Ekaterini

  ‘America is rich and people can do what they like! Forget America. This is where we live, here, in poverty. We all gonna drop from so much smoking!’

  The baby had just two pronounced moods – dismal and cheerful. It was a great mystery for potential interpreters.

  ‘Perhaps we should ask a doctor,’ Luka suggested.

  ‘A fat lot they know! We can rely on ourselves, let’s just wait and see how she develops,’ Lucija said, hiding her anxiety inside.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with the child. We’re all different,’ Ekaterini stuck firmly to her view, but she was amazed that everyone gave her opinion so much credence. Where did her persuasiveness come from? Why did they call her in jest the ‘Greek goddess of wisdom’? They knew she knew the Serbian saying about there being a grain of truth in every joke.

  Grandmothers and Fathers

  As a child I lived more with my grandmother than with my parents. I’m not thinking just of the time we spent together, but also of the quantity and type of events, mainly to do with films. There would be opportunities, later in life, when I least expected it, to make up for the limited time spent with my parents. But in the time I was growing up, the ancient inhabitants of European metropolises listened to Mozart and Verdi, the Requiem in B, in a fervour as if, through them, they were also listening to their ancestors all the way back to Verdi, Mozart and the inventor of musical notation himself. Without wanting to be ironic, that old species was a bit out of step with things or had missed out on something along the way. For example, the beautiful Partisan hymn Šume, šume, najlepša vam hvala (Woods and Forests, Thank You so Much), which together with the steadfast Al’ nikad neće pasti Kadinjača (But Kadinjača Will Never Fall) was performed all the way from the River Vardar in Macedonia to Mount Triglav in Slovenia. Anything which in the least smacked of communism, we kept to ourselves. The national liberation struggle was subsequently enacted as a kind of private secret in an exclusively domestic environment we imagined to reach all the way to famous Mount Triglav, although people rarely made it to the top of that mountain, and artists and musicians least of all.

  Since I was almost born in the cinema, I remember scenes. Some longer, some shorter; but those myriad, down-to-earth scenes dominate my memory and deprive it of volatile abstractions which some call ‘superstructure’. I remember most clearly the window I was sitting at with Ekaterini, and her trying to come up with ways to trick me and stick some food into my mouth. ‘There, look at the dove!’ she said. ‘How does the dove go? “Coo-coo, coo-coo.”’ Coocoo was one of my first nicknames, based on the cooing of doves. It was thought up mainly as a way of getting me to eat meat, which, like everything that demanded chewing, I only ate if I could be tricked. But the best man, Marović, was very proud one way or another. He still performed ‘La Paloma’, with ever more confidence, for Tito, the two white poodles and the ‘dresses’ which Ekaterini sewed by night in the bright, mirror-covered rooms.

  It was there in the house near Slavija that I learnt to walk, with the aid of the vacuum cleaner. Ekaterini judged that the time had come: she fastened the metal tube of the vacuum cleaner between two chairs and made me take my first steps holding on to the tube. At the time, my parents stood sturdily on a Bulgarian stage; the audience cheered and shouted to their choir which had only one other real competitor – the Russians. I was always cautious, overly so, and made slow progress. Everyone marvelled that Ekaterini had so much patience with me, since that was what she was least known for when raising her own children. Be that as it may, I could already walk pretty well when my parents returned from Lugano after previously having visited Salzburg, which like all cities shouted ‘Bis!’, while they best remembered the encores in Bulgaria inspired by the justified hope of victory over the Russians. Although I still held onto the furniture just in case, I felt like a runner approaching the finish line and leaving the rest of the field far behind me. I remember my parents looking at me as if I was some kind of circus attraction. As if they didn’t believe I’d ever be moving about on my own. In contrast to Ekaterini, they always missed the lead-up, so every one of my victories seemed to them like a gift from above, something unreal.

  Since Ekaterini was the only one around at that moment, she was the first person in my life whom I slapped in the face. She hardly recovered from that smart. Her reaction revealed to her, and to the friends and family in whom she confided, just how close the bond to her granddaughter was. ‘Why did she slap me?!’ she asked, rather than ‘Why slap at all?’ ‘Is she allowed to slap?’ or ‘How does she know what a slap is?’ I think I saw a slap in a film even before I knew what it meant. I found it funny, but that was all. What was just a joke for me had a tragic dimension for Ekaterini. But only because it was me; if Lucija or Ljubica had ever tried to pull off the same act in their childhood, the result would have been a splatter film.

  I watched films with the appetite of someone preparing for Film Academy; I saw each and every one which came on the TV given to us by godfather Marović, and soon afterwards at the cinemas as well. And, as these things go, as if to spite the official plans and programmes for the “advancement of quality culture”, we kids and oldsters – the main consumers – were particularly thrilled in those years by the film The Magic Sword based on the folk tale Baš Čelik (Head of Steel). The Culture and Propaganda Department was far from impressed but couldn’t come up with an antidote. Things took their course and little scenes from the film were performed spontaneously in the parks; children commandeered rubbish bins to serve as the barrel which the character Baš Čelik was hidden in, and the game began to offer serious competition to the cowboys-and-Indians theme avidly promoted by the Department.

  I remember a day we were sitting and watching TV spellbound, just like the day before and the day after. Usually Ekaterini would even hear a sparrow land in the courtyard, but now she was completely immersed in the film and repeated the words of the main actress to herself mechanically like an understudy preparing to take over the lead role if required.

  Suddenly there was an eerie voice behind us, ‘De-cap-i-tate!’– just like in the film – and Ekaterini jumped a mile high with me in her arms.

  ‘Idiot, you almost gave me a heart attack!’ she snapped once she calmed down again. It was Uncle Čedo, a distant relation who often visited us, since he was a lover of cards and nightly bridge parties. Once I got the words ‘deda’ (uncle) and ‘baba’ (grandmother) mixed up, thus turning Uncle Čedo into ‘Granny Čedo’ and had the whole card-playing troupe falling around with laughter. Needless to say, the nickname stayed with him for the rest of his life. Although we had a lot of relatives who were closer in purely genealogical terms, to tell the truth, ‘Granny Čedo’ was the only one who was always around, including the times when he was needed. As a child, I felt that rapport and simply gave a name to it.

  * * *

  Every summer I went with Luka and Lucija to ‘our sea’, sometimes even twice, of which I preferred the second time because we almost always ended up at the Dubrovnik Summer Festival. I adored Dubrovnik, a living and breathing city, as I’d call it several decades later during a war which would take it away from me. And it was not only those summer holidays themselves which made an indelible impression, but also Lucija and Luka’s fantasy and resourcefulness in making money so their bronchitic daughter could swim in the sea and breathe the pine-forest air: they repeatedly repaired our small Fiat until it was so decrepit that Mama called it a ‘kick-off scooter with a tin roof’; they took on extra, part-time jobs; and finally, at the peak of our poverty, as we considered it at the time, they sold the most valuable thing in the house – the piano my mother had paid off with such effort. But still, the summer holidays I remember most vividly were those spent with Ekaterini.

  In the photo album I see the two of us, always in the shallow water; she’s attentive all the time and doesn’t look into the camera; I’m posing with the obligatory inflatable ring around my waist – yellow and supposed to look like a du
ck. Next come the photos from Thessaloniki. I look like a princess: white fur cap and little coat of the finest material, in orange. I’m holding a handful of twine, with helium-filled balloons at the other end. Uncle Niko brought them for me like that on the way home from work every day, in the form of a bouquet. No chocolate is to be seen on the photo, but it entered my memory along with its rhythm – once a day.

  Aunt Niki was Ekaterini’s cousin. This well-to-do couple without children welcomed us in their enormous apartment in the centre of Thessaloniki. But that is not why we stayed at their place rather than with grandmother’s sisters, brothers and their families. We were drawn by what money cannot buy, as the saying goes, and that was so real. Niko and Niki were the epitome of an eternally enamoured couple. At their place we felt as if we were also bathed in that love; there’s no period in history when love, and also the hunger for love, aren’t the chief personalities. Love is a personality. I realised that at the age of two thanks to Uncle Niko and Aunt Niki – my favourite heroes not just of a film but of an entire series I followed throughout my childhood.

  Luka reluctantly consented for me and Ekaterini to go and stay with them for a while.

  ‘Something’s brewing,’ he told Lucija.

  ‘You always think something’s brewing!’ she replied nervously as she packed my things.

  I never took those things back to Belgrade. They ended up on some rubbish dump near Thessaloniki. For two months, Niki and Niko kept buying things for me as if they had three children of their own. When he came home with the balloons and chocolate, Uncle Niko would take me in his arms and we’d sit in his armchair; there he’d teach me Greek with the patience of a superparent. It wasn’t actually Greek at all, but pure, bookish katharevousa! Soon I was speaking like a child from the best Greek homes – correctly and cleanly. Obviously I wasn’t aware of this first elitism of my life; I just enjoyed it when they praised me.

  We had our games, too. His favourite was where I called him ‘baba’, the Greek word for father, and then he’d pretend to find another chocolate in his pocket by chance. Occasionally I’d go along with the game, unwillingly, and I could swear that each time I said to myself, inside, ‘Sorry Daddy, but I want some chocolate’. Of course this sentence cannot be proven and is quite probably invented. But the scene at the Belgrade railway station gives me the right to insert it into the thoughts of a two-year-old.

  ‘Right, that’s the limit!’ Luka’s rage had reached the critical point and there could be no more discussion.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Lucija conceded, now recognising that there was some truth in the word ‘brewing’ which had irritated her.

  ‘Call them and say that the child’s father has ordered that they come home as soon as possible!’

  ‘But what will they think? They’ve been so kind.’

  ‘Kind?! They want to adopt my child! Just because we’re penniless and they aren’t. No way, José! I don’t give a damn what they think! Go on and call them now; it’s better than me rolling up on their doorstep!’

  The train pulled slowly into the station. Every return is like a boat coming in to moor. Returning is slow, unlike departure.

  The tumult of passengers was punctuated by shouts of the porters and various screeches and grating noises, including the staccato gibberish over the loudspeakers announcing arrivals and departures. My head with the little white fur hat peered out the train window. Ekaterini held me tight, and I felt her tremble. As a child who was either cheery or dreary, I was in laughing mode now and calling out all the time, while my eyes tried to prise a way through the throng in search of my parents. I heard my father’s voice before I could see him. He couldn’t see me either, but he was calling for me; singing, in fact, and his warm tenor turned my name into an aria. Then finally I spotted him:

  ‘Baba! Baba!’ I screamed at the top of my voice. And laughed. But my father’s face creased with consternation before my eyes.

  ‘Is my Marilyn calling me an old woman, baba?!’ My father was on the verge of tears – or on the verge of going berserk and beating up a blameless passer-by.

  ‘That just means father in Greek,’ Lucija enlightened him.

  ‘I know very well what it means! Don’t you ever complain to anyone again that we don’t any have money. Do you hear? Never again! This time we’ve saved her – at least she recognised us.’

  ‘I’m sick to death of your damn paranoia!’

  ‘Is that what you call it? Then just you sit back and wait for them to kidnap your child so you’ll realise the sorts of things that happen today. I’m not going to!’

  For me, Luka was neither a baba, nor a father, nor even a relative; more than all that, he was always a friend to me. Even when I didn’t believe him I still listened to him and permitted the possibility that he might be right. A lot of time would pass between the awkward scene at the ‘Butterfly’ nursery in Belgrade, where I bewildered the other children by speaking to them in Greek, and the time where Luka, before I went out to my first party, demonstrated how easy it was for someone to spike a glass of soft drink. An equally large interval separated his mature insight into reality and an appreciation of my seemingly complex, but in fact very simple (though rare) temperament. Another father, the dad of a friend from university, didn’t consider me a child; Uncle Dick, as I used to call him, had various reasons; in any case, he spoke the ultimate truth about me when he called me ‘young, overly inquisitive, restless and naive’; that’s how friends and family saw me at a time when I was ‘already a student but still a child’. He tongue-lashed his daughter one time because of the overflowing ashtrays and two empty bottles of whisky we woke up next to; she countered and complained that he only yelled at ‘his child’ because he ‘thought she was a child’ but didn’t dare say anything to me; he replied with a statement which portrayed me more faithfully than any photo:

  ‘She’s different: bad habits are water off a duck’s back to her!’

  It really was as if my carefree, youthful zest got lost somewhere along the way and the cinema closed down somewhere between the balloons, handball matches and my smattering of poems – none of which were about love, only to open again in my years at university. But I listened to music in that interlude: Dnevnik jedne ljubavi (The Diary of a Love) by Josipa Lisac and Karlo Metikoš, Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen, Ti nisi sam (You’re Not Alone) and the voice of Bisera Veletanlić, Još uvijek želim za te biti lijepa (I Still Want to be Beautiful for You Tonight) by Gabi Novak, another colleague of my parents, and the constant ascension to Verdi’s and Mozart’s Lacrimosa; those themes and melodies went with me everywhere and blanketed not only the seasons, but also the years, and the decades, and time itself. Youth is usually remembered for love, especially one’s first. I didn’t have one. I always had a lot of loves and didn’t consider any of them to be ‘the first’. Each was one in its own right.

  The Serbian House

  When something lasts a long time, we begin to forget. If we spend a lot of time dissatisfied, for example, we feel it lasts a thousand years, although it was perhaps just one decade, or one and a half. I don’t remember what the first domestic quarrel was about, or the second, or what came after that. I don’t remember how that antipathy took shape. They say that duration is a characteristic of every process and that there being a process is the essence of all true phenomena. I don’t trust words like ‘every’ and ‘always’. The statements most suspicious for me are ones which name a culprit. Ekaterini figured as the main heroine in some of them. ‘Nonsense!’ I say to myself, it takes two to tango, though in practice three is often the minimum.

  It’s funny how the majority of people romanticise about the need to be together, only to later dramatise the separation. Why should separation be any less romantic? ‘What an injustice!’ Lucija would probably have said if someone else’s divorce had been at issue. But in this case she stuck to her position: ‘It’s Luka’s fault!’ Luka pressed his point: ‘We’d have lived happily if it wasn’t for y
our mother interfering in everything!’ Once they’d decided about living arrangements and then asked me what I thought, I said: ‘Everyone has their own life. I don’t interfere in yours, and you won’t interfere in mine.’

  I had long been drawn to the little house near Slavija. Not because of recollections, which was Lucija’s main motive to flee from there as soon as possible, but because of its location. Lucija complained that the ‘shack’ drove her ‘stir crazy with cabin fever’ and that there was ‘no getting rid of the mice’; yet it was also a fact that I took my first steps in that house. But all those things meant almost nothing to me, a fanatical pedestrian, compared with the closeness of the city centre and all the opportunities of that brilliant location which I was discovering by the day.

  Above all, it meant I could stay out until late at night wherever I wanted without worrying about getting home, or rather freed from the agony of our country’s public transport, which is probably the closest we’ll come to understanding eternity. At first, Ekaterini was inclined to sermonise in loco parentis, but she gave up when she saw that after two litres of wine I really wasn’t listening. I caroused, had my flings, studied and wrote poetry. Those were heady years – it wasn’t just my own vivid past. One of today’s ‘writers of national significance’ used to be a brilliant poetess. She loved to enter my room through the window, and the house near Slavija afforded that possibility. There were times I woke up to find her sitting by the stove, drinking coffee and reading. One night we left the house and tried to travel to Berlin. My friend, who at that time lived for poetry, while poetry reciprocated by giving her an unforgettable life, suggested we hitch-hike. There was accommodation for us in Berlin – the cosy flat of her former boyfriend’s sister and her girlfriend. ‘She definitely won’t say no, so they’re dead cert to take you in as well,’ she assured me. That night we only made it as far as the outskirts of Belgrade. It was the eighties and drivers no longer took hitch-hikers, not even girls, like drivers in the seventies or truckies in American films did. No one wanted to stop. They say you can learn a lot about people by observing them when they drive. That was the time when cautious driving began.