“It feels like justice to me. It feels like—”
He stopped suddenly in mid speech and I watched as his face grew a little pale in the afternoon sunlight. Following the direction of his eyes, I noticed an elderly woman making her way along the road, dragging a shopping trolley behind her, followed by a dark-gray dog of no specific breed. The woman was so small, with a face so deeply lined that a portrait photographer would have had a field day with her. Ignac put his glass down on the table beside him and when she reached the bar she stopped by the side door and called out something in a language I didn’t understand. A moment later, the waiter came out and handed her a glass of beer, placing a bowl of water on the ground for the dog, and as she sat down, she looked around and her eyes landed on us for a moment before she turned away and gave a deep sigh, as if the weight of the world was on her shoulders.
“The famous writer,” she said, her English underpinned with a thick Slovene accent.
“I suppose so,” said Ignac.
“I saw your picture in the newspaper. I wondered when you’d show up here.”
Ignac said nothing but the expression on his face was one that I had never seen before, a mixture of distress, contempt and fear.
“And who are you?” she asked, leaning over to look me up and down derisively.
“I’m his father,” I said, an answer that I had given people before when it seemed easier than the technical truth.
“You’re not his father,” she said, shaking her head, and when she laughed at my presumption I could see how many teeth were missing from her mouth. “Why would you say that?”
“His adoptive father then,” I said, a phrase I never used in relation to Ignac, whom I thought of as my son, more so than I did even my own son.
“You’re not his father,” she repeated.
“And how would you know that?” I asked irritably.
“Because his father was my son. And I would know my own son if he was seated next to me.”
Ignac closed his eyes and I could see his hands trembling as he reached for his drink. I looked back and forth between the pair and although there was no family resemblance that I could decipher I assumed from Ignac’s lack of protest that she was telling the truth.
“You had a dog just like him when I was a boy,” he said, nodding toward the mutt who was lying on the ground now, having a snooze.
“It’s his pup,” she said. “Or his pup’s pup. I can’t remember anymore.”
“Ignac,” I said. “Do you want me to leave you alone? If you want to talk.”
“No,” he said quickly, turning to me with a panicked look on his face. How strange, I thought; he’s in his mid thirties, married with four children, a successful man, and yet he’s still frightened to be left alone with this old woman.
“I’ll stay then,” I said quietly.
“So you took him on?” said the woman, looking at me as she drank her beer.
“I did,” I said.
“Poor you.”
“I’m glad I did.”
“But he’s so disgusting,” she said, spitting on the ground. “So dirty.”
Ignac turned and glared at her and she looked back at him, reaching out a hand to touch his face, but he pulled away, as if she was holding a flame to his skin.
“All that money and he never sends a penny to his grandmother,” she said now, putting her head in her hands and beginning to cry so suddenly that it seemed to be a completely fake and futile gesture.
“The grandmother who sent him away, you mean?” I asked.
Ignac shook his head and reached into his back pocket, removed his wallet and emptied it of all its notes—about twenty or thirty thousand tolars—before handing them across. She snatched the cash from him as if it was her right and secreted the bundle beneath her coat.
“All that money,” she said. “And this is all I get.”
And with that she stood up, the dog leaped immediately to his feet, and she continued on her way, dragging the shopping trolley behind her, my eyes on her all the way as Ignac looked in the opposite direction.
“Well, that was unexpected,” I said finally. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” he said.
“Did you know you’d run into her?”
“I thought I might. She’s a woman of routine. She passes by here every day. She always did anyway.” He paused for a moment. “I never told you why I left Slovenia, did I?” he asked.
“You said that after your mother died, your grandmother didn’t want to look after you.”
“That was only partly true. My grandmother kept me with her for a few months.”
“So why didn’t you stay?”
“Because she was just like my father. She wanted to make money off me.”
“How?”
“The same way. There were a lot of men here, bored of their wives and looking for something different. My grandmother found out. She walked in on me with one of them one afternoon. I was just a kid at the time, and when she saw what was going on she closed the door and went back to the kitchen, banging pots and pans around, and that was the extent of her anger. That’s what she did to save me. Afterward, she whipped me and told me that I was disgusting, a worthless piece of shit. But maybe she saw what an asset I could be. I was a good-looking boy. I was pretty. And she told me that if I was going to let men do that to me, then she would be in charge of it from then on. And the money would be hers.”
“Jesus,” I said, putting my glass down.
“It wasn’t just me. There were others too. One of my friends from school, she rented him out too, but he ran away and drowned himself in the Drava. His body was brought back and at the funeral all the men who had fucked us sat in the church and wept for his lost soul, making their way to the front row at the end of the service to offer their sympathies to his mother as if they held no responsibility for any of it. It wasn’t long after that that I decided to run away too, only I knew I was not going to throw myself in the river. Instead, I stole enough money for a train ticket. It got me as far as Prague and from there I did the only thing I knew how to do in order to survive. But at least then the money was mine. After a while, I moved on to Amsterdam. I wasn’t even planning on stopping there. I had no ultimate destination in mind. But I knew my father lived in the city and somehow I thought that he might take care of me. That he’d turn my life around. But he was no different from my grandmother. Then all I wanted was to keep moving, to keep traveling, to get as far away from Maribor as I could. And I did in the end. I left it all behind. And look at me now. That’s all thanks to you and Bastiaan.”
We sat there for a long time, saying nothing, drinking, and finally we stood up and made our way back to Ljubljana and the plane for Dublin.
The Planes