We were allotted Papa’s pension payments retroactively. We’d had no income all this time except for Mama’s salary at Uncle Grgo’s and our displaced persons’ allowance, that’s exactly what it was called, an allowance, and now we were given all the back pay at once. The rights of the missing began to be treated, finally, as equal to the rights of the dead, Papa was granted the rank of warrant officer, and we were given his pension. And everything owed to us. Mama agreed with my brother that we needed a car, Granny chipped in, and my brother bought a car. The new green car was parked in front of the hotel where we could see it from the window and from that moment on we watched it constantly. Every day somebody would turn up who wanted my brother to take them for a spin around the hotel, and he didn’t mind; the car was brand-new. Along with our television set— our first purchase while we were squatting—and a refrigerator, which we bought at a discount through the association, the new green car was our biggest purchase. We’re so privileged. That’s what everybody says. You get pension benefits, food and importation privileges, enrollment in schools and dorms, trips to the seashore, and hey, you aren’t walking around in rags. We’re dis-placed persons so we’re supposed to look mangy and snotty for all time. Like we’ve always been like that, we were supposed to be grateful no matter what. Professional lottery players. We’re so privileged. Željka and her mother were granted an apartment in Zagreb. We kissed and hugged, the apartment was old but the ministry would renovate it, an apartment had turned up with the right square footage for the two of them and as soon as it was fixed up they’d go. We were happy but also sort of sad, we’d part ways for the first time in all these years. Željka’s mother made stuffed peppers on her hot plate and had us over for dinner. They were happy, that much was obvious, but they said nothing about the apartment and I knew why, they didn’t want us to feel worse, we, too, had been promised, after all, but would have longer to wait. I don’t like meat much, but I ate and reached for more, it was so delicious and reminded my of my childhood, and my brother told me I was getting fat. Soon he left with the car keys, he didn’t say where, he just up and left. In these rooms of ours there was no dining table, all we had was a desk against the wall and a little coffee table in the middle of the room. My mother and Željka’s sat on the beds and ate, leaning over the low table: “How can a person’s stomach not hurt when we have to eat bent over like this,” said Željka’s mother, and in her eyes I see a table, a high oak table with four chairs, in the new apartment. I sat on the floor and ate because I didn’t fit on the bed, Željka was bent over me, my head rested on her knees and she ran her fingers through my hair. She used to do that when I was little and I’d just shut my eyes with pleasure, she was so tender and beautiful, the sister I never had. “Your turn is next, for sure,” said the two of them, as if apologizing. “And before that you’ll come for a sleepover at my place,” laughed Željka and fixed my hair in a ponytail. She got up and went to do her makeup, she was going out with a boy, I don’t love her as much as I used to, we’re no longer equals and we won’t be, she’s the one with all the luck. Our mothers smoked cigarette after cigarette, exchanged tearful looks, and I went off to our room. Maybe Igor would call, he hadn’t been in touch. My brother was still there, he was getting ready to go out; when I asked him where he was going, he just growled, “Tell Mama I’ll sleep in the car.” The night before he hadn’t come home, Mama died of fright and since she knew he had a girlfriend at the hotel on the hill, she sent me in the morning to fetch him. This made me uncomfortable, him even more so, and now he was less dear to me. His girlfriend was everything to him and he had no time left for us. Igor was everything to me, too, but we couldn’t see each other often because he lived elsewhere. We had coffee once and once we went to the movies. This was the first time after so many years that I’d been to the movies. We horsed around over coffee, he talked about his band that played in his garage and how they’d glued egg crates all over the walls. Then I started talking about music and he interrupted and starting kissing me and then we were mostly kissing. At the cinema we saw a movie about a pet detective, it was all they were showing, but mostly we were kissing and cuddling. On the way back we sat on the back seat of the bus and he quickly put his head in my lap. I ran my fingers through his hair and couldn’t believe how cute he was. He tucked his hand under his head, and then he slipped it between my legs. I could hardly wait to get back to the hotel, I felt hot and uncomfortable and my leg hurt, I was so tense. He saw me off but never came inside, not even to the front desk. “So do you have your own room or live with your folks?” “I live with my old lady.” This was my first time calling Mama my old lady, though I remembered, while we were still living in Vukovar, how I’d sworn I’d never refer to my parents as my “old folks,” and I’d never smoke or wear torn pants. “My old man’s missing,” again, like somebody else was talking while I stood on the sidelines. I hadn’t told him that before, it hadn’t fit in anywhere. “Missing?” of course he had to ask, people who don’t know us always ask. People from Zagorje, the kids, the foreigners, the morons. “Missing. He went missing in the war.” “Ah, I see,” he finally understood. Then he kissed me and said he’d be in touch. I’m still waiting.
Each time I came in and turned on the light in our bathroom at the hotel, blackness scuttled over the sink edge, into the plumbing, every which way around the shower stall. In a second they’d vanish, I could only nab one or two, usually the plumper ones, the older trophy specimens trundling more slowly. At first I shrieked at night, the sight of them terrified me, they revolted us so much that we armed ourselves with a thick bludgeon of rolled-up newspapers to kill them, but then, as always, coexistence took over. Fast-forward a few years and we no longer even noticed them, and if we were bothered by one of them in the bathroom, all we needed was a thin sheet of toilet paper to squish it with our fingers. At one point, my brother even trapped a middle-aged one, judging by its size, in an old toothbrush case and called it Stevo. Stevo lived for a few weeks as our household pet. Mama was appalled but I found it hilarious. Cockroaches were around long before we were, and as things stand, they’ll outlive us. Their survival depends on nothing and as time passes, the same holds true for us. We’ve survived. I got up for the fourth time, I was going to pee, probably nerves, I’ll be off in the morning, I’m moving away to live among people I don’t know. How long? Don’t know. Alone. Mama’s breathing soundlessly, maybe she’s dead, maybe gone, maybe thinking.
How will things be when I go? When she’s alone? A few weeks after me my brother will leave. What will happen to us? We’re still kids, her kids, and we’re everything she has, all that’s left. She lives for us. I know she loves us but I cannot understand, she doesn’t seem to be moving forward, it’s like she’s gone numb and is bracing herself to see what the next bad thing will be. Last week when we were in Zagreb she outfitted me with new clothes for the start of the school year, we had a nice time. We went into all the stores where we thought we might like something and I tried on everything that caught my eye. We giggled. Most of the time we didn’t like the same things, I didn’t want girly stuff with bright designs, I preferred things long, big, and brown. Except for a short lilac-colored coat. It was narrow, tailored of lilac wool, with a high-cut waist and little pockets. Wearing it, I looked like a character from a Dickens novel and I thought that was cool. Mama liked it, too. “It looks nice on you,” she said, checking it out and smiling. She looked me in the eye, and in hers there were thousands more things to see. “I had one like it, well pretty much, dark blue. That’s the kind of coat we wore when I was a girl, I was sixteen. I’m wearing it in a photograph with your papa, he’s in a shearling coat made of real leather. Coats used to be warmer,” she said while she stood behind me and watched us in the big store mirror.
She’s as tall as I am, pretty soon I’ll be taller, we aren’t similar at all, she has dark skin and curly hair while my skin is pale, trans-lucent, and my hair is straight, ash blond. They’ll say I stole you, foun
d you in a cabbage patch, that’s what she used to tell me when I was small while she laughed and tickled me. When she went to work, I’d wait a few minutes for the bus to pull away and then I’d open her wardrobe and inspect her clothes on the hangers. I never took anything off or moved it, I’d just push my nose in among the dresses and inhale the scents of perfume from parties, dances, movies. I wanted to commit everything to memory, I’ll have dresses like that, one day, when I have a husband, I’ll have a red silk dress with polka dots to twirl in and I’ll wear it when I dance all night. In my short yellow terry-cloth dress with spaghetti straps I’ll go for coffee at the neighbor’s and then we’ll talk the night away; have you heard what happened, can you believe her husband left her, have you heard her sister died, have you heard he was fired, and all those fine and ordinary things. Meanwhile my daughter will curl up by my feet and pretend to be playing. That’s how I pictured it, and I remember that coat of hers, not the actual coat, but from photographs. Whenever I went to stay with Nana for a few days, the visit would always start with Nana showing me Mama’s wedding dress, and then when I’d had enough of posing in front of the mirror with the veil on, I’d drag out all the boxes with photographs and go through them. I always looked for Mama. The smallest Mama there was five, the picture was black and white, and she was frowning in a new hand-sewn dress with a floral design, standing by a fence and squinting at the sun. Behind her leaned a bicycle with huge wheels, and she got her first spanking because of it. They’d taken it without asking, she and her cousin who was two years older, and they planned to ride it down the only hill in the village. Her cousin was pumping the pedals and Mama riding sidesaddle and it didn’t take them long to career into a mud puddle and bend the wheel out of shape on the bike Granddad used to go to work. When Granddad caught her, he spanked her so hard he, too, was crying. Nana told me all about it, her eyes full of tears, and I promised myself I’d pay him back one day when I grew up. Mama in a big city, in Belgrade, with a broad grin and big front teeth—her grown-up teeth had just come in—wearing a slim leotard, I picked her out among dozens of little girls. It was a jamboree held to celebrate Tito’s birthday, Happy birthday, little white violet. A Mama a few years older was in the one I remember best, maybe because she looked not at all like herself but like a distant, thrilling, dangerous person, someone I didn’t know. Mama’s standing on a hillside, feet planted firmly apart, wearing flared trousers or, as she called them when she laughed at herself, bell-bottoms, and a black turtleneck. Her thick curls fall halfway down her back, and photographed from the side she looks feminine and attractive, but none of this interests her because she’s taking aim, as if she’s been doing it all her life. This is what a girl with a rifle looks like.A warrior woman from another world. Princess Leia. The gun was an air rifle, actually, and my mother was in the ninth grade and had joined the shooting team; Dragica, her best friend, was on the team, too, because of a boy named Tomo. In the next photograph my mother exudes self-awareness. In an incredibly short red skirt— which in the black-and-white photo was just a shade of gray but I knew it was red because I’d asked a thousand times—she stands between her friends Dragica and Željka. She’s laughing, with one hand behind her back, probably hiding a cigarette, she’s wearing knee-high boots with super thick soles, even though it’s warm out. I know it is because behind them I see the Borovo swimming pool where dance parties were held. The girls in the picture are laughing because they’d fled the bus when the driver asked them for their tickets; they said they didn’t have the change and with peals of laughter leaped out at the Borovo stop. That’s where she met the cutest, coolest boy, whose brother worked in Germany, and when Mama asked him for a smoke he offered her Kents. He saw her home that night but only to her corner, my granny was waiting at the gate. He made a date and then didn’t show. After that Mama wouldn’t hear of him, but he came stubbornly every day to her school and her student job, until she finally agreed to go out with him again. Mama in her short dark-blue wool coat with the high waist at the snowy train station in Vinkovci with her arm through the arm of the young man in the shearling coat made of real leather, the train already at the station. There is something written on the train car in Cyrillic, I can’t tell what, but I know the train is headed for Macedonia because that’s where Papa served for a year in the army, they didn’t make any promises but when he came back they picked up where they’d left off, at that snowy train station in Vinkovci. Nana and Granddad, totally different looking, Mama a few months older than she was in the earlier one, awash in the gleaming sun that had overexposed a part of the picture, Mama in a short silken Sunday dress with a bow on her ponytail, standing somewhere outdoors in nature abuzz with bugs, and behind her, a bronze sculpture, the sculpture of Josip Broz Tito that stands in front of his birthplace. Nana, Granddad, and Mama on an excursion to Kumrovec. Soon comes my favorite. Mama in a wedding dress, next to a friend in a formal gown, beside a big potted plant in the office of the justice of the peace, next to Papa wearing a suit. After the ceremony, they’re smiling, a little differently now, shy, like everything changed after the night at Granny and Grandpa’s house, her first night outside her own room not counting the times she spent at the seashore. Different after Granny’s words: “You know he has nothing to offer but his ten fingers and you know what to expect from us.” This was the next to last photograph that lived in Nana’s box and belonged to the girl, not the wife of the young man in the picture. One more had found its way here, Mama must have given it to Nana when my brother was born. Looking tired, she’s cradling a bundle and she herself is wrapped in a thick brown vest, because only one room was heated, her hair cut short while Granny stands in the background, her head sliced off by the picture. I can still hear Granny saying: “Your hair was the prettiest thing you had and now you’ve gone and cut it off.”
All the rest I remember myself. No one believes me, but I remember the playpen they kept me in when I was a baby, the orange rim, the net with yellow and orange dots. It stood in the middle of the living room, in the morning it swam in sunshine, and Mama was tall, beautiful, and lively, she danced around me, she’d step away only sometimes into the kitchen. To cook or, as I later learned, to perch on the garbage can and hide from me a little. As long as I couldn’t see her I’d play on my own; when I spotted her I’d reach out my arms. The linden trees smell nice, Mama’s taking me for a walk, I’m wearing a velvety blue dress, everybody’s greeting us on the street and admiring me, and Mama enjoys it and swells with pride. She takes me to see Auntie Tanja on Boris Kidrič Street, full of gracious old villas, so Auntie T. can sew me another dress and Mama can have coffee with her daughter, Milica. I stand on the table for them to measure me, I’m so small, maybe three, I remember it all, nobody believes me, then I raise my arms, I dance and twirl, and they clap, enchanted. Mama and I go to the open market Saturday mornings, Mama has a big basket and high-heeled sandals, I have a little red plastic basket and red clogs that I clack with like they’re heels. At the market we buy everything we need, and the ladies tuck all sorts of treats into my basket, two chili peppers, an egg, two apples, and on and on. I know everything’s for me. Mama sits at the dining room table and sobs. I’m scared, I don’t know what this means, I’ve never heard grown-ups cry, especially not in front of kids. When she sees me she flashes a smile as if she’s sheepish, but I can never get that image out of my mind. Mama’s first tears. Granddad got drunk and wanted to kill himself, Nana asked Mama and Papa to come, she was at her wit’s end. At the dining room table Mama kisses me on the head, my face is facing hers and she looks me squarely in the eye and says: “Today is a big day.” I’m starting school. I’m only six, the youngest in my class, but I’m smart and big because Mama says I am. Mama and Papa in bed, I’m spying on them from the hall, a few days before we’ll leave for the coast they’re arguing quietly, I can hear bits: Why are you so stubborn? Don’t you care about us? Damn him to hell, my kids are never going to be ashamed of me. I go to my room, afterward I sne
ak back, Mama’s bare shoulder is sticking out from under the white sheet and she’s sleeping in Papa’s arms.
The Hotel Tito Page 10
