaustion.

  “Come on, Niks, you’re staring at it like it’s Paris.”

  “Right.”

  “Tired from the drive?”

  “Sure am.”

  A small town has its eye-contact logic; he was reminded of this by every passerby. In a big city people’s gazes float, hover, spark, while around here, scrutiny ruled the space, blazing like high beams. Every guy they met seemed to need to look them over while slogging through the slush; each made sure to look them right in the eye, check them out.

  The stares seemed routine. Nobody took any pains to be circumspect.

  Nikola found this irritating; he wished he could shake free of their stares the way a dog shakes off water after a swim.

  Oleg thought there was disrespect in the way they were being inspected. Apparently we don’t come across as threatening enough, he thought.

  Something to attend to. He had walked down back alleys and passed by people when he’d been careful to avert his eyes.

  He felt a momentary urge to turn around, walk away and never come back, but he knew he mustn’t breathe a word of this to Nikola. He glanced over: Nikola’s brow had begun to relax.

  “Food, drink, women.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Keep these things firmly in mind,” said Oleg brightly. He saw the sign: RESTAURANT HAIDUCI, and rubbed his hands together in glee.

  “Finally!”

  They walked into the perfectly preserved 1980s interior, and took seats in a booth.

  The waiter kept urging Oleg to order the fish, because he assumed Oleg was an import from abroad; Oleg found this mildly offensive.

  “So what’s with all the plastic bags down by the river? Were they thrown there on purpose?”

  “What can I say?” said the waiter with a helpless shrug. “The pea brains upstream allowed there to be dumps in all the wrong places, then the floods hit last fall.”

  “And nobody’s out there cleaning it up?”

  “Hmmm,” the waiter was startled. “Well, who?”

  He stopped mentioning the fish.

  The meat, however, was delicious.

  They inquired in passing about Sobotka, with no success.

  Later they asked about him at two little shops, huddled side by side, selling local handicrafts. They’d survived industrialization and stood there now like joyless champions. One was a coppersmith, selling copperware and hammering out ornamental bowls. The other sold only slippers, soft and warm, in lively colors and designs. There were so many slippers in the shop that just looking at them left you feeling all cozy. “People must have a thing about slippers here,” said Oleg.

  “Right,” nodded Nikola and walked out.

  Neither the coppersmith nor the slipper-maker knew the engineer Oleg was looking for. Maybe I’m asking the wrong folks, thought Oleg on his way out. Artisans and engineers—two distinct civilizations.

  “I was having difficulty breathing among all the slippers,” said Nikola.

  “Okay, but roll up your sleeves!”

  Nikola thought he’d done just that. He’d been inspecting the surroundings while he waited outside on the cobblestones, so he said, “How about we ask those guys over there?”

  There were six or seven men out in front of a convenience store,
buttoned up to their chins, passing around a bottle. They shot occasional glances at the newcomers. Above their heads glowed a streetlamp that flickered out every so often.

  Oleg walked over, asked about Sobotka, the engineer, and they all started talking at once. Oleg had trouble following what they were saying: a local dialect, or maybe they were just too drunk. After the others quieted down, a lanky guy with a hangdog expression who seemed sober said, “I used to work with him. But I don’t know where he lives. Can I bum a smoke?”

  Nikola took out a pack and gave them a few cigarettes.

  “We’re looking for him about business, if you see him,” said Oleg.

  He thought they might ask him to buy them another bottle, but they didn’t.

  “Should I have bought them a bottle?” he asked Nikola when they’d moved away.

  Nikola shrugged.

  Oleg walked back, went into the store, and came out with a bottle that he handed to the guy with the hangdog face. The man looked at him and said nothing but took the bottle.

  When he caught up with Nikola again, Oleg said, “Public relations.”

  Then they ran into an old mailman, a small, skinny man, who talked loudly, enunciating, as if he were presenting a report. He said his name was Youry Šaracen, and that people called him Youry the Mailman, or even Your Mail, which seemed silly. “In short, call me Mr. Mail!” he declared, as if they were on the verge of clinching a deal. He told them they could ask him anything, that he kept track of everything with an objective eye, and that he hadn’t drunk a drop of alcohol in thirty years, because “the mail’s the mail” after all, which they didn’t fully understand, and, before they’d had the chance to get a word in edgewise, he asked if letters were ever lost where they were from, or was that only here, and whether illiteracy was making a comeback, or was that only here, and whether the only person who ever received any letters flatly refused to receive them, or was that only here, and whether they had any idea where they were, and did they or did they not have any questions. Nikola stared at him, eyebrows arched, and Oleg finally cut him off and said, “We’re looking for an engineer named Sobotka. He used to work at the turbine factory, and we need to see him about an urgent matter!” After hearing the word “urgent,” the mailman looked at Oleg as if he’d finally found an interlocutor he could value. He gave them detailed directions, so they did find the engineer, but only after jouncing along a challenging road in the SUV for three or four miles outside the town of N. to a place that included two buildings and a few barracks. The man was sitting in a pub built like a log cabin with a bar that looked like the counter in a store. People were sitting at tables draped with checkered tablecloths, the place smelled like rakija, plum brandy this time, and there were Coke and Fanta cans on the shelf—but more as decorations. The place was lit by a bare light bulb and, surprisingly, there was a Metallica poster on the wall—maybe to give the place a modern feel or to remind them of the failed local industry.

  They stood in the doorway and everyone turned to see them. Nikola noticed his shoelace was untied, so he crouched down, which seemed—after everyone was already looking at him—as if he’d sunk. Under all the smoke and white light, the reek of the den gave Oleg a slight shiver of fear: he was overdressed and he’d shaved, though there were painfully dark bags under his eyes and he was a bit puffed up. But he was well-groomed; this was such an unexpected phrase, well-groomed. Oh well, it’s easy to seem well-groomed around here. But, indeed, he saw that the skin of his face was far too soft for local standards; he felt he was soft, too soft, when faced by their gazes and their dry, bushy beards, so in he stepped, realizing he shouldn’t be standing in the doorway as if anxious about something. He had to walk in, walk in like an investor.

  Someone should paint the scene, this could be an oil painting straight out of post-socialist realism—The Arrival of the Investor—he thought as he entered as if stepping up to a podium. In his knee-length cashmere coat, holding his black scarf and fur hat, he walked in as if he were entering a property he was planning to purchase, checking to see how the ceiling was faring, peering into the corners—greasy from all the smoke—and then surveyed the people, while nodding slightly, as if swaying with a gentle air of approval, exactly as if he had just walked into the sweaty, smelly locker room of his home team, with him as the new coach, a miracle worker who’d turn the sad group of losers into winners, who’d have them up and playing again; this was how he walked into the place, like an investor, the sort of mystical figure they were dreaming of, maybe or maybe not—they probably thought nobody would ever show up. There certainly hadn’t been much hope since the government shut down the subsidized railway line, and even buses seldom passed through.

  “Anybody know Sobotka, the engineer?” said Oleg loudly.

  A heavyset, slightly stooped man stood up with no haste and came over. His hair was already gray, and the ruddy hue of his face showed he used to be blond.

  “Sobotka,” he said. “Yes?”

  “I hear you used to be the lead engineer at the factory.”

  “One of the lead engineers,” he said. Oleg looked him over.

  After all the years of dealing with all brands of liars, he’d developed an eye for human faces: con men wore a protective facial membrane and a slight cataract over their eyes—theirs were shady faces, with a gaze that was supposedly directed at you, but which stayed partly inside, as if already protecting its share in the business. Another type of people was the kind who evaded looking at you at all: that type held back from giving you false hope. Only decent men and murderers looked at you as directly as Sobotka did, but he didn’t have the playful spark Oleg had spotted in murderers.

  You could only catch this in the first few seconds—later on it would be less and less evident.

  Spoken words obscure the view, he used to say when explaining his philosophy of first impressions.

  “We want to restart production at the factory,” said Oleg. “We’d like to know if that’s possible.”

  The engineer took a draw on a cigarette, squinted a bit, and peered at Oleg. Open suspicion like his was only purview of old codgers and drunks.

  “You must be fuckin’ kidding me.” The engineer had, apparently, had a lot to drink.

  “We didn’t come this far to crack jokes,” said Oleg.

  3

  “HOW DID THE factory function?” asked Oleg in the car while plowing through slush.

  “Hah, well, we had a market when there were no markets. You know, back in socialism. By the time the markets arrived, we’d lost ours. How do you explain that?”

  Oleg waited for the question to evaporate along with the fumes of alcohol. He pressed the button to open the back windows a crack.

  “I mean, how did things go organization-wise?” he asked in a voice that showed he knew what he was after.

  He’d already thought about this and now he ran through their options again. First, he and Nikola knew nothing about this type of business. Second, they needed to work fast. The two didn’t exactly go hand in hand.

  But there was a third factor sitting on the back seat: this man knew how everything had functioned. With him, the first and the second factors were both possible. Oleg glanced at him in the rearview mirror. He opened the back windows a bit wider. The cold smell of evergreen forest wafted in from outside. This is the fragrance I need, thought Oleg.

  “Organization-wise? Well, the way all things were back then.” Sobotka laughed in the breeze. “Like they used to say: self-management—workers’ self-management—that’s how they called it in socialism, you know.”

  “Did any work get done? Or was everything just a complete mess like they’re now saying it was?” Oleg asked.

  Sobotka was briefly silent, as if taking a deep breath, and then he said, “No, we did our job. Although I don’t know how that job is done nowadays, because I haven’t worked since then. I mean, not professi
onally.”

  “So, my plan is to get the factory up and running as soon as possible, to repair what needs repairing, to procure whatever materials you need, and I need you to spell this all out for me. We’ll be manufacturing the same turbines.”

  The very same ones? While trouncing around in the Japanese SUV, Sobotka began thinking he’d found himself in some kind of time warp with phantoms behind the wheel. He couldn’t see Oleg’s face from the back seat. The other man had dropped his head, probably dozing. They’d fastened their seat belts, an obvious sign that they weren’t from around here.

  “So tell me, would you be able to revive production? Pull it all together?”

  “Er. Well, if I had everything I needed.” While he was breathing in the sobering air, only one thing rang in Sobotka’s mind: the same turbines. These men were clueless. The technology was outdated. Would he scare them away if he said this aloud? Instead, he just pointed out, cautiously, “But I worked back then, under the old system, the old way.”

  Oleg almost said, I don’t care about systems, but instead he said, “As far as I’m concerned, do it your way, any old way, any new way, whatever. If you like, you can even self-manage. The finances and the sales are mine. The organization is yours.”

  He didn’t quite hear what I was saying, thought Sobotka.

  “It’d be easiest if you organized everything your way. Nikola will be the manager, just so we have some oversight. But we won’t interfere much. You will have your freedom. So, self-manage as you please, but the factory must be up and running soon. If not, then we’ll do things differently.”

  Sobotka sighed and said, “You kind of caught me by surprise. But this all sounds good. Look, I’ll give this all I’ve got.”

  Now you’re talking, thought Oleg.

  Sobotka watched the two of them up front, then he looked around, searching for a hidden camera. If he were sober, he’d be able to gauge things better. Hang on, they wanted to hire him, and he hadn’t worked for twenty years and he’d have serious problems with the modern turbines. Had these guys come from Mars?