Luck on a String II: The World Is Cast in Gray Concrete

“Sir, sir,” the cashier at Hofer shouted after me as I walked off, lost in thought, with a bag containing milk and tomatoes. I decided to ignore her until an older man tapped me on the shoulder and pointed out the agitated shop assistant. “Your card was declined,” snapped a barely adult brat with a piercing in her left nostril, “do you have cash, perhaps?”

Red-faced and sweating with humiliation, I climb the concrete footpath to the plaza and stop for a moment, not so much because of memories as to catch my breath. More than forty of the “best” years of my life, I think bitterly, and I’ve managed to get from here to here. Milk and tomatoes again, only there are no Indians to smash them in the face of. At least Rok is coming, I tell myself; it’ll be great to see him again after all these years.

In front of the entrance to the apartment block stands a younger man in a cheap suit, with scuffed shoes and teeth yellowed by tobacco. “Matic Škerjanc?” he addresses me, taking my elbow not very gently.

“Yes,” I reply warily. “And who are you? Why do you ask?”

“We’ve got a little enforcement order for you to sign,” he explains contentedly, shoving some sort of paper in my face.

The armchairs in my mother’s living room have been there as long as I can remember. When I was a child, she covered them with zebra skins in a desperate attempt to hide the patches of worn velvet and the truth about the real reasons for my father’s absence. “He’s in Libya, drilling in the Sahara,” she told me every night before bed when I asked where he was and when he would be back.

Drilling he was, all right, but not in the Sahara, I think, surrendering to the bittersweet embrace of self-pity, from which Rok’s thunderous laughter wrenches me. “What did you do to him? You’re not quite right in the head.”

His enthusiasm is infectious. “I smashed the lot in his face, mate, like in the old days. I even busted his eyebrow, but it’s hardly my fault they don’t sell milk in bags anymore,” I answer proudly. “And why’s he talking to me like some half-witted waiter? ‘We’ve got a little enforcement order,’” I mimic him. “Get lost, you debt-collecting cow, go back to the one who sent you and enforce your orders on her.”

“Speaking of ‘her,’ as you call her…,” Rok asks, flicking a speck of dust visible only to him from his designer jeans, ironed to a sharp crease, “…how’s Milena? I didn’t even know you weren’t together anymore.”

“Of course you didn’t. You don’t give a damn about me or her or any of us; you went off abroad to play the gentleman, and then you come back here now and then to crap on our heads about what half-witted yokels we all are,” I reply with a sharpness that surprises even me. Embarrassed, I try to busy myself with my bottle of Laško, but it is empty again.

My outburst doesn’t throw Rok. “I gather you didn’t part by mutual agreement,” he says, his eyes flicking over the combed-over remains of my blond curls and the beer belly pushing out from under my polo shirt, freshly put on yesterday.

“She left me. For one of those fucking Indians. That Southern immigrant Perot, who made his money in the voucher privatization. Now he’s supposedly into cryptocurrencies. Not very successfully, if you ask me, if they still have to live in the house I bought and I’m still paying off the mortgage. Cryptocurrencies. Crypto-faggotry, if you ask me.”

Rok doesn’t answer, just raises his eyebrows slightly. My remarks about the personal circumstances and business acumen of the guy screwing my ex-wife are evidently too much for his European humanist sensibilities. Any minute now we’ll get a lecture on hate speech. I wonder who the threatened minority is here: me or the two of them?

“Well,” he breaks the silence after a long pause, “so you’ve moved back in with your mum. How is she?”

“She’s in a home. Dementia. Always the path of least resistance, if you ask me. And I get to deal with all this crap,” I reply, waving my hand at the worn furniture, lost hopes and wrecked expectations.

“How’s work?” Rok asks, evidently keen to steer the conversation elsewhere. “Where do you work again? People say you’re a secret agent. Škerjanc, Matic Škerjanc,” he adds, laughing, but turns serious as soon as he notices my glare.

“Sure, James fucking Bond. In accounts. And even that was fixed for me by Milena’s dad. Which she never forgot to mention. That I wouldn’t even earn the few euros I bring home if it weren’t for her. Secret agent 000, she called me.”

I open another beer. Rok has barely touched his first. In a low voice I say: “I was just about to go to the Home.”

“The home?” Rok replies in surprise. “Your mum’s? Aren’t you a bit young? You’re not even fifty-four.”

“The Home, not the home. The Homeland League. You know, that new party, supposedly patriotic and all that.”

Rok doesn’t answer, but his silence speaks louder than words.

“Who are you to look down on me!” I explode, banging my fist on the table. “You lot in Brussels and Strasbourg don’t give a damn about us; you sit there with full bellies lecturing us. Meanwhile here, people walk all over us and treat us like dirt. Faggots and migrants and feminists; my ex was always going on about rights and values and equality too, and then she goes off and spreads her legs for someone else,” I shout, red in the face.

Rok watches me calmly. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Did you join the Home?”

Suddenly all the anger drains out of me. “I went to sign the membership form. And ran into one of my bosses there. Can you imagine? ‘Škerjanc?’ he asked me, staring with those bulging eyes. ‘Aren’t you from my department?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, and turned and left. I admit I’m a loser, but I’m not that much of a loser. I did feel like slashing the tires on that car of his, though,” I blurt out, clenching my fists in a spasm of adrenaline born of imaginary courage.

“Have you thought about getting a dog? To get out a bit, among people?” Rok asks, glancing at his watch.

For a long time I don’t answer, because I don’t trust my voice. “No,” I finally manage, with a lump in my throat, “not since they took Jakob away… She did leave me a Chihuahua she got when we were still together. On purpose, I swear, just to provoke me. I took it back and left it on her doorstep. Let that crypto guy of hers look after the mangy mutt,” I fall silent, because Rok is raising his eyebrows again. “I’m thinking of buying a bike. Like every real Slovenian. A patriot, you know,” I try desperately to turn the conversation into a joke. “A bike you can ride or leave in the cellar, but a dog has to be taken out three times a day. Because a bike is a bike, but a dog is alive. Who can be bothered? You even have to pick up its crap. I’ve got enough of that in my life without a puppy,” I declare.

Rok has slowly had enough of everything. He looks at his watch again, stands up and straightens the legs of his trousers. “It was really great to see you, mate. Let’s do this again soon,” he says, very unconvincingly, waves and leaves.

I don’t wave back. I stay sitting in the armchair, absent-mindedly rearranging my curls, which slipped out of position in all the excitement. “It’s you old folks’ fault,” I mutter into my beard, and open another beer.