I have to go to the drugstore.” She looked at Marina. “I don’t care about you, poor bitch. The same will happen to you after this womanizer finds a replacement for you.”
She clenched her fists and her nails left pale crescents on her palms.
Marina kicked the purse lying on the floor and sent it flying. Then she went to the door, setting her blouse straight. The door slammed behind her.
“Dasha,” Goran said.
“Please don’t say anything,” Darya said, interrupting him. “Just leave. Have it your way in your life. As you always do.”
She burst out crying. He came up close to her and put his hand on her shoulder. She pulled away from him.
She opened her locker and took out a plastic bag and a watch. As she was trying to lock the locker, her fingers disobeyed her, and she dropped the key. He bent down to pick it up.
“Just leave me alone!” she shouted and slapped him across his face.
As she did it, Goran’s face exploded. For a split second, he thought some explosive hidden inside his head detonated. But his face did not disintegrate. The room shook two or three times. Then it was normal again.
“Sranje!” he exclaimed. He always swore in his mother tongue. He looked at her. “What the hell was that?” He looked astonished, and his face was funny to look at.
Darya stopped crying suddenly. “How do I know?”
The dramatic situation was turning into a comic one.
Goran could not see what was happening outside as there were no windows in the locker room. Darya looked a little frightened. She picked up her purse, and they hurried out of the room.
After Darya had bought the medicine for her mother, she came back to help around in the hotel. And she helped to build the barricades around the main entrance and sealing back entrances and emergency exits the next day, too.
This Sunday morning Darya returned to her duty as a dessert cook. She was glad to be useful again.
There were half a dozen kids in the hotel, and they were to be fed in the first place. Andy wanted to keep everyone’s spirits up, and Goran decided to make a huge cherry cake for them. Cherries were expensive in winter, and with the power outage, they were getting bad pretty soon. That would be a waste of good ingredients.
“All right, guys.” Goran clapped his hands like a teacher in the classroom. “Let’s bring all the sweets up.”
His cooks took the ice-cream cones, bottles of Irn-Bru and boxes of chocolate and went out.
Darya drove a trolley with empty cups and saucers to the door.
“Dasha—”
The trolley squeaked on its casters and pushed through the door.
He was left alone in the kitchen. He came up to the cake, removed the cherry from the top, threw it into the dustbin and replaced it with a fresher one.
He nodded in approval. “Much better now.”
That very instant, the vent tube above his head broke apart, and a man covered in soot and dirt fell out of its torn womb, flailing his hands in the air as he fell. He landed on top of the cake like a shot bird, splashing the white chocolate around the shiny kitchen. His tattered shirt was speckled with blood.
The man tried to focus his gaze at Goran’s face looking through the dark gray cobweb covering his spectacles, rolled his eyes, and his head smacked against the table surface.
NINE
Ramses was having a dream. He often had dreams about his family since the time he had got divorced. He had had both good and bad dreams. Most of the good dreams were about his little daughter. And most of the bad ones were about his wife. He wasn’t sure if this dream was good or bad.
He found himself sitting on a dirty prison bunk. But he wasn’t in a prison, at least not the conventional one. He was in a strange cage, which had been placed inside a huge bell jar. There were glass walls instead of the bars surrounding him and keeping him from the outside world. All the sounds inside the room were hollow as if the air had been sucked out of it, and all there had been left, was a vacuum. The surroundings were dim and foggy. Only some dark contours of trees were visible. It looked like this glass thing was in the middle of a forest. There was a starless night sky above his head. The moon was the only source of light.
He looked at his hands. There was a syringe in his right hand. The point of the needle was glistening with a transparent liquid. A spoon, a can, a bottle cap, cotton swabs, and other drug user’s paraphernalia were scattered on the floor.
He pressed the needle to the crook of his elbow, under his left bicep, where it punctured the skin and penetrated into the vein. He jacked back the plunger and saw his ruby-colored blood in the barrel. He started pushing the plunger slowly, letting the liquid flow into his body. Soon he felt that his head began swimming, and everything became like in slow motion. Sweet poison. He smiled. He grabbed the edge of the bed not to fall over.
A prison guard slowly came up to the bell jar and said something, which Ramses could not hear through the glass. He could read the guard’s lips perfectly, though.
“Hey, Campbell! Your wife has come to see you,” the guard said.
“Is it Sunday already?” Ramses said, trying to focus his gaze on the man in front of him.
The guard said nothing and left.
It did not surprise Ramses that the guard hadn’t done anything about the drugs or hadn’t even said a word. He wasn’t even confused that he was inside a glass prison built in some swampy forest in the dead of night.
He saw his wife coming up. Her gait was graceful. There was a certain noble elegance in the way she was walking through the clouds of mist. She was wearing a black evening dress. The movements of her lithe body reminded him of a snake. Or a voodoo priestess. He recalled that she had Haitian roots.
She stood in front of him and stared at him coldly.
“Hi, Ayana!” He smiled to her and waved his hand, the syringe dropping out of his hand on the floor. “How you been, baby?”
Her face turned into a distorted grimace of fury. She started shouting, though her words could not get through the glass and reach his ears. He mentally blocked his ability to read her lips and did not understand what she was talking about. She was accusing him as usual. Of wasted love, wasted expectations, wasted life … The standard kit of accusations, with which former lovers generally exchange with one another before and after a separation.
“Just shut the fuck up!” He waved impatiently at her, fatigue in his voice. “You hear me?”
She kept on screaming, pointing at him furiously and gesticulating. She was so enraged that the bulging veins showed in her neck.
But he didn’t care. He lay down on his bunk. Warmth was flowing through his body, and her presence did not bother him.
As she
