Page 78 - To Family with Love

direction. We would hide in dead ends, yards, alleyways, and at pedestrian crossings, but all in vain, because he was right behind us the entire time. We turned our heads and looked in the oppo- site direction, sang Hrvatine, and also some Serbian songs just in case, but nothing and no one could help us. Least of all the po- lice, because this book has already clearly demonstrated that they didn’t deal with life-or-death situations, so when it came to them, the blue car had nothing to worry about. He became a shadow of sorts. You could already smell the stench of death in the air, and my ma and I had already come to terms with the bitter truth that there would be nothing of our swimming adventure that day. Once we reached the next bridge, when it was already obvious that the blue car would catch up to us, step-jerk suddenly hit the brakes, opened the car door, rushed out like a bullet and “splash”, threw himself into the Sava River. Unlike us, that guy had no intention of missing his opportunity for a swim.
− Sorry ma’am, I barely caught up to you, your husband left his documents behind at the gas station.
− Thank you, sir, and goodbye!
− Oh, you moronic moron!
My ma was yelling angrily under the bridge at the step-
jerk who had dropped out of sight. He disappeared as if he had jumped into hydrochloric acid, and left us with the car and all that stuff without any instructions whatsoever, so she yelled under the bridge, which had been blessed by a century-old undisturbed peace up until that moment, with the exception of a few pensive fishermen who had been soaking their fishing floats there since the times of Austria-Hungary. The cars honked like crazy as we were taking our things out of the car, and then headed for the tram stop loaded down like mules. So that our trip wouldn’t be a total disaster, we hopped on tram number five and circled around the city until I wolfed down all the food. During all that time, my ma couldn’t get over herself: what the hell did she see in that jerk,
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