“What? What are you talking about?” I came back to grave reality.
“Fay Wray,” Keret repeated. “King Kong’s first bride to be. Before Jessica and Naomi, back in 19 Fay acted in the first King Kong.”
“A Canadian, one of those movie divas that lived to a very old age,” Blaž Gandalf Perković added. “You got lost there for a second, Shamsky, what were you thinking about?”
We climbed over rocks as if this were a video game with platforms. The sun scorched the rocks, bounced back from them and wrought gallons of sweat from us. We had water, but none to waste.
“I was thinking that most likely we’ll all be dead before sundown. It’s all your fault, Perković, you know that, don’t you? You made us leave our cell phones behind!”
I stood up feeling the rush of anger.
“It’s all your fault because you abandoned civilization and came to live in this inhospitable shithole! It’s all your fault, Perković, because you’re pretending to be some fucking Grizzly Adams!”
At one moment Perković too stood up straight and, all read in the face, roared, “I’m no Grizzly Adams…”
Wanting to turn around toward me, with his right foot he searched for a firm foothold, but he didn’t find any – a piece of rock the size of a cabbage head came loose under his weight and he tumbled downwards. Blaž flayed his arms twice trying to regain balance and then he simply slipped into the abyss. We heard a dull thump and nothing more.
***
Etgar Keret and I stood above Blaž’s motionless body. He hit a rock with the nape of his head and that was his end. The extinguished eyes of the son of Velebit remained open and fixed onto clear blue above the mountain. The spark of life had already extinguished in them, but the Israeli nevertheless knelt down and checked his pulse.
“He’s dead,” he said.
“I can see that for myself. I killed him, I’m to blame.”
“I don’t see it that way. You got into an argument, our nerves are tense, and our friend stepped on a wrong rock. That’s all. That rook stood here for hundreds of years waiting. Today Blaž Perković finally kept his appointment.”
“Eternal rest grant unto him, o Lord,” I added.
We got up and stood in silence for a while. It seemed as if we were praying silently or something, but during that time I thought about Keret’s words. The man’s right, I thought, I mustn’t blame myself. When you’re clambering up and down the mountain, you have to watch your step, and Blaž didn’t. And so it happened he stepped on that very rock. It’s Velebit’s fault, it killed him, in the third place is, of course – the wolfgoat, and only then, somewhere in the fourth or fifth, it’s me. My blame is negligible. That’s right, I kept saying to myself, I hold no responsibility for the death of Blaž Perković, none whatsoever. In the end, he didn’t have to move to these gorges.
“Oh, my dear Perković, my wretched Perković,” I added out loud and quickly crossed myself.
“We’ll cover him with rocks so that birds and some such animals don’t get to him and eat him,” Keret proposed.
“And we’ll mark the grave with his stick, so that the Mountain Rescue Service can find him.”
We took Blaž’s canteen and got down to business. Very quickly we covered his body with rocks and positioned his stick above his head.
“This temporary grave is not half bad.”
“True,” I confirmed Keret’s thought. “Like in westerns.”
The Israeli fished out a joint from somewhere in his vest and suggested we light one before we continue our pursuit. We sat down above the grave and lit up.
“You’re not much of a nature lover?”
“I’m not, and this thing with the wolfgoat is the last jewel in the crown of distrust I have for wild regions.”
“The wolfgoat is the icing on the cake. Do you think it’s alone or there are more?”
“I think this is the only wolfgoat in the world.”
“Then it must be damn lonely.”
“It sure is, this monster is lonely here in the mountain.”
“Maybe that’s why it snatched Maruša.”
“No doubt, desire makes it do such things.”
For a while we stood in silence, looking somewhere into the distance and puffing smoke. Wilderness is all around us, I thought, and once we’re gone, it’ll crawl in and cover what’s left of civilization. Everything will be as it once was. We’re destroying rainforests, killing whales, drilling earth, but all of it is nothing. The battle is long lost. We live in our illusions.
“Do you think we’ll make it back alive?” I asked.