I continued to scan the column of names, and was shocked to find one that stuck out, stretching the Excel spreadsheet column just a bit wider. Yes, among the Sally Martinses, the Serbian “vić” of my own name was defiantly sticking out. “Iris, goddess of the rainbow,” it said beside it. “Goddess,” I whispered to myself, my breath catching.
As I slowly walked home, I remembered the stupid drama exercise in Ms. Danica’s class where Jasna had played the princess and I’d been ignored. How the tables have turned, I thought. It had been decided—by a teacher no less!—that I would play a goddess. Who needs a princess’s throne when you can be steeped in magical, mysterious grace? After all, I wasn’t named after the princess of wisdom, but the goddess of wisdom, I thought, tossing the idea around in my mind. I was exotic, and full of secret knowledge. Goddess. Gods aren’t bound by nationality, or wealth; they can travel across the seas without having to save for a ticket, they have the power to make people safe, to make the world a better place.
While I was having these lofty thoughts, I walked home, past Dr. Kearney’s office, where my parents, unbeknownst to me, were being given some news that made them both silent for once.
They sat in the clinic staring at Dr. Kearney and trying to process her words. Dad’s ultrasound showed a mass on his liver. The reason his skin was yellow was not hepatitis but because of the bile spilling into his bloodstream, from a liver so riddled with cancer, it couldn’t function.
7
The Tragedy Competition
All at once, we were a family who knew a lot about livers. In the way my parents had watched the news obsessively and talked ceaselessly about the war, they now analyzed ultrasounds and frequently spoke to doctors, as if gathering information could give them some control over something that was uncontrollable. But they were helpless, and their knowledge was useless, and they should have learned that from the war, which twisted and turned and kept going no matter how much they willed it to stop.
Dad’s surgery was scheduled a week after his diagnosis, so he took sick leave to prepare, while my mother continued to work at Health and Human Services. My parents agreed that she might end up being the only breadwinner, and shouldn’t take time off. I looked after Natalija when we got home from school, which meant playing Nintendo for hours every evening.
At school, I felt my newly won status as “just another kid” revert to “freak” all over again. None of the other kids had a dad who was sick, who was about to have an operation, who might die. Most liver cancers are related to alcoholism, but the sort Dad had wasn’t, and I felt myself rushing to explain that. “My dad has cancer of the liver. But he’s not an alcoholic!” I assumed people would look down on him if they thought his cancer was a result of addiction. I hated myself for caring what people thought, but I couldn’t help but be relieved he didn’t have a more embarrassing cancer—as we had discovered in our health education class, several of the boys in my class couldn’t even hear the word “testicle” without tears of laughter streaming down their faces.
Dad needed to have a large part of his liver removed to save his life from the aggressive disease, and only two surgeons in the country could perform the tricky operation. One of them happened to be in Melbourne. “You were right, for insisting we come to Australia,” my mother said to Dad, who was so unaccustomed to her agreeing with him, he must have thought he was hallucinating—something that had, along with his erratic moods, started happening because of his illness. But she was sincere: “Imagine if this had happened in Belgrade?” Dad’s work health insurance meant he had access to the best facilities and treatment, and that he could take medical leave, while Serbia’s economy was still struggling terribly. Picturing the hospital he might have ended up in back home gave my mother chills.
In the week between his diagnosis and the operation, my parents met with the famous surgeon, a detached man who ate Twisties cheese snacks during their meeting, both of my parents watching bewildered: those orange, salty fingers dipping in and out of a bag would soon be responsible for dad’s life. Afterward, my mother tried to see the upside. “Surgeons are supposed to be psychopaths,” she said, as if this was a known entrance requirement for the prestigious field of medicine. “How can someone who is normal open up a human and pick their way through the organs, blood, and bones?”
During the operation, Natalija, who didn’t know exactly what was going on, was sent to a friend’s house, while my mother and I sat with Dad’s friend Darko in our living room, waiting for the phone to ring to tell us if he had survived. I played a montage in my head, remembering holding Dad’s hand with the fingernails bitten down when I was small, and how I still liked to sit in his lap even though I was thirteen and too old to be a baby. We’d seen him before the operation, and, from his gurney, Dad smiled at me and said, “See you, kid,” and those words kept repeating in my head as we sat there.
After eight hours, the surgeon called—the operation had lasted longer than expected, but they thought they’d got the cancer out.
The next day my mother drove to give the surgeon and his assistant gifts—pieces from her art collection. The Twisties surgeon accepted with amused indifference an abstract oil painting by a Yugoslavian artist; his assistant said he would hang the pastel work she gave him in his office. My mother prayed that those paintings hanging in their offices would signify the end of this chapter: a punctuation mark to conclude Dad’s illness, and indicate a return to our normal lives.
• • •
Meanwhile, Dad was on a morphine drip in the ICU. From the drugs, he hallucinated and complained that the nurses were plotting against him, hissing that the doctors were talking about shiptars, using the derogatory term Slavs use for Albanians in Kosovo. My dad, who had always been antinationalist and levelheaded, who had chided my mother for being the paranoid one, was now saying things he would have been humiliated by in a lucid state. My mother visited Dad after work, and often Natalija and I went with her. To get to him, we drove from the suburbs through the city, past a massive billboard for the strip club Men’s Gallery. It was the brightest thing we saw before the hospital, that billboard of three women in lingerie, and I stared at them each time we drove past, looking at their healthy bodies, in stark contrast to Dad’s brittle one that we would shortly see. The flesh of these women’s legs was firm, their breasts rounded—norgs, I thought. That’s what the boys in my class would have called them.
• • •
When Dad came home from the hospital a few weeks later, he tried to regain his strength. One day he wanted to go for a walk, and I went with him, holding him under the arm. He was overdressed for the springtime weather in his beanie and coat. I saw my classmate Tom’s mom in her car waiting at the light as we stood at the crossing. Dad, in his getup, with his thin face; me, holding him steady, gripping his hand. Tom’s mom probably thought Dad was drunk. Or she knew he was sick just by looking at him, like the old ladies in the supermarket who observed Dad in the produce aisle and whispered, one to the other, loud enough for me to hear: “It must be AIDS!”
Once he could walk around on his own, one morning Dad put on his suit and showed up at his office. When he got to his desk, he discovered his computer was gone. He just waited politely, as his embarrassed colleagues went about attempting to retrieve it, trying to hide their shock that he was back, when everyone had thought he was going to die. Dad made a joke or two, trying to remain dignified when he felt like a fool in his suit that was too big, and was exhausted from the effort of standing.
• • •
Though it seemed suddenly small in the scheme of things, The Tempest performance was nearing, and I looked forward to it. My costume was a green, flowy dress and a feathered headpiece, which I was particularly proud of. Natalija drew a family portrait in honor of the performance: skinny Dad, chubby Mom, little Natalija, and me—the largest character on the page, resembling a glorious green alien whose feathered headpiece stood up like antennae. We had a dress rehearsal at the amateur
theater that had been rented by the school for the performance. Down in the backstage area, I adored being told what to do by busy older girls, who instructed me to hold still while they put “pancake” concealer on my face, and loads of makeup that I would keep on afterward because I thought it made me look beautiful. The actors were the stars, everyone fussed over us, and we waited importantly to be called to the stage from a speaker in the wall.
A boy named Andy played the mischievous sprite Ariel. I had never met someone flamboyantly gay before, so I was drawn to Andy, who would hug everyone, kiss us, and call us “darling.” Finally, I thought—as I sat leaning my head on Andy’s shoulder during a break, beside an older kid named Alon with long curly hair, who played Prospero—I am among artists.
As the youngest cast member, I longed for the other kids to take me under their wing—to recognize that I was young but mature, and include me in their social circle, as they joked and smoked after rehearsals, out of sight of the teachers. My social life was limited to looking after my sister while my parents focused on Dad’s care, and school, which is where everything non-Dad-related happened. The Tempest was the best thing in my life, but I didn’t want anyone to know it because it seemed pathetic, so I wasn’t explicit in my desire to be part of the older kids’ group. Mostly I just hung around, overeager, laughing at jokes, and planning clever lines to deliver (“I’d totally smoke, if I wasn’t worried I’d get teeth like Mr. Fisher!”) then chickening out at the last moment, remaining a smiling, yearning presence on the periphery of the group.
My family attended the performance, including Dad, who had transformed from Shakespeare authority to cancer patient in the months leading up to the show.
I stepped out onto the stage for my scene, wearing my green dress and feathered headpiece.
“Ceres, most bounteous lady!” I called, throwing one of my arms awkwardly out. I hadn’t bothered to research what each word in my monologue meant because I hadn’t wanted to do it without Dad—basically, I was a goddess, talking to another goddess about something not really related to the plot. I delivered my lines fast, with a shake in my voice. But I was standing on the boards, and there were lights on my face, and even though I couldn’t see the audience, I knew my family was there, and that Dad was looking at me and smiling.
When I stepped into the wings after my scene, I felt like I could collapse, like I’d been wearing a backpack full of rocks that had been unloaded that evening, my shoulders feeling floppy and loose. I high-fived my fellow goddesses backstage. “Great work, babe,” we said to one another, as we waited for the final curtain when we’d be onstage again, to take our bows.
After the performance, the cast signed one another’s show program, and for the rest of the year, I would often look at mine, rereading the things my peers had written on that day, when we had all hugged and cheered at our “wrap party,” which was really just standing around in a classroom with some snacks and Mr. Fisher. When I asked him to sign my program, Alon had been eating a sausage roll, an Aussie delicacy of minced meat baked inside a flaky pastry. He put the pastry aside and left a thumbprint of ketchup on the program. “Sorry about that!” he wrote, with an arrow pointing to the stain, and I found this endlessly charming. I didn’t even try to wipe it off. There was a note from Andy, with love hearts above the i’s. There was a note from Sally Martins who played Miranda. “Hope to work with you again soon!” she’d written, as if we were actual actors, working in “the biz.”
• • •
The end-of-year holidays were spent quietly, Dad still recovering from surgery. There were bright moments, such as when Natalija burst into the living room on Christmas morning singing, wearing a tutu and reindeer ears, her hair unbrushed (parental attention had been lax thanks to Dad’s illness, and her independence manifested in questionable hygiene and wardrobe choices). She jumped joyously on our mother, who observed that Natalija was not wearing underpants. “But Mama, it’s Christmas !” Natalija said, as if this was the one day of the year no one should be expected to wear underpants, and we all laughed.
After the holidays, a checkup revealed that Dad’s cancer had come back. The specialist suggested that Dad might want to skip the hematotherapy and chemotherapy treatments in exchange for a “better quality of life.” Of course he would do the treatments, my mother said. Who cared about quality of life when we were trying to save him? My parents didn’t realize that the specialist was implying that Dad was bound to die, and the treatments would make his last months painful, and foggy with medication. It might have been their imperfect English, or it might have been their denial, but my parents went for the treatment option rather than the “quality of life” option.
Every weekend, two of Dad’s friends would come over to play the Eastern European card game preferans. My parents had met when Dad babysat my mother’s nephews, though actually his version of babysitting the neighbors’ kids was sending the boys to bed and inviting his friends over for preferans, and my mother would pop around to join the game. Now Dad’s two well-meaning friends would come over to play a friendly game and distract him from his illness.
The three of them would sit around a table, Dad’s jeans practically falling off him, his eyes small and tired, while he held the cards up, his thin wrist sticking out of his sleeve. One of his friends was Maksa, a boisterous man from Northern Serbia who was by far the worst player, but also the most entertaining distraction my father could wish for. He would blurt absurd things all the time, putting down his terrible hand of cards and declaring, nonsensically, “And that, my friends, is why it is important to be called Ernest.”
“You talk more shit than I did when I was on morphine,” Dad would say in response.
Rajko, the third player in their team, would throw his hand down, frustrated at Maksa’s antics, insisting that he take the game seriously. Rajko indeed took games seriously: once he refused to talk to his wife for hours as he focused on staring at a game of chess he was playing with himself, until she finally grabbed a bishop and a pawn and threw them out a window.
And then there was my dad, who, in his healthy days had been the best player of the three, but who now increasingly lost track of which cards had passed, whether he’d declared diamonds or hearts at the start of the round. Eventually, my mother asked his friends to stop coming over because Dad was unwilling to admit he couldn’t play anymore.
Dad couldn’t read like he used to either, because he had trouble concentrating. He’d been the most voracious reader in our family except for maybe Grandma Xenia. When she visited us in Australia, there was a familiar pattern: when a new book came out, like John le Carré’s The Night Manager or something by Umberto Eco, Grandma Xenia read it first, while my parents were at work. At dinner, before Dad had a chance to crack open the book himself—he always read at night in bed—Grandma Xenia would start talking about it. “These are just minor details that are unimportant to the plot,” she would say, and go on to talk at length about the book, until Dad inevitably left the room, throwing his hands in the air, exasperated that she had ruined it. The biggest loser in this scenario was my mother, who would endure Grandma Xenia’s recounting of the book after Dad stormed off, and then, only after Dad had read it and put his little notes in the margins, would she have the pleasure of reading the book that had already been described to her in detail.
But now Dad found it hard to concentrate on new books. Instead, he turned to Agatha Christie, rereading the mysteries he’d already consumed as a younger man, their predictable pattern all that he could endure. Eventually, he stopped with those books too, and just sat in front of the fireplace, staring at the flames.
• • •
Up until that point, I had never had much interest in religion, unless something I’d overheard or seen on television was bothering me, in which case I would pray (like when I prayed I’d never step on a syringe on the beach, or to not become morbidly obese like the mother in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape). My parents never gave me a religi
ous education—they themselves had been brought up without one in Yugoslavia—but they did tell me that God was an entity people prayed to; that some people believed in his existence and others didn’t. I had been left to make my own choices about whether God was important to me, and generally I had decided he was not.
I’d already decided God was most likely not a bearded guy, but rather someone more gender-ambiguous. I’d known about the possibility of being both female and male ever since the first grade, when our teacher told us that a child who had a genetic difference was joining our class. When I went home and conveyed this to my mother, she proceeded to tell me all about intersex people and how this child was born with both female and male reproductive organs, and that when they got older, they’d be able to decide if they wanted to be a girl or a boy. It turned out that the child joining our class was actually a girl with Down’s Syndrome. But, as usual, my mother had inadvertently managed to plant an image in my mind, and I was fascinated by gender ambiguity from that day. I loved the idea of someone not being bound by one gender; it seemed transcendent and divine.
I prayed that Dad would get better. I didn’t pray to get richer, to have a smaller nose, for my parents to get along, for the family debts to disappear—all the things that had preoccupied me before. I didn’t pray for our relatives, for the people dying in Yugoslavia, I didn’t pray for an end to the war. Just Dad. And he got sicker and sicker.
In fact, one of the prayers I had not prayed was the one that was answered: the war in Croatia had finally come to an end.
• • •
When peace finally came, the Croatian army’s last offensive, Operation Storm, had driven more than 150,000 Serbs from Croatia. Croatia was now independent. Meanwhile on the other battlefront, in Bosnia, NATO began a huge bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serbs, the international intervention hoping to finally bring that war to an end as well.
Miss Ex-Yugoslavia Page 17
