Because, pursuant to this act, the families of Croatian defenders imprisoned or missing are treated as having rights equal to those of families of Croatian defenders killed, we find it necessary to inform you that you have the right to:
payment in the sum of family pension,
payment in the sum of family disability.
The procedure for exercising this right must be begun at the Directorate for Defense welfare office nearest to your place of residence. Please enclose the following documents with your petition:
a certificate of the Commission for Imprisoned or Missing Persons from the Government of the Republic of Croatia that unambiguously certifies the identity of the person who is imprisoned or considered missing;
a certificate of membership in a Croatian Army unit as well as status (rank, duty) —to be obtained from the Defense Directorate;
a certificate confirming the pension base (the basic wage for December 1994)—for cases to date, and the same will be officially requested from the Defense Directorate Personnel Administration, Zagreb, Stančićeva 6;
birth certificate (marriage certificate);
certificate of nationality;
registration of place of residence (residency);
certificate of circumstances of disappearance or imprisonment (request these from military unit).
As the Welfare Department does not have the authority to resolve housing issues, please return to the Housing Administration of the Ministry for Defense and solve the problem therein.
Sincerely yours,
HEAD OF THE WELFARE
DEPARTMENT FOR THE WOUNDED
Captain A. K. M.
And then, again, nothing.
I was sorry Marina and I weren’t speaking. The last thing she said, through Jelena during recess, was that I got on her nerves because nobody ever saw me as a loser even when I was carrying around the Barbie bag I used last year, while she was teased mercilessly by everybody, and anyway she was the first who’d heard about Igor. But though I was sorry about her, I was thrilled when Igor sent me a message through his sister to say I was sweet and we should go out for coffee if we ran into each other again at the Oaza. Now I was faced with a dilemma. How could I keep Marina from being angry now that she, too, liked Igor, without me losing him? And if she wouldn’t speak to me, how would I be able to reach out to her sister, who knew his friends and could hook us up? I walked home from school alone, I didn’t need anybody because I didn’t want to share my feelings. How cool it was to be all melancholy and sighs. The vestibule of the Political School was bathed in glimmering sun and all the glass and wood seemed warm. The only thing was all the dust visible in the air; after all these years the cleaning ladies were no longer vigilant.
Out of the enchanted dust swam a wizened, mournful face, frail little hands clung to my neck. Marina’s grandmother wailed and I was totally taken aback and it was incredible, all of it, especially because of Marina and Igor. After a few minutes I began to catch some of what she was saying and realized this had nothing to do with Igor. “Condolences, condolences,” the old woman chanted, kissing me and clinging. Granddad had been in the hospital for a while, a mental hospital. I was hoping it was he who’d died, not someone else. “Your granddad’s gone” confirmed my suspicions. I felt a wave of relief, but her sobs and how crazy in love she was with Granddad, and the thought that he’d never again send me to the bar to bring him a beer—even though I’d been resenting that recently and sometimes asked another kid to go—sent me into sobs, bitter sobs. Toward the end he’d started boozing even more. Whenever she came back from Zagreb, Mama was afraid of what she’d find. When he boozed he didn’t do anything weird, mostly he just wept and then he’d want to kill himself. Always by electrocution, probably because he’d been an electrician and knew how to do it that way. Then Mama and Nana would plead with him, they’d drag him away from the wall socket and tuck him into bed. My brother went ballistic a few times and I thought he might punch Granddad, and the whole thing was a little embarrassing. Then he started muddling days and years so they took him to Jankomir. The doctor there suggested Mama was the crazy one, she was so eager to be rid of him. Then Granddad came back to the Political School and wanted to die but they didn’t let him so on he boozed, and back he went to the hospital and now he’d died, just like that. From a pulmonary embolism, they said. In a few bounds I reached the first floor where Granddad and Nana lived, and all the way to their room I smelled cheese pastries and fritters. All the hot plates and toaster ovens on the floor joined forces when somebody died, the fuses would blow because everybody wanted to bring something. There were chairs in the dark hallway in front of their room and Nana, surrounded by women in black, was sitting on one of them. “Child!” burst out of her in the dark when she saw me. We hugged a long time and the others patted us and smoothed our hair. Everybody loved Nana, Nana didn’t love Granddad, Granddad loved the ladies and the booze. He was good to me when I was small, but now, I didn’t know. Nana cried, how could she cope alone, why hadn’t he waited till they could go back to Vukovar together, but she was ready, they’d be together again one day in the home nobody could destroy. When Nana babysat for me when I was little, she never missed the funeral of a close friend or even distant acquaintance; she’d bring me along. I was intrigued to watch grown-ups cry and how they were suddenly so kind to each other. When the ceremony ended, Nana would always turn to face the newer part of the cemetery and say: “There, that’s where our house is.” I’d stand on tiptoe to see a roof, but I never saw anything. Only much later did I realize she was referring to their future grave. Now, having lost his home, Granddad wouldn’t be put to rest in the house she’d imagined, but in the yellow dirt of Zagorje on a little hill by the church. Mama came back, dog-tired, on the last bus after the autopsy and the coroner, traipsing from one side of town to the other arm in arm with Željka’s mother, the buses only intermittent. Into the room Mama stepped, haggard, at around ten, a bye was heard in the hall, the neighboring door clicked and then ours. My brother and I said nothing, we didn’t know what to say, my condolences sounded forced, but, then again, he was her dad. “Are you okay?” I asked. “You’re not sleeping yet,” she answered. Lots of people were at the cemetery on the day of the funeral, nearly half my class came. The sorrow wasn’t crushing so the special attention felt nice. Everybody was kissing us, squeezing our hands, eyeing us. Nana handled herself well, she cried a lot but softly, and she’d look each person who came over to her in the eye. She was a gentle woman and she loved people, needed them. Mama was dark, as dark as she could be. Enveloped in a deep blue funk, she didn’t see anyone. When the funeral was at its peak, Nana’s wails began raining down on us. “You were so good to me, you never made it back to Vukovar, why did you leave me, where will I go now . . .” and so on, round and round. Even I cried a little, but I was mostly watching Mama, who looked like she might crumble, she was watching Nana like Nana was about to pull free of her and fly off. When everything was over and the funeral-goers were dispersing, Željka’s mother threw an arm around Mama’s shoulders while she brushed her eyes with a sleeve, and all I heard Mama say was, “Did she have to keep saying how she spent her whole life with him . . .”
That night after the funeral I slept in Nana’s room so she wouldn’t be alone. Her neighbor, Milka, stayed till late, I was drifting off to sleep and they still hadn’t agreed on how long one isn’t supposed to watch TV or listen to the radio, and how long to wear black. The customs varied from village to village. I didn’t dare ask how much this carried over to the third generation. I lay on Nana’s bed and thought about Granddad’s plaid shirt that had been too small for him anyway—it reminded me of one I’d seen on Cobain—and Nana’s ocher-colored sweater which would look great with it. Milka was all for two years in widows’ weeds, and that suited me because of the yellow sweater, while Nana said the custom was a year, to which Milka retorted, “Sure, six months’ll do if you’ve a mind to marry again.” Nana lowered her eyes
demurely and Milka said softly, “I’ll be off now.” Everybody knew Milka had been fooling around with Old Man Franjo. They didn’t wait long after his wife Mara died. For a time such things circled through my mind. Limun and Ozrenka were railing at each other in the hall, she was pregnant, alone, no teeth and no schooling, all she had was Limun and he’d left her for a Zagorje girl. I wanted to go to the Oaza on Saturday for a Zagorje guy; on Granddad’s bed Nana was sighing audibly, Granddad was six feet under, and despite it all, or maybe because of it, I felt so alive: I needed to come up with a plan.
After school I cruised around the halls of the Political School; I considered going down to the front desk to wait for Marina, she and Jelena weren’t in my class and their school day went on longer. Aside from Nataša, the only one from the Political School in my class had been Ivan, but he stopped going to school and didn’t do anything but steal, pick fights, and smoke. He wasn’t as dense as little Mika, who idolized him. You could talk Mika into just about anything, even stealing from the rooms right next to his, though he could’ve had whatever he wanted because his dad had broken out of Vukovar and was working in Germany. Things disappeared from the rooms of the women with whom his mother drank coffee and everybody knew it was Mika’s doing and Ivan had put him up to it. A few years later—when his family were among the first to return to their rebuilt house—the press reported that forty-three-year-old S. M. had robbed currency-exchange offices around Vukovar at gunpoint. Mika and his dad, this same S. M., had, so you see, been thieves since Mika was in diapers. There was talk for ages in the hallways, and women said Mika’s mother had always been trash. You could tell. Everybody knew what she was up to while her husband was in Germany, she was a slut and the kid was a crook. Somehow it got out that Mika’s little sister’s pubic hair started growing while she was still in third grade. They were all creepy, but while they were living there they strutted around like they were better than the rest of us. “Hey, where are you off to?” I heard behind me after I’d walked by Ivan’s room. “The front desk,” I said and was about to continue walking. “Come in, my mom’s in Zagreb.” “I’m going down to wait for Marina,” I said, hesitating. “Come here, see what I got.” I didn’t want to spar with him from the hallway and I was intrigued to see what he had to show me. “We were in down the village the other day, me and Miro,” he began. Miro was like him, a little older, sallow and freckled, a bar hound by high school. I figured they’d swiped something again from the Marshal Tito living-history ethno village, probably something big, after everything small had already been stolen. This was nothing new. We girls wrote all kinds of things railing against the Serbs and Commies in the guest book, and once a TV show mentioned the comments as an example of the vandalizing of the Croatian cultural heritage. I wrote: Comrade Tito, thanks a million, big of you to give the cute little room to my mother, brother, and me, rot in hell. They quoted some examples on the show but didn’t read mine. The boys first pilfered little stuff, but later they stole whatever they could drag out of there: plaster casts, a pig with an apple in its mouth from the wedding table in the little house exhibiting Zagorje wedding customs, rusty pincers from the make-believe Zagorje smithy, wooden toys Zagorje children were supposed to have played with, and other dumb stuff. The only place they couldn’t get into was Tito’s birthplace; guards were posted there. They were probably worrying we might make off with the big sculpture out in front. “So what did you do?” I asked. “We went out at night,” grinned Ivan, “you know the sculpture outside? We dressed it up in Tićo’s granny’s nightgown.” We both burst out laughing; that was so cool. “The guy who was on guard,” he went on, “realized something was up and came out to see, threw a fit and started screaming at us, and meanwhile I snuck into his sentry booth.” Ivan bent down and pulled something wrapped in a dishtowel out from under the bed. When he unwrapped it, I only realized after a minute that I was looking at a pistol, the genuine article. “You’re nuts,” I told him. “Hey, what if somebody tries to mess with me now?” “Put that away, you’ve gone too far.” We looked at each other. “Gotta go, Marina’s waiting.” “You ain’t goin’ nowhere,” he said. He started laughing and came over. My heart was in my throat. “One day you’ll be my wife,” he said. He shoved me hard with his shoulder and unlocked the door. I flew out and shouted, “Moron!” He just laughed, and I fled to my room.
Slaven and Antonia were the grandkids of a Vukovar man. Everybody called them Zagi, or Zagorac, because their grandfather had moved to Vukovar after the Second World War, but he’d actually been born in one of the villages nearby. He, too, had suffered, but some of his childhood memories began coming back, he was always upbeat, looked like he’d gained a little weight, and his local twang resurfaced. His daughter, son-in-law, and grandkids had been housed at the Hotel Laguna in Zagreb, and sometimes they’d come out to visit. Antonia was my age and fit right in when we saw her that afternoon sitting on the steps to the restaurant. She was wearing white All-Stars and tattered shorts. I’d seen a tall boy as I left Ivan’s room, he was going into Number Seven and lighting up a cigarette, and now it occurred to me that he might be Antonia’s older brother. Marina saw him and forgot about being angry with me over Igor. He was wearing a leather Ramones jacket, his face all cheekbones and his fingers bandaged from playing the guitar. The misunderstood gaze, of course. He was really cute but I had no interest in getting to know him, et cetera, because I didn’t want Marina to be angry with me again. It was Friday afternoon when they came, we heard he didn’t have a girlfriend and he’d be here till Sunday night. Of course their granny would let the Zagis go to the Oaza the next day so we, of course, had to be there, too, and of course my mother would never in her wildest dreams imagine I’d ask for such a thing so soon after the funeral and everything. On my way to the room I was working up strategies for how to approach Mama about Saturday. Dumbelina appeared in the hallway near the service stairs, wiping her mouth as she left the restaurant, and hurried past me. “Hey, were you at lunch? What’re they serving?” I barely had time to ask. She stared at me blankly, startled, and a tic she had with her lips started. It always did it when she was edgy, for example in class when the teacher called her up to the board, though nobody expected much from her. She’d open and close her mouth like she was yawning or her lips were bothering her. “Pasta with cheese, gotta go,” she said and vanished around the corner. Now Tićo came from there, too, patting the stiff hedgehog-looking hairdo his mother gave his ash-blond hair. Tićo was the male version of Dumbelina, just smarter. He, too, was slow but he had a temper. His dad had died in Vukovar, he and his mother were alone, and she treated him like he was a grown man even though he was only a sophomore at the vocational school for carpentry. He was over six feet tall and always hanging around the basketball hoop out in front of the hotel, he didn’t drink or smoke. His mother was crazy proud of him and was always going on about how her Tićo was so handsome and smart. It occurred to me that he and Dumbelina were up to something, but it seemed so incredible that she’d ever hook up with anyone, especially someone like him, that the very thought of it made me sick.
Igor. His long hair and his pale face. His hands, I had no idea what his hands were like but I liked thinking about them. He was cooler than everybody else around here. The room was locked and when I went in I closed the door behind me. I lay on the bed and shut my eyes. It was like someone else’s hand slipped into my underpants, I didn’t want to think about what I was doing, I just pulled the blanket up over me and gave in. When I came out from under the covers, my brother was sitting at the desk facing the wall. “A telegram came from Uncle, condolences for Granddad,” he said coldly. I said nothing, I just smoothed the bedding and walked out. When I came back that evening a copy of Super Teen magazine was under my pillow. It was open to the “Questions and Answers” page. The article circled in red marker began: “I am fifteen and I don’t have a boyfriend, but I masturbate every day and I can’t stop, though I’d like to. Am I okay? How can I help myself
? Miserable.” I didn’t read the answer. I wanted to die.
It was Saturday around noon and I had no more time to delay. Mama was cleaning our room with the so-called hand-held vacuum. The device didn’t have a proper name. It required no electricity; every well-equipped room in the hotel had one. It was hardly better than an ordinary broom and worse than a proper vacuum. And proper vacuums weren’t used even by the people who could afford them; if two or three were plugged in along with a few electric kettles, the fuses would start blowing on our floor. The cleaning device had a box the size of a videocassette which was closed at the top; below there was an opening for a brush that spun around, scooping the larger crumbs into the box, though of course not the dust, but for our little room it sufficed. We had a red one, Nana’s was blue. You could talk with the person while they were cleaning. It made no noise, only dust. “What’s up, are you here to ask for something?” Mama looked up at me from where she was kneeling, picking up the hairs that the hand-held vacuum wasn’t catching. She knew. She always knew, but I wanted to know, too. I tidied my things that all fit on one shelf and rummaged through my CDs. I had a dozen cassettes, but my three CDs were my pride and joy. On one, which I’d kept from the ZaprešiÐ library, there were covers of Beatles songs, while the second, the Doors, was given to me by a weird girl who was a friend of my brother’s, I thought they might be dating but he was too shy to say so. The third I got from Australia, it was called Happy Birthday, Ivana, and it was sent to me by some of Granny’s old friends, émigrés who had a pop tamburitza ensemble. “I thought I might go out this evening,” I said softly. “Didn’t you go out last Saturday and say you’d never ask for anything ever again? And besides, we buried Granddad less than a week ago,” she said, which was exactly what I’d expected. First she looked at me sort of implacably, but tired, and this was my space to maneuver. I kept still and waited. Nothing happened and she too was quiet. I fidgeted around the room, watched her out of the corner of my eye, sighed. When I was a kid, I used that look to get whatever I wanted out of Papa. Roller skates, ice cream, a trip to the pool. “You’re my little scoundrel,” that’s what he’d say, and take me into his lap. With Mama I had less of a chance, she was the one in charge. Now, too, but more tired. “He’d have let me go,” I whispered. “In your dreams. He’d have locked you up and thrown away the key, go ahead, see if I care!” she snapped. Not another word was needed, this was it, and I flew to Nana’s room for the ocher sweater. When I came back, she looked like she’d been crying but I didn’t ask. The bathroom where I was getting ready was so cramped that two people could barely stand in there together, but that was the last thing we’d’ve complained about. We knew there were twenty to a bathroom at the barracks, and the barracks were the bottom of the barrel in the life of displaced persons. At the other end of the spectrum was the Intercontinental Hotel in Zagreb. We were somewhere in between. Across from the bathroom there was a mirror in the hall so I took up nearly half the room with my preparations and couldn’t avoid the barbs from Mama and my brother. My blue Docs, the ocher sweater, my T-shirt on inside out and my carefully uncombed hair struck a different note from my last time out, but I was working on a fantastic image. “You have nicer stuff than that,” said Mama. “The perfect displaced person,” interjected my brother caustically. “Well, that’s what I am, moron,” I retorted, so he recited in a moronic voice, “I’m a little refugee, a big, bad Chetnik man blew up my house.” “Ha, ha,” was all I said, why argue with him, we did that every day, endlessly, no matter how much we avoided each other, the farthest we could get from each other in this room was on our beds with Mama in between. He didn’t have a clue about music, fashion, his girlfriend helped him some, but not much. Tonight he seemed to be in fine spirits, from Mama I heard that Uncle was in Zagreb and might come to see us the next day. That would’ve been a huge thrill if it weren’t for what lay ahead that night; I’d think about Uncle tomorrow.
The Hotel Tito Page 8
