galerija/zgodba-funny-gift-for-a-best-friend.jpg
There is a pub in our town where three chairs at the corner table have been ours since 1986. Nobody officially gave them to us. We simply sat there often enough that other people stopped trying.
Bojan turned sixty this year and there is nothing you can buy him, because he buys everything himself, immediately, and then tells you about it for a fortnight. So Andrej and I got him a picture instead, and we filled it with things that would mean nothing at all to anybody who was not sitting at that table.
It is drawn as a cartoon, which was the only sensible choice, because if you draw the three of us realistically it stops being funny and starts being a document.
The three chairs are on the back of an old van. Bojan's is the one with the wobbly leg that he has refused to let anyone fix for twenty two years. Above them, on a banner, is the sentence he says every single time something has gone properly wrong: It will sort itself out.
There is a plate of sausages, because he claims he has ordered something different at least once and neither of us has ever witnessed it. There is a broken fishing rod from the trip in 2004 that we still do not discuss in front of his wife. There is a football scarf, folded rather than worn, because his team has not given him a reason to wear it since roughly the Yugoslav era.
The number plate is the year we met, which happens to be the year all three of us failed the same exam.
And in the corner, small, there is a card table with the exact hand he was dealt in 1998, the one he still insists he played correctly. He did not play it correctly. This is settled among the rest of us and has been for decades.
He phoned me at eleven at night, three days after he got it, to say he had just spotted the cards.
He is still not admitting anything.