Here: Beograd

sintra, portugal

31 8 2010 Beograd. Int: Café


933-948

We see the glow of the ice-cream display case. We see the empty glass that reads, “voda vrnjci.” the table is black, and there is a small piece of cloth, like a decorative placemat, green with raised white threads, and loose fringes on the ends- a rectangle of fabric that is on the table beneath a piece of glass. The glass has a sort of rubber piece beneath each corner, and this prevents the glass from slipping off of the table. There is a knarled plant in a corner, and it is not neat enough to be fake, I guess. The roots, or branches sort of arch out of it and the leaves are askew and it is a sort of ball perching precarious on a black, possibly wicker vase- like a big vase- I don’t know the term for it, but it is about two feet off of the floor, and is semi-conical. And there is a ‘jelen pivo’ dispenser in front of me, and the base of this is a pretty tomato-red, and on top of the red is a silver, steel piece, like, capped over the red box, and the jelen pivo tap rises out of this in a white ceramic cylinder. And the tap itself is a piece of brass, wrapped around the white ceramic, and has two black handled levers, and a little oval shaped sign on top of all of this, that says, ‘pils.’



A plastic sack of ice-cream cones is next to this beer machine. The sack is open, and air is able to touch the ice-cream cones if it wants to; the air mingles as it pleases. And there is a television on the far wall and it plays the fashion network, and so there is an endless stream of dresses strutting across a catwalk.



In the room, on the left side, in the corner, I see a group. Two or more members of the party are in the shadows, and I see two more on stools with their backs to me, and one is in a tan sort of blazer, the true color is obscured by the dim lights, and the man next to him is in what seems to me, a hunter green sweater. The man in the tan blazer is animated and moves his left arm in pointing gestures. I hear claps and noises as if someone is amiably slapping at the table.



The girl who works here is in black, and she sits behind the bar and touches her fingers to her mouth. Her hair is curly and is back and in a pony tail. In the light, it appears that the pony tail glows amber and that the hair on her forehead and temples is black. Someone is next to her, and appears to me as a white elbow only. To the left of me the room is enclosed by windows, floor to ceiling, as they say, and the windows are encased in black frames, presumably metal, and there are three brick columns interspersed between the windows. The brick columns are painted white. The bricks are rough and protrude, and seem to me to be aiming for an old, reclaimed stone look. To my right, there are more of these white bricks, and they form a wall.



My peripheral vision catches the flash of passing car lights: white, red, white, red. A little red number glows red on the ice-cream case in front of me. I assume it is a temperature display. I cannot read the number.