The curly-haired girl was thrilled that I was going with them and that she’d been the one to find me; in the car, on the way to their house, she held my hand and sat right next to me. They all kept turning to me, speaking in Italian and smiling, and I didn’t understand a word. Then they’d repeat what they’d said, louder, enunciating more clearly, like I couldn’t hear them properly, and I smiled and repeated, a little louder: “I do not understand.” All I could grasp was that their son wasn’t with us but he spoke English. The first thing I saw when they brought me into the house was a grand marble staircase and paintings on the walls and I thought they must be super rich. They took me to the second floor to the big bedroom I’d share with their daughters. They showed me an empty closet where I could stow all my things but what I had fit on just one shelf. They explained all this with their hands because their son wasn’t home yet. The younger girl tagged along with me the whole time and when I went to the bathroom she waited by the door. When I came out, she pointed downstairs and brought her clenched fist to her mouth over and over, like Tarzan explaining to his girlfriend he’d made her dinner. I understood it was time to eat and down we went to a vast dining room with a long table and leather chairs.
More people I hadn’t met were there and I kissed them and was introduced. Here was the seventeen-year-old boy who knew English, but he spoke it so strangely that it was tricky to catch what he was saying. I ate a full plate of pasta with spinach, they called it pesto, pesto, and when I couldn’t eat another bite they were disappointed, so I said: “Good, good.” They had to understand that. They looked me over and I knew they were talking about me so I felt shy. My head was spinning from the noise. Then the phone rang, the father answered and said to somebody: “Si, bambina jugoslava.” After those words I didn’t understand the rest, but this first part rang in my head and I felt the blood rush to my face. Bambina jugoslava, that’s what he called me. No longer was I smiling shyly; I waited for the father to finish. When he came back to the table, I looked him squarely in the eye in the sternest way I knew, and said, “Croatia, no Jugoslava, bambina Croatia.” That night I fell asleep with my face deep in the feather pillow, sobbing so no one could hear me and praying to God that the two weeks would pass quickly.
They bought new clothes, and not only for me, but for my brother and Mama. Whatever they offered me in the store I liked, and whatever I was given, Lettizia and Isabella were given, too. Marissa was my Italian mother. On her shoulders was draped the gaudiest orange-and-pink top with garish parrots. That’s what she chose for my mother and I was ashamed to say no, my mother wore only black and dark blue; I hoped she might at least sleep in it. I was given two new bathing suits because it was summer and every afternoon we went to the city pool. The huge stores and shopping centers made me dizzy and I dreamed of the day I’d come back to the Hotel Tito with all these things and tell everybody what I’d seen. It was a thrill I couldn’t share with the Italian family, they were so good to me, my whole face turned into a little smile that never quit. And they kept saying: “Cosa vuoi? Cosa vuoi?” By then I knew this meant whatever you like. And in the end I was given a big green suitcase because, of course, otherwise I’d never have been able to carry everything home. I look five times better, I thought, than if I’d gone to Germany. Just wait for Uncle to come and see me now. One afternoon we were supposed to attend a birthday party for a friend of Isabella’s, and I heard there’d be another bambina jugoslava there, not from our bus but somebody who’d moved there two years before, so I’d have somebody to talk with in Croatian, though after the first few days, surrounded by Italian and with a little dictionary in my pocket, I’d begun understanding simple sentences and questions and was able to give an answer. On the way to the girl’s house, in the car, Giorgio, my Italian father, began asking me about something in politics. He was usually super serious and almost never joked, different from my real father. That was how he spoke with his kids and with me. He mentioned Tito and Tudjman. I tried to be clear because obviously he didn’t quite understand so I said, “Tudjman buono, Tito no.” I repeated this again. He nodded pensively. Then he mentioned his own father, gestured with a wave behind him, like it was a long, long time ago, Zadar, ćevapčići, ražnjići, and he when he was piccolo. They must have been on a vacation in Croatia when he was little, I just nodded and repeated: “Zadar, bello.” Later I learned that old Giuseppe, his father, was in Zadar, but Zadar wasn’t Croatia but Italy, and his dad wasn’t there on a vacation but to do with something I didn’t quite catch. Soon we arrived, took the gifts out of the trunk, and went in to see the birthday girl. There were a dozen kids there. They were noisy and were playing party games in a half circle. When Isabella and I came in there was a hush and some of them pointed at us. I said ciao softly and sat down next to a boy. Mostly I didn’t understand and assumed the girl I was supposed to talk with hadn’t come yet because they were all speaking Italian. Suddenly one of them, looking at least fifteen, came over and said, “Hi, I’m Maja, I’m from Belgrade, and you?” She was pretty, she had long curly hair and dimples. I froze. “I’m from Vukovar,” I choked. I couldn’t look at her. “Great, so we can speak Yugoslav,” said Maja. “I speak Croatian,” I snapped. “Well it’s all the same,” smiled Maja. “It is not,” I said and went off to the farthest corner where I found a chair. I sat there, shivering, longing for us to leave. Maja went back to her friends and prattled on in Italian. After half an hour, Isabella led me back to them. They explained something but I didn’t understand and didn’t even try. Maja no longer looked my way. An Italian girl stared at me and she rolled her eyes a little when she said to Isabella: “É noiosa.” On the way home I checked the dictionary to see what noioso meant. Boring.
The two weeks passed quickly and I was already understanding Italian better. With the help of the person leading our group I learned that my Italian family wanted me to visit them again. They invited me to stay at their house in Sardinia for the month of August. They really liked me and I’d begun to like them so I said I would if my mother would let me, though I was a little scared and I’d never been separated from my family for that long. They’d pay for my plane ticket and take care of everything, the only thing they needed from my mother was her permission. Why not, but it was so far off that it didn’t seem important; what mattered was that by this time the next day I was going to be in our cozy room. That evening they were taking me to a restaurant, they’d given me a special dress lined with lace to wear, and after that I’d sleep through the night and then my family would be together again. I thought the other kids in our group would be at the dinner with their families, but it was only us and some people we didn’t know. I’d been with Papa to eat at his hotel, we always went on the last day of school when I brought home my certificate with an “excellent” mark for comportment, and Papa’d order me a hamburger and three scoops of ice cream.
There was no way I could explain what I wanted to eat so I let them order for me. In general I wasn’t thrilled with Italian cooking, they always ate pasta first, and sprinkled everything with this cheese that tasted the same way the apartment smelled where Granny Djuka, our Vukovar neighbor, lived, and she had four cats. They poured olive oil that was green over everything and it gave it all the same flavor. After a while the waiter came and brought me a few thin slices of prosciutto and two slices of cantaloupe, all on the same plate. I’d been hoping that this place would be a little nicer than my father’s restaurant at the Hotel Danube, but I saw we were way ahead of them in some things, though in other things they were ahead of us. I made a sandwich of the bread and prosciutto while they were waiting because I was really hungry. I left the cantaloupe for later. Lettizia tried to convince me to combine them; she took a piece of cantaloupe and prosciutto from my place and put them into her mouth. Watching her made me feel sick and I thought it was odd that no one said anything about her behaving so strangely. Then I saw people at other tables doing the same. Soon the waiter came with a hundred other dishes, and I was ov
erjoyed to be going home the next day.
I opened my eyes, and the room was awash in sunlight. Through the old familiar broken venetian blinds on the slanted window the light poured in and it took me a few minutes to adjust. My brother was asleep on the other bed. I was home, finally, my mother and Željka’s sat on the third bed. They had coffee together every morning, one morning at our place, the next at theirs. This was always at about 7:30 on the days when we went to school, and on weekends or holidays it was while we were still asleep. They drank their first coffee in silence and if I woke I’d pretend to be sleeping. The only thing to be heard was “Hey,” then the water boiling on the hot plate, each of them smoking two cigarettes, I knew this because I counted the clicks of the lighter flint, then a few sighs, maybe once, softly: “Fuck you, life,” and “Bye.” I used to wonder what kind of friends would sit there silently like they were tired of each other, but then again, they were always together and didn’t mix much with anybody else or visit the other rooms. With eyes closed I waited for us to be alone to nestle my head into Mama’s lap so she and I could snuggle before we went down to breakfast. The night before it was late when we got in and I hadn’t even unpacked anything or shown them what I’d brought for them. When she saw the gaudy top with parrots, Mama laughed. “This is for me?” She was amazed. “Well it’s what Marissa sent you, she wears one just like it,” I said. “How could she wear things like this when she’s so rich?” Mama couldn’t stop laughing at the parrot while holding the shirt up in front of her and looking in the mirror. “Well it’s super fashionable,” I said. Her laughter swept up my brother and me and we didn’t want it to stop so in the end we convinced her to try on the shirt and prance around the room like on a catwalk. She played it up and I screamed with laughter and joy. And my brother got a few cool things that no one here, or even in Zabok where he went to school, was wearing. He was pleased, he suddenly seemed to care about what he looked like. “And now enough’s enough, we’ll be late for breakfast,” said Mama, her voice different.
While we were still in the bus on the way back to the hotel, Jelena and I’d agreed that the next morning we’d meet at break-fast and sit together. I came down to the restaurant with Mama and my brother and right away I saw her standing, tray in hand, at the head of the line. She’d put on her new high tops, the same ones I had. Burgundy Converse All-Stars. Mine were in our room and I was sorry. “There’s Jelena,” I said to Mama, hoping she’d say, “Why don’t you go sit with her,” but she just nodded. I cared about Jelena and me sitting together, even though I hadn’t seen my family for two weeks. Jelena spotted me, we exchanged glances and were the only people in the world who understood each other. It was only us from the Political School who’d gone on the Italy trip. Her Italian family had been rich, too, and they’d bought her whatever she asked for. They also invited her to come back to them over the summer, to somewhere in Switzerland. Her real family was her mother and brother who both had diabetes. The three of them had barely escaped from the hospital on the day Vukovar fell, and her father was stranded somewhere, like mine, and listed as missing. Her brother was a few years older and he gave her a hard time, just like mine did me, so we had lots in common. Hers was a shade crazier and ate live fish on a wager, and when he went to the bathroom he’d always strip down buck naked, regardless of what he was doing, she saw him through the keyhole, and once he heated up a coin on the hot plate and pressed it on her hand. Mine bugged me but he didn’t give me scars. I waited for some old lady ahead of me in line to move so I could get closer to the wall where the menus for the week were displayed. Hamburger and tea. That’s what it said for today. The first time this had appeared on the menu, we’d all been thrilled that we’d be served a hamburger for breakfast the next day. Most of the kids were already at the restaurant by seven that morning and then they pulled a fast one on us for the first and last time. On each plate we were greeted by two thick slices of bacon—all fat, no meat. Brand name: Hamburger. The greasy cook said, “What’s wrong? Ain’tcha ever heard of it? Grilled hamburgers? Now that’s a laugh, ha ha ha!” Ever since that day we’d known anything was possible, and even if it was on the menu, they might not serve it, and the ingredients might vary. For example, if there was fish for lunch on Friday, we’d have pasta with cheese for dinner, though finding the cheese on the plate was a challenge; the nutritional substitute was tiny fish bones. The line inched slowly along, and across the partition I saw Jelena. At other tables were friends of ours, but she sat alone. We got to the end, to the bread and silverware, and I turned to Mama and said, “I’m going to sit with her.” “But why? Didn’t you and she have enough time to talk while you were . . . ?” She didn’t finish. Off I raced, leaving her and my brother behind. I felt them watching me, surprised, because whenever it wasn’t a school day we ate together. I sat across from Jelena. She said, “Ciao.” I said, “Come stai?” “Bene, e tu?” Jelena shot back. Everybody was looking at us.
We were different.
Summers in Zagorje inched by slowly. There were no rivers, no seashore, just lots of flies and the stink of manure, and that was the hardest to get used to. At least at night one could sleep well—said those who slept well. My mother couldn’t, nor could Željka’s. She’d toss and turn while my brother listened tensely to her sighs. Sometimes she smoked and I breathed a sigh of relief because I’d heard somewhere that smoking soothed the nerves, it wasn’t super healthy but at least she’d feel calmer after. She’d go back to bed and calm down. She’d lie there, her mind elsewhere. My brother always slept with his back to us and his head under the pillow. Mama had been given sleeping pills by the doctor and she hadn’t stopped taking them. I believe she scarcely slept. Every so often she’d talk about how she’d worked herself to the bone in Vukovar—at the factory, with us kids, with her mother-in-law—and her spirit would be deep asleep when the alarm clock went off at three thirty in the morning because they were still living with Granny and Grandpa then and the house was far from where she worked, and then you come home and it’s cook for them all and do the laundry by hand. And now, here you are, so sleep. Sleep all day if you like, there’s nothing here but the flies and the waiting. The waiting. We’ve waited. For Papa to come, for Vukovar to be freed, for us to move up on the waiting list for apartments. All those were things that nothing could be done about meanwhile, but wait. We tried. We made the rounds of the Red Cross, posted Papa’s picture, asked others to look for the tanned man in an undershirt in the deep shade of the yard where the first kulen of the year was on the grill for my ninth birthday. Nowhere was a man found who looked like him. We paid for an ad in Arena magazine, for anyone to contact us, anybody with knowledge of a man with this first and last name. No one responded, and then one day Mama received a marriage proposal in the mail, probably inspired by the ad. We stopped posting it. We stopped going to exchanges because the exchanges came to an end. All the living had already been exchanged. The occasional person for whom all hope was lost turned up years later, working as a slave on a remote farm in Serbia, cut off from the world, unaware the war was over. He wasn’t even among them. The last person to see him in a vision, Fatma Nur Džennet—and what she saw wasn’t totally clear— said she saw him as if he were under water and in a fog—but still alive, she added, at Mama’s prompting of course. The last person who told us something about him spoke to us over the phone while we were freezing in a phone booth in the Zagreb main square; Mama dictated seven, six, one, nine . . . the man was Alen, a numerologist from Rijeka. None of us understood much about numbers, math was always our weak point, but with the current madness it was inevitable that we’d come to believe numbers held the secret of the universe. Or of my father. Nothing happened and nothing changed. Time passed. On a few occasions word circulated through the hotel that Vukovar had been freed. I happened to be partway through an episode of Beverly Hills, 90210 and near the front desk one time when that happened. Men began to gather and out-shout each other. Jelena and I rolled our eyes because they
’d spoiled one of our rare pleasures—enjoying the series together; we didn’t feel like watching it up in the rooms because of our brothers and mothers. As the men grew agitated, we began to take an interest in what was happening, and then little Darijan flew out of the crowd and declared: “We’re going to Vukovar tomorrow!” Jelena told him, “Poor little thing!” He was two years younger than us, and I said to him, “Take a walk, blockhead!” By then I talked like that. “No, but really, really!” he shouted. “Ask anyone you like.” We came closer to the frenzy and managed to catch phrases like Croatian Defense Forces, unit, break-through, and America, and that was enough for us to race off to our rooms and our mothers. When I came in, I saw her sitting in the half-light by the window, crocheting. Since we’d moved here, a tower of white yarn had grown in the cupboard, crocheted into flowers, doves, olive branches, and Mama came up with her own designs. This was all the rage among the widows or soon-to-be widows, it was even more than the rage. It became the currency brought to all meetings with members of the commissions, housing and otherwise, that ran our lives; a misplaced stitch might tip the scales one way or the other. This was the one thing she couldn’t be distracted from and it soothed her like a cigarette. “Mama,” I said; she didn’t answer. “Mama,” I said, louder. “Somebody downstairs is saying the city has been freed and return is a sure thing now.” “Stop it,” was all she said. “I didn’t make it up, everybody downstairs is talking, there has to be something to it,” I pleaded. “If there were, the Slovenes would already have said something.” She looked up from her crocheting and shook her head.
The Hotel Tito Page 5
