Singer in the Night. Olja Savicevic
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stars beside the intercom indicated that tourists had penetrated even into these concrete oases. Gale is right, it’s the loveliest street in Split, a serious street, not a little street, lovely little streets are something else, there are lots of them, but I like big streets. And I like tall buildings and skyscrapers. And I like the twentieth century more than the nineteenth or the seventh. I’m not sure about the twenty-first yet. I once lived here as a child, with my parents, but, after my father died, my mother and brother moved to a smaller town and sold our flat (every inaccessible dirty join, every hidden crack was mine), I moved just a few hundred metres east, to Gale’s place (Ma could never forgive me, poor Ma, I left her so easily).
I don’t know which was worse in my encounter with Šimunović Street: what had stayed the same or what had changed. I didn’t have the time or the will for such emotions, to stop and rethink. I hadn’t expected it to shake me up. It was like that situation when you rush out in your slippers to empty the rubbish and meet some shithead from your childhood who keeps you standing beside the dustbin for fifteen minutes and under his insistent gaze you grow visibly older and more decrepit, fatter. The street looked at me, it watched me patiently, from all directions. I had to look at it, in passing, to see where I was walking: skyscrapers, tall, slender buildings, the flight of steps, the sea. This was a return to the intimate, oh boy.
The things we have and know drain away and vanish, new ones cover them over like grass over a grave; the world of the inert is closest to death. If anyone thinks I’m mistaken, let them try to imagine a town without birds, insects or people, a town of inanimate things.
Or a hill without plants.
Or an old dance hall filled with the ghosts of dancers.
Or a house through which war has swirled, after which the blood has congealed and it has been aired of the stench of soldiers’ boots, the hot, sweaty grenades have cooled and lie in wait, put away in the bottom of a cupboard, tucked under bedding.
Or a snowy wasteland when the sun goes down behind a mountain.
Or a closed road.
A factory: machines and turbines without workers.
That is emptiness such as a real desert will never know, because for centuries nothing has inhabited it apart from eternity. It is not unusual for people to imagine the setting of paradise just like that. At that moment there is more death in a cup after the coffee has been drunk and the colour drained, than in the Sahara.
Gale (I’m always debating with him in my head) believed in technological progress in the spirit of socialism and used to say that at some stage soon, when people, all people, would be going on outings to the Moon, he would put on an exhibition there of all the things that are important, to everyone, or at least to him. There’s no atmosphere there, no oxidation, and so no death of the inert and objects we care about really will last forever or at least longer than us. He would reproduce the whole of our street. Of course, when you’re seventeen, it’s easy to fall in love with someone who wants to put on an exhibition on the Moon in order to save beautiful or important things from decay, although I was already aware then that if not everyone could go to Tito’s island of Brioni, they wouldn’t get to the Moon either.
And what’s left for death if you forget everything before it? Is there anything left to die? When things turn the wrong way round and oblivion precedes death instead of death oblivion? It’s presumably a defence mechanism if the body decays so rapidly after it’s emptied by oblivion.
Where were we? Oh yes, Šimunović Street. Proof that tall buildings and skyscrapers can be attractive, that third Split, Split 3, Trstenik, my borough. Proof that socialism can be beautiful, as Gale would say.
In the lift, opposite the door to the flat, I straightened my skirt and fixed my make-up. Without lipstick a woman is naked, my mother used to say and that habit of using make-up, which some people find stupid, but is definitely entertaining, has remained with me from my teens.
‘Stone ve crows. I mus’ be dreamin’,’ that’s what the man in his thirties who introduced himself as Joe Pironi said when he opened the door, with a smile. He was wearing Bermudas: between his thin hairy legs a Maltese (called Corto, wittily but really) peered and barked at me. The next thing I noticed about Pironi was his oversized shaved head and blue eyes with half-closed lids.
‘Is someone, like, makin’ a film?’ Here he paused and lit a cigarette. ‘I know, crap joke.’
I stood on the threshold genuinely afraid of the dog’s snarling little teeth and explained that I was looking for Gale. I said I hadn’t seen him in years, maybe ten, but I wanted to sell the boat, quickly, and I needed his agreement. The boat was in his name, my dear, but it was still my boat, my inheritance, although, it’s true, he had maintained it the whole time. I scowl when I lie, but no matter, Pironi wasn’t listening to me in any case.
He said: ‘Who’d ever fink, mate. You wouldn’ credit it! So it never crossed ‘is daft mind vat he knows you and you’d come for the keys of the boat. Yeah, the cunt knew you’d come. You and Gale, man and wife, good as. But ‘e’s not ‘ere, ol’ girl. He went off to look for someone he made a kid wiv two or free years ago. He may be in Bosnia – Livno or Tuzla – or Timbuctoo. If you ask me, it’s not worth lookin’. Better wait till ‘e gets in touch.’
The Malteser in Pironi’s arms was still barking. He put it down on a table and from a drawer took out cigarette papers, tobacco and grass. The little dog spun round in a circle and tried to get down. I didn’t have time to wait for him (Gale) to get in touch. There were no books on the shelves, not a single one, which meant he had no intention of coming back. But still, his strange writing outfit was dangling from a hanger on the door of the wardrobe as though he had left it there the previous day.
Pironi said: ‘Wan’ a puff? Since you’re ‘ere, we could spark up a bit? ‘S no fun solo. Homegrown, from Vis, not sprayed, sweet as honey.’
‘What the hell,’ I said, ‘it must be healthy, I’ll have a drag.’
We sprawled on the couch. Corto retreated under it and curled up between our shoes.
Pironi said: ‘Struth, ol’ girl, I wouldn’ con you for ve world, I’ve no clue where that waster’s buggered off to, maybe Travnik, maybe Bugojno. I’m just, like, looking after the flat. You know, a Croat, so’s it’s occupied, if you get my drift. Last summer, before he scarpered, he got up the nose of the whole neighbourhood, the police were after him, you wouldn’ believe it. Vat made him mad, he didn’t expect that kind of reaction to his letters. It’s unreal, you know, ‘e’s a dreamer. I told him – give it a rest, bro, forget those jerks, mind your own business.’
I said that, in actual fact, it was Gale’s business. ‘He’s an artist, my dear, he has to interact with his surroundings, he has to change them.’
‘You’re kidding me, yeah? I’m an artist too. You must’ve seen those graffiti: I’m hungry, give me what you can, in front of the door, above the intercom? Right, you saw it. I’m not pretentious like some vat puts on an act, I’m more interested in reality.’
I asked him whether he was a gay activist, because it looked to me like gay graffiti although it had a socio-economic base. He asked, of course, did I want to find out and laughed: ‘how did I know it didn’t mean give me salami in my sandwich, for instance?’
‘You’ve got a dirty little mind,’ he said, grinning.
He said, Pironi did, that Gale had nearly got him in the shit with those letters, and something else about some business with explosives placed in a Split bank, because on the wall people had found the same sentences as in one of Gale’s letters. ‘They had him in, for questioning, twice,’ said Pironi, ‘but they couldn’t pin anything on him, because the letters had been sent to the whole street, several hundred copies.’ (Magnificent, magnificent)
But nothing concrete about where I might find Gale.
Last summer, the June before last, somewhat more than a year ago, in Dinko Šimunović Street some unknown lovers had made love loudly until dawn,