Lucy (chapter one) • Translated by Lucy Stevens
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Once I called her Lucy, not sure why, saying her walk reminded me of a certain “Lucile,” and even though I don’t remember her reaction and the nickname never stuck, I never forgot it. I was moving into Studenjak[1] when an unknown number messaged me, “Why haven’t you been picking up? Why haven’t you called? Where have you been hiding? How have you been doing? Who are you hanging out with?” and I knew only Lucy would send the opening lines to “Adriatic Sea” by Ekatarina Velika, but I played clueless; I saved her as “EKV fan” and didn’t change it even later, after she revealed herself. Though she’s no longer in my contacts, Lucy’s one of only three non-family members whose number I still know by heart, yet since we stopped hanging out, I’ve never once tried calling her. Back when we hung out at Studenjak, I used to drink Turkish coffee from a large teacup in the morning, and when we gathered with the whole crew, with Tamara, Goran, and Vanja, I had a habit of putting sugar in my Turkish coffee, though I don’t remember which of the four got me hooked on that combo, probably Lucy. Once at a gathering at Lucy and Tamara’s, when they were still rooming together in Lion, an unknown number started texting me, pretending to be a girl, and because I told the crew it was amusing me, Lucy said without hesitation, “Neda’s messing with you, one hundred per cent,” my girlfriend at the time – turns out Lucy was right. She loved to wear olive green, I’m convinced that’s no longer the case, but my intuition remains untested because I haven’t properly seen her in over ten years. When asked “How,” Lucy would often respond, “Now,” which always surprised me because I expected her to say “Fine.” She loved to say, “next scene” instead of “next pic,” as I was used to. She smoked. Once, probably the first time, I lit a cigarette with her while the whole crew was there at a gig in the small club at SKC[2], and I held the cigarette awkwardly, becoming even more awkward as they took my picture, never wanting to smoke again. I went to my first strip show with the four of them as well, at Sačulatac in Skadarlija, it was completely unplanned, performed by a waitress after she had charged the last round, she jumped onto the bar and took off her panties first; I was disappointed. When Lucy slept over at my and Neda’s place in Dorćol, it felt weird; all three of us felt wrong, we ate breakfast in silence; Lucy would often describe it later as a painful experience, but what I remember best from that day is that she left the toilet dirty. While I was living there, both before and after that sleepover, Lucy would always walk me back to my apartment from downtown, almost to my doorstep, because she loved crossing the Dorćol passage and heading back to the center along the Danube Quay. We were sleeping in the same bed once at Studenjak when Gorana brought home some guy she picked up from the benches[3], having invited us over for safety, and we tried our best not to listen to them having sex, pretending to be asleep until we actually fell asleep, curled up and considerately facing the wall. During her birthday celebration, in the middle of the day at Tašmajdan Park, Lucy got a sudden urge for all of us to go to her village, Golubinci, thirty kilometers outside Belgrade, which I agreed to immediately; we crammed into a car, roamed around the place all night, and slept on the floor of her parents’ house, but when I told Neda all about our night out, she said what I did wasn’t fair to her; I looked at her in disbelief, we parted ways soon after. I often think I could write a long, euphoric letter to Lucy, with many digressions that mimic how we used to talk, and although I have her email, I don’t dare to send it – though if I had her postal address, I’d hesitate even longer. She had a big nose like me, though thinner than mine, and she always joked at her own expense, saying her snoot made her look like Sonja Savić before her surgery in the film Sugar Water; while we were still friends, she never changed it. Beer was the essential ingredient of all our meetings – I can’t resist it even now, just ordered another large one. We met mostly outside, at Pionirski Park or Tašmajdan Park, and when it rained, we’d loiter in building entryways, under tree trunks, or even the inner courtyard on General Ždanova Street, where the sign on the gate read: “Traditional handicrafts.” At bars, when it was time to pay, we’d often take our empty glasses back to the counter, never understanding why bartenders thanked us so crankily for our gesture of solidarity. Lucy was the one who taught me how to drink beer; at the store on General Ždanova, I touched bottle after bottle on the shelves to find the coldest one, until Lucy finally protested: “You got warm beer again,” and only after that objection did I realize the beer wasn’t cold and should be taken from the fridge. Her hands were red, cold, with short, unpolished nails and pronounced lines at the finger joints. Once at Tašmajdan, slightly tipsy, she was holding a rose picked in the park, deliberating out loud: “Do I give it to X or to Y?” – one of the two became her boyfriend that night. Several hours earlier, at the Old Spice Band gig at Resava Club, I tried to sneak pelinkovac in my pocket, the flask already uncorked, and the diligent bouncers saw me clutching the bottleneck and jumped at the opportunity, so they kicked out not just me, but our entire group. Vanja would later remind me that Lucy and that guy from Tašmajdan never would have gotten together if I hadn’t tried to smuggle drinks into the club; the fact that they stayed together for years wasn’t my fault. Only Gorana held a grudge about us missing the gig because she had been set to flirt with the drummer. I wasn’t the only male friend Lucy chastely shared a bed with, but she was the only female friend I ever did that with. I once slept in the same bed with her and her sister after a get-together for the sister’s birthday; we piled into a double bed with Lucy in the middle, and in the dark, I could only see the white of her teeth, but the next day when I innocently told Neda, whom I lived with, she snapped: “You didn’t seriously share a bed with that crooked-legged girl?” From then on, I’d secretly stare at Lucy’s legs, wondering how I hadn’t noticed they were crooked before. She walked calmly and gently, like a pheasant carefully treading over eggs. She never swayed her hips. When I first met her at the “Jelica Milovanović” dormitory – where she lived in the roadside building while I was in the mixed one – Lucy wore her hair short, and I saw her as a buddy because, by the standards of dorm students, she wasn’t hot. In one of my earliest recollections of Lucy, we were both sixteen, sitting across the street from some building, and I’m revealing a trivial secret about some girl I liked – I forgot her name, remembering only that she rejected all my advances, saying: “You’re gay.” I remember a weekend afternoon from that time, when most dorm students had gone home, Lucy and I stood under the mulberry tree on Proleterskih Brigada Street, bumming change from passersby; I don’t remember how much we made or what we spent the money on, as we weren’t close enough back then to drink together. During our final year of high school – Lucy had moved with Vanja to an apartment near Bajloni Market – she came to the dorm one spring day to pick me up, knocking on the door of the room to the utter bemusement of all the guys on the block. Girls were forbidden on the men’s floor, but Lucy no longer lived in the dorm so she couldn’t care less; my roommates’ knees turned to jelly when they saw a girl on our doorstep, and I ran out after her euphorically, only returning to my room the next morning. Just once, she cut my fingernails with a clipper, and I remember wondering why she was nicking and pulling them. I don’t have a recording of Lucy’s voice, but I’m sure I’d recognize it instantly. That spring afternoon when she dragged me out of my dorm room, Lucy told me how she celebrated her eighteenth birthday for three days back in her village, with different guests each day, and on the third day she got so drunk that she didn’t care if there were any crashers; she showed me pictures of herself wearing different outfits every evening, and I felt sad we hadn’t been close enough then for her to invite me too; I asked myself which day she would have invited me. We didn’t just meet in Belgrade and Syrmia, but also spent time at my parents’ in Trstenik, in Vrnjačka Banja, and even in the village of Grabovac at my late grandma’s, who grilled for us one summer. “She’s pretty,” my grandma told me then, and I was caught off guard, replying: “She’s just a friend, she came with her boyfriend.” Not long after, Lucy confessed she didn’t understand grandma’s accent. She once revealed that she had given her first boyfriend a diary she had written for him; I felt sorry there wasn’t another copy left. When I first visited her apartment near Bajloni, on Pavle Pap Street, while Vanja slept, Lucy and I lay on the living room floor, drawing and writing to each other in a blank notebook until morning. It was a large notebook, and we took turns doodling on the last empty pages, first playing a game where we drew using four hands, then leaving comments on the drawings in speech bubbles. I don’t remember exactly what we wrote, there was probably no real subject to it, but since we’d poured hours and our last ounces of strength into it, I suppose it truly fulfilled us; all I remember now are the sharp hand movements and crooked lines shooting in all directions. While I waited for Lucy’s response, which she wrote ever so slowly, hiding the page with her hand and checking to see if I was peering through her fingers, I thought: “When I was little, I imagined this was lovemaking,” but thankfully, I didn’t write that down. I bet she didn’t keep the notebook. One winter, it was so cold that we couldn’t keep warm even in the entryway of some building in Dorćol, so we just stood inside the elevator; when someone called it to another floor, we accidentally smashed a beer bottle, and I remember a tenant shouting curses at us as we fled and the many green shards scattered on the floor. Early one morning at the “Patrice Lumumba” dorm in Zvezdara, my mom came to visit, found Lucy and Vanja asleep in the two other beds, and on her way out to wait for me told the porter: “The boys are asleep,” as that dorm didn’t allow co-ed guests either. I associate the spring of 2002 entirely with Lucy, our roaming the city streets unchecked, and later we’d call that time “the year of the beer,” the only year we ever named. Possibly the very same day she came to pick me up at the dorm, we went to KST[4], and right before the end, we danced tangled up in her bag, which Vanja had thrown over us; from that whole night, what I remember best is Vanja’s loud insistence that we get together, which must be why we didn’t in the end, out of pure spite. One summer, we slept on the roof of block four at “Patrice,” having hauled out two mattresses and several blankets, all on Lucy’s initiative; I don’t think I slept much, but I wasn’t cold, though we never repeated the experiment. Whenever I secretly looked at Lucy, careful that she didn’t catch me, she always seemed so sure of herself, like she was doing exactly what she felt like, without caring what anyone else thought. I don’t know what Lucy thought of herself. She had small breasts – I don’t think I ever actually saw them – but she would always complain about them in our group whenever she got bored of insulting her own nose. We quickly became known as a buddy duo; we were friends for almost ten years, from 1999 to 2008, and this broken decade now sounds like the decade of the Beatles, too rich and too far away. I don’t remember how we met. For three years we’d stumble upon each other in passing, at the canteen, in front of the mulberry tree, or in the reading rooms, and these were the moments when we likely started spontaneously saying hello. Back then, while walking with a roommate, I saw Lucy pass by; she said hi, and I told my companion, “I have no idea who that is,” not even waiting for her to get out of earshot. We ended up becoming real friends because of recognition. It took Lucy leaving the dorm, finding a place, and coming to “Jelica” as a guest for us to truly meet. Of course, it was Lucy who recognized me, it wasn’t mutual; when she called me that spring, during the year of the beer, I was confused, first wondering how I had deserved the attention, what good this nodding acquaintance had remembered me by so ecstatically, which didn’t stop me from responding momentarily. My girlfriends were jealous of Lucy, but none of them lasted longer than her, and she would warn her boyfriends: “Zoran and I have a strange relationship,” though I don’t know how they ever agreed to that. She never called me “Zoki,” always by my full name, just as I did with hers. Lucy was the reason I broke up three relationships, and I don’t regret it, though I don’t know if she ever broke up because of me; I hope not. We exchanged three emails at best, and only toward the very end of our friendship; we rarely texted, preferring to talk over the phone instead. On February 14, probably during the year of the beer, she called me on the landline to wish me a happy Valentine’s Day; I was back in Trstenik, doing nothing, with the cassette player blasting “Custard Pie” by Led Zeppelin, and Lucy remarked: “I see something nice is playing!”, which instantly made that forgettable song jump in significance. Our phone conversation lasted for half an hour, but for now, this is the only remark I remember. Because of Lucy, I joined Resistance[5], a week after she did, and I put up several posters saying “He’s done” over the dorm; one morning the dorm supervisor stormed into my room, grabbed the pack of remaining stickers, and shot the legendary question: “Which one of you is the foreign mercenary?” I readily raised my hand, my only Resistance feat, but the greatest pleasure was getting to tell the anecdote to Lucy. At uni, Lucy was always on the front lines when it came to protesting and blocking lectures, while my engagement boiled down to asking her when the rallies were happening outside the Faculty of Philosophy. When we used the dorm toilets, neither Lucy nor I ever carried a toilet seat under our arms; we didn’t belong to the subculture known in the dorms as “surfers.” When we first started hanging out, she fixed an audition for me with an acquaintance of hers, a voice teacher at a music high school; I showed up, sang Radiohead’s “You and Whose Army,” and they accepted me; the board pretty much turned a blind eye. A month later, after my first public appearance, I simply walked away and never went back to the school; they automatically unenrolled me, but Lucy wasn’t mad. Like me, she couldn’t cook at all. At “Rifat,” another dorm in Zvezdara, we tried frying onions and burned them completely. One Sunday, back when she was living with Tamara in Kalvarija, Zemun, Lucy spent hours cooking peas while the whole gang waited; I don’t remember how it turned out, I just kept playing an Alice in Chains cassette on repeat until everyone grew sick of it, except for me. Aside from the dorm canteens, we never ate together at a restaurant. We just shared meal vouchers. We never used pet names. Lucy didn’t physically attract me at all. Nothing in her face or her body was irresistible by my standards. She didn’t fit the desirable chick trope that my roommates and I put on our crush list, a fat notebook that we updated weekly, which, for reasons unknown to this day, was called the “fancy list.” I never masturbated thinking of her. Lucy didn’t flirt or wear revealing clothes; she was direct and simple, and with her I wasn’t overcome with the usual, crippling shyness I felt around other girls – actually, she was one of the rare girls with whom I was able to exchange more than three meaningful sentences. From the beginning of our friendship, there were no formalities or tactics; Lucy took that stance, and she set the rules of the game. We didn’t relate to one another as man and woman but as conversation partners, and anything in our closeness that pushed us towards becoming a couple we rejected as mere peer pressure. For both of us, that was far too narrow and coded for what we sensed in one another. I speak confidently on her behalf because we often talked about attraction, “chemistry,” “osmosis,” their differences and nuances. Several times we told each other that when you like someone, you should jump on them momentarily, without delay, but we never applied this principle to one another; it was understood that we were exempt. We felt we could be more to each other than lovers, and that if it happened we slipped up and fucked, we stood to lose more than we’d gain. At the same time, we were too in love with ourselves, so egocentric that we couldn’t accept that our encounter, the meeting of two such individuals, could be reduced to something as shallow as a relationship. We never lived together, and when we lived close by in the dorms, the daily routine of neighbor life, running into each other at the canteen, grabbing coffee, seeing each other at the faculty, only alienated us, killed us, because we felt it was making us closer in a banal way, but even then, we didn’t separate. At “Rifat,” our windows faced each other – hers was on the first floor, mine on the ground floor – with an inner courtyard between us, and we developed a habit of phoning each other while standing at our windows, calling it the “videophone.” While living at “Patrice,” we used to walk over to “Rifat” for lunch on the weekends because it had the best canteen, taking a shortcut through the Zvezdara Woods. Before eating, Lucy would chop all her solid food into small pieces, then poke them with a fork held in her right hand so she wouldn’t have to hold a knife during meals; I’d laugh whenever I caught her doing that. Once, we were sitting in my room at “Patrice,” facing one another on separate beds, and there was a silence; we just stared at each other without a word until the ash fell from her cigarette, and though it was the perfect opportunity to kiss her, I let it pass. I was sitting on the same bed when I broke up with Dunja, my girlfriend at the time, talking about Lucy the entire time until she finally said: “Don’t worry, you’ll end up together one day,” so I asked curiously: “You really think so?” and her explanation prolonged our relationship for another half hour. “I know we are friends,” I wrote about Lucy in the fancy list, “and I know that X and Y are hotter than her, that stands, but she is incomparably more interesting.” “Friend zone,” my roommate from the Tesla school wrote, and another roommate, from the Mathematical Gymnasium, added underneath: “Which brings us to the conclusion that you like interesting chicks more than hot ones.”
[1] “Studentski Grad”: “City of Students”, the biggest student campus in Belgrade.
[2] Short for Studentski kulturni centar: Cultural Center of Students, an important concert venue in Belgrade from the 1970s until the end of the 2000s.
[3] Benches (klupice): a gathering place at the “City of Students.”
[4] Short for Klub studenata tehnike (“Technics Students Club”), a famous rock’n’roll nightclub still active in Belgrade.
[5] Resistance (Otpor): movement organized at the end of 1990s, directed against Slobodan Milošević and his party SPS. “He’s done” (Gotov je) is the current Resistance slogan at the time.
