Last night at three in the morning, outside the city center of Ljubljana, in a pink house on the edge of some soccer fields, Lincoln woke us up to tell us that he lost his tooth. And then when he walked back to bed, we heard a rattle as it fell on the ground. Whether that meant he had awakened, pulled it out and then lost it, or woke up and it was already nestled in a little crease on his shirt, we weren’t awake enough to ask. And this morning, when we got out of bed, there it was, small and white and hard on the ground, a marker of time passed.
The day before, on the way here, we stopped at Lake Bled, and took the Pletna boats across the clear blue mountain water. The oarsman spoke only Slovenian, except for the phrases that all oarsman must know to make their living from the tourists; “It takes 20 minutes, it is 15 euros, you will spend 45 minutes on the island.”
The island on Lake Bled is the only natural island in all of Slovenia, and the Pletna boats date back at least 500 years. They are flat bottomed, wooden, and covered with colorful awnings. Many of the oarsman are the direct descendants of those who carried the first religious pilgrims out to the island. It is a restricted and honored profession, as only 22 boats are allowed on the lake.
The boys found fish in the water and the castle on the cliffs loomed above us, and the slight, cool wind rippled the bright sky blue water beneath us.
Swimmers and canoers and stand up paddle boards went around us. “It’s the only island in Slovenia,” Eliot said proudly, when we stood on shore.
At the church, a wedding was in progress, and the groom braced himself to carry his bride up the ninety-nine steps from the dock to the church, in order to ensure a happy marriage. The boys ran around the path that encircled the island, and when we stopped for more than a few minutes they started in on what has recently been the norm (especially after long car rides) some shoving, and a little punching, some carefully aimed kicks that never quite kick the other person.
Thirty-five minutes past Bled and into Ljubljana and outside our back window, the Slovenian soccer players yell in their language that has a mulititude of j’s but never actually sounds them out. While the rest of the language seems hard, with lots of ‘z’ and ‘ch’ sounds, the j’s are flexible and easy, like a y that forgot its way. In the car, the boys practice ‘Hvala’. “Hvala for getting us groceries”, they say, as I triple check for bikes around our car that always seem to assume we know where they are.
Ljubljana is the city of dragons (Kostova’s “The Historian”, anyone?) and I bring out the little play dragons I had packed in my bag, and hand them to Eliot, whose eyes light up. All his favorite books have dragons in them, and I read him the legends of Ljubljana while he sits next to me. The Greek myth of Jason who killed a dragon here, St. George the dragon slayer who has a chapel dedicated to him outside the castle, and the local legends that come from the deep depths of the caves about the baby dragons that live down there, spawned from the one great dragon that none of them have ever seen. (They are proteus, a rare amphibian native to the Slovenian caves.)
In the city, the corners of the main bridge over the river are held down by fierce green dragons.
The Ljubljana city flag flies from every important building, a bright green dragon hovering on top of a castle flapping above the streets. Eliot walks beside the stone dragons with his new stuffed green dragon that he has named Fire, Lincoln practices on a wooden yo-yo with a dragon carved on it.
They both spot the dragon manhole covers at the same time, metal circles on the old stone streets.
When we stop for food beside the Ljubljanica River, Lincoln struggles to eat chicken wings with two missing top teeth. “I guess I’ll just eat the fries”, he sighs, while the waiter brings us lemonade without any sugar in it and a martini that is not a martini, but instead a kind of strong vermouth.
Back at the apartment, the soccer players still play loudly until after dark, and Eliot falls asleep clutching Fire, while Lincoln, true to form, refuses sleep and reads instead. A cool Slovenian breeze brings the rain, light at first, then so hard it sounds like a train roaring down the nearby tracks. The rain finally empties the soccer fields, finally puts Lincoln to bed, and somewhere, sometime, maybe in a past life, even the dragons sleep.
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