Olja Savicevic - Adios, Cowboy

That gilt, that radiance, how does he see it? I imagine it as two cappuccinos in St. Mark’s Square in Venice, Christmas in Vienna, white tablecloths and china for breakfast under a cloudless sky, a red sports car with a young woman in it, whom we watch from the beach (she’s wearing a silk dress that you could fold to fit into your hand). Or German poetry in leather binding that someone’s neighbor with clear eyes reads on her balcony right beside the sea. Now, in September, the radiance is in Dubrovnik. In a gallery or concert hall, radiance is discreet. It gleams on the sides of cruisers as they sail out of the western harbor at night under lights, Oasis of the Seas, Crystal Serenity , MSC Splendida : music on the deck and a mini-theater under the prow. Radiance is in the varnish and in the way in which the willowy waiter serves a dessert of bitter chocolate and chilies in a Tuscan cafeteria, while in winter radiance beams down on a skating rink on top of a Russian fur hat. That’s how I imagine it, never having traveled anywhere.

It may be that radiance is a confection, the cold glamour of the moon, false or petty-bourgeois like operetta, painting, or those receptions after exhibition openings. I really don’t know whether it can be entered into, whether radiance has three dimensions or not a single one, but the thought of it is always brilliant and lively and round like that magic lantern.

Radiance is best noticed, Herr Šain, where it’s been and gone or when it’s observed from that dark place where it’s never been. That’s the first thing I discovered in connection with it. Go on, just take a look at the complete absence of radiance we have here, a matte night full to the brim with darkness.

If I don’t ride, I walk; the key thing is not to stop in one place too long. Sometimes I run as well. When I first moved to Zagreb, I fancied a man who lived in the Trnje district, so I often ran to him, from the student hostel to Trnje, a place of tribulation. Through tribulation to the stars was already a well-worn route, but not for me. To start with I ran because I was too impatient to see him to wait for the tram, I recall. Once the clasp on my sandal broke, so I ran barefoot. Who knows what my PE teacher would have said — at school I didn’t like running, I used to get out of it.

I believed I was in love with the man from Trnje. But there are limits to your stamina for running toward someone who doesn’t run toward you. And one day I turned back several streets before his house and ran off in the opposite direction. Afterward I couldn’t remember anything especially important or especially nice in connection with that man, apart from the running. It must actually have been the running I fell for rather than him.

* * *

In the dawn following Verica Vrdovđek’s feast, I found myself for the first time in ages once again speeding through the streets. As other people might lose a child, I had lost Ma. To start with I walked around looking for her, then I began to call her. The Settlement was empty, beer bottles and single-use plastic cups rolled through the unswept lanes, while cats fought over pieces of roast meat left under the tables, scattering bones over the asphalt.

At the Little Lagoon, I caught sight of one of Mother’s shoes, under a bench. I picked it up and set off at a run. I ran down Long Road then across the street and there in the window of one of the houses I saw Žana Mateljan, a girl who had once lived in our neighborhood.

“Is everything okay with your mum?” called Žana, looking at the shoe in my hand. “She was here this morning, she rang the doorbell around five in the morning and asked whether some old married couple live here.”

“And?”

“And? I told her no, we were a young married couple, we got married in April, and I looked down at the ground, because I was embarrassed. Your mother has known me from birth, after all.”

“And?”

“And? And then she asked me why I was looking at her shoes, did I mean that they needed polishing. Her shoes. I wasn’t looking at her shoes at all, but at the ground. And I wasn’t thinking anything. I told her I thought her footwear was perfectly fine and didn’t need polishing.”

ou’re really going,” says my sister.

“She read the name on the door,” I said. On the door, it said MATELJAN.

“And?”

“And she thought, for some reason, that her friend Mariana lived here with her husband, she got lost,” I said.

“Well, there you are, your mum announced that she knew what I was thinking about: she said I must’ve been thinking that I’d give her shoes a good brushing. Then she thanked me and went off toward the highway. And I don’t give a toss about her shoes, I mind my own business,” said Žana Mateljan.

I ran along the stream, over the highway, as far as the railway and beyond, to the viaduct and then back, with the shoe in my hand the whole time.

Ma didn’t come home last night. It wasn’t until early in the morning, when I was awoken by thirst, that I noticed she wasn’t in her bed or anywhere else in the whole house. If I run I don’t think, if I don’t think I can run and run like this for hours and then stumble on her, but if I stop, maybe I’ll never be able to get going again, I reflected.

I found her on the slipway. She was awake and appeared uninjured. I gave her the shoe and she put it on without a word.

“Here, Cinderella,” I said. Then I called an ambulance.

“You’re really going,” says my sister.

“I’m really going,” I say and carry on chopping onion and meat for lunch.

Ma’s in the hospital. My sister is driving me to the station. The afternoon train to Zagreb, then “Berlin via München,” I’d said. “Then I’ll see,” I said. My roommate is waiting for me there for us to make tortillas together, for our legs to swell up with standing and the stench of paprika, onion, and oil to get under our fingernails, but maybe — when we emerge into the street, stepping out loudly, our boots’ heels beating out a harmonized rhythm — maybe a city, infinite as the world, will spread out around us, one of the centers of the universe, which we wouldn’t be able to cross in a hundred days. Maybe all the restaurants and clubs keep going till morning, maybe their doors will fly open like at airports and we’ll go in, carefree as girls in a film; inside everywhere is warm, light, and spacious, and maybe I’ll forget what I’m leaving, my own self, this asshole of the world. “Your young hair will turn gray, but your gray heart will be made young,” said some poet we read at school.

“It’s a bit helter-skelter, this Berlin thing of yours. You decide things too fast, it’s because you’re still green and juvenile,” said my sister.

“It’s temporary,” I said.

“Of course it’s temporary. I only hope it’s got nothing to do with the box and the pistol?”

“I’m all done with the box, you know that,” I lied brazenly, not wanting to talk about it anymore.

My sister must never know about the correspondence on the floppy disk. Neither she nor Ma — as long as we’re alive. Especially now that Ma has ended up in the hospital, I reflected. All they need now would be Daniel’s cyber-postal fairy tale with his fat friend.

When they ask if I’m okay, they expect me to tell them I’m okay, I sense. I expect the same thing from them, for that matter. That they should be okay, or at least not to be in a bad way, or at least not to tell me.

My suitcase is waiting beside the table in the kitchen in which nothing has changed since my birth, and perhaps not even since my sister’s. The Obodin fridge and red top cupboard, grease in the gaps between the ceramic tiles and the gas canister with newspapers piled on it. Through the window, always the same view with the changing seasons and rare feast days. On Long Road there are still little flags flapping, left over from Verica Vrdovđek’s feast.