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562 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
When you’re little and you measure life in days and not years, you often see a miracle happen, but more often you’re disappointed and convinced that there wasn’t any miracle.
There was an entire male world in Regina’s head, picturesque as Godard’s Paris, in which every man’s ultimate goal was to spray his semen wherever he went, and, if possible, inside her child. She hated them with every bit of strength in her big heart. However, if someone told her she’d gone too far because it wasn’t normal to call one’s own daughter a slut or anyone who eyed her a maniac, she acted like her hatred was the highest and holiest form of motherly love. When it came to sex, she felt extremely protective, although her feelings toward the one she was protecting didn’t differ very much from her attitude toward Dijana’s real and imaginary men. The girl reminded her of the tragedy of her own life and therefore had to be punished. In her dreams, at least.
In the summer of 1968 the old man turned eighty-five, and Luka Sikirić was told in a Paris cancer clinic that he had three months to live. He strolled down streets where children played war. They turned over cars, smashed display windows, pulled granite cobblestones from the street, and hurled them at the police, shouting their revolutionary slogans. The policemen shot tear gas at them and swung their batons, and many of them ended up in the hospital with bloody heads. They were forbidden from shooting at the children. The parents, against whom the revolution was started, forbade it. The stupid cops’ brains couldn’t comprehend this as the nurses tended to their wounds, and not even the most intelligent people would have comprehended this were it not for books, movies, and especially philosophical treatises that would turn 1968 into a significant historical event, more important than all the wars fought in French colonial Africa and maybe more important than the war in Vietnam, in which thousands and millions, mainly nameless slant-eyed primates, were being killed in the name of the same ideals against which the children of Europe had risen up. No answer would ever be given to the question of how a revolution, in which the counterrevolutionaries were not allowed to shoot, could be such an important historical event, but its meaning would finally be known in ten or fifteen years, when the children in the streets of Paris had grown up into replicas of their fathers.
Those who pass judgment usually don’t know that they’ve passed judgment on someone. Just as those who are condemned don’t learn anything about those passing judgment either, no matter how hard they try and no matter how sweet revenge seems. No one succeeds in taking revenge on anyone in this short life.