I’ve never seen a more good-natured, grateful creature in my life than the cat. I found her in the meadow which the neighbourhood children used as a playground and the households as a disposal site: a bristling black kitten with clotted, scabby fur, which for hunger and trembling couldn’t even miaow. It opened its mouth in vain, crying out with its frightened eyes. Mother very nearly jumped out of her skin when she discovered her beneath my bed, but that was the first of only two things where I didn’t give in to her so often extravagant demands: I wept and blubbered and rolled on the floor until I won permission for the cat to stay. Cat was her name because Mother refused to call her anything else, so in the end I accepted it. She slept on my pillow and brought me mice and little birds; I didn’t know how to explain to her that I didn’t want to share them with her. Periodically there was the problem of her offspring to deal with. The first time, while I was at school, Mother incinerated them in the woodstove. You can imagine what it must have sounded like because disconcerted neighbours called the police, and the rest was written in Cat’s eyes. For days she whined softly on the floor by my bed and didn’t care for the food I brought her. With the other litters, Mother categorically refused any discussion: What am I to feed them with? What?! she cried in such a desperate voice that I fell silent. At least she didn’t burn them any more. But she took them away in a sack and I didn’t dare to ask where.
It would have been an exaggeration to say that Mother ever took a liking to Cat. But when she was poisoned with something which made her vomit yellow mucous for two days before dying, she cried together with me. Cat used to visit the neighbours’ houses, and she particularly loved children. A week before the event, our neighbour Mr Kruhek gave Mother a telling off: the dirty animal had given his daughters fleas, he said.
On my first day at school, Mother made a name for herself by introducing herself to the teacher as my father. Classical Freudiansm; those aware of the situation might have seen their theories confirmed. For others it served as my first labelling, an indication of what kind of family I came from.
Father was a concept bound to rear its head sooner or later, precisely because it was so painstakingly suppressed, swept out of everyday use and pulverised–it was meant to lose all meaning. With exemplary obedience, I accepted Mother’s explanation that I was the fruit of momentary weakness, what she called an ‘adventure’, with a Gypsy who had only been in town for a few days with his travelling orchestra. When I started asking questions as a child, that story seemed as convincing as any other, but over time I felt there was too much nebulousness in it to want to correct it. The neighbours also accepted it, although they knew full well what I found out ten years later: that my father wasn’t a Gypsy at all but a man who had led an orderly life alongside them, had bought a little plot nearby and was building a house; but as soon as his wife’s belly began to bulge he chickened out of both challenges overnight, never to be seen again. Mother’s family–there was never any mention of the other side–had no ear for her version of the truth and soon all contact was severed; I didn’t meet a single relative from one side or the other until my grandmother’s death.
And so my mother’s romantic inspiration gave me the nickname ‘Gypo’. It was underscored by my astonishingly dark complexion, bristly black hair and deep, almost black eyes, which tended to arouse unease in people, the instinct to look away, more than the desire to explore what was inside. I was never ashamed of that nickname, least of all in front of those who used it to demean me and exclude me from their games; for the latter, in fact, I was grateful.
Mother’s Gypsy was not merely a caprice, however, but also a form of penance. For reasons which were never elucidated, she blamed herself for her husband’s disappearance and intended to expiate it. The collateral damage to me was of no concern to her. In one of her hysterical states, as frequent as they were arbitrary, she uttered with blithe ignorance of the consequences that I was a sorry case; she’d never wanted to have children and everything could have been different if she hadn’t got pregnant; and me turning out the way I did–the cross she had to bear–was God’s way of punishing her. Oh, the curse of my behaviour… That word embodied one of the root evils, which no gestures or avowals to the contrary could dispel. However much I tried to please her, and although my extreme self-consciousness in early childhood severed any inclination to escapades, her use of the term your behaviour designated my certain descent into a career of substance abuse and my predetermined, inevitable matricide.
God arrived in her life at the same time as me; until then she’d been involved in purely worldly pursuits, but thanks to my birth she found her God. From that point on she never missed Mass and worked tirelessly to equip the house with little holy pictures, statuettes and olive branches. She even lit candles and gave alms at church as soon she had a few coins to spare and our most pressing needs had been satisfied. At work she was rewarded for her spiritual zeal with a demotion–the Yugoslav state frowned on any religious fervour–although cause and effect were not spelt out. She was replaced as municipal cultural officer by the typist, a woman who never finished high school, and Mother was made her assistant. She bore that blow heroically, not flinching from her beliefs despite the objections of others. Her response was to opt out of any effective activity and spend the rest of her working life on go-slow, practicing quiet sabotage, until this was interrupted by the democratic changes in the early nineties; and her job was immediately terminated. Aged fifty-three, in the middle of the war, she found herself on the dole. The only other thing she could do, being a graduate accordion teacher, was to try and make ends meet by giving private lessons, but her skill was anything but appealing at that moment in history; in oh-so-refined Croatia, few things were considered as barbarously Balkan as playing the accordion.
Mother didn’t even try to arouse my musical talent, but God was number one on the agenda. I went through the complete torture of confession, communion, confirmation, saying the Lord’s Prayer before bed and going on pilgrimages to Marija Bistrica. The merciless woman even managed–undoubtedly through the magnitude of her sacrifice–to have me accepted as an altar boy. But that didn’t last long, thanks to the unavoidable difficulties caused by my sooty black head jutting out of the angelically white habit and my dark hands wrapped around the candle–it reeked of a Satanic diversion.
When I think back to my childhood, my first association is with smoke, not only from censers but also cigarettes. Mother smoked so much that layers of haze constantly hung in the house, around one metre from the ceiling, which no airing could dispel; she always had at least one cigarette burning, frequently more. She would forget them in the rooms and light a new one as soon as she noticed she had one hand too many. She got up for a smoke at night, too, woken by the lack of nicotine. Smoking merged with her being to such an extent that you no longer perceived a cigarette in her hand as an object; it could only be seen as an absence in the rare moments she wasn’t smoking–then Mother lacked something.
Towards the end of her religious phase, her devotion escalated to the point that she toyed with the idea of bequeathing the house to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. That was the second and last time I stood up to her, threatening that I would go away and that she would never see me again. But soon afterwards she broke with churches and all taints of religion; it being a time when people started pushing and shoving to get in the front pews, when those who had once persecuted the Lamb of God now eagerly held their mouths up to it at communion, and religious devotion shifted from being a reactionary stigma to a guarantee of virtue and patriotism. Ostensible piety inundated Croatia to such an extent that even garments, massage chairs and luxury yachts were renamed with a Christian epithet. The Jesus figure on the cross at the bottom of our street repented for our sins day and night; his fans soon had him gilted and put up a little tin roof so he wouldn’t get wet. Really, hardly anyone had taken any notice of him before, and now almost no one passed by without instinctively crossing themselves: not even the dr
unkard who lived somewhere near the top of the street and left his bicycle there every time his heroism only sufficed to lug himself up the hill, nor the other Jesus fan, a tea-totaller who beat his wife so badly that she had to be rushed to hospital on at least two occasions.
After the changes, new traffic regulations were introduced in our quarter and a one-way sign was put up next to the crucifix, not a metre away. It’s at exactly the same height and has an arrow showing which direction to drive. I don’t know if the local authorities and their staff are aware of how fraught that semiotic combination is. Coincidental or not, you have to admit the message is powerful: passers-by are confronted with a crucifixion–a drastic reminder that the rules of the road are to be observed; and immediately next to it, following the stick-and-carrot principle, is an upward-pointing arrow showing what is in store as a reward for obedience.
* * *
Christmas was designed as a punishment for those who don’t experience a sense of unification with God’s love, or their own love. It’s supposed to be the culmination of cheerfulness and hope for an even more cheerful afterlife which they’ve been beavering away for all year, a sentiment now represented by baubles and angels dangling from a dead conifer. I can’t decide what makes Christmas more unbearable: the warm putrefaction of this year or the usual soppy snowflakes.
That evening I dropped in to see Father. I could see from the street that it was dark in the kitchen, which was enough to trigger the darkest forebodings. I rushed breathless up the stairs. The TV set suffocated the living room more than casting it in a bluish light. It took a few seconds for me to make him out on the couch: one hand hanging to the floor, his head thrown back, and his mouth wide open. From up close it was clear he wasn’t breathing. I was stunned and my heart felt as if it would break. I grabbed him by the collar, shook him, and he opened his eyes. He gazed through me for an instant and then choked up, gasping for air. This happened to him from time to time–he would stop breathing when he fell asleep. But never before had he so staunchly, so pedantically, staged a respiratory shutdown.
I gave him his eye drops. His cataracts were growing diligently. Sooner or later he’d need an operation, but for the time being he brushed the prospect aside. The good side of it was that his impaired vision didn’t bring any major disadvantages; there were no longer any particularly precious sights for him in this world.
When I told him I was moving out, exactly fifteen months ago, he didn’t have any objections. Or if he did, he didn’t dare to state them. If he’d had a sliver of lucidity left, he would have seen what his condition had done to me. It had penetrated me to the core and turned me into a black hole. But he just kept on going, perhaps aware of what he was doing to me but powerless to prevent it. Unable to help himself and to accept my attempts to help him. No one can help anyone. That’s easily said, and I knew it all those years; but still I let myself be fettered, remaining in the embrace of his sorrow. As we know, time heals sorrow. His responded well to the treatment, was tamed, and grew over time into our own domestic monster.
Mother died in the summer of ninety-one when I was eighteenth, less than a month after Father’s appointment as a minister in the Government of Democratic Unity. That came about due to the Reconciliation: ex-Communists and Catholic conservatives alike welcomed a Jew in the cabinet so they could demonstrate their inclusiveness. He himself didn’t give a damn about reconciliation and the blossoming of democracy. He was already weary, preoccupied with his untimely ageing. But the offer flattered his vanity and he accepted the position like a medal awarded at retirement for sufferings endured. It’s safe to say that no one remembered his time as minister, and the Jewish bit was a half-truth at best. Religion was never mentioned in our family, let alone practiced–his ‘Jewishness’ and my mother’s nominal Orthodox Christianity existed purely on paper. That was almost the only thing I ever agreed about with my parents.
After all, I didn’t consider them capable of any sensible conversation, nor did they show even the semblance of a desire to comprehend where I was at. We lived under the same roof but on different planets. At least up until the day when Father, eavesdropping on my phone conversation, learnt that I’d lost my virginity. I was fourteen. I heard that, he growled, dashed into the room wild-eyed and laid into me with fists and feet. Mother didn’t lift a finger or say a word to stop him. When the ‘lesson’ was over, she took my head in her lap and stroked it until I’d cried my very last tear. Then she quietly closed the door behind her.
Still, her death probably would have well and truly crushed me if Father hadn’t made it there first. It was already hot and sultry in the morning, that July Sunday. Around four in the afternoon, I heard a smashing of crockery in the kitchen and then a despairing Oooh, oooh. Father was kneeling on the tiled floor, his face grotesquely twisted. Between the palms of his hands he held my mother’s face; unlike his, it was calm and almost serene, more beautiful than ever.
A face so different to mine that people viewed us innumerable times in disbelief: her soft, fair hair, blue eyes and milky complexion, and me downright swarthy. She had especially large, doe eyes. At forty-four, her beauty was fully intact and easily interrupted ministers’ conversations, turned heads 180 degrees, and caused nervous grimaces in other women. Allegedly it was the cause of one broken marriage and a broken skull before she married Father. He, in turn, was a striking man with austere features, of lean yet athletic build–an esteemed architect, broad-minded and cultured; although sixteen years her senior, he probably had no trouble hunting her down to put in the showcase among the other trophies he had won. He thought highly of competitions.
And then, all at once, she lay there on the kitchen floor, and he above her, with horrible cries which couldn’t bring anything back. By the time the ambulance arrived, it was too late. The clot had whisked her away. Now she lay on their double bed, and he didn’t stop hugging her, and choking on his tears and cries for help. The scene dried up my tears within a few minutes. I shoved him out and spent the evening with her alone, then I showed in the coroner and the woman we paid to do her up. I spent the night there by her side, following my father’s uneven breathing in the living room and wondering if it too would cease. My mother’s mouth hung slightly open. I was obsessed by the ghastly thought that, if my vigilance slackened for just an instant, the flies circling up near the ceiling would get inside her. In the morning her mouth still looked completely alive, as if it was about to tell me something important she’d been thinking of all her life.
I had to make the arrangements with the undertaker, choose the coffin, look after the epitaph, the wording on the wreath, the obituary notices in the papers and the details of the funeral protocol, as well as take care of catering for the condolence bearers, all by myself. The very mention of these things made Father’s eyes flow. However, he was only seized by hysteria one more time: when they were carrying Mother out of the house, like a log wrapped in a sheet; he fell to his knees and clung to the coat of one of the medics, a boy my age, whom I stared at in astonishment, wondering how he could have chosen such an occupation. Over time, Father calmed down and spent most of his time staring out the window. For him it was like Jim Jarmush’s window drawn on the prison wall, not one intended for looking out of.
It hurt to watch him diminish like that, both mentally and physically. He became bent and wrinkled, ridiculously small for the couch which was his prison; he devoted his days to the window and in the evenings hovered in the grey zone between the TV chat show and dozing off. For several months they took him to work, a bit like they cart away domestic rubbish. He resigned before the end of his term of office and before reaching retirement age, ‘for health reasons’. But these weren’t just of an emotional nature because all the ailments which had already been gnawing at him now gained momentum. Diabetes, gout, high creatinine levels, prostrate problems, painful joints, cardiac arrhythmia, a duodenal ulcer, insomnia, corns and cataracts: he was a gerontological showpiece. But he contributed to all th
at himself with intensive concentration, which he could direct depending on the acuteness of the problems and above all by groaning. With every step he took in the flat, and also when he went out to walk in the courtyard, he let out the sound of his suffering, such that until I moved out I was able to follow his every step as if he was carrying a beeper. Just recently he admitted that he groaned on purpose, self-therapeutically, in the hope that things would hurt less. Since pain can’t be seen, it’s easier to live with suffering if you hear it. Whatever.
Apart from shuffling to the corner shop, for years now he’s only been leaving the house to go to the Health Centre (is the sarcasm of that term intentional?) and the cemetery. He trudges back with his bags as if from martyrdom, groaning three times louder. When I cooked for him he only stabbed listlessly at the food, and the slightest criticism made him get up from the table, offended: This is the death of me, can’t you understand that?! He’d never been of the jovial kind. No frivolities interested him, not even spending time with friends. When Mother died, the rest of humanity passed away for him too. To those who phoned with words of encouragement or just with a conventional enquiry as to his health, he always replied with the same To be honest, I’m not well and never asked anything back. Oh, how many times did that honesty make me want to get up and strangle him just to cure him of his misconception that being honest like that was the best he could do, in fact the only thing he could do, for himself and others.
A Handful of Sand Page 3