Yugoslavia, My Fatherland Page 18
Nadia patiently waited for my time to start moving again, for oblivion to finally start healing my mounting fears, and I didn’t want to remind her that time, it is wasn’t spent meaningfully, was powerless in its fight against memory. I was only waking to remember that each morning was like the one before, and I felt like Bill Murray probably did, in that film in which he got stuck in one day and couldn’t get out.
Expecting to live this apparition of a normal life, Brane Stanežič probably figured I’d bury my living father for a second time, which I couldn’t, even though I occasionally wanted to. I couldn’t convince myself that I would never see him again, and consciously kill my own hope, which I might have spurned and despised, but which I could no longer deny. I accepted the fact that a part of me wanted to see my father and I was secretly looking forward to our meeting; sometime, somewhere. In time, I allowed myself this tiny weakness, and accepted it as my own, and I comforted myself that this was just the child in me, wishing for his father to hold his hand again and take him to see Maki at the market in Pula.
In despair, I resorted to my computer more and more often, and typed the names Nedelko Borojević and Tomislav Zdravković into Google countless times. I was reading the same news about him, over and over again, and soon started obsessively looking for anything new. So I began including verbs in the searches. ‘I give to Nedelko Borojević,’ ‘I see Nedelko Borojević,’ ‘I speak with Nedelko Borojević.’ I was typing entry after entry, thinking it would lead me to a new discovery. I started browsing for information about Brane Stanežič too, and Emir Muzirović and even Danilo Radović. Sometimes I sat at the computer all night Googling. The same names, the same entries, over and over: ‘I give to General Borojević,’ ‘I see General Borojević,’ ‘I speak with General Borojević.’ The same pages in the same order, over and over again. I looked for hits in different regions, in each region separately, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. I didn’t skip one single country. This was an addiction, an obsession which frightened me, but I couldn’t stop myself. I had to sit at the computer and type his name into the search engine. Into all search engines. ‘I give to Borojević Nedelko,’ ‘I see Borojević Nedelko,’ ‘I speak with Borojević Nedelko.’
Sometimes during the day I managed not to think about him for a long time, and such dullness felt good, but I was aware that this was just emotional numbness, and that the memories would return, together with feelings and thoughts. There were moments when I was losing hope, and was afraid that I would never emerge from this emptiness, and there were moments when I wondered how much power I had left, how many indistinguishable days I could wake up to. There were moments when I thought about everything, including what I shouldn’t have.
During this time, I began to feel that Nadia began fearing that the silence, which spread between us on those normal days, would swallow us up in the end. She dreaded that we would slowly go silent forever and that eventually everything that was ours would go mute.
She tried to talk to me, but this always turned out to be an attempt to beat my silence with her words, and most often, she failed. Our conversations were rarer and rarer, and increasingly disappointed Nadia as she tried to fill the space between us. She turned on the TV, put on some music, intentionally clattered anything that produced a sound, from the clothes she was putting in the wardrobe to dishes she washed. She opened the windows wide in the middle of the winter to invite the cold, urban sounds into the apartment, but even the deafening noise of the Ljubljana traffic whooshing by couldn’t drown out my unspoken words.
I felt sorry for her as she, ever more annoyed, persisted with these hopeless attempts. And I felt sorry for her when I saw how she was trying to hide her weariness from me. I felt that she was giving up, and that she was joining me in my absentmindedness ever more often. I believed that she was loosing her sense of time, too, and that her days were also blending into one. Except that Nadia didn’t deserve this: this wasn’t her fate, it was mine. I had no right to keep sharing it with her, and I even thought that I should gather my strength and drive her away from me. But I was too selfish, and at the same time too helpless in this selfishness to drive away my only fellow fighter. Instead, I was consumed by fear of her departure, a fear that grew every day, until it became my private paranoia. Soon I didn’t dare open the door of our apartment when I came home, petrified that the distant solitude I knew so well would welcome me once more.
21
It was getting harder over the years for the former police chief, Dushan Podlogar to hide the tiny flashes of joy upon my rare visits and at times, he seemed like a real grandfather. But already worn out by diabetes and a weak heart, he began suffering from stomach cancer, and after I had left home in protest, I found only a bed ridden creature to greet me. And Maria too, with a dying husband, didn’t have the slightest desire to offer shelter to a runaway teenager.
Mrs. Podlogar never liked unannounced visits, and when she opened the door to me, she was ready to close it post-haste, thinking I was the postman or a door-to-door salesman. Her astounded gaze couldn’t hide the fact that she would rather see a stranger or even a Gypsy psychic than her grandson with two bags in his hands and a backpack on his back. It seemed that Dusha and I only reminded Maria of her sins, and who knows if she wouldn’t have turned me away, if her surprised gaze hadn’t lasted so long that it aroused the curiosity of the old snoop. He interrupted the awkward silence for us, and shouted from his bed: ‘Who is it? Maria, who is it?’
So Maria had no choice but to let me in, shouting at least three times into the ceiling that Vladan was here. Before she disappeared somewhere inside the house, she had quickly told me the house rules: ‘Dushan’s upstairs. Go say hi to him, just don’t bother him too long, because he’s weak.’
I went up the stairs and found my grandfather barely recognizable. In the three months since I last saw him, he had shriveled like a withered rose. The disease sucked all the sharpness, sarcasm and anger out of him, as well as the life. Now he lay on his deathbed in front of me almost like a sweet and affectionate old man. His eyes looked at me with sincere gratitude, and his hand struggled to touch mine.
‘Vladan,’ he whispered, and seemed happy that I was sitting next to him. He hadn’t the strength to talk much, but when I tried to get up, he squeezed me as hard as he could and barely visibly shook his head. So I sat next to him for almost two hours, before he fell asleep and I could go to the toilet, listening to Maria’s advice that Dushan should rest more, which I later interpreted as her jealousy of his joy over my presence. As soon as he woke, Dushan called me back, and so I sat by his bedside until the evening and at some point started telling him about Dusha’s wedding, about Dragan, her pregnancy and about my never wanting to go back to Ljubljana. I told him everything and he listened, looking at me with affection and, in the end, he took my hand and whispered: ‘Stay here. Stay here.’
When soon after that Maria came into the room and brought him food and drugs, I had to step away, so I wouldn’t see her changing his diapers and wiping his behind, but I could hear from behind the closed door how Dushan summarized my story in a few sentences. For her ears, he adjusted any facts that didn’t favour me, and told her I would be living with them, then ordered her to get the bed in Dusha’s room ready. And when Dushan fell asleep soon after that, Maria officially informed me that my bed was ready, and that she had let Dusha know I was there. She also added that I should go to the shop tomorrow to buy things I liked to eat, because she didn’t know what young people ate.
And so it was that I spent the last few days of his life with Dushan Podlogar, sitting by his bed, holding his hand and absorbing a little love from his tired gaze. He was wasting away before my eyes, and had more difficulty talking every day, until he couldn’t utter a word, and we only communicated by touching. In exchange for him taking me in, I told him everything about Pula, my friends there, the Golden Rocks beach and the high rocks fro
m which I used to jump into the sea; about the Arena and the fireworks there; my primary school and classmate Mirana, who was my first crush (which was why I broke her glasses); about Maki and the He Man action figure; the shipyard and the large ships that were once built there; about Nedelko’s barracks; about the crazy priest who chased us away from the church playground, where we used to play football, and screamed after us, about our neighbour, Enisa, who used to call me her baby boy, so that I believed, for a long time, that she had given birth to me, rather than my mother. I told him about Emir Muzirović, aka Loza, about Dusha and Nedelko, our trips along the coast and the best pizza in town. All day I told him about various incidents from my childhood, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him about other, less happy times. So my stories always ended before the ‘secondment’ and Shkeljqim’s truck.
One day, Dushan stopped nodding when listening to me, the next day he stopped smiling, the third day he wasn’t able to hold my hand any longer, and the fourth day he passed away, without taking his eyes off me, not even when Maria was in the room. I was sure that she was more hurt by Dushan’s late attachment to me than by his death.
Following Dushan’s death, Dusha spoke to Maria on the phone several times, but she came neither to the house nor to the funeral. Maria justified her absence to people with silly-sounding words, about how her daughter couldn’t stand cemeteries and that she always got sick during funerals. All this vividly reminded me of the tall tales of Dusha leaving to study in Ljubljana that Dushan used to tell these people. Listening to Mrs. Podlogar repeat her story again and again, I wondered where people found the need to propagate this perfect family image, and whether actually functional families really existed, or were they all just pretend, like Maria and Dushan; pretending all their lives.
Besides us, the funeral was attended by a few neighbours, who came out of a sense of village duty, a few of Dushan’s fellow Partisans, who were counting the remaining survivors, Maria’s cousin’s daughter, Lidia, along with the cemetery workers. It was a modest funeral, without eulogies, songs and other formalities. We put the urn into the niche, Maria crossed herself, a lady lit a candle, and we stood by the grave for a bit and tried to be silent in grief, and then went our separate ways. It snowed softly the whole day and the cold wind blew and the weather was gloomy, just as it should be at a funeral.
Lidia then drove Maria and me back to the house, where we ate some reheated bean and barley soup, and then went to our respective rooms. The phone rang in the afternoon, and Maria briefly described the funeral to Dusha. In the evening, she came to see me and tell me that it would be reasonable for me to go back to my mother now, who probably missed me. I asked her if I could stay with her for two more days, and repeated my promise to go back home several times, until Maria reluctantly accepted.
Two days after Dushan Podlogar’s funeral, I left my grandparent’s house after a quick goodbye, as if I was off to the shop, to a woman who simply wouldn’t or couldn’t be a grandmother to her grandson. But I didn’t go back to our flat. Instead, I went to a small basement cubbyhole at the edge of Ljubljana, probably similar to the one Dusha had resorted to many years ago. I withdrew all the money I had on my savings account, added a few tolars Maria had stuffed in my hand when I was leaving, and paid the first month’s rent. I explained to the landlord, who showed me around my new home without many words, that I was a student from out of town, that I was studying Roman law and didn’t want to be in a student hall of residence because you couldn’t get any peace there. I also assured him that I wouldn’t be any trouble. But he just dropped the key to my room in my hand, saying that ‘he doesn’t give a shit what I read here,’ but that he would quickly send me back to ‘the God-forsaken place I came from’ the first day after my payment was late.
So, at the age of fifteen, I found myself lying in a cold student room, feeling that life had just cremated me, strewn me to the wind and scattered me to the four corners. I couldn’t see my nest anywhere anymore, and there was no ground where I could land, which I could dig into and slowly penetrate its depths. I was desolate on my little continent, irreversibly separated from the larger one, and I didn’t know how and why I came to be there. Impassable distances separated me from the rest of the world. They had their names, their homes, their families and their spiritual abodes, which defined and determined them. They were from somewhere, they were someone, and they all belonged to someone or something. They knew everything they needed to know about themselves. I didn’t know anything about myself anymore.
I didn’t share my story with anyone, and this made it more fateful than all the slaps and curses it might have brought me. The mercilessness of my situation provided me with the final acceptance of the fact that my father was really dead, and that there was no point in hoping for his miraculous return. Maybe it was an illogical acceptance, but it was in line with the only perception of myself I had left. My identity was only that of a victim; a victim of everything and everyone. I was a victim of an unfair sequence of events that had forcefully dragged me from a full children’s playground, in the middle of an innocent children’s game, into a cold, dark and solitary place, forever removed from this world.
The next day, when I finally returned to school, I was officially missing, and Dusha and Dragan were looking for me in panic all around Ljubljana, until they found me at a school desk. Poor Dusha literally barged into the classroom out of sheer joy that I was still alive and well, and was hysterically hugging and kissing me, so that my classmates believed, for years to come, that my mother had gone crazy. Meanwhile, Dragan stood at the door, shooting his killer gaze at me, telling me that our friendship was irreversibly over, and that he would never forgive me for scaring his pregnant wife to death, and that he would never even try to understand what brought me to this shameful teenage foolishness.
In the evening, we sat in front of the TV in our small apartment, half filled with Dragan’s parents’ stuff. The three of us listened to the news that the ‘chiefs of the Balkans,’ as Dragan referred to them all, had met in the American town of Dayton, to end the war in Bosnia. None of us were in the mood to be appropriately glad to hear this news, yet it was truly welcome, because with it we could more easily avoid talking about things that were far more important for us. Dusha tried to start a conversation a few times and Dragan, as if predetermined, instantly reacted each time by turning down the TV, but she was always interrupted by an interesting comment or a news correspondent reporting on another historic event.
Sitting there with the Ćirićs, I had the unprecedented feeling that my life was coming to an end, just like the war in Bosnia. Everything was upside-down. I didn’t have a father, a mother, a brother, a grandmother or friends, although in theory, I had all that. But only in theory. In reality, I didn’t have anyone. So I sat there, staring at the TV, hoping that the news would never end. At some point, out of sheer desperation and defeat, I blurted out that I wanted to live alone, and that I felt this was the best solution for all of us.
Dusha probably expected just such a suggestion, and had prepared herself for it in advance because, without much contradiction, she agreed for her and Dragan to pay my rent. The conditions were that I live modestly, was good in school and so on. However, Dragan insisted that if I wanted to live alone, I would have to work, to which I didn’t dare object, probably thinking that Dragan wasn’t completely serious about it.
On the historical day when Slobodan Milošević, Franjo Tuđman and Alija Izetbegović nonchalantly ended the war in the Balkans, with three autographs for their American fans, the three of us signed our own peace agreement, and buried the hatchet. We found ourselves happily sitting in the dark, not knowing what else to do with each other, and so when Dragan turned up the TV again, and we could redirect our attention to Dayton, all three of us were finally relieved.
The next day, I return
ed to my student room and a few days later, Dragan found me my first temporary job. I counted traffic. I counted happy people who were freely turning from one road to another in their cars, while I was stuck in one spot. Dragan found me a few more jobs after that, but then I started looking for them myself, which finally drove our relationship to a standstill.
Unlike him, Dusha never, in all these years, found me a single day’s work, and I’m sure she never even tried. I understood this as a kind of a peculiar farewell present from her, and the only evidence of her maternal care and compassion I’ve received since Dayton.
And even that was probably a stretch.
22
I’ve never been back to Dushan Podlogar’s grave since the funeral. At first, I avoided it so as not to meet Maria there. After that, I guess I didn’t go because I didn’t know what to do there. None of our people were buried in Pula, so we never went to a cemetery there, although it’s customary to go regularly. I only knew that people lit candles and brought flowers to the graves of their dear ones, but I doubted that Dushan was a candle or flower person. After all, he was a member of the Communist party for years. If I think about it, I probably avoided Dushan’s grave also because I didn’t know him so well, and I felt guilty because I had ignored his numerous requests to visit him more often. I always felt that he was only inviting me because he thought it was the right thing to do. But in those days before his death, I got the feeling that he really wanted my company. So I felt guilty. I also felt a bit guilty because, until the very end, I still saw in him the man with that strict and daunting gaze, which he had shone on Dusha and me when we first knocked on his door. I knew I would stand there in front of his grave, not really knowing why I had come, but also I knew that I couldn’t sit at home and keep torturing Nadia with my silence. So I got into my car and drove off. Nadia had asked me where I was going, but I ignored her, just like I had ignored almost all of her questions lately, until there became fewer and fewer of them. I just kept going until I reached the cemetery, because I felt that I couldn’t just drive by.