by Di Morrissey
He looked almost shy, his voice was hesitant, but his sincerity and passion made it impossible for Nina to refuse. She shivered, a tremor of nerves and anticipation, as a long-built wall around the core of her heart dissolved into nothingness.
With their bags in Lucien’s car, they drove south to Nuit St Georges, a famous winemaking village. It could have been the moon. But they would never forget what they ate, the name of the little restaurant, the name of the small pensione they checked into.
They strolled around the village shops and, finally, after a romantic dinner – where they tried to make sensible conversation but kept breaking into smiles – reaching for each other’s hands, they slipped between crisp cotton sheets, two naked bodies, too many years apart, that melded together as the one they should have always been.
In the dawn light they woke and stared, smiling into each other’s eyes.
‘Happy?’ Nina nodded and stretched and then studied Lucien who looked, felt and smelled of the same sweet musky odour she’d always remembered. Looking at his silver hair, the softening jawline, she saw only the virile handsome young man of her youth – her first lover, the man she had once imagined she’d spend her life beside.
‘My Nina.’ He kissed the tip of her nose and reached for her body, drawing its still slim yet rounded shape into his. ‘I was so worried about this . . .’ He began kissing her throat, moving down to her breasts.
She tangled her fingers in his hair, smiling like a contented cat. ‘Lucien, how could you . . .’
‘I confess to you, my darling. It’s been years and years since I made love. I thought it was over, I just was never able . . .’ He clutched her to him. ‘You’ve made me a man again, a young man. I can’t let you go, Nina. All my life, it’s only ever been you.’
‘You’re a more wonderful lover than I remember, the best, my darling. Don’t fret – we have a lot of catching up to do.’
He nuzzled her belly. ‘It might take a while . . . like years.’
Nina refused to think about those lost years, or what might be ahead. For now, there was the utter joy of feeling a whole and luscious woman, worshipped by a man she’d always adored who saw her as she’d been, and would always be, the utter love of his life. He accepted her as she was now, remembered her as she’d been when a girl, and cherished her as a precious gift that could be snatched away at any time.
But for now, there was now.
Nina called Ali once more. Ali listened to Nina’s excited voice as she outlined her proposal for an article on her journey to Croatia, weaving in historical background details, the effects of the wars and how it was now becoming a burgeoning tourist destination once again. ‘All told from a personal perspective as I go back to my childhood,’ enthused Nina.
Ali yawned, glad they were on different continents. ‘Sounds great, Nina. I’ll be interested in what you come up with. Sounds quite a challenge . . . making that part of the world and your personal experience relevant to our readers. But it needs pictures. Finding top professional shots could be tricky,’ said Ali, already looking for reasons not to use Nina’s piece at the end of the day. Ali thought the whole idea sounded old hat and boring. But she feigned enthusiasm. The longer Nina stayed away, the better it suited her.
‘By an incredible stroke of fate I’ve run into an old friend – a movie man who knew my mother. He’s going to join me. He’ll take photos.’
‘Bummer,’ thought Ali, beginning to back-pedal. She had no intention of running Nina’s story – she doubted Nina would actually do it. ‘Don’t make any promises, and bear in mind our budget,’ Ali cautioned.
Nina chuckled. ‘Glad to see you’re keeping an eye on the bottom line, Ali. By the way, have you seen Miche’s story yet?’
Ali groaned inwardly. God, was Nina trying to turn Blaze into a family effort – ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation’ by our editor-in-chief, ‘My First Time in Paris Seeing A Fashion Show’ by the editor-in-chief’s goddaughter. Just as well Nina had no other family. ‘No, I haven’t seen it yet. Larissa mumbled something. I’ll check on it. Now you go off and have a fantastic time, I don’t imagine we’ll hear from you in the depths of Yugoslavia.’ Ali tried to keep the hopeful note out of her voice.
*
In the bright light of their last minutes together, Lucien was matter-of-fact. ‘I will join you in a few days. I have to finish this film tour and tidy up loose business ends. I’ll join you in Zagreb.’
They parted with long hugs. Nina glanced over her shoulder as she went through the airport departure gate at Metz. Her breath was short, her chest tight. Would she really see him again?
The hotel clerk insisted on holding Nina’s passport and airline tickets in the hotel’s safe as was ‘customary’, which made Nina nervous, but she didn’t want to make a fuss. For her own reasons, she’d decided not to take the ambassador’s advice and draw attention to herself. While Zagreb seemed cosmopolitan, clean and catering to tourists, she still shivered as past memories crowded in on her.
From the first day, Nina set a pattern of behaviour of walking and travelling alone at night, eating at restaurants outside the hotel. For a while she had a feeling she was being followed, but dismissed it as paranoia. But she knew she was being studied, openly and surreptitiously, wherever she went because of the way she looked – her grooming, her clothes, even though she had brought simple, unostentatious outfits. She was obviously a woman from the West and she elicited envy and curiosity. When she spoke in halting Croatian, it became evident she was one of the lucky ones who’d been fortunate enough to leave and enjoy a comfortable life, and was simply revisiting her homeland. The people she met had no idea she was successful, famous or influential in her own right.
Nina merely told people she had grown up in Australia as a young girl. When asked about her family, she had given her father’s name, Trivitza. Clara had used her parents’ name, Bubacic, after she was widowed. Nina still had a niggling worry about Clara Bubacic escaping illegally from Croatia with her toddler.
She fretted there could be repercussions given the fact their homes had been taken over by the state and Clara had escaped at a time when permission to leave the country was rarely given.
Nina tucked a new notebook in her handbag and set out late one afternoon to find the street where she had been born and where she had lived with her mother and grandparents after her father’s death. She had the address and recalled the grand and elegant building from Clara’s treasured photo album.
The area was heavily built up, not the quiet residential street Clara had described. There was an industrial plant, a few shops and a café.
Nina walked to the end of the block looking in vain for the street number – 78. She retraced her steps. She double-checked and finally saw a number high above a set of doors in a four-storey building.
It resembled a concrete box, with small windows. Absolutely no sense of style infused this functional building, either for those who inhabited its depressing flats or for those who paused to look at it. There was no grace, no beauty, no personality to this postwar piece of communist architecture. If buildings reflected their time and era, then how matter-of-fact, how unadorned, how intellectually impoverished this time had been. Many buildings in Zagreb were grand, with a fading, peeling glory, where they had once been elegant and admired. Many had been restored and sophisticated new buildings attested to the fact that Croatia was reclaiming its past glory and moving on in the new millennium as a tourist destination once again. But this dreadful block of boring flats would only ever display a lack of colour and imagination until, in decay, it would one day disappear.
Nina was aghast. The Bubacics’ beautiful town residence had been replaced by an architectural monstrosity of public housing. The stylish heritage house, which had graced the avenue for more than two centuries, had been destroyed. Why? Because, she told herself, in the postwar era of communist revolution, housing the underprivileged was more important than the preservation of a wealthy family’s
conservatory, formal lounge and huge dining room, maids’ quarters, reception foyer and five luxurious bedrooms. But attempting to understand the possible reason for demolition did nothing to ease the pain of loss, a pain of such intensity that it almost had her in tears.
A man emerged from the entrance and she glimpsed a small, gloomy lobby. She pushed open the door and stepped inside to find an old man sitting behind a desk with mail slots set to one side. Behind him on the wall hung a large print showing heroic workers rallying behind a red flag carried by a man with a raised fist and a rifle slung across his back.
‘You want something? Looking for someone?’ asked the man at the desk rather gruffly, after giving Nina a swift assessment from shoes to hairdo.
‘Good morning,’ replied Nina politely in her best Croatian. ‘I am a visitor. I once lived in a house at this address. A long time ago.’
He briefly raised an eyebrow, the only acknowledgement that the encounter was of uncommon interest. She was obviously a foreigner of Croatian background. No doubt American. Her grasp of the language was, he decided, only very basic, so he spoke slowly. ‘Your house went years ago from what I remember. I grew up in this area after the war. Probably all that’s left of those days is the garden out the back.’
Nina tried to control her excitement. ‘I vaguely remember playing in the garden. It was a magic place for me as a child. Could I have a look?’
The old man took time to light a cigarette before answering. ‘Yes, I suppose you can. But there’s nothing much to see now. Down the hall there, and through the big door at the end.’
‘Thank you so much.’ Nina turned and walked down the corridor, momentarily closing her eyes as her steps echoed on the bare wooden floor. Wishing she could have been walking down the hallway of the family home, an image that had gone through her mind over the years.
At the door she paused, took a deep breath, then opened it and let out a light gasp. The past came flooding back as reality, not an image of memory. The courtyard style garden was real. Despite the changes, there was something familiar and welcoming and she quickly recognised what it was – the tree.
She walked slowly over to it, reached out and stroked the bark, then stepped closer, wrapped her arms around it, pressed her lips to it and cried.
From the doorway the old caretaker watched and scratched his head in puzzlement, then went back to his desk and the morning paper’s analysis of Sunday’s big soccer match.
The tree was a solid link into her childhood and Nina closed her eyes, smelling once again the beautiful garden flowers her grandmother had lovingly tended, seeing her dolls set out for a picnic, hearing Opa’s favourite music drifting from the upper floor, Clara singing. Despite the tragedy that had unfolded around them daily, music gave normalcy to their lives. How loved and treasured Nina had been. How glad she was that she had given love, care and security to Clara in return. How sad she was that she had no children of her own to cherish.
Nina sighed and looked around the untidy, neglected garden with its few stunted shrubs and plants, patchy grass. The glorious garden of her grandparents had vanished. She glanced back at the building, which had only a few small windows overlooking the garden. She studied the ground around the tree. Was it possible that whatever grandfather had buried was still there? After all these years the garden didn’t appear to have been disturbed since the flats were built. How could she bring a shovel here and start digging? Should she even bother? This brief pilgrimage had given her fodder to write about. But curiosity and the memory of the intensity of Clara’s last words convinced her to continue.
Nina began working out a possible scenario. She went back to the old man.
‘Are there any empty apartments in this building that I could rent for a short time?’
Within a day Nina had possession of the key to the vacant rear ground-floor apartment. Before checking out of the hotel, she rang and left a message for Belinda asking her to notify the Baron, Ali and Larissa, who would pass the news onto Miche, that she was staying longer than planned. She rang Lucien and told him what had happened and that she’d be staying in the flat, but only for a few days. ‘Not that they know that – I’ve paid two weeks rent in advance.’
‘I’ll meet you at the hotel on the seventh, Nina darling. We can go back and take whatever photos you need and then play ordinary tourists,’ said Lucien. ‘Perhaps the tourism people could help us. Have you contacted anyone yet?’
‘No. I want to keep my personal inquiries private. If my grandparents kept something so secret for so long, it could be sensitive.’
‘Perhaps, but it’s more likely monetary and material objects that were hidden during the war. It’s a shame they were never able to go back to retrieve whatever it is.’
‘A government official probably lived there without knowing what was in the garden. And now that beautiful old house is gone. At least Clara kept a photo of it. Oh Lucien, I feel so odd. It’s like going back in time and re-entering my grandparents’ life.’
‘I’m worried about you creeping around. Be careful, Nina my love, I’ll be there soon.’
Sitting in the very basic and sparsely furnished flat, Nina began making notes about what she remembered of her childhood in this place. While she had centred on her own desires in life – helping the cook in the kitchen, dressing up in her grandmother’s hats and shoes, playing under her magic tree – other images began to have meaning. Worried visitors who came to the house and hurried into Opa’s study and closed the door. Peeping out of the window at night with Clara who was frightened of a big, dark car across the street. Finding her grandmother and Clara weeping and being comforted by Opa. Rushing into Opa’s study to tell him something and finding him opening a safe in the wall behind a picture – which made him shout at her to go outside. Opa never shouted. Had that really been a gun she’d seen?
Nina worked out her plan. Hers was the only flat that had immediate access to the garden and she quickly befriended the old concierge with gifts of cigarettes and a few American dollars for his help in small ways. She asked him if it would be all right to plant a tree in memory of her grandparents. With summer on the way, she wanted to make the garden pretty. The concierge thought it a waste of money and energy and put it down to rich Western behaviour.
Nina made a show of appearing to settle into the tiny apartment, keeping her distance from the neighbours and trying to avoid prying questions from the local shops and café.
Late on her second afternoon at the apartment, she marked a spot to plant her tree. It was seven paces to the left of the old tree as she faced the house. The concierge wandered into the garden with a cigarette and watched her for a while and then strolled back inside.
Nina turned over the hard soil until the light was fading and then made a show of stopping work, sticking the shovel into the soil and returned indoors in case she was being watched. She was shaking. Not from the exertion, but because the shovel had hit something hard. Something metallic.
After dinner Nina packed her bag and sat in the dark waiting.
The hours passed slowly. Then, at 1 a.m., she tied her hair under a scarf, pulled on black pants and a dark shirt and crept out to the old tree. She began prodding and digging. Finding the boundaries of the hard object, which seemed to be the size of a large suitcase, she crouched and dug around it with a heavy trowel, throwing aside the loose dirt until she felt metal. Her heart pounded as she realised it was a metal handle. She scraped around it, snapping through narrow root tentacles from the old tree and, finally, she was able to lift out the rusting box.
She quickly half filled the hole so it looked roughly like it had been that afternoon when she had finished digging. She hurried back into the flat and locked the door. She was shivering with cold, excitement and apprehension. Then, after her racing heart had settled down, she brought knives and a tin opener from the kitchen and managed to break the lock. The lid creaked open.
The first object she pulled out was a rolled oilskin cloth t
hat contained documents. Beneath that were several soft leather pouches containing jewellery. She turned the pieces over in her hands, utterly charmed at their art deco and classic styles. She struggled to recall her grandmother or mother wearing them, but the only jewellery she had loved when she was a little girl had been her grandmother’s dragonfly brooch. The pin that now nestled in Nina’s safe in her apartment in Sydney.
Hastily she put the jewellery in her bag, then changed her clothes. She made a coffee and took a longer look at the papers, which were in surprisingly good condition. There was a journal and a file packed with papers, letters, photographs, birth and death certificates. But a number of the formal documents puzzled her, as did the crest imprinted at the top of each. She put them to one side and opened the journal that had obviously been kept by her grandfather. She struggled with the language, slowly translating as she went. But soon enough, it became disturbingly clear what it was. Nina sipped her coffee and wondered whether to burn the journal.
No wonder Clara had been so concerned. The journal contained lists of names, code names, locations, completed, aborted and failed missions, names of people listed as missing, others as killed. And contained in a sealed section at the back of the journal were the names of Nazi collaborators, local people who had betrayed their own for what advantage it gave them. It was appalling evidence of the war crimes of World War II. And just as surprising to Nina was the realisation that her beloved Opa, a gentle, scholarly and caring doctor had been a central figure in a dedicated network of Croat citizens who’d worked to resist the Nazis.
Several names appeared frequently among the collaborators’ list, each time marked as Nazi sympathisers believed responsible for the torture or disappearance of people whose names were listed below them. Nina recognised one collaborator’s surname and middle initial – it was the name of a popular, internationally known senior minister in the current government. Was it possible this minister’s grandfather could be outed as a hated domobran – a Croatian who supported the Nazis? This journal could embarrass and incriminate a lot of people. Even if they were dead, it would bring pain and shame to families. This could be a powerful piece of information for the Nazi hunters, who were still tracking down anyone who’d helped enforce Hitler’s holocaust against the Jewish people, even though those few remaining men were now in their eighties.
