“No good news,” I said quietly when I joined my beloved in the livingroom. “Where’s the insecticide?” I spotted a cockroach near the washing machine in the pantry, I explained calmly. She jumped at once. The insecticide can in hand, I sprayed all around the wall of the pantry and under the washing machine. Already dazed, the bugger appeared a moment later, and my beloved sprayed it over and over again. “That’s not a cockroach,” she grumbled. Amazingly, she had never seen one, but I had seen plenty, most of them in America. As it lay on its back, wriggling desperately, we started looking all around the kitchen. Then we searched through the entire apartment, but we found absolutely nothing. I sprayed the frame of the entrance door and of several windows that we use for ventilation. Luckily, it must have been a lonely scout. We got it in the middle of its mission. Coming from the neighboring apartments, either in our tenement or in a neighboring one, it was looking for new territory. Having assured ourselves that all was clear, we sat down for a rest, but the experience still lingered. “Remember,” I kept repeating, “we are clear.” The scouting cockroach has stayed with us, though. Central Zagreb must be crawling with them. From now on, we will be spraying the entrance door and the windows at least once a month. “I’d have thought it was something entirely different,” my beloved kept shaking her head in disbelief. “A beetle of some kind…”