37

How many days have I been in Maribor?

My head’s all buzzing from the all-nighter trash metal music in the Bakery complex, I haven’t slept for twenty hours and outside the heat is suffocating again. I see everything sped up, blurred, unfocused, unable to zoom in to the details.

It’s only in the afternoon that I manage to fall asleep for a couple of hours. I wake up in the early evening, drowsy but rested.

On the way to Mrs Daša I feel already that I’ll be in luck. One can simply sense that. All sweaty I crossed the Central Bridge by the Grand Cafe, and on along the Gosposka Street, dropped a few cents into the open case of the Bulgarian accordion player, shyly turned back my head towards the ancient street puppeteer standing in front of the DM drugstore, and then climbed all the way up Tyrš Street to the city park. Mrs Daša lives across from the central police building.

I couldn’t help it and opened, more or less out of habit, the lid to the container outside the police station. There was mixed refuse and biological refuse, and from the bottom of the bin came faint buzzing, but I couldn’t catch sight of any actual flies.

So I give up and walk to the little gate outside the Art Nouveau villa of Mrs Daša.

The path to the entrance door with a brass handle made of nickel silver leads through a garden overflowing with magnolia bushes, roses and oleanders. So many scents, so many beauties! To the left of the fence is a green-decorated wooden gazebo.

Mrs Daša was awaiting me in the doorway with a ladle in her hand. And before she sits me down in the spacious hall behind a richly dressed table with silver cutlery, she shows me through the spacious flat, equipped in the biedermeier style, and points out all the replica paintings: Rembrandt, Botticelli, Caspar Friedrich, van Gogh, Gauguin, and finally flaunts a little with a funny realistic sculpture of marble swans.

Then we pour out Muscat wine and toast to our meeting. I fix my gaze on the coffered ceiling above the vintage round table and can’t believe my eyes. Around the enormous crystal chandelier at least a dozen houseflies are circling, buzzing. Ahh. I opened the windows so they flew in, says Mrs Daša apologetically, as if she could read my thoughts.

No need to apologize, I buzz back, observing the housefly swarm, enchanted.

With all this weather, the pressure changing and the rain coming, people around here are either depressed, or manic, and also everyone in Maribor is sweating, continues Mrs Daša…

And right she is, for I am all sweaty too, so much so that my thighs stick to the leather of the armchair, I make gluey shifts up and down, which produces a mildly unpleasant squeaky sound, and I feel for a while like sitting on a sticky bus seat in plush.

You know, I was born in Ljubljana to a family of doctors and traders, a family of some stature, as they say. And we have relatives in Austria, aristocracy of some standing, as they say, but that’s of little consequence. And where is it again that you are staying? Come on, dig into that hors d’oeuvre, will you! Bon appetit.

Bon appetit. In the Bakery Hostel, that’s where I’m staying, I reply with some delay, covering my stuffed mouth with a serviette, not to transgress against the dining decorum too much.

Oh, it’s awful there, in that Bakery. But back in ninety-one it was even worse, during the war. I turned on the TV in the morning to hear the news and I can see the fighters from Bosnia flying to shell Slovenia so I do the maths, with them flying at eight hundred kilometres per hour, within one hour, they’ll be here, in Maribor. I wanted to do the shopping, my husband was in Ljubljana at the time, so I gave up in the end, and I am standing before my wardrobe totally at a loss if I should wear the yellow or the red blouse, so then I took on my dress, opened up the windows and went down to the cellar. My neighbour had candles, a blanket, everything, but I had nothing, just the dress. Even today that still bugs me.

After the hors d’oeuvre follows the second course: a thick bean broth soup with beef strips. The houseflies continue circling around the chandelier, one of them alighting on Mrs Daša’s delicate, blonde-dyed hair.

When we moved into this place, there were so many houseflies, in the bins outside the police station, that we were saying to ourselves they must have cameras to watch over us. You see, my husband was a minister in the Yugoslav government, you know, in the late eighties before it all collapsed and before he then left me and paid badly for it.

She somewhat laughs sadly at this.

Nothing is a coincidence, she continues. When Hungary stopped presiding over the EU, they wove a Hungarian carpet. Some people honour traditions, others don’t, she adds enigmatically.

When we pour out another glass, the bell rings. Excuse me, my neighbour has brought me my pills for blood pressure, says Mrs Daša and hobbles towards the door, and as she opens it, the draught opens the window in the dining hall and more and more common houseflies fly into the room, a perfect housefly paradise, with a couple landing on the egg yolk cake, tasting the delicacy with their legs, and I chase them away mildly.

At that moment Mrs Daša comes back. Nothing is a coincidence, nothing is a coincidence, she says, hold on, I should have a flytrap somewhere. And you know what, it’s also no coincidence that Zelensky wants to build an empire all the way from Israel through Syria to Poland. I’ll give you another helping of the soup. Please, help yourself.

The food is really excellent, I say and start coughing.

And that’s just the soup, says Mrs Daša with pride in her voice. My hair is weak, she says then, that’s because of the humidity here. Haven’t I told you about it?

We pass into the kitchen, where Mrs Daša is heating up the main course of the sumptuous dinner, honey and black pepper golden chanterelle risotto with fresh coriander.

À propos, have I told you about the plans Zelensky is making with Rothschild?

No, not yet, I said and swallowed and finished another glass of wine, tell me, Mrs Daša.

So… that it’s a global conspiracy you probably know already, says Mrs Daša. The thing is that… that this Rothschild man and his cronies from the oil fields and world banks, that they’re yet to give it a proper spin, and that will make our heads go around. If Putin doesn’t stop this, we are done for, the Euro will be nationalized and we’ll get food rations. The empire Zelensky is building will spread all the way from Israel through Syria to Poland. And yes, I’ll lose this villa, taken away from me by a Zionist conspiracy par excellence, one just mustn’t say it aloud, says Mrs Daša in a whisper and falls into a mysterious silence.

I observe the soaring houseflies on the coffered ceiling and buzz along voicelessly.

Then we shift again and talk for a while about how stuffy it is outside.

The risotto is really excellent.

Will you have some more? That cheese is from Trieste – excellent, isn’t it?

Have no doubt about it, Mrs Daša carries on, I wasn’t born yesterday, what’s brewing now will leave us all stunned…

At these words I nip off to the bathroom. I buzz off. I turn off. All around me there are mirrors in golden Art Nouveau frames. If you say Shit, I whisper to myself as I wash my face in front of the mirror, if you say Shit, a housefly will buzz.

Above the basin a buzzing housefly appears.

Don’t be vulgar and have respect for the elderly, buzzes the housefly and it flies away.

Zoom in and turn off, I reply into the silence and walk back to Mrs Daša.

The dessert is also excellent, it’s probably the best strawberry sauce with maple syrup I’ve ever eaten, and the pineapple pudding utterly fuddles me so I lose all restraint.

Now we’ll have a glass of Pinot! orders Mrs Daša frivolously and I find myself no longer really caring. Let the flies eat me.

My hair is weak, says Mrs Daša again after a while and again she runs her fingers gently through her truly thin locks of her blow-dried hair. It’s all down to this weather here.

By now we’ve finished another glass of wine and are about to part ways. We spend some time standing in the doorway, it is a gentle summer evening, the garden roses smell all the way up to the hall.

I depart and we wave at each other.

I pass again through the garden by the roses which are allegedly banned in America, as Mrs Daša told me, I pass by the green-decorated wooden gazebo, wave uneasily one more time from the decorated Art Nouveau gate that the local gypsies have twice tried to nick, as Mrs Daša told me, I close it, pass by the rubbish bins behind the hideous police station and I can really see them, those houseflies with little cameras in their eyes, there are suddenly swarms of them around, busy in the bins colonizing something the local cops missed, perhaps the nation of houseflies have fled even to the spying scouts from the land of Khazaria and now they are after Mrs Daša, they’re on her, plain as day, I say to myself. Something is lifting me up again like a helium balloon but this time it’s not a pleasant feeling, no, I also can fall for any idiotic nonsense. For instance when I was eight I fell for the idea that I’ll get a monkey the size of my little finger, and I even made a tiny habitat for her at home, and then out of frustration I convinced my younger friend Ríša that he can make a dwarf out of flour and glue, and he even made a tiny habitat for him at home…

Over Maribor dusk is setting. I am stuffed full and I’m almost soaring.

Behind the Central Bridge I hear the sounds of the metal festival and the loud booming finally grounds me a little. I could walk blindfolded and get there, where it’s been impossible to sleep the last nights. And today I don’t actually care, today I even walk with joy to the concert of the bands Mould and Nihilist and The Last Switch, and I see there is love in the air, the rocker woman at the point of retirement, who resembles the local secondary school language teacher, is embracing the pock-marked guy thirty years her junior with a thin ponytail and an advancing baldness, I immediately rank him among IT nerds and her among divorcees, I feel no shame about these hideous judgements, and even if I did, I should, I’m still a tad tipsy and also drunkenly sober from Mrs Daša’s information, from the information that I’ll google tonight, there’s no hiding it, I find myself googling pro-Russian channels, eyes wide open, irises like table tennis balls, at about two in the morning I hear retching outside, hope it’s not Mrs Teacher, it occurs to me in half-sleep, Khazaria, ma’e, Khazaria, some shouts in the street but who knows what I actually hear because I fall asleep.

I fall asleep with ear plugs, metal still keeps booming down there, and when I wake up at dawn, all around the Bakery it’s long dead quiet, so quiet that the barking of dogs can be heard from the street. I open the door on the terrace and howl back to the mutt in the rising sun: What is it, doggy, is having an opinion about everything your good friend as well? The only one you got? The only one you know?

The mutt lifts his head sadly towards me, pricks his ears, tucks in his tail and gives not one bark more.

Sorry, I say to him and shut the door again.

I try to sleep a little before the Bakery complex gets suffused by trash metal again. And I dream in the wee hours that for my P., who hasn’t been and won’t be getting a mention here because what is beyond the reach of words should stay there nice and cosy, I dream that I am buying him a bulletproof vest. We are standing on the border of the newly emerging Khazaria, he has just received an official letter that he must register there with immediate effect, for it’s his new home now, having been, with immediate effect, stripped of the previous one. And my P. is standing in a traffic queue on the border with his white car of South Korean make, the car has broken down, no, not broken down, a heavy snowfall is starting, so he just needs to fit his winter tyres with snow chains and he is looking so elegant in this mechanical job, so gentle and firm, though his hands are all messy with fucking oil. I flit by him, buzzing carefree, to ease his toiling, here you go, a hankie, wipe it off, I say. I hand him the gift of a bulletproof vest and his eyes are moved to glistening: the deal of the century, sweetheart, he whispers and kisses me on the nape, on the neck, where I love it most: these bulletproof vests are the deal of the century. Too true, too true. An unknown man from Murská Sobota in a long dark garb mutters in reply, as he’s passing us crossing the border on foot, followed by a huge group of a hundred and twenty muffled persons.

Too true, too true, the deal of the century, sounds the echo all around.

The snowfall is getting heavier and heavier.

A deal of a century, I say to myself and wake up, the deal of the century.

Of which one though?

38

From the recipe of Yugoslav partisans: How to cook a housefly broth. Place 300 grams of dead houseflies to a stockpot of boiling water. Add salt, pepper and a bay leaf. Let simmer for about ten minutes. Then add diced potatoes and celery, cook until tender, adding cream to taste (optional) and let simmer. Finally you may cream the soup with a blender. Serve with fresh parsley or roots of forest herbs.

39

Perhaps it’s unnecessary to record this recipe but still, let us leave it hanging here. It’s been circulating as one of the mildly dated anecdotes of European forensic entomologists. It was first recorded by the Soviet forensic entomologist Dr Plavchikova in the early 1980s. It’s entitled The Housefly Recipe, or How to Cook Your Dictator. Step-by-step instructions: Even the dictator dies one day. If he dies, for instance, of a gangrene in the leg and is left to mature sufficiently, we may colonise his body gently. His blood will serve as a nutritious dish for our little larvae. For example, a well-matured hundred-kilogram male may feed up to 50,000 of our houseflies. (Note: This recipe never actually came to realisation since hardly any dictator ended his days in undignified human conditions… I personally grudge considering it a joke. Dr Plavchikova, Forensic Criminology as a Merry Science, Picklock Publishers, 1990.)

40

I wake up and in fact there’s no snowfall beyond the window. Just the opposite. Beyond the French doors that lead onto the terrace hangs a warm June morning, a day like a bead. P. calls me, he has been playing tennis, probably got a heat stroke but other than that everything is as it should. Relieved, I go to get my morning coffee in the dining hall where it’s buzzing like a beehive. The festival is not over yet, so I make my way to the public terrace, carrying my cup of coffee, and as I focus on the quiet and dignified gait and the gossamer, barely tangible ray of the sun on the treadworn carpet dobrodošli, I fail to notice that the French doors leading onto the terrace are not open, so I crash my forehead violently against them. The impact is so fierce that the glass all but crushes. My head spins and I feel a trickle of blood running down my forehead, my T-shirt awash with the spilled coffee, my forehead has a bump coming on, now even the scent of blood attracts the houseflies circling around the flowerpots with red strawberries.

On the terrace sits a foursome of musicians from the Beograd band LudiLjudi and someone else, I see – the young guitarist Jim.

My unintentionally theatrical entrée surprises no one and raises no laughter. The boylike singer just looks at me and says I have nice hair and if he can touch them. He touches my hair and that brings to my mind the delicate hair of Mrs Daša.

The oldest guy, probably the band leader, seemingly without any logic asks me how old I am and slides down from his chair onto the floor.

It’s only then that I see they’re blitzed. The round coffee table features a disarray of eight empty wine bottles, three liquor bottles, empty bags of crisps, tin foil, cigarette packets, stubs, whisky, spilled sunflower seeds.

I’m going home lads, utters Jim and licks his dry lips.

So are we bro, utters the most alive of the band foursome, young, hardly twenty-year-old, and pulls out a line of cocaine and crystal meth.

My irises dilate.

Have some, he offers, I can’t take all of it home.

Cocaine is as white as snow, like the snow in my dream.

Oh my god, I squeak to myself in agitation and then realise that I get heady even from apple juice gone sour, so I refuse, I refuse and feel in a way kind of sorry about it.

Then I’ll have your share sis, says Jim and bends over the powder, one for the road.

One for the road mate… someone says.

Mate, fucking Maribor, shouts the youngest again so loudly that it gets the dachsie below the terrace barking, mate, fucking Maribor, everyone’s a fucking zombie, fucking zombies, and he’s looking at me, at my forehead, my burgeoning bump, but he’s also looking somewhere past me and past himself, he’s naked down to his waist, a snake tattoo on his back, hair shaved clean, a nice delicate boy, and besides he sees the world in four dimensions as if he were a housefly, and all of a sudden I’m also observing him with my pounding bump as if from afar, blurry, unable to zoom in on the detail.

What’s left of the liquor circles between the LudiLjudi and Jim, and when it’s my turn, I also take a swig, I don’t want to offend them, my temples thumping, my head starting to ache, and yet I feel festive.

Jim smiles at me gently, cocaine snowing on the terrace, Jim is juiced and he seems to me also at this moment lucky.

41

You must be asking what befell Svengali and his legendary life, where his Elis went and what awaits them after the war.

It’s not easy to write.

Well then.

The last war victim was a barely sixteen-year-old boy of Maribor, shot dead by the Nazis in front of the Theresienhof in early May 1945 as he was raising the Slovenian flax on the roof of the café.

On the second day after the liberation of Maribor, Svengali was arrested.

Major Milič waited for Svengali on the Main Square, right under the street advertisement for gasoline. His task on Tito’s order was to ascertain how much Svengali had collaborated with the Nazis.

Tito finished, just like Svengali, no more than five years of school, his Croatian and Slovenian weren’t flawless. Perhaps it was for that reason that Marshall Tito had a peculiar pet passion: he secretly admired the poetry that Svengali, himself clumsy in speech, lived by his prestidigitative jugglery, without giving it too much thought.

During the house search of Leo Svengali and his consort Elis’s apartment Major Milič discovered a genuine golden nugget. On the bedside table lay a torn-out piece of paper with a rhyme written in crude Slovenian:

Tip that Tito off, pal.

Fat chance, he’s titanical.

The major brought the text to Tito as evidence of Svengali’s crime. Tito is amused by this rhyme, secretly moved by it, ostensively disgusted by it.

So he’s truly afraid of me, that Svengali, he says to himself contentedly and rubs his chin.

Svengali is transferred to a collection camp.

That pretty naive rhyme truly came from the hypnotist, it was no planted falsum. That sentence had been buzzing in Svengali’s head for so long that one day he wrote it down right after waking up, and immediately forgot about it. During the inquest Svengali could give no explanation to this nighttime unrefined poetry, nor as to why and when it had actually happened. Besides he spoke in bad Slovenian, all clumsy and heavy-footed, his gaze transfixed as if he were on drugs, and when he tried to explain why he had performed with his Elis for the German soldiers in Maribor, he reached for his heart… he could not utter aloud this secret, this simple actuality because what exceeds us, what we do without the tricks of prestidigitation, out of pure sentiment, is often unpronounceable.

And so Svengali was convicted in a sped-up postwar trial with a death sentence by shooting and alongside a thousand collaborators was transferred to an internment camp on the bank of the Drava River.

On the twenty-fourth of May alongside ten thousand prisoners he was taken on the back of a truck to a forest by Tezno, near Maribor. There was a long pit about one and a half metres wide stretched there.

Most likely Svengali would meet the same end as the tens of thousands of the Ustaše, the members of the militia as well as the innocent who wound up in a mass grave in Tezno, were it not for his beloved Elis.

Elis hurried to confess, and that straight to Zagreb to Tito. Yes, she has abjured her progeny, yes, Elis wasn’t her true name nor her true identity, yes, he, Tito himself, does actually know this fact, Svengali falsified her papers and protected her in other ways too, for instance by performing for German inhabitants and soldiers.

Tito is pleased by Elis’s despair, hardly able to suppress his joy. Elis is kneeling at his feet, kneeling and weeping. His exquisite beautiful Elis is weak like a housefly. He lets her buzz out the entire melodramatic tale and then utters into the grave silence in a whisper, with tender sadism: It’s too late, sweetheart, too late. And he lights his cigar, slowly, as if he were standing on a podium ready for a grand hypnotist number.

Now then, wipe your tears, little one, he finally says slyly, lightly touching Elis’s face and handing her a silk handkerchief. Perhaps I could undertake something in the matter of the collaborator Svengali. But only on one condition!

He licks his dry lips, his right hand strokes his shock of hair and he carries on: Listen to me carefully, Elis. On every winter solstice you’ll visit me to spend a day and a night with me. And Svengali will live.

Svengali? He is now standing in front of a mass grave alongside the Czech architect Čejka who designed the public baths in Maribor on the river isle, dozens of houses in the city and has found himself here on a fraudulent denunciation. His morbidly pale face moves Svengali beyond words, so he decides to distract Čejka a little before dying.

You don’t happen to have a cigareta? he asks Čejka, and when Čejka with a blue eye and a toothless mouth shakes his head, Svengali uses the power of hypnosis to nick a cigar from the commanding officer’s uniform and the cigar levitates straight into the architect Čejka’s mouth. A lit cigar!

Čejka whispers with enchantment: How wonderful, sir, such calm I find in my soul now as if I were soaring in a balloon over Istanbul.

Wait a minute, says Svengali, in that case I’ll also conjure up that Istanbul. Close your eyes, and what do you see? A hot air balloon over Istanbul, alight it, mister architect, I’ll light another Indian cheroot for you, is it lit?

And Čejka is smiling, yes, yes, the cheroot is lit, he’s smiling and soars in a balloon with a smoking cheroot over Istanbul while simultaneously standing before a mass grave and at that instant, at that very instant, as he is contemplating the miracle he has witnessed, at that very instant comes the command that Svengali be pulled out of the crowd of convicts.

And at that same instant a shot is heard and the innocent architect Čejka falls into the pit of the mass grave.

Svengali is taken back to the work camp where he spends the next three months working with other collaborators. In the warehouses of the Bakery barracks he clears wartime jumble. In the sixties a slaughterhouse will open in the front with a renowned military butchershop, for the underground warehouses Tito procures gigantic supermodern freezers from the one and only American president John Kennedy.

Out of observing habit the hypnotist explores the underground precincts of the Bakery complex. He has no clue why but he lets it be. He lets it be.

Report from the OZNA Maribor archive

Outpost WITHIN THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOLLOWING COMMENTS:

 

The so-called Svengali was known as a sympathiser of Nazism. On consultation with the District Commission of Propaganda the aforenamed was not supposed to given permission for his productions which do not contain the following exact instructions as to how to proceed in such affairs.

Lately in the District of Maribor diverse artistic productions were held. Since we are lacking appropriate instructions as to the extent to which such permissions should be granted, with a view to the borderland sector of the Maribor district, we request a manual on how to proceed in such instances. We are of the belief that such productions should be limited to the utmost minimum.

2/10/1946

In principle nothing can be objected to the holding of artistic productions that present physical and mental abilities as long as they are based on circus numbers or continuous comedy and as long as they offer decent entertainment that withstands the criticism of healthy common intelligence. However, what has to be refuted is all the productions with the character of deception by seemingly supernatural capacities (magic, divination, etc.) and the scaring of credulous people.

Death to Fascism – Freedom to the People.

After his release the hypnotist gets by as a clown in music-hall productions for factory workers, men and women all over Yugoslavia. Elis becomes a saleswoman at a florist’s. Later Svengali performs music-hall acts for schools and from the early sixties, when Elis’s heart starts to hurts at times, and she’s no longer able to sell flowers at a florist’s, he is mercifully permitted to hypnotise chickens in care homes and orphanages.

The Comecon countries are swamped by the Colorado potato beetle. The Committee for the Elimination of the Colorado Potato Beetle makes its appearance in Yugoslavia too but local people no longer take directions from Moscow so seriously.

I hope, Elis, says Marshall and President Tito year by year on winter solstice as he is transferring Elis from Carinthia Street to one of his presidential palaces, I hope that you know full well that I could stub out that Svengali of yours like a fag end and I hope that you know full well that I am waiting for you to find sense and admit… Come over here, let’s take a stroll, I’ll show you the snakes in my private zoological garden.

This humiliating chapter plays out year after year on the shortest day of the year. Let us close the door behind them and not open it.

Between Svengali and Elis steps the most popular, because-most-benevolent, dictator of the twentieth century Tito, spreading through their lives like some parasite and rampaging through their lives like the housefly plague.

42

The metal festival is finally over. The joy. The metalheads simmered out of Maribor like steam over a stockpot.

In the dining room I share breakfast only with an elderly couple of e-bikers from Nuremberg.

Wunderschön, they keep saying enchantedly over the tourist brochure, otherwise it’s grave silent, the receptionist has an inexplicable bruise under her eye and keeps texting someone on her mobile. And that’s all and that’s about as much as I need to finally get some rest.

Around noon the sound of drilling arrives briefly from the courtyard complex and metallic bangs, from a couple of toiling sloggers knocking down the stage. And then not even that. The old punk rocker stands again with his German shepherd in his spot by the steel railing, smoking and concentrating his observing glance on the overflowing bins. Is he searching for houseflies? From the terrace I hear the dribbling on the clay playground that echoes in the sudden silence throughout the complex like an alarm clock.

I venture a little private cycling trip, ending up again in the emptied pool of the public baths Mariborski otok – this time a young couple is lying there, two teenagers hanging around close by holding badminton rackets, reading something on their mobiles… I sit down on the bench where I met Mrs Daša a few days ago, finishing Jančar’s Northern Lights, loitering, thinking of the fate of the architect Čejka who got from the popular Maribor rave of kopališče to the unpopular Maribor grave of pokopališče, unable to get that slanted image of the mass grave from my head, no, I have no plans to go to the Tezno forest.

I return along the Drava back to the town and make a brief visit to the tobacconist. I am also getting used to this idiosyncratic confessional therapeutic institution of the Museum for One Man.

The museum is full again. An elderly man is sitting there. Despite the horrible afternoon heat he’s wearing a windcheater, a winter jumper with Norwegian patterns, a baseball cap, on his feet well-trodden sneakers, and well-washed, baggy jeans. His right shoulder leans left as if it were dislocated. As soon as he spies me, he hobbles startled to the door and departs. I feel inappropriate.

Let’s air the room! announces Jan energetically as if he were a referee of a basketball game and stops his nose with a quick movement, and as he pulls his arm out of his sleeve I see three tattoos.

That was Mr Tom Miklič, announces Jan, as you know he doesn’t take showers too much. He comes here every day, he tells me and opens the door to launch a draught.

He comes here and we talk.

After all these years I know everything about Mr Miklič.

What is everything?

Well. He comes here and speaks mostly about snakes. He loves cobras and anacondas the most. He used to be an alcoholic, he worked in the steelworks and once in his drunkness he didn’t notice some steel joist, it fell on top of him and made an invalid out of him. Then he stopped drinking.

Does Mr Miklič have a snake?

No he doesn’t but he has a girlfriend. Come, have a look, I have a snake too and I have a girlfriend as well, my snake is here, says Jan and pulls up his T-shirt to show me the tattoo on his shoulder. Then he adds the story of the tattooist girl who tattooed the snake for him in the dorms in Prague, a student from Zimbabwe, well actually from Atlanta in the US, she studied medicine but she’s a tattooist today, I’m getting lost in all this, but Jan tirelessly continues, as if he were wound up with a clockwork, since then he has added a symbol on his arm that bears a distant resemblance to a swastika as well as to a Chasidic sign, and then the tattoo from the party, which was a bet.

Then he speaks about pet dogs that come here for dog treats, we’re a dog friendly museum, he says proudly. He speaks of children who come here with an ice cream. When I briefly mention the Khazarian empire, he instantly opens it on his phone and I beg him to hold on, please wait, later, but it’s all in vain.

Jan is unable to put off any mental tension, he has ADHD, as he has told me… and that’s why he continues surfing the channels about the Khazarian empire. There’s a Hitler in all of us, he mutters deep in thought, someone has a mere millimetre and that grows, I am about two on the racism scale. And you yourself?

Before I can say anything, a mildly stoned youngster enters the shop, says hi to Jan and departs again.

He’s also loaded, says Jan and plunges into an exhausted silence.

Onto the glass of the front door a girl glues her face and then a little boy, their mouths and cheeks all red from the ice cream, the glass is all sticky. When they notice the smears on the glass, they laugh out, smudge it into the shape of a smiley face and run away.

Life is beautiful, utters Jan dreamily. Atheism can’t exist. It’s like when someone thinks that Esperanto can resolve all misunderstandings. It’s like with Esperanto, trying to find an alternative to something that actually doesn’t exist. Isn’t that a paradox?

I am getting somewhat lost in his thoughts again but I let it be, I let it be.

Atheism is like AI, Jan goes on. A dysfunctional artificiality with good intentions. Well and in autumn me and my wife are having a baby, have I told you that? You see, my wife is a therapist and that’s my salvation, have I told you that she’s diagnosed typical symptoms of ADHD in me? That’s why my thoughts perhaps shoot in all directions and I perhaps repeat myself… Have I told that she writes to me on my mobile phone every day what I am to avoid?

What?

Hold on. And then he reads: If someone makes you do things you have no capacity for, if someone distracts you, tell them no.

Underneath us the Drava is running, to the left are the Balkans, to the right is Europe.

To the right there’s Alpine cows, to the left camels.

When I take my leave from Jan and I get to my bike I see that someone has clipped off my headlight.

I should deal with it but I don’t.

We are having warm summer days, there’s no darkness, or we don’t know about it.

A full moon in three days and the longest days of the year.

No dealing with stuff for me, no doubling down for me, no darkness for me.

Life is beautiful and atheism is like Esperanto.

I loiter on through the city, crossing the Main Square and notice that it’s starting to buzz gently all around me. The buzz of summer-tired children, waiters and a few tourists…

In Slomšek Square I sit down on a bench in front of the closed post office undergoing long-term reconstructions. With writing it’s like this as well: permanently undergoing reconstructions, the smiley faces keep heaping up, the letters keep dwindling, not even I write them any longer, and if I do, it’s only admin letters but I don’t deny that everything I am experiencing in Maribor is one long love letter that I’ll post at the end.

And now that I am on the famous Slomšek Square, I go to the Maribor theatre in the evening to see Wedekind’s Spring Awakening. A touring show from the capital. The play is a little dated, who can get a thrill from the darkness of the sexual scenes nowadays? Wedekind is dead. Not Punk.

When I arrive in the completely calmed-down hostel, the sun is setting. On the same bench I see the guitarist Jim. He is not playing, not greeting me. He is sitting in a catatonic form gazing into the darkness, his guitar lying next to the bench, his rucksack at his feet.

43

It’s morning. I lean from the terrace. On the bench there’s Jim. Strange. He’s been sitting like this since last night. The metalheads from Beograd have all vanished from the city.

Jim sits motionlessly as if he were asleep with his head tilted in a slightly unnatural position.

I can see the receptionist coming to him in a quick gait, eventually even running, and then her cry is heard and the sob of the old punk man with the German shepherd and then I see what I see. The receptionist makes a phone call and the hooting ambulance arrives and after a while a black van, I don’t know how long all of this lasts, I am unable to move from the spot, I am unable to move. Now two men carry Jim on a stretcher and take him away, in the black van and now without the hooting. There are houseflies circling around Jim’s body but I don’t feel like writing about that. Is he really dead?

If it was me who laced a litre of plum liquor with a line of cocaine and crystal meth, would he be here now and would I be gone? That awareness completely paralyses me. Where should I go with such a piece of intel. To Jan’s Museum for One Man, to Jančar?

I’ll light a candle for Jim in the evening.

44

Tito is a hero, in the late forties he stood up to the one and only Stalin. Stalin sent all of five assassins to him in Beograd, and when Tito replied that he should no longer send him murderers otherwise he’ll send one to Moscow, Stalin actually desisted from his obsession with murdering Tito.

Tito is a hero, he knows to work with people, no one asks why there are so many political prisoners in Yugoslavia.

Tito is a hero, loved by all, celebrated by all, competent in speech despite the flaw in his diction, competent in hunting chamois as well as other political game.

Tito is a hero, no one asks how old his first pregnant wife was.

Before the Christmas of 1964 Tito, like every year, has Elis called before him, the state police UDBA stops in the Carinthia Street exactly in the moment when Svengali walks out onto the courtyard balcony to empty the bins, the plainclothes makes a passing nod and Elis knows already. She’s getting old but the fear of the titanic power of a jilted love doesn’t depart. This time Tito invites her to his White Villa on Brijuni Island. In his insular residence he has recently received Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida.

After several hours’ drive in a car and on the ferry, Tito’s waiting staff treat her to wild boar in cranberry marinade, Tito has his official wife Jovanka, on the eve of winter solstice, taken to Beograd.

When Marshall Tito’s waiting staff leaves the dining room, Tito drinks a toast of Cuban rum with the scared elderly Elis. And then Josip Broz as is customary leans Titoically titanically towards Elis, and though it sounds more ridiculous and desperate from year to year, he makes his customary celebratory toast: You are my Christmas present, sweetheart. Your beauty doesn’t age. Let’s take a stroll to the snakes. He’s announced that and takes Elis below the elbow.

But Elis feels an uncertain threat. Outside it’s long been dark. They walk out of the doors of the White Villa and pass through the private zoological garden towards the heated and illuminated terrarium with poisonous cobras. Tito is speaking, Elis is trying to be and not to be.

How’s that wretched chicken hypnotist Svengali. Still alive, do you still love him?

Elis is silent and Tito interprets this unambiguously. Are you not ashamed, sweetheart, to deny me your services? The services I offered you in Vienna before the war? I’m not sure if you haven’t forgotten over the last year that I am the most famous politician alive today? À propos, how are you keeping in Carinthia Street? Is there still mould in your windows? Tell me. You know very well, sweetheart, that after the war I could have killed Svengali with one single blow, just like yourself. Hehe. Two flies with one stone, hehe. Two flies in a mass grave. Come on, have sense, Elis, confess your love for me finally, for fuck’s sake, or do you really want me to stub even those wretched variety shows of yours for pensioners?

The pair are passing a viper now. As is customary, Tito is toying with his revolver on this day too, dragging one of his legs behind a little, his left leg starts playing up with blood circulation, in fifteen years’ time after the leg amputation he gets a gangrene, which brings about his death in the end. But now he keeps telling stories to the silent Elis, almost casually, about his newest successes on the international stage.

In the evening he finally releases her hypnotised with fear from his residence back to Svengali, to Carinthia Street, to a one-bed flat on the courtyard balcony…

In a year’s time again, Elis, he adds, as Elis gets into the car and his voice breaks for an instant. Then he collects himself, erect again as a born leader. As a present for Elis he has the head of a newly hunted chamois wrapped up in a golden paper box. The black Cadillac takes Elis to a private ship, which takes her back to the mainland.

This time, however, something is different. Elis gets unwell on the ferry, she sees black spots in front of her eyes and can’t catch her breath… she sees the world all blurry, she’s zooming and going away, she’s buzzing Svengali’s name and it seems to her as if the Cadillac, the boat and the train were carrying her upside down.

When she gets back home to her beloved after the all-night trudging, she reaches for her heart and they both know that death is entering between the two of them.

It’s early morning, 22nd December 1964.

Elis manages to whisper weakly into Svengali’s ear: There, on the corner of Jurčič and Gosposka Streets, there, Leo, we’ll meet… There’ll be no Tito, no Yugoslavia, but you will, there on the corner of Jurčič and Gosposka we’ll be together forever.

Then she dies, turns off, buzzes off…

Svengali spends Christmas alone in Carinthia Street.

He despairs but as is customary he has a plan this time too.

 

 

Translated by Pavel Drábek and Josh Overton