I slapped myself on the forehead and exclaimed: ‘D’oh, they’ve stolen our balcony!’
Sanja just rolled her eyes.
Fatal slow food
‘Is there anything in there for us?’ I asked when I saw the classifieds lying open on the coffee table.
‘There are a few we could call,’ she said, and went to on the couch. I slumped into the landlord’s old armchair.
She read out loud: Refined apartments with charm. I closed my eyes and listened to her voice. While she read out the square footage and the location of the flats I envisioned them: A peaceful and quiet street, air conditioning, lift...
And soon we were climbing up into the clouds, up above that quiet street. We imagined that life, looking down at everything. But it wasn’t one hundred percent definite that we needed that peace and quiet. Or that we needed what it said lower down, in a second advert: Close to the tram line, kindergarten, school. That made us think of children of our own growing up quickly and switching from kindergarten to school in the course of the sentence.
‘And in the city centre? Is there anything there?’
Refurbished attic flat, right in the heart of the city centre, with parking space.
Immediately we saw ourselves coming down from that penthouse, going from café to café in the centre, with everything close by, like when you go out to get cigarettes and meet a whole load of people and breathe in the tumult of the street, with its boundless life.
We did that every day. Hovering in weightlessness and reading the adverts, we felt life was light and variable, and we thoroughly understood people who added the word urgent after the description of the flat.
Urgent, urgent, urgent.
We were catapulted into that imaginary life.
‘Come on.’
‘You do it.’
‘I called last time,’ I said
‘Oh, give me the phone then.’
It was nicer to read those adverts in weightlessness than to descend into the lower levels of the atmosphere and talk with those people, hear their voices and feel how businesslike they were. There was something draining about those conversations.
Still, we had to ring that number.
The one with ‘urgent’ next to it.
* * *
We’d been in that flat for a bit too long, that was for sure, and were starting to get sick of the furniture which the landlords had dumped there in bygone ages. My friend Markatović and his wife Dijana had bought an apartment on credit and furnished it futuristically: it was spacious and spacey. We’d been there a few times: they’d cook slow food for us, we’d drink Pinot Grigio from Collio Goriziano and feel part of a new elite in that designer apartment, so light and spacious.
Each time we returned from their place our rented flat looked... like a charity shop. They had boldly moved into a new world, while we dwelt among the dark wardrobes of aunts long dead.
We didn’t talk about that openly, but I sensed the disappointment in the air and – oh my woes – I even found myself wondering if I was successful in life.
I mean, what sort of question is that?!
I’d only just begun to live after the war and all that shit; I’d only just caught my breath again.
But there we were, one time when we’d returned from the Markatovićs’ and that fatal slow food. It was heavy in my stomach for some reason and I couldn’t sleep, so I got a beer out of the fridge and looked around at the cramped flat and its ugly furniture. Why don’t you take out a loan too, whispered a voice (probably my guardian angel). That bewildered me. I never would have thought of the idea because I always considered myself a rebel. Just look at Markatović, the voice said, he’s your generation, and he’s got such a fancy place and even twins. Why couldn’t you have that too?
Hmm, me and a loan, a loan and me... I thought about it that night. I don’t recall the date, but I thought about it long and hard that night. It was a fact that we were still living in Sanja’s student flat although she’d finished uni. At my age, my old man tells me every time, he’d already... And at my age my ma had already... ohoho... What can I say when I think how they lived back then? Perhaps I’d better not tell you. They didn’t have enough money to buy shoes, but they still had children and even built a house. So, naturally, they wonder what Sanja and I are thinking. Do we think? When do we think? When do we think of thinking?
I looked at our Bob Marley poster on the wall, a black and white portrait with him in a statesmanlike pose, and wondered: What does a Rasta think? But he just holds his joint enigmatically between his lips. We have Mapplethorpe’s black male torso on the other wall, which motivates me to do sit-ups regularly. That’s what we’ve invested in. And then you start thinking. A loan – hell, talk about feeling deepended! I wandered the flat that night looking around as if I was saying goodbye.
* * *
When I slept here the first time, Sanja’s rented flat seemed quite a des res: situated on the fifteenth storey of a tower block, above a tram loop. The view was so good that I was afraid to go up to the window:
I was afraid of falling out.
Of course, we came back drunk that first night. We were careful not to be loud because of her flatmate in the other room.
I couldn’t come. She tried to give me a blow-job but turned out to be inexperienced at that. It was nice that she tried, although her teeth scratched. We kept on screwing, the condoms dried out quickly and kept bunching up around the head of my penis. I finally came in the third round. And now? Nothing had been further from my mind than pacing the flat at night and racking my brains over loans.
Anyway, after my first visit I dropped by again the next day, too, but skipped it on the third day so it wouldn’t look like I’d moved in.
I tried to stick to some kind of rhythm, so my moving in was never officially confirmed. I’d visit in the evenings, spontaneously, as if I’d heard there was a good film on TV.
I haven’t organised anything and I don’t have any expectations, I wrote to her on a postcard which I sent from Zagreb to Zagreb just for fun.
She liked that.
She liked everything I said.
At breakfast I made jokes, as fresh as morning rolls, and also entertained her flatmate Ela to try and keep her on side; it wasn’t hard to make her laugh, and it seemed she didn’t object to a guy hanging around the house in undies. So she slept in the bedroom, while Sanja and I curled up on the couch in the living room. When we made love we’d lock the door with a quick, quiet turn of the key. Later we’d quietly unlock it and run to the bathroom.
For the first year I kept on paying rent in my basement bedsitter in another part of the city so as not to lose my independence. My things were there, I’d say.
I
