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those of large financial institutions are, and thus closer to Virtue. But there were few who appreciated that, and every now and again he would be beaten up by one of those to whom he had caused grief. But what can you do – everywhere and at all times, people are passionately intolerant of the Truth.
Goran also gave him money several times. Not out of greed, which he had been cured of, but out of a compassion and kindness that probably only still exist in Russian novels. How many times did I tell him, Don’t do it, you know he won’t give it back, you know you’re throwing your money out the window. But Goran would just shrug his shoulders, smile and say, He needs it more than I do.
Goran was my best and perhaps my only true friend. He lived with his father, a tyrant who first drove Goran’s mother out of his kingdom and into her grave, and then pushed his sister into voluntary exile at the age of seventeen. Fleeing head-over-heels from her father, she married the first good-looking, sweet-talking man she met. He would turn out to be the same as her father; but before she realized her mistake, she already had two children, and there was no escape for her any more. Hiding her misery from her husband, she would meet with Goran; she lamented to him, cried and said she’d kill herself then always went back home because she had to feed the children.
Goran worked as a waiter during the day, and at night he went out to sea to try and catch fish to sell so he could put some money his sister’s way. Now and then he would rebalance his and his sister’s budget by selling the odd matchbox full of grass he’d got from Albania. Goran dealt with the best of intentions, like everything else he did. He spent his free time with me. I couldn’t help him – I was never able to help anybody. We drank, told each other intimate things, and then parted, taking all our own misfortunes away with us again. I would watch him from the terrace as he headed away down the path with a light step. He had a proud, dignified bearing that suited him like height suits a cypress.
The morning they came to pick me up, he was particularly cheerful. He put on a brilliant parody of a broad Montenegrin drawl, full of all those lofty and pretentious ways of saying stupid things, which Montenegrins are masters of. He made two or three toasts, each more verbose and vacuous than the one before. Then Maria got up and ordered us to get going.
Radovan’s light blue Trabant was waiting for us in the parking slot. He apologized as he tried to unlock the door of the old wreck – his BMW was at the garage.
Even today you can still find discussions on The Web about which was the worst car of all time: the Yugo 45 or the Trabant. But whoever trashes the Trabant has obviously never been in one. Put it this way - if you like to compare a good car with a ship, a Trabant is a rubber dinghy in a force-ten gale. After all, a Trabant can be repaired the same way as people repair boats. The body of the car is made of plastic, and in seaside towns you could see specimens of Trabants among the sails and oars in the maintenance area of the marina, raised up on blocks in a row of yachts and smaller craft. There’s just one good thing about the Trabant, and it certainly came out that day in flooded Ulcinj; it doesn’t sink.
We set off on the watery voyage to Maria’s villa. Maria came from a family of weak fathers and masterly mothers – one where the men were married off. It was a mystery as to what had driven her great-grandmother to take her seven-year-old daughter by the hand and leave Trieste, where she had an enormous estate and social standing to match, and end up in Ulcinj, where people gossiped about and feared her. But once here, she bought a property on top of Pinješ Hill, where your gaze goes out across the Adriatic towards Otranto. She had a mansion built there, whose beauty could compare with any villetta by Lake Como, and which made everything ever built in Montenegro, including King Nicholas’s ostensibly luxurious palace, look like a dump.
That woman would go for afternoon walks by the sea clad in the finest dresses, striding the town and creating a public scandal because the women of Ulcinj rarely went out at that time, and only if accompanied by a man and covered from head to foot.
Maria’s grandmother enjoyed a home education: They engaged a governess from Rome, and her piano teacher – only the best would do – came all the way from Moscow.
The self-willed young woman ignored her mother’s advice that she stay single, without children. She married a Montenegrin officer from Cetinje, who fled from her when he was sober and beat her when drunk. He died in a Russian prostitute’s bed in a quayside brothel by choking on his own vomit while Maria’s mother was still in nappies.
Maria’s mother, Elletra, followed the family tradition of choosing a wimp for a husband. He did not die young like her father, and immediately after Maria was born Elletra banished him to the outhouse in the pine forest at the far end of the property. Happy there in his pigsty, he tippled and screwed around with the servants. When Elletra could no longer tolerate a bordello in her own backyard, she paid him out and he left for central Serbia to open a café. As Elletra expressly demanded, and in keeping with the contract they both signed, he never tried to contact Maria. Elletra later turned the outhouse into a larder with a collection of alcohol that the best of hotels would be proud of.
And it was to that store that Radovan now ran off, returning with a whole cardboard box of cognac. Elletra’s cook came waddling after him. He moved like a penguin because he was lugging two crates of Nikšić beer. Since he was short, the crates scuffed over the asphalt and screeched like Cobain’s teeth as he, already poised for suicide, played an MTV Unplugged concert on speedball that made him pogo up and down like a wild thing. If I ever come down with delirium tremens... Or rather, when I come down with delirium tremens, I won’t see white rabbits but a line of penguins with cook’s caps on their heads riding down the slopes of Mount Lovćen towards Kotor on empty beer crates and plopping into the sea one after another like ice cubes into whisky, I thought.
“This car is wonderful,” Radovan said. “Its only weakness is that the boot is so small.”
He zipped back to the larder and this time brought a box of Chardonnay, which he dropped onto Maria’s lap, as she had the honour of sitting in the front.
“Just a tick longer, have a smoke and then we’ll be off,” he said, vanishing into the garden. He came back with a children’s inflatable swimming pool, which he made the cook blow up. The fellow sweated from the exertion and I could imagine that he hardly restrained himself from butchering us and stashing the pieces in his freezer. Radovan then roped the swimming pool to the back of the Trabant and put another crate of beer and a few bottles of wine in it, taking care not to overload the vessel and cause it to sink.
As we were leaving, I thought I saw the silhouette of Maria’s mother up in the attic window.
A Trabant pulling along a children’s swimming pool loaded with alcohol didn’t grab the attention of the people of Ulcinj who, as happens with the poor in spirit who live in expectation of famine, cholera and family deaths, had lost all sense of humour and love of the bizarre – the only things of lasting worth among all that has gladdened, frightened or troubled us in our time on this earth.
Ulcinj was deserted and we passed through the town without any great hindrance. The real fun began when we came to the area behind the Velika Plaža beach. From there to Bojana River we had fifteen or so kilometres’ drive across the Štoj Plain. In Ulcinj, the water ruled like an autocrat, but in comparison with the reign of terror it unleashed in Štoj it was an enlightened dictatorship, perhaps a bit like the way Tito ruled Yugoslavia. In Štoj, the water was Pol Pot. Bojana River had burst its banks, and Lake Šas had also overflowed. A tide of shit rose from the septic tanks that the residents of Štoj had emptied their bowels into for decades. Dead cows and sheep floated around us. It was hard to avoid them because the water came half way up the windscreen. Our raft of alcohol bumped into bloated carcasses several times, but otherwise Radovan drove a perfect slalom.
“If you were in Noah’s situation, what sorts of alcohol would you take with you on the raft?” Maria asked us, holding a perfumed hanky over her nose.
We agreed that it wouldn’t be necessary to take a sample of every species of drink because not all of them deserved to exist. The world would be a better place without some drinks, and that is not the end of similarities between alcohol and humankind.
Maria