September 30 (Day Eighteen)
This morning I welcome the bells of Ljubljana, even though they wake me. Something I have forgotten to mention in any previous journal entries is that all of these European cities (starting with Ravenna) have bells, big reveille ones starting at 7:00 AM (remember the symphony of Siena) followed by periodic, more discreet rings throughout the day—a few clock-towers sounding every fifteen minutes, others on the hour. I suppose that, if you ordinarily sleep past seven and live here, you get used to this ruckus and after a while it recedes into the background (as it has in this journal). Today, however, I not only hear the chimes distinctly, I recognize their unrestrained tintinnabulation, a meaning their clanging confers on the aborning day.
Bells shatter one silence while creating another, deeper one. They transform the sacred time of dreaming into a sacred awakening. Days initiated and marked by bells can never be as jagged and randomly secular as days that lack this ceremonial ringing. The sound of the bells clears the mind and sets its attention deeper. After all, a different kind of bell—a tinier chime—begins and ends Zen meditations. A marker is needed to enclose time, to tie its passage to something more harmonic and contemplative than a clock.
Cities that have lost their bells or have relegated them to the general din have forfeited a piece of their own history and internal space. Overriding sacred space, they dispatch their modern pedestrians and traffic onto an enervating platform of achievement and acquisition, repertoires of shapeless acts beyond boundary or resolution. Losing bells is like losing the night sky, in each case to technological pollution.
After getting a code for my free fifteen minutes online, then reading emails and Yahoo sports, I join Lindy in the cafeteria. She is sitting with two sisters from Austria, one of whom, Karin Homberg, happens to be a retired homeopath and speaks sufficient English for a lively conversation. The other (a nurse) has only enough vocabulary to smile occasionally. Our age or a little older, they are on a “roots” journey, tracing the course of their father, mother, and grandparents to their family home in southern Austria, a journey that encompassed addresses in both Ljubljana and Trieste (where they are headed next). We hear about their discoveries in Slovenia, these stories punctuated by trips back to the buffet line.
When we planned our own itinerary back in Maine with Roger and Eda, Trieste and Ljubljana—in Italy and Slovenia, respectively—were two entirely separate cities that happened to occupy proximate space. Trieste was an Italian place merely on the way to Ljubljana. Now a more integrated reality has declared itself. Trieste, Vienna, and Ljubljana are part of one ancient country. Where they come together, Italy, Austria, and Slovenia share a Central European geography and culture that has always transcended national borders.
The Italy-Slovenia-Austria overlap reflects barbarian migrations that established the original European duchies and ethnic zones, was incorporated as a province within the Roman Empire, formed a flank of the eastward cusp of Turkish conquest, fell inside Austria-Hungary and the Hapsburg Empire, and was part of a greater pre-World-War Italy. Even within (and across) the Soviet bloc, these countries and cultures came together in a larger regional entity that included Croatia and Hungary. During the years of the Cold War, Eda, for instance, traveled across Tito’s lax borders to the Italian Alps and nearby Austria throughout her childhood. Slovenia and Croatia stood then in relation to Yugoslavia roughly as Georgia and the Ukraine stood in relation to the Soviet Union.
The imagined hard line between Italy and Slovenia is merely a gradation that not only virtually flows across the present 2006 border but historically found permeable barriers between what are now distinct countries. We will learn later that Slovenia’s twentieth-century masterpiece novel, Alamut, Vladimir Bartol’s account of Ismaili assassins during the eleventh century, was written in Trieste in the months leading up to World War II. Its author died virtually unknown in Ljubljana years later. (The irony of this novel is that Bartol meant his tale of the first suicide bombers and Islamo-fascists set in northern Iran to serve as a metaphor for Italian fascism, so he dedicated his book satirically to Benito Mussolini. But in the sixty-plus years since its publication, the metaphor become more powerful and consequential than the events for which it stood. World War II is long over, in Ljubljana as in Trieste, but the Christian West’s confrontation with jihad, dormant during the Cold War, dominates global politics today. Alamut is suddenly prescient, a post-modern deconstruction of early Muslim terrorism.)
So Trieste doesn’t just happen to be an Italian city that is near Slovenia. It has been and is part of Slovenia, at times politically, always aesthetically and ethnically. While a significant portion of Yugoslavia has at one time or another been contained within greater Italy, the relative paucity of Italians in modern Slovenia is the result of their expulsion after World War II when Mussolini forfeited land and the Slovenes kicked out the kin of the fascists. Only yesterday….
The ancestors of these two sisters with whom we eat breakfast in Hotel Park treated this geography (Slovenia, Italy, Austria) as one homeland, so they seek their origins across borders. We share our perceptions about Trieste, their destination tomorrow, with them, reporting on restaurants, stray cats on the hillside, the scenic view from Colle di San Giusto, and the Milano as opposed to the James Joyce.
This Italian-Slovenian theme continues unexpectedly in the car with Miha (no Irena today—she has gone unexpectedly to Maribor, the second largest Slovenian city near the Hungarian border, to tend to her mother). Meanwhile he has brought us one of his other novels in English translation, The King of the Rattling Spirits, a fictionalized account of his childhood and family. The back cover calls it a “coming-of-age memoir in 1970s Yugoslavia where rock ‘n’ roll—regardless of what mothers or dictators believed—was king.” At its beginning, he explains, a young Slovenian girl, a fictionalized version of his grandmother, is smitten by a fictionalized version of his grandfather, an Italian architect who came to Slovenia to build a church tower. Miha’s surname is Italian—Via Mazzini was one of the streets in Trieste that we kept crossing along Via Roma between Hotel Milano and the central piazza.
During his synopsis we are whizzing along E61 through moderate-to-heavy weekend traffic at a speed I find disconcerting, a steady 140 to145 kilometers per hour, occasionally creasing 160—but Miha has been doing this his whole adult life, so we have to trust the video game in which we find ourselves hurtling along. It is one of the hazards of travel that you occasionally forfeit control in order to be part of the event rather than a pampered tourist. Miha is now telling us that he used to live in Radovljica, the town prior to Bled, our destination today, and he commuted regularly from there to Ljubljana. He has done this trip too many times to count. Our present journey is really killing two birds with one stone: the reason Miha is able to give up Saturday for us is that he is picking up his thirteen-year-old daughter Lana who still lives in Radovljica and is coming back with us later to Ljubljana to spend a few days with her father.
The drive is actually pretty exhilarating because we do not have to worry about directions. We are with a pro, and he is pointing out sites, providing interesting color as we zip along. I had mentioned to him on our parting two days earlier that I had CDs of Country & Western with me, and he urged me to bring them along, so Dave Insley provides a curious juxtaposition to the Tyrolian landscape.
Pointing to a church on a mountain, Miha remarks on its evident fortification. “Whenever the Turks were coming,” he explains, “people ran to the church and hid inside those walls like a snail crawling into its shell. Most often the Turks wouldn’t bother them. They were interested in the big stuff—Vienna. It was too much trouble to attack every little town along the way.”
At our speed we reach Bled in under an hour and immediately take a shortcut Miha knows, skirting much of the town to the parking lot for the Bled Castle (Bledjski Grad). This is a—perhaps the—signal Slovenian landmark, a “central casting” Mediaeval castle with huge ramparts and a moat, perched on a hill overlooking a lake (also called Bled) with a small island, purported to be the only true island in the country. As we walk up the path to the castle’s entrance, our host fills us in on its history: Protected by a ring of mountains, this spot has been a habitation site since Neolithic times. The Slavs probably arrived during the sixth or seventh centuries, constructing their villages around Lake Bled. The town was formally founded in 1004 around the time the castle was being built. Bled later became part of the Hapsburg Empire and then, in the mid-nineteenth century, it was reborn as a spa and tourist destination, famous for its mountain air, hot springs, and mild lake. It is now the most popular resort in Slovenia, a mecca for Germans, Italians, Austrians, and Hungarians as well as Slavs, a tourist cash cow, mobbed in season.
Miha proposes a scenario: he will wait outside and read while we tour the castle, as he has seen it “maybe 100 times.” Then he will meet us and we will walk around the lake—or at least around as much of it as we have energy for. Entry to the castle is about $15 per person in American currency, and he thinks there is no reason to waste money on him.
Lindy will have nothing of that. Still smarting from the dinner debacle after the reading, she wants him to come as our guest and, also, she says, “it will be much more interesting if you can tell us things. We can benefit from your long-time experience.”
Initially reluctant, Miha finally gets into the spirit of the event. After entry for all of us eats up most of two 20-euro bills, we find ourselves in a museum of the Middle Ages with other exhibits showing the history of Lake Bled from the Iron and Bronze ages to its nineteenth-century conversion into a resort. There is mostly stock stuff, vintage fare: armor, swords, halberds, later firearms, barrels, jewelry from old burial pits at Pristava by the lake, paintings and carvings, baroque artifacts, an original Gothic-style chapel room. It turns out that, although the castle was first built in the eleventh century, the current structure is predominantly sixteenth-century architecture, the seat of the Bishops of Brixen who received it formally from German Emperor Henry II in 1004.
Far and away the highpoint of the half-hour visit is the terrace to which Miha leads us. On a clear day, he says, you can see higher peaks, Stol and Triglav, to the North. As it is, even in the light haze, we see three tiers of mountains, ranging from dark green nearest us to pale blue on the horizon. These are artistically arranged, as if by feng shui, their descending profiles coming from alternating directions and meeting at the crest of the lake.
Lake Bled is as utterly smooth a body of water as gravity could pat. From way above on the hillside hanging over the steep edge of the castle’s cliff, it looks like bluish silk, the only fold in it cut by a small tourist gondola taking a group toward the island that sits in its center. Bled Island (Blejski Otok) has a classic church sitting just off-center to the left. This building dates from the ninth century, Miha says, though there is archaeological evidence of pre-Christian ceremonies at the site.
From faraway everything forms an aesthetically perfect mirror double in the lake, the church amid the dense foliage of its tear-drop island. Over the spiked iron railing of our perch the drop is pretty close to ninety degrees, making an assault on this site a challenge—but then that was the point, wasn’t it? It is interesting to lean a bit and look straight dizzyingly down and then gaze at the calm mandala of the lake itself, a relatively small body (2 kilometers by 1380 meters, a sign tells us) which earns its grandeur not from its size but its picturesque locale and appearance.
Miha proposes that we go straight downhill and get ourselves on the trail around the lake. This meandering footpath’s total circumference is 6-7 kilometers and we can either do the entire walk, back to the castle, or we can hike partway, as far as we want, and then turn around. With the question left open, we are accelerated down the steep winding path through the forest, a course reminiscent of our hikes in Maine on Mount Desert Island where we are continually trekking up and down small mountains. This path is quite well constructed, with railings and wooden walkways in spots, pleasantly surrounded, in fact overhung, with very old chestnut, willow, and linden trees. When we reach the hillside’s bottom we emerge onto the clearly marked route around the lake.
The walk along the lakeshore is generic, with its main distinctive feature being shifting views of Blejski Grad and Blejski Otok, dramatic features with dynamic reflections. As we amble along, the conversation runs a wide gamut. Miha bitches for a while about the new protocol of running screenplays through computer programs before human beings get them in order to check them first for commercial elements. If the computer doesn’t accept a story, then no one in authority will ever read it.
We supply parallel horror tales from our publishing world, for instance the secondary auction of used copies on Amazon providing a “value” for an author’s books and then being used rather than an actual submitted manuscript by large commercial publishers considering whether or not to consider a book. Miha then tells us about a Slovenian T.V. show dedicated to literature that interviews three to four novelists weekly. As there are roughly forty to fifty novels published each year in Slovenia, one might assume, he states, that, a man with nine novels to his credit would have been on the show at least once during the last decade, but he hasn’t ever been on. “I am not a Slovene,” he says. “Not to them.”
On the more upbeat side Lindy and I are excited to imagine how we might reissue some of his novels in America. He then explains his history with Scala, the small publisher in Seattle that unexpectedly took on his writing when his agent could find no one in New York. “They all liked Hanna and my first book, The Cartier Project, which after all sold more than 50,000 copies in a country of two million, but they didn’t see any market for a Slovenian guy there. Luckily Mark White did, though I’m afraid his optimism was not proven in sales.” Not only did Mark publish all three of these novels (Rattling Spirits as well), but he brought Miha to the States for a book tour. Reminiscing about this, he describes his time in Seattle and minor adventures along the Northwest Coast and in San Francisco. He is very anxious to have another shot at America so, upon my suggestion that he try again with ua, encourages us to talk to Mark to see if we can work something out together.
The path winds in toward and away from the shoreline, through foliage and landscaped parks. There are various boat slips, wooden walkways, points of land to detour onto, rocky streams gurgling into the lake from the surrounding hills, stone and wooden bridges, and constricted passages formed by rocky slopes on the non-lake side. I remark at one point how everyone that we pass looks normal even though we have never seen any of these people. “We recognize them as regular people because they fall within a genome range of permissible variation. There are no Dogsbodies. If there were, we’d recognize them at once.”
It then becomes a game to look at people and imagine what makes them normal, what it would take to fall outside the margin, and also what makes them not American. In fact, except for the occasional beret and ethnic clothing, most of them could be circling a lake in any American urban park—and even those could too, just not in the high percentage that they are here. Everything about this hike is ordinary.
We are getting tired and a little punchdrunk. Much of the discussion becomes haphazard and low-energy, sort of an adult version of teenage bullshit. At about the one-quarter point, a wooden dock extends into the water, and we walk out onto it to visit the two swans at close proximity. I regret not having brought along the stale rye bread I have been carrying from the street fair in Trieste, but Miha reminds us of cake he has brought in his shoulder pack, a kind of imitation chocolate confection developed from a folk recipe during World War II when the real stuff was scarce. It has a slightly bitter carob-like taste, and there is far too much of it to consume without a digestive consequence. In handing a chunk of it to a swan, Lindy has her hand almost bitten by the bird’s aggressive snap. “It looks pretty,” I say, “but it is actually a feathered pair of serrated blades attached to a hunger neuron.”
This is quite a hefty walk, especially once we commit to the whole circumference, which happens at about the point at which Miha points to the castle approaching a position directly across from us, saying it would not be much less now to continuing around than to retrace our steps. Tired as we are, neither of us wants to revisit the same things.
The most interesting scenery at this point is the large number of visible fish, some very large, carplike and troutlike, hanging offshore, plus very dense clusters of little dark fish, much like clouds of mosquitoes in the water.
We pass the hamlet of Mlino and wind away from the lake through the outer grounds of the luxurious Hotel Vila Bled. This was where the one-time dictator of Slovenia liked to vacation. Here a Tyrolian alpine look is evident, though merging into other Tito-era buildings and typical Soviet-style housing built so that everyone could afford them, even in a resort area.
Up ahead we see into two strange guys, closer to the Dogsbody / Homo sapiens margin, settled along a stone bridge amid the trees. As we approach them, Miha whispers that he knows one of them; he was a neighbor in Radovljica and still lives there. He is a kind of itinerant artist-beggar, MM confides more softly. Once we get closer, we see he is selling penciled landscapes that are stacked along the stone. A thin old wiry guy, he is wearing a pullover cap and crouched elastically into a small crevice in the rock. His partner is bulky and snowman-like, bent over, walking with a crutch; he looks like Gump Worsley, the old Ranger goalie, ten years after facing too many pucks and Molsons.
Our arrival triggers a burst of conversation in Slovenian that runs from wildly enthusiastic (at first) on the artist’s part to conciliatory and restrained at the end. When we are far enough away, Miha comments that he knew this guy would try to sell him some paintings, so he postponed that outcome as long as he could. “We ended graciously. He complimented me on my recent article in the newspaper.”
After that encounter we pass some concessions with very old rowboats and swanboats, e.g. rowboats with swan prows. These craft look as though they have been in continuous use since the 1950s and will continue to be launched with tourists until water seeps through their pores. hen again this is a calm lake. Miha comments that his daughter jumped in at age six and, to the astonishment of her parents, swam to Blejski Otok.
This leads to a discussion about the risk of cramps while swimming and what one would do, followed by an even lazier conversation about whether the abundant black berries on bushes by the lake would be poisonous. They are clearly not edible but, when Miha is extra passionate about my not trying one, something I would never do, Lindy worries that I will take him up on his dare, so she hovers whenever I want to examine them or crush one and smell it. She remembers my encounters with huckleberries and wild cranberries in Maine and is concerned. No chance I will taste a wild Slovenian berry.
Realizing we are poor candidates for climbing the castle hill, Miha proposes we stay in the parking lot of the Gothic church partway up while he retrieves the car. Despite the tourist crowds milling there, I lie down on the stone outside the building and fall asleep (ten minutes) until he pulls up and honks.
On the way to Radovljica I notice that Miha keeps turning down the volume a little more every few minutes, a pattern that actually began as we approached Bled, so I try to unobtrusively remove the Slaid Cleaves CD that is playing. “I prefer women singers,” Miha explains, “Emmylou Harris, Loretta Lynn. These are too male, too folk or too rock, too cowboy.”
He had planned our lunch at an interesting fish place nearby, but now we are out of time and Lana is waiting, so we end up instead in Radovljica in a shopping center, a place he likes for its highly garlicked pizzas. Grajska gostilnica doesn’t mean “Denny’s,” and it is certainly not a chain, but the feeling is similar. The restaurant is also a den of smokers, and there is no escape possible. The masks I bought along in case of an environment like this are not in my backpack on this mini-trip and, even if they were, the social stigma of putting them on would outweigh the hazard of the smoke. By the end of the meal, I have a splitting headache.
At Miha’s suggestion, I order the same local fish that he was going to recommend at the other restaurant. It is okay steamed—not much you can do to ruin it. During the meal Miha gives us a lesson in what he calls “Slovenian software,” a continuation of his critique of the national art scene and Slovene character. “It’s programmed into the genes. A Slovene does not want to stick his head up. There is always some marauder on the horizon. The Germans are coming! The Russians are coming! The Italians are coming! The Turks are coming! The Serbs are coming! All of this is unconscious, of course, but it is the national mentality. Hide behind the church walls. It translates into culture. You cannot be successful or aspire to make anything that draws attention to itself. You have to be a sheep and follow the herd. That is why I am not considered a Slovenian novelist. I break with the software. I write in slang. So I must be an American. I’m too popular. I sell too many books. Of course, I am an American artistically because I began watching American films and listening to American music from the age of six. That was my escape from my family and from Slovenian conformity.”
He rather precisely, if circumstantially, corroborates this account by telling a story about an Italian journalist who had heard about his work, read one of his books, and was in Slovenia to interview novelists. Someone at the Writers’ Guild discouraged her from contacting him by saying, “‘You don’t want to talk to Mazzini. He’s not really a Slovenian novelist.’ It’s going to take a generation,” he adds, “for Slovenian thought to catch up to Western Europe and America.”
Lindy grabs the check like an owl pouncing on a marmot.
We stop at the housing development where Miha and her mother live, a duplex where Miha himself used to dwell years ago, before he escaped to the upper floors of Hotel Park and then his present Ljubljana life. He points at once to the adjacent building. “That’s where that artist we saw lives. You wonder how he can afford it—well, that was Slovenia under Tito, all subsidized housing. The question is: how does he afford it now? Hard to figure it’s by selling sketches along Bled.”
A chubby young Englishman is painting the outside of the downstairs, and I stay in his society to get some fresh air and work on my headache while Miha and Lindy go inside to fetch Lana. Back in the car Miha explains that wealthy British people are somewhat randomly buying up inexpensive properties in Slovenia, in fact throughout Eastern Europe, wherever they can. “Cheap Ryan Air flights,” he adds. “They figure they can come for the weekend any time they want. This fellow, though, has taken to living more and more in Radovljica, and his friends have also bought houses in the area. It’s just more of the suburbs of Cambridge to them.”
Lana is a bubbly, solidly-built teenager with much to say, almost all of it in Slovenian and to her dad. Eventually he encourages her to speak English. In fact, he had told Lindy and me that this trip back to Ljubljana should be a good practice session for her on English (though of course she also has her neighbor). Her main Anglo excursion is a story right out of Miha’s songbook. It seems she has won the best-actress award for a play with her school drama group when they went to the state finals, but she has been asked to withdraw from the competition because she is too advanced and offering unfair competition to the other girls.
“Enough for a drama teacher to say, you had your turn, now step aside for somebody else to shine. See,” Miha shouts, “there’s your Slovenian software, hate and fear towards achievers. Every success must be degraded into ‘everybody else can do it.’ Talent or hard work doesn’t exist. It’s just God giving presents blindly.”
Lana also just got in some sort of trouble on yesterday’s class outing and had to be held in detention with a boy she was fighting with. Sitting in the back with Lindy, she tends to start her sentences about these matters with a few perfectly pronounced English words and flawless syntax and then, in a paroxysm of bashfulness, bursts out a spate of Slovenian sentences for Miha to finish.
With them speaking in tandem, I realize a habit of English speech both have. It probably comes from Miha. They use the word “okay” for a number of meanings. It means “okay, yes” but, more than that, it is a kind of particle, a strategic bi-syllable either without a definitive meaning or a range of meanings in relation to something being said or about to be said. For instance, “Okay!” is inserted suddenly, to slow things down, to ward off possible interruption by a listener, to pause and take stock, to get a second wind in English and remind a listener that, hey, English is a second language here, perhaps also to be hip while struggling. In this latter sense, “okay” is cooler and more American than another “duh” or stumble-pause. It means, more or less, “we are going to be in a holding pattern for a moment.” Conversely, it is inserted to indicate that something just said is either interesting or obvious as, after reporting on her detention, Lana declared, “Okay!” She is in fact a symphony of all different tones and accentuations of “okay” and, as she punctuates her speech with them the way many people in America use “you know,” I realize that Miha mainly inserts his own assertive ones to hold the floor when a topic is subtle or difficult and his mind is still laboring for the appropriate English.
A long nap gets rid of most of my headache, and then Lindy and I set out on the early side for dinner. The lobby of the Park is packed with a tour group of young people from England, queues of them checking in, overwhelming the single clerk and making request of a code for fifteen minutes online impossible. (It is interesting that for all the Anglophones we run into into Slovenia, almost none are Americans; there are lots of British and almost as many Australians. In fact, there are more South Africans and New Zealanders than Americans at the Park.)
Taking a different route into town, we cross the Ljubljanica at Zmajski Most, the closer, dragon-headed span referred to the other day as the “mother-in-law” bridge by our tour guide on the premise that mothers-in-law are dragon-headed. In the light of streetlamps, we see one of the bridge’s four open-mouthed, spitting dragons, leathery stone wings partially unwrapped for flight like those of a bat, its tail wrapped around on the pedestal on which it is poised to leap. Ms. Guide had also informed us that this was a 1901 construction in honor of Fran Josef, emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire within which Slovenia fit at the time. Zmajski is far more impressive and sentient at this deserted hour in artificial light than in the daylight in a tour group. There is a dragon aura about it.
We are looking for a Chinese restaurant called Shanghai, listed in Lonely Planet at Poljanska 14, which means crossing the river here and then going the opposite way from town center. Not only are the streets black and empty enough to be foreboding in an American city, but the restaurant itself is down an alley into a courtyard. Though our own built-in software is on high alert, we are never actually concerned.
It is a little surprising to be the only patrons in a large dining room (two young women come in a little later and sit on the opposite side, against the aquarium glow). The menu, as promised in the guidebook, is a photo album of the dishes, which makes the fact that neither of the two Chinese waitresses speak English less of a problem—though I don’t know whether I convinced them and the summoned chef to use—or not to use—MSG, or whether they ever heard of it or even grokked the general domain of my hand gestures and wasted words (except for the acronym, maybe). In any case I don’t notice an MSG burn either now or in the middle of the night (when it usually comes as a craving for water).
After dinner we continue down the far side of the Ljubljanica and cross the Triple Bridge into town. Preseren’s trg. is filled with activity, lit by bright street lanterns and a huge chandelier suspended by wires from adjoining buildings over the approximate spot from which the tram leaves for castle in the daytime. This anomalous “streetlamp” was always there, but I am noticing it for the first time. The square is actually incredibly bright with all its various lighting. It is also surrounded by taxis and a few police cars at leisure. Punk-style youth with mohawks are encamped on Preseren’s statue, smoking and drinking beer. Other people among them are scooping gelatos from cups. Street cleaners are out in force, a massive brush-spinning tractor entering the square and continuing toward the Grand Union Hotel, other crew working their brushes and setting hoses onto a real dousing of the day’s debris.
How different a real place is than any dream or imagination of a foreign country. Walking its streets at night, we get to see all the density and detail. Everywhere we look, there is more, there is some detail to relish—graffito, poster, face, cobblestone, courtyard, alley, façade, shop window human face, energy holding groups together and dispersing. We make quite a splash on the face of the Galaxy.
Saturday night carousers shatter my sleep at 4 a.m., as they take an incredibly long time to move through Tabor and out of earshot. I am sure they must be doubling back or circling, but gradually the sounds fade before vanishing. Their chorus is repetitive and always ends on the same two-syllabled strophe. The rest of it is unambiguously Slovenian, and maybe it is just my drowsy state that leads me to imagine them crescendoing each time into “Asshole!”