Fox

by Dubravka Ugrešic

  And then, while he poked around the room, probably looking for something else to show me, V. quite unexpectedly toppled over. He fell the way old people and little children fall who have just learned to walk: my mother knew how to fall in the years right before she died and each time, to my great surprise, she’d get up unscathed. I froze with fear and pity. The old man’s son jumped in and with a practiced grip hoisted his father up off the floor. We went on talking as if nothing had happened, but the mood had darkened. I felt an invisible alarm go off somewhere above my head, telling me it was time to leave. We said our goodbyes, the old man and his son saw me to the door, and as I was about to step into the elevator, the old man said something.

  “What did you say?” I asked, stepping back out.

  “My apologies for collapsing!” he repeated.

  I smiled. He responded with a frail smile. I was startled by his choice of verb, it would have been more normal to say fall. He chose collapse. And the way he slurred the “s” at the end indicated there was something wrong with his dentures.

  The disintegration of Yugoslavia and the new war had pushed V. back in time. The old man, like so many people in what had been Yugoslavia, slid fifty years back into the past; the society’s iconography was backsliding, too, into the epicenter of Second-World-War trauma, wounds people had thought to be forever healed. V. opens his memoir with memories of his first childhood nightmare and ends it with a rhetoric of humiliation and self-denigration (he refers to himself as one unworthy of mention). This made me uneasy, perhaps because such things are not typical of the genre; people do not, as a rule, write autobiographies to abase themselves but, instead, to erect themselves a monument. V.’s autobiography was but a modest monument to the voluntary capitulation of the average Yugoslav citizen. His story did not stir compassion, perhaps because he wasn’t seeking it. From the text emanated unpleasant stains of a shame that was never plumbed. The accusation one might have expected, an invective against the injustice of the times, slid dolefully into a wail of remorse. My apologies for collapsing . . .

  I could see myself able to make sense of V.’s unhappiness and others like it with my mind, but only partway with my heart. Where had this hardness come from? I wondered. And didn’t my lack of a spontaneous rush of compassion spring from the fact that we were beaten—on all the warring sides—not by Serbs or Croats, but by riffraff, rogues, murderers, pickpockets, swindlers, psychopaths, shysters, cowards, roughnecks, thieves, robbers, nobodies? We were undone by our lack of will to stand up to them. His awareness of the true face of the enemy was what fueled his dogged denial, followed by the wave of self-pity that many of the victims of this shakedown secrete like a sticky saliva. And on the list of things that touch our hearts, self-pity does not occupy an exalted place.

  I berated myself for my lack of empathy. The average person’s blood vessels are said to be about 60,000 miles in length, meaning that the veins, arteries, and capillaries of a human being—if they were tied end to end in a single long thread, and if we imagine our planet as a spool—could be wrapped roughly two and a half times around the earth. That, at least, is what my little niece’s textbook claims. The very niece who not so long ago had come home from school awash in tears because she didn’t know why the Battle of Gory was waged. And, will you look at that, her tears, like hot wax, penetrated straight to the core of my hardened heart; I understood her child’s protest: she was being made to study the world using parameters that were not her own.

  Perhaps my father was right when he slapped that non-negotiable kibosh on his past. He died of cancer in 1973, still so young, and slipped away soundlessly like a shadow, taking with him to his grave his real and metaphorical shrapnel. Who knows, maybe he chose to kibosh his past once and for all when he realized how entranced his little daughter was by the story of the shrapnel he carried around inside him. Is it not perverse to drop explosive family-legacy souvenirs into the backpacks of one’s own children as they skip along on their way to their own shining future? For when facing such truths one arrives at nothing but the knowledge of banality, the banality of evil: there are no discoveries that change our lives, no justice, no remorse, no shame, no consolation, no desired catharsis, no nothing . . .

  In 1971, in what was then Yugoslavia, a prequel played out in Croatia of what was to come twenty years hence. Yugoslav political censors abruptly jettisoned the Croatian prequel and processed its authors in the courts. A number of people went to prison, and, they say, the prequel rocked Yugoslavia as a country to its core. Many Croats refer to this brief period as the “Croatian Spring.”

  That same year, 1971 (by then my father was already seriously ill), Mother surreptitiously slipped me a list of people; on it was my father’s name. I didn’t understand what it said, it was some sort of semiofficial document; perhaps it was even a brochure designed with the intent to rabble-rouse. It was a “hit list” circulated to a select number of addressees, and had (by chance or intent) found its way into my parents’ hands; it listed the people (in the small town where we lived) who were to be kept under “close surveillance” should those who were behind the “Croatian Spring” actually realize politically what they’d set out to accomplish. The people on the list were to be “scrutinized,” “sidelined,” “kept under control,” “liquidated,” though not in so many words. On the other hand, the more vague the instructions, the more focused and effective the implementation—for the instructions sent out twenty years later to libraries by the Croatian Ministry of Culture requesting the cleansing of “non-Croatian” books from the Croatian libraries were every bit as vague. And although there was no mention of the words burn or trash, books were, indeed, burned and others ended up in the trash. There was not, apparently, a list of authors and books explicitly slated for destruction, but the literary tastes of the zealous Croatian librarians concurred: it was mainly books by Serbian authors that were jettisoned: books printed in Cyrillic—even ones by Croatian authors; books by “Yugoslav” authors; books by “left-leaning” authors; books by communists and anti-nationalists.

  Meanwhile, at that same time, in 1991, apparently with no instructions from “above,” Croatian “death squads” cleansed Croatia of ethnically “unsuitable” people. If these squads truly did this at their own initiative, how could it be today, twenty years after the crimes were committed, that so few of the perpetrators have gone to prison?

  My father dedicated his life (yes, that’s the word) to building a new society in which the crimes of the Second World War would be forgiven and forgotten, a society that would insure for everybody, without discrimination, a better tomorrow, a society in which knowledge would be power, a society in which brotherhood and unity would be cherished like the apple of one’s eye, a society in which workers, farmers, and honest intellectuals would build equitable relations, a society whose future was shining, plain and simple. I have often thought since then that having seen the list and his name on the list, my father died of shame. A few months later he did die and took to his grave his shrapnel, both the shard in his leg and the countless metaphorical shards.

  In 1971, Mother promptly destroyed the sheet of paper with the list of names. Twenty years later she threw away what was left of father’s papers, including the letters he’d written to her during his stay at a tuberculosis sanatorium while she was pregnant, expecting a child, me, and on his way back from the sanatorium. She saved a pile of the death notices that were usually posted on neighborhood buildings, a pointless number of some thirty copies or more, and an equally pointless pile of condolence telegrams. I tossed them all out when I cleaned and remodeled her apartment. Mother had left only proof of Father’s death through her muddled censorial efforts, while destroying all evidence of his life. Except for a few photographs and medals (given to him for his self-sacrifice in realizing the ideals of socialism), there is nothing left.

  My quick glance at the “hit list” was something I’d buried deep in oblivion. The list, like mildew stains on a white wall,
blossomed, only briefly, on the surface. The very next instant I’d washed it away, scrubbed it, whitewashed the mildew as if it had never been there at all. There is nothing more vital, humane, and natural than the urge to forget a fall, and, especially, humiliation. We don’t trouble ourselves with such things, they are not the purview of the heart. Our self-defense system sees to that, the rubbery eraser of oblivion.

  14.

  We got back to the house, and while we were unlocking the door it suddenly felt as if I’d lost my sense of time. As if we’d already unlocked the door together once, indeed more than once, many times. The feeling was both precious and cheap, as in a sci fi movie with humanoids who cheerfully recall things that never happened to them.

  I made dinner while he showered, then I showered while he set the table. And at dinner again I couldn’t suppress my curiosity . . .

  “But I just can’t get it through my thick skull how you could have gone from judge to de-miner.”

  “While I, for one, can’t understand the position you’re judging from!”

  “Why?”

  “Because you know full well that our lives were upended! Wasn’t yours?”

  “True, it was, I could never have imagined . . .”

  “Nor I!” he interrupted, his voice slightly raised. “Nor many others! Nobody could’ve imagined! Why, then, should my case be any more bizarre than the case of the Croatian truck driver who became a Swiss millionaire overnight? I backslid, while he, don’t you know, shot upward! Does that mean I’m stupid and he’s a genius? Could a poor kid from backwoods Pakoštane dream he’d become a national Croatian icon? a hero children read about in school? the proprietor of a villa and an industrial fish farm, all of which were given to him as a gift for expelling some two hundred thousand Serbian civilians from Croatia? and all because instead of going to school he fled over the border and learned how to pull the trigger of a gun! Could a solemn little country boy from the tiny village of Repušnica have ever dreamed that he’d one day destroy an entire Croatian factory and then buy himself a villa in London and send his children to school at Oxford? And yet in this whole ludicrous affair—this wheel of forutune, this round-and-round-it-goes-where-it-stops-nobody-knows—you ask how I went from judge to de-miner? And yet I notice you’re not asking how Croatian judges could become criminals! It wasn’t Albert Einstein who came into power in this country, but riffraff!”

  “Well?”

  “You aren’t giving up yet?”

  “No.”

  “Use your imagination,” he said tartly.

  “I have none,” I dug in my heels.

  “I was out of work. I saw an ad, paid the tuition, attended the course for de-miners. At first they promised us a good salary.”

  “So you went into de-mining for the salary?

  “Whatever I say, you won’t believe me. If I say I took the job for the money, you won’t believe me. You’ll say I was all wrong; there are less risky ways of earning a living. If I tell you I did it for reasons of ethics, because, in the end, somebody must clean up the debris left by the war, again you won’t believe me. You’ll say I am flattering myself, right?”

  “Well you couldn’t possibly say you like doing it.”

  “You won’t believe me, but I do.”

  “You’re such an odd one!”

  “And what is wrong with that?” he said brightly.

  And then he rose slowly from the table and wished me a good night, but instead of going up to the bed in the attic, to his room, he turned toward the first-floor bedroom, my room. It was habit, he did it reflexively, it had been his room, after all, until now. I followed him; I couldn’t say why (could I be safeguarding my territory?). We paused at the door, I stepped in, he, startled, stepped back, we turned to one another, there were only a few inches between us. He rested his hand on my face. The gesture confused me. And then—as if mastering, for the first time, native rituals I’d been studying—I rested my hand on his. As if we were reading each other like Braille, under our fingertips tips streamed the history of the other’s body; one body paid its respects to the other, like elderly tango dancers or over-the-hill heavy-weight wrestlers. There was also something deeply ritualistic about it. The frozen instant lasted merely a second, two, maybe more, and then without a word we undressed, lay down, and made love. We made love with a tender restraint, no hurry, we made love the way, I guess, people of our age do, recovering from a long and painful lonesomeness. I fell asleep with his breath on the nape of my neck. Before I sank into sleep, I thought: home.

  I was woken in the morning by the birds. I crawled out of bed leaving Bojan to sleep and went out onto the porch. Through the air straggled sleepy wisps of fog. The air was redolent of lilacs. Down the steps I went and picked a lilac cluster. Back on the porch, I sat on the bench, broke off a tiny goblet-like floret, and poked it into the crease alongside my thumb. I sat there, thumb out before me, elbow propped on knee, taking care that the floret didn’t tip over—and breathed in the new morning. I cannot remember a morning that seemed newer.

  15.

  After Bojan went to work, my first impulse was to get in the car and leave for Zagreb, and then grab the first available seat on a flight to Amsterdam. The impulse was overwhelming, as if I were fighting for my last ounce of oxygen. I sat in the car, but instead of driving to Zagreb I cruised around on local back roads, dispeling my inner disquiet. Before he left for work that morning we exchanged a few words. I adeptly sidestepped any linguistic situations where I’d have to choose between a more formal and a more intimate tone. This was a kind of awkwardness I knew well, the hesitation at calling a partner by his name, the stupid, but inevitable “diplomatic” vigilance that more exposes than conceals us.

  On my drive I came across a neglected, tumble-down house. I stopped, atrracted by the beauty of a huge walnut tree growing in the yard. A gaunt man was sitting out in front on a bench, smoking. Next to him was a boy doggedly bashing a soccer ball against the wall of the house. I got out of the car. A woman in Turkish trousers peered out of the house and withdrew.

  “Hello,” I said.

  Absently, the man muttered something unintelligible.

  “I seem to be lost. Could you tell me the road I should take to Kuruzovac?”

  The man ignored my question. The boy kept bashing the ball, ignoring everyone. The woman in the Turkish trousers came out of the house.

  “We don’t know,” she said.

  “Aren’t you from around here?” I asked, though obviously they weren’t.

  “From Bosnia,” she said.

  “He’s your son?”

  “Grandson. Mirsad.”

  “How old?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Does he go to school?”

  “There are no schools nearby.”

  “Shouldn’t he be in school?”

  “Yes, but who can take him? It’s an hour’s walk to the bus stop and then another half-hour ride to the school.”

  “Are you employed?”

  “See for yourself.”

  “So how do you manage?”

  “We eat air,” she said, and her face twisted into a grimace that mocked a smile. They didn’t live on air alone. Their son, Mirsad’s father, had died several years ago and their daughter-in-law, Mirsad’s mother, was working in Italy. She cared for an elderly woman there and cleaned houses. What else could she do? She sent them a little money, if she didn’t they’d die of hunger. But for now she still couldn’t afford to bring Mirsad to live with her.

  From a poster plastered to the walnut tree grinned the puffy face of an old acquaintance of mine who had, in the meantime, become a Croatian politician. The puffiness came from pockets of air that had worked their way under the poster and were slowly billowing it out and dropping it. I pointed at the poster and looked at the woman, my eyebrows raised in query.

  “Oh, she was here, that lady, she put the poster up and promised transport for Mirsad . . . for school . . .”

  “And
?”

  “And nothing. They pass through, they even come to this hole-in-the-wall, it’s not that they never come through, but they never come back. Everyone has forgotten us: God, the Devil . . .”

  I thought about how these people, the boy included, had been erased. The woman was persevering, imitating her former life, doing the cooking, cleaning, washing, but despite her diligence the family was growing more and more invisible; soon they’d vanish, leaving no trace. Together with the tumbledown house they’d slowly be overrun with ferns, vines, grass, and then they’d be completely squeezed out by the roots of the walnut tree, it would envelop the house, octopus-like with its limbs, like the exhibit I’d seen before coming here at the Amsterdam Museum of Funeral History in which a root had sucked up a human skull.

  People are erased in any number of ways. Sometimes one group erases another, brutally, en masse, the way Serbs did twenty years ago in Srebrenica, murdering over eight thousand men and boys, Muslims, labeling them “packages” before putting them to death, all without batting an eyelash. Or one group kills another, either on purpose or inadvertantly, and the numbers swell to the tens of thousands of civilians who perished in Bosnia. Or people receive death threats and move away of their own volition, either individually or as a group. Or they’re dismissed from work, or all their sources of oxygen are cut off, or their home is torched so they have nowhere to return to, or they are moved out and others moved in, just as the Croats around here expelled the local Serbs, and into the houses vacated by Serbs they moved Bosnians whom other Serbs had expelled from homes in Bosnia. And, look, the war isn’t over yet despite the twenty years that are behind us, because many have an interest in prolonging the war, there are still “packages” on the move, seeking an address, there are human bones jutting everywhere from the ground. Both God and the Devil have forgotten these two, old before their time, and so many more. So many were moved, and not by choice, to a parallel existence, and from there, from behind a glass wall, they send us signals, open their mouths like fish, release silent bubbles, gesture a sad pantomime, point to their heart to show they’re still alive. And here we are, behind us barely a quarter century since the Wall came down, and the dam burst and water swamped millions of people like ants. They didn’t hit the ground running, well whose fault is that! They didn’t know how to swim. Well whose fault is that! The numskulls swam against the current! They didn’t know how to navigate the eddies! Why didn’t they hold to the shore? Grab a branch? Some hit the ground running, others didn’t—this divide, as non-negotiable as a death sentence, is the excuse for the withholding of compassion. What can they do, where can they go, this man and woman in their fifties, old before their time? The best they can hope for is that their own grandson—once he builds up more muscle mass or his mind addles or he goes off the deep end—smothers them with a pillow and puts them out of their misery.