Hope was not really tall, but she did have that what people called an inviting figure, with a waist too tiny and the hips too curved.
As she put on the half-torn white cotton undershirt she loved sleeping in, she nervously scratched across her breasts. They were growing and that meant constant itching and aching and the end of her refusal to wear a bra. She had not yet grown accustomed to having them.
Stuck between being a girl and becoming a woman, she was feeling uncomfortable in her body most of the time.
Her hair, that had kept growing longer over the years in spite of the lack of attention that she persisted in actually not paying to it, was kind of blonde and kind of wavy and sort of long enough to reach that spot on her back where the shoulder blades would touch when she was stretching her arms and tightening the muscles like she was doing now, standing in front of the open window.
She was like an Icarus, ready to take off , a spirit young and free of gravity and lusting for the touch of the Sun.
Lights were turned on across the tiny yard and she knew that something was happening in there. She tried to peak through the open first floor windows but all she could see was a bunch of amplifiers and large speakers stacked all the way up to the ceiling, one on top of another,like legos. That was the rehearsal room.
Bands would practice there for the concerts in this legendary place.
Hope had grown accustomed to listening in on them as they went through their set-list, argued over songs and even held some wild all night parties . Crem de la cremé of urban guerrilla she had witnessed play, sitting in this window, over the two years her family has lived in this crappy apartment.
At least this lousy European movie set came with a good soundtrack, she sighed.
Something was definitely going on over there. She knew the sound well.
Ta-ta-ta-ta-daum.
Someone was tuning the guitar.
Ta-ta-tau-tau-tauuum.
Someone good was tuning that guitar.
She dug frantically through the labyrinths of her brain trying to find a trace of anyone saying anything about a concert next weekend, because the bands that were good would usually get a full week to prepare and get that just right sound.
And there were fewer good bands around with every new day that dawned.
The country had fallen apart and no one was coming to play from other cities or countries.
Those bands that remained here active were mostly the old ones, leftovers of the new wave of the eighties that had swept across the former Yugoslavia with force and talent that could easily compete with the likes of the British or American post-punk scene.
Yes. Those that did dare to stay, she thought.
So many people had left, so many wonderful creative people unable to live under the clouds of war and in the sick and twisted reality that enabled it to start in the first place. Despite the closed borders, a flood of imagination, art and spirited though escaped and scattered the best people around the globe.
Others were dying off one by one from too many drugs.
An entire generation of the Lotus eaters was wiped away by heroin in this town.
Sasha told her of people he knew who had died overdosed in the back alleys. Hope never knew anyone who had died of drugs before she came here. She never even knew anyone who knew someone who had died from drugs before she arrived here.
Big city. Big troubles. Weak humans.
And, then, there were those who chose to remain silent in the protest
Those who claimed their right to protest with silence against the sound of the marching drums. Those who she thought were nothing but useless artsy wankers that someone should actually send to the front line and show them how ridiculous their passive pacifism would look standing against the tremendous pain and death they were supposed to be so thoughtfully fighting against by keeping their mouth shut.
Not many people dared to speak, write or sing of the horrors unspoken and unspeakable that were happening around them.
All in all, there were only a few bands who played for real these days . And of those, she actually maybe liked…one or two.
So whoever that was, over there, in the dimmed light of the rehearsal room, must be one of those few left behind.
Ta-ta tauuuu –taum.
Maybe . ..or the ... perhaps…-she tried random names but came up with nothing , as the music of a lonesome lead guitar started.
A hungry landscape made of sounds materialized in the vacuum of the hot summer dusk as his fingers went up and down in search of perfection. Cutting sharply through the rising darkness between them, the notes grew harder, thicker with echo.
The guitar man was getting angrier and angrier with every new second that passed, playing his instrument as if he were shooting from an automatic weapon, trying to kill the pain she could hear so clearly he felt.
He was, mad, he was sooo angry at this pathetic excuse of a world they were both stuck in .
He was on a roll. About to explode.
But instead, a sort of as a surprise, there was a loud screaming crescendo out-of- tune squeak and a full stop.
The sound was still not right.
Man, this guy is more than good - she thought to herself still trying to guess desperately who it was.
There was no way of seeing him, the lights were on, but he was probably sitting, or more likely standing, right behind the narrow wall that separated the two large double windows of the room.
The chords were coming again and were now rolling freely through the dry summer absence of air, full of halftones and breaks that sounded like someone gasping to catch his breath.
She smiled at him for this.
In this fucked-up city you get to breathe only when the shooting stops.
***
He continued playing and tuning in turns, and she could hear him for a moment clearing his throat and coughing somewhere near a microphone that was on.
The night had almost finally began.
When for a minute or two, or five, no sound came from the building in front of her, she concluded that the mystery guitar player had straightened up his unruly instrument and probably went downstairs to the bar to have a drink.
She turned on the lamp mounted onto the desk in the corner by the window, and decided to waste away another couple of hours reading the book that she borrowed from Sasha. No book she ever borrowed managed to find its way back to his apartment, but Sasha tolerated her.
A lot.
Hope had made reading by the open window into her little summer bedtime ritual, for she could never sleep when it was hot like this.
Sitting in the window, feeling the smallest breeze on her face, reading, was her way of relieving the tension.And there were a lot of demons to be chased away tonight before she could go to bed and actually fall asleep.Sasha going away to hide was merely starting to sink in, and together with that thought, her heart sunk.
Her building was old style solid, made of real bricks, with walls thick enough to house window panes big enough for her to sit on the inside comfortably.
Ignorant of the way how the lamp that she had pointed strategically for reading, was now throwing its beams towards outside and making her clearly visible to someone standing in the window across, she started reading her bedtime stories in complete silence.
The light sneaked its way gliding down her breasts, the elbows pressed against the knees and slender wrists holding the book firmly.
It contrasted her strong profile that looked like it belonged to a patricia engraved onto a coin from Roman times, age when legions roamed the streets of the town they called Singidunum, streets more orderly that the ones you could find in the same place a couple of thousand years of archeological layers later.
Mesmerized by the chant of words written, skimming quickly, every time she turned a page she would put a restless string of her wavy blonde hair behind the ear, which would again fall out of place as she reached to turn the next page, and she would pull it back again.
The book was good, great, speaking of people and history, and werewolves that were the true ancestors of this skewed nation, descending from times when the wolves turned into humans and remained wolves inside.
Soon, she was lost in the universe inside, sucked deep into the pages and thrown back to the time when heads were served on plates and taking interest in this part of the world was not really a good idea.
Not that it was a particularly bright thing to pursue in any other time either.
***
He watched her and he admired.
He admired the strength of the spirit that dared to devour the pages with such hunger, enlightening the soul with the purest knowledge in this darkness of despair that seemed to prevail.
He admired the desire of her youth for a better, brighter world, a world more beautiful and worthy of her beauty than the one she had the misfortune to live in and he had the privilege to watch.
And, each time her fingers reached out and she raised herself, slightly, to turn the page, her hair would fall down on her face and she would put it behind her ear with lightness of movement that made a heart skip a beat.
Every time her hypnotic hand arched through the air going from the top of the page towards her temple, he caught himself holding his breath, as if the sound of him breathing in the silent connection between them would somehow end the magic of the moment and she would disappear forever.
He clung onto the beauty of this moment in the continuum of time and, somewhere within that beholder’s adoration of the art of the life, he sensed something more.
He had never developed a taste for taking advantage of the young girls that followed them around, which most of his friends and bandmates did. He never could. And the reason that he never could do this was simply because he never wanted any of them. He never felt the desire or the need to.
Strict and thorough in his art and music, he was dedicated to the search for the depths of everything and anything he touched.
His songs and his lovers alike.
But, this girl, sitting in that second floor window reading that book paying no heed to the world outside the sentence she was taking in, this young girl here and now almost near enough for him to smell the taste of her skin, this magnificent vision in a girl he wanted more and more with each new silent and rhythmic caress of the fingers going through the hair.
God she really must be too young.
He twitched suddenly as if he realized that he had put his arm into a fire and it has burned down through the flesh all the way to the bone, turned around, grabbed the guitar, hung it briskly and, keeping his eyes firmly shut, began emptying his mind and cleansing his thoughts.
The hot air imploded with the sound of an electric guitar amplified to the maximum.
The chords kept coming, chasing one another, without breaths, almost forming a single sound. The roar that burned through the night moved the ground beneath them and tore the skies open.
It was big and sudden and overwhelming like an avalanche.
Startled by the sheer force of it, she jumped to her feet dropping the book into the dirty alley bellow.
She was blown away by the force of the thunder coming from his guitar, and was able to see him from behind now, playing like he was playing for his life.
He played faster and faster as the tempo spiraled into madness….like hypnotized tribesmen in a trance dancing around the human bonfire ...like horses rushing into a battle bewildered by the smell of destruction in their nostrils ...like a dervish spinning in the prayer for the quickening of the soul....like the river of protesters running down the Terazije square racing for their lives chased by the police...like the devil reaping the souls of the sinners on Judgment day…
The flesh of his fingertips tearing at the metal strings, the eyes still shut in a spasm, angry with himself for wanting a little girl and enraged by the guilt of wanting her still.
He finished with a scream so primal that it released and emptied him completely.
Head bowed down, with the air absorbing the last little echoes of his voice, he stood still for a moment waiting for his hands to stop shaking, before he opened his eyes and turned around, instinctively looking for her.
The man with the guitar was standing facing the window now, adjusting his eyes to the darkness and the light again, with his torso naked and drenched in sweat, with the instrument hanging around his neck still moving in the rhythm of his pulsating blood.
It took him another few seconds to realize that he was now looking her straight in the eyes.
She was standing there in the window, right across and no more than ten meters away, gripping the chipped wooden frame with her arms fully stretched, leaning down towards him, with her entire body trembling, with her mouth and eyes open wide.
Hope was taking deep, erratic, noisy breaths and her chest was pulsating recklessly. Her hands trembled and her knees were giving up, she was not in control of her body and only the thickness of the window pane prevented her from falling out.
That timeless tiny moment in which he saw her watch him looking at her lasted just long enough for both of them to figure out what had just happened.
The hair was short now and my god he grew some muscles on that lean body of his but that was definitely him…he was back in town playing … and he fuckin’ just gave her her first orgasm.
***
As she put on the half-torn white cotton undershirt she loved sleeping in, she nervously scratched across her breasts. They were growing and that meant constant itching and aching and the end of her refusal to wear a bra. She had not yet grown accustomed to having them.
Stuck between being a girl and becoming a woman, she was feeling uncomfortable in her body most of the time.
Her hair, that had kept growing longer over the years in spite of the lack of attention that she persisted in actually not paying to it, was kind of blonde and kind of wavy and sort of long enough to reach that spot on her back where the shoulder blades would touch when she was stretching her arms and tightening the muscles like she was doing now, standing in front of the open window.
She was like an Icarus, ready to take off , a spirit young and free of gravity and lusting for the touch of the Sun.
Lights were turned on across the tiny yard and she knew that something was happening in there. She tried to peak through the open first floor windows but all she could see was a bunch of amplifiers and large speakers stacked all the way up to the ceiling, one on top of another,like legos. That was the rehearsal room.
Bands would practice there for the concerts in this legendary place.
Hope had grown accustomed to listening in on them as they went through their set-list, argued over songs and even held some wild all night parties . Crem de la cremé of urban guerrilla she had witnessed play, sitting in this window, over the two years her family has lived in this crappy apartment.
At least this lousy European movie set came with a good soundtrack, she sighed.
Something was definitely going on over there. She knew the sound well.
Ta-ta-ta-ta-daum.
Someone was tuning the guitar.
Ta-ta-tau-tau-tauuum.
Someone good was tuning that guitar.
She dug frantically through the labyrinths of her brain trying to find a trace of anyone saying anything about a concert next weekend, because the bands that were good would usually get a full week to prepare and get that just right sound.
And there were fewer good bands around with every new day that dawned.
The country had fallen apart and no one was coming to play from other cities or countries.
Those bands that remained here active were mostly the old ones, leftovers of the new wave of the eighties that had swept across the former Yugoslavia with force and talent that could easily compete with the likes of the British or American post-punk scene.
Yes. Those that did dare to stay, she thought.
So many people had left, so many wonderful creative people unable to live under the clouds of war and in the sick and twisted reality that enabled it to start in the first place. Despite the closed borders, a flood of imagination, art and spirited though escaped and scattered the best people around the globe.
Others were dying off one by one from too many drugs.
An entire generation of the Lotus eaters was wiped away by heroin in this town.
Sasha told her of people he knew who had died overdosed in the back alleys. Hope never knew anyone who had died of drugs before she came here. She never even knew anyone who knew someone who had died from drugs before she arrived here.
Big city. Big troubles. Weak humans.
And, then, there were those who chose to remain silent in the protest
Those who claimed their right to protest with silence against the sound of the marching drums. Those who she thought were nothing but useless artsy wankers that someone should actually send to the front line and show them how ridiculous their passive pacifism would look standing against the tremendous pain and death they were supposed to be so thoughtfully fighting against by keeping their mouth shut.
Not many people dared to speak, write or sing of the horrors unspoken and unspeakable that were happening around them.
All in all, there were only a few bands who played for real these days . And of those, she actually maybe liked…one or two.
So whoever that was, over there, in the dimmed light of the rehearsal room, must be one of those few left behind.
Ta-ta tauuuu –taum.
Maybe . ..or the ... perhaps…-she tried random names but came up with nothing , as the music of a lonesome lead guitar started.
A hungry landscape made of sounds materialized in the vacuum of the hot summer dusk as his fingers went up and down in search of perfection. Cutting sharply through the rising darkness between them, the notes grew harder, thicker with echo.
The guitar man was getting angrier and angrier with every new second that passed, playing his instrument as if he were shooting from an automatic weapon, trying to kill the pain she could hear so clearly he felt.
He was, mad, he was sooo angry at this pathetic excuse of a world they were both stuck in .
He was on a roll. About to explode.
But instead, a sort of as a surprise, there was a loud screaming crescendo out-of- tune squeak and a full stop.
The sound was still not right.
Man, this guy is more than good - she thought to herself still trying to guess desperately who it was.
There was no way of seeing him, the lights were on, but he was probably sitting, or more likely standing, right behind the narrow wall that separated the two large double windows of the room.
The chords were coming again and were now rolling freely through the dry summer absence of air, full of halftones and breaks that sounded like someone gasping to catch his breath.
She smiled at him for this.
In this fucked-up city you get to breathe only when the shooting stops.
***
He continued playing and tuning in turns, and she could hear him for a moment clearing his throat and coughing somewhere near a microphone that was on.
The night had almost finally began.
When for a minute or two, or five, no sound came from the building in front of her, she concluded that the mystery guitar player had straightened up his unruly instrument and probably went downstairs to the bar to have a drink.
She turned on the lamp mounted onto the desk in the corner by the window, and decided to waste away another couple of hours reading the book that she borrowed from Sasha. No book she ever borrowed managed to find its way back to his apartment, but Sasha tolerated her.
A lot.
Hope had made reading by the open window into her little summer bedtime ritual, for she could never sleep when it was hot like this.
Sitting in the window, feeling the smallest breeze on her face, reading, was her way of relieving the tension.And there were a lot of demons to be chased away tonight before she could go to bed and actually fall asleep.Sasha going away to hide was merely starting to sink in, and together with that thought, her heart sunk.
Her building was old style solid, made of real bricks, with walls thick enough to house window panes big enough for her to sit on the inside comfortably.
Ignorant of the way how the lamp that she had pointed strategically for reading, was now throwing its beams towards outside and making her clearly visible to someone standing in the window across, she started reading her bedtime stories in complete silence.
The light sneaked its way gliding down her breasts, the elbows pressed against the knees and slender wrists holding the book firmly.
It contrasted her strong profile that looked like it belonged to a patricia engraved onto a coin from Roman times, age when legions roamed the streets of the town they called Singidunum, streets more orderly that the ones you could find in the same place a couple of thousand years of archeological layers later.
Mesmerized by the chant of words written, skimming quickly, every time she turned a page she would put a restless string of her wavy blonde hair behind the ear, which would again fall out of place as she reached to turn the next page, and she would pull it back again.
The book was good, great, speaking of people and history, and werewolves that were the true ancestors of this skewed nation, descending from times when the wolves turned into humans and remained wolves inside.
Soon, she was lost in the universe inside, sucked deep into the pages and thrown back to the time when heads were served on plates and taking interest in this part of the world was not really a good idea.
Not that it was a particularly bright thing to pursue in any other time either.
***
He watched her and he admired.
He admired the strength of the spirit that dared to devour the pages with such hunger, enlightening the soul with the purest knowledge in this darkness of despair that seemed to prevail.
He admired the desire of her youth for a better, brighter world, a world more beautiful and worthy of her beauty than the one she had the misfortune to live in and he had the privilege to watch.
And, each time her fingers reached out and she raised herself, slightly, to turn the page, her hair would fall down on her face and she would put it behind her ear with lightness of movement that made a heart skip a beat.
Every time her hypnotic hand arched through the air going from the top of the page towards her temple, he caught himself holding his breath, as if the sound of him breathing in the silent connection between them would somehow end the magic of the moment and she would disappear forever.
He clung onto the beauty of this moment in the continuum of time and, somewhere within that beholder’s adoration of the art of the life, he sensed something more.
He had never developed a taste for taking advantage of the young girls that followed them around, which most of his friends and bandmates did. He never could. And the reason that he never could do this was simply because he never wanted any of them. He never felt the desire or the need to.
Strict and thorough in his art and music, he was dedicated to the search for the depths of everything and anything he touched.
His songs and his lovers alike.
But, this girl, sitting in that second floor window reading that book paying no heed to the world outside the sentence she was taking in, this young girl here and now almost near enough for him to smell the taste of her skin, this magnificent vision in a girl he wanted more and more with each new silent and rhythmic caress of the fingers going through the hair.
God she really must be too young.
He twitched suddenly as if he realized that he had put his arm into a fire and it has burned down through the flesh all the way to the bone, turned around, grabbed the guitar, hung it briskly and, keeping his eyes firmly shut, began emptying his mind and cleansing his thoughts.
The hot air imploded with the sound of an electric guitar amplified to the maximum.
The chords kept coming, chasing one another, without breaths, almost forming a single sound. The roar that burned through the night moved the ground beneath them and tore the skies open.
It was big and sudden and overwhelming like an avalanche.
Startled by the sheer force of it, she jumped to her feet dropping the book into the dirty alley bellow.
She was blown away by the force of the thunder coming from his guitar, and was able to see him from behind now, playing like he was playing for his life.
He played faster and faster as the tempo spiraled into madness….like hypnotized tribesmen in a trance dancing around the human bonfire ...like horses rushing into a battle bewildered by the smell of destruction in their nostrils ...like a dervish spinning in the prayer for the quickening of the soul....like the river of protesters running down the Terazije square racing for their lives chased by the police...like the devil reaping the souls of the sinners on Judgment day…
The flesh of his fingertips tearing at the metal strings, the eyes still shut in a spasm, angry with himself for wanting a little girl and enraged by the guilt of wanting her still.
He finished with a scream so primal that it released and emptied him completely.
Head bowed down, with the air absorbing the last little echoes of his voice, he stood still for a moment waiting for his hands to stop shaking, before he opened his eyes and turned around, instinctively looking for her.
The man with the guitar was standing facing the window now, adjusting his eyes to the darkness and the light again, with his torso naked and drenched in sweat, with the instrument hanging around his neck still moving in the rhythm of his pulsating blood.
It took him another few seconds to realize that he was now looking her straight in the eyes.
She was standing there in the window, right across and no more than ten meters away, gripping the chipped wooden frame with her arms fully stretched, leaning down towards him, with her entire body trembling, with her mouth and eyes open wide.
Hope was taking deep, erratic, noisy breaths and her chest was pulsating recklessly. Her hands trembled and her knees were giving up, she was not in control of her body and only the thickness of the window pane prevented her from falling out.
That timeless tiny moment in which he saw her watch him looking at her lasted just long enough for both of them to figure out what had just happened.
The hair was short now and my god he grew some muscles on that lean body of his but that was definitely him…he was back in town playing … and he fuckin’ just gave her her first orgasm.
***
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