Cured Meats

BY Basil Basilovec

Izmit Anglochou not only survived the leap from his flaming window, but also immediately began shouting at me. Something about my mother

I return the favour from my windowsill, close the wooden shutters and lock the latch. Matter resolved, I think. I can content myself with the astrolabe, Pro-Tools, cured meats and slivovitz.

He can play in the snow and frost.

Our enmity had become two eggs that we each nested, and mine hatched first.

We were watching each other, but avoiding gaze meeting gaze. There was too much unrealised anger between us. The cold politeness was a lie, and, with my act of courage we found the truth, which will ultimately redeem us, as men, if not as friends.

I would have regurgitated these over-digested reflections by text, but given the scale of my self-indulgence, I send them by cable.

My friend, I hope you will humour me, at the very least; my conscience demands an audience, even if distant.

You remember I met Beatrice on the brigantine sailing from Malacca.

I was obsessed by her virtues – personal, carnal and utterly imaginary.

The trade wind mixed her musk with a dank fruit scent from the cargo. With this arousing essence I filled my nostrils, and then sinuses, so it caressed every lobe of my brain.

My strategy to win Beatrice was passivity. So much of my romantic conviction was conjured I could not afford to contrast it with reality.

Everyone knew, of course. Especially Carmichael Buntine in his worsted wool pants. He began the voyage as her companion and confidant, but before long had found fresh fields to exercise his equestrian talents, despite the cramped quarters.

Why was Mr Buntine fearful rather than hostile? I had no real agenda.

He must have read the honesty in my eyes.

After we had disembarked in this, our adopted colonial metropolis, from time to time I would encounter the couple by those social coincidences that occur in a large society comprised of many smaller ones.

His eyes would contract to pins and prick to keep me at bay. I was still his rival, even though we had never exchanged more than formalities; and, for my part, I had long discarded that particular fixation.

Years later I chanced by Mr Buntine at a Chamber of Commerce function.

I understood that he was by then estranged from Beatrice.

There was a spark of friendship that kindled in his eyes and brows, nothing I had seen before.

What was this reversal? Was I now a fellow traveller in his romantic misadventure?

Conjure a friendship from ashes?

I withdrew into a tortoiseshell of perfunctory politeness, nervous excuses, consulted my digital diary and fob watch, and I was gone.

Too much had happened that could not be denied, despite nothing having happened between us at all.

The actual bone of contention in any conflict or rivalry must be driven by muscular passions and animated by spirited imagination to become the full-grown and ravenous creature.

I am not above indulging in this myself.

In Montenegro, I had idealised the love of Gustav Panslav and Prinzika. Trust, complementary humour, moods in equilibrium, very compatible physiques, and genuine happiness in a time of alliances of convenience and circumstance.

They should have been carved in marble, buried and unearthed and put on public display, the embodiment of true romantic monogamy, which is so rarely fulfilled.

The scandal of their infidelity splattered us with bile and silent screaming jealousy.

Gustav took up with his new companion in a house on a hilltop from which all approaches were from below and visible from a distance. They sanctified their unholy beginnings with the graces of wedlock, but the disguise fooled no one.

They had placed themselves in considerable danger. Friends and kinfolk divided into two camps: a civil war. I was a partisan for her past. My private hostility and public abuse of Gustav became an opportunistic guerilla campaign.

Without accountability how will morality survive?

One by one we stole his goats and righteously devoured the spoils. When the mob climbed the hill waving firebrands, Prinzika had long since abandoned what we called her cause. She had tired of reopening old scars and left us for a different land. Her zealous champions, I included, carried on oblivious to her absence.

So you might better understand me, think of my homeland in Montenegro.

My kin occupy three valleys in our precipitous Dinaric Mountains. We are devoted to our vendetta with the neighbouring people, who are easily distinguished by their mixing of white sheep with black goats, and their reluctance to use more than a curved knife to eat.

Although to the naive outsider we are indistinguishable, we believe we are distinct and opposed in every custom conceivable – except our equal exchange of retribution for retribution.

On both sides this loathing and violence has become almost a celebration, which fills our conversation, populates our stories and legends, brings our friendships and families to life, and bestows a meaning and purpose more ennobling than just putting the next sausage in the mouth.

There is the disagreement over how we came to fight them. This has become a bitter schism in its own right, with wounds and ghosts to be avenged.

All this may seem to be resolved, if not made irrelevant, by the presence of the Turk. The forays of his Satrap are an ironic gift shared freely and in good will amongst us – the presence of an enemy more revoltingly foreign and despised than each other.

I myself grew tired of this game – a man cut from a heroic cloth must find his own story, not borrow an old one.

I cannot help think, despite so much time and distance, that if I had not killed my brother for breaking the taboo, we would have grown to become bitter and fully fledged enemies, rather than wasting the potential of our brotherhood in a premature, albeit prescient, moment of fratricide.

I now realise that family and friendships are most important, and I will always regret not having discovered and fulfilled such a precious relationship.