“Can I ever go to the movies with you?”
“Of course,” she said simply, as if she had expected him to ask. “Next Sunday.”
“But it’s so far off!” he said gruffly, though his heart was pounding, and he suddenly felt the thrill of their bodies touching again.
Janja thought for a moment, her eyebrows fluttering. “All right, then. Wednesday.”
“Shall I pick you up at home?”
“No, not at home,” she said, shaking her head. “On the corner.”
So Wednesday it was. He took great care in choosing the film, making sure it was not something she could have seen on Sunday (he forgot to ask her what she was going to see). He decided on the film playing at the Avala, the posters promising a love story he thought likely to please a girl of her sort. He bought tickets for the last row in the balcony, traditionally occupied by lovers, and set out at six. But turning down one of the narrow streets connecting Karadjordje with Šajkaška, he panicked: he didn’t know the way. He went back to Karadjordje and walked more slowly, trying to concentrate, but again he was forced to return. He started once more, but couldn’t tell if he was right and couldn’t ask anyone either: on their walk he had been too absorbed in what he was telling her to notice the street signs. He broke into a sweat. He went back two or three more times, turning again, then suddenly found himself just where he was supposed to be: on the corner of her street, facing the house with the peeling plaster. It was half-past six. He was on time.
She was not. He walked up and down in the stifling twilight of the late summer day, looking at the house, looking at his watch. At last the gate opened, but instead of the neatly dressed, well-groomed Janja he expected, out came a disheveled girl with dusty bare feet wearing a short dress and swinging a dented red water pail. He scarcely recognized her. She greeted him with a clatter of the pail and pattered off in the direction of a pump in the middle of the square just behind the house, her bouncing dress revealing a strong pair of thighs half tan and half white. Her appearance was such a surprise, yet so powerful and natural, that instead of going after her Blam just stood there, as if under a spell, and watched her run across the square, lean over the pump to hang the pail on the spout, pump the handle (which she did with such force that the water splashed all over the sides of the pail), then remove the pail and return, slightly lopsided and flushed from the burden, her hair in her eyes and over her cheeks, the tip of her tongue between her teeth, her every step carefully balanced. It was not until she reached the house that he ran up and offered her a hand. But she jerked away in surprise, spattering her grimy knee with water and thus making it shiny as well. “Let me go,” she said, “I’ll be right with you!” and disappeared behind the gate.
True to her word, she came out very soon and was all clean — with her hair smoothly combed, in a white linen dress, wearing white shoes on washed feet, handkerchief and keys in hand — as if she were going to a dance. But walking next to her, Blam could not forget the image he had just had of her. It was as though he had seen her naked or in a lewd act and could no longer appreciate her regular appearance. Or, rather, much as he admired the pert, beautiful girl at his side, from then on he saw instead the flushed and breathless little girl beneath. He yearned for that little girl, body and soul; she was the feminine ideal he had long sensed and only now saw revealed. But since she had changed back, hiding her true nature, he was unable to talk freely to her and, later, unable to go through with his plan of conquest in the dark of the last row in the balcony. True, he took her hand from her lap as soon as the lights went out, and she let him hold it, but the hand, instead of clutching or kneading his as he had hoped, lay there dry and limp. He put his arm around her waist, and she adjusted her body to give it room. He felt how firm the waist was, a taut arc between the rounded, softer areas above and below, but it remained stiff to his touch. She followed the images on the screen with rapt attention; he could see her moist eyes shining in the dark. What was she thinking? Could she sense the hunger in his fingers? He put his hand on her face and turned it to his; he put his lips on hers and pressed them. She offered no resistance and even opened her mouth obediently to receive his tongue, but she kept her eyes open and slightly to one side so as not to miss entirely the flickering images. And he had to accept it, because she accepted everything, clearly regarding it all as the duty of a girl who goes out with a boy. He kissed her again later, and after the film, and on the way home, and on the corner where he had waited for her. But there she pulled away from his embrace, saying she had to get to bed, she had to be up early, she’d see him at the dance on Sunday. Her response to his protest was “It’s only three days away!”
Even after he got to know her better, she remained distant. She occasionally let him see her home or take her to a film, to a café, or for a walk; she let him hold her hand and kiss her, but she was always sober, even calculating, in any case far from the image he had had of her at the pump. But the moment he left her, the moment she was gone, his disappointment would yield to the image of her warm, half-naked, flushed body, so powerful, so alive that he felt the only reason it did not materialize for him was that he had taken the wrong tack, had been overcautious, not bold enough, and he longed for their next encounter to right the wrong. He therefore kept trying to see her and refused to be put off by her stalling. He begged so hard that she eventually agreed to let him come to the house.
“All right, if it means so much to you. But I can’t guarantee I’ll be there.”
The very next afternoon he set off for the house with the peeling plaster, excited and festive, as if having been granted admittance to a secret sanctuary. His heart pounding, he entered the spacious courtyard, where a girl in a faded dress — a dress he recognized, because it was the one Janja had been wearing when she ran for the water — was hanging out the washing. At the creak of the unoiled gate she turned to Blam the same open, curious look that Janja had, though she was much younger, still a child.
“I’m looking for Janja,” he said, unable to take his eyes off the dress.
His stare did not faze her. She turned her narrow back to him and called “Danka!” into the courtyard in a loud, almost angry voice.
A young woman with a freckled face appeared in the door of the back house and looked Blam over without much interest.
“He wants Janja,” the girl explained, shaking the last drops off a man’s white shirt. She did not turn around.
“You know she’s not here,” said the young woman, as if Blam were not present. But then she looked at him again and said with a shrug, “You can wait if you like.”
He waited in the courtyard and waited so long that the young woman finally invited him in. The house consisted of a main room and a kitchen. The earthen floor was covered with rag rugs. There was little furniture apart from a number of beds, but what little there was, though it looked rather worn, was covered with starched needlepoint hemmed in blue thread. The young woman and the girl were Janja’s elder and younger sisters, the tired-looking woman sitting at the kitchen table and overseeing their labors — her narrow head propped on large bony hands crisscrossed with dark veins — Janja’s mother. Janja was the only one who went to work: she was a day laborer for a local landlord. The younger sister did the housework, the elder — newly married, pregnant, and living apart with her husband — spent the whole day in her former home, joining the husband only when he came back from the factory. Neither the mother nor absent brother was gainfully employed, the former because she was ill, the latter because he was lazy.