You will keep this thick glass vase she’ll offer you for many years, as it will trigger your love for fresh cut flowers and be the first of your collection. It will have the shape of a double cone sharing the same base, one around 20 centimetres high, the other inverted and just 2, preventing it to sit flat and making it oscillate at the slightest touch. It will be possible to put a flower straight in it since one side can keep strictly vertical, but will be at its best with a long curved stem leaning out of its inclined narrow opening and the flower as far as possible from the vase. She’ll know it and leave the vase in your apartment with one white Freesia alba in it – and it will be the best flower for it ever since after.
You’ll meet her twice – the first time in Serbian Vojvodina where she’ll accompany her talented and inspired dancer of a boyfriend or husband, who will give there a butoh dance workshop to which you’ll attend. It will be an intense episode in your life, shared with dear friends, full of joys and dramas, flamboyant Serbian girls and traumatized Croatian guys expunging the recent Yugoslavian wars with avant-garde dance and plenty of booze, Gypsy musicians, cinnamon cappuccinos, an attempt to swim to the Hungarian border across a perfectly rectangular lake, early cybercafés where from you’ll send your first love e-mails, etc… The camp will be incredibly dusty – actually the ground will be made of mere dust - and the sanitary conditions rudimentary, and you’ll remember the colour of her dance training clothes turning into the colour of the soil – when the Serbian girls will always manage to clean up and refresh their make-up (as they did when Belgrade was bombed by NATO they’ll say) – as she’ll dance and train indifferent to the dirt.
You’ll befriend the boyfriend or husband and the next time he’ll come to Europe – he’s Japanese but lives in California -, he will ask you to play the music for a series of dance solos in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. You’ll prepare a set with the support of a residence at STEIM in Amsterdam and it will be your first computer music composition, including ambient samples from the Serbian butoh camp and live silicone-string Ashbory bass (a young local guy will see the French show and ask you to re-record the piece to release it on his French-Japanese micro-label as a limited edition CDR). The dancer will come together with her and you’ll lend them your small apartment in the core of the old city – the locally famous gentrified medieval Place aux Oignons – while you’ll sleep at your girlfriend’s. You’ll be of course blasé about your hometown and never really look at it, but while you’ll be rehearsing in the courtyard of a 13th century hospital where the show will happen, she’ll be walking around the area, highly enjoying its strange mix of Spanish-Flemish Baroque and Imperial eclectic neo-classicism – and she’ll be surprised by your lack of enthusiasm… She’ll also explore the local shops in which you’ll never set foot and buy this vase and this flower for you, and you’ll never know if she’s a tasteful well-educated woman, a good reader of your soul, or just lucky.
You’ll stick to this one vase and one kind of flowers for years, it will follow you while you drift across Europe, until you’ll buy a new one when settled in Berlin, where you’ll acquire furniture and objects for the first time of your life. It will be an even more minimalist cylinder of thick glass for one straight flower – Freesia alba is not so common is Berlin and the slanted cone vase will stay empty more often than you’ll want. A wide carafe for bigger flower arrangements will follow, then three small olive oil flacons from your favourite Mediterranean restaurant on Dieffenbachstraße. You’ll stick to single white flowers as much as possible, sometimes a simple white tulip will soothe your soul, sometimes a nymphea with delicate shades of pink floating in a glass bowl will fill you with joy, sometimes a gladiola, a calla lily or a amaryllis will enlighten you for a few minutes.
You’ll hear about her that she’s from a big bohemian family in California and her sister married a renowned musician, sometimes you’ll think a little bit shamefully of her as one of the two degrees between you and Salman Rushdie – one of your favourite writers –, an idle thought typical of the post-fame era. Also you will have promised to the Serbian girls that one day you’ll visit them in Belgrade and this time you will suspend your vow of sobriety and empty a couple bottles of Slivovitz with them – but you’ll never go.
