Page 74 - To Family with Love

were still a family and when my old man took us there, my father and your husband, and the people from Zagorje had just intro- duced a levy on the use of pools also known as tickets. We evad- ed the levy by going round the entrance, but, after crawling under the fence, we were full of tar, because the cunning people from Zagorje coated the fence all over with it. Later, black as coal, we had to go for a swim in a nearby stream into which the pools poured because they didn’t want to let us in like that anymore, not even with tickets. For two full days after returning to Zagreb, we were still the main attraction, until we somehow managed to remove all that tar off our skin with a thinner, Vim, some scrub brushes and a soldering iron.
− Do you remember that, mommy?
My ma turned red in front of the step-jerk, as if she was returning from the spa sunburned, and not as if we were only just getting there.
Unfortunately, the trip started way too early for any of my scoundrels to see a liveried driver wearing shorts and a T-shirt personally picking up the goalkeeper of their first team. Now I know exactly how celebrities feel and I can only say this – it’s a shame you don’t get to see what that feels like, too. It didn’t even help when I pushed my head through the half-open window as soon as we got in the car and waved at whomever I could like a drowning man. None of my people in sight. We only ran into some friends of my step-jerk, the whole town was full of them, and every now and then someone would shout after us:
− Look at the jerk in that car!!
The wind was blowing so hard in my ma’s face that she was forced to pull up the window in self-defense, and as she didn’t notice me airing out my ears at the window, she would have defi- nitely choked me had I not made an unnatural, high-frequency
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