As soon as I enter it, I know it’s heavenly, it tells me so, there’s no doubt about what kind of a forest this is, it’s incorporeal, and yet with a body, with the bodies of the trees, the bushes, the grass, but there’s nothing hard, nothing sharp, nothing to prick you, nothing to hurt you, the way there otherwise is in nature, which is magnificent to look at, but don’t lie down because it will attack you.
When we’re not at my place then we’re at his, lounging on his living-room sofa after lunch. His father Frane nods off in the armchair, which is where he does everything anyway, reads the newspaper, hems, coughs, drinks his coffee, watches television, whatever’s on, he likes the news, we’re not interested in that, or in politics generally, we don’t even read the newspaper, except for the last page, for its humorous column, but his mother never sleeps, she sits down for a bit, washes the dishes and then tackles the sewing, because the clients will be coming later in the day.
We don’t sleep either, we just enjoy lying next to each other, side by side. Standing on the table are glasses of red wine with the wedges of peach inside, and when they soak up the wine we eat them with a fork as a treat; only soft, ripe peaches are good, they dissolve in your mouth, and we move to the balcony, where we can smoke, to finish the wine. We’ll stand next to each other, our elbows resting on the railing, and look down below, or off into the distance, feeling full, languid, floating through life like a cottonwool cloud, and he’ll tell me how a sparrow once fell off the balcony, the little bird hadn’t learned to fly yet, and down below was a cat waiting for it with open jaws, and it polished it off in a second.
In the evening we’ll go to the cinema. Or to a nearby restaurant, on the edge of town, where he lives, where his local friends go, where I don’t really like going, I’d rather be with our friends from uni; his crowd is too mixed for my taste, and they’re all men, one is hunchbacked, he always sits on the arm of the chair otherwise you can’t see him, he works at the telephone exchange, another is some sort of former football star, a dubious character, they call him Blacky, the third is an actor who’s never sober and tried, unsuccessfully, to make an actor out of my darling, because he’s supposedly talented, and because when you’re an actor you can earn enough money to buy yourself a Lincoln Continental, but he flunked the entrance exam, so that was the end of that. And he could have also been a painter, his mother Danica told me when we were discussing all of her son’s talents, showing me a watercolour he did when he was ten and they had framed.
Then it’s summer and we go to the seaside for a week, to Omišalj, the two of us, with Flora and her boyfriend Boris, whom she’d picked up at Ria’s, but she mysteriously vanishes, probably because she’s busy being a sorceress and casting her spell, I now think, but at the time I’m amazed that she can disappear like that, people here don’t just disappear, except when they die. The lads are in tents down below and us two girls are in the little hilltop town above, staying with a friend of my mother’s in a narrow, stone house. The friend’s mother, dressed all in black, her braided hair wreathed around her head, makes sheep cheese in the cellar, then puts the yellow rounds of cheese on the shelf to dry, they smell to high heaven, and she sleeps in the adjoining space. My mother’s friend and her daughter sleep in the room above that, and we’re in the room above theirs, which has a double bed, a wardrobe, a chest, and everything is ancient, huge, the room is so full you can barely move in it, but we love it.
The village is on a hill, and after dancing at the seaside hotel down below every night, my darling walks me back up to the house. On the way, we always stop and sit on the bench to make out, which we did that night, too, when I took off my sandals because they were pinching me, and when we finished, we continued on our way, with me barefoot, which I didn’t notice until I got to my room, even though I’d been walking on an unpaved road laid with stones.
What now, I panic, those are the only sandals I’ve got, except for the flip-flops I have for the beach, my boyfriend has gone back, and Flora’s not around to help me look for them. Never mind, I tell myself, collapsing onto my side of the bed, onto the damp sheets, my feet dirty, I’m sure I’ll find them in the morning, I tell myself, falling asleep before I know it. But my poor brand-new blue sandals are gone by the morning, somebody took them. I’m devastated, because, of course, that means no more dancing, so I run to the post office to phone my mother and tell her my tale of woe, she isn’t far away, she’s in Pula, staying with Aunt Višnja. My father was feeling better, his brother and his wife had come to stay for a week and so my mother had given herself some time off; I’m barefoot, I sob, as if they’d cut off my legs, and my mother says: come to Pula, you can buy yourself some sandals, I’ve just won the lottery! Auntie Višnja isn’t here, she’s gone to the hot springs in Serbia.
And it’s in Pula, where I immediately buy myself a pair of sandals like the ones I lost, blue with webbed straps, each one with a nickel-coloured clasp, that I first experience what is to become the rule of my life, until I extricate myself, though it still has a hold on me – my darling vanishes.
That happens on our third day there, he goes out to buy a pack of cigarettes and doesn’t come back. Like that joke about the man who went to the newsstand and disappeared forever. I wait for him and his cigarettes for five minutes, ten, then, after going to the corner newsstand to buy cigarettes, furious, obviously, I wait just for him, I wait half an hour, an hour, two, becoming more and more worried, where is he, where can he be, I pester my mother, maybe something’s happened, I lean out the window, stretching my neck to see better, firing nasty looks at passers-by for not being him, I go out into the street and stand there like a mad woman, spinning around, as if looking for a child who’s hiding. We were supposed to go for a swim, then come back for lunch and now everything is ruined. And that’s the least of it!
After waiting for two hours, I go looking for him, it’s noon already. Auntie Višnja doesn’t live far from the centre of town, which is small anyway, you just have to walk down the long dusty street, past the dilapidated houses neglected since the war, and you’re in the centre of town, near the ancient Arena, and the café garden, where I decide to look for him.
I find him immediately, as if I’d conjured him, sitting by himself at the table, under a sunshade, his legs crossed, with that thoughtful, hard expression on his face that sometimes escapes him. There’s a glass of brandy glowing on the table like amber, a cigarette between his long, slender fingers, virtuoso pianists have fingers like that but so do schizophrenics, I later learn; the smoke rises straight up like a candle’s, because there is no wind, his gaze is intense, the café is packed and I can’t see what he’s looking at, I don’t think he’s looking at anybody, he’s just looking, because he’s sitting, because he’s alone, because he’s got eyes and it’s natural to look.
And I’m livid, just livid watching him, I dig my nails into the palms of my hands, I could kill him, gouge his eyes out, pull his hair out, break his fingers, throw the brandy in his face, yank that cigarette out of his hand and crush it with my brand new sandals; there he is, leaning back, enjoying himself, while I’m at home waiting for him, worrying, despairing, how can this be happening, it can’t be happening, it’s not part of the agreement, it’s beyond logic, its madness, it’s not reality, it’s the end of the world and you can’t do anything about it because it’s the end and because it’s beyond comprehension; because it’s beyond you.
I know what I should do, I should leave without his seeing me and return to Auntie Višnja’s house, pack up his things and send him back home on the bus that same afternoon, no arguing, no discussion, that’s what I’ve decided to do and that’s it. I especially need to avoid any discussion, I know and I understand that, I’m enough of an adult, after all, so no discussion, that’s basically just mirrors and smoke, it doesn’t let you move on because you don’t know where you’re going, because the different sides of the world have disappeared and you’re happy just to see any object that belongs to this world and will show you the way, even though you don’t know where it leads: into the abyss, to salvation or to something else, neither here nor there... to something that’s maybe worse.
And