Singer in the Night. Olja Savicevic
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But I can’t make anything of this. Is he sick, what do you think?’
I shook my head.
‘I’m glad he’s okay. Since when does he love Split?’
‘Sorry?’
‘In the letter he loves Split. He didn’t like it much before, he didn’t even go out, except at night like a fool.’
She squinted at me and the roses on her head shook.
‘He was never completely normal, ever since my late husband gave him the name Nightingale, I would have called him Daniel or Petar. We were old when he came along, maybe that’s why he’s like he is. It’s shameful in the village, me having a child at forty-two and my man a whole sixty years old. Our neighbours were getting grandchildren, and we had a baby. But to hell with the village, bugger the village and the whole district. But I won’t say a word, I’ll shut up,’ – here she started to laugh – ‘because the way his daddy used to chirp at him like a bird, he could have been a peacock or a swan.’
She wiped her nose on a kitchen cloth and poured us both another glass.
‘My parents had my brother when they were in their forties too, so what?’ I say ‘He’s more normal than many others, my dear, Gale is. Nightingale is a real artist, that thing with the letters to his neighbours, that’s in fact a great performance.’ I wanted to say something consoling. ‘Besides, Gale and I are similar, nonsensical, a bad lot here. Each to his own.’
‘You’re an artist, for sure, how come he is? He scribbles on walls, upsets people. The police are after him.’ She chomped on her carob, which must have been too hard, because she spat it out into the sink. ‘If he’s so clever, why’s he skint?’
She was angry, her cheeks flushed.
‘Is there a performance where he doesn’t get in touch with his mother for a year and more? Or makes a child he doesn’t even know exists for two years,’ she adds.
‘That’s bit radical.’ (Does Gale have a child?)
‘Radical, radical.’ She agreed.
Then she changed the subject; she ran through the TV programmes and politics and made us supper after which I kicked off my high heels, washed in completely cold water, because there was no hot water in the boiler, and quickly fell asleep in Gale’s childhood bed in the white room.
Beside the pillow, on a little table, lay a mouth organ, polished, cheerful, and beside the bed was a pair of school slippers, size 10. I had never seen such enormous school slippers, a child’s object. Josipa had left them out for me, but they were several sizes too big. There were a few school readers on the shelves, in the drawers neatly folded clothes belonging to some former child who would never return. The boat’s log-book, which I am looking for, is almost certainly not there, the old lady would have found it already. They never got on, the controversial Nightingale and his old mother.
Above the bed hung a tapestry of the Mona Lisa, which had once been sewn long ago by the young Josipa. The village women thought it was the Holy Virgin, she told me, smiling, ‘let them think so, let them, bugger me if I care what they think!’
For years afterwards the embroidered Mona Lisa became an important figure in Gale’s stories, sonnets, sketches and strip-cartoons. In the room, it rests calmly in the whiteness of the empty walls behind glass in an ornate plaster frame, sometimes friendly and gentle, but sometimes capricious and caustic, the Gioconda pricked out 13,190 times with a needle.
‘I don’t get that, what’s the point of these tapestries, who dreamed them up, what a scandalous waste of time. Is it obtuse or Zen? That’s crap, it’s really like my work. Except – I do it for money.’
That thought used to warm me like hot sun, but with time, with time it has cooled down a lot. But, hey, let’s get back to the story.
Around seven in the morning, we opened, then closed, the house door. I set off towards the car, accompanied by Josipa. She had a new headscarf, yellow, with blue peonies, non-existent in nature, but nevertheless peonies, wonderful peonies.
‘You’re dead set on finding him … Watch out for the mujahideen!’
I started the car.
‘Why them?’
‘They were on the News yesterday.’
‘Don’t believe the News, my dear.’
Perhaps it isn’t fair to tell an old person not to believe the News, that might freak them out, I thought. But still, I probably don’t have much clue about old people, my parents aren’t alive (my Ma died three years ago, darling). I remembered them beautiful, in their prime – they didn’t have a chance to get on my nerves. A friend of mine said that old people have selective deafness and they only take in what they want or can bear to hear.
Josipa shouted: ‘I’m only joking, I’m joking!’
I felt better, although I would not have sworn blind that she really was joking. I didn’t want to think of Josipa as a bigoted old hag, it’s hard to love people, they often mess things up. It would be nicer if dear, kind people weren’t chauvinistic idiots, but they are. I got out of the car quickly and hugged her, tight. ‘We’ll be in touch!’
I see her in my head (I do see her, now, clearly). A tall old lady, the tallest among the babushkas. The mother of my former seasonal bridegroom – the unrecovered-from Nightingale – is waving to me with both hands. It’s an Indian summer and in that pose she could be a mascot for it. Above her flowery head goldfinches flitted into the empty, pale early-morning sky, and the clock on the old bell-tower, the one I already mentioned, was still showing three in the afternoon.
I set off towards the border, towards Bosnia. The road swallowed me sullenly.
All right, I’ll tell you. So, my name is Clementine. On the outside, I’m a blonde orange. I have silicon lips, I have a Brazilian hairstyle, I drive a two-seater Mazda MX-5 convertible, gold, but inside I’m a black orange. Full of black juice.
The day before my meeting with Nightingale’s mother, the meeting with which I began this story, I travelled from Ljubljana to Split. I decided to make the journey after I had spent the whole of the preceding week vainly calling Gale every day. When I tried to pay money for the boat’s berth I discovered that his account had been closed months before, at the marina they told me he had paid all his bills, but, they’d noticed that for some time no one had been coming to the boat. His mobile was dead and at first that annoyed me, then it worried me (we had not been in touch often, in fact very rarely in recent years, and then mainly in connection with our shared boat, but nevertheless).
Then I began calling his family, our common acquaintances, our former neighbours: a whole lost life so unconnected with my present life that it could have been anyone’s, and that whole mini-Atlantis rose to the surface, my dear. None of the people Gale and I had known could say exactly in which direction that sexy bird had flown off last summer. They weren’t troubled, not even his mother to whom he had simply mentioned that he had something to do in Bosnia, not even she was troubled, she just looked anxious for a moment, or so it seemed to me, because that crazy Gale came and went like that, no one ever knew when. What I found on the Internet turned out to be of most use: the blog he had written for a while had been dead for a long time, he had completely abandoned the virtual life which he had in any case found vulgar, but Google knew anyway – he had worked for a while in Libya, then in Chernobyl. Then a photograph appeared and was published on a foreign portal: a mural with Bosnia and his name written under it. And that was all.
Officially, he lived in our old street, Dinko Šimunović Street, on the tenth floor in the same building and flat in which I had spent some time with him, but, as I said, I knew nothing about the last years of his life, although in the depths of my heart he had remained my beloved. It’s not that other loves hadn’t come along, my dear, but in Gale’s case that had no bearing on my preference.
My encounter with Dinko Šimunović Street two weeks earlier had