Till Kingdom Come

by Andrej Nikolaidis

  Grandmother and I lived together happily in Ulcinj – we needed no one else – until one searingly hot day when a dry sirocco was blowing, and her kind heart failed.

  The sorrow I felt in the first few days after her departure and the funeral soon gave way to a sense of complete freedom. There was no one else I loved, and no one else loved me. I was no longer indebted to anyone or anything. My life belonged to me alone, and I didn’t give a tuppence for it. There was nothing I desired in the future, and there was nothing in the past that others desired of me that would enslave me. Everything was here and now, doused with alcohol and filled with idleness and indifference. Why delve into the past, when all I would find there could only jeopardize the perfect freedom I lived in?

  And then Uncle Tripko spoiled everything in just a few sentences. He seeded doubt in me that I couldn’t root out. I had never cared about my background. I was brought up not to ask and not to think about my family. And yet here I was, examining the flimsy, perfunctory saga of a family that lurched from one misfortune to another, a story that suddenly revealed gaping holes and soon turned out to be a fairy tale, shabbily contrived and unconvincingly told. How could I have believed in it, I asked myself, aware of the answer: Because I wanted to. That was enough; that is always enough. Everything we believe in is a fairy tale. The firmness of our belief does not depend on the persuasiveness of the story but on our determination to remain blind to all evidence that could turn the story on its head. If we decide to seek the truth, everything collapses like a house of cards. Truth levels everything before it like an earthquake and carries it away like a flood. As soon as doubt arises, everything is doomed: Nothing remains of all we believed in, happily relied on and made the foundation of our existence – only ruins covered in stinking sludge.

  13

  Here were the photos I had browsed through with grandmother hundreds of times: Her and my mother drinking coffee beneath a cherry tree in the garden in Visoko one May; her and my mother in Ilica Street in Zagreb, arguing about my father (grandmother with her arm around my mother’s shoulders, my mother looking through her, a tram passing by, and an elderly gentleman who had just come out of an ice-cream parlour bowing to them and raising his hat); her and my mother in front of Le Plaza Hotel in Brussels, where they spent two pleasant nights in long conversations about the Magritte exhibition they had seen, with coffee and Petit-Beurre biscuits; her and my mother in Red Lion Square in London, searching for Cromwell’s secret grave; her strolling beside Lake Ohrid in an elegant costume bought in Paris; her and friends at a festive lunch at the source of the River Bosna to mark the retirement of her colleague Milutin, who played the accordion and sang Bosnian ballads like a nightingale, and who died of a heart attack not long afterwards while singing like a nightingale to celebrate the birth of a grandson, an event he had waited a whole decade for, saying over and over again, ‘I just want to have a grandson, then I can die in peace’, meaning he died happy, like a man whose final wish has been granted; her and me strolling along the Stradun promenade in Dubrovnik, where she went with me for my seventh birthday (the bus from Ulcinj took five whole hours); her at the grave of her daughter in the town of Kronberg near Frankfurt, where she bought me a little sailor suit in a children’s clothing boutique (I wore that suit obsessively until it fell to pieces – its process of disintegration was recorded in several photos); her at a Munich airport café drinking Julius Meinl coffee with milk and waiting for the clerks of the bank where my mother kept some hard cash she had willed to me (money my grandmother intended to spend on my education but which would be eaten up by the hyperinflation of the 1990s); and her by the sea in Oslo, where she travelled as if to fulfil the desire of one of her daughters, who died without having seen the northern ends of the earth, which she had dreamed of all her life. All these scenes were suddenly no more than illustrations of a tall story to lull a child to sleep. They documented nothing but lies.

  But instead of telling myself to stop, I returned the photos to their places in the albums. Instead of shaking off all the questions I had and all that would necessarily follow, because questions are like misfortunes and never come alone, I crammed everything into my rucksack and raced off to Podgorica with the kind of determination that can only get you into trouble fast. Mandušić arranged for me to be received immediately at the forensic centre, where they promised to carry out a full analysis of the ‘evidence’, as they called it, as quickly as possible.

  Needless to say, the findings confirmed my doubts. They are always confirmed.

  All the photos were fakes. But very well done, I was told, the work of a master retoucher – a true professional. They were all produced in the same workshop in the space of a few days. It was as if someone had been given the task of fabricating a watertight family history. Grandmother hadn’t been to Oslo, Germany, London or Brussels, at least not in those photos. She had never argued with my mother in Ilica Street or had a congenial coffee with her in Visoko. Who was that young woman in the photos with her? Who was my mother, Ida Hafner? - And my grandmother? - Was she really mine? - And who the bloody hell am I? So many questions that couldn’t be ignored once they had finally been asked...

  14

  What could I do? I sold the house and moved to Podgorica, where I used the money to buy a flat. The investigation that had been foisted upon me and that I was now in the midst of could not be conducted from Ulcinj. I had to be physically close to the police, whose resources Mandušić generously placed at my disposal.

  “What you’re telling me requires serious organization and means,” he said tersely and called Inspector Todorović, whom he instructed to assist me in any way I needed. “Interesting, very interesting,” he muttered. “You’ll appreciate that this is now my problem too – having a man close to me with a past like this...”

  I took a trip to Visoko, where I was supposedly born and had family roots. There was no proof of my birth there, nor any trace of Olga, Ida or me, David Hafner. But in the local archive I did find a birth certificate and a baptismal record for Tripko Pavlović, who had a sister named Olga.

  I travelled on from Visoko to Višegrad and booked into a motel there. That same night, I sneaked out and broke into Tripko’s house. I located his photo albums without much trouble. They were full of photos of him and Olga Pavlović, my grandmother.

  The next day, already back in Podgorica, I met with Todorović on the terrace of Hotel Montenegro. He had promised to make enquiries with the Bosnian police about Olga Pavlović, and now he read out some of the notes the Sarajevo police had compiled. It turned out that she really had worked as a police clerk in the section that issued identity papers in Hrasno, a suburb of Sarajevo, where she had moved as a teenager and finished high school. Olga was reliable and popular with the other staff members. Her former colleagues stated that they had been surprised when she decided to take early retirement in August 1983, less than four months after I was born. Milutin Zec, who she shared an office with, said that it was ‘as if the earth had swallowed her up’. As far as he knew, she never got in touch with any of her co-workers and friends again after she retired. He searched for her at her old address, 103 Lenin Street in the suburb of Grbavica, but the door of her flat was opened by a woman he had never seen before, who had come to the city from some God-forsaken village. She wasn’t sure, but she seemed to recall that Olga had mentioned moving to the coast. After that, Zec no longer searched for her, but he hoped for a long time that that kind and cheerful woman would get in touch again one day, when the unusual circumstances that had befallen her and forced her into such secrecy had changed; and he emphasized how ‘out of character’ her abrupt departure was.

  15

  Despite these revelations, it took months before I finally made a breakthrough in the investigation, which seemed to have run up against a tall, impenetrable wall separating me from myself.

  Podgorica was sticky and slow. The months there passed like months in hell.
Podgorica is a city of false poets, false academics, false journalists, false civil-society activists, false political leaders and false fathers of the nation. The city is a heap of lies and falsehoods on a patch of sun-scorched ground.

  And all that is to do with the simple fact that Podgorica is a fake city. I had often mused about there apparently being cities without boulevards, but until I came to Podgorica I didn’t know there could be boulevards without a city. To live amidst such haughty ugliness, as one is surrounded with in Podgorica, is unbearable for anyone with an ounce of good taste.

  Old Podgorica was destroyed during the Allied bombing raids in 1944. The only way to make the new Podgorica more beautiful would be to conduct a new and equally devastating bombardment.

  But the greened terrace of Hotel Montenegro was a comfortable niche in that extremely unwelcoming city, and I had my weekly meetings with Todorović there. Over time, he was sounding increasingly like a scratched record; no progress, no progress, no progress... In the end, he and I talked about everything: football, politics, and alcohol – anything but the job he was meant to be doing for me. Todorović, like all policemen, had the talent of being inconspicuous when he wanted to be, and that is a quality I appreciate in people whose company I share. Our weekly stock of comments on current events would quickly be used up, so we drank our coffee and smoked in silence, watching the passers-by swarm along Saint Peter Cetinjski Boulevard, while liveried waiters darted to and fro around us. They looked like they had stepped out of a time machine that had come straight from the 1980s and the days following Tito’s death.

  Hotel Montenegro was supposedly a scaled-down replica of a hotel in Havana, so, sitting in the shade of the tall, massive Cuban columns during Podgorica’s sweltering heat, you could imagine you were somewhere nicer. The hotel’s furnishings were old and functional, in contrast to the leather armchairs and marble tables of Podgorica’s other hotels and bars. Here they served strong Turkish coffee and perfect Jelačić cubes, confections named after the former Croatian viceroy that were rich yet refreshing, as well as caramelized-milk ice cream – a flavour full of childhood memories.

  The city authorities were no different to the populace of Podgorica in feeling the greatest imaginable antipathy towards beauty and tradition of any kind, and ultimately they ordered that Hotel Montenegro be demolished and a chrome-and-glass Hilton was raised in its place.

  When they destroyed the only place in Podgorica where you could feel you weren’t in Podgorica, my meetings with Todorović came to an end. They say that Guy de Maupassant vocally opposed the construction of the Eiffel Tower. He claimed it would irreparably destroy Paris. When the tower was built, because progress, particularly progress towards the worse, cannot be halted, journalists observed that Maupassant had the habit of dining in the Eiffel Tower’s restaurant. Stupid as journalists always are, they reminded him that he had been the most vocal opponent of the construction of the Eiffel Tower and asked if it wasn’t hypocritical for him to now be sitting in the tower every day. “Not at all,” he allegedly replied, “the Eiffel Tower is the only place in Paris where you cannot see the Eiffel Tower.”

  In Podgorica, alas, you always knew you were in Podgorica. A city that, like all other urban abortions in the world, constantly and aggressively reminds you of its existence. I therefore kept my outings to an essential minimum – although it was still unbearable – and received Todorović’s empty reports by phone in the flat.

  I am a person prone to nostalgia and who can enjoy sorrow. Few things in life have brought me as much happiness.

  Cooped up in my flat in Podgorica, I missed the routine of my old life in Ulcinj; the security of repetition and the comfort of rituals. I missed the throng of the steep, narrow lanes, which always had water running down them from the nearby courtyards where women washed carpets and children yelled in a language I had never learned. I missed the old men in their white caps, like egg shells, sitting on stools in front of the pastry shops and smoking, the tinkle of bicycles on the worn-out cobblestones, and the voice of the muezzin from on high, calling the faithful to prayer. I missed the wall of sound on summer afternoons; the hysterical cicadas, the braying of thirsty donkeys and the stomp of horses left to wander the olive groves all summer (in the Autumn they would be taken out to the scrub to cart firewood their owners gathered for sale). I missed the clear February days cleansed by the northeaster, the cold that the wind brings from the snow-covered Albanian hills, a freshness good for thinking and for sleeping. I missed my conversations with Goran, so much like confessions. And, most of all, I missed Maria.

  16

  She wrote to me. She sent long emails and brilliant essays imbued with her exquisite melancholy, which grew and grew, towering over her like the blue shadow of a tired, old oak, its branches like sonorous, silver gallows. Her thoughts about suicide, which at first frightened her and made her want to dispel them, merged into an idea that took control of her, and she became its fragile body. If I had been able to imagine myself as a knight, even for just one second, I would have raced off to Ulcinj to try and save her. But to love means to unconditionally accept. To love Maria meant to love the death that was approaching not timidly, like a thief in the night, but proudly and with dignity, like a matriarch with her retinue.

  My mother hasn’t come out of her room for years, she once wrote. The servants bring food and alcohol to her chambers. Ever less food, ever more drink. They leave the trays at the door and run without looking back; fear drives them, and so they gossip about her in the kitchen. The only sign that she is still alive are the empty bottles and tins they discover from time to time in the corridor. One night I opened my eyes and saw her naked, still beautiful – terrifyingly beautiful – leaning over me in bed. She put her hand on my forehead: “My poor child, my poor little me,” she whispered. Her hand was icy cold and as soft as a spider’s web. I wanted to speak, but I was only able to stare at her. Then sleep took me.

  17

  At the time, Maria was reading Jacques Le Goff’s Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle-Ages. Despite her nervous disorder and all the alcohol, her mail to me left no doubt that her intellect was still a fine instrument she played like a virtuoso:

  William of Auxerre wrote on the cusp of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: ‘The usurer acts against the natural laws of the universe because he sells time, which is common to all creatures... nothing gives itself as naturally as time: willy-nilly, all things have time. Since the usurer sells what necessarily belongs to all creatures, he injures all creatures, even the stones; thus, if men were silent against the usurers, the stones would cry out if they could; this is another reason why the Church pursues the usurers.’ The usurers misappropriate God’s time, with terrible repercussions: earthly justice is curtailed. And, William adds against the usurers: ‘God says: When I take back possession of time, that is, when time is in My hands again and no usurer can sell it, I will judge in accord with justice.’ David, the accusation could not be more serious: the usurers prevent God from administering justice fairly! But if the usurers stole God’s time, was the Church not a party to the crime?

  The stakes in the conflict between the Church and the usurers were enormous: ‘The whole of economic life at the dawn of mercantile capitalism was called into question’, Le Goff writes. An enduring ban on earning money based on time, which is the essence of usury, would have meant destroying the very precondition for credit transactions. It would have meant an alternative history. Can we imagine history without banks, without debt?

  On one side stood the Church’s time, which belonged to God and could not be sold. On the other there was that of the merchants, whose business rested on ‘hypotheses around the concept of time – the accumulation of stockpiles in anticipation of scarcity, and buying and selling at favourable moments’.

  Our world is at a crossroads. Concession by concession, each of which is more significant than the last, ‘the a
ristocracy of money changers is succeeding the aristocracy of money minters’. In the Middle-Ages, ‘a great indifference towards time’ prevailed. But after Saint Bernard, who cursed money, people soon arrived at the conviction that time is money: not just subject to sale, but a firm currency that ensures prosperity and social prestige for those who possess and distribute it. All this, Le Goff says, ‘heralds the Stock Exchange, where minutes and seconds would create and destroy fortunes’.

  In 1355, the councillors in Aire-sur-la-Lys allowed entrepreneurs to erect a belfry, whose bells would not call to prayer but chime the hours of commercial transactions and the working hours of the weavers. The workers who came from the surrounding villages to work needed to be called. The church bells lost their monopoly over the measurement of time. Many contemporaries were concerned and considered that Europe was beginning to beat to “infernal rhythms”.