www.DrazanGunjaca.net

CHAPTER I

2003
Three hours past midnight. A park in the town center. The town is Pula, one of those at the end of the world where the terminal depot terminates, one of those which become aware of their existence only during the summer season, when tourists from all over the world swamp their streets and alleys, suffocating the forlorn natives, depriving them of the little oxygen that the rapidly collapsing town plants manage to produce. The month of August, temperature between 30 and 40 degrees Centigrade. Air humidity around 80%. Tonight more than that, because some storm was being heralded by a wind whistling louder and louder through the pine and cypress trees around us. Those pine and cypress trees that the old Romans must have planted solely because of their beauty, now blamed by the clever national leadership for all these numerous fires raging this summer along the Adriatic coast. These trees contain resin, they say, plus some other ingredients stirring fires that are enclosing us these hot days. But the lives here are enclosed anyway in all kinds of elementary disasters, so why put all the blame on these fires? Probably because of the foreign tourists who are, unexpectedly and against their will, forced to attend crash courses in firefighting, although, frankly, it's partly their own fault. Each of them wants to have his own trailer caravan, his own shade, his own pine-tree, his own sun, his own sea… So why not have now their own fire… At least they can no longer complain about the lack of night life, because fires somehow tend to burst out when the sun goes down for a deserved rest. This time I'd rather not say too much about the self-denying, diligent pyrotechnicians whom we owe most of these fires. They, too, must be understood. No more war, no more state-ordered arsons that folks got used to so nicely… Got the knack of it somewhere at the end of the war. Run in. And then the war should end all of a sudden. Having lasted only five years and having met all the requirements for a renewed term. The international community decided to interfere in our internal affairs, which didn't end well for the local enthusiasts. It rarely happens, but it happens. The thing about all wars is that for some they are always too long, for some always too short, no matter how long or short they actually are. Not even wars are an eternal category, although they look so when going on. Be that as it may, our immeasurably wise authorities have found the culprit in the mentioned pine and cypress trees and swooped on them without mercy, while they were without a word disappearing in flames. Ah, how we love those who can stoically suffer without much ado. But then, who cares for complaints, they are of no interest to anybody, especially if coming from pine and cypress trees.
Besides, the first big raindrops began whipping through the tree-tops, some of them even landing on our heads.
- Oh, dammit – he cursed.
- What's wrong? – I asked, just to show that my sense of hearing was working.
- I managed somehow to light the fag in spite of this fucking wind, and the very first drop hit the tip of it – he replied, exasperated, and flung the wet cigarette to the ground. – Gimme another!
- Have mine – I mumbled, reaching out my freshly lit cigarette.
Rain was getting heavier and heavier. Windborn, it was creeping into every nook. The pine-tree above us was spreading its branches to no avail, trying to protect us somehow, but we were getting soaked rapidly. He pulled his shirt over his head, passionately inhaling the smoke of the received cigarette, until it got wet, too.
- Oh, dammit – he cursed again, throwing the cigarette away.
- What's wrong this time? – I surveyed him sullenly. – Throwing a burning cigarette?
- I've burnt my shirt I'm wearing today for the first time – he declared angrily, pushing his right index finger through the freshly made hole in the shirt covered with floral designs.
- Don't bother – I comforted him. – To those who notice the hole say that a beetle mistakenly fertilized one of these flowers.
- And made a big hole like this? – he snapped querulously, demonstrating it.
- In a rush of passion – I replenished the thought. – He was carried away, enraptured. Must have restrained himself too long, so when it happened…
- Never mind the fucking shirt – he muttered nervously. – Disposable stuff anyway. Nives bought it at one of those stands that anybody having a monthly pay higher than 100 Euro gives a wide berth. Oh, hell, Nives again… Here I start again talking about her.
- Then shut up for a minute or two.
In a few minutes we were soaked through. Sitting on a weather-beaten park bench with our legs stretched, hidden in half-darkness, lit up now and then by a flash of lightening tearing across the murky sky, or by feeble lamplight from a street twenty-odd yards away, we may have been easily mistaken for a monument. I told him that, whereupon he gave a husky laugh.
- We are monuments – he observed half-audibly. – Living monuments in a failed time, a failed state, a failed generation…
- Stop at the generation, will you – I cut in.
- I just had a good start – he sighed with inspiration. – But you Croats are really a fucked-up sort. Nipping any beauty in the bud. You do have something destructive…
- Destructiveness is our common heritage. Except that in this respect we Croats are little babies compared with you. But, they say, the opposites complement…
- The opposites attract, very rarely complement – he corrected me. – And when mutually attracted, they usually explode. Otherwise, if complimentary, the Balkans would be a paradise on earth today.
- We agreed not to talk politics tonight – I admonished him. – Neither Nives. It's a pity to spoil such a gorgeous rain.
- Yeah! – he sighed. – You are almost right. One should try and enjoy it a little bit. Look how nicely, evenly, it's pouring down my haggard face… Damn, we are fucked, we really are. I am, no doubt. All my women have left me, my sweetheart doesn't understand me, my books are not read… What's the use of sweeithearts if they, too, can't understand you? Buying cheap summer shirts for you, is that what you need them for? For shirts that that get easily burnt?
- What do you expect after making a sweetheart out of your former wife? – I remarked maliciously.
- There you are, you can see for yourself what a failed case I am – he supported my remark. – Any normal man will make a wife out of his sweetheart, I'm doing the other way round. My life has become a farce…
- Like the life of most other people…
- I don't care about others – he retorted. – You tell me one good reason why I should wait to meet tomorrow?
- Because it'll come whether you wait for it or not – I replied. – It doesn't care a jot for your reasons.
- Nobody cares – he agreed in a resigned voice. – Sometimes I feel like killing myself, I swear I do. I thought I'd managed to get rid of this suicidal drive, but it seems to have been one of rare constants in my life in recent years. I would have done it, believe me, I surely would, if I could just choose between all the reasons offered for it. As it is, however, I always get lost in their variety, the sheer absurd quantity of them, and that's how I miss the right moment. Well, I had a right moment…
- Why not kill yourself for all these reasons taken together – I suggested to him. – And thus make at least the rest of my life a bit easier.
- Oh no, it wouldn't work. For one thing, my mission in your life is not to make it easier for you, it is…
- It's more than crystal-clear to me – I interposed. – A long time.
- So much the better – he went on. – For the other, shooting yourself makes sense with one reason, maybe two at most, never because all things around you are fucked up. If everything is fucked up, you are dying slowly, in installments, day by day you are counting crevices on the ceiling of your subtenant's room, reexamining vainly your past, over and over again, trying to single out your worst failures. There are plenty of them, of course. Children, for example, but let's leave children out of it, take Nives… but who the fuck cares for Nives! Anyway, you languish in loneliness, slowly crawling on the floor, exploring if you can fall even lower than where you already are…
- Loneliness in life is like seasoning in food – I put in. – Given in proper quantities, it improves the flavor, given too much, it destroys it.
- What a clever sonovabich you are – he hissed, ill-tempered. – We've been all swallowing over-seasoned stuff for ten or so years now, our mouths have grown stiff from all these flavors and dressings, our teeth fallen off. Any important idiot passing by throws an handful of spices into your soup, cooled long time ago, chilled… There you can see the rest of my teeth, all decaying… Well, it's night, you can't see, but I give you my word…
In that moment the wind broke a medium-sized branch of the pine-tree which in falling landed straight on his head and he tumbled down to the ground with the branch on him. For a while there was no sound from him. I jumped to help him, remove the branch…
- You motherfuckers! – he started howling as soon as he pulled himself together, touching the top of his head, while I was helping him get on his feet and resume his seat on the bench. – The only branch broken tonight in this whole damn town ending on my head of all places. Even nature has turned against me.
- Since you were born – I said, trying to look serious. – Look at yourself in the mirror.
- Why has nature turned against me? – he was wondering angrily, ignoring my remark, tapping his head in search for the remains of the branch.
- Because you are a Serb who…
- What the hell has that got to do with it? – he interrupted me, still tapping himself on the top of his head.
- … who is not nationally enlightened, which is an unnatural phenomenon today. Been unnatural for quite some time now, to be more precise. Besides, you have no urge to slaughter your next-door neighbor, which is still more unnatural. Well, with the war over, it's now more verbal than real, but, God permitting, we'll live to see a war or two more before qualifying for the old people's home. Last but not least, you are in Croatia and you still have a Croat friend, I mean, you have me, which by the today's generally accepted criteria is bordering on perversity. It is therefore obvious that such devious conduct must have an adverse effect on the newly established natural balance in this part of the world. Don't forget how much ammunition, blood, sweat, lofty historic words, were spent to finally achieve this balance. And then you come, totally irresponsible, advocating anarchism, spitting carelessly on all these gigantic efforts put by our Messiahs…
- I see, we said we wouldn't talk politics – he muttered. – But if our Messiahs and their followers were just a bit cleverer, everything would be all right. You know that I am a lazy bastard. If they left me alone, I wouldn't write a word. But they step on my toe, give me a hard time, and in sheer pain, out of spite, I have no choice but let off steam. And there we go, all hell breaks loose. Unnecessarily. Both ways.
- Prevention – I said. – Imagine one million people reading your books…
- You are mad – he laughed. – We don't even have that many literate people, to say nothing about reading.
- They play safe. You never know when some of these literate ones will start reading. When least desired. And you can well guess what kind of books they'll pick up first. So prevention is better than cure. You don't understand the secrets of ruling.
- I better not – he sighed. – The basics of it haven't changed since Christ. By the way, you are a failed writer yourself, so I'm curious to know how in these rotten circumstances you are getting along as a Croat.
- Same as you as a Serb.
- We are lucky indeed… Speaking of Christ, didn't his earthy envoy, the Pope, say during his recent visit to Croatia that all people were brothers and sisters, regardless of the color of skin, religion, nationality, gender, etc.? Weren't you all nodding ardently, approving his words about the duty to forgive, about coexistence, tolerance, beginning from one's own family…
- That's right. But…
- But what? – he insisted impatiently.
- The Pope departed – I finished the thought. – Vatican is remote. As far as I know, my compatriots have embraced the Pope like a member of their own families. When it comes to the families other than theirs, well, that extended context of the same story has eluded them somehow. I doubt very much that those who have problems with national and other "differences" within their own families turned up at those huge masses that the Pope was staging throughout the country. For fear of being spotted by the tolerant overwhelming majority. Life must go on after the Pope's departure.
- Poor us – he said in a quiet voice. – How is the Almighty seeing it all from his safe celestial heights?
- Not seeing at all – I shrugged. – Once He tried to be a man and they hastened to crucify Him. It's hard to be a man even if you are God, let alone nothing but a man. No wonder He got sick and tired of us after all the sacrifices He'd made for us. Frankly, you can't bear Him a grudge. Everybody's got an utter limit of tolerance, even God. We've succeeded to break through it, too.
- You mean, others dug a hole in it and we fell through it – he replenished me. – Nevertheless, I believe one day God will revisit this part of the world. He can't do without us…
- He can do without us, we can't do without Him – I cut in. – It's just that most people come to understand it after falling through that hole of yours.
- How about being silent for a minute? – he suggested. – While silence has some sense.
- Let's try.
So we were sitting silent for a while. Rain was subsiding. Like all storms, this one had its spree, messed up a thing or two, and disappeared. As if nothing had happened. Then you pick up broken bits and pieces and try to go on from the point you were before the storm. But after each storm something's missing. Lost. Or damaged beyond repair.
- What are you thinking about? – he asked me.
- Nothing worth mentioning – I replied peevishly.
- Is there anything left worth mentioning? Even if there is something, you don't dare. Thus the very thought of my son…
- Stop! – I hastened to interrupt him. – We agreed you wouldn't mention him when in a drunken condition. I am fed up with broken glasses and bottles, your lacerated hands, blood, hospital…
- All right, all right – he intervened in a conciliatory voice. – Last time I definitely overdid it.
- At a wrong place…
- That's right – he agreed. – There are fewer and fewer places where you can afford to crack up. It used to be different once. Or there were more such places or we were cracking up less often. As the years go by…
- Hey – I interrupted him again – have you ever seen a woman with extinct eyes?
- Of course, I have. After half a liter of vodka…
- I am serious.
- Oh, dammit, this night, too, is going to end up low-spirited, isn't it? Are you asking me about my sleepless nightmares, or are you again haunted with your own past? It's Paola, isn't she? You weren't satisfied with the number of your local failed affairs, you had to take up with that Italian girl, so you're fucked up now both nationally and internationally. A global failure, is that what you want to be?
- Well, you've mentioned her, so let me remind you that you introduced me to her, remember? Quite a few years ago… Which year was it?
- No idea – he shrugged. – I've stopped following events by date. Now I remember them only by good or bad. Mostly bad. By the way, when introducing you to Paola, my intention was not that you and her …
- Fuck the intentions – I interposed. – Fate doesn't care for such trifles. Fate is attracted to…
- Extinct eyes – he completed my sentence. – Fate exists because of the extinct eyes, not because of the very act of extinguishing. I know. I've experienced that. Humph! Love fades first in the eyes. Love actually lives in the eyes. People wrongly associate it with the heart. Love starts moving to the heart only when it starts dying in the eyes, when it's stripped bare, disgraced, degraded, scorned, when it has no more strength to fight for the lost, when… Ugh! – he suddenly groaned and with his right hand started to massage the chest in the area of the heart. – Some damn fucking weight pressing hard here on the chest, arrived from nowhere, just like that – he muttered in a subdued voice. – No one has so many enemies as love has. No one. And there is no love without many enemies, my friend. Enemies just waiting to pass the final sentence on it, although all beaten-up already. In public, preferably. To trample it under their feet. Love is so difficult to protect from them, often even from itself. Unfortunately, we are so stupid that if love happens to us, we take it for granted, as our natural right, instead of cherishing it as the most delicate, most precious present we can get. We don't know how to preserve it, how to protect it, we just go for it self-complacently, aggressively, convinced in our conceited ignorance that we are a present to love, not the other way round.
- You are much more than depressive, you are heavily pathetic – I said.
- I surely am – he agreed. – It's easy to love while the going is good, but try to be a loving hero when the first sounds of the funeral song are heard. And then all the way to the end of it… When love starts moving to the heart to languish there. To hide there. 'Cause it never dies. I mean that rare, true love which doesn't happen to everybody. Such love never ends, it only retreats into the dark recesses of our tortured consciousness and conscience to suffer there in complete solitude. Forsaken even by us, who will do our best to forget it. But we can't forget, because love never dies. It goes on living in us, only in a different way. We can only suppress it, but never completely.
- Blessed are those who haven't experienced such love – I blurted.
- What an idiot you are – he snarled at me. – Instead of praying God to let it happen to you, you run away from it. Because true love is rather demanding, isn't it? It makes a mess of comfort you are accustomed to live in, so you seek compromises, trying to keep both, until you lose both love and comfort. More precisely, you are left with your comfort which is not that any longer, which, too, becomes a burden you don't know what to do with. Compromises are usually so rotten that they start making rotten all other things around…
- You of all people giving me this lecture – now I snarled at him. – You, the personification of… But let's make it short and simple. Why have you, a person whom God made so clever, why have you failed to preserve or protect your love? I'm talking about women, to make myself quite clear and exclude in advance any misunderstandings.
- I am also talking about women. About that other thing I don't dare talk anyway… Dammit, that's how you provoked me last time when I ended up in hospital…
- You are one of those who were born provoked.
- Maybe I am. OK, why have I failed to protect any of my loves? Well, because I'm an idiot just as you are. Because love is larger than we are, most of us are no match to it, but for the life of us we don't want to admit it. That makes us frustrated and we try and downsize love to our own measure. But that's impossible. As soon as we begin to force it into our own size, it's the beginning of the end. Love can't be forced. Instead of accommodating ourselves, instead of accepting it, we start bullying it with our own defects. Instead of curing our own frustrations with love, we force them on it, trying to sell them as virtues.
- I can agree to it, more or less – I commented. – Especially the introductory part about you being an idiot. But tell me, do you think that love can ever reappear?
- I doubt it – he replies, thinking. – I can't tell. I don't believe it can ever recuperate enough to return in full. Maybe pop in here and there, just to see if something is left in its wake, and then run away again. A true love never withdraws, as long as there is some strength in it. If it does, it means that it's badly wounded, knocked down, utterly exhausted, rendered helpless. So I'd say love has no power for any serious comeback. And what for? To have its remnants exposed to ridicule? To let itself being dragged about in the dust… Indeed, what for? At any case, I never believed in miracles. Not in good miracles, that is.
- How about changing the topic?
- Yeah! – he responded absent-mindedly. – How can I appear again before Nives after doing what I did the day before yesterday? I've used up all standard excuses and I'm no longer capable of inventing new ones.
- What the hell made you promise her publicly on a crowded terrace to marry her again?
- We already discussed it at some length. An incompetent, drunken fool I am, that's a known fact.
- And then ask her next morning who it was that had offered her marriage?
- I couldn't remember a thing – he tried to justify himself. – I thought she was just provoking me. I thought so until she threw me out of the flat, precisely, until you told me what had actually happened.
- When are you going to repent?
- What? Ah, you mean that. I don't know. Perhaps now is a good chance. I've never looked as miserable as I look now, and women, they say, relent at the sight of misery.
- You are a living proof of it – I observed mockingly. – Only I don't see that you look more miserable now than you usually do.
- What a big mouth you are. You always were. Well, I'm no better myself… As for the looks, what I meant is that soaked as I am now, with the battered head, the holed shirt, I deviate a bit from the average. If it doesn't work now, it'll never work. I may take her by surprise. And, as a result, she may take pity on me. Look at me! Who wouldn't take pity on such a bundle of misery?
- Nobody would – I said. – Look at the others around you. Speaking of the average, I mean.
- You don't have a bit of optimism in yourself – he reproached me.
- What about your optimism? Solely based on your miserable appearance? How would you define your optimism?
- Your mouth is not only big, it's malicious, it's cynical, it's…
- How would you define it? – I insisted on my question.
- As despair – he said in a feeble voice. –With a small plus sign though. Can I define myself? I can. I am a walking despair occasionally radiating small plus signs. I must remember that.
- You like wheedling yourself, don't you? – I went on teasing him.
- Just you go on blabbering – he reacted dismissingly. – There is always something in Nives' eyes. True, it's no longer the same old volcano, but it's still burning, it's still active, still spewing lava…
- Be careful you don't get your fingers burnt.
- You know what – he said, rising from the bench, stretching his arms theatrically – I, Lazarus, humble servant, I go straight down to the crater, born on the wings of love, ready to die for her if need be…
- Make it short, for God's sake!
- And you, my friend, I leave you to reflect on some of your many wise moves in the past. Especially those in connection with women.
- Fuck off!
- I am off to Nives, God willing.
- If again unwilling, which in your case is very likely, I'll leave the key under the mat at the doorstep so that you don't wake me up. If I manage to get some sleep.
- Agreed.
Lazar was slowly walking away towards Monte Zaro, a small elevation close to the center of the town, where Nives lived on the fourth floor of a building. At a still slower pace I was walking back to my flat about one hundred meters away from the park. At the entrance gate I cursed. I remembered that the tenants had recently installed the door phone, which meant that the jerk was going to wake me up willy-nilly after being again booted by Nives, a sure thing. The fucking phone. Mike's doing, a neighbor who started a small business, sale of fancy jewelry in the spacious ground-floor corridor of our old building, so he needed to have the gate locked, or else every night he'd have to take all that worthless bric-a-brac back to his flat on the second floor. He could now leave the knickknacks in the corridor in the hope that the lock would discourage those tourists who had come to the seaside with the assignment to make off with anything they could lay their hands on. True, there was also another less private reason justifying the installation of the door phone: underage drug-addicts who were using our corridor in late-night hours as a passage to a cozy little courtyard which offered an ideal setting for their sessions. Now, poor kids, as a result of Mike's newly opened private business they had to find themselves another shelter. The kids hated him for that, including his elder son Aldo who had brought them into the building. Mike didn't seem much impressed to learn about his son's preferences, with him he just shared the same flat and the same family name and that's what their relationship was all about. The same applied to the rest of his household. A group of strangers living together on the same premises. And yet Mike was a staunch believer, seen every Sunday attending the mass in the local church.
I knew Lazar since boyhood, when we were about ten years of age and his father, officer of the former Yugoslav Army, was transferred from Belgrade to Split and assigned a flat in the same building where I was living with my family. Lazar was very soon accepted by our small exclusive company, in fact became one of its most conspicuous members owing to his sharp wit and mischievousness. The two of us soon became inseparable friends and remained so to the end of our secondary school when his father perished and he returned with his mother to Belgrade where he enrolled in the university college of arts. A little later the vicissitudes of my life brought me to Pula to serve on board of the Yugoslav navy vessels and to concurrently study at the university college of law in Rijeka. We both finished our studies and went our separate professional ways. In spite of the distance between us, at first we were seeing each other relatively often, inventing one hundred and one reasons for such meetings from which our families had to recuperate for months afterwards. Those were good times, a youth worth living. Then came the war. We survived. It brought us even closer together. Although, formally, we were enemies. But we cared more for substance than form. Formalities were always our weak side.
I took off my wet clothes, put on trunks only, although in that African heat I'd have had no use of them either, if I hadn't expected the volcanologist soon back, sure that Nives would give him a cold shoulder. The door phone rang. Can't be that soon, I thought. Couldn't get to and back from Monte Zaro and have a word with Nives, all over such a brief span. Perhaps it's somebody else. But who? And at this time? I raised the receiver and asked who it was.
- Try and guess, damn you – I heard his husky voice in the receiver.
- Romeo already coming back from Juliet? – I couldn't resist the temptation.
- Open this fucking gate and shut up – he retorted morosely.
- You'll never be a well-mannered Balkanian, let alone Latin lover – I said in a little better mood, and pressed the buzzer button.
He entered the flat dragging his feet, low-spirited, mumbling something indistinctly. I said nothing. He slumped in the settee, lit a cigarette and reached for a half-empty bottle of vodka on the table to pour himself a drink. He was holding a sizeable envelope in his hand, still mumbling.
- Here I am – he finally sounded articulate – back in your prematurely destroyed world. Does it make you happy?
- You know well that your figure fills my sleepless nights giving them a non-existing sense – I returned him in kind.
- Again I found lights on – he said in a quiet voice.
- At Nives' place?
- Of course – he reacted nervously. – Where else? I was no longer in the mood, so I turned back and went away. To prevent the repetition of that scene ten days ago.
- Ten days ago in a rush of mad repentance you broke the jaw of her sister's husband at this same unearthly an hour, you remember? – I scolded him.
- How the hell could I know that they were some relatives – he tried to justify himself. – The man opened the door, and, without caring to present himself, not bothering in the least about some elementary manners, not even by our Balkanian standards, told me to fuck off and banged the door before my very nose. Actually into my nose, because I lunged forward… Hah! It served him right when I whacked him on that presumptuous monkey jaw of his…
- Then you helped him go and get the first aid. – I injected.
- Yes, when I learned who he was. Later I was sorry, what could I do…
- Later you were kneeling before Nives until noon, until she took mercy on you…
- Yeah, that was the most difficult part – he muttered. – Not the kneeling itself as an external manifestation of your helplessness, but the humiliation of knowing that you are helpless, that you have nothing to counter it with. Were you ever kneeling?
- I was, on more occasions, but without witnesses.
- Without witnesses – he drawled. – Instead of coming face to face with yourself and people surrounding you. How can you solve a problem by running away from it?
- A very good question, but asked by a wrong person – I observed cynically.
- Forget about the question. But can you satisfy my curiosity and tell me if the kneeling was of any use?
- Not much, as far as I can remember – I admitted.
- No use? Interesting. You never asked yourself why?
- I did, each time, but never learned the acceptable lesson.
- Acceptable? – he repeated, wondering. – Never mind, it's all bullshit. Let me return to Nives. So I halted about fifty meters away from her building seeing light on the windows of her flat. You know, one of those situations when millions of thoughts start streaming through the sponge that was once the brain, when you desperately try and catch some of them, like clutching at straws to save yourself, to find some sense, any sense of your existence, of your being where you happen to be. You stand there amid all that mess wondering what the fuck you're doing there.
- And?!
- There is no "and", and that's where the trouble is. Time stops running at this simplest and, at the same time, tragic question – but you can't make the slightest movement. That's the most devastating question that a fucked-up subconsciousness can ask. Consciousness, subconsciousness, survival instinct, call it as you like, makes no difference. One way or the other, you become a mere object of your own personal madness. I've gone astray tonight, haven't I? I have. Badly?
- So-so – I replied. – You are still within the normal limits of your insanity.
- Very comforting – he muttered. – How do I look? Like a confused cretin…
- Come on, stop crying over your miserable self.
- I am not crying – he protested, raising his voice. – I am not crying at all. Just determining the degree of my being fucked up. So much indeed that I couldn't summon strength, courage, guts, to ring again the bell on her door and come face to face with all the things behind the door. Because neatly sorted out behind the door is all the shit I've been hurting her with all these years we've known each other. It makes no difference whether she's alone in there, or with her lover, with sister and her husband, with God, with anybody, it makes no difference, understand?
- Wait a minute! – I interposed. – Are you taking all the blame?
- Does it matter? Of course, I can find an excuse for anything, almost anything I've done, the only trouble is that such excuses no longer mean anything to me, let alone others. Some of them may be justified, they probably are. But what's the use? Should they serve me to ease my conscience? In fact, even such justifications have become burdensome to me. Once it worked. Or I thought it worked. You find a suitable excuse, you put the blame partly on yourself, partly on others, and so it goes on and on. As years pass by, however, that part with their share of the blame is tilting to your side of the scale until your side yields under the weight. Once you reach a situation like this, it no longer matters to you who is sitting on the other side of the scale, the one which is rising sky-high, becoming unreachable… Dammit. I'm at my wits ends, aren't I?
- That's right – I agreed. – You are about to cross your normal limits. Hey, what about that envelope you are displaying in your hand?
- Ah, this – he looked surprised. – No idea. Oh yes, it was sticking out of your mailbox. Can't understand how you didn't notice it. Something for you. May I open it?
- Open it.
While he was sluggishly tearing the envelope, I was standing leant on the window frame staring out into the darkness, smoking. A ship was sailing into the port of Pula passing by St. Catherine Island towards the customs terminal. A big passenger ship with arrays of illumined portholes in her side. Life going on its way, ignoring what's happening to us…
- A photo album – he made himself heard.
- What?! – I turned to him, quite surprised.
- A photo album – he repeated. – Sent by Paola. Your joint photos. Taken at various places. This one from Pula, there are some from Trieste, here's one from Belgrade, too… For Christ's sake, when was it? Lo and behold, there's also an inscription. All done by the book. Let's see what's written. "When you find some strength and will, take some time and remember that you and I existed once. Paola". Not bad at all. Who would say she's got a poetical streak. In a single sentence she lets you know that you have no strength and no will, that you are living in passing, that you once existed and exist no more… Not for her anyway. Briefly…
- You make a review out of one inscription? – I asked irritably, snatched the album from him and placed it on the lower shelf of the wall system.
- Won't you have a look at it? – he asked, curious.
- Not now – I replied in a gruff voice.
- A brave guy you are – he mocked me. – I almost thought that of the two of us only I was a failure. All right, all right, we won't start a quarrel over nothing. Hey, something flashed across my mind. Where is that cassette with songs we recorded in Belgrade about one hundred years ago?
- No idea – I mumbled. – Must be among other cassettes, somewhere in the middle drawer of the shelves.
He got up quickly, opened the mentioned drawer of the shelves, replete with mostly old cassettes, and, low bent over it, started rummaging inside the drawer, flinging to the floor those which didn't fit.
- Can you do with less disorder? – I snarled at him.
- I can't – he replied quickly. – Forget disorder, we'll discuss it later on. Now I need that cassette. Immediately. Oh, there it is. We are there. Shit, we were there. The Quicksand Group and their album "After All".
- You won't play it whole, will you? – I asked as he was inserting it into the player.
- Nope – he replied. – Only the instrumental part we did at the end of the recording, just for the kick of it.
- "In memoriam"?
- Yes, "In memoriam". There it goes.
The sounds of a melody, popular at that time, which he and I and some other guys recorded in Belgrade long time ago, back in 1980, began to fill the space. He relaxed in the armchair, poured himself some vodka and lit a cigarette.
- You remember when we were recording it? – he asked me, his eyes fixed at some point in the ceiling.
- I remember.
- As if we'd known what was going to happen.
- As if we'd known – I echoed.
- That was roughly the beginning of the end, wasn't it? – he reminisced moodily. – Tito was dying, and he died soon after. Everything began to change, at first almost inaudibly, then louder and louder. We were growing up, becoming mature, whether we liked it or not. Suddenly, overnight, our mistakes stopped being follies of youth, and became omissions of varying gravity. Omissions to be paid for. We were losing our illusions, one after another. Illusions, too, became an intolerable burden, just as it is intolerable to live without them.
- How do you manage to live between these extremes?
- Stretched, torn, how else. Like a drowner I am clutching at two or three tiny illusions left to me, just don't ask me which.
- I won't.
- Our lives have left some marks on the environment, haven't they? Maybe shadows rather than traces, whereas the environment has left furrows rather than traces on our lives. Should we or could we have done something different?
- We would have if we could have – I said.
- That's true – he agreed.
The melody "In memoriam" was finished.
- Start it again – he demanded, pouring himself another glass of vodka.
- Go the whole hog until we drop dead?
- We always went the whole hog…
- We never reached the end – I cut in.
- Everybody has a different notion of the end – he grinned. – My notion of it is stretched so thin that the end can turn real any time now.
I refrained from commenting this and bent instead to rewind the tape to the beginning of the melody. He rose slowly to his feet, holding his cigarette and glass in his hands, posted himself at the window, his eyes fixed at the distance, sending out smoke rings.
- My dear friend – he first broke the silence. – Believe me, everybody has a different notion of the end. And everybody is convinced that his notion of the end is the only relevant, that at the end of the day all the rest is irrelevant. If I kick the bucket in time, as I probably will, please come a day after others have forgotten me and play me that melody. For the soul. OK?
- If I live to see it, I'd do it anyway.
- I know you would – he said, almost inaudibly. – Dammit. It could have all ended differently…
- But I hasn't.
- No, it hasn't. It hasn't, dammit…

CHAPTER VIII

1995
The third quarter of the year arrived and with it one of a series of Lazar's letters, but one on which it was finally written that I could start reading. In the left corner of the envelope, just as he had instructed me, it was written "Go!" I took them all out of the chest of drawers, each neatly marked with the ordinal number of arrival, about a score of them, poured myself some vodka, left the open bottle beside me on the table and went ahead opening the envelopes and reading. More than a half of the letters contained blank papers. Not a word written on them. The others were typed partly with a classical typewriter, partly on a PC, one was handwritten. In Cyrillic script. In his desperate, shaky, nervous hand. Some letters were replaced by weird signs few people except me could have deciphered. He was particularly hostile to the letter "r". I never saw it written by him, instead he used a kind of perverted Greek letter zeta, lowercase. A traumatic experience from childhood, it seems. Reportedly, it was not until he was seven or eight that he managed somehow get this unlucky letter roll over his tongue.
All the stories had titles and dates. The one written in hand was entitled "Look to the sky, my angel".

PARIS AND I
Paris, February, 1992

My God, for the first time ever I start a letter by addressing You, and for the first time I admit being afraid of my solitude. What conceited, arrogant, complacent fools we are until the fate blows away our flimsy sand castles. Until we are disgusted with ourselves and our infinite naivety. Our foolishness, more correctly. Until only yesterday I was craving for "some peace and quiet", in my utter ignorance equating these two things. And then, abruptly, you are dragged away from this little world of yours and pushed into a big world where there is no human understanding, no concern for fellow men, where nobody gives a damn for what's going in the adjacent part of the town, let alone in a Balkanian mini-state.
And so I am sitting by the famous river of Paris on a freshly repainted bench, one in a row along the conscientiously tended promenade, in that city of art and love, bristling with life, I, who thought I had devoted my life to art and love, I, an insignificant creature lost in the overall chaos of a world metropolis… The overall human chaos. All alone. I understand the language, but I don't understand the people. I know what they are talking about, but I don't know what they want to say. I don't understand their laughter, their jokes, their nonchalance, the obvious importance of their discussions which to me, however, seem trivial… Here they have at least twice a week symposiums, seminars, round and various other tables on the topic of risks posed to all sorts of rights, from those of the penguins in the Antarctic, to human rights all over the globe. In the beginning I was visiting some of them, sometimes even tried to take part in them, but then I gave up. I do find their views about the endangerment of the penguins more acceptable, but they wouldn't accept my views about the endangerment of… There are wonderful, well-meaning people among them, the only problem is that we largely can't understand each other, except in the exchange of courtesies. But then how could we understand each other? The kind of problems that weigh heavy on us today were solved by them a long time ago. They've forgotten about their existence, and rightly so. After all, you can't blame them for not sharing your type of misery, something that has become alien to them. Besides, people are generally inclined to steer clear of what they are unable to understand. Which is better, when you come to think about it, than poking into it. Less damage done. Sometimes I take a book by some of their classics and I notice that I understand them quite well. Pity they are no longer among the living. Perhaps things would look completely different if the human life span were three or four centuries. Perhaps we would understand some things much better, so history wouldn't have to repeat itself. Not necessarily though. Imperfect and miserable as we are, it may even be worse. Again I am moving in that mad wheel dance to the rhythm of those primitive, untalented players who think that they have invented music. Worst of all, people, the Serbs living here, believe in these mad drummers… I just watch their maddening reactions to the news coming from the Balkans… Unbelievable quantities of naivety resulting from ignorance and national euphoria. How easily they have fallen prey to this ancient cruel play. Bread and games. But bread is getting scantier and scantier, while there are more and more of these trashy games the winners of which are greeted less and less with applause, more and more with contempt. But what do they care as long as the games are on? Nothing.
Sunday morning, bells chiming from a nearby church. Maybe it's just chiming in my head, those ominous tolls I can't get rid of no matter how hard I try. Actually, they never stopped ringing in my ears. Traumas from childhood. You remember those old partisan movies where the church bells signaled the arrival of the enemy and made people run for their life. For those who failed to hear them they stopped chiming for ever. Do they toll now again for the same reasons?
Oh yes, I started with solitude, so let me finish with it. Solitude is all right as long as it doesn't assume physical forms. Until it starts showing the symptoms of most known diseases: ranging from maddening headaches to the crippling pains in the abdomen. Then, half-dead, you go to the local doctor who, dead serious, tells you that judging by blood and other tests you are a perfectly healthy individual. What can you tell him then? Nothing. Sedatives are of no use any more. Besides, who the fuck cares for pills you can't take them with booze? Not these they dispense. Aren't our pills… But there are no longer our pills, are there? They, too, have received national prefixes. Serb pills against coughing, Croatian pills against arthritis. They seem to have no more use of sedative drugs. What for? Is there any sedative that can cool down any of the hotheads there? We have become immune to any soothing agent.
As I told you on the phone, I am moving to London one of these days. Somehow I've got hold of a British visa, so I'm going there. Just don't ask me why.
I'll write you again as soon as I arrive in the United Kingdom.
Your friend Lazarus.
P.S.
Are you still in touch with Paola? Or have you again screwed up, as usual?
P.P.S.
I hope you respect my small silly wish and abstain from opening these letters until I tell you so. I fact, I know you wouldn't do it no matter how intrigued you may feel. I explained my reasons, didn't I, or made an attempt to. Don't remember exactly, neither the explanation nor the attempt at it.

MY GRANDMOTHER'S EYES
London, March 1992

They say that she closed her saintly eyes shortly after the first alarms sounded in the country once called Yugoslavia and that God heard and answered her prayer to spare her one more war in her scarred life. They say that in the end she mistook a hospital attendant for me and talked to him tenderly the way only she knew to talk. They say that her eyes never looked old, that they retained that same glitter to the very end when she herself closed them.
Her last wish was to be buried far from Belgrade, in a small village in the heart of Serbia where she had come into being a long time ago, thrown into these cruel lands. Her last wish was to rest in a half-abandoned graveyard with a dilapidating chapel in the middle. She didn't like those big churches in Belgrade without graves surrounding them. As she used to argue, a church must be surrounded by the dead for the living not to forget them as long as they believe in God. They have to believe, they have no choice. That's the only place where human beings are coming back to each other, she was saying. And where many human beings become human only after being brought brought dead.
They say that in her last days she was praying that the war, once over, be forgotten as soon as possible, that God help us stop hating each other. God, if her self-denying life ever meant anything to You, please fulfill this last wish of hers.

THE FIRST HEART ATTACK
London, March 1992

One evening a few days ago my solitary room on the fringe of London was suddenly visited by some invisible weight, something ghastly and fearsome, something that gives you the creeps, grips first your stomach, then gradually spreads all over the body, all the way up, raising whatever hair is left on the top of your head… Something malign crept into my half-life that I live at half the will… In the first moment I thought I was getting mad. I was feeling worse and worse. Then it came. The heart attack. It saved me from the madhouse. Luckily, it hit me at the doorstep, so somebody picked me up, called the ambulance… As soon as I recovered a bit in the hospital, I started thinking. That's it, I thought. Death paying me a visit.
Anyway, hospitals have their advantages. There is no better place for meditation. There you get everything in the right perspective, somehow you realize who's who, who's nobody.
That is how I survived my first heart attack. There would be more, a sure thing. I returned to my solitary room, and it's still in there. The death. Made itself comfortable, unpacked its suitcases, waiting. Waiting for whom? It could have taken me, had it wanted to, nobody would have moved a finger. I surely didn't. If it stays with me some more days, the sure thing will be the madhouse.

DEAR MILUTIN
London, April 1992

I understand that you have moved into the world of my wretched friend. Beware his ways, although he is not as bad as he may look at the first sight. Little by little you'll get used to his many faults and defects, as I did. Don't ever go soft on him, otherwise he'll do whatever he can to elude the slightest of obligations he may get wind of. A typical Dalmatian. True, after spoiling things he is always extremely self-critical, goes out of his way to make amends, which can be quite charming sometimes. Nevertheless, don't let him push you into his fruitless routine, make you develop his sick and futile ways. Or else he'll make you his second self. Believe me, his first self is horrible enough. So you can never be careful enough. If he succeeds in dragging you into his maze of questions without an answer, alleyways without a way out, you'll be lost, and whatever makes you different from him will become worthless. Because a life where every beginning seems to be an end is no life, it's nothing but a repose between two misfortunes. Yet, if you ever get to know me, you'll see that there are even worse versions than he is.
In fact, when I come to think about it, it seems to me that your fate has been sealed by the very place chosen for your birth, a place you can't escape even if your were a hare. Besides, a well-meaning but ignorant person has attached you to one of three normal Dalmatians, as he himself is fond of flattering himself, and thereby to me, so you have willy-nilly become our co-traveler and co-sufferer. I'd be glad to help you if I only knew how. As it is, the only friendly advice I can give you is to try and remain a hare as long as possible. But certainly not a house pet. And under no circumstances don't ever bring yourself into a situation where you wake up in the morning with dark rings around your eyes, with splitting headache and a swarm of unanswered questions zooming around aimlessly like bees when their habitation is destroyed, wantonly, allegedly for some higher purposes. Because somebody needs their tree to make a front or rear part of the cabinet. But what do the bees know about the cabinet and why should they be left homeless for a thing that means nothing to them?
Damn, I've gone astray again. Milutin, please don't read it for the life of you…

JESUS…
London, September 1992

Jesus, I wish I could write something today… Something worth reading tomorrow. Something, anything… When so much accumulates inside, so much, to the point of explosion, but refusing to come out. Such are all those unwritten letters, blank papers… I was sending them as they were, blank, hoping … I don't know what for. If I could put down something on paper, perhaps I would know that I've been living today. As it is, however, once I depart from this world and perhaps get some gravestone, the inscription will consist of my name, surname, the year of birth and many years of death: 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 199…

HAPPINESS AND I
London, December 1992

Here it comes, yet another Christmas. First their western, then my eastern one, although, until recently, I was claiming both. Now I am no longer sure of either. It is some years now that I've stopped writing altogether during such seasons for fear that I may send the written words to somebody. And spoil his or her holidays. Nobody should be allowed to spoil holidays to others. It's an inalienable right.
For you, dear friend, below are some haphazard thoughts I've put down these days:
"I've run all round the ceremonial circle to bow to her majesty – the Happiness. In utter humility. She didn't understand or wouldn't accept my sincerity. Instead, apparently offended, she stopped talking to me. I don't blame her. I was always bad at bowing, it's not in my nature and nobody taught me how to do it. Besides, I must have offered an appalling sight, judging by the expression on her face. I'll never do it again. To spare her, not myself. I simply don't know how to cope with hurt ladies.
The other day I chanced to read a confession of a penitent. When he came face to face with the Almighty, he asked Him why He had been so rarely at his side. Only when the going was good, when he could do well by himself. Only on such occasions did he see two trails behind himself: his own and the Almighty's. At his surprise, God replied that He had been with him even on such occasions, that on such occasions He had been carrying him in His arms, so that he could see only one trail behind. I wonder if I should believe him. Sounds too simple. But then, God is supposed to be simple, so that everybody could understand Him. The fact that people have raised so many barriers, appointed so many mediators standing between us and Him, in order to make themselves look more important at His expense, is our problem, not His, isn't it? After all, unless I believe Him, whom shall I believe? Myself?
If I could only make Him tell and assure the Happiness that my intentions were not bad…»
P.S.
They say that the Christmas time is the time of forgiveness. On this occasion I wonder if in our damned lands anybody has ever forgiven anything to anybody. At least during the Christmas time? To me, nobody has forgiven anything, but I am of no importance anyway… Oh, damn, this Christmas, too, will be over, and thereby the duty to forgive…

IT'S CALLED WAR
London, January 1993

Damned war. It won't leave you alone for a moment. It moves into your life, never for a moment letting you escape from its grip. When you are alone, it keeps you company, as soon as you meet a person who learns where you have come from, the war turns out to be the only topic the person wants to discuss with you. Nothing else matters. How should I explain these people that I am trying to mingle with them because I want to forget about the war at least for a moment? Then you take recourse to writing, and again the same story. Well then, if I can't get myself out of it, let me make a digest of all those sheets I've written over the past months, a choice of what for some reasons seems to me more interesting than the rest. But what should be of any special interest in this stuff, except that I send these thoughts to somebody, in order to expel them, as it were, to get rid of them… Send them for a trip as far away from me as possible… Of course, they'll be back home on the same day, because timetables, calendars, mean nothing to them… Boomerang travelers, that's what they are. Some of these writings I even published in some local literary magazines, but that made me sick either. After that I felt even worse. Writing out of despair makes you even more desperate.
Well, the war viewed from my narrowed angle. I am using the singular, because all wars have so much in common that it makes no sense to refer to them in the plural. For a start, the problem is that we don't see that the war is knocking on the door not because our miserable locks could prevent it from getting inside, but because it likes playing with our naivety. The war is also an inquisitive creature. Highly interested to see how far human folly can go. Then, seeing that it's limitless, the war gets fed up with his own decency (always shown in the beginning) and assumes again its true face.
As a matter of fact, even in the beginning the war doesn't pretend to be something other than it is. On the contrary! But it is probably amused being called all kinds of names, all except its own. And it's called war. Nothing special, nothing hard to remember or to comprehend. It seems so at least. But once we finally call it by its real name, as we have to sooner or later, then it's already too late for many.
Quite understandable, annoyed at so much absurd ignorance, the war moves into our small world with unbearable ease and becomes an unquestioned master of it. The worst possible master. They say that the war, too, has its masters, the warlords. I doubt it very much. Who are they? Ordinary yes-men who are unscrupulously used by the war just as the innocent victims are used by these yes-men. Just remember some of the biggest warlords. Attila, Hitler, any of them. Remember how they ended. Like slaves, not like lords. The real question is where these "lords" have come from, who has created them… We have. With our behavior I tried to conjure up for you. Unbelievable how much can be done by doing nothing, don't you think so?

LOVE AND HOMELAND
London, February 1993

Tonight I am again assailed by swarms of questions falling from my tensely spread canopy … Coming in waves, without any meaningful order, striking against various places, breaking up into sparkling particles, going back again, vanishing into – nothingness.
May I share them with you? With whom else? I doubt that they'll be of any use to you, even less that they'll make you feel better, but there they are for you to know at least that you are not the only one sailing on this dead sea. I can't offer you anything more than that.
Oh, those issues… I love my homeland, or fatherland, as you like, but love is a two-way street, isn't it? Love, if not returned, becomes a nightmare sooner or later. How and to whom can you prove that you love your homeland, if you are not one of those loudmouths whose love is supposed to be measured by the volume of their voices and the vehemence of their gesticulation? What if you can't shout so loudly as they can? What if you love your homeland in a different way? Tenderly, quietly, almost secretly… What if you are not made to be a rough lover? If God simply hasn't made you so and…
But why should I be expected to prove that I love my country? Because it's very often a precondition for survival in it. Conditio sine qua non. Good, suppose it can't be different, but what shall I be doing with my true feelings? Am I allowed to publicly show them as others do, although different from theirs?
Perhaps it should all be simplified and reduced to the right to be different. Every love is unique, isn't it? What is left of love if it is uniformed? How can love be forced to comply with the rules?
Incidentally, is it possible to love too much? It is, unfortunately. The price of such love is proportionate to the degree in which it is unreturned.
Is departure to another country the right solution? Should I have shown a higher level of tolerance and waited for the homeland to return love? That's what I keep asking myself during my desolate London nights: suppose I stayed in my country, would it ever take notice of my existence? With love, of course? I know the answer to this question, but I still keep asking it in order to delay the moment of going nuts completely.

PROMISES
London, April 1993

I hate promises. No matter who gives them. My cup of illusions was filled to overflowing a long time ago and I have nowhere else to fill them. What I particularly hate are the so-called big promises. In the past few years I must have grown terribly old inside. Old men do not have much use of promises. As I noted down somewhere, in terms of the impact on the state of mind one war year equals twenty peacetime years.
When did promises start making me sick? They were first reassuring people that there would be no war, then telling them that there might be some war after all, and then in only few months the war was hailed as a long-awaited natural path to freedom… Who did authorize them in the first place to liberate me? Don't listen to the promises of those who recognize life as the highest value only if it is laid on the altar of the homeland. Assuring you, on top of all, that you are not dead. At the same time, sly characters and profiteers of all kinds keep explaining to the survivors that they have liberated them, also demanding gratitude towards those they have thrown on to the altar. So you survive if you dare.
The world at large. My biggest and most painful illusion. Not only mine. Among other things, the war is a period of strong rejection of the unacceptable. It took me too long to realize that, no matter how incredible it may sound, some people out there in the world needed this war of ours. Why? I don't know. Even if I knew, I wouldn't dare say it aloud. Not for fear – fear killed me long time ago – but for the sake of the little left over of my true self. I wish to preserve it, whatever it is.
I do hate big promises. To conclude, you know how I distinguish between big and small promises? By the number of victims.

THE OLD BRIDGE
London, November 1993

My God, this year 1993, too, is drawing to its end. My country, the one where I was born, is no more. Now instead of that one I have more of them, neither of which wants me. I'm nowhere welcome any more. How could I be? These new countries have their new grand values which I don't fit in, tiny and insignificant as I am.
Do you remember, my friend, an old bridge in an old city called Mostar in that former state, the city named after that bridge on which we took photographs with two girls of Mostar, those we had met in Makarska and then… What were their names? Maya and Selma?
Now, thousands of miles away, on these first rainy November days, I am watching on television those stones of the bridge where I was kissing and was kissed, I watch them in disbelief crashing down into the cold waters of Neretva. An ordinary day in an unordinary year, this year 1993, when that enchanting stone bridge, a crescent, an arch, tumbled down after 427 years of existence and in no time turned to ruin, a war cripple… Built centuries ago by a great architect to serve people. It was standing there as long as those people needed a bridge between them. Now in place of the old bridge there is a ghastly gap over which only bullets are nicely exchanged. They don't need the bridge. All they need is hatred, the greater it is the faster they fly. With that old bridge my country has also collapsed. Together with all that constitutes me… My memories… My kisses… All finished in the restless waters of Neretva river. Drowned where so many dead bodies were washed downstream in the early forties… For more than forty years we were swearing that dead bodies would never again float in Neretva… Before whom were we swearing?
How thin is the line between human fraternities and demolished bridges!
Who knows, they may renew it one day. But what will they do with all those demolished dreams? For what is that bridge without them? Without some warm summer nights long time ago, without happy laughter, without the twangs of guitar, without some wonderful people…

BORN IN THE BALKANS
London, November 1993

I am listening to Bruce Springstin, his song "Born in The USA". The guy is obviously proud of his country of birth. For good reasons, probably. I can't judge on his country of birth. But, listening to him, I think to myself, what can we be proud of? The bunch of us born in the Balkans.
In an area where the past has always been more important than the present, where little or no heed is taken of the future, because it is so uncertain that it makes no sense wasting one's time on it. Playing your card on a future somebody has already gambled away in your name surely wouldn't be a very reasonable thing to do. Perhaps we would have come out better off, if our big pretenders had known at least the basic gambling rules, let alone those invisible subtleties on which the outcome of investments depends. Perhaps we, too, would now sing like Bruce, not like our Johnny Štulic.
Anyway, what could you sing about in a region where, for example, a referendum, the ancient civilized form of expressing the people's will, is organized only on those issues which harbor the seed of new conflicts of one kind or the other. Enemies can always be found, can't they? If none available, so much worse for them. We'll invent them.
It will remain so as long as it matters more to us who groans than why he groans.
But, apart from the Balkans, when I watch these people here, far from the Balkans, I don't see that they understand much. They don't understand a thing. Not only our war, they don't understand any war at all.
It seems that never before in history the human race needed peace more than it needs now, and yet peace has never meant less than it means today. How could it mean anything? Isn't this situation a logical result of the fact that no normal person right in his mind wants war, while, at the same time, war has become a normal phenomenon?
The Balkans, unfortunate for us born there, is in many bad respects nothing but more extreme than other regions, an exception only as an extreme case, otherwise very much the same, and less and less of an exception.

THE SECOND HEART ATTACK
London, November 1993

I've made it again. The second heart attack. Survived, I don't know how. They say I am alive. I can't believe them absolutely, although there are some signs pointing in this direction… I am having an affair with a Russian woman. Natasha. As a matter of fact, except for her parents' background and name, she has hardly anything to do with Russia. A typical English girl, born in England, living in England all her life… Nothing special about the affair, except that she is helping me to survive somehow. A sparkle anyway, showing that I haven't forgotten yet how to breathe…

A CONFESSION OF AN OLD POET
London, December 1993

I have one more friend… Having two friends, quite a thing, isn't it? You remember Isakov? The old poet from Ivanic Grad, with whom I exchanged letters from time to time. You remember his poems? I don't know how he got my address here, but this morning I received a letter from him, which you, too, may find interesting, so I am sending you its abbreviated version. If you find yourself somewhere in it, or get a glimpse of your own future, don't blame anybody for it. It's only fate, nothing else.

"Dear Lazarus,
I understand that you have left these condemned areas and that you are now longing for them somewhere. Longing and suffering is a poet's lot. Take me, for example. Tonight I am waiting for the 75th year of my life to knock at the door that I can't lock myself for some time now. By the time I finish this letter, the year will come. And while it's coming, I am traveling in my mind to Voivodina, back to my childhood, on the only hill we had in those plains, in the vicinity of Vršac, height some 800 meters, whence at the age of 13 I had my first flight as a sports pilot. So much enthusiasm and energy of my life spent on flying, so much effort to reach out to the sky. Only to meet July 1968: Belgrade, student unrest, new hopes, new persecutions. Hopes and persecutions going hand in hand.
I escape to Czechoslovakia where in the dawn of August 21 of the same year 1968 I am awakened by Russian tanks. I join another hope. This time, with Miloš Forman , Vera Capkova , Karel Hlašterka and others I am chalking stars on those tanks with a swastika in the middle. My God, is there any limit to human naivety? All the tanks are the same. All of them leave the same traces. I am running away from Czechoslovakia… Next is Germany, then…
The 75th year is coming soon, inexorably, wherever I happen to be. What is a man of 75? The superfluity of existence gnawing at you inside. Like slow-working acid. The outcome deadly certain. So little dignity left in old age. If it ever existed at all. The Eskimos approach it without our hypocrisy that we have been polishing for centuries. They give you a loaf and a piece of bearskin, put you on a sleigh and take you further away to a place where hungry polar bears come before long and start fighting for your flesh. Any essential difference between our worms and their bears?
I have no one to write to, so I remembered you. Not exactly to share my sorrow with you, only to remind you that, in the words of Chekhov, sorrow we breathe and sorrow surrounds us. While waiting for the 75th year to knock on the door, I am recalling all my numerous failures, trying to detect some innocence in them… My innocence. Wars, women, are coming back to me… Wars, not worth wasting one's words on. The current war included. In every respect they are so tiresomely predictable. The frightening side of this predictability no longer excites me as it once used to do. The years have done their work after all. You come to realize that war is a marathon effort for nothing.
Women! Our permanent obsession. You can forget or suppress bad memories only with a woman. Whether we like it or not, to women we owe the bulk of both good and bad. From the earliest childhood. From the first contact with mother… Yesterday I visited the grave of my Laura to whom I devoted so many of my poems… I wonder: was I hers, or was she mine? If I was hers, to whom do I belong now that she is no longer around, if she was mine, what do I have now?
In addition to my 75, there is also the new 1994 coming. New, old, what's the difference? They are not changing, we are changing. Time is immobile. Playing its walk-on part in eternity. We are departing. Without luggage, without return tickets. Definitely. Without the right to return. That's good. I don't want to return and go through all this all over again. One lifetime is enough. More than enough if you are born in the Balkans.
What should I wish you for the New Year? To live long enough to understand what I wanted to tell you. And, which is even more important, to succeed in retaining your dreams. At least a smaller part of them, because most of them you'll certainly drop. For dreams to come true, you must first have them. And preserve them. Which is difficult. Extremely difficult. They have so many enemies that the frightening quantity of hatred coming from them may mislead you into thinking that you'll be doing better without dreams. That is how most tired dreams find their end. These are our biggest and incorrigible mistakes. Never allow yourself to meet your end without any dream left. For it is only the dreams that are truly yours and that will never forsake you unless you forsake them first. So never forsake them. Never and at no price. Dreams have no price.
So many things I have come to understand too late in my life… So many questions the answers to which have lost any meaning. So many dreams shared with wrong people…
It's midnight. There it comes at last, the seventy fifth, somehow silent, tired, reluctant to step into my old man's world… But it's all right. A little bit more time and I'll have my last little dream, of no importance to the world. Again I'll be writing poems to Laura, whisper them tenderly into her ear, hold her hand… If it were not for that dream, I wouldn't even know how to die.
Take care, young friend. Keep the rest of your dreams and be careful with whom you share them. It is hard to make new dreams out of nothing. That is why those you already have are inestimable.
Yours S. Isakov"

THE LAST STRAW
London, December 1993

It is not advisable to enter a deeper relationship if you are scarred, sunk, about to hit the bottom… You tend to pick up a wrong straw. Provided that the right ones do exist. My straw wrenched itself free and drifted away. I was too much of a burden to her. She got away with it. Luckily for both. Otherwise I would have pulled her down with me, and things would get even worse for us both. There is no more free space in my suitcase replete with sorrow… I should buy a new one. This one is all battered and worn-out as a result of endless moving. Must be fed up, just as I am.
Yet another foreign Christmas. Morning. A clear sky, surprisingly. A promising day. Shortly before Natasha asked me to get out of her life. She loves me truly, she says, but can't bear any longer standing helpless, watching me dying before her very eyes. Doesn't want to be an accomplice to my disappearance, observer of something she can't understand. She says she'd stand by me to the last if it were some normal disease… What are the normal diseases? The people here do not know nor recognize our diseases. So they can't cope with them. Their diseases also hurt, but they try and get over them and go on living. She says that I have stopped living. I am explaining to her that in the Balkans everybody has one or more stages of stopping to live… Some never wake up. But I want to rise again, I just need some more time, I say. She hasn't got time, she says, and adds that we are the kind of people who have no respect for time, some timeless people we are. I am giving up. So, after a month, one more failed marriage, one more scar – Long ago I stopped counting my defeats. What's the use?
Natasha asks me to give her my diary. Those several volumes, notebooks, all kinds of scribbles accumulated since my boyhood. In our language, in the Cyrillic script. You'll surely remember. I am offering to translate a part of it for her, but she refuses. She wants to have it as it is. Is she afraid of seeing it translated? I refuse and take my diary with me. After all, nobody can read my Cyrillic handwriting. Except you.
She is gone. Actually, I am gone. Which, in the last analysis, doesn't make any difference, does it?
No snow this Christmas. Forgotten to visit us. I so badly need its whiteness… I could have some use of a nice white blanket to cover all this accumulated dirt, to remind me of innocence which is no more… I do hate being pathetic, and yet get so easily carried away, which drives me mad.
Isakov's letter haunts me every so often. Where shall I find my Laura? To whom shall I write my poems? What kind of poems?

THE SEA
London, January 1994

Damned nostalgia. I must return though… I terribly miss the seaside lately. As somebody told me the other day, now it's the Croatian sea and we the Serbs are no longer allowed to come and visit it. Not even allowed to see it. Including myself, because by the will of God I was born a Serb. My sea. The Adriatic Sea where I was growing up. I am not allowed to see it, hear it, feel it splashing me, its drops drying on my skin… Has the sea really stopped existing for me? By an act of decree?
To whom shall I give my best assurances that to this sea of mine I wouldn't bring any Serb flag nor would I mind any Croatian flag posted on its shore? That it would be an affair entirely between the sea and myself? I would come only to share with the sea what unites us, some moments spent together, those which do not mean anything to anybody except us. I wouldn't come as a Serb, I'd come as a human being who once had a special relationship with the sea, who on its shore experienced his first kiss, got drunk for the first time, on his eighteenth birthday, as you will remember… I know that on its shore I'll never again meet the girl I was kissing, the folks in whose company I was drinking, no matter how much I'd like it…
I wouldn't come as a conqueror, because all my conquests were lost loves… Love is a poor conqueror in the history of human race, isn't it? I am sick and tired of Pyrrhic victories. I'd come as a man beaten black and blue, as a wretch seeking where to drop his last tears. In the sea with others of their kind, where they wouldn't recognize them as mine, wouldn't laugh at them, because, no matter how nadve they may be, they do not deserve to be laughed at.
I know that my sea would embrace me again because I love it in a different way… In my love there are no banners, no boundaries. I don't want to seize anything from that sea. I just want to exchange memories with it and go, immensely grateful that no anthems, no military marches are heard in the wonderful symphony of its waves…
I don't mind any anthem, any nation. Let them play the Croatian anthem while I am on my knees before the sea, I'll dedicate it to the sea. With their permission, I'll kneel down before every scar on the ancient walls of Dubrovnik, apologize for every shot fired at that beauty… I don’t mind anything, I don't ask any favor. All I seek is the piece of soul I left there a long time ago. Just that little piece and nothing more.

LOOK TO THE SKY, MY ANGEL
London-Belgrade, March 1994

Ten days ago they called me and informed me… I can't see the letters on the typewriter, so I am writing in hand. Your guess is right. He is no more…
I was seeing myself, my gaunt, drawn figure, eyes which have lost any glitter, now just two extinct volcanoes, their surface pulsating dark-gray and slightly bloodshot… Leant on the wall in an antechamber, I was a part of that poor interior, blended with that surrealist picture dimly illumined by a small bulb suspended from a rather high ceiling. My God, what has happened with all this? This Belgrade, this year, these people, these events, have nothing to do with the city I used to know while we were still alive. Not even a semblance, only the same name left. But they may change it, too. What do they need it for? It'll be easier to forget that we ever existed, won't it?
I was in Serbia, I was in Belgrade at his funeral. I was trying to enter the room through the door before me, to finally see my child, but just couldn't make it. My legs wouldn't obey. As if I hadn't been really at that place, at that time. In the corner of my eye I saw others watching me in bafflement, as I was lighting one cigarette after another, not knowing what to do with myself. The cigarette was a part of my conditioned reflexes, something you take in your hands when you don't know what to do with them. I vaguely remember that my lighter fell to the floor as I was trying with my shaky hand to light the next cigarette, that Dana picked it up and lit my cigarette. I don't remember whether or not I reacted to it. Dana was comforting me, explaining that I hadn't killed him… Hadn't I?
My dear friend, it was all wrong what we were taught and it was all wrong what we were teaching others. You remember our childhood, down there in Dalmatia, before the deluge? Jesus, a millennium seems to have passed since. Do you remember how often I used to stare to the sky? Of course you do, because it always irritated you. I've never told you why I was doing that. You know, whenever I felt low I was watching the sky, hoping that there was plenty of room up there for the likes of me. They simply couldn't have occupied all that infinite space, I thought, so there was plenty of room for us all to enjoy peace and quiet without being a nuisance to each other. With my eyes fixed on that immense blue, I somehow managed to maintain a semblance of mental equilibrium. It seemed that up there, unlike here on earth, there was enough place to find a shelter to protect you from evil and suffering, plenty of place for both good and evil. How nadve I was! There is no such distance at which good wouldn't be in the way of evil. As long as there is a tiny little bit of good anywhere out there, evil will come out to fight it. At that time, on the eve of the war as I was running away from Belgrade, I took leave from my son and the last thing I said to him was: "Whenever you feel low on this hard Balkanian soil, look to the sky, my angel, it belongs to everybody". Gosh, what a pathetic nonsense! I escaped the war, he didn't. A collateral victim. Senada decided to return to Belgrade with our child and thence to Germany to join her relatives. Somewhere at the state border they came under a bombing attack. From the air. All of them took cover in an improvised shelter, but my little angel remembered those words and ran out to see the sky… That's what Senada told me. They were staying inside for hours and he simply couldn't stand it any more, had to see the sky. And ran out. Oh, Jesus what did I do to him. Failed to send him a message that the sky, too, became contaminated by them. That stars had disappeared from our sky. That from now on only death was coming down from our sky… They don't even know whose plane was sowing death…
I have neither strength nor courage to at least try and feel like a victim; I never learned. It's in the fucking genes. We don't know how to be victims. I don't know how to behave like a victim. Perhaps the butchers know. But who is the culprit? That thoughtless pilot who, pushing a red button in his cozy cabin, was throwing bombs over some predetermined targets? No names are written on the targets down there where children are walking about, looking to the sky to find their guiding star. The culprits may be those jerks who sent this human robot up there to tear the sky, to dump his murderous weight somewhere. Today they are making aircraft able to do all kinds of things, anything except come back and land safely with the bombs attached to them. They must be dumped somewhere, anywhere, to explode. Those jerks must be the real culprits, the bombs always explode far away from them, although sent by them and intended for them. They explode among those who are looking to the sky for salvation. In the end, there is no answer. Only the dead and the survivors, a devastated land and a sky torn apart, and the majority of us who are neither dead nor alive. The rest of us whom life holds by the left hand, death by the right hand. We are all right-handed, aren't we? The left-handed knew beforehand that there's no life out there in the sky. My friend, where shall I look to now? How to find a new sky after all this? Does it exist at all?
I was the only person who could not utter a word at his grave. No a single word. The words got stuck in the throat, unable to find the way out. Suffocating me, stifling me. I turned green, they say, and ended up in hospital. Heart attack. Again. Stopped counting them. Somehow I put myself together again and again left Serbia. So here I am in this rented lair in London, where I drink without being able to get drunk, where I am writing to you what I couldn't say down there. I am sorry, I have no one else to write to. I am haunted by his image day and night, first thing in the morning with coffee, cognac, cigarette smoke. I am seeing him everywhere… Let me say good-bye to you, my son. With the prayer from my childhood I'll try to recall.
Our Father, Who art in heaven… damn those motherfuckers, damn them to eternity… Hallowed be Thy Name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done… forgive me, my sweet son, all my fallacies… On earth as it is in Heaven… forgive me for telling you to look to the sky… Give us this day, our daily bread… damn those mean fucking bastards… and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us… damn motherfuckers… And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil. Amen.
Forgive me, my son, for overplaying it for a moment and playing God. Amen.

REMINISCENCES
London, April 1994

My God, will I ever find strength to return to the land of graves? To see a gravestone with a Cyrillic inscription? For fear of seeing his name written… Will I ever return to my country?
Whatever was any good in that country I have either buried or preserved in my memories, which is worse than any punishment man has managed to invent.
Memories of those innocent eyes which are no longer shining, memories of a man that I was, now feeling remorseful without knowing why. They have driven me to exile and condemned to reminiscences.
I am trying to forgive them… I've forgiven them all, except… my God, can you forgive them that? If You can, I can. If I ever return to the country which was once mine.

DEPARTURE OF THE OLD POET
London, April 1995

It has been brought to my notice that the old good genie, Isakov, has departed to join his Laura. Together with his little dream. The biggest there is.
I so much envy him and I am so much happy that he has succeeded in keeping his dream. He'll be able at long last to entirely devote himself to his poems and to her… How many dreams you must give up to find out which of them are worth keeping? And how in the sea of false hopes recognize the real one? Farewell, dear old poet, and see you again.

WAR, LAST TIME
London, 1995

It has been reported here that our war has ended. Have they also informed you about that? Have they told the warriors to stop shooting? Have our peoples stopped being mutual enemies? If they have, what now? If they have not, what will they do next? Have they at least buried the dead? Or will they start excavating them?
Is anything left of what I once knew and loved?