Ekaterini

  The Step

  What gives us a sense of security? People here say it is the ground beneath our feet, although there are people who feel more secure up in the air or even out at sea. Perhaps it is a base then, or a backdrop to our lives, which provides a refuge.

  Is there a my-home-is-my-castle common denominator valid for all people across different dispositions, cultures and eras – something which guarantees us permanence? Or is it different for each individual? That’s what they say in English, the language which everyone understands today, like they once did the mixture of languages and dialects in Thessaloniki or Vršac. Maybe those universal bastions also change over time depending on the individual, the circumstances or some other plural?

  The soil we come from must be one, surely. It betrays us first of all, and we it, although we continue to cling to each other like the foundation and the rest of a house fused together after an earthquake. If we leave it, nostalgia pursues us in different forms: disguised in a single smell, in a pictorial superstructure like Lucija’s gobelin of the River Mlava, in the word ‘family’ or in a longing for particular people who remind us of the deep loss. It can tenaciously observe us from the corner of lodgings we find ourselves in for the first time. And it can remain entrenched in us like a morbid heirloom shut away in a particular room for safety. We imagine at least half our lives.

  Ekaterini loved dreams, as she did films. Instead of insisting on a distinction between dreams and reality, she was rigorous on the question of beauty versus everything else – the worthless. That year when she was in Greece for the last time, sensing her imminent death and accepting it in a kind of tacit agreement, she noticed the beautiful colour of the earth. She stirred it, furrowed its surface with her fingers and filled it into a flowerpot which she’d look at briefly in her room there in Greece; then she took it with her back to Belgrade and instructed us to sprinkle it over her final resting place when the hour came.

  The world is sometimes beautiful, but language is always a miracle. ‘I know what you miss here most: jokes in your own language,’ an American friend said. It’s a widely held belief that when we live in a different place for a long time the ‘here’ and the ‘there’ converge almost to the point of overlapping. Real bonds are those between two abstractions. Ekaterini’s daughters teased her for forgetting Greek and never learning Serbian properly. I was horrible and told her on a completely different occasion that she spoke like the Serbian-Greek comedy figure Kir Janja, but she didn’t get angry. She took these comments as if they didn’t relate to her all, as if they were beyond her and from a totally different plane. She knew that no one could fathom the mystery of language; and she knew that she didn’t know, which is a significant realisation. That’s why she so readily became melancholic whenever she heard Greek songs, even if she didn’t understand all the words, or when she listened in on Greek students in the bus – not because their relationship problems interested her but because of the words; she longed to hear those words and their sound, their melody, as she used to say. Language is pure longing. Our first and final love, although we only discover it through its lack.

  Various things can give us a sense of security: family, a beloved being or beings, customs whose repetition is reassuring. Some find calm in a comfortable life with possessions and a full house, others in the opportunity to roam and wander free. Peace can certainly play that role too, in the long or short pauses between wars. As can hard times which could easily have been the end of us, but which we survived, and become the strongest foundations of all to have been invented. They’re like wisdom after a shipwreck for the survivors, in a life which in Serbian we’d call ‘a gift’. For some, it’s enough to hear just one ‘I love you’, se agapo.

  We usually rely on things which are on the same level as us or higher – recognisable things. Therefore children are undoubtedly a strong motive, but not something that can give us a sense of security. From her father’s death through to the end of Ekaterini’s life, Lucija longed to be a substitute for everything her mother had lost through her father’s death. That’s what she thought as a child, all through girlhood; she believed in it as a woman, too; and when she finally became a mother herself, she was completely convinced of her redemptive mission vis-à-vis her mother. Illusions like Lucija’s are nothing but empty and dangerous dreams, like when a person doesn’t realise to what degree they’re still a child and pretend to be an adult whatever it takes; usually there’s no end to it. This role-playing is inevitable, and according to Aristotle it is the essence of growing up; Shakespeare, on the other hand, saw it as more than that, since all the world’s a stage. Precocious children are bad imitators. This fitted into Ekaterini’s conception of beauty, which Lucija considered frivolous. Besides, every story could find support in the idea of the golden mean.

  Ekaterini was only spared thinking about security in those few years when she strode along Paralia on the way back from Madam Atina’s salon, a little tired but content and proud; she felt that was her step. That new stride gave her a taste of independence and she learnt what it means to be the master of one’s destiny, or at least to feel that way, which is the same thing. Because a feeling is a truth in itself, and the proof that she was right was precisely that step, a measured step which was just spot on: lithe, slightly seductive, slightly roguish – especially when she’d gaze out to sea - a continuous, resolute stride. She was convinced she possessed it. Imbued with the confidence of that step she was also able to stop, sit down for a moment or jump into the sea without a care for ‘what people might say’; she had overcome those words her mother Maria spoke like a mantra, or rather an iron rule of conduct. She felt she could do anything. There, and never again. But that once was quite enough.

  That inalienability heartened her and gave her courage throughout her life, even when it seemed that all the armies in the world had marched into the village on the banks of the River Mlava, and when she fled before the bullets, had to go hungry, was threatened, sad or feared for her life, although that was only briefly, during her first heart attack. That step stayed with her even when her legs went wobbly with fear or, more rarely, happiness. It guided and returned her to where she had met it, once and forever.

  Infectious

  Why you not take me, dear God? Why you torture me? Why you make me live like this, alone with two children? There’s no way out. Better for you take us straight away!

  Thoughts like this, like prayers condensed into several words, often came back to her, ringing in her ears and scaring her like the Devil when he hounds someone without respite. There’s no fear greater than those thoughts which arise within us and whose repetition leads us to take them on and consider them our own. Ekaterini was a Christian, and what’s more – she loved life. But the situation she was in seemed truly inescapable, with no sign of any improvement on the horizon and much to suggest that things might even worsen.

  Even while Stipe was still alive, she had secretly traded crystalware, gold coins, jewellery and what remained of her fine wardrobe for a whole sack of flour, and later for a little bag of flour or salt, and in the end for just one egg. War knows no measure. Somehow she reconciled herself with that more easily than Stipe. She wanted to spare him the indignity, to at least not tell him what she was doing, although somewhere he knew. As soon as he saw a new loaf of bread on the table he imagined he’d soon be lifting a piece of crystalware, gold or silver to his mouth. But he loved this benevolent deception. He loved his Kata until the end of his life and didn’t miss a single gesture of hers which could be taken as a sign of love.

  His death cast Ekaterini into a desperate existential struggle. The first idea she had was to sell off the furniture. The main buyers in those parts at that time were ethnic Germans, particularly the German women, whom she remembered as a people of extremes: either they’d give you their soul, or heartlessly take your life. One German woman, a widow like herself, literally never baked a loaf of bread, made hot cakes or even just polenta without sharin
g it with Ekaterini and her daughters.

  Another woman came that day to have a look at the goods. Ekaterini took everything out into the courtyard, and the woman rode around the things on her bicycle, inspecting and valuing them at her leisure.

  ‘I’ll give you two sacks of flour and one sack of salt for all this.’

  ‘And sugar? Please, lady, I have small children – one sack of sugar.’

  ‘All right, but that’s all! And you can give me that pram there, too. Your children are big and you don’t need it.’

  Ekaterini agreed and was happy for it. The German woman went away and soon came back with a truck. The workmen loaded the furniture into it: walnut-wood cupboards, glass cases, what was left of the crystalware, armchairs, stools, a beautiful couch she had been given by her parents ‘so you and your husband can sit on it together for a long, long time’, and lastly the pram. Ekaterini and the two girls were left in the gloom, beneath a dim light bulb in an almost completely empty house.

  ‘Mama, Mama, my doll is still in the pram!’ little Lucija suddenly yelled. ‘Please go and ask the lady to give it back.’

  ‘I can’t, my child,’ Ekaterini muttered. ‘You saw what the lady’s like. She won’t give anything back.’

  ‘Please, mummy, please!’

  It was an ordinary rag doll of no real value, but Ekaterini knew how much it meant to Lucija. So she went back to the lady.

  ‘An agreement is an agreement!’ the German woman reprimanded the downhearted Ekaterini. ‘When are you Balkan folk ever going to learn to stick to agreements?!’

  The doll was forever lost for Lucija, yet that one event suddenly gave Ekaterini the will to fight; she felt a real pugnacious fervour. That same night, on the way back from the German woman’s house, she first went home, silently took the tongs and kitchen pan, and then sneaked up to the German coal store and cut a hole. Being of slight build, she easily squeezed through the small hole and began filling coal into the pan.

  ‘Stop! Who goes there?’ she heard out of the dark.

  ‘I, the Greek woman.’

  ‘Is that you, Kata?’ It was Milan speaking, a man from her neighbourhood, whom the Germans had mobilised to guard the coal store.

  ‘Of course it’s me.’

  ‘Are you crazy? I could have killed you! Typical mad woman!’ ‘I not mad. My kids are cold. There nothing to make fire with. I already burned the chairs, rags, paper... I used up everything.’

  ‘I know. But you mustn’t do this.’

  ‘What else I can do?’

  ‘Well, I’ve got an idea for us.’

  ‘For us? What idea?’

  ‘I let you in when I’m on guard duty, and later we have a bit of nookie. All right?’

  ‘What is “nookie”?’

  ‘You know what I mean! Come on, don’t play the fool – I’ve just caught you breaking into the coal store...’

  ‘Listen here, Milan, you are good-for-nothing! You kill me now, if you wants! Shoot! You know, you are one big good-fornothing! No need your “nookie”. I go, and you shoot!’

  Ekaterini kept stealing coal from the Germans, making sure she went when Milan wasn’t on guard duty. The main thing was that the hole remained. But the myth about Greek women being ‘easy game’ was far from being just a traditional prejudice of Serbs. One day, while she was making a big pot of plum jam, a Bulgarian soldier turned up. As soon as she saw him, she knew he was no different to Milan: she knew what he wanted. So she invited him into the house with pretend hospitality, found a glass of rakija for him somewhere, got out the fruit preserves she’d been given by the good German woman, and welcomed him like a good host should. While the fellow was making himself comfortable, Ekaterini quickly called the girls to her and dabbed spots of the red jam on all uncovered parts of their bodies. Then she ‘camouflaged’ herself in the same way. She hugged the girls and went into the house, where the Bulgarian was eagerly expecting her.

  ‘You are welcome guest, but better you go and run away from us.’

  ‘Why? What’s the trouble, love?’

  ‘We are sick. One soldier come here, he stay a week. From then, we all sick.’

  ‘A soldier? Where from?’

  ‘He wear uniform, but I not know what army.’

  ‘What are you sick with?’

  ‘You see this red spots?’

  ‘Yes. What is it?’

  ‘Shyphilis.’

  It struck her that she’d just pronounced the difficult ‘sh’ sound for the first time in her life, even in a word that didn’t have it! It’s amazing what panic does to you. Only after her moment of astonishment did she glance out and see the Bulgarian running for the gate without a glance backwards.

  * * *

  Fortunately, it takes all sorts of people to make a world. Yet we only recognise those differences and their advantages clearly when we’re in a difficult situation and depend on other people’s help. Not everyone cultivated the myth about easy Greek women. There were people with quite different preoccupations. The Partisans needed sheepskin hats, shirts and warm breeches. She sewed them at night, covering the window with a thick blanket so the lamp wouldn’t be seen. For her trouble, she was usually just given receipts, but now and then a Partisan or a neighbour from the same village brought a tin of food, a cupful of flour, a few plums – something to keep them going. At first the young woman who came to pick up the items behaved like a stalwart militant: ‘Death to fascism! Have you finished the job, comrade?’ But over time she relented and would leave a piece of fabric so Ekaterini could sew something for the girls, and when there was parachute silk to spare she made underwear for them all. In the end, the courier would surreptitiously produce a piece of food from her bag, exclaiming, ‘For the children, our future!’

  The proprietor of ‘Balkan’, the local coffee house, remained the main personality in the village during the war, just as he had been before. Until this war broke out, his daughter was considered the disgrace of the family, even more so than his son Dragan, who was interested in cooking and handicrafts. His sister, Danica, wore trousers and sat around in the coffee house drinking and smoking together with the visitors. One morning she came to Ekaterini’s house. That was the first and last time Danica knocked on her door. Ekaterini felt a slight shudder, anticipating what she might want. She knew Danica had some kind of influence, not only from her wealthy father, and this set all her instincts on edge.

  ‘You have to leave the house at once! You can sleep at our place if you want.’

  ‘Why should we flee from our house?’

  ‘The Jerries are going to make a raid in a few hours time. You’re on the list. Whoever they catch is sent to prison camp, and there’s no coming back. Do as I say and don’t tell anyone I told you. Do you understand? No one! I’m risking my life because of you. If you say a word and someone happens to ask me, I’ll say you’re lying. Believe me! Now smarten up. You have two hours.’

  Dragan was the complete opposite of his sister. He often dropped in, helped with the housework, played with Lucija and Ljubica, and made toys for them from leftover pieces of metal or wood, or even from clay. He delighted Ekaterini with his enthusiasm and attention while she was crocheting, and he absorbed her every move, insatiable for learning new patterns. Since she needed wool and thread, he supplied her by stealing from his parents’ house. Anything he judged that members of the household had forgotten, he crammed into his breeches. The girls would always laugh when Dragan started pulling out a ball of wool hidden in his underpants; it had often unravelled and got lost deep down between his legs, so it took a while to wind it up again.

  But all of that, and even the plethora of jobs and little assignments Ekaterini took on, couldn’t avert the day when they lay down in bed, expecting never to get up again. For days they had had nothing to eat. No one called by, and Ekaterini had had enough of begging in the village every day. ‘All right, that’s enough! If we have to die, we die in peace, in our own bed,’ she decided and laid her dau
ghters down beside her. They lay there in silence. The hours passed by and brought their own vision of eternity. And then someone tapped at the window. ‘Is that our fate?’ the now frail Ekaterini thought. ‘Here it is – death has come for us.’ She had no strength, and even less will, to get up. But fate was persistent. The knocking continued and became ever louder. In the end, Ekaterini became agitated and eventually got up to answer the door.

  ‘Oh my God, you look terrible!’ her neighbour Marica gasped.

  ‘Leave me. We go to bed and wait for death. I not able to take this life no more!’

  ‘What are you saying, woman? Have you lost your mind? What death?!’

  ‘No food, no strength, why I live?’

  ‘But you have to live! It’s not for you to play God and decide when you’re going to live and when you’re not. And you’re condemning the children to death. Really! Listen, I’ll be straight back. I’m just going home to get a bit of food, and we’ll share what we’ve got.’

  ‘And tomorrow?’

  ‘Listen to me: every day is a day of life! Understand? You have to be grateful for every day you wake up alive – you and your children as well! Now go back into the house, and when I next tap at the window don’t leave me standing around in the freezing cold!’