The mesecnik files

A Nalepka Noir Novelette

Our eyes locked as she slipped me the nalepka for February, and I knew I'd never ride the bus alone again.....

Chapter 1: The Passenger's Tale

Mesecnik. The fuzzy purple jacket, the matching puffy hat hovering over a teenaged yet world-weary face. They pop up out of nowhere like magic mushrooms after a Balkan downpour: in the first hopeful days of every month, they come. They hop on and off the crowded buses at will, expertly threading their way past the overstuffed shopping bags, the students' backpacks, the canes and walkers of the cranky, creaking elderly. Vrhovci, Mestni Log, Rudnik, Zelena Jama, Barje; Gameljne, Podutik, Sostro, Fuzine, Brod. It matters not the line. They get on and off at ever-congested Bavarski Dvor; across the street at the next stop, near tourist-congested Copova street, they congregate outside the gorgeous golden main post office like giant hormone-fueled Smurfs, talking shop.

Mesecne nalepke is the only thing they ever say, for public consumption that is. Mesecne nalepke. They crow it forth like the nasal clarion of the national bird. Monthly stickers, monthly stickers. They roam the aisles like they own the thing, corpuscles in the gas-fueled arteries of Ljubljanski Potniski Promet. Most passengers never give them much thought, or more than a passing glance, before they return to their own petty commuter's concerns. I certainly didn't. One more bit of local color, one more mental note to scribble into my ever-expanding inner map of my adopted town. A city with an unpronounceable name, the capital of a country nobody back home had ever heard of. It didn't really matter to me, though. I knew where I was, you bet, and after several months' residence I could pronounce the city's name without a moment's hesitation.

So as we've established, the monthly appearance of the purple-clad mesecnik tribe did not thrill my blood. Until that fateful fourth of Februar.

Riding the number 7 Przan line that frigid Wednesday morning, jostling and lurching my way inevitably rearward into the bus's creaking, bifurcated bowels and being in turn inevitably jostled back, in the back of my brain I knew I'd have to fork over a modest yet significant sum to renew my bus pass for another four weeks. Tomorrow was the last day the January sticker would be valid, and if I didn't buy a new one now I'd very soon have to. I had learned to be fatalistic about it, like most of my fellow passengers, who wore the same rigid expressions on their face no matter what the weather or the circumstances of their personal lives. Sober and resigned, they shuttled between their brick-and-plaster apartment blocks and their concrete-and-steel work sites with blinkered determination, and Bog help anyone who got in their way. Never let anybody else know what you're thinking. Especially anybody else on the bus...

So when I heard the old cry, familiar yet startling, I knew what I had to do.

Ja, eno nalepko, prosim...

And then I saw her face.

Our eyes locked onto each other and somehow, I knew I'd never have to ride the bus alone again. I handed over the variously sized bills depicting the poet, the painter and the mathematician, and sighed. She, too, sighed beneath her cap as she slipped me the nalepka with a practiced flick of the hand. Our fingertips brushed as I took possession of the stiff bit of paper with the perforated peel-away back piece. February was the shortest month, but the moment expanded into an eternity for both of us.

"Let's do the Strand," I said.

Kaj? she said.

*****

She was in her late teens, not too tall, but solid and athletic-looking, and wore a cheerful but saucy expression under her baggy purple cap with the brim pulled low, almost to a level with her round dark eyes. Her hair, which was very dark brown, almost black, was long enough to brush the sides of her neck. She wore a silver lightning-bolt earring in each ear, plus a short gold post below the bolt in her right earlobe. I had an unexplainable feeling that she liked to gossip about people.

She wore the regulation uniform: cap, as noted. Jacket, equally purple, fuzzy and roomy, with capacious pockets to hold stickers, change, who knew what. Actually, they were probably roomy enough to conceal a small pet cat and its recommended daily intake. Said pockets, as well as the shoulders and a strip bordering the back of the neck, were covered with multicolored triangular patterns. The word MESECNIK was emblazoned across the back in big caveman-style block letters, including a little cartoon mesecnik incorporated into the logo. The jacket was just long enough to cover the butt. A black leather money pouch strapped across the front, and a black belt with the clasp in the back, completed the official ensemble. On the occasional male mesecnik the getup looked definitely dorky, but it gave her the appearance of a friendly urban warrior, someone who knew her turf. Mesecniks were apparently free to dress as they liked below the belt, and for her this meant dark blue corduroy trousers and old-fashioned, men's-style black oxford shoes. Other mesecniks wore jeans or plaid pants, equally popular among students.

I had fallen in love with a mesecnik.

*****

I live in Ljubljana, City of the Incongruous Architectural Juxtaposition. All the buildings in El Jay are either incomparably graceful and stylish, or possess no style whatsoever. Head in one direction away from the center of town and you'll come across a neoclassical cemetery across the street from a large lot filled with individual vegetable-garden plots, each with its own tumbledown tool shack out of Tobacco Road. This is not far from the sprawling, charmless BTC mall complex and surrounding superstores, with prices slightly less extortionate than elsewhere in town. Too many buildings away from the old town look as though they were slapped together over a long Communist-era weekend by people for whom the concept of outer trim was totally alien.

Alternately, you might take the wrong turn somewhere in the kava-bar-clogged tunnels sprawling outwards from the train station and happen upon an entire urban sub- neighborhood that opened for business last Wednesday in Bezigrad, the area just north of Center, which was designed with special concern that any personality that might possibly emerge be totally bleached out in the quest for some architect's blinkered post- communist postmodern (PoCoPoMo) vision of modernity. The buildings are pale, sanded, powdery blank slates reflecting nothing of their occupants' character (if any occupants indeed exist, not at all something to be assumed) and certainly grant no warmth to passing pedestrians. There do exist, if nothing else, an endless number of neighborhood bars populated by those who shape most of their waking hours nuzzling a pale glass of Union or a fizzy bottle of Zlatorog, drinking and talking endlessly to their fellow imbibers in a continuing battle to drive away any remote chance of or desire for change in the order of things (especially their own).

Mesecne nalepke. The phrase haunts my dreams as do curtain calls a ham actor's nocturnal reveries, obscuring my normal clarity of thought like the fog that turns Ljubljana into a spookhouse netherworld around ten o'clock every November night.

Mesecne nalepke...mesecne nalepke...mesecne nalepke...

Chapter 2: I, Mesecnik (The Mesecnik's Tale)

Call me mesecnik.

My name is Anja. I am a mesecnik and proud of it. I'm good at my job. I project a positive image, sell more than my quota, and, heck, I even like the jacket and the cap.

Monthly stickers, I call, over and over. You'll see me around town on the first five days of the month. Another strident voice on the bus. By the fifth day, I'm bolder, getting on and off the buses at will, mixing with the crowd outside the post office, selling people nalepke like they're going out of style, which, eventually, they will. O! Mesecna nalepka, thy joys are fleeting but acute.

Sorry. Sometimes the moment overtakes me.

Like I said, my name is Anja. I live in Crnuce, which is a near northern suburb of Ljubljana. You can get to and from by bus, which is what I do. Of course. I have been a mesecnik for eight months now and if you want to know the truth, I love it. Not so much the selling of nalepke, who really cares that much about that anyway, but the contact with the public it allows, people from all walks, byways and dead-end unpaved streets of life. Slovene people. My kind of people. Of which there are a lot in ol' LJ, believe me.

So, I put on the jacket and the cap and the belt and stuff and go sell nalepke in Ljubljana for the first five days of every month. My favorite five days. Call me romantic.

Coming in Chapter 3: Anja gets down at the Klub Nalepka.