We walked past Ukulele and along the boulevard. Away from the centre and towards the sea. We approached her ‘home.’
‘I’m just going to chuck my bag in,’ she said. ‘Come in.’
I was not keen on meeting her mum, but she told me her mum was not home. We went in through the gate, across the echoing courtyard and into one of the three buildings of the barracks.
The floor where she and her mother shared a room with a family was damp and dim. The walls were sooty and they were sweating. A young woman was cleaning underwear in two wash boilers on a stove at the end of the corridor. From inside the various rooms all kinds of noises were heard: the wailing of the radio, laughter, a quarrel. At any rate, I heard, ’you whore!’ shouted several times.
I waited in the corridor. Two children with holes in their socks, a boy and a girl, ran around kicking a tennis ball. When she came out, they pointed at us, teased us and laughed.
‘Let’s beat it,’ she said.
‘Yes, let’s.’
As soon as we came outside in the light, I forgot all about the children and the sooty walls. The steam from the simmering boilers, I forgot about that in particular. She laced her fingers into mine, and we swung the large V of our arms. Her hair fell over her shoulders. It covered part of Cobain’s confused face. A bit of wind whistled through her hair.
It was windy out by the water too. A group of grungers sat around an extinguished fire plucking at their guitars. The grey sea stirred behind them. They sang: ‘Something in the way, mmm … mmm … Something in the way, yeah …’ We waved at them and continued.
One kilometre.
One and a half.
Two.
We found a solitary place and lay down.
The warm surface of the cliffs beneath us. A leaden sky above. An entire afternoon in front of us. Maybe more. Maybe the rest of our lives, who knew?
She said something about death amongst idols at the age of twenty-seven. Then something about death in general. I lay on my side and leaned on my left elbow. With my right hand I caressed her cheek, her shoulder, her arm and thigh.
Then I kissed her on the lips and glanced across the open sea in front of us. From the high cliff we lay on, the turbulent blankets of the sea could be seen melting into the heavy sky on the horizon. It was perfectly still. Only the gentle sound of the waves striking the cliff, a whistling in the treetops up by the road and our steady breathing could be heard.
A minute passed.
Two. Three. Four.
Jelena, it was on the tip of my tongue, I would never forget this day. This sky, this sea.
But I didn’t say that. I said nothing. For over half an hour I did not say a single word.
Neither did she.
MAURO DEAL
On the way back we said at most five sentences each. Jelena looked at me as if I had just stepped down from a stage.
The girl is lost in me, I thought as we walked down the boulevard. What did I do right? Is this really happening to me?
We kissed for a long time by the gate to the barracks. Then I took a city bus into the centre, where I had to get off.
My body was quite relaxed, almost dozy from the wind, Jelena’s kisses and the rolling sea, which had flickered in front of us for hours. My left thigh felt moist and cold. By all accounts, I had released a drop or two.
At one point I discreetly pulled my T-shirt down over my groin with a sigh. I was surprised there could even be such banal activity down there during such a sublime, romantic moment. On the bus, it was not only the feel of the liquid’s cool moisture on my skin that I noticed, I could also see the extent of it. The moisture had soaked through the denim and was clearly visible on my heavy outfit.
I was wondering if the guy sitting next to me could see the stain, when Mauro suddenly came rocking through the bus.
‘Hey, Miki!’
‘Hey, Mauro! What’s up, what have you got there?’
‘This,’ he said and placed a brown guitar case on the seat in front of me, ‘is my new sweetheart.’
‘What is it?’
'Gibson copy. From 1970, man! One of a kind.’
‘Wow, it must have cost a fortune?’
‘Not really, but it sure wasn’t cheap.’
‘Can I have a look?’
‘Wait till we get outside.’
‘Fair enough. Where are you getting off?’
Mauro was Fabio’s big brother. He had once played in a punk rock band. The band was called Shelter and during its brief lifespan had managed to perform two concerts, until the bass player and drummer were called up. Mauro and the lead singer were left with no rhythm section and decided to break the band up.
He joined another band later, one that played something a lá Pantera, just not as well. Oblivion, they called themselves. The lead singer was completely mental. During Mauro's solos he cut himself on the chest with a razor blade. One night he cut one of his nipples, screamed like a pig with blood everywhere. The concert was stopped. A local newspaper made a brief report of the incident, using the doctor’s report as a source. It was the peak of their fame, because Mauro left the band the next day. He mentioned the term masochist when talking about the singer, which it turned out did not have anything to do with the Serbo-croat verb maziti, to stroke, which Fabio and I had assumed.
Now Mauro was ‘ready again,’ keeping busy with ‘laying the groundwork for a new band,’ as he put it. He had just been to the rehearsal room with some guys, and it had gone ‘swimmingly.’
‘We’re still trying a few different combinations,’ he said when he got off the bus. ‘Now you get to see how beautiful she is, my sweetheart. Check it out!’
He opened the leather case beneath a plane tree by the bus stop. I immediately praised the guitar’s design.
‘What does that say? Galson?’
‘Yeah! Gibson, Galson. Almost the same, right?’
‘Yeah, who cares! It looks like the one Slash plays in the ‘Sweet Child O’Mine’ video.’
‘Exactly! Except this is a Galson instead of a Gibson. Maybe I’ll cover it with a sticker.’
‘Fuck that,’ I said. ‘I don’t know anyone who has a genuine Gibson. Actually, I don’t know anyone who has an electric guitar!’
‘You mean you didn’t know anyone. Until now!’
‘Yeah, until now, man! Thanks!’
‘How’s are you coming along with the lyrics?’
I knew that would come. He had asked me that question for months. He was good at putting chords together and composing songs, but his English was not great. Fabio had told him about my famous report on The Goldsmith’s Treasure, and how I knew loads of lyrics by heart. For that reason, Mauro invested a lot of hope in my writing abilities. I was hesitant, even though I was flattered.
‘Why don’t you just write a first draft?’ he asked and closed the case. ‘I’m tired of playing covers all the time, man. It’s a drag.’
‘Alright,’ I said. ‘If you can get me the lyrics for ‘Dead Embryonic Cells’ by Sepultura and ‘The Clairvoyant’ by Maiden, then I’ll look into it. Those two songs have some wicked lyrics.’
‘Deal! Anything else?’
‘I heard you’ve got all sorts of tapes.’
‘Yes, and records and CDs,’ Mauro added with considerable pride. ‘Biggest collection in the city.’
‘I want to borrow ten original albums!’
‘Tapes or records?’
‘Tapes, of course. You choose.’
‘Cool! Drop by one of these days. Then we’ll look into it.’
We said goodbye and I took the next bus to Majbule. An ugly surprise awaited me there.
COVER
‘Police!’ Mum said. ‘They’re on the ground floor.’
‘Now? At night?’
‘I’m pretty sure it’s them. Emir, get up! Straighten the duvet a little! Look at this place!’
‘Where are our papers?’ Dad shouted. ‘Where are our cards? Did you get them extended?’
<
br /> ‘Yes, I did.’
We had to get our refugee cards extended every three months. That was done at the refugee office in Vešnja, where you they were stamped with a new date and a signature in the field, ‘Valid until.’ I had been there the previous day.
‘Then where are they?’ Dad was stressed. ‘Where did you put them?’
‘Aren’t they in the drawer?’
‘Which drawer?’
‘By the bedside table. Where else?’
‘There’s nothing in here!’
‘Not in the cupboard either?’ Mum asked.
Then it hit me. I knew exactly where they were. Exactly. I opened my shoebox and looked for a particular tape. It was not there.
‘Shit! I gave them to Kaća!’
‘What?’
‘I forgot them … She borrowed … It doesn’t matter. I’ll go grab them.’
‘Hurry! They’ll be here in a bit.’
I slipped on my shoes and raced out the door. They were still warm. I had just taken them off and hopped into bed when Mum shouted from the balcony. I had a hard-on. Lying on your stomach, it does not take much. I was also still wondering about the stain. It confused me, that I had zero interest in doing it with Jelena. That I did not look at her that way, while at the same time, ‘my organ for peace and harmony,’ as Zlaja referred to his manhood, was raring to go.
Does it have a life of its own? Are love and sex two different things? Or am I just strange?
I never got an answer for that. Was interrupted by the word, police. I did up my laces and went into the corridor. Kaća and her mum had moved to D2, a room with a balcony. I raced down the stairs but was forced to slow down again. Near the entrance to D1 there was a guy wearing a denim jacket and black pointed shoes.
Do the police always wear denim when they’re in civilian clothing? I wondered. Don’t they have any other clothes?
‘Where are you going?’ he asked, when I got closer, out of breath.
‘Over to D2.’
‘No you’re not! We’re checking IDs,’ he nodded down the corridor of the ground floor, where a couple of doors were open. ‘Where do you live?’
‘Up on the second floor. That’s why I have to go to D2. Our cards are over there.’
He did not seem to understand so I had to repeat myself. He looked exactly like Danny DeVito, just younger. His face was actually quite sympathetic.
‘I just extended our cards,’ I said, ‘but they’re over at my friend’s place. I have to run over and grab them.’
On the other side of the terrace, near the entrance to D2, one of his colleagues appeared.
‘What does he want?’ he shouted.
‘He wants to come over to your side!’
‘Fine!’
I hurried across the terrace.
‘What do you want?’
I explained everything once again. This time less convincingly. The guy was suspicious. Luckily Kaća’s mum appeared at the entrance holding a shopping bag in each hand.
‘Is Kaća upstairs?’
‘Yes, why? What’s happened?’
‘I forgot our cards inside a cassette cover. Kaća borrowed three tapes from me yesterday. Our cards are in one of them.’
‘Umm … okay?’
‘I had them extended yesterday and put them inside the cover. If you put them in your pocket, they curl up. I was wearing these tight trousers. Kaća borrowed …’
And so on, until finally they understood and we were allowed to go upstairs.
‘I haven’t listened to them yet,’ Kaća said. ‘You can’t have them.’
‘Quit joking. Are the cards there?’
‘I don’t know … Yes, here! In the Carcass cassette. Heartwork, is it good?’
‘To hell with Carcass! I have to fly! They’re probably waiting at our place by now!’
They were. The door was open. A couple of metres away I saw the back of a well-built man with close-cropped hair. Both our drawers were lying on the bed, and Dad stood there mumbling something indecipherable. One of the policeman shouted ‘Shut your mouth!’ and Dad did as instructed.
‘Where’s the boy?’ the man asked Mum. ‘When’s he coming?’
‘I’m here!’ I said before she had time to reply. ‘The cards are here.’
The other man – the one not shouting, standing closer to the door – turned around and took the three yellow cards.
Dad looked away and sat on the bed. Mum remained standing with her arms crossed, staring directly at the floor.
‘Fine,’ they said and left.
I took off my shoes and lay down on the bed.
Right! So how am I going to avoid that bloody stain next time?
ISRAEL
Following the raid, Dad was afflicted by what Mum would later call ‘Dad’s Israeli madness.’ He had no idea why there were still raids. Three weeks earlier the presidents of Bosnia and Croatia, Misters Alija Izetbegović and Franjo Tudjman, had signed a ceasefire and confederation agreement. Even though he and Mum did not know exactly what a confederation was, the three of us understood it as a clear step forward, because the newspapers, radio and TV all used that phrase when they discussed the two gentleman’s signatures and weak handshakes.
Following the second unannounced visit by the men in denim jackets, it became clear that the so-called step forward could easily become a more or less unnoticed step in an unknown direction for me and Dad. We had heard stories of raids in Savudrija and Varaždin. At the camp in Varaždin the men shot themselves in the foot – literally – to avoid being sent to the front. In Savudrija the police loaded a group of men onto a bus and drove them to Hercegovina. A CDC officer refused to accept them. They slept overnight on the floor of a primary school and the next morning were driven to the other side of the border. A number of them did not have any money on them, so they had to hitchhike hundreds of kilometres back to their camp.
These rumours, as well as the second visit by the police, gave Dad a temporary, but fierce bout of paranoia. He woke up several times a night, walked back and forth in the room and repeated:
‘They’re looking for something, something in particular! Why would they want to hurt us now? There’s no reason for it. All our documents are in order.’
‘Fine, then why don’t you lie down and go to sleep!’ Mum said. ‘At least let the rest of us sleep. We can’t get a wink of sleep when you’re walking around talking to yourself all the time.’
Then one day he returned from the Red Cross, bringing an ugly windcheater that did not fit any of us, along with some news: he had added all of our names to a list. We were going to Israel!
‘What?’
‘We are going to Israel. They are taking two hundred people, only two hundred, Bosnian refugees. If all goes well, we will leave in two weeks! By plane.’
You could hear a pin drop. Mum put down her romance novel and looked at me.
I looked at Dad. What was going on with him? It was as though some random person had accidentally mixed up our rooms and just barged in.
‘Dad, are you okay?’
Of course he was. He had just been thinking that maybe I had been right. Maybe we should go somewhere after all. Just for a while, maybe. We should find out if there was a right to withdraw or something. This will not do any more. You cannot just stand here, putting up with …
‘Then you’ll be going without me!’ Mum said and I hurried to add:
‘Same here.’
‘Why? Wasn’t that what you wanted?’
I was just about to mention Jelena or Neno, but changed my mind.
‘I don’t want to travel to a country that has been at war for fifty years, when we’ve only been at war for two! It makes absolutely no sense.’
‘It is a big country,’ he assured me. ‘I cannot imagine there is war everywhere. And they would not send us to a place where there’s war, would they?’
‘Sweden hasn’t been at war since 1814!’
‘Is that so,’ Dad said and
raised his eyebrows. ‘Who told you that?’
‘Amar.’
This was not about Israel. No matter how many times he repeated that he would leave on his own, write to us and send us money, if we did not want to go with him, both Mum and I were well aware that it was just a supposition. An abortive but necessary diversion from something else. Of course he would never leave us. Especially not now, with Neno’s situation still up in the air. He just needed to imagine himself far away from building D1, room 210, where any Tom, Dick and Harry could knock on your door and say ‘ID check’ and besmirch you. Israel was his Sweden over those days. That was it.
He really had put us on a list and later received confirmation that everything was arranged. That there was room on a plane from Zagreb on Monday at 18.25. But the closer it got to the Monday in question, the less he talked about the journey to the Middle East.
In the end it went just as Mum predicted: he called the office and cancelled the trip. For a number of trying days he sulked around and barely slept. Then he went back down to the Muscle Market and never spoke about the trip to Israel again. It was as though the country had never existed for him.
SCRATCHES AND FLIP-FLOPS
Mum grew calmer but no less concerned. She said she would happily leave now were it not for ‘the stuff with Neno.’ Even though we had done everything we could to find him, she did not think we could leave the country without him. If a new opportunity arose to do something, or if news about him arrived, she preferred to be nearby and not in some distant, foreign land.
As for me, I was on an entirely different planet. The police visits, like the wailing radio reports about meetings by politicians in Bonn and Brussels, were just noise – background noise, which grew closer – but nothing more. In the foreground I had Jelena and our frequent after-school meetings. I was unable to write the lyrics for Mauro’s song, I was unable to do my homework, on the whole, I was unable to do anything but think about her.
Ukulele Jam Page 19