Olja Savicevic - Adios, Cowboy

“If there’s a reply, there must be a letter that preceded it,” I’ll go in and tell him.

“Isn’t that letter yours?” I’ll say. The letter from Perm, typed on a rickety typewriter.

I’m sitting directly opposite the gate to his courtyard, where it says: K. ŠAIN SMALL ANIMAL VETERINARY CLINIC.

And it seems to me that the ancient, lopsided house over the wall is watching me; the half-open senile windows squint at me. In my pocket I have the black stick with the half-peeled-off label. I could aim it at him; I could press it into his temple. Shove it into his mouth. Ask him for whatever he has of Daniel in return for the film.

It’s a black stick containing a copy of the amateur porno video, the one I had first seen at that private party in Zagreb. The copy is poor and murky. It had evidently been dark in the room, I reflected. It begins with the expression on the face of the man rearing up over a thin, white body. A young girl or, which seemed more likely, a very young boy, unknown to me. The fucker is holding the object of his lust by the shoulder or neck, a bit too firmly with one hand; with the other he is pressing it slowly downward, grabbing lower down, pushing in and thrusting slowly and powerfully and crying increasingly loudly until he climaxes, grunting and sobbing. That howling is what it’s impossible to forget. That crying was in fact why I had recognized his voice: a deep but nasal voice, as when a child is trying to imitate an adult man.

“Listen to the old pig squealing!” someone in the room had commented during the projection, laughing, and I shut the door, went out into the street, and walked for hours. I walked beside the Sava River, over the dyke and further on, until I collapsed with exhaustion and stayed lying in the mud and grass.

When we had sat in his garden several weeks earlier, the man from the film, whose blurred face I had been reconstructing all these years, the porno star Herr Professor Karlo Šain, had said to me, topping up my rose brandy in a glass of the finest crystal: “I haven’t sought or received much in life, dear Dada. And a little radiance would have been enough. You understand, just a fingerful of radiance, something gilded.”

His announcement was accompanied by the cacophony of trombones escaping from the rain. “I have to go,” I said abruptly. “The shoes outside our door are getting wet.”

I shoved the envelope with Laika on the stamp under a china dish.

How could someone who wanted something gilded agree so easily to end up in shit? I reflected. And this was a person my brother had trusted. On top of everything else, a liar.

To make matters worse, he had added that the only radiance in his life was Daniel. And then he put his hands over his face as though he was going to sob. Like a pleated fan, I reflected. Oh, damn it all, I thought. But he restrained himself.

Does someone who wants to see radiance look through his own fingers?

The lad, a good-looking young stud with dark hair, the twin brother of that girl from Ipanema, bronzed, slender, manly, smiles, catches me around the waist, and, as poems and stories would say, we ride off through the night, over the asphalt, through the dust, under the dense forest of jumbo posters, past the poster of General Gotovina, larger than life, over the bridge, past the industrial zone, past the sign saying JESUS LOVES YOU.

And who wouldn’t love you, I reflect.

My bike is a Zippo, it fires in a shudder, abruptly, it stinks of petrol with a bit of octane and burns slowly, my Zippo is an eternal foal, a tin nag, my Boreas, foot soldier, a 50cc witch’s broom that carries you through my native desert. In a word, my Zippo is a solid scooter, it’s not short of breath given that it can carry two young people uphill like this without stumbling.

The short, soft beard of my co-pilot tickles my neck while he laughs into my ear, a soft baritone that reverberates in my ribs, the smell of his white T-shirt… My hair whips his cheeks, and the sandy wind, full of little needles and sea salt, drives tears into his eyes.

We spent the whole night slowly and persistently breaking and opening one another. And now I had buried my face between the boy’s relaxed thighs. My mouth feels sour as though I’d been sucking the unripe plums or figs that we picked on the way and ate without peeling. My throat burns with hungrily, greedily swallowed milk, hot and salty. His unruly, forked tongue is now sleeping in my belly button, and I nurse his cock, tender and brown as sugar, darker than his skin, between my palms. Sour milk and sweet flesh, you’re sweet and sour, I croon to the sleeping lad, to myself. He’s lying propped on his side, his neck curved, his mouth slightly open. He sleeps peacefully, deeply, dreaming of me. My hair slumbers between his thighs wet with kisses, stuck to the thick hairs of his groin. It’s not clear exactly where he begins and where I end, our destinies have entwined in the course of one night like the dreadlocks of a little she-devil.

* * *

He took the pulp westerns out of the box that occupies a good part of the space under the bed in the little room. They had lain there, who knows since when, with some cartoons and old cassettes from the Braco & Co. video store, which I certainly wanted to look at again, if I could remember where the video player had ended up.

“Daniel’s?” he asked.

“As a matter of fact, these were our father’s, he really liked those westerns.”

It was very late, an owl could be heard in the park down the street.

“Have you noticed there haven’t been any cicadas this summer?” I said, for the sake of saying something.

“It’ll be the spraying, they must have spread something,” he said, handing me the bottle.

“And those are some of his actors?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“Cowboys,” he pointed toward the wall with his chin.

“Yep,” I said, “Dad’s beloved actors. Although they were Daniel’s as well.”

Who could explain that.

“Do you recognize anyone?” I asked.

Over my head were two of Clint Eastwood and Franco Nero in Django —dragging the muddy coffin behind him — and young Ned Montgomery in Gold Dust. He’s stepping toward us with a smile in the corner of his mouth and with six shiny Colts under his open bison-skin coat.

“Father loved those spaghetti westerns, like cartoons or Partisan films, heroes and snappy dressers, lots of bodies, one guy fixes it all. Kill everyone and then come back alone. What’s more, he worked in the cinema, before the war, afterward in the Braco video shop.”

I’m burbling, I thought.

He closed his eyes, holding the bottle, nearly empty, against his chest.

“And your old man… why was he so keen on westerns?”

“No idea, don’t remember. They were very popular at the time. Mother says he was naïve. Maybe that’s why.”

“He was naïve?”

“Naive, that’s what they say when a man doesn’t earn enough to feed his family,” I said.

I went out into the hall and closed the shutters in the library , they were half open because a warm wind had been drawn into the streets and gusts blew dust and pine needles from the park, rattling against the windowpanes. The little owl was still calling outside and the sea was starting to swell, while the church bell rang once: on the half hour. Half past two. Upstairs Ma was puffing rhythmically in her cell in a deaf analgesic paradise.

“I think the thing with my father and westerns had some connection with a higher justice, with the question of honor,” I said, coming back into the room and thinking only how much I wanted to bury my face painlessly in a ball under Angelo’s wing; and not to lose him, not to scare him off.

“A question of honor ?” he laughed, grabbing me by the hand and pulling me to him. Brave, I thought.