Vera waits. The word “child” explodes inside her. “Her name is Nina, and I don’t know where she is.”
“And you were always talking, you and him. You argued and laughed. I remember once you were literally dancing around your man, and I didn’t know anything like that from my husband, and I thought, What do they have to talk about so much?”
“About everything,” says Vera, “there was nothing in the world we didn’t talk about.”
“And the little girl kept pulling your hands and your handbag and your husband’s pants, trying to get you to notice her. She talked to the squirrels, to the crows, such a serious girl…”
“Yes, yes.”
“And sometimes you would swing her up in the air together, ‘Fly up high, airplane…’ ”
The warden talks as if she cannot stop. Vera stands with her head down, arms drooping to the ground. Muffled sobs rock her body. If this is an UDBA trick, they have managed to break her.
“My husband,” says the warden, “they killed him over nothing, over nonsense, and we did not have a child. We didn’t have time for anything. I loved him, I think, but it was like I hadn’t got to know him yet. I hope for you that your daughter is alive and that you find her.” She touches Vera’s shoulder lightly, then leaves.
A full, airy, luminous ball of world hovers in the air before Vera, and she takes a step forward and opens a little door in it and walks back inside. She nods her head at Jagoda, her good friend and desk mate from school in Čakovec. She smiles at Mimi the cook with the apron around her waist. She strolls past the police band playing in the park on the weekend, and eats hot chestnuts from a newspaper cone handed to her by the vendor on the street corner. Here is Father sitting at the cash register in the shop, winking at her as she walks by, and here is Mother in her armchair, reading, looking up and smiling at Vera. Here is the main street floating past, the houses of red-and-white brick, the maple trees. Here soon, around the corner, is Vera aged seventeen. Any minute now she’ll be dancing at the high-school-graduation ball and she will meet Milosz, and life and love will open up for her.
There will yet be life, Vera suddenly knows. She walks out, head held high, from the floating bubble of the world and returns to the island, to the mountain, to the sapling. She kneels down and searches with her fingers. Surrounds it with her hands. “Don’t worry,” she says calmly, “I’m here, don’t worry. I’m protecting you.” The sun blazes more harshly than usual today. Perhaps it feels that Vera is stronger. She stands with her back to the sun. She locates the familiar flame in the center of the sun wheel, the one that burns the hottest. She sets it in the middle of her back and holds her arms up to the sides, as if to separate two people fighting. Thanks to her, thanks to the shadow cast by her tiny, shriveled body, the plant and the sun are almost equally matched. Thanks to Vera it has lived here all this time. The burning intensifies. The sun swells, filling with anger at Vera. Vera breathes deeply. Buttresses herself against the blaze. Sweat rolls down her face and body. Does it know, the sapling—perhaps thanks to a mysterious survival instinct possessed by vegetation—that she is the one rescuing it day after day? Does it, after all the days and weeks she’s been standing here, at least recognize her scent? Does it correlate, through some sort of neural network, her presence with something good? A pleasant sensation spreads through her. Of all the hundreds of women in the camp, she might be the only one doing something beneficent.
That thought, those forgotten words. She stands up straight and her arms open wider, like in a dance.
Then she turns around and, with the splendor of a brave child, of a seven-year-old snotnose, faces the full sun and soaks the blinding light into her eyes. She could drown an entire sun in the black of her pupils. Then she gives the sun a little bow—a victor’s bow.
It is unclear to her how, but the three of them seem to have attained a peculiar equilibrium: there is sun, there is plant, and there is Vera, who feels like one of the astral bodies.
* * *
—
In the silence that has fallen on the barracks, Nina shouts nightmarishly: “But how did you stand it?”
“What?”
“This, this Goli. How did you not—”
“When you have to—you do.”
“No…You’re strong…,” Nina mumbles. “You’re much stronger than me. You’re made of different material.”
“But you stood it, too,” Vera says tenderly, “don’t forget. And for you it lasted exactly the same time that I was here.”
“I didn’t ‘stand it.’ I was crushed by it.”
“No, Nina, don’t say—”
“Of course I’ll say. It’s hard for you to hear, but I will say it. Because you got out of here and quickly found work in Belgrade, and then we went to Israel, and you built yourself a new life and a new family, ready-made, and you had Tuvia and Rafi and the whole kibbutz, you saw what that party on Saturday was like—”
“You also have your own life, and probably your friends—”
“Me? Look at me. I have a quarter of a Red Cross blanket.”
She laughs through the sobs, and we laugh with her, cautiously, with her always cautiously, so she won’t think we’re laughing at her. Our guarded laugh seems to amuse her, because she sniffles and laughs even harder, maybe in desperation, and we laugh with her: Rafi in a deep bass that jolts his belly, Vera in cackles, and me and Nina in choked-up creaks. We sound like a quartet tuning up before a concert.
“Rafi,” Nina says when we calm down, “you will take care of me.” It is neither a question nor an imperative: it is a statement of fact.
“Always,” he grunts through his thick beard, “we settled that. But for that to happen you’ll need to be in Israel. I can’t take care of you long-distance, and I hate flying.”
“I’ll be in Israel. I have nowhere to go.”
“Also, Ninotchka,” Vera says, “don’t be angry with what I want to tell you, but I can also a little, really, remember for you…”
I freeze. I can’t believe she said that.
“What? What did you say?” Nina asks quietly. “You can what?”
“Don’t be angry…I was just thinking, we two will remember everything, a little you’ll remember and a little I will. We can go in together, share the pot. What do you think? Is it okay for me to say?”
Silence. I’m guessing Nina’s response will send Vera running to the UDBA for shelter.
“Mom,” Nina says softly, and she laughs and swallows down the tears and takes Vera’s hand. “Mom, Majka, Mom…”
It turns out I’m always wrong about everything. About everyone.
Vera wipes her eyes and asks what project Nina is working on in the North Pole.
“It’s not quite in the pole,” Nina says, “but close. It’s a project for preserving seeds of edible plants that are going extinct all over the world. But I don’t work there anymore. My contract ended a year ago.”
“Oh,” says Vera.
Silence again. We study the new information. Afraid to say the wrong thing.
“I don’t understand,” Vera says, “then what have you been doing since then?”
“There’s a coal mine in the village. I told Gili. I cooked for them a little. I worked in their laundry for a while. Then they shut down parts of the mine, and it turned out they didn’t need me there anymore either.”
“So what do you…What are you in now?” Vera stammers, unable to comprehend even a single day without work.
“There’s always someone in the village who needs an extra pair of hands. Laying tiles, drying sealskins, mopping the church floor.” She laughs. “If there’s one thing I learned on the kibbutz, it’s how to mop floors…Odd jobs, nothing intellectually challenging. Five or six days a month, enough not to die of starvation.”
“But we talk every week,” Vera says wanly,
“and you didn’t even say.”
“What is there to say about nothing?”
“You said you were working at a satellite station…”
“So I said.”
“You were just lying?”
“Not just,” she searches for the words. “I…The truth is, I didn’t want to upset you, Majka. You’ve had enough from me.”
“So just like that? Nothing?” Vera looks very old.
“Nothing,” Nina says.
Nothing and suddenly, I think. Suddenly and nothing. From both those breasts I suckled.
Rafi asks some more about her village. I can see he’s fascinated by it, and the truth is, so am I. Nina relaxes under the blanket. She tells us about the deep snow, about cages with dozens of sled dogs that bark all day and night, about time, time itself, which in the dark months takes on a different meaning there, “because what difference does it make if it’s ten a.m. or ten p.m., it’s all the same darkness, so you start developing your own internal sense of time.” She tells us about the people who ended up there, like her, each for his own reason, each with his own secrets. “It’s a place where no one asks you questions, but on the other hand they’re constantly bombarding you with gossip.” “Just like kibbutz!” Vera laughs, and we laugh with her, making the proper noises of a family. A ludicrous one, but a family. I notice that Nina hasn’t got any words wrong or forgotten a single thing since we’ve been under the blanket. She tells us there’s a home on the island for kids removed from abusive families. She worked there for a few months as a cook. “I cooked them all your dishes, Mom.” “Did they like it?” Vera asks wondrously. “They licked their plates clean. Do you know how great it is to eat yufka in chicken soup when it’s thirty degrees below freezing?”
* * *
—
“After three or four months of darkness, on March eighth, every year, the sun comes back,” she tells us. “The whole village wakes up in honor of the day. They dress the children in yellow, paint their faces yellow, decorate them with all kinds of sun-shaped pendants and tiaras.” Her voice is warming up, and we feed the flames with questions. It does us good to ask her things. It does us good to hear the melody of a question that knows it will be answered. In the pale moonlight I see, or imagine I can see, the delicate pulsing of a light blue vein on her neck. Forty-five years ago my father saw it and fell in love with her.
“And then everyone flows to the church, from the children to the elderly, they walk in a procession through the tall snow, and they stand on the church steps waiting for the clock to strike eleven. A bit of pale light starts to show on the edges, but not direct sunlight. And we sing a song of thanks to the sun, which someone from the village wrote. Then there is total silence for a few minutes, no one says anything, even the kids feel that something special is happening. Then the priest looks at the clock and gives a signal, and we all shout together: ‘Here comes the sun! Here comes the sun!’ And on the third time, the sun appears, and its first ray touches us.”
In the almost dark barracks, her face is lit up. I see her standing among the kids with her eyes closed and hands held out, allowing the sun to touch her. I whisper to her from a Lea Goldberg poem: “I shall be as a tree in the dark of the woods / On which the light chose to shine.” She doesn’t know it, but she repeats the words silently, like a prayer.
* * *
—
I watch her all the time. The way her body moves, her facial expressions. Tiny motions of withdrawal and gathering in, then suddenly a sort of propelling outward, forward, then embarrassment and hesitation, and another withdrawal. My mother tongue.
There is a constant nervous tremor in the air around her, as if wobbly pencil lines are continuously sketching her contours. Several times I’ve caught myself mimicking her expressions. I have no control over it. I must be learning her—thirty-six years too late—the way a normal three-year-old girl learns her mother.
* * *
—
“I heard you asked for me.”
“Is that the commandant? Commandant Maria?”
The tip of Maria’s whip travels over Vera’s face and props up her tightened, infected eyelids. “They said you had something urgent to tell me.”
Only now does Vera grasp what she’s done: her concern for the sapling must have driven her insane. Made her act against the instinct possessed by every woman on the island—stay as far away as possible from Maria.
“I’m listening.”
“It’s the plant, Commandant.”
“Which plant?”
“The plant that’s here, Commandant.” She deliberately points a few centimeters away from the spot where the sapling is planted.
“Let me understand. You called Commandant Maria up to the top of a mountain for a plant?”
“He’s going to die, Commandant. He hasn’t been right for a few days.” Footsteps circle her slowly. She feels Maria’s breath on her face, on the back of her neck. “The wardens water him too much, Commandant. His roots are rotting. Let me water him when he needs water. I know him.”
“You know him…” Maria is amused. The edge of her whip tickles the plant, and Vera is horrified. “And I thought you finally wanted to sign some papers for us, give us some names…”
Vera says nothing. The stupidity of her act fills her with terror. She was so engrossed in the sapling that she forgot how the world outside operates.
“Tell me the truth, banda, wouldn’t you like to lift the weight of betrayal off your heart?”
She shudders. “What betrayal, Commandant?”
“Wouldn’t you like to cleanse your conscience a little?”
“My conscience is clear, Commandant.”
Maria gives a slow laugh that horrifies Vera. “Someone who betrayed Tito will betray anyone.”
Vera swallows. “Yes, Commandant.”
“And tell me this, banda,” Maria says calmly, “how many days have you been up here?”
“With him?”
“With him, yes,” Maria says, walking slowly around the circle of stones, the tip of her whip picking up blackened leaves and dropping them.
“A few weeks, Commandant. I wasn’t counting.”
“And how long have you been blind?”
“Maybe about two months, Commandant.”
“And they probably told you this is a plant that Commandant Maria brought here.”
“Yes, Commandant.”
“A plant that Commandant Maria brought from home.” She talks in a strange, slow tune, as if telling Vera a story.
The skin on Vera’s back starts crawling. “Commandant, please let me take care of him. I know what’s good for him, I have an instinct.”
“In-stinct!” Maria rolls the word over her tongue, giggling. “Let’s examine your instinct. Look at the sun.”
“What did you say, Commandant?”
“Wait, let me understand, are you deaf now, too?”
“No, I just didn’t hear what you said, Commandant.”
“I said look at the sun and open your eyes wide.”
Vera bows her head.
“Is that hard for you?” asks Commandant Maria, with sorrowful commiseration.
Vera nods.
A rough hand caresses the back of her neck. “How long have you been able to see?” asks Commandant Maria softly, and her fingers tighten on Vera’s gaunt neck.
“It just started this morning, Commandant.”
Maria laughs. “Come on, banda, you know we’re after the truth here.”
“Maybe since yesterday evening, no longer, Commandant.”
“And you decided to keep the little secret to yourself, banda?”
The pain in the back of her neck is dreadful. It’s hard to breathe. “No, no, Commandant. I was thinking—just until he recovers a little.”
“What a kind soul you are.”
“But, Commandant, he can still live, I really do know how to care for him.”
“That’s nice. Very moving.” Maria wipes a clownish tear from her eye. “Now pull it up.”
In some way she knew this would happen. From the moment she saw Maria emerging from between the two rocks, she knew that either she or the plant would not get out of this encounter alive. She gets down on her knees and begs. For the first time in her life, she begs. Not for her life, but for its life. She begs to the point of tears this time. She gets one lazy lash on the back of her neck, and another on her temple, above the ear. There is no point resisting. The plant is easily uprooted, as if it had no roots at all. The little leaves lie in the palm of her hand. They are almost black. How could the plant be so paltry?
With two fingers Maria takes it from her hands and tosses it over her shoulder into the abyss. Vera sees. It’s been at least a week since she’s been able to see. The light came back, the colors, the images. She won’t dare believe it and won’t dare celebrate. The sight of the little bundle flying over the sea and the gulf sends horror through her. Now it’s her turn.
“Tomorrow morning you go back to work in the rocks.”
“Yes, Commandant?”
“You should thank God and Comrade Tito that you’re not down in the sea right now.”
“Thank you, Commandant.”
* * *
—
Vera followed Maria to the camp headquarters. For a few hours she stood outside her office. No one came up to her and no one spoke to her. Then a warden came out and told her to leave. She was not punished; she was not lashed. The next morning she rejoined the women rolling rocks up and down the mountain. Their talk, the noise, the crying and shouting, even the occasional laughter, were almost as hard for her as pushing the rocks. One morning the Punat docked at the island and off-loaded dozens of women for reeducation. A senior warden’s voice came over the loudspeaker, naming the women who had finished their prison terms and would be sailing to freedom. Vera’s name was read out. Vera stood there in disbelief. They called her name again. Someone hit her on the back and shouted at her to run to the office. No one explained why they’d decided to release her. She had not confessed to a crime, had not expressed remorse. She had not given them a single name. She had betrayed no one, and yet they’d decided to release her.
More Than I Love My Life Page 25
