The Royals

Still surprising to have these large bovine heads and heavy jowls, these figures in their songkoks from the newsreels, the old papers and postage stamps, showing such bright smiles and lifting the hand for greeting. No memory at all of the old chap by the pillar here this morning where the old dapper nose-picking uncle sits weekends. (After she spotted his habit at encounters Beechoo always attempted to avoid this man’s handshakes.) Forbidding old Yugoslavs in childhood were the same, their frightful, daunting horse heads breaking unexpectedly radiant after sly witticisms and mystifying—nay, highly alarming—playfulness. In his house around the corner in the Avenue Chika Dakic with his German wife from his time in the camps and four or five children suggesting your willy needed trimming, he would get the scissors, just a tick. Chika Zero in Kernot Street, the Dalmatian Catholic royalist from the time of the first Yugoslavia, kept colourful caged canaries and parrots in the garage that he favoured you with display. A former lad it would later emerge, trapped in the union with Teta Andrica after she gave birth to son Jovan; close friend of father Lazar. There had never been any sign of affection between father and son, yet for his former friend’s orphan boy always a ray of sunshine from Chika Z. (Years later Zero Mostel demonstrated there was no liability whatever with such a moniker.) This old kampung paterfamilias fitted within the same continuum, no doubt a firm supporter himself of the Sultan in his parts.