His mother, looking distraught, bursts into the room, saying she’s looking for her brooch, she left it somewhere, and slowly she moves around on her square legs. She’s one of those women with broad hips but narrow, drooping shoulders, and she’s still pretty, although in a doll-like way, and although she’s old, she’s already in her forties. I draw that kind of heart-shaped face on scrap paper when I’m on the phone and the conversation is boring. It’s always faces, in profile or en face, with the eyes, nose, mouth and hair, finishing with the neck. I rarely draw bodies, and if I do they are slim, like a model’s. Her nose is exactly like the ones I draw – small and straight. And her mouth is like what I draw, too – full, the lip-line heart-shaped, not too big. She’s got high cheek bones, which is what makes for her regular features. Her eyes are big and blue, the deep blue of a summer sky, which her son has inherited, and with their dark lashes they look fabulous, they don’t need any make-up. Her dark hair contrasts with her milky white skin, skin like her son’s. It really is milky white, like in books, but I don’t really like that. For instance, I’m blond and olive-skinned – that’s a better combination. She looks surprised, like a three-year-old who doesn’t understand why everybody is searching for him. That surprised look is heightened by the freckles on her nose and cheeks; her son has them, too. But his nose is bigger than hers, he’s bigger in every way, a head taller than she is, scrawny, angular, built like his father.
She’s all red from searching for the misplaced brooch, she’s looked on the bookshelf, in the tin box of threads, in the shell-studded box on the television stand, in the kitchen, where on earth did I put it, she asks herself, her eyes flitting like a bouncing table-tennis ball from the kitchen to her son in the armchair and back again. I offer to help her look, but she decides to stop, I can do without the brooch, she says, though I see that she needs it to close the brown woollen jacket she’s wearing over a light blue blouse. Maybe it’s in your room, I say, but she waves away the idea with her white, freckled, plump hand, saying she’s already looked there, and smiles at me dolefully as she walks out, as if paying her condolences.
She was supposed to live in a villa in a leafy suburb, as the wife of an officer, but instead of a life of good fortune and plenty, the war came, changing everybody’s plans, mostly for the worse, which was her case because the officer died of typhoid at the very outset of the war, although some fared better, like those who lazed around the villas confiscated after the war. She didn’t tell me the story of the officer, her son did, and according to him he was the one who lost out, who was short-changed, as if he’d have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth if she’d married the officer, as if he’d been created in that never-achieved marriage, and then mistakenly wound up with this poor excuse of a father, who wouldn’t even let him smoke in his presence. And whose coughing pierced his ears all night long. He didn’t say it as crudely as that, but I got the point, that he’d been robbed of the wealth that should have been his. And in which he had revelled in advance. And so now, though he couldn’t even afford a little Zastava 500 car, he saw himself sitting behind the wheel of a silver Lincoln Continental, wearing a custom-made suit, with a Rolex on his wrist, in New York, of course. These stories of his made me explode with laughter, I dubbed him Lincoln Continental, but he just nodded, swinging his crossed leg – it was never still – saying, you’ll see. And he’d light another cigarette on the ember of the old one. But when I asked him when he was going to earn all that money for a life that would give him a Lincoln Continental and a Rolex, he’d just repeat that I’d see, and nod at the wealthy future he already saw as his. Then his father came into the room with his shiny bald head, his hat in his hand, his dark green loden coat dancing around him, saying that he would be back in two or three hours and we should take care. The son jumped up and almost pushed him out of the room, closing the door behind them, and they began arguing in the hallway. I heard their voices but not the words, and I didn’t feel like listening. There was the sound of the front door finally closing and he came back into the room.
It was nothing like what Steve – the forty-year-old I had chosen to deflower me – had promised: tender and painless and afterwards lovely, no, it was painful and bloody and anything but lovely, but at least it was over and done with.
VII.
We live now like two butterflies flying over a meadow of flowers, fluttering here, there and everywhere... Lectures at uni in the morning, and once or twice a week the cinema in the afternoon, usually the one near my house that shows art films, Bergman, Godard, Truffaut, then we’d see friends from uni, couples like Petra and Filip, or just people like Adam, who had joined our crowd. We see each other every day after lectures, there are endless conversations in pubs – when you become a world-famous writer which, of course, you will – we philosophise, laugh, drink, all in clouds of smoke, because we all smoke a lot, we are together everywhere, in his apartment, in mine, holding hands, arm in arm, embracing, darling, sweetheart, honey, a kiss on the eye, on the cheek, on the mouth, on the chin, under the chin.
In the street we run into a poet, he’s our age, wearing a black, broad-brimmed Bohemian hat, with a black beard that I scan for any remains of food, it’s so thick it’s bound to get some stuck in it, I say to myself, he’s grown it because he’s going bald. He stops us, he wants to read us a poem that he pulls out of his pocket, alright, says my beloved, as long as it’s not long. He reads the poem as if he’s on stage, performing in front of an audience, full of himself, and we smirk, it’s good, old man, says my one and only, patting him on the back, while the poet looks at me goggle-eyed, as if he wants to grab me.
There’s a lot of flirting going on. Adam flirts with me, too; strange that people from the Podrava region should call their son Adam, I think when I learn that he’s from there, a rural boy, that his father is a tailor and mother a midwife, that they moved to Zagreb from Bjelovar five years ago so that he and his brother could get an education, and that they’re still building a house to which we’ll be invited once it’s finished. Whenever he gets a chance, he puts his hand on my knee, and I immediately remove it. I don’t get angry, I giggle, I like being twenty years old, having a boyfriend and an admirer, and I get along better with Adam than with the others, sometimes better even than with my own darling, whom I love more than anything... And from talking I move on to just enjoying his presence, his mere existence, being together, without any demands except that he be with me. And so in the evening I often doze off on his lap, I lie down on the sofa, my head on his lap, and drift off to sleep.
He’ll wake me up before he leaves, because we’re at my place, in my little room next to the kitchen, where I moved from the bigger room next to my parents’, because my father is in there dying, and it makes me feel uncomfortable. Anyway it suits me to have so much space separating me from them, the kitchen, the hall, it’s like being on the other side of the world. Of course, they come into the kitchen, shuffle around in their slippers, creak open the door, take glasses and dishes from the kitchen cabinets, pour water, say something to each other, but then they leave and we’re on our own again. Mind you, not for long enough that we can do anything, they’re too close by for that and you never know when they’ll burst into the kitchen, maybe even say something through the closed door, usually it’s to ask if we need anything, if we’re going to eat after all that studying, my mother has been known to come in with lemonade as a pick-me-up, though she does knock first, just in case, but we’re not really up to anything, we’re happy the way we are.
When he leaves, when I walk him out, laughing, kissing his mouth, his nose, his eyes and his ears, so that he can feel my kisses all over, I pull out the sofa, make my bed and go to sleep, all happy. At night I fly over my city, I simply leap off the pavement and fly. It’s wonderful to soar over the houses, the roofs, waving my arms like wings, my heart almost bursts with the joy of it, it’s better than flying on a magic carpet, like in Scheherazade, which I imagined when I was a child, better than anything I’ve ever known, even if it is only in my dreams, because, honestly, what’s the difference?
The only thing it’s not better than is being in the heavenly forest I dream about before the wedding. At first I’m somewhere down below, above there’s a clearing, greener than