We quickly eliminate selling the car as an option. We might need it if we are forced to flee, and if we sell it now, we won’t be able to buy another one in future.

Perhaps we can sell a painting or two. Is there a market for art at all nowadays? I have a collage by Salvador Dali. Perhaps someone might buy that. It is the only valuable thing in our rather small collection. Maybe not. Perhaps it is a fake. Salvador Dali did not hesitate to sign somebody else’s works for money. Anyway, we all like the collage. It consists of two postcards—one of which has been retouched so that, when viewed from a distance, it looks like a man with a mask on. Above it, there is a one word: “Babaouo.”

We might perhaps sell Glavurtic’s drawing of Heidegger? How much can one obtain, in Belgrade, for a work drawn by a Croat who was born in Montenegro and then fled to Croatia when Yugoslavia disintegrated? At any rate, the drawing is very dear to me, and I cannot sell it.

I also have a large painting by Radovan Kraguly, a well-known Parisian painter of Yugoslav origin. But that is a gift, and one never sells a gift.

The bicycle remains! No, everyone agrees we cannot sell the bicycle. Now, when we are sparing the petrol for only our most urgent needs, we cannot imagine life without a bicycle.