Читать книгу Singer in the Night - Olja Savicevic - Страница 3

Part One

LETTERS TO LOUD LOVERS

‘Here at last is a true lover,’ said the Nightingale. ‘Night after night have I sung of him, though I knew him not: night after night have I told his story …’

Welcoming letter

Dear citizens, householders, close friends, fellow townsfolk, mild and attentive civil servants and waiters, courageous and patient nurses, magicians’ secretaries, dressers of abundant hair, eternal children in short trousers, seasonal ice-cream sellers, dealers in intoxicating substances, drivers who brake on bends, gondoliers of urban orbits, captains on foreign ships, foreign girls on captains, neighbours – agreeable disco gladiators, neighbouring proto-astronauts and everyone else in Dinko Šimunović Street, not to list you all,

I am writing because before I leave I want to tell all of you that we live in the loveliest street, in a wonderful city, in a country without match or peer!

The sun rises at five, warms us, and sets at eight, sometimes at nine, and at night, without our knowing it, cascades of meteors pour over our heads, while down below, in front of our doorways gleam the little golden stars of apartment bells, caper flowers close their calyxes filled with heady aroma, and the quiet air refreshed by nocturnal moisture is riven only by lovers’ cries. Summer in the city is rainy and hot and plants from ground-floor gardens beside the root and trunk of skyscrapers grow as far as the birds, up to the tenth or fourteenth floor. Some may find that monstrous, but it’s beautiful. Towards evening, cats awaken, and go scampering along the branches of the climbing plants, they fly over the narrow sky-filled gaps between apartments, with the occasional curse flying after them, which makes the image real and protects us, up to a point, from madness.

It may be like this also in other towns on the meridian and further afield, but do they have such tall and proud men, modest champions with powerful thighs and such well-built women with ponytails and long nails, somewhat impudent, in the way that a thorn on a rose or bramble by the road is impudent, do they have such aromatic pines constantly under their city windows, such melodious voices, such healing sea and such a street, a cheerful torrent, a musical ladder, a flight of steps travelling into future memories, into incorruptible childhood? And are they aware of it?

Because, if you do not know how lucky you are, then you really are out of luck. Enjoy it all, even unthinkingly!

With love from your neighbour,

Nightingale,

35 Dinko Šimunović Street.

Two weeks had passed since that event, and I had set out in search of the man who wrote the letter. After a brief visit to Split, I decided to turn off the motorway onto a side road and to speed off into that steppe-like landscape where even a goat would go hungry, towards his native village.

Even then I was aware that I was finding it increasingly hard to concentrate and that my thoughts were slipping away. I could not recall the meaning of a road sign: a consequence of my state of mind, or perhaps ordinary emotional excitement. (Maybe both). That’s why I’m going to record them – those thoughts and letters – so that my notes about everything that was happening or was going to happen in connection with all this would remain preserved for me (primarily for me, yes) and maybe for someone else, my dear.

Mitrovići, Nightingale’s village, in the hills where the frontiers of Croatia meet Bosnia and Montenegro, has a small U for the Croatian Ustasha and a sticker of the Hajduk football club logo stuck beside the name of the village, above the name is a stop sign – you have to stop (although there’s never anyone there) before continuing on your way.

His mother met me in front of the bell-tower plonked in the middle of the village. The clock on the tower, black hands on stone, was fifteen minutes late and pointed to midday. She was alone, she and several flies, and she had not sat down but, large and round as she was, she was rocking from one foot to the other. She had wrapped a black scarf with bright pink roses on it round her head: her face blossomed into a smile when she caught sight of me. The beginning of September is hot, but not in that lethal July way. September is summer after ecstasy, lazy, stupefying and discreetly illuminated in the moment before everything that has just ripened begins to rot. Everything has been brought to its height, in tastes and colours, and then subdued into an over-rich tenderness, melancholy.

She said ‘Bloody ‘ell you looks great, better than on telly!’

She said that and kissed me on both cheeks, then took my arm and led me into the house on the square.

I looked dreadful, after two days’ driving with a broken air-conditioner (the fact that the car is a convertible didn’t help) and after I’d been peed on by a dog, but I didn’t say so, after all that I was glad of that moment, that compliment.

‘Nothing from Gale,’ I say, taking out his last letter. ‘I was given this by the lad who’s looking after his flat, living there. (I didn’t mention the other letters.)

She took a carob pod out of her apron pocket and chewed it. Then offered me another. ‘More scribbling, damn ‘is eyes. I can’t read it any more. So tell me – no one knows where he is. What do we do now? How’re you going to find him? And what if he’s not in Bosnia? You’d do better not to look for him.’

She’s called Josipa, Nightingale’s Mum.

She flapped her hands over her thighs a few times – I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Don’t worry, my dear,’ I say. ‘I’ll find him. The world is limited, but time is infinite.’

She looked at me quizzically as though I had spoken in Chinese and swatted something with her hand.

‘It’s a quote from a graffito, my dear. Gale wrote it,’ I say. I didn’t want her to think I was making fun of her. I felt stupid and in my awkwardness I downed in one gulp the brandy she had poured for me.

She put her hand out towards the letter. ‘So, let’s have a look!’

She read slowly, her lower lip forming the letters.

‘He had put it in all his neighbours’ letterboxes before he went away, instead of saying goodbye I suppose.’

‘It always surprises me, what he writes. But I can’t make anything of this. Is he sick, what do you think?’

I shook my head.

‘I’m glad he’s okay. Since when does he love Split?’

‘Sorry?’

‘In the letter he loves Split. He didn’t like it much before, he didn’t even go out, except at night like a fool.’

She squinted at me and the roses on her head shook.

‘He was never completely normal, ever since my late husband gave him the name Nightingale, I would have called him Daniel or Petar. We were old when he came along, maybe that’s why he’s like he is. It’s shameful in the village, me having a child at forty-two and my man a whole sixty years old. Our neighbours were getting grandchildren, and we had a baby. But to hell with the village, bugger the village and the whole district. But I won’t say a word, I’ll shut up,’ – here she started to laugh – ‘because the way his daddy used to chirp at him like a bird, he could have been a peacock or a swan.’

She wiped her nose on a kitchen cloth and poured us both another glass.

‘My parents had my brother when they were in their forties too, so what?’ I say ‘He’s more normal than many others, my dear, Gale is. Nightingale is a real artist, that thing with the letters to his neighbours, that’s in fact a great performance.’ I wanted to say something consoling. ‘Besides, Gale and I are similar, nonsensical, a bad lot here. Each to his own.’

‘You’re an artist, for sure, how come he is? He scribbles on walls, upsets people. The police are after him.’ She chomped on her carob, which must have been too hard, because she spat it out into the sink. ‘If he’s so clever, why’s he skint?’

She was angry, her cheeks flushed.

‘Is there a performance where he doesn’t get in touch with his mother for a year and more? Or makes a child he doesn’t even know exists for two years,’ she adds.

‘That’s bit radical.’ (Does Gale have a child?)

‘Radical, radical.’ She agreed.

Then she changed the subject; she ran through the TV programmes and politics and made us supper after which I kicked off my high heels, washed in completely cold water, because there was no hot water in the boiler, and quickly fell asleep in Gale’s childhood bed in the white room.

Beside the pillow, on a little table, lay a mouth organ, polished, cheerful, and beside the bed was a pair of school slippers, size 10. I had never seen such enormous school slippers, a child’s object. Josipa had left them out for me, but they were several sizes too big. There were a few school readers on the shelves, in the drawers neatly folded clothes belonging to some former child who would never return. The boat’s log-book, which I am looking for, is almost certainly not there, the old lady would have found it already. They never got on, the controversial Nightingale and his old mother.

Above the bed hung a tapestry of the Mona Lisa, which had once been sewn long ago by the young Josipa. The village women thought it was the Holy Virgin, she told me, smiling, ‘let them think so, let them, bugger me if I care what they think!’

For years afterwards the embroidered Mona Lisa became an important figure in Gale’s stories, sonnets, sketches and strip-cartoons. In the room, it rests calmly in the whiteness of the empty walls behind glass in an ornate plaster frame, sometimes friendly and gentle, but sometimes capricious and caustic, the Gioconda pricked out 13,190 times with a needle.

‘I don’t get that, what’s the point of these tapestries, who dreamed them up, what a scandalous waste of time. Is it obtuse or Zen? That’s crap, it’s really like my work. Except – I do it for money.’

That thought used to warm me like hot sun, but with time, with time it has cooled down a lot. But, hey, let’s get back to the story.

Around seven in the morning, we opened, then closed, the house door. I set off towards the car, accompanied by Josipa. She had a new headscarf, yellow, with blue peonies, non-existent in nature, but nevertheless peonies, wonderful peonies.

‘You’re dead set on finding him … Watch out for the mujahideen!’

I started the car.

‘Why them?’

‘They were on the News yesterday.’

‘Don’t believe the News, my dear.’

Perhaps it isn’t fair to tell an old person not to believe the News, that might freak them out, I thought. But still, I probably don’t have much clue about old people, my parents aren’t alive (my Ma died three years ago, darling). I remembered them beautiful, in their prime – they didn’t have a chance to get on my nerves. A friend of mine said that old people have selective deafness and they only take in what they want or can bear to hear.

Josipa shouted: ‘I’m only joking, I’m joking!’

I felt better, although I would not have sworn blind that she really was joking. I didn’t want to think of Josipa as a bigoted old hag, it’s hard to love people, they often mess things up. It would be nicer if dear, kind people weren’t chauvinistic idiots, but they are. I got out of the car quickly and hugged her, tight. ‘We’ll be in touch!’

I see her in my head (I do see her, now, clearly). A tall old lady, the tallest among the babushkas. The mother of my former seasonal bridegroom – the unrecovered-from Nightingale – is waving to me with both hands. It’s an Indian summer and in that pose she could be a mascot for it. Above her flowery head goldfinches flitted into the empty, pale early-morning sky, and the clock on the old bell-tower, the one I already mentioned, was still showing three in the afternoon.

I set off towards the border, towards Bosnia. The road swallowed me sullenly.

All right, I’ll tell you. So, my name is Clementine. On the outside, I’m a blonde orange. I have silicon lips, I have a Brazilian hairstyle, I drive a two-seater Mazda MX-5 convertible, gold, but inside I’m a black orange. Full of black juice.

The day before my meeting with Nightingale’s mother, the meeting with which I began this story, I travelled from Ljubljana to Split. I decided to make the journey after I had spent the whole of the preceding week vainly calling Gale every day. When I tried to pay money for the boat’s berth I discovered that his account had been closed months before, at the marina they told me he had paid all his bills, but, they’d noticed that for some time no one had been coming to the boat. His mobile was dead and at first that annoyed me, then it worried me (we had not been in touch often, in fact very rarely in recent years, and then mainly in connection with our shared boat, but nevertheless).

Then I began calling his family, our common acquaintances, our former neighbours: a whole lost life so unconnected with my present life that it could have been anyone’s, and that whole mini-Atlantis rose to the surface, my dear. None of the people Gale and I had known could say exactly in which direction that sexy bird had flown off last summer. They weren’t troubled, not even his mother to whom he had simply mentioned that he had something to do in Bosnia, not even she was troubled, she just looked anxious for a moment, or so it seemed to me, because that crazy Gale came and went like that, no one ever knew when. What I found on the Internet turned out to be of most use: the blog he had written for a while had been dead for a long time, he had completely abandoned the virtual life which he had in any case found vulgar, but Google knew anyway – he had worked for a while in Libya, then in Chernobyl. Then a photograph appeared and was published on a foreign portal: a mural with Bosnia and his name written under it. And that was all.

Officially, he lived in our old street, Dinko Šimunović Street, on the tenth floor in the same building and flat in which I had spent some time with him, but, as I said, I knew nothing about the last years of his life, although in the depths of my heart he had remained my beloved. It’s not that other loves hadn’t come along, my dear, but in Gale’s case that had no bearing on my preference.

My encounter with Dinko Šimunović Street two weeks earlier had not been agreeable (had so many years really passed?). I stepped into the street cautiously and briskly, not looking around too much. It was a hot afternoon and the street was deserted, although little stars beside the intercom indicated that tourists had penetrated even into these concrete oases. Gale is right, it’s the loveliest street in Split, a serious street, not a little street, lovely little streets are something else, there are lots of them, but I like big streets. And I like tall buildings and skyscrapers. And I like the twentieth century more than the nineteenth or the seventh. I’m not sure about the twenty-first yet. I once lived here as a child, with my parents, but, after my father died, my mother and brother moved to a smaller town and sold our flat (every inaccessible dirty join, every hidden crack was mine), I moved just a few hundred metres east, to Gale’s place (Ma could never forgive me, poor Ma, I left her so easily).

I don’t know which was worse in my encounter with Šimunović Street: what had stayed the same or what had changed. I didn’t have the time or the will for such emotions, to stop and rethink. I hadn’t expected it to shake me up. It was like that situation when you rush out in your slippers to empty the rubbish and meet some shithead from your childhood who keeps you standing beside the dustbin for fifteen minutes and under his insistent gaze you grow visibly older and more decrepit, fatter. The street looked at me, it watched me patiently, from all directions. I had to look at it, in passing, to see where I was walking: skyscrapers, tall, slender buildings, the flight of steps, the sea. This was a return to the intimate, oh boy.

The things we have and know drain away and vanish, new ones cover them over like grass over a grave; the world of the inert is closest to death. If anyone thinks I’m mistaken, let them try to imagine a town without birds, insects or people, a town of inanimate things.

Or a hill without plants.

Or an old dance hall filled with the ghosts of dancers.

Or a house through which war has swirled, after which the blood has congealed and it has been aired of the stench of soldiers’ boots, the hot, sweaty grenades have cooled and lie in wait, put away in the bottom of a cupboard, tucked under bedding.

Or a snowy wasteland when the sun goes down behind a mountain.

Or a closed road.

A factory: machines and turbines without workers.

That is emptiness such as a real desert will never know, because for centuries nothing has inhabited it apart from eternity. It is not unusual for people to imagine the setting of paradise just like that. At that moment there is more death in a cup after the coffee has been drunk and the colour drained, than in the Sahara.

Gale (I’m always debating with him in my head) believed in technological progress in the spirit of socialism and used to say that at some stage soon, when people, all people, would be going on outings to the Moon, he would put on an exhibition there of all the things that are important, to everyone, or at least to him. There’s no atmosphere there, no oxidation, and so no death of the inert and objects we care about really will last forever or at least longer than us. He would reproduce the whole of our street. Of course, when you’re seventeen, it’s easy to fall in love with someone who wants to put on an exhibition on the Moon in order to save beautiful or important things from decay, although I was already aware then that if not everyone could go to Tito’s island of Brioni, they wouldn’t get to the Moon either.

And what’s left for death if you forget everything before it? Is there anything left to die? When things turn the wrong way round and oblivion precedes death instead of death oblivion? It’s presumably a defence mechanism if the body decays so rapidly after it’s emptied by oblivion.

Where were we? Oh yes, Šimunović Street. Proof that tall buildings and skyscrapers can be attractive, that third Split, Split 3, Trstenik, my borough. Proof that socialism can be beautiful, as Gale would say.

In the lift, opposite the door to the flat, I straightened my skirt and fixed my make-up. Without lipstick a woman is naked, my mother used to say and that habit of using make-up, which some people find stupid, but is definitely entertaining, has remained with me from my teens.

‘Stone ve crows. I mus’ be dreamin’,’ that’s what the man in his thirties who introduced himself as Joe Pironi said when he opened the door, with a smile. He was wearing Bermudas: between his thin hairy legs a Maltese (called Corto, wittily but really) peered and barked at me. The next thing I noticed about Pironi was his oversized shaved head and blue eyes with half-closed lids.

‘Is someone, like, makin’ a film?’ Here he paused and lit a cigarette. ‘I know, crap joke.’

I stood on the threshold genuinely afraid of the dog’s snarling little teeth and explained that I was looking for Gale. I said I hadn’t seen him in years, maybe ten, but I wanted to sell the boat, quickly, and I needed his agreement. The boat was in his name, my dear, but it was still my boat, my inheritance, although, it’s true, he had maintained it the whole time. I scowl when I lie, but no matter, Pironi wasn’t listening to me in any case.

He said: ‘Who’d ever fink, mate. You wouldn’ credit it! So it never crossed ‘is daft mind vat he knows you and you’d come for the keys of the boat. Yeah, the cunt knew you’d come. You and Gale, man and wife, good as. But ‘e’s not ‘ere, ol’ girl. He went off to look for someone he made a kid wiv two or free years ago. He may be in Bosnia – Livno or Tuzla – or Timbuctoo. If you ask me, it’s not worth lookin’. Better wait till ‘e gets in touch.’

The Malteser in Pironi’s arms was still barking. He put it down on a table and from a drawer took out cigarette papers, tobacco and grass. The little dog spun round in a circle and tried to get down. I didn’t have time to wait for him (Gale) to get in touch. There were no books on the shelves, not a single one, which meant he had no intention of coming back. But still, his strange writing outfit was dangling from a hanger on the door of the wardrobe as though he had left it there the previous day.

Pironi said: ‘Wan’ a puff? Since you’re ‘ere, we could spark up a bit? ‘S no fun solo. Homegrown, from Vis, not sprayed, sweet as honey.’

‘What the hell,’ I said, ‘it must be healthy, I’ll have a drag.’

We sprawled on the couch. Corto retreated under it and curled up between our shoes.

Pironi said: ‘Struth, ol’ girl, I wouldn’ con you for ve world, I’ve no clue where that waster’s buggered off to, maybe Travnik, maybe Bugojno. I’m just, like, looking after the flat. You know, a Croat, so’s it’s occupied, if you get my drift. Last summer, before he scarpered, he got up the nose of the whole neighbourhood, the police were after him, you wouldn’ believe it. Vat made him mad, he didn’t expect that kind of reaction to his letters. It’s unreal, you know, ‘e’s a dreamer. I told him – give it a rest, bro, forget those jerks, mind your own business.’

I said that, in actual fact, it was Gale’s business. ‘He’s an artist, my dear, he has to interact with his surroundings, he has to change them.’

‘You’re kidding me, yeah? I’m an artist too. You must’ve seen those graffiti: I’m hungry, give me what you can, in front of the door, above the intercom? Right, you saw it. I’m not pretentious like some vat puts on an act, I’m more interested in reality.’

I asked him whether he was a gay activist, because it looked to me like gay graffiti although it had a socio-economic base. He asked, of course, did I want to find out and laughed: ‘how did I know it didn’t mean give me salami in my sandwich, for instance?’

‘You’ve got a dirty little mind,’ he said, grinning.

He said, Pironi did, that Gale had nearly got him in the shit with those letters, and something else about some business with explosives placed in a Split bank, because on the wall people had found the same sentences as in one of Gale’s letters. ‘They had him in, for questioning, twice,’ said Pironi, ‘but they couldn’t pin anything on him, because the letters had been sent to the whole street, several hundred copies.’ (Magnificent, magnificent)

But nothing concrete about where I might find Gale.

Last summer, the June before last, somewhat more than a year ago, in Dinko Šimunović Street some unknown lovers had made love loudly until dawn, waking the sleeping populace, and it was a hot summer, with daytime temperatures of forty-two and airless nights and many wide open windows.

Judging by everything Joe Pironi told me, and he told me a lot, disjointedly, I gathered the following: the letters that Gale had zealously dropped into his neighbours’ mailboxes had upset the whole street. They upset the street more than the reason they were written, although that too had sent sparks flying. I was agreeably surprised by their lack of indifference, even if it was negative. I was used to people here reacting only to football, which made Gale think them limited and worthy of contempt, but I was more tolerant and practical, because these were the people we had grown up with, I would have felt oppressed to think negatively about them or to think about them at all. Compromise, always compromise, well, I had to live with people or die alone.

In June of last year in Dinko Šimunović Street, Gale worked by night, so Joe Pironi told me: a well-known foreign, American, magazine had commissioned a strip cartoon from him, which was important to him – I presume it still is important to him – and noise interfered with his concentration.

On the tenth evening he, Gale, not Pironi, felt a powerful moral obligation to ask the overly-loud lovers to be a bit quieter (I don’t really believe that). But since, according to Pironi, he didn’t know who the moaners were, he wrote to almost everyone, working his way systematically, scattering letters into their letterboxes, but the groaning continued for three whole weeks, maybe even longer, into the second week of July. The street has this unusual cascading architecture, narrow buildings with hundreds of windows, and if someone is making love by the south-facing windows, high under the clouds, it is no simple matter to determine the source. It lasted for three whole weeks, maybe even longer, into the second week of July. Then it stopped.

And before Nightingale completed his game with the letters, which he had evidently entered into with his whole comical, idiotic and wonderful soul, a meeting of the tenants’ councils of the buildings nearest to the sighing in Šimunović Street was called:

the letters were collected and handed over to the police:

the police didn’t really know what to do with the material,

they warned Gale that he was causing a disturbance, threatening him with reporting him for violating the peace and public order,

‘Crazy stuff,’ said Pironi.

In short, as far as I could make out, they banned him from completing his ‘project’ of letters to the neighbourhood.

‘Banned him? What was craziest of all,’ said Pironi, ‘vey even accused ‘im that ‘e, Gale, was ve maniac groaning in ve night.’

Pironi didn’t believe that (nor do I), but he couldn’t confirm it, as he was at that time living with another friend in another part of town.

Pironi said: ‘What do vey mean ‘project’, honeybun, ‘e calls it artistic expression when ‘e takes a piss. Get it, it’s a question of morals how far you as an artist should invade people’s privacy. On ve other ‘and you keep invading it, ven it’s a question of packaging, if you get my drift. You ‘as to package it, mate, I say, but he doesn’t listen.’

‘He didn’t package it – that’s the problem,’ I say.

‘And did they discover who it was? Who was the doer of the debauchery?’

They didn’t, they never did, they calmed down. But it was madness, his bicycle had once broken down so he spent the night at Gale’s place while it was going on. ‘It wasn’t true,’ he said. ‘You see what this street is like, a million open windows, it reverberates: it could have been anyone.’ (It’s unseemly for people to go around at night banging on doors to check whether folk are fucking.)

Gale’s flat/bed-sitter stretched around me – I was looking for windows – a rather large room with no internal walls, different from the flat I remember, which did not seem to suit the Gale I had known, and that lack of recognition disheartened me (and maybe frightened me).

I said to Pironi: ‘ What kind of morals, don’t make me laugh. Someone’s letters really bug them. Matey.’

He said: ‘Hey, ol’ girl, take it easy, you’re gettin’ het up for nothing. I haven’ a clue what he wrote to ‘em, but it got to ‘em. You can ask Bogdan Diklić to show you the letters. He’s on the first floor. He’s not an actor, no way. Chair of the Tenants’ Council, that type. Shall I go? D’you fink I’ve got more chance with Bogdan Diklić than you?! Why, you’re a celebrity! You’d feel awkward. Ah, ha, so you’re not that famous. I get you, but there’s no fuckin’ way Diklić will give me ve letters. He takes it seriously. I mean seriously seriously. He’s fifty and he lives wiv ‘is mother, ‘e doesn’t even jerk off any more, ‘e ‘as to take fings seriously. Chair of the Tenants’ Council. Another smoke? Ok, ol’ girl, all ve more for me.’

Something along those lines. As he talked, Pironi’s verbal ping-pong balls skittered round about, bouncing off the rubber edges of my consciousness. After a while I became aware of an agreeable warmth on my feet.

Pironi yelled: ‘Corto, son of a bitch! Hey, ol’ girl, don’t be mad, ol’ girl. You’re ‘is now, ‘e’s marked you, now he finks you’re, you know, okay.’

Like hell.

I wasn’t angry. Joe Pironi went to the toilet to get a sponge and paper to wipe up the dog’s pee, but since he was taking his time, I used paper handkerchiefs and water from the kitchen tap. In passing, strategically, I opened a few drawers where Gale’s things ought to have been, in case I could somewhere catch sight of the boat’s log, but they were empty. I stuffed his writing outfit into my bag, deciding I had a right to it (as his former wife, my dear, I could always try that line). Corto followed me with his little pink tongue out. Unlike big dogs, which filled me with confidence, I’ve always been afraid of small dogs as of all other hysterics … I wagged my finger at him, opened the door, summoned the lift. Although it was the ground floor.

Maybe I could have knocked on Diklić’s door on the first floor, but I didn’t feel like it. I was a bit high, peed-on, sweaty and hungry and not in a very good mood, and the chances of some zealous chair of the tenants’ council passing those incriminating letters over to me were, even without all the aforementioned, minimal. (What madness, who on earth would run away because of a bunch of letters.)

On my way out, at the lobby door, I came across two thin little girls playing with a plastic doll. ‘I’m not sure I love you,’ one of them told the doll seriously and crossly, and then hid it from me. No one in the street, midday scorching heat, the town is still full of tourists at this time, down in the necropolis, in the centre, on the beaches, but Split district 3 is wonderfully empty as though the whole summer had lain down over it to rest a bit.

My eye was caught by a grafitto on the flyover under which one could see the sea and on which someone had written in huge letters MEANING. In the distance I heard the honk of a ferry horn, the captain’s intrepid bass baritone. Oh Nightingale, where on earth are you? Where’ve you been my whole life?

Before dusk fell, I went to the marina, to Woody Mary, our boat.

She was swaying in the dark shallows of the harbour, bewitching as ever, at least to me.

She was in the same place, at the same jetty, as before, but unlike his flat, Gale did take care of the boat: freshly painted, white and blue as in the song, brass and copper gleaming, polished, although a year had passed, and more, since the captain’s departure, and the boat’s teak – rosy, warm-blooded, and alive beneath my hand, and, seeing that there was no one near, I kissed it loudly.

I hugged the good, constant, beloved Woody Mary like I used to, when I would throw myself down on the prow, carefree, wet and happy, like a young bitch.

I sat on the stern for a while, airing my head.

A light mistral breeze towards evening and a pink sky promising fine weather in the west. If I were to photograph or describe that scene it would be banal kitsch. Beautiful things have no need of art, which has already long been better suited to the half ugly or entirely vile.

A producer once flattered me: that’s why people like your series, good-looking lovers, emotions, falling in love, happy end, all that life denies them and that contemporary art cannot give them. That’s how one producer flattered me (not Kalemengo, Kalemengo is a decent guy), but one who wanted to have it off with me, in which in the end he succeeded, probably because at that stage of my life I was denied all of the above: good-looking lovers, emotions, falling in love among other things.

And to make matters worse, that poor dreary slob of a producer who produces productions was right.

People needed a lot of cheap, quick emotion, they needed it in greater quantities than it was possible to produce, teams of typists banged away on keyboards, churning out total nebulousness, without investing an iota of passion in it, just angry typing slaves’ sweat, but out of that sweat germinated and bloomed abundant, copious magnificent gunk which in turn generated laughter and tears, loves, fears and passions and moved people like the best works of art.

Let’s face it, gunk has moved the vast majority of people and filled their thoughts probably more than the best work of art ever could.

Oh no: oh yes. That’s the way it is.

At the end of that day, my mobile showed twenty-four unanswered calls (a dozen from Kalemengo, two from my brother, and – to my surprise – two from Bert), but not one I felt like replying to. When it rang again, I wondered how it would be to throw the phone into the sea and watch it sink, dumb and deaf. It would be like a small victory. However, that momentary relief would have brought existential complications, and I had already decided to return to Ljubljana as soon as day broke. So instead I switched the mobile off until morning (sleep, sleep little master).

When I finally unlocked the door of the boat, moved aside the hatch cover and slipped under the prow where I was to spend the first night of the journey I am writing about, things changed: Although I rummaged through everything, I didn’t find the boat’s log in the boat either, but under the mast, on the table, carefully laid in a box, those letters of Gale’s awaited me (I shall read some of them here).

The difference between Gale and a lunatic lies in the fact that Gale is a worker, truly Japanese in his craft. Had he engaged in any slightly more lucrative occupation with as much zeal, who knows, my dear, he would be a wealthy man. So, I crawled in under the prow and read until my torch battery gave out – since I didn’t have a clue where the electricity cable was.

LETTER FROM A WISTFUL DOG

Distinguished people, canine friends and others,

I believe you are familiar with the little acoustic scandal that has been rocking our neighbourhood in recent days, or perhaps you are the very ones who have been filling our silent nights with decibels of passion – whatever.

Whether you make love quietly like dogs or loudly like cats is not the main issue, I am addressing you with the desire, prompted by the aforementioned events, to share with you a dog’s thoughts about love. In this appeal, I ask just one thing of you: that, caught up in a vortex of passion or exasperated or astounded by feverish cries from the darkness, you do not forget that as well as feline love that screeches there is also canine love that whines. Remember that at least in the morning, when the common sense and innocence of a beginning briefly reign, toss a bone or two to those genuinely hungry for love and meat.

This letter is also a study of unrequited loyalty – it is well-known that loyalty is inherent in canine love. But loyalty, contrary to widespread and superficial conviction, is not always monogamous, just as monogamy need not always be loyal or devoted, with either humans or dogs.

You may remember, perhaps, the handsome mixture of schnauzer and who-knows-what dog from our street, whom you called Shakespeare-in-love? That shaggy fellow (we’ll go on calling him Shakespeare, so there’s no confusion), at the time of the banishment of a certain little bitch Gara from the district of Mertojak, would run away from his comfortable home in Šimunović Street, to settle himself outside her gate. For three years in a row, he exposed himself to peril by dashing through the busy streets, for two weeks he would be without a roof over his head, hungry and thirsty, dependent on charity; he sat outside her courtyard resolutely, like a hairy monument, waiting for Gara to show her little tail.

Barking intrepidly and baring her teeth, she drove all other dogs from her hindquarters, which was not easy, because, we all remember, when her mistress took her out for walks, she would return at a run, with her little dog in her arms, accompanied by insatiable Alsatians, Labradors and Dachshunds which had broken their chains and, driven by their senses, roamed through the streets wordlessly and furiously pleading for a partner.

But only one, outside that hypnotised pack, made a suitable mate for her and as soon as her mistress looked away, little Gara would leap over the fence, lift up her tail, and Shakespeare-in-love would readily lock on.

Once, when they were locked like that, blinded like an amorous Janus, the unfortunate happy couple spent hours outside the back entrance to the building, and your children tugged at them and threw stones at them – but they were unable to part. That can even happen to humans, sometimes a timorous heart can block the nether regions, let alone to dogs whose brains are full of moonlight and adrenalin.

When, for the second spring in a row, Gara’s young mistress was surprised by a damp heap of puppies in her laundry basket, that marked the end of Gara and Shakespeare-in-love’s romantic liaison.

After the procedure, Gara was no longer up for anything, uninterested in mating, she gave herself up to food and melancholy, while Shakespeare transferred his amorous vigil a few streets further away to Luna the spaniel and remained hers faithfully for ever more. After Luna came Hani the pug. His affair with the pug resulted in some interesting offspring of the canine genus, and, consequentially, the dog’s master reined him in, so that he was no longer seen without a leash, starry-eyed and frisky.

But before and after these serial monogamies, canine erotic romances, golden ringlets and defiant bristles, excavated bones and painful balls, Shakespeare always returned to his human. The dog did not resent it even when he had him castrated. Indeed, it focused his faithfulness and he was in a way grateful that he had been freed from sexual tension. Now he was able to adore his dear human friend with his whole being, with the unconditional, unrestrained, platonic, mad and pure love that only dogs bestow. His unalloyed devotion did not end even when his man abandoned him, leaving him in the street, why yes, like a cur, as people rightly say.

Only a dog can have such a stupid heart. A dog like me, a religious fanatic.

You know me? Shakespeare-in-love, the tailless ragamuffin, from a Schnauzer mother and unidentified terrier. Maybe you yelled at me when I was rolling a beef bone I’d stolen from the butcher down the street, maybe you kicked a stone in my direction or threw a bunch of keys at me when I sniffed your coiffured pup’s backside.

Towards the end of spring, my best friend left me in the wood beside the slaughterhouse, over there by the motorway, I walked for seven nights and six days, got home, with a bloody nose and torn paws and in the morning, in front of his house, when he was leaving for work, I threw myself at his feet, crazy with joy. He stopped in surprise and then said: scram!

And that was all.

I still wait for him in the morning, outside the building. I don’t throw myself at his feet, I stand to one side and wait, I only whine when he has gone.

Neither dirt nor poverty have dimmed the shine of my humiliation. Is there anything more dignified than being humiliated in love? It is a spectacular fall and the further you fall, the deeper is your sorrow, and the more magnificent your pain. You who skirt around me in the street, fearful and disgusted, should know that whenever you kick me you send me to the sky, along with your contempt, my love-luff-uff-uff that no one needs becomes ever more beautiful, this suffering could make a holy dog of me.

I’ve seen this too: a few days ago, my human bought a new dog. I don’t despair and I don’t hope, but I still wait. Besides, where could I go with this invisible chain with which I was born.

So, I ask you again, because I am a scrounger and beggar and skinflint if necessary – caught up in the vortex of passion or exasperated or astounded by feverish cries from the darkness, do not forget that in addition to feline love that screeches, there is also canine love that whines. Remember that at least in the morning, when the goodwill of a beginning briefly reigns, toss at least a bone to those genuinely hungry for the meat of hope.

Yours faithfully,

A Wistful Dog

If I had to describe Nightingale in two words, I’d say he is a street poet.

Although since he was twenty-something when he published a samizdat edition of just ten poems, he hasn’t written any poems but everything he has done could be called poetry. His collection was even called Poetry, which is neither good nor bad, but simply accurate. They were interesting poems, authentic, but he felt that he needed a new means of expression, for him paper was slow, dull and uncommunicative, while the Internet is garrulous, polluted and cacophonous, those are places that don’t offer space for development, that’s what he thought. He wrote poems with a felt-tip on walls, by night, on peeling façades, in lifts, toilets, on rubbish skips, in subways. He drew. He discovered spray paint. An excellent concept, always fashionable, he liked spray.

He said that when the poets left the streets, it was a bad day for poetry.

Because the first poets were guttersnipes;

noble Homeroid beggars,

the occasional Villon beyond the law,

Byrons who typically limp on the other side of the law,

and beatniks,

their distant relatives Cendrarses,

whole brigades of Bukowskys,

a few Bolans,

Rimbauds, Wildes, Verlaines, Dalmatian reporters,

rappers …

gentle decadents, anonymous painters and grafitti writers, Banksy

et al,

and too few women, poets,

(maybe, if we stretch the term, Tracy Emin? Nin, Anaïs?)

because for too long over the centuries their wanderings

have been hampered by the skirts and children round their legs.

The threshold of the house

and men’s shoes

women’s too, pointed.

On the other side of the street music wafts

from rhapsodes, troubadours, cantators, street singers:

young backpackers with a guitar.

They were all his gambling fathers and prostituted brothers,

although, although,

he used to say

you never know whose dad is whose.

Gale said that the poets were ruined when they focused on each other and their medium, language, and stopped thinking about the people they were addressing. They perfected their tools, they precisely tuned their instruments, but they sang into emptiness, with empty words, and empty space responded.

But bollocks to the poets and pseudo-poets, they will always have poetry, the blessed idiots.

Nevertheless, the first thing I heard about Nightingale was not that he was a poet or a grafitti artist, comic-strip maker or art student, and he was all of that, but that he was visited by women, all sorts of women and girls, when they fancied sex, unpaid of course, for he was not a tart. Approachable and affable, he would say: benign.

It was all strange to me, because at the time I kept seeing him with a girl, whom we called Helanka, she was a refugee from Bosnia, better known as a girl without a single hair (about which she gave various explanations). At that time I didn’t know there could be male/female friendships, because we had been taught they didn’t exist. And I didn’t know that Gale, Helanka and I would become inseparable for that brief phase of youth when your friends are more important than anything and anyone, but that passes as though it had never been, hello-goodbye, each to his own path forever and no matter.

A village, a melancholy village. Why is a village more alarming than a town? The smallest village is more alarming than the biggest town, isn’t it? No one locks their door for fear of burglars, but before long here comes your next-door neighbour tapping on the door with an axe. I’m not a fan of villages.

But what can you do, the heart does not ask, after I had left the village of Mitrovići behind me, on my search for Gale, I set out towards the village of Tulumbe in pursuit of my Helanka, because wherever she was he could have been too.

Tulumbe is a village of ghosts, on a mountain between clumps of hazel and meadows full of blueberries. The old Red School in the middle of the fields is concealed by wild corn, and the long burned-out houses have been taken over by plants. Here and there the occasional light in the darkness, a lantern, a generator humming, electricity never reached here, nor asphalt, nor mains water, but there is that delicious water from the forest well, and if the well dries up, there are springs in the villages down the hill. I heard all that, all that and more, my dear, some time ago, and soon I would see for myself. That was two weeks ago, a little less, at the start of my search, at the sweet start, and it was sweet, I can see that now…

I drove tirelessly across and beyond the border, deep into the deserted land of Bosnia, through glistening red and black forests and through canyons full of wild beasts’ eyes, through gigantic greens, a moist tearful landscape of magnanimous beauty and past the peeling façades of towns.

Every minaret and every gilded church bell-tower, and they were as numerous as house chimneys, reminded me of an evil phallus. Evil phalluses are always ready to thrust. ‘Oh God, wherever you may be!’ my grandmother used to say as she watched devastation on television or when she spilled coffee on the tablecloth. If he exists and if he’s worth his salt, of one thing I am certain: from the outset he avoids places of worship.

I drove, without a break, from dawn to dusk, along little by-ways that don’t exist on Sat-Nav, I got lost and then found myself, evening caught me on a road with not one single lit window and the blood in my veins had frozen repeatedly.

And then I became accustomed to the east, studded with tiny stars. The night was not yet impenetrable – soon a small town in a hollow would be revealed by the headlights and beyond it was the village I was looking for. I did not stop until I reached my goal. Such a journey ought perhaps, no, certainly, to be planned, more things and warmer clothes brought along, a different car, not to attract attention, but I had not had time for plans. Freed from plans, from responsibility, from obligations. (I am alone and therefore free, says the optimist. My dear. I am free and therefore alone, says the pessimist.)

If anyone saw me at the one traffic light or at the queue at the border, he would look round questioningly, one person even shouted: ‘Hey, there’s Clementine, the blond, the soap girl!’

I have silicon lips and perfectly whitened teeth, I have a Brazilian hairstyle, soft and expensive, if crumpled, clothes, I drive a gold Mazda convertible, but I am a black orange, inside. Full of hell.

I’m going to a melancholy village. The road devours me sullenly, but the night – the night is glad of me.

LETTER FROM AN INDIFFERENT GOD

Who’s this waking me?

I’m an old, tired God and I have to sleep, because I have to calculate, I have to arrange things, I have to do book-keeping, I have to write down everything that has come in and out of my mouth, I have to digest it all, I have to empty all those inboxes of prayers. Day and night, I sit bowed over the Earth, sorting: a prayer for health, a prayer for forgiveness, a prayer for success, a prayer for a life, but sometimes also a prayer for death. I do my work in a professional manner, the profession of God, I don’t delve into the meaning.

Well, hey, what else could I do; you’re so pathetic, so feeble: blind puppies looking for their mummy, little children for whom their father assumes responsibility. You don’t need a God, just a prosperous parent! An illusionist! A fortune-teller and lottery-drum, that’s the ideal God for you.

Who’s waking me with their sighs?

I’m a God in your image, a conformist God, an indifferent God, a God who doesn’t lose His head, and has forgotten how to fall in love, that was so long ago. When I fall in love, when I feel my body, I who am incorporeal, become a frenzied rapist, a sodomiser and pornographer god, a GHB god and drink-spiker who attacks women and boys disguised as an animal or a spirit, and men disguised as fire or a knife. I’m Achilles and Jesus’s daddy, and, allegedly also the Cyclops, they’re all my pitiful, slain bastards.

It’s true, my love is thieving, criminal, out of control – you would say blasphemous.

But I gave you that signal, finely tuned, the best of myself, a divine spark, a little gift. And what did you do with it? What does love mean to you? Did you love? You faint-hearted folk who have never felt a divine surge of the blood, you have reduced my gift to your narrow measure, you took fright: first for centuries you forbade others from loving, now you forbid it for yourselves.

While I, let me say it again, it’s a well-known fact, I am nothing other than you, your image, your prototype: if you are in love and I am the God of epiphany, your amorous sighs and your laughter are praise for me, I can hardly bear your psychopathic sufferings, hysterical sacrifices, hatreds, prayers and restraint.

I am God, creator, author! I am not a supernatural being produced in the sterile conditions of church laboratories – I am dithyramb, firework, holy heathen. The millennia were hard and repellent, but also full of inspiration for a young god, sprung from wine, dance, thunder, from thought, from a burst star, from the sun, no less! God is immoderate in love, whether he has a form or the face of a totem, a demented saint, an epileptic or wild goddess.

Whoever is waking me, is waking me at a bad moment in the century just begun which I had awaited for a long time with a trembling heart, like a lover who promised tenderness and delights, understanding and harmony, but turned out violent and obtuse.

Let them leave me to carry out my judicial tasks in the indifference which you assigned me, I have found peace here, a flat desk on which I sort out these innumerable prayers.

Should I refer to your merchant priests? Should the likes of them be my PR? Hatred is the only heresy, but indifference is worse. And here too is the hypocrisy of their golden chalices and vestments. What have they to do with the divine? A cross to cross me out with. Could a God, a creator, an artist of genius, be enthused by the dryness of bishops’ underwear and dribbling lips that preach fear and ignorance?

Why, from my finger sprang the mango, the peacock’s tail, Sophia Loren. From the clicking of my tongue fell all the languages of the world, first the tongues of Africa, then the others, including the song of birds and the laughter of small babies.

So sumptuous, mighty and tender can I be.

I no longer wish to have anything to do with scoundrels, I’m too old for such crap. I’m waiting to retire and stick seals on your uneasy consciences.

At some stage I want to be everyone’s God. A magnanimous, powerful and comical father. Until then – make your own way,

Amen.

The sea is more beautiful than cathedrals. But are rivers more beautiful than lively town streets or are streets sometimes more beautiful than rivers and streams? Some Saturday, any morning of that spring, the streets down which I made my way to the sea were lovelier than waterfalls. Full of sky, flowers, fountains and birds, full of people in sunglasses, thin t-shirts and linen trousers. My eyes were seventeen years old and all of that was spread out in front of them in bright shades as I stepped towards the Valley of the First Menstruation.

Today (twenty years ago), Marko and Bert are waiting for me there. They’ve parked their Vespas by St Franjo’s and occupied their patch. They are knights with plastic helmets, the small rulers of our hearts. In honour of them, and many other boys before and after them who were the object of collective adoration for a brief flash of youth, on that patch the Valley of the First Menstruation was formed, it was where secondary schoolgirls used to hang out – although the term is inaccurate and behind the times and generally gave rise to disapproval, it imposed itself tacitly. After the schoolgirls came guys, they put gel in their hair and their hands in their pockets. When Marko and Bert and their Vespas change their patch in a year’s time, the whole Valley will move after them to a new place, first the girls, and then the boys with them.

Great care is taken not to cross the border between the Valley of the FM and the Outland, where the yokels are, although no one strives for a different status here, on the Quay. The yokels don’t give a damn about being yokels, they are in the majority and they have a good time. Besides, soon, as soon as they mature, even the little fashionable girls will leave the little phonies Marko and Bert and their bikes and climb into the yokels’ well-groomed cars. They will like their little gold chains, their loud yokel music, thin tank-tops on body-built torsos, sneakers and minimalist trainers, their marble and brass interiors. There were days when I regretted that I wasn’t a real pure-bred yokel, that their whole culture didn’t bore me, that I genuinely enjoyed folk-songs, rave and techno, that I liked everything associated with that: clubs where you party till dawn, they were the only ones who felt truly good in this country, they were the only ones who enjoyed themselves, while everyone else lazed about, they had somewhere to go where there was always some dosh around, there was whisky, cola, macchiato, free entry to the club, coke snorted from new big banknotes. It’s more or less the same now. At times I wanted to live in a bare plastered house with three floors, with no plumbing, unencumbered, with a crazy car in the yard and a t-shirt with Versace emblazoned on it, not to worry about anything other than my false nails falling off, but here’s the problem: I’m a girl and along with that story goes a guy who would have sometimes given me a punch with his fist or at least a slap, who would make me kids and imprison me at home between two masses, and I would no longer enjoy being a pure-bred yokel. There’s no country where life’s good for a yokel girl, only for yokel lads.

Today (twenty years ago) everyone is on the Quay and the Quay is everything. This is the first sun after the winter and everyone avoids staying inside the town walls – the best cafés inside the walls are run by dykes, they hang together and get each other jobs – that’s the theory. They’ve found some way of coping with the half-people involved in protection rackets round the cafés. They are the only ones who can do that, survive, and they are probably used to everything in order to subsist, so thought Helanka, my friend who knew everything. (Everyone was a bit crazy for her and her freedom, and she also had an appearance that opened the doors of the marginalised and marginal groups to her.)

The folk who go to the dykes in bad weather, are today (twenty years ago) sitting north-east of Outland, because that’s the Valley of the Geeks, that’s where coffee is drunk by the nonchalant intelligentsia, with a few young alternatives tagging along, every town has its snobs, but here they are probably the best people the town has, at least that’s what they believe; only you have to observe them individually, yes, individually, never together, if you don’t want your heart to shrink to extra small. It’s not too much, it’s not even a lot, but everything is prettified on that postcard. No one is going to stumble into the wrong valley or sit on the wrong chair, if he does not wish to sit alone.

Only the mega-yokel Nightingale in camouflage pants imposes himself on everyone, the moron, but he gets on my nerves particularly when he sits beside us secondary schoolgirls. ‘You go to Matejuško’s, to the drunks, you acid head, to the Little Boss and co., you’ll fit in,’ says a girl yesterday (twenty years ago), but some people laugh at him, he’s funny, he has nice eyes. Nothing offends him, nothing.

The war is over, the war is near its end, that’s already clear. Some­one ought to tell him that the war is nearly over and that he shouldn’t wear those camouflage pants any more. It’s Saturday, there’s no school, there’s not even any war. Let him first have a wash and a haircut, and then let him come among us, we’re young and attractive, who cares if we have only one pair of denims, our pocket money stretches to Hay deodorant and a toasted sandwich and the occasional fruit smoothie with cream: we want Marko and Bert, their haircuts and helmets, hairless faces, foreign goods on slender bodies and their little Vespas which whisk us off to the turquoise part of town.

Did you know that our folk in the Lora harbour district killed Boba’s dad? That’s the kind of story the south wind brought to us in the Valley of the First Menstruation from the Valley of the Geeks.