A good friend of mine once told me two stories, one after another, and without any respite, while we had a wonderful meal in the Writers’ Club in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and I will therefore record them in the same order in which I heard them, together, although there is no significant connection between them. Put differently, the fact that the central object, in a manner of speaking, that either vanishes or materializes, miraculously, in the stories, and in that particular order, should not be construed in terms of some kind of deficit and surplus accounting, for instance, as this is by no means an essay in comparative scatology. This mysterious central object is therefore purely contingent and almost irrelevant in itself.

But enough of this prefatory chatter. Let me add only one more thing, though: my friend, a psychologist by training as well as by vocation, has lived most of his adult life in Ljubljana, that is, on the outskirts of the Austro-Hungarian empire, that still lingers in the foothills of the Alps like a mirage.

Now then, the event that serves as the foundation for the first story took place during the Second World War, somewhere in the woods high up in the mountains surrounding Ljubljana, and, more specifically, in a Partisan camp, peaceful and serene during a welcome lull in German military operations. One fine morning, a young fighter, seventeen or eighteen years old, from a small village in the Alps, strong, healthy, and simpleminded, went into the bush not too far from the camp with the intention of relieving himself. As he wandered through low shrubs underneath majestic oaks, in search of the right place, he aroused the attention of couple of other young fighters of the same age, same origin, and same predilections. They did not have to do much more than exchange a couple of knowing glances, and their plot was born. The age-old prank congealed in their minds in no time: they got up from the soft grass, scrambled through the camp to find a shovel, all the time watching our unsuspecting hero, who continued in his solemn and absentminded search, and, once they had found the equipment necessary for their plan, they followed him into the bush, where he was already crouching and concentrating, his pants pulled down below his knees; they approached him from behind, very carefully and quietly, as their guerrilla training allowed them to do, just in time to place the shovel under his buttocks, and, when he finally delivered and started looking for large and soft leaves, they equally carefully and quietly pulled his treasure from under him, retreated, ran through the woods as far as they could given the war out there, hid their loot behind a rock, covered it with dry leaves, and then returned to their places in the camp, stretching, yawning, and whistling, as though nothing had happened. According to my friend, who was there at the time, the bewildered victim spent hours in the bush trying to locate something or other, muttering, shaking his head in disbelief, cursing his fate, and looking very distressed indeed. In fact, it took him a couple of days to calm down sufficiently in order to tell one of his comrades, who himself participated in the ambush, about the mysterious event, about his certainty concerning all the other material evidence, impeccable as it was, about the laws of nature, etc., when, after his confession, expected to occur sooner or later by practically everybody in the camp, an uproar of laughter shook the mountains, echoed far and wide, and perhaps confused the German regiments stationed in the valley below. He soon laughed himself, somewhat belatedly, but he first raced after his comrades around the camp, and displayed all the signs of deep, desperate, and justified rage.

The second story is much more complex in nature, as it evolved under much more complex circumstances, in the relative affluence that Ljubljana enjoys today. My friend heard it from a friend of his, another psychologist, who is also its central character, and who had asked his colleague and my friend for advice and help regarding his own unexplainable and untoward behavior. Namely, at some point he got involved in a love affair with a considerably younger woman, who was married as well, and they thus had very few opportunities to get together and enjoy each other in peace. One evening he was invited to come to her house, somewhere in the suburbs of Ljubljana, as her husband was away on a business trip, if I remember correctly, and, as he, the psychologist, approached the house overwhelmed with expectations, he saw her, the woman he craved for, through the large and well-lit livingroom window, in the last stages of preparation for his arrival and a very special dinner. He presently crouched, for no reason, behind the bushes in the garden, just a few steps from the front door, and he watched her arrange the plates and napkins, repeatedly rearrange and then light the two red candles, check her hair and her brassiere occasionally, scrambling hither and thither all the while. From his privileged position behind the bush he saw everything and remained unobserved. After a couple of minutes at most, it flashed through his mind, first, that he might be discovered and exposed by the neighborhood dogs, and second, that he could not possibly enter into that house any more. And then, he approached the front door, stooping as low as he could, and, without any hesitation, without a single thought in his bald head, mechanically and with utmost urgency, he pulled down his pants and disburdened himself right in the middle of the door mat inscribed with a garish “welcome” in red letters, and finally, feeling free and accomplished, hurried into the dark and away from that monstrous place. He never returned there, although it occurred to him that he should go back and clean up the mess the same night, but he ultimately decided against it for fear of complications. He never even called the woman he had slighted in such a terrible manner, and, interestingly enough, she never called him or tried to get in touch with him either. After a couple of weeks of confusion and crisis, he called upon my friend and begged him to provide an interpretation of his unseemly behavior, because he felt that he had committed a crime against this woman, and maybe against nature, but in the end my friend shrugged his shoulders and they ended up laughing their heads off together. This we continued doing in the hushed atmosphere of the Writers’ Club, to the quiet but undisguised amazement of the waiters, as though nothing had happened, because I had no idea myself what to tell my friend when he presented me with this puzzle.

As a matter of fact, I had an idea, and a very good one at that, but it turned out to be unfounded. I asked whether the psychologist, his girlfriend, or her busy husband, were in any way related to the young Partisan fighter from the first story, but my friend looked at me incredulously at first, frowned, and then waved at me with his bulky hand in disbelief, bursting into another bout of uproarious laughter. No, that was not the answer.