A Handful of Sand

by Marinko Košcec

  Mr Steinhammer was unable to have children–a consequence of his internment in Auschwitz, but to have a son as an heir was his great unfulfilled desire. The death of his wife had left him alone in the world, since he’d lost all his relatives in the concentration camps together with the fortune his family had gained through manufacturing mine-shaft frames; but he was able to regain and redouble this fortune after the war owing to his business talent. Now he was looking forward to my arrival so he could enrol me in university. My studies, of course, would be to prepare me for a position in the management of the firm, because he remained its majority shareholder.

  And no sooner had Mother settled in and got up the courage to leave the house by herself and was entering the local supermarket one day, than a frenzied dog came bolting around the corner and went like a projectile for her buttocks, as if it had been waiting just for her–as if it had been sent down to Earth with exactly that mission; it sank its teeth into her several times and disappeared again in a flash, just like it had come.

  The wounds healed relatively quickly, but something in her heart shifted irreversibly. When they brought her back from hospital, she wouldn’t hear a word about staying. No pleading and promises would help, nor pointing out the difference between what she had there and what she said she wanted to go back to, nor the fact that no such incident had been recorded in the area for decades. She interpreted this last aspect as a sign from God showing her where she really belonged. Until her last days she remained broken and timid, always more or less on pins and needles, but passive, forever awaiting the next blow of fate.

  But rapid flourishing and abrupt end of the Steinhammer episode was nothing compared to what had happened a few years earlier, straight after we returned from Gabrek’s for the second time. The boy I sat next to in class was called Božidar. Also an only child, from even poorer circumstances than mine, he had a hard time keeping up with lessons. I whispered him the answers in tests. We didn’t meet outside of school, but since our way home was in the same direction we usually walked together. There was one hundred metres of poorly illuminated footpath down to the first intersection and compacted snow had turned it into a veritable ice rink that day. It was 24th December and the Christmas-tree vendors were selling off the last of their wares cheaply in front of the school. Božidar pushed off with one leg and skated in front of me to the very edge of the cross street, where he turned to wait for me. At that instant the cabin of a large truck and trailer appeared from behind the building on the corner. I only just managed to yell Watch out! before the truck, winding around the tight bend, collected Božidar with its veering rear end and sucked him under its wheels.

  Even today, that is the only plausible version of the event for me. According to the forensic report, Božidar died from a skull fracture caused by a blow to the back of his head and can’t possibly have been run over by the wheels because the weight of the trailer, loaded with sacks of potting soil, would have crushed his body. But I kept telling the investigators what I’d seen–an image which visited me for years afterwards, especially in the middle of the night: of Božidar being swallowed up by wheels bigger than himself and thrown out like a rag doll, and of him lying on his belly, eyes wide open, with the blood from his nostrils conquering the snow in a starlike stain. The only other thing I remember is the man who shook me and yelled to me that I should go home, which I finally did, still believing that Božidar would just blink, wipe his nose and get up.

  That man, who had been at the other side of the intersection, was the only witness, and he stated at the inquest that he’d seen me and Božidar standing together at the curb. That was enough for different stories to spread through the school and the neighbourhood suggesting that I’d pushed Božidar onto the street or tripped him while he was running. And it was enough to make Božidar’s father come to our door, distraught, with his distress further fuelled by alcohol. What the hell are you hiding him for? he cried and swore, Let me ask him what bloody well happened! Mother managed to stop him at the doorstep and send him away, with tears of both sympathy and determination to protect me, and threatened to make heavy weather to anyone who needled me by alluding to the event. Moreover, she stopped the investigators molesting me and taking me to court as a witness, and also prevented the psychiatrists from poking around in my head. She spent many nights by my bed watching over me in the months which followed.

  From then on I always detoured Božidar’s street as if it were cursed. The seat next to me in class remained empty until the end of primary school.

  * * *

  Father’s condition was stable. That meant he couldn’t think of a single part of his body which didn’t hurt, but no pain was excruciating enough to make him forget the others.

  It was incomprehensible that I’d lived with him for so many years. I would rather have gone to have a wisdom tooth pulled out than visit him, and yet the whole time I was rankled by an emptiness I seemed to have left there. So I forced myself to go once a week. I showed up, that was all I could do for him. That cheered him up, for three or four seconds. Then it would be back to moping. We don’t hug, not even when we say goodbye. Basically we avoid physical contact. We’re full of respect for the air between us and careful not to infringe it. We don’t touch on difficult topics, in fact hardly any at all, because when he runs into a gap in his ever more impoverished vocabulary he doesn’t know how to get round it. He stays all frowning and stares into that void–oh what do they call it…–until I help by changing the topic. He regularly reports about the rotten fruit they slip him at the market and the obligatory misunderstandings about the change. But medical issues are still the major topic, and if we leave them it’s virtually only to talk about the weather. At this time of year, that boiled down to the remark that the weather outside was nasty, really nasty. If it was summer, it would have been nasty inside as well. Unbearable. I wouldn’t have disagreed. We’d sit quietly by the TV for a bit because we haven’t played ludo for thirty years or so.

  That evening I happened to see a feature on the exhibition of a former fellow student from the Academy. Today he’s a big-time artist, the gallery owner explained with a playful smile: not only intriguing as a personality but also dynamic in the market place. Then a critic spoke in front of one of his pictures about its inner necessity and about reality growing into an elusive fascination; the tangible vanished in the immeasurable yet gained new quantifiability through abstraction. He mentioned a shifting luminosity rising from the depths and crystallising in a seething turmoil, in wellsprings of resistance and reflection. Here we saw broad vision and deep resonance, a blend of abrasive energy and sweet intimacy.

  I had to rub my eyes. The pictures were deceptively similar to those he’d begun to paint in the middle of his studies just for fun, as a way of mocking minimalism: each had two or three small squares or triangles, perhaps an arrow or a curvy line, a bit like Kandinsky for bathroom tiles. But their titles were long and enigmatic like Bursting from their Blue Embankment, Bareheaded Brownies Behold the Beanstalk. He made an intelligent impression, which the feature confirmed. Not only did he dazzle critics, the reporter noted, but his clientele was in the specific milieu of footballers and models. Art lovers of this calibre would willingly sacrifice ten thousand kunas and more for a picture, the artist himself admitted in the only original snippet we heard. The camera focussed for a second on a glass of champagne being filled.

  Some are born with a champagne glass in their hand and sooner or later it will be filled. And whatever happens in life, they’ll still have their champagne to sip. I have a little theory of my own which I’m coming to believe in more and more: that my father was born with a talent for suffering. Something big just had to come along to trigger that potential and really get him going. There had always been material in abundance, albeit scattered and subject to wear. But the real thing, the capital-E event worthy of full commitment, came in the form of my mother’s death: he seized it with all his remaining strength and devoted himself
to it entirely. But over the years, imperceptibly, it stole away once it had done its job and raised him into a state of permanent hypnosis. He mentions Mother less and less, and her grave is overgrown with weeds, because what he now sees is the very essence of suffering, cleansed of external substances.

  My own substances and substrates didn’t overly impassion me. Whatever made its way down to me through the genetic gutters didn’t reach my erogenous zones. On my mother’s side, there wasn’t much to whet one’s archaeological appetite anyway. All she inherited from her parents was the vocation of primary school teacher, which she gladly gave up for my future. Her family moved to the city after the Second World War from an area which had been outside the Independent State of Croatia and occupied by the Nazis–this was fortunate because the Germans didn’t put them on an extermination list. They died fairly young of normal human ailments. We had them buried back in their village and visited their graves from time to time. In 1995, the sons of the Croatian Army’s ‘Operation Storm’ thoroughly ‘liberated’ the ramshackle house and daubed a sign on the crumbling walls: OCCUPIED DO NOT BLOW UP. This was quite superfluous because no one intended to expropriate the ruins, but it did happen a few years later when the government presented its refugee resettlement programme.

  Father’s family tree was more ramified, but his parsimonious nature also meant that he was no storyteller. I only knew the basics. But in the middle of my studies, while going through Father’s things, I chanced upon my grandfather’s notebook. It wasn’t intended for me or anyone else. Grandfather had evidently kept it in an attempt to clear his head. His aim had been to set down what was real and true amidst the mess of images and voices which besieged him towards the end of his life, taking complete control and deleting his life’s present tense. The truth as laid down by Grandfather’s hand was a hotchpotch of brainwaves jotted down as they came, without order and without concern for occasional contradictions. I needed this about as much as the girl George in Dead Like Me needed the toilet seat to come down and hit her on the head. Still, I showed a sensational, hitherto unseen ability to relate to the family’s nitty-gritty. I adopted all those basics, integrated them into my foundations and took them along with me as life’s luggage. Or rather, they adopted me and shaped me a posteriori to fit into an already tailored dress.

  Grandfather’s father grew up in a family of Jewish tailors, and later innkeepers, on German soil. The notebook didn’t trace the family roots back any further. It mentioned a boarding house on the shores of an unnamed lake, which my great-grandfather lost at cards. Allied with alcohol, his gambling passion consumed all other real estate and even created debts which left him no other choice than to secretly relocate to some backwoods. In the chaos of the First World War, he managed to move with his wife and my very small grandfather. Zagreb played the role of backwoods impeccably. No one looked for him there and he was able to start afresh with the acquisition of property, and its squandering.

  He found work with a textile dealer. As the years went by, he was allowed to manage the business and later bought the shop in Kačićeva Street. Apart from fabrics, he also traded in sugar, lard, coal and timber. He would often lose his stock to others in games of chance. He played cards almost every night, in German, Hungarian, Czech, Yiddish or a mixture of all those, soaked in wine. Great-grandfather learnt only as much Croatian as he needed for his transactions with local farmers. Games were broken off due to excessive drunkenness. Then they sang, retold their exploits and other’s misfortunes, and let out animal-like howls. Some drunkards had to sleep the night on the floor until they were brought new clothes because they’d pawned everything down to their underwear. The apprentices would come in the morning and sweep everything out onto the street: sawdust, broken glass and dead-drunk bodies. They would take great-grandfather home in the horse-drawn cart and put him to bed.

  He quickly realised the value of having a private wine cellar, so he set one up in the premises next door. Then he bought the whole house and extended his business to renting out rooms. Things happened here which mellow-mooded gentlemen are inclined to desire in the middle of the night. Women from the annexe were part of the shop’s decor, tasked with topping up the glasses and sitting on customers’ knees. Grandfather learnt to sit on their knees at an early age, the notebook boasted. He grew up quickly, married at eighteen and immediately had a son, and another on the eve of the war. The elder, my father, spent a good part of his childhood helping out in the shop. The basement of that so educational business complex is today a macrobiotic food shop.

  Great-grandfather was more inclined to the nocturnal aspects of entrepreneurship than to dry, academic business. Until Grandfather came of age, the day-to-day management was run by the apprentices, who sometimes lined their own pockets. If there was a profit, my great-grandfather looked the other way; otherwise he sacked them regardless of their diligence. A fanatical follower of his own instinct for happiness, every now and then he zeroed the business results and was left without a single bale of fabric, sack of flour or barrel of wine. Then he started from scratch again. I ask myself if he perhaps did that intentionally or because of a subconscious instinct to undermine whatever he’d built.

  He was a great admirer of the Teutonic spirit: its breadth and firmness, its cult of vitality and personal expansion. A self-taught philosopher, he particularly esteemed German idealism. And he loved music, above all else, especially Wagner’s operas. He rarely got up before noon, and until then all noise was banned in the house, including kitchen clatter and children’s voices. But as soon as he opened his eyes he would start to sing arias from operas or military marches, whose words he would playfully, lasciviously change. That was a signal that one was allowed to talk at normal volume, and also for the beginning of preparations for the ritual main meal. He also sang while he shaved, then donned a fresh, starched white shirt which was waiting on the coat-hanger, while on the table was a little glass of rakija. Kein Glas mehr! he admonished, although rivers of wine had flowed the night before.

  The house he bought in the Medveščak neighbourhood was soon populated. Along with three generations of my ancestors, there were also two Jewish girls who he took in as servants as much as out of compassion, and they also became part of the family. No problems were to be mentioned at the table, not even in the frequent periods of scarcity. Nothing was to spoil his mood or appetite. He had another child, a girl, in the early 1930s. He liked to caress her and both his grandsons in passing, amazed each time how much they had grown. Of this numerous household, Father was to be the only one to escape the concentration camps.

  At first, it seemed that great-grandfather’s connections would guard his back. Business partners and pals held high positions in the new government of the Independent State of Croatia. His friendships with them now became especially cordial, assisted by many a costly gift. But the neighbours were also enterprising and proved to be even better connected. One June morning in 1942, an extermination team turned up at the door. Within a few minutes the whole household was out in the truck, with bundles of sheets containing what was needed for a new life, and a little more.

  I’d heard about the truck before from Father. That morning he’d been sent on an errand, and when he returned he saw it in front of the courtyard fence. He ran after it until his legs gave way, sat down on a bench and cried, and then continued on down to Kačićeva Street. Men in uniforms were carrying out the merchandise and furniture. One of the apprentices spotted him, took him aside, and then out to his home village. His family let Father stay in the hayloft above the stable. He slept there until the war’s end, taking care of the cattle in return. For fear, he only went out at night. He returned to Zagreb at almost at the same time as the liberating Partisans. But he didn’t find anyone he knew. The shop was buried in rubbish since the building was missing all its windows and doors, and the Medveščak house had been occupied by a man with a moustache, lots of little stars and a resolute tone of voice. He arranged that Grandfather be tak
en in at a refuge for war orphans. After his three years of holidays, he went back to school. The curriculum was modest and the tests could be sat in advance. He soon caught up with his age group and, as an especially gifted pupil, earned a scholarship to study architecture. Towards the end of Father’s studies, Grandfather returned. He was another person altogether as if he’d been taken apart, limb by limb, and reassembled clumsily.

  The notebook went into who and what had been in the truck, although the description was rather impressionistic. It was certain that the family was separated at the detention camp–a cluster of barracks somewhere on the outskirts of town, windowless and without beds, surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by thoroughbred German shepherds. When the accommodation was jam-packed, pure-bred Croatian selectors went through and sifted the human refuse, under the supervision of German delegates. They talked politely with every piece of refuse, and all the information was neatly recorded. Those fit for work were rewarded with a trip to Germany. Despite his germanophilia and assurances that he was still strong and healthy, my great-grandfather was rejected and sent to a holiday home somewhere in Croatia with my great-grandmother and their small daughter. Years later, Grandfather met a man who swore that all three had escaped during a mass breakout: they weren’t among the corpses piled up as a didactic installation to intimidate the local population. But another fellow maintained that he’d seen them along with about twenty others lined up on the bank of the River Sava that day; one after another, obediently, they stepped up to an Ustashi sledgehammer and then floated away lifeless down the river.

  German technology was far more refined. Straight after their journey in a cattle wagon, Grandmother and Father’s brother were designated for the special showers and ovens. When the cattle were unloaded, they were divided once more. Like Grandfather, Grandmother was pointed to the right; but she didn’t allow her child to be torn from her arms, and so after several lashes of his whip the officer said Na gut, and gave her a towel and bar of soap; Grandfather was sent off with a group to have their heads shaved. This side or that, it all looked the same to him at the time–merely a question of sequence in the schedule of arrivals.