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knows, maybe he finally got them, and that’s why he left?
But then I think that he probably would have contacted me,
if he’d gone to Slovenia. He knew that I have a cousin
there.’
‘Did he happen to tell you about my mother?’
‘About your mother Agnes, about you, about your
brother Zoran and your sister Milena, about your family
left behind in Herzegovina and Subotica. He came to my
place for a coffee many an afternoon, and stayed for a
good long time. He’d just talk and talk. I could feel his
relief when he started talking, so I wouldn’t interrupt him.
Though sometimes he’d sit there so late into the night
that I thought... well, you know people might imagine
things. He liked to talk about all of you, but mostly about
you. Probably because he knew that you were the only
one who survived.’
Mediha reminded me how I had inherited my own vivid
imagination. Tomislav Zdravković told his tales so tall
and so precisely because he had no trouble believing
them: Knit your own lie within your head so it wraps
around and blankets the unbearable truth, which then
protects you from the destructive ash of guilt, or whatever
else eats away at you. This would explain many things
about Tomislav Zdravković and also Nedelko Borojević.
Even though I knew nothing of the self-preservation
techniques taught in the Yugoslav Army, I was quite