Читать книгу Farewell, Cowboy - Olja Savicevic - Страница 6

2

You didn’t tell me how old you were?’ he said.

‘Seventeen,’ I lied through my teeth and that made him smile.

He’s quite a lot older than me. He has joined-together eyebrows above bright eyes.

‘What're you doing at the market, this early?’ he asked.

‘Nothing much, looking at the fruit and vegetables, taking some photographs. Good colours.’

He had caught me off guard, in other words. In fact I was meant to be collecting news stories from the market about the vendors’ strike; the camera was my room-mate’s, a prop. An amazing new Konica-Minolta – with which neither fruit and veg, nor the old women at the market would need ‘Photoshop’ – they’d never have given me one like it at the office.

We had met three weeks earlier, he and I, at a party at Shit.com that was paying me to write or steal news for their site. I was good at re-working news from competitors’ pages: copying, pasting and touching-up. Even its own author wouldn’t recognize it. It was more than they deserved for the pittance they paid me.

The party was on the fifteenth floor of a skyscraper, and at that time I adored skyscrapers, lifts and all of that, life in the air, in the heights. Understandably, given that I had grown up, as it were in a depression, in a cleft between two houses.

I spent the whole evening being pestered by a scarecrow from Marketing.

Before she turned thirty she would ‘sometimes knock back a little glass of brandy or dark ale,’ she said, but that evening she was smashed.

‘I’m totally smashed.’

Unusually, though, she told me the same three stories each time she met me in the corridor or when she found me sitting somewhere, drinking. The first story was about a colleague from the editorial office, who it was discovered, had once mistakenly phoned the mother of a colleague whom he fancied, moaning and saying: ‘Oh, the things I’d do to you, cara mia.’

As it happened the mother was called Cara and she had a total fit.

‘Too, too awful,’ said my collocutor, opening her eyes wide and then bursting out laughing. ‘But it’s true,’ she added, grabbing me by the elbow with her long nails, like a crab. The second story was about silicone implants and the possibility of breast-feeding when the woman had children, and the third about a Danish artist who was a cannibal.

She went from one person to another at the party, that crazy goose, repeating her stories, exactly the same each time. But people ignored her, turning back to those they were talking to, so she kept finding me and starting all over again. About the colleague who moaned into the telephone of someone’s mother Cara, about implants and breast-feeding and about that performance artist in Copenhagen who ate fat from liposuction of the chin. In a moment of lucidity, she added delightedly that she had ‘totally lost it, like a broken record’ and went off to get some more wine.

That gave me time to escape. I wanted a refuge from this persecution, and I needed to lie down. My room-mate and the boy who drove us to the party had vanished without trace, into one of the bedrooms I assume, and I, dying of boredom, had to wait for a lift.

‘I can’t wait to be thirty,’ my sister said before she became thirty. ‘So that I can go home to bed at midnight, without being embarrassed.’

She used to say that often, I recall.

In the kitchen, people were throwing canapés with sea hare caviar at each other. In the room showing projections of old Disney cartoons, there were some partially dressed damsels lying around, while the guy with glasses showing the films rolled a cigarette and absently stroked the nylon-clad leg of one of the girls.

It was still too early for anything more daring so he put on some silent films. Who on earth would think of showing old films at a party, I thought. Perhaps they were the same people who listened to jazz at a wedding, and then everyone would go into an empty swimming pool and take each other’s photos, turning it into a happening.

In the empty dining room, three guys on Ecstasy were singing a medley of Dalmatian songs, their arms round each other.

‘Someone should exterminate them,’ said the man with joined-up eyebrows and the pale eyes of a dingo. He appeared beside me in the doorway and smiled. He looked more sober than anyone else.

In the hall I noticed my persecutor staggering purposefully in search of a victim.

‘Please,’ I said to the dingo with joined-up eyebrows, ‘if you’ve got a car, get me out of here.’

‘You’re white as a sheet,’ he said, wrapping his jacket round me and leading me out into the wet street, where lights were playfully flickering.

‘Have you had a lot to drink?’ he asked me later, as he unlocked the door of his flat that smelled of newness, of polished parquet and Ikea furniture.

‘Not really. Time of the month,’ I explained like an advert for sanitary towels. ‘That’s why I’m not feeling great.’

‘Ah,’ he said. And pointed me to the toilet. ‘Freshen up,’ he said.

I stayed for a while in the black and white cloakroom, looking at the little women’s bottles on the shelf. I touched each of them. I had never been with someone else’s man before.

When I came into the room he was lying on his stomach without a stitch on, snoring. I took off my panties and lay down, naked, on his back, but he didn’t stir. Towards dawn, when I was already asleep, he turned me over like a huge doll and parted my legs. I didn’t manage to protest or draw him to me before we had both cried out. He once, at length. Me twice, but briefly.

The bedclothes were ruined, spattered with blood and semen.

‘Look what we’ve done,’ I said in the morning.

‘What a pair we are,’ he whispered into my hair, pulling me onto his chest, winding his arms and legs round me as though he had at least twice as many, like a hairy octopus. Maybe a spider, I thought.

Days later we ran into each other at the market.

‘You didn’t call me. And you said you would,’ he said, hopping between the little mounds of Macedonian paprika and Golden Delicious apples. It was winter, freezing, white, noisy mornings and steamy evenings, full of smoke.

‘Wait while I take your photo,’ I said.

He posed with a stupid smile, paralysed with cold. Those eyebrows on his face looked like one big one. Later I lost that photo, or I left it in my flat, when I set off for home, to the Old Settlement, with no clear plan, apart from leaving Zagreb and not coming back.

‘The last time was bloody,’ I said as I pointed the lens towards him. ‘I wasn’t sure that you wanted to be reminded.’

‘You really could be seventeen,’ he said.

‘Well, I am, in a way,’ I said.

He took me home, we put the camera down on the little Ikea table, undressed and stayed together for two years.

Just before the end it sometimes happened that I shaved my armpits with his lady’s razor and used her brush to do my hair.

With time everything becomes practical. Besides, it would be strange for me to be physically repelled by a woman whose husband I was sleeping with.

We produced the ineradicable strong, bitter smell of fresh milk.

Sometimes I wondered whether she could sense my presence in her apartment – saliva on the pillow, skin and hairs in the dust under the bed – or maybe he did a thorough job of clearing it all up.

What kind of... relationship was it? As soon as I approached, he would shove himself into me. Lying, sitting, standing, kneeling, he’d throw me onto my elbows, lift me onto the wall, a table, a tree, filling me.

I grabbed him. Kissed. Scratched. Hit. Gripped him, gripped him.

Stroked him, stroked him.

As we fucked, my arms grew out towards him, even face down.

On the morning my sister phoned about Ma, I was sitting naked in his kitchen, watching CDs, which were strung up on the balconies of the neighbouring building to scare the crows and pigeons, dancing in the wind. If I closed my eyes and ears tight, I could hear music from all directions in my head.

He had slipped out to the shop for some breakfast, he looked happy when I saw him for the last time, smiling with his dingo eyes. But by then I didn’t love him any more.

I dressed unhurriedly and slammed the door shut.

The next day I left Zagreb and went to the Old Settlement.

It was forty degrees outside, in the bus probably only five, bitterly cold. The driver had put on the air-conditioning.

A short-legged white terrier crossed the empty road, so I couldn’t even say that there wasn’t so much as a dog in the streets.

‘Rusty,’ said a female voice, grabbing me by the shoulder.

I was sitting with my forehead stuck to the dirty window of the bus that went from the bus-station, through the car-ferry port into the outlying housing developments. I had shoved my suitcase behind my feet. Houses, mostly without facings, but some white, various colours, were rising up in Tetris hills and hillocks at great speed. Every time I raised my head, on the hill in front of me there were yet more unfinished cubes with satellite antennae. The wind blew the soil off those hills, while goats had long ago devoured the original vegetation. In summer the north wind brought fires, and above the houses, on the mountain, black pines grew. Here and there one caught sight of a bush of Maquis, prickly broom or a palm with tiny inedible dates.

I stared at the face of the woman who had roused me from unconsciousness. The bus had left the bus station and the doors hissed shut.

‘Rusty, I hasn’t seen you in an age... why’ve you come? Eh?’

Her skirt was tugged right up under her breasts; she was wearing shiny, lacquered pink boots with broken heels. She was swaying over my head, holding onto the strap with one hand.

Only someone from the Old Settlement could have called me Rusty.

‘You’ve forgot me...’

Inflamed eyes under a shock of bleached, almost white curls.

‘You’ve forgot me. Maria Čarija. The Iroquois’ cousin, for God’s sake!’

To the delight of the passengers, she tapped her open mouth with outstretched fingers briefly and jerkily several times, producing the old war cry of her tribe from the railway track by way of greeting.

She laughed with large yellow teeth, a young woman. What was with her hair? It stuck up in places in long and short thick white tufts, and in places there was none at all. Maria Čarija. That face.

‘Why’ve you come? Why’ve you come?’ she asked through her cracked lips.

‘I remembers you,’ I said quickly. ‘I’ve come. The world goes round, and you always comes back to the same place.’

‘You’s never does remember me,’ she said loudly, right into my face.

Now the other passengers were looking at us quite openly, but cautiously, as you look at a spectacle involving two lunatics. If only I wasn’t dressed like this, in red. If only I wasn’t so tall. If I were smaller, paler, more functional.

‘But I knows you. Oh yes, I knows you.’

She laughed with her big yellow teeth, hopping from foot to foot. She had followed Daniel secretly, couldn’t stop pursuing him, there was nothing to be done – he was like a magnet to her.

I push my case towards the door. There are still four stops before mine, I hope I’ll be able to walk that far. She had come close to my cheek. I noticed the locks of her hair had been pulled out, drawing blood.

‘I knows your brother too. I knows who killed him,’ she whispered.

‘Oh, of course you do, why don’t you tell it all,’ I muttered crossly, to myself.

The harmonica-like middle of the bus shifted under my feet. The doors hissed again and in the next shot I saw from the pavement Čarija’s face pressed against the bus window. She was licking the glass and smiling, cheerily, without malice.

And so I had made it. Yes, I’d made it! I’d returned to my hometown: nothing more than a vast rubbish dump, mud and olive groves, glorious dust, evenings on the empty terrace of the Illyria hotel, heavy metals in the air, excrement and pine-woods, cats and slippery fish scales on the greasy slipway and the sea stretched out as far as November, when the north wind gets up.

On my route home, I see shopping malls and forests of jumbo posters, tundra and sorrowful bungalows on the road, but before that I pass along brightly-lit walkways. Down below are the cruisers in the passenger harbour, guides with their arms in the air in front of a column of Japanese and American pensioners with prostheses and toupés; casinos, the mild winds of hashish, the stench of bodies and perfume; acid, trans-folk as well as Saint Tropez, Monte Carlo, Cista Provo, belle dame sans merci, girls in high heels squeezed into white nylon and animal skins; clean-shaven lads jingling the keys of polished cars, their hands, as they touch my face, smell of vinyl and genitalia, money and tobacco.

Music blares, handfuls of worthless coins are scattered over the copper bar top. Salon Sodom. Cafe Eldorado.

There, on the glass and granite quay, while the yachts sail out of the harbour, the workers who swear that they destroyed communism are on strike. Their thinning hair is tied in ponytails, some have bad teeth, all have large hands and look younger than their wives. They sit around the fountain, among the trampled begonias, Indian figs and dog mess, smoking York or Marlboro and saying that nothing’s going to change that’ll do them any good.

In the early hours, after midnight, women and men take off their clothes, discard their sandals and go into the sea. They stand and immerse themselves in the sandy shallows. Girls and young men drink long cocktails out of thin glasses. Some foreign students lie on their backs, their legs together and wave their arms to leave the imprints of wings. That game in the sand is called drawing angels.

The summer night has replaced the day in the flaming centre of the town, under the moon’s bloody wink.

That is where I shall erupt from the total darkness of a side street and pass through a scene like this, pure and flat as a drawing – and come out of it appalled that so much life goes on without me.

My suitcase clatters along behind me, a faithful wheeled dog. Even if someone had picked me up and shaken me upside down, I wouldn’t have had enough cash for a taxi. People pass me in noisy groups: They are showered, with loud waves of brilliantine in their hair, while I smell of sweat and the sour bus. My short dress sticks to my back and legs.

I look round several times, afraid that Čarija will appear behind me and spit into my hair. We used to do that at one time. I’m almost ready to give the daft bitch a hiding, because of today, because of every yesterday and day before yesterday, because of things that aren’t connected and because once, long ago her brothers cut my head open with a stone.

Maria had always been in the background: a silent Iroquois from that bellicose tribe. If she so much as made a sound, one of her relatives would bash her with a stick or turn on her with a ‘None of your crap’. Later her status improved – when it transpired that not one of the Iroquois, not even Tomi, could fire an air gun as accurately. When the fair came to town at New Year, the Iroquois Brothers took her to the shooting gallery and afterwards exchanged their trophies – lucky charms and teddy bears – with the gallery manager for a bottle of Ballantine’s.

‘Iroquois Maria can hit a bird’s eye in flight,’ the lads said.

But I remember her most clearly in connection with our ginger Jill.