Free Zagreb Cowboy by Alen Mattich

Wasn’t you, was it?”
    “Were they doctors?”
    “No. But when I left them, they looked like they could have used one.”
    “Then it couldn’t have been me. I spend my whole life with other medics. And patients too sick to be wandering around killing people,” she said.
    “Well, that’s a relief, then.” Della Torre winced. He’d made the mistake of trying to bend his knee.
    “Is that why you’re dressed like a Gestapo scarecrow?”
    “Friend gave me the jacket. Would have been rude to turn him down. Mind?” he asked as he pulled a Lucky Strike out of Strumbić’s packet.
    “Let me shut the kitchen door and open the one onto the balcony.” Irena had never liked the smell of cigarette smoke, which for someone living in Yugoslavia was a permanent cross to bear.
    He smiled at her. Her hair was tousled; grey was beginning to streak the black, though she was three years younger than him. It made her look even more elegant. She’d never been one for fashionable clothes. Even so, her striking features, her carriage always turned heads, men’s and women’s. Her skin absorbed sun so that she looked tanned year-round. Most people assumed she had Gypsy blood. But that was only because there were so few Jews left in Zagreb.
    One lot of Irena’s grandparents hadn’t survived the wartime transportation. But her mother and her mother’s parents had been kept hidden deep in a forest village for the duration, the locals glad to have an eminent physician at their disposal, mostly because they thought he was a vet. The villagers didn’t know they were Jews, only that they needed to be hidden. So they were treated well, though they lived in the same primitive conditions as their hosts. Her mother couldn’t remember much about it; she’d been too young.
    Irena’s father never spoke about how he’d survived the war, though whenever someone offered him food he didn’t like, he’d say he’d already eaten enough roast rat to last a lifetime. Not everyone took it as a joke. He never meant it as one.
    Della Torre still loved her. He was pretty sure she returned the feelings. They got on well and had dinner together once every week or two. But the arguments had become too frequent for the relationship to survive. For five years they’d managed, but it got ever worse. Always about the same thing. When eventually she’d got pregnant, by accident, she was euphoric. He’d never felt such panic in his life. Or such elation as when she miscarried.
    He shouldn’t have made it so obvious. For a time her loathing of him was unbearable. She suspected he’d poisoned her. It was an unfair accusation, but his job made it an easy one. The dam finally burst at a summer party a fellow doctor from her hospital had thrown at his country place.
    Neither della Torre nor Irena had ever spoken honestly to anyone else about his job. Besides being secret, it tended to put people off. When they had to, they said he was a criminal lawyer at the prosecutor’s office, working on cases where it was suspected that personal vendettas on the part of officials had caused miscarriages of justice. Which was more or less what he did. An honourable job. And the answer always sufficed.
    Except that at this party, after he’d finished giving the stock answer to a doctor who’d just come up for training from Macedonia, Irena interjected with deep sarcasm, “Yes, he’s a real humanitarian. For the UDBA .”
    The man had only just made an indiscreet witticism about how if della Torre were sorting out all the country’s politically motivated cases, he’d have enough work for two lifetimes. He’d need two because he’d be spending one of them in prison. So at first the medic treated Irena’s comment as an uncomfortable joke and laughed nervously. Della Torre gave him the biggest, most sincere smile he could manage, trying to defuse the situation. But Irena’s stony look gave the game away. She was telling the truth.
    The man’s face took on the