MAJA HRGOVIĆ

Zlatka

My head was hanging over the hair-washing basin like a weighty pistil. With her soft, sensually slow circular movements Zlatka made her way through the wet mass all the way to the roots. Pleasure spread down my neck; I closed my eyes. Naturally, the tips of her fingers were seductively certain of their experience.

Later, she sat me in front of a large mirror. In it I caught sight of well-thought-through clips of scissors snipping at the split ends of my hair, and two crinkles incised into the corners of Zlatka’s mouth as she said: “I’ll get that mane of yours in order.”

* * *

I lived near the train station in a neighbourhood built many decades ago for the families of railroad workers and machinists. Like tombstones over grave mounds, hardened chimneys rose from parallel rows of elongated one-storey buildings. Decaying, hideous buildings made of concrete, separated by narrow tracks of municipal ground and an occasional wild chestnut, shivered before sudden passes of express trains from Budapest and Venice.

My apartment perfectly blended in the sorrow of the neighbourhood; it grew out of it like a twig from a knarled old mulberry tree. I had two rooms at my disposal, but one smelled of damp so badly that I gave up on it. I slept, read and ate in the other, larger room, in which I was – perhaps because of a red futon, the only new piece of furniture in the apartment – less often taken by the feeling that someone had recently died here. The wardrobe seemed like a vertically placed coffin into which someone very clever had installed shelves. A large square window opened up to yet another horrible one-storey building and let in just enough light to give me a sense of missing something. The cold crept in through the worm-eaten window frame and it made, as I breathed, the air evaporate from my nose in light little clouds. The