Farewell, Cowboy

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Olja Savicevic. Farewell, Cowboy

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Farewell, Cowboy

Summer 2009 came too early. This meant that ferocious heat had been building up ever since the beginning of May: the spring roses were expiring in the parks and stone troughs.

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As kids we all had that knowledge – in our legs more than in our heads, like a foreign language that waited, rolling around in our middle ear, whose hot-blooded Romance melody we had woven into our own, far more languid Slav one. Me, my sister and Daniel, and the boys too, who came to us from the new estates beyond the railway – the Iroquois Brothers’ family and some other outlanders, always with freshly shaved heads in summer. At that time they wanted to be like us, so they gabbled the way we did, differently from their sweet fat mums and hairy dads whose consonants stuck in their gullets and who used to yell, whenever they needed to speak.

We cobbled that language together from what we learned at home from our parents as much as from the unknown translators of film subtitles and dubbed cartoons; the language we’d picked up in the street and from announcers on the News and stolen from Dylan Dog, Grunf, Sammy Jo Carrington and Zane Grey. It was the musical lingua franca from the west of the city and the centre through the Old Settlement and as far as the railway. Wherever there were kids who talked and called to one another. We sought each other out and hung out, there was nothing else to do, and nor did there need to be.

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