The End. And Again. Dino Bauk

the successive scenes, as if she were opening some short video files that had been lying in the archives of her recorder for years.

       Recording 1

      It’s hard to run across a macadam parking lot at night in heels and a long skirt. An ankle twists at almost every step. Despite this, she keeps going, because she heard him run after her, and the loud rhythms of the concert were still coming out of the hall into the foggy street. She doesn’t want him to catch her, least of all does she want to fall like some weak game in deep snow, so she tries to run even faster. He doesn’t follow for long. She knows he could catch her in just a few steps, but he clearly got the message. She hears his steps slow, how he says ‘Damn!’ (later she often heard the word because Denis, Peter, and Goran used it almost like a full stop). She still feels his eyes on her back, and she wants to run away as fast as she can. She doesn’t know which way to run, because the fog hides all the landmarks, so she decides to go in the direction from which the loudest sound of night-time traffic is coming. When she gets to the main road and the bus stop where she and Denis met, she knows that she’ll make it home on foot in less than half an hour, to her room in an old building right by a city park. A worried Noah, who imagines he is her custodian or something, is almost certainly waiting for her. They’ll continue the argument from that afternoon, when he unsuccessfully tried to convince her it wasn’t wise to go alone on a date with a stranger whom she met by pure chance on a city bus a few hours before. She tried to lend the reasons for her insistence on keeping the date some deeper meaning, citing her missionary calling, although she didn’t sound convincing even to herself. Noah threatened that he would have to inform the supervisor if she was really going to stick to her plans, and her parents too, but she was sure he wouldn’t actually do that. She knew he liked her too much; he wouldn’t want to hurt her. Now, having escaped Denis’s embrace and the concert hall, returning on foot through the thick fog, she thinks about how Noah was probably right. It was a bad idea. It’s not good to set off on a trip knowing in advance that you won’t be able to finish it. All the same, she won’t put up with preaching. When he waits for her at the door to her room, she’ll push him away and go to sleep as quickly as possible. And that’s what she did, convinced, actually determined that that was all she would have to do with Denis; a little hand holding, some whispering in the ear, and a lot of goosebumps. But he found her the very next day, at the same bus stop where she had got on yesterday. He was sitting with earphones on, reading a little book. He raised his eyes at exactly the right instant to catch the smile she sent him.

       Recording 2

      They’re sitting in a park beneath the wide crown of an old tree. It’s already dark, especially on that bench, because the street lamps don’t pierce the branches thick with leaves. The warm spring evening already smells faintly of summer. The distant, steady sound of city traffic is all that intrudes on the almost complete silence. A romantic view on the city illuminated by innumerable lights opens up beneath them. It draws their attention for only a short while, as long as they sit next to each other holding hands. After a few gentle kisses, Mary decisively moves into his arms. Denis’s right palm now travels across her side and up towards her breasts, slowly, like the first scout on enemy territory. After each centimetre covered, it stops and checks if the way is clear, then cautiously continues on to the next piece of untouched skin that with every breath moves away from his palm for a second before immediately returning to its firm grip with the next. Denis’s left hand occupies the forbidden territory of her smooth right hip, and the closer it is to its goal, that gentle curve where her leg rounds into her ass, the more pronounced the goosebumps rising under the pillows of his cautious fingers. Exhilaration, a slight twinge, and Mary’s ever slower and deeper breathing excites his; he presses his face closer, they wrestle more, taking turns nipping mouth, tongue, and neck. He feels a hardening; they’re both a little embarrassed. He tries to move off a little, but she pretends she doesn’t notice. When after slow, centimetre moves he finally reaches his goal and touches her breasts for the first time, they quickly retreat and hide, as if frightened off. As if she didn’t know what his palm is coming for. It, too, jumps away because of her reaction. She sighs and takes him by the hand. He slowly withdraws his palm from her grip and again occupies the same place, smiling and whispering some words in his language before again burying his head in her neck. When she takes his hand once more to remove it from an excited nipple, her grip has no strength. Her reserve, which church, school, and parents had built up over all those years, crumbled almost without a fight, and her passion burst forth so powerfully that it surprised them both.

PETER & GORAN

      A night-time telephone ring that harshly rouses a man from his dreams, with no compassion, always triggering fear. Fear of the news it brings, waiting in the phone for us to release it with the touch of a green button. There’s seldom good news at night; it is more patient and waits for morning, which seems too distant for bad and unexpected news. It has to get out right away. Peter’s mobile phone rang at the time of night when not one window in the whole neighbourhood was lit. Only the tightly spaced street lights. At that dead hour of night, they actually shine for no one. As if they were only there to declare this is city, not countryside. City people let thousands of such street lights and countless lanterns of various kinds burn even when they sleep, as if afraid of that genuine black night. You have to go past the city limits, to the countryside, where people always turn the lights out before bed, to experience a true, thickly woven dark night.

      The neighbourhood where at flat 16, fifteenth floor, windows still dark, the mobile rang and roused Peter from his sleep, consisted of something more than thirty buildings. The lowest ones were only five stories, the highest ones up to twenty-five. All together they formed a unified terrain of iron and concrete. It was built in the early 1970s between three smallish villages on the edge of the city. When you exited the concrete terrain down concrete steps as if exiting some airliner or ship, you instantly found yourself with two feet planted in the countryside, without any fluid transition. You were suddenly no longer in the city but in a small, unspoiled Slovene village – houses with tidy balconies, a butcher, volunteer fire department, little church, and a small, almost full cemetery in which the last free spaces still await the very oldest members of the community, people who have been there since the city was still about an hour away on foot and who haven’t yet accepted the fact that at a certain moment, when they weren’t paying enough attention, it might creep right up to their village. Viewed from a distance, the neighbourhood looked like a huge spaceship that landed among the peacefully sleeping villagers like some Galactica, with innumerable small lights, and docked there for an undetermined time. It forever ended their flawlessly black nights and brought with it strange speaking beings from other planets who on the weekends at first cautiously, then more loudly and in larger groups, set out on exploratory hikes through their village and farther, into their fields and gardens, all the way to the Sava river and back.

      The polyphonic melody of a recent hit Peter had loaded on his mobile didn’t immediately call him to a waking state, as some old alarm clock would undoubtedly have done. Each time he almost woke up and passed for a split second from sleep to reality, he fell asleep the next second; this was repeated several times until he forced himself to come to. The red numbers 3 and 25, separated by a colon, were flashing before his eyes. The first few seconds he couldn’t decipher their meaning. Ah, it’s time, the alarm, he thought. He hit the off button a few times, but the repeating melody kept piercing his ears like a long, thin drill straight to his brain. ‘Damn… the phone!’ After having wandered separately for a few seconds through his drugged consciousness, the fact that it was actually his phone ringing and the fact that it was only a little before 3:30 in the morning collided, and the collision caused a minor explosion of fear that spread first from his head to his rib cage and then to all his limbs, causing them to shake hard.

      A forty-year-old, middle rank, office worker in the Ministry of Culture, Peter’s previous workday evening had ended almost the same way as all the other evenings of all the other workdays the past two months. On the way back from work – he went on foot now – he stopped in a bar where everyone knew him, drank two beers, ate a hot sandwich, then on the way home smoked three ultralight Wests and at the building entrance exchanged some pleasantries with a neighbour from the sixth floor who happened to be walking her Highland Terrier. She got in a conversation