that his phantom old man had been a customs officer from Cetinje.
‘Well honestly,’ said my sister later. ‘Whoever heard of a red-haired Montenegrin?!’
‘Our old man is an incredible loser,’ she added. This was the time when older boys were beginning to smoke Croatian cigarettes, war was just brewing and everyone had suddenly become nationally aware. ‘He’s always on the wrong side. First he was a Kraut, and now he’s a Montenegrin.’ Montenegrins were historically aligned with Serbs, and that was the wrong side to us.
‘Filthy half-breed!’ said Tommy Iroquois to Daniel in the course of one of our fights, belching like a pig.
‘Lousy redskin! Scabby Indian!’ responded Daniel, belching even more loudly and piggily, and knocking him into the dust.
A half-breed like Castellari’s Keoma, like McQueen’s Nevada Smith. Or Sergio Leone’s Nobody.
On several occasions, the neighbour with whom we quarrelled about the communal steps cursed our Kraut mother. We used to curse her cunning, heathen mother in a familiar manner. But in principle, we never knew who was what, so we were caught off guard when everyone else knew who we were better than we did. The advent of the war had a way of making people’s ethnicity everybody’s business.
It still happens today that one neighbour will spit on another or piss on his car tyres or pour dirty water over his children during their afternoon siesta. Sometimes the women, who are more highly strung here and fierier than their weary husbands, fight so that their tits gleam and their teeth and kitchen knives flash. But, this pathetic neighbourhood is no worse than others when you grow up in it – that’s what I think when I sit with Ma on the balcony and we drink beer from plastic bottles, and the fan pretends to be wind. When the night's sultry, those neighbours who don't go off to bathe with a towel slung over their shoulders, amuse themselves singing outside their houses.
And I join in, whispering, from my bed: You’re a heavenly flower.
This business with the cowboys was my father’s doing. He started it, and somehow it was his story. Everyone else in Yugoslavia liked the Indians best, apparently because of our most popular TV series, which had Winnetou, the Indian boy as the hero. It was only much later that cowboys came into their own. But my father loved the proper cowboys: John Ford, Zinnemann, he used to say. He adored the Italian westerns of Leone and Sergio Corbucci, he said he liked Sam Fucking Peckinpah as well and all the films acted in and directed by ‘the great Ned Montgomery’, as he called him. Since he became my late father, I have dreamed about him twice, the same dream both times. How it was before, when I was able to smell him after his morning shave, rubbing my cheek against his chin – of course I don’t remember that, because then dreams were different. Ordinary dreams about other things.
In my dream, my father is coming towards me, accompanied by a bird. It is the same cockatoo that used to peck at the top of his ballpoint pen while he did Rebus and crossword puzzles in his leisure time in the afternoon. He took it everywhere, my father did. It cackled on his shoulder as he sat at a table on the waterfront with the other tall men from the settlement. The crested fashion-model strutted about, turned her idiotic little chicken’s head around self-importantly, crapped on the light fittings and cupboards and watched out for a chance to leap onto someone’s head and peck their skull, I recall. It was only my father to whom she attached herself with some kind of servile avian devotion. Nothing like a hawk whose devotion, were it not so magnificent, would be canine, I thought. The cockatoo, as my sister described it, had the temperament of a monkey and the manners of a possessive little madam.
The parrot imitated the way our father whistled to call us in from the street, striking terror into our hearts, because our father was strict. Later he softened, as though he knew that he had no time for anything other than fun. In summer he took us to a distant sandy beach and to play badminton and brought us copies of the latest videocassettes of films and MTV clips and pulp fiction that we watched or read in the quiet, empty seasons. He kissed our feet and eyes and under our chins, where a child is softest.
Sometimes I spent winter mornings at the Little Lagoon looking for cuttlefish shells for the cockatoo, to please my father, and that bird of his, which no one in the house liked.
‘You’ll make great soup, you’re just right for soup,’ said Daniel. He threatened the bird from a respectable distance kissing the tips of his fingers and smacking his lips.
‘It’d make a great crown of feathers,’ he told me once quite seriously.
‘Hey, you’d be a great headdress!’ he shouted to the parrot.
Daniel thought that if an animal talks, it must also understand. And if I think about it, for that matter so did I, because once I said something to it and our cat Jill looked at me and sighed.
‘Oh,’ came a muffled sound that you often hear dogs make.
And Jill’s just an exasperated dumb creature who reads our lips, but perhaps she does hear. She certainly feels our words but isn’t capable of repeating or creating them, I thought. But still my words reach Jill like flying objects, invisible artefacts – when I say food, she hears the crisp rind of bacon with red strips of meat, when I say love, she hears my hand, its moistness and warmth, my pulse.
Although it was able to repeat them, our words reached the cockatoo as noises, simple melodies.
Our pa was taken ill early, so the guys from the cement works employed him in the factory cinema. The Balkan Cinema it was called back then. It’s been closed for ages now.
He tore the tickets in half, stuck up posters, carried huge reels of film and showed the films along with Uncle Braco. Those were brilliant years for his children, the last years of that cinema, just before the war: three days a week. After the matinee I sat in the little projection room, with the projector whirring, leafing through catalogues of the films that would be coming or reading about those that would never be shown in our cinema.
After the screening, we would come out into a night full of stars pricked into the black, above the tubular, pot-bellied factory halls and chimneys painted red and white like a lollipop, and tread over the carpet of cement dust that stretched to the edge of the sea and beyond, far below the sea. Roundabout, in the dust, lay perfectly smooth metal globes, some small, some large, that were probably used for grinding marl, and steel rollers that we took to make go-karts, I recall.
We came out of the old Balkan Cinema – hearing the wooden seats clatter as they folded up behind us – as though we were passing from one film into another.
And as a finale: the spongy, muffled sound of the large cinema door closing, then my father turning the key and putting it away in the inner pocket of his jacket like the keeper of a secret.
I was proud of him then, far more proud than if he’d been a doctor, a singer or a director.
After that Uncle Braco opened a video rental shop, Braco & Co., where my father was the Co. until the end of his short life, working behind the counter.
I asked him whether we were going to have our own video shop.
‘What’ll it be called?’ I asked, pushing myself into his hands.
‘It’ll be called Almeria,’ he said, tracing the invisible name in the air with his finger and winking.
My
