One night forty years later, when I had returned from a short stay in Sarajevo, she waited up just to tell me on the phone that her heart had been torn to pieces back then when I would cry the moment I saw her, when I looked only for Nona and reached out my hand always to her.
I answered that as far as I knew six-month-olds still couldn’t properly see, so I couldn’t very well have looked for Nona.
“But you did!” she exclaimed, “whether with your eyes or in some other way.”
I didn’t even for a minute feel the slightest pang of guilt.
I was seven months old when Nono and Nona took me to Drvenik. It was the end of November 1966, Sarajevo had become plagued by smog, and Nono had begun to suffocate. For years he had suffered from cardiac asthma, waking up at all hours of the night in fits of coughing, unable to breathe or seemingly find air anywhere. His was a frightening illness, filled with a fear that, in the six years we were together as grandfather and grandson, was passed down to me. He taught me about fear, about living with fear, his fear, and that there is no greater gift in life than a strong breathful of pure night air.
His cardiac asthma was the result of a weak heart, which could have been inherited or could have been acquired over time. This wasn’t something that was being studied in the sixties, and even if it was, it would have been hard to trace in retrospect the life course of Franjo’s heart: whether it was Mladen’s death, or all the wartime fears he’d experienced, or messing around with the Slovenian anti-fascist T.I.G.R., or his famous tendency to run his mouth, which had impelled him to speak out against Hitler and Pavelić and afterward almost die from fear that someone might inform on him, or in the war years on that bloodiest of fronts, at the Piave River, where he was saved by being captured by the Italians, or back to his poor, disorderly Bosnian childhood, with a violent drunk of a father responsible for the untimely deaths of both Franjo’s sisters, one who killed herself, the other who wasted away – God knew how exhausted his heart was, such that it could no longer pump blood with enough vigor, the left ventricle unable to squeeze out the blood from his pulmonary veins. Nono suffocated gradually every night.
My father treated him with careful attention. The one thing my mother always acknowledged about her husband was his care for his patients, one of whom happened to be her father. They got along well, the two of them, even if their roles were unequal. While the doctor held the authority over his patient, they were both the weaker sides in their respective marriages. My father defended himself against my mother’s accusations, ran away and hid from any obligation, and was, as the women of the time would have said, a typical weakling. Nono was incapable of convincing Nona to let Mladen ignore his draft notice and to find connections they certainly could have found that would have allowed him to run away into the woods; nor was he able to convince her to let Mladen desert afterward and, even if through some sort of crazy plan, escape to the British through Dubrovnik. He had been weak, and for that his son had died. If he had been strong, he would have been the one to make the decision, not his wife. Because of this weakness before her, when he’d lost his nerve completely, he was known to reprimand his wife for having sent their son to his doom. This didn’t serve to truly unburden his conscience, but it certainly did leave her isolated in the world with her own conscience in the face of Mladen’s death.
And so, my father and my mother’s father understood each other well. This was why they played preferans together. Nono went a little easy on my father because otherwise the game would not have been interesting, given that he was practically unbeatable. He could only play seriously, without letting up, with three or four older men, Jews and Germans, retirees from the railroad management office. They were joined by his best friend, Matija Sokolovski, but he was such a weak player that even an amateur like my father could beat him sometimes.
My perspective was different from my mother’s. I was captivated by the narrative, and I could narrate the story of Nono’s card playing, even in the same room, very softly and looking on from one side, when I was three, four, and five years old. I remember everything. At first I remember rooting for Nono, without saying a word because otherwise they would have made me leave. He felt this, it seemed to me, and tried harder to remember the numbers of cards played, calculating until in the end he knew without looking which cards were in the others’ hands, and he always won when I was there. They said I was his good luck charm, in their cardplayer jargon, and with me around he could become preferans champion of the world. The truth was that there wasn’t any luck in it at all. It was just his way of using his sharp mind to compensate for all his losses and defects of character.
His preferans didn’t interest my mother in the least. Her father, by contrast to her mother, wasn’t cold to her, he didn’t drive her away from him. But when he played, she didn’t matter to him, and he wouldn’t speak with her. He would talk with me though. This might also have offended her. She could have been jealous. She forbade him to teach me preferans. No child of mine is going to be a layabout, she told him. Preferans is no game for layabouts, he laughed. Layabouts wouldn’t have the intelligence or the patience for it. But she didn’t listen to him. I cried and begged him to teach me then, though I was still too little.
If he had lived, Nono would have taught me to play preferans, of that I’m sure. Even though I don’t have a gift for mathematics, and maybe not even the practical intelligence for the game with its combinations of sums, I would have tried hard not to disappoint him.
That first winter in Drvenik I spent in a stone Dalmatian house heated by a single gas stove. They say little children should always be kept warm, but I certainly wasn’t at the time. The Drvenik winters of those years were cold, snowy, with a stiff northern wind, but this did no harm to me. Just as I wasn’t harmed by the difficult relationship between my grandparents, which perhaps was not quite as difficult after I came on the scene. Like a peacemaker, a gift from God for all the years of suffering and guilt they endured because of Mladen’s death (though, since neither of them believed in God, this last sentimental assertion misses the mark, or else I’m compensating for some inadequacy of my own and in this way resemble my mother…).
My mother came to visit us every other weekend. She traveled by train to Ploče, then by bus. In 1966 was the first season of operation for the normal-gauge track from Sarajevo to Ploče. The year before the engine had traveled along a narrow-gauge track, and the trip took some twelve hours. Now the train got her to Ploče in three and a half. Then another half hour by bus to Drvenik.
This was how she was able to watch me grow. In obvious spurts, for a child is visibly bigger two weeks later. I would go back to Sarajevo at the beginning of the following June, several days after my first birthday. Three weeks before that I’d taken my first steps. I remember this. Or I remember the memory of my remembering that I remembered my uplifted arms, which were being supported by our Drvenik neighbor, Aunt Mirjana, a woman from Belgrade who spent several months a year with her husband, Mr. Momčilo, at their vacation house, which they had built just next to the house we were living in.
This woman was important in my earliest childhood: after all, she taught me to walk.
I don’t know what happened to her, or whether she’s still alive. If she is, Aunt Mirjana would be ninety years old. She too, like my wet nurse, I lost for good somewhere along the way.
Above the bed in the room where I slept with Nona – Nono slept in the basement, where he could cough, gripe, and worry in peace – hung a small, framed reproduction of the Girl with a Pearl Earring. I hadn’t yet been able to talk when I started pointing at her, saying, “Mama, Mama, Mama…”
For some reason the woman from Vermeer’s famous painting reminded me of my mother, she felt more accurately pictured in this painting than in any photograph. And she looked out at me from the wall just as the Mother of God looked out on a devout Christian.
Nona was touched. Fifte
en years later she would be telling this story with the same strong emotion, and as she told it she would suddenly feel love for her child, because her child had given birth to me, who saw his mother in a Vermeer picture, and there was no way to convince me that it was not her.
I don’t remember this, but Nona said the first time I recognized my mother in the picture, she brought a photo of Javorka, pointed to it, and said, “See, here’s Mama!”
I didn’t contest it. That was indeed Mama – that is, until I lifted my head and saw a better picture of her.
My mother was then twenty-five years old. Only her pale complexion and gray-blue eyes resembled the women in the Vermeer painting, but to me it was her. Even when I was a little older, maybe three or four, it was still my mother. Later, even as a grown man, I would continue to find similarities between Javorka in her youthful photos, where she looks just the same to me as she had in those winters when she would come to see me every other weekend, and Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. That was exactly how she looked when she would appear at our Drvenik house, opening the door at the base of which a folded sheet had been tucked to prevent the wind and snow from entering.
Those winter weekends when Javorka would come from Sarajevo were peaceful and harmonious. There were no fights, harsh words, or reproaches for anyone having done anything to anyone else. My mother would flutter in, on a wind from the north or south, as light as Vermeer’s young girl. Sometimes the train took a while to clear the snowdrifts. Once she was so late that the last bus from Ploče for Makarska had already left and she had to spend the night all by herself in the overheated station waiting room. Another time a guy from Tuzla who was on his way to Split gave her a ride. She met him at the tobacco store at the Ploče station, where he was buying cigarettes and she was waiting for a bus that refused to come. He felt sorry for the young girl, already a mother, on her way to visit her son – she knew how to describe her predicament without the self-pity that would surface later on – and he must have liked her. He drove her to our house. I was then three years old and hugged her legs, in my bare feet on the kitchen floor, though it was February, and the man stayed – at Nono’s invitation – to have some coffee at least. Did he want a drink? Just one, since he was driving, you know. And then he went back on his way to Split and we never learned anything else about him. Not his name, not who he was going to see, not even what sort of a car he was driving.
When I went to visit her in the summer of 2012 – at the time our story about the Stublers and her youth had not yet begun to be written – I asked her what she’d talked about with that guy from Tuzla during the half-hour drive from Ploče to Drvenik, back in February 1970. At first she couldn’t remember the man – what guy from Tuzla, there wasn’t ever any guy from Tuzla! – but then I reminded her of how she’d been standing by the news kiosk because there wasn’t any bus, holding a big rubber rabbit under her arm because she couldn’t fit it inside her bag, and of how her string bag had got torn, and then she remembered the guy from Tuzla.
“Good Lord, bless you, you remember absolutely everything!”
I didn’t tell her then – just as I never said another ugly word to her after I left Sarajevo late in the spring of 1993, after which I never moved back and only by some errant miracle found her alive in the midst of all those mortar shells and snipers – that fortunately I don’t remember everything. And I hope I’ll forget 2012, which flowed through me with her dying, with the torment in my conscience that I wasn’t helping her, and with the lie that somehow I could and everything would be okay. For there really was no way for me to help her. I knew it was easier for her to grab me around the neck and pull me toward the water, drowning me along with her, I knew it was easier for her to latch onto my heels suddenly and pull me backward into the grave, for she did not want to be there alone and couldn’t stand the idea that someone – except that drunk doctor whom we couldn’t do anything to – should not be held at fault for her illness, and that no one could do anything, not without a miracle, to stop her from disappearing. It was easier for her to pull me down with her, drown and kill me, for in her relation to me, her grown son, and now a respected author, she was the child. It had been like this earlier, but in her illness she’d become ever more childlike, dying as very intelligent children die, those not turned into angels by their illnesses – this happens only in the novels of Thomas Mann – but instead grow embittered at the world they are in the process of leaving behind.
I couldn’t tell her, but now I say it, without hoping she might ever hear me from beyond the grave, that during the year 2012, in the midst of her illness and our endless phone conversations, I understood how important the blessing of forgetfulness was in life. Until then I’d thought, stupidly and arrogantly, that – since life was really just crossing a field – a man would be happiest if he never forgot a thing. When he remembered every beautiful and ugly moment in life, every circumstance, sensation, and experience, from birth to distant death, then life would stretch across thousands of subjective years and truly be eternal. Her seventy years, if she did not forget anything, would be an eternity entire. This is what I thought, and then, in her company, as she died, I began to understand that this was hell. Not to forget anything, to keep all of it in mind, this was really hell. A person could only be calm and content by keeping this in mind, by eschewing such thorough remembering. It wasn’t the same as when memory was formed into some sort of literary fiction, something that could be truer than fact, more transcendent than memory, something that wasn’t etched so painfully into the living flesh as memory was.
What was she doing from Monday to Friday during those first two years of my life, before going to work for the Service of Social Accounting in 1968? I asked her, but she didn’t answer. I repeated my question a few more times, and then again in the fall of 2012, when we were on the phone together.
“Why are you asking me this?” she asked angrily.
It was during those weeks that she’d stopped being able to go to the bathroom on her own. One woman cared for her during the day, another at night. (I’m not going to tell stories about them: in this report on Javorka’s life and her final year they will remain only shadows. They are alive, and they have a right to their own lives outside literature. If I do say anything about them, it will be merely a notch and a bridge to her life. Their strong women’s armpits, the forearms she gripped desperately while taking those seven or eight steps between her bed and the toilet…) She would soon lose her remaining strength, but still she believed she would recover. And I supported her in that belief, reinforcing her childish illusions and dreams, and trying – quite selfishly – to make my stays in Sarajevo as short as possible, beside her there, on her way to the toilet and back.
But despite her deterioration my mother’s voice remained clear and strong for a long time, up until a few days before the end. Her voice had hardly changed from the days when she’d come visit me every other weekend under the Vermeer painting. I can’t remember her voice now. I can barely call to mind its high pitch, the fact that it was always a little too loud, on the cusp of crazed laughter, or the beautiful soprano somewhere within it from which, in the seventies, she sang while washing our clothes in the bathtub. The songs I remember from those occasions are “Bethlehem Is Not Far,” “Terezinka,” “In the Hills,” “Far Away,” and “U tem Somboru.” I remember so much, but my mother’s voice is gone, it has disappeared, for the human voice is the first thing we forget. I thought about this as two skilled grave diggers used ropes to lower her into a grave dug in the grayish-yellow Sarajevo clay. It seemed to me then that her voice still lingered in my ear, but it occurred to me it would soon be gone.
“Why are you asking me this?” she snapped angrily, when I’d asked what she’d been doing during those first two winters of my life, in Sarajevo, in our apartment above the Temple, or wherever it was she’d been when she wasn’t with me. If she’d only known how to tell me what she really
wanted to keep to herself, she might have tried to sound less angry.
I’d started walking very early, and after that no one ever carried me again. The baby carriage disappeared from the Drvenik house, given away to locals who were just then having children. From then on I walked where they did, treading beside Nona and Nono, holding their hands. Before long we were walking to Zaostrog or Donja Vala, neighboring towns some three or four kilometers away. Because of his asthma Nono couldn’t pick me up, and while Nona was strong enough to do so, she didn’t, for some unstated reasons of her own. When our relatives would come from Kakanj and Zenica, or when Uncle Dragan and Aunt Viola came from Russia, where they were living then, they would lift me up into the air, carry me around the basement or around the courtyard in front of the house. I remember the sensation very clearly: it’s nice to be in the air, but after a while it starts to feel unnatural, you want down, you don’t understand why they’re doing this, what you didn’t ask them to do in the first place…
I don’t remember my mother ever carrying me.
She probably did, but I don’t remember it. Every two or three months, once or twice in the course of our winter stays in Drvenik, she’d come with my father. They weren’t living together, and I had always known they were somehow separated, but they’d come together and sleep in the same bed. He would toss me into the air but also hug me so tight I couldn’t breathe, his face, unshaven, rough as emery board, chafing against mine. It was a pleasant feeling, even if there was something exaggerated in his embraces.
My mother and father behaved toward me the way adults do toward a child. Nono and Nona talked with me like an adult. This wasn’t the result of a position they had taken, it just happened that way. I wasn’t their child, nor did they always want me around, so they didn’t think beforehand about how they would treat me and everything unfolded almost arbitrarily, unselfconsciously. I wasn’t long with Nona and Nono – he would die by the fall of 1972 – but my stay with them brought peace, a pause in the mutual, spoken and unspoken dissent, which lasted to the end. Although his asthma tormented him constantly, despite the fear of not being able to breathe in the next moment, and although he spent the nights pacing the basement or, if the weather was nice, the courtyard – because he’d begin to suffocate the moment he lay down – those six years when we were grandfather and grandson were calming and beautiful for him, and for her too. I fit between them as something completely new, as someone who was their own but unconnected to their misfortunes. But was this really the case?
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