‘Matjaž.’
‘Do you know, Matjaž, this is my fortieth trip here.’
‘Wow, congratulations, that’s an anniversary, that’s dedication!’
Albert went quiet for a moment and, looking out of the window, said, ‘Yes, it really is . . .’
Matjaž thought that Albert was going to say something else, but he merely carried on staring out of the window, lost in his thoughts. Matjaž decided that there would be plenty more opportunities for conversation, so he leaned back and closed his eyes, and pretended to be asleep.
The relative silence, which was only disturbed by the hushed voices of some women sat behind him and the humming of the bus, caused Matjaž to fall asleep for real. He was awoken by a strong hand shaking him. ‘Matjaž, wake up! Can you hear me, son?’ Dušan explained that they’d stopped in Zagreb to have a bite to eat and do what people usually do when they make a stop. Matjaž soon discovered that ‘Zagreb’ was in fact only a metaphor for a petrol station located somewhere on the motorway.
Dušan and Matjaž sat down at one of the tables in the café there, both a little tired after their sleep. It was nine o’clock. They ordered coffee and a snack. When Albert and another older couple walked past, Dušan called after them, ‘Albert, you going to sit down and have a coffee?’
‘Thanks, Dušan, but we’re heading to the shop to get a few things for the journey,’ he replied. When they disappeared out of sight, Dušan discreetly turned to Matjaž and said in Serbian, ‘Albert is a legend here, you know, a proper legend. He’s been coming on this trip for forty years.’
‘I know, he told me.’
‘I don’t know where his wife is, though,’ said Dušan, to himself more than anything. ‘The two of them always travelled together. Maybe she’s not well.’
Matjaž also learned that Albert was over seventy years old, retired, and once worked at the Ministry for Transport. He was a good official, stressed Dušan – whatever that may mean, Matjaž thought to himself – or perhaps just a really good person. He had three children, one of whom had been gravely ill and died of leukaemia aged five. Those must be terrible times for a family, Dušan went on, but through that tragedy they united, so much so that the other two children still called their parents every day, visited them regularly and cooked for them often.
Now Albert had grandchildren, three, if Dušan was not mistaken, and he was really happy; he and his wife looked after them often. Last year they showed their photos to the entire bus, telling everyone what the children had been up to, which words they already knew, how the eldest was already singing songs and his brother danced to nursery rhymes. Matjaž was grateful that Albert didn’t feel the need to show his family photos this year, or to repeat his grandchildren’s first syllables and tell stories of how adorable they were when they threw everything that came their way on to the floor. Matjaž didn’t find children cute, sweet and utterly adorable. No, he saw a pure evil in them, one that sucked parents dry.
‘What about the others, do you know them?’ Matjaž asked eventually.
‘A few, a bit. There are fewer of us every year. Some have already passed away, for others health won’t allow it any more, some just don’t feel like it.’
‘I see,’ said Matjaž. ‘So who else apart from Albert do you still know?’
‘Well, of the young ones I think the tour guide is the same as last year, then there’s you, and Anica and Lojze, the nice couple from just outside Ljubljana. They were both so intensely, passionately involved with the Communist Party, and it was really painful for them when war broke out here in the Balkans. Martin and Milica are funny, though. They’re both Catholic, never joined the Party, but then when everything collapsed they slowly, really slowly, started to realize that it was better before, and they became interested. They’re both doctors. When the Party was still in power they wanted democracy and the West, but later they started studying and now they’re more on our side.’
Matjaž nodded and shortly afterwards Dušan continued in his mix of Serbian, Croatian and Slovene, ‘There was one other young woman – I mean, not terribly young, about forty-five – stunning, the beautiful Nada, who usually came with her husband and daughter. I thought I saw her, but without her husband . . .’
They had something to eat and finished their coffees in silence, and then like two obedient schoolboys they reported back to the bus exactly fifteen minutes later. A few women were late and ran up to the bus, out of breath. ‘Oh, so sorry!’ and ‘Sorry, excuse us!’ They lugged numerous bags from the service station with them, as if it were the last service station on civilized earth, with only savage wilderness ahead. Matjaž didn’t pay much attention to these women until he caught sight of a pair who didn’t fit the bill of the average expedition member.
First a middle-aged woman, very well presented and wearing a fairly short skirt, walked past him without batting an eyelid. Behind her, he caught sight of a girl who was really young and very pretty – incredibly pretty, thought Matjaž. She wore headphones and her eyes were fixed to the floor. It was clear that travelling around the old Yugoslavia (yes, Tito’s Yugoslavia was already old) was not her thing, and that she’d had entirely different plans for this long weekend. Maybe some kind of ‘spring break’, as they now called it, where young people organized a get-away to somewhere on the Adriatic coast and tried to drink as much alcohol as possible and then do boring, stupid things. She can’t be more than sixteen, he thought to himself.
‘See, now, she’s really young. She can’t be more than seventeen, can she?’ Dušan laughed, clearly unable to take his eyes off the young beauty. ‘I remember her mum from before, she came here with her husband. Nice couple, the pair of them, but now . . . who knows, who knows?’
At the front of the bus a young guy appeared, standing behind the driver, and spoke into the microphone, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, delegates on the journey to Jajce, ho, ho!’
‘That’s Peter. He’s the guide. He’s been travelling with us for a few years. He’s a good lad, you’ll like him, everyone does. He’s just a bit pushy sometimes,’ Dušan explained to his travelling companion. Matjaž nodded and listened to the tour guide.
‘Here we are, together again on the same journey. There we are. It will be a while until the next stop now, unless there’s a real emergency . . .’ He chuckled to himself. Matjaž, meanwhile, shuddered at the thought of this man – this relatively tall, pale, fair-haired young man of around thirty-five – thinking that he was funny. ‘So, dear ladies, dear gents – or should I say, comrades . . . our next stop is Bosnia, where we’ll stop somewhere for lunch as soon as we’re over the border.’ Someone on the bus shouted something to the guide. Matjaž didn’t understand what they had said, but of course Peter understood it immediately. ‘Ah yes, brilliant, Anica. The restaurant is booked, so no one will be suffering from hunger and thirst, and the price is – as always – included in your package deal, which you’ve already paid for, ha ha ha.’
Matjaž rolled his eyes and looked to Dušan for confirmation of his feelings, but he only said, laughing to himself, ‘This Peter’s so happy.’ Matjaž had just decided to leaf through his copies of Mladina and Global, when he heard the familiar tone of a text message. It was Aleksander, of course.
‘How’s the Liberation Front? Is freedom on the horizon yet?’
Matjaž smiled and replied, ‘The war is only just beginning!’
‘If you don’t behave, I’ll tell my Dad on you!’ came Aleksander’s quick rejoinder. Matjaž didn’t bother to reply; he knew that the exchange could easily carry on until his return to Ljubljana and beyond.
‘Is that your lady?’ Albert asked Matjaž from across the aisle, using the polite form of address and nodding towards the mobile phone with a friendly smile.
‘Ah, no, I don’t have a girlfriend. And please, let’s be on first-name terms – we’re all brotherhood and unity here after all, aren’t we?’
Albert laughed, ‘Of course, of course.’ They were quiet f
or a moment, then Albert began, ‘When my wife, Theodora, and I started courting, I always addressed her formally – that’s what I called her back then. When we got married, she slowly became Thea. It was normal back then.’
Matjaž just nodded. He didn’t know how to answer, it seemed silly to him.
‘Maybe it seems silly these days,’ Albert began, as if he’d overheard Matjaž’s thoughts yet again, ‘but actually there was something respectful about it, a kind of honesty and affirmation, which the suitor – in this case me, ha ha – could use to prove that he was genuine, that he really liked a girl and that he really wanted to ask her to dance.’
‘Hey up Albert, where’s your Thea this year?’ Dušan butted in, with the best of intentions, having obviously overheard their conversation. Albert fell silent and swept his hand over his eyes. The question had obviously upset him. ‘What is it, Albert? Is she not well? Tell us, don’t bottle it up.’ Albert shook his head and looked as if he could hardly hold back the tears. Dušan clearly did not believe that people in pain ought to be left in peace, and sat down next to him in the empty seat.
Matjaž wanted to respect Albert’s grief, and he turned away, although he could still hear their conversation. Albert explained that other friends on the bus already knew; Anica, Martin and Milica. He went quiet again, took a breath and then smiled softly, as if to apologize for having put it off for so long. When he began to speak again, he explained the basics very briefly. Around Christmas his Thea had started to feel extremely unwell. Her doctor made her see several specialists and straight away the diagnosis was cancer. The final stages. Within a month she had bid them farewell. ‘She bid us farewell,’ was the phrase Albert that used, and it struck Matjaž right in the guts.
Tears ran down Albert’s cheeks, and he wiped them away with his palms. Dušan began to comfort him. He was good at that. ‘Oh Albert, how was I to know? I’m so sorry. She was such a good wife, your Thea, I’ll never forget how she prepared potica for everyone on every trip . . .’
Matjaž couldn’t listen to him any more; he looked at his phone and thought about what it would be like to love the same woman for fifty years, maybe more. Thea and Albert had been a couple for so long and, as far as he had heard and sensed, they were a good, maybe even happy, couple. How did such happy, solid couples come to be in those days? Were they like that because courting began with polite forms of address, and when you accepted a polite invitation to dance it took on a deeper meaning, it became more existential? Matjaž knew what it was for love to be existential, but so far for him existential love had been tied to the fact that it did not last. Existential love was possible, but it passed. The day had come for his Sara to bid him farewell.
At around one o’clock they arrived in Gradiška, one of those numerous nondescript towns of former Yugoslavia that always seemed to Matjaž like forgotten corners of the earth, where the present was a fleeting reminder that the past was not so glamorous after all, and where there was no future to be seen on the horizon either. Actually it seemed to him as if the whole of Bosnia operated as one such cut-off piece of the world, a piece of the world that time had forgotten.
However, in the restaurant, which was attached to some neglected motel, he felt completely fine. The waiters were even joking with him; they enjoyed exchanging tasteless jokes with each other, and in the spirit of hospitality they gave out shots of rakia for free. He sat with Albert and Dušan and two couples, who he soon found out belonged to that old family of AVNOJ veterans – veterans of the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia. That was what they called themselves anyway, even though the majority of them had been born after the Second World War.
Matjaž kept quiet for most of the time, following events around the table. Anica and Lojze seemed like one of those couples that you couldn’t ever really imagine getting together. Which is to say that she was a rather polished lady, who clearly put a lot of effort into her appearance even though she had – as he gleaned from the conversation – worked as an accountant in some small company her whole life. He, on the other hand, was a typical small-town guy: a little bit chunky, his ample figure hiding beneath clothes that were too tight for him. And whereas his wife spoke less frequently, Lojze was constantly brooding over things; whether it concerned NASA’s space programme or the sale of the Mercator supermarket chain, he knew plenty about many subjects and was happy to share his knowledge with others. It was clear that he’d never been able to achieve his full potential in his career as a food inspector. This unlikely couple had two children, with whom they didn’t exactly have a lot of contact; at least that was his impression, given how little Anica and Lojze had said about them – only mentioning that they were fine after Martin and Milica enquired after the family.
It was entirely clear to Matjaž why Martin and Milica, a kind-hearted couple, were together. In fact, he felt it would have been strange if these two people, similar even in appearance – both rotund and rosy-cheeked with short red hair – were not together. Both of them were quick to reveal everything new in the life of their only child Reza and their granddaughter Ivana to their AVNOJ friends. Naturally the group gave a lot of time to Albert, too; the reserved Anica even took his hand and softly asked after his health.
As soon as the second round of beers arrived at the table, conversations became less formal and more jovial. They gossiped about this year’s expedition group. Milica thought Peter was looking a little older and more tired; Lojze said that he was missing a woman in his life, but Anica corrected him and said it was probably a man that he was missing more than anything. Lojze didn’t understand that comment, just as he probably didn’t understand the majority of the things that his wife said. Then they came to the subject of Nada. Dušan was surprised not to see her gentleman friend this year, and Milica was able to provide him with an answer. Her husband had moved out and married a much younger woman, who was already carrying his child. Everyone began shaking their heads. Albert muttered something to the effect of ‘Poor woman!’ to which Milica immediately also added, ‘Poor child!’ to which Martin went one further, saying, ‘That’s no child any more!’ Dušan had to agree that the young Melita had turned into a real stunner, who was surely going to break a lot of men’s hearts. ‘Until she reaches her mother’s age, then someone will break her heart,’ Anica said wisely, surprising the group with her contribution. ‘Well, she’s still got sufficient time before then to completely ruin some guy’s life,’ remarked Matjaž, as if in defence of the young girl. The present company smiled at his attempt to be gentlemanly, and Dušan patted him heartily on the back for having slotted into the group so well.
There wasn’t much news on the other passengers. A few of them seemed familiar from last year, and there were even a few new faces on the excursion. ‘There are also these two friends . . .’ remarked Milica, and it now became clear that she would be providing the majority of the hot gossip. ‘They sit behind us on the bus. They’re young, maybe a bit older than our Matjaž here. Patrik, that’s the skinny bald guy, is recently divorced and pretty devastated. And his friend Matevž isn’t really helping. He talks constantly about magnetic forces going back and forth, and about molecules sometimes coming together and then repelling each other . . . something like that. I gathered from Patrik’s reply that Matevž is a physics teacher, which explains a lot.’ She nodded at her own conclusions.
At that point a laughing Peter came up to the table. ‘Hello, dear friends, nice to see you all here again. Can I sit down for a moment?’ The group nodded although he had already sat down among them. He offered his hand to everyone, and he and Matjaž exchanged official introductions. After that he began, ‘How are you, how are you all doing?’ He looked at Albert with pity, took his hand and gave him a sympathetic wink. Albert just returned a hazy smile. ‘Listen up, the plan is after we’ve eaten we go back to the bus, then we head off on to Jajce. There we’ll be staying at the Hotel Turist, as before. We’ll meet up again for dinner at the hotel. OK?�
� Everyone nodded their heads enthusiastically. ‘Now, the rooms. I’m afraid one of you will have to be in a room by yourself . . .’ He looked around as if trying to work out who would make the noble sacrifice.
Matjaž quickly made the most of this opportunity. ‘Well if nobody else minds, that’d be OK with me.’
‘Albert & Dušan, would you two be all right in the same room?’ asked Peter, like an over-protective parent who wants to treat all of his children equally. This confirmed Matjaž’s first impression of Mr Tourguide: that he really did not like him. Albert and Dušan nodded their heads. Peter continued, ‘See, my friend, it’ll be nice, we’ll have a great time . . . Not like oldies, but just like back at school.’ He patted Albert on the back, and received only a sullen smile in return.
Anica spoke up, ‘What about after that?’
‘After?’ queried Peter.
‘What’s the plan for tomorrow and the day after?’
‘Oh of course, of course. How could I forget! Well, first thing tomorrow we’ll start off around Jajce and finish the tour at the scene of the crime . . .’ (As he said this he laughed conspiratorially, as if visiting the National Liberation War memorial was highly illegal.) ‘Then the afternoon is free for you to do your own thing, or rest – basically whatever you like. Then in the evening one of our fellow passengers has prepared a little surprise for us all. His cousin Elvis and his family have invited us to a picnic. Elvis is a butcher by trade, and he lives in a villa with a splendid big garden, so there’ll be plenty of space. This encounter with some authentic Jajce community and their generosity is already included in the price, so everything is sorted.’ When he’d finished, he was left with a smile imprinted on his face, which Matjaž read as a mix of self-satisfaction and an old habit of feeling like he had to make everyone happy.
‘And we leave on . . .’ Anica asked, wanting to know every single detail of her journey.
Jela Krecic Page 10