True, we did not make love that September: we fornicated shamelessly like beasts and plants, like oceans and rivers, like stars and planets… But there was no place for love left between us, as our bodies, our innocent bodies, knew of neither boundaries nor obstacles that would call it forth. Even now, five years hence, the memory of our relentless fornication makes me almost proud of our failure.

Addendum I (January 16, 1988)

It was September 1978, in Ljubljana. Vesna was her name. She could drink many a man under the table (she was Slovene-Montenegrin). The best dancer I had ever seen, she had a complete control of her lean, muscular body. A simple girl, Vesna was endowed with a trick-pelvis, as the apt American expression goes. Her vagina was as dexterous as her hand: a true marvel of socio-biological evolution. Although we had never had an opportunity to try it, she could probably even write with it. Vesna lives in London now, where I pay her a visit whenever I go there on business. Still full of energy, she has dedicated herself entirely to photography. She has had several exhibitions thus far. Ever since my treacherous bout with Ejti Štih, it is my feeling of guilt that brings me back to Vesna, my old friend. She talks and talks, and I listen attentively to her ravings, transfixed like a little boy.

Addendum II (March 18, 1994)

I met Vesna in one of Ljubljana’s fashionable cafés the same day Elise, my first wife, and our son, Marko, who was three at the time, left for Dallas, Texas, where they were going to spend a month with Elise’s mother. Elise and I got back together just a few months earlier. Elise was to return to Ljubljana a few days after Vesna’s departure for London, and Vesna’s husband stayed at home—in short, we had few concerns of any kind. It must have been a special pleasure ravishing Vesna for an entire month on the very same bed where Elise fucked her boyfriend because of whom we had split up.

But Vesna was an immense pleasure in her own right. In our favorite position, I would kneel and sit on my heels while she would straddle me, thus giving us full control of our hands and our pelvises. In this position, my penis would penetrate very deep into her, giving me strong erections, and giving her strong orgasms. Every single day we would spend three or four hours in bed, and she would have at least twenty orgasms in this period. During brief pauses we would drink a wonderful white wine from Mostar called “Žilavka,” we would eat olives and fine cheeses, and we would listen to music. Whenever we would go out to the Writers’ Club for dinner or out to a party, Vesna would not be able to look into my eyes for long without coming.

Our September was a period of unadulterated sexual bliss of the kind one finds only in trashy books and movies. For many years I was able to feel Vesna’s pubic bone on my own whenever I would make an attempt to recall our times together. That physical memory is now gone, though. Indeed, all that remains is very much like a trashy book or a movie.

Addendum III (March 27, 1994)

It just crossed my mind to call Vesna. For some reason, I expected to find her in London. I looked into my address file and found her phone number. Perhaps I would get some information about her whereabouts even if she had moved, I thought. The phone rang a few times, and then she picked up the receiver. And presto, we were talking to one another! She sounded good. She laughed with ease. She told me that her photography was going well, that she had recently had another exhibition of her work, and that she would soon start an undergraduate program in art someplace in London. She was delighted to hear me. I told her that I was living close to Portobello Road, where Vesna first took me in the early 1980s. She said she remembered that occasion. She could not see me tonight—she said she had a horrible hangover from last night—but we will meet tomorrow afternoon. She will come to the Bayswater Station on Queensway at half-past-four. I gave her my phone number. We said goodbye a few times over, unable to figure out when to stop in anticipation of our meeting tomorrow. And it will be wonderful talking to an old friend after so many years apart.

Addendum IV (March 28, 1994)

Immediately after I called Vesna I decided to give her a copy of my Residua. A few hours later I decided against it. First, she would not appreciate this particular piece and its first addendum, the only one which appears in the “edition” of January 1994. Second, she would not appreciate diverse pieces about Ejti Štih, a woman so much less deserving of love than Vesna. Third, she would most likely feel rather lost in the rest of my book. Fourth, Vesna does not need any intellectual titillation. If she likes me—that is, if there is anything likeable left in me—she will sleep with me on her own accord. For she is a simple girl in the best sense of that word. Having gone through some of these reasons in my mind, I stumbled upon another and surprising argument against giving her my book: I feel much love and respect for Vesna. All of a sudden, the table had turned, and I started wondering about my feelings toward my key project. Although this does not have anything to do with the last edition as such, the more recent flood of sexual garbage in the pages of my Residua seems to have spoiled it in some way. Some of its innocence is now gone. And this may be a bit grating for Vesna, my beloved friend, who may be able to discern this shift by just looking at me with a big smile on her face.

Addendum V (March 29, 1994)

Vesna just left. It is almost midnight. I am not sure what to say about our reunion—probably our last. It was wonderful and horrible at the same time. She seems to have been hurt so much and by so many people that it is now impossible to penetrate through all the scabs and calluses. She appeared hard, hardened, armored, fortified. At the same time, she drank too much and she soon became incoherent. She told me she was so nervous about meeting me again that she had a couple of drinks beforehand. She spoke like an alcoholic. Most of the time I had to strain to get her drift, but much of what she was trying to say was completely garbled. All my attempts to tell her how much I appreciated her were to no avail. My tears would entice hers, but she would soon appear to forget about my emotions. Before she left, she let me have it. She told me that the little bit of rebellion she remembered I used to have in me was now completely gone, that I appeared lifeless to her, that I meant nothing to her and that the month we had spent together was an insignificant part of her life, that my house appeared to her dead and empty and cold… I just nodded, unable to stop her from hurting herself. Against this background, the few moments of tenderness and even passion between us are so very painful to revisit that I will rather let some time go by before I return to my last reunion with Vesna, my poor friend.

Addendum VI (July 22, 1994)

From the very moment we met that afternoon, Vesna resisted my attempts to kiss her, touch her, make love to her; however, she happily showed me the scar left by the scalpel on one of her breasts and her lean lower belly, which she proudly bared all the way to her pubic hair. On another occasion she pulled down her tights to show me her muscular thighs. Although I cannot say that she was deliberately teasing me, one moment she would let me suck her nipples or bite her crotch, and another she would push me off with real determination.

When she was leaving I stopped her on the stairs and pulled down her tights and underpants. She was perhaps too drunk to resist. I pulled my pants down, as well. Leaning awkwardly over her on the stairs, I attempted to lick her, but that turned out to be too difficult. I sat a step or two underneath her, spread her legs, and sunk my fingers into her vagina. She was wet. I started to lick my sticky fingers, and she joined me hungrily. She grew excited as I kept digging my fingers into her and then smearing our faces and mouths with her juices. The smell and taste of her cunt was divine—so clean and so viscous at the same time. Then I offered her my prick, and she licked and sucked me for a while, biting me ever so gently. She was really good at this, too. When I attempted to drag her off the stairs and find a place where I could make love to her, she looked at me hazily and pleaded with me to let her go. “This is not fair,” she repeated a few times. Tears came to my eyes one more time, and I helped her stand up and put herself in order. “This is not fair,” I echoed her plea again and again.

A few minutes later I went out with her to find her a taxi. Angry with herself and with me, she insisted that I should leave her to her own devices, but I made sure that she found a cab and that the driver understood her garbled directions. As soon as she arrived to her place, she started to call me on the phone, but I would not answer. She would call every twenty minutes or so and let the phone ring for a long while. She kept doing this for two or three days, but I never picked up the phone.

Addendum VII (April 7, 1998)

As I expected back then, that meeting was our last. As months and years went by, it became clear that we would never get in touch again. I should have called her back the next day, or soon afterwards, but I was afraid she would become a nuisance. More to the point, I was afraid Lauren would get the wind of my reunion with Vesna, leading to the breakup of our ever more shaky marriage. And thus I have betrayed Vesna yet again, I realize only now. Given to drink, tempestuous, preoccupied with her own foibles, she remains a fine woman, a woman true to herself, and I remain a fiend. She is perhaps the only woman toward whom I feel remorse—the only woman I would like to have treated better, more honestly, more humanely.