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soldiers in Pula were well aware that the good colonel was
officially on call at the barracks on Thursdays, and that he
also, unofficially, cheated on his wife, Ivana, in room 132 of
the Brioni Hotel, his coital maneuvers squelching over a
stomach full of grilled squid, mixed salad and a litre of red
wine. But the soldiers guarded this secret as if it were
treasonous to release it. When Ivana called, as she did on
rare occasions, they meticulously served their country by
explaining to the wife, without a blush of guilt that
‘Colonel Barac can’t come to the phone right now.’ Only
once had a new-recruit, an ethnic Albanian, told Ivana
that ‘the colonel is in the barracks, but not exactly in the
barracks,’ but Barac had managed to explain this away by
saying that the man understood Serbian well enough, but
hadn’t known what he was saying. And so the secret
remained secret.
Those who maintained those secret Thursday nights
were well-rewarded, not only for those expected to
respond to potential calls from the cuckolded wife, but
also for the guard duty of having to ‘keep a close eye on
Captain Muzirović, and not let him out of barracks for all
the tea in China.’ You see, Neven Barac’s Zhana had once
been Captain Emir Muzirović’s Zhana, until the latter
had discovered, to his horror, that there were multiple
officers in her life, to which fact he responded that he
didn’t ‘waste his time and his cock on whores.’ But of
course Muzirović never really got over her and put on a
brave face, as he knew that she secretly met with his