‘How could they agree to be separated from such a small baby?’ Beba interrupted the young man. Like Kukla, she was hearing this story for the first time.
‘They knew what was coming, and that the doors of European countries were closing to Jews. But they had their studies to complete in Zagreb and they just hoped that the evil would after all not spread there… It’s hard for me to answer that question. I know that it’s because of their decision that I’m sitting with you at this table today,’ said the young man, smiling his disarming smile.
In April 1941 Croatia brought in a racial law: ‘Legal Provision for the Protection of Aryan Blood and the Honour of the Croatian Nation’. They introduced the obligation to wear a yellow star, soon followed by the persecution of Jews. Pupa’s parents and younger brother were deported to the Jasenovac camp, where they were killed, some time in 1943. Pupa and Aaron fled to the woods to join the Partisans at the end of October 1941, after the Jewish Synagogue in Zagreb had been destroyed with the blessing of the new Ustasha authorities.
‘There were a lot of Jews in the Partisans, incidentally, from Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, but you must know that better than me,’ said the young man.
‘Oh my God, what a story! Why didn’t she ever tell us any of it? Did you know?’ Beba asked Kukla.
Kukla shook her head without a word. The story had affected her as deeply as it had Beba.
Aaron was killed fighting in 1944, while Pupa, who had meanwhile developed tuberculosis, lived to see the Liberation. Her tuberculosis was cured, she continued her interrupted studies and then, thanks to her Partisan connections, she finally managed to obtain a visa to travel to England. She appeared in London in the spring of 1947, with the intention of taking Asja back with her to Zagreb. Aaron’s parents had no intention of returning to Zagreb. The little girl, meanwhile, had such an attack of hysteria that they all agreed it would be better to delay sending her back. Pupa hoped that next time she would manage to procure a longer stay in London, spend time with Asja and manage to persuade her to travel back with her.
‘This is terrible…’ said Beba, choking with tears.
‘That’s how it was. A lot of women who were in the Partisans left their children in children’s homes and orphanages, to be looked after by relatives or families in villages where it was relatively peaceful during the war. I know of several similar cases,’ said Kukla.
Pupa returned from London and continued her medical studies. She worked hard, exhausting herself by studying at the same time as volunteering in Zagreb hospitals and provincial medical centres. She qualified, and then came 1948 and the dreadful, dark days of the Cominform. In 1950, Pupa ended up on Goli Otok, or rather in St Grgur, a prison for female political prisoners.* Like all the other inmates, if they managed to survive, Pupa never found out why she had been sent to prison or the name of the person who had denounced her. After she was released, it was clear that the frontiers were closed to her and that meant only one thing – she would not be able to see Asja. Pupa married again in 1955, a doctor colleague, and in 1957 she gave birth to her daughter Zorana.
Goodness, you only need a slightly different light, and things we have always known become suddenly different and alien, thought Kukla. The ‘doctor colleague’ was Kosta, Kukla’s brother. That was when she had met Pupa. Over the years they had grown close, but, remarkably, Pupa never mentioned Goli Otok, or Aaron, or Asja. It is true that all the former Goli Otok inmates had one thing in common: they never said a word about it. When they came out of prison, they were strictly forbidden to discuss their experience with anyone, and Goli Otok altogether was a strictly forbidden topic, until, some time in the nineteen-seventies, the taboo was lifted. But time had reinforced the prisoners’ own habit of simply saying nothing. Because there, on Goli Otok, every observation, even the most innocent, reached the guards’ ears, and the prisoner was made to pay for it. Yes, those were dark days. People landed in prison for no reason, saddled with the crippling accusation of betrayal of the homeland and alleged support of Stalin. Everyone denounced someone. The communists used a Stalinist stick to beat Stalin. Who knows whether Kosta knew? He must have done, only he did not tell her, Kukla. The Goli Otok embargo dragged in wives and husbands and other members of the family. It was simply never mentioned. It is very hard to explain that to anyone else today. And when the ban was finally lifted, few people were interested in hearing those old Goli Otok stories. Kukla tried to summon up a picture of the young Pupa, but despite her best efforts she could not do it. She thought about the fact that Pupa’s grandson – the child of a different culture and different age – had succeeded in solving a puzzle, which they, both Kukla, who was closer to Pupa, and Beba, had been unable to solve, and indeed had made no effort to do so. The invisibility in which we live next to one another is appalling, thought Kukla.
Aaron’s father died in 1952, the same year that Pupa came out of prison, and his mother died in 1960. A little later the same year, Asja Pal married Michael Thompson and four years later she gave birth to a little boy, David, and then to a little girl, Miriam. Asja had never been to Yugoslavia, nor had she ever wanted to go. For her Pupa was a monster, a woman who had abandoned her own child in order to join the communists. Pupa’s second husband, Kosta, died in 1981. Their daughter Zorana studied medicine and got a job in a Zagreb hospital.
‘In the Vinogradska Hospital! Where I spent my working life as well!’ In her thoughts Beba whispered to David. It was through Zorana that Beba had met Pupa and somehow it happened that they had become friends. Zorana could occasionally be a bit jealous. ‘How come you get on so well with my mother,’ she would say, ‘when I’m forever quarrelling with her…?’ Who knows, perhaps the whole secret is that daughters always make excessive demands on their mothers. The mothers feel guilty, and then protest at both their guilt and the demands made on them. The daughters feel the same mixture of guilt and anger. And round it all goes in a closed circle. Oh, life is so confused! And then stories like this one come like a bolt of lightning out of the blue and turn the picture we have of others on its head. Perhaps that is why people hang on so desperately to their stubborn little truths, because who knows, if everything was put together, as in this case, people would fall apart. It is the brutal truth that what we know about other people could be contained in an insultingly small package.
Pupa tried to get in touch with Asja, without success. When she was finally able to travel, she went to London again. Asja had been so reluctant to meet her that Pupa went home in complete despair. That was why David had appeared like balm for a wound that had never healed. He learned Croatian and came to see Pupa whenever he could. The two of them, Pupa and he, became secret allies. Pupa adored him. When he opened his own legal office and began to earn a decent salary, David set about trying to trace the property of both his Jewish families, the Singers and the Pals. And by some miracle he succeeded in getting back the Singers’ family home in Opatija. It did not mean much to Pupa and she immediately offered to leave the house to him. He refused. Then, with his help, she sold it. The major part of the proceeds from the sale was invested in the bank in Pupa’s name. Quite recently, Pupa had called him and asked him to alter her will.
‘I presume that she didn’t tell you… That is, Pupa left a significant sum from the sale of the house to each of you,’ said David.
Beba, filled with a vague sense of guilt, started to count the things she had recently spent money on, some on massage, some on make-up and some on clothes, and then she had gone to change that five-hundred-euro note, but no one in this town was prepared to, and that was how she wound up in the hotel casino, because she thought that they would be able to change it there, because, in fact, she only needed fifty…
‘Pupa has left you a sum that will guarantee you a secure and peaceful old age,’ David repeated, because he could not work out what Beba was prattling on about so frantically.
‘I don’t need money. I’ve got my pension,’ said Kukla quietly.
‘So have I!’ said Beba, blushing, because she still could not take in the fact that the money in the hotel safe was hers.
‘I’ve brought all the papers with me. Pupa signed everything before you came here,’ said David.
‘So, you knew everything! Where we were going, and everything! She tricked us all, the old witch!’ cried Beba.
‘That’s what we used to call her… the old witch,’ said Kukla, apologising in her own and Beba’s name.
‘It’s only old witches who lay golden eggs!’ said David.
Kukla thought that the young man’s Croatian was not as good as it had seemed to her at first. Who knows where he came across that clumsy sentence?
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘It’s an old Polynesian proverb. It means that old women do good deeds.’
Let us pause here for a moment to say that life is a field where the wind always blows, while the tale may expand and contract as it goes.
At that moment Mevlo came into the restaurant, holding the little Chinese girl’s hand. The child was hopping from foot to foot and carrying a puppy in her arms, while a smile was spread over Mevlo’s face. When they came up to the table, Beba, wiping her tears away, remarked:
‘And since when have you been a swimming instructor?’
‘Oh, love, when they tell me “swim”, I swim! When they say “massage”, I massage!’
Mevlo sat down at the table, set the little girl down beside him, spooned raspberries, blackberries and blueberries into a bowl, poured cream over them and placed the bowl in front of her.
‘Here you are, sweetie-pie, try that!’ said Mevlo, as naturally as though the little girl were his daughter.
‘What’s the child’s name?’ Beba asked David.
‘Wawa.’
‘Wawa?’
‘And another thing,’ said David cautiously. ‘She’s not my daughter – she’s your granddaughter.’
There are all kinds of people in the world, good and bad. Beba had a heart as big as a frying pan and a mind that those around her did not consider worthy of mention. Between her heart and her mind there was a sudden short circuit. Beba was simply not in a position to take in the quantity of new information that had splashed over her like a bucket of cold water. That was why her eyes narrowed, she swayed on her chair, cried out something that sounded like ‘Awaw!’ and, dragging the tablecloth with her, crashed to the floor. There was general consternation in the restaurant: the waiters flocked round like seagulls, picked up the cutlery, wiped up the spilt milk, ran after a bun that was rolling over the floor. In a few seconds two male nurses appeared. They put Beba on a stretcher. The stretcher was followed by Kukla, after Kukla came David, after David Mevlo and after Mevlo skipped the little girl with the puppy in her arms. In the whole scurrying procession, it was only the little girl whose face showed no trace of anxiety.
‘Honestly! Why are you giggling, my pet?’ grumbled Mevlo.
‘Old ladies are funny!’ said the little girl.
‘My special friend has fainted, and you think it’s funny. What’s funny about it, eh?’
‘Awaw! Awaw!’ the child chirped, hopping from foot to foot.
‘Aw! Aw!’ the puppy joined in for the first time.
From his pocket Mevlo took a little wooden ladle decorated with Czech folk patterns that he had picked up on some local souvenir stall:
‘Here, see if this will help you calm down.’
‘Why?’
‘Vai, vai, vai! So you can make me soup when you grow up, that’s vai.’
The little girl burst into peals of silvery laughter.
Here it should be said that Mevlo found nothing strange about the fact that the little girl was speaking English and he Bosnian, but they understood each other very well. The only thing Mevlo could not understand was why the little girl kept repeating ‘Awaw! Awaw!’ But the little girl was only saying her name – Wawa – backwards, which was after all what Beba had done as she passed out. It was one of Beba’s little quirks, that at moments when things started going awry she would pronounce words backwards.
What about us? We keep going. While life finds humps and bumps to stumble on, the tale keeps hurrying and scurrying along.
2.
Mr Shaker, Pupa, Pupa’s grandson, that nepos ex machina! Goodness, how much had happened, and at what breakneck speed! Kukla had not yet managed to take any of it in properly, nor give it due consideration, and, what do you know, here she was dragging a completely strange little girl around after her and having to find some way of entertaining her until Beba came to and was able to get her bearings. And then the news that Beba’s son had died of Aids, that his partner had refused to take over care of the child and that Beba would have to take legal charge of her, because there was no one else to do it… It was all too much, too much even for a very bad novel, thought Kukla. But, then again, things happened, and, besides, life had never claimed to have refined taste. Each of them, Pupa, Beba and Kukla, had her own life, each of them had accumulated baggage on her way and each of them dragged her own burden after her. And now, all that luggage, piled up in one great heap, had collapsed under its own weight – the suitcases had burst at the seams and all their old junk was out in the open.
As soon as Kukla opened the suite door, the child’s gaze was drawn to Pupa’s fur boot, as though to a magnet. The boot had stood there since the hotel staff brought it back from dry cleaning. To start with the little girl just looked at the boot in wonder, then she went cautiously up to it and peered in. Slowly she raised one foot, then the other, and stepped into the boot. At first she stood in the boot, looking all around her, and then she slipped deftly into it and sat down, without letting her puppy out of her embrace.
‘Are you hungry?’ asked Kukla.
The child shook her head.
‘Thirsty?’
‘Umm…’ replied the child non-committally.
‘You’re not thirsty?’
The child shook her head again.
Kukla was a little embarrassed. Looking after small children was evidently not her greatest talent. The child peeped out of the boot, tensely following Kukla’s every move. Kukla sat down wearily on the edge of the bed and gazed at the little girl.
‘What am I going to do with you?’ she asked.
The child raised her shoulders and let them fall.
‘Do you like the boot?’
‘Aha…’
‘My friend used that boot to keep her feet warm,’ said Kukla, because she didn’t know what else to say.
The child stared at Kukla without stirring.
‘Her name was Pupa.’
‘Apup saw eman reh,’ said the child.
Kukla gaped at the little girl: that was not Chinese, for sure. The child watched her blithely, knowing that she had attracted Kukla’s attention.
‘Pupa,’ repeated Kukla.
‘Apup!’ said the little girl.
‘Kukla.’
‘Alkuk,’ said the child.
No, it’s not possible! thought Kukla. The little girl is far too bright for her years, no adult is capable of playing with words like that at such speed. Kukla shuddered. What if reversing words was the symptom of some serious illness?
‘Mum makes lunch, Dad reads the paper,’ said Kukla, knowing that what she was saying was stupid, but it was the first thing that occurred to her.
‘Mumdad makes lunch and reads the paper!’ said the little girl.
‘Who’s Mumdad?’ asked Kukla surprised.
‘Filip,’ said the little girl and drew herself into the boot.
* * *
There was a silence. Again, Kukla did not know what to say.
‘What are you doing in that boot?’ she asked after a while.
The little girl said nothing.
‘Where are you? I can’t see you.’
‘I can see you,’ said the little girl.
‘You’re like a mouse… Like a mouse in a slab of cheese doing just what you please.
’
‘I’m a little girl.’
‘Come on, then, get out of that boot.’
‘I can’t.’
‘What are you doing in there?’
‘I’m flying,’ said the little girl.
‘Floating, more like,’ Kukla corrected her.
‘Flying, more like,’ said the child.
Good heavens, thought Kukla in surprise. She had no experience whatever of children, admittedly, but it seemed to her that little girls of four did not talk quite like this.
‘Hey, come out of there a minute, I want to ask you something.’
‘What?’ asked the little girl, but she did not poke her head out.
‘Do you know what two plus two makes?’
Out of the boot poked the little girl’s hand, showing four fingers.
‘And how old are you?’
The little girl showed four fingers again.
‘What about you?’ came a little voice from the boot.
Kukla stood up, found a piece of paper and a pencil, wrote a large figure 80 on the paper and turned it towards the child.
Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (Myths S.) Page 18
