I also felt as if a thousand languages were ringing in my head, a proper Babel, thousands of different tones – croaky, squeaky, deep, rough, insistent and machine-gun fast – and I didn't understand a single one. As if all the conversations in the whole, not particularly large room converged on exactly the spot where I was shifting my backside, bruised by a hard wooden bench. I thought a beer would help, a can of Slovenian Zlatorog. That I'd wash the heat down my gullet and go numb. But queuing for a beer meant shuffling about for half an hour with the other sweaty bodies pushing and shoving each other, and it meant letting the deoxygenated air stick to me even more intensely and soaking up all that talk, which blended into an incomprehensible gibberish – cut through, as the hour wore on, more and more often by the loud and, by contrast, perfectly comprehensible laughter of drunks who had well and truly done themselves in. When these mountain men finally crash, their snoring will lift the roof, I thought, as I sharply changed course at the last stinker in the queue and turned my gaze to the door. I went outside.
Air. Delicious fresh air. I breathed it in deeply, half closing my eyes. Only a narrow slit remained between my eyelids. As that delicious rush of oxygen flowed through me, I felt a slight tingle down my back, as if a thin little brush on a metal wire were passing through my body from top to bottom. The kind you use to clean a beer tap or a hookah, or the kind we had at home in our yellow kitchen – I was utterly fascinated by the way the bristles frayed at the end; I was seven then, and I think Mum used it to clean vases. Air. Empty and fairly clean air. No voices, guffawing, grunting, smacking of lips, sniffing or chairs scraping across the wooden floor. Air, and above it a swept-clean sky scattered with distant worlds. Air, and in it the silhouette of Triglav. I wish I could have been here when people were still afraid of mountains like this. When they believed that up there the deities of the earthly, underground and heavenly realms gathered, so only ibex dared to climb this high – God knows why they bothered coming to such places, since they found nothing to eat or drink in the heaps of limestone scree anyway.
By the chapel not far from the hut, a figure took shape in the clean air. A girl's figure. I walked down the concrete steps and set off to talk to her. But at the bottom of the steps my courage deserted me and I curved off in a slow, inconspicuous arc to the right – lovely view of Triglav, eh, you coward?
When I'd had my fill of the view, she was still standing there, in front of the chapel's coloured stained glass, softly lit by the moon – probably one of those priestesses of the gods, a noble handmaiden of Triglav. I set off to talk to her again. Maybe she had no idea I was there until the last moment, or maybe she was crafty enough to turn round only when I appeared a metre away from her, wondering whether to greet her in Czech, Slovenian or English. All I could say in Slovenian was dobro jutro, so that option was quickly out. Czech seemed stupid, because she'd most likely understand zilch, she'd stare at me like a goldfish, my knees would start shaking and I'd run off out of nerves to stick myself back inside the hut. She said hello first. I repeated it after her.
We sat down in the chapel, breathed that fresh air together, the two of us, looked at the burning candles lighting up the dangling feet of Jesus Christ and tried to find a common language. And although we didn't understand each other, it felt as though we understood each other quite well. It must have been her smile. She wasn't the most beautiful girl in the world, but when she smiled I had to squint as her teeth, lined up side by side as if with a spirit level, lit up beneath her small, rosy lips. I asked her how you say pretty girl in Slovenian – cringe. But she acted as if it was sort of sweet, or maybe she really did like it, I don't know; she showed me those beautiful teeth again, I squinted, and when her heavenly smile had drained from the chapel's stone walls, she told me it was lepa deklica. I told her she was a lepa deklica – cringe. Though I have to admit frankly, and I admitted it to her too, that the Czech pretty girl sounds at least a hundred and fifty-six times better. To me, lepa deklica sounded like the lid ("dekl", in Czech) of a dusty dustbin or a hubcap off a Škoda, which certainly didn't evoke anything pretty. But it probably did for her. Her name was Adriana, and she smiled again.
An hour later we were both standing by that door again, from behind which the grimy air and the well-lubricated racket were forcing their way out to us. I asked her how you say good night, wished her lahko noč and she wished me the same. I wanted to kiss her, but the door closed behind her before the light of her smile had faded.
Inside, an accordion was playing; the drunks had stopped talking and were just bawling incoherent notes and rattling their chairs, which immediately set my right eye twitching. In less than six hours I had to get up and lead my four clients up Triglav, and I knew I'd be setting off without any sleep, because in this sticky hut not even earplugs would help. Besides, I'd left them at home anyway.
At 4:30 in the morning the alarm went off and made me pull the torn bits of paper tissue out of my ears. Total silence reigned in the hut. I was tempted to at least slam the door of my room properly, so that this time I'd be the one waking those drunken swine who hadn't let me sleep all night. But they wouldn't have noticed anyway, precisely because they were so drunk, and for some reason I thought of my parents, who wanted to make a decent person of me. Unfortunately – thank God – it seems they succeeded. I quietly clicked the door shut behind me, and two floors down I stepped into a gooey pancake that was impossible to avoid in the dark below the last step. When I realised what my right boot was squelching in, I nearly added a second helping. I wiped the stomach contents of one of those drunks off on the scree in front of the hut, switched on my head torch and gave the order to set off. Fuming and tired.
Adriana must have set off shortly after us, because just as we were gathering ourselves in the shelter below the summit to start the descent, I spotted a bloke in front of the tin rocket on the highest point of Triglav – the pride and symbol of Slovenia – slapping her on the backside with a knotted piece of rope, the kind normally used to tie boats to a harbour jetty. When he'd finished with Adriana, he started slapping the next in line, a man this time, so I concluded he probably wasn't a pervert who enjoys spanking bottoms, but the baptiser of all the pride-filled Slovenians who, in his company, had climbed Triglav for the first time in their lives. When Adriana turned our way, I smiled at her and shot my right hand up into the highest air there is in Slovenia. She did the same, and then I never saw her again.
We descended, and coming up towards us staggered sweaty, sticky drunks with bloodshot eyes. As we passed them, one of them started throwing up.
Triglav was covered in puke,
but Adriana –
lepa girl.
