TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

Olja Knežević

We all wore cotton T-shirts and jeans. The shirts and the jeans had Levi’s tags on them, like we were in the West. That, we heard, was something kids in the Soviet Union couldn’t even dreamof. Over there, with these things, andwith chewing gum, you could buy a house with what they were worth in rubles— but who’d want to live in the USSR? We got the shivers thinking about the enormous expanse to the east, where the dark would swallow you in the blink of an eye. Gulag, gulag , we whispered, imagining a goulash made of human flesh. Our social system is completely different , we said, parroting the grown-ups. We would rather live in Bari, anywhere in Italy, if not London or New York—even Pula, where Marijeta’s mother was from. That girl Marijeta was the best at Chinese jump rope, she had skinny legs, sick skinny , we said, and she whistled through the air on those legs, decisive, precise, but gentle— swish, swish — she could jump over the elastic even when it was around our necks, and the elastic never broke skin or drew blood. I can still hear her mother calling her at noon from the balcony to come home for lunch, which astonished us because we had just eaten breakfast. And she ran fast. Her father, one of the nameless fathers who will forever be only “army men,” used a stopwatch to time her at a hundred meters and announced the results out loud: “Twelve-point-zerooo-five, we’re getting faster. We’re right behind you, Little Miss Šteker, guard your medals!” “Who’s Miss Šteker?” we asked. “Martina Šteker, record-holder for the one hundred meters,” Marijeta answered. “I bet she gets the hiccups every day when my dad says her name.” That June she said they were moving back there, to Pula. She showed us pictures of the lit-up Roman amphitheater, talked about thefilmfestival, howall theactresseswentaround topless, 60