Maja Hrgović – Zlatka | Damian Kelleher

Thursday, September 15, 2011 — Damian Kelleher

Maja Hrgović – Zlatka

The narrator of Maja Hrgović's Zlatka is alone and lonely and her heart, which we sense immediately that it beats strongly and feels deeply, has filled to overflowing and is about to burst. Life has filled her up, her life, though it isn't the most pleasant, but, at least, she's living. She is one of those people, usually very young, about whom one notices an unexpected ebullience, as though they are constantly warmed by an inner fire which causes their skin to vibrate, just a little, and just enough to notice.

For all that she seems a bundle of kinetic energy about to burst, her life is slow and grey and, as the story opens, not lovely. She lives in a place where “like tombstones over grave mounds, hardened chimneys rose from parallel rows of elongated one-story buildings”. Much of Zlatka reads like this – exuberant metaphors, rich imagery, slightly too-extended similes. The story seems, particularly in its opening pages, to be almost too-ripe, like a piece of fruit that carries about it a whiff of the rottenness which will soon overtake it if it isn't consumed immediately. The personality of the narrator leaches into the text, drenching the narrative with paroxysms of enthusiastic description over what is, on the whole, a fairly drab existence.

...I feared the loneliness that would almost certainly have skinned me to my shuddering, sad core had I stayed home that evening, alone with myself, with all my sober thoughts...

This kind of language doesn't always work, such as when the narrator goes to a dance hall where the DJ “made the front row scream like they were getting bikini waxes”. We understand what she means, but the simile just doesn't work – it feels forced and over the top. But overall the effect is effective and works in the story's favour, serving to increase our understanding of the narrator's personality (lonely, heart-felt, willing to be beautiful if someone will let her) while reinforcing the primary themes of the text. To wit:

Although I lived alone, I could feel the presence of others: every word of the neighbours' arguments reached me through the porous walls, and in the evening when they made up and fucked, I could tell who came first by their muffled or piercing screams.

That is to say – frustrated sexual desire. The narrator is clearly suffering from a lack of release and she finds it, perhaps, when she goes out at night and spies her new hairdress, Zlatka, dancing. They say hello, laugh, share a drink, and then:

The people around us were just a moving background, extras in a movie starring Zlatka and me. I got carried away. At moments I felt a sort of joy, thick and saturated, clotting in me, somewhere in my lungs, in my esophagus – I had to open my mouth wide and yell into the noise, anything, just to let it, this something, come out.

The release begins. It's important to note here that at this stage of the story, we don't yet know for certain that the narrator is a woman. There are strong hints to suggest she is – and the author is a woman – but that doesn't always make it so. The word choice and sentence structure suggests femininity (which is interesting in itself), but so too, of course, when the narrator goes to visit a hair dresser (as opposed to a barber), or when she notes that someone compliments her on her “hairdo” (as opposed to the more masculine “haircut”). At any rate, it soon becomes clear from the story that both Zlatka and the narrator are women, and that they are rapidly falling into lust – perhaps even love.

She offered me her toothbrush. I showered with her shower gel, I put her lotion on my body, and used her makeup remover and cotton pads to take off my makeup. When I was done, she tossed me a pink Mickey Mouse T-shirt. We opened the couch, puts on the sheets, and turned off the light.

The next paragraph shows the two women kissing, caressing and making loving. Hrgović's writing here is a culmination of the sensual pleasure of the proceeding ten or so pages – the long build-up of exquisite writing pays off in a scene which is erotic without being brutally sexual. And yet, for all that, after consummation the story takes a darker turn. Gone is the exuberance of previous pages (the narrator has had her release, after all) and, as is often the case, the clear light of day reveals that, although we don't always make mistakes the night before, sometimes we do things we aren't necessarily keen on repeating. For Zlatka and the narrator it is a problem of where to take the relationship now – if it even is a relationship. Zlatka seems uninterested in anything long-term, but the narrator does and thus: tension.

The story ends exuberantly and, for the reader, a bit sadly. There's a strong suggestion that, although Zlatka might easily move on, the narrator probably won't. And then she'll go back to being lonely and wanting to love someone. Though at times the writing slips into the off-putting (the bikini wax simile), by and large the exuberance is used as an effective character building device. Maja Hrgović has created a very appealing character in the person of her narrator and Zlatka, correctly, remains an enigma. Zlatka is a strong story that firmly stakes out its thematic geography and explores it with great sensitivity and art.

Zlatka by Maja Hrgović is a short story from the Dalkey Archive Press' anthology, Best European Fiction 2012

Author	Maja Hrgović
Title	Zlatka
Translator	Tomislav Kumanović
Nationality	Croatian
Publisher	Dalkey Archive Press
Availability: ---Amazon (US) ---Amazon (UK) ---Fishpond (AU)

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