Later I often wondered why my mother had brought my father along during those years. If I’d asked her, I know what she would have said: she did it to preserve for me the illusion that I had two parents. This was a sacrifice for her, for she didn’t love him and he was psychologically abusive. This is what she would have said, but I know it’s not exactly true. She would often refer to this kind of sacrifice, but never was she actually ready to engage in it. If she had been, I wouldn’t have been living with my grandmother and grandfather in a cold Drevenik basement until the age of six months. There was something else too, something in the relationship between my mother and father that was never explained to me and I never managed to discover, not even in the last months of her life, when I asked her about all sorts of things and we had long conversations about the Stublers, the Karivans, and the Rejcs, and about her own life as well.
Once near the end she wanted to tell me about what my father had said the first time he saw me in the hospital. She had only managed to say he was completely horrified before I was able to stop her. I told her this wasn’t interesting to me anymore, he was gone, I didn’t need stories about him, for they didn’t serve me in any way, not even literature. I told her I would be writing The Stublers and the subtitle would be A Family Novel. When I saw her for the last time, I gave her the first chapter to read, “Have you Seen Regina Dragnev?” It had been some time since she could hold a book in her hands, but she grasped the papers on which the story was printed easily. She was satisfied and didn’t bring up my father anymore, or say anything else about how horrified he’d been when he first saw me as a newborn baby.
This episode served her as a way of convincing me she was in the right in that marriage without marriage, and that she was the victim. She also wanted to tell me he really didn’t want me. This was something she cared about a lot. She didn’t know how to affirm her love, or she didn’t feel the need to do so, but she wanted to establish beyond a doubt, in these last months, weeks, days, and moments, the clear and powerful difference that existed between her and my relation to him. She wanted me to know which of the two of them was mine, and which was not, even if I no longer cared. The last time such a story might have interested me was probably when I was twelve years old. But normally she repeated the same stories again and again, even when she knew she’d already told them.
I rejected her, and that could have sounded harsh. I told her I was busy with my writing, trying to offend her just as she had offended me, boiling down the reasons for her confessions to the very utilitarian end of some future book of mine. But it didn’t offend her, she couldn’t care less how I used her stories, for to her they were at least then serving the most important purpose in the world, more important than the world itself – while she talked, she had the sensation of being outside her own body, as if she were not ailing but living inside the stories.
“I’m only happy when I’m talking to you. But I don’t have anything more to say,” she uttered, breaking into tears, in that last week before the morphine.
“You do, you do,” I replied, and maybe I slipped in some coarse word so as not to seem different toward her, so she wouldn’t think I’d become tender just because she was dying. I did not acknowledge her death to her.
She used to take my hand as the two of us walked toward Zaostrog or Donja Vala. This would end badly – she’d start to feel nervous, and we’d come back quickly, because she didn’t know how to talk with me. She would answer questions and maybe ask some, but between us there was no real understanding. We talked together as if we’d met by chance. I was three or four years old, and she wanted to talk with me as one does with a three-year-old. This didn’t work because no one had taught me to speak in that way. The only people who had spoken seriously to me, Nono and Nona, had not spoken to me like that, and I didn’t really understand what was expected of me.
She interpreted this as a boycott on my part.
Such a little kid, but he already understood.
And it would play on her conscience because just after, I suspect, she’d think of how her mother Olga had turned me against her. Or how Olga’s sense of guilt was unconsciously being transferred to her.
Whatever it was, the best moments were when my mother appeared suddenly at our door on an afternoon, or evening when the train from Sarajevo was late.
Once she arrived so late that I’d already fallen asleep. She came and kissed me on the cheek. An unusual, beautiful sensation. It had never happened to me before. And it never would again.
When summer came, and the first German tourists with it, we would slowly prepare to go to Sarajevo. Everyone else was heading to the beach, but we were leaving. It didn’t seem fair. We stood with our bags beside the highway waiting for the bus to take us from Makarska. We’d loiter in the comfortably fresh air of the train station waiting room for Sarajevo. Nono would study the train schedule, checking what had changed since the time when he was part of creating it.
Summer in Sarajevo was uncomfortably hot. The Miljacka River stank with sewage. I hated the town with all my heart before we settled there for good, after Nono’s death.
My mother tried to take care of me. My father came by once a week. Every Sunday, during the summer, we’d go to Trebević. We’d take the closest cable car, just up to the pensioners’ home, and later on, when he had purchased some land and begun to build a summerhouse, we’d go by car to Mala Ćelina. In the mountains my mother’s head would begin to hurt as she was accosted by migraines. I’d get sick for a little while on Mondays. I’d have a temperature, which would soon dissipate.
Often during the week we’d visit my mother at work. She worked in Novo Sarajevo, in SDK’s modern new building. We’d travel by tram. There we would sit down for a little while. Her colleague, a rather fat young man named Novica, would give me a piece of paper with an ink pad and stamp so I could play by stamping up the paper. I think Novica was secretly in love with my mother. Or maybe that part wasn’t a secret, but that she’d rejected him. She couldn’t stand the man, though he hadn’t done anything wrong. She also didn’t like the fact that he gave me company paper and an official stamp. She said this wasn’t done, a stamp was a serious thing. Out of deference, so as not to make him feel bad, I stamped on the white paper, but we threw it away each time just in case. God forbid someone might misuse a stamp from the Service of Social Accounting. Such were the times. And such was she.
She had not yet turned thirty, the age she would be when Nono died.
In Sarajevo in those years it had become customary to have pictures taken at funerals. Somewhere among the boxes of documents in the apartment on Sepetarevac Street there are still probably a hundred or so black-and-white, ten-by-six-centimeter photographs from Nono’s funeral, fastened together with a rubber band. I see my mother, her blond hair done up high like the singers in the B-52s, who were very popular at the beginning of the seventies, crying openly before the excavated grave, in which no one has been placed yet. Nona’s standing beside her, in a black coat with a black fox collar and a wide Russian shawl covering her mouth. The air is cold, and this is how she’s protecting her lungs. In winter she would always cover her lips with a shawl. Or with an ordinary kerchief. Here she is standing over the open grave, looking down, shielding herself from the cold, or from others’ recognizing what she’s really feeling. I don’t know what she was feeling. She’s hiding it, as she always did. I don’t know if I learned this from her, or whether it’s simply a matter of human nature, but I do the same. When I appeared at the same excavated gravesite forty years and two months after the picture was taken, at the funeral of the blonde woman crying openly in the black-and-white photo, it was important not to let anything show on my face.
The one who arranged for the pictures was my father, who in the photograph is standing next to my mother supporting her arm, though they long before ceased to be man and wife. Or they never were. Everyone at the funeral knows these two a
re not together, though there has to be a reason – am I the reason? – they’re together at her father’s funeral. The pictures from Nono’s funeral are the most intimate of any of the photographs of my parents together. There are others – one from Pioneer Valley, a zoo in Sarajevo, and another from Drvenik, with the requisite Dalmatian donkey – but they’re not so intimate. Also, in almost all the pictures of them together, or perhaps in all of them, I’m included. But I’m not at Nono’s funeral. They didn’t bring me, believing a child wouldn’t yet understand what death was, and left me alone with Aunt Lola in Drvenik. She took care of me, being careful to supervise how much I ate. She thought I was fat and would never let me eat as much as I wanted. She’d take the plate away at just the moment when things tasted sweetest. When she came back from Sarajevo, Nona said, “Ah, you’ve gone all skinny on me!”
I didn’t dare say anything then, because Aunt Lola was there, but I did later. She wouldn’t let me eat as much as I wanted. She said I was fat. Later everyone found this funny. It left no bad memories. There was nothing bad to remember. We all loved Aunt Lola, and besides, all of us, including Nona, thought she wasn’t really all there.
And why would a person need to be all there?
Both my mother and Nona were disgusted by the fact that my father had ordered photographs of Franjo’s funeral.
“It’s so primitive!” said Nona.
I don’t know what my mother said, but something else bothered her. She was afraid of death and kept it at bay for as long as she possibly could. Three weeks before the end, and two before the morphine drip, she told me with great sadness how the disease had destroyed her physically: “If I pull through, I won’t make it even another ten years!”
This was what she’d said, and I answered that one never knew. And it’d be better for her to stay quiet. This was what I said, always pretending she wasn’t dying. I took part in the grand illusion. It would’ve been easier for me then, and it would be for me now, if I hadn’t. At the heart of this deception – that there was no death, that the illness was not serious, that miracles happened and were reserved just for us – lay the whole horror of her death. It was something I could never recover from and after which I had aged by decades. It was the kind of delusion the parents of dying young children use. They think children don’t know what death is and they lead them toward it as if it were the finale of a Disney film, with good fairies and sorcerers. My mother always believed she would pull through by some miracle. Every kind of suffering was possible, she herself had experienced almost all of them, but there was no death, not for her, there couldn’t be! And although she’d seen off Nono in the same room in which she would die, in a bed with the same window and ledge where pigeons roosted, except that he had a view on Trebević while hers was of the white wall of that new building nearby, she was a child who angrily expected her elders to help her and produce a miracle.
She was angry at me for not delivering that miracle. Or for not immediately getting into my car and setting out from Zagreb with one to hand over to her, for she was suffering and in pain. And I lied to her and chattered away, exactly as children do.
I don’t remember when I last saw the pictures from Nono’s funeral. It was surely after the war. I leafed through them quickly and uncomfortably, as if I were looking at pornographic shots of people I knew in all the poses of the Kamasutra, and then I put them away in the package and wrapped the rubber band around it.
Why hadn’t the two of them thrown the pictures away if they hated them so much?
There was a very simple reason: one doesn’t throw out things that someone paid a lot of money for. This is the worst aspect of our Balkan frugality. One does not throw away anything that might still be worth something or that is not obviously trash. Actually the pictures could not have been sold, no one would have bought them, and today few people who might see them would even know what is in them, who is being buried.
And my father? He didn’t think about it. He paid for something that had been offered. He wanted to be gallant. I don’t believe he took any of the photos for himself, even though they were the most authentic pictures of his marriage with my mother.
Nono’s death was not prolonged. Nor did he suffocate. Among some heart patients, death is easy to predict, to the week, the day. In the course of August it was clear he was near the end. But my father fought, believing he could do something, even as Nono’s legs bulged, the water making its way to his lungs and heart, which had grown so weak that my father did not know how to describe it.
“This is what his poor heart was like!” he said, crumpling his handkerchief and tossing it onto the table.
Nono’s heart was transformed into a snotty crumpled-up handkerchief. I kept my eyes straight ahead, hoping no one would notice my presence. Forty years later, it’s just a metaphor. A frame from a family film.
In September I started school, and my father decided Nona and I should go back to Drvenik on our own, where I would be enrolled in first grade, while he would try to treat Nono at the hospital and boarding facility of the pensioners’ home on Trebević. The fresh mountain air would do him good. He hoped for a miracle.
The last photo taken of Nono was on the terrace in front of the pensioners’ home, with Nona, my mother, and his grandson Dragan. My father took it.
He looks calm, his illness invisible. Under the blanket one can see his white shirt and tie. He’s looking somewhere to one side of the lens, posing.
Javorka had loved her father more than her mother. Nono’s death shook her, and she would often repeat what he had said to her at the very end: “There are thieves all around and just the two of us are left!”
His middle and index fingers, which hung from the bedside, were curved and pressed together as if there was a cigarette between them. He didn’t say anything else after that. He didn’t answer when she called him. He was sleeping, unconscious, but he continued to hold the invisible cigarette between his middle and index fingers.
He smoked despite the asthma until just a little before his death. After he was buried, Nona put out her last butt, having completed fifty years of smoking. Javorka stopped after her second operation, when she was left with just four months to live.
I completed the first grade in Donja Vala after Nono’s death, but then we returned to Sarajevo. I should say returned forever. The time that extends from after what would be my eventual departure from Sarajevo during the war is somehow different, not countable as part of what preceded, and beginning somehow after that demarcated forever.
My mother and I lived together from the moment I turned seven on. Our coming to know one another would last a long time, until Nona’s death on June 6, 1986, and onward to my wartime move to Zagreb, her own illness and death. I’m not sure I knew her through and through, or that she didn’t deceive me about anything. She was an unusual and unhappy woman. There is no one else whose unhappiness I can attest to with such certainty. My mother was as unhappy as Varlam Shalamov and long tried to change this. But all sorts of things got in her way.
Today I can say calmly: I too was in her way. Perhaps me most of all.
I don’t remember the first time I asked her whether I was wanted as a child.
She answered readily, saying I was and that there was nothing she’d wanted more than to give birth to me. And she was convinced she wasn’t lying. Later she told me, quite rationally, that abortions had existed then too and if she hadn’t wanted me she would have got rid of me. I discovered later that after my birth, in 1968, at a clinic on Skerlićeva Street, she had aborted my brother or sister. And with whom had she got pregnant? My father.
I didn’t ask her why this happened, when they hadn’t been together for years. I knew she wouldn’t answer the question, or she’d lie, say something self-pitying, but either way I knew I wouldn’t learn the truth. But the truth didn’t matter that much to me – I’d lost the chance to have someone else of my
own. Her abortion in the fall of 1968 – which meant the child was probably conceived during the summer, while we were still all in Sarajevo – was proof that I was, after all, the son she wanted.
Or was it that she’d been so disappointed in me that she didn’t want another?
Did I disappoint her?
Probably. Even though I had only been speaking for a short time and couldn’t yet pronounces my r’s and l’s, I could barely make myself understood with her, because she didn’t know the language I spoke with Nona and Nono. She didn’t know her own son, and it was as if she couldn’t come to know him, for he had learned speech and all the other most important things in life from his grandmother and grandfather. Did she think she wasn’t capable of being a mother? It’s entirely possible, though she would never have confessed it to anyone. And perhaps it was then that she came to realize I was a fatal burden to her, one which would ruin any chance she might have of being happy.
“Who would want a woman with a child?”
These self-pitying words, more confirmation than question, I heard from her more than once. True, it was always in jest, sitting with her friends at coffee, on a union outing with colleagues from work, and it was always followed by a quick laugh, as if someone had made a tape recording of a laugh and was playing it back.
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