Ekaterini

  She looked forward to the splendour, to all the colours and textures she was going to see. They would have been perfect nights if only the ‘Partisan ladies’, as she called them, hadn’t been so exacting. One needed her bottom to be made slimmer, another wanted her waist shrunk, and a third needed her breasts bolstering. She already knew off by heart the demands which the ladies would pronounce in the tone of military commands, with threats of prison or even worse if their figure wasn’t corrected with fabric. Ekaterini wasn’t easily impressed by shouting. She had also become insensitive to the crude words, harsh and repetitive, which were bandied around in the mirror rooms; they penetrated the camel hair, Shetland wool, tweed and silk, and departed irrevocably into other rooms.

  It’s incredible how much you can find out in women’s salons. Here history is retold as it really was, without tailoring to suit particular interests. Ekaterini now understood everything she heard and realised who was whose wife and what position her husband had. What she learnt in those nights between the mirrors, she took with her when she travelled south for the last time. Historians would certainly have envied her this information, because there are also ones among them who really search for the truth. But it was too late. The truth about the mechanisms of the Tito’s era had already hung over her native Paralia for several years and wafted freely along the whole coast of northern Greece. Only there, where no one cared for it.

  * * *

  It was dawn. It was always the crack of dawn when he came in his leather coat. She never remembered his face, although he sat there for a long time, sometimes for hours, and drank a third coffee with rakija; he threatened, made advances, and threatened again, but she just remembered that leather coat.

  ‘Please leave me in peace. I have nothing to confess. My father died – I heard it from another Greek woman – and I haven’t seen my mother, brothers and sisters since forty-one.’

  ‘There’s ALWAYS something to confess! Come on, have a good think. It’s better than if I have to take you away. You’re not going to be uncooperative again like yesterday, are you? Do you really want to spend all day in our office? Come on, jog your memory. For your children’s sake if nothing else.’

  ‘But there’s nothing for me to remember! I wish there was. I’d like to see my mother. But I don’t have a passport. I don’t have money either. You can check, everyone can tell you: Mrs A knows how I make my living, and also Mrs B. And then there’s Mrs C...’

  ‘Watch what you say! What do you mean by ‘missus’?! Those are our distinguished comrades!’

  ‘All right, comrades then. They know. You can ask them.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘You’re a cunning Greek fox! Oh yes, very crafty. You know how to get under people’s skin. But we know how to deal with your sort! Oh yes, we have ways of dealing with everyone!’

  The black automobile, identical to the one which took Ekaterini to the Dedinje villas in the dark, now went in the opposite direction. The dawn ripened into day. Lucija and Ljubica remember the waiting room where their mother left them, after which she disappeared behind a thick door and didn’t come back for hours. They spent six months in that waiting room. Every day the fellow came for them at five in the morning, at the latest.She’d only get to know his name, Živko, the day he stopped coming. For six months she and the girls waited for ‘black leather coat’, and he turned up regularly; then followed the routine of automobile, waiting room, their mother disappearing behind the door, and coming out silent and crushed afterwards. Only once did the door open before she’d spoken her final words: ‘Me, spy on my own country? That’s sick in the head! Never! You can kill me and the children, but I’m not going to sell my country for a passport, a house in Voždovac or any of the things you proposed! Go ahead and kill me! Right now!’ She stood there in the doorway for a while. No sound came from the office. Then she closed the door, this time forcefully, grabbed the girls and headed back the familiar way to the black automobile.

  ‘Bloody Greek whore!’ an unfamiliar woman screamed in the courtyard of the house near Slavija Square. There were several buildings clustered around Sultana’s little house, lots of flats and God knows how many old and also post-war tenants. Everyone went to the window to look.

  ‘Who are you?’ Ekaterini asked from the door as if defending it, but in fact it was her pride that made her go there where she was shielded from the eyes of so many neighbours.

  ‘As if you don’t know who I am! Who let you into our country, you damn whore, so you can ruin my marriage? And you just stand there like a moping widow, you rotten Greek bitch!’

  ‘Please calm down. Why are you insulting me? I don’t think I even know you.’

  ‘Of course you don’t know me! That’s why you take in my Živko every morning! Then you coddle him and ply him with rakija, and we all know what comes after that!’, and with that the woman burst into tears.

  It was a quite a miracle that Ekaterini took all that abuse without even feeling insulted, let alone reciprocating. On the contrary, as soon as she saw the woman she recognised her misery and sympathised with her. That was due to intuition but also experience – she was no stranger to suffering herself.She didn’t know who the woman was, nor the Živko whose name she mentioned hysterically as she wept, yet Ekaterini calmly asked her into the house. To her surprise, the anguished woman accepted. Ekaterini sat her down by the stove, shut the girls into the other room, made coffee and brought out the fruit preserves, and when the woman stopped her sobbing she sat down to talk with her.

  Her name was Dunja, and later Ekaterini was always to speak of her as her saviour. That day, beside the warm stove, with coffee and preserves, they became the best of friends. Dunja told Ekaterini the drama of her life: her father had been a foundry owner, whom the Communists had taken away to prison camp and later killed; her mother then died of grief; their property was confiscated; she had been on an odyssey from flat to flat; in the end she had been forcedto marry Živko, a member of the secret service, OZNA. ‘They blackmailed me by threatening that otherwise my sister and I would be made prostitutes, and afterwards, like all prostitutes who know too much, we’d end up in the River Sava.’ Still, over time Dunjacame to accept Živko and her completely new life, and managed to make a home and even have a child. The baby, called Stalin, was one year old when Dunja turned up in Ekaterini’s courtyard that day. After their long conversation by the stove, Ekaterini would watch him grow every day when she went to their house to sew. She neversaw Živko again. Several years later, Dunja confided in her that he’d been taken away to the prison island of Goli Otok. ‘Serves him right!’ Ekaterini thought to herself, and she had the feeling that Dunja read her thoughts and agreed.

  Her circle of clients gradually spread. She earned good money. The girls had enough to eat and clothes to wear; it was modest attire, but such were the times, and Lucija and Ljubica didn’t stand out from their classmates. And as soon as the borders were opened up, Ekaterini received a passport thanks to Dunja’s connections.

  * * *

  Ekaterini came back from Greece with four baskets full to the top with fruit. Two with oranges and two with lemons. It was such a powerful sight that Lucija and Ljubica completely ignored the first sandals their uncle had sent for them, as well as a dress and a watch each. Whoever dropped by in the next few days – neighbours, friends and clients – would be given two oranges and two lemons each. Grandmother’s hand would dip into the baskets, and when she held out her hands with the fruit she felt she was sharing out manna from heaven. She taught Lucija and Ljubica not to throw away the peels but to lay them on the top plate of the stove. The walls greedily imbibed the aroma. The beauty of the south lies also in the unforgettable. Once scented with the orange and yellow peel, the house remembered that smell forever.

  Husbands

  Whenever they mentioned Maria, it was when talking about cheerful or pleasant things like her delicious, unsurpassed pies, for which there were no recip
es because she made them with love – me agapi. Gold-hearted as she was, they wanted to believe that she had finally gone to join Yorgos, her only love. Not a single tear was shed for her. And their dearly departed Maria smiled down on them, silently following their successes and scolding them when they deserved it; she didn’t allow anyone to grieve. ‘Life is too short for that,’ they heard her voice, as clear as it had once been in the courtyard.

  When they told her what year her mother had died, Ekaterini immediately linked that number with the appearance of ‘black leather coat’. Dunja had given her the smell of oranges and lemons, and, if we believe that every evil has its good, it is perhaps the best way of taking leave of one’s mother. She couldn’t visualise her on her death bed, or even in bed at all, in a horizontal position. Maria continued to dash around her courtyard and kitchen for all eternity. Longing for one’s mother is incurable and often quite disconnected from whether the mother is physically alive or not. Dunja was given two more oranges and two lemons – in memory of Maria, and also for little Stalin.

  Ekaterini’s brothers, at first discreetly and later pretending to authority, tried equally unsuccessfully to marry off their sister. They found truly excellent matches: respectable, well-heeled gentlemen who’d accept a mother of two children. But she didn’t yield. Whether she already had Mr Marić in mind will remain unknown, like almost everything else about grandmother’s love life. She loved to talk about love and especially to listen to others, and she loved to watch romantic movies and cry to love songs. Her final words were that one word repeated twice: agapi, agapi. But she had nothing to say about her own liaisons and would soon deflate the topic with the story about the pilot. Perhaps it was her upbringing – essentially the sole spouse in the lives of women such as her – which made her draw a line. She had amorous adventures, by all means, but kept to the maxim: ‘Only the ill-bred make their bedroom stories public.’

  Mr Marić called several times with flowers, chocolates and linden honey from his bee-keeper brother. One day, Ekaterini informed her daughters that she was getting married. She stuck to the given way of doing things, respecting every detail of the model she was convinced she had brought from her native country, where decorum and family values were respected. And so it went like this: that morning she told them that they had to talk about something important when she came home from work. Lucija got flustered, which was unlike her. After the meal, she made coffee. Ekaterini lit up a cigarette (she had long since been on over ten a day) and said:

  ‘Mr Marić is a fine man. He’s an accounting clerk and earns good money. Plus he’s respected at work – I’ve asked through my clients. It doesn’t bother him that I have children. He loves me, and I’ve decided to marry him.’

  ‘It doesn’t bother him that you have us?!’ the cry burst out of Lucija, unrestrained.

  ‘Calm down, my child, and don’t take me so literally. That’s not what I meant to say.’

  ‘But that’s what you said!’

  ‘So what if I did? I’m a foreigner and don’t know Serbian as well as the two of you! You go to classical lyceum, learn five languages, and it’s me who’s given you that opportunity. Me, a seamstress! But be that as it may, it’s enough. I can’t torment myself any more. I want to enjoy life a bit too.’

  The advent of Marić in their lives led to two versions about their stepfather. Lucija claimed that he was arrogant, selfish and just wanted their mother for himself, and therefore hated everyone to whom she gave attention, even the two of them, her children. In one rendering of this condemnation, Lucija mentioned certain advances which Marić had made towards her – but just her – using an opportunity when Ekaterini wasn’t at home. Ljubica, as usual, hardly had her own version of things; only enough so as to differ from her sister’s in some minor detail. In her version it was not true that he was arrogant, jealous or, heaven forbid, ever laid a finger on one of them.

  Whatever the case, Marić enjoyed life with Ekaterini. He was forty-five, and she was his first love. He learnt what it means to wake up beside someone you love; he discovered the charm of buying flowers, going out to restaurants on special occasions, making excursions and regular shopping trips. It must have been a relief and satisfaction at the same time to go to the market with his wife on Sundays like everyone else. He alone knew how long his happiness really lasted, since it’s impossible to quantify. Seen chronologically, two years later he ended up in a mental hospital.

  ‘He isn’t mad; an embezzlement case was uncovered at work and they removed him because he’s innocent,’ Ekaterini explained to her daughters.

  ‘The loony bin is just where he belongs!’ Lucija snapped.

  Her mother never forgot that remark, perhaps precisely because she didn’t fly off the handle. She felt really, really hurt. According to one version, Marić threw himself out the window of the mental hospital because he couldn’t stand it any more. Another version is more socio-historical: the secret service UDBA carried out many so-called suicides at that time, accompanied by the explanation that the person was ‘of unsound mind’ and almost predictably jumped out the window.

  Ekaterini never married again. Nor did she talk about men, except when she had to analyse potential, and then official sonsin-law. Once, when she had been living alone in the little house near Slavija for some time already, she dreamed that someone woke her at night, pushed her aside, and wanted to get into her bed. In her dream, she woke up and saw that it was Tito.

  ‘But Tito… Comrade Tito – you’re dead!’

  ‘So what? Move over so I can get into bed.’

  Clients

  Marić’s pension was the only memento of the man which changed; small to begin with, it proved over the next six decades that it could always become smaller. Ekaterini had a lot of clients but needed still more to make a decent living. Her circle of ‘comrade ladies’, ‘mother ladies’, ‘comrade-of-a-comrade ladies’, ladies whose families weren’t artful enough and thus fell under the definition of ‘ruined bourgeoisie’, but also ladies who did the best they could to look attractive – this circle of women from the upper layers of society expanded slowly and cautiously. Patience was the best policy in those days, and rectitude the only thing more lucrative.

  One day, while Ekaterini was unpacking the washed and ironed curtains which a courier had just brought to one of the ‘comrade ladies’ who wanted to sew dresses from them for herself and her two daughters and look special for a reception given by Tito, she heard a squeal from the next room:

  ‘Oh no, this is the end of me! My husband will kill me! I’m done for! Again he’ll say: “Didn’t I tell you to keep them in one place?”, and I did – here’s one of them. But where’s the other, damn it?!’

  ‘Madam, what’s happened, if I may ask? Perhaps I can help,’ Ekaterini said softly, not going into the bedroom but standing at the open door.

  ‘You can’t help me. I’ve lost an earring, a diamond earring! Do you know the ones Radovan gave me for the First of May? Well, I’ve managed to lose one of them. Here’s one, but the other seems to have vanished into thin air!’

  ‘Wait a minute, madam, we’ll search the apartment bit by bit. I’ll help, don’t you fret.’

  ‘An apartment like this, bit by bit?! But he’ll be coming home from work in an hour! He mustn’t see me without that ear-ring! Do you understand? He simply mustn’t!’

  Ekaterini stopped listening, got down on the floor and began crawling around on all fours, starting with the surfaces covered in plush carpet. She groped around and even held her ear to the shag, harnessing all her senses. After forty minutes of moving around like this, she found the earring in one of the lady’s daughters’ rooms. The first thing that went through her mind was how well she’d be able to live from one such earring – she and the children would be able to get by without having to work for a good two years. Ekaterini was never ashamed of her thoughts, not even those gut feelings. She had faith in the power of judgement she had inherited from her mother, one c
ould even say tact and diplomacy, and having been fired for refusing to chant ‘Comrade Stalin’ at the rally in no way dented that confidence. She also knew that her intuition didn’t deceive her in situations where she had to react instinctively; she did the right thing. Time was on her side and looked kindly on her actions.

  ‘Here it is, madam. I’ve found it.’

  ‘Where?!’

  ‘Over here,’ she pointed at the deep pile of the pink rug beneath the vanity table.’

  ‘Here?! But what’s the ear-ring doing in my daughter’s room?’

  ‘Things are strange, madam. No one knows their paths. What’s important is that we found it.’

  ‘You’re right! Oh, my dear Kata, I’ll never be able to repay you for this! You’ve saved my life!’

  She offered Ekaterini money, but she refused. With style, of course, and the modesty befitting a dressmaker. Good repute is priceless. Especially its corollary – in just the next week she gained five new clients. Not only did they pay well and frequently seek her services, but Dana, Mirjana, Lela and her sister Kaća would remain grandmother’s friends until the end of her life. The fifth new client was a certain Mrs Bogdanović, who due to combination of linguistic circumstances only came twice, and then never again.

  Ekaterini’s daughters attended classical lyceum. Although she didn’t tell them or want them to know, she was proud of that fact. She listened to how they spoke and was full of admiration. They had learnt so much, and how eloquent they were! As she listened to them she secretly repeated new words to herself; first she learnt them by ear and later found out what they meant. But there were lots of words, and ever more, and many of them remained in the repositories of hearing without an assigned meaning.

  Mrs Bogdanović started being finicky at the very first fitting session. Ekaterini already knew the word ‘to nag’ by then. Obstinate Mrs Bogdanović carped on and on like a scratched record: ‘Downsize the bottom. Yes, it can be done! No, don’t take it in at the waist! Pleating? Certainly not! It has to be close-fitting. No buts, I won’t hear a word of it! I was told you were a top-notch dressmaker, so now you can jolly well prove it.’