Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

1.

As soon as the receptionist, Pavel Zuna, caught sight of the three figures approaching the desk, he became aware of a slight current running upwards from his left big toe and stopping somewhere in the small of his back. Or the other way round: running downwards from his back to his toe. Pavel Zuna was not a neurologist but a receptionist, and a receptionist rather than a poet, so he did not abandon himself to contemplating this unusual sensation, especially as the picturesque appearance of the approaching figures occupied his full attention. In a wheelchair sat an old lady with both feet tucked into a large fur boot. It would have been hard to describe the old lady as a human being; she was the remains of a human being, a piece of humanoid crackling. She was so little and so crumpled that the boot appeared more striking than she did. The old lady had a tiny face that consisted of a skull and aged skin stretched over it like a nylon stocking. She had thick, closely cropped grey hair and a hooked nose. Her lively grey eyes sparkled brightly. The old lady was hold ing a big leather bag on her lap. The other one, the one pushing the wheelchair, was exceptionally tall, slender and of astonishingly erect bearing for her advanced years. Although Pavel Zuna was not a particularly short man, a quick glance suggested that he would barely reach the tall woman’s shoulder. The third was a short breathless blonde, her hair ruined by excessive use of peroxide, with big gold rings in her ears and large breasts whose weight dragged her forward. Pavel Zuna’s career as a receptionist had been neither brief nor unsuccessful, nor indeed uninteresting, that is to say he had seen all kinds of things – even more intensely bleached hair and even bigger earrings. But still, Pavel Zuna did not recall ever, either behind the reception desk or in his entire life, seeing women’s breasts larger than those of the breathless blonde.

Pavel Zuna was an experienced receptionist with a particular talent. He was endowed with a built-in financial scanner, which had, up to now, proved infallible: Zuna was able to guess at once to which class a given person belonged and his or her financial status. Had Pavel Zuna not loved his receptionist’s job so much, he could have been head-hunted by any tax department in the world, so infallible was his estimate of the depth of other people’s pockets. In short, Zuna could have sworn that this unusual troika had just wandered into his hotel by mistake.

‘Good morning, ladies. What can I do for you? Might you have lost your way?’ asked Zuna in that patronising manner adopted by medical personnel in hospitals and old people’s homes when addressing their older patients.

‘Is this the Grand Hotel?’ the tall lady addressed Zuna.

‘It is indeed.’

‘Then we have not lost our way,’ said the lady, handing Pavel Zuna three passports.

Pavel Zuna felt that current in his toe again, this time so forcefully and painfully that it took his breath away. However, in the practised manner of a supreme professional, Zuna smiled agreeably and went to verify their names on the computer. Pavel Zuna’s face illuminated by the light of the computer screen turned pale, partly with pain, partly with surprise: the two best and most expensive suites in the hotel had been reserved in the names on the passports.

‘Excuse me, how long will you be staying? I don’t see the date of your departure here,’ said Pavel Zuna in the tone of a man whose professional pride has just been bruised.

‘A couple of days, maybe,’ said the little old lady asthmatically.

‘Or maybe a week,’ said the tall lady drily.

‘Or maybe forever,’ chimed the blonde.

‘I see,’ said Zuna, although he didn’t see at all. ‘May I have your credit card, please?’

‘We’re paying in cash!’ said the blonde with the large breasts, smacking her lips as though she had just consumed a tasty morsel.

The little old lady in the wheelchair silently confirmed the authenticity of the blonde’s statement by opening the zip of the leather bag that was lying limply on her knees. Pavel Zuna bent slightly forward and caught sight of the fat bundles of euro notes arranged tidily in it.

‘I see…’ he said, feeling a little dizzy. ‘Ladies of a certain age always pay cash-in-hand.’

There had clearly been a serious malfunction of Pavel Zuna’s inner scanner, and that troubled him. He waved a hand feebly and at the same instant three young men in hotel uniforms appeared.

‘Help these ladies to their rooms, lads. Presidentske apartma! Cisarske apartma!’ Zuna commanded, handing them the keys.

Surrounded by hotel personnel of the male gender, the three female figures glided away towards the lift. Pavel Zuna just managed to observe a sudden breeze blow petals off the luxuriant floral display in a Chinese vase on the reception desk, before his eyes clouded over. The pain from his left big toe swept upwards. It struck him in the small of the back with such force that he simply collapsed.

This whole scene was observed out of the corner of his eye by Arnoš Kozeny, as he sat comfortably sprawled in one of the lobby armchairs. Arnoš Kozeny, a retired lawyer, was a kind of fixture in the Grand Hotel. He came here every morning for a cappuccino, to leaf through the fresh newspapers and smoke a cigar. He would reappear in the hotel about five in the afternoon, in the café, and in the evening he would hang around the hotel casino. Arnoš Kozeny was a well-preserved seventy-eight-year-old. He was wearing a sand-coloured suit, a freshly ironed light-blue shirt and a bow tie of a bluish hue, with canvas shoes that matched the colour of his suit.

As he leafed through the papers, Arnoš was struck by the news that Czech vets had found an unidentified strain of bird ’flu on two farms near the town of Norin. The vets had confirmed that it was the H5 virus, but they were not sure whether it was the H5N1 type, which, if measures were not taken in time, would be as deadly to humans as the Spanish ’flu of 1914. The article suggested that, in the course of the last year, the virus had appeared in some thirty countries. Josef Duben, spokesman for the Czech Veterinary Service, announced that, as far as the Czech Republic was concerned, it had not yet been decided whether or not to decontaminate the two farms where the H5 virus had been detected. For the time being there was a three-kilometre quarantine.

The item caught Arnoš’s attention because of Norin, where his first wife, Jarmila, lived. He hadn’t called her for more than a year now. This would be a good excuse for a little chat, he thought, puffing the smoke from his cigar with relish.

What about us? We carry on. While the meaning of life may slip from our hold, the purpose of a tale is to be told!

2.

Beba was sitting in the bath weeping bitterly. No, she had not burst into tears as soon as she entered the suite, because it took her some time to produce the quantity of tears she was going to shed. When she first came in, she swept her eyes slowly over every detail, exactly like a diver examining the seabed. She ran her hand over the snow-white linen in the bedroom, opened the cupboards, went into the bathroom, removed the disinfectant tape from the toilet, examined the little toiletries by the washbasin, stroked the soft white towelling wrap. Then she opened the curtains and before her eyes stretched a magnificent view of the spa and the wooded hills around it. Here Beba suddenly remembered a Bosnian she had asked to redecorate her flat. It was long ago. Beba had asked for it all to be painted white. When he finished the job, the Bosnian had said: ‘Here you are, my dear, now your flat is like a swan!’

And now everything congealed in that stupid word swan. The word stuck like a bone in her throat – and Beba burst into tears. And what exactly was the matter? In that hotel with its white façade, spreading its wings over the town like a swan, in the soft space of the imperial suite, wrapped round her like an expensive fur coat, Beba was forcefully struck by a sudden awareness of how ugly her life was. As though under powerful police searchlights, all at once the image of her Zagreb flat appeared before her eyes. The miniature kitchen where she had pottered and fiddled about for years, the fridge with the broken handle and its plastic interior now grey with age, the rickety chairs, the sofa and worn armchairs that she covered with rugs and cushions to make them look ‘jollier’, the moth-eaten carpet, the television set in front of which she sat mindlessly more and more often and for ever longer periods. And then the licking and cleaning of all that junk and trembling at the thought that something might stop working – the television, the fridge, the vacuum cleaner – because she could no longer buy anything much. Her pension was barely enough to cover her basic outgoings and food, while her meagre savings had vanished with the Ljubljana Bank some fifteen years before, when the country fell apart and suddenly her bank was in a different state, and everyone had been rushing headlong to steal from everyone else. Had she wanted, she could have derived some bitter satisfaction from it all: in comparison with many other people’s losses hers were negligible, because she had simply had nothing in the first place.

Then all at once, everything had turned ugly. The people around her had grown ugly with hatred, and then with self-pity and the realisation that they had been cheated. They had all developed a rat-like expression, even the young, those who had begun to come of age breathing in their parents’ poisonous breath.

Beba was weeping because she could not remember when she had last had a holiday. She used to go in both summer and winter. Winter holidays on the coast had been especially cheap. Now they were out of the question, now everything was out of the question. The coast had apparently been bought up by wealthy foreigners and local tycoons.

When Beba opened her suitcase to put her things into the wardrobe, and when the salami wrapped in foil that she had brought along ‘just in case’ rolled out, it unleashed a new torrent of tears. That salami made her look like a comic figure from some other age who had accidentally found herself in this one. A glance at her cosmetic bits and pieces, her toothbrush and toothpaste (especially her worn, frayed toothbrush!), by contrast with those that awaited her in the hotel bathroom, provoked a sharp pain under her diaphragm. And, as though she were performing some kind of ritual murder, Beba threw all her bits and pieces – one by one – into the bathroom rubbish bin. Bang! Bang! Including the salami in its foil. Bang!

Although she had brought with her all the best things she possessed, Beba’s clothes now seemed shoddy and vulgar. She was used to poverty, she bore it cheerfully, as though it were an unavoidable downpour. Besides, hardly anyone lived better. She was the daughter of working people from the suburbs of Zagreb who, instead of training as a hairdresser or retailer, had insisted on going to art school. And she graduated, but, for various reasons, was obliged to get a job. She worked for years at the Zagreb medical faculty, drawing anatomical sketches for professors, students and medical textbooks. In those days there were no computers, but everything changed when they came on the scene. Beba continued to carry out administrative tasks, and then she retired. It was through the faculty that she had come by her little apartment, some forty square metres in size.

Beba sat in the bath wrapped in lacey foam. She could not remember the last time anyone had treated her with greater warmth or tenderness than this hotel bath. This was the kind of painful realisation that drives the more sensitive to put a bullet in their temple, or at least to look around to see where they might attach an adequately strong noose. Now her decision to come on holiday with Pupa and Kukla seemed a mistake. It would have been better if she had stayed in her burrow. All the more so since she could not see the point of their coming here. Who goes on holiday with an eighty-eight-year-old lady with one foot in the grave?! Pupa had stubbornly insisted that they should go ‘as far away as possible’. They could have gone to a spa in Slovenia, but that wasn’t far enough for Pupa. They could have gone to Austria or Italy, but at a certain moment Pupa had latched onto this place. It was true that the journey had gone without a hitch; Beba even had the enduring impression that an invisible hand was carrying out all the actions for them, guiding them towards their destination. She did not understand how Pupa had come by so much money. Pupa was a doctor, a gynaecologist, who had retired long ago, and pensions had not increased – on the contrary, they were lower with every passing year. Beba had several times stopped herself from calling Zorana, Pupa’s daughter, to tell her about the situation, but she held back, because she had given Pupa her word that she would say nothing. Pupa had asked them not to tell anyone where they were going, which was a little strange, but could be explained by Pupa’s old lady’s paranoia. And then, even if she had wanted to, Beba had no one to whom she could boast, or complain, and that was the most sorrowful thing of all.

Beba gave a start when a telephone rang right by her ear. And when she realised that the handset on the wall was not an additional shower-head but a telephone (Heavens! A telephone in the bathroom!), Beba burst into tears again.

‘Yes…?’ she said, her voice cracking.

‘We’re meeting in an hour. We’re going to dinner,’ Kukla’s voice poured through the telephone receiver.

‘Fine,’ said Beba without conviction and slipped back into the bath.

There was plenty of time for suicide. Dinner first, and then she would make a plan with herself. For the time being it was more sensible to stop tormenting herself, to try to get at least a little pleasure out of this ‘swan’, for heaven’s sake, and stop this snivelling right now, because there’d be lots of time for that when she got home.

That’s what Beba was thinking. What about us? We carry on. While life like a seal wallows in glee, the tale sails off to the open sea.

3.

Mr Shaker, an American, was one of those people who could be called ‘a man of his time’, the right man in the right place at the right time, one of those people with whom our modern world abounds; those numerous stars, artists, pop singers, male and female, those con men and bullshit artists, those gurus who hoodwink us daily, those numerous prophets, swindlers and ‘designers’ of our lives in whose power we choose to place ourselves.

Long ago, this seventy-five-year-old had used his small inheritance to purchase a Chinese man’s run-down drugstore together with a vast number of vitamin preparations that were passed their sell-by date. Mr Shaker had stuck new, alluring labels on the old bottles and the vitamins were selling like hot cakes. At first Mr Shaker had not believed that people were so naive, but after the cheerful clink of the first cash, he came to believe not only in people but also in the fact that he was a man with an important mission in this world. And Mr Shaker’s mission could be condensed into a simple slogan: Pump it up! To cut a long story short, with time Mr Shaker had grown into the king of an industry of magical powders and potions, bearing the label food-supplement. Those whose job it is to monitor such products had long since realised that it was better for these things to be sold legally, because otherwise they were only going to be sold illegally. From vitamins that had passed their sell-by date, Mr Shaker moved on to mixtures, or, to put it another way, he moved from fiction to science fiction, from grammar to mathematics, from physics to metaphysics. Like every successful tradesman, what Mr Shaker actually sold was ideological hot air, in this case the hot air of metamorphosis. His products suggested to frogs that they would turn into princesses. His customers believed that the body was a divine temple, that his magical powder was the sacred host and that only a transformed body was a valid visa for a life in paradise on earth. Mr Shaker’s advertising slogans contained the words nutrition, transformation, form, reform, shape, reshape, model, remodel, tone and tighten – suggesting that the human body was a heap of Lego pieces, and that it could therefore become its owner’s favourite toy. Mr Shaker activated the acupuncture point of the archetypal dream that slumbers in each of us, a dream in which, with the aid of a magic potion, the dreamer can become as small as a poppy seed, pass through any keyhole, become invisible, be transformed into a giant, vanquish a terrible dragon and win the heart of a beautiful princess. More by chance than design, Mr Shaker had put his finger on the fundamental obsession of our age, which explained his success. In the absence of all ideologies, the only refuge that remains for the human imagination is the body. The human body is the only territory which its owner can control, thin, reduce, pump, increase, shape, firm and adapt to its ideal, whether that ideal is called Brad Pitt or Nicole Kidman. Yes, Mr Shaker successfully milked that obsession.

While the contents of Mr Shaker’s preparations stirred respect (creatine monohydrate, creatine phosphate, alpha-lipidic acid, glycogen, taurine, argol, aminogens), their names evoked real reverence: AS, C-250, Powermax, Aminomax, Myo Maxx, Trans-XX, Volume 35, Sci X, Iso X, WPC, Ultra AM, GLM, ALC, CLA, HMB, HMB Ultra, Carni Tec, Mega AM, Uni Syne, Yohimbe, Gro Now, Carbo Boost, Cyto For, Hyper M, Cy Pro, Cyto B, Animal Mass.

Mr Shaker’s kingdom began gradually to implode when the newspapers published a few dubious reports, and then serious articles as well, suggesting that his powders may have helped pump up muscles, but their hormonal ingredients reduced potency. Mr Shaker watched in despair as everything he had built up over the years deflated like a balloon. And that was how he had ended up here, to kill several birds with one stone: to soothe his nerves and at the same time have a good sniff round the post-communist market, to see whether there were any crumbs for him there, and if there were, to drive the ‘easterners’, stodgy with beer, yellow with smoking and bloated with alcohol, to reshape their bodies from what had been commercially incompatible to what was compatible.

And since we have mentioned compatibility, Mr Shaker had yet another burden on his shoulders. That burden was called Rosie. Mr Shaker was a widower, and Rosie was his daughter. And his daughter, who he hoped would inherit his kingdom, represented a constant mockery of Mr Shaker’s ambitions. It could not be said that she was not pretty, but, at least in American lifestyle terms, she was simply too chubby. And what was worse, she seemed to be entirely indifferent to the fact. Mr Shaker knew the reputation of this spa and its Wellness Centre under the creative management of Dr Topolanek, and he hoped that he would be able to refresh his brain with new business ideas, and that Rosie would lose the odd pound. And as far as business ideas went, there was something else nagging at him. From acquaintances who had recently been on holiday here, Mr Shaker had learned that there was a young masseur working in the Wellness Centre who was not only physically attractive but also apparently uniquely sexually endowed. If he were able to persuade such a young man to be the potent advertising mascot of his products, Mr Shaker would once again sail off at full steam.

Such were the dreams Mr Shaker wove as he sat in the hotel restaurant. And when he caught sight of a tall, slender woman of his own age, accompanied by two others, yet another of his dreams suddenly leapt into life: old age à deux. It was quite possible that this whole world of crackling, explosive physical energy, which had surrounded Mr Shaker for years, had after all damaged his nerves. That is why a mere glance at the lady with her tranquil way of moving had a beneficial effect on him, like good old valium.

Somewhat later, Mr Shaker summoned up his courage, approached the table where the three ladies were sitting and invited the tranquilising lady to dance. To his great surprise, the lady did not refuse. What is more, she spoke very decent English.

There, that’s enough about Mr Shaker for the time being. As for us, we carry on. While life’s road may twist and bend, the tale hurries to reach its – end!

4.

Pupa kept urging them, in her disarming way, to be her surrogates. She did not actually use that word, but she would say: you drink, and I’ll get drunk. You eat, and I’ll love the taste. You have a massage, and my bones will be rejuvenated. You dance, and I’ll enjoy it. She herself, poor thing, no longer had the strength for anything at all. She spent most of the time dozing in her wheelchair. From time to time she would open her eyes just to ‘check on things’.

‘I’m just checking, to make sure you’re having a good time.’

And, what do you know, just a few hours after they arrived, Kukla had already found a dancing partner. ‘Where does she get the energy?!’ thought Beba, endeavouring to suppress her fresh sense of affront. After dinner an elderly guy had come for Kukla, rather than for her, which was an insidious blow in the plexus of Beba’s already shattered self-confidence. Although Kukla was ten years older than Beba, it was Kukla the guy had chosen. Admittedly Beba did not find him remotely attractive, and that was some small consolation.

‘What are they doing?’ Pupa roused herself from her slumber.

‘Dancing,’ said Beba.

‘Aahaaa,’ said Pupa, nodding off again.

That was why Beba came suddenly to life when she saw an older man, far better-looking than Kukla’s dancing partner, approaching their table.

‘Allow me to introduce myself. Doctor Topolanek,’ said the man, squeezing Beba’s hand vigorously. ‘Would you have any objection to my joining you?’

‘No indeed, by all means sit down,’ said Beba cordially.

Pupa roused herself again and squinted in their visitor’s direction.

‘Allow me to introduce myself, Doctor Topolanek,’ the man repeated.

Pupa simply smiled. She did not offer him her hand. She knew that she was already so old that no one expected anything of her any longer, and that everything was forgiven her in advance, like a child. So she relaxed into her role, not even saying ‘pleased to meet you’ and – drifted off again.

Of course going through life was not the same as walking across a field – in the words of the Doctor’s favourite poet Boris Pasternak, with whose hero, Doctor Zhivago, Topolanek had identified in his early youth. Of course going through life was not the same as walking across a field, but since the tale always pleases itself, we shall, to please the tale, say a word about Dr Topolanek.

When the velvet Czech revolution took place, Dr Topolanek felt that his moment had come. In fact, the revolution was more than a little late, but nevertheless it happened in time, at least as far as Topolanek was concerned. He was exasperated with the communists, but communists were the only people he knew, and then he quickly became exasperated with anti-communists when anti-communists were the only people he knew. Both sides just talked hot air, there was nothing to choose between them. The revolution had dawned like a peacock, or that was how it seemed to Topolanek. Now it was all an unholy mess of wounded revolutionary vanity and the first things to rise to the surface were greed and stupidity. In the general transitional turmoil, Topolanek made a firm decision to grab a little of what was going for himself. His colleagues, outstanding practitioners, were all languishing in hospitals on miserable salaries, while he, who had begun his career without ambition, as a GP in a spa, had made it to the position of manager of the best-known Wellness Centre in the country and beyond. Yes, he could be called an amateur surfer, skating over the waves. Some people are helped by their genes – you can clobber them as much as you like, but you’ll never do them in – and others by their character. Topolanek was not burdened with a surfeit of character, and this little handicap saved his life. Mild as grass, he bent whichever way the wind blew. Only oaks are destroyed by storms, thought Dr Topolanek poetically, while grass just keeps on growing.

Topolanek knew something about that, about flora and survival – his parents had been intellectuals and dissidents, and some of that had rubbed off on him. And then came the moment of freedom, and, what do you know, freedom behaved like a capricious Santa Claus, bringing his parents nothing. More exactly, they had possessed nothing that could be restored to them, so they gained nothing. What bothered them most was that they had been bypassed even by moral acknowledgment. No one so much as mentioned the underground struggle they had waged for years. All that was left for them was to confront every day the results of the freedom for which they had sacrificed their youth. Their surroundings changed, while they themselves stayed the same: living in a small flat, on a small pension, with two or three remaining friends, losers like themselves. They had struggled and beaten Big Brother, and now they watched it on television every day. The Russians embarked softly on a new kind of occupation, not with tanks as before, but with crinkly banknotes. But in fact the Russians were unimportant in the whole story, money has no nationality, only people do, and generally speaking those are people who have nothing else. All that was left for Topolanek’s parents was senile grumbling and they sank into that grumbling as into quicksand. They grumbled at their former co-fighters, dissidents, who had, allegedly, got everything, while they got nothing; they grumbled at their friends who had made it, at emigrés who had returned, at foreigners who were overrunning the Czech Republic, at Slovaks, for whom things were, allegedly, going quite well, at everyone and everything. The freedom for which they had fought turned out to be fatal. It destroyed them the way oxygen destroys buried frescoes when they are suddenly brought into the light.

In the first capitalist commotion, Topolanek realised that the easiest way to make money was out of human vanity, without harming a hair on anyone’s head. His clients were satisfied, and his Wellness Centre brought in far more than the hotel itself. They were in competition; they sold the radiance of Central-European Europeanness, which, against the background of former communism, had looked more attractive than the West-European version. The medical institution, a communist leftover, stood on firm foundations: the prices of minor medical services were lower than in Western Europe, and those same services were here, on the spot and within reach.

Dr Topolanek was not one of your transitional cynics. He had his own revolutionary dream, only his revolution, unlike that of his parents, was played out in a more profitable, more beautiful and softer place – in the human body. Dr Topolanek was concerned with the theory and practice of longevity. That was why he had approached the table where the ancient lady was sitting in her wheelchair, beside her agreeable companion. Topolanek considered it his duty to greet them, to invite them to make use of the services of his Wellness Centre and to attend, if they wished, a series of his lectures on the theory and practice of longevity.

Beba listened to Dr Topolanek with great interest, while Pupa dozed.

‘Why don’t you dream up a way of dispatching old people comfortably, instead of tormenting them by dragging out their old age?’ Pupa emerged from her slumber.

‘Forgive me, I don’t understand…’

‘Crap! Prolonging old age indeed! It’s youth you want to prolong, not old age!’

Dr Topolanek could not believe that these resolute words should have issued from such a tiny, frail body. But, just as he opened his mouth to say something in defence of his theory and practice, an elderly lady came up to the table with her companion.

Mr Shaker was pleased to meet Dr Topolanek. He promised that he would be sure to visit the Wellness Centre the following day and attend the lecture. Pupa and Beba learned that Kukla’s dancing partner was called Mr Shaker, that he was American, that he was staying in the same hotel and, like them, had arrived that day. However, by then it was quite late, so Kukla suggested that they go their separate ways.

‘Goodbye!’ said Beba and Kukla to Dr Topolanek.

Beba shook hands with Mr Shaker.

‘See you, die!’ she said.

The American took a step backwards. There was an uncomfortable silence.

But here we should explain that Beba had some unusual traits and one of them was a tendency to linguistic lapses. So she did not understand why Kukla was apologising to the American, when she had simply bid him farewell with the usual: ‘See you, bye!’

Kukla took hold of Pupa’s wheelchair and set off towards the lift without a word.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Beba, scurrying to catch her up.

‘Why are you angry with me? What have I done now?’

Pupa woke up for an instant and asked:

‘Has that Dr Bullshit gone?’

She meant Dr Topolanek.

What about us? We carry on. We wish Pupa, Kukla and Beba pleasant dreams, while we hasten to reinforce our story’s seams.

1.

The girls were indifferent to the Wellness Centre’s seductive offers. Pupa was like an ancient porcelain cup that had been shattered and stuck back together again repeatedly and now had to be stored in one place and ‘used’ as little as possible, in order to be kept whole. Unlike Pupa, Kukla was in an enviable physical state, and Beba could not understand her resistance. Kukla, who shared a suite with Pupa in order to be on hand instantly, should, heaven forbid, anything untoward occur, apologised that she could not leave Pupa. But they both encouraged Beba warmly. In any case it was high time Beba finally tried to make friends with her own body, with which she had lived far too long in mutual hostility. But, as life is lived slowly and tales are told swiftly, we’re going to fast forward a bit here, and we’ll slow things down later to relate the brief history of intolerance between Beba and her body.

As she ran her eye over the list of massages with picturesque names, Beba resolutely crossed out the ‘Sweet Gallows’, a massage in which, according to the brochure, the masseur hung from a rope, swinging to and fro and scampering lightly over the back of the client on the massage table (As though I’m about to let some Tarzan use my back as a springboard!). Beba eyed the Thai hot-rock massage, the ‘Sweet Dreams’ treatment – and in the end opted for the ‘Suleiman the Magnificent Massage’. She chose ‘Suleiman’ because in the ambience of Czech spa culture and post-communist tourist recreation it sounded the most bizarre. The photograph in the brochure was appealing: it showed a naked female body lying covered in a cloud of soapy foam, like a sponge-finger in cream. Pupa and Kukla approved Beba’s choice. They both also thought ‘Suleiman’ sounded exciting.

A woman in a white uniform led Beba into a not particularly large room lined with tiles of oriental design. In the centre was a stone massage table. The woman asked Beba to undress and lie face down on the table.

‘I’ll freeze on that stone.’

‘Don’t worry, it’s a special table with built-in heating,’ said the woman kindly.

Beba climbed up the little steps onto the table, but the idea of lying face down was simply out of the question. With an apologetic expression on her face, Beba pointed to her large breasts.

‘Don’t worry!’ said the woman sympathetically and disappeared. She came back with a special aid in the form of a small hill, lined with soft sponge, with two large openings in the middle. Now Beba was able to lie face down, while her breasts slipped through the openings and were not pressed painfully against the table.

Beba hugged the little hill. The position was comfortable. Soft, agreeable, vaguely oriental music trickled out of invisible speakers. Lying on her little hill, Beba felt like a gigantic slug on a mushroom.

The woman in the white uniform reached under the table, drew out a nozzle like the ones used for washing cars and delivered a cloud of aromatic soapy foam to Beba’s back.

‘Don’t worry, Pan Suleiman will be here in a moment,’ she said, and went away.

Pan Suleiman? Covered in the warm foam, Beba waited for what was to come.

A young man came into the room. He was wearing a rainbowcoloured turban, and his upper body was bare, if you did not count his tiny, extremely short waistcoat. Instead of trousers, he was wearing wide silk oriental pants, gathered at the ankle. The young man had a virile body, nicely formed muscles in his arms, a flat stomach and satin skin. His face was oriental, or at least so it seemed to Beba, with a prominent nose, fine teeth and full lips, large brown eyes and a little moustache, which struck her as a trifle old-fashioned and therefore attractive.

‘Hai, mai neym iz Suleiman. I em yor maser!’ he announced huskily, in beginner’s English.

‘Hi! My name is Beba!’ said Beba.

At that moment, Beba’s head, poking out of the cloud of foam, happened to be right beside the young man’s pants, that is to say the young man’s pants were right beside Beba’s head, and Beba came face to face with the part of them that was about eight inches below his navel. Beba’s face flushed red. That below-the-navel part of the young man’s pants was peaked like a tent. ‘Whatever is the old woman thinking of…’ Beba reproached herself silently.

‘Reeleks!’ said the young man, running his hands over Beba’s body. Beba tingled all over with pins and needles, as though she had been given a slight electric shock. Plunging his hands into the foam, the young man began to massage her body.

The space was filled with quiet. The oriental music from the invisible speakers was barely audible. Beba thought that the young man was not saying much because his English was bad.

‘Mmmmmmm,’ moaned Beba with pleasure.

At that moment the young man happened to brush against Beba’s thigh with that below-the-navel part of his pants and now there was no longer any doubt – or so it seemed to Beba. ‘Good lord! What now?’ she thought.

‘Reeleks!’ said the young man.

Beba could not remember when this had last happened to her, that a young, attractive, half-naked male body had stood before her, in full battle readiness. Beba’s face was lit up with a dreamy smile. She pressed herself into the little hill lined with soft sponge and licked the aromatic soapy foam. Her body was tingling with expectation. As he massaged her, the young man came round the table and now he was again standing beside Beba’s head so as to reach the back of her neck. Through her half-closed eyes, she could see the young man’s smooth stomach muscles. That tent-like part of his pants was still taut. ‘Shame on you! You female Gustav von Aschenbach!’ Beba silently chastised herself.

Perhaps it should be said at this point that Beba, who con sidered herself stupid – and those immediately around her did not exactly fall over themselves to disabuse her – often chose intellectual comparisons, without herself fully understanding why she did so, and when she did understand, she had no idea where that knowledge came from. No matter, we have to move on. Because in life we each have our cross to bear, while the tale makes obstacles disappear.

‘Veer yu from?’ asked the young man.

‘Croatia,’ Beba muttered reluctantly. The young man’s appalling English acted on her dreamy mood like an icy shower.

The young man’s hands stopped moving.

‘One of us!’ said the young man in his own language, gaping.

‘A fellow countryman!’ said Beba, gaping.

‘Yes, of course, what did you think I was?’

‘A Turk!’ said Beba, although she had really thought that the young man was a Czech in disguise.

‘Turk indeed! Not on your life! I’m Bosnian!’

‘Where from?’

‘Sarajevo!’ the boy burst out, with the stress on the ‘e’, evidently imitating foreign war reporters.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Massaging, of course. As you see.’

‘I mean, how did you end up here?’

‘I was a refugee.’

‘When?’

‘A bit before Dayton…’

‘So how long have you been here? Twelve years?’

‘About that…’

‘So how old are you?’

‘Twenty-nine… Well, am I going to massage you or what?’

‘I don’t know, I feel a bit awkward now. I could be your mother…’ said Beba, trying to get off her little hill. The young man hurried to help her.

‘Why should it be awkward? I’ve had all kinds of bodies through my hands, since I’ve been doing this.’

‘But even so…’ Beba mumbled, embarrassed.

Somehow Beba clambered up and sat on the table, but the aid remained stuck between her breasts. Seeing Beba in a cloud of soapy foam, with the aid, and her breasts sticking out of the openings like two watermelons, the young man began to roar with laughter. Realising what a ridiculous situation she was in, Beba too burst out laughing. Her laughter sent the foam flying in all directions.

‘Oh, my! Now you look like a Yeti!’ said the young man, in his Bosnian accent, trying to suppress his laughter.

The young man helped Beba remove the pillow and brought her a towelling robe. Wrapped in the white robe, Beba wiped the foam from her face with a towel.

‘Fancy a fag?’ said the young man in his characteristic Bosnian accent.

‘Sorry?’

‘Shall we have a smoke?’

‘Here?’

‘Well, why not?’

‘Oh, all right.’

‘I call the shots here, love. I’m untouchable! And what kind of a Suleiman would I be if there wasn’t a smell of tobacco round me, eh?’

Beba and the young man lit their cigarettes.

‘Eh, I haven’t had a good laugh like that in years!’ said the young man warmly.

‘Eh, my Suleiman…’ Beba sighed cheerfully.

‘My name’s not Suleiman!’

‘What is it?’

‘Mevludin.’

‘Muslim?’

‘Hardly, love! I’m like the former Yugoslavia, like a Bosnian stew, I’m a bit of everything. My dad was Bosnian and my mother half-Croatian, half-Slovene. And there were all sorts in the family: Montenegrins, Serbs, Macedonians, Czechs… One of my grandmas was Czech.’

‘Eh, Mevludin…’

‘You can call me Mevlo. I’m known as Pan Mevlička here. Suleiman is my professional name. It was the Czechs who dressed me in these pants, they say Turkish massage is great for tourists. They haven’t a clue, it wasn’t them who had the Turks breathing down their necks for five hundred years.’

‘You strike me as something of an actor.’

‘Sure, I’m an actor. But I’m trained as well, as a physiotherapist. People say I have golden hands.’

‘It’s true, you do,’ said Beba solemnly.

‘What good are they to me…?’ sighed the young man, frowning.

‘What do you mean, what good are they?’

‘What’s the use if I don’t have anything else?’

Beba didn’t know what to say. As far as she could judge, the young man was fine in every way. More than fine.

‘This thing of mine stands up like a flagpole, but what’s the use, love, when I’m cold as an icicle? It’s as much use to me as a cripple’s withered leg. You can do what you like with it, tap it as much as you like, it just echoes as though it was hollow.’

‘Hang on, what are you talking about?’

‘My willy, love, you must have noticed.’

‘No,’ lied Beba.

‘It happened after the explosion. A Serbian shell exploded right beside me, fuck them all, and ever since then, it’s been standing up like this. My mates all teased me, why, Mevlo, they said, you’ve profited from the war. Not only did you get away with your life, but you got a tool taut as a gun. Me, a war profiteer? A war cripple, that’s what I am!’

The young man looked dejected. Out of the corner of her inquisitive eye, Beba observed that the relevant part of his anatomy was still just as perky.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘I’m hiding here in these wide pants. I act the part of a Turk, and keep waiting to get better. I’ve asked some doctors. They’ve examined me; they laugh and say there’s nothing wrong with your tool, Pan Mevlička. That’s how it is in life, love, everyone wants to push and shove, but no one to cuddle and snuggle… I’d go back to my Bosnia, I felt really great in Bosnia, even during the war, but they’d all make fun of me there. Mevlo the Superman, Mevlo the Golden Tool, you know what our lot are like. That would really do my head in. I can’t go back like this, I’m not a man, or a woman, I’m nothing… I’ve had some women after me here, actresses, all sorts, you know what working in a hotel means, you’re on room-service twenty-four hours a day, everyone thinks they’ve got a right to pester you. Some people tried to talk me into making a porn film, some Germans, Russians, Yanks… I gave one of them a proper hammering, I broke all his bones, I got a bad reputation, but at least that means people leave me alone. Maybe it would be easier if I was gay, what do you think?’

‘The main thing is that you have a good heart,’ said Beba gently and at the time she sincerely believed what she said.

‘I’ve got a heart as big as a mosque, but what’s the good of that!’

Beba smiled.

‘And I’m sure you’ve got brains as well.’

‘Well, now, that’s something I haven’t got,’ the young man brightened up. ‘I’m a fool, love. And once a fool, always a fool.’

‘It’ll all get sorted out somehow, I’m sure,’ said Beba compassionately.

‘Well, if only this boa constrictor down there gets sorted out. I’m sick of the sight of it! It’s as though that Serbian shell put a spell on me, fuck it to hell!’

The young man looked at Beba and a gentle smile spread over his face.

‘Hey, sorry for swearing like that.’

‘It doesn’t bother me.’

‘And sorry for all the stuff I’ve offloaded on you. If only someone could unwitch me, the way the shell bewitched me. That’s what I dream about every day, love…’

There was a knock on the door. The woman in the white coat came into the room.

‘Pan Suleiman, there are two clients waiting for you outside.’

The young man helped Beba to get off the table and accompanied her to the door.

‘How long are you staying?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Will you come again?’

‘For sure.’

‘Do. Don’t forget. Call by after work, and we’ll go for a beer… You’ll find me easily, I live here in the hotel. Just ask for Pan Mevlička. Everyone knows me.’

‘I’ll do that!’

And then in eloquent Czech, he turned to the woman in the white coat:

‘Napište masaž teto damy na muj učet.’[1]

And what about us? While life gets tangled in the human game, the tale hastens to reach its aim!

2.

Dr Topolanek was standing in front of a colour photograph projected onto a screen. It was the portrait of an old woman sitting in an armchair, dressed in a suit, a white shirt with its collar and cuffs emerging from the jacket sleeves, and with a brightly coloured pullover thrown youthfully over her shoulders instead of a shawl. The old woman had curly grey hair, blue eyes sunk deep into their sockets and lips that were completely sucked in. The most striking things about her were her hands, with their fat, misshapen fingers, exactly like claws.

‘They could at least have put lace gloves on her,’ thought Beba, looking at the photograph.

Dr Topolanek handed everyone in his audience a list of people over a hundred years old. Beside their names were their race, gender, nationality and the number of years they had achieved.

‘You are wondering,’ said Dr Topolanek, ‘who the woman in this photograph is. If you take a look at the list, you’ll find her name at the very top. Jeanne Calment has been proclaimed the oldest person in the world. Mrs Calment died at the age of one hundred and twenty-two years and sixty-four days! “I’ve only ever had one wrinkle and I’m sitting on it! Je n’ai jamais eu qu’une ride et je suis assise dessus,” she announced to the press. Mrs Calment rode her bicycle until she was a hundred!’

Dr Topolanek continued: ‘Sarah Knauss, Lucy Hannah, Marie-Louise Meilleur, María Capovilla, Tane Ikai, Elizabeth Bolde, Carrie C. White, Kamato Hongo, Maggie Barnes, Christian Mortensen, Charlotte Hughes – I could go on. These are all the names of ordinary people, heroes of longevity. Or more accurately: heroines. Take a closer look at the list. Ninety of the people there are female, and ten male!’

Dr Topolanek looked significantly at his audience.

‘We men are called the stronger sex. But has it ever occurred to anyone that we are apparently stronger than women simply because somewhere deep inside us we have a built-in bio logical alarm, the realisation that we will leave this world far earlier than our female companions? The future belongs to women: both metaphorically and literally. And once we are no longer needed for reproduction, which will happen very soon, the whole male gender will be definitively thrown onto the rubbish heap of history.’

Mr Shaker was the only man in the anyway sparse audience. Beside Beba, Kukla and Pupa, who was dozing in her wheelchair, and a few other old women, Mr Shaker was definitely in the minority. And when Topolanek explained in such a picturesque way that he was about to be thrown onto the rubbish heap of history, Mr Shaker got up and left the hall.

‘If the gentleman affected by the near future of his gender had not left the hall, he would have heard the consoling fact that things are quite different in mythology. There it is exclusively the men who are long-lived, which makes sense since the creators of that mythology were men. So, Methuselah, the oldest being in the history of the human imagination, is credited with a life of nine hundred and sixty-nine years. Our forefather Adam lived nine hundred and thirty years, his son Seth nine hundred and twelve and Adam’s grandson Enoch nine hundred and five years…

‘We will not find any information about Eve and her age in the Bible,’ said Dr Topolanek significantly. ‘Eve was made from Adam’s rib. That mythological fact gave Eve and the whole female gender a secondary status, which is why women from Eve on have on the whole been treated like – ribs.’

There was a giggle from the audience. It was Beba, who was amused by Topolanek’s dramatic performance, and his observation about rib-women.

‘Noah lived to be nine hundred and fifty, which is the first confirmation that genetics play a major role in longevity,’ continued Topolanek. ‘Noah was Methuselah’s grandson, and probably the last long-lived man in the history of humanity. After the Great Flood, human life was no longer measured on a heavenly but a human scale, no longer by the gods, but by mortals. The Great Flood divided the two worlds once and for all: from then on the divine was to belong exclusively to the gods, while the human was left to human beings. In the human world, longevity was achieved only by important people: saints, prophets and rulers. Thus Abraham lived to be a hundred and sixty-five, and Moses a hundred and twenty, while ordinary mortals lived out their brief human lifetime…

‘And the idea of longevity,’ continued Dr Topolanek, ‘was transferred into Utopias and legends about paradise on earth, about healing springs, fountains of youth, living and dead water, about the tree of life, about special races, tribes, islands and places usually situated in far-flung areas of the globe. There are legends about the “golden age” and people who lived young and carefree for many years, and when the time came for them to pass into the next world, they would simply fall asleep. There is a legend about the Egyptians who, according to Herod, were the most handsome and tallest people in the world, and who lived on average a hundred and fifty years, in great cheerfulness, happiness and friendship with their gods. The ancient Greeks believed that there were people in India with the heads of dogs, the Cynocephali, who lived some two hundred years, unlike the Pygmies, who, according to the ancient Greeks, lived barely eight years. There is a legend about long-lived people in Africa, called the Macrobi, and a legend about the Hyperboreans, who lived in the far north, and whose lifespan was a thousand years. One of the most entertaining legends was spread by the Greek Iambulus. He was borne by the sea onto an island in the middle of the Indian ocean, inhabited by beautiful people over six feet tall. These people spoke the language of birds and had the ability to talk to two people simultaneously, because their tongues were pronged like forks. They did not practise monogamy, but shared their women, they cared for their children communally and lived well and happily for a hundred and fifty years…’

‘This doctor of ours has hardly started. By the time he reaches Bulgarian yoghurt, botox and anti-oxidants, we’ll all be skeletons,’ Beba whispered to Kukla.

At this moment Pupa also woke up.

‘Are we staying or shall we call it a day?’ she asked.

‘Let’s call it a day!’ all three agreed.

Kukla apologised to Dr Topolanek, inventing a reason why they could not stay for his lecture.

‘That’s absolutely fine,’ said Dr Topolanek. ‘But you will come tomorrow, won’t you?’

‘But of course!’ said Pupa, Beba and Kukla sweetly in unison.

As soon as they were outside, Pupa said resolutely: ‘Not on your life!’

Here we have to say that Pupa, Beba and Kukla were unfair to Dr Topolanek, and it really was a shame that they left the hall: they missed hearing all kinds of interesting things, for instance Plato’s idea of a happier world, which would come into being as soon as the whole universe started moving in the opposite direction. Instead of being born from sexual union, people would spring out of the earth like plants, straight into their adult form, and then they would steadily become younger, and in the end return to the earth. Life might not be longer than ours today, but it would certainly be happier, because it would be free of ageing and death. Pupa, Kukla and Beba missed hearing the interesting story of Medea who, in order to make Jason’s father younger, carried out the first transfusion in the history of medicine. Medea slit the old man’s throat with a sword, let the blood run out and then filled the old man’s veins with her own concoction, consisting of many spices, plants, roots, seeds, deer’s liver and vampire’s entrails. The old man’s white hair darkened, his wrinkles were smoothed out, his limbs twitched into life, his heart began to beat faster and the burden of some forty years slipped from his ancient body.

Yes, the three old girls had missed learning a lot more, but we too, unfortunately, must press on. While people yearn for what they cannot get, the tale hastens on, with no regret!

3.

The son of one of Pupa’s patients told her that he had once taken his mother out in her wheelchair, to sit outside the house for a while and breathe in the fresh air. It was the end of November, and he had snuggled her up in blankets so that she wouldn’t catch cold. He went back into the house for a moment to get his cigarettes, then forgot what he had gone for, so sat down and smoked a cigarette… In the meantime, it began to snow. And when it was getting dark and the old woman was covered in snow like a haystack, the son remembered to his horror that she was still outside. The old lady was so senile that she did not understand what was going on. She had enjoyed watching the snowflakes and had not even caught a cold.

Pupa often dreamed about how nice it would be if someone were to take her to Greenland and forget about her, lose her the way one loses an umbrella or gloves. She had reached a stage where she was unable to do anything any more. She was like a rubber plant, moved from place to place, carried out onto the balcony to have its fill of air, brought into the house so as not to freeze, regularly watered and dusted. How could a rubber plant make decisions or commit suicide?

All primitive cultures knew how to manage old age. The rules were simple: when old people were no longer capable of contributing to the community, they were left to die or they were helped to move into the next world. Like that Japanese film in which a son stuffs his mother into a basket and carries her to the top of a mountain to die. Even elephants are cleverer than people. When their time comes, they move away from the herd, go to their graveyard, lie down on the pile of elephant bones and wait to be transformed into bones themselves. While today hypocrites, appalled by the primitive nature of former customs, terrorise their old people without the slightest pang of conscience. They are not capable of killing them, or looking after them, or building proper institutions, or organising proper care for them. They leave them in dying rooms, in old people’s homes or, if they have connections, they prolong their stay in geriatric wards in hospitals in the hope that the old people will turn up their toes before anyone notices that their stay there was unnecessary. In Dalmatia people treat their donkeys more tenderly than their old people. When their donkeys get old, they take them off in boats to uninhabited islands and leave them there to die. Pupa had once set foot on one of those donkey graveyards.

She who had helped so many babies into the world, cut who knows how many umbilical cords, who had so often heard a child’s first cry, she at least deserved to have someone sensible extinguish her, the way lights were extinguished in houses so as not to waste electricity. That is what she kept trying to explain to Zorana, but Zorana had resolved to respect medical rules rather than show any empathy.

Zorana did not understand her. Zorana, who had spent her whole life accusing her, Pupa, of not understanding her. To start with Pupa had resisted and defended herself, then for a long time she had felt guilty, then finally she admitted that Zorana was right, at least in one respect: no, she really did not understand. She could not, for example, understand why Zorana agreed to live with a husband who was a notorious creep. Some eighteen years ago something in him had responded to the call of Croatian nationhood, and he had vehemently supported the government of the time, shouting from the rooftops that all Serbs should be slaughtered, and suggesting in passing that neither Muslims nor Jews had much more appeal. Overnight, the man had become an anticommunist and a devout Christian, hung Catholic crosses round Zorana’s and the children’s necks, and a portrait of one of his ancestors, an Ustasha cut-throat, on the wall, and, what do you know, his zeal paid off. He was appointed manager of a hospital, slipped deftly into some kind of financial embezzlement, and they – Zorana and he – became part of the newly minted Croatian elite, who Pupa had watched on television, while she still could, at New Year receptions hosted by the President of the state, at concerts and at exhibition openings. And the creep went so far as to accuse her, Pupa, ‘and her commie friends’ of being to blame for everything, being part of ‘a bloody Yid conspiracy’. And when he said something ironic about Zorana’s father, calling him his ‘stupid Serbian father-in-law, who had the good fortune to be in his grave’ – Pupa threw him out of her house. This was more than fifteen years ago, and the creep had never set foot there again.

Sometimes she felt that Zorana was punishing her, that she was keeping her alive so that she would at last ‘open her eyes’ and realise how much things had changed and that her life and values no longer had anything to do with the new reality. Meanwhile she, Pupa, was spared ‘the great revelation’ by ordinary old-age cataracts. She could no longer read or watch television; she felt as though she was living at the bottom of a well. And it was not only that the world around her had become invisible: she herself had become invisible. And only one sweet creature in this world was able to see her…

She sat in her wheelchair, imagining that snow was falling round her. She watched the fat flakes in the air and was surprised not to feel cold. The snowflakes kept on and on falling, and she imagined hibernating under a snowy blanket, until the spring, until it got warm and the snow melted. And she could already see a little heap of her own white bones, appearing out of the melting snow.

4.

Beba and her body lived in a state of mutual intolerance. She could not remember exactly when the first hostile incident had occurred. When she put on the first ten pounds? Perhaps her body had already taken control by then and nothing could prevent it from continuing to conspire against her. And she had imagined that taking ten pounds off would be a simple matter; she would start the campaign the very next Monday. Or was it when she came face to face with her image in a mirror and discovered to her great surprise that she was in a body that was not her own, and that it was a body that she would have to continue to bear as a punishment? Her breasts, which had been neither large nor small, had become big and then too big, and then so huge that things happened like this morning, when she was leaving her massage… A sullen Russian jerk with spiky hair, flanked by two similar jerks, had remarked: ‘Ai, mamaaa, tytki kak u gipopotama!’[2] confident that she would not understand Russian. But Beba had understood; insults don’t need translation.

Her shoulders were deformed by the weight of her breasts, and had acquired deep clefts; her upper arms were as bulky as a dock-worker’s and dragged her neck after them. She had always had a neck of a respectable length, and now all of a sudden it had completely disappeared. The upper part of her body had begun to swell, a thick layer of fat had built up round her waist, like an old-fashioned rubber ring, on the upper part of which big Beba was wedged, while the lower part of her body, from the waist down, had begun to taper off. Beba had also acquired a new behind, one of those sad, flat behinds that could belong to an old woman or an old man. The only thing that had not changed were her calves, and her forearms, from her elbows to her wrists. Beba’s face, which until a few years before had been appealing, oh, it too was taking its revenge! Fatty sacks had formed round her eyes, and her once lively blue eyes had sunk dully into subcutaneous fat. Jowls had appeared on her lower jaw, dragging her mouth downwards. Her hair had grown thin, and her feet had become two sizes larger. Originally a thirty-eight, Beba now took size forty shoes. The only thing that she took a bit of care over were her toenails, and had she not gone regularly to a pedicurist, her feet would have turned into – hooves. And her teeth?! What had they done to her? She had spent her whole life in a dentist’s chair, in the hope of preserving healthy teeth, but she had not succeeded. Yes, her body was exacting cruel revenge, nothing belonged to her any longer.

To be fair, she was still trying to improve the situation. She had begun to wear a ‘minimiser’ corset, which reduced the size of her bust, then large earrings, strikingly long scarves, big brooches, big rings, all with the intention of deflecting the critical observer’s gaze from her bust to these details. She was rarely parted from her necklace, a ribbon with a large, round, flat stone with a hole in the middle hanging from it. And the strategy worked; most people would tend to fix their eyes on that stone. Yes, she was gradually turning into what she found repellent: one of those bleached old hags with cropped hair, their faces overcooked from tanning in cheap solariums, their hands mottled with swollen veins and aged freckles, decorated with strikingly cheap rings and thick rhinestone bracelets. And as for their ears, those sorrowful, elongated ears drawn down by wearing too many heavy earrings…

On the other hand, what is left for women when they stumble into old age? One rarely sees those few fortunate ones with übermensch genes, such as that crone of Hitler’s, Leni Riefenstahl, who lived to be a hundred and one, and showed everyone the meaning of ‘the triumph of the will’! She carried on climbing mountains and skiing until her hundredth year, at ninety she learned scuba-diving, travelled through Africa, photographed the poor Nubians and slept with them, sucking their blood – it kept her fit! And what other, worthy examples are there? Jessica Fletcher? Gloria Swanson in the film Sunset Boulevard? Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? But most are left with the ‘old-lady in good-health look’. These are desexualised old hags with short, masculine haircuts, dressed in light-coloured windcheaters and pants, not differentiated in any way from their male contemporaries, and noticed only when they are in a group. Yes, perhaps that is the way out: perhaps one should disguise oneself as a third sex, a sex without a sex, and live an unnoticed, parallel life: climbing mountains, walking with Nordic poles, travelling in organised tour groups of opera lovers, lovers of Alsatian wines, lovers of Mediterranean cheeses… Because what other variants are there in the typology of old women? Those dotty old creatures surrounded by cats, whose neighbours break into their house one day and find them dead, in a stench of cat pee? Those greedy old hags of unquenched sexual appetite who each spring visit geographical zones in which the local young men prostitute themselves for money? Those wealthy old women who submit hysterically to treatments – face-lifts, liposuction, hormone therapy, shit therapy if necessary – just to delay by a little the inexorable onset of age? Are spas not places which offer the illusion that they delay ageing? Yes, spas are the natural habitat of old hags, except that what used to be called a spa is now – same crap, different packaging – a wellness centre.

With the white towelling robe draped over her naked body, Beba looked at herself in the mirror. Everything was hanging out, everything was old, everything was distorted, and only that ‘little bush’ down below, sprinkled with grey, was still luxuriant. Come now, why this idiotic pride in the ‘luxuriance’ of her ‘little bush’? As though it were treasure! As though the other parts of her body were police, accountants, porters – existing only in order to attend to the treasure! But what was this, why this sudden moralistic protest? Had not her ‘little bush’ been her ‘treasure’ for many years, had not everything revolved around sex for a major part of her life? When she was younger, she would have sold her soul to the devil for that, for the simple mechanism of the snap fastener. ‘Men and women are like snap fasteners’, one of her lovers had once said. She no longer recalled his name, but she remembered the sentence. At the time, she had found the image irresistibly comic. Click-clack! Click-clack! Now she felt it was inappropriate. But if she really thought about it, was there anything apart from that click-clack? Was everything else not mere fog to soften the truth and make the human snap-fastener mechanism appear less frighteningly simple? Of course, it was all a matter of perspective. Now it seemed to her that before, when she was younger, she used to think the opposite. She was prepared to die for that damned ‘snap fastener’.

Beba plucked at her ‘little bush’ down below in a desultory fashion. But just as she was about to go into the bathroom, it seemed to her for an instant that instead of that dry, greyish ‘bush’, she saw sleek, black feathers. Beba went up to the mirror and – oh my! – now it seemed that a bird’s eye was observing her from that place and, what is more, that gleaming, malicious bird’s eye was winking at her. ‘Shoo, you fiend!’ muttered Beba, and, wrapping her robe tightly round her, made her way to the bathroom.

What about us? We carry on. While life can at times be hard and rough, the tale shies away from anything tough.

5.

Mr Shaker, who was lying on the stone massage table, pasted with soapy foam like a car in a carwash, saw it at once: the young man could have been Clooney’s son. Olive skin, large, dark eyes, but a fuller and more finely shaped mouth, a natural smile, which did not, like Clooney’s, end in a fan of lines at his temple. And he was far taller than Clooney! But why was he so stuck on Clooney? The young man was simply good-looking and would appeal to both women and men, regardless of their age, which, from a marketing perspective, was the key. And those wide oriental pants, imposingly taut in the right place, hinted that the rumours of the young man’s sexual prowess may have been well-founded.

‘Hi, mai neym iz Suleiman. I em yor maser!’ muttered the young man through his teeth.

‘Hi! I’m Mr Shaker,’ said the American warmly, offering the young man his hand, but he did not manage to shake it. The young man pinned him to the table with a deft movement of his arm.

‘Reeleks!’ said the young man.

The young man’s dreadful English would not be a problem, thought Mr Shaker, he was bright, he’d learn the language… Mr Shaker squirmed nervously on the massage table. The foam was suffocating him, and he felt extremely uncomfortable in that whole soapy set-up.

‘Where are you from?’ he asked the young man.

‘Sarajevo,’ snapped the young man.

This information stimulated Mr Shaker’s business imagin ation. The young man was Bosnian; that should be exploited! Because, for instance, Havel and the Czechs didn’t mean anything any more to the average American. But Sarajevo still rang in the average American ear. Or more accurately, Mr Shaker hoped that it still rang.

‘Listen,’ Mr Shaker tried to lever himself up, but the young man glued him back to the table.

‘Reeleks!’ said the young man and began massaging the vertebrae of the American’s neck.

At a certain moment the young man’s attention lapsed and Mr Shaker flapped like a tuna and straightened up to a sitting position.

‘Listen, young man, there’s been a misunderstanding, I didn’t come here for a massage, but to offer you a job.’

The young man listened to the middle-aged American in amazement. He was quite baffled. ‘Could he be gay?’ he wondered. All that he managed to grasp from the American’s tirade were figures: tventi tausand, then fifti tausand, then hundrd tausand, then hundrd tventi tausand…

‘What’s he on about? I don’t get a word of it,’ grumbled the young man in Bosnian. ‘Are you listening to me? He’s not listening, why should he, Yanks never listen, they just press on with their own agenda. Leave me alone, I’ve already been called by the Viagra people… Oh, but you, you don’t give up, you’re like NATO! Why didn’t you come when they were shelling Sarajevo, and when that bomb exploded near me, instead of coming to harass me now?’

‘I have to find an interpreter! Yes, an interpreter,’ said Mr Shaker resolutely. He leapt from the table and, almost slipping, ran out of the massage room.

‘What a performance! What will these idiots think of next?… Hey, my Mevlo, what else have these hulks got in store for you?’ sighed the young man.

What about us? We carry on. While life may beguile and tempt like a gift, the tale is decisive and above all swift!

6.

Kukla went down to the hotel computer for a moment, to check the Croatian newspapers on the Internet. She could have done this in her room, but she felt like stretching her legs. At home she amused herself every day leafing through local and foreign newspapers. The Croatian one she usually took was The Morning News. Its format was predictable: embezzlement, corruption, quarrels between political parties and their opponents, articles about the unjust conviction of ‘Croatian heroes’ by the Hague Tribunal, financial scandals involving people who had earned small fortunes through Croatian patriotism and the war. Kukla clicked on the cultural section and was surprised to see a fairly lengthy review of Bojan Kovač’s new novel Desert Rose.

The novel Desert Rose by Bojan Kovač will disappoint all those who think that it has any connection with Sting and Cheb Mami’s ‘Desert Rose’, or with popular romances, said the article. Kukla hadn’t a clue who Sting and Cheb Mami were so for a moment their names sounded threatening, but the way the review went on cheered her. Desert Rose is the greatest event on the Croatian literary scene for the last fifteen years, if not longer, the review went on. It is a book through which this prematurely deceased Croatian classic writer has earned the right to a second life and places himself at the very peak of Croatian literature. The novel of unusual structure, reminiscent of a rose, is rooted in the deposits of time, the biographies of ordinary people, reality and dreams, essayistic and fictional passages which treat events from the recent wartime past, from contemporary Croatian reality, and the time of the Second World War. A novel left as a legacy by a writer who lived in the shadows, far from the lights of the literary stage, is a great lesson for today’s instant products of the literary-entertainment industry. This unusual book is like a solitary rose blooming in the desert of Croatian literature.

The Evening News announced that a review of this ‘first class work by Bojan Kovač’ would appear in the Sunday edition, while a weekly magazine advertised ‘a masterpiece of Croatian literature on a par with Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.’

‘Blah-blah-blah,’ muttered Kukla and logged off. Passing through the hotel lobby, she caught sight of Beba and an elderly man in the hotel café. Beba waved to her, inviting her to join them. Kukla declined, as she had promised Pupa that she would take her out in her wheelchair for a spin through the town. A little fresh air before dinner would do them both good.

What about us? We carry on. While humans long for fame and glory, the tale just wants to complete the story.

7.

Arnoš Kozeny adored the Grand Hotel. In fact, for him it was not a hotel, but a metaphor for human interaction with other people. The hotel stood in its place, everything else changed: the times, fashion, political régimes, people. The hotel rooms were ears through which a thousand and one human stories had passed. And not one was complete: they were just the exciting sounds of human lives. As he sat in the hotel lobby, Arnoš Kozeny would for a moment close his eyes and listen in. He would go back to his childhood and the moment when he had turned the knob on the radio for the first time and tuned in to the din of the world: noises, tones, sounds… And when he opened his eyes, it seemed to him that he was holding an invisible television remote in his hand. For the most part there was no volume and Arnoš Kozeny would fix his gaze on a scene: two people at the reception desk talking about something, opposite him a tubby man reading a newspaper and sipping cognac, a young couple in the restaurant, whose outlines flashed in the glass, hotel employees scurrying outside to meet some important person, the important person coming into the hotel and going to the desk without looking round. Arnoš would zoom in on a gesture, a movement, a detail, a shadow, someone’s hand, someone’s smile, a ray of sunlight that suddenly revealed the gleam of someone’s false teeth, an ear lobe with an earring, a high heel, the line of a leg, a mouth, the rim of a coffee cup with a lipstick stain. Arnoš Kozeny read the signs, signals and gestures, just as in his youth he had read books, with great attention and great enjoyment. And that reading filled him with his old youthful excitement.

Now that he had retired, he could not imagine life without the hotel. Compared to the great satisfaction he felt when he was there, all other options for spending the modest remains of his lifespan seemed unappealing. At one point, Arnoš Kozeny had bought a small flat in the town. That flat, which had served in his younger days as a secret refuge, now became his permanent address. All the assets he had acquired in the course of his life as a lawyer had gone to his wife and children. Arnoš had married and divorced several times and this bachelor flat was the only thing he had left. But Arnoš Kozeny was not complaining; he no longer needed anything more.

Now he was sitting at a table with three ladies, with whom he had immediately felt at ease. He knew their country, admittedly from a time when it had been in one piece. He had often spent his family summers (not always only with his family) on the Adriatic coast. Enchanting Opatija was one of the significant topoi on the modest geographical map of Arnoš’s otherwise rich amorous biography.

‘Such a shame,’ said Arnoš Kozeny. ‘Do you know that I followed the events in your unhappy country for days on end? What a shame! Hey-ho, what can we do, the country fell apart, but maybe that’s how it had to be. Maybe it was no good…’

‘The country was good, perfectly good, it’s just the people who are shit!’ snapped Pupa.

‘Which just goes to show that we never learn anything from history, as our forebears would have us believe,’ said Arnoš Kozeny in a conciliatory tone.

‘Indeed not!’ said Beba, blushing. (Oh God, she thought, why must I always blurt out stupidities!?)

‘Which might even be good, because otherwise there’d be no life!’ said Arnoš Kozeny brightly.

‘How do you mean?’ asked Kukla.

‘Simple. Many people don’t have the best of experiences with their parents, but they still have children, don’t they?’

‘That’s not a choice, it’s our biological code. We exist only in order to procreate,’ said Pupa, who had surfaced for a moment from her doze.

‘And love? Where is love in all of this?’ asked Beba.

‘A complicated question,’ said Arnoš.

‘In the egg!’ exclaimed Kukla.

‘What egg?’ Beba and Arnoš perked up.

‘You know that Russian fairytale… Ivan falls in love with a girl, but to make her fall in love with him, he has to find out where her love is hidden. And he sets off over seven mountains and seven valleys, and reaches the ocean. There he finds an oak tree, in the oak there is a box, in the box a rabbit, in the rabbit a duck and in the duck an egg. It is in that egg that the girl’s love is hidden. The girl has to eat the egg. And when she eats it, the flame of love for Ivan flares in her heart.’

‘The message of that fairytale is that love does not exist. Because no one has the strength or time to make that journey,’ said Beba.

‘That’s why people have sex,’ said Arnoš.

‘Sex is instant love,’ said Beba.

‘Sex is a quick lottery, a shortened version of the search for the egg,’ said Arnoš.

‘Oh, don’t say that, I’m a child of the sexual revolution…’ said Beba, biting her tongue.

‘Just as well that revolution didn’t catch you as a child,’ said Kukla wickedly.

‘Every revolution devours its children,’ said Arnoš.

‘I am the victim of the sexual revolution,’ Beba corrected herself.

‘You don’t look like a victim to me,’ said Arnoš agreeably.

‘What do you know about victims and sacrifice? You’re a man. Sacrifice is a strictly female accessory,’ said Kukla.

‘Perhaps. But since you’ve mentioned Russian fairytales, here is another Russian example. Pushkin’s poem Ruslan and Lyudmila. You know the story: brave Ruslan sets out in search of the beautiful Lyudmila, who has been snatched by the magician Chernomor. But actually I’ve always been intrigued by a secondary story in the poem,’ said Arnoš Kozeny.

‘Which one?’ asked Beba, although she hadn’t the remotest knowledge of either Pushkin or his poem.

‘On his journey Ruslan comes to a cave,’ Arnoš went on, ‘and in the cave there is a wise old man. The old man tells Ruslan his life story. When he was a young shepherd, he fell in love with the beautiful Naina. But Naina rejected his love. In despair, the shepherd left his homeland, founded a fellowship, put out to sea and fought wars in foreign lands for ten years. And then, tormented by longing, he returned and brought Naina gifts: his bloodstained sword, coral, gold and pearls. But Naina rejected him again. Humiliated, the “parched seeker of love” as Pushkin calls him, decided that he would conquer Naina with spells and so he spent his time alone, learning the secret art of wizardry. And when he finally discovered the last “terrible secret of nature”, there was a flash of lightning, a fearful gale began to rage, the earth shook beneath his feet – and before him appeared an old hunchbacked woman with sunken eyes and grey hair. “The embodiment of senile blight,” says Pushkin. That was Naina,’ said Arnoš, pausing significantly.

‘And what happens next?’ asked Kukla and Beba impatiently.

‘Horrified, the old man bursts into tears and asks whether it is possible that it is her, and where has her beauty vanished, is it really possible that the heavens have changed her so terribly? And he asks how much time has passed since their last meeting. Naina replies:

Arnoš recited in Russian with a strong Czech accent. Perhaps it was because of the accent that Kukla and Beba had no problem understanding him.

‘And what happens next?’ they asked.

‘Next? Um…’ said Arnoš, ‘next we have an interesting and psychologically most satisfying situation. Naina says that she has only now realised that “her heart was fated for tender passion” and invites him into her embrace. However, the old man is profoundly revolted by the physical appearance of his “wizened idol”:

My wizened idol warmed to me

With passion, started to importune,

On withered lips a ghastly smile,

In churchyard tones she would beguile,

Avowals, hoarsely wheezed, she offered…

‘The old man refuses to acknowledge reality,’ continued Arnoš. ‘He flees from Naina and resolves that he would prefer to live as a hermit. What is more he accuses Naina in front of Ruslan of transmuting “thwarted love’s belated flame to ire”.’

Arnoš puffed impressively on his cigar.

‘Why yes, the old witch!’ said Pupa, rousing herself from her slumber.

They all laughed, apart from Beba…

‘Naina apologises for her ugliness. But the old man does not see himself as either ugly or old!’ said Beba.

‘What misogyny!’ said Kukla. It seemed that she too had taken Naina’s story to heart.

‘I agree,’ said Arnoš.

‘Women are more compassionate than men in every way!’

‘You’re right,’ said Arnoš.

‘What a moron!’ said Beba bitterly, still mulling over the character of the wise old man.

‘What else could she do but become a witch!’ said Kukla, who was still protesting in Naina’s name.

‘Our whole life is a search for love, which you, Kukla, based on the example of a Russian fairytale, have identified as – an egg,’ concluded Arnoš. ‘Our search is frustrated by numerous snares that lie in wait for us on our journey. One of the most dangerous snares is time. We need only be one second late and we will have lost our chance of happiness.’

‘That right moment is called death, my dear Arnoš, an orgasm from which we no longer awaken. Because the logic of love is to end in death. And as none of us accepts that option, we all bear the consequences. Old age is simply one of them,’ said Beba.

They were all astonished by Beba’s eloquence.

‘All that is left us is the art of dignified ageing,’ said Arnoš.

‘Dignified ageing is crap!’ announced Pupa, putting an end to the discussion.

It was already quite late and the little group decided to disperse. Arnoš Kozeny saw the ladies to the lift, kissed each one’s hand and, before the lift door closed, he blew them a kiss for good measure.

In the lift Beba said:

Kukla and Pupa listened in surprise.

‘You know Russian?’ asked Kukla.

‘No. Why do you ask?’ asked Beba.

Beba had quoted a stanza from Pushkin’s Ruslan and Lyudmila. Aside from her occasional lapses, this was another of her quirks: she would from time to time blurt out something in languages she otherwise had no mastery of. These attacks occurred to Beba out of the blue, as in a dream, and so Kukla and Pupa did not wake her.

And what about us? We carry on. While in life we stop to greet a friend, the tale speeds to embrace its end.

8.

A girl was standing beside the town fountain. Her head was turned towards it and she was leaning all her weight on one hip. The young man could see her luminous complexion, pink ear, which seemed to him as fresh as a segment of orange, and a copper-coloured curl that had caught on her ear like an unusual earring. The girl was wearing a simple little floral sleeveless dress. The dress revealed the girl’s plump shoulders sprinkled with rusty freckles, her broad hips and the chubby calves of her legs.

All around, in the tops of the old plane trees, whose leaves had acquired a pale grey-green colour in the bright sun, birds were chirping. The young man walked round the fountain and stopped opposite the girl. Now he could see her face. She had a regular, full little face, almost child-like, with bright green eyes, quite wide set. The neckline of her dress gave the young man a glimpse of her ample bosom and the freckles, like an army of pale orange ants, disappearing into the shadowy dip between her breasts. The girl was licking ice cream out of a crunchy cornet. She ran the tip of her tongue round its edge, as though she were making a little pit, tidily licked up the drips of ice cream that were sliding down the outside of the cornet, pushed the foamy mass towards the top with her tongue, and then, with her full, pink lips, she sucked up the peak. The girl was licking her ice cream so carefully and with such concentration that she might have been solving a difficult mathematical problem. From time to time she took her right foot out of her clog and scratched her left ankle. And then she tucked her right foot back into its clog, took out her left foot and used it to scratch her right ankle. All this time, she did not for a moment lose her focus on the ice cream. As though the ice cream was a tiny wild animal she had caught. She played with the ice cream like a cat with a mouse.

The air was glowing with the setting sun, birds rustled in the surrounding treetops, paled by the sunlight, the water in the fountain sputtered in short comic spurts. Everything seemed to have been numbed by the heat which was slowly settling into the ground; there was not a breath of wind, the leaves of the plane trees hung as though turned to stone. But nevertheless, the young man seemed to feel a vague current of air. At a certain moment the girl raised her eyes and looked straight at him. Her slanted, light-green eyes met the young man’s. A little blob of ice cream was melting on the girl’s lip. The young man felt a sudden longing to be that little blob.

1.

Kukla was nearly six foot three, slim, with an exceptionally straight back and an easy gait, all of which made her seem younger than she was. What stood out on her regularly featured face were her strong cheekbones, slanting eyes of indeterminate colour, usually called ‘almond’, and her shy smile. That smile was also unusual for her age. She had broad, bony shoulders, as though she had done a lot of swimming in her youth, although she despised every sport apart from walking. Her ‘uniform’ contributed to the refinement of her appearance. That was what Kukla called her simple outfit: a dark straight skirt, light silk blouse, usually white, and a fine woollen cardigan, usually grey. She always wore a small necklace of real pearls. Her hair was dark, well streaked with grey, secured at her nape with an ordinary little comb. The only unharmonious parts of her body were her feet. She wore men’s size shoes, forty-four. When she was younger it had been hard to find anything in her size, so she had simply begun to buy men’s. But she successfully disguised her handicap through the lightness of her stride. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Kukla was not afraid of death. However, she had the feeling that she would live a long time: all the women in her family had been centenarians. And there was something else: those who came near her were inclined to think they could feel a vague current of air, something like a gentle breeze.

‘Please explain to him,’ Mr Shaker was saying, ‘that I am prepared to take on all the financial obligations, that is travel costs, hotel accommodation while he is in Los Angeles and a rapid course of English. Dr Topolanek assures me that he would give Mr Mevličko unpaid leave, if, that is, the gentleman decided not to remain in America.’

Kukla translated all of that for Mevludin.

‘Ask him what he wants me there for,’ said Mevlo.

Mr Shaker began by explaining at length the purpose and importance of his industry of potions and powders, and then said that Mr Mevličko’s job would be to advertise his products. He, Mr Shaker, had a whole team of experts in marketing. They would see to it that Mr Mevličko became a great star of promotional videos, posters, websites and other advertising material.

‘Tell him I won’t have my picture taken, not at any price,’ said Mevlo, but Kukla interrupted him.

‘And what would Mr Mevličko’s salary be?’ she asked Mr Shaker.

‘A thousand dollars for an hour of filming,’ said Mr Shaker, and added: ‘that’s a very high rate, I hope you realise.’

Kukla translated all that for Mevludin.

‘Tell him to forget it,’ said Mevlo.

‘Three thousand!’ said Mr Shaker.

‘I’m not interested, what good are dollars to me? Just look at it, it’s stuck and it won’t go down,’ said Mevlo, directing his message to no one in particular.

‘Five thousand.’

‘Are you deaf or do you just need your ears cleaned!? I’m not interested; that’s all there is to it!’

Now Mevlo was addressing Mr Shaker, who was looking to Kukla for help. Kukla, of course, did not translate what Mevludin had said.

‘He says he’s a bit nervous about the offer,’ she said.

‘Seven thousand!’ said Mr Shaker, adding, almost angrily: ‘tell Mr Mevličko that one job leads to another. I have connections in Hollywood. I’m sure that a man of his appearance will easily make a career in film as well.’

‘A career! In your dreams! I won’t have my picture taken, I won’t have folk in Bosnia seeing me like this and taking the piss,’ Mevlo dug his heels in.

‘Ten thousand!’ said Mr Shaker angrily. ‘For God’s sake, not even Naomi gets more!’

‘Naomi who?’ asked Mevlo.

‘Naomi Campbell, the model,’ explained Kukla.

‘Oh yeah, Naomi wouldn’t get out of bed for less than twenty thousand,’ said Mevludin impassively.

‘How the hell do you know, if I may ask?’ said Mr Shaker, who was quite furious by now.

‘Whoopi told me.’

‘Whoopi who?’ asked Kukla.

‘Whoopi Goldberg.’

It sounded unlikely, but in fact the name of Whoopi Goldberg had caught Mr Shaker’s eye when he was examin ing the list of famous guests at the Grand Hotel.

At that moment a young girl in a flowery summer dress, with clogs on her bare feet, approached the table. She had a pale round face scatteredown and, parting her legs a little, began rubbing her right ankle with her left foot.

‘My daughter Rosie,’ said Mr Shaker testily. His face showed the inner fleet of his hopes slowly sinking.

The girl, staring more at the ice cream dripping down the sides of her cornet than at those present, shifted the cone from her right to her left hand and offered her right hand to Kukla, then to Mevludin. A drop of ice cream slipped out of the cornet and fell onto Mevludin’s hand. Mevlo gave a start, gazing at the little drop like a gold coin that had fallen from the heavens straight onto his hand, and then he licked it attentively and smiled.

‘Tell him,’ he said quietly, ‘that I accept…’

And then he came right up to Mr Shaker’s face and repeated:

‘I em in!’

Mr Shaker hastily took out his chequebook, wrote a cheque for a considerable advance and handed it to Mevludin. Admittedly, he did this more to impress Kukla than the stubborn young Bosnian.

And what about us? We push on. Life may linger, lurking for the attack, but the tale moves on, without looking back.

2.

After a cosmetic treatment for her face, Beba decided to try something else from the rich array on offer. The promotional brochure offered bathing in hay made from meadow grasses, bathing in a mash made from oat flakes (That must be quite disgusting, thought Beba), bathing in seaweed, then various kinds of massage… Beba finally chose ‘Sweet Dreams’ – a special treatment, consisting of being steeped in a bath of warm chocolate followed by a massage. First, of course, she asked Pupa whether she could put it all on the room bill. Pupa had no objection, on the contrary:

‘Just you go and have a good soak. When you come out you’ll be like a chocolate truffle!’ she said.

A young woman in a white hospital gown led Beba into a space that looked like a film set. It was a small room with an antique copper bath in the middle. The walls were covered in greenish silk wallpaper, on one wall there was a reproduction of Renoir’s Woman with Parrot, and under it, on an old-fashioned flower stand, there was a fern. How kitschy, thought Beba. What had induced the designer to connect the greenish wallpaper, the bath and its function – with the reproduction on the wall?

Here one might add that the presence of fine art in all the rooms was one of the most striking features of the Wellness Centre. It was Dr Topolanek’s doing. He considered that agreeable and unobtrusive education delayed the process of ageing just as moderate exercise did, so he had arranged for the Wellness Centre to be literally ‘clothed’ in reproductions of well-known paintings, mostly classic art. For instance, at the entrance to the Centre he had placed a reproduction of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Fountain of Youth – a painting that was the symbolic representation of the fruits of Topolanek’s professional efforts.

Now Beba was lying back in the tub filled with warm chocolate. A loudspeaker was emitting that irritating new age music that is supposed to induce relaxation. Beba’s gaze was focused on the reproduction on the wall. And, hey, the living fern on the stand seemed to be imitating the fern on the right of Renoir’s painting. Beba also felt that the wallpaper echoed the blue-green tone of the walls in the picture. And, thanks to the fertile imagination of the hotel designer, the golden cage in Renoir’s painting was given form in reality in – the copper bath! The young woman in the sumptuous black dress, with a long red bow behind, had dark hair and a homely, girlish face. The woman was holding a parakeet on the finger of her right hand, while she fed it with her left. The whole of the woman’s body was bent towards the parakeet, and she appeared to Beba to be completely spellbound by the bird.

As she looked at the picture, Beba suddenly recalled a word from her childhood that she had hated more than any other: fanny! Little boys had peckers, and girls had fannies. That would have been all right if Beba had not once stayed as a little girl in the country with a relative who kept fan-tailed chickens in her garden. The fans of their tails had somehow got caught up in Beba’s child’s mind with that hated word fanny and their persistent pecking with the idea of little boys’ peckers. One day her relative wrung the neck of one of her fantails and they had chicken soup and meat for lunch. Peckers and fannies… Why hadn’t all this occurred to her before? That all this sexual business is connected in the male imagination with – ornithology! In the history of the male sexual imagination the role of women was constantly to pull onto themselves, and then push off, birds of all shapes and sizes. From Zeus who forced himself on Leda in the form of a swan onwards. And, in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the swan – that unambiguous companion of women – transformed itself into a more discreet and smaller companion, a parrot!

A slide show now got underway in Beba’s head, fuddled by the sweet aroma of chocolate. That famous painting by Tiepolo of a half-naked woman with a parrot… The beauty has astonishing skin, which seems to be made of milk, mother-of-pearl and blood. The young woman is wearing a pearl necklace. It is placed high on her neck, right under her jaw bone, so that it looks more like an expensive bridle than a necklace. She has a rose in her hair. Her dress has slipped off one of her shoulders, exposing her breast. The young woman is holding a copper-red parrot in her arms. Large as a hen, the parrot has gripped the woman’s hand with its claws, while its sharp beak has come dangerously close to her nipple with its mother-of-pearl sheen.

Then that Dutchman, Quirijn van Brekelenkam, from the seventeenth century. In the background of his painting a young lute-player is sitting at a table, completely absorbed in his playing, while in front of him, in the foreground, a young woman is sitting, with a parrot on her finger. She sits straight as a rod, her left hand lies relaxed in her lap, which is covered with a long white apron, while on her right hand there is – a parrot. The parrot has gripped the woman’s finger with its claws and is looking at her, while the woman gazes at the lute-player. On the floor, beside the woman’s feet, there is a jug. It is unclear whether the woman is mesmerised by the parrot on her finger, the music she is hearing or its young performer.

And then Courbet. That painting of Courbet’s of a lascivious, naked woman’s body on a crumpled bed. The woman’s legs are partly open, her luxuriant brown hair is spread sumptuously over the bed. The woman is relaxed, exhausted, as though her passionate lover has just left the room. In the background is a stand for a parrot, with a water dish on the top and crossbars at the sides. While the woman is lying there, the parrot has left its observation post – its perch – and landed on its owner’s hand. The parrot has spread both its wings wide, as though it were in a state of total ecstasy. And again, a riddle. Perhaps there was no lover, perhaps the parrot is that perfect lover, a flying penis, the tool of the male painter’s imagination, which has satisfied the woman and is now spreading its wings in satisfaction.

In Delacroix’s painting, a naked beauty is sitting on a sofa, although it looks as though she is sitting on open bales of silk. One would not notice the parrot had the beauty not let her hand dangle, followed by her sleepy face with its half-closed eyes, towards the foot of the sofa, towards a parrot crouching in the dark shadows. The naked woman is evidently playing with the parrot and seems to be about to stroke the feathery crest on its head. And again, it is not clear: is the parrot a toy, a living vibrator, a substitute for a lover or is it the lover himself? Or could it be that the woman is playing with her own genitals, embodied in – a parrot.

Then Manet’s Woman with Parrot, painted in the same year as the Courbet! Olympia is dressed from head to foot in a peach-coloured habit almost as ascetic as a nun’s. On a tall perch is her companion, a grey parrot. The parrot has bowed its head, it seems despondent. Olympia is holding a small bunch of flowers, which she has moved a little away from her nose, or perhaps she is just about to smell them. Her gaze is directed straight at the observer. At the bottom of the parrot’s perch lies a large, half-peeled orange – the one licentious detail in the painting. Who is the parrot in the picture? The woman’s grey dejected genitals or her unsatisfied companion, whose rival is that ecstatic parrot in Courbet’s painting? Or are the two painters – Manet and Courbet – sending each other secret messages about the length of their respective penises?

And then Marcel Duchamp, who paints a woman in stockings – as Courbet does in one of his paintings! The woman’s legs are parted, but, unlike Courbet, Duchamp places his parrot unambiguously at the very entrance to the woman’s vagina.

Frida Kahlo also uses parrots as a decorative detail! In one picture she puts a green parrot on her shoulder, like a pirate; in another she paints herself with four parrots, one on each shoulder and two in her lap. And she is holding a cigarette at the same time.

And René Magritte? His painting is the portrait of a young woman with loose copper-red hair. The woman has a dress with a collar made of rich white lace. There is lace also at the end of her long sleeves, like gloves. The woman is standing beside a tree in which birds are perched. One bird with a luxuriant coppery crest and a long slender beak is particularly striking. The woman has picked up another bird with both hands and is eating it as though it were a ripe fig. We can see the bird’s dark red insides, its heart and liver, but surprisingly there isn’t a drop of blood! The lace collar and cuffs remain astonishingly white. The woman has a lascivious look on her face and the painting has the unambiguous title Pleasure.

Women and their enchantment with birds… Apart from bisexual Frida Kahlo, a woman who appears in the picture as a man with a moustache and a cigarette in her hand, the authors of this implicit eroto-ornithological debauchery are all men. And, were the women to be asked, their choice of favourite bird would certainly not be a parrot but – Superman! Is it a bird? Is it a plane…?

Beba was feeling somewhat faint from the slide show in her head and the aroma of the chocolate. So she got out of the bath and went to look for the shower. In passing she caught sight of her reflection in a mirror and gave a start. She looked like a gigantic chocolate owl.

‘What about your massage, madam?’ the woman in the white coat called after her.

‘We’ll leave the massage for another time,’ said Beba, getting into the shower. Instead of raising her spirits, the bath had had quite the opposite effect. Beba felt as though she had emerged from a whirlpool which had drained all her energy.

Hurrying to tell Pupa what that stupid ‘truffle’ was like, Beba nearly collided with Mr Shaker. Catching sight of an unappealing woman, spreading a disagreeable sweet smell round her, Mr Shaker scowled.

‘Have a nice lay,’ said Beba pleasantly.

Mr Shaker said nothing, just rolled his eyes and hurried on his way.

Heavens, what an unpleasant guy! thought Beba. Because Beba, knowing that Mr Shaker and Kukla were going to play golf that afternoon, had simply wanted to wish him a nice day.

What about us? We hasten on. While life mocks us, often seeming absurd, the tale flies on through the air – like a bird!

3.

Yes, man has developed a terrific appetite for life. Since it became likely that no other life awaits him in the skies, man has decided to stay where he is for as long as possible, or in other words to chew the chewing gum of his life as lengthily as possible and amuse himself the while by blowing little bubbles. If the statistics are to be believed, the difference is truly impressive: at the beginning of the twentieth century the average lifespan was around forty-five years, in the middle of the century it had increased to sixty-six, while today, at the very beginning of the twenty-first century, the average age achieved is the fine figure of seventy-six. In the course of a mere hundred years, people have extended their life expectancy by nearly fifty per cent. Admittedly, this statistical boom has occurred in the more peaceful and richer parts of the world. Because in Africa people still die like flies, probably more quickly and effectively than ever before.

Dr Topolanek was sitting alone in the hotel lecture hall, thinking. A photograph of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was flickering on the projection screen. Today Dr Topolanek wanted to say something about the communist idea of longevity, but he had no one to say it to. The lecture hall was empty.

Yes, the communists were skilled. The new communist man had to live long, collectively and industriously, by the strength of his own will, rather than genetic inheritance. For inherit ance, even genetic, was not acknowledged. Illness, depression, suicide, physical weakness – that had all been dreamed up by the bourgeoisie, defeatists and deserters from the frontline of life. Belief in a better, hybrid tomorrow permeated all the pores of communist society. Michurin and Lysenko were concerned that what the communist masses might one day eat should be as good and abundant as possible. Later everyone laughed at them. And today everyone devours those gigantic smelly strawberries blown up with gas, but strangely no one laughs any more, nor does anyone ask any questions. Not to mention those white Dutch aubergines, which seem to have grown up in Michurin’s garden! The famous Caucasian Nikolai Chapkovsky lived under communism and died at a hundred and forty-six. Centenarians sprang up in those days like mushrooms after rain, mainly in the Caucasus, their longevity confirming the idea that their countryman, Stalin, would live if not long, then forever. He did not live especially long, or forever. Alexander Bogomolets, the author of Extending Life, invented the famous serum named after him. The serum combined with regular transfusions was his recipe for rejuvenation. Everyone laughed at him too, later: it was all part of the megalomaniac communist delusion. Today clinics offering complete blood transfusions are springing up everywhere, but only those with deep pockets can indulge themselves in a change of blood. Serums too, somewhat more advanced, are on the daily menu of those who can afford them. Gerovital, a cream made from the placenta, could only have been invented under communism, when abortion was the most common means of contraception, and here the Romanian Ana Aslan should be acknowledged… Whether the cream really was made from placenta or not no one knows, but Charles de Gaulle, Pablo Picasso, Konrad Adenauer, Salvador Dali, Charlie Chaplin, John F. Kennedy, Omar Sharif and many others made a pilgrimage to Ana Aslan, and communism did not bother them in the slightest. Mankind has always been obsessed by death, immortality and longevity. Battles have always been waged on that territory, and they are still being waged today, that is where things were always liveliest. One vast army of people – in medicine, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics – serves another army which has taken on the task of living as long as possible and looking as good as possible. They are both firmly connected, like organ donors and their recipients.

There was nothing wrong with Topolanek’s ‘theory’. The theory, as always, was frustrated by brazen, disobedient and unpredictable life. In addition to the insultingly empty hall, that ‘life’ now appeared in the doorway in the shape of an unexpected visitor, a tall, agitated old woman, who demanded, more with gestures than words, that Topolanek accompany her urgently to the golf course! Dr Topolanek turned off the projector, grabbed his doctor’s bag, which he kept with him at all times, and set off after his flustered visitor.

And what about us? We shall hurry after them. While in life one may often demur and dither, the tale hurries on – we all know whither!

4.

As they made their way to the golf course, Mr Shaker had given Kukla a vivacious account of the meaning of his existence. He was like the drawer in an old-fashioned lady’s dressing table, which emits clouds of powder when opened. Mr Shaker choked on his own words. Kukla felt sorry for him, as she did for everyone who saw their work as the only reason for their existence. She found this human machine producing words, movements and gestures amusing, until the moment when the conversation snagged on Rosie, Mr Shaker’s daughter.

‘Rosie is, unfortunately, incompatible.’

‘How do you mean, incompatible?’ asked Kukla.

‘It is our duty to make ourselves into better and more perfect beings than God made us, is it not?’ said Mr Shaker.

‘I can’t see what your daughter’s lacking,’ said Kukla.

‘There’s nothing lacking, unfortunately; on the contrary, there’s altogether too much of her.’

‘That’s just a bit of puppy fat, youthful sturdiness.’

‘Sturdiness could be the source of her future unhappiness. Unfortunately, we live in a time when even a little excess weight determines our life’s course.’

It could not be said that Mr Shaker was not concerned about his daughter. But his concern was for the product, and, in Mr Shaker’s eyes, although of course he would never have admitted it, Rosie was a kind of reject.

‘What about your wife?’

‘My late wife… She was perfect. Like you,’ said Mr Shaker.

She was perfect until she broke down. Of course Mr Shaker did not use the expression ‘broke down’, he said ‘fell ill’, but he meant ‘broke down’. The mechanism stopped working properly, and Mr Shaker had done everything in his power to get the mechanism mended. But, unfortunately, there was nothing to be done.

‘Strange,’ said Mr Shaker.

‘What’s strange?’

‘Well… When I’m with you I feel as though I were beside a fan,’ he said.

Mr Shaker became exceptionally animated when they reached the golf course, evidently because the role of teacher appealed to his vanity. Kukla didn’t have a clue about golf and Mr Shaker endeavoured to explain the rules. What had always seemed to her pointless – strolling around a grassy expanse with a stick in one’s hand and knocking a little ball into a hole – did after all have some point: being outside in the fresh air.

They were an incompatible couple. The tall, bony woman with large feet and a golf club in her hand strode across the sun-drenched grassy expanse like a kind of female knight. Her partner, a short, breathless man, rushed energetically over the grass like a lawn mower. Kukla watched him: he was saying something, waving his club, gesticulating, demonstrating movements, making her imitate them, waving his arms and hitting the ball energetically with his club.

While Mr Shaker was preoccupied with the idea that all incompatible bodies must be transformed into compatible ones, Kukla had always thought that there was too much noise in this world and amused herself imagining how nice it would be to be able to control that noise, to turn off talkative people like radios, to put silencers on sharp sounds, to turn down the shrill din of ambulance sirens and amplify birdsong. As she waited for the green light at crossings, she imagined stopping the traffic completely for a moment and serenely crossing the road. These were childish imaginings, daydreams, her mental exit lights. Sometimes those daydreams were so strong that they seemed quite real. When she was a little girl, the sheer force of her intentions had sometimes made things happen: something would shift, scrape, collapse, fall onto the floor. With time she learned to walk cautiously through the world, as though on eggshells, quiet and silent as a shadow, accompanied by currents of air whose origin she could never fathom.

Come on, gesticulated Mr Shaker, hit the ball. Kukla thought he was far further away than he really was. For God’s sake, come on, the man on the green horizon waved his arms, and Kukla finally swung her club, hit the ball, the ball spun in the air and took flight. The man jumped up and down with delight, bravo, a perfect shot, he made a fist with his thumb pointing up and waved it at Kukla, congratulating her. The little ball hovered for a moment in the air, or at least so it seemed to Kukla, and then with all its force it plummeted and lodged in the man’s wide-open mouth. The man dropped to the ground, as though felled.

When Kukla reached him, Mr Shaker was lying motionless on the grass. The little ball had trickled out of his mouth like saliva and was now calmly settled by his head, like a miniature gravestone. Mr Shaker’s death had been crouching inside an innocent golf ball.

Kukla rushed to the hotel to find Dr Topolanek. They went back together to where Mr Shaker’s body was lying. It seemed to Kukla that in the meantime his body had shrunk. In the course of those ten minutes it had taken her to go and fetch Dr Topolanek, Mr Shaker’s body had condensed and, if it was true that there was a soul which parted from the body after death, then Mr Shaker’s soul weighed as much as ten golf balls.

‘Heart attack!’ announced Dr Topolanek.

And then, smoothing his hair, ruffled by an invisible fan, he turned to Kukla and added:

‘I do hope that this disagreeable incident will not have put you off golf forever. Golf is an exceptionally fine sport.’

And what about us? We carry on without hesitation. While we may all be targeted by a drawn bow, the tale speeds like Hermes and is never slow.

5.

While everything in a story goes quickly and easily, it’s not usually like that in real life. This time, however, real life surpassed the story in speed and ease. Here’s what happened. Before she set off on this trip, Beba had taken out her pension and meagre savings, and changed it all into euros. The bank gave her a five-hundred-euro note and some change. Beba took the note without thinking. How could she possibly have known all the problems that she would encounter in an EU country, when she tried to change that cursed euro note?

At the hotel reception they told her to try the hotel bureau de change, while the hotel bureau de change directed her to the local banks. She tried two or three banks, and they all gave her the same answer: why didn’t she change the note at a branch of her own bank?

‘But my bank’s in Zagreb!’

‘So why didn’t you change it in Zagreb?’

‘That’s where they gave it to me.’

‘Why don’t you use a credit card?’

‘I haven’t got one.’

‘You’re travelling abroad and you don’t have a credit card!’

‘Not everyone has a credit card, you know!’

‘It’s just as well you told us, because otherwise we might have changed that note, but only if you had shown us a credit card.’

‘I’ve got a passport.’

‘A passport isn’t a relevant document any more. You know how it is with passports, anyone can get an illegal one nowadays for just a few hundred euros!’

‘So, what should I do?’

‘Try an exchange bureau.’

Beba tried several. They told her that five-hundred-euro notes were notorious.

‘Why?’

‘They’ve been forged.’

‘Well, you presumably have those machines that verify notes.’

‘Yes, but they’re no use, since the North Korean forgeries came on the scene.’

Beba was going to ask what on earth North Korea had to do with it all, but she decided against it. Obviously, nothing was going to help.

And it had all started with Beba wanting to buy some hair dye, to fix those grey hairs of hers which had flashed that morning in the Wellness Centre mirror after her chocolate soak. She really could not have asked Pupa for something so trivial. But, apart from that, Beba wanted to have a bit of money of her own, for little needs, for coffee and fruit juice, or hair dye.

In short, when she reached the hotel having got nowhere, Beba found herself breezing into the casino, more by chance than design. At the entrance, she was met by a wave of clamouring voices mingled with the metallic sounds of the roulette wheel, so that for a moment she felt as though she had wandered into a monkey house. But since Beba considered herself a person for whom nothing human is strange, she stopped at the first roulette table, right by the entrance, to see what something she had only ever seen in films looked like in real life.

Most of the players were laying fifty-euro notes on the table. Although some did put a hundred down. The croupier gathered the money from the table and dropped it into an opening, where the notes disappeared at lightning speed. Then he distributed brightly coloured round plastic chips to each of the players, and the players placed them on various numbers. And then the croupier spun the roulette wheel with the little ball, said something in French and passed his hand over the table as though he were clearing away invisible crumbs. That meant that from that moment no one could place any more chips on the numbers or alter their position. The roulette wheel came slowly to rest and the little ball landed in a metal section with a number on it.

Beba liked the look of it, and thought maybe she should try her luck and incidentally change that wretched five-hundredeuro note. On the opposite side of the table sat that morose Russian jerk with the wild hair, who had mocked her so unpleasantly at the Wellness Centre. He was holding a glass in his hand and shifting a Cuban cigar around between his teeth. Beba, who was standing to one side, felt uncomfortable about drawing attention to herself, so she whispered discreetly to the croupier to buy her chips to a value of fifty euros, and give her the change in cash. And she placed her note on the table. The croupier nodded, took the note, put it into the opening and the note disappeared with the speed of lightning. Unlike the other players, who were given a heap of chips, to her great disappointment Beba was given only one. She put it on number 32. That was the first number that occurred to her, nothing significant, just the number of the entrance to the block of flats where she lived. And just as she was expecting the croupier to give her back the rest of her money, he spun the wheel and waved his hand over the table, saying something in French. The little ball spun and spun, and finally came to rest on number 32. Now, instead of plastic chips, Beba received a sheaf of little plastic cards, also in bright colours. The people who had been watching the game muttered something, but Beba did not hear them properly. The din that broke over Beba made her feel a little dizzy. And, truly, as though something had happened to her hearing, the sounds that reached her ears seemed to be coming through cotton wool. Beba followed the croupier’s hands carefully, hoping that he would give her back the rest of her money. She whispered to him again to give her back the rest of her money and the croupier nodded again, and Beba laid her bright plastic cards on number 32 again. In the circumstances she really could not think of a different number, and besides 32 was right in front of her. And again she had no time to think or exchange a word with the croupier; he was already passing his hand over the table as though brushing invisible crumbs and saying something in French. The little ball spun in the roulette wheel, and when it came to a stop the little ball was once again in the opening of number 32. Beba was quite deafened by the clamour and shouting, but again she could not make anything out. Now the croupier handed her a still larger sheaf of bright little plastic cards. Beba gathered them all up, before they could be put back on the table, and now asked the croupier loudly to give her back those four hundred and fifty euros. The croupier told her to collect her money at the cash desk.

‘You might have told me straight away,’ said Beba and, clutching her little cards in her hand, she tried to find the cash desk through the crush, but halfway there she was met by a gentleman carrying a bottle of champagne on a tray. The gentleman insisted on giving her the champagne, but Beba said she had not ordered anything. They all just want to take your money, she thought, and asked the gentleman where the cash desk was. The gentleman was very kind and took her straight there. The lady at the cash desk asked Beba for her bright little cards, and then in return showed her a pile of notes, but Beba said that she would like her four hundred and fifty euros.

‘Would you like us to put the rest into your bank account?’ asked the lady at the cash desk.

‘But my account’s in Zagreb,’ said Beba.

‘We can transfer your money to your account, if you like,’ said the lady.

Beba was afraid that she would be left without change for coffee and fruit juice again, and said that she would prefer to take the money in cash.

‘In that case, madam, I would advise you to deposit the money in the hotel safe,’ said the woman at the cash desk kindly.

‘Do what you like,’ said Beba, ‘but please let me have my four hundred and fifty euros.’

And then that gentleman, who was still carrying the bottle of champagne on the tray, said something to the lady at the cash desk and she handed Beba a form with numbers on it, which Beba had to sign and attach her passport to. Beba was relieved when the lady finally handed her a bundle of four hundred and fifty euros. The gentleman thrust the bottle of champagne into one of her hands and then shook the other one, which was exceedingly strange.

The whole time, Beba had felt that something was wrong with her. She was slightly deaf, as though she had just got off an aeroplane. And her sense of balance was haywire; she swayed as though she was drunk. Indeed, she kept thinking she was going to fall over. And, just as her eyes began to mist, Arnoš Kozeny materialised beside her and took her by the arm.

‘Come and sit down. Over here, in the restaurant… You’re white as a sheet! Is everything all right?

‘It’s all white, don’t hurry,’ said Beba.

Arnoš called the waiter and ordered two French cognacs, which the waiter brought with the speed of lightning.

‘Get that down you, you’ll feel better,’ ordered Arnoš.

And Beba downed the cognac, and she really did feel a bit better. If nothing else, at least her ears had popped.

‘Well, warmest congratulations!’ said Arnoš, raising his glass and clinking it against Beba’s.

‘What for?’ she asked.

‘How do you mean, what for? How much did you bag? Go on, tell me!’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘People are saying you cleaned the casino out of half a million euros and that you’ve ruined that Russian.’

‘What Russian?’

‘The Russian, they call him Kotik, he’s the local con artist and Mafioso.’

Beba felt a wave of exhaustion sweep over her again.

‘Are you yelling the truth?’

‘You’re a wealthy woman, my dear,’ said Arnoš.

‘Me? Healthy?! ’

‘Have a look in your handbag, they must have given you a figure…’

Beba opened her bag, took out the form and showed it to Arnoš. It had the hotel casino’s stamp on it, and some signatures, including Beba’s.

‘Why yes!’ said Arnoš. ‘That’s what I thought, more than half a million. €612,500 tax free, to be precise.’

‘How did that happen?’ Beba asked as though a great misfortune had occurred.

‘I don’t know. Ever since I’ve been hanging around this casino, I’ve never seen anyone scoop up so much cash so quickly, effectively and in such a stupid way. Didn’t you notice that they were all freaked out?’

‘Why were they eked out?’

‘Dear child, you’re in a state of shock, you don’t know what you’re saying,’ said Arnoš sympathetically, giving Beba back her piece of paper.

‘Put that away. And remember that Latin saying: Dantur opes nullis nunc nisi divitibus! Let me see you to your room, I can see that you can barely stand.’

Beba leaned her full weight against Arnoš. She was grateful that he was there. She would think about everything in the morning, it was best to weep on it.

Here perhaps it should be said that in addition to her tendency in moments of excitement to pronounce words wrongly, Beba sometimes also reeled off series of numbers. But of course she was not aware of it. So once when she happened to be involved in a short-lived love affair with someone and he had hit her, instead of returning the blow, or bursting into tears, or saying anything, Beba had responded to the shock by listing a series of numbers. The guy was a creep, bone idle, but he did not lack imagination, so he wrote down the numbers, the next day he bought a lottery ticket, and, what do you know, he won a substantial amount of money, which he did not mention to Beba of course. After that the relationship went rapidly downhill, because the guy often hit her, frightened or insulted her, in the hope that she would again spit out some winning combination. Beba soon sent him packing, but the guy did not leave her in peace until she started another love affair, also short-lived, with a policeman.

What about us? We charge ahead at full steam. While life may not know where the rudder and the prow are, the tale cuts through the billows, following its star!

6.

Who knows what factors shape our biographies? Lives can be very different, but Kukla’s life was like a bad film. And a very bad film at that. Perhaps Kukla’s future life’s choices had been determined by an incident that had occurred long ago, when Kukla was a very young girl. And what occurred was something comical, or tragic, or even banal: judgements of this kind generally depend on whether the person is a partici pant or an observer. In short, in her first sexual contact with a young man, inexperienced as she was herself, Kukla had what the medical profession calls a vaginal spasm. Although later on she found out something about it, she was not consoled by the fact that it was neither as bizarre nor as rare as people think. But in those days psychotherapists and sexual therapists barely existed. Be that as it may, Kukla buried that disagreeable episode deep in her subconscious and simply forgot it. However, the episode did not forget Kukla, and continued to disrupt and interfere with her life. To make matters worse, Kukla married that unfortunate young man, they were connected by the shame of the unpleasant incident, but after their wedding it turned out that the young man had leukaemia and very soon Kukla became a widow. And a very young widow at that.

Kukla studied English language and literature at university, she got a job teaching in a secondary school and stayed stuck in the same school her entire working life, until she retired. Kukla’s second husband was some fifteen years older than her, he was a prominent politician, but almost immediately after the wedding he had a stroke, and Kukla spent the next ten years nursing this man who had turned into a demanding houseplant. And a very demanding one at that.

After her second husband died, Kukla married a third time, this time someone who was already an invalid, a well-known writer, who after an unfortunate fall down some stairs was permanently confined to a wheelchair. The writer was a few years older than her and when she was sixty Kukla became a widow for the third time.

Kukla was a quiet, calm person; she spread serenity around her, she never talked about herself and never complained about anything, so that there was no reason for people not to like her. She had no children. There were children, in fact, of her second and third husbands, from their previous marriages, but the children were grown-up, they lived their own lives and had very little contact with Kukla.

Although she would never have admitted it herself, Kukla’s husbands served her as a shield: as a married woman she had tangible cover that there was nothing wrong with her. She had also served her husbands as a shield, although she would have sworn that this was not the case: being married to a woman like her was more than tangible proof that there was nothing wrong with them. Had she wanted, Kukla could have married fifty times, her qualities were highly prized. She was a perfect wife, a wife-cover, wife-prosthesis, wife-mask. She accepted her role, she made no demands, she did not attract attention in any way. She was feminine, but not provocative, open to a certain point, pleasant, but not overly so. And, what was most important, for all her above average height, Kukla gave the impression of being fragile and so instantly aroused protective impulses in men. And then, perhaps just because of her exceptional height, as well as the fact that she chose invalids as her protectors, those relations quickly changed, and the men perceived Kukla as a protector, nurse, mother, surrogate wife, all in the one package.

As far as Kukla herself was concerned, she had worked things out roughly as follows: the Fates had meted her out a destiny based on a ‘bad joke’, and she had done all she could to ensure that the ‘joke’ never saw the light of day. She had buried three husbands and remained a virgin, in virtually the literal sense. She tormented and belittled herself, saw herself as a ‘grave-digger’. Under her hand even the flowers on her balcony failed to flourish! She was convinced that her glance was enough to dry out even cactuses on the window-sill. For some reason those dried-out cactuses really got to her…

And then one day a young man appeared. He was writing a doctorate on Kukla’s third husband, the writer Bojan Kovač. He was interested in everything about this ‘enigmatic’ man. What intrigued him most was whether there was anything left in the ‘great writer’s’ papers. He was haunted by the idea of understatement, on which, according to him, Kovač’s work was based, particularly as it was precisely that – understatement as an integral element of the novel – that was the topic of his doctoral thesis. ‘Kovač is the Mona Lisa of Croatian literature,’ the young man claimed, ‘the enigmatic smile of his prose is the key to reading his whole opus.’

Kovač had left absolutely nothing, as Kukla knew better than anyone. He had written nothing for the last few years, mostly because of his illness. They had lived on her salary and his barely existent royalties. It would have been hard for him to write anything, because with time his disability was capped by diabetes, and then Alzheimer’s… ‘Is it possible that he left nothing at all?’ asked the young man. ‘What makes you think he left nothing? On the contrary, he left a lot,’ said Kukla. ‘I can help you organise his archive,’ the young man offered pleasantly. There was a great deal of material, over the last years Kovač had not been able to write himself, because of his arthritis, and she had put everything on the computer, she explained. She was Kovač’s typist; they had worked for ten hours a day, particularly just before the end, ‘because Kovač was determined to finish that novel,’ she added. ‘What novel? Can I see it?’ Of course, but not immediately, she would need time to sort out the manuscript… ‘Can you at least tell me the title of the novel?’ ‘Oh yes,’ said Kukla, ‘Desert Rose, that’s the working title. ‘Desert Rose, hmm, an unusual title, feminine, more suited to cheap romances than Kovač,’ observed the young man.

And so Kukla began to write. Later it occurred to her that she might find something else among Kovač’s papers: a short romance, for instance, or an unusually interesting essay-novel that he had written earlier, foreseeing events that were yet to happen. Yes, she knew that Kovač’s right to a second life was in her hands, that it depended only on her, Kukla.

But then, when the young man appeared, there was only one thing on her mind: to maintain his attention for as long as possible. And she succeeded, only for a time, but that was enough. And the young man was clever, he got his doctorate without waiting to see his favourite writer’s last novel, and then he got a scholarship, set off to America and disappeared without trace.

Given that Kukla’s life was in any case like a very bad film – at least that is what she thought – let us hope that it will support this one last observation: Kukla never forgot the young man’s attention. His attention had been like dew dropping onto a desert rose – and the foreword to Kukla’s second life.

What about us? While life stories are muddled and extended, the tale slips along in its rush to be ended.

7.

It is not true that Mevludin knew no English at all. He knew a lot, of course he did. That is why he said to the girl who was standing in front of him, crying bitterly:

‘I am sorry, I understand the full extent of your damage.’

Mevlo knew that kind of BBC and CNN English and he was in a position to enunciate eloquently such sentences as: There has been no let-up in the fighting in Bosnia. Heavy shelling continued throughout the night… Mevludin knew a lot, he knew about peace negotiations, about ceasefires and the ceasefire appears to be holding… He also knew about sporadic gunfire, progress towards a settlement, wail of ambulance sirens, the horror of the early-morning blast, he knew all about a pool of blood, explosion, reminders of horror and many, many other things.

That is why he said to the girl:

‘Stay calm but tense.’

Mevlo remembered the sentence The atmosphere in the city remains calm but tense as the ceasefire appears to be holding and he was sure that his words would comfort the girl. The girl glanced at him in horror, as though she had come face to face with smelly socks, and went on sobbing.

Mevlo considered what he could do to console the girl. Then he remembered the cheque that Mr Shaker had given him. He took it out of the little pocket in his jacket, tapped the girl on the shoulder and said:

‘Look! Take it…’

The girl looked at him with the same expression, as though there were smelly socks in front of her nose, leaned her elbows on the table, laid her head on her folded arms as on a pillow and continued to cry.

‘Look!’

Mevludin tore the cheque into little pieces and tossed the pieces into the air like confetti. For a moment the girl watched the little pieces of paper floating through the air, stopped crying, and then remembered that she had been crying, and laid her head back on the table, arranging her folded arms like a pillow, and carried on crying.

Mevludin looked at her lovely round shoulders shaking with sobs. He felt helpless.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, love, do stop crying, you’re going to melt clean away. And then what’ll I have left? Tepid water?’ Mevludin whispered in his Bosnian, a language Rosie could not understand.

And then Mevludin thought that maybe the girl was hungry, she had probably not eaten anything all day, and he had some food in his bag that he had forgotten about, a boiled egg and a slice of bread. Mevlo placed the boiled egg and slice of bread in front of the girl. For a moment she raised her face out of the tangle of her copper-coloured hair, and then laid her forehead back on the pillow of her folded arms. Her sobs were slightly weaker, or so it seemed to him.

Mevlo took the egg and started to peel it. And, what do you know, as he was peeling the egg, out of the blue, Mevlo was visited by a life-saving recollection. Once, while he was massaging one of his guests, the guest had demanded that they play him his favourite song during the massage, and he had explained the words of the song, so that Mevlo remembered it. When he left, the guest had even presented him with the CD…

‘You’re my thrill…’ said Mevlo.

The sobs stopped, but the girl still did not move.

‘You do something to me…’

The girl was as still as a little bug.

‘Nothing seems to matter…’

The girl was silent.

‘Here’s my heart on a silver platter…’ he said, handing the girl the egg.

The girl peeled her forehead off the table, and, without looking at Mevlo, took the egg with her pink, child’s fingers. First she nibbled the end indifferently and then went on nibbling the egg, gazing at an imaginary point in front of her. Mevlo crumbled bread with his fingers. He could see, as though through a magnifying glass, a little drop of yolk trembling on the girl’s lip. A leftover tear slipped out of her eye and came to rest on the drop of yolk. Mevlo broke off a piece of bread, picked up the drop of yolk and the tear with it and put it into his mouth. The girl watched him with wide-open eyes.

In that instant, Mevlo felt that the tension eight inches below his navel was easing. As though something heavy had broken off him and fallen soundlessly onto the floor. Mevlo knew perfectly well what was happening. Just as that wretched shell had cast a spell on him, so this girl with the egg in her hand had broken it.

‘Where is my will, why this strange ceasefire…’ whispered Mevlo.

The girl smiled. Those copper freckles on her face began to shine with a miraculous glow, and her wide-apart greenish eyes sparkled like two little pools.

1.

First thing in the morning, Beba popped into the Wellness Centre to invite Mevludin to a little celebration.

‘Mashallah! I heard,’ said Mevlo warmly. ‘So what’ll you do now, love?’ he added anxiously, as though Beba’s win in the casino was a great misfortune.

‘I’ve no idea. But, what’s happened to you?’ Beba asked, as Mevludin had fervently hoped she would.

‘That thing of mine… finally drooped!’ he said brightly.

And Mevlo told Beba what had happened to him the previous evening, while he was consoling Rosie.

Beba wanted to say something like ‘congratulations’, but then it seemed inappropriate, so she just said:

‘So that’s you sorted.’

‘I wish I was,’ he sighed.

‘Come to the pool, and we’ll talk,’ said Beba.

Dr Topolanek showed exceptional understanding for his three guests’ idea, all the more so when Beba rewarded his understanding with a substantial wad of notes. Dr Topolanek ordered a notice to be put up announcing that the pool was closed due to the repair of an unexpected fault, and the three old ladies had the whole place to themselves. The hotel staff carried in vases of flowers, with broad smiles on their faces, as they imagined what fun the three aged nymphs would have in the pool. When Beba thrust a flattering tip into each of their hands, they all became suddenly serious and now they carried the flowers with dignity, as though at a funeral. They brought special sun-loungers for ‘the elderly and less agile’. Beba had found a child’s one-piece swimming costume for Pupa in the local shop. It had a stupid Teletubbies design on it, but it was better than nothing, she thought, so that problem was solved. Pupa stubbornly insisted on keeping her long white socks on, as she was not allowed to go into the water in her fur boot. The staff placed Pupa carefully on the lounger in the shape of a horizontal ‘S’, and pushed her off into the waters of the pool. Beba had ordered champagne and a lavish selection of pastries from the hotel confectioner’s, which was all arranged on trays on the very edge of the pool. The only other person left in the pool room was a young waiter who opened the bottle of champagne, poured it into the glasses and then silently withdrew.

‘Well, cheers!’ said Beba with a smile on her face. The three old ladies clinked glasses. The water was agreeably warm, the champagne chilled. Beba took a round chocolate cake from the tray on the edge of the pool and put it into her mouth.

‘Girls, this is amazing!’

Then she placed a selection of little cakes on a china plate for Pupa.

‘Mmmmm…’ mumbled Pupa with pleasure, and in a few seconds she had devoured the lot.

Beba and Kukla were astonished by Pupa’s sudden enthusiasm for sweet things. If anyone had shown a dedicated delight in food, it was Beba.

For a moment, Beba felt a little downcast. For the first time in her life, she could feel the power of money on her own skin. She had never in her life had money; she had lived from pay-cheque to pay-cheque, not even thinking about money. Money is like a coat made of the most expensive fur, she thought now. People treat a woman in a fur coat entirely differently from a woman in a sports jacket, and no one would be able to convince her otherwise.

‘Money is like a magic wand,’ said Beba.

‘How do you mean?’ asked Kukla.

‘As soon as you show that you have money, people who had looked at you like scum until then suddenly treat you as though you were Kate Moss!’

‘Ich deck mein schmerz mit mein nerz!’ said Pupa.

‘People simply respect you more,’ said Beba primly.

‘Money is shit. People are like flies. And where do flies land, if not on shit,’ said Pupa, resolutely bringing the conversation to an end.

Beba was a little offended at first because Pupa and Kukla did not appear to be particularly pleased about her winnings. She had dreamed up this little celebration for them, as a treat, but they were indifferent, or that is how it seemed to her. But then, thought Beba, she could not take credit for the money; it had come to her by chance. Why should they praise and congratulate her? On her stupid good fortune?

At that moment Mevludin, who had clearly skived off work, because he was wearing his ‘uniform’, burst into the pool room.

‘Well, well, well! What do you mean by starting the party without me, eh?’

‘Come on, we’re waiting for you,’ called Beba brightly.

Mevlo grabbed a glass from the invisible waiter and then, slipping off his clogs, walked slowly into the pool in his wide trousers, little waistcoat and turban.

‘Hey, my ladies! Here you are soaking in the pool like gherkins in brine. Well, then, cheers, my lovelies! And I want to toast my granny as well: I sent her some money a few days ago so she could have lovely new teeth made, and stop clicking like castanets all over the place,’ Mevlo chattered, and then he stopped in amazement.

Coming face to face with a little old lady on a floating lounger, wearing white socks and a swimming costume from which the Teletubbies gazed out at him, for a moment Mevludin felt as though he were in the presence of some ancient divinity.

‘Excuse me for jabbering on like this, madam,’ said Mevludin.

With almost youthful sweetness, the lady offered him her little, dry hand. Mevludin was touched by this hand that resembled a bird’s claw, and then he was ashamed of his chattering.

‘Well, Mevlo, you’re right welcome, boy,’ said Beba cheerfully.

‘Ah, my lovelies, it’s all very well for you, drinking champagne and soaking yourselves in the pool,’ Mevludin opened his mouth again, but this time he addressed Beba.

‘But you’re drinking and soaking yourself too.’

‘Maybe I am, but I’m not happy.’

‘Why not?’ asked Pupa.

‘She knows,’ said Mevludin, pointing to Beba.

‘Shall I tell them?’ asked Beba.

‘Go on, tell them, love. I’ve got nothing to hide. Good things keep mum, while misfortune kicks out, showing its bare bum.’

‘Mevlo’s in love,’ explained Beba.

‘Who with?’ asked Pupa.

‘You know, that little American girl, we told you…’

‘So you’ve been blathering to all and sundry!’ said Mevlo crossly.

‘No, I haven’t, honestly, no one knows apart from the three of us!’

‘Kukla knows.’

‘Well, that’s three, presumably.’

The women burst out laughing.

‘Honestly! It’s all very well for you to wet yourselves laughing!’ said Mevlo.

‘That’s right, it’s not nice for us to be cackling, when the girl’s lost her father!’ said Beba.

‘God rest his soul, rahmetli Mr Shaker,’ said Mevlo.

‘When did it happen?’ asked Pupa.

‘Yesterday.’

‘How?’

‘The guy kicked the bucket.’

‘How?’

‘He suffocated on a golf ball.’

‘What a lovely way to die!’ said Pupa.

Kukla drank the rest of her champagne in silence, while Mevlo, Beba and Pupa discussed Mr Shaker’s ‘lovely’ death and philosophised on the theme ‘here today, gone tomorrow’. She did not seem particularly interested in their conversation. But she did give a little start when one of Pupa’s observations reached her ear.

‘Fine. Now there’s nothing in the way of your happiness!’ said Pupa, curving her long neck and directing her bright gaze in Mevludin’s direction.

How lively she’s become, all of a sudden! thought Kukla, who was anxious about Pupa’s sudden chattiness. Because on the whole she dozed or said nothing and this unexpected liveliness did not bode well.

‘I’m in the way of my happiness, like a log,’ Mevlo replied.

‘Mevlo thinks he’s not good enough for the girl, that he doesn’t speak English, which is true, and that he lacks polish,’ explained Beba.

Here Pupa raised herself up a little on her lounger and asked in a serious tone:

‘Do you pick your nose in the girl’s presence?’

‘No, I don’t, I swear by my granny,’ said Mevlo, astonished by the question.

‘Are you stingy?’ Pupa went on.

‘No, I’m not, I swear by my mother.’

‘Remember, there’s nothing worse than a stingy man!’

‘I’m not stingy, I swear by Tito!’

‘Do you chatter a lot in the girl’s presence?’

‘Well, I like talking, I can’t say I don’t, but I control myself… And anyway I can’t speak English,’ he replied candidly.

‘You’re as handsome as Apollo, you don’t pick your nose, you’re not stingy and you don’t talk too much. There’s nothing at all the matter with you!’ announced Pupa in the tone of a doctor who was a hundred per cent sure of her diagnosis.

Beba burst out laughing. Even Kukla laughed, but like someone who was just learning how to do it. Her throat just let out a sound like whinnying.

‘Who’s this Apollo guy?’ Mevlo whispered to Beba.

‘She’s saying that you look terrific, and she can’t see what the problem is.’

‘What’s the good of it if I don’t have even the remotest hint of a brain?’ said Mevludin, turning to Pupa.

‘You have clever hands!’ Beba leapt to Mevlo’s defence.

‘Beba’s right. Do you know how many children I’ve brought into the world with these hands?’ said Pupa, for some reason spreading out the fingers of one hand.

Mevludin stared in awe at the old lady on the lounger, who now reminded him of a holy chicken, because for a moment it seemed to him that instead of her hand she had spread her wing.

‘I don’t know, madam, perhaps you can tell me how to improve my situation. You’re older, wiser, you’re educated, so I assume, you can’t altogether have forgotten the syllabus,’ said Mevlo, evidently enchanted by Pupa.

Beba moved away for a moment and observed the scene. Standing in water up to his waist, a young man in wide trousers, with a little waistcoat pulled over his naked torso and a turban on his head, was gazing in reverence at a little old lady, in the shape of a horizontal letter S, wearing a child’s swimming costume with the Teletubbies printed on it, floating on a lounger. The old lady resembled a hen, while the young man looked like a hero out of A Thousand and One Nights.

‘Shall we order another bottle of champagne?’ suggested Beba.

Here it should be added that in reality everything went far more slowly. The reality of a story, however, rarely corresponds to the reality of life. Or, in other words: while in life a cat struggles to catch its prey, in the tale, like a bullet, it strikes home straight away.

Mevlo signalled to the invisible waiter to bring another bottle of champagne. They poured it out, sipped it slowly and then Beba, who had resolved to help Mevlo come what may, made a solemn proposal:

‘I’ve got a suggestion: let each of the three of us choose and describe her ideal man, and then it will be easier for Mevlo to see what he’s lacking!’

The women looked at each other. Who knows when they might last have had a conversation along these lines? At school? Beba had evidently drunk too much champagne and it had made her childish. However, what happened next was something quite other than the participants could have anticipated. To start with no one had expected any response at all from Pupa let alone an immediate one, but, nevertheless, it was Pupa who piped up:

‘My ideal man is Superman.’

‘Why Superman?’

‘Because Superman is the best, quickest, cheapest and most comfortable means of transport!’ said Pupa and her blue eyes sparkled with a girlish gleam.

‘Just because he’s mobile?’ asked Beba.

‘And because he’s a handyman.’

‘What’s that when it’s at home?’ Mevlo asked Kukla.

‘Someone with golden hands who fixes everything round the house.’

‘Superman can weld a ton of steel with one glance, so he’d certainly be able to fix a cooker, a blender or a blocked water pipe. He could also be a home diagnostic centre, so you wouldn’t have to hang about in hospital queues forever. All he has to do is look at you with those X-ray eyes of his!’ prattled Beba.

‘There’s something else,’ said Pupa.

‘What?’

‘Superman mends the world. He fights evil.’

‘Like Tito!’ Mevlo burst in.

Here it should be explained that Mevludin was one of those Bosnians who valued the long-dead president of former Yugoslavia, Tito, and who were convinced that had Tito been alive in Yugoslavia, which meant in Bosnia too, there would have been no war, and therefore no shell that had so fundamentally altered Mevlo’s life.

Mevlo looked downcast.

‘I’m not qualified.’

‘Why?’ asked Pupa seriously.

‘I can fix a leaking pipe for you in a jiffy, I can change a tyre, I can unscrew a bulb and change that, but when it comes to mending the world, I can’t do that… When that war flared up in our country, what did I do to stop it? Nothing!’

‘You’ve got golden hands, you know that,’ said Beba.

‘That’s what people say.’

‘Well, just imagine that Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladíc, instead of going to The Hague, turn up on your massage table!’

‘I’d wring their necks!’

‘There you are, clever hands have great power,’ said Beba, although she was not too sure of her idea about the clever hands.

‘What about you, Beba, who’s your choice?’ Kukla cut Beba’s prattling short.

‘Hmm… it’s difficult.’

‘Come on, love, think of something,’ said Mevludin.

‘You all know who Tarzan was?’ said Beba brightly.

‘Of course!’ said Kukla, Pupa and Mevludin at the same moment.

‘But do you know his real name?’

‘Tarzan,’ Mevlo blurted out.

‘Tarzan’s real name is John Clayton, Lord Greystoke!’ said Beba triumphantly.

‘What are you implying?’

‘Half-ape, half-lord! That’s my ideal man!’ Beba burst out.

The three of them started giggling: Pupa asthmatically, Kukla whinnyingly and Beba throatily. Mevlo looked dejected again:

‘There you are, I’m not qualified again, love.’

‘Why?’

‘The monkey bit I can manage, but as for being a lord, there’s just no way!’ he said.

Once again it should be said that in reality, in this case the watery, poolside one, everything happened far more slowly. But while life will dither and shilly-shally, the tale’s seven-league boots leap over hill and valley.

‘Now it’s your turn, Kukla!’ said Beba.

‘I don’t know…’

‘Oh, come on; it’s not fair to the others!’

They all waited tensely for Kukla’s answer. Kukla grew serious, she frowned a bit, sipped a little champagne and then said, slowly:

‘The devil.’

‘What do you mean, the devil?’

‘The devil is my ideal man,’ said Kukla calmly.

‘Why?’ they all asked together, uneasily.

‘Throughout history the devil was the most dangerous opponent of ordinary men. Superman cannot be an ideal man. Still less Tarzan. The devil is a man with a long, powerful and convincing history of seduction. The devil is the only opponent of God Himself, who is, as we know, also a man.’

They all fell silent, because it seemed that there was some truth in Kukla’s answer.

‘Ah well, that counts me out as well!’ Mevlo burst out, breaking the silence.

‘Why?’

‘What do you mean, why, love? My soul is as soft as a Bosnian plum, you can’t be a devil with such a wishy-washy heart!’

‘But the devil likes women!’ said Beba.

‘So what?’

‘You like women too!’

‘I do, my dears, I like you all!’ said Mevlo.

‘The very fact that you like women qualifies you to be an ideal man!’ Beba pronounced her verdict.

It will not be inappropriate to observe once more that in reality everything took a lot longer. For while life always tends to drag its idle feet, the tale dashes on, brisk, swift and fleet.

‘Isn’t it surprising,’ said Beba thoughtfully.

‘Isn’t what surprising, love?’

‘Well, the fact that, actually, very few people actually like us, women.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Kukla.

‘The only people who like us are transvestites!’ said Beba bitterly, then she added: ‘And Mevlo!’

All three of them – Beba, who was a bit the worse for wear, Kukla and Mevlo – failed to notice that Pupa’s lounger had floated away. And when they did realise that Pupa was not with them, they turned round and spotted her lounger at the other end of the pool. Her head had slumped onto her chest, a little to one side, and now she looked even more like a hen.

‘She’s nodded off again,’ said Beba.

‘Why is her hand in the air?’ asked Kukla in alarm.

‘Why not?’

‘She’s sleeping with her hand in the air?’

Truly, Pupa was sleeping in an unusual position, with her hand slightly raised, and her fist clenched.

Kukla, Beba and Mevlo put their glasses down on the edge of the pool and hurried towards Pupa. When they got close, they saw that her two fingers were clenched in an unambiguous gesture.

‘Maybe she was a bit tipsy and was showing us two fingers,’ said Beba.

‘Maybe she’s kicked the bucket,’ Mevlo burst out.

‘God, Mevlo, call the doctor!’ screamed Beba.

Dr Topolanek came at once. Nurses lifted Pupa out of the pool. Dr Topolanek felt her pulse, pressed her jugular vein, lifted her eyelids… No, there was not the slightest doubt, Pupa had finally passed over into the next world.

‘Eighty-eight is a ripe old age,’ said Dr Topolanek.

He wanted, in truth, to add that it was nothing compared to Emma Faust Tillman, who died aged a hundred and thirteen, but he realised that his enthusiasm with regard to longevity would be inappropriate in these circumstances. So he just added:

‘May she rest in peace.’

2.

Who knows what Pupa was thinking about as she drifted away on her lounger towards the far end of the pool? Perhaps at a certain moment she gathered that the warm, cheerful voices that had surrounded her had grown quieter and then disappeared altogether, and she was suddenly immersed in a silence as dense as cotton wool. The brightly coloured blotches – the faces of Kukla, Beba and the young man in the turban – gradually disappeared and she found herself in a world without colour, where it seemed to her that she had already died and that now the nursemaid Death was rocking her in the warm Lethe? Perhaps her memory had suddenly stretched out like that child’s toy, that little brightly coloured tongue that straightens out when it is blown, and it had then rolled itself up pliably into a Moebius loop, and, well, well, she clearly recalled that she had already been here, in this very place, before. It was nineteen-seventy something, when she had at last, after a long time, acquired her first passport. Czechoslovakia was at that time one country which vanished into two, just as Yugoslavia was one country, and now there are six. She and Kosta had been invited here to a Gynaecologists’ Conference, and stayed in this very hotel, except that then it was called the ‘Moscow’.

Pupa slipped along the Moebius loop as though sliding downhill on a toboggan, and, what do you know, she saw everything, it was all lined up, all the events of her life, those that had occurred, and those that were to come, although she would no longer be there. She felt light, all her sense of shame – mostly to do with the fact that fate had ordained that she should live so long – lifted from her. The little bodies of the children she had brought into the world, dozens and dozens of newborn babies, glided past her like stars. Goodness, she thought in wonder as she slipped along her loop, how many there are? Is it possible that she should have brought so many children into the world, and into a world which, to be honest, she liked less and less? And, who knows, perhaps that was the reason why she had clenched her right hand, straightened her bony index and middle fingers and, raising her hand a little, held them up to the world, at once accusing and gleeful.

Or might it have been something quite different? Perhaps after so many years she had gone back to look for some little thing, an earring, which she had lost back in nineteen-seventy something, in this same pool. They were earrings made of onyx and silver, a present from Aaron, which she rarely took out of her ears. A trifle, a knick-knack, but still it bothered her for a long time; what is more she sometimes felt as though her ear lobes were burning because of the loss of that earring. That is why she now sighed deeply and dived – slender, young and elastic as the Moebius loop. She searched the bottom of the pool carefully and, what do you know, she found the earring stuck in the grate-like opening at the bottom of the pool wall. She had to come up three times for air before she could free it. And then she finally managed it. She clutched the earring tightly in her hand, so that it should not escape, and now that she had found what she was looking for, there was no longer any reason to go back up to the surface again.

3.

Pupa’s vanishing soul drew away with it that discreet smell of urine, which came with old age and dragged after her like the train of her dress. Pupa’s rigid body lay before them, but – as though death were like blotting paper – the smell had disappeared. The ‘old witch’ was right: death has no smell. Life is crap.

She lay on her back, in the same position in which they had lifted her off the lounger, with her knees bent and slightly parted, like an oven-ready-Christmas-turkey. Her slightly raised right arm with its hand bent in the unambiguous two-finger gesture, it too remained in the same position in which Pupa, lying on her pool lounger in the shape of a horizontal S, had sent her last goodbye to her friends or to the world, who knows. Unlike her right hand, with its unseemly message, her left lay hanging, as though it were still stroking the edge of the non-existent lounger. A glance at the deceased’s legs and feet, now when Pupa’s socks were finally off, filled those present with mild horror. The skin on her legs was criss-crossed with broken capillaries and swollen veins which wrapped round the spindly calves like the tentacles of an octopus. From her knees down everything blended into the terrifying colour of rotten meat. Her toenails were so ossified and twisted that they resembled claws. ‘God forgive me!’ Beba crossed herself, stunned by what she saw.

Two nurses – one small, willowy, red-haired, and the other large, white-skinned and linear as a pillar – were doing their job. After she cut off Pupa’s socks with scissors, the willowy one tried to lower Pupa’s right hand, exerting particular determination over the fingers. However, neither fingers nor hand would budge, as though they had turned to stone.

‘Careful! You’ll break them!’ Beba protested.

‘God forgive me, but I’ve never seen anything like this in my life, and I’ve been working for twenty years!’ said Willowy, crossing herself for some reason.

The linear one pressed her hands down on Pupa’s knees, as though Pupa were a folding umbrella, rather than a human being, a former one admittedly. Her knees offered amazing resistance.

‘It’s as if she’s made of iron,’ muttered Linear, rolling up her sleeves and preparing for one last effort.

‘Stop! I can’t bear to watch you any longer!’ cried Beba.

Linear shrugged her shoulders indifferently, ran her tongue round her mouth without opening her lips, just like a camel, and then spat an important question out of her mouth:

‘How do you imagine you’re going to stuff her into a coffin, with all these bits sticking out?’

‘Quite. How?’ Willowy joined in, gratuitously belligerent.

‘Well, you presumably have coffins?’

‘We’ve got one. A child’s. Made by our carpenter, the late Lukas. He made all his coffins too short and too narrow. His corpses were squeezed in like sardines.’

‘That was in communist times, when people cut corners everywhere,’ said Willowy.

‘Lukas skimped on everything apart from drink,’ snapped Linear.

‘Why don’t you turn her onto her side?’ asked Beba.

‘The foetal position, you mean?’ said Linear professionally, measuring Pupa roughly with her hands. ‘Hmm, she won’t fit,’ she shook her head.

‘Little body, big problems! I’ve really never seen anything like it!’ Willowy crossed herself.

‘Well, it’s possible it could be done if you would let her be squashed a little,’ added Linear.

‘Is there such a thing as an undertaker in this town?’ asked Kukla.

‘Yes. The undertaker is the carpenter Martin. But he won’t make you a coffin overnight. I had to wait a fortnight for my mother,’ said Linear.

‘Where did you keep her?’

‘Here, in the fridge.’

‘We’re Wellness Centre staff, we have priority,’ explained Willowy.

‘What about a crematorium?’ asked Beba.

‘In Prague. But even there the dead usually go into the oven in coffins. No one’s going to burn them in just a sheet.’

‘Only Indians are burned in just a sheet,’ said Willowy.

‘Do you mean no one ever dies here, for God’s sake?’ asked Beba.

‘We’re a Wellness Centre!’

‘I give up! Lukas, Martin, Indians, I don’t understand a thing!’ said Beba angrily.

‘We don’t understand you either. What were you thinking of dragging an old woman about with you, and never thinking that she could snuff it? And in a foreign country as well!’

Willowy probably wanted to say ‘shame on you’ or something like that, but restrained herself at the last moment, and instead said:

‘I’d never drag my mother about, not on my life!’

‘You’re not very kind, the two of you, you know,’ said Beba.

‘If I was kind I’d have popped my clogs long ago!’ Willowy snapped.

‘The conditions we live in, certainly,’ said Linear vaguely.

‘This is absolutely intolerable! You girls really know how to help a person!’ snorted Beba.

‘Let’s go, we’ll think of something,’ said Kukla, dragging Beba by the sleeve.

‘Think of something, only quickly! Our fridge isn’t large. It’s Thursday now. We can keep her till Monday morning maximum. Other people die as well, you know,’ said Linear, biting her tongue. ‘I mean it does happen once in a while, like now for instance,’ she added.

‘We’re a Wellness Centre!’ Willowy leapt in, pronouncing wellness centre with particular reverence, as though it were a matter of divine law.

‘Fuck you and your Wellness Centre!’ Beba shrieked, exasperated. She only ever swore in English, and the only English swear words she knew were ‘fuck you’.

We should add that we have had to translate this conversation into a language everyone could understand, because in reality it took place in a mixture of Czech and Croatian: that is Linear and Willowy spoke Czech, and Kukla and Beba Croatian. In fact Kukla did try to set her completely forgotten knowledge of Russian in motion, but all that emerged from her mouth was Russified Croatian. Linear and Willowy snorted at it. The Russians, it seems, had got up their noses.

What about us? We’ll keep going. Life drags as heavy as lead, while the tale just keeps racing ahead.

4.

A glance at the audience sitting in the lecture hall filled Dr Topolanek with a wave of anger, and, immediately afterwards, a wave of self-pity. He, who endeavoured to give this whole health business its rightful aura of scholarship, could not believe his eyes. The audience consisted not of guests from the hotel, but three local old ladies whom he knew well.

Dr Topolanek, who always carried a little whistle with him, placed the whistle in his mouth and blew it. The old ladies woke up and clapped. Topolanek gave them a little test: he read out loud the shopping list that his wife had thrust into his hand that morning. The old ladies began to snooze at the very beginning of the list, somewhere between ‘a loaf of bread’ and ‘a pint of milk’. Topolanek put the whistle back in his mouth. The old ladies gave a start.

‘Mrs Blaha, what are you doing here?’

‘Can I be honest, doctor?’ the old lady asked.

‘Go on,’ said Topolanek ironically.

‘The children have worn me out with cooking and cleaning, so I’ve come to have a little rest. Besides, you’ve got that air-refreshing thing here…’

‘Air-conditioning!’ said Topolanek. ‘What about you, Mrs Vesecka, why are you here?’

‘I came with her,’ said Mrs Vesecka, pointing to Mrs Blaha.

‘What about you, Mrs. Čunka?’

Mrs. Čunka snored.

‘Mrs. Čunka!’

Mrs. Čunka gave a start.

‘I’m asking you what you are doing here.’

‘Doctor, that list you read us a moment ago… When you come to buying the tomatoes… Pan Šošovicky has better and cheaper tomatoes today than the ones in the supermarket.’

Topolanek sat down and held his head in his hands. Although his defeat was patently obvious, his nature, fortunately, was not that of a loser. Topolanek may not have been distinguished by a superabundance of backbone, but he was not malicious, and there was only one thing he could not live without – dreams. Topolanek was a child of his transitional times, and no one could blame him for having dreams that were money wise or at least tried to be. Yes: he would fill the hall with local people. The local people ought also to be included in wellness tourism. Once a month every member of the community would have one free session in the Wellness Centre! If they had recently discovered in the south of China old men of a hundred and twenty who were growing a third set of teeth, old women who had begun to menstruate again and whose faces were speckled with adolescent acne, then why should the miracle of the third age not happen here as well, in this Czech spa? He would found, the very next day, a local club for the battle against ageing, which would be called ‘Third Teeth’. He was already inventing titles in the leading international newspapers about a newly discovered source of youthfulness in the heart of ancient Europe. And a museum, there would certainly have to be a little local museum, the Museum of the History of Longevity. And he would found an amateur dramatic society. Every year the society would put on a production of Čapek’s play The Makropulos Case. The play would stimulate public discussion, should Makropulos’s recipe for longevity have been burned or not. Yes, thanks to him, Dr Topolanek, the spa town would bloom with ever more beautiful and varied flowers.

As he looked at the three creatures in the audience, Dr Topolanek was overcome with sudden tenderness.

And, what do you know, Mrs Blaha’s grey hair began to darken, the lines on Mrs Vesecka’s face melted away as though they had never been there and Mrs. Čunka’s false teeth fell out of her mouth, because new teeth had begun to grow. In the audience sat three young, vigorous women in relaxed poses, snoring loudly.

What about us? While life may land us in a dreadful plight, the tale speeds to be home in daylight.

5.

Towards evening, Kukla and Beba met in the hotel lobby with the intention of walking through the town and clearing their heads. As they left the hotel and Beba was glancing aim lessly around, she bumped into a young man entering the hotel holding his small daughter by the hand. The young man was English and apologised pleasantly to both of them, as though it were his fault. While Kukla, who was in charge of English language requirements, took it on herself to apologise to the young man, Beba involuntarily took in some details. The young man was handsome, tall, elegant, with grey eyes, ash-coloured hair, a disarming smile, while the little girl, the little girl was… hm, presumably Chinese. The little girl, who was holding a small puppy in her arms, watched Beba with wide-open eyes, in wonder.

‘…if you will insist on rushing around like a headless chicken!’ Kukla grumbled a little later.

‘It’s not as if I knocked him over!’ Beba defended herself.

‘Honestly, you barge about like a tank!’

‘So what? I didn’t do him any harm!’ said Beba, adding caustically, ‘besides, at least I choose the people I knock over! They’re always handsome young men, and not worn-out seventy-five-year-olds!’

‘Oh, sure,’ remarked Kukla ironically.

Two unusual figures were ambling through the small town, suffused in a pink sunset. One, tall and thin, cut through the air with a light step as though she were holding an invisible lance. The other, round and heavy, scuttled after her, breathlessly, like her shield-bearer.

‘So, what are we going to do, the two of us?’ asked Beba anxiously.

‘The most important thing is to have papers, the doctor’s death certificate and that sort of thing…’

‘Why?’

‘How else will we get a corpse across the border?’

Beba suddenly felt quite unequal to the situation in which she found herself.

‘And we have to find out about transport regulations for carrying a dead body,’ added Kukla.

‘I hadn’t even thought about that…’

‘And what’ll we do about the money?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Pupa has left her money to her daughter. She would be able quite rightly to accuse us of stealing Pupa’s money. And then crossing the border… After all, it’s all in cash. There are laws about that as well.’

‘And I hadn’t thought about that either.’

‘And what about the money you won gambling? Have you asked about transporting a sum like that?’

Beba was suddenly very angry with Kukla, and then with Pupa as well. What did she mean by dragging them here and dumping them in all of this! Why had she abandoned them to fritter away their time on so many problems? And then she was angry with herself, because she had rushed into the whole thing like a headless chicken!

‘Why should we go back at all? We could stay here for a while…’

‘What would we do with Pupa?’

‘We’ll go to Prague and have her cremated.’

‘It’s Pupa’s daughter who’ll decide about all those things.’

‘A lot she cares!’

‘All in all, we have a major problem.’

‘God, what a fool I am! How did I ever get involved in all of this!’ complained Beba, not considering that Kukla had got involved in it as well, through no fault of her own.

As they walked briskly along, the two women did not notice that the whole town had become immersed in a smoky pink colour. The heavy, brocade sunset had turned the little river and lavish façades of the houses pink. The window-panes sent russet reflections to one another. The treetops had sunk into the late-afternoon dusk and were giving off a heavy, intoxicating mist.

Beba and Kukla walked on, deep in conversation, until at a certain moment they stopped as though immobilised. The two women stood with their mouths wide open. In front of them appeared a gigantic – egg! It appeared, just like that, as though the finger of fate itself had rolled it where Beba and Kukla could bump into it. To be more precise, in front of them was a large shop window, and in the window a gigantic wooden egg! They had seen eggs like this, real-life-sized ones of course, they sometimes turned up in the Zagreb markets, where, having travelled from Russia, Ukraine and Poland, they rolled around on the counters, with Russian lacquered boxes, spoons and wooden dolls, the ones that fitted inside each other.

‘Good Lord, look at that King Kong of an egg!’ exclaimed Beba, almost devoutly.

The egg was painted in shiny, bright colours and muddled patterns of flora and fauna. Beba and Kukla’s eyes floated over flowery meadows, with butterflies the size of helicopters flying over them, fields blooming with red poppies, blue cornflowers and golden corn; they plunged their gaze into greenery and creepers, ferns and trees, with monkeys and birds swaying on their branches. Then they lowered their eyes to the undergrowth: there was a rabbit family hiding under one shrub, Adam and Eve under another, does and stags under a third. The egg was girded with bushes of ripe raspberries and blackberries, with mushrooms growing at their feet. Snails slid and ladybirds scuttled over their tops. The boggy areas were particularly striking: there were luxuriant water lilies with frogs swinging on them, large fish wallowing in their depths and wading birds peeping out of the reeds. Finally, Beba and Kukla directed their eyes to a tall palm, with a camel resting in its scant shadow. Somewhere in the air above the camel a small family was sitting in an eggshell, like a little boat: a woman, two children and a man with glasses on his nose and a paintbrush in his hand. All in all, it was a garden of Eden painted by an amateur. The man with the glasses on his nose and brush in his hand was evidently the painter of this grandiose creation. The egg consisted of two parts, and metal rivets and a handsome lock with a hook in the middle suggested that the egg opened like a trunk.

That was not all. All around the gigantic main egg, life-sized eggs were scattered: wooden painted Easter eggs, crystal Swarovsky eggs, more or less successful imitations of the famous Fabergé eggs, a new series of Fabergé eggs. The eggs scattered round the main egg gave off magical reflections of bluish, lilac, golden, golden-greenish, crystal-whitish, milky-silver tones, and the whole thing was a sight that must have left everyone who saw it speechless.

The shop bore the unambiguous name ‘The New Russians’. The interior looked more like an art gallery than a shop. The walls were white and almost bare. In two or three places there were art photographs of eggs in glass frames. A young woman was sitting at the elegant white counter, and behind her was a white-painted glass display case full of exhibits.

‘How much is that large egg in the window?’ asked Beba in English.

‘Unfortunately, it’s not for sale,’ the girl replied politely.

‘Why did you put it in the window, then?’

‘As an advertisement, to catch people’s attention.’

‘And what would it cost if it were for sale?’

‘We are not an ordinary souvenir shop. We are a specialist gallery,’ the girl stalled.

‘Specialising in what?’

‘Why, eggs…’

‘And these other eggs, are they for sale?’

‘Yes.’

‘How much is this “Peter the Great”?’

‘Three thousand five hundred.’

‘Three thousand what?’

‘Dollars. Most of our customers are Russians, you know.’

‘Rich Russians?’

‘Well…’ the girl smiled.

‘And how much is the “Tsar Alexander Caviar Bowl”?’ Beba read from the plaque in the window.

‘Six thousand dollars.’

‘And a real Fabergé egg?’

‘Don’t ask!’ said the girl with feeling.

‘Nevertheless, if you were selling that big egg, what would it cost?’

The girl looked at the two elderly women dumbfounded.

‘Are you Russian?’

‘No, but we’d really like to buy that Russian egg!’

‘In fact, it isn’t Russian,’ said the girl. ‘It was made by our local artist Karel…’

‘Karel Gott?’ Kukla blurted out, half to herself.

‘How do you know?’

‘I’m not sure. I just said it without thinking. Karel Gott, the golden nightingale… That was long ago.’

‘Zlaty slavik!’[5] said the pleasant girl. ‘But this is our own, local, Karel Gott. I think that he’s some relation of the famous singer.’

‘So? Give us a price.’

‘I’m sorry. It’s not for sale,’ said the girl apologetically.

Just when it seemed to Beba and Kukla and the girl that the situation was hopeless, and as the two women were preparing to leave, a sullen-looking man with wild hair burst into the gallery. Beba recognised him at once. It was that idiot, the Russian, from the casino. The man went straight from the door into an adjoining room without so much as glancing at the visitors.

For some reason, the girl lowered her voice:

‘That is the owner of the gallery. Hold on a minute, I’ll ask him,’ she whispered in a confidential tone and vanished into the adjoining room.

They heard voices coming from the room, and then the man peered out to take a look at who the potential buyers of the egg might be. Beba and Kukla stood modestly beside the counter, waiting. The man did not recognise Beba at first, but then, when he did, he gave a start. Beba was able to read the traces of an inner struggle on his face. He was evidently wondering whether to show that he recognised her, or pretend that he had never seen her before. The sullen-looking man vanished behind the wall with lightning speed just as he had appeared. The results of his inner struggle remained unclear. However, now his raised voice could be heard speaking Russian interspersed with the girl’s indistinct responses in Czech.

‘Sell it, no one buys that crap in any case! That idiot of yours, Karel, will make us a new one! Let the old bags pay twenty thousand! For that amount, for twenty thousand, I’d let the old witch rip me off!’

After a while the pleasant young girl appeared out of the adjoining room, now somewhat pinker in the face, and said:

‘You’re in luck.’

‘How much?’ asked Beba.

‘Twenty thousand,’ the girl spoke cautiously.

‘Does that include transport?’

‘Where to?’

‘To the Grand Hotel.’

‘Oh, but that’s right here! No problem. Are you paying cash or with a credit card?’ the girl asked, still disbelieving.

‘Cash!’ Beba burst out. ‘We’ll be back in a second. You’re not closing yet?’

‘No, you’ve got another full hour yet. I’ll wait for you.’

‘What’s your name?’ asked Kukla.

‘Marlena,’ said the girl.

At that moment the sullen-looking man with wild hair came out of the adjoining room and headed for the door. Despite his evident inner intention of looking neither left nor right, his glance escaped his control and came to rest on Beba. She managed to wave to him.

‘Spassibo, Kotik!’[6] she said sweetly.

What about us? Let’s keep going! In life there’s a lot we can delay, but the tale moves on and cannot stay!

6.

It was already late when two sulky young men from the ‘New Russians’ gallery brought the egg and placed it in Pupa’s suite.

Beba was sprawled wearily in an armchair, filling it entirely with her body like risen dough in a tin. Kukla was striding up and down, her arms folded on her chest. And then she stopped:

‘Well, aren’t we going to open it?’

Beba hauled herself out of the chair and waddled over to the egg. They unlocked it together. The room was filled with the pleasant aroma of fresh pine.

‘Who would have thought it was so spacious!’ said Beba.

‘We’ll have to make sure we buy enough bags of ice in the local supermarket,’ said Kukla drily, closing the egg.

Moths flew in through the open balcony doors into the brightly lit suite.

‘And the boot,’ added Kukla.

‘What boot?’

‘We ought to put Pupa’s boot in with her as well, don’t you think?’

‘Sure, put it in.’

‘I think Pupa would really like it if the boot was cleaned.’

‘We can have it dry-cleaned,’ said Beba, waddling over to the telephone to ring room service. ‘They’ll send someone right up,’ she said and made her way to the door. Beba had had enough for the day. She had no strength for any more words.

When she handed the hotel employee the bag containing a large fur boot, he opened his eyes wide and raised his eyebrows, but the question mark that formed for a moment on his forehead vanished at once, proving him a true hotel professional for whom nothing human is strange. Kukla withdrew to her part of the suite, leaving the door carefully ajar, as though Pupa was still in her room. She went out onto the balcony. The night was warm and soft as plush, and the sky was lit up by an enormous full moon. A barely visible mist rose from the trees, at least that is how it seemed to Kukla. The warmth that had accumulated during the day was evaporating from the leaves. Kukla breathed in the warm, fragrant air. Her nostrils caught the sweet smell of elder flowers. And then the door of the next-door balcony burst suddenly and noisily open and a metallic, tart woman’s voice rent the silence of the night.

‘Why the hell did you close the door? We’ll suffocate in here!’

‘I didn’t close it! Besides, we’ve got air-conditioning!’ replied a male voice calmly.

‘Everyone knows who keeps shutting the doors at home!’ grumbled the woman.

‘So open them!’ said the man’s voice.

‘I have done! Things soon get smelly round you, at home and on holiday!’

Kukla stood with her arms leaning on the balcony railing. The voices scratched roughly over the soft plush of the night. And then she screwed up her eyes, like the first time when she was still unaware of what she was doing, like many times before now – and directed all her thoughts in one direction. The door of the next-door balcony closed with a bang.

A little while later the metallic woman’s voice was heard again.

‘Why did you open the door?’

‘Which door?’ asked the man’s voice.

‘The room door!’

‘Why would I open the door into the corridor?

‘Because the balcony door banged! Didn’t you hear?’

‘Heavens, woman, you’re crazy…’

‘The balcony door banged shut, and there’s not a breath of wind outside!’

‘So?’

‘So you must have opened the door onto the corridor on purpose to make a draught, so the balcony door would close by itself!’

‘Oh for goodness’ sake, give me a break! What’s got into you?’

‘What’s got into you!’ sawed the metallic voice.

Kukla stood on the balcony, gazing at the moon. A smile passed over her face. In the park opposite, the trees were lit up by moonlight and the light of lanterns at the base of their trunks. It seemed that the canopies had no weight and that they could at any moment lift off the trees and float away across the sky like luxurious green zeppelins. Large rooks rustled in the treetops. Kukla could not see them, but she knew they were there.

What about us? Unfortunately, we must keep going. While life may lead us on a merry dance, the tale hastens on without a backward glance.

7.

When she got back to her suite, Beba was overcome by indescribable fatigue. She collapsed, fully dressed, onto her bed, managed to catch a glimpse of the full moon in the sky through the balcony door, which was still open, and then sank into a deep sleep.

Beba dreamed that she was entering a sumptuous royal palace. She appeared to be the queen, although she seemed to be dressed in a nightgown and housecoat. She had bare feet, and had not had time to pull on her ‘minimiser’, which she was immediately aware of, because the weight of her breasts hurt her. That is why she was supporting them with her hands. She held her left breast in her left palm and her right breast in her right palm. She stepped into the hall like a Sumo-wrestler, which must have aroused respect in those present. Her gaze fell on a red carpet stretching away from her and two rows of figures, between which she was evidently supposed to walk. At the end, somewhere in the depths of the hall, stood a podium and a red and gold royal throne. But, amazingly, the rows were not composed of people, courtiers and ladies, but – eggs!

Having seen plenty of films with such ‘regal’ scenes, Beba decided to treat the eggs as though they were courtiers, to bestow her queenly attention on them and stop for a moment in front of each of them. And, fancy, as Beba stopped, each egg bowed as a mark of profound respect, pronounced its name – Cuckoo Egg, Renaissance Egg, Lily Egg, Tsarevich Egg – and gracefully opened its interior. Beba examined the inside of each egg in amazement, while the egg listed the precious materials of which it was made: gold, platinum, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, pearls, diamonds… Heavens, how many splendid eggs there were in each row! And all the eggs had bowed to her, Beba, with the greatest respect, and then charmingly opened up their insides! Some of the eggs stood on little golden legs, others had pedestals made of the finest material, yet others were rocking on little golden saucers, others again stood firmly wedged in silver or gold holders, while others sat on lavish miniature thrones, but when Beba stopped in front of them, they slipped off them and curtsied. Beba was beside herself with pleasure. It seemed to her that her sight had sharpened, because she noticed, amazingly, even the tiniest detail, as though she had strong magnifying lenses built into her eyes.

And then, perhaps on account of those lenses, she was overcome with fatigue. It was tiring to support her heavy breasts in her hands, and the distance between her and the throne did not seem to be getting any less. Nor were the eggs in front of her beautiful now. One of them opened its interior, in which there was a miniature loudspeaker, and said in a metallic voice:A little house with no windows or doors, when the owner wants to get out he breaks down the walls! Beba wanted to walk past the ugly egg, but when she tried to take a step, an invisible force prevented her. The sentence the egg had pronounced was, obviously, a riddle, and the invisible force prevented Beba moving until she had solved it. Beba thought for a long time, her breasts had grown so heavy that her elbows and hands were aching as well, and then she finally worked it out and said: ‘An Egg!’ And, fancy, the invisible force let her move on.

But at the next moment Beba was suddenly attacked by a fresh yellow yolk that splashed in her face. Beba didn’t have time to feel offended. She understood that she had to be quick and smart because the eggs had obviously become hostile.

‘I have egg on my face,’ she said, under the fierce attack of the yolk ‘kamikaze’.

‘On ne saurait faire une omelette sans casser des oeufs,’ said Beba quickly, but afraid that eggs didn’t speak French, repeated: ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’ And the eggs backed off.

Yes, the eggs were different now, sort of ‘verbal’ eggs. Beba found herself in front of a grey one, which bowed down in front of her, said its name, Grandmother’s Egg, and opened up its inside. Inside, where there should have been a gleaming white and a golden yolk, there was nothing, as though it had all been sucked out. Beba realised at once that the egg represented that saying about teaching your grandmother to suck eggs. Beba had never used that expression. Maybe because she did not like the idea of sucking eggs.

The entire ceremony had become wearisome and pointless, and Beba wondered what would happen if she was to smash all these arrogant high-protein bastards. She was the Queen, wasn’t she, and after all this was her dream, wasn’t it? ‘I am going to make scrambled eggs out of all of you!’ grumbled Beba in her thoughts. And, as though they had guessed what Beba was thinking, the eggs suddenly started to run away in all directions and hide. All except one. At the end of the red carpet, a golden egg was waiting for her. When she reached it, the egg made a charming curtsey, like all the previous eggs, and opened up. Beba felt a sharp stab and for a moment the pain took her breath away. In a miniature golden coffin a beautiful, naked youth was lying in the foetal position. She bent down, took the egg in her hands, looked at the little golden body without breathing, and then a painful sob broke from her chest. The egg slipped out of Beba’s hands and fell onto the floor and – hop, hop, hop – jumped into Pupa’s boot! It was only then that Beba noticed that Pupa’s fur boot was standing beside the throne.

The dream had been horrifying and Beba woke up. She shook herself, her cheeks, wet with tears, were trembling and her heart was beating violently. Still sobbing, Beba got out of bed, went to the fridge and took out a bottle of champagne. She sat for a long time on the edge of the bed, calming her heart, drinking the champagne in rapid, small sips like water and – staring at the round moon. Oh, what a nightmare! Beba tried to separate the tangled threads of the dream, but they just kept getting more tangled. Like a glittering medallion, the golden body of her son in the foetal position flickered in front of her eyes. The moon had grown pale and become almost transparent by the time Beba, dazed with champagne and exhausted by successive sobs, finally fell asleep.

1.

Beba and Kukla were pleasantly surprised at breakfast the following morning, when they caught sight of the elegant young man whom Beba had almost knocked over the previous day in the hotel doorway. A still greater surprise ensued when the young man got up from his table, came over to theirs and asked them politely whether he could join them. Kukla and Beba’s jaws dropped in amazement when it turned out that the young man spoke Croatian, with an English accent, admittedly, but still quite fluently. It turned out that the young man was a lawyer by profession, that he lived in London and that his daughter was at that moment in the pool with the hotel swimming instructor. The young man was evidently not someone inclined to beat about the bush. Kukla and Beba did beat about the bush, however, because if they had not first asked where he lived, what he did for a living and where his daughter was, they would probably have discovered immediately what soon followed. And the discovery that landed in front of them, like a thunderbolt out of the clear blue sky – on the table with its snow-white linen tablecloth and embroidered linen napkins, with its coffee cups and plates of the finest porcelain, with its silver cutlery, with slivers of pink salmon covered in cream and laid on crisp pancakes, with a little basket full of fresh rolls, with butter in a porcelain dish ringed with ice, with a porcelain bowl of raspberries, blackberries and blueberries that looked as though they had just been picked – was that the young man was none other than Pupa’s grandson!

‘Grandson!?’ exclaimed Kukla and Beba in the same instant.

‘That’s right,’ said the young man.

‘Can you prove it?’ asked Kukla cautiously.

‘Oh, yes, I can show you all the necessary documents. We’ll get to that in a moment in any case,’ said the young man pleasantly.

‘So, you’re claiming to be Pupa’s grandson!’ said Beba, presumably to gain some time, although during that time she did not manage to think of anything apart from what she had already said.

‘Yes,’ said the young man succinctly.

‘Thank goodness you’ve appeared. Your grandmother passed away yesterday,’ said Kukla, who evidently coped with surprises better than Beba.

‘That’s what I thought,’ said the young man, not remotely taken aback.

The wind blows, then calms down, but Pupa’s trouble lasted her whole life. While life is lived slowly, the tale is told quickly, so we shall now briefly relate what Pupa’s grandson told Kukla and Beba.

Pupa Milanović, née Singer, enrolled at the Zagreb Medical Faculty in 1938. In her first year she fell in love with Aaron Pal, a fellow student. Pupa very soon found that she was pregnant, the young couple married and in 1939 Pupa gave birth to a little girl, Asja. In 1940 Aaron’s parents could see that things were looking bad everywhere in Europe, so they moved, with the help of family connections, to London, taking advantage of a brief green light offered by the British authorities, and joining Jews from Poland and Germany. Pupa and Aaron decided to stay in Zagreb. Aaron’s parents suggested that they take Asja with them, which seemed a sensible solution to Pupa and Aaron at the time.

‘How could they agree to be separated from such a small baby?’ Beba interrupted the young man. Like Kukla, she was hearing this story for the first time.

‘They knew what was coming, and that the doors of European countries were closing to Jews. But they had their studies to complete in Zagreb and they just hoped that the evil would after all not spread there… It’s hard for me to answer that question. I know that it’s because of their decision that I’m sitting with you at this table today,’ said the young man, smiling his disarming smile.

In April 1941 Croatia brought in a racial law: ‘Legal Provision for the Protection of Aryan Blood and the Honour of the Croatian Nation’. They introduced the obligation to wear a yellow star, soon followed by the persecution of Jews. Pupa’s parents and younger brother were deported to the Jasenovac camp, where they were killed, some time in 1943. Pupa and Aaron fled to the woods to join the Partisans at the end of October 1941, after the Jewish Synagogue in Zagreb had been destroyed with the blessing of the new Ustasha authorities.

‘There were a lot of Jews in the Partisans, incidentally, from Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, but you must know that better than me,’ said the young man.

‘Oh my God, what a story! Why didn’t she ever tell us any of it? Did you know?’ Beba asked Kukla.

Kukla shook her head without a word. The story had affected her as deeply as it had Beba.

Aaron was killed fighting in 1944, while Pupa, who had meanwhile developed tuberculosis, lived to see the Liberation. Her tuberculosis was cured, she continued her interrupted studies and then, thanks to her Partisan connections, she finally managed to obtain a visa to travel to England. She appeared in London in the spring of 1947, with the intention of taking Asja back with her to Zagreb. Aaron’s parents had no intention of returning to Zagreb. The little girl, meanwhile, had such an attack of hysteria that they all agreed it would be better to delay sending her back. Pupa hoped that next time she would manage to procure a longer stay in London, spend time with Asja and manage to persuade her to travel back with her.

‘This is terrible…’ said Beba, choking with tears.

‘That’s how it was. A lot of women who were in the Partisans left their children in children’s homes and orphanages, to be looked after by relatives or families in villages where it was relatively peaceful during the war. I know of several similar cases,’ said Kukla.

Pupa returned from London and continued her medical studies. She worked hard, exhausting herself by studying at the same time as volunteering in Zagreb hospitals and provincial medical centres. She qualified, and then came 1948 and the dreadful, dark days of the Cominform. In 1950, Pupa ended up on Goli Otok, or rather in St Grgur, a prison for female political prisoners.[7] Like all the other inmates, if they managed to survive, Pupa never found out why she had been sent to prison or the name of the person who had denounced her. After she was released, it was clear that the frontiers were closed to her and that meant only one thing – she would not be able to see Asja. Pupa married again in 1955, a doctor colleague, and in 1957 she gave birth to her daughter Zorana.

Goodness, you only need a slightly different light, and things we have always known become suddenly different and alien, thought Kukla. The ‘doctor colleague’ was Kosta, Kukla’s brother. That was when she had met Pupa. Over the years they had grown close, but, remarkably, Pupa never mentioned Goli Otok, or Aaron, or Asja. It is true that all the former Goli Otok inmates had one thing in common: they never said a word about it. When they came out of prison, they were strictly forbidden to discuss their experience with anyone, and Goli Otok altogether was a strictly forbidden topic, until, some time in the nineteen-seventies, the taboo was lifted. But time had reinforced the prisoners’ own habit of simply saying nothing. Because there, on Goli Otok, every observation, even the most innocent, reached the guards’ ears, and the prisoner was made to pay for it. Yes, those were dark days. People landed in prison for no reason, saddled with the crippling accusation of betrayal of the homeland and alleged support of Stalin. Everyone denounced someone. The communists used a Stalinist stick to beat Stalin. Who knows whether Kosta knew? He must have done, only he did not tell her, Kukla. The Goli Otok embargo dragged in wives and husbands and other members of the family. It was simply never mentioned. It is very hard to explain that to anyone else today. And when the ban was finally lifted, few people were interested in hearing those old Goli Otok stories. Kukla tried to summon up a picture of the young Pupa, but despite her best efforts she could not do it. She thought about the fact that Pupa’s grandson – the child of a different culture and different age – had succeeded in solving a puzzle, which they, both Kukla, who was closer to Pupa, and Beba, had been unable to solve, and indeed had made no effort to do so. The invisibility in which we live next to one another is appalling, thought Kukla.

Aaron’s father died in 1952, the same year that Pupa came out of prison, and his mother died in 1960. A little later the same year, Asja Pal married Michael Thompson and four years later she gave birth to a little boy, David, and then to a little girl, Miriam. Asja had never been to Yugoslavia, nor had she ever wanted to go. For her Pupa was a monster, a woman who had abandoned her own child in order to join the communists. Pupa’s second husband, Kosta, died in 1981. Their daughter Zorana studied medicine and got a job in a Zagreb hospital.

‘In the Vinogradska Hospital! Where I spent my working life as well!’ In her thoughts Beba whispered to David. It was through Zorana that Beba had met Pupa and somehow it happened that they had become friends. Zorana could occasionally be a bit jealous. ‘How come you get on so well with my mother,’ she would say, ‘when I’m forever quarrelling with her…?’ Who knows, perhaps the whole secret is that daughters always make excessive demands on their mothers. The mothers feel guilty, and then protest at both their guilt and the demands made on them. The daughters feel the same mixture of guilt and anger. And round it all goes in a closed circle. Oh, life is so confused! And then stories like this one come like a bolt of lightning out of the blue and turn the picture we have of others on its head. Perhaps that is why people hang on so desperately to their stubborn little truths, because who knows, if everything was put together, as in this case, people would fall apart. It is the brutal truth that what we know about other people could be contained in an insultingly small package.

Pupa tried to get in touch with Asja, without success. When she was finally able to travel, she went to London again. Asja had been so reluctant to meet her that Pupa went home in complete despair. That was why David had appeared like balm for a wound that had never healed. He learned Croatian and came to see Pupa whenever he could. The two of them, Pupa and he, became secret allies. Pupa adored him. When he opened his own legal office and began to earn a decent salary, David set about trying to trace the property of both his Jewish families, the Singers and the Pals. And by some miracle he succeeded in getting back the Singers’ family home in Opatija. It did not mean much to Pupa and she immediately offered to leave the house to him. He refused. Then, with his help, she sold it. The major part of the proceeds from the sale was invested in the bank in Pupa’s name. Quite recently, Pupa had called him and asked him to alter her will.

‘I presume that she didn’t tell you… That is, Pupa left a significant sum from the sale of the house to each of you,’ said David.

Beba, filled with a vague sense of guilt, started to count the things she had recently spent money on, some on massage, some on make-up and some on clothes, and then she had gone to change that five-hundred-euro note, but no one in this town was prepared to, and that was how she wound up in the hotel casino, because she thought that they would be able to change it there, because, in fact, she only needed fifty…

‘Pupa has left you a sum that will guarantee you a secure and peaceful old age,’ David repeated, because he could not work out what Beba was prattling on about so frantically.

‘I don’t need money. I’ve got my pension,’ said Kukla quietly.

‘So have I!’ said Beba, blushing, because she still could not take in the fact that the money in the hotel safe was hers.

‘I’ve brought all the papers with me. Pupa signed everything before you came here,’ said David.

‘So, you knew everything! Where we were going, and everything! She tricked us all, the old witch!’ cried Beba.

‘That’s what we used to call her… the old witch,’ said Kukla, apologising in her own and Beba’s name.

‘It’s only old witches who lay golden eggs!’ said David.

Kukla thought that the young man’s Croatian was not as good as it had seemed to her at first. Who knows where he came across that clumsy sentence?

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘It’s an old Polynesian proverb. It means that old women do good deeds.’

Let us pause here for a moment to say that life is a field where the wind always blows, while the tale may expand and contract as it goes.

At that moment Mevlo came into the restaurant, holding the little Chinese girl’s hand. The child was hopping from foot to foot and carrying a puppy in her arms, while a smile was spread over Mevlo’s face. When they came up to the table, Beba, wiping her tears away, remarked:

‘And since when have you been a swimming instructor?’

‘Oh, love, when they tell me “swim”, I swim! When they say “massage”, I massage!’

Mevlo sat down at the table, set the little girl down beside him, spooned raspberries, blackberries and blueberries into a bowl, poured cream over them and placed the bowl in front of her.

‘Here you are, sweetie-pie, try that!’ said Mevlo, as naturally as though the little girl were his daughter.

‘What’s the child’s name?’ Beba asked David.

‘Wawa.’

‘Wawa?’

‘And another thing,’ said David cautiously. ‘She’s not my daughter – she’s your granddaughter.’

There are all kinds of people in the world, good and bad. Beba had a heart as big as a frying pan and a mind that those around her did not consider worthy of mention. Between her heart and her mind there was a sudden short circuit. Beba was simply not in a position to take in the quantity of new information that had splashed over her like a bucket of cold water. That was why her eyes narrowed, she swayed on her chair, cried out something that sounded like ‘Awaw!’ and, dragging the tablecloth with her, crashed to the floor. There was general consternation in the restaurant: the waiters flocked round like seagulls, picked up the cutlery, wiped up the spilt milk, ran after a bun that was rolling over the floor. In a few seconds two male nurses appeared. They put Beba on a stretcher. The stretcher was followed by Kukla, after Kukla came David, after David Mevlo and after Mevlo skipped the little girl with the puppy in her arms. In the whole scurrying procession, it was only the little girl whose face showed no trace of anxiety.

‘Honestly! Why are you giggling, my pet?’ grumbled Mevlo.

‘Old ladies are funny!’ said the little girl.

‘My special friend has fainted, and you think it’s funny. What’s funny about it, eh?’

‘Awaw! Awaw!’ the child chirped, hopping from foot to foot.

‘Aw! Aw!’ the puppy joined in for the first time.

From his pocket Mevlo took a little wooden ladle decorated with Czech folk patterns that he had picked up on some local souvenir stall:

‘Here, see if this will help you calm down.’

‘Why?’

‘Vai, vai, vai! So you can make me soup when you grow up, that’s vai.’

The little girl burst into peals of silvery laughter.

Here it should be said that Mevlo found nothing strange about the fact that the little girl was speaking English and he Bosnian, but they understood each other very well. The only thing Mevlo could not understand was why the little girl kept repeating ‘Awaw! Awaw!’ But the little girl was only saying her name – Wawa – backwards, which was after all what Beba had done as she passed out. It was one of Beba’s little quirks, that at moments when things started going awry she would pronounce words backwards.

What about us? We keep going. While life finds humps and bumps to stumble on, the tale keeps hurrying and scurrying along.

2.

Mr Shaker, Pupa, Pupa’s grandson, that nepos ex machina! Goodness, how much had happened, and at what breakneck speed! Kukla had not yet managed to take any of it in properly, nor give it due consideration, and, what do you know, here she was dragging a completely strange little girl around after her and having to find some way of entertaining her until Beba came to and was able to get her bearings. And then the news that Beba’s son had died of Aids, that his partner had refused to take over care of the child and that Beba would have to take legal charge of her, because there was no one else to do it… It was all too much, too much even for a very bad novel, thought Kukla. But, then again, things happened, and, besides, life had never claimed to have refined taste. Each of them, Pupa, Beba and Kukla, had her own life, each of them had accumulated baggage on her way and each of them dragged her own burden after her. And now, all that luggage, piled up in one great heap, had collapsed under its own weight – the suitcases had burst at the seams and all their old junk was out in the open.

As soon as Kukla opened the suite door, the child’s gaze was drawn to Pupa’s fur boot, as though to a magnet. The boot had stood there since the hotel staff brought it back from dry cleaning. To start with the little girl just looked at the boot in wonder, then she went cautiously up to it and peered in. Slowly she raised one foot, then the other, and stepped into the boot. At first she stood in the boot, looking all around her, and then she slipped deftly into it and sat down, without letting her puppy out of her embrace.

‘Are you hungry?’ asked Kukla.

The child shook her head.

‘Thirsty?’

‘Umm…’ replied the child non-committally.

‘You’re not thirsty?’

The child shook her head again.

Kukla was a little embarrassed. Looking after small children was evidently not her greatest talent. The child peeped out of the boot, tensely following Kukla’s every move. Kukla sat down wearily on the edge of the bed and gazed at the little girl.

‘What am I going to do with you?’ she asked.

The child raised her shoulders and let them fall.

‘Do you like the boot?’

‘Aha…’

‘My friend used that boot to keep her feet warm,’ said Kukla, because she didn’t know what else to say.

The child stared at Kukla without stirring.

‘Her name was Pupa.’

‘Apup saw eman reh,’ said the child.

Kukla gaped at the little girl: that was not Chinese, for sure. The child watched her blithely, knowing that she had attracted Kukla’s attention.

‘Pupa,’ repeated Kukla.

‘Apup!’ said the little girl.

‘Kukla.’

‘Alkuk,’ said the child.

No, it’s not possible! thought Kukla. The little girl is far too bright for her years, no adult is capable of playing with words like that at such speed. Kukla shuddered. What if reversing words was the symptom of some serious illness?

‘Mum makes lunch, Dad reads the paper,’ said Kukla, knowing that what she was saying was stupid, but it was the first thing that occurred to her.

‘Mumdad makes lunch and reads the paper!’ said the little girl.

‘Who’s Mumdad?’ asked Kukla surprised.

‘Filip,’ said the little girl and drew herself into the boot.

There was a silence. Again, Kukla did not know what to say.

‘What are you doing in that boot?’ she asked after a while.

The little girl said nothing.

‘Where are you? I can’t see you.’

‘I can see you,’ said the little girl.

‘You’re like a mouse… Like a mouse in a slab of cheese doing just what you please.’

‘I’m a little girl.’

‘Come on, then, get out of that boot.’

‘I can’t.’

‘What are you doing in there?’

‘I’m flying,’ said the little girl.

‘Floating, more like,’ Kukla corrected her.

‘Flying, more like,’ said the child.

Good heavens, thought Kukla in surprise. She had no experience whatever of children, admittedly, but it seemed to her that little girls of four did not talk quite like this.

‘Hey, come out of there a minute, I want to ask you something.’

‘What?’ asked the little girl, but she did not poke her head out.

‘Do you know what two plus two makes?’

Out of the boot poked the little girl’s hand, showing four fingers.

‘And how old are you?’

The little girl showed four fingers again.

‘What about you?’ came a little voice from the boot.

Kukla stood up, found a piece of paper and a pencil, wrote a large figure 80 on the paper and turned it towards the child.

‘Come out and I’ll show you!’ said Kukla.

The child peered out.

‘Eighty!’ she said.

‘Not quite, actually, I’ll be eighty in December.’

‘You’re twenty times older than me,’ said the little girl.

‘Which makes you twenty times younger than me,’ said Kukla.

Kukla was alarmed again. She wondered whether the little girl was not too clever for her years. She would have to talk to Beba. Poor Beba, she must be lying in her room in despair. David was inaccessible. You couldn’t ask him anything. He was rushing about sorting out Pupa’s affairs.

‘Listen, little one, what would you say to the two of us ordering something sweet from the cake shop?’

The little girl poked her head out of the boot and nodded.

‘Ice cream or cakes?’

‘The first,’ said the little girl.

Kukla felt better. She was a child after all. A dear, sweet little girl…

‘What about Toto?’

‘Who’s Toto?’ asked Kukla in surprise.

Wawa pointed at the puppy.

‘Hmm… OK, let’s go for a walk; we’ll buy some dog biscuits for Toto, and the two of us will find somewhere to sit and have an ice cream. How about that?’

The little girl clambered out of the boot and cheerfully held her hand out to Kukla. Kukla noticed that the little girl had dark eyebrows, almost touching in the middle. On her round face they looked like a child’s drawing of a bird in flight.

3.

Everything had fallen apart, as though the cupboard in her little office in the medical faculty had burst open. The office was where she had spent her whole life drawing sketches that no one needed any more, and now those sketches, rolled up in dusty bundles, had tumbled out of the cupboard and unfurled like little rugs. Fragments scampered in front of Beba’s eyes: bones, muscles, nerves, the nervous system, cells, reproductive organs, the urinary tract, the cardiovascular system, the heart, veins, arteries, the liver, ears, the auricular canal, the spleen, stomach, intestines, large and small, the rectum, anus, lungs, windpipe, oesophagus, the eye… That was Beba’s field, Beba’s Guernica. And in that paper snowstorm a lost child wandered, Beba’s son.

Yes, Beba had a son, Filip. He had inherited her talent for drawing, and as soon as he graduated from the Academy, he had gone abroad: Italy, France and London. That was where he met his partner (‘partner?’ What a clumsy word!). According to David, at a certain moment Filip had wanted a child; he had gone rushing about, investing all his time and energy in the business of adopting one. Finally, he got lucky, and they, Filip and his partner, succeeded in adopting a little girl who was just a few months old. But then Filip began to obsess about what would become of the child if anything happened to him. And he would not rest until he had drawn up a will with David’s help, according to which, in the event of his death, Beba would take over care of the child. When Filip died of Aids, exactly what he had foreseen occurred. His partner left the little girl to David, collected all Filip’s paintings and disappeared. That was all Beba managed to glean from David. But she would ask, she would try to find out. Because ever since he left home, Filip had rarely been in touch. The occasional letter, more often a postcard, just to let her know he was alive. He had never given any address. He had never contacted his father. In truth, he had no reason to. His biological father had never shown any interest in him, and if he had done, there would have been a scene as soon as he learned of Filip’s inclinations.

It was all her fault, of course, and it would not have been right to blame his father. Because she was the one who had pushed the unfortunate father to one side, proclaiming him ‘biological’, and then ‘hypothetical’, in order to have Filip to herself. Yes, her passion had drawn misfortune in its wake. God, now that she thought about it, she had bought him clothes as though she was his lover, rather than his mother. When he was little, she had dressed him like a doll, and then, when he grew up, like the lover she had never managed to acquire. When he was not at home, she sometimes went to his little room and stood for a long time in the doorway, breathing in his smell. It was her fault. And when he left, she had spent days dreaming of his return. Yes, she had wanted him all to herself, and had only pretended that that was not the case. She concealed her feelings, she acted, she did all she could not to suffocate him. She went out with men, pretending to have her own life, to be an independent woman who lived life to the full and did not care about anything else. But still, love seeped out of her and, like the foam putty used to fit window-panes, it filled all her cracks, pores and openings. She could not deceive him, it was impossible to breathe: the air in their apartment was just too dense. She followed him like a dog, arousing first his pity, and then his revulsion.

And then one day, returning early from work, she went into his room and found him in bed with a young man. She stopped, dumbfounded, in the doorway, he shouted something, but she did not understand the content of his words. She stood there without breathing, without thoughts, without interest, without curiosity, without censure. He got up and banged the door in her face. And the very next day he packed and left, forever. At first she agonised about it; she could not understand why he had been so angry. Because she was innocent, if that is the right word, she had wronged him only for a second, for heaven’s sake, for just one single second. She had been entranced by what she saw, the image of a male body, to which she had given birth, that was her blood, her flesh. She had forgotten herself, astounded, she had disregarded human decency, and she had been justly punished. She could have shut the door, been ashamed, apologised, but she had not done that. She was to blame, she had driven him from the house. Oh, God, how come she had not thought of that then? That win at the casino was only an intimation of imminent loss.

There was a soft tapping at the door. She did not respond; she did not have the energy to get up.

Mevludin came into the room. Beba did not stir. Her lips were dry, her eye make-up had run and now it streaked her face in thin streams.

Without a word, Mevludin went to the bathroom, wet a face cloth under the cold tap and began to wipe Beba’s cheeks.

‘Poor you… you look like a chimney sweep…’

Beba burst into tears again.

‘Drink this. And stop crying, love, you’ll run out of tears,’ said Mevlo, offering Beba a glass of water. Beba drained it and felt able to breathe more deeply.

‘Here, have a smoke, you’ll feel better,’ said Mevlo, handing her a lit cigarette.

Beba and Mevludin smoked in silence.

‘Don’t be cross with me,’ said Mevludin after a while.

‘What about?’

‘For acting the fool. But then, I kept thinking it’d be more fun…’

‘And it was.’

‘It’s right for me to say it, though.’

‘I know.’

‘Then you must also know that I think you’re great. And I won’t forget you.’

‘I know.’

‘Well then, now that we’ve said all there is to say, I’m off.’

Mevlo got up and set off towards the door.

‘Wait,’ said Beba.

Beba got out of bed and took an envelope out of the safe.

‘Just in case…’ she said, handing him the envelope.

The envelope contained a bundle of notes.

‘I can’t take this.’

‘It’s a present from me. You’ll need something to get you started, to buy a ticket to America and to keep you going while you find your feet…’

‘I can’t…’

‘Which of the two of us is older and stupider?’

‘You,’ Mevlo smiled.

‘Well, then, your place is to do as I say. You’ll find my address inside. So one day, when you’re passing through Zagreb…’

‘I’ll look you up.’

Mevlo and the stout old woman hugged. Beba burst into tears again. Mevlo patted her shoulder and grumbled:

‘You women are all made of water. The quantity of tears you have in you is unbelievable. You should all be packed off to the desert and used for irrigation.’

Mevlo took a cigarette out of his packet and stuck it behind Beba’s ear:

‘Just in case,’ he said and left the room.

4.

When he was making his new spa, Dr Topolanek had thought about his grandmother, to whose place they had always gone for lunch on Sundays. Afraid that she would not get everything ready in time, his grandmother always started cooking so early that by the time they, the Topolanek family, arrived everything on the table was cold. Every Sunday his grandmother got upset, and every Sunday his father consoled her:

‘Come on, Agneza, calm down, you know yourself that there is nothing in the world tastier than cold meatballs and – warm beer!’

Topolanek called his new spa ‘Granny Agneza’. It sounded local, but still a little mysterious, because people would wonder who Agneza was, why Agneza, which Agneza…? As well as this private justification, Topolanek had an objective one for his choice of his grandmother’s name: Agneza lived ninety-one years, which was a pretty decent age.

The previous evening, Linear had made a heap of meatballs, which were piled in a round dish on the edge of the swimming pool, while Willowy had brought gherkins and mustard. The girls moved Topolanek to tears with this gourmet detail. Now the three of them were sitting, naked, immersed in the hotel jacuzzi, which had been transformed into a vast tankard. Topolanek had had the jacuzzi filled with beer, and reduced the churning to a minimum, to ensure that, heaven forbid, they did not suffocate in froth. As it was, the froth was flying about in all directions.

It was a scene worthy of Lucas Cranach Senior, and, were he alive, he would have been able to paint Fountain of Youth ‘Part Two’. Except that, on the table, in the top right-hand corner of the painting, instead of a fish on a platter, there would have been Granny Agneza’s meatballs.

The girls were having the time of their lives. Willowy had made herself a beard of beer froth, while Linear had made a wig. Topolanek himself had gone beerily berserk. He was chasing Linear and Willowy round the little circular pool, repeating:

‘Little seals, come to daddy, little seals…’

And then the little seals came closer, slurped some beer from the pool and started rubbing their bodies against Topolanek’s. They were both smooth, slippery and agile, just like the seals in the zoo pool. Exclaiming, ‘Here!’ Topolanek tossed one meatball with his right hand into one mouth and another with his left into the other. The little seals fed from his hands. Willowy dunked her meatball in the beer froth, claiming it was nicer with froth than mustard. Then they dived under the surface, gambolled, played tag, clapped their hands in the foam, threw balls of beer froth at each other, touched each other, petted and kissed each other, from time to time chanting a little song that Linear had made up:

Merrily we swim, like little bugs in beer,

Beer is our element: clear, dear and here!

Topolanek felt magnificent, like a great reformer, like a scientist after a revolutionary discovery. If he had not actually discovered the formula of longevity, then with ‘Granny Agneza’ he had at least composed an ode in praise of vitamin B, and discovered yet another of the ways life could be merrier and more relaxed, and that, in our anxious and dismal age, could be regarded as a capital contribution, could it not?

And us? While life is often gloomy and cheerless, the tale runs on, bright and fearless!

5.

‘I can’t. I simply can’t,’ Beba kept repeating, as though in delirium.

Beba and Arnoš Kozeny were sitting in the half-empty hotel bar, sipping French cognac.

‘I entirely understand,’ said Arnoš Kozeny, puffing smoke from his cigar.

‘My granddaughter!? Why, I don’t know her at all!’ said Beba.

‘And how could you, for goodness’ sake! You only discovered a few hours ago that you’re a grandmother.’

‘And the murderer of my own son,’ said Beba bitterly.

‘Come now, don’t exaggerate, we’re all murderers. First we murder our own parents, and then our own children.’

‘I don’t know. All I know is that whoever wrote the screenplay of my life was completely incompetent.’

‘They’re all incompetent.’

Arnoš was right, they’re all incompetent. Few can boast that their screenplay writer really suits them. Who knows, perhaps the bureaucratic offices of Destiny are like Hollywood or Bollywood, perhaps instead of millions of diligent bureaucrats, there are millions of bunglers copying, rewriting, smudging the paper and scribbling. Maybe there are even different departments, and some do the dialogue, others the storyline, still others the characters, and maybe that is why our lives are such an indescribable mess. As soon as we are born, an invisible bundle is thrust into our hands and we all scatter off into our lives like Boy Scouts, each of us clutching our invisible coordinates in our hands. And perhaps that anxious race is the reason for our monstrous ignorance of other people’s lives, the lives of those who are closest to us.

‘So why don’t you intervene?’ asked Arnoš.

‘How could I intervene?’

‘Well, for instance, you could go back to your hotel room and confront the new circumstance in your life, your little granddaughter! And then endeavour to make the very best you can of the situation.’

‘How?!’

‘You’ll know, when it comes to it.’

Perhaps Arnoš was right about this as well. Perhaps intervening in the screenplay is all that is left to us? To offer our shoulder at the right moment for someone to cry on, to hand someone a handkerchief, show them the way. Because people often do not know the most basic things. Once Beba was waiting in a queue at the bank when a man asked her: ‘Excuse me, which is the right-hand side here?’ Everyone who heard him burst out laughing. It was only Beba who felt sympathy for the confused man. Showing someone which is right and which left, that is perhaps the intervention Arnoš means. We cannot do more than that, even if we wanted to. Take Pupa. Ever since she had known her, Pupa had always been reticent and restrained. If she ever said anything it was usually a comment on what others were saying. Beba had always thought that tiny little woman was as strong as an oak. Now she recalled a distant scene which she had forgotten. She had once gone to see Pupa, her door was open, and she had gone in and found Pupa kneeling on the floor, sobbing. It was a chilling scene, and Beba had wanted to tiptoe out again, to simply run away from the place of someone else’s misery. That was when she realised for the first time that we are capable of swallowing all sorts of things. After all, she had herself had her fill in hospital – of stomachs split open and guts falling out – and all that could be borne; there was only one thing that it was very hard to accept: the sight of someone else’s pain, a glimpse of a soul seeping unstoppably out of a body like a stream of urine. In the face of such a sight, we are hypnotised, like a rabbit confronting a boa constrictor. Beba sat down on the floor, without a word, spread her legs, placed Pupa in her lap, clasping her with both her arms and legs, pressing her to herself like a cushion, and who knows how long the two of them sat there like that in silence, fitted one into the other like two spoons. They never mentioned it afterwards, Beba did not ask, and Pupa never told her what it was about. Perhaps it had not been anything special. Perhaps some inner sorrow had risen up in her and stuck in her throat like a fish bone. Beba had helped her cough it out. And that was all. As we grow older, we weep less and less. It takes energy to weep. In old age neither the lungs, nor the heart, nor the tear ducts, nor the muscles have the strength for great misery. Age is a kind of natural sedative, perhaps because age itself is a misfortune.

‘How will I know? I was a lousy mother. I’ve wasted my own life pointlessly. I’m not qualified to be a grandmother,’ said Beba.

‘Just take a look around you, see how many people have placed their stakes on you!’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Your son, for example, he placed his stake on you! And the dice went in your favour! And your late friend, she too gave you a chance. And I, talking to you now, I am placing my stake on you. Admittedly it’s only a small coin, but I’ve placed it on you, and not on anyone else.’

‘You’re a good man, Arnoš.’

‘Perhaps, but I was a bad husband, father and grandfather. All I cared about in my life were women. I’m nothing but a scatterbrain, my dear. But still I’m lucky. There are few people my age who can afford such luxury.’

‘I don’t know. I’m seventy years old; I haven’t learned anything sensible in my life. Sometimes I think it would be best to kill myself…’ mused Beba thoughtfully.

Arnoš looked at her and said cheerfully:

If you want to end it all, do it with good taste:

You would not wish to leave a pall or a bitter taste.

Choose with care, as though it were a matter of fine wine:

Leave those who stay here with a sense of touching the divine.

If you want to end it all, do it with good taste:

Let others know you had a ball, your life was not a waste.

Choose a plaited rope of silk, in the hour before dawn,

When the air is smooth as milk and dew bejewels the lawn.

If you want to end it all, do it with good taste:

Find a sparkling waterfall, its spray spun and laced,

Scatter it with flowers whose fragrance lasts for hours,

Take something sweet to sustain you through the moment’s heat,

Breathe in and dive arrow-like, in your most graceful style

Straight as a die through the narrow gate, wearing a blissful smile.

‘Who wrote that?’

‘I did. I’ve written quite a pile of worthless verses. And so as not to fall into the temptation of reciting any more, let’s clink our glasses and drink to a good night and a forthcoming bright, sunny morning!’ said Arnoš Kozeny in high spirits.

And us? While life stumbles through thickets and briars, the tale is one of the constant high-fliers.

6.

The young man and the girl were sitting on a bench in the local park under a large chestnut tree whose luxuriant branches shrouded them like a green crown. The grass around them was moist and soft. It looked like a field prepared for an unusual ritual whose pagan signs no one was capable of deciphering. The local birds were changing their plumage and leaving their feathers everywhere. From a distance, it looked as though the young couple on the bench were protected by a feathery net, a large Indian ‘castle of dreams’. The birds hidden in the thick branches of the chestnut hushed their song to listen to the human chirruping.

‘You’re my pudding, my fruit pudding…’

The girl listened breathlessly, but her gaze was directed somewhere towards her feet, where from time to time she scratched one foot with the other.

‘You’re my peach melba, my cream alpine, my blueberry anglaise, my floating island, my chocolate éclair, my choux chantilly, my kirsch bûchette… you’re my kirsch puff.’

‘What?’ the girl laughed delightedly.

‘You’re my croque-en-bouche, my brioche, my brioche au sucre, my almond cookie, my rum baba, my biscuit, my biscuit de savoie, my profiterole,’ whispered Mevlo into the girl’s ear, which was pink as orange rind.

‘Ah, Mellow…’ whispered the girl, trembling from the intoxicating shivers running through her round body.

‘Mevlo…’ Mevlo corrected her.

‘Mellow…’ repeated the girl, looking at Mevlo with wide-open eyes.

‘My name is Mevlo…’ repeated Mevlo, plunging into those two green pools.

‘Mellow…’ said the girl sweetly.

‘OK, mala moja, vidim da mi to néceš naučit…’[8] Mevlo sighed resignedly.

Mevlo had taken a menu from the hotel confectioner’s and spent the whole night learning the names of cakes and sweets. That was the cleverest piece of advice that anyone could have given him. And it was advice given him by Arnoš Kozeny.

‘My dear young man,’ Arnoš Kozeny had said, when Mevlo complained in despair that he could not speak English and that he did not know how he could explain to the girl that he cared about her, ‘the fact that you don’t speak English is to your advantage. Because if you could, you might make a mistake. Whereas this way it’s quite immaterial what you say, chemical formulae or car parts. In any case in the first phase of being in love couples don’t talk. They chirrup…’

‘Like birds?’

‘Like birds, my boy…’ said Arnoš Kozeny, adding enigmatically: ‘Not only do they chirrup, but feathers fly in all directions.’

‘You’re my truffle, you’re my black forest gateau, you’re my gateau basque, my guadeloupe, my nian gao with one hundred fruits, my vassilopitta efkoli, my tremolat, my black devil, my gianduja ganache, my sachertorte, my caramel, my marzipan, my marquise, my mousse au chocolat, my passion fruit cream, my passion fruit, my fruit, my passion…’

‘Ah, Mellow…’

‘You’re my little strudel, my truffle, my fudge…’

‘I’m feeling mellow…’

‘Oh, Rosie, Ružice, my little rose, my rosebud…’

The young man and the girl were so deeply engrossed in their twitterings of love that they did not notice that a slight breeze had got up and lifted the feathers from the grass around them. The branches of the old chestnut rustled and feathers flew through the air.