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