Trafika Europe 5 - Slovenian Interlude

there was some raw form of comfort in thinking that I never would. My childhood memories of him had faded away, and washed like water over watercolour paint, blurring the colours over the years. The most telling thing for me was that I could no longer remember his face. It only came back to me through photographs, but its direct image had been scraped out of my memory. I recalled him now through several black and white photographs from various birthday parties, or his driver’s license picture, which featured a boyish, tender face, at a time when he barely resembled himself. Back then he didn’t have the bushy brows that met in the middle when something confused him. I couldn’t recall his dark eyes that strained to see the TV without glasses. I didn’t see his full, mobile lips, which pushed and prodded pieces of food while my mother incoherently regurgitated details of her day’s work, every lunchtime. I couldn’t picture how he would pinch himself with impatience at the Arena cinema, waiting for the Partisan film of the week to start, yet I knew he did it every time. In my memory, I only saw him from afar, a distant humanoid figure rising on the horizon, like a brazen statue. I saw his elegant officer’s uniform hanging in front of the mirror at home, just before Yugoslav People’s Army Day; saw his body in a bathing suit, lying on a towel that was too short, telling me to come out of the water because my lips were turning blue. I saw his white parade shirt, bought in Trieste...

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