pleasure.
Z DRAVKO ALL BUT DISAPPEARED for a time and sickly Robert was always out on errands with his mother. He needed a lot of air … I was left with Gisela, the twins, or the old monkeys over behind the hospice’s fence. I couldn’t understand how a person could become so old and decrepit and still feel like living. Particularly in as messy a yard as that. If only the old folks were at least a little bit nice. But sometimes their eyes would start glinting as though a whole madhouse had just opened up in their heads. They also sang now and then, sometimes in the middle of the night, like monks … I could hear them through the wall. They didn’t have bad voices.
Finally I gave myself a kick and headed over to the barracks. I climbed up the fence and looked in. What utter poverty! The wooden shacks were as shabby as those plague-eaten horses in the pictures of my illustrations … Heaps of rusted metal, pipes, strips, and sheets … And what wasn’t strewn around the gate … motorcycle tires, holy icons, horse collar padding … But they had piglets in pens, with chickens pecking around, and rabbits in warrens … There was a brilliant sign on the fence: “Cunt and prick make little Dick,” next to which therewas a picture of something like poop dropping into a potty … A few boys with bowl haircuts came out accompanied by girls. I wasn’t afraid of them … they seemed to be shyer than I was. I particularly liked one of the girls. She was wearing a skirt that probably belonged to her mother, because it reached to the ground. Her ass almost bounced like a ball. Dark hair. With a little ring on her tanned hand … They invited me to come on over the wall … Lots of interesting wrenches lying around heaps of old metal, some of which would have made fine brass knuckles. And cleaning rods like arrows. Unusual package-like parts of machines. And fat rubber bands for slingshots and tanks that you could make out of spindles. Sheets of aluminum. Glass liquor bottles … I kept close to my Gypsy girl. She let me know that she liked me. She was like Adrijana and Anka rolled into one … We scaled a few little fences and in an empty, abandoned pigpen with high walls we kissed each other on the dry cinders; she put her tongue in my mouth … she stroked my balls so hard, with both hands, the way the little Gypsy girls in Cegelnica begged for a dinar, and I stroked her cherry with its little groove. Her little sisters and brothers exploded with laughter. They made fun of our caresses by rubbing themselves between the legs and kissing the air with big, puffed-up cheeks, as if in some big movie … When I came back the next day, firmly resolved to see our nastiness to its end, my girlfriend was gone … she had moved … It was always like that: either I moved or others did.
At the end of Bohorič Street on the other side of the railroad crossing was the Salesian Home, which housed the Kodeljevo movie theater. This building and the playgrounds below it is where you would seesome strange boys, all of them religious and a little crippled. They would kick the ball in a restrained, oddly tame sort of way under the watchful eye of their trainer and referee, a young priest in a cassock, with a whistle clenched in his mouth, who kept jumping around among the spectators … Their founder was the blessed don Bosco, the educator priest whose life I was familiar with … The players ran around their shallow clay-covered depression in pathetically baggy uniforms like harlequins … The goalie was leaning up against the goal, probably because his position gave him some peace and quiet that he could use to think about things. He didn’t like it when they disturbed him and he always let the ball go by … Toward the end of the game they looked like staggering statues of clay … The reason for the bad match was probably that they didn’t have any real opponent. They were playing against
Z DRAVKO ALL BUT DISAPPEARED for a time and sickly Robert was always out on errands with his mother. He needed a lot of air … I was left with Gisela, the twins, or the old monkeys over behind the hospice’s fence. I couldn’t understand how a person could become so old and decrepit and still feel like living. Particularly in as messy a yard as that. If only the old folks were at least a little bit nice. But sometimes their eyes would start glinting as though a whole madhouse had just opened up in their heads. They also sang now and then, sometimes in the middle of the night, like monks … I could hear them through the wall. They didn’t have bad voices.
Finally I gave myself a kick and headed over to the barracks. I climbed up the fence and looked in. What utter poverty! The wooden shacks were as shabby as those plague-eaten horses in the pictures of my illustrations … Heaps of rusted metal, pipes, strips, and sheets … And what wasn’t strewn around the gate … motorcycle tires, holy icons, horse collar padding … But they had piglets in pens, with chickens pecking around, and rabbits in warrens … There was a brilliant sign on the fence: “Cunt and prick make little Dick,” next to which therewas a picture of something like poop dropping into a potty … A few boys with bowl haircuts came out accompanied by girls. I wasn’t afraid of them … they seemed to be shyer than I was. I particularly liked one of the girls. She was wearing a skirt that probably belonged to her mother, because it reached to the ground. Her ass almost bounced like a ball. Dark hair. With a little ring on her tanned hand … They invited me to come on over the wall … Lots of interesting wrenches lying around heaps of old metal, some of which would have made fine brass knuckles. And cleaning rods like arrows. Unusual package-like parts of machines. And fat rubber bands for slingshots and tanks that you could make out of spindles. Sheets of aluminum. Glass liquor bottles … I kept close to my Gypsy girl. She let me know that she liked me. She was like Adrijana and Anka rolled into one … We scaled a few little fences and in an empty, abandoned pigpen with high walls we kissed each other on the dry cinders; she put her tongue in my mouth … she stroked my balls so hard, with both hands, the way the little Gypsy girls in Cegelnica begged for a dinar, and I stroked her cherry with its little groove. Her little sisters and brothers exploded with laughter. They made fun of our caresses by rubbing themselves between the legs and kissing the air with big, puffed-up cheeks, as if in some big movie … When I came back the next day, firmly resolved to see our nastiness to its end, my girlfriend was gone … she had moved … It was always like that: either I moved or others did.
At the end of Bohorič Street on the other side of the railroad crossing was the Salesian Home, which housed the Kodeljevo movie theater. This building and the playgrounds below it is where you would seesome strange boys, all of them religious and a little crippled. They would kick the ball in a restrained, oddly tame sort of way under the watchful eye of their trainer and referee, a young priest in a cassock, with a whistle clenched in his mouth, who kept jumping around among the spectators … Their founder was the blessed don Bosco, the educator priest whose life I was familiar with … The players ran around their shallow clay-covered depression in pathetically baggy uniforms like harlequins … The goalie was leaning up against the goal, probably because his position gave him some peace and quiet that he could use to think about things. He didn’t like it when they disturbed him and he always let the ball go by … Toward the end of the game they looked like staggering statues of clay … The reason for the bad match was probably that they didn’t have any real opponent. They were playing against
Similar Books
