Mother Tongue

by Tania Romanov

  Zora’s father regained some of the land he had owned—the pieces closer to the sea that had no houses on them—but the Marinovič family home stayed with the relatives who had moved in when the family fled. They were not about to give it up and even resented the parcels Martin regained. It hurt Martin to think about them and this feuding. He knew he wasn't going back to live there, but he had hoped that ridding themselves of the Italians would bring a deeper sense of connection to his homeland. Instead, there was this permanent reminder of how things had gone wrong.

  The acreage Martin again owned had some fig trees and grapes on the most buildable plots. The land was flat and had rich soil and gorgeous views of the water. Sometimes they vaguely talked of building a summer home there, where everyone could gather and celebrate the family and their heritage.

  Meanwhile, Zora was happily living in Belgrade. Daria Pavlovna had grudgingly moved into the smaller room. Zora was used to large families and tight spaces, so just four of them in the apartment felt like a luxury. She hadn’t brought much with her from Zagreb—a few embroidered and crocheted pieces her mother had made—but the apartment looked familiar. It was simply decorated, with worn furniture and old pots and pans. She did buy some new cake pans when she realized there were no implements for baking her torte, cakes.

  Daria Pavlovna never lifted a finger in the kitchen, and Tolya was ecstatic to discover that Zora was a fabulous cook. She quickly developed an expertise in Russian cooking, trading recipes with her sisters-in-law. Tolya also loved the food she had learned from her own mother, especially her sarme, stuffed cabbage, and the delicious torte she made in the new pans.

  Zora learned to speak Russian fluently and with no accent, and easily fit in with the rest of Tolya’s family. Sasha grew quickly and was a model baby. His dark hair, eyes and complexion were definitely Balkan in character according to Zora’s family, and seemed quite Cossack-like to the other half. He smiled easily and—most reassuringly—almost never cried. He walked early, and not only talked early, but spoke two languages before he was a year old. He spoke Russian with his father’s side, and Serbo-Croatian with Zora’s family and their friends. Zora just assumed this was what having children was like. The only other infant she had helped raise, her youngest sister Ljuba, had also been bright and easy.

  On Sundays Sasha and his father would stroll to the café together, Tolya bending sideways so his son could reach up and hold his hand. Sometimes people would look at Tolya on the street quizzically. He would laugh and have Sasha introduce himself to them. It made him very proud. In the café, each would sit with a section of the newspaper, as if they were both reading. Tolya would pour a beer and Sasha would get some foam in a small glass, just like his father.

  Daria Pavlovna fell in love with Sasha and became his caregiver while his parents both worked. Zora was doing well at her job and was also thriving as a wife and mother. Tolya’s business was growing, and they were getting involved with the new electrical appliances that were starting to appear in the country. Sometimes Zora would go visit Jana and her new baby—a second son—and they would laugh and talk about how sweet life was.

  Last picture of Sasha and Tania before the family fled Belgrade. With cousin Mima on right.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Cold War threatens

  For a time after Zora and Tolya’s marriage, the political situation in Yugoslavia eased. The leader, known as Marshall Tito, enjoyed a degree of global esteem and was slowly leading the country to a more liberal version of Communism than his friend Stalin was in the Soviet Union. It seemed like maybe everyone could relax for a while and rebuild their lives.

  But about a year after Sasha’s birth, in the middle of 1948, relationships between Tito and Stalin started to change, and not for the better. Stalin was leading his country on a disastrous path, creating fear and devastation instead of letting them slowly recover from a war that had killed millions. His secret police were notorious, and people were spying on each other. A series of labor camps, or gulags, were set up in the same parts of Siberia where the tzars had once imprisoned opponents.

  The tzarist banishments paled in comparison to the stories that started coming out of the Soviet Union. Millions of people were being deported without warning or trial. The secret police—the Checka and then KGB—were everywhere; neighbors spied and reported on neighbors; children were taught to report on their parents. One or two letters had come from near Tolya’s home village, followed by silence. His grandmother was never heard from, and there was no way to search for her.

  Stalin was furious with Tito’s bid for more independence and neutrality. In 1948, Czechoslovakia threatened revolt and was brutally brought into line. But Yugoslavia was beyond his immediate control. He would have to invade to get the blind obedience he insisted on. And invading would be harder now that the aftermath of World War II was winding down and America was getting protective. Nevertheless, tensions rose.

  None of this should have been an issue for Tolya and his brothers. They had emigrated to Serbia as infants to flee Soviet Communism. They hated the Soviet Union and all it stood for.

  But things were never what they should have been in the Balkans, and the situation was especially sensitive in those days of early Cold War jockeying. Shortly after the schism between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, White Russian émigrés in Yugoslavia started being accused of spying for the Soviets. Some were rounded up and evicted from the country, others put on trains back to the Soviet Union. If that happened, they would be either summarily shot as traitors or sent to the gulags, the infamous work camps in Siberia.

  Soon after, all White Russian refugees, regardless of how loyal they were or how long they had lived in the country—or even whether they were married to Yugoslav women—had their citizenship revoked. They were granted a one-year permit to stay in the country, theoretically renewable, but no one knew anything for certain.

  Then the situation grew worse. People who spoke Russian were carefully watched, sometimes by neighbors. Several close friends of Shura’s were deported. Anyone with a Russian name was suddenly at risk. Zora was pregnant with her second child, and fear and worry endangered her health and the baby’s. She and Tolya spent hours talking about what they could do.

  Since Zora was from Istria, in Croatia, they considered going there for a time, seeing if things might settle down further from the capital. But moving about between the states required paperwork and permission, and right now they had to keep their heads down and hope things might resolve themselves. In addition, they deeply believed that if they had to leave their home, they would do all they could to ensure a future for their children that was free of this constant turmoil they had both endured their entire lives, from earliest childhood. Chaos was the only consistency in their lives, and they wanted something better for their children.

  Shortly after that, however, the pressure became insupportable. A Communist party man who was a major client of the business told Shura and Galya that he would be happy to “buy” their apartment and “manage” their business for them. They got the message. They could “sell” to him and leave, or they would be forced out, and it might not be to a place of their choosing.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Tania born to crisis

  As her pregnancy neared its term, Zora feared that their situation could only end with escape. The claustrophobic aura tightening around them—in what had so recently seemed like a world of new beginnings—was crowding out the joy she desperately wanted to feel, but couldn’t, about this new life forming inside her.

  Zora’s ongoing pregnancy didn’t help in managing the risks of their situation. Intense conversations between Tolya, Shura, Kolya, and their mother seemed endless. Their sister, Liza, having married a Serb, felt more secure—her sons were Serbs, and had a Serbian last name.

  One night, Zora heard their loud voices through the wall of her bedroom. Their apartment was often the gathering place, since with her pregnancy, Tolya took extra care t
o stay at home as much as possible. The walls between the rooms weren’t thin, but the sitting room was right next to their bedroom, and tensions were high enough that their voices carried.

  They were up late, and she was almost due. The four-kilo mound that would soon be her new baby struggled to get comfortable in her womb, just as she struggled to get comfortable in the bed she normally shared with the man who was arguing with his mother and brothers in the kitchen.

  She had heard it before, this debate, but its intensity was increasing. ”I am a loyal citizen,” Zora heard her husband shout, “I fought in our army, why would they arrest me? I have nothing to do with Stalin, I curse the ground he walks on. We fled them thirty years ago; we would be killed if we return to Russia.”

  “Hush, Tolya. Oni, they, are probably listening,” whispered Shura.

  “If ‘they’ listened they would know I am not a risk to them.” Tolya was defiant.

  “You have to tell Zora there's no alternative,” even Kolya was determined they would all go together.

  “She knows; she knows.” Tolya sighed. “I just hope she doesn't decide she and the children won’t come with us. She could just go back to her father and leave me to my uncertainty.”

  Of course Zora knew. They had talked about it endlessly. Tolya was angry, but it was for fear of putting her and the children at risk as much as potentially losing everything he had spent a lifetime building.

  The pains then wiped everything else from Zora’s mind. Tolya ran into the room, and got her quickly to the hospital, which was luckily nearby. The next thing she really remembered was a baby girl emerging, screaming as if some need to protest had infused her every molecule.

  The new child, conceived in hope and born into fear, should have been loved and cosseted. She might have, had she been delivered to a happy couple making a new life, like her brother had been, less than two years earlier. But those calm days were gone and nothing was to be the same again. And she was as different a baby from the calm boy who preceded her—her older brother Sasha—as it was possible to imagine.

  Fat cheeked and chubby, everything about her was noisy. She gurgled when happy, and screamed when she wasn’t. Squirming was her style, and she fell out of her grandmother’s arms often enough that the old woman quickly tired of trying to comfort her. The requisite dark eyes were mysteriously linked with pale—nearly white—blond hair so fine that it felt like the down that flew from the comforters when Zora shook them out. Who could she possibly have taken after?

  I was that new child. They called me Tatiana: Tatjana Anatoljevna—or in Cyrillic—Татьяна Анатольевна. A mouthful of a name in either language or alphabet, but an easy Tania for short. My first name had the advantage of being Russian, but my mother’s favorite name as well. The advantages, it seemed, ended right there.

  I was born in the middle of 1949, into a family in turmoil. My mother’s older sister, Jana, had a daughter, Vesna, around that time. Vesna and I were born in hospitals in the heart of Belgrade, and came home to apartments nearby.

  Vesna came home to a certainty about life that I was not to know for many years. A calm and quiet baby, she was the third child born to a family that combined Serbian and Croatian parents, but was fully Yugoslavian. She was welcomed into a country that grew stronger on the world political chessboard, but one that didn’t have room for my half-Russian family. For our first years, at least, it seemed that of the two of us babies, she had won the lottery in life.

  I was a very difficult child who cried endlessly and loudly, and developed slowly. For most of my life, when she was particularly frustrated, Zora would remind me that, had I been the first, there might not have been a second child. She forgot to mention that the family’s circumstances around the time of my birth were uncertain to an extreme and not conducive to bonding. For six months the family’s entire future was in question. Would we leave or stay? Would we make it safely? Where could we go?

  And how long would it be before anyone felt safe again?

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Exiled again

  But of course there was no alternative. Exile. Again.

  My father’s brothers and their wives left Yugoslavia in the late summer of 1949, a few weeks after my birth. My parents, along with my brother Sasha and my father’s mother, Daria Pavlovna, waited a few months, until I was old enough to travel.

  We spent some time with my grandfather Martin—Deda Marinovič—and Mama’s sisters in Zagreb. Mama would be leaving behind her sisters, her father, and a lifetime spent in the belief that her family had endured their final forced flight. Half of the sisters, including Zora, were in Serbia, while the others were in Croatia, in Zagreb. But all of them were safe in a united Yugoslavia, and it was only Zora’s husband’s Russian ethnicity that now threatened her immediate family and forced this flight. She was leaving her country to join a diaspora composed of Russians fleeing a revolution that ended thirty years earlier but whose consequences affecting her family just would not end. It wasn’t her battle, but Tolya was her husband and therefore her future lay through the path of this crisis.

  Martin was haunted by memories of Zora’s own birth. The parallels were strong, both families being forced into exile, both mothers with new infants. But he was worried that the future for Zora was even more uncertain now. At least he had known where he was going, and that the new country, Yugoslavia, had offered shelter. There was no such certainty now.

  “Are you sure you want to do this, draga?” Deda asked Mama when they had a moment alone.

  “Tata, I really don’t have any choice.” They had tried everything they could think of to stay in the country. Mama’s boss at work had petitioned to get her family special classification because she was a vital worker, but it did no good. “Tolya and the children can’t get their Yugoslav citizenship back, and if we stay he could be deported to the Soviet Union. And you know how insane Stalin is. We have to leave,” said Zora.

  “Yes, we’ve been reading about it.” He sighed. “You know that if you go, there’s no coming back.”

  “I do, Tata. We have actually already crossed that divide. The children and I gave up our citizenship to get permission to leave. It was the only thing we could do.” Zora spoke in short sentences with long pauses in between. It was the only way she could keep the tears at bay.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means we are stateless. We have no papers.”

  “Nothing?” The finality of the situation was sinking in for Martin. He might never see his daughter and her family again. Just like he had never again seen his own birthplace.

  “Nothing. We are lost souls. I almost feel like a character in a Russian novel,” she continued, trying for a bit of humor to ease the discussion. “No identification papers, no passport.” Zora told him she was able to sneak a copy of our birth certificates, translated into English, into the lining of a coat. She also had made a copy of all our identification cards translated into English before my father was forced to turn them in.

  “Why English? I thought you were going to Trieste?”

  “We are going to Trieste. There’s a camp there, a Displaced Persons camp, sponsored by the United Nations, but mostly funded by the Americans. We can live there until some country agrees to allow us in, and we are doing all we can to ensure that country is America.”

  “That is so far away, duša. Why America?” asked Martin.

  “It’s the only place in the world where our family will be safe from the long reach of Stalin, Tata. We want our children to grow up in peace. I want them to know about their heritage, but I want them free of the constant tensions and threats that accompanied our lives here.”

  “But will America take you? And how long will it be before you know?”

  “They have a quota for those who have been made stateless by persecution, Tata. We hope it’s just a few months. It shouldn’t be very long.” They had all already filed papers to get visas to the United States. “And you know,
there are already many Russians in America who will sponsor us and help Tolya get work. Engineering is a valuable skill everywhere, and it’s a tight community. We’ll be all right, Tata. In a few months I will be writing you from America about our new lives.” She wasn’t sure how realistic all this was, but she didn’t want her father worrying. She was as committed as Tolya to create a new future for her children. They had to get away from this turmoil that kept invading her Balkan homeland.

  “Oh draga, America is so far away!”

  “I know, Tata. But after everything that’s gone on here for our entire lives, we want to get as far away as we can. I wish I could stay here with all of you, but it just isn’t possible.”

  They had been sitting on the bed he slept in, which also served as the sitting area in the daytime. Now they moved to the kitchen, and Zora got the jezva and started the coffee.

  “You know, I once dreamed of going to America,” Martin sighed. He hadn’t planned on talking about this.

  “You did? I didn’t know that.”

  “I never told anyone. It was when Mussolini was kicking all the Slavs out of Istria. I thought, Why not go far away, away from all this madness? But your mother wanted to stay in a country where they spoke our language.”

  “You know, when I promised her my children would speak her language I never envisioned this happening. But I’m determined that they still will,” said Zora.

  “But draga, they will have to speak English if you go to America.”

  “Of course, but they can speak my language as well. I’m their mother, after all.”

  “And will Tolya want them to speak Russian?”

  “Is the sun rising tomorrow?” Zora laughed. “Of course. That family can’t imagine a world where Russian isn’t their language. If they didn’t give it up in thirty years here, they won’t give it up now, especially since they are being forced out because they are Russian.” She was happy that her father had moved on to talking about language rather than what might really await them at the end of the train ride to Trieste.