by Miha Mazzini
‘It would be for the best if she didn’t come at all.’
I remembered that I had invited her myself that morning. I started regretting it.
‘Yes, it really would be for the best if Ajsha didn’t come. But everybody sobers up. Sooner or later.’
I looked at Selim sideways. These words could’ve referred to his love for Nastassja, too. But he didn’t seem to get it.
I looked up. Over the rotten gutter into the sky. It was littered with stars. Not even the smallest fragment was missing from the moon. From the road, women could be heard laughing. It was Ajsha with two friends.
Selim slowly released his breath from his lungs.
They went in.
Ibro came laughing from the bushes.
‘I’ve bought some aftershave, too,’ he immediately let us know.
‘Oh really, which one, show me it.’
He showed me it. The bottle was still full. Maybe there was still time to talk him into leaving it like that.
‘Has she come yet?’
We shrugged our shoulders and shook our heads.
‘Come on, let’s go inside. She’s sure to be there.’
We went in, Ibro in the middle. He was clicking his heels and held his elbows out with his thumbs tucked into his belt. His every step was accompanied by the quiet rustling of the fringe on his cowboy outfit, similar to the sound of brushes in a slow jazz blues number played in a sleepy bar. Just before the entrance, I slowed down and peeped behind his ears. His hair prevented me from seeing what I was looking for.
‘What’s the matter? Are you afraid to go in?’ he asked me, full of confidence. The absolute boss. I hoped I wouldn’t be the one to walk him home.
‘Let’s go,’ I said and put my hand on the door handle.
‘Wait a moment.’
He pulled the bottle of aftershave out of his pocket, screwed off the top, and splashed it in his hair. There was a smell of cheap chemistry.
He grabbed his jacket collar and pulled it away from chest. Poured in the second third of the bottle. He used the rest for consecrating his armpits and between his legs. The bottle flew into the night.
‘Now we can go in.’
He opened the door.
The glass bottle rattled on the gravel.
We stepped inside. The corridor was full of desks. In the middle, by a narrow passage, stood a schoolboy collecting the entrance fee. We looked through him. Pushed in side by side. Moved the table and the doorman sitting on it. He didn’t say anything. A clever boy.
We made our way through the corridor and into the gymnasium. We didn’t go to the dance floor. We stood in what looked like the locker room, judging by the hooks on the wall and the mirrors. We watched the crowd through the door. Somewhere in the middle, it seemed, people were dancing. Or at least swaying rhythmically. Along all four walls there was an unbroken rectangle of people sitting on the exercise benches.
Among the constantly moving bodies crammed against each other, I noticed Ajsha sitting with her two friends.
‘There she is. She’s here,’ whimpered Ibro. His confidence had all but evaporated. He’d gone soft, and it seemed as if he would just melt onto the floor between us.
‘What do I do now?’
He clung to me like a drowning man.
‘Nothing. Ask her for a dance.’
‘Yes, I will. Just let me calm down.’
He shuffled from one foot to another. He shook every now and again and he probably really would have calmed down. Eventually, sometime in the early morning. Alone in the gym.
‘Well, go on.’
I pushed him into the stream of people milling around the dance floor. Mainly men looking at women sitting on the benches. Like in a market. I followed Ibro. Pushing away the elbows and the backs, I made slow progress.
Near Ajsha, Selim joined us. I was staring at something in the middle until we went past her. I didn’t want to see her. I didn’t want to be Ibro’s scapegoat.
He didn’t ask her for a dance. Slowly we made a circle around the gym and jumped out of the crowd into the locker room. I’d had enough of this joke. I went to the bathroom. There was a queue in front of the stall, so I had a smoke.
While looking at the stream of my piss I noticed three coins in the toilet. I zipped my fly. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the coins. I sang Three Coins in a Fountain loudly, from beginning to end. I stepped out of the stall and everybody moved respectfully to let me out into the corridor.
A man who sings like that is capable of anything.
Ibro was in the locker room. Selim wasn’t there.
Ibro reported, ‘She’s turned quite a few away already. She only danced one dance with somebody and then sat down again. She’s waiting for me.’
I nodded and swam into the stream again.
I saw Magda with her boyfriend among the dancers. She said hello. I said hello. That’s all that was left.
I stopped by the storeroom where they kept exercise mats. I lit a cigarette and looked through the glass door into the little room where they’d put the amplifiers and the rest of the equipment. Three schoolboys sat next to a cassette player, drinking wine from a bottle.
Somebody bumped into me. I turned around and exchanged looks with a boy in a black leather jacket. His chest covered in badges.
‘Fuck off,’ he hissed.
I stuck my tongue out at him.
There wasn’t enough room for a blow. Or at least that’s what I was counting on. He kicked and missed. The hobnailed boot hit the wall.
I looked around to see how all that space could have suddenly appeared. I was standing in the middle of a semi-circle of his buddies. The local punks. Young boys, most of them around fifteen. I knew them by sight only.
‘Egon!’ The shout came from my left.
We fell into each other’s arms. The leader of the group.
We held each other’s shoulders, cursing each other’s mothers.
‘Have you got a band?’ he asked.
I shook my head and we unearthed a memory or two. The boys were whispering in each other’s ears, and their fists returned to their normal position.
They looked at me respectfully. Punky and I were old friends. We’d often been beaten up together. The worst beating came once when our band went to play in some godforsaken village. I’d been talking to Hippy before leaving. He too used to used to have a band, and years earlier they’d been to play in the same village, with their long hair and beards. The local short-haired young peasants went mad when they saw them. They beat the shit out of them.
And then, years later, we went. With crew cuts, dressed in leather. The long-haired young peasants went mad when they saw us. They beat the shit out of us.
And so another small circle in time was completed.
Suddenly Ibro made his way through the circle. He wasn’t paying any attention to whose feet he stepped on or who he pushed away. He fell onto me.
‘Egon, help me!’ he said in a croaky voice.
The punks looked at each other, trying not to laugh.
The neck of a bottle was sticking out of Punky’s jacket pocket. I gestured to him. He gave me the bottle. It was schnapps.
I offered it to Ibro. He drank a third of it in one gulp. I gave the bottle back to its owner. Ibro was gasping for air.
‘Are you all right?’
He nodded.
‘Now I can do it. Just one more thing. Have a look, is it straight?’
The top two buttons on his jacket were undone. He was pointing to the thick hair on his chest, which was bursting out of the jacket.
‘Is what straight?’ I asked.
‘This, for fuck’s sake.’
He kept pointing to his chest. To where his neck joined the rest of his body. I leaned forward, straining my eyes.
‘I can’t see anything. Do you mean the jacket?’
‘No Egon, no. The hair. Can’t you see? I bought it in Italy. It’s like a sticker. You just put it on. They sell it by the
metre.’
To show me what he meant, he pulled the hair away with his fingers. It really was stuck on. It came away like wallpaper.
‘Now tell me, is it straight? I don’t want to look like a fool.’
‘It’s straight, Ibro, it’s stuck in a perfectly straight line.’
‘Egon, I’m going now.’
We shook hands.
‘Good luck, Ibro.’
He turned and took a step. I called him.
‘What?’
I put my hand on his shoulder.
‘Take care!’
He nodded. Pressed his lips together.
He went.
We broke into laughter. Everybody. I explained the situation quickly and we jumped onto the parallel bars by the wall.
We didn’t want to miss a second.
Ibro was making his way towards Ajsha, who’d just declined a dance. Both her friends were already dancing. He stepped in front of her and his body hid her from us. We stretched our necks. Ajsha got up and went to the exit.
Ibro stood there for another minute and then walked towards us. We waited for him in a tense silence.
We surrounded him.
‘Well, what happened?’ I asked.
‘I couldn’t get anything out of me. I was opening my mouth and not one word came out. Oh, God!!!’ He sobbed. ‘Ooooh God!!!’
He went to Punky and took the bottle out of his pocket.
There was about another half litre of the clear liquid in it. He put the bottle to his mouth and when he put it down again, it was empty. He stood there looking in the direction of his defeat. He let go of the bottle. It rattled on the floor.
He fell like a tree.
We picked him up and put him on the bench. We covered his face with a hat.
‘I didn’t know you could buy chest hair per metre,’ Punky broke the silence. We were looking at each other not knowing whether to start laughing or crying. The other boys were waiting to see what their boss would do.
‘Where do you find them?’ he shook his head in the end.
‘Fuck it, remember where you and I met.’
He grinned.
‘Let’s leave him in peace. Have you got that cassette of yours with you?’
‘I have.’
I always carry it with me when I go to a dance. It might come in handy one day.
‘Shall we change the music?’ I asked innocently.
Everybody was for it. The bass was still drumming. Over it a colourless women’s choir was hooting.
We entered the storeroom, which was temporarily acting as a studio. The schoolboys raised their heads.
‘Get out. You’re not authorized to come in here’ one of them said. He didn’t make it sound like an order.
I took the cassette out of my pocket and gave it to Punky.
‘Side A.’
‘Yeah, I do still remember.’
He walked over to the cassette player and turned it off. He put my cassette in and started playing it from the beginning. A cacophony of whistling could be heard from the gym.
‘What are you doing?’ asked the schoolboy and grabbed Punky’s upper arm.
He just punched the boy in the face without even turning around. The other two were dealt with by the boys. The cassette stopped.
The whistling in the gym got even louder.
Punky turned the cassette player on again. It started. We shook with the rhythm. A friend of the three boys lying on the floor looked in and opened his mouth for a question. He had it shut with a boot.
We were shouting the chorus at each other. Dancing on our vibrating toes. A group of workers from the foundry marched in.
‘What sort of crap is this, you motherfuckers? Give us Madonna. Now! Do you hear?’
We did hear and we were surprised. Who did they want?
Punky started looking through the cassettes. He couldn’t find Madonna. He gave the worker a kick in the groin. The man’s friends didn’t look very pleased. People started fighting left right and centre. The punks drove the workers out of the room. Other people thought it was a fight based on nationality and joined in. I was making my way to the wall. The whole gym was one big fighting ring. Somebody launched at me. I kicked him in the balls with all my strength and ran away.
A few metres in front of the locker room I spotted Ajsha. She was holding hands with some good-looking guy. They were running in my direction.
Directly above me was a basketball hoop on a wooden board. I waited for a gap between the escaping bodies, jumped up, and grabbed hold of the hoop.
I swung. Mr. Handsome came nearer. I kicked forward, let go of the hoop, and hit his right cheek with my foot. He didn’t offer his left cheek. He folded like a tie into a bowl of soup.
A rattle and a squeak could be heard from above. The hoop fell down. I pushed Ajsha out of the way. The wooden boards shattered on the parquet floor. The hands of those fighting grabbed them immediately and struck at each other.
I took hold of her hand and pulled her towards me. I put my left arm around her and started making towards the exit. She followed me willingly. The locker room was a bottle neck between those running out and those eager to fight, storming in so as not to miss out. We were moving slowly, a few steps forward and then back again, depending on which side had more people taking part at each point. From the middle, I forced my way through to the wall and then started moving slowly along it, holding Ajsha’s hand.
The bodies weren’t so dense there; the worst fights were taking place in the middle.
A mirror covered the whole wall. From floor to ceiling. Boxer was sobbing with his face against the mirror.
‘Out of my way! Let me out! What’ve I done to you? I want out! I’ve had enough of this meeting.’
In his younger days he’d been an ardent functionary, the president of the youth organisation. A moustached Komsomol. Sometimes the drink would take him back to the days of his youth. Like this time. I was surprised at the liveliness of those bygone meetings. For a moment I regretted never having taken part in one.
‘Let me out!’ He raised his voice. ‘I’m warning you for the last time, let me out. Otherwise I’m going to hit you!’
The reflection in the mirror was still trying to catch him. Boxer started to strike. But he had no real strength. His hands were soft due to drink. The mirror remained whole.
Whichever way he tried to manoeuvre, whichever punch he tried to use, he always hit his opponent’s fist. He gave up. Leaned against his reflection and moaned. A bottle flew past my head and broke off the top of the mirror.
A diagonal crack appeared down to the floor.
I could see my image becoming distorted. The two halves were shaking. I let go of Ajsha’s hand. I stood in front of the mirror, my left hand up in the air, my right hand on my heart. I started reciting, ‘Mirror crack’d from side to side…’
Ajsha looked at me with horror and incomprehension.
I mumbled over the forgotten line but finished the next one in full voice:
‘…the Lady of Shalott cried!’
A second bottle finally shattered the mirror. It broke into fragments and scattered on the floor.
Strange that they don’t love Lord Tennyson around here. I turned to Ajsha, took her hand, and smiled encouragingly.
We squeezed into a corner and waited. The stream of those eager to fight was slowly subsiding. The direction of movement through the locker room changed slowly. Those running away were winning.
I looked into the gym. A magnificent, huge, megalomaniacal fight. The other basketball hoop was shattered, too. In the corner on the left, four muscular guys were holding Ibro in their arms, swinging him and smashing his head against the wall. Selim stormed in from somewhere and started hitting them.
‘Let’s go!’ I shouted to Ajsha and pulled her after me. We made our way to the exit along the wall where the glass fragments were on the floor. On the way I tapped Boxer on the shoulder, turned him the other way, and told him to run out. He we
nt like a bulldozer. We sheltered behind him. In the middle of the corridor he lost his bearings and stormed into the bathrooms. We went forward. Wanting to get out of the building.
A siren could be heard from outside. The police came pouring in through the door. Wearing different uniforms than usual. With long batons. They were striking everywhere.
I pulled Ajsha to the right, up the stairs. The passage was blocked by desks. We jumped over them and got to the top in the dark.
I listened to see if anybody was following us. I couldn’t hear anybody. They must’ve been too busy downstairs.
I pushed a small steel door, and we found ourselves in the attic. Full of old junk. Broken desks, placards, and decorations from various festivals.
I sat on a desk. Wiped the dust off for Ajsha. I offered her a cigarette.
We smoked slowly.
After the third puff, a barrage of words came pouring from her. About the madmen and maniacs surrounding us. I interrupted her and asked if she remembered the scarecrow in a cowboy outfit who’d asked her for a dance.
‘Of course. He was the worst. I was looking at the floor and suddenly a pair of winkle-pickers appeared in front of me. I didn’t want to look up at all. I was waiting for him to go. He didn’t. I looked at him, I can’t remember anymore what he looked like, and I saw him staring at me opening his mouth. Like a fish. At first I thought that he had something stuck in his throat. Or that he was suffocating. Then I thought he was going to throw up. I ran away. What if he’d dirtied my one-month-old blouse or shoes. I bought them in Italy. I’d said to myself I had to wear something red…’
I was looking around. The moonlight shone through a large round glassless window in the middle of the wall, making the room appear blue.
Ajsha suggested we leave.
There was no point. We had to wait. We’d fall straight into their hands. I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that she was at the same time frightened of me and attracted to me.
I stepped towards the window and looked out. The grass and road in front of the building were littered with Black Marias. A few ambulances among them. One fire engine.
They were well trained, I had to give them that. A Black Maria would park its arse against the door. The policemen would throw in the participants of the dance. When it was full, it would drive away. And the next one would come to be loaded.