Olja Savicevic - Adios, Cowboy

“Your call, but it’s the only quasi-city in this wasteland,” said my sister, brushing the hair out of my eyes.

“Karlo Šain says it’s all the same thing, that our mentality can be described in four words, from you never will in the south to whatever in the north,” I said.

“Really?” said my sister, looking at me in surprise. She didn’t know I’d already been to the Professor’s. “Well, the old pervert’s right. From arrogant mules in the south to haughty fools in the north. However much you shift the crap and carrion around in this sewer, as soon as you raise your head, it floats into your mouth.”

“And so, what’re you gonna be when you grow up?” she asked, lighting a thin white cigarette. The stain on the filter was greasy and the dark color of sour cherries. That lipstick suits her best, I reflected.

I shrugged my shoulders. I could be a writer, get into the papers, but my stories are shit, or I’ll start a village business, go into agriculture, I reflected. There must be some state incentives for that, it’s quite popular.

“You’ll never be staying in the Old Settlement?” my sister asked in an anxious tone, dusting the nonexistent dandruff from my shoulders. “Small places are good while you’re small. Later they cut you down to their own size.”

“Maybe I’ll go to Mehico after all,” I sighed. “I’m already learning: hasta luengo, amigos! Bienvenida estranjera! ”

I had learned that from the soaps Ma watches.

* * *

Speaking of Mexico, since I’d come home I had tried several times to get in touch with my former roommate, but she had left Zagreb too. Everyone was forever on the move; everyone was looking for something, stumbling about, all chasing their tails.

Afterward she phoned from Berlin, from a Tex-Mex restaurant. Her old man had withdrawn her from her law course after she’d flunked the fourth year for a second time.

“Guess what, Dada,” she said, “I’ve become vegan! I’ve spent the whole summer shoveling gristle rissoles around on a hot plate. Meat makes me gag.”

At one time her old man in Berlin had owned one of those Croatian restaurants that serve Balkan stew and charcoal-grilled food, but he had recently moved over to Mexican.

“You’re late again, old man, it’s Japanese eateries that are in now — sushi, sake, shiitake,” my roommate told him, but her father responded by “nearly clipping me round the ear.”

“Send Ma to me for a month’s rehab, we’ll sort her out,” she said.

“Big deal,” she said, “it’s like getting off poke balls. Poke balls for me, pills for her, isn’t that right?” she said from her cell phone.

On the screen was her face from her emo phase with a tongue stud. Before that she’d had a neopunk phase, and a hippie one at high school. She’d passed through all these trends as through a chain of clothes stores.

“I’m the last emo girl,” she’d concluded while we were still in Zagreb.

“You’re certainly the oldest emo girl, and probably the last,” I said.

I imagined her as a little old Gothic lady, but little old ladies, at least the ones here in the Settlement, are generally Gothic in any case, that’s their dress code.

My roommate and my ma would get on well, I reflected. They could go to the graveyard together and shave their heads in keeping with the Weltschmerz.

I’m thinking as though she had settled in my head, I reflected, immediately afterward, anxiously. I really am my sister’s sister.

Sar-cas-ti-cal-ly, I reflected, in syllables.

Perhaps my sister is in my head like a Cymothoa exigua , a parasite that the vet Karlo Šain had once shown me — it eats a fish’s tongue and then stays in its mouth forever, in its place.

“ Hasta luengo, estranjera, ” I said to my roommate at the end of our conversation.

“Huh?” she said.

“Farewell, stranger — I learned that from the soaps Ma watches. What d’you think, maybe I could be an actress?” I said.

“Like hell!” she said. “Ha ha ha,” she said, “just kidding. Don’t forget, Dada — all famous actors were first waiters or else they were photographed nude.”

For the first time in my life, something is happening in the Old Settlement: half the population is dressed in denim and gingham because of Montgomery’s film. Everyone’s involved.

The shooting is to last about a month: around the tents and prefabricated huts a whole small garden has sprung up with paprika, chamomile, and marijuana plants.

Cursed Rider , that’s what the film’s called. Couldn’t they have thought of a cleverer name than Cursed Rider , I thought, anxiously. There’s a whiff of trash about it.

“Bet it’s about vampires,” said my sister when she heard. “Everything’s about vampires these days.”

“What kind of vampires d’you get in a western?” I asked.

“Handsome,” she said.

“It’s the eclecticism of the early twenty-first century, anything goes,” she said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Bosnian stew that’s trying to be moussaka, probably,” she said.

“Tutti frutti gelato?”

“Don’t be so fucking benign.”

During those days, wandering along the edge of summer, before my final decision to leave the Old Settlement and before the cooling soil had finally lapped up all the velvety russet-and-gold juice of September, I at last met Angelo in the prairie, beyond the railway track.

There’s something about beautiful people that suggests a deceptive good fortune; I feel that when I happen to meet them in passing. It’s a joy for the eye that’s easy to get used to. I can’t say that beautiful people particularly appeal to me or that they particularly attract me, but I like their beauty.

For a time, when I was a child, I used to stay after class sitting in front of the primary school until our Italian language teacher came past. I had never before met a girl who looked like that or dressed like that; sometimes I waited for an hour or two just for her to pass and say hello to me.

Later my idols were less beautiful, very often even ugly, but Angelo was someone I wanted to look at. Not as an idol, but the way, from time to time, some men look at me.

People said that during the war his father had sent him to America. He’s got an aunt there, they said. As soon as he had grown up, he was taken in by a lady who found him in the street.

“How did he end up there?” I asked the people who were telling me, but they just shrugged their shoulders and stabbed at a few guesses. The journey from the well-heated home of some mother or aunt to the street seemed unbelievably long, but “mostly it’s enough just to open the door,” they said.

“While he was on the street he learned to play the mouth organ and ocarina really well! And some other things too!” they said, grinning conspiratorially and as though they had long ago solved every rebus puzzle.

In previous summers Angelo used sometimes to play on the Illyria summer terrace and Mariana Mateljan said that some foreign women (“in their prime,” said Mariana Mateljan) used to offer him money and their life for a little tenderness and sometimes he took both.

As I rode my moped along the stream toward the cabbage fields and olive groves behind which the film everyone was talking about was being shot, I already knew that I was actually looking for him. If I hadn’t known, it was perfectly clear as soon as I set eyes on him.

He was sitting on the ground, against a wall, beside a pile of truck tires, playing a comb.

I don’t know what I could say about that particular skill, but it couldn’t be said that it didn’t suit him.

I pushed my bike straight up to the pile of tires, kicked its stand down, and said: