And they’d say, “Goodness, Javorka, you’re still so young! And so pretty! And your son is so smart!”
It made her feel good to hear this, but she’d be waiting for the next opportunity to repeat her question, “Who would want a woman with a child?”
The thought that I might have been an unwanted child didn’t bother me. If one believes Freud, this should trouble every adult male. But it didn’t trouble me. Nor do I believe it would have bothered me to discover I was adopted and my biological parents were some other people unknown to me. And it would not have bothered me to learn I’d never know who my mother and father were. What was important, what needed to remain incontestable in every respect, was Nona and Nono. I wasn’t linked to them the way grandchildren are linked to their grandmothers and grandfathers. I didn’t really experience them like that. Whenever I named them subsequently as Grandma and Grandpa in my stories and essays, in fiction and nonfiction, instead of calling them Nona and Nono, it felt false, it seemed to me I was lying, the story had suddenly fallen upon a detail that was fundamentally untrue. These two elderly people, who in fall 1966 when we set out on our Drvenik consociation and I was still a half-blind, tiny, suckling babe, when Nona was sixty-one and Nono sixty-eight, though they were actually each much older than that, meant more to me, I think, than a mother and father mean to other children. In addition to their not having time to talk with me as one does with a child, everything strong and secure in me would be theirs. Every piece of knowledge, up to the present day, would come from them.
This is why the question of whether I was an unwanted child didn’t torment me even as I entered puberty. I was curious and wondered just as curiously about it then as I do today. It was probably easier for me to think about it then because Nona was still alive. Today none of them are left, and perhaps it would be comforting to believe I was, after all, someone’s realized desire.
Even if it really was the case that before my birth my mother wanted me, afterward she didn’t know what to do with me. Nor did she know what to do with herself. Her life was under strain from several directions, and there wasn’t any easy way out. Or maybe there wasn’t any way out at all.
From Yugoslav National Army Street, the building next to the National Theater, where Franjo and Olga Rejc had lived up to the war as tenants in the building that had belonged to Madam Emilija Heim, which after the war was nationalized, giving the people living there tenants’ rights – meaning a kind of part ownership – from that building we moved to Sepetarevac Street. From the twenty or so apartments offered to us, or rather to Nono, as the “possessor of tenants’ rights,” Javorka chose an apartment in a building that had been constructed and shared by the brothers Obrad and Branko Trklja. Obrad had later sold his apartment to the Energoinvest engineering firm so he could move to Belgrade. In this apartment, she decided, we would live. She was twenty-seven years old. (I always remember how old she was then, because it seems to me she lived her entire active life when she was very young, and everything had happened to her by the time she turned thirty…)
She chose this apartment because she believed, naïvely, as it was higher up on a hill, above the center of town, with cleaner air, that Nono would find it easier with his asthma. The calculations were of course completely wrong – the air was the same, and Nono couldn’t make it up what was one of the steepest streets in Sarajevo on his own and had to take a taxi. She never admitted she’d made a mistake. And maybe she hadn’t – who knows how we might have lived if we’d moved somewhere else.
It is probably an aspect of human nature not to admit one’s faults to others.
When I think this, it occurs to me that I haven’t ever admitted a major mistake to anyone else either.
Either that or I say I’ve been mistaken in everything and I would do things differently if I could do them again.
But my mother not only didn’t admit her mistakes, she directed her life in such a way as to persuade us all that she had been in the right. And then time would be spent, months and years, life itself, on valueless unimportant things, in trying to repair something that had come out broken. She lived in a past that grew with time, swallowing her up, devouring her, while she tried not to notice. She never talked about what was happening today, about what she was doing to make things better for her – or for me, her ten-year-old son – but rather about endlessly and uselessly analyzed instances of injustice and justice, of mistreatment and abuse, of lives and histories already lived, which would not leave behind any trace of themselves.
As if something were keeping her from moving from where she was.
After two marriages and the birth of a child, barely twenty-four, it was as if she’d been buried. As if her feet were planted in a leaden bog. And she was a leaden soldier. Or just leaden, she didn’t move.
In May, before she had grown completely weak, she called me one morning to tell me the dream she’d had the night before.
She had dreamed, she said, that she could no longer move. Not her feet, or hands, or index finger. She lay in the room in which she really was lying, except she couldn’t move. She couldn’t blink or breathe.
And then she braced herself with all her strength and cried out my name.
She called me but I didn’t come.
This was her dream.
I was in Konavle, standing on an old street built by the French, under an enormous walnut tree, looking at the open sea in the distance, and I listened to her dream. It offended me. Not, of course, that she had dreamed it, but that she had had to tell it to me immediately. I was to blame in her dream, and a dream is truer than reality. A person can’t overpower a dream, it comes on its own, and from it we learn what we otherwise wouldn’t know. I was to blame for not answering her, just as I was to blame for the illness progressing implacably, and for the doctors who continued to react too slowly, and for her unhappy fate. For this last item I was, perhaps, to a certain extent, to blame. But my blameworthiness was not conscious. Rather it was something I’d been born with. Such blame existed only in ancient tragedies. And once in a while in the relations of parents and their fatally ill children.
She was not my daughter. I was her son.
But this, it appears, did not need to be true to the end of life.
Now that she is no more, the dream she offended me with – or I was just waiting for her to offend me with so that it’d be easier on me – has been transformed into a short fairy tale of her life. She no longer moved. She just strained with all her might to call someone who could save her. Or someone who could be at fault in her place.
My mother didn’t want to be at fault for anything because her own mother had already blamed her for Mladen’s death.
I believe this was the truth. It occurred to me after Nona’s death that this was true. Before the story, before the novel, before God – if she really believed in him at the end – before the world, I justified my mother because of this one distinctive need of hers, which made her insufferably selfish. This justification applied universally, in all cases but one.
By justifying her, I took Mladen’s death upon myself, to carry with me to the end – I took on the guilt that my mother didn’t want, because her mother had blamed her for her son’s death. I didn’t want to do this. I’m not good. I wasn’t worried about her. But such things are passed on without volition.
This also shows how present my uncle’s death that autumn of 1943 remains to me at this moment, along with everything that created the context and framework for his death.
My mother knew how to cook, but she stopped in the middle of the seventies, when she was baking sweet bread on Sundays – according to a special recipe, now lost God only knows where – and chicken with potatoes. Nona cooked all the other days of the week.
After that Nona cooked on Sundays too, the day my mother would usually be lying in bed with a washbasin. A migraine. Or she’d be depressed. In which case again sh
e would be lying down all day Sunday. After Nona died, she didn’t cook even once up to the day I left Sarajevo during the war.
She no longer cleaned the apartment or wiped away the dust. She only worked at her place of employment. She was a good, thorough head of the accounting department. She followed the rules with Stubler strictness. But did nothing more. She didn’t move, didn’t care about the state of things around her.
This bothered me immediately after Nona’s death, but later on it ceased to. I grew accustomed by degrees to her unhappiness as an aspect of my own family circumstance. We lived together, but until the war all we ever talked about was how badly she felt. During the war in Croatia, she was at the height of menopause. A year or two earlier she’d had a serious hemorrhage. She went three times to have the layer of skin scraped off in order to remove all the blood. I was with her during every instant of this. She had no one but me, so I experienced my mother’s menopause from beginning to end in great detail, both the psychological and the physical aspects.
When they attacked Croatia, she was in the depths of depression. She would take her yearly vacation time only to lie in bed for three weeks. It’s hard to live with someone who doesn’t leave her bed. She said her life had no meaning, she would kill herself. She had no one else, so she had to say this to me. At night she would call a number for help. This kind of line had been working for years in Sarajevo. It was started by a psychiatrist couple. But now it was someone else who answered. The other two had better things to do.
Nor would she move from her bed on the weekends. She’d lie down on Friday afternoon and get up just to head off for work on Monday morning. She would lie in the living room, covering her head with a synthetic Vuteks blanket from Vukovar, while the sounds of the war emanated from the TV at full volume. Generals read pronouncements about the declaration of a state of war, politicians announced cease-fires, an international representative spoke with the intonation of a British tourist on the Adriatic, television announcers reported in hysterical voices on the front lines, explosions and bursts of gunfire could be heard, along with patriotic songs newly rearranged as wartime marches, but she wouldn’t hear anything. She’d be sleeping deeply, having taken a few Lexilium tablets, and there was no thunder from even that war that could have woken her.
The siege of Sarajevo happened while she was in a stupefied state. Soon there was no more Lexilium, nor was there a hotline for psychological support, or any phone line. The electricity stopped and then the water, and my mother forgot about the idea of killing herself. She was still listless, often depressed, but she went to work regularly – at the time this was at the Academy of Performing Arts – and she made her way through the falling of the rain and snow and mortar shells, even when others readier to live than she had finally quit because they didn’t understand what possible sense their little municipal job might have. Her employment by contrast had that much more sense because it brought her out of her depression.
During all those years at work she communicated with the people around her, often had arguments with her superiors – someone always had it in for her, either because she was a woman, or because she did her work promptly and diligently – while with her female colleagues she had conversations about children, cleaning the house, the prices at the market, ironing, how she didn’t really like ironing, almost as if she didn’t realize she was discussing things that had long since ceased to have any connection to her own life. She hadn’t ironed a single piece of clothing for years. It was mostly me who turned on the washing machine, put our clothes on the line, and brought them in, though I didn’t do the ironing because I didn’t know how. She had no children she needed to take care of, nor did she go out to the market. She’d always managed to avoid all that.
In her purse she carried a school notebook she’d bought to write down cake recipes. At the time women would exchange recipes at work since the fashion of printed cookbooks and gastronomic contributions to newspapers had not yet taken off. Instead, people believed in secret knowledge and in the sorts of family recipe collections that were collected over years, written down mostly in little notebooks. My mother wrote down everything. Except for tortes with white cream and cakes with sugar icing.
“My Miljenko doesn’t like white cream,” she would tell them.
And yet not once did she ever bake a cake after Nona’s death. Not even for the birthdays that we once had celebrated, not ever. At first she said it was because of her migraines, or periods of accounting reconciliation, or biannual budgeting, or because she had to stay late at work, but later she wouldn’t say anything. She just wrote down the recipes.
This made me angry. It made me furious. Because I thought she was hiding the truth from her women coworkers. And lying to them about baking cakes. And lying about caring about me so much. Only after I was no longer in Sarajevo did I start to think of this differently: my mother believed for a long time that all of a sudden by some miracle everything would change, her daily life would be transformed, every day she would prepare lunch, on Saturdays she would bake cakes like other women did, and make sure her son wasn’t hungry and his shirts were ironed, just like her women coworkers. All that she did was actually in preparation for the moment when everything would be different.
That was why in 1972 she bought a sewing machine, which to the end of her life remained boxed up in a corner of the living room. She never opened it, but it was there, and from time to time she would arrange the sewing-in-one-hundred-lessons booklets she had purchased on sale in bookstores or from street vendors. She didn’t even stop doing this after the war. The last book she bought was probably a few months before she got sick.
She didn’t do this out of habit but really believed, even into her seventieth year, that she would one day learn to sew, while a cake with chocolate cream baked in the oven.
Her women coworkers and acquaintances, with whom she would go out, after she’d retired, to the Café Imperijal for coffee and pastries, never learned about the difference between her exterior and interior life, between what happened around her and inside her, what happened in our apartment on Sepetarevac and what she did, said, and thought outside our home.
Sometimes in the years after Nona’s death I would reproach her maliciously for that notebook, with which she never parted and in which she very carefully recorded each and every recipe, with an obligatory note – as if cakes too had some sort of authorial rights attached to them – from whom she had heard a given recipe: chocolate cake (Sonja), Mubera’s baklava, dried fig bombs (Nadja)…Sometimes she’d break into tears, or start screaming, throwing the notebook into the corner like an offended child, and I would leave without a word, slamming the door behind me.
Once she asked, calm on the surface, “Would you feel better if I didn’t write down any recipes?”
Her chin was shaking.
I didn’t answer. I pretended not to have heard and went into the kitchen for some water. She continued copying into her notebook a recipe she had found at the supermarket on a vanilla sugar bag: for pineapple cake. Even with white cream, I could have liked that cake. Because of the pineapples.
I don’t know what happened to her notebooks. She went through about five or six of them. As soon as one was filled up, she would cram it into the drawer of the little table the telephone was on. I don’t believe she ever took a single one of them out again. In one of them she had copied down recipes for savory dishes for years. Maybe it’s still in the apartment, under piles of paper that don’t mean anything to anyone anymore, instruction brochures for independent accounting, issues of the Gazette, old appointment books without any appointments in them, telephone directories, bookkeeping forms, old newspapers, file folders, books with financial regulations, economics textbooks, logarithmic tables, blank sheets of merchants paper with a red line down the long edge, boxes of used-up indigo paper…
She was formally divorced from my father in 1974 or 1975.
&nb
sp; I know this because that’s when she changed her last name. Actually she just got rid of the added Jergović and went back to Javorka Rejc. She said she was doing this for the man she might meet later. Other women, she said, kept their names because of their children, but she didn’t understand that reason. She talked a lot then about her last name. I remember feeling offended, but I didn’t say anything. I was eight or nine years old, having trouble getting used to Sarajevo, finding school painful, as well as life on Sepetarevac, with a new backdrop and a new allocation of roles between Nona and my mother, in an apartment where we were always renting out one room because there was never enough money, her paycheck was too small, and I understood her change of name as a betrayal, a distancing of herself from me, perhaps a hidden accusation about her not having met anyone, remaining a lone divorcée, because she had a child. Other people’s children were always a burden, like in Cinderella and all the fairy tales about evil stepmothers and unfeeling stepfathers, and the burden was especially great here in Bosnia where women were looked at disparagingly and a divorcée was already half a prostitute. This was how she talked, finding a frame for her suffering, a social category, and a justification. She was a martyr more readily than a disillusioned woman. She couldn’t stand disappointment. It seemed to her that each instance of disappointment was just a new proof to others of her own lack of ability. She went screaming around the house, defending herself even when no one was attacking her. She took pains to make her private unhappiness public.
Or maybe she did this because she knew that Nona really couldn’t stand it. Nona always did her best to conceal her private life from others, from family, and from neighbors, who in Sarajevo were always eager to know what was going on behind closed doors. My mother flung open everything that Nona wanted to keep closed.
The divorce was an unexpectedly important event for her, even though she and my father had never lived together and there had been no mention of reconciliation. In talking about how the three of us should live together, especially given the fact that he would soon be getting a beautiful, spacious apartment in a high-rise near the stadium on Koševo (my father acquired this apartment, in which I would never set foot, in 1974, a few months before they divorced), he was resolving a problem with his conscience, with some real or invented sense of guilt. When we would go to see the animals at Pioneer Valley – I loved the animals and our outings to the zoo were important events for me, and I remember him promising to take me to Vienna and Berlin to see the biggest, most beautiful zoos in Europe – my father would point to the pansies in the windows of family homes on the wealthy fringes of the city, where country and city houses began to mix together, and say, “We’ll have flowers like that.”
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