Her body was still untouched, there was just a bit of groping, he was not in a hurry, he said, and I even less, I was afraid of being deflowered, which, they said, hurts, tears you until you bleed, they said, so what kind of pleasure was that, I secretly wondered, to be torn and bleed; others had already tried it on with me, but to no avail, each time I’d run away. Actually, one time I did set out to get it done, the deflowering, just to get it over with, like an operation, I’d heard that the best for that were slightly older guys, who were well-worn, rather than young guys bursting with energy and wanting to explode inside you... God help me!
And I found just such a forty-year-old, with a square head streaked with grey, good-looking in a way that meant nothing to me, because I didn’t care, but tall, straight-backed, a good body, a tennis player, an oil expert who’d travelled the world, a picture of experience. He literally offered me his services like a surgeon, he would do it so that it didn’t hurt, he said, there was nothing to worry about, he’d done it before. And it would be in a wonderful setting, at his friend’s villa in the woods, with a fine meal, drinks, then the bedroom, everything nice and gentle and civilised, like in a fairy tale, though fairy tales didn’t include that part, except metaphorically, and it meant nothing to the body for the simple reason that you couldn’t eat or drink a metaphor, you couldn’t seek refuge in it. And once we’ve finished with that first part, you can’t imagine the pleasure that awaits you, he promised, oh yes I can, I thought, because I’d tried it on myself when I entered puberty; we know what’s what, I mused, but obviously kept it to myself, it was private, I was the object and he was the instrument that would work on it, that’s all. If I was satisfied, he could continue to provide his services, he said, nuzzling me like a cat, it was the first time that I noticed the cat in him, one that would make short work of you if you were a mouse, but since I wasn’t, he played up to me. And he told me about a student he had serviced when she was at uni, and it calmed her, he said, liberated her from any kind of drama with her peers; it’s you I have to thank for graduating, she told him when they parted, my jaw literally dropped listening to him talk about this robotic idyll as the ultimate consolation, and I discarded it in advance.
Still, I went with him to the villa, it belonged to a lawyer friend of his who looked sick, floundering in a mouse-grey suit that was too big for him, his face like a crumpled sock, white as wax, stretching a smile that seemed servile, especially as he kept agreeing with everything you said, you were always right, and it was with that smile that he walked us to the room upstairs, raising the glass in his hand as if toasting us, and when we came back downstairs he was there waiting for us, nodding at a job well done, except it had been a fiasco... I had undressed and laid down on the bed, he had undressed and laid down next to me – when I saw all that hair on his chest and arms and the signs of fat on his body, I didn’t let my eyes stray any further – and he started to massage my breasts to help me relax, because I was all tense, and then he pressed his hairy body against mine and I cringed. I can’t, I won’t, help, I’m leaving, I screamed my head off, I sat up, hugging my knees, closing myself off. He hovered over me, Just try it, you’ll see you’ll enjoy it, we’re already half-way there, he said, trying to reason with me and, as I later came to understand, for my own good, but it didn’t work because I just wanted him to disappear, to evaporate, to not be there, to never see him again, not even casually in the street.
Because a few years later – during which he disappeared as if wiped off the face of the earth – his lawyer friend, standing at Republic Square, at the place where Zagreb’s trendy sophistos hang out from noon till two, and where you can inspect them like cattle at a fair, informed me with that same stretched smile that he had died, a heart attack, they said, and he said, I didn’t know he had a heart problem, he never mentioned it. It’s possible it was something else, he stressed... And then added something that shocked me, that he’d been a spy, a Russian spy, which was discovered only after his death, just so I knew. He suddenly turned serious when he said these last words, there was no smile. He looked even sicker and more miserable, floundering in that mouse-grey suit of his.
I didn’t understand why I needed to know that, or even what I had learned except that it was something from another planet, from another part of the universe, outside my own reality, which I believed to be the only reality, strong and indestructible from the outside, destroyable only from within, following clearly set rules. So I left that particular story outside somewhere, and locked the door. Because spies didn’t walk around my world and people weren’t killed like in the movies and books, in my world you looked out into the radiant distance, where a miracle would happen and the expectation of that miracle remained strong, even when the ground under my feet turned into quicksand.
V.
What’s wrong with him, what, I accost my mother because her words are eating away at me, I want her to say that everything is fine, that she gives me her blessing for the person I think is the one, the person I’ve been saving myself for, because somebody had drummed that into my head – that there is that one and only you have to save yourself for – somebody, maybe her, books, the church, no, not the church, because I don’t go to church, we aren’t allowed to go to church, but the church still inhabits my mother, she went to church for years, she had virtually lived in the church before she got married, before the war, and I guess she spontaneously absorbed its ideas, one of which was to save yourself for the right one, in other words for your husband, because only he can be the right one. And from the church, through my mother, this idea spilled over into me.
I sing his praises to my mother, he’s polite, he’s a gentleman, he holds my coat for me and pulls out the chair, if he sees me shivering from the cold he’ll take off his jacket and give it to me, leaving him to freeze, he always chats with her in the kitchen before we retreat to my room, and I remind her that he is somebody I can study with, that we are interested in the same things, the same books, that we’ve been together for three months now and he still hasn’t touched me, he’s waiting for me to be ready, that’s how much he cares about me, I want to tell her, but I don’t, I don’t want to embarrass either of us, not her or me.
I still don’t know about the woman with the tail, he’ll tell me about her later, about the radio journalist whose needs he satisfies, I realise, whom he’s met through Leon, another journalist, a family friend, I still believe that I’m the only one. At least since the girl he’d been with before me, the girl who left him, Dunja, her father died while they were together, he said, and her father was all she had because her mother had died long before. He went with her to visit her father in the hospital, practically every day, they brought him lunch because the hospital food was terrible. Then one day her father’s bed was empty; awful, that bed, already made up for the next patient while her father was lying in the refrigerator down there in the basement, he said, she didn’t even cry or go to see him, she couldn’t, but when they left she threw his lunch into the bushes, he said, pretending to throw something, obviously impressed by the gesture. After the funeral she moved in with him and his family, because she was afraid to be alone in her flat, he said, but their place was cramped, I had already seen that for myself, a living room, bedroom and kitchen, you could barely call it three rooms, so it was a tight squeeze. That was in the spring, and in the summer she went to the seaside, but he stayed behind, he had to study so he could get his high school diploma in the autumn, because he had failed the summer term; she had passed. During her summer vacation she fell in love with a musician at a dance, confessed everything to him when she got back, all tanned and happy; he was a guitarist and singer and she immediately married him, he said wistfully, but not unhappily, it didn’t surprise him. Guys like that are attractive, he said, especially at the seaside, in the summer, he said, when it’s all about the body, I thought to myself.
But the odd thing is, he said, that now he again has a girlfriend with a dying father, I thought it was odd, too, although my father has been at death’s door forever, and even odder, I found, was that his own father was retired,