Singer in the Night. Olja Savicevic

a God in your image, a conformist God, an indifferent God, a God who doesn’t lose His head, and has forgotten how to fall in love, that was so long ago. When I fall in love, when I feel my body, I who am incorporeal, become a frenzied rapist, a sodomiser and pornographer god, a GHB god and drink-spiker who attacks women and boys disguised as an animal or a spirit, and men disguised as fire or a knife. I’m Achilles and Jesus’s daddy, and, allegedly also the Cyclops, they’re all my pitiful, slain bastards.

      It’s true, my love is thieving, criminal, out of control – you would say blasphemous.

      But I gave you that signal, finely tuned, the best of myself, a divine spark, a little gift. And what did you do with it? What does love mean to you? Did you love? You faint-hearted folk who have never felt a divine surge of the blood, you have reduced my gift to your narrow measure, you took fright: first for centuries you forbade others from loving, now you forbid it for yourselves.

      While I, let me say it again, it’s a well-known fact, I am nothing other than you, your image, your prototype: if you are in love and I am the God of epiphany, your amorous sighs and your laughter are praise for me, I can hardly bear your psychopathic sufferings, hysterical sacrifices, hatreds, prayers and restraint.

      I am God, creator, author! I am not a supernatural being produced in the sterile conditions of church laboratories – I am dithyramb, firework, holy heathen. The millennia were hard and repellent, but also full of inspiration for a young god, sprung from wine, dance, thunder, from thought, from a burst star, from the sun, no less! God is immoderate in love, whether he has a form or the face of a totem, a demented saint, an epileptic or wild goddess.

      Whoever is waking me, is waking me at a bad moment in the century just begun which I had awaited for a long time with a trembling heart, like a lover who promised tenderness and delights, understanding and harmony, but turned out violent and obtuse.

      Let them leave me to carry out my judicial tasks in the indifference which you assigned me, I have found peace here, a flat desk on which I sort out these innumerable prayers.

      Should I refer to your merchant priests? Should the likes of them be my PR? Hatred is the only heresy, but indifference is worse. And here too is the hypocrisy of their golden chalices and vestments. What have they to do with the divine? A cross to cross me out with. Could a God, a creator, an artist of genius, be enthused by the dryness of bishops’ underwear and dribbling lips that preach fear and ignorance?

      Why, from my finger sprang the mango, the peacock’s tail, Sophia Loren. From the clicking of my tongue fell all the languages of the world, first the tongues of Africa, then the others, including the song of birds and the laughter of small babies.

      So sumptuous, mighty and tender can I be.

      I no longer wish to have anything to do with scoundrels, I’m too old for such crap. I’m waiting to retire and stick seals on your uneasy consciences.

      At some stage I want to be everyone’s God. A magnanimous, powerful and comical father. Until then – make your own way,

      Amen.

      The sea is more beautiful than cathedrals. But are rivers more beautiful than lively town streets or are streets sometimes more beautiful than rivers and streams? Some Saturday, any morning of that spring, the streets down which I made my way to the sea were lovelier than waterfalls. Full of sky, flowers, fountains and birds, full of people in sunglasses, thin t-shirts and linen trousers. My eyes were seventeen years old and all of that was spread out in front of them in bright shades as I stepped towards the Valley of the First Menstruation.

      Today (twenty years ago), Marko and Bert are waiting for me there. They’ve parked their Vespas by St Franjo’s and occupied their patch. They are knights with plastic helmets, the small rulers of our hearts. In honour of them, and many other boys before and after them who were the object of collective adoration for a brief flash of youth, on that patch the Valley of the First Menstruation was formed, it was where secondary schoolgirls used to hang out – although the term is inaccurate and behind the times and generally gave rise to disapproval, it imposed itself tacitly. After the schoolgirls came guys, they put gel in their hair and their hands in their pockets. When Marko and Bert and their Vespas change their patch in a year’s time, the whole Valley will move after them to a new place, first the girls, and then the boys with them.

      Great care is taken not to cross the border between the Valley of the FM and the Outland, where the yokels are, although no one strives for a different status here, on the Quay. The yokels don’t give a damn about being yokels, they are in the majority and they have a good time. Besides, soon, as soon as they mature, even the little fashionable girls will leave the little phonies Marko and Bert and their bikes and climb into the yokels’ well-groomed cars. They will like their little gold chains, their loud yokel music, thin tank-tops on body-built torsos, sneakers and minimalist trainers, their marble and brass interiors. There were days when I regretted that I wasn’t a real pure-bred yokel, that their whole culture didn’t bore me, that I genuinely enjoyed folk-songs, rave and techno, that I liked everything associated with that: clubs where you party till dawn, they were the only ones who felt truly good in this country, they were the only ones who enjoyed themselves, while everyone else lazed about, they had somewhere to go where there was always some dosh around, there was whisky, cola, macchiato, free entry to the club, coke snorted from new big banknotes. It’s more or less the same now. At times I wanted to live in a bare plastered house with three floors, with no plumbing, unencumbered, with a crazy car in the yard and a t-shirt with Versace emblazoned on it, not to worry about anything other than my false nails falling off, but here’s the problem: I’m a girl and along with that story goes a guy who would have sometimes given me a punch with his fist or at least a slap, who would make me kids and imprison me at home between two masses, and I would no longer enjoy being a pure-bred yokel. There’s no country where life’s good for a yokel girl, only for yokel lads.

      Today (twenty years ago) everyone is on the Quay and the Quay is everything. This is the first sun after the winter and everyone avoids staying inside the town walls – the best cafés inside the walls are run by dykes, they hang together and get each other jobs – that’s the theory. They’ve found some way of coping with the half-people involved in protection rackets round the cafés. They are the only ones who can do that, survive, and they are probably used to everything in order to subsist, so thought Helanka, my friend who knew everything. (Everyone was a bit crazy for her and her freedom, and she also had an appearance that opened the doors of the marginalised and marginal groups to her.)

      The folk who go to the dykes in bad weather, are today (twenty years ago) sitting north-east of Outland, because that’s the Valley of the Geeks, that’s where coffee is drunk by the nonchalant intelligentsia, with a few young alternatives tagging along, every town has its snobs, but here they are probably the best people the town has, at least that’s what they believe; only you have to observe them individually, yes, individually, never together, if you don’t want your heart to shrink to extra small. It’s not too much, it’s not even a lot, but everything is prettified on that postcard. No one is going to stumble into the wrong valley or sit on the wrong chair, if he does not wish to sit alone.

      Only the mega-yokel Nightingale in camouflage pants imposes himself on everyone, the moron, but he gets on my nerves particularly when he sits beside us secondary schoolgirls. ‘You go to Matejuško’s, to the drunks, you acid head, to the Little Boss and co., you’ll fit in,’ says a girl yesterday (twenty years ago), but some people laugh at him, he’s funny, he has nice eyes. Nothing offends him, nothing.

      The war is over, the war is near its end, that’s already clear. Some­one ought to tell him that the war is nearly over and that he shouldn’t wear those camouflage pants any more. It’s Saturday, there’s no school, there’s not even any war. Let him first have a wash and a haircut, and then let him come among us, we’re young and attractive, who cares if we have only one pair of denims, our pocket money stretches to Hay deodorant and a toasted sandwich and the occasional fruit smoothie with cream: we want Marko and Bert, their haircuts and helmets, hairless faces, foreign goods on slender bodies and their little Vespas which whisk us off to the turquoise part of town.

      Did