Ekaterini

  At that time, the choir of the Yugoslav People’s Army performed works by Mozart, Bach, Verdi and other composers of that calibre. Fifty years later, the choir would shrink to a quarter of its former size and their repertoire diminished to background vocals. Such was the spirit and style of the times. Fortunately, Lucija and Luka had retired by the time the ‘turbodiets’ of poverty came in. Their small pensions were also in keeping with the general trend of devaluation. But Tito, who ordered the Requiem or Passion in person, knew what he was doing. Europe was all abuzz about “Tito’s fantastic choir”. A team of designers and costume makers worked hard to produce elegant dresses and suits according to the latest style. Make-up artists had the final word in the creation of a “refined but not excessively luxurious look”. Since it was officially an army choir, although composed of civilians, an element of military discipline had to be present, if only in various details. The costumes included specially designed uniforms. On one occasion, after a concert at the scene of the famous Battle of the Sutjeska, an old guy with a stick hobbled up to Luka in a uniform from the Second World War with several rows of jingling medals.

  ‘Which arm of the forces are you from, son?’

  ‘The Artistry!’

  ‘Aha! So we’ve got that now too.’

  Their wedding day was ever closer in their minds, though neither of them mentioned a date. As perfectly bonded as they were, they could have married any minute. They just needed to talk their fellow choir member Mr Marović into being their marriage witness. The very idea was a great honour for Marović, so much so that worrying about a suitable wedding present cast him into gloom and almost made him ill; he was tormented by the problem of what to buy for the young couple, and where to get the money. It definitely had to be an impressive gift, far beyond his pay as a rank-and-file member of the choir. Marović felt he had got himself into an utter dead end. But one day, unexpectedly, a foreign dignitary announced that he’d like to visit Tito’s residence. The choir was in a state of readiness – from morning until the reception scheduled for six in the afternoon they had practiced their repertoire of ‘light pieces’. Now the programme was under way. Tito gave a gentle smile; no one could see any difference in the way he held the crystal glass with whisky and the cigar. No one except Luka the ‘devil’, as his mother had called him ever since he was a childhood.

  ‘Comrade Tito!’ he managed to break through several concentric circles of security guards. ‘Would you perhaps like something a little more cheerful?’

  ‘You’re a bright young fellow! What’s your name? Ah, a beautiful Yugoslav name. What else can you sing?’

  ‘One of our members, Marović, soon to be best man at my wedding, has a repertoire of Mexican songs but is a bit embarrassed. He thinks they’re not up to your standard.’

  ‘You’re a pert young man! Well, what are you waiting for? Call that – what’s his name – Marković! Why should he be embarrassed? Let’s say I commanded that he sing! But first let’s each have a whisky.’

  ‘I’d rather not, thanks.’

  ‘Come on, lad, don’t disappoint me. I’m not offering you whisky because of you, you know, but because of me!’ Tito laughed uproariously, looking at Luka, whose jaw dropped in bewilderment.

  ‘Er, because of you I will!’

  ‘That’s the spirit! But don’t drink, just hold the glass, and when my doctor there isn’t looking you pour me the rest.’

  ‘Of course, Comrade Tito! I won’t take a single sip!’

  ‘All right, you can have a sip, but mind you leave enough for me.’

  After that night, Marović became a household name. He made a career for himself and soon had plenty of money. He stood before Tito and his retinue and sang Mexican songs. He sang badly, and the guests laughed and took it to be some kind of clown number. But when he was singing La Paloma and crowed the cock-a-doodle-doo, something strange happened: Tito’s white poodles started to howl! Tears of laughter ran down Tito’s face: ‘Come on, Marković, sing it again, but only that bit!’ Marović howled with the poodles until Tito said, ‘All right, that’s enough. A man can tire of laughing too!’ He bowed his head. The closest security guard pressed his ear up against Tito’s whisper: ‘See that this Marković becomes a famous singer.’ Marović bought the bridegroom Luka an EI Niš television set – the best which Yugoslav electronics had to offer – after which he stopped worrying. That was the most important deed for him. Lucija and Luka could now finally get married.

  * * *

  Although Ekaterini allowed no one to assuage her dissatisfaction with the profession of singer, and particularly with the marital combination of two singers, the wedding was celebrated in her courtyard with all due dignity and ceremony. Sultana had died one year before and the local council had allocated Ekaterini her room, along with the hall and the toilet. The wedding was a modest affair or, as Ekaterini put it, ‘without going overboard, but with style’. But the wedding dress was enough to take people’s breath away. It was the creation of a lifetime for Madam Atina’s best pupil. She made it from different materials: parachute silk, a pair of curtains, several metres of lace she had been given as a gift after five end-to-end days of sewing at a villa in the Senjak neighbourhood, and with some improvised details which seemed like a kingly seal on a diploma for artisanal excellence.

  Ekaterini stood welcoming the guests as they arrived. At one point she realised she hadn’t seen Lucija for a while. She entrusted Ljubica to take her place at receiving the guests and started to look for Lucija about the house. Hearing a gentle sobbing from the bathroom, she opened the door without knocking and found her daughter sitting there on the wooden stool in her wedding dress and crying.

  ‘What, already?’

  ‘Oh, leave me alone!’

  ‘Come on, it’s just all the excitement. Get up now, the guests are arriving!’

  ‘Mama, why don’t you show some feelings for once.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. Just let me have a good cry.’

  ‘Hang on, my child. Won’t you tell your mother why you’re crying?’

  ‘No! I don’t have anyone to confide in when I’m down.’

  ‘That’s not true! Don’t be unfair to your mother. Of course she loves you. Who else do I love if not my children? Come on, you can tell me.’

  ‘It’s Luka...’

  ‘What about Luka?!’

  ‘Just a minute ago he told me where he’s taking me for our honeymoon, the cretin!’

  ‘Hold on. Where’s he taking you?’

  ‘To some wretched campsite with the Youth Hostel crowd! In a train with wooden benches, and we’ll spend our honeymoon in a tent! Do you see what I mean now?!’ Lucija burst into tears.

  ‘There there, my child. Don’t get so upset. He just didn’t think.’

  ‘That’s the trouble – he didn’t think!’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to get used to that. That’s what men are like. They don’t know the first thing about women!’

  ‘But I’m getting married to the guy!’ By now she had stopped crying and instinctively began worrying about her smeared mascara and the locks of hair which had come loose from the bun.

  ‘It doesn’t matter one scrap who you marry. But now that you’re getting married, take it from your mother: learn as soon as possible to see your advantage.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It’s easy. He’ll never know what’s in your head. Mothers know, and women in general, but men – never! Just use the common sense there in your pretty head! To start with, do yourself up to look like the happiest woman in the world. Let him think he’s done the right thing. Let him always think he’s got the pants on. And then, goodness me, just work out how to have your way with him. You’re a woman, after all. Women learn fast.’

  She may have tried, but she never learnt. And if Luka accepted someone else’s will, which he did, it was Ekaterini’s, articulated subconsciously in Lucija’s lovely soprano.

  Justice

&n
bsp; Justice is probably the greatest illusion of this, the only civilisation we know. It leads us to not only make assumptions but also to reach definite conclusions about all of existence.

  Faith in justice is essential. But without scepticism, it’s pure stupidity. It takes talent to bring together faith and scepticism. In other words, we’re talking about exceptions. Society is no exception – it’s the mass of people. The system of justice is necessary so that the masses don’t butcher each other, or at least so that the massacre be contained. Complications arise when people try to wed the social system to the concept of justice. The best analogy is an incurable disease. That’s brutal but correct. Why did someone fall ill? Did they deserve it? As soon as we start asking that question or use the concept of victimhood, we fall into the dark abyss of justice.

  The cure for this kind of illness are those life experiences which, if we survive them, make us wiser. Therefore it was clear that Ekaterini couldn’t believe in justice, although she often referred to it, as a good upbringing requires. Lucija believed her mother’s words, so much so that Ekaterini was sometimes struck when she realised to what degree her daughter listened to her without understanding. Taken literally, any word is really debased. Reduced to one dimension, it’s just a brick in the wall of ideology. For Lucija, justice was an ideology. That level of faith doesn’t tolerate scepticism. It rests on steep ascents and abrupt plunges. Hardly anyone recovered from their disillusionment with justice.

  Bathing Beauty

  Lucija sat down to have a cigarette and sweeten it with the remains of her morning coffee in the demitasse. She couldn’t stop sweating, and the pain in the small of her back took her breath away. But she was satisfied: the house gleamed! It was a lovely, sunny day, but her house was more beautiful still. She turned that little rented flat into a home – she had that gift, that love. She conquered every little corner, and even the draughty window became hers once she muffled it with her mother’s rag rug. The cracks in the walls were silenced with framed photos. The good old Smederevac stove glistened, its chipped enamel vanquished by the dazzling whiteness of the rest of the surface.

  The sun shone in through the freshly cleaned windows and she was delighted with the day’s efforts. As if there was no glass; not a fleck to be seen! But the rays wandered around the room and played with the specks of dust, those irrepressible thousands of particles which eluded both mop and rag. She blew out smoke and began to get annoyed. This blasted dust! You go to so much effort and the room still isn’t immaculate. She stubbed out her cigarette and went to the bathroom. If she wasn’t able to institute cleanliness around her, at least she’d be able to do so with herself.

  Ljubica got married and had a son that same year. Lucija now had an excuse to neglect the cooking, washing, ironing and cleaning a little and to help her newly-mothered sister. She was enchanted by the baby. She didn’t even try to bridle or quantify her happiness while she was buying jumpsuits, always a size too big, or bathing her nephew and changing him, or taking him out for walks and lulling him to sleep. But her happiness seeped away into a trough of melancholy. This gash in her feelings, which never healed, was the memory of the male embryo she had had to do away with because Luka said they weren’t yet in a position to have children. She never forgave him that abortion and would adduce it decades later at the top of her list of reasons ‘why I’m getting a divorce from you’. He may have been right back then – that their son simply wasn’t meant to be – but it was still inexcusable.

  In her words, I was conceived through an affair. ‘That’s a good start!’ I thought when she first told me. She and Luka weren’t in any different a position this time, but she couldn’t wait any longer. She wanted a child. Ekaterini not only exclaimed ‘Thank God!’ but, with Lela’s help, also arranged for Lucija and Luka to spend the summer holidays in Rovinj. There they felt me moving for the first time, they used to tell me. So no one would think she had changed her temperament and gone soft – God forbid! – Ekaterini made them ‘pay’ for her good deed by grousing at them:

  ‘Gosh, I didn’t get to go on holiday when I was pregnant with you!’

  ‘How could you have? You went straight to war,’ Lucija laughed, overjoyed.

  ‘And you, daughter, could be a little less facetious!’ Ekaterini flared up.

  ‘I’m not being facetious, Mama, I’m just happy!’

  ‘OK, OK, but don’t get carried away. You’re so restless, always doing something and fussing around when you could be taking a few months off. Listen to your mother: don’t gad about so much, to and fro, back and forth... as if you had a bee in your bonnet!’

  Ekaterini never found out what a bonnet is, but she knew how to use the expression and that was enough.

  Her passion for films was something Lucija inherited or received from her mother (these two notions are hard to separate with women). Gone with the Wind was their all-time favourite. Ekaterini had watched this film much earlier, with her sister Afroditi in Thessaloniki. She was proud of that temporal advantage and it was always she who explained to people what the film was about whenever Lucija mentioned it. Luka and his resourceful Dorćol crew got hold of tickets for The Kreutzer Sonata, A Woman’s Face and the unparalleled Bathing Beauty. At the house near Slavija there was no end to the discussion about who was best: Vivien Leigh, Audrey Hepburn or Esther Williams? Kirk Douglas or Steve McQueen? They could only agree on Omar Sharif.

  That night, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was showing at the cinema for the first time. Ljubica’s husband was over and watched as Lucija put woollen socks and then slippers on her swollen feet. He noticed she was in pain and looked at his watch. The twitch on her face came back half an hour later.

  ‘Your baby’s going to come tonight.’

  ‘No, it’s not! I’m going to watch that movie!’

  The Zvezda Cinema was ten minutes walk from the flat. It was an unusually harsh winter, with three metres of snow. Luka and his brother-in-law set off with Lucija, virtually carrying her along the trenches dug through the snow. They traipsed along on the icy ground, taking care not to slip, for half an hour. Lucija was in pain. Her brother-in-law glanced at his watch. The contractions became more frequent: every twenty minutes. The newsreel had finally finished and the film’s credits and cast began. Lucija groaned, unable to put up with the pain in silence, although otherwise she was an expert.

  ‘The baby’s coming! Let’s go!’ her brother-in-law took command.

  The ambulance skidded around on the icy streets. They went to two hospitals, but no beds were free. It was New Year’s Eve and celebrations were well under way, and the hospital staff made no secret of having a glass or two, especially the night shift. The contractions were now coming every five minutes. ‘That’s the baby!’ the brother-in-law panicked. ‘Surely not here in the ambulance...’

  Luka saw red.

  ‘We don’t have a spare bed.’

  ‘Listen here, my wife is in labour! If you don’t find a bed for her this minute I’ll have your guts for garters!’

  ‘And who are you?’

  ‘I’m the child’s father, and I’m also a mad Montenegrin getting hot under the collar! Do you know what that means?!’

  Lucija was admitted straight away. There really were no beds, but they found a vacant operating table.

  ‘Why are you crying? Your daughter is a healthy and thriving bub, and you coped with the birth wonderfully,’ said the good old-fashioned midwife Leposava, who happened to live right near them in the Slavija neighbourhood. Her care and absolute devotion more than compensated Lucija for having to give birth on the operating table.

  ‘I’m crying with happiness.’

  ‘That’s all right then. You just have a good cry. I thought you might be crying because you have a daughter, and I hear you were longing for a son.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Your husband, but in strict confidence. He’s worried, the poor fellow, so he warned me you might be sad when I tell you it�
�s a girl.’

  ‘And what does he say?’

  ‘Him? He’s overjoyed! He’s buying drinks for the whole hospital and yelling: “My little Marilyn is born!”’

  ‘Oh, he always has to overdo it.’

  * * *

  Our first and very major limitation is that we don’t know what it was like to be born. From that very first moment on, we depend on other people’s versions and have no way of learning the truth. Everyone talks about how they felt; no one even thinks that we might have felt something at the time too, let alone what, although we were the cause of all those manifestations of happiness, excitement, fear, inebriation and sobering-up because of the birth of a child.

  Ekaterini had bought several outfits in blue for the grandchild while Lucija was pregnant; now she came along after the birth with a complete set of clothes in neutral white. She notified her clients not to reckon with her for the next month and, in keeping with the custom, devoted herself to her little granddaughter. The nappies had to be boiled, dried and ironed, the room had to be aired, and Lucija had to eat liver to keep up her iron levels and to drink herb teas since she and Ekaterini both ‘smoked like Turks’, meaning like a chimney. That was one of grandmother’s favourite sayings. As well as expressing a weakness for tobacco, it also reflected the traditional Greek-Turkish antipathy.

  ‘But Mama, isn’t it Americans who smoke the most? They light up one after another in every film!’