SUMMER 2009 CAME TOO EARLY. This meant that ferocious heat had been building up ever since the beginning of May: the spring roses were expiring in the parks and stone troughs.
At the end of July I packed all my belongings, abandoned the borrowed apartment where I had lived through several lost years and set off for home.
My sister met me in the kitchen of our old house with her suitcase already prepared for her departure. During our conversation lasting an hour and a half, she got up from the table four times, once to pour me some milk and three times to go to the bathroom. Finally she came back with her lips colored bright pink, which surprised me, but I didn’t say anything. She hadn’t used that color lipstick before. While she was talking to me, she sent several text messages, and then finally she stood up, straightened her skirt, and set off along the lengthy corridor and down the stairs. Ma was lying in her room on the lower floor, surfing channels.
They said goodbye briefly, at the front door, I heard their voices, and I watched from the balcony as my sister disappeared around the corner, behind the baker’s house. For a moment she was an unreal apparition in a real scene, a simulation. I finished the cold coffee in her cup with its smudge of pink lipstick.
Before she vanished, my sister had told me something of her daily ritual with Ma over the past month. It was precise and simple: they rose early, always at the same time, and spent at least twenty minutes over coffee. Then, before the sun was too hot, they set off on foot, one behind the other, along the main road to the cemetery. In summer, the thin strip of earth beside the road, barely wide enough for two narrow feet, turned to dust. Between the road on one side and the brambles, groundsel, and unplastered houses on the other side of an imagined pavement, dust rose up, getting into your eyes and throat and between your toes in your sandals.
“D’you know some folks eat earth?” my sister asked my mother as they trudged through the dust, beside the main road. “It’s called geophagy.”
But Ma responded tangentially, as she so often did these days: “Dust to dust, better be buried in earth than immured in concrete.”
“Death don’t bother me none,” my sister broke in. “Fuck death. You can get used to it too, I’m sure.”
“Course it don’t bother you.” Ma was offended. She shook the dust out of her clog and strode on, chin in the air, with all the dignity of a future deceased person, one step ahead of my sister.
After they had washed our grave and cut the rotted stalks off the flowers, they would make their way down to the beach with a more sprightly step.
“It’s calm and quiet as a microwave,” my sister had remarked as they passed through other people’s gardens and desiccated orchards.
At the beach, Ma took squashed pears and bananas out of the paper bag in a plastic bag in a Tupperware box and offered them, with her famous Hollywood smile (which ought to make any normal person feel a bit better, observed my sister). But she thought Ma used to just pluck that expression out of a folder or the big straw basket she toted around wherever she went. And it seemed to her that sometimes Ma would produce that smile, the ace from a sleeve of mass-produced expressions, at the wrong moment.
Their togetherness would come to an end with their return home, after lunch, when my sister would withdraw to her room upstairs till suppertime and try to get on with her own work, even though she was on holiday (she’s a schoolteacher). Ma would then feed ginger Jill, settle down in front of the television, and announce: “My serial’s starting.”
Minerva, Aaron, and Isadora had decided to investigate the true identity of Vasiona Morales. She was a very dangerous woman who had to be separated from Juan.
In Ma’s eyes all serials are important, and equally so.
She would fall asleep in front of the TV, wrapped up to her ears, although at the time the temperature didn’t fall below thirty even at night.
The day I left Zagreb, my sister told me she was terrified that Ma was going to overdo her sleeping pills—she didn’t stir under the sheet, she didn’t even breathe, just occasionally farted in her sleep.
“She’s dreadful,” Ma said of my sister after she’d left. “She says terrible things. I don’t get it, Dada.” That’s what I’m called—Dada, that’s the name my parents gave me.
When I accompany Ma to the highway, the heat rises from the earth: by seven it’s up to one’s ankles. On dry mornings, just after midday, it starts grilling down straight from the sky. In town it’s worst around five p.m.—the salt air begins to sweat and everything that moves passes limply through treacle, while the song of a million sounds is transformed into a steady, electric hum that hypnotizes.
Although she’s perfectly upright when she sits or stands, when she’s walking Ma rolls over the edges of a line. Cisterns and refrigerated-fish lorries hurtle past a few centimeters from her shoulder. Maybe there’s just no place anymore for a non-driver in traffic, I reflect.
“They should be shut up in pedestrian gulags, those idiots don’t realize their life’s on the line,” my sister said once, I think it was when we were driving in her ex-husband’s turbo off-roader to Daniel’s funeral and some kids suddenly tore across the road.
“Pedestrians have to be loved. Pedestrians created the world. And when it was all done, cars appeared,” I said. Everyone looked at me as though I was nuts. “It says that in a book somewhere,” I added.
I was sitting in the back on sticky fake leather, surrounded by wreaths of palm branches that pricked my bare arms, among arrangements of chrysanthemums and bunches of blowsy roses with big red ribbons. The wreaths had mauve ribbons and names written in gold felt-tip.
“So folks know who’s sorry,” my sister remarked, which was deemed inappropriate.
“My, but we’re primitive,” she then added, closing the window out of which she had tossed a still-lit butt the color of blood. “Things like this prove it. Every love’s weighed, see, the bigger the death notice, the bigger the advertisement, the more marble on the grave or gold on the cross. More cash, more love. Chucking money around. The more luxurious the vacuum cleaner he gives the young couple, the bigger the brother’s love, s’all the same. There’s no such thing as a poor relation, just a tight-fisted sod who doesn’t love you,” she turned to tell me.
I was sweltering among the prickly wreaths, trying not to crush the flowers and watching people picking cherries beside the cement works. They had ladders, caps, and blue aprons. They looked contented in their manual toiling. I wondered whether cement dust scattered over them as they pulled down the branches with their long-handled pincers. I remembered that dust as being like a soft carpet; it was an agreeable memory.
I didn’t answer my sister and that provoked her to keep on talking, sentences that flew like projectiles around the absence of my reply. Her former husband, a peaceable and transparent type, soft and stiff, said: “Okay, calm down, now.”
As we walk along the side of the motorway, my mother is transformed into a mole alongside a poster of a pastoral center on which is written JESUS LOVES YOU, then into an extinguished glow-worm beside the discount store and into a minus sign when moving beneath a larger-than-life-size, washed-out poster of our very own “Hero Not War Criminal,” General Gotovina. We walk on in the dust beside the road by the petrol station, on a path barely wide enough for two narrow feet. The speed limit here is sixty, but people drive at least eighty and a little further on, the four-lane fast road comes to an end and drivers lose all sense of speed. Farmers in their tractors are known to come out onto the highway from one of the un-made-up side lanes and slow the traffic down to a crawl.
Until recently there was also horse shit on the highway, but not anymore. It’s become too dangerous to drive a cart and horses there. And I think there’s just one man in the whole town with a horse now; it’s illegal to keep a horse in town now, but he’s the old blacksmith, and they’re just waiting for him to die in peace, if Ma is to be believed. What’ll happen to that horse when the blacksmith dies, I wonder. There used to be a smithy in the Old Settlement run by that old man, in the port where the restaurant La Vida Loca is now. But it closed the year Daniel was born. I remember the sound of the shoeing, the horses neighing at the darkness and fire. I was still very small, and I looked at things from a distance, staring out of the summer light that hurts the eyes, into the open darkness of that building. I was still very small when along the street where we lived one would hear hoof beats on the worn stone, an unreal sound the way the sound of a Ledo van inviting you to have an ice cream during the afternoon siesta is unreal. Willy Wonka has come to your town too.
But there are no longer fresh horse droppings in the streets. Dogs shit and no one picks up after them, just as they didn’t after the horses. But no one’s going to throw dog turds at you, you can be sure. That really would surprise me.
When the shape of my mother in the distance becomes a line—a horizontal line, a minus, rather than vertical, as one might expect, because of the glare on the road—I turn and hurry toward the house, along the concrete stream beside the new buildings for disabled veterans. There used to be all kinds of rubbish and treasure in that stream: in springtime it would hurl itself over the trash barrier. Since it’s been cleaned out and lined with concrete, I’ve noticed that a ribbon of slime trickles along it, congealing into green mud in summer.
“You could go to the cemetery on your own tomorrow,” I suggested to Ma the day after I arrived. “I’ve got things to do in town, it’s quite important,” I lied.
Ma smiled at that, exactly as my sister had said she would, producing her Hollywood smile at the wrong moment. She had nice teeth, a gold incisor in her lower jaw. Sometimes she would tap her teeth with her fingernail to demonstrate their firmness and health.
“Mother looks like a smiley on speed,” I told my sister over the phone, later.
“See what I mean,” she replied, blowing smoke into the receiver at her end.
I told her I found Xanax, some Prozac, Diazepam, Praxiten and Valium on the floor, under the dresser in the kitchen in an ancient boiled-sweet tin along with plasters, Aspirin, and cough pastilles. Ma wasn’t even hiding them, as my sister had presumed—or else Ma knew that one of the best places to hide things is where they can be seen. Yet last winter she had thrown them all into the bin, I saw her do it.
“Where on earth does she get them?” asked my sister, incensed.
It’s not hard, I thought. Half the student hostel was on vodka or wine combined with Valium, sedatives, and other bits and pieces that can theoretically only be got on prescription. They’re cheaper than sweets.
“Leave her some Lorsilan to help her sleep,” my sister advised. “Anything else you find you can chuck down the toilet.” I flushed it several times, but one blue Prozac capsule kept floating back to the surface. In the end, though, even that persistent one disappeared.
Later, as I sit on the swing on our balcony, I can see out over the roofs. Our neighbors greet me from the street and I wave back.
When Ma appears—first a minus sign, then a mole—from the west, behind the baker’s house, I wave to her too. As soon as she reaches the door, I tell her: “I’ve decided to stay for a while, Ma. Could you take Daniel’s things out of my cupboard?”
She’s standing in the cloakroom, in front of the washbasin, rubbing soap into her hands under a jet of water.
“Yes,” she says, turning off the water, drying her hands with a stiff towel.
“S’no point taking flowers in summer, they all burn up in a day,” she adds thoughtfully.
* * *
“I’ll use the rebate on my pension,” says Ma later, dividing the melon with a blunt knife as we sit in the hybrid dining-living room we call the tunnel, “to fix up the grave.” She says she’ll put the shares she’s sold into my account. “You never know, one day you might want to finish your degree.”
I say: “Okay. But I’ll keep it for my own pension. By then folk’ll be able to go to the moon. Although your shares won’t be enough for even two minutes on the moon.”
“At least you’ll be able to go to the moon,” she concludes thoughtfully, and, nodding, she drags her slippers behind the green curtain that divides the kitchen from the improvised room.
“You’re hungry,” the green curtain shouts now. “But there’s no fresh bread. I couldn’t get none, the Albanian closed early. Give me a moment, I’ll make some French toast.”
I don’t like French toast, I begin to say, why can’t you remember, but I change my mind and say: “Fine.”
Behind the curtain I hear the clink of tin plates and eggs being broken, milk gurgling.
“Did you know that swallowfish molt when they come back south from the north? Their feathers fall out, and they grow scales and fins so they can swim again.”
I sometimes tell her idiocies like this to amuse myself.
“Everything’s possible after Chernobyl,” she replies, beating the egg yolk, milk, and sugar together briskly. “The Mišković woman from Lower Street gave birth to one child with three fathers.”
* * *
My room is a box in a house of boxes.
At a time I don’t remember, this was a cellar full of barrels, then it was used as a larder, so there are no windows in the room. Just a narrow door, a narrow table, a huge wardrobe with a large Crying Baby Doll on top of it, and a bed, with a few of Daniel’s leftover ancient film posters on the walls, mostly westerns. There’s a dry olive twig tucked behind one of them, in memory of John Wayne.
Before it was Daniel’s room, and before it was mine, that catacomb on the ground floor, in the depths of the house, was where my mother’s gran had lived, motionless, a blind and immobile diabetic. Five years in the dark, without moving, entirely conscious.
“Santo Subito,” said my aunts and some women whose particular faces under their permanent waves I can’t remember. There was one blind woman who never protested or complained much, which is a sound reference for sainthood. She recited her prayers with thin lips that had once been full. In the old photographs of our great-grandmother my sister noticed the same thing: “A smoker’s lips,” she remarked, grinning.
There was nothing that ancient woman would rather talk about than love, with a lot of spice. As we grew up and she began to fade, the old lady’s youth became ever more unbridled, until in the end—in our recollection of her past—she was canonized as the insatiable one.
She buried three husbands, gave birth to five children, and in her mature womanly days she was able to scythe a field of brambles, fennel, and asparagus—so it was said—and then eat two kilos of shellfish for lunch and wash them down with three quarters of a liter of red—so it was said. She swore out loud and frequently and prayed with equal fervor.
Throughout her stay with us, Mother systematically disinfected the little room, I remember. There were mothballs in all the cupboards, the odor of lavender and camphor in the corners.
“She’s afraid the old girl’s going to fall to pieces on her, any minute now she’ll be dousing her in formalin,” said my sister. “Or quicklime.”
The embalmed old lady, fairly emaciated, was not much bigger than me or Daniel then. She was vanishing before our eyes, day by day, on her high bed, with heaps of quilts, from under which she squeaked: “Children! Oh, children!”
My sister and I sometimes pretended not to hear her, I remember, but Daniel was something else, it didn’t bore him.
There’s a song from those days that Ma often sang around the house:
You’re a heavenly flower
Beloved by all each hour
You are the one I love
All others far above
And she went out alone, not a word to her mother
To pluck roses for her dearest lover…
Later I sang that song to Daniel, and Daniel sang it to our great-grandmother while she lay with her open, watery eyes in eternal darkness.
“Hey, Gran, do you see everything in black and white, like hell?” he asked her.
“Hell’s no black, hell’s green, and shiny with plankton. Inside me too’s all green, like a Martian’s ass.”
Daniel used to press his eyes deep into his skull, I recall.
“Then your eyes turn over and you see inside, into yourself,” he said.
He pressed his eyes until he began to feel sick, yet he didn’t, as far as I know, see a yellowy-green light. He didn’t see that until later, one summer when the sea blossomed with seaweed full of phosphorus. During the day it looked like a puddle of dung, mare sporco, but at night every movement we made would scatter into fluorescent bubbles.
“And heaven?”
“Heaven? There be no heaven. Aah. Just hell, right here, on the black earth!” the old lady moaned in pain. Then she added: “O, santo dio Benedetto, holy shit. Come, come, my little dove, sing that Not a word to her mother.”
A few days before our great-grandmother’s death, a little monkey that lived at the time in our neighbor the vet’s garden slipped into our house. People said some rich tourists had grown bored with it and left it behind. It caused havoc all over the house, that monkey. We spent ages looking for it, I recall. It had crept in under the old lady’s oversize nightdress. Sneaky beast, we said. And soon it escaped the vet altogether, first into the park, and then who knows where.
“D’you love Great-Granny?” asked my sister.
Daniel and I nodded. The old lady was our wooden reptile—she touched our cheeks with her dry, odorless antennae. Our underground doll from the attic.
“Then we’ve got to help her,” said my sister, her green eyes looking at us straight from hell.
“Great-Granny’s suffering,” she said, “and we’ve got to help her fly up to heaven.”
I believe she really thought that. That we’d put a pillow over her head. A child playing with weapons is a terrible thing, and everything is a weapon, I recall. It’s really amazing that so many of us have survived our own and other people’s childhoods.
“Heaven doesn’t exist,” said Daniel quickly. “Go ask her.”
Things were easier with Daniel. That was the end of it.
“Don’t let Ma hear you,” I whispered.
“I never said God doesn’t exist.”
“You’re idiots! Pathetic! And craven,” said my sister. Her contempt was terrible, I recall. Still is, for that matter.
Craven, where’d she got that word from? Some film, I imagine.
And the old lady—“poor thing, poor thing” everyone said—really did cry out for help and blaspheme against God and the devil.
I think my sister loved Great-Granny, though you never know with her.
She prayed fervently to the saints for the old lady to die, even at mealtimes, which earned her a smack.
In the end her passionate spiritual euthanasia worked.
Great-Granny died like a fish, her mouth open.
That was the first time we’d seen death—it didn’t look that terrible.
She was lying on her bed, with her eyes finally closed, and Daniel lifted up her wide nightdress dating from the time when she was the insatiable one. We were looking for the tourists’ monkey, but there was nothing under her nightdress. Everything about Great-Granny had been dead for years already, her blue-and-brown shanks covered in scabs, hairless. The only thing alive was the muff between her legs, shaggy, shiny fur, bright black, that climbed from halfway up her thighs to her groin and then in a narrow spindle up to her belly button.
“Is that the monkey?” I asked.
“A cat,” said Daniel, surprised, covering her up with the nightdress.
That evening I discovered a hair under my panties. One single hair, but I couldn’t pull it out. I was almost a boy, just like my brother, who was “like a little girl,” my aunts used to say.
That wasn’t right, though, because Daniel was a boy the way boys are like those carved wooden angels that are supposed to guard your house or those Gothic ones with cheery expressions. They are free from either male or female sins, the only sunny, full-blooded creatures in church frescoes or in free flight above anorexic saints, hysterics, and virgins in the side aisles. Perhaps that’s because they have interesting jobs to do, dealing with the profane interactions between demigods and people.
The chubby little gilded angel above the Pietà behind the altar in St. Fjoko’s Church still chuckles at me today, sucking his thumb or picking his nose. All the devout ladies dream of nibbling his cheeks.
A neglected angel, perhaps, but not from a porcelain cup and not a little girl—that was our Daniel.
My room is a box in a house of boxes. Above the room there’s a bathroom, so damp stains come through the fresh paint on the ceiling. The bed behind the low cupboard is a still smaller box. The next box is me. The smallest box, a boxlet, is my cunt.
Before I go to sleep, I put each little box into the next, and then in the last one I put everything it’s agreeable to think about, everything that soothes me. Such as going into a clean empty kitchen, in which the fridge is purring; the sound of an airplane landing or taking off; something warm with a neutral smell like a dry child’s or cat’s head; sniffing the tips of one’s fingers, the chance touch of strangers, unexpected, with no ulterior motive; a hallucination while perfectly rational—that I am the white contents of a capsule or yogurt being poured out in a single dollop.
But if I spend too long awake, with insomnia that becomes like delirium and a torment, images appear, bursting rapidly into leaf.
The images I see most frequently are shots from an amateur porn video taken off the Internet, which I came across at a party two or three years ago. The images have rooted in my consciousness, draining and annoying me, because particularly nauseating images have a way of coming back and not fading. It was a custom at certain gatherings to show such amateur little films in one of the rooms, in the small hours, films that had been allegedly taken from certain sites, nothing illegal, allegedly, although I wouldn’t swear to it. The party guests would try to make fun of the two, three, or five people sporting lively genitals on the screen. I would most often wander out of the room at the very beginning of the projection, but this time I stayed to the end, because the main actor’s face caught my attention.
The film was poor quality and too dark; it had evidently been dark in the room where it was made. It was probably shot with a phone, I thought at the time.
It begins with the expression on the face of a man rearing up over a thin, white body. The man doing the fucking has very large hands and his face, which I can’t make out clearly, is blurred, but it seems to be on the verge of tears. The person under him occasionally moves an arm or leg and emits a barely audible moaning sound. Then there’s a cut and the next image is of the narrow thighs of that second person, boy or girl, it’s hard to tell: the thighs are bare and pressed together, with a thin barb between them, the big man’s snout. The third scene shows a boyish nape, with short hair and a huge fat hand on it: the face of the person being fucked by the big man is hidden by a pillow and can’t be seen. The fourth scene moves, but barely: with one hand the fucker holds the object of his lust by the shoulder or neck, probably too tightly, and slowly pushes it downward, grabs it lower down, thrusting in and ramming slowly and powerfully and crying increasingly loudly, then coming with a roar and a wail. His crying is the thing it’s impossible to forget, particularly if you want to.
I wouldn’t be able to say that these scenes excite me; rather they disturb me. There are some images that bruise me like slaps on the face: such as those of that huge ejaculating, crying man whose face I can’t put together.
In my box of boxes, droplets of sweat travel down my ribs, I stop them with the tips of my fingers and rub them over my belly. I turn the pillow onto its dry side, push my hands down inside my panties between my thighs, and try to curl up toward the aroma between my legs. That used to send me to sleep when I was a child.
Finally I give up on my efforts to fall asleep, I take off my damp T-shirt and light a cigarette sitting by the low window of the summer kitchen, looking up into the blue cleft above the street from where, instead of the freshness of nocturnal dew, a moist, lukewarm blancmange is sliding over the town.
All that can be heard in the Settlement is snoring—interrupted by curses and squeaking springs, the irritated thrashing of limbs coming through holes in the neighboring houses—and a cat exhaling air through its tiny nostrils. Someone’s left a player on and it’s emitting a thin, repetitive squeak. The fat town is sleeping in a fever, the guttersnipe.
It’s almost six, but the air outside is already warmer than inside.
Looking back, I can see clearly that everything had changed faster and more fundamentally than I had. I must have spent the last few years standing still on a conveyor belt while everything else was rushing and growing. I rarely came home, caught off guard every time I went to the center, to the west end of the town, where my sister lives, into that scintillating showroom, that garish shop-window of a broken and robbed world. Going into town is a digital adventure in which I’m met around familiar corners by ever newer and more unrestrained silicon hordes. The adrenaline scattered through the air is an aerosol that fills and pierces my lungs.
I go to the big beaches with their concrete plateaux, recliners, and cocktail bars, to the marinas where there are Russian yachts larger than our houses and to hotel complexes with ramps and a caretaker; a mass of rubble and broken glass, diggers and trucks, steel scaffolding, and smooth prisms of black opaque glass whose metal glare assaults your vision. But I pity only the birds, the dolphins, and flying fish. I believe that these things must horrify them when they leap out of the water or fly down from the sky.
In the east is the industrial zone. The east is a great stranded wreck. The shipyard with its tall green cranes, hangars, cement factories and abandoned railway tracks, and behind that vast garbage heap, on the edge of a peninsula, is the shabby Old Settlement, with a post office and church and dark runny mud in the polluted port, a comical little place under the distant skyscrapers, which blink at night at us beneath them… At me and Ma sitting on the balcony, sipping tepid beer out of plastic bottles or eating melon, while a fan on the railing pretends to be a breeze. Our neighbors who don’t have air-conditioning sleep on settees dragged out onto the terrace; whole families. Around the evening news time they sit around and watch TV. Here, nothing has changed; it hasn’t budged. Perhaps this is the only corner of the world I know, my haven, my salvation, my place of greater safety. Despair and refuge, a shred of happiness in a lukewarm bitter liquid.
The oleanders, capers, and bougainvilleas have come into flower in the courtyards. And our cat, ginger Jill, has a streetlight like a star in each eye.
On such evenings the world and the town are not divided into east and west, but, as in an animal’s head, simply into north and south. Because that, urbi et orbi, is the language of moss, compasses, and wind roses, migrating birds, the rhythms by which people rise and dance, the kinetic language that divides into hemispheres; eels and smelts that mate ecstatically in the shallows so that you can tread among them, through that lively seething and flickering, migrating birds, mapa mundi, Luna and the North Star and the place up on the hill up to where the broom bushes grow.
Ah, that’s when everything seems to be okay, and sometimes that’s the same as if it was.
Back here, I know every rat run, hiding place, and way out in case of danger.
As kids we all had that knowledge—in our legs more than in our heads, like a foreign language that waited, rolling around in our middle ear, whose hot-blooded Romance melody we had woven into our own, far more languid Slav one. Me, my sister, and Daniel, and the boys too, who came to us from the new estates beyond the railway—the Iroquois Brothers’ family and some other outlanders, always with freshly shaved heads in summer. At that time they wanted to be like us, so they gabbled the way we did, differently from their sweet fat mums and hairy dads whose consonants stuck in their gullets and who used to yell whenever they needed to speak.
We cobbled that language together from what we learned at home from our parents as much as from the unknown translators of film subtitles and dubbed cartoons; the language we’d picked up in the street and from announcers on the news and stolen from Dylan Dog, Grunf, Sammy Jo Carrington, and Zane Grey. It was the musical lingua franca from the west of the city and the center through the Old Settlement and as far as the railway. Wherever there were kids who talked and called to one another. We sought each other out and hung out, there was nothing else to do, and nor did there need to be.
Variations on the game of hide-and-seek offered endless possibilities. Or the game of group-seeks-group. Back alleys lead through unlocked villas, or through the kitchen of the cake shop with big vats of custard and tubs of ice cream, through dark vaults leading down to still darker cellars. The cellars come to an end in tight passages between buildings, pipes that emerge into bare courtyards with sheets drying above them, steps that end in the sky, garrets on rotten beams, roofs over which we leap to the old castle, then we clamber up on the sea side, dragging ourselves along the edge of the wall and coming down into the park, under upturned boats in dry berths.
That’s where we found Daniel, the first time he got lost; he had hidden under a boat on the slipway during a game of hide-and-seek and sung to himself so as not to be afraid. After that he kept disappearing and he would stay away for increasingly long spells—because he was no longer afraid, he said.
We thought all our games and wars must be even more exciting than those of the children who grew up in the movies with the cactuses and the big bright sun over the wide prairie. After all, there is a prairie here, too, at the foot of the hill above the cemetery where my father and brother are buried, even though now the path there is cut off by huge houses with hens pecking around them.
It was in a battle on the lunar expanse behind the cement works and old salt pans, between the road and the prairie, that I won my real name, Rusty, because of my red hair. That day I fell three times for justice and liberty, I was a courageous general and that’s the name I call myself—Rusty—in private.
Immediately after the war, through an exchange of volunteers, a precocious first-year student from Heidelberg ended up among us. He had come to interview us for their student radio station about the postwar life of young people in Croatia.
“You live in a multicultural country…” he began.
“No, I don’t,” I said into the dictaphone, distinctly, as though it was a microphone.
“Oh, I know what he means,” my sister butted in. “There’s various nations here, at least two nations in every house in our street, but it’s all the same mangy culture, if y’ask me. Only the Chinese can save us from boredom.”
My sister had her own way of being imbued with the spirit of internationalism.
“Eh,” said my sister to the lad from Heidelberg, slapping him on the shoulder in a comradely way, “before this war we used to play at war with the tourists; then the little Germans and Italians acted Germans and Italians.”
“And in this war? And afterward?” he cleared his throat and turned the dictaphone toward me.
“Oh, I don’t know. No one played at these Balkan wars, if that’s what you mean. Fuck it, they all wanted to be Croats.”
“Yep,” my sister confirmed.
“That’s why we played cowboys and Indians.”
“With the outlanders.”
“Against the outlanders. You have to have some kind of conflict: cowboys and Indians.”
English and Dutch people had recently settled in our narrow lane, followed by Belgians and French people—I don’t think the Chinese believe that poverty is especially romantic. It was fascinating to watch dwellings stuck together with stone, cement, and bird droppings—with worms burrowing through their beams and mice nesting in them—turn into little picture-book cottages. It was a delight for those with a bit of time and money.
All the Chinese people I’ve ever met live in high-rise blocks, I reflected. There are those who value the solidity of construction, I completely get that. They are people who live in settlements like ours all over the world.
“Jesus, these tourists are cracked,” said my sister before taking her suitcase and going down the hall, saying goodbye to us and disappearing behind the baker’s house, leaving a greasy, pinkish mark on her cup. My sister calls all the westerners who have moved into our street over the last few years, transforming those hovels into pleasant summer houses, tourists.
“Paint away, carry on painting,” she said, watching our Irish neighbor waving to us in a friendly way from under a paper cap. “You’ll never get rid of the damp and woodworm, the stink of burned onions, or the kids on your steps.”
Perhaps that’s why they come, I thought.
The daddy tourists push their children around in buggies, and we see them hanging out washing on the line between houses in the street. They don’t grill fish on charcoal in an old concrete mold or cardboard box in front of their front door with the other men in blue overalls. And they haven’t learned to play cards.
We used to have my father’s Yugoslav National Army officers, but they all married nice girls and evaporated after a while during the last war, or they ran off after some skirt, and their wives went back to their parents’ kitchens, in their unsuitably fine dresses, and later concealed their children’s surnames. We also used to have the working fathers, manual workers usually from Macedonian or, more often, Bosnian villages, who married bad girls. They stayed on in our street to drink with their wives and fight with their sons. Or the other way around. They were the only fathers we ever saw, apart from the occasional sailor or a dad working abroad. Every time they came home, those men would find a new bun in the oven.
And then there was my father, not quite like anyone else. He bore the surname of his long-dead mother, and whether his old man had been a kraut, as people said, no one knew for sure. At home no one talked about that, he least of all. He had this red hair and light skin. Like me and Daniel.
My sister is the image of Mother. She looks like the other women in the Old Settlement: brown velvet, black silk, sandpaper.
Later Daniel transformed that unknown forebear into a soldier of the Third Reich who falls in love with a young virgin in the occupied Town from—to make matters worse, but more interesting—a Partisan family. He returns several years after the war and in a brief and passionate affair he gives her a son. They never see each other again; she dies young of grief, a victim of complex political circumstances.
I believe that my father heard this story, because one morning at breakfast, out of the blue, he said that his phantom old man had been a customs officer from Cetinje.
“Well, honestly,” said my sister later. “Whoever heard of a red-haired Montenegrin?”
“Our old man is an incredible loser,” she added. This was the time when older boys were beginning to smoke Croatian cigarettes, war was just brewing, and everyone had suddenly become nationally aware. “He’s always on the wrong side. First he was a kraut, and now he’s a Montenegrin.” Montenegrins were historically aligned with Serbs, and that was the wrong side to us.
“Filthy half-breed!” said Tomi Iroquois to Daniel in the course of one of our fights, belching like a pig.
“Lousy redskin! Scabby Indian!” responded Daniel, belching even more loudly and piggily, and knocking him into the dust.
A half-breed like Castellari’s Keoma, like McQueen’s Nevada Smith. Or Sergio Leone’s Nobody.
On several occasions, the neighbor with whom we quarreled about the communal steps cursed our kraut mother. We used to curse her cunning, heathen mother in a familiar manner. But in principle, we never knew who was what, so we were caught off guard when everyone else knew who we were better than we did. The advent of the war had a way of making people’s ethnicity everybody’s business.
It still happens today that one neighbor will spit on another or piss on his car tires or pour dirty water over his children during their afternoon siesta. Sometimes the women, who are more highly strung here and fierier than their weary husbands, fight so that their tits gleam and their teeth and kitchen knives flash. But this pathetic neighborhood is no worse than others when you grow up in it—that’s what I think when I sit with Ma on the balcony and we drink beer from plastic bottles and the fan pretends to be wind. When the night’s sultry, those neighbors who don’t go off to bathe with a towel slung over their shoulders amuse themselves singing outside their houses.
And I join in, whispering, from my bed: You’re a heavenly flower.
This business with the cowboys was my father’s doing. He started it, and somehow it was his story. Everyone else in Yugoslavia liked the Indians best, apparently because of our most popular TV series, which had Winnetou the Indian boy as the hero. It was only much later that cowboys came into their own. But my father loved the proper cowboys: John Ford, Zinnemann, he used to say. He adored the Italian westerns of Leone and Sergio Corbucci, he said he liked Sam Fucking Peckinpah as well, and all the films acted in and directed by “the great Ned Montgomery,” as he called him.
Since he became my late father, I have dreamed about him twice, the same dream both times. How it was before, when I was able to smell him after his morning shave, rubbing my cheek against his chin—of course I don’t remember that, because then dreams were different. Ordinary dreams about other things.
In my dream, my father is coming toward me, accompanied by a bird. It is the same cockatoo that used to peck at the top of his ballpoint pen while he did rebus and crossword puzzles in his leisure time in the afternoon. He took it everywhere, my father did. It cackled on his shoulder as he sat at a table on the waterfront with the other tall men from the Settlement. The crested fashion model strutted about, turned her idiotic little chicken’s head around self-importantly, crapped on the light fittings and cupboards and watched out for a chance to leap onto someone’s head and peck their skull, I recall. It was only my father to whom she attached herself with some kind of servile avian devotion. Nothing like a hawk, whose devotion, were it not so magnificent, would be canine, I thought. The cockatoo, as my sister described it, had the temperament of a monkey and the manners of a possessive little madam.
The parrot imitated the way our father whistled to call us in from the street, striking terror into our hearts, because our father was strict. Later he softened, as though he knew that he had no time for anything other than fun. In summer he took us to a distant sandy beach and to play badminton and brought us copies of the latest videocassettes of films and MTV clips and pulp fiction that we watched or read in the quiet, empty seasons. He kissed our feet and eyes and under our chins, where a child is softest.
Sometimes I spent winter mornings at the Little Lagoon looking for cuttlefish shells for the cockatoo to please my father and that bird of his, which no one in the house liked.
“You’ll make great soup, you’re just right for soup,” said Daniel. He threatened the bird from a respectable distance kissing the tips of his fingers and smacking his lips.
“It’d make a great crown of feathers,” he told me once quite seriously.
“Hey, you’d be a great headdress!” he shouted to the parrot.
Daniel thought that if an animal talks, it must also understand. And if I think about it, for that matter so did I, because once I said something to it and our cat Jill looked at me and sighed.
“Oh,” came a muffled sound that you often hear dogs make.
And Jill’s just an exasperated dumb creature who reads our lips, but perhaps she does hear. She certainly feels our words but isn’t capable of repeating or creating them, I thought. But still my words reach Jill like flying objects, invisible artefacts—when I say food, she hears the crisp rind of bacon with red strips of meat; when I say love, she hears my hand, its moistness and warmth, my pulse.
Although it was able to repeat them, our words reached the cockatoo as noises, simple melodies.
Our pa was taken ill early, so the guys from the cement works employed him in the factory cinema. The Balkan Cinema it was called back then. It’s been closed for ages now.
He tore the tickets in half, stuck up posters, carried huge reels of film, and showed the films along with Uncle Braco. Those were brilliant years for his children, the last years of that cinema, just before the war: three days a week. After the matinee I sat in the little projection room, with the projector whirring, leafing through catalogs of the films that would be coming or reading about those that would never be shown in our cinema.
After the screening, we would come out into a night full of stars pricked into the black, above the tubular, pot-bellied factory halls and chimneys painted red and white like a lollipop, and tread over the carpet of cement dust that stretched to the edge of the sea and beyond, far below the sea. Roundabout, in the dust, lay perfectly smooth metal globes, some small, some large, that were probably used for grinding marl, and steel rollers that we took to make go-karts, I recall.
We came out of the old Balkan Cinema—hearing the wooden seats clatter as they folded up behind us—as though we were passing from one film into another.
And as a finale: the spongy, muffled sound of the large cinema door closing, then my father turning the key and putting it away in the inner pocket of his jacket like the keeper of a secret.
I was proud of him then, far more proud than if he’d been a doctor, a singer, or a director.
After that Uncle Braco opened a video rental shop, Braco & Co., where my father was the Co. until the end of his short life, working behind the counter.
I asked him whether we were going to have our own video shop.
“What’ll it be called?” I asked, pushing myself into his hands.
“It’ll be called Almeria,” he said, tracing the invisible name in the air with his finger and winking.
My excitement in those years sprang from a different world but continued in this one, equally exciting.
A life lasting a whole evening, a film lasting a whole life in which the best heroes lived just long enough to act an episode, for you to like them.
In my dream, my father coughs, just as he did in real life. His lungs are overgrown with little silver asbestos hairs, which you can clearly see through him. You can see through him everything it’s essential to see, only it’s hard to reproduce it when you’re awake.
“Eh, where’ve you sprung from?” I ask him in that dream in which he appears in the company of the bird.
He smiles, draws from a phantom holster, winks, and says: “Bang, bang!”
“Bang, bang!” repeats the parrot from his shoulder. “Bang, bang!”
M a and I didn’t talk about the dope, or its mysterious disappearance from the tin under the dresser. Which wasn’t that mysterious, after all. And what was there to be said, after all. As though it was possible to drive the devil out. One has to sit down beside one’s demon and mollify it until it’s calm—that’s all, perhaps, that can be done.
From time to time Ma seemed agitated—for instance, she dropped things. But that used to happen before as well. Once it seemed to me that she reeked of alcohol.
Otherwise, she watched TV or swept the pavement in front of the house in the evening, to get some air. She would sprinkle the street with water that evaporated before it was swallowed by the manholes.
We didn’t even cook, although Ma is a cook, or used to be. Mostly we ate meals from the foodshop, ordered on the free number 0800 30 33 01. They offered heated-up frozen things that the workers bought cheaply at the nearby market and threw into hot oil in a wok. The menu included bizarre hogwash such as veal medallions in tuna sauce, wtf… But I don’t care, I’m perfectly happy with a plastic plate containing meat and rice, if possible not stuck together, and beetroot salad, and there isn’t even any washing up, it doesn’t taste of anything and it’s all consumed without exaggerated emotion about food. Sometimes they add a little vacuum-packed chocolate cake.
This morning she got up very early; I recognized the sound of the vacuum cleaner. She had taken out all her shoes, new, old, and those that no one wore any longer, and arranged them on the steps. I found her brushing them and rubbing polish into them.
My coffee was getting cold and there was a short, sharp hair in it. Jill had probably licked it, the wicked cat. I took the hair out with my finger and drank.
As soon as she saw me through the open front door, Ma abandoned her shoe brush and ran up, wiping her hands on a rag as she came. As though she’d hardly been able to wait for me to wake up.
“Look, I wanted to show you this,” she said excitedly. “What do you think? Is it tacky?”
On a shiny piece of paper was written:
GERBERA HEART (code: 3-70606)
Pain, sorrow and melancholy are part of life, especially at the times when we remember our dearest ones who are no longer with us. This arrangement symbolizes two hearts, which will remain forever together. It is made up of red mini gerberas, red roses and seasonal greenery arranged in the form of a heart.
DIMENSIONS: width 42 cm, height 40 cm.
PRICE: 425.50 kunas
The arrangement in the picture looked like a strawberry-cream gâteau.
Her glasses had slipped to the tip of her nose, an old-fashioned frame, comical.
“It’s not too tacky, is it?”
“It’s lovely,” I said.
Outside we were met by a mass-produced dry morning where everything was burned up: the sky that had lost its color and the two of us, without a drop of blood, were trudging along the uneven road beside the stream toward the highway. I have a new straw hat, yellow; on the label it says it is in fact a hat made of paper. As I put it on, I think of Tom Waits in Down by Law, that is, his attitude to cowboy boots—when you walk that much, you surely like boots—or Puss-in-Boots, Supertramps and all those valiant warriors, lonely riders, walkers, their spurs and rivets, Pippi Longstocking’s enormous shoes and Henry Thoreau’s philosophical hiking boots, the sandals of some young wanderer and especially those boots of Nancy Sinatra’s, made for walking. Perhaps I would be able to develop such an attitude with this hat? I would certainly like to develop such an attitude toward the hat, which is not difficult when there is so much sun. I felt like telling someone about this, Daniel most likely.
Ma is dragging her beach things for afterward. She’s shoved a linen cap adorned with some obscure logo over her eyes and steps out, while behind her, I’m expiring under the seasonal greenery of the Gerbera Heart. Seasonal greenery, that’s what they call it, as though there was anything green in this season apart from inside greenhouses.
There is nothing green anywhere you look. Only dust and thorn bushes; needles and pins. My tongue is hard and my throat sprinkled with flour; the spring juices have now turned to dust and my blood has turned to dust. I’m sure that in males of all species their sperm has turned to dust. Perhaps they spurt it out like confetti or cannons of artificial snow. That thought amused me, for a moment.
I’m aware of my head swaying above the Gerbera Heart, above my bare legs, on the burning highway, and I see Ma up ahead in the haze, scuttling along in her gold clogs.
If I could weep, I would probably weep tablets: milligram size. I recalled a story in which a girl wept roses, yellow ones, I think, but that girl must have been from an area with a different climate and better irrigation.
It’ll be easier on the way back, without this thing in my arms, I console myself, and the way to the beach is shorter, it goes through olive groves, vineyards, and scorched gardens, beside courtyards with barbed-wire fences where furious Alsatians and Dobermans hurl themselves against them, and through an underground tunnel in the stream that acts as a passageway for schoolchildren.
We used to drag ourselves through there once when we were attacking the Iroquois Brothers or drawing up a truce with them on no-man’s-land.
Parents used to put ordinary wooden ladders on either side of the road so that their children didn’t have to run across the highway. In summer, the tunnel was dry and full of green lizards. Problems arose when the streams swelled and the impatient kamikaze outlanders, accustomed to living with the road, threw themselves in front of herds of metal buffalo.
Every kilometer along the highway, there is a bouquet of plastic flowers in a plastic vase and a wooden cross, lamps, candles, even real marble tombstones with the faithfully engraved smiling faces of the deceased. A whole small town has bled to death on the road here. Every thirteen-year-old has a scooter cobbled together from spare parts. A traffic accident in our country is death by natural causes.
“What’re you thinking about?” I’ll ask Ma as we leave the graveyard and go down onto the beach through the remains of an olive grove above the old salt pans. The sun will have risen between the factory towers and the bell tower and will be pouring burning honey over us.
“I’m thinking about conditioning, how we’ll have to get conditioning, it’s hotter every year. This could drive you mad.”
Sweat and dust will leave the imprint of muddy circles on her sandals and her heels, which she lifts in a sputtering rhythm. She has such small feet, a weak foundation for such heavy thighs, and a taut back and a face on which I recognize at most two expressions, talking head.
“What about you?”
“I’m thinking I ought to fix up the scooter. I’ll get it out of the shed for a start. I hope it still works, it’s exhausting doing this walk every day. It’s really too much.”
That’s what we’ll say to each other. And each of us will be thinking that today would be Daniel’s birthday.
Daniel’s death swallowed up the death of our young red-haired father, and all the previous deaths that had happened to us were caught up in it as well. Like a new love, I thought, new, and already ragged with all the earlier losses.
(“Love and death are words without a diminutive,” said our neighbor the vet, Herr Professor. I tried: lovette, lovelet, loveling, deathlet, deathette, deathling… And augmentatives: death and a half, superdeath, superlove… “Hey ho. There are no bigger or smaller words than them. Unlike life, which is a lifelet,” sighed Herr Professor theatrically. He’s that sort of guy, he doesn’t really fit into the Old Settlement. He wore his hair combed back and he had a thin, sparse mustache on his fat face, above his full lips. He used to beam at us. He was different. He knew more than other people, he knew something about everything and expressed himself well, in a literary way. Apart from that, we found him somewhat nauseating.)
We laid the flowers down, a birthday Gerbera Heart, on our grave, threw away the rotting plants, replaced the water. Ma swept the grave while I sat on the edge beside the marble vase with Daniel’s name, bored. Bored to death.
Ma and my sister watched a film recently where a woman goes mad after her child dies. So Ma said when she finally sat down beside me and lit a cigarette.
“And when after a while the pain eased, that woman, a fine lady, if mad, stopped a man in the street, a passerby, and asked him whether she was alive.”
“‘Am I alive?’ she asked him,” Ma repeated vaguely, brushing bits of dry flowers from her dress.
“What happened to the woman afterward?” I wanted to know.
“What d’you mean what happened?” said Ma. “D’you know anyone who went unmad?”
When we get back, outside the house, I see that all those winter shoes intended for cleaning have been left on the outside steps and now they’re roasting in the sun. Among them are some men’s boots, brogues, and trainers, although the last time a man took his shoes off in this house was… four years ago?
Two pairs of shoes on each step, from the fifteenth to the third, as though some chance group of people who had found themselves in a column were coming down the steps. A funeral, a procession, or wedding guests.
Daniel, my brother, died in his eighteenth year by jumping under a speeding Intercity Osijek—Zagreb—Split train. He threw himself onto the track from the concrete viaduct over the railway one early winter morning. His body was found some twenty meters further on, in a vineyard.
“His blood was splattered everywhere, on the trees and the frozen leaves of the vines,” said people who, for the first few weeks, had made a pilgrimage to the site of the mishap, leaving behind the St. Andrew’s cross, plastic roses, and lamps that glimmered for as long as their batteries lasted.
Among my jottings, written on a notepad, I found this:
“Stay up, stay on the surface,” said my father, throwing me into the sea from the jetty. “Swim, for god’s sake, you’ve got long arms and legs,” he laughed out loud, with his tanned face and light eyebrows. And I swam, like a puppy, like every child.
Daniel jumped in after me and went under. Just a plop. Then nothing. That’s the only time I ever heard Ma scream. She shrieked at my father. My sister shouted and wailed as well, standing on the beach in her wet bathing suit, dropping unchewed slimy pieces of bread and paté from her mouth. But I could see that Daniel had stayed sitting on the bottom, he wasn’t even trying to come up.
“He’s swallowed a bit of salt water,” my father repeated from the sea, holding him.
Afterward Daniel laughed and said: “What’s the big deal, I was just teasing. Seeing who’d save me!”
They left me alone in the sea, for a moment, while they brought him out.
“What’re you thinking about now?”
“Cicadas. It’s strange that we can’t hear any cicadas. Had you noticed?”
It’s as silent as a cave.
“It’s really strange, maybe they’ve all burst.”
Everything is brightly lit, and yet I can’t see anything. I cover my eyes with my hand and through the milky screen against that unbearable light I peer into the still olive grove, full of evil silence and bad sun. I see my suntanned fingers and the thin white membrane between them. Behind them is the even sunnier beach, behind the beach is the empty prairie at scorching noon.
My hands will become even darker, my hair copper, my private places white in front of the mirror in my cold, darkened room.
But still, I never succeed in imagining the comfort of my room as I cross the prairie with a red-hot hat on my head, every time, every blinding Monday and Friday.
I try to step broadly and shallowly, to stay on the surface.