Till Kingdom Come. Andrej Nikolaidis
for ideological reasons I wouldn’t save a single Californian wine,” she said. “Some of them are good, some are perhaps even excellent, but Californian wines are anti-wines. Where there is no tradition, there ought not to be any wine either. Do you also get the feeling that they’re instant wines concocted like Nescafe? The only thing more scandalous than Californian wines is Californian cognac – because cognac is a perfume among drinks, the essence of tradition.”
The rich are fundamentally conservative, and Maria was no exception. However decadent they are, however many transgressions their life is full of, however ardently they promote liberal values, or the manners of their class, and however much compassion they may have for people of colour, the disabled and the LGBT community, the rich want one thing above all: For everything to stay as it is – for them to stay rich, that is.
Goran enthusiastically accepted her thesis. He considered there should only be a place for a very few types of cognac in the new world.
When Radovan announced he would load the raft with good old-fashioned Rakia, and add the occasional crate of beer, it became clear that our apocalyptic fantasy was a confirmation of Béla Hamvas’s theory that there are wine-, vodka- and beer-drinking peoples.
As far as I’m concerned, there has only ever been one drink – Scotch whisky, single malt. There was no need for any other kinds of alcohol – neither in this world nor in any other. When I later succeeded in life, as they say, and finally had the money for single malt, I didn’t drink anything else. A raft loaded with select oak barrels of single malt didn’t need to be seen as the seed of a better, future world – it already was the best of all possible worlds.
Entertained by imagining utopias – the path to which is always paved with corpses, or at least carcasses – we arrived at the Bojana River in good spirits. The water had not carried away Goran’s hut, although it had been a close call. The small wooden structure, sheathed in tarred and rusty corrugated iron, built to the highest standards of the slums of this world, had proved exceptionally sturdy. There are times when the glass towers fall and all of modernity founders with its information systems and social structures, when gravity overcomes everything that people’s pride has put in its way, and then only holes and hovels survive the universal destruction.
The Bojana River wasn’t always the cloaca it is today. Fishermen once used to net schools of grey mullet here, and at night they would sit together with local wine and home-grown tobacco telling tales of the good old days and big catches. But the little river had the misfortune of being discovered by rich Muscovites, who brought along their lovers – badly bungled crosses between the male ideal of female beauty and the female need to please the male eye. These Frankenstein-like brides came with their Luis Vuitton handbags and their shrieking Chihuahuas in tow. Later, prostitutes from Novi Pazar opened their all-inclusive spa centres. Then hordes of Montenegrin tycoons descended on the river like tribes of barbarians set on razing Rome to the ground, and this perfect landscape lay in their path, perfectly vulnerable. The moguls’ excess of money and lack of taste spawned architectural monsters by the waterside, and in a truly just society they would be publicly executed in the town square and their brains sent to advanced research centres for close examination in the hope that future experts would be able to prevent aesthetic crimes – the most terrible of all.
Radovan sped back to Ulcinj to kill one more wretch’s last trace of trust in humanity. The three of us, in a silence disturbed only by the clink of glasses, gazed into the river, which was carrying away the remains of a world lost in the flood. For hours we watched the millions of destructive raindrops compress into the stream of the river. At night, only a few lanterns upstream impaired the perfect darkness we gladly consigned ourselves to.
When Radovan came to collect us three days later, I asked Goran and Maria to wait for me in the car as I prepared to take my leave. I stood on the terrace and let the sorrow flood through my whole being, a sadness that numbed my limbs and then took away my thoughts. I floated in the weightlessness of that potent melancholy, sensing beyond any doubt that something majestic had ended, a grandeur I would remember till my dying day. I knew it was over and that I wouldn’t be able to talk about it because, however much detail and eloquence I described it with, the essence would slip away – it was essential to me alone and could not subsequently be interpreted and shared with another person, not even with the future me. I knew that no future intimate bond would be complete enough for that feeling to be shared, because however many words I used, no one would find what I was talking about more significant than some second-hand anecdote.
Our return to Ulcinj ended in catastrophe. Radovan insisted that we drop in for a drink in Štoj on the way. There another guy from the Krajina borderlands ran a pub called The Second Chance. As soon as we set foot in that hole it became clear to us that the name was not without significance – here you had a pretty good chance of picking up AIDS, or syphilis at the very least. Prostitutes roosted in artificial-leather booths lit by imitation candles; the girls were from Moldova, as it turned out. Radovan was a welcome guest here. You could even say a stakeholder. He and his fellow countryman went off for a conspiratorial conversation in ‘the office’, they told us. The three of us dragged ourselves to the bar. The waitress threw a few bottles of Nikšić beer at us – lukewarm the way bricklayers drink it.
By the time Radovan came back from his ‘meeting’ and buttoned up his flies, I was starting to slur my words. He insisted we have another drink, claiming he had reason to celebrate. One drink turned into five, or ten, it makes no difference. They carried me out of The Second Chance and heaved me into the Trabant.
They woke me when we arrived at a petrol station because our East German wreck finally gave up the ghost. We even tried to jump-start it for a hundred metres or so – in vain, of course. I stumbled several times and fell face down in the slough. Since I was wet and barely able to walk, Maria took me home. I don’t know many people who would haul a drunken pig three kilometres through a flooded town in the diluvial rain, fully aware that he would never thank her for it.
Somewhere on the way, I realized from what she told me later, I tried to kiss her. I wasn’t pushy, just wet and icky with vomit – my worst possible manifestation. It takes a special feeling for melodrama and tragedy for a man to declare the love he has been harbouring for years to his victim, the unlucky object of his love, at the worst possible moment.
She turned me down, though I don’t doubt she did it with a ladylike tenderness that would make anyone she turned down love her even more hopelessly. I then gave a romantic speech, whose details she spared me, but clearly it was in keeping with the genre, and thus unbearable. When cynics ‘open up their heart’, as the phrase goes, they ought to be shot on the spot like rabid dogs. It becomes clear at that moment that the best in the man – his razor-sharp humour, his cold, refined, analytical mind, and the dignified distance he maintains towards everything, including his own life – is actually just a mask. His confession and tears wash away that mask and you have an intellectual wretch before you who has pretended to be an aristocrat of the mind; instead of a rare being whose reason has overcome instinct, you have a rotten hulk kneeling in front of you for whom you feel nothing but disgust.
That’s what I told her later, too: “You should have killed me.”
“Would you be able to kill me?” she asked with a laugh.
“I’m afraid I don’t know any more,” I said, but it didn’t sound half as good as it would have one day earlier.
She was getting sick of pulling me along against the current, so she called the servants. She took me to a garden, where we sat under an orange tree and waited for the little kitchen hand to come in the pick-up. Then they threw me in, drove me home, took off my wet things and left me on the bed, unconscious.
I woke up in Sarajevo, a city I had never been to. I had a clear memory of the previous night. We had been drinking at the Piccadilly, a bar behind the cathedral. The father of one of the boys in the group, who owned the place, had the waiter bring us a bottle of whisky as soon as we arrived and got settled in the booths. By ten, we were all drunk – it doesn’t take much with teenagers. I wanted to clear my head and decided to go for a walk and get a trolleybus at the Skenderija sports centre. Snow was falling silently