under the vine, imagine!
I felt he was doing this to me on purpose. I saw straight away how he looked at me when we met a month ago in Zagreb after the nice, long years of not seeing each other.
The layout guy Zlatko had had a baby daughter that day and treated us to a round of drinks; afterwards I went and sat in the bar close to the firm to wait for Boris. Cuz was over half an hour late. I expected he’d got lost. But then I saw him coming along the street, glancing around cautiously.
I waved.
I watched him as he came up: his gait took me back to when we were teenagers and greeted each other loudly with a clap on the shoulder and a yell of Hey, old chum. We learned a rakish swagger: walking broad-legged with our hands in our pockets as it if was cold. We put on a show of enthusiasm when we met in bars and clubs because we were relying on each other in the event of a fight, I guess.
As I watched him now I saw he still walked that way.
I got up: ‘Hey, old chum, how are things?’ and patted him on the shoulder.
‘Is it you?’ he offered me a flabby hand.
He sat down.
He was wearing orange-tinted shades and smiled like a mafioso pretending to be a Buddhist; De Niro wore that ‘mask’ in several films and since then streetwise guys have taken to using it.
Sinewy, with a longish face. We’d always been similar. He’s even got a streak of colour in his hair, a yellowish stripe behind his ear. He looked quite urbane, as they say. You could tell he didn’t live in our village, which incidentally has expanded quite a bit but still isn’t a city, so we called it a ‘town’... Could there be any notion more non-committal than ‘town’? A multi-purpose whatever, an amalgam of dilapidated houses and holiday flats strung out along the road...
But Boris lived in Split – cuz was urbane, a city boy, good on him. I wouldn’t need to feel embarrassed if anyone I knew passed by.
He sat down at the table so sluggishly that I thought he was smacked out. But he said he’d been clean for a long time. Now he told me he’d come to the big smoke cos, like, there’s no perspective back ’ome and grinned as if he wanted to make fun of that hackneyed word perspective.
He wore his underdoggery in a slightly high-handed way like victims of the system do. Soon he took out some sheets of paper and handed them to me: ‘So ya can see ’ow I write.’
The pages were densely typed from top to bottom with a worn ribbon – you could hardly see the words, but I tried... and read a little longer than I wanted. He just stared straight ahead, smiling at the fruit juice he’d ordered, smoking Ronhill and blithely blowing rings.
What he’d given me were poems in prose on some intangible topic.Never mind, I thought, he’s bound to be unrecognised in his neighbourhood. I could see he was literate, and that was something. His filmstar smile which put me on edge was simply a defensive stance in case I told him his writing was crud.
‘You need to take this to a literary magazine and let them have a look,’
I said
‘It doesn’t matter. I can do any kind of writing.’ He started tapping with his leg. His smile faded.
‘Look, this is literature of sorts, it’s special in its own right,’ I stated cautiously. ‘For newspapers you need to write concisely and...’
‘That’s even easier,’ he interrupted.
I ought to have seen straight away that this wasn’t a promising debut.
Well, actually, I did see.
‘I really don’t know just now,’ I told him. ‘If there’s an opening, I’ll let you know...’
‘Fine,’ he said in a descending tone as if I was abandoning a little puppy.
I felt those pangs of conscience again. Why? Was it guilt for me having become estranged? Fear of having become conceited? When he asked me what my girlfriend did and I told him she was an actress, I felt like I was boasting. But what should I have said – that she’s a toll-booth cashier?!
Whatever I said looked like bragging to a provincial audience, a milieu dominated by rough-and-ready Gastarbeiter types. So I spoke in a blasé voice as if none of it mattered, which probably sounded like I was weary of my own importance.
It’s strange when someone like that comes to see you, someone allegedly close who can’t understand you and looks at you like a commercial on TV. I saw that Boris couldn’t conceive of my life in any real terms. I knew where he was coming from and could imagine his life, but he couldn’t imagine mine; that’s why he looked at me like an apparition which had been magically beamed from the summertime shallows where we played ‘keepy-uppy’ in our swimming trunks, into the actors’ jet set, and from there had skydived down into a newspaper office overflowing with cash that was occupied with things arcane.
Once, long ago, we listened to the same records and were so alike in dress and behaviour that old grandmother Lucija could hardly tell us apart; and now look at us... If I hadn’t gone away I would’ve got stuck in a rut like him, I thought. I recognised myself in him like a parallel reality, but he sized me up as if asking himself what made me better.
It seemed I reminded him of some form of injustice.
‘I could write what no one else will,’ Boris said and laughed for no reason. ‘It’s no sweat for me.’
‘Hmm. Shall we have another drink?’ I asked, not knowing what else to say.
‘I’ve only got twenty kunas,’ he warned me.
‘It’s OK, it’s on me,’ I said so it wouldn’t be awkward for him.
‘All right,’ he sighed, as if he’d needed persuading.
I ordered another beer and he – I couldn’t believe it – another juice, and I realised that the conversation wasn’t going to get more fluid. I began to feel time pressure.
‘Don’t you drink?’ I asked.
‘Now and then,’ he said and fell silent.
Then I launched into a spiel about when, how and how much I drink – an inane, incoherent story that soon got on my nerves, but I had to say something so we wouldn’t sit there like two logs; he obviously hadn’t developed a talent for small talk.
We sat there for a little longer and finally he mentioned his degree, which he hadn’t been able to finish. I could tell he’d planned to mention it and had thought about how to present the topic.
He obviously thought I knew what he’d studied.
We were supposed to behave like we were really close, so I nodded. Still, after things ground to a halt again I said: ‘Sorry, what was it that you studied again? I just remember it was pretty exotic.’
‘Arabic,’ he laughed and slapped his hands on his knees. It seemed he was laughing at himself. Probably because he had studied Arabic instead of a more pedestrian subject.
Bingo!
