The Neighbor in Zagreb

Posted on April 20, 2003 in Book of Days Travels - Past

Note: This is fifth in a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days.

Today’s topic: Write about meeting someone for the first time.

Peace Center, Zagreb. 1992. Eleven years ago. Memory appears in my head, like the flash from gunfire, repeated. The place in the back. The neighbor who hated us and shouted at us because the peace center people brought traitors. I heard his voice before I saw him, a balding man on the balcony, wearing a greying tank top. Like all the other Croats that I met that summer, he didn’t look dark or oriental as Americans weened on spy stories thought. He was balding, heavy-shouldered, like one of the cookie-cutter guys I heard a Buffalo activist describe as a member of the Brotherhood of Steel. Drop him off in any northern American city and then cruise through the union neighborhoods because that’s where you’d have the best chance of finding his like. Neighborhoods where hard muscled men with gray beards and protruding bellies sat in fabric chaise lounge chairs, slopping up the beer, and staring at the boat they liked to take out to the lake. The perpetually irate neighbor would be there with the best of them, running in to grab his Saturday Night Special if he thought you were encroaching on his property.

Seemed like the only man who didn’t have a gun in Zagreb. I couldn’t help but wonder why — having seen the collections of plastique, automatic handguns, grenades, and AK-47s that nearly everyone in this until-recently unfree nation had. I suspected that he kept one in the house, to use should we activists ever decided to pick his corn or climb the squash vines onto his balcony. If he had one, he never showed it while I was around. Zagreb had no shortage of gunfire. I might not have noticed if one of the local peace activists walked in, a Kaleshnikov slung over her shoulder, but he was different because he was always threatening us in a barrage of wide words with sharp corners, sounds that fragmented in the ear every time someone crept through the courtyard to the peace center. If he’d drawn a weapon, I would have slammed my chest to the ground and taken up Pascal’s wager in a desparate last minute of prayer for the forgiveness of my soul. The soldiers and others who carried guns openly never looked at me as I passed them. They could stop and hold a civilized chat. Not this man. His voice murdered us as we scurried across the courtyard, pretending that he was all part of the routine and the price of our witness for peace.

I only met him face to face, once, in the short grey hallway running from the cobblestone street of Yugoslav-spiced gingerbread houses to the courtyard that separated the peace center from the house in front where he lived. He burst out of his door which was next to the mailboxes. Waved his hands at me and yelled. The stink of the beer and the sweat hovered like a chemical cloud in the passageway. The flashes of palm in my line of sight attempted to bring my eyes to his. I knew that this would be fatal, that to look at him like that would accept the challenge. So I denied myself my one chance to check the color of his eyes. I stiffened, looked straight over the hands, and stepped to one side, kept going to the office. I don’t remember what I said to the others, if I said anything at all. I may have simply sat down at the computer and typed one of the MIRacles for the day. I never mentioned him in those messages. He reminded me too much of the people who couldn’t handle that I opposed the First Gulf War, the ones who screamed in my face and spoke of their desire to launch spittle rockets at me or pellet my mouth with the contents of their bladders.

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Tomorrow’ topic: Something seemed different….