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It must have been a normal, early summer day in 1991, when my childhood suddenly ended. The day was heavy and close, and since early morning, the grown-ups had been saying it would rain that afternoon, while the children wondered why people who didn’t even have tomatoes or courgettes planted in their gardens, would summon rain in the middle of the prime swimming season. Our world at the time was a far cry from the one our parents seemed to inhabit. For most of us, grown-­ups were creatures from a distant planet, only worth noticing if they were missing an arm or a leg, if they had a wild, long beard down to their toes, dressed like an Indian or had tattoos on their backs, or giant biceps like Rambo, with all his sequels.

On that sultry morning we set off to see one of those rare, interesting grown-ups. Mario and Sinisha couldn’t believe that I had yet to see the guy with the red lump on his face. It was just a big brain tumour; at least according to some, while others were convinced that it was something called bulimia, a new disease that had recently been discussed on TV, and which turned a person’s head into a huge red lump, or so Sinisha claimed. Mario claimed that everyone aside from me had already seen the guy with the lump, while Sinisha recounted one escapade after another featuring Lump Guy as protagonist. According to the biggest bigmouth in Pula, a German tourist took one look at Lump Guy and started to back away from him, and walked backwards the mile or so back to her hotel. An Italian family was even supposed to have notified the police and the Italian embassy in Belgrade about him. Mario and Sinisha both said that I just had to see Lump Guy, cause how often can you see someone with only half of his head normal, while the other half was inflated like a basketball and as red as a sliced watermelon? It didn’t take long to convince me and, in no time, we were marching together past the shop and towards the workers’ dormitory.

A humdrum, white rectangular building housed the guy with the lump, as well as the workers who, following their hard working days at the shipyard, would sit peacefully in front of the entrance, sipping their beers, and chewing over their Bosnian topics. Even though they lived just around the corner from our apartment buildings, they lived in their own parallel – and almost invisible – world. They fraternized only with each other, and gathered in the evenings in the common room on the first floor of the dormitory to watch the news, a live broadcast of a football match, or some series on national TV.

Along the way, my well informed friends explained that, during the day, Lump Guy vegged out in front of the box and watched TV Zagreb, motionlessly: everything from the domestic family sagas to documentaries picked by the head of Croatian national television. Sinisha told me rumour had it that Lump Guy’s room-mates had once collected money, bought him a small portable television set and installed it in his room, but he kept hanging out in the common room, though he never spoke to anyone. Mario added that Vaha, the welder, once tried switching the program every ten minutes, but Lump Guy hadn’t reacted at all, as if he didn’t give a damn what he was watching.

As I listened to these stories, I approached the entrance of the dormitory with high expectations, almost as high as when we set off to vi