Trafika Europe 5 - Slovenian Interlude

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

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