Night Shift
An excerpt from the novel Vanilla Ice Cream by Đurđa Knežević
Translated from the Croatian by Ena Selimović
After nearly two consecutive shifts—afternoon into early morning—her body teetered between numbness and pain. Or rather, when at rest, it grew numb, and when she’d had to move, the pain would flare through her whole body, not just in its moved part. She had “jumped in” for a colleague who had some personal business—she’d muttered something about celebrating some friends’ wedding anniversary, and then asked, much more intelligibly, if she could cover half of her shift. It wouldn’t take long, she’d said, she would get back to the hospital in time to take over what remained of the shift. Just an hour after midnight, maybe a smidge longer, depending on transportation.
She was particularly tormented now by her wooden arms and back. She shrank into the uncomfortable chair, stiff, her arms in her lap, striving to stay still. The slightest gesture provoked a sharp pain, along her shoulders most of all. The job required her to bend over patients, some of whom she even had to lift to the bathroom. The infirm she had to turn and wash, had to feed them. Her feet, too, suffered. She discreetly removed her shoes now and, tucking her feet as far under the seat as she could, with great relief she rubbed them, painful and swollen, against one another. She had to endlessly crisscross those rubbery hallways, a task for which even her comfortable—and, yes, hideous—orthopedic shoes weren’t of much help.
But all of this was better than sitting alone in a dead silent apartment on a Saturday night. The few people she knew, she never invited over and joined out only rarely. Ordinary get-togethers—to see some critically acclaimed film at the cinema, or, rarer still, a concert, and in exceptional cases, they’d meet up just for coffee. She had no idea whether she enjoyed these outings, rare though they were, or whether they irritated her. An uncertainty that often led her to accept the invitations. To top it off, most of her acquaintances were married or in relationships that were even more closed-off than marriage. She didn’t think that it fell on her to make the contact, to be the one with initiative. She left that to them, and so those outings—fortunately, she thought—didn’t happen often.
A female friend, the kind she imagined, drawing on friendships that were familiar, that were widely thought to be the appropriate kind of relationship between women—she didn’t have a female friend like that. Nor a guy friend. That was just too complicated. Plus, all her past attempts were anything but pleasant. This absence of friends wasn’t because she couldn’t make any—oh, there were plenty of opportunities, but fortunately she knew how to identify snares and dodge them in time. In any case, everyone somehow already had someone. She’d seen enough with her own eyes. There were the female friends who couldn’t really stand each other but were glued together with a powerful adhesive made of habit and the fear of loneliness. And then there were the couples—or, almost everyone she knew who lived with another person, together with children or still without, inseparable round-the-clock. They took no time off from each other, even took vacations together. Shoe to shoe, jacket to jacket, rows of snuggling pairs of underwear, toothbrushes tidily beside one another. She would watch from the sidelines and see how little they understood each other, how they’d accumulated heaps of consideration for one another, made countless compromises and how, taken together, it was all one endless, demanding job, in which she saw no point. She could see how they were ground down by a life-saving routine, a conveyor belt that brought and hurriedly carried away anger and disappointment, beauty and joy, spinning round and round. It was as if they were standing beside the conveyor and watching themselves, a cellophane-wrapped suitcase, tumbling and flipping, abandoned to its endless cycle. They must have felt an occasional urge to grab the suitcase and tug at it… but then what? She’d also come across those couples who, if exceedingly rare, after years had passed, still shared not only mutual decency and intimate affection, but a thrill or two, which presumably lightened everything. But with time—and shoes, toothbrushes, children, cars, debt—little remained. They clutched each other even more feverishly. The gesture made them subtly, almost tenderly, hate each other. Hence the petty mutual harassments, the teasing and complaining wont to evolve even into genuine malevolence. They didn’t see, and would never see, how much they resembled one another. Each was made of this mind-numbing reciprocity that had nourished them all the while, maintaining their relationship. In the end, they really couldn’t do without each other. And this they called love.
She had met plenty of people, and socialized with them on various occasions. You could say that there’d even been a sense of closeness kindled. But after years of trying and searching, back when she still thought she should be in some sort of a relationship—a romantic one, or a friendship, in the least—she’d given up. After puzzling at length over what it was she really wanted and whether she wanted it at all, she’d realized that she didn’t need friends who would be skin-tight, or get under her skin—especially not in her head. Those attempts took considerable time, feeling, energy. Hopes invested and as often dashed. To be sure, there were wonderful spells and experiences, but more often than not, unexpected betrayals and bitter disappointments poured in. Not seldom, agony too.
Yes, it was better this way. Instead of anxiously flipping through the TV channels, she would toil away and do almost two shifts in a row—with equal good reason and a clear, simple purpose. She needed money for the vacation she’d long been trying to make her mind up about. It had been several years since she had gone anywhere, partly because at the time she’d been making less, but mostly because she’d had nobody to go with. Those who would have liked to join her on such a trip—she essentially didn’t care for them or their company. And the feeling was certainly mutual. Still, she dreaded going alone. Now that Ana had appeared in the friend group and they’d grown a bit closer over a long stretch of time, she’d finally decided she could go with Ana, and she even started to think she would enjoy it. They’d agreed to spend the holidays together this summer. They would go to Greece.
This fellow who had just gotten on the train and sat precisely opposite her—on the other side of the aisle separating the bench seats that ran along the train’s length—could, as a matter of fact, have been Greek himself. He had dark hair, carefully styled, the part he’d combed back falling slightly to the left. But he didn’t have a moustache, and he was thin—skinny, even—and tall. Plus, his skin was lighter, no trace of an olive hue on his face. He wasn’t Greek, no, probably a Slav. A southern Slav. Gastarbeiter, but of a higher class. The clothes he had on were moderately expensive; she was sure she’d see top brand names sewn into the linings. Then there was this smart hairstyle to account for. And the sharp scent of his cologne: a thin strand of it travelled to her nose on the coattails of a draft when the train doors opened. She barely managed to contain herself from raising her head and letting her nose be seduced by the trail. It reminded her of a cracked horse chestnut still in its fleshy, spiky green pod. His beautiful, well-looked-after hands suggested he could be a doctor. A few of them from those little southern Slavic countries—she couldn’t name even half with any certainty—worked in the same hospital she did. They all behaved the same way. This one was no exception—just look at his self-confidence, borderline arrogance. He’d boarded with a faint smile. What could he have possibly been smiling about at that hour? His legs splayed, swaying lightly but maintaining his balance, he circled the nearly empty train with his eyes, pausing and staring at the passengers, with no attempt at concealment. After scanning the entire compartment in this calm and unhurried manner, he finally picked a seat. As if there were so many passengers that he’d had to decide among only a few places. This whole performance was utterly pointless, because the train was empty, or nearly. Aside from her and this newcomer, there were two other passengers, both on her side of the train—evidently friends, huddled together as they were. He’d chosen to sit on the other, vacant side of the train compartment and, with unconcealed curiosity, still wearing the smile he’d entered with, he continued to stare at all three of his fellow travelers. She endured that smiley little look which she greeted with a stern expression, letting a slight scowl loose. Someone needed to show him that southern pretty-boy seducers wouldn’t cut it with everyone. The two other women, just a meter or two away, smiled back. One bashful and insecure, quickly casting her eyes down, the other brashly candid. Almost complicit.
What he did next she considered a crowning vulgarity: he sat sideways, leaning his back against the low partition separating the seat from the door. That on its own—reclining as if on a sofa—she found inappropriate. But then when he raised his left leg, pulled his knee closer, and placed his shoe right in the middle of the seat, her jaw almost dropped. He left his right leg on the floor to tap some beat. Then he flung his head back and squinted at the ceiling lights. He was muttering something as well, she couldn’t make it out, only a deep murmur. He could have been singing, but she couldn’t discern the melody—if there was any. He was an attractive man, which compounded her distress: she was sure he knew that well enough for himself. No doubt he relied heavily on his looks when it came time to seduce, just like those Slav doctors who worked at her hospital—rumor had it that they slept with all the female doctors and nurses, unless, of course, they were lesbians. She didn’t fall into the category of women they slept with. Or the latter category. She simply left no room for cordiality or familiarity—no chumminess. She considered it an expression of discourtesy, not a quality of being laid-back, as they tried to explain to her from time to time. After all, they were at work, not at a bar. Although, she had to admit, it was endearing at times, and, one might even say, quite collegial—no, she couldn’t deny that. But she avoided them all the same. Especially when they had downtime and could shut themselves away in the staff room. In those moments, the workplace did start to look more like a bar. Sometimes they’d even proffer some alcohol—strictly forbidden, of course—and with miraculous speed hors d’oeuvres would materialize as they laughed and joked. Their banter tended to confuse and frighten her. She couldn’t always find her bearings. She usually didn’t get the jokes or else didn’t find them funny. Double entendres made her shake. And the jokes were often unseemly, at the expense of female colleagues who would subscribe to them with a laugh or, when it went a little too far, with a smile. Or they would counter, to her horror, with a similar joke but at the expense of men. The allusions and the winking, punctuated by frequent crossovers to their own language, the sharp, quick exchanges in that language unknown to the locals—all of this disgusted her, and scared her.
*
She was never late. To work, to meetings, public or private events or commitments—no matter whom with or where. The meeting’s importance played no role: it was the being on time that mattered most, and it involved no guesswork. Regardless of whether she was making arrangements for a dream job or visiting the zoo, she experienced the same anxiety, long before she headed out. She would calm herself down by mentally reviewing the directions and calculating the time it would take to reach her destination. She didn’t see arriving on time as an obligation, but as a compulsion, almost like an internal command. Whereas arriving late was shameful, a character flaw. Without even trying, the ones waiting gained the upper hand. Short of the force of habit, all of this riled her up before every meeting. She was so afraid of being late that she made it a rule to arrive at least ten minutes early. Sometimes more. Once, she outdid herself and showed up nearly two hours ahead of time. It had been a serious meeting, about a job she coveted. Her anxiety had begun welling up days before and she’d spent the evening rehearsing her route on the city map. Besides, she needed to account for the possibility that she wouldn’t find the building right away, or that there’d be traffic. The meeting had been scheduled to take place at the opposite end of the city and, having no confidence in public transportation and its complicated network of connections, she was unsure of her calculations. What she couldn’t predict chipped away at what she could, and so she set off much too early. Fortunately, it was a beautiful autumn day, the kind where the sun was baking, calming the air and stilling the surroundings. In the courtyard of the building there was a small artificial pond encircled by several tall trees and orderly benches arranged at even intervals. She planted herself on one of them and wiled away the time looking by turns at the cloudless sky and the smooth water.
There’d been that other occasion where she—and perhaps it was needless now to say—had arrived first, some ten or so minutes too early, and sat at a corner table in the bar, between a wall and an enclosed terrace that was shrouded in darkness. Bruno and Vera were usually punctual; plus, the wait wasn’t hard if you were comfortably seated, as she was. It was far worse to wait out in the street, which she avoided whenever possible. She had no tolerance for exposure to weather’s strange whims—be it excessive heat or bitter cold. Moreover, she was bothered by exposure to people, to passersby pushing their way around her, suddenly vexed with her, as if she’d deliberately blocked their way (they would shove her aside without hesitation). It seemed unintentional, but she knew, she felt, the gravity of malice—maybe not in everyone, but even so. Out of defiance, she sometimes stood intentionally in the way.
She would order dessert and mint tea; Bruno and Vera would have beer. They would exchange a “How are you?” and reciprocate politely with “Thank you, I’m well” to avoid breaching an overtly personal topic dwelling beyond the latest cultural and political events. There, too, they’d be careful to skirt any misunderstanding, stick to the surface, simply checking whether they were informed, and in the meantime another round of tea and beers would arrive. That rattling interruption would provide a needed pause in conversation, which had started stuttering to a stop, with everything there was to say mostly said, and slowly the time would come to talk about work, to which they’d need to redirect their attention. All three would fall silent and wait while the waiter served them. Then Vera would start asking her about the terms of the job posting that had been advertised in her hospital and that she’d very much hoped to land. This had been the reason they’d met up.
They’d picked a quaint little spot. During the day, it was visited by employees from the nearby offices and by the neighborhood’s residents. Come night, it transformed into a club. The space was furnished with a dozen small round tables and a gargantuan circular bar in the center which was already fully occupied, though not crowded. She leaned her elbows on the table and, resting her head in her hands, discreetly surveyed the room: a few couples scattered about, a somewhat larger jovial party of friends, the hubbub and warmth of human bodies mingling under the low ceiling. At the bar there were five or six men and two quite young women—she wasn’t sure whether they were all together. The woman behind the counter seemed to know them well and spoke to them with a familiarity reserved for regulars. They often laughed out loud all at once.
One of the men caught her gaze and smiled. He was tall. Handsome. She immediately averted her eyes and fixed them on the tablecloth’s pattern.
Well! she scoffed to herself. Not going to go batting my eyelashes in a bar now, am I… Where are they?
But, it did please her. She smoothed down her hair and nervously tucked a stray end behind her ear. The gesture gave her another chance to raise her head a little and glance at the bar. The man was still looking in her direction and she saw his lips moving: he was saying something to the man beside him. She couldn’t look again—she wouldn’t. Ah, here they were, finally, she thought with relief as Bruno and Vera walked in. Her impatience was unwarranted: they’d arrived right on time.
Time was the trouble with bars: want to or not, you’d have something to drink. So, after a little over an hour and two cups of tea, she had to use the restroom. It was at the opposite end of the room; she’d need to pass by the bar. She’d nearly forgotten the faint uneasiness she’d felt moments ago, and she stood up and confidently took her first step, looking straight ahead, not at the floor, not to the side, and especially not to the left, toward the man who’d kept looking at her. Just as she passed them, barely a foot from the people at the bar, someone’s arms hastily slipped under hers from behind, high under her armpits, two palms firmly gripped her breasts and pulled her backwards, pressing her against someone’s chest. She felt all her bodily fluids boil, longing to break free, evaporate through her skin, now painfully sensitive, as if burning. She repeatedly opened her mouth. Silence. Not a word or peep, not a scream or sigh, not a curse, nothing, not on her lips, not in her head. Perhaps she could have blurted something if any combination of letters with any meaning existed out there, somewhere in her head, the only place she could of course even begin to think them up. She turned around, wooden. The hands, the massive palms had in the meantime retreated, and she saw the same face from before, only then it had worn a friendly smile—and now, it was grotesquely baring its teeth, cackling with laughter. He moved away a step, two, raised his cupped palms and by turns showed her and the people at the bar with a grimace that was supposed to communicate that her chest was so-so… Nothing special. It wasn’t exactly fear—not solely, anyway, though it was certainly there. Nor was it embarrassment, though that, too, was present, to a considerable degree. All the clothes she was wearing—her underwear and bra, skirt and collared shirt, her light sweater, shoes—everything, it was as if everything had evaporated. She felt naked on the bare floor, in the middle of a hollow ring of laughter. She crossed her arms over her chest. She could still feel those hands on her, every finger, every pressure and movement, still clenching her breasts. They might as well have been a permanent imprint, a sign on her flesh. The humiliation only grew when the audience at the bar became satiated with the scene and turned back with their glasses in hand to continue their conversations at the exact point where they’d been interrupted by their friend’s little stunt. Only here and there would one of them have a giggling fit. The bartender had frowned—or else a shadow had passed over her face for a moment and made her wrinkles look deeper and her cheeks like they were burning—but now she shrugged and focused back on her work.
She stood frozen for some time. A moment? Or had hours passed? She felt fettered to the floor, powerless to move, to undertake anything. A thousand thoughts raced through her head. She had difficulty fully comprehending how it had all unfolded and what she was to do now. Or maybe it hadn’t happened? What if it had never happened? No, it happened. Why had she even gone in that direction and made herself vulnerable? It hadn’t been that urgent. She could have held it, waited until she arrived home. None of it would have happened then. And she’d eyed at that man. Though really she’d only returned his gaze—but, she’d encouraged him. How many times had her mother told her, while she was still a little girl and over and over again in later years, something she hadn’t for a long time understood the meaning of? She would say:
“The dog won’t ride the bitch if she doesn’t wag her tail.”
She’d wagged her tail, she thought, repulsed by herself. Her mind was panic-stricken in search of a way to undo the event itself—reverse time and make something else of it.
Later, as she boarded the bus home and looked at the faces of Bruno and Vera, who’d escorted her, she couldn’t recall anything that had happened immediately afterwards. Regarding her with worry, they’d said, “Would you like us to go with you? Never mind them, they’re morons. Go home and get some sleep—forget it. We’ll talk tomorrow. Thanks for coming.”
She’d said nothing, only waved to say she didn’t want them coming with her—the doors were shutting anyway. She toppled into the seat behind the driver, heavy and empty of all thought.
Once home, she took a long shower. Her skin turned red from her feverish scrubbing. She made every effort not to look in the mirror. The hands, the paws that had grabbed her, were still there, the memory imprinted on her skin and flesh—that, she couldn’t wash off. Not easily, not with soap, not even the rough mitt . . . In her pajamas and bathrobe, she went into the kitchen and sat at the dining table. Her stiff body slowly slackened. She began to melt, bit by bit, her raised shoulders relaxed. It seemed to her as if it was only then that she’d inhaled, exhaled, as if all this time she hadn’t been breathing and had only now begun. Then a powerful shudder coursed through her body and for a short while she continued to shake—violently. Her teeth began to chatter. She looked at her hands, at her palms resting on the colorful vinyl tablecloth, at her fingers—how they stretched, spread, gathered into fists. The shame and humiliation began to soften and recede, giving way to a lump in her chest. It became bigger, and hotter. From there, it spread to the rest of her body, down her limbs, along her throat to her face and to the tips of the hairs on her head: a dense, dark rage. It finally erupted, this time voiced, through her mouth, at first high, loose and hissing, then tough and hoarse. What followed was the hard smack of both palms flat against the table.
“You pig!”
It echoed through the empty apartment without dying out before it echoed anew.
“You pig!”
Another smack.
“You pig, you damned pig, you little shit, you shit, you reeking pig shit, you pig, pig, pig—!”
*
The fellow passenger across the aisle—this probably-Slav Gastarbeiter with the beautiful hands—could be past forty. He was close-shaven and dressed in a black suit, which must have cost him a pretty pfennig, and a thin dark grey collared shirt. No tie. Topped with a soft, black, lightweight coat. And that black shoe shining dully in the middle of the seat—what an impertinence: someone would sit there later—was skillfully crafted of fine leather. Only, at the moment he was acting rather indifferent toward his clothes, which he must have taken great pains to pick out. The hem of his coat slid from his knees and finished on the floor, but he just threw a lazy look over his shoulder, shrugged, and went back to the staring at lights and the burbling. Or, humming, if there was even a melody to discern.
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