Mother Tongue

by Tania Romanov

  “Zorića, you have to pay attention,” Katarina said one day, not for the first time. “Get your head out of that book; Ljubica and Milena need help with their reading.”

  Katarina continued with her baking. All three of the younger girls were in the kitchen with their schoolbooks, as usual.

  “Just one more minute, Mama. I promised the teacher I would return this book tomorrow. And I just haven't had time to read it.” Zora barely looked up.

  “I know, sladka, sweet one. I’m sorry,” her mother continued. With Mara and Roža both gone she counted on Zora to carry more of the burden of helping her sisters.

  It was late afternoon, and soon Slavića walked into the house and straight to the kitchen. She greeted them all, then turned to her mother. “Mama, I ran into the postman on my way home from work. There's a letter for you from Roža,” she said, giving her mother a thin envelope.

  “Oh, lovely. I can't wait to read it.” Roža was almost at term with her third child.

  Slavića nodded. “Mama, she wrote me a letter last week. She wanted to know if I would come help her with the younger children. She is not feeling as strong as she did with the first two.”

  Katarina’s joyful look disappeared. “Oh my God! Why didn't she tell me?” She read the brief letter, then turned to Slavića.

  “She didn't want to worry you, Mama. But she needs help.”

  “What do you want to do?” Katarina asked her daughter.

  “Mama, I really want to go,” said Slavića. “I miss Petrovaradin so much. And I really think Rožića needs me.”

  “Oh, sladka, Roža and Ivan’s house is so small. Slavića, where would you sleep?”

  “She told me they've arranged one large bed for all the children in the bedroom. She and Ivan have put a small bed in the kitchen for themselves. I would sleep in the large bed with the children.”

  “I don't know, Slavića. You're just beginning to get settled here in Zagreb. Don't you want to stay in your job?” Katarina could barely think about this possible move. And how could she let Slavića go?

  “Oh, there's lots of time for that, Mama. And you know I love being with babies.”

  “I do know that,” Katarina replied, thoughtful. Her mind moved to the challenges this would raise. “Zora, you would have less time for school as well, as I would need more help.”

  “That's all right, Mama,” interjected Zora. “If Roža needs help, then of course Slavića needs to go.”

  “I can be ready to get on the train by the day after tomorrow!” Roža's letter had told Slavića that she really, really needed help.

  “Slavića,” her mother said, eyes narrowing, “my letter just says Roža would like you to come spend a little bit of time with her. You're talking about leaving immediately. What are you not telling me?”

  “Let me see it, Mama.” Slavića read the letter her sister had written to their mother. It did sound as if Roža was just inviting her for a visit.

  “Mama, you need to read the letter she wrote me. You have to know. She's not doing well.”

  “Oh dear.” Tears started running down Katarina’s face as she read the letter Slavića gave her. She had lost babies of her own. She knew how frightening labor and birth could be. And because Petrovaradin was still just a small town, the hospital stood across the Danube in Novi Sad.

  “Of course you have to go right away.” She couldn’t protect Slavića, even though she had worried about her from the day she was conceived, in the dreadful circumstances of the last war. But she wouldn’t think about that now. It had been so long ago and they had moved on. Now the girls were becoming adults and would all just have to work things out for themselves.

  “But, Mama, I hate to leave you alone with all the young ones.”

  “They'll just all have to grow up a little faster. Life has a way of doing that to us, it seems.”

  “Oh, Zorića is growing up fast enough!” exclaimed Jana, who had walked in during this last conversation. “That tall handsome boy down the street from us has been hanging around an awful lot lately.”

  “What tall handsome boy?” Zora blushed as she said it, giving herself away. At sixteen she had developed into a beautiful young lady, and the young men were already noticing.

  “Oh yes, I know, there are so many tall handsome boys,” Jana teased. “You just can't keep track of them all.”

  The tension in the room eased, as it always did when Jana entered.

  “Jana,” said Katarina, “it looks like Slavića is going to have to go to Petrovaradin to help Roža with the birth.”

  “Oh dear! So things are not improving?” Jana turned to her sister as she said this.

  “You mean you knew about it also?” asked Katarina.

  “Yes, Mama,” said Jana. “I knew they didn't want to worry you. But how lovely that Slavića will be able to go help. She’s so good with babies. You know she will take good care of Roža and the babies.”

  “Maybe I do worry too much. It's probably because Martin is gone so often, and I can't get him out of my mind. It will be nice when he sets up his work to be closer to home.”

  However, Jana clearly had something else on her mind, and she needed to share it.

  “Mama, there's one other thing we need to talk about.” Jana was not so bubbly this time.

  “Now you sound serious, draga.”

  “Oh, it's not something bad. In fact, it's very good! It's just hard to talk about something happy with Roža suffering.”

  “But what is it Jana?”

  “Well,” Jana paused, smiling in spite of herself. “Atza has asked me to marry him!”

  “How exciting!” exclaimed Zora. “And you said he was just a friend.”

  “Well, he was at first. But when we were apart, after our family moved to Zagreb, Atza and I realized we really missed each other. He's been writing me every day!”

  “We know; we’ve seen the letters,” piped in little Milena.

  “But he's not in Petrovaradin anymore, is he?” asked Katarina.

  “Do you love him? Enough to move and leave us all?” interjected Zora.

  “One at a time, one at a time,” said Jana. “I love him, I want to marry him, and I hate to leave you, but Atza is who I want to be with for the rest of my life.”

  “Bože moj! Oh my God!” bemoaned Katarina. “I can't believe you're all scattering. My babies are leaving the nest.”

  “But where will you live?” Zora went back to questioning. She wanted the details.

  “That's why he's asking now. He has a new job in Belgrade. He has an apartment, and he can support me while I look for work. He wants me to come see it.”

  “But that's wonderful,” said Slavića. “We could go to Belgrade together. I could see your new apartment. Novi Sad is just seventy kilometers further. This will all work out after all.“

  The two of them went off, chattering and planning. Zora returned to her book, forgetting she was supposed to help Ljuba and Milena. And Katarina just wished Martin was home, so they could discuss these issues. She knew they were significant, but the girls seemed content, and she didn't want to concern them.

  She was also very happy for Jana. She and Atza had been sweethearts for some time, and Katarina knew it was hard on Jana when they had moved away from Petrovaradin.

  When Martin returned, he and Katarina talked about all the news. As they discussed Slavića’s return to Petrovaradin, it became clear this was not the end of the bad news. Martin had heard from Istria, and it was grim. The shipyards at Pula had been reopened and there was much activity building warships. Mussolini and the Italians were belligerent. It seemed more and more these days that World War I—the so-called “war to end all wars”—had ended nothing. Slavića had been born from that war, and had helped heal her mother after it ended.

  Was the nightmare to start again?

  Zora and sisters circa 1930. Zora is the first from the right. Probably in Petrovaradin, Vojvodina

  CHAPTER NINE

&nbs
p; World War II

  Katarina’s worst fears were realized with the advent of the second World War. Her family, like the whole country of Yugoslavia, was torn apart. Katarina, Martin, and the younger girls—along with their eldest daughter Mara’s family—were living in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. Slavića was now with Roža’s family in Novi Sad, the capital of Vojvodina. Jana was in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia.

  The country was split into pieces again. For Martin and Katarina, there could be no winner in this conflict.

  Politically, Yugoslavia was a mess before the war even started. The nominal head of state was the Serbian regent, Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, with a Prime Minister serving in Belgrade. In Croatia, meanwhile, separatists continuously fought to establish greater autonomy.

  The Yugoslavian central government, already weak and fearing defeat at the hands of the Axis powers, finally negotiated a Pact with the Germans to avoid senseless fighting. They chose subjection over war.

  But the Serbian people would have none of this. They rose in protest and staged a coup against the government. They would not collaborate with the Nazis and the Fascists—no matter how high the cost. And the cost was unbearably high. The action that followed was swift and brutal. The Germans launched a full-scale attack on Serbia.

  It started on April 6, 1941 and was over in eleven days—only eleven days to destroy a country, but a very important eleven days for the world.

  Hitler, outraged that Serbia dared defy him, decided to destroy the upstart country. The Germans staged a massive air attack on Belgrade, and their land forces came in from Bulgaria, Romania and Austria. The Hungarians drove through Vojvodina. The Italian army attacked through Ljubljana in Slovenia and from Italian Istria along the Dalmatian coast.

  To do this Hitler had to postpone his long planned invasion of Russia by four weeks—the most important four-week delay of the entire war.

  The invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany—the largest military invasion in the history of warfare—therefore didn't start until June 22, 1941, postponed by one month from the original detailed plans. As a result of that delay, in early December German troops, believed to be within four weeks of a final victory, were crippled by an unexpectedly deep Russian winter. Hitler’s troops were just outside Moscow. Instead of victory, it was the beginning of the end for Germany.

  Serbia’s defiance and refusal to collaborate had made all the difference, but Serbia paid a high price. Central Serbia was occupied by the Germans as an enemy state. Vojvodina was annexed to Hungary.

  Croatia, where the family was living, took the opposite path. They refused to fight the Germans and Italians, and on April 10, 1941—led by the Ustaše under the right-wing radical government of Ante Pavelič—became the Independent State of Croatia, a puppet state of the Germans. The Ustaše were violent in their hatred of Serbs, and followed the Nazi tenets of anti-Semitism. By this point in time, however, the family had no alternatives and remained in Zagreb.

  The populations of all the countries were subject to random and horrific atrocities that led to enormous numbers of deaths. Even though the official fighting was over almost before it began, the hard days of hunger and quotas and waiting in lines and secret battles had just started. The Marinovič family, like so many, was split in three different war zones. They were on opposite sides of the war in what were suddenly different countries speaking different languages. As they could not communicate with each other, Katarina could only hope her daughters and their families were safe.

  Slavića, in Petrovaradin to care for Roža, had grown to love the two children, and took care of Roža’s husband Ivan as well while Roža was in the hospital in nearby Novi Sad. But Roža died in childbirth and Slavića stayed on to take care of the new baby and help the family, now with three children under five years of age. One thing led to another, and after a year Ivan asked her to stay. While the whole region was annexed by Hungary, Petrovaradin was small enough to be left mostly alone, and Slavića’s new family—for she soon married Ivan—could grow most of the food they needed. She felt sheltered in their tiny house and was too busy with babies to think about the war.

  The central neighborhood of Belgrade where Jana and her husband lived with their baby during the war was heavily bombed. Three days of massive attacks—with no declaration of war and no warning to the civilian population—destroyed much of the city center, including the war ministry, the post office, telegraph and power stations. Up to twenty percent of the housing was destroyed.

  The terror of those days and nights was unimaginable. A building next to Jana’s apartment house collapsed, and fires raged everywhere, but their building was spared. Fortunately, their apartment remained usable and eventually the city was rebuilt around them. But food and power were hard to come by, and transportation networks were destroyed.

  Meanwhile, Martin and Katarina kept their heads down in Zagreb. Devastated that their own part of the country had submitted to the Nazis without resistance, they couldn’t believe it was their own countrymen, now led by a Nazi sympathizer, who persecuted Serbs—including neighbors and acquaintances.

  Their small apartment was on a busy central street in the city, with a tramway down the middle that Martin used to get to work. Although the city was not bombed until the end of the war, life was a constant battle to find enough food, and they had to queue up for hours every day.

  “Martin, I am worried to death about our missing girls,” lamented Katarina one day in the midst of the war. It was a Saturday and Zora had taken her younger sisters to the market where farmers brought vegetables, hoping to find something for their dinner. “You know the Serbs are suffering even more than we are. I wish there was some way to find out how they are.”

  “And we haven’t heard from my brother or any of the family in Istria for years,” she continued. “The last war tore us up, but this feels almost worse. It feels like it might never end.”

  “You’re right, Katarina. Not knowing what is happening to them is impossible.” Martin was always telling the girls that the war would soon be over, but he really wasn’t sure how long it would go on. “Thank God I got out of military work when I did,” he continued. “I don't know who I would be working for if I hadn't. Pavlič has the schools teaching in German now. And they are being taught the evil and hatred that his party is spreading. I thought the Italians were bad, but this is worse.”

  “Yes, but you know the girls don’t believe any of that. Most of the people don’t, thank goodness. I couldn’t live knowing they were all animals.” Katarina instinctively moved to put the jezva, the tall Turkish style coffee pot, on the fire, as she always did when they needed distraction, but then remembered that there was no more coffee and only enough gas for a quick meal. She studied her husband’s crestfallen expression. She knew he was remembering the last war, and how its result forced them into this movement between countries. She, too, still felt rootless and stateless.

  At least they were still speaking Croatian at home. Whenever things got tough, they remembered how their language was outlawed before that earlier exile. It was a key symbol of repression to them, the banning of the language. It was also all they had left that remained consistent in their lives.

  “Well, it's not the first time that German is the language of our home, you know,” Katarina continued, remembering, trying to reassure him—or perhaps herself. “The birth records at the church in Medulin were in a Germanic language even when my grandmother was born, while it was part of Austro-Hungary.”

  “That's true, but the Austrian Empire didn’t try to convert us all into German speakers. We kept our language for centuries. I'm not so sure what these Germans will do now. And our own countrymen are persecuting Serbs. Its hard to tell who’s the enemy.”

  “But Martin, our daughters in Serbia are much worse off,” Katarina continued, rubbing a jezva that didn’t need more burnishing. She knew Belgrade had been bombed and that the Germans were killing Serbs in reprisal for choosing the wrong side of
the war. She was frightened and torn by conflicting emotions. “It’s not the Serbs; it’s us. We Croats are on the wrong side of this war as far as I’m concerned . . . but at least we aren't being bombed. I worry about Jana. I know Atza will fight the Germans any way he can.”

  “Duše, you're right. But none of us have alternatives now. We can't go back there, and they can't come here.” They also couldn't go home to Istria, for things were not any better there. Martin had secretly hoped for a time that they could return to their little town of Medulin, but they no longer owned a home there, and it was close to Pula. With the giant military shipyards there, it was even more dangerous. “We have to stay here for now.”

  “And there's still that prokleti Mussolini,” growled Katarina. “He's been a curse on our existence since Zora was born. Now he's teamed up with Hitler.”

  Martin interrupted, now the one trying to calm things down. “You know, Katarina, you have to stop that now. We're under the Germans, and the Italians are their allies. You never know who is on their side. Please don't say any more about Mussolini or Hitler. It's really dangerous. I don't want the girls to start talking carelessly.”

  The door opened and Zora came in with some beets and potatoes in the string bag she always carried. Soon the kitchen was bustling with girls, and talk of problems was forgotten. Throughout these tough times Zora steadfastly refused to get involved in politics. She had a job in the city, in an office. It was boring, but kept her distracted and helped pay for food when it was available. If she had private dreams, she kept them to herself and focused her energy on her sisters and parents and on just getting through this time.

  Zora was never one to talk loosely. She had been horrified when she began really understanding what her countrymen were doing. How could they side with those evil Fascists and Nazis? When the war ended, which had to be soon, she knew she would have to find a way to create meaning to her life. And it would not be with one of these toadying Ustaše, no matter how blond and handsome they might be. She would find her own way no matter how long that took.