This plan failed, of course, just like all the others, because Zlaja came up with a newer and brighter idea. People who were unacustomed to café society often tired of these interminable discussions, but most of Zlaja’s cronies were also self-deluding Walter Mitty characters who thoroughly enjoyed spending the whole night in his company. He was intelligent and well-educated, after all, and seldom talked nonsense even when he was completely drunk.
Nobody knows for sure how Elena met Zlaja, but according to the most reliable version she just happened to walk into a café as Zlaja was holding forth. It was love at first sight. Later, when they went for a romantic stroll around town, she just melted into his arms as soon as he began to tell her stories in that somewhat incongruously laidback way of his. It has to be said that Zlaja’s storytelling operated at the same level of unreality as most of his business plans, and yet it was very effective in terms of courtship because Zlaja had the knack of talking about things we boring and rational types long to discuss, but don’t know how.
When they started living together, everybody just assumed that one of them would have to change. Zlaja would ruin Elena — or Elena would be the making of Zlaja. Either she would discover the pleasures of drinking, daydreaming and loafing about, or he would slowly become neat, ambitious and calculating. As time went on, they continued to love each other as much as ever, but there were no personality changes. Indeed the two of them were brought closer together by all the things that in other relationships would probably have led to conflict or bad feeling or separation. Elena was happy and successful. Zlaja was happy and unrealistic. Often she accompanied him on his drinking bouts but only when there was a gap in her busy schedule. By the same token, he delighted in her success and used to give her plenty of career advice, with the result that she began to figure increasingly in his plans.
The war, however, ruined Elena’s ambitions and Zlaja’s dreams. As a couple, they hadn’t reckoned on the non-stop shellings; it couldn’t be ignored or avoided; it destroyed real as well as imaginary worlds. Death bulked large not only in people’s dreams but also in their dayto-day lives, and perhaps that is why the bombardment was especially upsetting for people like Zlaja and Elena who were cocooned in a world of their own, not wanting to question the state of things, and having in some ways an unusual approach to life. A month into the war Zlaja managed to persuade Elena to leave “infernal Sarajevo” and go to Zagreb. Yet he stayed behind, for he did not believe that all was lost. He still hoped to make a go of things, the sort of things that were possible only in Sarajevo. No other city, Zlaja felt, could sustain the fragile world inside his head.
The months of separation had no effect other than to make Elena realize that she had left something invaluable behind her in Sarajevo. Zagreb was no longer the center of her world. It didn’t matter to her whether she had become addicted to Sarajevo itself or to Zlaja. She always walked around her native city with a pebble in her shoe to remind her that life — her life anyway — was elsewhere, and that she couldn’t go back to it.
At the end of the first year of the war in Sarajevo, Zlaja made the long journey in search of Elena. He travelled by roads that were unfamiliar to him, over the Bosnian mountains, passing angry soldiers in different uniforms, until finally he reached Zagreb. He wasn’t the only one, by any means. So little remained of the country that had nurtured Zlaja, the dreams and projects, the diverse Bosnian cultures, that even the most determined patriots became refugees, opting to save their own lives, for which, ironically, they discovered they had no use once in exile.
It was impossible to reconstruct the lost dreamworld in Zagreb. In the local cafés the big plans just sounded empty and artificial. Tall stories were interpreted as lies. Besides, you could never find anybody to lap up your wit and repartee, to shoot the bull. And even if the right kind of people did exist, they probably had their own way of telling stories, not to mention their own cafés to frequent. So what if their big ideas were akin to Zlaja’s — he had fuck-all chance of meeting them.
Elena tried to persuade Zlaja that it was necessary to change his lifestyle. He responded by telling her stories that were pale imitations of his Sarajevo yarns, often lacking a climax or dwindling into nothingness like the bad copy of a fax message. He did attempt to change, however; for instance, he tried to think up a hyper-fantastic scheme as a way of reviving the old magic — but he failed to come up with anything. Soon he came to resemble the kind of no-hoper who achieves nothing by force of habit and is utterly devoid of spark or imagination.
Not long afterwards Zlaja developed an obsession with cookery, an art at which he became as proficient as he had once been at spinning yarns. He immersed himself in haute cuisine with the single-minded passion of a person who has no other choice or interest in life. His dishes, like his stories in a former existence, were feasts of pure pleasure. Among his staple ingredients was the odd spoonful of a Bosnian metaphysics that was strongly opposed to the idea of nutrition or a healthy diet, being more interested in unadulterated hedonism.
Elena was happy that Zlaja enjoyed cooking. So that was it! At least he was able to derive meaning and a sense of purpose in the kitchen, and was no longer sinking inexorably into the depths of despair. One day, however, Zlaja decided to prepare a Bosnian hotpot. He told Elena that he couldn’t possibly make such a dish in any of those teenyweeny pots that will still bear the legend “Made in Yugoslovia” a hundred years from now. To prepare a Bosnian hotpot you have to use a clay pot of a sort that obviously doesn’t exist in the overtly Westernized city of Zagreb. The kind of pot Zlaja was talking about wasn’t even on sale in the shops of Sarajevo, but you’d find one in every Bosnian household all the same.
For a long time Elena and Zlaja searched everywhere in Zagreb for a clay pot. In the end they found two pots — at opposite ends of the city — that were ideal for preparing the traditional dish. However, it was very hard to choose between them, and so they travelled back and forth on crowded trams up to a dozen times, expertly tapping the pots, shaking their heads and then leaving the shops empty-handed in order to rethink the purchase. The dilemma of Buridan’s Bosnians was impossible to resolve. Fortunately, the problem was solved by a third party, presumably another Bosnian, who bought the second pot — and so there was only one left.
Zlaja was very happy with his pot. He described the method of preparing the dish a thousand times, often hinting at its divine flavor. Once again, he had found something about which to fantasize.
But then the police raids started in Zagreb. Muslims without refugee papers were arrested, and there were many unconfirmed stories about their fate. Now Elena tried to persuade Zlaja to leave the city, as he had persuaded her to leave Sarajevo when the shelling had begun the previous April. It didn’t take much to convince him. He packed his bag straight away and went to some refugee camp in the West. The pot was never used. I suppose it will remain in the kitchen like an empty flowerpot until somebody breaks it or some other Bosnian comes along.
So what happened to Elena and Zlaja? No doubt it’s already clear. Even so, it would be a pity if the unhappy end of a love affair were to stop other people dreaming or having fantasies. In fact, the cliché gives you a magical opportunity to escape from the real world and to enjoy with somebody else, who may be thousands of miles away, the kind of love story that always happens elsewhere, in Africa, say, or in another country where things still happen out of pure pleasure.