Ukulele Jam

by Alen Meskovic

  Why had Horvat even asked me to come? We had not exchanged two words since he set eyes on the hottie.

  Eventually they got up to go back in the water. I seized the opportunity and forced a hoarse declaration across my lips:

  ‘I’m heading out now.’

  ‘With us?’

  ‘No, no. Home. I don’t have my trunks.’

  ‘But we just got here.’

  ‘Yeah, but I don’t have my trunks. And I’ve got this thing in Majbule. I’ve got an appointment.’

  That was probably the most blatant lie on the entire planet. Everyone knew it.

  I didn’t care. I just wanted to get away.

  ‘Okay. See you then!’

  ‘See you, man!,’ Horvat replied and gave me the sign of the horns. ‘Take care of yourself!’

  ‘You too.’

  I nodded to the others:

  ‘See you.’

  ‘See ya.’

  ‘See you later!’ Horvat’s hottie said, completely over the top. She forced a smile and waved goodbye to me, like I was a little child. I responded with some indeterminate movement of my hand.

  Never in my life had I felt so despondent and so stupid as the moment I walked away from them.

  Cassette 5

  NEW NOTES

  ASININITY

  Fabio and I looked around. Horvat was right: trade school was for losers.

  For example Bobić from the Nenadovo district. I could barely understand him. He only spoke in dialect and very rarely showered.

  ‘What the hell, Bobić,’ Fabio said to him. ‘Do you sleep with goats or what? Why don’t you wash?’

  Or Honda-Denis, who had failing marks in almost every subject. While the business studies teacher described the relation between principal and interest, he hawked with all his might and spat on the floor. She looked at him in shock:

  ‘You’re mad. You are absolutely insane!’

  He put on his motorcycle helmet and crossed his arms.

  ‘Out!’ she shouted. ‘Get out!’

  He got up and left. Calmly and quietly.

  Martinović, our English teacher was the only real nuisance. After the fall of Communism he returned to his homeland from England, and of all the cities in Croatia he had to settle down in Vešnja, and of all the schools in the city he had to be employed at this particular trade school. The man dressed unfathomably ugly – tie and grey suits – and only spoke English. He taught us English grammar in English, even though there were those in the class whose brains could barely follow even if it had been in Croatian. We were set some senseless dialogues that we had to memorise and perform in front of the class, in pairs.

  FABIO: ‘Should I put this in front of the fireplace, darling?’

  ME: ‘No. Please put it by the window, dear.’

  Nobody in the class had ever heard Martinović speak Croatian. Apart from me. I set a trap for him once after the lesson. He completely screwed with me.

  ‘What does “numb” mean?’ I asked him in English. ‘Comfortably Numb. It’s a song title.

  ‘I know,’ he smiled and mumbled three possible meanings: paralysed, frozen or without feeling.

  I loved him for that. The man in the suit knew Pink Floyd!

  Back at the camp Mum told me that Dad had got some work. At a vineyard near Lovgar they were short of manpower. The trip took an entire two hours, because the bus had to pick up muscles in several towns along the way.

  Mum was part of a group of women from the camp who knitted gloves, sweaters and caps for a sleazy businessman from Vešnja. It must have been a very good business. He drove past the camp every other day to pick up the finished products.

  In the evening, when the two of them collapsed on the bed and complained about their sore backs and shoulders, I prodded them:

  ‘What’s up, working class! Once upon a time you had the first of May, a good salary, health and social insurance. And now? Dad, you’ve been thrown back to the age of feudalism, and Mum, to the age of the manufacturer. I’m the only one in the family maintaining the standards!’

  ‘Drop that crap, son!’ Dad said. ‘I can barely keep my eyes open.’

  I ‘maintained the standards’ by going on work experience with Master Electrician Boro Krivokapić, who paid for my lunch, though still not for my efforts. He taught me how to lay cables and connect electricity in new flats and business premises. We repaired the existing wiring as well as a range of home appliances. I unrolled cables, made plaster, connected copper wires and dreamt I was somewhere else, somewhere in Sweden, in the vicinity of Stockholm, where my friends and I chased fit Swedish babes, went to cool concerts and drank from freshly opened bottles.

  When there was no work, we drove Boro’s Zastava from one pub to the next. We stood in the bar and waited for someone to mention something about a defective iron or something. The pubs, the bistros and the wine cellars functioned as Boro’s private offices. It was there that people went to look for him and left him messages. All his friends and acquaintances spent most of their time there. Some of them were tradesmen themselves, looking for work. Others were unemployed and permanent fixtures. With long faces, they hung out by the bar from morning till night and squawked about the good old days. The stories got better and better with every emptied glass. One of them was a history teacher, now retired, but without a pension. The other: a policeman, Serbian, fired. The third: Croatian, a drunkard, no job. I never saw any of them eat. They just sucked on their bottles and bought each other fresh rounds.

  One I remember was Ljumbomir, a retired YPA officer with an aquiline nose and a thin moustache. He once talked about how in the seventies he had been to the opening of the zoo in Vešnja.

  ‘I go inside, stand there and see something: what in the world is that? Is it a sheep or a donkey? Something furry and tall with a long neck and long ears, really long. I come closer to get a better look at the creature. Then God-help-me the shaggy devil spits at my head! Arghhh! My cap flies off, people are dying with laughter, and I’m near dying with shame. Later a colleague says to me: “Ljubo, that was a llama, it’s an exotic animal. How could you make such an ass of yourself while in uniform?” But honestly, I’m telling you: the first thing I thought – that’s not a sheep or a donkey!’

  Then Marijan, Fabio’s employer arrived, with an urgent job. He needed to replace the sockets at the home of a diasporan man in Grozvin. The man had built a two-hundred-square-metre villa and had had a range of nice, very fancy Italian sockets installed. Now, six months later, a number of the sockets had stopped working, and the diasporan man wanted to replace the lot of them. Marijan had warned him about the poor quality, but the guy had insisted on the pink mussel-shaped sockets. Marijan was not able to make it out there himself.

  ‘No problem. We’ll take it,’ Boro said. ‘Is everything ready?’

  ‘Yep! But be careful. The guy is a real patriot,’ Marijan said, then whispered: ‘Emigrant from the communist era.’

  We knew what that meant.

  ‘Find yourselves some other names,’ he added.

  Boro dubbed himself Franjo, and me, he called Igor. At the home of the great patriot the wife was there alone, and she served us beer, wine and Slivovitz. ‘Franjo’ had already had a few, and as usual his pronunciation had started to slip in the Serbian Ekavian direction. He had lived in Vešnja for two thirds of his life, but the Ekavian made an appearance every time he drank.

  I had to make toasts and speak far more than usual in order to keep him quiet. The president’s namesake spoke sonorous Serbian.

  Around six or seven, we drove back. Boro insisted on giving me a lift to the camp, and I was stupid enough to agree. As soon as we left Grozvin, the Zastava began to drive along the white line. Occasionally we were all the way over on the left side.

  I was rather intoxicated myself, but still I got a chill down my spine every time we approached a bend in the road. Boro sang: ‘The snow fell on spring flowers, on fruit.’ I prayed to the higher powers: Please don�
�t let anyone come driving in the opposite direction! Please let me survive this trip!

  Never before had D2 and the reception building looked as lovely as it did that evening. I stepped out of the car and breathed in the cool air. I was alive. It was beautiful!

  I leant forward to say goodbye. Boro dug into his pockets and unfurled some crumpled notes:

  ‘Here! Take this!’

  That was a first.

  ‘Next time, boss. On a bigger job.’

  ‘Do as I tell you, take it! Do you want me to get angry?’

  ‘It’s too much,’ I said and was just about to add ‘and you’re drunk, sir.’

  He removed two notes and handed me the rest.

  I thanked him, slammed the door and headed slowly back to D1.

  Reception was quiet and deserted, while the TV room was more crowded and noisy than I had ever seen. The voices intermingled, people were shushing one another and there were vehement discussions.

  Still drunk, I did something I had not done for a long time. I went in. Stood at the very back, by the entrance. Pero was sitting on an armchair further ahead. He could not see me. Nobody could see me. Only the TV screen lit up the viewers faces and shiny heads.

  There was news.

  The sound was cranked up, but I could not understand what the newsreader was talking about. I stood furthest from the TV, and sitting between me and the speaker was Parasite, Clove and a bunch of others, all talking at once. I listened to their incomplete sentences, the fragments of their theses and theories.

  ‘It must be our people! That was …’

  ‘Are you mad? They were the ones who …’

  ‘ … to get the attention of Europe!’

  ‘ … force the Americans to intervene!’

  I was afraid to ask someone what the commotion was over. I pricked up my ears and tried to isolate the sound of the TV from the bellowing and bleating in the room.

  Then Ivan entered, nodded at me and asked what was going on. The man in front of me turned and stated coolly that the old bridge in Mostar had been destroyed, and now they were waiting for Franjo to say something on the matter.

  It was the ninth of November, 1993.

  THE BASEMENT WINDOW

  I walked out of the TV room. Thought of Safet from our street, originally from Mostar. He had married Amila and moved into her Dad’s house about one hundred metres from ours. Next to them lived Selim, the man with the finest basement in the entire neighbourhood. Selim was a retired carpenter and used the basement as his workshop. For that reason he had it built so that you could stand upright and work there. To let some light in, he had two small windows built in the wall facing the river.

  Now, as I dragged myself up the stairs of D1, half drunk, I thought about one of those windows.

  There was not a single cloud in the sky that day. It was spring, nearing summer – sunshine, pollen and horny bees in the air. The only object of desire for Adi and me was the curvaceous Lana on Ribarska Street. She was over thirty, married, and had a spoilt eight-year-old.

  We sat on the veranda at my place having a melancholy conversation about the girls from our class. Expected to be treated as heroes once the war ended and they returned. I pictured them admiring Adi and I, two tough guys, two experienced lads who were there when it happened, not just sitting far away watching it on the telly.

  ‘Definitely!’ Adi said ironically. ‘They’ll put up statues of us in the park. While we’re alive!’

  ‘No, down by the boats,’ I said. ‘Where I saw the two Chetniks.’

  ‘I want to be on a horse!’

  ‘You are the horse. Beneath me.’

  ‘And a cowboy hat!’

  ‘Not serious! I want to have a woman on the horse with me! Why are there no partisan statues with women? I thought the partisans scored like mad, man.’

  Boom!

  The first shell fell. I was on the stairs trimming my nails as we spoke. Adi was lying on the floor of the veranda flicking through a comic book, a Captain Micky issue entitled Bart with the Scar. He threw it down and shouted as he got up:

  ‘Wow, man! That was close!’

  With talons on one hand and an exemplary manicure on the other, I ran after him. We jumped over the fence of Zaim’s garden, dashed around behind the house and entered his basement hunched over.

  Then number two exploded. Even closer! I could feel the pressure – the sudden gush of air – before Adi managed to shut the metal door.

  Half an hour later we heard screaming and wailing from Selim’s garden and knew that it was bad. Adi wanted to go over and see the bodies, but his Dad threatened to cuff him if he moved an inch.

  I had no interest in seeing it. Neno did, and came back. It was the first time I had ever seen him cry.

  ‘Safet, Selim and Drago are dead,’ he said when people started to question him.

  The three of the had been sharing some tinned sardines in the garden behind Selim’s house. Safet had removed his T-shirt and had his back to the hot sun. Drago was smoking half a cigarette.

  When the shell fell, they ran into Selim’s basement. Shell number two flew in through one of the windows and killed them on the spot.

  The window was no larger than forty by sixty centimetres. How big was the shell? What angle was it launched at? What were the odds of something like that even happening?

  Had the three of them remained in the garden, they would have been unharmed. Safet still would have spoken with his Mostar accent, Selim’s basement would still be packed with neighbours that night, and chain-smoking Drago would have been sucking on his ciggies as usual.

  But how could anyone know that the near impossible would happen? That the place that everyone thought was the safest, was in reality the worst place to go?

  THROUGH THE GATE

  ‘Maybe you’re right after all,’ Kaća said.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Maybe it was the Croatians.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘In Mostar, you know. The bridge. Maybe they were the ones who did it.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ I made a sweeping gesture. ‘Fuck it.’

  I pointed at the white plastic bag she was holding:

  ‘Is that for me?’

  ‘Yes. And do you know what? They were on sale. This is how much you saved.’

  She handed me a roll of notes, and I unfurled them. A little more than thirty kunas. I pinched her on the cheek:

  ‘You’re an angel! One of these days you’re going to get a big sweet. Let’s see what we’ve got here.’

  I pulled the cardboard box out of the bag and sat down on the bench. I rested the box on my lap.

  I could already smell them.

  ‘So, how was Trieste?’ I asked.

  ‘Noisy and filthy. Mum was utterly impossible.’

  ‘You always say that.’

  I removed the lid, and there they were, a set of twins covered with a thin piece of rustling paper.

  ‘Forty-ones, right?’

  ‘Relax,’ Kaća said. ‘They’re exactly as you asked. I’m not an idiot.’

  I kicked off my worn-out Adidas and dipped my feet into Paradise. I put the laces in and tied them up.

  Then I got up and walked back and forth.

  ‘What do you think?' I asked.

  ‘Not bad. Actually they suit you quite well.’

  I placed my misshapen and practically disintegrated Adidas in the box. The things I had been through in them! War and Peace. I looked forward to chucking them as soon as I got the chance. Maybe as early as the next morning, out on the peninsula:

  Splaashhh!

  Dad completely flipped out:

  ‘What? Are those meant to be shoes?’

  ‘Yeah, what’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s the middle of November! How could you buy such crap? You are not going to make it through the winter in them.’

  ‘They’re Converse All Star, man! They’re totally cool!’

  ‘They’re a pair of socks with laces and s
oles! That’s an out-and-out con!’

  ‘No, they’re too cool, and they suit me. Here!’

  I took the thirty kunas out of my pocket and handed it to him:‘Here! I’ll get you the rest as soon as I’m paid again.’

  He had lent me some of his salary from the vineyard. The money Boro had given me barely covered half of what the shoes cost in Trieste.

  ‘I don’t want it,’ he answered. ‘It was not a loan, it was a gift, you are my child. But those are not shoes! Especially not in the winter! You will get ill as soon as a drop of rain falls on them.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to find me something better at Caritas or the Red Cross.’

  ‘But you do not want anything I get from there!’

  ‘The stuff you bring, nobody is interested in wearing them.’

  ‘Why? Are they too hot? Is the prince scared his feet are going to get sweaty or what?’

  ‘No, only pop-boys and country bumpkins wear those. Pointed shoes. Find me a pair of army boots, then I’ll take a look at them.’

  ‘Find them yourself, good sir! Don’t be so posh. Go dig through the cardboard boxes with the commoners! Why does it always have to be me?’

  I chose not to reply. He’d had some problems at work, before the season ended, and he was often short-tempered at home. Several of the employees were newly-arrived Croatian refugees from central Bosnia. They had been persecuted by Muslims, so they spat in his face. To top things off, he had developed a rash on his hands. The grapevines had been sprayed with chemicals and he had forgotten to wear gloves.

  Mum placated him with phrases like ‘the child is at that age’ and ‘young people today.’ She even suggested knitting a pair of warm woollen socks for me, which would compensate for the insufficient thickness of the shoes. She had already knitted two long sweaters – a thick black one and a thin grey one. The former went with my trousers and new shoes. The trousers were still scruffy, washed-out and tight, but I no longer hated them. Since my hair had grown long, it looked like I wore them on purpose. Like it was just a part of my heavy style.

  They were going to look good with the shoes and the black sweater, I thought. They are going to look cool in the dim lighting at Ukulele.