Mother Tongue

by Tania Romanov

  “He does speak Russian with his mother. But Tata, he’s Josip’s kum; they are best friends. He’s part of our community.”

  “And isn’t he Orthodox?”

  “Yes, but I’m not sure he’s any more religious than I am . . . or than you, for that matter.”

  “He lives far away. That’s a lot of things he’s got going against him,” Martin insisted. “Are you sure he’s worth the effort?”

  “Oh, he’s certainly worth the effort, Tata. We can talk for hours, and I never get bored. I really like him. Please try and stay open-minded,” Zora pleaded.

  A month later, in October, Zora was heading to Belgrade for a brief visit. She told her father it was mostly to see Jana’s new son as well as to visit with Draga and Josip, but everyone knew Zora would be spending a lot of time with Tolya.

  The trip settled everything.

  There was no question in Zora’s mind about her future. Tolya was the one for her. She had introduced him to Jana, met his family, seen his apartment, and, ever practical, visited the Belgrade headquarters of the telephone exchange. She was a swirl of emotions, but her most important task now was to talk to her father.

  “How was the visit, honey?” Martin asked. For a rare moment, it was just the two of them in the apartment.

  “Oh, Tata! Tolya’s asked me to marry him!” So much for planning the discussion carefully.

  “Marry him? But, duše, you’ve only known him a couple of months, and you’ve spent less than a week in his city! He can’t be serious.”

  “But he is, Tata. And so am I. I said, “Yes!””

  She got out the jezva without which there could be no conversation with her father. Heating the water and grinding the coffee gave them something to do while Martin absorbed the news.

  “You want to marry a foreigner from another city? A man you barely know?” Martin frowned. “A few weeks ago you were worried about Josip working for those Russians, and now you want to marry one?”

  “Oh, Tata. I know this man.” Zora sat across the table from her father, and reached for his hand. He just had to understand how she felt. “I’ve been with other men, and I know the difference. Tolya is the only one for me.”

  “So you’ve made up your mind?” Martin should have expected it, but it felt so sudden. He suddenly missed Katarina more than he had in months. What would she counsel him to do? “Don’t you want to talk about it?”

  “I’d love to talk about it, Tata. I can hardly think about anything else. But I have made up my mind. If you want to talk me out of it, then let’s not.”

  “What would your mother say?” Martin felt lost. This wasn’t easy, and he didn’t know the answer to his own question.

  “I don’t know, Tata. I hope she would be happy for me.” Zora too, wished her mother were there. But it was because she wanted her to know things were going to be all right. “You know she wanted me to marry and have children. He wants lots of children, just like I do.”

  “But she meant for you to marry one of our men, to speak our language with your children.”

  “Tata, I’m not even sure who ‘our’ men are. Do you think she would have liked me to marry a Croatian nationalist, an Ustaša? Or a Serbian partisan who’s now in the Communist party? Don’t you think she would just want a good man for me? And we’ve talked about language. He knows I will always speak po našemu, in our language, to the children,” Zora insisted. “I promised Mama that.”

  Suddenly Martin knew his wife would have supported Zora in her choice. She always supported him and the girls in whatever path they chose. That’s why he had loved her so much.

  “I did really like Tolya, “ he said, smiling and putting his arm around his daughter. “I just worry that you are going into this so quickly. Will you wait a while before getting married?”

  “Not really, Tata.” Zora smiled at him. She knew this was hard, but she saw no reason to wait once she had made up her mind. “I went to the telecommunications headquarters in Belgrade while I was there. You know I have worked closely with a number of the people in that office. They’ve offered me a job. It’s a good position, I'll be even more involved in this new technology that is changing the world. I’ll make more money, and I can start next month.”

  “Next month?” Martin’s coffee cup clattered as he put it back on the saucer. “But that’s so soon!”

  “I start on November first.” Zora spoke quietly and just looked at her father. “I can live with Jana until we get married.”

  “And when will that be?”

  “On November twenty-second.” Martin was silent. Zora stood up and walked next to her father, bending down and looking in his eyes. “Please give me your blessing and be happy for me.”

  “Oh, zlato, golden one,” Martin wrapped his arms around Zora and finally gave her the only blessing she needed. “I am so happy for you. It’s wonderful to see you excited.”

  “But what about his family?” Now he started wondering what it would be like for her to leave him and their home for an unknown family. “Are they pleased? This is rather sudden for them, as well. At least I met him a couple of months ago. They’ve just met you for the first time. And while I know you are wonderful, I also know how protective mothers can be of their sons.”

  “Well, to be honest, his mother didn’t seem all that thrilled.” Zora didn’t want to go into the details with her father; he was concerned enough. “But Tolya’s quite determined, even though he is very gentle most of the time. He told her he had made up his mind, that he wanted her support, but that he was going ahead with it with or without her blessing.”

  “Oh, zlata, I’m so sorry. What about his brothers and sister?”

  “Well, his brothers are married to Russian women, but his sister married a Serb. So at least he’s not the first to jump a boundary. I liked them all; we really got on well.”

  “I suppose,” said Martin, “that it’s normal for them to marry our people. After all, they’ve lived their entire lives here.”

  “His sister is pregnant with her first child; it’s due in a few weeks. So the first grandchild will be half Serbian.”

  “And my next one,” he smiled, “could be half Russian.”

  “That's right, Tata,” Zora said. “And I did promise his mother I would change my faith to Orthodox and raise the children that way.”

  “Oh, well, that’s not too important.” Martin didn’t really have to think much about this. Religion just wasn’t a big issue in their household. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been to any church. “Our families were Orthodox in Montenegro, and your sisters also converted when they married Serbs. You won’t be the first.”

  “I also promised,” continued Zora, “to learn Russian. Really, it will be a self-defense measure. It’s all they speak at home. I don’t think it will be difficult. I already picked up a lot of words.” She was actually excited about this. Zora had always loved languages and learned them quickly.

  “So you’re happy about this?”

  “Oh, yes, Tata!” Zora beamed. “And I meant to tell you, he loves to fish and will take you with him whenever you come visit us!”

  “Well, if he loves to fish, he must be a good man!” Martin declared. “If you are certain, then I am with you all the way. I think I hear Ljuba walking up. I need to go rest a bit while you tell her. By the way, she has some news for you, too.”

  “Really?” Zora rushed to the door.

  Ljuba thought it was all very romantic, of course, but her mind was on other things. She had just been offered the opportunity to spend a year in England, going to university. All her expenses would be paid.

  So the family had a lot to celebrate that night. They invited Zora’s sisters, Milena and Mara, and their families, and stayed up until way too late, talking and celebrating everyone’s good fortune. For there was another momentous event. That evening, Milena told them she was pregnant. It was the first time since they lost their mother that everyone was happy, and Martin was feeli
ng good, surrounded by his girls—women now. He’d think about the fact that they were all leaving him later.

  Zora and Tolya's wedding picture, Belgrade, November 1947

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Belgrade and marriage

  Zora had understated her concerns about her future mother-in-law. Tolya tried to prepare her, but no preparation would have been enough for Daria Pavlovna Romanov.

  “She’s a Cossachka, you know,” he said, as they had stopped in a café while walking from the train station in Belgrade to his apartment. Tolya used the Russian word for a female Cossack, as if this would be explanation enough. “They’re tough, these Cossacks, and in my experience their women are even tougher. But don’t worry, it will be all right.”

  “What do you mean, ‘they’? Aren’t you a Cossack as well?” Zora had learned a lot about the Don Cossacks over the last few months, for it was as much a part of Tolya’s cultural identity as being Russian. His family had lived for generations on the Don River, in the south of Russia. It was a land of rolling plains and wide rivers. The small villages made up of simple isbas, or hay-roofed huts, were widely dispersed, and the men rode horses long distances. The people were loyal to the Tsar and would risk anything to protect that culture.

  The Cossacks were a fiercely independent community, and the first and final group to fight the Communists as part of the White Army. Tolya’s immediate family had long moved away from the nomadic past of their ancestors and were small landholders and grain merchants who barely escaped as they lost the war in 1920, when he was a child of two. They had fled to the Black Sea—with five children and a grandmother. At the last minute, they ended up in the town of Evpatoria, where the Don Cossack Host, as the military arm was called, were being evacuated. It was November of 1920, and the White Army was finally acknowledging defeat. Because Tolya’s father Ivan had served in the war, they were taken to the Greek island of Lemnos by a military minesweeper—the T-412, which was captured by the British and given to the White forces. At the end, his grandmother had refused to disembark and returned to Russia, never to be heard from again.

  As far as they knew, they were the only family to escape their village when the Red Army, as the Communist forces were called, defeated them. They waited almost a year in an overcrowded tent camp on Lemnos for any country that would give them refuge. Finally, the King of Serbia decided to take them in, for there had been close ties between the Slav countries and their royal families. Yugoslavia was to take in over a hundred thousand Russians, and set up schools and organizations for them.

  The Cossacks all became part of a global Russian diaspora, with an émigré organization that had elaborate plans for the defeat of the Communists and a return to Russia. They ran military academies for the boys and boarding schools for the girls. It was a way of life that preserved their Russian culture, frozen into a pre-revolutionary fervor.

  “Well, you know, zolotko,” said Tolya, using the Russian endearment that meant golden one, “all this militaristic behavior is not for me. I want to live in peace. And I don’t want to be in the middle of these infernal Russian dela, or affairs. I’ll tell you more about it later, but it’s not a group I want to be enmeshed in. I’ve been in this country since I was a baby, and I left all that behind when I left the Russian Cadetsky Corpus, or military boarding school. They raised us to believe we were all just waiting here to go back home, but I’m not going back to some godforsaken village in the heart of Russia. I like living here, in a large city. This is my country.”

  “I’m glad,” said Zora, laughing, “to hear you aren’t planning on going back to Russia!”

  Zora met the whole family when she went to visit the flat Tolya shared with his mother. It was where they would live when they married. Apartments were still very hard to come by in Yugoslavia, and they were fortunate there were two bedrooms. Right now, Daria Pavlovna had the larger room, but Tolya had assured Zora they would move into it, rather than the monastic room he had shared with his brother Kolya until his brother’s recent marriage.

  Daria Pavlovna’s was not a warm welcome. The tall, black-haired, strongly-built woman glared at Zora whenever she thought her son wasn’t looking. Her long hair was tightly braided and wrapped around the back of her head, not one hair out of place. She wore a long black dress and sensible shoes. Small gold stars dangling from pierced ears and a gold cross around her neck were her only jewelry other than a plain gold wedding band. She looked down on Zora from her superior height as if their size difference established superiority and reflected the appropriate relationship between them.

  Zora knew she was most likely reading too much into this. The woman was tall and therefore had to face downwards to talk to Zora. She did seem relieved that Zora at least spoke Serbian and not Croatian. The Serbs and Russians had always been tightly linked and shared a religion and an alphabet. The fact that Zora had agreed to convert to the Russian Orthodox faith from her own Catholicism didn’t impress her; in her mind it was the only option.

  The formidable oldest brother, Shura, was even taller than Tolya, himself over six feet. He was clearly the man in charge of the family fortunes. His wife Galya, a laboratory scientist at the hospital, was working late and couldn’t come. Shura was a bit aloof in bearing, but clearly loved his younger brother and wanted to support him. If he approved of her, Zora thought, their mother would have to go along.

  The next brother, Kolya, was the antithesis of these two handsome men of military bearing. He slouched, had a slight paunch already, and greeted Zora with a gentle smile. His wife, Lyolya, on the other hand, was a tall, beautiful, patrician Russian who might have been a princess in their previous world. She smiled sympathetically, as if she could easily imagine what Zora was going through. Kolya also worked in the family radionica or workshop, but he didn’t get involved in technical problems. He basically talked to the customers and kept the place orderly, if Zora understood correctly.

  Sister Liza—physically a younger version of her mother—and her husband Mika walked over from their home just down the street. Almost nine months pregnant, Liza was anxious to get back home. However, Zora felt great sympathy from her, as well.

  Daria Pavlovna, who was of such icy formality that she had required the use of her full name and patronymic even by her husband, was dressed in mourning black although that gentle man had died some years before. She knew Serbian but preferred to speak Russian and have her sons translate for her. A torrent of Russian words would flow from Daria Pavlovna, as if bursting from behind a dam of frustration. Tolya would synthesize—or recast—it all to just a short phrase or two, usually innocuous enough. He would then change the focus and bring Zora into conversation with the young people, easing the tension. Zora determined then and there that she would learn Russian. She had agreed with Tolya that their children should speak both languages, so she needed to be fluent.

  Tolya had also told her that his mother was an appallingly bad cook who insisted on eating only Russian food. She was already worrying that her future daughter-in-law didn’t know how to make borscht, beet soup, pirozhki, fried meat buns, or even seledka, the pickled herring that made vodka go down more smoothly.

  Zora couldn’t believe that she was not only marrying, but adopting a martinet of a mother-inlaw. It certainly made her realize how fortunate she was in her own mother. Mama had been such a warm and sweet woman, and all her daughters and sons-in-law adored her. How did Tolya turn out to be such a wonderful man with that woman in his life? It did probably help explain why he had that strong backbone under his gentle humor and kindness. Actually, that was what made him irresistible to Zora. The fact that he was almost glamorously handsome didn’t hurt either. She had fun thinking about the wonderful children they would have, mixing her steely determination and his more flexible approach.

  She did have a few moments of doubt that weekend, and wondered if she would have been so ready to accept the whole proposition had she met Daria Pavlovna first. But Belgrade really wasn’t tha
t far from Zagreb, and she would continue working for the phone company, which could lead to trips back to see her family. And Tolya really didn’t seem in the least bit foreign. With her sisters and her friend Draga nearby, and Tolya’s siblings so friendly, life in Belgrade would be an adventure without being a radical break from the life she had built over the years.

  Or so she imagined.

  Sasha with Zora and Deda Marinovič.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The golden child

  Nine months after the wedding Zora and Tolya’s son Sasha was born. Sasha, short for Alexander, was named for his Uncle Shura, yet another nickname for Alexander. Zora and Tolya were beside themselves with joy. Tolya’s first nephew had been born the day of their wedding, and Zora already had two young nephews in the capital, so they were surrounded by family and babies. Fortunately, Sasha was a quiet and easy baby from his first days. And of course he was brilliant.

  While Zora, now living in Serbia, was busy recovering and learning how to take care of a newborn, her father and other Istrians were celebrating a vital moment in the life of their own country.

  On September 15, 1947, just four days after Sasha’s birth, Istria was formally reintegrated into Yugoslavia as part of Croatia and Slovenia. The northern part went to Slovenia, and the largest piece, including Medulin, went to Croatia. The Istrians celebrated in spite of the fact that many young people, like Zora’s cousin Matte, had wished for a separate state of their own. At last, they were free of the horrible yoke and persecution that started when Mussolini came to power just after Zora’s birth in 1922.

  Not everyone rejoiced. Many Italians now lived in Istria. Some had been moved into Istria after the first war and had displaced Slavs like Zora’s family, but others had been there for generations. Now a reverse persecution started, and many were moving back to Italy, in a forced reverse migration. It seemed there could be no shift in that geopolitical landscape without pain to some part of the population.