When we first arrived it was a beautiful day in early autumn. There were throngs of people, chaos, commotion. At the front desk of the old political school complex, otherwise known—by some of us—as the Hotel Tito, people were elbowing each other and squabbling. Everybody wanted a second room, or one on the first floor for the kids, or one for their husband who might come back, or some other privilege; they felt entitled to make a fuss. We stood to the side.
After we’d been squatting at the New Zagreb apartment for a few months the court gave us eight days to leave or we’d be evicted. We were offered a place to stay on the coast, but we preferred staying closer to Zagreb because otherwise everybody would forget us, and besides if Papa showed up he’d look for us there. Other people from Vukovar, who were staying at the Zagreb Holiday Inn, had heard about a nicer place in an area not far from Zagreb called Croatian Zagorje, so we went out there with them to have a look. I was super excited because Damir lived there now. I’d first seen him at the Holiday Inn back when he was still staying there. He’d been coming out of the elevator, super cute, and I’d fallen for him right away. My family and I stood near the front desk at the new place and waited to see what would happen. The loudest, who shoved forward as representatives of the headless, wailing mob, the ones with the largest families already settled on the second floor, started shouting: “Get lost, trespassers! Beat it!” They meant us and a few other families who’d come to see the new place, having fled the seaside barracks where there had been seventy people sleeping per room. I could hear women sobbing and I, too, began crying really loud. I knew somebody would notice, I didn’t want them to throw us out and besides I was hoping I’d see Damir again. Suddenly this pretty woman in a uniform turned up, squeezed my shoulders and said no one would touch us and the loudmouths wouldn’t be the ones deciding who’d go and who’d stay, because there were plenty of rooms. I was proud I’d pulled that off so well. The loudmouth representatives grumbled, because they’d lost their chance to push the rest of us around, but in the end they relented. It was, after all, about women and kids who had nowhere else to go. I was super happy. We were given a room on the third floor, number 325, with three beds. A miniature, sunny, cozy room with its own bathroom. Mama sat on a bed and began to cry. I couldn’t understand, we’d gotten what we wanted, even though there’d been no guarantees. I went out into the hall. Damir was going into number 326 and said, “Hi.” All night I couldn’t sleep.
The young and healthy were given rooms on the third floor, the ones who could manage all the flights of stairs. Two rooms down from us was Aunt Slavica with her two sons. Mario was soft-spoken and withdrawn, while Dejo was younger and more brash. When he walked by he’d grab the little girls by the butt or the tits we didn’t have yet, he’d probably seen that somewhere. He wasn’t very good at it because we’d duck and slip away, but after that he’d punch us hard in those same places and that hurt. All of us hated him, but at that point I began to grow like a weed and soon I’d outgrown him by a whole head and he left me alone. Aunt Slavica was always wearing these garish clashing T-shirts and tight jean skirts and she was pretty bulgy. She had a frizzled perm and bright-red lips. She spent most of her time out in the hall with her neighbor Kaja, laughing loudly, sometimes even screaming with laughter. Some hated her because she was happy and because her time had come and she was still young enough to enjoy it. Her husband had beat her, they were poor and lived in a shack with no plumbing, and then he was killed. She was given his pension and bought a cassette player and sang at the top of her lungs by the open door. She never came into our room to ask how we were. In the room next to Dejo’s lived my friend Marina with her mom and sister. Then they were given another room. That autumn was one of the last exchanges and her dad came back. We crouched all afternoon by her door waiting for her to come out and say what had happened. She came out with two big bags of candy when we were heading down to lunch. All pink and grinning she said her dad had showered for a whole hour to wash off the first layer of dirt. I asked her if he’d said anything about my father. It had slipped her mind to ask.
We were among the last to move in so I didn’t know anyone. At the front desk I saw kids my age. After two or three days in our room, I ventured out and started exploring the cold, dark halls. The rambling concrete complex was vast and easy to lose my way in. The dark, that’s what I remember best, there weren’t windows except in the rooms, and out of the dark would swim the faces of old people shuffling noiselessly among the catacombs. I skipped down the service stairs to the ground floor and at the end of the hall I spied a boy and girl. I started trailing after them, this was my fight for sheer survival in this vast new place. They seemed to be out exploring their new home and I meant to go along. They began glancing back and whispering. “Poor thing! Those socks! And your stork legs,” said the little girl to me. I didn’t answer. I stopped, then went on following them. The boy said: “Coming with us to steal bananas from the kitchen?” I said, “Okay.”
They were my first friends. Biljana and Ivan. Bilja’s parents were divorced. Her father was down by the coast and she was here with her mother. Her mother protected her from everything, both of them had been held at a prison camp. All the over-the-top worrying was what made Bilja so thin, frail, and see-through. Most of the time she was invisible, but at least everybody knew about her. I was glad she’d hang out with me. Later I forgot her.
Ivan also lived only with his mom, who hadn’t been married to his dad. When his dad was killed, Ivan and his mom weren’t given the pension. It went instead to his other family, the one he didn’t live with. Ivan often slept on armchairs by the front desk. He stole ice cream, and then some of the grown-ups began paying him to steal tools and other things. He dropped out of school in sixth grade. I think I was a little in love even with him. He smoked a pack of Marlboros a day. His teeth started falling out and he turned yellow. He stayed short, but hung out only with the bigger boys. For them, just for the fun of it, he’d sometimes tie a cat to the bottom of a basketball hoop. When he and his mother were granted an apartment, people often spoke of her in the same breath as truck drivers and men from the ministries.
In Conference Room Number Five they made a church. Mass was held there every Sunday. They built an altar on a big conference desk and covered it with a white sheet, and inside it were locked a hundred books about the party and framed pictures of Tito. At the end of the room there were three confessionals made of three pairs of back-to-back chairs. On Sundays we prayed to God and attended catechism classes there. Sometimes doctors came to give us check-ups in the assembly hall and talk to the youth about sex. A movie director came once looking for two kids to act in a movie. I signed up to try out for a role and I was so sure I’d get it. Fifty of us crowded around the big oval table. They were looking for actors between the ages of seven and twelve. To start with we stood up one by one and gave our first and last name and age. Then was the first round. I raced off to our room and told Mama we’d probably have to move back to Zagreb, then I went back. After a few minutes they read out the names of the kids going on to the next round. I missed my name and pushed through the boisterous crowd. When I reached the tall lady with the papers and said I thought they’d skipped me, she just looked over and said, “If we haven’t called you, you can go.” This was a shock, I couldn’t believe I wasn’t going on to the next round and wouldn’t get the part. But nobody from the Political School did. In the end the movie was bad and everybody was disappointed. The main role went to the son of our former dentist. He didn’t even know how to say his r’s.
Granddad drank. Years ago, while he was young, he fell off a motorbike and cracked his head. Something was off after that and he started drinking. This was the official version. Sometimes less, sometimes more, but mostly he was on his feet and he’d find his way home. From those who’d stayed in Vukovar, we heard that he’d been riding drunk on his motorbike and had been shot in the ass with shrapnel. This was relayed with hoots of laughter. I heard only once
that the Chetniks had plied him with brandy and he’d cozied up to them. If he’d had any schemes in mind, they had obviously failed because he signed his house away. I pretended I didn’t know him sometimes. When I saw him heading my way, I’d spin around on the service stairs and flee. He always had a pack of little kids trailing behind him because he had pockets full of candy. He loved to play with them, but they were cruel to him. Until the day when Dražen’s dad told Granddad he’d kill him if he saw him hanging out near his boy, sorry old lush. After that I kept my distance even more in the halls, but sometimes in the afternoon I went to their room. Granddad would be sleeping, but if he saw me he’d go all tender and give me a toy made of wire. He’d also give me pocket money and send me to the bar to fetch him a beer. I could keep the change. If only he’d shut his eyes for good that would be best for everyone.
I was loitering around the front desk once and ran into Ivan and Zoki. They said they were going to follow Granddad; every day he went behind the Political School at the same time, before dinner, and they were curious to see what he was up to, maybe he was hiding money or something. What was I to do? If he was up to something awful, it would be better not to see it, but I didn’t want to abandon him. Off we went. We trailed some fifty feet behind, but Granddad didn’t turn around. We went through the big grassy area behind the building and came to a little slope. There was a big bare rock sticking up out of the grass there and Granddad kneeled. We couldn’t see what he was doing, and as Zoki wasn’t scared of him, he went right over and said, “Granddad, where’d you hide the treasure?” Seconds later he came back. He said Granddad was crazy and was kneeling in front of a rock where somebody had drawn a cross in chalk. Still, I was relieved that he was just crazy, nothing worse, and back we went into the building in silence.
Zoki was my age, he was always picking fights, spitting at other kids, and when you saw him you knew he was no good. His cousin told me that when Zoki was a baby his dad threw him naked into the snow in the yard when he wouldn’t stop crying. His twin sister, Zorica, was in my class. On the last day of school, when we were on our way back to the Political School, Marina, Zorica, and I saw a mangy little kitten. We were thrilled. It was so small we could cup it in our hands, it had no fur in spots, but it was wiggling and softly meowing. We decided to save it. I pulled out the bag for my school slippers and put it in. We carried it to the hill behind the Political School, found a box and some clothes from Caritas, and wrapped it up. We agreed to steal a syringe from the infirmary and use it to feed the kitten milk. We’d take turns getting up before seven and bringing it breakfast. When it was Zorica’s turn she overslept. We didn’t say a word but we moved the kitten to a new place and began avoiding Zorica. One day when we were going out to the hill, we noticed her following so we turned and went back. Zorica came over and said, “I hope your dad never comes home.” I spat at her but she dodged and ran off. I told everybody what she’d said and soon nobody would hang out with her. A few days later the kitten disappeared from the box. We searched the whole hillside but never saw it again. The summer went by and Zorica and I still hadn’t made up. She was mostly by herself or with her cousin Nataša whom everybody called Dumbelina and who was borderline stupid. One afternoon I ran into Nataša and told her to tell Zorica I wanted to make up. Zorica came running over a few minutes later and from way off I could see she was smiling. She offered her hand and said she hadn’t meant what she’d said. I didn’t give her my hand. Instead I told her I was joking. I turned around and walked away.
Nataša had nicknames. Dumbelina, Poor Thing, and Beatles because her hair was like wire and her mother cut it like the Beatles’; nothing else worked. She pronounced it Bitlus, which made her sound even dumber. Her older sister Kristina had thick black waist-length hair, had graduated from the commercial high school, and was engaged to marry a local Zagorje guy. Their room was hospital pristine but still crammed with stuff. I know this because sometimes I went to Nataša’s when there was nobody else around at the hotel. She called me every day and often tagged along because sometimes I’d be nice. When I went to her place, she’d show me everything she had, especially whatever she wasn’t supposed to touch, like her sister’s things. She took out Kristina’s sanitary napkins once—pretending she didn’t know what they were for—and said she’d give me one if I promised to come back the next day. Her father and mother lived in the next room, her mom was a quiet woman who spent her days tidying and cleaning, while he, in his own eyes, was this big-time Don Juan. Everyone knew he was up to something with the local Zagorje girl who worked the front desk.
I started a dance group and chose the girls to dance in it. I came up with the choreography and decided which songs we’d dance to and what we’d wear. For our rehearsals we were even allowed to use Conference Room Number Four, the one used every morning for daycare. When we’d rehearsed a number we’d paste posters around the front desk and invite people to come and watch us in the sports hall. It was mostly old folks and little kids who showed up by the stage, but we were sure they wanted to be just like us. Dumbelina followed us around all that time and wanted to dance in the group. We conferred and agreed—no way. We were working on a song that opened with a rapper rapping before the singer started singing and I thought we could use a boy to do the rapping while we danced, but we couldn’t find a boy who’d agree to. The day before the performance there was some big commotion, a woman was shouting and I could hear gasping sobs. Dumbelina appeared beet red on the service stairs. I asked her what was up. “He took off with that Zagorje slut.” I think the worst part for them was that the woman was a local from Zagorje. I told Nataša if she wanted to she could dress all in black and wear a baseball cap and come to the sports hall. She could stand next to us and be the rapper boy. She said she would, but the next day her mother didn’t let her.
Conference Room Number Seven was the most popular spot in the whole Political School. The front desk had let the teen crowd use it for their New Year’s party, Parcheesi sessions, card games, and general socializing. Everybody between thirteen and seventeen was there. I was a little younger but I knew what Number Seven looked like because I’d lurk on the service stairs that passed right by it and peer in every time the door was open a crack. All of us who hung out by the door to Number Seven peered in, and whenever anybody who was inside spotted us they’d slam the door in our faces and leave us in a cloud of smoke. There were a few armchairs in there, a sofa with stuffing spilling out in places where it had been gashed with a knife, and some stools. A Ping-Pong table stood in the middle. And nothing else. The walls were covered with Post-its in different colors with dumb things kids had said. Most were Dumbelina’s bloopers, but she didn’t go there often so they probably didn’t upset her. My first foray into Number Seven was after the good doctor from Vukovar visited our accommodations; he distributed a carton of Marlboro Reds to every person at the hotel, and when I say every person, the cartons weren’t given only to the adults but literally to every two-footed resident. A truck parked out in front of the hotel, they unloaded the cigarettes, and two men stood there with a list of the rooms and residents. I waited in line to collect our cartons. After half an hour I was given the three packages and went back into the hotel. I decided to tell Mama they’d given me cartons just for her and my brother. I knocked at Number Seven. There was no sound from inside so I sat on a bench and slid the cartons under my feet, just in case somebody I knew passed by. Soon, from the dark of the room, Miro poked out his head and said, “What’s up? What do you want?” “I brought you smokes,” I said softly. He grabbed the carton and banged the door shut. Behind me appeared Dragan, on his way in he asked, “What are you doing here?” “I brought you smokes,” I said again. He laughed, baring his yellowed teeth. “Wanna come in? You know what they’re up to?” he leered. I looked in over his shoulder but it was nearly dark so I could only see silhouettes on the sofa. I heard Miro’s voice and a girl’s. “What are you doing?” I asked. “Spin the bottle in the dark,” s
aid Miro. “Now get lost and come back at New Year’s,” said Dragan and shut the door.
The Hotel Tito Page 3
