TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

Olja Knežević

to us, and besides, word had gotten around that it was boring, and Marijeta, who would know, said so. “An old book for old people,” she said. Her father was an army man, but her mother was from Pula and kept a Bible hidden under Marijeta’s winter clothes. It’s the beginning of summer and only the most experienced guerillas, like me, hide from the gendarmes in the smelly alley next to the burek shop. We press up against the piss-stained wall, we keep quiet and breathe into our cupped hands; in the heat, the smell of groundmeat and onions hangs thicklyaround us, a smell that keeps our enemies at bay. Grown-ups we don’t like, grown-ups like Marijeta’s father, try to convince us that the shop owner fills his bureks with ground-up cats. No, we don’t say gendarme like they do in France, we pronounce the g like the dg in fridge. Guerillas and gendarmes. We all call the game “cops and robbers” in front of the grown-ups. They ask us if it’s where we hang out with friends or somewhere else that we heard people singing rabble-rousing Chetnik songs. My grandmother asks me this, she’s who I’m most scared of and that’s why I hide the word gendarme from her, it sounds like Chetnik to me. I don’t know what songs she means—I listen to BoneyMand practice dance moves with three of my girlfriends. Ra-Ra-Raspuchin, lava-rava-wash-machine is how we sing it all wrong. I am in love with one of the gendarmes. I want it to be himwho finds me in the eternal gloom of the alley by the burek shop. If he finds me, if he approaches me from behind, so I have to turn around suddenly to face him, I’ll kiss himon the lips. Who 54