‘Do I stink?’ she asked and assailed me with a heavy onion breath.
‘Ugh, get off me!’ I said.
‘I don’t caaare!’ She imitated a naughty child. She was obviously trying to cheer me up. I put on some theatrical revulsion: ‘Jeez, what a disgrace! Bloody hell, I mean: she plays the fancy actress, but here at home she stinks like a skunk!’
‘Your problem. I don’t caaare!’ She giggled and fumigated me with her onion breath, trying to kiss me while I kept trying to evade her.
In the end I let her kiss me, but then it wasn’t fun for her any more.
I wondered whether I should tell her about Charly and Ela...
‘Have Jerman and Doc been cramming their lines?’ I asked to change the topic.
She rolled her eyes: ‘Ingo has moved the dress rehearsal to eleven in the evening! He has to work with them before that. But the craziest thing is: he gives me more shit than he does to any of the others. I mean, they disrupt me too, of course. But then he comes down on me to assert his authority.’
‘Well well, he’s supposed to be progressive but he vents his fury on the girls?!’
‘All he tells me is that I have to act like a punk. His spiel is, like, I have to rebel against how others see that role,’ she said, imitating the director’s speech and his way of smoking while constantly looking up at the ceiling.
‘Hmm, perhaps...’
Now she got edgy: ‘OK, I have to be rebellious, but he shouts at me all day.’
I didn’t know what to say: ‘Who’d have thought.’
Then I added, cautiously: ‘He’s obviously panicking. I mean, you all are.’
I thought she knew what I meant. She knew she was the one panicking. But she wanted to let out her frustration: ‘I know. But today I was about to tell him where he could stick it. Like: if punk’s what you want, punk’s what you’ll get!’
Sanja liked to be brave and to make a stand. If she were male it’d all be different, but I adored it like this: her pugnacity, her independence, her attitude... You’re my hero, I whispered to her sometimes.
But now she sighed, looked away sulkily, took a cigarette... She blew out a drag, and another, and glanced at me furtively to see if I’d noticed that sense of crisis.
‘Well, tell him where he can shove it!’ I said.
‘What?’
‘He should think twice, it’s too late to throw you out now!’
I wanted her to feel my support. She had to act with conviction and show she was prepared to defend herself. She wasn’t going to swear at the director, but she should at least feel that she could. That’d put her back on her feet and get her over the feeling that everyone was taking it out on her.
She looked deep into my eyes, as if she saw a beautiful sight there, and kissed me.
‘Ugh, you really do stink,’ I said.
‘Then I’ll go and brush my teeth!’ she yelled cheerily.
When she came back we sat on the couch, she stroked my head, neck and tummy as if she had hidden intentions, but I probably seemed too wooden to her, so she asked me if it was because of her. She reassured me that I needn’t worry, that she’d see us through it all.
I took a deep breath. This time it was my turn.
* * *
Sanja was against Boris going to Iraq, against the war, against anyone writing about such a spectacle, against infotainment, against various things, and I had an inkling she wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about my relatives either. OK, neither am I, but I always defended them whenever she said anything, the devil knows why, probably so it wouldn’t look like she was genetically superior.
I remember how she rolled her eyes when I told her Boris was going, and I assured her that it wasn’t because he was a relative of mine but because he was the right person for the job – he knew Arabic, he was literate, and war wasn’t a problem for him. So now I didn’t mention the problems to her, but I had to share them with someone, dammit. I just gave her a quick run-down and, of course, it all sounded like a confirmation that she was right.
‘Recommending him was a terrible mistake,’ I concluded.
‘You wanted to help him,’ Sanja said, and added, almost maternally.
‘You’re too sentimental. Your relatives are just using you.’
I didn’t want to talk about that again.
‘Can we skip the topic?’ I said.
‘I had a kind of premonition,’ she continued, as if she herself was in the mess. ‘But you were so enthusiastic about him.’
‘Who me? Enthusiastic?!’
‘Don’t you remember? Your cousin knows Arabic. You said I had to meet him.’
‘I don’t remember.’
I had no intention of talking about that. It’d even look as if I was losing my memory.
‘OK, don’t get angry,’ she placated. ‘You’re just a bit naive, you misjudge people.’
Come off it, I wanted to say to her – I saw straight away what was going on. Then I realised this wasn’t exactly the right time. I felt the gap between those two poles.
She waited for me to say something.
I waited too.
Then I waved dismissively.
Sanja continued in a gentle tone of voice: ‘I just wanted to say something about your relatives: you let them walk all over you...
They’re not interested in you, but they keep dragging you down.’
‘Yeah, Sanja, yours aren’t avant-garde either,’ I said.
The wall and the garage
We’d been putting it off for a long time and living in a fiction, as it were. Not until our third summer together did we set off on an official tour to meet the in-laws: several days with hers, several days with mine.
It looked a bit like an actor’s workshop: we watched each other finetune our performance, took care that the other didn’t put their foot in their mouth, sat at the table stiffly and respectably and exchanged trite phrases in that regional slang. I didn’t exactly know my lines...
But I talked about the high price of living, various ailments and car accidents, basically from memory, a bit stilted I suppose, like an amateur actor.
They asked us about our life in Zagreb in a well-intentioned, worried tone and suspected we were living the wrong way; we tried to stick to factual matters and somehow extricate ourselves because we couldn’t openly admit that we aimed to live a life diametrically opposed to theirs.
It was interesting that we weren’t able to tell them anything about our life as it really happened. When you looked at it, there was hardly anything to say. Our life barely existed, as if it had been left behind in some secret argot, where I had also left my real being, while this imposter sat at the table, enumerated bland facts, nattered about the car and introduced himself to her parents as me... His gaze wandered around the flat. At Sanja’s parents’ there was nowhere to look – there was no empty space. Her mother had a morbid fear of open spaces and the flat was so crammed full of ‘practical’ little tables that there was hardly any air to breathe.
Then, just on our second morning there, Sanja suggested to her mother that they knock down the wall between the kitchen and the living room to gain more space, and I made the mistake of seconding the idea. Her mother glanced at me in consternation and I realised