‘What?’
‘Oh, Father, don’t be so uptight. Jure’s piece had just given birth, and he’d gone out with his mates to celebrate. And, of course – as is customary for these types of men – they overdid it, to put it mildly. When they sat down to join Kat and me they were already fairly wrecked; in fact, they were so wasted they were slurring and throwing up. Then Jure forgot that he’d just had a baby girl and not a boy, and then, when the rest of them wanted me to get them some cocaine so that they could carry on drinking …’
‘The wretched things!’ the priest moralized.
‘Don’t look at me like that. I’m not wretched and I’m certainly not a dealer,’ Matjaž defended himself.
‘I’ve heard far worse than that in the confession booth – you wouldn’t believe, dear boy … but carry on!’
‘Obviously I told them that I couldn’t do anything for them. After that came the final blow, at least for Kat, who had had enough of them by this point.’
‘What was that?’ The priest looked at him with interest.
‘When Jure said that his child was named Julija, these friends started to sing Mežek. You know, the song Julija by Aleksander Mežek?’ he asked, and wrinkled his brow.
The priest just said, ‘Holy mother!’
‘Yeah, then Kat stood up and left.’
‘Because of Mežek?’
‘Mežek was the straw that broke the camel’s back …’
‘Alcohol, arrogance, disregard for women and children …’ The wise priest supported him.
‘Those were the words she used, too, although I do think she was exaggerating.’
The priest was quiet for a moment. A long sigh followed. ‘Well, we’ve started so we may as well go on ‘til the end.’
‘Let me think,’ said Matjaž, who was now beginning to enjoy his storytelling. ‘The next one was Ro … Oops, I can’t talk about this in front of Gabi.’ He clutched at his mouth.
‘Gabi, go to the toilet,’ the priest gestured to her.
‘What? I don’t even need to,’ she protested.
‘Listen, Matjaž here wants to tell me something but he’s not going to say it while you’re around, which is why I’m asking you to respectfully remove yourself!’ The priest was strict and to the point.
‘Father, I’m not sure if it’s good for you to listen to him too much,’ Gabi said softly, frightened.
‘That’s enough now. Go to the toilet, quickly!’
‘Fine, I’ll go to the toilet, but there’ll be absolutely nothing respectful about it,’ Gabi protested.
‘There’s no doubting that,’ Matjaž said quietly.
When Gabi had left, downcast, Matjaž continued. ‘We had a work party at our boss Ksenja’s house in Kras. You’ve no doubt already heard about this picnic, because that’s where Gabi met her Roko.’
‘Yes, it rings a bell.’
‘Anyway,’ Matjaž continued, ‘there I met Ronja, a friend from secondary school who is also my colleague. But she hadn’t been around for a year, even longer, because she’d had a baby. At the party we became close. Different from before, different to the others. She was so easy to talk to, and lovely and funny. She was the reason that I survived that evening at all. Together the two of us watched the others, and she remarked on what their gestures and actions said about them. It was really enlightening, and good fun. Oh, Ronja,’ he paused briefly. ‘She guessed it all! Who wanted what and who wanted whom. She was like Sherlock Holmes – do you know that detective?’
‘Only by name,’ the sarcastic priest replied. ‘Anyway, we don’t need to go into all of that. I’m already confused by all the names. So what happened with this Ksenja?’
‘Ronja,’ Matjaž corrected him.
‘Ronja, then.’
‘As I told you, nothing.’
‘Oh, well, how is a man supposed to know in such drunken surroundings,’ The priest was restless now.
‘At the end you’re going to say you don’t believe any of it!’
‘Alas, I’ve been in this business for an awful long time and I guarantee you’ll be hard pressed to shock me.’
‘So at some point Ronja and I were left just the two of us, beneath an enormous tree’, said Matjaž, finally realizing that the priest was now tiring of his adventures, ‘and then we stopped joking around. We became more affectionate. She was vulnerable, and I was also strangely moved by just this closest kind of closeness between us.’
‘You fell in love with Ronja?’
‘Very possibly. I hadn’t felt as good as I did with her for a long time. And a man always falls in love with the feeling he has around another, right?’
‘Maybe. We don’t have time for definitions of love. Continue.’
‘In short, it was very affectionate. By some miracle, God’s grace as you would call it, we were sharing a room – or rather, an office. We went there to get to know each other – you know, in the biblical sense.’
‘And did you?’
‘Not really.’
‘What the devil does that mean?’ the priest asked crossly.
‘We were naked and we were caressing each other a little. We really had good intentions of it being biblical, but we were chatting in between.’
‘And that was it?’
‘No, at some point she fell asleep, you know, because she’s got a little kid and she’s exhausted and all that,’ Matjaž explained.
‘Another one you’ve managed to send to sleep!’ the mischievous priest burst out laughing.
‘You might laugh, but this time it was beautiful, really beautiful.’ With those words Matjaž fell silent. He was thinking about Ronja again, her gentle presence.
‘And you didn’t repeat this?’
‘No, some people are already spoken for, and put the well-being of their little ones first,’ Matjaž concluded bitterly.
‘And here is where your odyssey ends?’ the priest asked, interrupting Matjaž’s trail of thought.
‘No. There’s summer, too.’
‘Which isn’t over yet … but go on, be brave,’ the priest said encouragingly, more to himself than to Matjaž.
There was a knock at the door and they fell silent.
‘Yes!’ the priest called out.
‘Can I come in now?’ Gabi asked patiently. The priest felt a bit guilty, as he had completely forgotten about her.
‘Of course, Gabi,’ he called out kindly. ‘Carry on, Matjaž.’
‘Well, then the unimaginable happened!’
‘What?’ Matjaž’s story unnerved him again.
‘Sara, my ex!’
‘Impossible!’ the priest said, enraptured.
‘What’s impossible?’ asked Gabi, as she sat down on her chair.
‘Well, sit here quietly and listen to your elder and you might find out,’ the priest replied, clearly used to bad-mannered children.
‘But it is possible,’ Matjaž asserted, and a trace of pride could be heard in his words. ‘We bumped into each other by chance over lunch. It was one of those magnificent July days, when Ljubljana is so pleasingly deserted, the clear sky –’
‘OK, I get it, get to the point,’ The priest’s patience was slowly coming to an end.
‘So, we bumped into each other in some almost-empty restaurant. Everything between us was as it always had been. She was beyond beautiful, beyond fun, and I felt as if no time had passed, as if we were still connected as before. Then we set off elsewhere: for coffee, for a beer, for more beers, then for a whisky. We had a wonderful time; we told each other everything, passed comment on everything, just like our good old times.’
‘And then?’
‘Then she wanted to come back to mine.’
‘And you went, and it happened,’ the priest said matter-of-factly.
‘Exactly, and it was … strange, actually. Pleasing and familiar, but at the same time totally foreign. I don’t actually know how to explain it.’
‘What about that Jaka of hers?’
�
��Jaka Shmacka,’ Matjaž replied childishly.
‘Ah, Jaka didn’t quite make her happy,’ the priest said, interpreting Matjaž’s words, and signalling for him to go on.
‘Then she just told me upfront that she wanted to us to try again.’
‘Really?’ The priest smiled proudly. ‘That’s splendid!’ Congratulations! Sometimes it pays to be patient. You see, Gabi, like I’m always telling you, patience is …’
‘I told her no.’ The priest’s enthusiasm was crushed by his interlocutor.
‘Idiot!’ Gabi shouted out. ‘After you had fornicated, you at least ought to …’
‘Gabi, enough!’ The priest rolled his eyes. He looked somewhere out of the window, and slowly said, ‘It’s interesting that you rejected exactly what you wanted the most. Have you any explanation?’
Matjaž calmly replied, ‘No, I don’t know if I can explain.’
‘Do you think you were maybe still thinking about Kat, or the other one?’
‘Which other one?’ Gabi enquired.
‘The one we were talking about when you weren’t here,’ the priest replied, once again without looking at her.
‘No, it wasn’t that,’ Matjaž reflected. He attempted to distil some thought from his inebriated head, and continued, ‘I’ve thought about it a lot, and I still don’t know for sure, but I think it’s that when I was with others I was always thinking about her, at least a little bit, but then when I was with her I wasn’t thinking about her any more. It was like the Marx Brothers said: “Everything about you reminds me of you; your eyes, your throat, your lips – everything reminds me of you except you,” ’ Matjaž tried to explain clumsily.
The priest nodded as if he understood. After a short silence he said, almost resignedly, ‘Is that everything?’
‘Yes.’
‘Thank God!’ he said, and crossed himself.
They sat silently for a while, and then Matjaž looked over tenderly at the priest.
‘Thanks for listening, Father. I never thought I’d open up to a priest.’
‘You see, after all the complaining you did when we set off –’ Gabi began, but before she could finish her outburst a glance from the priest stopped her in her tracks.
‘And what do you think about it all?’ Matjaž looked to the priest. It seemed only right that he ask the man of God for advice after he’d bothered him with his life story for so long.
‘I’m happy that I pledged myself to God,’ he replied diplomatically.
‘That’s all you’ve got to say?’ Matjaž was disappointed.
‘Well, what did you expect? That I’d scold you, give you a penance for all of your sins? That I’d stroke you and say, “There, there”? Did you think I’d be full of good advice?’ the priest asked, raising the tone of his voice slightly.
‘Not exactly, no, but something, anything …’ Matjaž said beseechingly.
‘God be with you, then!’ the priest replied.
‘No, that doesn’t do anything for me because I just don’t believe in Him,’ he protested.
‘The Lord moves in mysterious ways, in that case.’
‘So do I,’ Matjaž laughed.
‘On no account must you be so bloody self-satisfied,’ the priest began gravely, and Gabi turned slightly pale once again. ‘I have a good mind to say that you’re just another young man gone astray. But now that you’ve lost Sara for the second time, you’ve maybe gained an opportunity to become a better man.’
‘Yes, but what if I don’t know how – or don’t even want to?’ Matjaž asked him.
‘Don’t start philosophizing. Why are you asking me for advice if you’re already so pleased with yourself, in one way or another? What do you want to hear? That you’re special? That your story is testimony to your charming misbehaviour? You won’t hear that from me. You’re nothing special and you probably never will be!’
‘Ha!’ Gabi shrieked mockingly.
‘Neither will you, so don’t you start laughing!’ the priest said sharply.
‘Thank you, Father.’ Matjaž shook his hand sincerely. The priest’s words hadn’t bothered him. Quite the opposite; his conversation with the unconventional priest didn’t seem like anything particularly special but it had nevertheless had a calming effect upon him. Maybe because just once he had had to condense all of last year’s stories, turn them into a narrative, a timeline. Left unexamined they loomed over him in a vague formation with all kinds of apparent hidden meanings and potentials, which he now knew had passed already or never would have materialized anyway. He didn’t understand himself any better than before, nor women for that matter, but it didn’t seem important to him now. With the priest’s help he had reconciled himself to his own stupidity and ignorance – and to other traits that had succeeded in throwing so many people off the track. That, to him, seemed like a job well done.
‘I don’t get why you’re so offended,’ Matjaž looked at Aleksander, who was nervously shaking geraniums from a plastic container and potting them up into ceramic ones. The idea was to give them a change of soil and add a bit of fertilizer. Karla obviously wanted a balcony in bloom.
‘I don’t get how you can confess to a priest,’ Aleksander replied, alarmed.
‘They’re people, too,’ his friend shrugged.
‘Maybe, but you have me. What’s wrong with me? Have I not been your confessor ever since we’ve known each other?’ Aleksander continued, more downcast. He momentarily let the flowers drop from his hands.
‘But it’s not as if I’ve deceived you,’ Matjaž said apologetically, sipping his spritzer.
‘Well I’m not sure, it sounds to me as if you had just a bit too much fun with your storytelling,’ the newfound gardener said somewhat obstinately.
‘What am I supposed to say? You care about me too much, Aleksander, and you have too many feelings towards me. I liked that the priest didn’t pretend to like me, nor was he disgusted with me. He was indifferent towards me, but at the same time he was strict. And that’s how I was able to come out with everything, the whole story, the whole stupid, awful story,’ Matjaž tried to explain.
‘Your story isn’t stupid at all,’ his friend protested. ‘And no priest should convince you of that!’
They sat silently for a moment, watching as one of the flowers rejected its new bed and lurched uneasily to one side. When Aleksander had reclaimed victory over it, he asked, now a little less offended, ‘And what did you take away from this synopsis, this outpouring of your heart to a complete stranger?’
‘I didn’t take anything away, at least not any new discoveries. But his indifference towards both my suffering and my happiness put things in a new perspective for me, if you know what I mean,’ Matjaž replied, blowing out his cigarette smoke.
‘I’ve no idea. In relation to what?’ He looked reproachfully at his friend again. ‘Just don’t tell me you’re at peace with God!’
‘Worry not. Even if I were at peace with Him, he probably wouldn’t want to have any dealings with me,’ Matjaž continued openly.
‘So what now?’
‘I’m calm. I’m not annoyed by anything any more. I don’t need Sara, which means, in truth, that I don’t need anyone else either.’
‘Because they’re all the same, or what? Fucking hell!’ Aleksander sighed. ‘This is Gabi’s fault! I think you’re still in shock at her poetry. Or are you going to say now that you know how to handle her?’
‘It’s not Gabi, not Sara, not anyone else. You’re not getting it. I am completely content by myself. I think I’ve experienced all types of women … what else do I need? Do you remember Stela? I gave it my all throughout.’
‘Ah, Stela, I still long for her and her particulars even now.’ Aleksander looked to the sky, as if the fundamental error was that all good women were not men.
‘Anyway, I think I’m destined for the single life. I have no desire to fall in love,’ Matjaž concluded.
‘You can’t plan for that, though. It just happens,
’ his friend informed him. He removed his gloves and allowed himself a cigarette.
‘I know, but I don’t want it to happen. I actually don’t want anything, apart from this feeling of calm, sitting with you on this nice summer’s evening.’ He looked fondly at his muddy friend.
‘You’ll want it when it comes!’ Believe me, even the best people crack,’ he said, almost disappointed, looking involuntarily at his wedding ring.
‘To be honest, I don’t know what all the fuss over love is about. It’s just problems. The priest knows that well, and he chose the right profession.’
‘Yes, but each and every human being is clearly designed to always complicate their life. That’s just the way it is and I see no reason why you should be spared that worldly experience.’
‘You know, every now and again someone is born who is fortunate enough to slip through the net,’ Matjaž said encouragingly.
‘But that won’t be you,’ Aleksander said decisively.
‘Why not me, exactly?’
‘Because you don’t deserve it!’
ALL TOGETHER AGAIN
It was quite hot for a late August evening, but it didn’t take a genius to notice how things had changed in the time since he and Sara had conquered the quietly scorched surface of the city. The dense treetops along Petkovšek Embankment were still green, but now somewhat haggard, as if they’d had enough of the evening noise – the clattering of beer glasses and the voices of the people below. The solitude and desertion of summertime was no more.
Matjaž didn’t have himself down as the sentimental type, but he always felt a lump in his throat when the season began to turn towards autumn like this, with the eternal promise that summer would still one day return. But by that time he’d be another autumn, another winter and another spring older. It wasn’t the fact of ageing in itself that he found particularly galling, as he was lucky enough to feel relatively well physically – or it would be more appropriate to say, perhaps, that as yet his body had not begun to hold his foolish behaviour against him. But nevertheless he realized that as time poured away, his life was pouring away in just the same way. Actually, what troubled him more than the passage of time was repetition; a thought that caught up with him on occasion, at times such as now, when he encountered the handshake between late summer and early autumn. The repetition of time, of working days in the office, of adventures with friends, with women, of numerous photographs piled inside an external hard drive with the promise that he would sort them at some point, but that remained there because it was easier to forget about them that way.
Jela Krecic Page 24