He pulled the door and it closed much more loudly that he expected. The light in the hallway always went out when he was waiting for the lift to reach the twelfth floor. He never turned it on again so through the crack he could see his shadow on the steel doors in the shaft’s darkness just before it was filled with the lift car’s neon light. From beneath the basement stairs leading to the shelter to which not one of the building’s residents believed they would actually flee in fear in the near future, he took his cigarettes and lighter from hiding, and as was his habit, opened the building door with an elbow, having already lit up, and exited with a kind of half circle step. The cold evening air, to which smog and cheap coal lent a characteristic Ljubljana charm, filled his nostrils and mouth, and then his lungs, along with the first draw on the Winston. He thought of it as the smell of freedom: a mixture of gloom, cold, fog, and cigarette smoke. He was alone on the street, blanketed with a thick cloak of fog that hid him from familiar and unfamiliar passers-by. The walk to the bus stop lasted one cigarette. A scrawny young man with glasses, a little older than him, and a girl, were already there. Must be some student, Denis thought – only fucking students wear black sweaters and coats with badges that announce they care about things, that they’re ‘active’. They care about free speech, they care about dolphins, they care about Tibetan monks, they care about the Amazon rainforests, they care about the Kosovo miners, they care about Chinese students, and they care about Janša, the local journalist who supposedly swiped some secret documents from the army and published them. He remembered the skinny guy from school a few years ago as one of the punks in leather jackets fitted out with chains, cigarettes always in their mouths. They seemed pretty scary to Denis, who was several years younger, like some kind of ghouls from below ground. He was scared of them, even though they never paid him any attention. Now, having returned from the army, the lanky guy looked more like a wildly unkempt hippy than a punk. The good old Yugoslav National Army had clearly somewhat castrated him too, something Denis and his classmates in the neighbourhood often noticed with those who returned from the service. When Denis came up next to them, the guy was in the middle of explaining to the student how disappointed he was with the turnout to the benefit concert for Janša and his three co-defendants. All the while he nervously puffed on a cigarette, as if labouring to finish it before the bus came. There was no sign that the student was interested in what he was saying. Maybe the topic would have drawn her in, but the accidental acquaintance was obviously more than getting on her nerves, so she just nodded, very attentively looking down the street for the bus to finally arrive. They hadn’t come together; the hippy had obviously ambushed her unawares when she was waiting at the stop. Denis was amused by the fact that the student wouldn’t evade the burden of the guy in glasses even when the bus came, since the character would surely stick to her and torture her for at least another eight stops with his theorizing.
The bus that would take him, the hippie, and the student downtown drove up empty. The hippy and the bored student sat somewhere in the middle and he kept up his boring monologues, while she, resigned to her fate, waited for her stop to rescue her.
Denis always sat in the back of the bus, in the last row. That way he had a view of what was happening. He like watching total strangers getting on and off, guessing their occupations, and imagining their stories. He was sorry for some, because they obviously were destined for a statistician’s role in life, and others he envied, because it seemed to him they were more fortunate than he when roles were assigned, although he thought he was playing one of the leads. He believed he wouldn’t pass through life unnoticed, though he hadn’t the faintest idea how he would rise above the ordinary. Perhaps the underground band with Peter and Goran, that was taking more and more of his free time would make it, although they were long hours of practice from their first performance. He never dreamed that several years later, upset by the crowd, he would leave the line at the window for getting citizenship and become completely invisible. And that several years after that he and those like him would be called the ‘erased’.
His mind went back to earlier that day, when he was sitting in the same back seat of the bus, and watching people come on. A blinding sun, that for a short interval after the morning fog dispersed, and before the afternoon fog would fall in an hour or two, reigned over Ljubljana and pierced the large, spattered windows. The bus filled only through the front door, by the driver, who had just taken off his green winter uniform jacket and was slowly rolling up the sleeves of his striped shirt as he carefully checked passengers’ monthly passes through his sunglasses. Since it was not yet the hour of mass exodus from downtown towards the suburbs, only a few school pupils and retirees got on. And then Denis spotted her: at the end of the line getting on, in a group of four uniformed young people. She got on last, after two young men and a girl in white shirts and dark coats. He recognized them by the black tags on their chests.
‘Hey, morons.’
He had noted their arrival in the city not long before. Young Americans his age and a little older started ambushing him sometimes on the way from school, on the pavements downtown, which they clearly chose as ideal traps. Until now he had only met male representatives. They seemed like a joke to him because of their polish, the complete opposite of his image of young people from the cradle of rock ’n roll. They lay in wait – flawlessly parted hair, pressed pants, and fixed smiles – for passers-by and tried to explain Jesus Christ’s final days or something like that in fairly good Slovene, if tinged with an American accent.
Dropping a few coins in the box by the driver, she first gave him a smile, and then turning and heading through the bus, she did the same to all the other passengers, including Denis. He could have watched her, like many people before, and tried to guess her story, maybe catch her eyes for a moment, even smile at her, and then, after getting off, march away from the whole thing with yet another pleasant sketch in the collection of moments that wouldn’t immediately be wiped away, but float there for some time, and every once in a while elicit a melancholy sigh. But she was a Mormon: contact with her should like as not be avoided, not sought. A quick look in her direction, which one of the young men also caught, was enough for the entire Mormon platoon to approach him. Although she was still in the back, he tried to catch her eyes, as if not noticing the other three, and not responding to their well-rehearsed introductions, ‘I’m brother so-and-so, he’s brother so-and-so.’ Only she interested him.
‘So you must be sister something?’
‘I’m Mary.’
‘Of course, the Virgin Mary, who else?’
He felt that his childlike laugh didn’t anger, but amused her. She rewarded him with a changed, teasing smile, which fuelled his courage. He rose from his seat to take an equal place among the small group and push closer to her as she stood behind her two brothers and sister. One of the two slick assholes tried to guide the conversation, but Denis was communicating with her only, turning the other three Mormons into useless appendages, which they themselves understood after several stops, and gradually retreated into their own conversation.
He was finally one on one with the playful smile that betrayed curiosity and at the same time, like a raging river, easily overflowed its defensive levees. The bus engine, fortified with the hissing and groaning of the well-worn brakes, wrapped their conversation in an airtight sound curtain that rose for a few seconds at every stop, making it audible to the other passengers, especially the remainder of the Mormon expedition.
‘I’ll let you tell me all about your God, but first you have to let me take you to my church’, he said at one of the stops, once the bus completely halted, and he caught the questioning look that one of the brothers sent to Mary. The bus set off once again, and the continuation of their conversation was drowned in the roar. The brother’s attentive eyes were on Mary all the way to the stop where the platoon got off.
Back in the present, the student pronounced ‘I’m getting off here’, at the same stop at which Denis had agreed to meet with Mary at the end of their unexpected mutual commute. Denis wasn’t fully convinced that she would actually show up. When in the morning he had invited her to meet, she responded with open interest and quiet assent, followed immediately by a quick guilty look at the brother who was watching her with most concern