did a door, closed for many years somewhere in the attic of her memory, slowly open, and from the dusty vault of the past released certain long forgotten pictures. Pictures of her missionary year in Europe when she was barely seventeen, in a country that not long after her departure (preceded by a series of almost unbelievable events) exploded and blew to pieces. Like the majority of teenagers and adults in Mormon families, she had decided to spend a year in one of the missions the church had founded around the world. Unlike some of her relatives and friends, she didn’t decide to go on a one-year mission out of a desire to convert people or out of charity, which are supposed to be missionaries’ two fundamental aims. No. Her two motives were much more secular: to travel and gain experience. To live. Her mother tried to convince her to delay leaving for at least a year, but she didn’t want to heed her mother’s warnings that missionary work was hard and that you have to follow very strict rules that permit little free time. She could hardly wait to get on the plane that would take her over Utah’s high mountains and across the Atlantic to Europe, which she dreamed of as some sort of wonderland; an amusement park in which adventures and experiences would follow in such a wild rhythm that she would barely be able to deal with it. When she dreamed of Europe, she naturally dreamed of fields of lavender in Provence, Ireland’s green coast, hidden beaches on the Greek islands, Paris coffeehouses, and London pubs. She first heard of Ljubljana, a city in a country with the difficult-to-pronounce name of Yugoslavia and supposedly only several hours by car from Vienna and Venice on the evening of a large meeting of future missionaries, where they told her the location of her mission. She and Noah, the son of family friends of similar age, together with three other missionaries, were to try and start a mission under the supervision of an established Austrian one in the neighbouring socialist country. Since she knew nothing at all about Ljubljana, she couldn’t really be disappointed. Nonetheless, she somehow envied Vondra, who was setting off for Lisbon. Lisbon… Lisbon sounded a lot more colourful and fun. That evening Mary’s parents bent over a map of Europe and put their heads together. In her room just before falling asleep, Mary heard her father’s worried conclusion that his daughter was going to live with communists.
More than fifteen years must have passed since she last thought of him. Denis – what could have happened to him? Had he been swallowed up in the fire of war? Fortunately, the war had not lasted long in that westernmost part of Yugoslavia, only a few days, and as she recalled, his father was a member of the Federal Army, which had to withdraw south from there very soon after. Had Denis stayed in music, or had he grown up and found some serious job? She could hardly imagine the latter; the seventeen-year-old she last saw in a Ljubljana police station was still before her eyes. He was straining to look back at her, while the two detectives pulled him in the other direction. It was a scene that hardly predicted an illustrious, if any, career in the civil service or large company. She couldn’t remember his last name. She wasn’t even sure he had told her. Yeah, if she knew it, she might catch up with him now, Google him, or search for him on Facebook. But at the time his last name seemed to her an unimportant piece of information.
Her head full of dusty memories, the walk to the closest shop for cigarettes and back to the one-room flat passed without her noticing. It was the time of year in New York when the cold could really be miserable. When she closed the flat door behind her, took off the woollen cap, coat and scarf, and leather Canadian boots with leather soles, she opened the fresh pack of cigarettes, took one out (the first one is always hardest to extract), went to the stove (not really wanting to look for a lighter), and with a practised move lit the cigarette from the gas, having moved her long dark hair to the safe side of her neck with the other hand. As she moved it away from the flame – actually just for a second, but even so – several grey hairs showed in the dead light of a dull, classic light bulb. She didn’t do much with them even the first time she noticed. She accepted them as a fact she couldn’t much control. Finally holding the lit cigarette, she visibly calmed down and took another, very slow walk around the flat, as if wanting to be sure that he really had left and she was still alone. On the way she grabbed the laptop, put it on the kitchen table, sat down, moved the ashtray closer, and put down the cigarette. Then, both hands on the keyboard, she started entering different search words. The search ‘Denis from Ljubljana’ didn’t yield encouraging results: a link to flight schedules between Ljubljana and Saint-Denis and the website of some escort agency that offered a date with an attractive Denise from Ljubljana. Things like that, nothing solid. Of course, neither could Mary recall, in fact she never knew, the last names of Denis’s two friends in the band. It was as if all of it had taken place two hundred, and not twenty, years ago. If it had taken place now, they would have exchanged mobile numbers on the first evening, the night of their first date they would have become Facebook friends, and a firm connection would have been established that almost nothing could interrupt, no matter how far from Ljubljana her Mormon group director would have sent her after the newsstand thing. As it was, they moved her a few hundred kilometres away, to a small city in Austria, and contact was lost forever. Denis wasn’t her first love, but he was somehow almost her first beloved. A lot of things happened with him for the first time, irreversibly awakening desire in her young body, although they never went all the way. From the first touch of their hands at some local band’s concert and whispering verses in each other’s ears…
‘Hey, wait!’ she caught herself on that thought. ‘What was the name of that band. C’mon, Mary, try to remember. Russian queen or something… Anastasia? No, no, no… What was it? Fuck!’
She dug the fingers of her right hand into her hair and steadily drummed the table with those on her left. She took the cigarette from the ashtray, inhaled long and strong, put it down, and again drummed the table…
‘Catherine, Catherine the Great! Yes! That was the band’s name!’
When she excitedly searched ‘Catherine the Great’ in Google, all of the results were connected with sites that actually had to do with the eighteenth-century Russian ruler; not a trace of any rock band. In the next search she added ‘rock band’ and bingo!
Wikipedia result:
Ekaterina velika (English: Catherine the Great, initially called Katarina II).
‘That must be it! Alternative rock, years 1987–1991, yes, that’s definitely it!’
A click on the result.
Ekaterina Velika (Serbian Cyrillic Екатерина Велика, English: Catherine the Great), sometimes referred to as EKV for short, was a Serbian and former Yugoslav rock band from Belgrade, being one of the most successful and influential music acts out of former Yugoslavia.
Initially called Katarina II (Serbian Cyrillic Катарина II, English: Catherine II), the band had built up a devoted following that greatly intensified and expanded after the death of its frontman Milan Mladenović in 1994, which resulted in the dissolution of the band. The group’s core consisted of singer and guitarist Milan Mladenović, keyboardist Margita Stefanović and bassist Bojan Pečar, with other members mostly remaining for comparatively shorter periods.
At the side was a black and white photograph of the band.
She, the young woman on the keyboard, and three young men. Just as she remained in her memory. It says she’s Margita; it also says she died. Actually, three of the four in the photo were dead. This fact unpleasantly surprised her. Three of the four people who that evening in Ljubljana so assuredly sent their pure, youthful energy into the crowd below the stage were no longer alive. Just like then, at the concert, she now directed most of her attention to the female member as she looked at the band’s photo. Even now, something in the young woman greatly attracted her. Maybe the story of how she turned off the road from classical music that others had planned for her. Maybe she was just attracted by the idea of a dark, gentle woman (at this age, she too fit that description) in an alternative rock band made up of men.
Evening fell as she was watching recordings of the band on YouTube. The street lights came on, snowflakes started drifting from the sky, and at a twentieth-floor window of a red Brooklyn building the silhouette of a slender, long-haired woman not looking out the window at the street but across the Atlantic and twenty years into the past, at old recordings she never had time to organize either chronologically