Читать книгу Till Kingdom Come - Andrej Nikolaidis - Страница 4

PROLOGUE: WATER

I think I remember how it all began.

The world was soaking wet like a sponge. By the time February came around, the earth couldn’t take another drop.

The winter was unusually mild that year. But it dragged on, as can happen by the Mediterranean, until it swallowed the Spring like an Aesculapian snake eats an egg. The rain poured down day after day, for months. Soon it was half a year. The sardine season was almost over, but people still only went out if they had to, and only in their raincoats. The fishermen gathered every morning in their little cafés by the shore, where everything stinks of fish and seaweed, ready to drink their espresso and head out before dawn as usual. As if the old reality would come back if they held on to their little rituals for long enough. They sat in silence, scrying their coffee sludge, like the last survivors of an exterminated tribe that still doesn’t understand why its world has disappeared. They listened in vain to the weather forecast, as bleak as a pagan mass. There was no good news: the rain wouldn’t stop, the sea wouldn’t drop, and they wouldn’t be heading out. The men whose families depended on the catch despaired and drank glass after glass of grappa. In March, only the most persistent went after shad and then vainly stood in the rain trying to sell their fish to non-existent customers. The prawn season, the most profitable of the year, was delayed at first, and then it became clear that it wouldn’t take place at all. Even if they had managed to head out, risking their necks in the waves that broke with a roar in the shallow water of the bay, it would have been a pointless effort. The sea was icy cold – just 12 degrees – although May was drawing on. Prawns only come with the warmer currents. They herald the beach tourists, but they wouldn’t be coming either, it seemed. The nature that people knew, whose unwritten laws they thought they could rely on, had betrayed them. The things they considered certain failed to occur. What no one in their families had any memory of, and therefore couldn’t tell them about, had now happened. The most dogged of the fishermen kept setting their alarm clocks so they could get up at night and tip the water out of their boats, which would fill again even before they made it back to their beds. The others let their vessels sink. When all this finally passed, they would pull them up onto the shore and their skilful hands would clean, repair and re-float them.

Once, out of curiosity, I went down to the marina at three in the morning. I wrapped myself in my raincoat, opened the parasol I had taken from a burglarized storeroom at the beach and sat down on a bench. I opened a bottle of Vat 69 and watched the boats lying at the bottom of the bay for hours. That’s what the Ulcinj pirates’ fleet must have looked like after it was sunk by the Sultan’s navy at the entrance to nearby Valdanos Bay. I thought that same, vacuous thought again and again, vainly trying to think of some other words, until I finished the whisky and threw the empty bottle into the sea. Only then was I able to free myself of the thought of the corsairs’ sunken ships. Whoever finds my bottle will get the message: I wanted to say that I have nothing to say. I trudged home, took the basins of rainwater off the bed and slept through until the next evening. It seemed to me, when I finally opened my eyes, that the rain was beating down as if it intended to flatten everything beneath it.

If you wanted to go outside, gumboots were the only suitable footwear. But they were no good now either because the water was getting faster and deeper. In the end, wherever you went, you arrived wet up to the waist. The foundations of the houses absorbed the damp, and before the eyes of the tenants it climbed the walls towards the ceiling. Everything we touched was water. We slept on wet sheets under cold, clammy covers. The floorboards were swollen to bursting point. Parquet flooring buckled like the ground after mighty tectonic shifts, such as shook the Earth in pre-human eons. The contours of the floor changed from day to day. Windows, even those with heavy shutters, were no help against the rain. It came with a wild westerly one moment and with a sirocco the next, constantly changed the angle at which it fell, attacking now frontally, now from the side, until it had crept through every invisible opening in the walls and woodwork. In their rooms, people made barriers of towels and babies’ nappies beneath the windows. When they were sodden, they would be wrung out in the bathroom and quickly returned to the improvised dykes.

Roofs let through water like a poorly controlled national border. Like in a bizarre game of chess, families pulled pots and pans across the floor: Casserole to f3, frying pan to d2. The whole town suffered from sleep deprivation. Everyone finally understood the terrible power of Chinese water torture: the beast dripped all night and drove everyone out of their wits. Some tried to protect themselves from the sound of the drops that fell louder than bombs by stuffing cotton wool in their ears. When even that didn’t help, they would turn on their televisions, radios and computers, trying to make noise to block out the monstrous aquatic symphony. Those who had small children would find brief salvation in the children’s crying. No one attempted to calm them. They screamed with hunger, fever or colic, but their parents made no attempt to feed them or lull them to sleep. Mothers later recounted guiltily that they had hoped and prayed the crying would go on forever. In the end, the children did tire and fall asleep, and the parents would again be at the mercy of the sound that tormented them. That winter, children learned that crying is useless because no one will help us. And parents learned the lesson that everyone who tries to find salvation in procreation realizes sooner or later: that the children will betray us, just as we betray them.

Ultimately, everyone gave up the struggle. Those who would never have lain in bed and gazed at the ceiling now sat and smoked all night, staring vacantly and watching the containers on the floor fill ever quicker, until they decided it was time to stop emptying them.

The Winter firewood was already used up, and going out to gather new wood in such a gale made no sense. The stove would only smoke, producing no heat, and there were no prospects of it drying the rooms, let alone the walls, where the rising damp was puckering the plaster.

The alleyways ran like rivers. We would long ago have been inundated if the town was not built on a hill. The storm-water drainage became clogged before the New Year. The Central Canal gave way in the middle of April.

Now what we called the Central Canal is an interesting thing: it had not actually been dug for the passage of water. The people of Ulcinj originally made that tunnel because of a different enemy - one of flesh and blood. It led from the old fortress by the shore to half a kilometre inland, all the way to today’s promenade, where you find one boutique after another with second-rate Italian wares and jewellers peddling trinkets from Turkey.

At first, the tunnel served for the rapid evacuation of the residents of Kalaja, the fortified Old Town of Ulcinj, who, it should be said, were pirates. They had the custom of plundering Venetian cities, and it seems they particularly liked attacking Perast, a small, wealthy town in the Bay of Kotor, which was practically defenceless because its menfolk were valued mariners in the fleet of La Serenissima and thus were constantly sul viaggio. Therefore, from time to time the Doge would send the fleet to Ulcinj to take revenge. The Ulcinj pirates evidently considered a good plan of withdrawal no less valuable than a wise plan of attack: the secret tunnel they dug allowed them to flee from the superior Venetian forces. We can just imagine the bewildered Venetian soldiers wandering through the eerily empty Kalaja, where they were met only by starving dogs and seagulls. There was no trace of the corsairs because they had already reached the swamp in the town’s hinterland. They made their way through the water lilies and reeds in small, fast rowboats, rushing to Velika Plaža beach, where their ships lay hidden. From there, they would embark and launch a counter-attack. With a bit of luck, they would be able to approach the Venetian fleet from behind, while the infidels were still in the fortress, busy with plundering and getting drunk. If the Venetians had already left, never mind: the pirates were still alive, and what had been burnt and stolen they would plunder back again, inshallah. Today we’d say: the main thing is that merchandise changes hands and capital circulates.

People I knew told me that the tunnel was wide enough for a VW Golf to pass through it. I never tested the claim: probably because of the disdain I feel for empirical proof

In any other town, a pirates’ escape tunnel would be a tourist attraction. The fact that it was left to become a drain should not be ascribed to a conscious plan of the local authorities, but to their negligence – a unique blend of idleness, impudence and fanaticism – which is interpreted here as consistent non-interference in God’s will and His competencies. When Communism collapsed, the local population rediscovered God and started flocking to the mosques, and it became common to complain about dysfunctional municipal services at the local council and for staff to reply that the heap of rubbish that lay stinking in front of your house was there because God wanted it to be:

“If He wanted us to remove the dead horse from your parking slot, we would already have done it,” an official told me once.

“If who wanted you to?” I asked nervously.

“Out, get out!” he shouted.

As I hurried away down the corridor, fearing that I had involuntarily experienced proof once again that dialogue is the most overrated thing in the world, I heard the fellow banging the drawers of his desk and repeating to himself: “If who? Whaddaya mean If who??”

Searching for a path, the water found the tunnel – it was as simple as that. And then it worked its way out of the tunnel: it breached the fifty-metre tall Cyclopean walls of the Old Town and, true to Kant’s definition of the sublime as beauty we experience as fearful, surged into the sea in a mighty torrent.

It may have been a state of emergency, but there was no lack of alcohol in the shops and the black-market cigarette trade still flourished. In Sulyo’s crummy shop, where everything was twice as expensive as elsewhere, I was the only buyer anyway. When some local informed me that Sulyo’s stocks of Rubin white wine, brandy and Johnny Walker were, if not inexhaustible, then at least sufficient for me to drink for another year of floods, all cause for concern disappeared from my mind. I kept buying my cigarettes via the Tadić delivery system: you call them at any hour of the day or night, and the Tadićs bring you a carton of cigarettes within half an hour. The combined IQ of all the Tadićs did not exceed 200, but they had certainly organized a proper little family business: the father sold cigarettes at the market, while his sons darted about town on rattletrap Vespas, delivering them to bars and houses.

“For every four cartons you got a free Coca-Cola,” the youngest Tadić told me one evening around midnight as he slugged a litre bottle into my hand.

“Listen,” I said to him, “I see you got the idea of the free Cola from pizza delivery services, but if you think about it you would realise how absurd it is. Cola may go with pizza, but with cigarettes you need alcohol or coffee.”

He looked at me bluntly through the streams of sweat running down his face. He was computing inside.

“We can’t give away liquor. That wouldn’t pay off,” he told me after a pause for computation that seemed as long as the Peloponnesian, Hundred Years’, Guatemalan, and all the Punic wars put together.

“Alright, but how about a hundred grams of coffee?”

“Yeah, that would work,” he beamed.

“There you go! Do it like that from now on. But I’ll keep the Cola all the same – it goes with whisky.”

* * *

Now that I was provisioned with everything an honourable man could need, I gladly accepted Maria’s invitation to go to Bojana River for the May-Day holidays. That was typical of her and part of her charm that I found so irresistible: she thought it was perfectly natural and normal to leave a flood-stricken town and go to where there is even more water, just for a change of scene.

She, Goran and Radovan woke me before dawn, bursting into the house like a SWAT unit. Even before I could open my eyes, Maria was rummaging loudly in the kitchen trying to find a vessel to make coffee in, while the other two attacked what was left of last night’s Vecchia.

“Come on, get this into you,” Radovan passed me a glass of alcohol. “You know what they say: you have to fight fire with fire.”

Then Maria arrived with coffee in a Teflon frying pan.

“You don’t have any detergent, and this was the only thing that was clean.”

Goran found glasses beneath the armchair and the bed, and Maria ladled the coffee into them.

“The three-day rule applies here,” he said.

“Which is?” I asked.

“The same as the three-second rule: what’s been on the floor for less than three seconds or longer than three days isn’t dirty and you can eat and drink out of it,” was his reply.

Radovan came from some God-forsaken place in the Krajina borderlands. He claimed he was a close relative of a well-known Bosnian Serb folk-singer. Having a nationalist bard like that in the family opened many doors for him here. That’s the kind of time it was. Montenegrin ethno-fascism was comparable with the German variety in terms of its intensity. Its relative lack of coherence and effectiveness at killing can be put down to Montenegrins’ legendary laziness and incompetence in organization.

Radovan brought his wife, children and mother with him. His daughters were spectacularly ugly – prime specimens of negative natural selection – but they were not nearly as shocking as his wife. Even the budget of an average Hollywood movie would not have been enough to rectify her appearance. Such disfigurement is a rarity, even in the history of literature. At first she reminded me of one of Tolkien’s orcs, but later I realized what ought to have been obvious all along: that God created the woman not in his own likeness, but in that of Dorian Gray.

Radovan claimed to be a talented cook and even to have healing hands. There was no one who believed it and gave him a job, so he just used his hands for lifting bottles of beer, and he was able to fit more amber fluid in his small body than the laws of physics allowed, I can vouch for that. He was a first-rate liar and intelligent enough to know that you can always rely on people’s greed. He found business partners in cafés and bars, where he would booze with them until the small hours. Then, when they were drunk enough, he would ply them with the bizarrest of ‘business plans’ and ardently describe ‘investment opportunities’ until they took the bait and turned their pockets inside out for him. The way Radovan conducted his business did not differ substantially from the functionings of global financial capitalism, which is a euphemism for the Ponzi scheme. The Radovan scheme differed from the Ponzi scheme only in so far as Radovan never paid a single instalment to anyone – not one cent of profit. Since I was interested in psychoanalysis, I understood that Radovan could be said to be part of real-existing financial capitalism. He never paid any dividends as an enticement for further investment, which would mean greater losses in the long-run, and there was no false hope in making gains – as soon as you gave money to Radovan, you knew you’d get fuck-all back. You could even say that his dealings were closer to The Truth than those of large financial institutions are, and thus closer to Virtue. But there were few who appreciated that, and every now and again he would be beaten up by one of those to whom he had caused grief. But what can you do – everywhere and at all times, people are passionately intolerant of the Truth.

Goran also gave him money several times. Not out of greed, which he had been cured of, but out of a compassion and kindness that probably only still exist in Russian novels. How many times did I tell him, Don’t do it, you know he won’t give it back, you know you’re throwing your money out the window. But Goran would just shrug his shoulders, smile and say, He needs it more than I do.

Goran was my best and perhaps my only true friend. He lived with his father, a tyrant who first drove Goran’s mother out of his kingdom and into her grave, and then pushed his sister into voluntary exile at the age of seventeen. Fleeing head-over-heels from her father, she married the first good-looking, sweet-talking man she met. He would turn out to be the same as her father; but before she realized her mistake, she already had two children, and there was no escape for her any more. Hiding her misery from her husband, she would meet with Goran; she lamented to him, cried and said she’d kill herself then always went back home because she had to feed the children.

Goran worked as a waiter during the day, and at night he went out to sea to try and catch fish to sell so he could put some money his sister’s way. Now and then he would rebalance his and his sister’s budget by selling the odd matchbox full of grass he’d got from Albania. Goran dealt with the best of intentions, like everything else he did. He spent his free time with me. I couldn’t help him – I was never able to help anybody. We drank, told each other intimate things, and then parted, taking all our own misfortunes away with us again. I would watch him from the terrace as he headed away down the path with a light step. He had a proud, dignified bearing that suited him like height suits a cypress.

The morning they came to pick me up, he was particularly cheerful. He put on a brilliant parody of a broad Montenegrin drawl, full of all those lofty and pretentious ways of saying stupid things, which Montenegrins are masters of. He made two or three toasts, each more verbose and vacuous than the one before. Then Maria got up and ordered us to get going.

Radovan’s light blue Trabant was waiting for us in the parking slot. He apologized as he tried to unlock the door of the old wreck – his BMW was at the garage.

Even today you can still find discussions on The Web about which was the worst car of all time: the Yugo 45 or the Trabant. But whoever trashes the Trabant has obviously never been in one. Put it this way - if you like to compare a good car with a ship, a Trabant is a rubber dinghy in a force-ten gale. After all, a Trabant can be repaired the same way as people repair boats. The body of the car is made of plastic, and in seaside towns you could see specimens of Trabants among the sails and oars in the maintenance area of the marina, raised up on blocks in a row of yachts and smaller craft. There’s just one good thing about the Trabant, and it certainly came out that day in flooded Ulcinj; it doesn’t sink.

We set off on the watery voyage to Maria’s villa. Maria came from a family of weak fathers and masterly mothers – one where the men were married off. It was a mystery as to what had driven her great-grandmother to take her seven-year-old daughter by the hand and leave Trieste, where she had an enormous estate and social standing to match, and end up in Ulcinj, where people gossiped about and feared her. But once here, she bought a property on top of Pinješ Hill, where your gaze goes out across the Adriatic towards Otranto. She had a mansion built there, whose beauty could compare with any villetta by Lake Como, and which made everything ever built in Montenegro, including King Nicholas’s ostensibly luxurious palace, look like a dump.

That woman would go for afternoon walks by the sea clad in the finest dresses, striding the town and creating a public scandal because the women of Ulcinj rarely went out at that time, and only if accompanied by a man and covered from head to foot.

Maria’s grandmother enjoyed a home education: They engaged a governess from Rome, and her piano teacher – only the best would do – came all the way from Moscow.

The self-willed young woman ignored her mother’s advice that she stay single, without children. She married a Montenegrin officer from Cetinje, who fled from her when he was sober and beat her when drunk. He died in a Russian prostitute’s bed in a quayside brothel by choking on his own vomit while Maria’s mother was still in nappies.

Maria’s mother, Elletra, followed the family tradition of choosing a wimp for a husband. He did not die young like her father, and immediately after Maria was born Elletra banished him to the outhouse in the pine forest at the far end of the property. Happy there in his pigsty, he tippled and screwed around with the servants. When Elletra could no longer tolerate a bordello in her own backyard, she paid him out and he left for central Serbia to open a café. As Elletra expressly demanded, and in keeping with the contract they both signed, he never tried to contact Maria. Elletra later turned the outhouse into a larder with a collection of alcohol that the best of hotels would be proud of.

And it was to that store that Radovan now ran off, returning with a whole cardboard box of cognac. Elletra’s cook came waddling after him. He moved like a penguin because he was lugging two crates of Nikšić beer. Since he was short, the crates scuffed over the asphalt and screeched like Cobain’s teeth as he, already poised for suicide, played an MTV Unplugged concert on speedball that made him pogo up and down like a wild thing. If I ever come down with delirium tremens... Or rather, when I come down with delirium tremens, I won’t see white rabbits but a line of penguins with cook’s caps on their heads riding down the slopes of Mount Lovćen towards Kotor on empty beer crates and plopping into the sea one after another like ice cubes into whisky, I thought.

“This car is wonderful,” Radovan said. “Its only weakness is that the boot is so small.”

He zipped back to the larder and this time brought a box of Char­donnay, which he dropped onto Maria’s lap, as she had the honour of sitting in the front.

“Just a tick longer, have a smoke and then we’ll be off,” he said, vanishing into the garden. He came back with a children’s inflatable swimming pool, which he made the cook blow up. The fellow sweated from the exertion and I could imagine that he hardly restrained himself from butchering us and stashing the pieces in his freezer. Radovan then roped the swimming pool to the back of the Trabant and put another crate of beer and a few bottles of wine in it, taking care not to overload the vessel and cause it to sink.

As we were leaving, I thought I saw the silhouette of Maria’s mother up in the attic window.

A Trabant pulling along a children’s swimming pool loaded with alcohol didn’t grab the attention of the people of Ulcinj who, as happens with the poor in spirit who live in expectation of famine, cholera and family deaths, had lost all sense of humour and love of the bizarre – the only things of lasting worth among all that has gladdened, frightened or troubled us in our time on this earth.

Ulcinj was deserted and we passed through the town without any great hindrance. The real fun began when we came to the area behind the Velika Plaža beach. From there to Bojana River we had fifteen or so kilometres’ drive across the Štoj Plain. In Ulcinj, the water ruled like an autocrat, but in comparison with the reign of terror it unleashed in Štoj it was an enlightened dictatorship, perhaps a bit like the way Tito ruled Yugoslavia. In Štoj, the water was Pol Pot. Bojana River had burst its banks, and Lake Šas had also overflowed. A tide of shit rose from the septic tanks that the residents of Štoj had emptied their bowels into for decades. Dead cows and sheep floated around us. It was hard to avoid them because the water came half way up the windscreen. Our raft of alcohol bumped into bloated carcasses several times, but otherwise Radovan drove a perfect slalom.

“If you were in Noah’s situation, what sorts of alcohol would you take with you on the raft?” Maria asked us, holding a perfumed hanky over her nose.

We agreed that it wouldn’t be necessary to take a sample of every species of drink because not all of them deserved to exist. The world would be a better place without some drinks, and that is not the end of similarities between alcohol and humankind.

Maria would have liked to turn Noah’s raft into a floating wine cellar.

“Guys, for ideological reasons I wouldn’t save a single Californian wine,” she said. “Some of them are good, some are perhaps even excellent, but Californian wines are anti-wines. Where there is no tradition, there ought not to be any wine either. Do you also get the feeling that they’re instant wines concocted like Nescafe? The only thing more scandalous than Californian wines is Californian cognac – because cognac is a perfume among drinks, the essence of tradition.”

The rich are fundamentally conservative, and Maria was no exception. However decadent they are, however many transgressions their life is full of, however ardently they promote liberal values, or the manners of their class, and however much compassion they may have for people of colour, the disabled and the LGBT community, the rich want one thing above all: For everything to stay as it is – for them to stay rich, that is.

Goran enthusiastically accepted her thesis. He considered there should only be a place for a very few types of cognac in the new world.

When Radovan announced he would load the raft with good old-fashioned Rakia, and add the occasional crate of beer, it became clear that our apocalyptic fantasy was a confirmation of Béla Hamvas’s theory that there are wine-, vodka- and beer-drinking peoples.

As far as I’m concerned, there has only ever been one drink – Scotch whisky, single malt. There was no need for any other kinds of alcohol – neither in this world nor in any other. When I later succeeded in life, as they say, and finally had the money for single malt, I didn’t drink anything else. A raft loaded with select oak barrels of single malt didn’t need to be seen as the seed of a better, future world – it already was the best of all possible worlds.

Entertained by imagining utopias – the path to which is always paved with corpses, or at least carcasses – we arrived at the Bojana River in good spirits. The water had not carried away Goran’s hut, although it had been a close call. The small wooden structure, sheathed in tarred and rusty corrugated iron, built to the highest standards of the slums of this world, had proved exceptionally sturdy. There are times when the glass towers fall and all of modernity founders with its information systems and social structures, when gravity overcomes everything that people’s pride has put in its way, and then only holes and hovels survive the universal destruction.

The Bojana River wasn’t always the cloaca it is today. Fishermen once used to net schools of grey mullet here, and at night they would sit together with local wine and home-grown tobacco telling tales of the good old days and big catches. But the little river had the misfortune of being discovered by rich Muscovites, who brought along their lovers – badly bungled crosses between the male ideal of female beauty and the female need to please the male eye. These Frankenstein-like brides came with their Luis Vuitton handbags and their shrieking Chihuahuas in tow. Later, prostitutes from Novi Pazar opened their all-inclusive spa centres. Then hordes of Montenegrin tycoons descended on the river like tribes of barbarians set on razing Rome to the ground, and this perfect landscape lay in their path, perfectly vulnerable. The moguls’ excess of money and lack of taste spawned architectural monsters by the waterside, and in a truly just society they would be publicly executed in the town square and their brains sent to advanced research centres for close examination in the hope that future experts would be able to prevent aesthetic crimes – the most terrible of all.

Radovan sped back to Ulcinj to kill one more wretch’s last trace of trust in humanity. The three of us, in a silence disturbed only by the clink of glasses, gazed into the river, which was carrying away the remains of a world lost in the flood. For hours we watched the millions of destructive raindrops compress into the stream of the river. At night, only a few lanterns upstream impaired the perfect darkness we gladly consigned ourselves to.

When Radovan came to collect us three days later, I asked Goran and Maria to wait for me in the car as I prepared to take my leave. I stood on the terrace and let the sorrow flood through my whole being, a sadness that numbed my limbs and then took away my thoughts. I floated in the weightlessness of that potent melancholy, sensing beyond any doubt that something majestic had ended, a grandeur I would remember till my dying day. I knew it was over and that I wouldn’t be able to talk about it because, however much detail and eloquence I described it with, the essence would slip away – it was essential to me alone and could not subsequently be interpreted and shared with another person, not even with the future me. I knew that no future intimate bond would be complete enough for that feeling to be shared, because however many words I used, no one would find what I was talking about more significant than some second-hand anecdote.

Our return to Ulcinj ended in catastrophe. Radovan insisted that we drop in for a drink in Štoj on the way. There another guy from the Krajina borderlands ran a pub called The Second Chance. As soon as we set foot in that hole it became clear to us that the name was not without significance – here you had a pretty good chance of picking up AIDS, or syphilis at the very least. Prostitutes roosted in artificial-leather booths lit by imitation candles; the girls were from Moldova, as it turned out. Radovan was a welcome guest here. You could even say a stakeholder. He and his fellow countryman went off for a conspiratorial conversation in ‘the office’, they told us. The three of us dragged ourselves to the bar. The waitress threw a few bottles of Nikšić beer at us – lukewarm the way bricklayers drink it.

By the time Radovan came back from his ‘meeting’ and buttoned up his flies, I was starting to slur my words. He insisted we have another drink, claiming he had reason to celebrate. One drink turned into five, or ten, it makes no difference. They carried me out of The Second Chance and heaved me into the Trabant.

They woke me when we arrived at a petrol station because our East German wreck finally gave up the ghost. We even tried to jump-start it for a hundred metres or so – in vain, of course. I stumbled several times and fell face down in the slough. Since I was wet and barely able to walk, Maria took me home. I don’t know many people who would haul a drunken pig three kilometres through a flooded town in the diluvial rain, fully aware that he would never thank her for it.

Somewhere on the way, I realized from what she told me later, I tried to kiss her. I wasn’t pushy, just wet and icky with vomit – my worst possible manifestation. It takes a special feeling for melodrama and tragedy for a man to declare the love he has been harbouring for years to his victim, the unlucky object of his love, at the worst possible moment.

She turned me down, though I don’t doubt she did it with a ladylike tenderness that would make anyone she turned down love her even more hopelessly. I then gave a romantic speech, whose details she spared me, but clearly it was in keeping with the genre, and thus unbearable. When cynics ‘open up their heart’, as the phrase goes, they ought to be shot on the spot like rabid dogs. It becomes clear at that moment that the best in the man – his razor-sharp humour, his cold, refined, analytical mind, and the dignified distance he maintains towards everything, including his own life – is actually just a mask. His confession and tears wash away that mask and you have an intellectual wretch before you who has pretended to be an aristocrat of the mind; instead of a rare being whose reason has overcome instinct, you have a rotten hulk kneeling in front of you for whom you feel nothing but disgust.

That’s what I told her later, too: “You should have killed me.”

“Would you be able to kill me?” she asked with a laugh.

“I’m afraid I don’t know any more,” I said, but it didn’t sound half as good as it would have one day earlier.

She was getting sick of pulling me along against the current, so she called the servants. She took me to a garden, where we sat under an orange tree and waited for the little kitchen hand to come in the pick-up. Then they threw me in, drove me home, took off my wet things and left me on the bed, unconscious.

I woke up in Sarajevo, a city I had never been to. I had a clear memory of the previous night. We had been drinking at the Piccadilly, a bar behind the cathedral. The father of one of the boys in the group, who owned the place, had the waiter bring us a bottle of whisky as soon as we arrived and got settled in the booths. By ten, we were all drunk – it doesn’t take much with teenagers. I wanted to clear my head and decided to go for a walk and get a trolleybus at the Skenderija sports centre. Snow was falling silently through the universe. Each plume of steam from my mouth revealed perfect snowflakes, and whoever saw them would have recognized the structure the world was created from by the principle of endless iteration. I walked past the Markale market hall, the Eternal Flame, and went down Tito Street to the Sarajka department store, where I turned left and stopped outside a bar. I remembered with the precision of the clearest, crispest photograph, although I had never been inside, that I once went in there with a friend the time he bought a matchbox full of hash from the barista before a school excursion to Venice; we smoked it in Cividale del Friuli, another city I had never been to. Recollecting the details of an excursion someone else was on, not me, I arrived at the banks of River Miljacka. It seethed and swirled, flowing as fast as that piddling river could, I recalled.

The trolleybus had broken down at the Olympic Village. I was still drunk and needed to keep walking in the cold air, so I decided not to wait for a bus. I set off for the suburb of Dobrinja, taking a route I had never gone before. The avenue was deserted and I headed down it, ploughing through snow that seemed immaculate. When I unlocked the door of the flat, I heard water flowing in the bathroom. Then I trod on something. I lifted it up from the floor, and in the gleam of light from the upper, glazed section of the bathroom door I saw it was an empty jar of Zolpidem sleeping tablets.

I knew the layout of the flat intuitively and without turning on the light, I undressed, went into one of the bedrooms and crashed. I didn’t care whose bed it was. I remembered all this when I woke up. I jumped out of bed and went to have a shower because I was supposed to meet a young guy called Amar, whom I didn’t know, in the Bazaar that morning. I found a winter coat in the wardrobe and put on my sturdiest boots. I went outside, donned cap and gloves, and was heading for the tram turntable in a Sarajevo suburb when I saw a reflection in a drop of rain on a pine needle, and only then did I realize I was standing on the terrace of my house by the sea; it was night, the 4th May, and the water was draining away from Ulcinj; the sky had opened up, the lights of the town shimmered beneath the stars that had finally come out, and I didn’t know what was happening to me.