It is common knowledge that silence can be found in the expected places, such as a freshly opened jar of jam.
The permanent absence of noise in the cramped space of a bus stop, however, is capable of driving you out of your mind altogether. A dinky little place where passengers gather, peering intently at the timetable on the notice board as they decipher the letters and make out the numbers in the traces of faded paint. Distrustful of the information on the board, or of the accuracy of the great clock on the Catholic church tower, everyone, as a rule, will after a while turn to the confectioner employed right there at the stop.
A heaven-appointed alternative to your average dispatcher, this fellow in the spotless white uniform, with the worried face and the coal-black moustache, gives you every reason to conclude that he is simply waiting to be asked something.
“What time does the bus leave?”
“Has it already gone?”
“Do you know when the next one is?”
As though it were perfectly understandable that the buses, which look more and more like old, tattered dragons, despise this cheerless place from the depths of their diesel souls. It seems their engines have drunk up all the fuel the way folly drinks up a man’s wits. Now and then the dragons arrive on time, most often they are late, and sometimes they don’t turn up at all.
In keeping with the unwritten rule: precisely when they are needed most.
The fellow in question had completed the entire complex curriculum, not only the timetable for holidays and weekdays but the psychology of the traveller as well. And so most of the inquisitive turn into the “pie-quisitive”, and after some time spent in conversation they order at least two slices of meringue pie, the better to recover their strength and calm themselves with a rush of dopamine from the sugar. Should the would-be traveller order a coffee or a lemonade on top of that, he will begin, or merely continue, his psychotherapy with the confectioner, who will listen to him patiently and attentively.
At some deaf hour of the day, the buses neither snort from their patched exhausts nor groan their compressor groans through their rattling doors. The silence is vast, and so the smacking and clinking, the squeak of metal chairs and the hum of the fridge become material proof that life here is, after all, possible.
It was a Thursday afternoon when a lady in a straw hat, rouged and doused in sweet scents, ordered a cold lemonade and asked for two scoops of vanilla ice cream to be dropped into it.
“And here comes the mishmash!” declared the cheerful confectioner, proud of the name he had himself invented for this unusual combination.
From the lady’s expression he understood that he urgently had to ask the next question.
“How are the children, madam?”
He wasn’t sure whether she had any children, but he couldn’t think of anything else.
“Oh, never mind them, they only remember me when they need money. As if I were some kind of piggy bank. When they need money, I’m the piggy bank, and when they don’t, I’m apparently just the pig. Anyway, stick a coffee on there too, a bitter one. To kill this sugar.”
Then, a little more thoughtfully, she added:
“In the end, sugar will kill us all. Every last one of us!”
She paused, then waved a hand.
“Don’t fuss! Just put in that coffee, because it’ll be the grandchildren and my daughter that kill me before the sugar does.”
On his way to the coffee cupboard, Ljuzim thought that it is sometimes wiser to pick a safer topic of conversation, such as the weather, especially if the patron is in a bad mood.
You can blame the weather with a clear conscience and a sound mind. And few will disagree.
The weather, after all, has every trait of a culprit. It is unpredictable and answers to no one.
Surely I’m not going to be the one to blame? Or, worse still, the customer?
Terrible weather today.
He listened to his inner voice, trying to find the most pleasant melody for that sentence.
Then he noticed something.
The lady pushed her glass away and stared at him as though she had discovered that her hairdresser had cut more off the right side of her head than the left.
“What did you say?” she asked, although he had not actually said anything.
He had struck a nerve. He had asked about the children, but the woman had spoken of the grandchildren as though they were her own. Perhaps she helped her daughter too, but he did not yet know that.
He wiped his hands on the front of his white uniform, the way one washes one’s hands of blame, and then fixed a peculiar stare on the straw hat the lady had set down on the chair beside her.
It was the kind of hat that, were it a man, would sit in the front row of the cinema and comment loudly on the film. By rights it should long since have been strung up on a coat peg, like a sinner.
“Mister Hat,” he began, unwittingly addressing the hat instead of the woman, as though it were the hat that made the decisions in the house and not the head beneath it, “you are, pardon me, like this mishmash.”
The lady blinked. You could almost hear the ka-ching of a till totting up the sum. She had not expected the confectioner to explain life to her by way of a beverage.
“The lemonade,” Ljuzim went on, stirring with a teaspoon in a glass that was no longer in front of him but in front of her, “that’s you. Sweet, cold, a little sharp. And the vanilla ice cream, that’s the children. The grandchildren. Or whatever. You mixed them into yourself. And now you’ve got this... this...”
“Mishmash,” the lady finished for him, and smiled for the first time that day. Only with one corner of her mouth, admittedly.
“Mishmash,” Ljuzim confirmed, as though something deeply philosophical had just been said. “It doesn’t look pretty. I’ve noticed. People raise their eyebrows. But it’s delicious, madam. And full of sugar. And above all, unusual. And you thought it up. You decided to put lemonade and ice cream together. Nobody told you to. You simply knew what you needed.”
The lady looked at her glass.
The mishmash was slowly melting, forming patches on its surface that looked like the continents on a globe, only much sweeter and without political problems.
“I am,” she said quietly.
Ljuzim wasn’t sure whether that meant “I thought it up,” “I am the mishmash,” or perhaps “I am tired,” so he decided not to ask.
“My children don’t come,” she went on, by now speaking to the glass, or to the hat, or to herself. “I have a daughter. She has children. I have grandchildren. But I see them more often than she does. I take them to school. I buy them trainers. I know which cartoon is their favourite. And she...”
She stopped.
Ljuzim waited. Waiting was his natural state, like breathing or stirring mishmashes.
“She is,” said the lady, “busy. With work. With herself. With someone who goes by a dog’s name, Leo, and before that was called Dobrivoje or Borivoje, and before that... I don’t remember any more. Not even God would have thought up such names. And there’s always someone. Always something. And I’m here. With a mishmash.”
Ljuzim nodded.
Nodding was his universal reply, applicable to everything from bus timetables to existential crises.
“You know, madam, you’re like this bus stop. People come, people go, and you are always here. Somebody has to be the station.”
Ljuzim fell silent.
He was not particularly pleased with the comparison, but it was too late to take it back.
Like in a game of chess. Touch it, move it, no taking it back.
A counsellor’s life is a merciless one.
The lady was silent for a long time.
In the background, the fridge hummed as though trying to remember a tune it had heard somewhere and so kept repeating it endlessly. The metal chairs squeaked. The sound cut sharply through the stale air.
“You are a strange man,” she said at last.
“Ljuzim,” he corrected her, without a trace of pride in his voice, as if stating the temperature of the room.
“Ljuzim,” she repeated.
The name sounded different in her mouth, as if she were translating it into some wordless tongue that people speak sometimes, in their sleep.
“Ljuzim. That’s a name that sounds as though something is missing. As if it ought to be Ljubomir, or Luzitan, or...”
“Or nothing,” he finished. “Just Ljuzim.”
“Just Ljuzim,” she repeated.
Now she smiled with her whole mouth, a smile that did not befit her years, from the time before the children grew up and became strangers who only visit when they have money troubles.
She lifted the glass and took a sip of the mishmash.
It was sweeter than she had expected, a little bitterer, and utterly unusual. Hers.
“Will you have another?” asked Ljuzim.
“I will,” she said.
She paused.
“Make it as sweet as you can. Let there be more of me in it.”
Ljuzim nodded and began to stir.
The lady put her hat back on. It sat proudly and unchanged, as though it were the hat that had solved someone’s problem, and not the woman beneath it.
At that moment a bus snorted in the distance, but neither of them looked.
Some buses arrive on time. Some are late. Some don’t come at all.