across_the_street raze i have a friend in ljubljana who i've been unable to find recently named seka tavcar. i met her when i first did a tour in the old yugoslavia with paco de lucia, who started in ljubljana and went to places like spit and una and a couple of others i don't remember. i came back every year for about four years and did this same little tour. on our fist stop, we were introduced to seka tavcar and a mountain climber, a heart surgeon, a physicist, and some other people the government at the time trotted out to meet everybody. nobody wanted to be there. we tried to be polite to one another and admit it was something that had to be done. we were forced to have dinner together after the show. by that time we were enjoying ourselves naturally and i asked seka, since i didn't know yet, what she did. she was the token artist in the group. she was a lithographer. i said, "oh, lithographer from ljubljana," and she did not smile. i gave up on limericks and asked, "could i see your lithographs?" she said, "no, you can't." so i said, "sorry." and she said, "no ... i've only made *ten* of them." i couldn't figure that out. i asked her why, and she said, "i break the stone." usually, as i understand it, you make a lithograph. you run off three to five hundred copies of this lithograph. then you smooth the stone and make another one. otherwise it's like sisyphus or somebody, to break the stone. it sounded nuts. so now it was a lunatic lithographer from ljubljana. i asked her why she did that. she said, "it's none of your business." i saw her again the next year and she said, "i can't stay for the show. my father found his way home. he's sick. i'd better go back and take care of him." the year after that she came to the show and i asked, "how is your father?" picking up the conversation where we left it off. she said, "he died." i said, "oh." she said, "would you like to see some of the things he did?" the next day she took me to downtown ljubljana and showed me, among other things — he was an engineer and an architect — a bridge he had built. and while she was showing me this, she said he had been arrested when she was three years old and imprisoned. and i asked why. which is a question you wouldn't have to ask, i guess, if you've lived there. she ignored me and showed me the bridge, starting on one side of the river with three roads, which in the course of the bridge merged into one road on the other side of the river. so i had an idea why he'd been arrested. it was a beautiful bridge. and as i looked at this thing, she told me what had happened. she said he was imprisoned for twenty-six years. "we were never told," she said, "where he was imprisoned, why he was imprisoned, or for how long he would be in prison. what we were told, once a year at some indeterminate time, was that he was still alive. that's all we ever knew." when he got sick, they let him out after twenty-six years. "that's," she said, "when i found out he'd been imprisoned across the street. and for twenty-six years, he'd been able to look up through a gun slit window in his cell and see my sister and i grow up playing on the balcony of our apartment." and then she said, "that is why i break the stone." — leo_kottke 181008 what's it to you? who go blather from