The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

the most heavenly feeling, as if they were God’s balls or something. I come back to my senses and finish the paragraph:
    “Actually, I’ve never lived in Iceland before.”
    “But you speak Icelandic?” one of the three Poles asks. Somehow they all look like soldiers from WWII. Could be stand-ins in some black-and-white Oscar-nominated Jews-R-Us movie, sitting in the back of an army truck, about to be blown up in the next scene.
    “Just a little. My mother, no, my grandmother used to speak to me in Icelandic when I was a boy.”
    I went a bit too far. One of them disappears for a while and comes back with a letter in Icelandic, full of crazy letters—a pregnant I, and an A making love to an E—asking me to translate it for him. I take it to my stall and make a quick call to Hanna. It takes me forever, though, to read her the unreadable words. It turns out to be a simple invitation to the inauguration of some building the guy was working on. He can’t go, he says, too busy working at another construction site. The Seven Elevens are real working machines. Their bodies are so used to going to sleep at midnight and waking at six, that they’re unable to sleep in Sunday morning. Therefore they can’t get drunk on a Saturday night but have to do it the day after. They start at seven in the morning and finish at eleven at night.

CHAPTER 25
GRANNY’S
    06.17.2006
    It must be Balatov’s good influence, but after a week on the Hardwork floor I can’t think of much else other than sex. My Bible reading hours are crowded by memories, fantasies, and daydreams. Sometimes they all collide into one, into one big Senka, my Split girlfriend. My great Split girlfriend. Again and again her head pops up from the dirty pool of my unconscious. I even dream about her for three nights in a row. It’s kind of strange, for she hasn’t really visited my mind in years, though I try googling her name every once in a while.
    Senka was always big fun, and a bit crazy, with her triangular breasts pointing east and west, and her short, black hair pointing up and down. She had a big black birthmark on her left cheek that made her look a tiny bit like Brooke Shields. Her lips were full and soft, but her cheeks kind of hard, angled. Somehow you always wanted to press them with your finger. And despite the dimples they always made her look kind of boyish.
    She had a much older sister and her mustached mother was old enough to be her grandmother. Her stepfather was a poet, a very serious, very unknown poet. Senka knew a lot of poems by heart and sometimes she would recite some for me. I don’t know why, really, but I always remember this one, written by one of her stepfather’s friends:
    Svatko tko je putovao zna da se jabuke nigdje ne jedu kao na ulici i trgu nekog stranog grada.
    (Anyone who has travelled knows that apples taste / the sweetest on a street or a square of a new city.)
    Now the two lines only appeal to my dick, making him rise up from his den, trying to listen. (Mr. Crotch Dweller has a very good ear for poetry.) I spend my days between her strong, almost manly, thighs, remembering her clumsy dancing style or going through our early morning lovemaking on that beach in Brač. The still blue water, the loud white pebbles, her wicked smile…
    I don’t get it really. I’m held hostage by Senka. By good and solid old-fashioned pre-war sex. Yugoslavian national sex.
    Senka’s was the hairiest crotch of the Adriatic. (I’ve always been a bushman. To me the idea of a bald pussy is like steak without sauce.) She used to suffer from it, she said, but I tried my best to convince her that hairy wasn’t scary, that Brazilian wax was to sex what this new French cuisine was to cooking. No fucking sauce.
    I wake up with her on top of me and before falling asleep at night I bury my face in her bushy crotch, humming old Arsen Dedič songs. I probably just miss my country.
    The good man that goes by the name of Good Knee seems to feel my frustration, and my week of Homeland Sex finds its appropriate conclusion when the good slave master decides to take all his subjects to Granny’s, a strip club buried deep in an industrial zone close by.
    We walk past rusty car bodies and a blue container that must be full of teddy bears stuffed with heroine. After all, this is the town of Cop War. Once past the standard heavyweight bouncer, we enter another world. The new me had thought of staying home, but after a week under Balatov’s