23.

I dream that a building is collapsing on top of me. A horrible clatter, there’s no way out, only chunks of concrete falling nearer and nearer, my legs shake, my body is too heavy, I’m out of my mind. I get up from bed drenched in sweat and look out the window, they’re paving the road by the building, hence the noise, iron that grinds and smoothes; a young man pushes the machine. A mowing machine for a road. I lower the blinds halfway and go back to bed. I look at my phone, nothing. Everything is in a fog, the only thing crystal clear is that this is now the fourth day. My lungs are stinging. I can’t get back to sleep. I lower the blinds to the sill. In the half-dark of the room the blue light of my monitor flickers. I have to get through this, you’ll call. I know you will, you always do. I’ll wait. Because I cannot accept this. I sit down by the computer, puff a lump of ash off the desk, get ready and off I go into the province of Skyrim. A hero born with the soul of a dragon who happens to find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and is condemned to death. A true hero in the wrong body in the struggle against evil and multiple enemies. And a kingdom always on the brink of civil war. But there are enemies you cannot defeat until you resolve the quests they are linked to. It always comes down to that, observing and adapting. Combining magic and weapons. Should I call your mother? I’m worried. The quests related to her were always too complicated, not weapons or magic, though I did try my best. When you talked about her at first, you’d raise a wall straight away, not a chance, you said. So, absolutely no chance that she accepts this. But, love, when she gets to know me, I always charm mothers, no need to be so worried, then you punched me in the arm, what other mothers, you dimwit!

It was New Year’s Eve, winter like in the countryside, every detail of the landscape visible. The whiteness was so rich that it transported us to a state of exaltation. Because actually, our eyes don’t perceive all the colors that go into the color white. It is only when they are refracted, like in a rainbow in the sky, when raindrops are falling from dark clouds and the sunlight illuminates them laterally, that we can see the seven pure colors, which show us the true nature of light and the secret that white light is actually a mixture of colors. This is what I have been wanting to explain to you the whole time. People think they see white or black, they think they have a grasp on clarity, they think their faulty eyes have the monopoly on reality, but actually they can perceive only one dimension of the world. I knew at once that you knew this, though you may never have analyzed light, though you weren’t interested in the way white looks white in photography only because the surface is reflecting light, and buildings in deep shadow look black because they are absorbing light. Which actually means, just like when I first saw you, my love, that black objects are full of light. Do you get that? And the white ones are full of dark because they repel light. You accepted this without surprise, the invisible rainbow, as if it were everywhere, as well as the fact that things are often the opposite of what they seem on the surface. We started drinking before noon, just you and I, in a little café in the center of town, we had no plan for how we’d usher in the new year, or rather the plan was just for us to be together. This was always our only plan. After a few glasses of wine we went over to Olja’s and Dijana’s for lunch, we watched them bustling around the stove and bumping hips, how Olja called her mother to come and eat with us, how Olja’s mother didn’t feel like getting up because she was watching Doctor Zhivago on the television set in her room, so Dijana and Olja rolled their eyes, teased her, laughing, and took a tray with lunch to her mother’s room; we were seeing a family. We heard the cough from that same room and noticed the look the two exchanged over their plates of steaming stew. We were seeing concern and love, drank a little more and decided we would do the same. We went back to your place, slowly. I was driving. You know how I love to drive. And I love driving your little blue car, I always love driving you everywhere. Then you lay your hand on my neck. After a time you took it off and I said, more. We put on some music at the apartment, then we made an apple cake, I am a little clumsy at that sort of thing, but I do a good job of chopping, peeling, arranging, you just have to tell me how much and when, I’ll do the rest. Then we got dressed up. I put on a suit and I think I looked dashing, I even wore a tie. You were marvelous. In a slim black dress with your hair up, then nice make-up, we stood in front of the mirror and we couldn’t see anything wrong, nothing that we were could be held against us. Then you picked up the phone. I heard the little girl. “Hey, what’s up? Are you okay? I see. Nothing special, some friends over,” at first I was plural, “we want to stop by to bring you a little cake, if you’d like. Of course I know we don’t need to, but still, I made it from scratch . . . Fine, okay, good, see you.” The afternoon and day were still propelling you along, though you’d shrunk a little in the dress, but I kept lifting our spirits all the way to the elevator, and then I plummeted one hundred floors down. What if she says something to you, I think, I don’t want that, I don’t want to expose you, I always come with problems and I want you to be happy, not all miserable and green. You go up to the apartment, I stay outside. Then you come back to the stairwell and say, come in, come in. I step into the hallway where the light is dimmed. The whole apartment is dim, I see your mother at the back of the room, standing with dust cloth in hand by the bar. I walk in boldly, energetic, I put on my finest smile, I proffer my hand without a thought, there, chop it off if you like, I don’t need it, I have another. She approaches, slow and cautious. She doesn’t say a word. She stops an arm’s length from me. This is a good distance for a camera lens. She looks me up and down with a vague expression, her gaze slides over me. Over my face, frozen in a smile, drops to my neck, hairless, stops on the scars under the shirt and eyes the shoes I’d wiped clean on the snow. My hand is left midair and instead of a clasp I’m given a question. “How old are you?” “Twenty-seven,” I answer clearly, adding six months to make up for what my thin, pale skin takes away. “You’re on the small side,” she says huskily. “Come on, Mama, please . . .” you plead like a little girl who is feeling awkward, miserable, the way one pleads with authority, and at the same time I assume my oh so familiar mask of the joker and say something like: “I’ll just have to grow some more!” all with a grin. You trade cake platters, discomfort rips the clothing off us with its teeth, we stumble and run out the door, Happy New Year, Happy New Year! We’re silent in the elevator, we stare at the chewing gum stuck to the floor, and then somewhere around the second floor our eyes lock. We start talking at the same time, that wasn’t so bad, well okay, we made it through, yes, now she’ll start to see that there is no reason for her to be that way, well I think, but she saw you, you’re charming, debonair, she still doesn’t know you’re also smart, you’re teasing me, well you’re no monster, after all your folks aren’t Serbs, there’s nothing wrong with us, look at us. We love each other so, but that is how we chip away at ourselves, I know all about it. We turn every lie into our truth, and this costs, you need strength for it. We didn’t know then what all awaited us, what was ahead, exactly how much strength we had. Should I call her? Maybe she’ll be glad to hear from me if she hears you haven’t called. Every misfortune has at least two sides, every picture has its negative. Defeat.

I switch off the battlefield and switch on the news. Before my eyes across the top of the screen scroll news of corruption, the purchase of military aircraft, a priestly pedophile from Bibinje, the identity of a man who was nabbed with an incredible 16.5 tons of cocaine, in Split they tried to load an excavator, the cable snapped, they weren’t able to load it, the woman who was hit by a train at a railway crossing is still in critical condition. There is a circle on the photograph around a smashed blue Renault Twingo. Shivers run up my spine, the last letters on the license plate are the same as yours. Last week I paid for parking with my cell phone. That car is exactly like yours. I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to you. I scroll down and my gaze drops from the photograph to the brief text. Most people are horrified only by the visual, something primeval, they want speech, they want text, they want something unambiguous, they want an explanation. Not me, but this time I can’t resist. “The police are reporting that a train smashed into a vehicle, a Renault Twingo, where a local road crosses the tracks. The crossing has a gate to stop traffic, and there are sound and light warning signals. At the scene of the collision the siren of the locomotive was heard blaring before the crash. The freight train only could come to a stop a hundred meters later at a difficult-to-access location, dragging the car along ahead of it. A young woman was in the car. Thanks to the timely intervention of the police and the emergency services she was rushed to the hospital. Her condition has remained unchanged for four days; she is in critical condition. Doctors are fighting for her life.”