[ In Mating Time, Dragan Djokovic, Dental, Belgrade, 1994. ]

I am trying to write a re-view of Dragan's book. Not to say something appropriate, but to say something re it, on the rim, something quite on the fringe, I am making an effort to read what I wrote down in the margins of his book, if a book, any book, can be said to be anybody's. And the first thing I wrote down was a question mark beside the title of his book. My copy of the book which Dragan wrote, if a book, any book, can be said to have been written by anybody, is, therefore, called Za vreme parenja? (In Mating Time). No doubt, that is what it is called, this copy of mine, because I realized too late that the stories told in the book were not in conflict with the title, that none of the stories in the book told only about mating, about that mating which Dragan calls seasonal -- his stories do not tell about those exciting one-day, one-hour, five-minute matings, if there are such matings, and there are, we are already grown up, we know that, about those matings the aim of which is the absence of any coupling. On the contrary, these stories tell about mating as an always failed coupling, they tell of the constant search for for the other who has forever escaped -- they tell of the creation of a couple which, however, never comes into being, because doublings and joinings are not possible except in stories, in which, in a very complex way, they regularly take place. If they are not Dragan's stories. Because there is nothing of this in them, nothing of these happy meetings, fateful glances, decisive words, unforgettable touches. Which does not meant that in them there are no meetings, looks, owrds, touches, smiles... unimportant, therefore, the most important, those which are given out readily many times a day, those which are forgotten by the one giving them long before they are given.

I shall say it out right, because I can find no good reason for delay: Dragan is a hunter as well as a thief. Thieves are those who simply take, covertly, what is not theirs. And later on they do what they want with what they have stolen, and disport themselves with it in various ways... say, they write a story about their robbery, or about what they have stolen, or the person whom they have robbed. And they even sign their names to this story, they just go and do it. That is what he, Dragan, also does. He lurks in the dimness of his room, he is silent, he listens, "breathing slowly, deeply, so as not to disturb the course of her story", he is inconspicuous, it is therefore also always inconspicuous how much he enjoys his inconspicuousness, his ability to observe while unobserved. And he observes constantly, without rest, and then sits down to his desk and writes down all that he has stolen while watching. "I hunt her gaze... I write down, trying not to let anything slip by", "I bend my head towards the laughter, I write down", "so the shadow won't escape me", or anything that exists in the manner of a shadow, which means everything. But in Dragan's stories this everything is broken into a multitude of unconnected movements, twitches, touches, kisses, smells, sounds, dreams, memories, sighs, steps, whispers, photos, voices, names, and is then joined into impossible links, into images of an impossible world, of a manly-tender world in which man always does to woman the most beautiful thing he can do to her, which is always undefinable, which can be defined only in words which do not say anything: ".. always something undefinable, in any case, something manly and tender". Dragan tells impossible stories about this impossible world, "manly tender". Because these stories of his are like that, impossible, manly tender stories about what is "definable and undefinable", about coupling, linking, complicity, about what is gone before it has happened, never to be determined whether it actually occurred or not. How can a smile be proved, an accidental touch, someone's name? "Just one moment, just this smile, just the kiss now, and it's gone" -- as all these loves pass, anyway, both unhappy and happy, if these latter ones exist at all, and they don't, we already know this, too. What I wish to say is that Dragan's telling impossible stories means that he tells love stories, and that he tells them in a "manly tender" way, in a male way, "as just a real man, that very suspicious character, can". The stories which have managed to tell the impossible deserve having been told, these stories are not superfluous, even if they are "male".

For a long time I have been playing a game with Dragan. Every time I smile at him in a different way, every time I pronounce Zh and Sh differently, every time I look at him in a different manner. I do not touch him, never. Without all these precautions, I think he would rob me, he would take away my Zh and my Sh, and my smiles, and my glances, and my touches, and put them into one of his manly and tender stories. And to live without all these things, especially without the Zh and the Sh is, I suppose, not simple at all.

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