Olja Savicevic - Adios, Cowboy

“He’s got manners, that man,” Ma once said. She always overrated politeness.

“His whole family, especially his late mother, was very refined. Crème de la crème,” said Mother’s relative Mariana Mateljan. And added: “God knows who this waster takes after.”

He kills several horseflies and smaller flies and sits down right beside me. He smiles like a pile of gelatin, slightly triumphantly, and “in that name” opens a special cut-glass bottle. The liquid in the bottom of the glass looks like the fluid in which the amphibians on the vet’s sideboard had once swum. I can’t avoid that image, although I recognize the smell of rose liqueur, honey-sweet and sharp.

“Rose liqueur,” the insatiable one used to say. “Oops-a-daisy! That’ll warm those fine ladies up. Give ’em a couple of glasses, they all start cooling themselves with their skirts. They haul their dresses up over their knees and air themselves. The whole street’ll stink of cunt…”

“The larger the cymbal, the deeper the sound and the longer it lasts, it behaves like spilled mercury,” says Herr Professor, handing me a silver teaspoon.

The light here is very soft and perhaps that, combined with the brass band and the liqueur, is why I am feeling lethargic.

Now that I was finally within reach of him, I had kept putting off the meeting like an exam or a visit to the doctor, but in the neglected garden belonging to that gelatin gentleman whom I do not wish to touch with even a millimeter of skin or clothing and of whose breathing beside me I am all too conscious, I feel that, after so many years of dragging my heels, I have sat down beside water, to rest. I have arrived somewhere. If nothing else, I am no longer being tormented by the need to get up and walk.

The timpani announce summer; the brass band declares the beginning of a cheerful holiday, even if it lasts only a few moments.

“Even a bear can play the cymbals,” my sister said on one occasion.

But I like cymbals. Without them a marching band would be less exciting.

“Cymbals and trumpet, that is, dear Dada, true theater! In the street! In our Long Street!” Herr Professor beams, like a returned exile.

He had polished the brass plate on his flaking front door, I observed: SMALL ANIMAL VETERINARY CLINIC. K. ŠAIN.

“Karlo Šain, good name for an opera conductor or someone’s uncle,” said my sister, long ago.

“Your buddy’s a faggot, you clown,” she said, slapping Daniel’s bum when he began visiting the vet frequently, as though he had bird flu.

“Fag, fag,” she taunted, making that shameful gesture with her hand and fist. Daniel would respond with another gesture, careless, twisting his finger against his temple, I recall.

Although she was never what you might call a beauty, my sister could, even then, have had a lot of men — for her sake one had already dived off the Big Pier onto the rocks, but he didn’t make it to the sea, or her attention. Tenderness in her had solidified like sugar on which you break your teeth. My sister always expresses caution as far as love is concerned, I observed. That stiffness doesn’t fit with her lips, like a wound, or her smooth dark skin. “Camouflaged,” Daniel called her if she wasn’t in the room with us.

Whoever met my brother wanted to take him home, to have him nearby laughing or speaking, to be Daniel, to touch him on the shoulder, to pinch his cheek (which he hated). He had the gentleness and ferocity of a serious little man. Well, tenderness attracts people in different ways, it tempts some to crush it, I recall, people often wanted to thrash him; it gets on some people’s nerves. Being just a little bit different was always an excellent reason for something to be destroyed.

I see them: my older sister and my younger brother sitting arguing, their heads close together so that Ma wouldn’t hear them: side by side like that, they looked like a cactus and its flower.

Keeping company with the vet developed into friendship the autumn my brother started secondary school. That year Daniel made a terrarium in the Prof’s garden: over dry sand that he had carried from the Little Lagoon glided lizards, transparent little tarantulas, and a blasé gecko, a big greenhorn, a real dandy; he had fireflies and scarab beetles and two tortoises, you could tell the female by her cracked shell, I recall. They survived and are still here in the garden, beside the clouded glass of the greenhouse, which “bore witness to the fact that this house had seen better days,” said my sister once. The Professor’s yard, enclosed by a stone wall with little sparkling pieces of mother-of-pearl in it, the bodies of shellfish, and its crawling, rattling, grunting animal kingdom, attracted us, all of us children, I recall. We used to go there almost stealthily, because of those stories. Apart from Daniel, who, by all accounts, had no problems of that kind.

Later I observed behavior similar to ours in people who privately, to themselves, admire things that they will gladly vilify in public, equally sincerely and fervently. That must be painful, I thought. Depends on the person, I think now.

It seemed that everything was simpler for Daniel. He came here every day for as long as he felt like coming. Perhaps that’s why my younger brother is more present in this yard than in our house.

It’s still strange, I find myself thinking, that Daniel won’t now appear through the colorful plastic strips in the Prof’s doorway. This is all that remains of his games, those two debauched tortoises, the already brittle posters for cowboy films that I had moved to my own room, and this Herr Professor here.

The only other possession of my brother’s that I regretted was the Colt our father had given him, which we never found, along with his school case.

In my pocket I have a letter that has been folded and unfolded countless times. On a dirty piece of paper, typed on an old typewriter, it says:

Dear Daniel,

I’m sorry I haven’t written before now. The circumstances are such that I rarely open my electronic post, and I don’t have access to a computer here. In fact, it’s a lucky chance that I did read your messages at all. As you see (postmark), my work has taken me to the other side of the world. You’re clever and you probably know that I’ll need more time than has now passed to accept some of the things that happened, but I blame myself for this more than I do you. This stamp, of course, is not random, it’s for you, as is the picture of the spotted salamander I’m sending you. I hope you’ll like it. These are things I can’t send by email, so I’m sending them by good old postal coach! There, let them be signs of reconciliation and good will. You write about the difficulties that have befallen you — I hope that you’ll be able to solve those problems and that they aren’t a consequence of that unpleasant event. I’d like to be able to help you. However, at present I can barely help myself, I sleep in some rather strange and miserable places, I eat when I manage it, that’s how things are. It seems as though I’ve acquired pneumonia as well. For the moment I’m still not in a position to send you an address where you could write to me, or to promise that I’ll be able to read your emails for the foreseeable future, but I hope it won’t be long before I can. I’ll let you know. Keep well.

Greetings,

Your Friend

In the upper right corner there is a date, several days after Daniel’s death.

I wasn’t impatient, and I wasn’t rushing anywhere.

I had left several messages on his answering machine — I knew he was just a few meters away, the man who had the answer, behind the walls that divided his garden from the rest of the Settlement; and I believed that he would look for me. I turned several times into the short side street where his house was, but at the last minute my will failed me or I would be overcome by a comical and terrible shame or unease.