Generational gap , David Kelečić

“Hello, son.”

“Hi, Dad.” An awkward silence. “You called,” the son squeezed out.

“Yes, I did,” the reticent father confirmed. The unpleasant silence crept in again. “I called to hear how you are doing,” he muttered finally. He had hoped that Dragoslav would help him somehow, that he would utter something meaningful. Just please, don’t say that you’re fine, he pleaded on the inside.

“I’m fine”, his son replied. Old Dracanto sighed heavily on his side of phone and then pressed his fingers against his wizened forehead. Suddenly, his son gave him a chance to continue the uneasy conversation. “And how are you?”

“Me?” Dracanto replied with surprise. “Well … fine. Yes, I’m fine. There, I’ve been taking a bit of a nap these years. What are you doing, are you plundering …” He stopped suddenly when he remembered that Dragoslav hated the word. “I mean, are you earning a lot?” This time, a heavy sigh came from Dragoslav’s side of the line.

“Yeah, I’m earning a lot,” he replied wearily. “People still talk about the crisis, but it’s not that bad”, he put a bit of spirit in his voice. “You know, I managed to surpass the amount I had in two thousand and eight.”

“That’s… great.” Dracanto enunciated each word slowly. He was clenching all his face muscles in an effort not to say it, but it was more powerful than him. “Although … I’m sorry that you had to work yourself so hard. You know … If you had gold …”

“Dad, do we have to go over this again?” Dragoslav pleaded when the sore was picked at.

“Oh no, it was just a small remark,” his father withdrew quickly. “I understand that you know what’s the best for you,” he recited a mantra that he had repeated thousands of times, but never actually believed.

“Thank you, Dad”, Dragoslav said with ease while he was putting down his war spear. He reached for a new topic. “Have you talked to Mother lately?”

“No. But, we have spoken recently.”

“Dad, you haven’t talked in thirty six years.”

“As I said, we spoke recently. In any case, I have nothing to say to her. Obviously, she’s fine down there in Argentina since she thinks that her gold is safe there.”

“You know, you could visit her sometimes,” the son said hopefully.

“She’s the one that left in '41. She should visit me!”

“Dad, you know very well that she was protecting her gold. She did what she considered wise.”

“If it wasn’t for her bright ideas about moving, you might have stayed sane and not moved across the big pond to that stupid city,” Dracanto was losing his temper.

“Dad, it’s called New York. Not ‘that stupid city’. It’s the financial center of the world. Besides, you’re the one who moved from Venice to Istria, to Draguć.”

“It’s here in the neighborhood, just one hour of flight!” Dracanto replied vehemently. “And you know very well that it's your grandmother's country,” he proudly drew the traditional argument-winning card.

“Yeah, fine, you’re right.” Dragoslav gave up reasoning with his father; he knew it was in vain.

“Apart from that,” Dracanto continued although he knew that this would wrap up the conversation, but he was sincerely worried about his son, “how are you sleeping?”

“Perfectly fine. Thanks for asking,” Dragoslav replied icily. He knew where the conversation was going. It always went that way.

“Are you sure? In that small apartment … it’s not even underground,” Dracanto non the less shared a portion of his misgivings.

“I’m quite sure that I sleep very well, I don’t need a cave. I have a three hundred square meters apartment in the center of Manhattan. It suits my needs.”

“But … how do you treasure your gold? It’s in an open space. Aren’t you afraid that somebody will steal it?”

“Dad, I’ve told you a hundred times, I do not have gold,” Dragoslav could almost see his father on the other side of line, rubbing his chest in pain at the words.

“Son … how can you sleep without your gold?” Dracanto squeezed out desperately while anticipating the imminent storm. His one, on the other side of the line, remained calm.

“Like I said, I don’t need the gold”, Dragoslav hated himself because he knew how his father would react to what followed. “I have my shares, bonds, options, deposits, funds, eight tokens of net banking and a golden American Express card as well as a golden Mastercard and Visa. I keep them under my mattress and I sleep perfectly well.”

“But Dragoslav, that’s not NORMAL!” his father bellowed. “How can you do that to yourself? Gold never loses its value, and now it’s worth more than ever! And the best thing about it is that you can SLEEP on it!”

“I don’t need GOLD to SLEEP NORMALLY!” Dragoslav finally lost it. “I’ve told you this a MILLION times! I’m not interested into your senile philosophy. TREASURE IS NOT COMPOSED ONLY OF GOLD AND METAL!”

“Dragoslav, listen to me! I am your father! I know what's the best for you!” Dracanto fell back on the age old parental statement.

“I’m not a CHILD anymore! I’m one hundred and eighty six years old and I am not interested in your advice any longer. You can call me again on the day you accept that!”

“Son…” Dracanto tried to continue, but the phone line went dead. He sighed heavily and plunged his face into his palms. He couldn’t understand it at all, his son's behavior was actual torture to him. He wondered if his son was uncomfortable when sleeping and could not imagine how anyone could possibly relax without the daily counting of every coin in their treasure. Shares, options … these words were as empty as their value. These couldn’t be a treasure, one could not sleep on them.

                                                                                    *

“Pazin Financial Agency, Mirjana speaking,” the office worker said lazily into the phone, not taking her eyes of the Cosmopolitan article explaining how to bring passion back into a decade long marriage with two children. The voice on the other side of the line was sobering enough when she realized who is calling her. It was ‘The-Weird-Guy-From-Draguć’. She put on her widest smile while nervously taking the order from their VIP client. After hanging up, she took a few moments to calm down the loud beating of her heart.

“Marica,” she squealed to her colleague. “That guy contacted us again!”

“What guy?” Marica wasn’t paying much attention. She was switching from Facebook to the Coolinarka online cookbook where she was picking the best out of the 73 recipes for ‘chicken stew’. Unlike Mirjana, Marica knew that her husband's affection went through his stomach.

 “The-Weird-Guy-From-Draguć,” Mirjana hissed since it was clear that the older colleague wasn’t paying attention. The mention of the VIP client was good enough to make Marica come to. Armed with many years of administrative work and a freshly acquired ECDL certificate, she took command of the situation.

“Tell me the quantity of the order!” The office chair creaked under the weight of all 38 recipes for the deer stew that Marica and her husband had tasted and eaten in ‘Gourmand April’. Weekends that comprised the preparation of two full meals a day were a bit of a challenge but the quality of their spousal relationship had never been better.

“This much,” Mirjana hesitantly showed her a block with the written down order.

“Bullshit?!” uttered Marica forgetting about proper business behavior and language.

“I wrote it down correctly”, Mirjana confirmed.

“I’m calling Zagreb and you call Rijeka, Split and Osijek! If we fuck this up, we can forget early retirement”, Marica was panting furiously while taking up the phone. “Hello, Zagerb Financial Agency? This is Marica from the Pazin branch. We have code Alpha-005-Golden Luce! I repeat: code Alpha-005-Golden Luce!”

                                                                                *

Dragons possessed few virtues. But the greatest one, all the Istrian grannies, each one with a hip more fragile than the next one, would agree, was patience. It was rumored that a dragon could sit on his gold for years without a single motion, as immobile as a rock. Among the grannies from the Far East it was even rumored that the great Buddha had learned the art of meditation from a dragon.

Dracanto disagreed with these rumors. While sitting in the basement and waiting, he was thinking about how wrong folk interpretations of his species were. Yes, it was true that dragons wouldn’t move for months, but the trick wasn’t patience. Because, had patience, they would not have any family disputes. The trick was in the dragon’s eyes which could sense subtle changes in the growth of wall mold. To the external observer it could look like the dragon is in the deep meditation, but in fact, all the dragons were doing was watching a great action movie. They could never predict which part of the mold is going to take over the next micrometer of the wall. Dracanto understood the human obsession with epic serials like Game of Thrones quite well while poor humans had no idea what they were missing in mold.

On the other hand, dragon family disputes could take centuries. Of course, Dracanto managed to get into it with absolutely everyone in his family. And the centuries did not ease the pain; they only gave it more time to eat away at his heart. And so, despite the mold that continued to fight for every micrometer of space, Dracanto was losing his temper while waiting for the delivery.

Waving his red tail, he waited before the orifice on the ceiling through which the workers of the Financial Agency would drop the delivery. In order to be able to observe the mold, he had to return to his dragon form. Recently, he wasn’t spending much time in it. He wondered if his son Dragoslav ever returned to his dragon form anymore or if he was completely adjusted to his human shape. If so, no wonder Dragoslav slept on a human bed. Once again, he exhaled a small puff of fire feeling the pain that could only be felt by a parent.

Finally, hundreds meters above, he could hear the creaking of the brakes of an overloaded van that entered his estate in the small Istrian village of Draguć. Security guards already knew the procedure. There was a terminal on the villa’s wall where they would load the bags. After that, the bags would automatically descend through dozens of top notch security systems. In the process of designing the villa, Dracanto had insisted on adding a part with swinging blades and rolling boulders to satisfy at least the minimum of traditional norms. After that, the bags would fall into a section that could be opened only from Dracanto’s cave. There was no going too far in protecting a dragon’s treasure.

Dracanto gave the go ahead for the descent and watched as the bags filled with hundreds of kilograms of metal cargo fell before him. Satisfied, he took them in his claws and moved to them to the hall where he kept his treasure. Dragons didn’t only go for the value, they also went for quantity. Of course, Dracanto’s main bed was comprised of gold, but all around it were heaps of thousands and thousands of small coins whose joint value could barely exceed one purple five hundred Euro bill. Dragons, at least the older ones, didn’t acknowledge paper. The point was in the metal. That was the main reason why Dracanto was considering moving somewhere north, to Scandinavia. He knew that there the cashiers always returned the exact amount, each and every small coin. In Croatia, there was nothing worse for a dragon than buying an item that cost a few kuna and ninety nine lipa. That one lipa … it was his! It wasn’t some negligible deficit, it was HIS small coin, and he wanted it back! However, although he would ask for it every time, he would never get it because no one felt it was worthwhile to keep such tiny, almost worthless currency.

Dracanto opened the first bag from the Financial Agency: it spilled thousands of small twenty lipa coins. Deeply pleased, he took the first coin between his claws and examined it thoughtfully and expertly. He noticed small scratches over the middle leaf of the right branch of olive tree. After that, he carefully took it with his tail and put it in the empty spot where he was planning a new heap. Grannies were definitely right about the second virtue of dragons: excellent memory. All of them knew intimately each piece of coin that they owned.

Coin by coin, minute by minute, Dracanto finally felt he himself calming down. True, he had paid for all these coins more than they were worth, but he did pay for them in paper. Stupid humans never appreciated the true value of metal. Six days later, when he finished counting, he started planning when to call Dragoslav again. Probably in a year or so. The third virtue of a dragon was tradition, at least for the older ones.

                                                                                *

“Um … Hi, Dad. It’s me.”

“Son! It's been only four months,” Dracanto was shocked.

“Well, yeah … I wanted to call you, it’s important. I would have told you sooner, but the last time we ended up on that topic again,” Dragoslav was speaking very carefully.

“OK, I’m listening,” the father replied. He hoped that Dragoslav finally came to his senses and was calling to admit how wrong he had been all along.

“Well, there is no simple way to tell you this so I will just tell you: I’m getting married.” On the other side of line, Dracanto said nothing. He tried to stare at the mold on the wall of his living room, but human eyes couldn’t perform such a task. His son was only one hundred and eighty six years and he was getting married already?! Where did he go wrong as a father?

“Dad?” Dragoslav tried again.

“I’m here, son,” Dracanto replied while looking through his pockets for his wallet so he could count the small coins to calm down. “Um, somehow … it seems a bit early, you know?”

Dragoslav gave a sigh. “Dad, there’s more. As a matter of fact, she’s from Japan. Her name is Ryumi.”

Dracanto dropped the wallet and placed his hand on his heart. Mixing of dragon lines from the European and Far Eastern tradition? That simply … isn't done. One moment you let them open a Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood and in the next their dragon is plundering your gold while a Chinese traveling salesman is selling you cheap fireworks garbage. Moreover, paper money was all their fault, they invented it! The European line despised them from the bottom of their hearts for that particular stupidity. And they didn't even have wings! They just floated and were as thin as Dracanto’s tail!

“Dragoslav, you are marring a Chinese?!” Dracanto shouted into the phone.

“She’s not Chinese, she’s Japanese!” Dragoslav replied in even higher tones.

“Same difference!”

“Oh, come on, you’re just like grandfather!” This time, Dragoslav showed no mercy. He knew his father’s weak spot.

“WHAT? You are comparing me with that old dragon?! How dare you?”

“I knew that this would be a mistake, but Mom IMPLORED me to call you,” Dragoslav said.

“Wait, SHE told you to? Since WHEN are you talking with HER?” Dracanto was shocked.

“I never stopped! YOU were the only one who had a problem with us leaving Italy. And now, I’m sorry, but I have a wedding to plan!”

Dracanto was again left alone on the line. Completely crushed, he called the Financial Agency.

                                                                                *

Counting the coins, he was thinking about Dragoslav. Even if he could put everything aside, the Chinese girl, shares and credit cards, he couldn’t shake off the bitter fact that his son compared him with Dracorelli. Dracanto’s father was an ancient dragon, a bigoted traditionalist who slept only in volcanoes, counted exclusively gold and ate people. Even old dragons of the Roman Age had learned that they would have to accept people and cover up in order to keep their gold. Dracanto, when he was a young son of Dracorelli's, was among the first ones to learn to speak Latin, one of the first ones who studied people, their habits and behavior.

Of course, Dracorelli had been horrified by his son’s life choices. For him, people were only food that dug out and minted gold. He couldn’t accept silver or cooper as new metals although the whole kingdom traded in them. Dracanto also wondered how his father even chose to mate with dragoness from Histria, a simple province of the Apennines at the time.

The pinnacle of animosities between them came about when some dragons mastered the magic of shape shifting into human form. Dracanto, a member of the new generation, had visited his father in a cave in Vesuvius to teach him the new skill. Seeing his son in human form, Dracorelli was outraged. Enraged by what he saw as his son’s betrayal, he spewed so much fire he forced Vesuvius to erupt. On that night, twenty thousand people in Pompeii died and Dracanto couldn’t do anything to save them. Witnessing his son’s sorrow for these people, Dracorelli disowned him and swore never to be part of the world where dragons live alongside with humans. He buried himself with his treasure deep down in the Vesuvius and closed all the entrances. Dracanto swore that he would never forgive his father the death of thousands because of his own bigotry.

Almost two thousand years later, Dracanto was wondering how his father was doing. He imagined him staring at the wall every day, his eyes intently following the motes of dust falling from the rocks of his volcanic cave.

“I could never be like him,” he muttered while observing a coin with a carved tuna. “Where did Dragoslav get such an idea?” Dracanto mumbled furiously. “You’re the same as grandfather,” he imitated his son’s voice, mocking his assertion. “His scales are still purple; he can talk to me when he's as red as I am.”

In that moment when Dracanto froze. Talk to me when your scales are as red as mine, echoed his father’s words from the day when Dracorelli destroyed Pompeii. Dracanto sighed, finally grasping the thruth. “I really am the same as him,” he felt the confession take the burden away from his heart. He wondered if he should go to his father, now that his scales were as red as his father's had been back then. He assumed that Dracorelli had by now become completely black, a legendary dragon.

He stopped counting coins and returned to his human form. He might try to speak to his own father once again, but first he had to patch things up with his son and a special dragoness in Argentina.

                                                                                *

“Dragoslav, please, don’t make this harder for me than it already is.”

“Well, of course. But … I’m surprised. How is it that you want to come to the wedding?”

“Ah, let’s say that I thought about it for a while and realized that these were new times. I won’t say that I like it, but the least I can do is support you,” Dracanto explained tiredly. “However, there is one thing that I really don’t understand.”

“What is it?” Dragoslav asked cautiously.

“Well, how do I put this… Do you want to have children?” Father was also careful.

“Not right now, but yes. We definitely plan it. Why does it matter?” He was confused.

“Um, you know, I do not understand if … I mean, how are you going to do it? I mean, we’re Europeans, right? So … that’s why, we’re a little bit big, right? So … then …” Dracanto was sweating.

“Dad, I don’t understand you.”

“How are you going to mate when your tail is bigger than her whole body?!” the question came furiously out of Dracanto. He cursed himself for not managing to have that particular father to son conversation before Dragoslav left the cave for good all those years ago.

“Oh, that. Do we really have to touch that subject?” Dragoslav felt embarrassed.

“It’s just that I don’t see how that would even be possible,” Dracanto said.

“It is very simple: we do it as humans,” son replied. There was a hush on the line. Dragoslav wondered if it was his father who had hung up this time, but he then heard that the line was still active. “Dad?” he asked carefully.

“I’m here, son”, Dracanto slowly replied. “I’m counting coins; I had a bag prepared.”

“Just take your time, I’ll wait,” Dragoslav responded patiently.

“So, when do I have to fly to your place?” Dracanto asked after a few minutes.

“What exactly do you mean ‘fly’?” his son was suspicious.

“And what do you mean?” The father was confused.

“You don’t think of … wings? They have planes, you know?”

“Son, if I managed to accept that you are marrying the Chinese …”

“The Japanese.”

“Whatever,” Dracanto responded. “You will have to accept that I will fly with my wings even if I do turn up on dozen of their radars.”