Pop’s Drunk Again

“Great,” she said. “Go on, tell me, what was the deal with that politician? What was he doing in your building?”
I was beginning to feel a little better. I even thought of doing another line. I shrugged at her question.
“It’s obvious what he was doing there, isn’t it? There’s whoring everywhere, Dušan, take my word for it!”
Hey, man, now she’s adopted a maternal attitude to me, I thought. She’s really in the bag and up the pole. I kept nodding and grinning.
“It’s been that way since the beginning of time, Dušan. Go on, have another one, ha-ha, to steady your hand, ha-ha,” she came out with a combination of yokel common sense and black humor, and poured me another shot. “Yeah, yeah, they’re all whore masters, and politics is nothing but a whore. You know what’s the difference between electricity and politics? Huh? Politics is a whore, and electricity … Oh, darn, I forget … Wait, electricity is … electricity’s a whore that… Right, a whore you can’t touch, and politics … Oh, I can’t remember, but it’s funny and … It turns out in the end there’s no difference.”
I mean, it was really funny, no denying that. She got up and went to the sink. She took out a glass, rinsed it and put it down on the table next to the bottle of schnapps. She sat down, wriggled into a comfortable position, pushed out her enormous chest and said:
“Go on, pour me a drink, will you? I’m a bit nervous, you know?”
Naturally, I poured her one. And one for myself, because I was nervous too. She raised her glass and clinked it against mine. We drank to each other’s health, man. She smiled sweetly as we did this, and I, really on edge with the situation and all, grabbed my gun nervously to finish, goddamit, what I had in mind and what I’d come to do in the first place. I aimed it at her. My hand shook like some damn country butcher’s.
“Are you in such a hurry?” she asked with a lump in her throat.
I stared at her for a while and then rested my befuddled and weary head on my hand, which still held the gun. For a short time I even closed my eyes. I could hear nothing but her deep breathing and a clock ticking somewhere in the room. I opened my eyes again, looked at her and realized that I really was in no hurry at all. After all, I had the whole night before my flight. I shook my head no.
“That’s good,” she said and downed the glass she was still holding. Then she got out of her chair and went to the bedroom. A short while later some music came pouring out. Slow music, heartbreaking. Pathetic, corny. I finished my drink and poured another. For both of us. She came back from the bedroom and stopped in the doorway. She was twisting a rag in her hands and looking at me. Then she asked:
“What’s going to happen to this apartment now, Dušan?”
I mean, talk about banal! The wench knows she’s got one night left to live at the most, and she wants to know about the apartment? I mean, come on!
“I don’t know,” I said, and I wasn’t lying.
“Are you guys going to take it back, because, now that …” Her voice trailed off. Then she continued, a bit lower: “Now that Uroš is gone …”
Another thing that got me down. Another fact. That is … Until then I hadn’t even known the name of the kid we’d killed. I hadn’t even known whom we’d killed.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
She told me. A stupid hick name. I nodded at her. She came up to me and proffered her hand. She really had bats in her belfry. Then she sat down across the table from me again and—my, what a sight—stuffed the rag she’d been twisting in her hands down her gargantuan bosom. I quickly downed my drink. She yammered on endlessly:
“Now you’ll never get your money back, no way. Were you thinking of claiming it from his family? They think it’s their apartment now. But… ha-ha, if they knew what happened, they wouldn’t want it, would they, Dušan? And I,” she said, and made a zipping motion across her mouth to show that it was sealed, “I’m keeping my mouth shut. But they tried, you know, Dušan, they tried to make me leave by force, though they never gave a penny for this place, while I contributed quite a lot, you know. But now this loan … Neither my family nor his family have that kind of money. Oh, darn, what’s going to happen now, Dušan?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and to be honest, I couldn’t care less. Now there were only two things going through my mind. Her enormous boobs and another line. I don’t know why I got up and went to the bathroom to cut a line, but that’s what I did. I locked myself in the fucking john, and cut a line on the water tank as though I was ashamed of my deeds in front of her. In front of the woman I’d come to kill. As though I’d never snorted coke at that kitchen table. Hey, man. And another thing: She could’ve easily run from the apartment, fuck it, and called the cops, or simply taken my gun, which I’d left on the table, and blown my brains out. I have no idea why I did that. Maybe I was stoned out of my mind by the schnapps and coke and the wine I’d been drinking all day, or maybe I just didn’t give a damn about what happened to me and all that. I don’t know, my dear Quakers, I really don’t. To cut to the chase—when I returned, sniffing, my head aching so badly I thought it would burst, she was dancing in the bedroom. With her arms spread wide she twirled around the bed, while her loose nightgown revealed more than was sensible.