Olja Savicevic - Adios, Cowboy

Ma is dragging her beach things for afterward. She’s shoved a linen cap adorned with some obscure logo over her eyes and steps out, while behind her, I’m expiring under the seasonal greenery of the Gerbera Heart. Seasonal greenery , that’s what they call it, as though there was anything green in this season apart from inside greenhouses.

There is nothing green anywhere you look. Only dust and thorn bushes; needles and pins. My tongue is hard and my throat sprinkled with flour; the spring juices have now turned to dust and my blood has turned to dust. I’m sure that in males of all species their sperm has turned to dust. Perhaps they spurt it out like confetti or cannons of artificial snow. That thought amused me, for a moment.

I’m aware of my head swaying above the Gerbera Heart, above my bare legs, on the burning highway, and I see Ma up ahead in the haze, scuttling along in her gold clogs.

If I could weep, I would probably weep tablets: milligram size. I recalled a story in which a girl wept roses, yellow ones, I think, but that girl must have been from an area with a different climate and better irrigation.

It’ll be easier on the way back, without this thing in my arms, I console myself, and the way to the beach is shorter, it goes through olive groves, vineyards, and scorched gardens, beside courtyards with barbed-wire fences where furious Alsatians and Dobermans hurl themselves against them, and through an underground tunnel in the stream that acts as a passageway for schoolchildren.

We used to drag ourselves through there once when we were attacking the Iroquois Brothers or drawing up a truce with them on no-man’s-land.

Parents used to put ordinary wooden ladders on either side of the road so that their children didn’t have to run across the highway. In summer, the tunnel was dry and full of green lizards. Problems arose when the streams swelled and the impatient kamikaze outlanders, accustomed to living with the road, threw themselves in front of herds of metal buffalo.

Every kilometer along the highway, there is a bouquet of plastic flowers in a plastic vase and a wooden cross, lamps, candles, even real marble tombstones with the faithfully engraved smiling faces of the deceased. A whole small town has bled to death on the road here. Every thirteen-year-old has a scooter cobbled together from spare parts. A traffic accident in our country is death by natural causes.

“What’re you thinking about?” I’ll ask Ma as we leave the graveyard and go down onto the beach through the remains of an olive grove above the old salt pans. The sun will have risen between the factory towers and the bell tower and will be pouring burning honey over us.

“I’m thinking about conditioning, how we’ll have to get conditioning, it’s hotter every year. This could drive you mad.”

Sweat and dust will leave the imprint of muddy circles on her sandals and her heels, which she lifts in a sputtering rhythm. She has such small feet, a weak foundation for such heavy thighs, and a taut back and a face on which I recognize at most two expressions, talking head.

“What about you?”

“I’m thinking I ought to fix up the scooter. I’ll get it out of the shed for a start. I hope it still works, it’s exhausting doing this walk every day. It’s really too much.”

That’s what we’ll say to each other. And each of us will be thinking that today would be Daniel’s birthday.

Daniel’s death swallowed up the death of our young red-haired father, and all the previous deaths that had happened to us were caught up in it as well. Like a new love, I thought, new, and already ragged with all the earlier losses.

(“Love and death are words without a diminutive,” said our neighbor the vet, Herr Professor. I tried: lovette, lovelet, loveling, deathlet, deathette, deathling… And augmentatives: death and a half, superdeath, superlove … “Hey ho. There are no bigger or smaller words than them. Unlike life, which is a lifelet,” sighed Herr Professor theatrically. He’s that sort of guy, he doesn’t really fit into the Old Settlement. He wore his hair combed back and he had a thin, sparse mustache on his fat face, above his full lips. He used to beam at us. He was different. He knew more than other people, he knew something about everything and expressed himself well, in a literary way. Apart from that, we found him somewhat nauseating.)

We laid the flowers down, a birthday Gerbera Heart, on our grave, threw away the rotting plants, replaced the water. Ma swept the grave while I sat on the edge beside the marble vase with Daniel’s name, bored. Bored to death.

Ma and my sister watched a film recently where a woman goes mad after her child dies. So Ma said when she finally sat down beside me and lit a cigarette.

“And when after a while the pain eased, that woman, a fine lady, if mad, stopped a man in the street, a passerby, and asked him whether she was alive.”

“‘Am I alive?’ she asked him,” Ma repeated vaguely, brushing bits of dry flowers from her dress.

“What happened to the woman afterward?” I wanted to know.

“What d’you mean what happened?” said Ma. “D’you know anyone who went unmad?”

When we get back, outside the house, I see that all those winter shoes intended for cleaning have been left on the outside steps and now they’re roasting in the sun. Among them are some men’s boots, brogues, and trainers, although the last time a man took his shoes off in this house was… four years ago?

Two pairs of shoes on each step, from the fifteenth to the third, as though some chance group of people who had found themselves in a column were coming down the steps. A funeral, a procession, or wedding guests.

Daniel, my brother, died in his eighteenth year by jumping under a speeding Intercity Osijek — Zagreb — Split train. He threw himself onto the track from the concrete viaduct over the railway one early winter morning. His body was found some twenty meters further on, in a vineyard.

“His blood was splattered everywhere, on the trees and the frozen leaves of the vines,” said people who, for the first few weeks, had made a pilgrimage to the site of the mishap, leaving behind the St. Andrew’s cross, plastic roses, and lamps that glimmered for as long as their batteries lasted.

Among my jottings, written on a notepad, I found this:

“Stay up, stay on the surface,” said my father, throwing me into the sea from the jetty. “Swim, for god’s sake, you’ve got long arms and legs,” he laughed out loud, with his tanned face and light eyebrows. And I swam, like a puppy, like every child.

Daniel jumped in after me and went under. Just a plop. Then nothing. That’s the only time I ever heard Ma scream. She shrieked at my father. My sister shouted and wailed as well, standing on the beach in her wet bathing suit, dropping unchewed slimy pieces of bread and paté from her mouth. But I could see that Daniel had stayed sitting on the bottom, he wasn’t even trying to come up.

“He’s swallowed a bit of salt water,” my father repeated from the sea, holding him.

Afterward Daniel laughed and said: “What’s the big deal, I was just teasing. Seeing who’d save me!”

They left me alone in the sea, for a moment, while they brought him out.

“What’re you thinking about now?”

“Cicadas. It’s strange that we can’t hear any cicadas. Had you noticed?”

It’s as silent as a cave.

“It’s really strange, maybe they’ve all burst.”

Everything is brightly lit, and yet I can’t see anything. I cover my eyes with my hand and through the milky screen against that unbearable light I peer into the still olive grove, full of evil silence and bad sun. I see my suntanned fingers and the thin white membrane between them. Behind them is the even sunnier beach, behind the beach is the empty prairie at scorching noon.