552 - 764

Long before Yahoo and Google, there was a telephone number of 981: you would type it into the keypad of Iskra's plastic green phone - on the older, black ones, you would turn it with the dial - after which a friend from the Information Service would answer, who would patiently listen to your crazy question: in a more crazy case, what time is it in Porto Allegre or when the last ferry from Vladivostok to Donghae leaves, and in a more reasonable one, for example, what was the name of Pontius Pilate's dog in The Master and Margarita.

When I was little, I considered the Information Service - along with astronaut - the most exciting profession in the world. However, I only dreamed of an office filled with books, encyclopedias, dictionaries, poetry anthologies, geographical maps, timetables of English and Soviet railways, and a big black telephone on which I would be called by world travelers, mere curiosities and drunkards who bet in inns the name of Pontius Pilate's dog in The Master and Margarita: eh yes, long before Yahoo and Google, drunkards were arguing in taverns about the name of Pilate's dog in The Master and Margarita.

When I was little, I thought - I knew - that even the Information Service doesn't know everything, and that there must be a job as the general director of OOUR World Wisdom, some unknown secret phone number that, in the last resort, when they don't have an answer, they call the all-knowing friends from phone number 981. I imagined the questions to which they have no answers in their lexicons, atlases and timetables, and the number that the Information Service calls in an emergency: that's the job I dreamed of when I was little, that's what I wanted to be when I grew up .

That or an astronaut.

How and when exactly my life went wrong, the devil will know, only in the end, instead of in the post office or in space, I ended up in a newspaper editorial office. There, in the nervous newsrooms - I will understand later - the omniscient and omniscient people end up not enough for their desk and their black phone in the office of the Postal Information Service. There, however, I also discovered that there really is an OOUR World Mind, and its general director, and its secret telephone number, which even the all-knowing editorial encyclopedists themselves call as a last resort, when they don't have an answer. To this day, I remember that number: first it was 552-764, and then, a little later, 512-357.

I remember those numbers because it was the last thing I needed to remember. Everything else, everything else he remembered and remembered the voice from the number 552-764: since I first dialed it, in the summer of 1988, my own life is also in a vague fog.

Eh, yes: long before Yahoo and Google there was Predrag Lucić.

If literature is right - and only literature is right - and if the departure of one man really ends an entire world and ends its entire history, then with the departure of Predrag Lucić, the magnificent history of an incomprehensibly vast world has ended, never again to the end of the explored, so great that ours revolved around him, each in its own orbit. It is polite to say on such occasions that a good part of us has disappeared with someone's departure, but there is nothing polite when I say that with Predrag's departure, a huge part of me also left forever, the whole of me in fact: it faded and quietly disappeared like those pictures and people from fantastic films about time travelers, when in one of the possible pasts - how, the devil will know - at one moment life goes in a completely unforeseen direction, and in the only present you have, suddenly, just like that, you fade away and disappear.

I'm not kidding at all. I, for one, remember well the moment when my life started here. I remember my whole life well, finally, until that year in 1988. It was the beginning of summer, I was a graduate student in fine arts and art history, seduced by journalism and imprisoned in the editorial office of Omladinska Iskra, and it was a hot June morning when a fat man burst into the editorial office asking to meet me. In those days, namely, he was leaving for the army and he suggested that I, together with his friend, continue working on the satirical feature of Nedjeljna Dalmacija. The fat one was Viktor Ivančić, and I met his friend the next day at a coffee in Prokurativi. He looked like the unknown brother of Goran Bregović, whose family does not invite him to Sunday lunches because he is awkward when he drinks, so he mixes up Captain Beefheart and Mitar Mirić. That guy drank a double pint and gave me his phone number, and I had no idea that it was the mythical secret phone, the number you call when you don't know.

In the afternoon, I called that number and told him for the first time that I don't know: I don't know, well, can we do it, just the two of us, a whole newspaper page every week. A few days later, I called that number and told him that I have no idea who Dragiša Pavlović is, fuck him and Dragiša Pavlović. A few days later I called that number and told him that I didn't know if what I wrote was valid. The next day - it was Wednesday, July 6, 1988 - I called that number and told him that I had no idea where the Radost buffet was.

And that's the last thing I remember.

Or at least the last I remember well. I called that number countless times, but it's been a long time since I've known what I didn't know. The next thirty years are in a haze for me, from which only fragments of furry edges emerge from time to time. It rolled and rolled for those thirty years with frantic speed, like the dining car of a deranged train with no brakes, an entire history of the world played out in its dirty windows before it finally derailed. Behind him, thrown along the railway, only debris remained.

It was easy to collect and assemble them while the number 552-764, later 512-357, and even later some cell phones with long numbers were calling. Predrag was not only our Information Service - our private Konstantin Porfirogenrt, the only source of our biographies, more reliable than the old Konstantin and more contemporary to us - but also an exact signpost at every crossroads, a signpost of Japanese precision. And it was easy. Our resumes were in safe hands. In an apartment in Omiška Street, filled with books, encyclopedias, dictionaries, poetry anthologies, geographical maps, timetables of English and Soviet railways, and a telephone on which we will call him every time we can't remember exactly when we got drunk and in which inn bet on the name of Pontius Pilate's dog in The Master and Margarita. And what was it even called.

Then came Yahoo and Google, but what do Yahoo and Google know. Yahoo and Google don't have correct answers, only the ones you want. And few want them to be accurate. Even fewer know them. Predrag was one of those, a man who wanted the right answers and who knew the right answers. It's not the Information Service. This is the number that the Information Service itself calls in a last resort, the one when you know the answer to a question is correct, but you don't know if the question is correct. It was a job for the CEO. For Predrag Lucić.

And if literature is right - and only literature is right - and if with the departure of Predrag Lucić, the history of an incomprehensibly vast world, never fully explored, so big that ours revolved around his, ended, we are left in that empty cosmos without the brightest star, so that we head around it and collide uncertainly in our own orbits.

Then we'll start from the beginning: I'll start from the beginning, and continue where I left off in one of the possible pasts, the summer of 1988, the day the fat man broke into the newsroom, the morning when the guy from 552-764 told me how sure he was we can. Everything in between - these thirty years in a vague fog - I will put together as I know how, from broken fragments that float freely in space after Predrag, and make it my own private myth, because I no longer have a reliable source. I will be in that incomprehensibly large and empty cosmos a collector of debris, a service of unreliable information.

That or an astronaut.

* * *

Eh, yes: Kožo called me that night at two past midnight to tell a joke. He has this habit of calling in the dead of night from the pub to tell a joke.

Well, Viktor, Boro and Predrag are making fun of each other at Miljenko Smoja's funeral, and they talk about what they would like to say about them, one day when they die, over the bier. "I would like," Viktor began, "for you to say that I was a truthful and honest man for whom one human being was more important than the whole state." "I would like you to say how I loved people and how I had many friends," Boro then added, and Predrag would say at the end: "I would like you to say: 'People, it's moving!'"

(oslobodjene.ba)