LITTLE PIONEERS

Jadranka said:Don’t go.

Father said:You’re right to go.

Nenad said:If only I could go.

Jasna said to Sara:Your mum’s capable, you’ll be fine. Three years earlier (when we moved from Belgrade to Rijeka in Croatia), Jasna had said to Sara:Your mum’s hopeless, she’s never achieved anything.

Laura asked:Will you write to me about how bad things are? (When I wrote that things were all right, Laura stopped talking to me.)

My brother said:I’m going to America, that’s where I was born. (He didn’t go anywhere.)

Only my sister Lena sighed:I’ll miss you. But she lived in Slovenia.

I had applied for a small managerial post. I didn’t get it. The newspapers wished me a safe journey.

I read Dovlatov.

I read Krleža.

I read Brodsky.

Dovlatov was big and strong. He downed two litres of vodka a day. He spent seventeen years in Petrograd writing, but no one published any of it. He went to America, became well-known and after twelve years, in 1990, he died. He was forty-nine. Before that his daughter had asked him:Are you happy now? He replied:No.

After living in Rijeka for three years, Sara finally summoned the courage to ask for frankfurters using the Croatian and not the Serbian word.

Vesna told me that someone in a Croatian bank had said that she couldn’t understand Serbian at all.

There’s little Lulu from Somalia. Her father speaks French, English and German, as does her mother. Her mother is not from Somalia but of half-Polish, half-Hungarian origin and she was born in America. She asks Lulu from Somalia:Qu’est-ce qu’il y a dans ta soupe? Lulu says:Il y a des carrotes, des pommes-de-terre, chicken and noodles and je veux un ice-cream maintenant. She asks the waiter:A glass of voda, please. Lulu’s not yet five. Everyone understands her.

It’s a sunny winter’s day. The sky is electric blue as it can only be in Paris or on the Adriatic when there’s a north wind. Sara is saying goodbye to her girlfriends in the pizzeria under the building where we live. I walk and sing (to myself).

Rijeka is divided by a railway line. In Rijeka trains pass slowly through the city. Trains completely block out the view of the sea. This makes the city seem smaller.

There are several benches along the Quay. They’re used by prostitutes and old people. The old people rest from standing, because the benches are opposite various administrative offices in which the old people spend a long time waiting in queues. The old people wear old clothes and worn-out shoes. Old people find it hard to get used to new clothes. The old men don’t shave every day. The old man beside me takes a bun out of his shopping bag and sucks it. The way my granny Ana used to suck old toast because her teeth were no use anymore. There’s a carrot poking out of his bag.

The sky is electric blue, says the old man.

The prostitute is no more than nineteen. She’s got a small pale yellow towel poking out of her bag. The prostitute is eating salami. It’s midday.

My mum sent me this, says the prostitute.

I’m sitting in the middle, between the old man and the prostitute, and I’m not eating anything.

The shape of your face isn’t at all Serbian, my colleague R. V. in Belgrade had said.You’ll have to leave, she also said.

In Rijeka everyone told me:Tone down that Serbian accent.

Dovlatov wrote about Spivakov.

As a Jew in the Soviet Union, Spivakov experienced a lot of unpleasantness. Even though he was called Spivakov and not Spivberg or Spivman. After all kinds of tribulations, the authorities permitted him to give a recital in the USA. When he arrived at the Carnegie Hall, he found a crowd from the American League for the Defence of Jews. They were holding up placards reading:KGB agents – out! They were shouting:Fighting for the rights of Soviet Jews!

When the concert began, Spivakov was bombarded with tins filled with red paint. Spivakov was completely red.

That was a long time ago. It’s nothing like that now. Spivakov is internationally famous now. Among the most famous.

My li