Mother Tongue

by Tania Romanov

  Zhenya just smiled gently, as he always did.

  That morning they were all sitting as they usually did, having Turkish coffee in the pergola outside the door to the barracks where twenty families were crowded into rooms with all the privacy of public toilets in a train station. The doors didn't shut tight, there were no locks, the walls might as well have been made of paper. There was nowhere to think, nowhere to breathe. These people knew every detail of Zora’s intimate life, every detail of how she was raising us. For all she knew, they could all read her innermost thoughts. And right now those thoughts were not very gracious.

  She knew she left me to them too often. She knew they believed she favored Sasha, my older brother. But damn it, Zora thought, yet again, why does Tania have to be so difficult?

  The thought no sooner entered her conscious mind than she rejected it out of hand. Of course she loved me. But life was so hard there, what with not knowing where we were going or when. It had started before I was even born, this unsettled existence. Zora knew it wasn't my fault, and she knew it would get better some day. She just had to get through it somehow, the best she could.

  “Thank you, Vava. I really appreciate it that I can leave Tania with you. I hope she doesn't pester you too much.” Zora’s mind settled as she said the words, and by the time she finished, she knew she meant them.

  She was lucky to have these people sharing the space across the hall. Thank God they loved her children. Four childless adults all past middle age, vaguely related to each other, permanent refugees from the endless wars of a cursed century, they could have made her life much more miserable. Instead, they were tireless caregivers for her challenging daughter, who far preferred their company to her own Mama’s.

  Everyone knew I never cried with them.

  They don't have to take her to the clinic to get her shots, Zora thought. But she knew this was ungracious, a way to try to justify her somewhat fractious relationship with me, and apologized again for having to leave me with them so often.

  “Oh, she's never a pest!” Zhenya said. A lifelong bachelor, a Russian émigré like everyone else at the camp, he made me the light of his life. Mama knew I would be fine with them. She knew I’d start talking when I was ready, and I would speak her language and everyone else’s. Sasha had spoken both languages before he was a year old; he didn't find it confusing. But he grew up surrounded by both languages. Now, Zora was the only one speaking Serbian in a world of Russians.

  Zora had promised her mother, Katarina, on her death bed that she would raise her children speaking their language. It had seemed easy, then. She knew how important it was to her mother. Katarina felt they had given up everything back in Medulin, to protect themselves from the Italians who were trying to kill the Slavic language and culture. To her, it was like trying to kill her soul. She never learned another language, and couldn't imagine what that would be like. Thinking and talking and breathing all happened in Croatian, for her. It was her mother tongue.

  For four hundred years she and her ancestors had protected the language while all else changed around them. It was the one known, the one tie that they would not sever. Zora had promised that her own children would know the security of that solitary constant and she intended to live with that promise, no matter what environment she had landed in through no fault of her own.

  Zora headed to the central kitchen to get lunch ready. When she returned with the food for our meal, Vava greeted her joyously.

  “Progovorila! She spoke!” Vava cried. “In Russian, like we knew she would.”

  “Šta je rekla? What did she say?” Mama asked, in Serbian, of course. These Russians had all lived in Serbia for thirty years after the Russian revolution, and they all spoke the language fluently, if reluctantly.

  “Well,” Zhenya explained, “Tolya walked by on his way to his darkroom and when he greeted Tania, she said, ‘Papa!’“

  Of course, thought Zora. It had to be. All children say Mama first, but not her daughter. And not, Tata, or father in her language, but Papa, in Russian.

  Enough! She forced her mind forward. Be happy she is talking.

  She walked into the barracks, then down the hall to our quarters. Everyone looked at her, and then at me. “Papa!” I said, pointing at my father.

  “Kako lepo, How nice, Tania,” Mama said to me, in Serbian, hugging me close. No baby talk in the camp, interestingly.

  “Tata je došao kuči? Tata came home?” Zora asked me, po našemu.

  “Tata kuči!” I affirmed, po našemu.

  That brought the house down. Two sentences, two languages. I was my Mama’s girl!

  “Tolya, Tolya,” Zora shouted, as if he wasn’t right there next to her. “Progovorila ye, istina, progovorila ye! She's talking! It’s true; she’s talking!”

  And from that moment on, I spoke. Easily. Constantly. In two languages. I used Russian with my father, my grandmother, my uncles and aunts, in the pre-school, and with everyone in the camp. And, miracle of miracles, I spoke Serbian with my Mama.

  No one else, just Mama. It was our language. Our private link.

  I could change languages in mid-sentence if I stopped talking to Mama and started addressing anyone else. It was as if I’d been storing it all up, skipping that silly baby talk stage of just having a few words. When I was ready to start, I started—when I had something to say.

  Mama wanted to believe it was special, having our own language, a language no one else used. And it was, in its own way. But really, she knew I was still much closer to Zhenya and Vava and the two aunts than I was to her. I would slip under our front door and into their space whenever I wanted.

  She had to confess, she told me often later in life, that with my blond curls and round face, my giggly laugh and my impious humor, I brought joy into all their lives, lives that needed joy. Even if she had the ability to hold me back, she couldn't imagine doing so. Both our barracks and our camp was a happier place because I was, in effect, the camp mascot. I would spend afternoons sitting with Zhenya at the entry gate, for his job was to let people in and out of the camp. I would put on that silly cap of his, walk up to the gate, and give a sharp salute when a stranger walked up. I was the only one there who didn’t know we were living in a refugee camp or that our lives used to include adequate food and apartments and bathrooms and kitchens that weren't shared. I had never known another life. It was my world, and I thrived in it.

  Sasha did fine, as well, but he was just living a normal life. I was reveling in mine.

  Well, most of it, anyway. I thought the camp food was pretty boring. Every day Mama went to the kitchen and brought back cafeteria food. In the morning there were powdered scrambled eggs, from old American military kits left over from World War II, and we kids had cocoa. For dinner it was spaghetti one day, the next it was rice, the third it was polenta. There was a bit of tomato paste, some bread, sometimes meat. Mama tried to get vegetables in town whenever she could.

  I loved spaghetti, and Zhenya did as well. On spaghetti days everyone gave Zhenya anything extra and on the days in between he would heat it up and the two of us would eat it at his dining table. I never got tired of eating pasta with him every day. The camp food wasn't very healthy and my first set of teeth, which lasted until I was almost ten, were actually brown stubs. While later in life I would have many opportunities to regret the lack of minerals in my diet, as a child I never complained as long as I had my spaghetti.

  But the thing that killed Mama the most was how much I loved Vava. Why I seemed to prefer this creature to her was confounding.

  Picture a really loud, overweight woman in her early forties with big hair, big features, big red lips. Now imagine a cigarette hanging out of the side of her mouth. Picture a dress too tight at the hips and too low in the bosom. Add a hard, raucous laugh. Now imagine this as the pre-school teacher, taking your daughter away every morning. Your daughter holds her hand as she happily skips down the front steps, the two of them chattering away like old best friends.


  Vava was Zhenya's niece, and he, too, adored her. Tama was her mother, and Sonja was her aunt. Vava had left a husband somewhere in her past, and her father had left Yugoslavia to fight the communists with a group of Russians who joined a German brigade in World War II. He was never heard from again.

  This odd foursome—Vava, Tama, Zhenya and Sonja—was my second family, and they became Mama’s, too. You choose your friends, but not your family. It was true of the family Mama was born into, and it was true of the family that adopted us in these odd and difficult circumstances.

  Sasha outside the hospital in Trieste that Zora and Tolya had to sneak him out of because the Italians were being paid by the day while he was in the hospital

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Sasha in Italian Hospital

  “Tolya!” Zora called one morning while waking Sasha for kindergarten. “Sasha’s stomach hurts and he has a high fever. We need to take him to the clinic!”

  Tolya was startled, because Mama was usually very reluctant to take us to the clinic. I would howl at the very word, for to me it was associated with the big needles that stabbed my butt and left me unable to sit for days. Zora always took our illnesses in stride, and mostly cured them with hot chamomile, so Tolya knew this was serious.

  Two days later Sasha was in the nearest hospital, outside of Campo, in the city of Trieste. He had an appendectomy, and while recovering was diagnosed with the flu and put in a quarantine unit. Then things got really frightening. Not only did Zora and Tolya need permission to leave the camp, once they got to the hospital, they weren’t allowed to visit him.

  And of course there was no way to call the hospital, so they just kept making the trip and getting turned away. One day they saw him through the window of his ward. He was lying on a small cot in the middle of a long room with a handful of other little children. A nurse walked around, talking to them. The sight of her son through the window, now a skinny little boy in a gray cotton shift that looked like prison garb or worse, had Zora nearly in tears. She knew he could see her, but could do no more than smile and wave.

  Finally Mama and Papa arrived at the hospital one day and were told they could visit Sasha. Many of the other beds were now empty, and it felt lonely and cold. They ran into the room, Sasha jumped up from the bed, they all hugged and then Zora did cry. Sasha was still skinny, but he looked so much better. Zora was sure he was well and needed to come home. It had been a couple of months, but felt like years.

  “Sasha, Sasha. Kako si, mali? How are you, little one?” Zora held his hands as she kept looking at him and repeating the question. And Sasha looked back, smiling, but he didn't say a word.

  “Kak ti malchik moy? How are you, my little boy?” Tolya said in the Russian he always used. And Sasha sat back on his bed and smiled but still said nothing.

  Just as they started getting concerned, a nurse in blue and white walked into the room with a stethoscope around her neck. Middle-aged, with dark hair curled around her head, she looked like someone who had eaten a lot of pasta in her life. She leaned in over Sasha’s chest and said, “Come vai, piccolino? How are you, little one?” In Italian, of course.

  “Sto bene. Vado a casa!” Sasha suddenly jabbered away in Italian. Zora knew enough of the language by then to understand he had said he felt good and was ready to go home. She and Tolya just stared at each other in horror as the nurse walked out of the room.

  “Bozhe moy. Dear God,” muttered Tolya. “Zabyl. He's forgotten. Forgotten to speak po nashemu, in our way.”

  “Prokleti Italiani,” cursed Zora. But it was said slowly and quietly while she stared blankly at the wall in front of her as if reading the title of a book she hadn't seen in a long time, rather than cursing the people who made her son forget his native languages.

  It was the first and last time Tolya was ever to hear his wife swear. And then he realized she wasn't swearing so much as repeating a mantra she had grown up with—the very words her mother used when describing Mussolini's takeover of their Istrian home.

  When Sasha had first gotten sick and was then diagnosed with the flu after surgery, it made sense that the medical reaction was swift. There had been a major flu epidemic throughout the world earlier that year. Even the Pope and the King of Belgium had reportedly come down with it, so everyone understood the initial need for the isolation ward. There was no way Zora would want her son’s illness taken lightly. But now Sasha was clearly healthy, and he was still locked away.

  “Tolya, I keep having nightmares about Sasha,” Zora had told Tolya, more than once. He knew she was remembering that her own mother lost two sons to the flu epidemic of 1918, during the First World War. They too, were living in exile, in a camp. They too, were controlled by foreigners who spoke a different language. And they never came home from that isolation ward.

  And in the camps there was now talk that people were being held in the hospital longer than needed. The rumors were that the Italians got paid more for a refugee in the hospital than a refugee in the Campo. It made perfect sense in a macabre sort of way. It had been over two months already, and Tolya realized they had to act, and act at once.

  Now, Tolya reached for the blanket and wrapped my brother’s long thin body in it, then hugged him close, as he had when Sasha was an infant. He boldly strode down the corridor as if their son had been formally released. He and Mama held their breath as they slipped through the busy entryway and out the front door of the hospital to the bus stop.

  He held Sasha close until they were safe in their cubicle in Campo and Zora had soup steaming in front of their son, as she started the process of fattening him back to health.

  Shura and Galya leaving the refugee camp at the end of 1952. Galya in the center with flowers, Zora above her and Babusya to her left. Shura on the far right and Tolya with his Leica camera on the left. Their leaving was the last straw for Zora, who then insisted that Babusya go to France.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Zora's ultimatum

  Sasha relearned his languages swiftly, but for Zora the whole hospital experience was the final indignity.

  “Tolya, I can't take this anymore,” she said one day soon after. “Almost everyone else is gone. Your brothers have left: Kolya for Canada, Shura for San Francisco. The Karsanidis are in New York, the Shestakovs in Venezuela. We need to get out of here and move on to the rest of our lives. We've been here almost four years now. It was supposed to be just for a few months, until we got our papers.”

  “I know, Zora, I know,” Tolya replied. They were alone for a change and could talk seriously. Their neighbors had gone to the coffee shop up the road which they could now visit as the rules were easing slightly with the passage of time. “But I thought you were determined to go to America. You know what happened to Kolya and Lyolya in Canada.”

  “I do, Tolya, I certainly do.” Tolya’s brother and his wife had expatriated to Canada as indentured servants on a farm. It was the only way to get a visa to North America quickly, and they were anxious to move on. Lyolya couldn’t bear living in that old rice factory, sleeping on cots in a large drafty open space divided by old blankets. In Canada, however, they had been badly mistreated, and had finally fled, living in secret in Toronto while trying to normalize their situation. “I don’t want to go to Canada; I want us to go to America. We need to start new lives, and I want our children to live in peace and freedom.”

  “But what can I do?” Tolya struggled to be reasonable, but he, too, was near exhaustion. “We've had our names on the list for American visas since we left Belgrade. I never imagined it could take this long. We just have to wait . . .“

  “Tolya, I'm at the end of my endurance. I left my family and my country for you, but I can't live here anymore.”

  “But, Zora . . .”

  “No, don't interrupt me. I have to say it. We always wanted a big family, but I've had three abortions since we've been here because we were told the Americans wouldn't take a pregnant woman. Who knows how long it wil
l be before we're settled enough to consider more children?”

  “Three abortions?” asked Tolya, astonished and disturbed.

  “Yes, three.” Zora bowed her head, holding back the tears that came too easily these days.

  “When?” He knew she had two. They had been difficult decisions, but everyone knew a pregnant woman would not pass the required medical exam they had every three months while waiting. And how could they bring another child into this insane uncertainty?

  “Two months ago. I went to the gypsy woman.” Tolya didn't know about this last one; she hadn't wanted to tell him, but it was out now.

  “Oh, good lord! Zolotko, honey, that's so dangerous! Why didn't you tell me?”

  That last abortion was frightening. Zora was afraid there might never be another child, even if their lives ever returned to normal—whatever that might be. She knew for sure she was never having another abortion. It wasn’t her Catholic upbringing that was torturing her; it was how badly she had wanted all those babies and how much it hurt to know she might never hold them. But still, she hadn’t been able to tell him. She wasn’t sure he could deal with any more.

  Zora knew the stress was destroying Tolya. He spent his nights tossing and turning; he was losing weight. The English classes were impossible, and he was convinced he would never learn another language. Waving goodbye to his brothers and their wives hurt deeply. Zora simply couldn't add more pressure. But now she had learned something that convinced her that there was an alternative, and she was not backing away.

  “We need to get out of here, Tolya, we must get to America. I’m not spending one more Christmas in this camp.”

  “I know, Zorića. This is all my fault.” Tolya looked at the ground. He felt abandoned and alone and his guilt was killing him. “If you had married a Croat, like your father wanted you to, none of this would be happening.”