This was how he would put her out of sorts, she would seethe as we looked at the animals. He did this on purpose, to put the blame on her. Or he was just abusive to her in that way.
On one such occasion, during a trip to Kladanj, when he had offended her by some sort of allusion to our future life together, I scribbled down a poem:
The Incident
Late fall somewhere in Bosnia
A pool with a diving board
My mother standing on it
Looking in
Father and I beside the pool
Is she going to jump, I ask?
This was the first text about my mother that I thought could hurt her. She didn’t respond. She liked the poem, as if she didn’t notice the cruelty.
Or maybe she’d read it differently.
My mother would humiliate my father by poking at certain painful spots. My father, for instance, didn’t know how to swim. He was an adult by the time he saw the sea for the first time, and as a child he was strictly forbidden to go with his peers to the banks of the Miljacka. He was filled with a sort of internal shame that prevented him from admitting before others that he didn’t know how to dance, ride a bicycle, swim, or speak German well, so there was no way for him to learn how to swim when he got older. Or dance. This awkward trait – or rather this complex, as they’d put it in Sarajevo – I’ve inherited from my father.
Maybe my mother climbed up on the diving board to show him she could jump in and nothing terrible would happen because she knew how to swim. To torment him.
As always, everything came down to stories, many of them, which would recur in regular succession and, in later years, become a series of verbal ceremonies, mantras, and litanies that were repeated in such a way that it wasn’t possible to have a serious conversation – only the illusion of communication was retained. My mother no longer knew how to communicate with me or simply couldn’t because I was the only one who could see both sides of her world: the inside and the outside. In her final days her conversations with others were completely disconnected from reality. Everything was invented by that time – just as the reasons for collecting her recipes had been invented. And she could dream about her everyday existence according to the measure of an invented life. I rejected all this vehemently. I did so gruffly. I have no excuse for this. I would have been better able to live with her, and with myself as well, if I had managed to embrace her way of understanding.
She was an attractive girl, with sad eyes.
Blonde.
Recognizing that my parents were divorced to me was exactly like recognizing that the sky was blue, the sea was salty, and Mount Biokovo was full of rocks. I grew up with it and didn’t know anything else. My mother was a free woman and would sometimes have boyfriends. She wouldn’t call them that, and she wouldn’t call them dates or lovers, but rather Veljko, Enver, Firuz…That was what they were called.
The first of them, Veljko, was a sailor from a town on the interior of Dalmatia about thirty kilometers from Drvenik. Once long before they had been together. When exactly I didn’t know, but at the time Veljko had been working as an engineer. After they split up, he married a woman he didn’t love, had two children with her, and went off to sea. Some people get separated, others become sailors.
This was the way my mother talked about Veljko. I don’t know whether this was her romantic sense of life or it was really like that. I was five when I first met Veljko. It was in early fall, a little after our return from Sarajevo, when my mother had come for a weekend in Drvenik.
“Veljko’s coming!” she said.
Nona was silent. Nono wasn’t there.
Veljko didn’t come into the house but just stopped for a moment to pick us up. His car was in the middle of the street, so we had to hurry.
A handsome man, a year or two older than her, with a gentle appearance. He drove us to Tučepi, we sat in a local restaurant, and looked at the sea. He put a paper sack in front of us full of grapes from his vineyard.
I took the small grapes and the firmer large ones but avoided the wrinkled ones.
“But those are the sweetest!” he said.
This was one of the things adults said, the sort of thing you hear until you’re an adult. There are people later, too, who will tell you something is good that looks bad, but then you don’t have to care. Nobody can force on you the ugly, dried-out grapes if you also have the big plump ones to choose from.
It was just so they didn’t get wasted. That was why he was saying that. Just so they didn’t get wasted, not because a dried-out grape was better than a fresh one.
And I thought he was going to try to convince me and was ready to eat the dried-up ones too, just so he wouldn’t keep bothering me.
But Veljko didn’t do that. If you like those better, just eat those, and I’ll eat the other ones. Then he left me alone.
It was years later when I first tasted grapes dried on the vine. I remembered Veljko. And later in life, whenever I bit into one of those sugary, sun-dried black grapes, sweet like full-bodied prosecco, I couldn’t help but think of the man.
I only saw him once. He was still in contact with her afterward, and maybe they saw each other, but then he disappeared forever. She didn’t know where he was, on which sea, or if he was still alive. She often said he was unhappy in his marriage, in such a way it was as if his unhappiness made her happy. As if this confirmed her and Veljko’s eternal love.
I thought she could be happy, and everyone around us would be happy if Javorka and Veljko had become man and wife, if he had not married a woman he didn’t love. This was the great missed opportunity I lamented, imagining what her life and everything around us would be like if things had been different.
But in that case I wouldn’t be here.
And all of a sudden I asked myself which was more important: me or the general happiness? Of course there was only one indisputable answer even for a five-year-old. Never in my worst moments of childhood or adulthood was I ever attracted to suicide, or, for that matter, nonexistence. But this was the first time it had ever occurred to me that I was the opposite of happiness. That I meant unhappiness for my mother and maybe for the rest of them too.
A childish thought, harmless, noted in textbooks on children’s psychology as something quite ordinary, something that leaves no lasting consequence, and about which no one should worry. But the memory stayed with me, as did the impression that my mother and I had split up right then. That a rift had opened up between us that would last a lifetime, which would widen through other memories and events, and at some point I would come to see her as a foreigner. Everyone closest to me was dead, lying in their graves.
She was never as close to me as when she’d passed into the grave and was covered up with earth.
In the middle of May 2012, in the days leading up to her seventieth birthday, which were characterized by daily psychological breakdowns, when she still had the physical and mental strength, and her rage was such that it seemed the Golden Valley was opening beneath her feet, I had a dream at the end of one of the most horrible days – over the course of which I’d had ten accusatory phone conversations with her – one of the most unusual dreams I’ve ever had and one that’s quite difficult to paraphrase because nothing really happened in it.
I dreamed of a fine, carefully excavated grave, deep and light, in Sarajevo’s Bare Cemetery.
At the bottom of the grave grew fine, neatly tended clover. Like in a picture book.
I ran my palm across the clover.
The dream, it seemed to me, lasted a long time.
And nothing happened.
Except for the fact that this was a grave.
Light and deep.
And that I ran my palm across the clover.
Growing at the bottom of the grave.
* * *
—
&n
bsp; Enver was ten years her junior, an Albanian from Kosovo. An accountant. Firuz was a friend from school, a professor of mathematics, an eccentric person. They broke up quickly. Zdenko was from Knin and lived in Zagreb. They were together for a long time. He’d visit us in Sarajevo. They met on a train during a trip to some sort of economics symposium. She dozed off, and her head slipped onto his shoulder. She broke up with him just before my military service, and after that there was no one else.
When she broke up with Zdenko she was forty-three. She was never with another man, and she lived another thirty-seven years, healthy almost until the end. Three years before her death she was still going to work every day, socializing with her friends.
What did my mother hope for? What did she expect from life?
The last trip she’d made to the coast was during a summer outing in 1981. After that, right up until the war, every year she would plan a trip and then, for whatever reason, not go. After the war, taking a summer trip never even occurred to her again. While her workmates would be saving for those seven days’ worth of Dalmatia, that Sarajevo vacation tradition of which this part of the world was never able to deprive itself, or of going off to the summerhouse they had built long before, driving out post-war squatters by means of the courts, or taking an island cruise in a small wooden sailboat – in Sarajevo after the war sailing was all the rage – she would spend her vacation time at home on Sepetarevac. She would lie on the couch in the living room, dozing, reading novels and self-help manuals, and after her doctors said she might have problems with her back when she got older she would walk to Goat’s Bridge and all the way to the border with Republika Srpska, where at a good café she would sit down for a coffee and talk with people. These walks, which in her later years became habitual, were an entertaining exception to her sedentary life. She found joy in walking. The next day she would call me to tell me about it.
But she couldn’t travel.
Or didn’t want to.
Over the course of the twenty years I lived in Zagreb, she visited me just once. She wanted to come, and she came. She spent five days there and was difficult the whole time. She needed to be looked after every instant. She suffered from migraines. She behaved strangely toward people she’d never met, made me feel ashamed. This was how I experienced it.
That was in 2000, I think. After that I did my best to discourage her from visiting.
Once in a while she would take a very short trip to Zenica or Kakanj to see relatives or for the funeral of one of the last of the miners, smiths, drunks, and their wives. She would come home in the evening, only occasionally staying overnight with one of them. Zenica and Kakanj were the places of her childhood, along with Ilidža, where the Stubler home had long stood, and Dubrovnik, where Aunt Lola had moved, and from which she had drawn a bit of her family heritage and identity. These two industrial towns in Central Bosnia – hopeless ecological time bombs in which, since the arrival of the Austro-Hungarians, the native-born and kuferaš proletariat had worked and died – were my mother’s adopted homelands. By contrast to Sarajevo, nothing bad ever happened to her there.
On one occasion she went to Neum for a seminar on decentralized bookkeeping. Another time she went to Mostar, and a third to Međugorje. These were more like union outings than actual travel. Accountants from all across Bosnia and Herzegovina, from both parts of the country, would gather for two to three days in the frigid conference halls of socialist hotels to listen to presentations by foreign finance specialists who organized all this – it seems to me – in the context of the international project of reconciling the estranged Bosnian-Herzegovinian peoples, all under the guise of presentations regarding new tax laws and the use of new computer systems in the field of accounting. And then they probably all marveled at the living miracle of how well these people got along, how they all loved each other.
Two years before her death, she was going to Hungary on a company bus that was to take her back to Sarajevo by way of Zagreb. She would have had to spend one night in Zagreb. I was relieved when for some reason the trip fell through. I didn’t want her to come, didn’t want to see her in my protected space, bring her into my home, show her the bed where I slept, while she examined everything without interest, looking around for a place to lie down and repeat the same stories I’d heard so many times before – even though today I look on all this with a certain regret.
My mother grew up on Yugoslav National Army Street, which extended from Baščaršijia and Ćurčiluk all the way to the new city prison, the Hotel Istria, and the very heart of Austro-Hungarian Sarajevo. Her childhood would stretch from the theater to the First Gymnasium, and from Obala Kulina Bana to Marshal Tito Street. Her Sarajevo was a city where retired Austro-Hungarian officials and elders remembered the time when the Ottomans still strolled the streets. In every entryway lived families that communicated exclusively in German at their Sunday dinners, and who had accumulated misfortunes from a variety of wars. In that Sarajevo there were still displaced persons from the war who had not yet moved on – they were waiting for their moment, for when the conditions might change and the truck would come to take them to Rijeka, Zagreb, or still farther, to Vienna. The truck eventually came while the little girl in her shabby frocks rushed to school, where she was a straight-A student, valedictorian, a paragon for the lowlifes in the back row, who would, each in turn, do better in life than she.
In the early spring, Nona noticed little black dots in the white of her daughter’s scalp. Lice, those vermin of the early, poverty-stricken years of socialism, made their attack on the children of postwar Sarajevo every spring, giving rise to clear, legally prescribed procedures in the battle against them. The classrooms were sprayed with DDT, the most celebrated insecticide in our history, which arrived along with American humanitarian aid and so-called Truman’s eggs, and which decades later would be discovered to be poisonous to people, not just vermin. But DDT was scarce and often it wasn’t possible to wait for all the signatures, verifications, and stamps needed before it could be applied, so the lice were exterminated in various other ways, according to old folk recipes, mostly with kerosene. (Petroleum derivatives for practical applications first came to Bosnia in the fight against lice, and for a long time were not used for anything else. Kerosene lamps came later.)
The procedure against lice used in schools was very strict: complete shaving. This was true for boys – in not a single prewar photograph do her older brothers have any hair – and, in the poorest of times and most depressed of regions, it was no different for girls.
She was deathly afraid of this.
And this was the one place she found an ally in her mother.
Nona would take care of everything, sending Nono off for some very expensive shampoo and cream that he would order at a certain pharmacy on Zrinjevac Square in Zagreb, asking the morning train conductors to purchase them on his behalf and then deliver them when they returned.
The kerosene would make sores on her sensitive skin, so the choice was between shaving or expensive products from Zagreb.
In Vienna lived two brothers, Erwin and Erich Dussel – who require their own story – who are Stubler relations, descended from a common grandmother, Josefina Patat. Though they were not closely related to us, these two men and their sister Dora (with whom Nano was in love, despite their being cousins, and with whom he’d had an affair in Vienna in the wild 1920s) were very dear. So dear that in 1970 Nano, Javorka, and my father Dobroslav spent an entire week at Erwin’s, while he showed them around Vienna.
My mother boasted to everyone about how Erwin had purchased the best anti-lice medicine at the pharmacy. One little ampoule, smaller than an ampoule, of penicillin, like a little morphine drip bottle, whose top you removed before drizzling it over your hair. The lice fall out dead and are gone!
Who knew how much Erwin had paid for one of those little ampoules, she told everyone, boasting.
Those were t
he last lice she ever had, picked up from the headrest in the first-class guest workers’ train on the Ploče-Vienna line.
She brought back an album of photographs taken mostly by my father from that trip. The little black-and-white pictures survived times that were disinclined to family memorabilia, when everything was being transformed into garbage that needed to be tossed out of the house, and when many things more valuable than pictures from tourist sites were lost in the chaos that emerged during those moments of the family’s withering away – which resembled Marx’s withering away of the state, for it reduced a person to his or her own fate.
Like the photos from Nono’s funeral, these are of a small format, taken by an amateur who, it’s clear, did not know how to use a camera very well. Probably he purchased it just before the trip, never discovered how to use the zoom function, and barely knew how to adjust the aperture. Nearly all his pictures are taken in some sort of general landscape mode, so that only somewhere in the depth of the frame is it possible to make out the tiny figures of people: Nano’s bald head is barely recognizable, or my mother in her bright Chanel outfit, her skirt cut above the knee.
In some shots there are no people at all. My father was amazed by the Prater amusement park. He had to get really far away to be able to take a shot of the whole Ferris wheel. And the loop along which the two-person cars came rushing upside down while people’s veins flared up with amusement-park adrenaline. But nothing of that is visible in the little photos, only metal machines that resemble construction cranes captured in the eternal black-and-white twilight of a dilettante’s photographs.
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