CONTENTS
Denis, 1994
Peter & Goran
Denis, 1990
The End
And Again
The Author
The Translator
DINO BAUK
THE END. AND AGAIN
Translated from the Slovene by Timothy Pogačar
First published in 2019 by Istros Books (in collaboration with Beletrina Academic Press)
London, United Kingdom
www.istrosbooks.com
Originally published in Slovene as Konec. Znova by Beletrina Academic Press, 2015
© Dino Bauk
The right of Dino Bauk to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Translation © Timothy Pogačar
Cover design and typesetting: Davor Pukljak | www.frontispis.hr
ISBN:
Print: 978-1-912545-28-5
Ebooks: 978-1-912545-29-2
This Book is part of the EU co-funded project “Reading the Heart of Europe” n partnership with Beletrina Academic Press | www.beletrina.si
The European Commission support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
For Maja, who, since I was of Denis’s age,
smiles at me from the passenger seat and
for Urban, Gašper and Uroš,
who are, one over the other,
constantly taking to us in the rear-view mirror.
“There were six of them: four men and two blond girls. They stood, seemingly scattered across the hill, but Kate recognized the pattern. She walked passed one of the men and saw nothing in his eyes. Another step and she found herself in her place. At that moment she heard the silence. And she started singing the silent song.”
David Albahari, Silent Song
DENIS, 1989
He liked foggy autumn evenings when he could see only what was very close by. In that small world of a metre radius, bordered by walls of condensed moisture with no room for anyone else, he could pretend he was alone: on the street, in the city, in the world. He could see only a step or two ahead, and his small world moved with him, as if a round cluster of yellow lights were following him across a dark stage. At first, he heard only the quiet, dull steps of other people approaching him. They become gradually louder, and then for just an instant, black shadows cut through the foggy wall and fell aside. He could even pass by people he knew in the fog without having to say hello or strike up boring, polite conversations. To be honest, most people got on his nerves. He was sixteen: old enough for cigarettes, alcohol, and evenings out, but not enough for genuine independence. He had long grown tired of being accountable to his old man and mum. The one-and-a-half room flat on the thirteenth floor of a twenty-floor high-rise on the North Side seemed smaller to him by the day. It was only bearable when no one moved about much, when his old man drowsed in front of the TV, his mum busied herself tidying up the kitchen and lit a cigarette at the big dining table, and he was in his room listening to music with earphones, reading, or inaudibly, so to say, fingering chords on his guitar without really strumming the silent strings with his right hand. Most of the time he felt the flat was unbearably crowded, even though there were only three people living there. It was as if each day the ceiling dropped another millimetre to the floor, and the walls came a millimetre closer. He lacked air. He had an urge to go out, onto the street, into the cold evening, into his foggy refuge. Evening after evening, he and his old man played out a set ritual to the last detail like two veteran actors. They staged the one-act street theatre for themselves and for his mum, when she didn’t work second shift. When he was almost to the door, after having pulled on a worn field jacket, black cap in one hand and the other on the latch, his old man called from the living room in his native Serbo-Croatian.
‘Denis! Where you off to again?’
‘To town.’
‘Why the hell are you wandering around town like some bum? You want to be in trouble with the police again?’
For his old man there was no real difference between the police giving him a warning during a routine patrol and them seizing him in front of a burgled duty-free shop with a bag full of imported cigarettes, whiskey, and chocolates. Having anything to do with them meant being guilty of something – if nothing else, of wandering about aimlessly and uselessly in the evening, which of course cast his parents in a bad light even more than him, being that his old man lived in a world that respected all manner of authority. This had been his old man’s new, constant worry ever since two policemen had stopped him on a walk around the North Side, asked who was writing the graffiti on the walls, and carefully took down his details. Someone (and of course Denis knew full well who) had written ‘Fuck off Poland’ on a white wall. The graffiti, hastily written in black spray paint, seemed to the policemen, not to mention to the concerned citizen who reported it to them, and probably to most adults on the North Side, as like something aimed against the government, or at least against a friendly socialist country, a complaint. In fact, it was a wholly innocent and senseless piece of slang that had caught on among North Side teenagers at the time. One evening, someone had probably tossed it off at some gathering, a second and third person used it on some other occasion, repeating it in some gathering, and it entered into general use. Kids on the North Side now said ‘Fuck off Poland’ instead of the boringly simple, ‘Addio’. Of course, Denis didn’t start explaining this to the two men of the law. In a certain sense, he was amused at how terribly dangerous the quickly scrawled lettering seemed to the two of them. Its author probably forgot about it the day after conspiratorially applying it to the wall in the dark. On the other hand, it was really pretty careless to tell his parents about his talk with the men in blue, thinking he would share with them his rage at the gratuitous harassment, and he damn well regretted it the instant his old man exploded in agitation, shooting from the living room couch into the kitchen.
Since then, his old man, who was mostly worried about possible troubles at the army base on his account, reminded him almost every time he went out in the evening to be careful not to get a warning. He was convinced that every such entry in a vigilant policeman’s notebook would be preserved forever somewhere deep in the state’s administrative bowels, and that if it turned out to be needed, it could be spat out into the daylight at any time. Yeah, the world his old man lived in was a world of constant surveillance that wasn’t carried out by some big brother’s all-seeing eye with the aid of the state security service’s cameras and microphones: the whole thing