When they diagnosed her, she carefully researched all she could find about her illness. This was when she discovered the Internet’s brutality. It showed her how much longer, according to the statistics, she had to live. In the end she lived according to the statistical average. Almost within a week of what had been promised. She hoped for a miracle. She considered finally that she had a certain right to one, for she truly existed while all around her was mere image and illusion, but the miracle never arrived, though she would never have recognized it if it had. A miracle is only possible if it is noticed by the person for whom it is intended. Miracles could have whooshed by in flocks beside her. And she was angry with me, for I was supposed to be her miracle maker. I failed her.
I repeat it like a parrot, like a novice repeating the same simple prayer. I repeat this litany. I repeat this melody that sticks in your head from the morning when you first heard it on the radio. I repeat it so in the end it will be gone forever, forgotten.
In the last week of her life, she could no longer hold up a telephone receiver. When I called, someone else’s hand would hold the receiver up to her ear, and she would cry, pronouncing incoherent phrases, as if she’d been awakened in the middle of the night.
The morphine would calm her, but then her consciousness would fight against the heroin daze and she’d want to talk again. Several times in those final days she fussed about my not wanting to give her my new phone number. She would call me, wanting to tell me something, I was her son – at that point she would break into tears again – but she couldn’t call because I’d changed my number.
At the beginning I told her it wasn’t true.
“So what’s the number then?”
“Zero, zero, three, eight, five…,” I would say, listing the digits of my phone number, and she would repeat them after me: “Zero, zero, three, eight, five…,” until she seemed to be falling asleep. With each number she grew more distant, and at the end of the fourteen digits of my mobile number she would have given up on the conversation, only to return to it the next time I called or the next time she wanted them to call me.
This way of giving up was rather in accord with her nature.
That’s why it was comforting.
I believed it was still her, though, speaking reasonably, she wasn’t there. Or not entirely anyway.
On Friday I left for the book fair in Pula. I would work at the fair, presenting books. This is what I said: I was presenting books. I normally wouldn’t have said such a thing to her, it’s no way to speak to anyone, except small children, or when it doesn’t matter what one is saying anymore. When the language I use, for whatever reason, becomes foreign. The next morning my mother wouldn’t remember what I’d said to her anyway. The morphine had wiped her away, shaking her memory like flour through a sieve. Some went through, but some remained behind in the mesh. What stayed behind was no longer good for anything. Such was memory on morphine.
As soon as I had said it, I thought how accurate it really was. I was going to present books. And that was the only thing I wanted to do anymore: write stories, novels, books about what was really happening, having sat down, let’s say, in a train bound for Sarajevo to spend the long hours writing a book about the journey, taking a few pictures, taking notes in the slow moving train with a fountain pen in a notebook purchased just for this, and doing this for my whole life. Presenting books. Presenting them as they are without rectifying or spoiling anything. As a true reader. That was all I wanted to be, and so it was good that I had said this to her.
Too bad my mother would not remember my words.
She would live just another two and a half days.
On Friday we stopped in Vodnjan, about fifteen kilometers from Pula. We had lunch in a restaurant decorated with the dolls of Italians who used to live there. It was good, enjoyable. A simulation of a lost Istrian world. Except that I had to call her beforehand. My friend Ana sat at the table, flipping through a newspaper, the menu, played with her phone, and I went outside to dial her number.
The caretaker answered, a big, solid Christian woman with a kind expression and a soft, reticent way of speaking. I had never met such a considerate person.
She gave the phone to my mother, and we talked.
I walked during the call. I’d been doing this for the last weeks and months, and during the talks with my mother I covered entire city districts, almost getting lost. I walked through Belgrade like this, and Wrocław, and Graz, and now I was walking through a tiny town in Istria, which had been emptied of all its inhabitants at the end of the 1940s. Here too lived other people, just as in Bosowicz.
She answered in a tearful, sleepy voice. She held me responsible for something I didn’t do. Her sentences didn’t make any sense, but the emotion in them was very precise. It’d been this way for eleven months. And maybe for a whole life. I was to blame because I was not interested in her illness and I hadn’t done anything to help her. What could I do? I never asked this question, for it would have sounded as if I were saying there was no help for her. I didn’t want to do that, to suggest that she would die, that her illness was incurable, that it had spread through her insides and would soon swallow her up. I didn’t want to tell her that, for I knew my mother lived on childish hopes. Which perhaps were not so childish. Everyone in the end only needs a miracle, nothing but that. Truly religious people are fortunate because they provide their own miracles. The rest hunt for them in the air, grasping at them with their empty hands, rushing after them with waving arms as if trying to catch a fly that always escapes them. Has anyone ever caught a fly with his bare hands? Yes. And miracles have happened too.
That day she was especially aggressive. I couldn’t cut off the conversation. She would not stop. It went on for some ten minutes, one sentence after another, without any sense, like Hesse’s Glass Bead Game and those endless Led Zeppelin songs. I tried in vain to change the subject, get her onto something else. My mother didn’t give in, said it was my fault, it would be my fault for as long as I lived, because I didn’t go to the pharmacy when I should have, didn’t answer when she called, didn’t give her my new telephone number.
She would die without my solving the mystery of where this fixation had come from. It must have come from somewhere. There must have been some phrase, some little event, or perhaps a thought – before she had taken the first drops of morphine into her being – that had led her to accuse me for days on end of changing my number and not wanting to give it to her. With that, she thought, our contact had been cut off and that it existed only in these moments, amid her daily distraction, when she could do nothing but cry and implore and chastise me as a mother.
And since my mother showed no sign of stopping, the woman caring for her would slowly move the phone away, and I could hear her wailing, blaming me, and her asking the woman why she wouldn’t let a mother talk with her son.
“So, now you know everything…”
“Yes. It’s hard.”
“Yes. Now it’s like that. But don’t worry about her anymore. We’re taking care of her.”
I walked away from the Vodnjanka restaurant, no longer knowing which street I was on, which empty little alley of the town, but before I could figure out which way to go, the phone rang.
Mother.
“Thank you for continuing to call,” she said, her voice sleepy. “It means a lot to me that you keep calling. Thank you.”
I told her to take care, to sleep, and not to thank me. And now I was going to do what I had left to do – present books.
When she got sick, I was writing a picaresque novel about a man lost in time who lives in airplanes and airports. The book’s structure was relatively simple, but I couldn’t continue. I stopped at the moment when the main character, Babukić, is watching the ants that have marched from inside a sandwich to carry away another suspended ant. I stopped, certain that there was nothing more to get from writing, as
long as my mother was alive, as long as she hadn’t died or been healed by some miracle. But things became so terrible with time that it seemed to me even after those final moments there would be no more writing. Or even that there would be no more me. It felt as if my bones were being ground up in a mill that turned rock to gravel. And then, four months before the end, there was a sudden change. Mother started to tell stories, and chapter by chapter I wrote The Stublers.
And now even that seemed as if it wouldn’t continue. I’d managed to write one more chapter, “The Grave in Donji Andrijevci,” when she was on morphine and it was clear she would not go on. I couldn’t take that book any further after my mother had made this sudden turn. Or rather it wasn’t that she had turned into something different, but that she showed me how besides the worlds of the living and dead, there was another world that immediately preceded death. There was dying, which cannot be described in a story because those are feelings and ideas without names.
People don’t always manage to come up with words. Dying is impossible to describe, explain. Witnesses try to calm and console themselves, carry on with life which – because of the dying – had been arrested. They try to forget. And I was trying to forget, so I would write a report about my mother, her life and illness. Every story written stops being real life, moves into fiction and fable, even if it is all recorded from reality. There are no stories that deal with so-called true events. There are only true and untrue stories, actual and invented. Andersen’s “Little Mermaid” and Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales are equally true. This is the way I talk now when I present books.
The next day we were in Pula.
It was Saturday, ten fifteen in the morning. It was cold. Heavy snow was predicted.
We were at the Cvajner Gallery. I’d ordered a coffee and now headed outside to call. I crossed the Roman Forum heading toward the sea.
The phone rang three times before a man responded, saying, “Here we are having some coffee. The snow’s falling. We’re watching the pigeons on the window sill…”
As if there were some child involved.
“Miljenko, Miljenko’s on the phone. Ah, if only you could see how she’s laughing, she’s laughing so happily. Here you are.”
She cried, yelled at me as loudly as she could, as if the morphine wasn’t working at all. It’s over, she shouted, repeating it several times, over, over, over. I said okay, calm down, and she said there was nothing okay about it. It’s over, over, not okay…
The conversation lasted twenty seconds.
On Sunday they told me the funeral would be on Tuesday.
She, my father, and Nano had gone to a very expensive, well-known restaurant in Strasbourg during their 1970 trip. Erwin Dussel had sent them there, saying it was the best place in town and anyone who visited had to go. The Gothic cathedral dedicated to the Mother of God and this particular restaurant. She couldn’t remember its name anymore, but she had remembered it for a long time. “If your father were still alive,” she said, “he’d remember for sure.”
The food was certainly special. She didn’t especially like it, but it was honestly special. The wine was magical. You know I don’t like alcohol, she said. I get drunk from a couple of swallows, but that red wine took your breath away.
And then she had looked up and seen a huge rat calmly making its way across one of the rafters, in this fine Strasbourg restaurant.
“A rat!” she shouted, spilling wine onto her white blouse. She would have to throw it out because that wine was so red and so real that it couldn’t be washed out.
Nano and my father looked up.
Yes, indeed, above their table a large gray rat was walking along.
The waiters did not chase it away. They were used to it.
And in Vienna, when they had just arrived and still had their bags with them and my mother’s hair was filled with lice, Nano had called Erwin from a pay-phone and agreed to meet at a café on Ringstrasse.
Nano got around like it was his home.
He pointed to where the bathroom was for her.
He chose a table by the window where the passing people and carriages were visible.
They looked out at Vienna.
Nano had wanted to meet Erwin Dussel in the same café where they used to get together when he studied here. Fifty years had passed since then, but Nano behaved as if the waiters were the same ones from back then, giving them orders, arranging who would sit where, sure of himself like the regulars in every good pub in the world. They listened to him, followed his instructions, smiling obligingly, ignoring the fact that my mother and father surely looked like a couple of indigent Yugoslav guest workers, and if they happened to say something in German, their German did not differ much from that of a guest worker. The gentleman, however, was simply a regular. Like Nono, Nano spoke fluent German, but whereas Nono had spoken a learned form of High German, such that our neighbor Hans had told him he spoke a lot like the tiresome announcers on the morning programs of German state radio, Nano spoke his paternal Stubler German from the Banat, but wrapped in a Viennese accent and vocabulary, a slightly roguish language from that long-gone time when Vienna, at the beginning of the twenties, had not yet become conscious of the fact that it was no more and that after centuries of glory what remained was the backdrop of a city with a lot of good cafés and hidden whorehouses.
She marveled at his ease in this Viennese café.
She talked about it with wonder forty-two years later, lying ill in bed, although at first glance the only thing of interest in the story was that Nano had felt just as much at home in the old café as ever, even after fifty years, the Anschluss, the Yugoslav occupation, and the Second World War.
And while he could show Javorka where the bathroom was located, which was in the same place as when Jakob Reumann was mayor, Nano was not the same. He was a different man, his movements were quicker and lighter, as if gravity had suddenly become less heavy to him or a heavy burden had been lifted from his shoulders.
She wasn’t conscious of it, but she liked her uncle then in a way that was different from other times. My mother loved Nano. She might have loved him more than her father. But not this Nano, a different Nano, one constantly on the verge of tears. This one’s eyes were alert, seething. He pierced through the café with them, as comfortable as a pilot in a cockpit.
She could have fallen in love with her uncle just then in that Vienna café.
Though there was nothing so offensive and forbidden in the family as incest.
Since as far back as when Nano had fallen in love with his Viennese cousin Dora Dussel.
I don’t know if my mother was conscious of this. She certainly would not have really fallen in love with him, nor would she have acknowledged, God forbid, that she was beginning to have feelings for her own uncle. But still, she never told a story for no reason, without thinking about it. She always had a reason and a point to her stories. The story about Nano’s ease in the café where he had agreed to meet Erwin had some unstated meaning.
Erwin arrived, they hugged and exchanged several harsh Viennese expressions, which sounded like Yiddish to her.
Erwin knew my father.
They greeted each other, the Viennese architect and the Sarajevo doctor, as warmly as might have been expected, or even a little more so.
Erwin didn’t know that Javorka and Dobro were actually divorced. The only thing they had together was their son. And if they were divorced, then why were they traveling together like this, and without their son? None of the distant relations knew that the two of them were no longer together, nor would they for a long time. Nano wanted them to be together and pretended their divorce hadn’t happened, because he loved Dobro. My father impressed him because he was a physician. It was a profession especially prized among the Stublers. The best part of humanity was made up of doctors and engineers, and of course artists: great writers and musicians. Ever
ything else was below that, less important and less reputable. Rail men were, let’s say, far above lawyers in this hierarchy. They were the highest of the second tier, just below doctors and civil engineers, bridge builders, electrical engineers, bassoonists. Karlo Stubler admired bassoonists. An ordinary person, he thought, was incapable of learning to play the bassoon, no matter how musical he might be. Bassoonists were like the stylites, those Byzantine hermits who lived for years on the tops of poles. He was persuasive and succeeded in passing his views on to his children and other members of the household, even the strangest ones, like those comparing bassoonists and pillar saints.
And so doctors were highly respected among the Stublers and in all the Stubler-related households. And so Nano loved my father and pretended to be deaf and dumb in the face of any story about their divorce and any attempt by Javorka to convince him of it. He could not listen and could not allow a doctor, let alone such a fine person, someone capable of playing and losing at cards for hours on end without ever complaining, to leave his home forever or stop being the husband of his niece.
And then Erwin came, and that was where the memory ended.
She only remembered as far as the greetings.
Or she made that part up because the memory was cut off at the point where Nano showed her where the bathroom was. She started toward it, maybe to look at her hair in the mirror, pick out the lice, and throw them into the sink…That part she surely didn’t remember.
Kin Page 28
