The sky was the color of lead. Heavy clouds so low they seemed to be resting on the rooftops, still weeping sleet and ice. The apartment was dark, a sort of greyish twilight. Luka had blown out the candles.
"I don't have very many," he'd said. "Better to save them for evening, when it will be really dark."
But this left it too dark to read. Without power there was no tv, no music. The batteries in Luka's portable radio were low, so he just turned it on intermittently to check the weather report, which, of course, never changed. Cold; sleet expected to continue most of the day; power out across the entire region.
Abby sat silently, huddled in her heavy coat. The cold didn't seem to bother Luka. He appeared quite comfortable in his turtleneck and light jacket.
She had called into work on her cell phone, and found that Luka had been right. The night shift was stranded there, and there hadn't been a new patient since about 2 a.m. "Just stay warm," Jerry had told her.
The silence was growing oppressive.
"One good thing about the cold," Abby said. "The stuff in the fridge won't spoil very quickly."
"We won't starve," Luka agreed.
"Just freeze to death, which doesn't sound much better."
"Didn't you grow up in Minnesota - the big white north? It's colder there than here."
"Great white north," Abby corrected. "Yeah, it was cold outside. But we did have heat in our house." At least most of the time, she remembered. There had been the occasional week when Maggie had neglected to pay the gas bill and the heat had been switched off. But when you are 10, that kind of thing is an adventure. At 32, it's something entirely different. "We were also the only family in the state, I think, that wasn't into ice fishing."
"Ice fishing? What's that? Catching ice?"
Abby had to laugh. "No, it's a bizarre form of entertainment involving sitting on a frozen lake, in front of a very small hole, trying to convince the fish to leave their reasonably warm homes to join you on the subzero surface. I never quite understood the point."
"They would eventually end up in a nice warm frying pan, right?"
"Yeah," Abby agreed. "And I guess the fishermen usually ended up in a nice warm tavern."
"If it gets much colder in here, we might end up doing a little ice fishing," Luka said. He went over to the fish tank. The pump had stopped, of course, and the light was out. The fish were still alive, but swimming, Abby thought, a bit sluggishly.
"Will they die?" she asked.
Luka shrugged. "Probably. Tropical fish don't do well in the cold."
"Maybe we could heat some water, pour it into the tank?"
"Or maybe peritoneal lavage, with some warm saline?"
Abby couldn't help laughing again at the image, though it wasn't really funny. The poor fish.
Luka added a pinch of food to the tank. "At least they can get a good last meal," he said. "Die happy."
Another few minutes of silence. Luka was fiddling with the controls on the Walkman. Abby just sat. "Don't you have anything we can do? Anything that doesn't require light?" she finally asked.
Luka smiled. "Just the usual activities that people tend to do in the dark. We'd keep each other warm too; generate lots of heat."
"That isn't funny," Abby said, even though she knew he was joking. Or she assumed he was joking.
"Or," Luka said mildly, "We could talk. That doesn't need light or heat."
Abby shrugged. "What do you want to talk about? I think we've exhausted the possibilities concerning the weather."
"Pick a topic. I'm easy."
Abby stuck her hands in her pockets. It couldn't be much below 50 in here yet. Why did indoor cold always feel so much colder than outdoor cold? She tried to think of something to say. And the question popped out.
"In Vukovar, how long were you without power?"
"A few months. It wasn't as cold as this though, even though it was pretty cold for the season. Still, by the time the real cold weather set in, it was all over. By mid-winter I was back in Zagreb."
"Doing what?"
"Staying alive." Luka rose abruptly from his seat and went into the kitchen.
So much for that conversation thread, thought Abby. Not that it had been a very good one ...
Luka opened the fridge and took out a bottle of beer. "Want one?"
Abby shook her head. "No thanks." She did want one. Badly. Though she wasn't quite sure why. Still, starting to drink at 11 a.m. was probably a bad idea. She'd wait until at least noon, she thought.
The day dragged by more slowly than any day Abby could remember. She smoked. There were only 6 cigarettes left in the pack, and no real hope of getting more, so she rationed them out, and hoped that the combination of boredom and nicotine withdrawal wouldn't make her nuts before this was over.
At noon Luka lit another JAMA, and they had soup and instant coffee for lunch.
The apartment grew steadily colder. The radio said that it was 20 degrees outside and dropping. Eventually even Luka added another layer of clothing.
They talked on and off, but mostly just sat, as each attempt at conversation fizzled out.
And the ice continued to fall.