independent, listen to my old radio and stare at the ceiling.
* * *
At one stage Ela became nervous during our breakfasts, despite the fact that I used to go down to the shop and buy everyone a pastry.
Once she found a little pile of my laundry in the washing machine and said with a look of mild disgust: ‘Aha, so you two are in a serious relationship then!’
‘Where else am I to put his undies?’ Sanja defended herself nervously, and I felt guilty.
I stared downcast at them both.
I said to Ela by way of apology: ‘I haven’t got a machine, you know, and...’
They both began to laugh.
They laughed long and hard: ‘He hasn’t got a machine,’ they repeated, started giggling again, and were soon hooting with laughter.
But Ela soon found herself a new flat.
Our sex became louder. The ladies down in the shop started calling me ‘neighbour’: I bought bread, salami, milk, newspapers, cigarettes, two pastries and the non-existent yoghurt.
* * *
It all ran by itself, without any particular plan. We enjoyed that experiment. We went on our first summer holiday together, then there were autumn walks in Venice, the Biennale, Red Hot Chili Peppers in Vienna, Nick Cave in Ljubljana, a second summer holiday, a third, Egypt, Istria, and so on. Mutual friends, parties, organising things... Everything rolled along nicely as if nature were doing the thinking for us. And then we reached an invisible point.
At a particular moment, I don’t know exactly when, we started to wait – waiting for things to keep happening all by themselves like before. Sometimes, on empty days, you could literally feel the standstill. We’d screw, lie sweaty on the bed and wait for things to go on. We caressed each other, gave each other sloppy kisses, kept each other warm, fell half-asleep, and then one of us would get the remote and zap through the channels.
Now and then I asked myself: what now? It wasn’t that boredom crept in between us. It wasn’t that it might have been good to get up to go off and do something by myself. It wasn’t that; we didn’t speak about that. All in all, things were perfect. We ought to have been happy. That’s when we should have been happiest. That lolling around on the couch, our bodies’ mutual laziness – that’s the ideal of consummate love. We didn’t have a crackling fire in the fireplace, but central heating is all right. The blokes at the heating plant were shovelling like mad. The heating panels were really aglow.
Now and again there’d be an unexpected bout of the blues. But it wasn’t that. Perhaps there was also some kind of anger, but we weren’t aware of it. It just coiled up in our bodies and sometimes made us feel a bit tense. The muscles in your back stiffen. You wake up and you’re not rested. The alcohol really starts to knock you about. Sometimes you have attacks of hypochondria, but they pass. You watch TV, channel-hop...
We’d have arguments over little things.
I’d blow up and then apologise: ‘Sorry, I don’t know where that came from.’
‘Perhaps we should break up,’ Sanja would say, offended, without looking at me.
That was how she spoke. For example, she’d say ‘perhaps I shouldn’t go with you to X’ – not because she didn’t want to go, but so that I’d assure her that she was going with me. So she said ‘perhaps we should break up’ so I’d assure her of the opposite. So I’d prove to her that it all made sense.
I had to make sense of things.
At some point things stop developing by themselves and you have to give them a boost. Think up a new project. Feel a new drive. Playfulness, joy, passion.
Now I watched Sanja ringing up adverts for flats.
It was her turn; I’d done the calling the day before.
She was trying hard to make a serious impression. The people on the other end thought her voice sounded immature – they felt she couldn’t be a serious buyer.
She smoked and periodically nibbled the nail of her little finger.
She rolled her eyes.
I saw that she’d hit on an another old lady who was going on and on and being a pain.
‘Yes, I know where the Savica market is. Yes, I know we need to come and look at it, but could you please tell me the price?’
She just wanted to finish the conversation, but sometimes it’s hard to.
‘We’ll probably drop in,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to see when my boyfriend gets back from work.’
‘Say “husband”.’
‘What?’ she cocked her head as she put down the receiver.
‘Why did you lie that I was at work?’ I laughed. ‘Do you think it makes us sound more serious?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said darkly.
‘If you’re going to lie, say “my husband’s at work”. The boyfriend bit is half-baked.’
‘Oh, shut up!’
* * *
Baghdad is burning, the Allied bombing has begun, yoo-hoo!
You saw it, and what can I tell you, the Alliedbombing tore us out of our depression, life has become sportive, dynamic, everyone is fighting to get a word in edgeways, everything is in motion.
The Allied bombing, bro, like when you pour sugar into coffee, night and white crystals, attractive images you see again and again. I watch the allied bombing from the Sheraton Hotel in Kuwait City and am looking for a way to attach myself to the troops, to be embedded, cuz, but for some reason they don’t trust me, which doesn’t surprise me cos I don’t trust myself when I promise myself things, and they can probably see it in my eyes: I emit it like radiation or it comes out of me like bad breath.
I hear the alarm sirens, in Kuwait City they take them seriously, you know how it is at the beginning: people call their families, turn off their hi-fis, suddenly everyone hurries home, and the traffic jams, bro, long lines of waiting cars, and all in big cars, everyone honks their horns from inside, out from everyone’s metal box, the windows are rolled right up, everyone is afraid of poison gas, people just breathe the air in their vehicles, they sweat and stare out like fish, and I don’t know what to do with myself, so I go out roaming in the gloaming in that city of tall, shining towers by the light of the silvery moon.
OK, it’s not silver, but never mind.
Everything here now depends on which country you’re from, and Croatia’s decided to be against the war, so Lieutenant Jack Finnegan, the officer in charge of liaison with journalists, doesn’t believe me when I say I’m on their side, he won’t give me a press ID card cos in his eyes I represent Croatia, so I go out walking around Kuwait City in the name of Croatia, I look at the shop windows in the name of Croatia; they say several missiles came down in the sea, and the government has closed the schools for seven days.
On
