Ivan Dobnik - Vilenica

Edo Popović · 219
Mother made a mistake calculating fertile days, or else Father really got
going and pulled it out too late…
If I think about it more carefully, I don’t really care what happened at that
moment. I’m not racking my brains out for I had no say in the matter.
Had I been given a choice, I wouldn’t have been born. I was therefore
born against my will, on somebody else’s initiative and responsibility. And
if this is how you put things, there’s little in life that could constrain you.
You’re free.
I was born in the sign of Scorpio. This was the first major setup, not counting
the birth, of course. A scorpion is an animal like any other, I’ve got nothing
against scorpions; once, when staying in Pakoštane, I leaned on some wall
with my hand, and there was a scorpion, I almost touched it with my palm,
but it didn’t kill me, it just crept on… but a Scorpio in the Zodiac!
Scorpio, the eighth sign of the Zodiac, takes up the middle of the autumn
term when people, animals and plants return to chaos in expectation
of life’s revival. The sign’s governed by Mars and Pluto, obscure, merciless
powers of the underworld and inner darkness, its favourite climate is
stormy weather, and its homeland is tragedy.
Fantastic, right? And don’t you now go and say that being born in this sign
is a coincidence. On top of it all, that very same day the Russians launched
into space the rocket with that bitch Laika in the capsule. I’m mentioning
it here because we were both given a one-way ticket that day – Laika for a
flight towards the stars, and I for crawling on the Earth. When some bitch
fucks you up at the very start and on top of it you’re assigned the sign of
Scorpio, you do start to wonder whether it really was your lucky day.
And so I was launched into life. In those years satellites were swarming
round the orbit, astronauts were dancing their pogo on the Moon, people
were transporting themselves to parallel worlds with LSD and holy mushrooms…
and my world? My world was a flat, square block between December
Victims Street, which we called Main Street, in the north, and the
railway in the south, between Osijek Street in the east and a brook in the
west. Planet Dubrava in the Zagreb galaxy, you see, where only the streets
vertical to the Main Street were asphalted. I’m not saying this because of
the social undertone, but because the asphalt streets were arteries leading
to the Main Street, to its sweetshops, cafes, fancy goods store, florist’s,
grocer’s and textile shop, hardware store, stationer’s, dispensary, fruit shop,
tobacconist’s and the Bratstvo cinema, where the great, exciting show of
life was going on.
Along those streets new people were coming to our quarter every day. In
those years, the Yugoslav poor were pouring into Dubrava: walking down