A life lasting a whole evening, a film lasting a whole life in which the best heroes lived just long enough to act an episode, for you to like them.
In my dream, my father coughs, just as he did in real life. His lungs are overgrown with little silver asbestos hairs, which you can clearly see through him. You can see through him everything it’s essential to see, only it’s hard to reproduce it when you’re awake.
‘Eh, where’ve you sprung from?’ I ask him in that dream, in which he appears in the company of the bird.
He smiles, draws from a phantom holster, winks and says: ‘Bang, bang!’
‘Bang, bang!’ repeats the parrot from his shoulder. ‘Bang, bang!’
Ma and I didn’t talk about the dope, or its mysterious disappearance from the tin under the dresser. Which wasn’t that mysterious, after all. And what was there to be said, after all. As though it was possible to drive the devil out, one has to sit down beside one’s demon and mollify it until it’s calm – that’s all, perhaps, that can be done.
From time to time Ma seemed agitated – for instance, she dropped things. But that used to happen before as well. Once it seemed to me that she reeked of alcohol.
Otherwise, she watched TV or swept the pavement in front of the house in the evening, to get some air. She would sprinkle the street with water that evaporated before it was swallowed by the manholes.
We didn’t even cook, although Ma is a cook, or used to be. Mostly we ate meals from the foodshop, ordered on the free number 0800 30 33 01. They offered heated-up frozen things that the workers bought cheaply at the nearby market and threw into hot oil in a wok. The menu included bizarre hogwash such as veal medallions in tuna sauce, wtf... But I don’t care, I’m perfectly happy with a plastic plate containing meat and rice, if possible not stuck together, and beetroot salad, and there isn’t even any washing up, it doesn’t taste of anything and it's all consumed without exaggerated emotion about food. Sometimes they add a little vacuum-packed chocolate cake.
This morning she got up very early, I recognized the sound of the vacuum cleaner. She had taken out all her shoes, new, old and those that no one wore any longer, and arranged them on the steps. I found her brushing them and rubbing polish into them.
My coffee was getting cold and there was a short, sharp hair in it. Jill had probably licked it, the wicked cat. I took the hair out with my finger and drank.
As soon as she saw me through the open front door, Ma abandoned her shoe brush and ran up, wiping her hands on a rag as she came. As though she’d hardly been able to wait for me to wake up.
‘Look, I wanted to show you this,’ she said excitedly. ‘What do you think? Is it tacky?’
On a shiny piece of paper was written:
GERBERA HEART (code: 3-70606)
Pain, sorrow and melancholy are part of life, especially at the times when we remember our dearest ones who are no longer with us. This arrangement symbolizes two hearts, which will remain forever together. It is made up of red mini gerberas, red roses and seasonal greenery arranged in the form of a heart.
Dimensions: width 42 cm, height 40 cm.
PRICE: 425.50 kunas
The arrangement in the picture looked like a strawberry cream gateau.
Her glasses had slipped to the tip of her nose, an old-fashioned frame, comical.
‘It’s not too tacky, is it?’
‘It’s lovely,’ I said.
Outside we were met by a mass-produced dry morning, where everything was burnt-up: the sky that had lost its colour and the two of us, without a drop of blood, were trudging along the uneven road beside the stream towards the highway. I have a new straw hat, yellow, on the label it says it is in fact a hat made of paper. As I put it on, I think of Tom Waits in Down By Law, that is, his attitude to cowboy boots – when you walk that much, you surely like boots – or Puss-in-Boots, Supertramps and all those valiant warriors, lonely riders, walkers, their spurs and rivets, Pipi Long Stocking’s enormous shoes and Henry Thoreau’s philosophical hiking boots, the sandals of some young wanderer and especially those boots of Nancy Sinatra’s, made for walking. Perhaps I would be able to develop such an attitude with this hat? I would certainly like to develop such an attitude towards the hat, which is not difficult when there is so much sun. I felt like telling someone about this, Daniel most likely.
Ma is dragging her beach things, for afterwards, she’s shoved a linen cap adorned with some obscure logo over her eyes and steps out, while behind her, I’m expiring under the seasonal greenery of the Gerbera Heart. Seasonal greenery, that’s what they call it, as though there was anything green in this season apart from inside greenhouses.
There is nothing green anywhere you look. Only dust and thorn bushes; needles and pins. My tongue is hard and my throat sprinkled with flour, the spring juices have now turned to dust and my blood has turned to dust, I’m sure that in males of all species their sperm has turned to dust. Perhaps they spurt it out like confetti or cannons of artificial snow. That thought amused me, for a moment.
I’m aware of my head swaying above the Gerbera Heart, above my bare legs, on the burning highway and I see Ma up ahead in the haze, scuttling along in her gold clogs.
If I could weep, I would probably weep tablets: milligram-sized. I recalled a story in which a girl wept roses, yellow ones, I think, but that girl must have been from an area with a different climate and better irrigation.
It’ll be easier on the way back, without this thing in my arms, I console myself, and the way to the beach is shorter, it goes through olive groves, vineyards and scorched gardens, beside courtyards with barbed-wire fences where furious Alsatians and Dobermans hurl themselves against them, and through an underground tunnel in the stream, which acts as a passage-way for school children.
We used to drag ourselves through there once when we were attacking the Iroquois Brothers or drawing up a truce with them on no-man’s land.
Parents used to put ordinary wooden ladders on either side of the road so that their children didn’t have to run across the highway. In summer, the tunnel was dry and full of green lizards. Problems arose when the streams swelled, and the impatient kamikaze outlanders, accustomed to living with the road, threw themselves in front of herds of metal buffalo.
Every kilometre along the highway, there is a bouquet of plastic flowers in a plastic vase and a wooden cross, lamps, candles, even real marble tombstones with the faithfully engraved smiling faces of the deceased. a whole small town has bled to death on the road here. Every thirteen year-old has a scooter cobbled together from spare parts. a traffic accident in our country is death by natural causes.
'What’re you thinking about?’ I’ll ask Ma as we leave the graveyard and go down onto the beach through the remains of an olive-grove above the old saltpans. The sun will have risen between the factory towers and the bell-tower and will be pouring burning honey over us.
‘I’m thinking about conditioning, how we’ll have to get conditioning, it’s hotter every year. This could drive you mad.’
Sweat and dust will
