A PHANTOM LANDLORD: In conversation with the neighbors we learned they hadn’t seen the negligent landlord in seven years, which is how long ago he was deeded the apartment by his company. Three years ago, when there was a thunderstorm in Zagreb and some of the windows were smashed, the apartment became a dovecote and breeding ground for disease! But not even then did the owner show up. The pigeons died and the filth was cleaned by an elderly gentleman, possibly the father. The two-bedroom apartment had a subletter who was not, apparently, liked by the residents: even though she lived there for three years the apartment was listed as empty. For, the Vukovar family says, we’d never have moved in if we’d known she was staying here. It just so happened that the apartment in dispute was visited that day by a threemember commission from the company that owned it in order to establish who was living there, since the time to condominiumize had come. Faced with the tears of the Vukovar family and their fate, the company committee relented, but the tenants couldn’t remain there illegally—they had to have some sort of certificate for temporary use. The company allowed the Vukovar family to stay on until they found a new place to live. One of the commissioners even told them: “I’d sooner have you stay at my house than throw you out . . .” As many in the category of “wartime squatters” have been coveting apartments in the big city, it’s clear that this family could only be there temporarily, until the institutions responsible for handling the problems facing displaced persons see to their needs. Until then, the company committee agrees that these people cannot be on the streets. The tragedy of this family with two children began with the fall of Vukovar. They’ve heard nothing ever since from their father. He stayed on to defend the city until the Chetniks and Yugo Army marched in, and then all trace of him vanished. He is not on the list of wounded or killed, he is not in the register of the International Red Cross who made the rounds of all the Serbian camps . . . The only hope left is that their father may be alive in one of the improvised camps in Serbia, out of bounds for the International Red Cross. Their property (two family homes and an apartment) they can live without one way or another, they say, but in Vukovar their grandfather’s throat was slit. “We don’t want someone else’s property, we want to go back to what’s ours even if it is in ruins. Please allow us a roof over our heads and compassion. We have to stay here though we’d rather be going home tomorrow,” says the thirty-year-old mother in tears. “My son crosses the street without even looking at the traffic light. He says, ‘Who cares.’”
At first we used only one room and the kitchen. In the other, bigger room were the things belonging to the woman who’d left. Mama said we mustn’t touch anything. On the heap there were a fur coat, flashy scarves, baubles, boots, and a red handbag. The heap stood there in the middle of the room until the day Željka and her mother moved in, when we pushed it aside and covered it with plastic sheeting. At the army barracks where they’d spent a few weeks, they’d been sharing one bathroom with fifty people, and there were at least fifty with them in the room; they all slept on cast-iron double-decker beds. They couldn’t stand it there so now there were six of us. I was super glad they were with us, it was cheerier. I think only Granny felt a little grumpy about it, but she did get her own room. The rest of us slept all together on the floor, on comforters and blankets. In the apartment across the hall from us lived Auntie Barica who’d look after me when the others went off to the prisoner exchanges. She made me crepes with tomato marmalade and took me to Bundek Lake, into the Sljeme hills, and to visit her sister out in Šestine. She never married and never had kids of her own so she really loved me. The apartment next to ours belonged to Uncle Rudi and Auntie Nina. They brought us poppy seed strudel and Auntie Nina would bring along her pendulum to tell us whether there was news about Papa. The pendulum always said he’s alive, he’s not in the ground, and he’s healthy. Auntie gave Mama phone numbers of seers and numerologists who said the same. Just one man, who came out through a prisoner exchange, told Mama he’d covered my father with a sheet.
Spring came to the park by the high-rise and I spent hours on a bench. I joined the public library and read three books a week. I read in the park, in the bathroom, on the balcony, during recess. I read everything I could get my hands on, I’d discovered a parallel world and moved almost totally into it. I woke up before everybody else, while the house was quiet, and raced out the door after drinking a glass of powdered milk. My mother and Željka’s began working at Astra for minimum wage and left the house early. In the afternoon they’d go to Caritas sometimes to pick up food supplies or to the Zagreb Vukovar offices for any news. Around then the government began granting military rank to the people who’d stayed in Vukovar, and based on that they’d receive an army salary. We went to ask about my father, but nobody knew because he wasn’t registered anywhere, yet he hadn’t been killed. The computer listed him as part of Civil Defense and with that document they sent us home. This sounded fine to me, but Mama was angry and she kept saying: “He wasn’t willing to drive his very own wife out of the city for fear they’d think he was running away, and now he’s being labeled Civil Defense like the little old ladies cowering in their cellars.” I didn’t know little old ladies were in Civil Defense too. The next day we went back and Mama said she wouldn’t accept the paper and to let somebody who’d really been there tell her what my father was doing, because she knew he’d bought a gun with his own savings. “He cared only about himself and wore a fanny pack,” muttered a rude man in fatigues. Later I found out the man was Lidija’s dad who’d made it out in the breakout. My mother began to cry and asked them to let her see a general. Later it turned out everybody knew my father had stayed to the end and that the rude man in fatigues was the one who’d left earlier. We waited for the general for a long time, but when he came, he was super kind and offered Mama coffee. He apologized and asked what we needed. Mama explained it all to him and right away he gave us a document that said Papa was a member of the Croatian army. “Do you need an apartment, ma’am?” he asked my mother kindly. “No, we have a place, all I needed was the certificate,” she answered. We left happy. Papa was a defender, the only thing we didn’t get was money, he hadn’t been killed, he was missing. Out we went for ice cream.
My brother and I never got along well. He’d make me eat hot dogs when he knew I hated them, and when he was looking after me I had to check in by buzzing the intercom every few minutes from outside. The game we played a lot was called “Border.” He’d ask me: “Which country do you want to be, Yugoslavia or Germany? And remember Yugoslavia is where you’re from and the Partisans beat the Germans.” “Yugoslavia, I want to be Yugoslavia!” I’d shout. I had to cut up four little slips of paper, while all he needed was one because the Deutsch mark was worth so much more than Yugoslav dinars. Also my vehicle was one plastic truck from a gumball machine, while he had cars with batteries because Germany was so much more advanced. Pretty soon he’d confiscate even my one truck at customs because I didn’t have the proper papers. I’d be on foot with the pedestrians, my Barbies, who weren’t allowed to walk across the border. Then the game would be over because I’d wail, and he’d tell Mama: “We were just playing.”
My brother started high school. He’d wanted to go to the commercial high school, but Papa had signed him up for the gymnasium, the most challenging school, and they fought about it something awful. I cried, I felt bad for him. I always cried when he was in trouble, but when I was in trouble he’d tease me. And besides, I could never tell when he was being honest. For a while I fell for his story about how he, Mama, and Papa, before I was born, lived in a castle in Germany and raised horses. When I was born they ran out of money so they moved to Yugoslavia. Because of this I both adored and hated him, he was big and smart while, compared to him, I was dense. Once, in second grade, I got a D. He predicted I’d finish that year with a B, third grade with a C, fourth grade with a D, and I’d flunk out of fifth grade, and my husband and I’d end up living in a musty cellar with only one light bulb.
When we came to Zagreb he went everywhere with Mama. To the nighttime prisoner exchanges, and even to parliament where he argued with politicians. Mama let him do anything he wanted—stay up late, sit with the grown-ups while they were talking—anything except enlist. At his new school he ran into old Vukovar buddies; back home he used to sneak off with them to the barricades without our parents knowing. To go to Vukovar, this was their new plan. Luckily they weren’t eighteen yet so nobody would let them. We hadn’t heard from Uncle for ages. He probably didn’t know where we were, and we didn’t have the money to call Germany. One day Granny told us he’d been in touch with other relatives and he’d be in Zagreb the next day. My brother and I were crazy happy. And Granny was glad, too, but she was sad he’d see us in this sorry state, he was suffering over his brother’s fate, it was worst for him. I felt bad. My brother and I didn’t sleep all night. We believed Uncle would visit and we felt certain that when the school year ended he’d have us up to Germany over summer vacation. We started waiting first thing in the morning and Mama baked cakes. He arrived late in the afternoon and was a little miffed about the power outage and walking up to the fifteenth floor. He brought with him a bag of old clothes for my brother, and for me he brought colorful animal-shaped stickers for my notebooks. I was sorry to use them so I saved them until they started curling, and then I tossed them. He drank coffee and told us all this had made him quit smoking. He was in a big hurry because he was driving a truck and passing through. I kept nosing around, aiming to slip into his lap. He picked me up and said, “What’s up, little one, hard at work in school?” I announced, “Straight As at the end of the term and I’m competing in a contest for Croatian.” He smelled so good and reminded me of Papa. My brother told him how he’d gone with Mama to parliament and how he’d told them that if they didn’t resolve our situation he’d bring a mattress and sleep there. Uncle laughed like this was a huge joke, so we laughed too. Soon he put me down, even though I wanted to snuggle more, and from the leather bag he wore over his shoulder he took out an electric shaver. He showed us how it didn’t even have to be plugged in. He switched it on so we could see how it worked and began to shave right there. Granny leaned over, and with a quick gasp asked, “Does that hurt, son?” but he only pushed away her hand and said, “Hey, old girl.” From his wallet he took a picture of our little cousin we’d never even seen and said we could keep it. Time to go. Granny started crying, and he told her, “Hey, old girl, this is a nice enough place.” We saw him to the door, and when we came back in Mama told us, “He’ll have you up this summer for sure.” Afterward I heard her saying to Željka’s mother, “I never expected much from him anyway.” My brother said nothing and scribbled away in his diary. I followed him into the room. “Why didn’t he invite us?” I asked. “Because he isn’t home now either, he’s driving humanitarian aid around Croatia. He’s doing the same thing Papa’s doing,” he answered. “We’ll go to Germany this summer for sure,” I parroted. “Beat it!” he said for no reason. “I didn’t expect much from you anyway,” I snapped and left.
It was early morning and I was lying there awake in bed on the floor when I thought I heard familiar voices in the kitchen. There was nobody around me, which meant everybody else was up already even though it was a Saturday and there was no school. I thought maybe I was still dreaming. I went to the door and put my ear to it to hear better. Now I knew. Into the kitchen I flew and there were my nana and granddad, Mama’s folks. We’d thought they were dead, the city had fallen five months before and we hadn’t heard from them. They started crying, Granddad took me in his lap, and Nana could barely move because her upper body was wrapped in a plaster cast. It turned out that in their Vukovar neighborhood the Chetniks were a little better and didn’t kill every last person, they just made them sign away their house. Then they were evicted, and somewhere along the way Nana broke her arm. We were overjoyed they were alive and now there were eight of us. Nana and Granddad joined Granny, Papa’s mother, in her room. They were given the sofa bed because there were two of them, and Granny slept on two armchairs tied together. All of us who’d made it out alive were together now and that was nice. The only thing was that other problems cropped up because there was less money but more mouths to feed. And besides, my nana and granddad didn’t get along well with Granny. Granny felt she had more right to be there, we were only allowed to stay because of my father, her son, while Mama’s parents felt the same because we were being supported, after all, by Mama, their daughter. And other things pitted them against each other. At five one morning we were woken by shouts from their room. Mama ran in and saw Granny throwing her slipper at Granddad. She shouted he was a damned Partisan who’d blown up bridges. It was true that Granddad had been in the Partisans as a kid, when he was twelve the Partisans came to his village before anybody else and took him with them. I didn’t believe he’d blown up bridges, I thought Granny made that up, I was ten, and I couldn’t imagine doing such a thing. Home guardsmen were the first to come into my other grandfather’s village, the one whose throat was slit, so my two grandfathers ended up on opposing sides. This almost pushed Mama over the edge and she said she’d toss them off the fifteenth floor, them and all the rest of us, if they didn’t start behaving like normal people. I could see us flying. A pipe burst that morning in the bathroom and flooded part of the apartment. My mother and Željka’s didn’t go to work, they’d had it and they went off to a café instead. For a short time we received aid, then Mama got a new job. She came to pick me up at school, smiling for the first time in ages with good news. “Who gave you the job?” I asked. “Uncle Grgo, I’ll work twice a week at his office, cleaning after the work day is over, and the salary will be more than I was paid at Astra. He even said you could come along and choose a pair of shoes,” she said. I was thrilled because I had had to put up with wearing things I didn’t like much, except for light-blue tights we’d bought on sale.
Uncle Grgo was Papa’s childhood friend and his folks moved to Vukovar when he was little. He was super smart, he went to the university and put his little sister through school. He had a wife and two boys, and then they got divorced so he moved to Zagreb a few years before the war. He ran a company importing shoes. When I was very small Mama told me that once when I was at their house I picked up a large green bag and carried it all day slung over my shoulder. When we were leaving to go home I didn’t want to give it back so Uncle Grgo gave it to me. Since then he and I had been buddies. Of all of Papa’s friends who came to Zagreb he was the only one who was really glad when we got in touch. Nobody else had the time. In the main square we’d run into Uncle Ivan, who stood there all day calling out in a creepy voice, “Foreign currency, foreign currency.” I didn’t understand what that meant, but sometimes he invited us for coffee, which Mama always declined, but once I said I’d like pizza so he bought me a slice. Another time he wanted to buy Mama roasted chestnuts, but she said no to that, too. The third and last time I saw him was when he came to our apartment in New Zagreb. He was carrying a metal box and Mama was surprised to see him. He came because he’d heard that Mama had broken into our apartment and he’d heard of another one that was empty not too far from there, so he wanted to ask her to go with him. Mama just looked at him like somebody had kicked her in the gut, and Granny shouted, “You have your own wife to take with you, leave my daughter-in-law alone.” Mama saw him out and slammed the door. When she came back and sat at the table, I could see she was shaking. That spring I got to know the Kvaternik Square part of town because often, whenever I had school in the morning shift, I’d go with Mama to her job in the afternoon. Mama would do the cleaning after everybody had left the office, Uncle Grgo would always be waiting for us, he’d make Mama coffee, and pour himself a whiskey. Then they’d talk about my father. He always said how Papa was a good man, my mother made him who he was, and Papa loved her more than he loved his own brother. Mama was sometimes in a rush to clean everything as quick as possible and he’d sit there with his head in his
hands reading papers. In the end he’d sigh and say, “I should’ve been there.” Each season we were given new shoes and Mama got a Christmas bonus. Then we went shopping like everybody else for the holidays.
We’d take the no. 6 tram into the town center. The tram stop wasn’t far from our high-rise, but the ride was pretty long so I never went to town alone, only with Mama, mostly when she went to work. I hung around the school and the neighborhood, trying to pick up the local way of talking without having to ask about words I didn’t know and look stupid. Back home we didn’t say salty rolls, we called them long rolls, and hella sounded lamer to me than wicked, which is what we said, their dork was our moron, and there were all sorts of other Zagreb words, some of them even different from one part of town to the next. They found my accent weird, and when I said my mother had picked me out new dungarees, instead of jeans, at Caritas, I was branded a hick and a refugee. In my New Zagreb class they were all super fashionable, they’d been studying English since they were six, changed clothes every day and had names like Lana and Borna. Among them I had no friends, but I did get to know a girl named Vesna in my neighborhood who was three years older and hung out with me every day. Later a brother and sister, Josip and Maria, moved there from Bosnia and their mother would invite me in every day for burek with meat. Vesna lived in an old corrugated-tin apartment building and I often sat on a bench near it. One day she sat down next to me and started talking. When we got to know each other she told me her Aunt Flo was visiting, and I said how great, terrific, but it was kind of strange that she’d be out in front of the building with me while her aunt was upstairs visiting. It was only two years later, when I felt something warm dripping between my legs during history class, that I found out I too had an Aunt Flo. Vesna was tall and skinny, she wasn’t pretty exactly, but she had these beautiful long fingernails she did in red polish and she was always working on them. She was not a straight-A student, but she was friendly to all the kids, even the ones a lot younger. I never went to her apartment, where she lived with her mother who always worked the night shift, her father who’d stopped leaving the house and only watched soccer matches, and her brother Mladen who hung out at the stadium and scuffled with the kids from Trnje. They were true Zagreb locals. They hardly ever went anywhere over the summer, only occasionally to city-run vacation facilities. When Mama sent me to make a copy of Papa’s picture for the Red Cross archive,Vesna took me to a photocopy place in the neighborhood. It cost a lot to make photocopies of color pictures, but we were hoping somebody might recognize him. Papa was grinning in the picture, he didn’t look like himself, the shadow of the terrace roof out in front of Granny’s house half hid his face. It had been the last summer we were all together, dinnertime when the first kulen sausages were on the grill. The lady asked me why I needed the pictures and, when I explained, she said her friend worked at the Wall of Love and gave me the lady’s number. They were looking for missing persons and seeking aid for our country, they wanted to find out the truth, help kids with no parents, and moms. Sometimes they sent groups of kids for a vacation on the coast or even abroad to affluent families wanting to help kids hurt by the war. That was what I understood and I raced home with the phone number to tell Mama there was still hope, proud to be bearing the news.
The Hotel Tito Page 2
