saying that this had been going on long enough for her to expect a ring instead of a rose, but she’d reply that she was just having fun and was in no rush. She also liked to add that any girl would be afraid to marry someone who looked that handsome in his uniform, because a girl could never be sure if it was the uniform she liked more than the man in it.
Before Dusha could unpick this riddle, her colleague had grown tired of her repetitive work, and of the toffees. And it wasn’t too long before her boss had also stumbled upon his salesclerk, curled up like a baby among the shoeboxes on the warehouse floor one afternoon.
But since misfortune never walks alone, comrade Podlogar, a notorious snoop from a nearby town, heard through the grapevine that his model daughter, Dusha, who worked so hard at the shoe shop to earn her keep, hadn’t been seen at the Faculty of Education in ages. Dusha’s father, Dushan, was a special sort: he had reluctantly moved away from his modest home, where he had dragged himself after the first heart attack, which resulted in obligatory invalidity retirement from his long-standing career as the staunch police commander of the small town. But when comrade Maria Podlogar, a former secretary at the primary school, who made a hobby of keeping tabs on the moral meanderings of the neighbourhood, commented one day that it just wasn’t right when parents don’t know what is happening with their own children, Dushan felt forced into action. It was never his choice, but he went about it professionally.
So Dusha not only lost her job at the beginning of March 1978, but former police chief Podlogar made sure, in his own special way, that her wayward ways would be punished, and she ended up loosing her rented apartment very quickly. While Dusha was still a theoretically diligent student in Ljubljana, her offended father had silently accepted the gall of her decision to leave home, putting up a good façade when the neighbours inquired, claiming that he was proud of her, supported her. ‘A student needs complete peace and must be close to the faculty,’ Chief Podlogar would say, projecting confidence in his deliberation on the immutable laws of student life, which were utterly unknown to him. Those he spoke with, however, knew even less than he did. In order to avoid admitting that Dusha had escaped his parental control, Dushan Podlogar convinced himself and the neighbours that her departure was all part of his master plan.
But Chief Podlogar’s house of cards began to collapse the night that Lieutenant Borojević summoned up his courage, after a whole evening of preparation, and requested the band on the hotel terrace to sing ‘Hey Hey Hey We’re Not Going Home Yet,’ (the only Slovenian song in their repertoire) so that he could grab a dance with the beautiful Slovenian tourist. It was not long after this that Chief Podlogar lost faith in his own lie. As a last grasp, he tried to reel his head over heels daughter home as soon as possible, and set her up with a ‘dream’ job at the local leather plant, which was certainly a form of punishment as far as she was concerned.
But the machinations of his carefully prepared correction-plan graphically demonstrated that comrade Podlogar did not know his daughter at all, despite his conviction over the years that she was his favourite. This infamous snoop, who the local hooligans used to justifiably dread, never took seriously the hereditary stubbornness that he had passed on to Dusha, though stories of it had been circulating for long enough. Podlogar’s plan had been to force Dusha’s Ljubljana landlord with a report since, like so many landlords, he had never registered the fact that he was subletting his apartment. So Dusha was kicked out, and Dushan might’ve thought that she would have slumped down on a street corner, before humbly sulking home to daddy. But instead, she went straight to the train station and waited, for the last time, for the green train. Carrying two small suitcases, her stubbornness dictated the rest of the story – she was determined never to return to her father’s village, not even for a Sunday lunch. She rode off towards the lights of Pula, believing that this very evening, her lieutenant would be waiting for her with a rose in his thorn-scratched hand, on Platform 2, and for the last time.
But as luck would have it, Lieutenant Nedelko, on the very evening that should have been the most special of his young life, failed to remember that it was Thursday. Thursday evenings saw a special ritual at the Karl Rojc Barracks. Around seven, Colonel Neven Barac, fresh from the shower and anointed with smuggled Italian cologne, set out for dinner at the Fisherman’s Shed Restaurant with his mistress, Zhana. The soldiers in Pula were well aware that the good colonel was officially on call at the barracks on Thursdays, and that he also, unofficially, cheated on his wife, Ivana, in room 132 of the Brioni Hotel, his coital maneuvers squelching over a stomach full of grilled squid, mixed salad and a litre of red wine. But the soldiers guarded this secret as if it were treasonous to release it. When Ivana called, as she did on rare occasions, they meticulously served their country by explaining to the wife, without a blush of guilt that ‘Colonel Barac can’t come to the phone right now.’ Only once had a new-recruit, an ethnic Albanian, told Ivana that ‘the colonel is in the barracks, but not exactly in the barracks,’ but Barac had managed to explain this away by saying that the man understood Serbian well enough, but hadn’t known what he was saying. And so the secret remained secret.
Those who maintained those secret Thursday nights were well-rewarded, not only for those expected to respond to potential calls from the cuckolded wife, but also for the guard duty of having to ‘keep a close eye on Captain Muzirović, and not let him out of barracks for all the tea in China.’ You see, Neven Barac’s Zhana had once been Captain Emir Muzirović’s Zhana, until the latter had discovered, to his horror, that there were multiple officers in her life, to which fact he responded that he didn’t ‘waste his time and his cock on whores.’ But of course Muzirović never really got over her and put on a brave face, as he knew that she secretly met with his married friend, Neven Barac. Unlike the impassioned Muzirović, Barac spent only his time and reproductive organ on Zhana, and wasn’t in the least bothered with whatever she might be doing, if it was not a Thursday. But Thursdays were killing Muzirović.
He finally broke down while watching his friend prepare for one such Thursday, whistling a popular song, ‘This is Our Night.’ First he ritually downed a litre of Lieutenant Borojević’s grape schnapps, in a further attempt to repress his pain and then, at the climax of his delirium, vacillated between a desire to apologize to Zhana on his knees for his ugly words, then propose to her, right in front of Barac, the restaurant staff, and any random cluster of German tourists or, Option B, throwing Barac through the window of the Fisherman’s Shed Restaurant, straight into the sea. But rather than enact either of these options, with a little help from the soldiers on duty, he merely fell asleep in his office, putting off the difficult decision of whether or not to snap into action until the following Thursday.
Alas, it was the following Thursday that Dusha fled Ljubljana, and the soldiers on duty were sparse since Filipovski, the flag-bearer on call, had forgotten to tell anyone what it really meant to be ‘on duty’ on Thursdays. So Nedelko Borojević was on his way out of the barracks, when he noticed the conspicuous absence of any snoring coming from Captain Muzirović’s office. A minute later, Filipovski announced that Muzirović had left the barracks, drunk, shouting ‘I’m gonna fuck fishing pimps and their pimpy fish,’ whatever that meant, but Filipovski knew what would happen next. Instead of going to the train station, Borojević was forced to sprint to the Fisherman’s Shed Restaurant, to intercept a disaster of wide and resounding social dimensions. This meant that Dusha Podlogar was left without a rose and a thorn-scratched hand for the first time and was abandoned that evening, like a lost little girl, with her two small suitcases on Platform 2.
Who knows if it was because she had nowhere else to go, or simply because Dusha Podlogar was the way she was but, after waiting an hour, Borojević’s ‘Slovenian girl’ marched directly to the barracks. She stormed past the guards, as decisively as a military parade, and almost bumped into Lieutenant Borojević and Colonel Barac as they jointly supported the dead drunk and snoring Captain Muzirović. When he saw Dusha, Borojević dropped the captain in astonishment, so that he fell to the floor, which did little to sober him up. Barac thought Dusha was a lost tourist, and was about to step forward and direct her to the nearest hotel, when she spoke.
‘Nedelko,
