More Than I Love My Life

by David Grossman

  Then suddenly there is movement. The rock on top of Nina’s foot shifts. Rafi presses carefully. It’s amazing what gentleness comes out of that clumsy body. In the thick rain, the two of them are now focused on each other. They use precise movements, forward and back, and her foot gradually breaks free until he is holding it in his hand, and he falls sideways onto his back, lies on the rocks, and laughs up at the sky and the rain. Nina laughs with him. There are streaks of blood along her shin and on her ankle, but she’s not worried. She pulls up her pants, puts on the shoe that came off, and together, embracing and drenched, with Rafi’s big coat as an umbrella, they enter the barracks and stumble over to Vera, who is covered up to her neck in a soft, red blanket.

  Apart from the Red Cross survival kit, the fisherman also left us a few apples, a flashlight, some candles, matches, and hand warmers. He even left the flare gun. I am moved by the display of generosity by that unfriendly man, especially here on Goli.

  “Come,” says Vera to Nina and Rafi and me, and she holds up the edges of the blanket. “Come in, children, there’s room for everyone.”

  * * *

  —

  Eight-thirty p.m. We sit on the concrete floor, slightly stunned by what we’ve done, leaning on the least decayed wall. From left to right: Nina, Rafi, Vera, me. We are all huddled under the blanket. We’ve eaten two of the three apples, passing them from hand to hand and mouth to mouth, gnawing them down to the seeds. The rain comes and goes, unpredictable, like everything else on Goli. There is no cell-phone reception of course, so we can’t call the hotel and tell them we’re stuck on the island. No one is going to come and rescue us in this storm. We don’t want to be rescued anyway.

  “Our flight’s taking off now,” Rafi notes. Vera wants to know if they’ll refund our airfare, at least partially. “After all!” she demands, and her voice is already climbing up and arguing with an impervious bureaucrat from Croatia Airlines. “Is it our blame that we got stuck on the island? There was weather! You could barely put your nose out!” Nina gets riled up just as quickly: “And whose fault is it that we decided to set sail a minute before a storm?” Vera: “Is that our problem? That’s force majeure!”

  Those two—

  A scene from the flight to Zagreb: Vera, Rafael, and Nina asleep in the row of seats behind me. Rafael is in the middle, mouth open, snoring loudly. Vera and Nina huddle against him, their heads on his shoulders. They both have their eyes open in their sleep. Not fully open, but about a quarter of a lid. You can just see the whites of their eyes. Honestly, it’s a disturbing sight. I shoot stills and video.

  Later, in the hotel, I watched the film and discovered something: in both of them, every few seconds, the eyeball slowly descends from its hiding place under the lid, appears halfway against the white background, then ascends and disappears again. I couldn’t hold it in: I ran to Rafael’s room with the camera. “Those two”—he says with a laugh—“they won’t let themselves shut their eyes even in their sleep.”

  Before I left the room, he stopped me: “So, Gili, that’s what I look like?” I pointed out that as compensation he has inner beauty, detectable only by a fortunate few. He threw a pillow at me and grumbled, “Time hates man…”

  * * *

  —

  An hour, another hour. The sun moves across her body like a slow flamethrower. Head, shoulders, neck. Everything is burning. The sweat drips. Her lips are cracked and bleeding. A cloud of flies buzzes above her. The bedbugs are nicely fattened up on her blood. She doesn’t scratch. No longer brushes them off. Lets them drink it all. This body is not hers. Neither it nor its pains. She is no longer human or animal or anything. Since yesterday, since she understood what she was doing here, her limbs and joints have been rigid. Her legs wooden. She walks as if she’s on stilts.

  A day, another day, a week, two weeks. Even before sunrise they stand her atop the mountain. There are wardens who like her arms out to the sides. There are others who demand that they reach upward. Sometimes they spread her legs and order her to bend over with her head down. At noon she sniffs at the tin plate but does not eat. Her intestines have practically ceased functioning. In the afternoon they move her to the other side of the circle of stones, with her back to the sea and the slowly setting sun, which blazes until the moment it dips in the water. Then Vera stands extinguished for another hour or two, an unwanted object, until someone down at the camp remembers that she has to be brought back.

  Here and there an outburst: pounding, unruly heartbeats. Almost always they presage Nina: walking to school, satchel on her back, skipping among the red fall foliage. Memories arise, things she said, gems that Milosz wrote in a special notebook, which was also confiscated by the UDBA. (“Why do I laugh when my friend tickles me, but not when I tickle myself?” “Is it true that even the worst person in the world once did something good? And is it true that even the best person once did something bad?”) But even those tiny memories are becoming scarcer, soaked up in the wasteland of her existence.

  For the past few days it’s been Milosz who has appeared more often. She tosses and turns on the prickly straw in bed, and when he appears she starts to complain. Why did you do it, Milosz? How can I be strong like this for two and a half years, and yet you broke down after one day of beating? Why didn’t you take some power from the love I gave you? She wants to stop complaining, but the words burst out: Maybe you didn’t love me and Nina enough, if you were willing to go so easily? So quickly, Milosz? As if you were just waiting for the chance to get out? Milosz listens. He has only half a face, and it’s impossible to know if that is because of the darkness in the barracks, or if that’s what he looks like now. Then he starts talking and it’s not exactly what Vera was expecting. “How could you do such a thing to our Nina?” he whispers. “How could you give them her instead of me?” Vera waves her arms in front of her face, to erase and eradicate the bad impression left by his words. “What sort of thing is that to say, Milosz? There was no choice, you know that. You would have done the same for me!” Milosz says nothing, and she begins to fear that he has forgotten what their love is. A frost starts to crawl up from her feet to her head. Only if Milosz has forgotten, only if he is watching them from the outside, like a stranger, like those ordinary, cowardly people who have not known love like theirs—only then could he be angry at what she did. But if he loves her the way she loves him, if he is deep inside their love, their extraordinary love story, then he cannot be angry. After all, he would have done exactly as she did, one body and one soul, the same thoughts and the same logic…And she shouts out from her heart: “I loved you more than anything in the world! I loved you more than my own life!”

  A few women in the barracks wake up. They curse. She huddles. She is not afraid of anything in the world, but it terrifies her to consider that he thinks differently than her, that he doesn’t understand her, and, if so, that perhaps their whole love was a mistake or, worse, an illusion. Perhaps it was not the absolute, pure truth, the most refined matter that exists, which only she and he had discovered—no, not discovered: they had created it, produced it every time his thought touched hers. Every time his body entered hers. She lies there frozen, helpless. “Ultimately,” he’d once told her in a moment of despair, “love only loves itself.” Such terrible words. The little muscle in his cheek trembles, perhaps with the effort to tell her that he loves her, too. Or perhaps he is holding back from saying something else, something that would cause her to cease living all at once, like a candle snuffed out between two fingers. Milosz does not say anything, only looks at her with one terrible, terrified eye. As if he is seeing a monster. Vera fights to wake herself out of the dream, if it even is a dream. Milosz’s half face looks squashed and long, and it pulls back, the darkness sucks and swallows him, and then she wakes up bathed in a cold sweat.

  Dazed by the heat, without thinking, she kneels down and touches the sapling. She counts out loud. More
than twenty leaves already. It’s growing. Sucking up her life force and growing. She scratches a leaf with her fingernail. The smell sprays out, sharper than usual. Perhaps it’s the smell of the plant’s fear, sensing that something is happening? That its faithful guard is becoming a danger? She holds a pair of tiny leaves between her fingers. She gently pulls them: Should she tug more? A little more? Perhaps grasp the stalk at its bottom and uproot the whole thing and fling it into the sea? “Does that hurt, sweetie?” she taunts, her mouth yellow with hatred. “You are my catastrophe, my murderer. Why do I have to give my life for you, my body for you?” She waits. It does not answer. Suddenly, in her blindness, she spreads her fingers out and slams her hand down as hard as she can on the soil next to it, almost crushing it. She feels it trembling. Tomorrow or the day after she will not be able to control herself. Its end is nigh.

  As is hers.

  She’s seen Maria giving orders to murder women for lesser crimes.

  A day, and another day. Today Vera is more tired and grumpy than usual. No one came to let her relieve herself at midday. She has at least two hours to go before sunset. She shifts from one foot to the other, cursing the camp, and Tito, cursing out loud. Let Maria hear. Let her informants hear. The plant is getting on her nerves, too, with its comfortable, bourgeois coolness in this sweltering hell. Sitting there in her shade and flourishing, goddamn it, as if it really does not know at all and does not understand that she is burning alive here for days on end only to give it life. The fury seethes inside her. These characters, these parasites, she knows them all too well. She’s been fighting against them ever since she can remember. She starts taking small, blind steps around its well. This is the first time she’s dared. But now—let this spoiled brat feel what it’s like, let it feel some bare sun. Let it understand what lies ahead if she decides to start a little class warfare against it.

  Silence. What does she want from it? Every time she flees it, taking two steps this way or the other, she can feel its leaves moving, trembling. Even without seeing with her eyes she knows: it’s looking for her. Deep in her gut she senses it seeking her, needing her, and then she hurries back to it. For some reason she cannot tolerate its anxiety for even one moment. But what is this thing? What is it doing to her, and how did it happen that a stupid little plant has become the focal point of her life? How has her entire existence been flowing into it for weeks, the way blood flows to a wound? Vera kneels down. She cups her hands around it. She strokes it, strokes it also for the woman with the crazed eyes. For her shattered mandolin. She forgets herself, forgets the warden who will be here soon and will catch her sitting down stroking the plant. She runs her fingers over the leaves, the delicate fuzz. It has never been as soft as it is today. Maybe it really does recognize her? She laughs. You’ve lost your mind, girl. She quickly checks to see how many new leaves have budded since yesterday, and if the stalk is any thicker. For some time she hasn’t been pushing rocks up the mountain, and her fingers are a little more flexible and sensitive. She must tell Milosz about how she talks to the plant, how she gives it political speeches. So he’ll see that she does have a sense of humor. He always said she didn’t. She will make Milosz laugh, and he will forgive her. No, no, there’s nothing to forgive: he will simply understand.

  A day and another day. Or perhaps it’s the same day? Or a week later? Today, for instance, the hours have started moving backward. She feels them peeling back. Someone forgot to come and rearrange her around the plant. She rearranges herself. The sun today is white-hot. The sea is a metal sheet that reflects the blazing sun back to her. You will not lose your mind. It’s just a plant, and you are still slightly human. And remember that there is someone waiting for you on the outside. There is Nina, whom you have to take care of. Nina, though you must not even for one second wonder what she is going through, where she is, whom she’s with, what sort of girl she will be when you get out and take her back from wherever she is.

  Because there were stories. There were girls the UDBA kidnapped, yes, girls. Most no older than ten. Someone must have requested those ages. Sometimes they sent them back and sometimes not. They said the ones who came back were not the same anymore. They told a story about one girl who was sent back after three months with a note pinned to her shirt: “Tell her she dreamed it.”

  She hears the warden’s footsteps. It turns out Vera is not standing in the right place. She must have walked around the plant a little. She gets the two slaps. She begs the warden to let her go and defecate. Threatens to do it right then and there, next to Maria’s plant. The warden gives in. She takes Vera to the usual spot and says she’ll wait by the plant meanwhile, to get some fresh air, and that Vera should call her when she’s done. Vera tenses up, sensing that the warden used too many words. If only she could at least see shadows. She has a strange intuition: the warden is doing something up there. Maybe she’s touching it? Or talking to it? Vera is dying to relieve herself, but she is anxious. Why would that woman come here and take her place? Besides, it’s not good to confuse the plant too much, it’s grown accustomed to Vera. She gets up quickly and feels her way back. The warden lets out a startled cry when Vera appears from between the rocks with the face of a bereaved mother bear. She beats Vera and knocks her to the ground and screams: “Jewish trash, ĉifutka!” She drags her over the rock face.

  Then the warden lets go. She takes a few steps back. Breathes quickly. In an unsteady voice she hurls at Vera, “You should know, whore, that when you lose your mind completely, they’ll replace you. I’ll replace you!” Why did she say that? Had she heard something at the headquarters? Were they thinking of replacing her? Vera stifles a shout: No one can replace her. No one knows it like she does, no one knows exactly what it needs at every particular moment.

  Later, a week or two later, the same warden comes to arrange her again. Vera recognizes the footsteps and shrinks back, protecting her head with her hands. Today the warden does not yell or beat or curse. She only repositions Vera’s feet. She lightly touches her back to straighten it. Touches her forehead and lifts her head up. And then, when Vera is standing in exactly the right spot, even before watering the sapling, she offers Vera the canteen.

  “Drink.”

  Vera recoils. Bracing for the trap.

  “Please,” says the warden.

  Vera lets out a strange sound, her body’s response to the word. She puts her hand out to feel for the canteen and touches the woman’s hand. What will happen now. What do they do to someone who touches a warden. Nothing happens. Nothing bad. The woman holds Vera’s wrist and moves it to the canteen, wraps her hand around Vera’s other hand, and closes Vera’s hands over the canteen. Vera waits. Maybe now she’ll be pushed over the cliff. The warden says, “Drink.” Vera drinks. She drinks maybe half the canteen without taking a breath.

  The other woman talks: “Don’t you sometimes get the feeling he’s constantly watching you?”

  “Comrade Tito?”

  “No.” She laughs quietly, deeply. “This sapling. Doesn’t it seem like he understands?”

  “Understands what, Commandant?”

  “This madness. How they’re turning us into animals.”

  Vera stands silently, head bowed, the way you anticipate an especially vicious blow. Like a man with a noose around his neck waiting for the trapdoors beneath him to open up. Nothing happens. How exhausting to live in a place where everything is unpredictable.

  “I have one like it at home, in Belgrade,” says the woman. Her voice is so different from the screams on her last visit. “In a pot on the balcony. It doesn’t like a lot of water. And by the way, you can make excellent tea from the leaves.”

  Vera does not speak. They must really have decided to drive her mad. Sent a talented actress to spur her on. Just the sound of her voice, so tender today, is enough to make a person die of homesickness.

  “I envy you,” says the warden quietly next
to Vera’s ear.

  “Me?” Vera whispers. “What is there to envy, Commandant?”

  “Because you have something to live for.”

  Vera hardly breathes. These words are so forbidden that there is no doubt this woman is from the UDBA. She doesn’t dare ask the warden what she meant by saying she has something to live for. Did she mean the plant? Or maybe she knows something about Nina? Has she seen Nina?

  The warden whispers, “I knew you and your husband.”

  “Where?” Vera whispers.

  “Well, I didn’t really know you. But I used to watch you in Kalemegdan Park, where you walked with your little girl on weekends.”

  “Please, please, I’m begging you, stop—”

  The warden holds Vera’s wrists. Her face is very close. She talks quickly. “Your man was so thin, a rake, but with a kind face.”

  “Yes.” Vera fights against the choking sensation scratching at her throat.

  “And his eyes…Weren’t you afraid to look into those eyes?”

  “No, I wasn’t afraid. I wanted those eyes to see me all the time.”

  “You were a sweet couple, almost like kids, even though you already had a child.”