Ekaterini

by Marija Knezevic

  The next stage of grandfather Stipe’s career was here, in Vršac, near the Romanian border. The area had a living a mixture of languages, and after leaving Thessaloniki and the odyssey that ensued Ekaterini thought for a moment she had miraculously returned home. But the miracle ended as soon as she began learning Serbian. There was nothing for it, she had to get a grasp of the new language, if only because of the cooking. Pata’s Cookbook was her primer. Stipe carted home food just like he used to do in Thessaloniki, and thanks to his habit of buying wholesale, several Thessaloniki families – grandmother’s closest relatives – survived the four years of that war. During another turning point of history, they in turn would save Lucija and her family. Deeds like that are never forgotten. Yet generous people, those who give gladly, don’t do it so that their kindness will be reciprocated. At least those who give from the heart; that’s simply how they are – incorrigible. Other people are born of weak character; evildoers, petty thieves and great usurpers, and that’s normal for them, that’s just how they are. Once people used to call a spade a spade, but times change; now we have pop psychology shot through with detective-story elements. Food hasn’t changed so much. Housewives still consult the old cookbooks, and there’s no generation which hasn’t had to queue for food. A heavily laden dinner table is part of tradition; hunger is individual destiny.

  After his barren, stony childhood, Stipe bought food by the sackful from the start of his career till the end of his life. That godsend of a man hated no one and nothing – except hunger.

  ‘What this now, dear God? You crazy, husband? How I now make so much food?’ Ekaterini stumbled in her newly acquired language of the Serbs.

  ‘Oh, come on Kata.’

  Stipe swelled with pride as he watched the miller’s boy, white with flour, carrying sacks from the heavily laden cart into the little room proclaimed pantry. ‘I’ll help you, don’t fret.’

  ‘But how much people is coming? This all for one feast?’

  ‘Whoever comes along, dear wife, will be welcome and can eat and drink his fill!’

  Ekaterini felt that if she survived the preparations for St Nicholas Day she’d be entitled to beatification herself. ‘My husband is a bit crazy –,’ she grumbled in Greek, there’s a war going on, and he brings cartloads of food and drink to ply people with. And who’s going to prepare it all? Why do people eat so much? Did I get married just so as to cook?

  They arrayed all the cakes along the cupboard shelves, on sheets of cellophane which rustled in the draught, since the tables were occupied by the trays of appetizers, glasses and bottles of home-made rakija and wine. Every chair, stool and bench in the house was brought into the living room as the guests gradually arrived, be they invited or uninvited; all of them were welcome. The next day the whole scenario was restaged. The feast lasted three days. Godfather Božović was the guest of honour this time, too. He travelled up from Belgrade, where he had invested the small fortune cleverly acquired in Thessaloniki to buy and furnish a beautiful house in the old Voždovac neighbourhood, and then sent for his wife and newborn daughter. They came nicely dressed up just as they had been announced – as ‘the guests from Belgrade’.

  Božović was a jokester; he pretended to sympathise with Ekaterini, who was intimidated by so many unfamiliar faces, and took her aside for a word of advice. She listened spellbound.

  ‘God-daughter, the tradition is that when you’re serving the boiled wheat as entrée you go up to each of the guests, offer them the spoon and say: “Help yourself. So BAD to see you!”’

  After playfully misinstructing his god-daughter, Božović took a seat at the very end of the ring of people whom Ekaterini was serving. All eyes focussed on him, and not only because of the presentiment that he was up to one of his fun-loving practical jokes, but because he was truly a person of note. He radiated the irresistible energy of a mover and shaker. Bold, resourceful and clever, he wasn’t one of those you’d call perfect, but he certainly was great. ‘Ah, that Božović...,’ people would say, ‘how can he lose when God has given him both wits and good looks!’ And indeed, he was handsome and winning, not only with drawing-room charm and tact but with a particular energetic kindness of his own. However, he wasn’t like that with everyone; on the contrary, he ignored philanthropy and considered it a weakness. That’s why he was prepared to do everything for those he thought deserved the effort. After the war he found himself at the very top of the new system. But now he allowed the jester in him full reign, and was scarcely restraining his laughter as he looked into the astonished faces of the other guests at the table. Some didn’t know what to think: whether this was a joke in poor taste, and how they should react, while others thought that Ekaterini, as a foreigner, had got something mixed up, and weren’t sure whether to correct her or not. But the tray travelled quite quickly, faster than anyone’s decision to say anything. Even Grandfather Stipe, Božović’s chosen man, couldn’t help but roar with laughter. There were so many guests that Božović was at the end of his tether when it was finally his turn.

  ‘Help yourself, godfather Božović. So bad to see you!’

  Now he theatrically exploited the ensuing silence, turned serious, and instead of reaching for the spoon and the wheat he cast Ekaterini his best reproachful glance. He raised his eyebrows and turned his head in the direction from which he’d come, as if inwardly preparing to return home.

  ‘If that’s the way it is, god-daughter, I’d better not hang around,’ he sighed. ‘Back to Belgrade then. Wife, we’re going!’

  And with that he left. The room shook with laughter. Stipe’s guffaws drowned out the others and echoed in Ekaterini’s head as if she was inside the giant bell in the dome of Vršac church on a Sunday morning. Frightened, embarrassed and angry, she ran off into the kitchen, slammed the tray down on the table and started to cry, finally letting out all her pent up tears. All her bottled-up sorrow poured out of her onto the table, all her distress at the war and the dull town, at having had to leave the big city with its beautiful, world-class markets and shops the equal of those in Paris, at not knowing when she’d see her family again, her brothers and sisters and parents, at this accursed language, at so much food and the constant arrival of more dirty dishes. ‘Oh mother!’ she wailed. ‘Dear mother, why are you so far away? How can I manage without you?!’

  This tragicomedy could only be ended by he who started it. Despite his practical joke, Ekaterini felt a special bond with her godfather, undiminished since the days when the three of them – she, Božović and Stipe – first strolled together along Paralia. He went into the kitchen now and spoke to her, with little more than one sentence: Dear god-daughter, calm down. That’s the way things have to be. The effect of words can be baffling; these came at just the right moment from the person whose presence, even for only a few minutes, satisfied the fundamental human need for the voice of a prophet. Ekaterini soon returned to the living room and was like a new person. Božović sauntered in proudly behind her. His favourite facial expression was in place – that of a man who gets things done. Stipe marvelled, but put it all down to mysterious female mood swings. From the very depths of despair, Ekaterini had arisen and now went from the kitchen to the living room with confident step, elevated by the decision she had just made: that she lived here and would keep on living here however she felt. There would be more such situations to come, but this was the first time she decided to live. This was her feast.

  * * *

  That year, immediately after the feast, grandfather was given another posting and the family moved to the village of Petrovac on the River Mlava. The magnolias of Thessaloniki didn’t grow there either; instead, chickens roamed and cats strolled through the garden. There was also a piglet trotting around which Stipe had bought for Christmas with culinary purposes in mind, but the children took it as a pet. It came with a red ribbon and a little bell around its neck. Stipe loved laughter, once Božović had introduced him to its beguiling power, and now he didn’t miss a single
occasion to arrange it for himself and others. He’d watch little Lucija walking the pig through the village on a string tied to the red ribbon, and he’d laugh as if he was seeing her for the first time. Ekaterini fell even deeper into despair. ‘This is the end of the world!’ she thought to herself in the rare breaks from the housework when she had time to think. However affluent you are, in the countryside you have to work. Every day was full of chores from morning till night. Not only did they need doing, but first she had to learn how to do them; and shrewdly avoid doing some of them. Once she even gave a Gypsy woman her amber necklace so she wouldn’t have to kill a chicken herself. When she later learnt how to do it, she was sad about the necklace. She realised there was nothing in life that couldn’t be learnt when it had to be. Most people arrive at that realisation sooner or later and she was angry that she hadn’t come to her senses earlier.

  The Mlava was considered a small but dangerous river, full of snags and obstacles, but exceedingly beautiful. It was as if the river itself had laid out and nurtured pastoral scenes along both of its banks. Everything came together there – the most luscious grass and several species of birds which nested in the trees perched almost amorously over the river. People flocked down to the Mlava, if not to swim then at least to feast their eyes on it or to dangle their legs in the water and chat. Their mood would change here and all at once they became close, candid and well-intentioned, although beyond the reach of its spell some of them may have killed their father, raped their daughter, seduced a daughter-in-law, swindled or stolen. As clear as spring water, the Mlava and its rapids soothed people’s feet and sweetened their tempers. Where its waters rested, they harboured all five species of frog to be found in Serbia, and the murky bottom was a breeding ground for the carp famous in the big rivers, which the fish had forgotten for love of this silt. The markings of the Mlava’s butterflies convincingly defended the thesis that nature is the greatest artist.

  Lucija remembers family outings to the banks of the Mlava, a willow which at one spot reached right over to the other bank, climbing the tree – a passion which would stay with her even when she was much older – and splashing around in the water until her mother got mad at her: ‘Out of the water! You’re all blue!’ Everyone paints themselves a picture of paradise somewhere during their life; at first an entirely real picture they have once seen, which they later elaborate in their memory. Yearning for an idyll is part of human nature. Lucija would often remember the River Mlava: when she looked out over the roofs of Belgrade from the top of the Second Girls’ Lyceum, trying to gain inspiration for her art homework; she remembers when, during menopause, she wove Wiehler’s gobelins on the doctor’s recommendation; and again during the bombardment of Belgrade in 1999, for no apparent reason. Not the river itself, but a portrait of happiness with the river would remain a haven for her throughout her life.

  Lucija adored her father. For her, he was all-powerful and yet tender; he’d sit her on his knee and sing her songs, and he also taught her to read and write. She remembers well the big box he brought home after one of his wholesale shopping days. He put it in the children’s room, called Lucija and Ljubica and, beaming with joy, full of that anticipation which is the greatest pleasure for those who like to please others, watched their astonished reactions when he lifted the lid. The box was full to the top with stationery. The girls were speechless with amazement. They saw all these things for the first time. They didn’t know if they were enchanted by the exercise books, rubbers, pencils and rulers per se, or by the sheer quantity of stationery, which would surely last them into their high-school days.

  ‘You really pamper the children. You’ll spoil them!’ Ekaterini moralised.

  Unlike Stipe, who barely remembered his mother, Ekaterini had internalised her mother Maria’s golden rule: ‘Beatings are heaven-sent’. Children were to be brought up in a Spartan manner and no other. And on that topic, the two parents argued for the first and perhaps last time. Once Lucija helped herself from a tray of little cakes which her mother had baked in a race against the clock for one of the gatherings of her growing circle of friends, huffing and puffing that she had to cook so much food in this life. She chased after her daughter with a wooden spoon. Lucija was fast and Ekaterini couldn’t catch her, so she gave Ljubica a whack instead, ‘just for good measure’, despite the fact that poor Ljubica had been there by accident, having heard the noise and run in from the courtyard, and was standing there smack bang in the middle of the hall. The girls ran to their father crying, and he received them protectively, calmed them with his gentle voice and hid them between his knees. Ekaterini burst in, brandishing the wooden spoon and accidentally struck her husband. ‘Are you crazy, woman? Are you trying to kill me?!’ My mother recalls that scene with the same vividness as her memory cherishes the pastoral by the river. She loved her mother and over time became ever more attached to her, nursing Ekaterini until she breathed her dying breath in her arms. But self-sacrificing as she was, Lucija was equally in a constant state of agitation. Those two forces were constantly at strife in her mind, and that conflict continued unabated throughout her life in that fertile soil – a battlefield which would never know peace.

  * * *

  As the story goes, during the Second World War my grandfather saved a wounded man by pulling him in through the window after the poor fellow had collapsed beneath it, covered in blood. He patched him up and hid him in the cellar. The man whose life my grandfather saved was of course a soldier, but there are multiple versions as to which army he belonged to. He was a Serb, that much is certain, but whether he was a Partisan or a Chetnik will remain in the dark. Grandfather was a patriot – that was the only conviction he had; he knew exactly what that meant, and all the stories agree on that point. He loved Yugoslavia and hated the German occupiers. Lucija doesn’t remember him ever saying the word hero. ‘This fellow needs help,’ he said as he hauled him onto the double bed. Hardly anyone knows the details of this act, yet it was certain that grandfather considered it a normal, human gesture. There’s no testimonial, veteran’s pension supplement or a single word about it in the historical records.

  We’ll never find out whom grandfather really saved. But a rumour soon spread through the village, as precise as only a moment of the truth can be. As a result, grandfather was given a transfer, formally ‘for official purposes’ but off the record actually designed to do him in; since in his new position he was forced to cover many kilometres on foot, and as such no one except the circumstances could be called the murderer. Stipe walked there and back every day, in every weather. The giant of a man sweated profusely and developed a light, dry cough. Soon it became chronic. One day, sometime in the middle of the war, he became very sweaty and thirsty, and dropped into a café for a mug of cold beer. The next day, instead of going to work, he collapsed into bed. Soon he was hospitalised. He had contracted tuberculosis and lay in hospital in Pančevo. Whether it was easier for her to cope that way or it was really how she felt, Ekaterini treated the visits to her husband as just another chore. She prepared food for him in silence, packed the lunch boxes into a bag, put on her gumboots, walked the muddy road to the railway station, and returned in silence in the evenings. The girls awaited her impatiently and asked how their father was. ‘In God’s hands,’ she’d reply.

  Lucija, my mother, dreamed during her afternoon nap one day that the flue of the stove had came loose and a load of soot fell down on her father’s right shoulder. She woke up with a shout, ‘Daddy’s dead!’ Ekaterini calmed her, reassuring her that it was only a dream, but it made her get ready straight away and head for the hospital. Although she had got a fright when Lucija woke up with a start from her dream, Ekaterini glanced at the clock. It was about five in the afternoon.

  The hospital was full of serious and critical cases. When Ekaterini arrived at around ten in the evening, the doctor dryly expressed his condolences and proceeded to give her basic instructions for dealing with the body, for the umpteenth time in his care
er.

  ‘What time did he die?’ Ekaterini asked.

  ‘I don’t know exactly,’ the doctor replied. ‘I think sometime around five.’

  Less than a month later, from somewhere far away, Pančevo hospital received its first delivery of penicillin.

  Grandfather Stipe used to love clocks. He wound them every morning without fail and enjoyed the ritual of slowly waking up and gradually beginning the day. There was an amazingly beautiful clock on the living-room wall in a battered but equally remarkable housing, made in Thessaloniki by the hand of a craftsman who was undoubtedly also an artist. The clock had stopped long ago and as such was of no practical use to him. But it accompanied him everywhere, on every posting, and he gave it pride of place in every one of the houses he moved into.

  Silence reigned in the house that night when Ekaterini returned from the hospital in Pančevo with the baskets still full of food , untouched, and with everything still wrapped in its newspaper. The girls didn’t ask anything. They knew. Ekaterini, Lucija and Ljubica never felt such mutual closeness as that night when not a word passed between them. And yet each of them longed to be alone. Ekaterini sat in the kitchen and wept silently in the hope of not upsetting the girls any more. Ljubica went straight to bed and lay there staring at the ceiling until noon the next day. Time stood still. Lucija sat quietly in her father’s armchair in the living room. That silence was even harder to bear than the sound of shells exploding – the shells which had made her swear she’d kill herself if she heard them again. And yet she would hear them several times in her life. In the dour muteness of that night, as only a traitor or the most faithful friend can do, the clock suddenly started ticking, though no one had wound it up. Lucija looked at it and smiled. The sound of the clock soothed her almost as her father’s voice would have. At first she thought her father was calling her and that he had found a way of calming her this time, too. Afterwards she didn’t care; she just adored that sound without seeking any meaning or message in it. The clock kept ticking until it too was sold for a kilo of flour: corn flour, of course, poor folks’ food.