And then I answered the phone and said her name: An Excerpt from "Catch the Rabbit" by Lana Bastašić

AND THEN SILENCE. Her knotty legs covered with blue-yellowish bruises, dusted with crumbs from the chips she wolfed down in two minutes, without offering me a single one. The shimmering wedding band dancing in the air between our heads. I wanted to do something—hit the brakes and send her through the windshield, or at least park somewhere, take my suitcase, and head down the road on foot. I would have walked to Dubrovnik if necessary, until she swallowed her pride and yelled my name, admitting she needed me. But I didn’t do anything. I drove fast, but with care, afraid that something might slow us down, that we would never reach Jablanica, let alone Vienna. That Michael would be barefoot forever.

I don’t know the names of trees; I only remember that they were silently observing us as we were running away. The trunks were straight and quiet like they had come to our funeral. I didn’t want to stop, although I had to use the restroom. I wanted to say something, but was stuck between two Lejlas—the one I had known my whole life, who once waxed my crotch, and this stranger, with bleached hair and slutty clothes, blowing her gum bubbles and letting them burst over her nose. I can’t recall half my childhood, yet I remember the details of her with irritating clarity. Blue bubble gum, watermelon flavor. A scratch on her left knee. Cracks in the red lips. One time she had told me that writers write because they don’t have memories of their own, so they make some up. That was before, while Rabbit was alive, and we had just started reading books. But she wasn’t right, at least not entirely. Memories might be like a frozen lake to me—blurry and slippery—but every now and then there’s a crack in its surface and I can put my hand through it and catch a detail, a recollection in the cold water. But frozen lakes are vicious. Sometimes you catch a fish, other times you fall through and drown. I know from experience that all my memories of her tend towards the latter. That’s why I had done my best not to remember for twelve years. And it worked. When it comes to our humanity, it’s amazing the low levels to which we can sink when it suits us.

And then I answered the phone and said her name. The coldness of the water was familiar. Three-headed beasts lurked in its depths.

We should have been somewhere in the American Midwest in a polished Buick, or cutting Russia in half on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Then I could have named the trees and the small towns, would have googled them in order to sound smarter than I am. I could have claimed that our story was in fact a damn good road trip, that we’d listened to the masters of the blues, eaten spicy cheeseburgers, and had profound conversations with a bunch of symbolic turns. But the fact is that this was her, Bosnia, and me, and I couldn’t name a single tree from the row that observed us. The fact is we exchanged just a couple of necessary sentences all the way to Bugojno—about eating and pissing—our topics never reaching beyond primary biological motives. Another fact is that a road-trip story makes sense only when the travelers, albeit wrongly, believe in reaching the finish line, the journey’s end that will solve all problems and end all misery. There’s no finish line in Bosnia, all roads seem to be equally languid and pointless; they lead you in circles even when it looks like you’re making progress. Driving through Bosnia requires a different dimension: a twisted, cosmic wormhole that doesn’t take you to a real, external goal, but into the gloomy, barely traversable depths of your own being.

The heat squeezed into the car like a terminal illness, though the sun had already gone into hiding. My legs were swelling up inside the uncomfortable jeans. I was a fat scone next to her who, dressed in half-garments, was cooling herself with a fan. She smelled like sugar, baked coffee beans, and blood. She tried to find something on the radio, but the choice annoyed her, so she turned it off in the end. I didn’t dare ask whether there were any tapes in the car. I couldn’t make myself start a conversation. With some people, after a bunch of years and stories have taken place, it’s impossible to engage in small talk. I wanted to ask her—I was dying to ask her—why Armin was in Vienna, where he had been all those years, why he hadn’t called. Had he really poisoned all those dogs? I was afraid. I didn’t have any right to extra questions, that I would scare her off, she would find someone else to take her to her brother whose location would forever remain secret to me. I had to follow her rules in order to reach the answers. Armin was alive and I would see him. I would bring him Lejla, dyed and married, but still Lejla. Her pathetic story would become a thing of the past, something that was never right in the first place. Armin was alive all along. The morning after prom when we got Hare, and the night we buried it. She had collected my sympathy on loan. It was about time that injustice was corrected.

After a while I slowed down so much we were barely moving, certain I was driving towards that goal and that the feel of it on that wound would be even more beautiful the longer I put it off; it would correct her mistakes and my silence even more effectively. The road felt slippery, like ice, and cars kept honking and passing us by, while I toyed with the idea that this was the last favor she could ask on account of her missing brother. At least that’s what I wanted to think.

And then that darkness. I hadn’t noticed it at first. The sky must have changed its mind at some point and slowly pulled the gauze down over its eyes without anyone noticing, like a tired widow in a crowded church. The digital clock above the steering wheel said 15:02, in the pitch-dark, wrong like colors at a funeral. Was that the life she and her tattooed giant were leading? A life without time? It hadn’t crossed anyone’s mind to adjust the clock in the car? I was annoyed equally by the fact that she was still so irresponsible, and by the fact that it still bothered me. I assumed I had miscalculated the time I had spent in that restaurant, waiting for her to finish her shift. It must have been afternoon already if it was so dark now.

“What’s the time?” I asked her.

“Why, you in a hurry?”

“The time’s wrong.”

Lejla stretched over and looked at the clock with the expression of a mother looking under the bed to assure her daughter there are no monsters there.

“What’s the big deal? A minute up or down. Don’t be obsessive.”

Obsessive. One of her words. Back then, before college started, when I thought I was pregnant. “Don’t be obsessive, Sara.” We’re sitting in some kafana toilet, waiting for the sign to appear on the stick. No, before that, before the stick, when we were studying for the chemistry test. I was angry because she couldn’t sit still and study. “Don’t be obsessive,” she told me. Or perhaps even before, much before? Perhaps to her I had always been obsessive. And then I moved to Dublin, met Michael, and started speaking her language. “Don’t be obsessive,” I’d tell him without blinking, at the same time feeling as if I had stolen something, something I didn’t think I needed. I had brought pieces of Lejla on me, tiny insects that had crawled into my bag, my pockets, under my pants, and yet they would hide their real nature before Michael. Our first date: an Icelandic movie we both pretended to have understood. “So what, you’re like an artist or something?” I asked. I twisted my foot on the sidewalk and looked at him condescendingly. And he loved it, the Lejla in me, though he never met her. She got to have him, too.

“Lejla,” I said, trying to gather my patience and remind myself we were both well into our thirties. “Look through the window.”

“Geez, you’re such a weirdo. I thought that Belfast of yours would have fixed you up a bit.”

“Dublin,” I corrected her.

“Dublin. Whatever . . . What am I supposed to look at? There’s a cow. Yo, cow, what up?!” she shouted and I did my best not to laugh.

“Never mind the cow, look how dark it is. No way it’s three p.m. Gotta be at least seven,” I said and she rolled her eyes.

“What difference does it make whether it’s three or seven?”

She was getting irritated, too, which wasn’t a good sign. Perhaps I should have laughed at the cow thing. I hadn’t seen her in twelve years and was still scared of some of her reactions. As if I had recovered from a lethal virus back in childhood and was sensing it again. I couldn’t fight back the pathetic fear that she would abandon me, she would realize my true nature and change her mind. That first week of school, I was afraid I would say something stupid and she would sit with someone else. Was it possible that I still hadn’t managed to shake off that silly fear after all these years? She would sit with someone else and the story would end there. A whole life would be different. I was still afraid. Even that moment in the car, while she irritated me just as much as all the old-times Lejlas, but at the same time scared me like a complete stranger from whom I didn’t know what to expect might. Who was that woman in the car with me? Who was I? Or maybe that was us, the real us, if such a thing exists, those silent creatures from the dark depths, everything else was a puppet show for idiots.

“When’s the last time you were in Bosnia?” she asked. Her voice was deeper, as if she had just realized a great truth and was looking for words simple enough to pass it on to me, a dumb kid.

“I don’t know . . . I can’t remember. A long time ago,” I said. I didn’t want to admit that I had counted the years.

“Yeah, but more or less . . .”

“What does that have to do with the clock?”

She took a small Motorola out of her purse. Of course, I thought, she still has a flip phone with huge buttons for retired people. So cool. The rest of us are all idiots with our touchscreen tech.

“Can’t remember the last time I saw that phone, either,” I said and laughed. She rolled her eyes again. This time it was so obvious that for a moment I felt like a lame dad of some cool teenager.

“You’re right. The time’s off,” she said frowning.

“Of course I’m right.”

She opened the Motorola and pointed the small green screen at me.

“It’s not three yet—14 and 58.”

I hit the brakes so hard she dropped her phone and started laughing.

“Lejla, stop fucking around. What’s the time?”

“What the fuck, Sara? Relax.”

“Lejla. What is the time?”

She checked her makeup in the rearview mirror and said,

“I just remembered our Serbian teacher, the one that made us say wottiss instead of what’s, remember? Wottiss the toyme . . .”

She laughed and started typing a text on her clunky Motorola, as if everything were fine. It crossed my mind that she was crazy, I should have guessed as much back in Dublin when she had called. Lejla is mentally disturbed. And I’m the idiot driving her around in complete darkness.

I unfastened the seat belt and started rummaging through my bag for my phone. My phone was, after all, a smart phone. Perhaps everything else was crazy: Lejla, her old-school cell phone, the car, the cows . . . But not my phone. No, that one was from Dublin. I could count on it.

At least that’s what I thought until I realized she was right all along.

It was three in the afternoon. Even on my phone. Everything was pitch-black. A car would pass us every now and then, the lights cutting the darkness; someone would honk the horn or curse, and then disappear into the night again.

“Velkam bek,” Lejla said, in a softer voice. She realized my terror. Even under the fake blueness of the contact lenses, her eyes were something I could recognize. She gave me that face—the Lejla who had lived in my head, the one I had missed and who would, after all the circus, understand that it was enough now, that I needed her to be normal, attuned to my fears. She must have realized that I was lost for real, I wasn’t pretending. I had forgotten everything: her and Armin, Bosnia. The darkness.

“But in Mostar . . .” I said, imploring. A car drove past us and honked a couple of times. The driver gave me the finger. “The closer you get to the sea, the better,” Lejla said, “that’s why I went there. Heartland’s the worst. Blind as a bat.”

Heartland. That word always made me think of the human body.

I thought of the two of us in that car as a white blood cell making its way to the heartland, in deep obscurity, unaware of the life powering it. I felt completely lost—the car was stopped in the middle of the road, in the impassable night, in a country that resembled my own as much as a funeral mask resembles a living person.

“Sara,” she said carefully, “we should move, people are honking.”

“Just a second.”

Though I needed a whole extra life. She leaned forward and kissed my naked shoulder. Ten minutes earlier that would have freaked me out, but now I was paralyzed, as if I had to find the levers somewhere inside me and put them to their right position in order to keep moving. They were rusty after so many years. It wasn’t enough to resurrect a language—I needed to find in myself something more profound than mere cognition, something carnal and primitive, an instinct that would allow me to survive the darkness. I used to have it, back when I was wandering around our town as a kid, looking for Armin. I had the skin for Bosnia. Now I had to grow it again, let it excrete and harden over my naive European pores in a few seconds.

Lejla suddenly jumped as if she had remembered something, and started unzipping her shorts. She pressed her back into the seat, pushed her hand deep between her legs, and pulled out a thick, bloody tampon.

“Fuck, Lejla . . . That’s gross.”

She rolled the window down and launched the tampon into the night.

“What, you want me to get that shock thing or whatever, and then you gotta bury me somewhere?”

“It’s not funny, if you need to use the toilet, we’ll pull over someplace. I don’t need to look at your used tampons.”

“We can’t stop here, can’t you see you’re in the middle of the highway?” she said. And then, as if suddenly annoyed, added, “And what difference does it make whether you are looking or not? They’re here, with or without you. Come on now, start the car.”

“I need a second.”

“She needs a second . . . Geez, you mad woman. Can’t you see someone’s gonna mow us down here?”

When she saw that I wasn’t answering, she added softly, “OK, let’s do this: you get us to Jajce. Yeah? It’s super close, you can spit to it. I’ve got a friend there. We can stay the night, if you’re freaking out. And tomorrow we go on. You look exhausted anyway. What d’you think, can we do that?”

I nodded in silence. I was too tired to ask questions or fight. In fact, I was thankful. The disgusting image of her bloody tampon pulled me back to reality. I turned the key and changed gear. She cheered up the minute we started moving down the dark road. She found a fresh tampon in her purse and pushed it in while I was trying to block my peripheral sight.

“We can go see the catacombs,” she said cheerfully, as if talking about lemonade stands.

“Sure.”

I had it coming, I thought, answering calls from unknown numbers. Now I had to shut up and drive whichever way Lejla Begić pointed her finger. A bloody finger.

“And we can visit that Yugoslav Council museum . . . what’s the name of that freak show . . . The Antifascist something . . . The AVNOJ Museum! The liberation of Yugoslavia!” she shouted and slapped my leg. “And the waterfall!”

“Sure,” I said, exhausted. “Whatever you want.”

There was a trace of her blood on my jeans.

About the Book

About the Author

© Radmila Vankoska

Lana Bastašić is a Yugoslav-born writer. She majored in English and holds a master’s degree in cultural studies. She has published three collections of short stories, one book of children’s stories and one of poetry. Her debut novel Catch the Rabbit was shortlisted for the 2019 NIN award and was awarded the 2020 European Union Prize for Literature. She lives in Belgrade.