Ekaterini

  When Ekaterini reversed her decision about that day being the end, she realised she’d never again lead the kind of life she knew before the pilot with the chocolate, or when she took pleasure in her stride along Paralia, or when she and Stipe moved into their first house. Rare are the moments when we catch a glimpse of the ultimate truth, but they do exist. Sure enough, Ekaterini never again had what we call a good life, and her prophecy lasted for sixty three years, until 1999, when she died in her ninety-eighth year.

  But that day, when food was conjured up as if to spite fate, she learnt several more crucial truths about life. She learnt, for example, that life is full of wonders, that existence itself is a miracle, and that we can study it, take delight in new discoveries and keep learning as if we had been granted three lives. You really don’t need to make things up because that’s pointless, or boring, take your pick. Life is much more interesting. Reality! What’s more, she realised she had to see beauty in moments, to use all the beautiful days which came, and use them to the full.

  And yet poverty is like a disease, a noxious virus. Once we become acquainted with it, it stays inside us forever. Smouldering like embers and biding its time.

  Rations

  Serbia was always one big kitchen of languages. Foreigners came and passed through, or stayed, becoming ‘domestic foreigners’, and later ever greater Serbs. They left behind their blood – or genes, as people say today, but also many a word. Ekaterini loved the Serbian word of Turkish origin ‘taman’, meaning ‘just right’, although she thought it was Jewish because she heard ‘tamano’ for the first time from her playmates in Thessaloniki, children of Sephardic Jews who’d later move to Paris. Living in Serbia, she had to cope with the tongue-twisters, consonant clusters and sibilants in expressions dictated by the circumstances like ‘a teaspoon of’, ‘a handful of’, ‘a pinch of’, ‘one or two fingers’ or ‘three crumbs’.

  During the war they received rations. In her old age, during yet another war, Ekaterini would remember how the biggest ignominy, to her mind, was the lack of cigarettes. When she saw me exhausted one day after a five-hour march to find a carton of ‘Superfilter’, she said: ‘So this is how deep we’ve fallen! This Milošević won’t even let us smoke, and you have to traipse around for a whole day just to get this chaff – if you find it at all! When I think that Hitler gave us ten cigarettes a day!’ She tried hard to be a good example, despite the counter-evidence in the form of overflowing ashtrays, but she didn’t explain that she’d started smoking because of Hitler. I heard that story from Lucija, who kept a vow of secrecy until one day she had to pay a Romanian hustler ten deutschmarks for a pack of ‘Vikend’, after five hours of queuing in front of the kiosk, only for them to announce that the cigarettes were all gone. For years she had withstood hardships by seeing them as part and parcel of ‘taking care of Mama’, but this episode must have just been too much. In her frustration, she revealed to me the big secret: after Stipe died, Ekaterini received cigarettes with the rations; she tried unsuccessfully to trade them and in the end started to smoke ‘so as not to throw them away’; from then on she smoked like a chimney.

  ‘The rich weren’t like these nouveaux riches today,’ was another of Ekaterini’s sayings. She was speaking of the past and thinking of the Bajlonis. Mr Bajloni owned a large mill in the town of Petrovac. He gave people as much flour on commission as he could. Ekaterini had special status because she used to sew for Mrs Bajloni. They entrusted her ten sacks of flour each time, which the workers loaded onto trolleys and took to the train, while Ekaterini arranged the transport within Belgrade and sometimes managed to sell the whole load at the station after arriving. She sold the flour with a mark-up and kept the difference for herself. If she sold all ten sacks of flour, which was most often the case, the price of one sack was hers.

  That same ‘businessman with a heart’ recommended that she accept Janko.

  ‘But I alone, with two small girls! How I can take man into the house?’

  ‘He’s not like that, you know. He won’t hurt you. Janko is a good man, and hard-working like every Slovenian. He’ll help you. What’s more, he gets official’s rations.’

  The girls took a liking to Janko. He was mild-mannered and truly a hard worker: when he finished one job, he’d immediately started on the next. When the landlady suggested he take a rest, he’d reply that work was his relaxation. Ekaterini was away from home ever more often and relied on her eldest daughter to do all the housework. In a way, she began to ‘replace’ her mother, accepting or rather actively adopting that role for the rest of Ekaterini’s life. Years of peace would come, but even as a grown woman and a mother Lucija never shrugged off the sayings she developed as a girl: ‘This is how Mama does it’, ‘Mama prefers it this way’, ‘Mama would never do that’, ‘Mama wouldn’t even have tried this!’

  As well as doing the many household chores and looking after her sister, Lucija also took care of her own ‘child’, the cat Mara. She brought her up strictly, just as she had been brought up herself. When she later heard the word ‘Spartan’, she found a way of inserting it into everything she said, even when it sounded forced. No wonder Mara was obedient when it received so many beatings! Lucija imitated her mother in every way – with one exception. ‘If I have a daughter, I’ll call her Mara too,’ she said, stroking the cat. ‘I’ll pet and pamper her like I do with you. Not like Mama, who’s never ever caressed us!’ And it was true: Ekaterini only kissed the girls when she thought they were asleep. This made sleepy Lucija try to stay awake for as long as possible so as to savour that small dose of tenderness, that frugal fare.

  Just before liberation, Russian soldiers arrived in the village. They were billeted out in the houses. Ekaterini was terrified. She had heard a good many stories about drunken Russians raping every woman they found, even old women. ‘Don’t worry, dear, I’ll sort things out,’ Janko comforted her. He used his connections to ensure that they were sent a group of five officers instead of common soldiers, though Ekaterini locked the girls into the next room just in case. But as soon as they entered the house she was fascinated by their bearing; she had never seen such fine manners and only had an inkling of them from mythical stories in Madam Atina’s salon of faraway French monsieurs. These officers would stand up as soon as a woman, or rather a lady, entered the room, assist her with her chair, help her with her coat, and show photographs of their beautiful wives in fur coats and hats as well as children in sailor suits like her brothers wore long ago. They led Ekaterini to the discovery that there was only one type of man who was good for her – the gentleman.

  Shock Worker

  After the end of the war, Godfather Božović turned up. He explained that he wasn’t allowed to tell them where he had been and what he had been doing between the time of the big family feast and liberation. Having got used to a conspiratorial way life in this country, Ekaterini asked no questions. Godfather Božović soon became Yugoslav ambassador in Moscow, but before that he found a room with a little kitchen in Belgrade and invited his god-daughter and the girls to move there. The small courtyard house had two rooms. The other was inhabited by Sultana, a Greek woman devoted to her employer, Živojin. She had come as a girl to work as a maidservant when Živojin’s wife, Milica, was ill. Živojin worshipped his wife, nursed her all by himself, and none of the numerous domestic staff were allowed to approach her. Even when she was bedridden he continued to buy her jewellery. Not a day passed when he didn’t at least try to make her happy in some way. Milica took a liking to the new girl and asked her to tell her, as best she could, about her ancestors from Armenia and Turkey. Milica would start to cry when Sultana, struggling in the new language, tried to describe the pogrom against the Greeks in Edirne. Živojin listened to these stories behind the door of his wife’s room and cried too; he withdrew into the kitchen and wept convulsively. As soon as his wife fell asleep, Sultana went into the kitchen to comfort him. And so it was that he didn’t even notice that he fell in love with her.
He was convinced that he saw his wife through to the end honourably and was faithful to her until her death, and beyond. In the confusion of nationalisation he gave all the jewellery to Sultana to hide and also made the courtyard house over to her. He died soon afterwards, yet he lived long enough to cure Sultana of any desire to marry. No man was worthy of the memory of those several years spent with Živojin.

  * * *

  Ekaterini found work at the Dressmaking Cooperative. ‘Those Partisans girls are peasants and ignorant bunglers!’ she’d hiss when she came home in the evenings. Lucija would always be waiting for her with dinner ready – ‘as Mama likes it’ – and would bring a basin of hot, salty water for her feet. By that time, she had taken over doing the household completely. She waited every evening for her mother to praise her, and this was the only reward she wanted, and for which she was prepared to do anything. But the reward would regularly be forgotten because of the ‘Partisan girls with a two-month needlework course if you’re lucky, those clumsy, brassy botchers!’ For Ekaterini, the biggest benefit of the job, which she had been forced to take, was the opportunity to vent her feelings in the time between leaving work and going to bed. She’d rail against the new authorities, their sycophants and all the ‘consequences of communism’. ‘Lackadaisical’ became her favourite word.

  Yet Ekaterini spontaneously exceeded the work norm seven times and was awarded a shock-worker badge. This brought her the envy of the whole cooperative. She didn’t care for that either. ‘What do I need their commie badges for! They should give money! Huh, but they’re not going to!’ She’d spend almost all her life in socialism but never gain a clear notion of what communism really was. Nor did she want to know. For her it was something terribly bad, a calamity worse than foreign occupation. Grandmother was what they sometimes called reactionary. In reality she just grumbled, happy that she had at least something to label the culprit of the life she lived. She loved gentlemen and the ethos of lost times, but she also had friends who had been Partisans. After refusing to chant ‘Comrade Stalin, lead the way! We follow every word you say!’ at a mass meeting one day, she was given the sack. Ironically, this was the break she had been waiting for. She started sewing for private clients in their houses, and she always took with her the faithful Jelena – a country girl from near Požarevac who had won great fame for her bravery as a member of the resistance movement during the war, and the only fellow worker at the Cooperative who Ekaterini had taken a liking to. But Jelena went on these ‘missions’ secretly so the Party secretary wouldn’t find out, not so much to partake in Ekaterini’s baksheesh but to follow her passion to master the skill of dressmaking. That shared passion for sewing never died; it bound them, and when they grew old and stopped working they still met regularly in Kalemegdan Park in Belgrade.

  * * *

  It was a time of food stamps and there was no time for love, at least not for Ekaterini. When she wasn’t at work, she had to queue for rations; two hundred grammes of bread and one hundred grammes of meat – whatever they hacked off, sometimes just bone. And then it was wrapped it in newspaper or whatever paper they had at hand. Lucija was the real carnivore of the family and the only one who could eat the ham and prunes from the UNRRA parcels.

  Lucija and Jelena walked for kilometres and kilometres, even leaving the city just to get some horsemeat. Ekaterini went livid: ‘I’d rather starve than eat horse!’ But Lucija’s hunger for meat was even stronger than the unquenchable desire to please her mother in everything she did.

  Lucija was fourteen when Ekaterini plonked a bundle of meat – or bones, there was no telling – on the kitchen table one day; she left it, with repulsion, and went to finally take her shoes off. She rubbed her swollen feet for a long time and muttered to herself in Greek. In the other room, strangely, the girl was in no hurry to unwrap the parcel, and had already been staring at the paper for some time. It was sheet music. She kept it and later showed it to Miss Marta, her piano teacher, with whom she secretly had lessons. ‘Oh my God, this tops it all!’ was the exasperated reply. Miss Marta was a first-class piano teacher in Belgrade at the time and the only one who taught at the music school despite having been branded a member of the ‘traitorous bourgeoisie’. ‘To think of using Beethoven to wrap up meat! And it was even bones, you say? What ignoramuses!’

  When Lucija first started lessons, Ekaterini believed her daughter was just ‘going for a walk’. Miss Marta let Lucija play her cherished, one could even say historical, piano – the only item her family had ‘stolen back’ from THEIR house after they were evicted during the war; and this was only possible because she spoke perfect German and had the daring to knock on their OWN door and ask the German officers to at least let her have HER piano. At home Lucija practiced on a piece of paper with piano keys drawn on it.

  By the time Ekaterini became suspicious of her daughter’s regular walks, Lucija was one of the best students at the Mokranjac music school. One day, when she noticed that Lucija had put on some of her better clothes and even made herself pretty, Ekaterini decided to shadow her. When Lucija entered the school building, Ekaterini couldn’t believe her eyes. She waited a moment and then followed her in. A cacophony of pianos, violins and wind instruments assailed her from all sides. She followed her daughter to the auditorium, actually a largish classroom where, as she would soon find out, internal auditions were held. There she found the audience getting seated and took a seat herself. Then the students performed on the stage, one after another. When it was Lucija’s turn, loud applause rang through the auditorium. No more and no less than Bach! The fugue, said the lady next to her, but by then Ekaterini was completely bewildered, feeling as if she was watching a film and caught up in it; she couldn’t catch which fugue it was, as the air was filled with roars of ‘Encore!’ as soon as the playing ceased. Then Lucija played once more, before finally leaving the stage. Ekaterini ran up to her daughter, grabbed her by the ear while she was being commended by the other students, and led her like that all the way home, where her only reaction to Lucija’s great effort and success was to beat the living daylights out of her.

  ‘Why you lie at me, your mother?!’

  ‘But tell me at least – how did I play?’

  ‘You never lie to me again, understand? And now let me to calm down! I can hardly breathe! Later I’ll ask you where you know all that from!’

  Severity is most often a mask. The question is what lies beneath it. Ekaterini never developed a liking for Bach, nor even Chopin. Her devotion to music was limited to having dreamed of playing the guitar when she was a girl; crying to Greek songs, later to French chansons, and later still to ‘Yugonostalgic’ ballads. Nevertheless, she decided to borrow the money needed buy her daughter a piano so she wouldn’t have to ‘go begging to other peoples’ houses’. Uncle Jova and Aunt Ružica, Stipe’s sister, agreed to give them an interest-free loan under one condition: that whenever they came to visit – and their visits became more and more frequent, Lucija play them the popular song ‘Mummy, Buy Me a Cannon’ as often as they wished. Everything has its price and it is always relative: what is ridiculously cheap for one person is outrageously expensive for another. Ekaterini found this silly little whim amusing and laughed every time; but Lucija was despondent. She kept playing that song until the very last dinar of the loan was repaid, shortly before enrolling in the music academy.

  Freedom is when You Can Go South

  It was night. It always had to be night when the black automobile came for Ekaterini and whisked her away. It was a darkness which eliminated all vision and left only voices.

  ‘Comrade, you’re coming along with us,’ the driver would say each time.

  Now she knew where they were taking her: to the villas of Dedinje, in the wealthiest suberb of Belgrade. She stopped saying farewell to the girls and bequeathing them her testament of tears as she had done when the ‘government vehicle’ pulled up in front of Sultana’s drab little house for the first time. They paid her well for her assignme
nts, if the truth be told. The only condition was that she not say a word to anyone: ‘Where you were, what you were doing? Nothing.’ Everything has some strings attached, of course, but since Ekaterini calmed down after the first night, Lucija suspected that the condition was easier for her mother to bear than it was for her to play ‘Mummy, Buy Me a Cannon’ at least once a week.

  The automobile glided to one of the Dedinje villas, sometimes even as far as the White Palace, often to an exclusive neighbourhood where they said Tito lived with his wife and entourage. ‘What’s the occasion now?’ she speculated and made a wager with herself. She loved games of chance. ‘Just some party of theirs, or a big reception? How many ladies will be there and how much work? When will I be going home? Will I be going back at all?’ Sometimes it was just for a night, other times for several days. The only information was that there was no information.

  The premises for sewing convincingly resembled, or in most cases were identical to, the best dressmaking salons in the world. ‘They don’t cut corners here!’ she thought, and the idea appealed to her. Here, at least, was a little luxury beyond her dreams. And there would always be material to delight her – an abundance of fabrics, not to mention the huge, adjustable worktops with thread, buttons and all the accessories she needed; new Singer sewing machines; walls covered with mirrors; as many assistants as she wanted; foods she had never tried before; and, when the work was done, a glass of whisky or French cognac.

  Contrary to widespread opinion, in delicate situations such as these in the upper echelons of power no one asked if you were a Party member or vetted your long-vetted past. All that counted was your skill, and Ekaterini’s repute as a dressmaker had reached those at the very top. She even began to enjoy that quiet drive. She never knew if she’d be coming back or if this was a journey of no return, but she wasn’t afraid.