Diary of Interrupted Days by Dragan Todorovic

naturally, so that even when she was upset she looked as if she were smiling. Her heavy hair, almost black, framed her face tightly, making it appear narrower than it was.
    “Why don’t you write for a magazine?” Boris said. “You do terrific interviews—that always sells.”
    “Everyone is taking sides, Boris. Can you think of a single independent magazine that has lasted more than a month? You know that as well as I do—how many galleries would even think of exhibiting the project your group isdoing? Two? One? Your space is shrinking. So is mine. Independence is expensive.”
    One gallery, only. And even that one only because its owner was the brother of one of the artists from Boris’s group. The soundtrack of their lives: sad stuff, ballads. Their movie: grey frames in slow motion.
    A gust of wind carried in the scream of some small animal caged across the street.
    Johnny shook his head. “We can’t play in Slovenia now, or Croatia, or Bosnia. Half of my audience is in Croatia. The other half, here, is worried. They don’t have time for music.”
    They all froze in their thoughts, leaving Van Morrison to fill the void.
    “Do you have any plans?” Boris asked Sara.
    She stopped fiddling with her watch and looked him in the eyes. “Are you worried about me?”
    “No,” he said. “It’s just so sudden. I don’t know what I would do if I were you. I’ve never worked full-time so I don’t know how it feels …”
    Sara smiled. “I’m furious at them. And I will fight the idiots. You know me that much. But some of us who were suspended today are not that good. That’s another trick they use, to mix it up a little, to cover their tracks. There are only maybe four of us who have a chance to get our jobs back. Even if they lose, they still win. It will last for months and even if they have to take the four of us back, it’s still not that bad. They will have eliminated seven people.”
    She took another swig from her glass. This time her shoulders stayed level.
    “Perhaps I’ll put on a miniskirt and high heels and go to the office from time to time. That’s the language they understand. That will give them some sleepless nights.”
PAYBACK TIME.
November 5, 1992
    November started with cold rain. The northern wind, sliding down the Danube, occasionally added sleet to the mix.
    Boris’s exhibition had turned into a non-event. The crowd at the opening were mostly artists who all knew one another. The media scribbled down a few notes about it and that was that.
    The book he was reading now was Charles Bukowski’s
Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness.
He had brought it with him from Amsterdam the previous summer. He liked Bukowski but had bought this particular book because its title summarized the feeling he had that summer—and throughout this war, for that matter.
    To finance the trip he’d sold a painting—he’d decided that he needed to remove himself from the overheated political noise. He chose Amsterdam because he knew the city, and it had always been good to him. But on the first day of his stay, he ran into two of his colleagues from Fine Arts and realized they both had emigrated—they were talking about how to find a job in welding or picking tulips. From their perspective, every sane person should leave Belgrade immediately. After parting with them, he went back to his hostel and opened his backpack. Two shirts,three pairs of underwear, two pairs of socks, sandals, three T-shirts, a sweater, a pack of condoms, five painkillers, and a bar of milk chocolate. Definitely not enough painkillers to emigrate. Bukowski’s book was all he brought back.
    Now he was reading it again because he needed a dose of reality. Life inside its covers was full of stench and love and passion and oblivion and madness. It soothed him. There was so much hypocrisy outside, so much distortion, he found it good to get down to the basics. Screw the high philosophy. His other