Olja Savicevic - Adios, Cowboy

“Looks like a rice pudding,” said my sister, tottering off on her twenty-centimeter heels to the bar for a caipirinha.

Does she mean the bride or the hotel? I reflected.

The bride was a scowling future matron in gilded curtains and the seventh month of pregnancy, and beside her the groom protruded, a mariolino with a thin neck and a round bleached head, which he shook in constant surprise.

The Super Mario clones had gathered up all their buckets and spades two days earlier, and behind the scaffolding a phony palace had appeared bearing the neon sign .

Vrdovđek had invited everyone and was roasting lambs for the whole Settlement.

“It’s not long till the election for mayor,” said my sister. “Love goes through the stomach,” she said. Then everyone clapped the happy couple, and we joined in. It was a good show.

I recalled a local politician from Bosnia whom our friends showed us on YouTube, who had secured votes from all the bloody factions in his area and become the municipal leader because he had a good breeding bull. We laughed and said, “Would you believe it?” but my sister said she could well believe it because “that’s the way things work here.” On the screen, the bull leapt onto a cow, unencumbered by prejudice.

At the table next to the host, the witnesses, and the bridal couple, Maria Čarija had settled herself, the belle du jour , in a wedding dress cobbled together from bits of gauze and polyester. In one hand a serviette holding a piece of grilled meat, in the other a Pepsi-Cola.

“Get her,” said my sister, pointing in the direction of Maria, before she staggered off for a new caipirinha. “At least someone’s got style,” she added.

Further down, near the stage, there was a stir among some of the wedding guests when on the new facade under the neon sign “a painted member,” as it would say in books, was revealed. It was a giant penetrator, a celestial howitzer, and it was cheerfully winking one eye at the astonished guests.

Some guerrilla fighter had his work cut out last night, I reflected.

Čarija did not betray any disquiet or recognition of the artistic signature, although suspicion for the devastation of the facade immediately fell on her relatives. She was entirely focused on her beauty, she passed the tips of her fingers over her forehead and the curls around her face and lowered her eyes, sucking her lips.

“Hmm, a picture speaks a thousand words,” commented my sister, grinning at the drawing. She sucked up everything under her paper umbrella fiercely. The mustached, bearded, and clean-shaven glances of the men stuck to her in various currencies, I observed.

Our host quickly sorted it out. Two Super Mario clones sprang out of a van with a ladder and tin of paint and noiselessly carried out the action of sanitizing the shameless facade. Then three hefty friends of the family took hold of Čarija, as discreetly as possible, and dragged her away, willy-nilly.

The lusty showbiz star raised the tone once more, and two cooks moving as one bore an oval platter with a roast donkey adorned with chips and orange peel to the top table.

And everything fell into oblivion, into a shallow dish full of fat.

For a while I listened and then I heard, clearly, although from a distance, Maria’s furious female scream, the old war cry of the tribe from the railway line, tapping her lips with her palm: “Va-va-va-va…”

I was born during the reign of now-forgotten technical appliances, those transitional forms that didn’t survive although it seemed that their epoch would last forever. Who’d have thought something as modern and contemporary as a cassette player would so quickly and definitively end up in a museum? A camcorder, a Walkman, a floppy disk, telephone boxes, telephone answering machines… who still uses any of those things? In fact it’s easier to find someone who plays gramophone records or someone who writes letters and sends them by post, just as there are still people who go to the cinema and film libraries. But finding someone who watches videos or has a telephone answering machine, who walks around with a Walkman or files data on floppy disks, doesn’t seem possible, ever less so, even theoretically.

“It’s as though that time never existed. Everything I used to know, it’s as though it’s been recorded over. I just can’t keep up with that speeding-up, that bullshit, it makes you feel like a relic of the past even when you’re still young,” my sister said on one occasion.

How many times in your life can you link in, I reflected. It’s exhausting. In this instance, the few years between us give me an advantage after all, I concluded.

“When new things overtake you, you think you’re getting old, that you’ve been crushed by the army of the linked-in. But then again, they’ll dream up something new tomorrow,” said my sister.

“Don’t exaggerate, it’s like keeping up with soaps, if you like — you can join in whenever,” I said.

“But still, it’s an effort,” she said once — when the video shop Braco & Co. closed forever.

Herr Karlo Šain doesn’t call back. It’s pointless to call — even the answering machine doesn’t respond, the telephone is off the hook.

When I shoved the blue envelope from the bottom of the box into my pocket, quickly, so that my sister and Ma wouldn’t see, I had felt something flat and hard in it. But it was only later, in my room, when I took it out, that I realized it was a disk: a disk and a letter from Herr Šain.

“That’s it,” I said to myself. It must be his answer.

The letter was easy, that’s why it’s an invention that resists, I reflected, but finding someone who saves data on a floppy disk doesn’t seem possible, or someone who watches videos or has a telephone answering machine, who walks around with a Walkman, uses a typewriter… you can’t find anyone like that — ever less so, even theoretically — unless you happen to know Herr Karlo Šain. As far as gadgets are concerned, he’s like those heavy-metal followers in small towns who live in the nineteen-eighties. Herr Karlo is a subculture, with a membership of one.

But what can I do with his disk? I cruised through the Old Settlement decorated for the evening wedding of the decade, I cruised through the town, went into internet cafés and playrooms full of “kids with fat asses,” as my sister would say. But nothing. “Computers like that are out of date,” said the employees of the internet café, smiling in a somewhat superior, somewhat one-track-specialist way.

It’s absolutely true that you’ll get by more easily today with cuneiform script and a clay tablet than with a floppy disk in your pocket.

They say he disappeared overnight. Left. Outside his door, under the fig tree, a queue of people formed with baskets containing guinea pigs or cats or with dogs beside them, on leads.

Karlo Šain is a dark avatar who suddenly vanishes then reappears. Who leaves questions and answers. Who opens his jaws and says, unexpectedly sadly and pleasantly: “I don’t ask anything of life, other than a little radiance.”

I asked my sister whether she thought he was in some way a fool of God. A fool of God, like Prince Mishkin, Arturo Bandini, or Alan Ford. Like Tim Burton’s characters played by Johnny Depp, and sometimes Helena Bonham-Carter, only bigger and uglier. Young Hamsun, pure and hungry in the crystal cold of Kristiania, until he became a Nazi, I reflected. Amadeus, Van Gogh… Anaïs Nin, for sure.

“My dear, the only fools of God I know’re you and Calimero,” said my sister, in a slightly mocking way. “And Warhol,” she then added, more seriously, after a brief reflection.