They clap in rhythm under emotional (and faux-emotional) faces. Olga remembers that she should have asked for a blessing, so she looks at the priest, who makes a discreet sign of the cross over her food and nods. Because he doesn’t want to ask anyone else, Bernard reluctantly asks Aunt Svetlana if she can cut his steak. She does, feeling blessed to be able to help out.
They eat in near-silence.
Mila is twenty years old. Kras, her father, so passive-aggressively coerced her into studying law that by the time she’d enrolled she didn’t even realize it wasn’t she who’d made the decision. She was open to ideas, which is why at university they easily moulded her into that contradictory (but so common) type of being that is convinced people are for the most part beasts in need of a firm hand, but when it came to herself she asserted a certain amount of leeway in regard to the law.
She gets up from the table and signals to Alan to join her. Alan is seventeen years old. His skull still hasn’t withdrawn from that amorphous adolescent mass of face and is plagued by pimples, but otherwise he’s quite nice. He and Mila get along well. They pass through the kitchen together, where a waiter Mila fancies is sitting.
‘Want to go for a smoke?’ Alan says.
‘I don’t smoke,’ the waiter replies.
‘Well, come with us anyway. Have you been upstairs yet?’
Alan smiles at him. The waiter stands up. ‘I’m Borut.’
‘Alan.’
‘Mila.’
‘Nice to meet you.’
They take the wooden staircase up to the attic, where there are several locked doors and a wide-open one leading to a fusty, dusty room full of old furniture and boxes filled with stuff. Mila opens the window, the waiter Borut doesn’t know what to do with his hands, and Alan rummages through the boxes and finds a pile of old Komunist magazines.
‘Rip me off a sheet,’ says Mila.
Alan tears a page down the middle, hands it over to Mila, who folds it in half and then stretches a hand down past her shirt collar. She extracts a bag of weed from her bra. Alan grins; the waiter is visibly uncomfortable.
‘Do you toke?’
He is searching for the right answer.
‘Yeah, I do, but I’m working, I mean, I’m at work, and if the boss finds out I’ll be in the shit because he knows my folks, so, I don’t know, maybe it’s better if I just head back downstairs.’
Alan and Mila look at each other.
‘Don’t worry, dude,’ says Alan.
Mila adds, with a wink, ‘No, seriously, I mean, as you wish, but if you ask me, there’s no problem, we won’t tell anyone.’
‘Yeah, no, I know, but still, it would be best if I didn’t.’
But he doesn’t move. Mila breaks a clump into small pieces, pulls a pack of fags from her pocket, removes a cigarette, licks it, breaks it lengthwise, then sprinkles the weed in with the tobacco. Alan makes a filter out of a Komunist cover. Mila has the cigarette paper in her other pocket. She removes it, sprinkles the mixture onto it, takes the filter and rolls the joint in five quick motions. She catches Borut watching her while she stretches her tongue and licks the joint, so she runs her tongue over it one more time, though there’s no need to.
‘Do you have a lighter?’
Alan takes a lighter from his pocket and lights it for her. A cloud of smoke rolls out of the window. Borut moves to the sill to see if anyone’s down below. There’s nobody. He hopes they won’t catch them and it still seems like he really should leave. It smells great but is far too pungent. When Mila presses a still smoking joint into his hands, he takes three quick tokes, passes it to Alan and immediately regrets having smoked. He presses his eyelids together, senses that his whites have turned bright red, realizes that everyone will immediately know what he’s been up to, his co-workers, those rotten snitches, will tell the boss on him, the boss, that rotten scoundrel, will tell his father on him, and then he’ll have to move out of the house, live on the streets, these bloody kids of feudal lords, and especially their smoking-hot daughters, always causing him grief. Something rattles at the door, footsteps are heard, and Borut collapses.
It’s hard to say whose eyes are open wider, Magda’s or Svetlana’s. Their mouths are agape and both are gently shaking their heads. ‘Oh, no, that we won’t, Olga…that we won’t.’
Olga does not know whether to play the victim or use force, so she swings between the two poles.
‘Sisters! If you knew everything I’ve had to suffer in this family. The humiliation and the shame! If you have any love for me, if you still feel anything at all for your sister, who raised you, who ironed your rags and washed your diapers, if you are at all grateful for anything in life, then do as I say!’
She passes over in silence the twenty years she ignored them and tones down the haughtiness, and it also doesn’t seem fitting to her to mention the fact that she ran away from that godforsaken place the first chance she got. Magda and Svetlana turn pale.
‘But,’ ‘Yes, Olga, but,’ ‘we can’t,’ ‘no, really, you do not,’ ‘how can you ask for such a thing,’ ‘but didn’t you forgive?’ ‘I will not, I cannot’ ‘me neither.’
Olga has lured them out onto the terrace after dinner, under the guise of wanting to reminisce about their father. The evening Alpine air has banished all memory of the sun. It’s quite chilly. Olga is wrapped up in a scarf; her sisters have left their jackets at the table. They’re cold. A strange fragrance fills the air.
‘Magda, Sveja, I’m asking you, have I ever asked you for anything? I’m coming to you in an hour of need and I’m asking you to help me. Do I bother you every day with some sort of request? Do I ask you for something every day? My son is fifty years old, is it possible in this world that I, too, may wish for something?’
Olga stands in front of the door to prevent them from fleeing. She sees them shivering.
‘But what will they say?’ moans Svetlana.
‘What, what will they say? That somebody finally did something for me, for the poor, humiliated wretch! That somebody finally showed that they love me, can’t you see, sisters, the despair in which I live? That I have to depend on you, if I want somebody to show they care about me?’
The last note emboldens Magda.
‘Yeah, help yourself and all that, Olga, you know, why don’t you do that?’
‘Because I have something else in mind,’ says Olga and looks out beyond the clearing to the edge of the woods, ‘look here, if you do this for me, please, I ask you, please, I will take you right away, next weekend, to Reka.’
‘To Rakek, the village?’ ‘I don’t understand…’
‘To Reka in Croatia, I mean. Saturday morning, I’ll take you there, we’ll board the Galeb and sail on it around Istria all the way up to Portorož.’
‘On the Galeb?’ ‘But that’s…’ they whisper, in unison, ‘The ship of Tito!’
Their eyes light up and Olga smiles cunningly.
Stoja is laden down with children. Immediately after dinner Raven retreated to the ‘circle of the reasonable’ – Edgar, Katarina, Olive, Grace. The children are behaving, for now. Their questions are innocent. Such a cute little boy, that Voranc, such a pity he’s sick. She makes sure he doesn’t bump into anything. Where has Po disappeared to?
Alenka is dilly-dallying with her knife over her steak and daydreaming. Once a minute she snaps out of it for a second and looks for Voranc. Everything is fine. She catches the whispering of passing waiters. ‘Where’s Borut?’ ‘He went off somewhere with that girl.’ ‘Ooh.’
Meslier and Bernard have business in common. Before the war Bernard earned some money by seeking out and exploiting loopholes in the customs laws. He bought cheaply around the world, sold not cheaply at home, nothing earth-shattering, anybody could do it if he had the gumption. The initial growth of capital and the benefits that came with it (especially the sudden increase in attention from family members) made him greedy, but a lack of imagination in matters of business had kept his greed in check.
Until the war broke out.
Even people of no imagination realize that you can earn a fortune from war. His brother was the Minister for War, he had some money – what could go wrong? – and right away he commenced with the genteel, domestic tradition of gun-running. But he soon saw that he didn’t have nearly enough capital. Expensive, corrupt practices, buying stock and thousands of unforeseen variable costs sucked up his cash supply faster than Americans sucked up oil. On a tip from his mother he went to see the priest.
It turned out that the priest Meslier had managed the church fortunes extremely well indeed. Bernard didn’t know whether to ascribe this to a Lutheran-like fear of squandering or just to the usual cheapness, but one wouldn’t have known from the derelict church and the plain mortuary chapel that the Parish of Bodičava was swimming in money.
At first the priest resisted, so Bernard, day after day, besieged him with visions: the loveliest parish on earth, local social problems solved, a shelter for orphans and a youth centre, with, so to speak, a pure financial injection into the hearts of believers who would, before the earthly splendour of the Lord’s face, have to take the gospel more humbly. ‘How can they believe in God if they earn more than Him?’ he asked.
Today, ten years later, the church has two bell-towers. Bernard and Meslier wink at each other conspiratorially.
‘How does Olive like Slovenia?’ asks Edgar. Grace and Olive have been living together for ten years in the autonomous zone of Ost-Berlin. They have justified these few weeks in Grace’s home country by calling this a holiday. They’ve spent one weekend in the mountains, one weekend at the sea, but otherwise they sleep at the homestead, in the annex that had been built for Edgar.
‘She says it’s beautiful and peaceful and quiet. Almost too much for her taste. Even for mine, perhaps. But it’s still somehow nice to come home. Olive was disinherited when she was still a teenager, so I took her along to see that things can be even worse.’
Friendly laughter. ‘It means so much to Kras that you all came,’ says Katarina.
‘Oh, I know a married person has to go easy on their partner,’ replies Grace, ‘but we all grew up here with Kras, so you’ll have a tough time portraying him in a different light. He couldn’t care less about the fact that we actually came, but he’d be livid if anyone didn’t.’
Katarina tries to put on a somewhat passable oh-come-on face.
‘I don’t know, Grace,’ says Edgar, ‘Kras has changed a lot lately.’
‘Since they lost?’
‘Since Mitja left.’
Katarina looks around, afraid. Nobody’s listening in.
‘Yeah, what was that about?’ asks Grace. ‘I mean, where is Mitja? Does anybody know? Everyone I ask says something evasive. I can see it’s a taboo topic around here.’
Katarina goes over to her mother and asks her to stop bothering people with all that chakra business. Olive looks out of the window. Edgar sidles up to Grace.
‘Kras’s terror towards his son bore fruit,’ says Edgar.
Raven approaches and grabs them by the shoulders.
‘How are you?’
‘I mean, I just don’t get it. Is he in jail or something?’ asks Grace.
‘Worse,’ says Edgar, and turns to his ‘father’.
‘We’re ok, everything is fine, which is an achievement, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, absolutely,’ says Raven. ‘Give the Wolfs a bit of meat and everyone’s satisfied. Grace, do you know I haven’t eaten meat in five years?’
Grace pats his tummy.
‘Yes, I can see that something has changed. And what did you have?’
‘The chef made soya patties, excellent fare.’
Po pops out of somewhere and tugs at her father’s trouser pocket.
‘What is it, darling?’
She wags her finger and Raven bends down with difficulty.
‘Alan and Mila are in the attic.’
‘Yes?’
Po whispers, ‘They’re smoking up.’
Raven raises his eyebrows, Po pulls him by the hand and takes him with her.
‘What do you mean, worse?’ Grace asks.
Edgar sighs.
‘Wolf.’
‘General.’
Kras sits down at the end of the table. His shoulders have tensed up. He’s not at ease.
‘Thank you for coming.’
‘Ah, it’s a pleasure. I just realized that I haven’t seen the Soča River for at least a decade. I didn’t want to let this chance slip me by. It’s wonderful.’
Kras smiles.
‘The clear daughter of the mountains.’
‘Sorry?’
‘That’s Gregorčič, isn’t it?’
‘Who’s that?’
‘It doesn’t really matter. Some poet.’
The general gives a booming laugh.
‘A poet.’
Kras tries to copy the general’s expression onto his own face.
‘How are things at headquarters? The new minister – what’s his name? – Gobec, is he any less annoying than I was?’
The general suddenly turns serious and slaps the table.
‘Fucking incompetent bastard, that Gobec, but don’t spread it around. Things are a little tense right now, you know how it goes: when the political leadership changes, the necks start to itch.’
‘And on the front?’
‘Ha, child’s play, nothing new, what can they do to us? We could be sending boy scouts down there, you know how it is.’
‘What about that helicopter?’
‘What helicopter?’
‘The ten who died.’
‘An accident! Where did you hear about it?’
Bernard had told him.
‘I still know people, General.’
‘You tell those people to keep their mouths shut because we’ve got a review on the go and you’re not doing them any favours if you needle them for intelligence info.’
Kras tries to temper the assault.
‘I thought it wasn’t exactly a big secret.’
‘Everything’s a secret, Wolf. It’s a war.’
Kras looks around the table. Bernard and the priest are smirking. Father just went off somewhere with Po. Katarina is sitting with her mum and looking sad. He can’t see his mother, or his aunts. Edgar looks at him as he converses with Grace. Nobody has told Grace yet. The twins are running around.
‘Is Operation Equator progressing?’
‘Wolf, I didn’t think you invited me for this.’
Kras sighs.
‘Excuse me, General, but I was there when it started. I was at the head of our contingent for eight years, I know the matter inside and out. I was personally responsible for not just a few successes, so I don’t know why it should be anything unusual if I’d still like to know at least approximately what’s going on. Especially now that the 250th INFB is closer and closer to going into battle.’
The general frowns, his lips silently form the numbers 250, 250, 250, before his face finally clears. He runs a hand along Kras’s shoulders.
‘I understand you, Wolf, so don’t think that I don’t. It was always a pleasure working with you. No bullshit. I appreciate that in a man. But the system is just such that…ah, why should I be telling you, you know full well how things are. You were in the chain. You simply don’t have access any more, full stop. But you have nothing to worry about. INFB 250 won’t see action. We have them in the hinterland, security, anti-smuggling, I’ve already said too much.’
‘You’ve told me enough, thank you.’
‘Is this really why you invited me?’
‘Most likely.’
Olga enters with her sisters, who dash to their chairs and put on their jackets. They’re pale, but with flushed cheeks. Olga waves to Kras.
‘The postman’s outside,’ she says.
With a nod of his head, Kras takes leave of the general and moves over to his mother.
‘What postman?’
Kras stares throu
gh the frosted glass in the door. There’s a silhouette of someone in a blue uniform leaning his moped against the tree, against that long-suffering apple tree, girdled with a bag, cap on his head, and with an outstretched hand in which he’s holding…something, he can’t quite see, probably an envelope, he walks along the gravel path to the front door. Time slows down, almost stops. Kras grabs the handle, squeezes it, as if cramped, the veins on his forearm are protruding, his knuckles are turning white and somewhere down around his stomach the blood is rushing about, rocking and lifting a something he has to force himself to swallow back with saliva, his lungs are burning and his heartbeat becomes a drawn-out march, boom, in step with the postman’s steps, boom, the crowd behind his head is pressed into the hissing voice of his mother, who is very slowly tapping her teeth with her tongue, boom, the stamping feet of the twins who are chasing each other about to monstrous laughter, boom, Bernard and Meslier toast, the frosted window pane smashes with a dullish pop, the shattered glass falls to the floor and the door opens.
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