Ekaterini

  But there were also love affairs. Left, right and centre. We untiringly invoked Eros, and He sent us his fanciful gifts. Sometimes exciting, pervading you to the bone, other times ludicrous. There was Miki and his motorbike and my vague idea about a ‘serious relationship’. I just remember those rides, the abrupt descent from the National Library down to Slavija, then zooming over the bridge and across the plains to his parents’ weekend place. It was always cold there and we soon rode back. Miki would skilfully conceal his jealousy and oblige me with laughter whenever I mentioned the elderly gentleman from number 12 who waited for me near the checkout in the supermarket every morning so that, after I had paid, we could do a lap around the square together with our bags of shopping. He laughed at my nightly drinking parties with poets and the casual coffee-house acquaintances we collected en route and ushered into the house through the window. The episode with the chair was the one he found the craziest: just for kicks, Dragana and I stole a chair from the ‘Two White Doves’ and took it home by bus. Passers-by called out words of encouragement, the bus driver laughed and nothing nasty happened. Miki was no prophet and couldn’t have known that in just ten years we’d find ourselves in a time when people would kill others for a chair. He’d have gone speechless back then if someone had told him that he – blonde, curly-haired Butterfly Miki – would be arresting people like that. Still, he admired our pluck. Only when the topic turned to my poetess friend was Miki unable to cope with the silence. It became ever louder. In the meantime my friend had almost moved in, sometimes into what used to be Sultana’s room, sometimes into mine.

  ‘I really don’t understand you, children. What do you see in this house? I’m ashamed of it, and you come here every day and are even inspired by these ruins, my granddaughter tells me.’

  ‘Your house is wonderful!’ my friend said with that lasting shine in her eyes, be it from the alcohol or from the ability to perceive things that weren’t there.

  ‘What?! How you mean “wonderful”?’ Ekaterini laughed.

  ‘I’m telling you – this is a proper Serbian house!’

  Neither grandmother nor I understood the socio-historical significance of this scene, but we took it as a compliment, insofar as it suggested that the house wasn’t a total shack. In other words, it had something to it, a real ‘Serbianness’, as my friend put it, with whom I listened to Nights in White Satin. In those days, Belgrade was in the grips of Azra fever, and the rock groups Film, Ekaterina Velika and Idoli were also all the rage. Bands, singers and actors came to Belgrade from throughout the world. They weren’t ‘foreign guests’ but simply ‘guests’ to us, and mostly we just called them by their names. Five short years later my friend would tell me, admittedly in the privacy of her home, that I wasn’t Serbian enough. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I chuckled. But she didn’t laugh. Her visits to the house near Slavija became few and far between; she began to sit around in ‘Serbian coffee houses’, with ‘Serbian poets’, and to travel abroad ‘on official business’, by plane of course. Only ten years passed between her saying ‘This is a proper Serbian house!’ and war breaking out in Yugoslavia. Who would have thought? Those beautiful, magic ten years lasted – and still last – at least a hundred times as long.

  * * *

  The lives of women, if we accept that ever more dubious biological dichotomy, are still little explored. In literature, as well as in psychology and other disciplines largely informed by literature, women are viewed, described and analysed either by men or in relation to men. Female communities remain uncharted, although much happens in them, perhaps more than in the vertical postulates of father-son and child-fathermother. Female stories are more like overlapping circles on a horizontal, very flat surface, and sometimes they overlap. ‘That flat, flat, flatness’ is all I remember from the poem ‘Three Women’ by Sylvia Plath. Details of the kind that the menstrual cycles of women who live together synchronise over time are not insignificant. Women build a zone of understanding among themselves, which is naturally inaccessible to others, while at the same time constantly vying with each another, and only in such communities do people discover the significance of the inviolability of personal space. A woman who once gets to know her own territory will never relinquish it and will defend it at all costs from everyone, even from her own children. Sometimes even to her own detriment.

  Ekaterini and I respected a tacit agreement about discretion in the Serbian house from day one. No word about who visited Ekaterini and who came to my room reached ‘the public’, by which we meant mainly Lucija, Luka and Ljubica, as well her husband and children. Later, when the three generations of women moved into one and the same flat, each of us managed to maintain a different relationship with each other. It didn’t occur to Ekaterini, for example, to report to Lucija that she had bumped into an unfamiliar male person on the way to the toilet, who could only have come from my room. When a girlfriend of mine knocked on her door in knickers and a back-to front singlet to ask for a cigarette sometime around midnight, Ekaterini hopped out of bed and offered her the whole packet. If her daughters had got up to anything like that, at home or abroad, there wouldn’t have been a single wooden spoon left unbroken. But her relationship with me was different, while the educational rigour towards Lucija and Ljubica remained in place.

  ‘Just look at you – you’ve withdrawn like a snail into its shell. You just work, gaze at the TV and smoke! Why don’t you do something? Go out a bit! Take a cue from the two of us,’ Ekaterini chided my mother, citing me as an example of precisely the behaviour which was categorically banned for her daughters when they were my age.

  For Ekaterini considered that she had well and truly done her job as a parent. She withdrew from that function and kept on making models for eternity, as we called them, playing cards and travelling even more with her friends. She cruised around the house with a centimetre tape around her neck and prepared for her afternoon outings from the morning on. And at the time when inflation made a loaf of bread be worth millions, Ekaterini still had a hairdresser and a pedicurist at her disposal. Her fingernails were done by Lucija, always at home and in the same dressing gown.

  ‘Whenever are you going to change out of that old nightgown?’ Ekaterini would say every little while, even as she blew on her freshly varnished nails.’

  ‘When the war’s over!’ Lucija snapped.

  ‘If that’s what you’re waiting for, my child, you’ve got a long wait ahead of you. This is my fourth war, and I don’t plan to wait for anyone or anything! You only live once.’

  Each of us had her own bedroom in the three-room flat. While two of us were in possession of ourselves, our time and our privacy, the third was torn between shopping and errands, waiting in queues, money worries, the war news on TV, crying with friends whose sons had been conscripted and sent to the front, crying (seemingly or really) without reason, and her confused thoughts about Luka.

  Ekaterini had a box of Metaxa in her room, just for the rare occasion; whisky flowed in mine. Sometimes we did a swap, but strictly on par – a shot of hers for a shot of mine. Mama’s wine stood on the kitchen table accessible to all. Sedatives didn’t arrive in our house until somewhat later, not as a replacement but as a reinforcement of the other drugs and distractions which swamped all homes, not just Serbian ones. Back then a degree of choice still existed – one’s choice of drug. But soon it was gone too, like a victim of the war, and neighbours began to mingle in the queues in front of the wine cellar.

  The Chinese Method

  Another Yugoslavia fell apart even before Tito’s death. Every little while various premiers and politicians hopped on or off the roundabout of the countries we lived in. The presidents of the constituent republics were jockeying to become presidents of states whose marriage first had to be dissolved. The break-up ended in a typically Balkan war, just as the Western world would have expected. We proved to be a suitable testing ground for that cinematic genre. We played the war live, professionally, without disappoi
nting the expectations of the millions of viewers of Wag the Dog. Interest in films about the cold war had long since melted away. The screenplays about Korea being saved from itself recycled themselves into oblivion. The war in the Balkans was fresh material for animating, sermonising and entertaining an ever greater number of addicts of the small and large screen. Munitions production for both sorts of screen, as well as almost all other consumer goods, was shifted to Taiwan, China, India, and of course Japan. Cheap labour assembles the parts while Pax Americana cuts the patterns. And that, in brief, is how the new world tailoring shop works.

  Independent of history, Ekaterini grew old. The radius of her movements declined and the number of coloured pills which kept her alive increased proportionately. The last film she went to see at the cinema was Supergirl, a kind of counterpart to Superman. Although the leading role was played by Faye Dunaway, an actress she loved, Ekaterini rightly said the film was dumb; the foyer of the Army Culture Centre cinema appealed to her much more. Like all buildings of significance for former president Tito, it too was prestigious. Ekaterini singled out the comfortable armchairs and large ashtrays.

  When this war began, there was no need to go to the cinema any more. One Serbian media mogul, who called himself Robin Hood, came up with an idea of how to help his people in the hardest of times. It was very simple: he pirated the most recent films via satellite. People still had to queue for bread and milk, but they knew that the most recent accomplishments of cinematic art would be waiting for them when they came home. They could thus make themselves nice and comfortable, take their valium, crack open a beer and enjoy all the wonders of the seventh art. There’s nowhere like home. There were some who criticised the concept and said that the people were being deliberately doped. But that sounded all too much like the hackneyed ‘opium for the people’, and at the time no one cared for flashbacks.

  We took it in turns. Some watched movies, others sank into sleep, and others again sneaked into Romania and Hungary by night to buy food. The black marketeering of food and petrol was strangely reminiscent of the work drives of the past. Whether they liked it or not, people fraternised and helped each other. After the Romanians had ripped off Luka twice, Lucija concluded that ‘he was no good at it’ and that it made more sense for him to wait for her at the bus station. Luka, naturally giving priority to his personal drama over the spectacle the country was in, perfected his own private peace; that kind of tranquillity, which, once we reach it, lasts forever. Having barely survived the divorce, he became utterly resistant to war, impecuniosity, hunger and the like. He perfected his immunity to such a degree that he even slept through the bombardment. He sailed through what were once big challenges for him, like Lucija’s carping, ‘Careful, you fool!’, ‘Look, you moron, the toilet paper’s fallen in the puddle’, ‘You really are hopeless!’, ‘Have you ever tried lugging half a bloody calf from Hungary?’, ‘Slowly with that bucket, dammit, I didn’t buy a hundred eggs for you to make an omelette of them!’ He followed orders and didn’t care what tone they were issued in. He knew that a day has only twenty-four hours and that everything would pass, as his father used to say. You just needed to be able to wait.

  * * *

  Ekaterini couldn’t believe it when she heard I was going to America.

  ‘To America?!’ she repeated, as if trying to make sense of a dream full of riddles and enigmas.

  ‘Grandmother, I’m going to see my friend Carol. She just happens to live in America. You know I’m not one of those who go to America like your Hristina and Marika and I don’t know who else.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that? They live a lovely life over there.’

  ‘Yeah, on social welfare.’

  ‘And what do you think we live on?’

  Touché. She was a master of repartee, and although she seldom practiced it on me (having Lucija as the ideal sparring partner) she judged that intervention was necessary this time – for my own good. She diplomatically commended the one hundred and fifty letters and the thirty hours Carol and I had clocked up on the phone, and emphasised again and again: ‘Be sensible and see that you stay there.’

  The fundamental truth about America is that everyone has their own America. It’s built in our minds and based on impressions. My first was the trauma of not being allowed to smoke. As I endured the nagging boredom of the nicotineless flight, I imagined Ekaterini comfortably strolling about the flat in her dressing gown with the special tray for her gear: a packet of cigarettes, lighter, ashtray, glass of water, saucer for her medication, and the remote control. My second impression was a question, or rather the impossibility of an answer. By the time I woke up in her beautiful home that first morning, looked through the window and started thinking of a strategy for going for a walk amidst so much snow, and then trolled into the living room in my pyjamas in search of coffee, Carol had long been up. She had already come back from the gym, had a shower and got dressed for the new working day. At the risk of being late for work for the first time in her life, she waited for me to wish me a quick ‘Good morning’ and ask:

  ‘So how do you find America?’

  Jolted from my sleep, I pretended to still be tired and made excuses to do with the change of climate, pace of life and anything I could think of. It didn’t work. Carol stood at the door with her briefcase in one hand and her laptop in the other; her face bore the expression of an offended child. She demanded a particular reply and was prepared to wait for it as long as necessary.

  ‘Very nice,’ I said, so as to absolve myself of any blame for the possible transgression of her missing work for the first time. Although she wasn’t satisfied, she judged that such a morning reply sufficed and that she could start the working day. By the time she returned from the office in the evening, I was ready. I realised that I had to come up with stories for Carol where she’d forget the questions. Something that functioned a bit like the cinematic opium for the people, only much more demanding because every day required a new story. America was inconceivable without premières – big new stories. American days and Arabian Nights.

  There was only one story which Carol was able to listen to over and over again. As someone who until then had considered herself a particularly resolute, and also liberal-minded American woman, she couldn’t believe that a grandmother and granddaughter could watch pornos together. ‘Hardcore pornos,’ I’d correct her and explain that these films broadcast every night at one in the morning were a political ploy – poor compensation for the even poorer masses. They were a narcotic, after which, if nothing else, people could sleep well. She didn’t like my explanations – ‘all those dark, serious things’ – but she waited patiently for the story:

  “By day Mama rushed around to get food, and at night she did the housework. One in the morning was her regular time for doing the washing-up. Grandmother wouldn’t let go of the remote control: she was channel-hopping and watching any moving image with an equal mix of interest and indifference. I was reading and casting an occasional glance at the TV in case something interesting came on. It would be wrong to say we were really interested in the production called ‘The Chinese Method’. It was the sort of nonsense you didn’t need to immerse yourself in. All of us cried out for such moments. The film was slow, since the pornographic scenes were shown in detail. The plot could be summed up in one sentence: the heroine is searching for a ‘Chinese method’ of making love and is passed around from hand to hand, from dick to dick, and learns a little bit each time. Ekaterini sat and smoked calmly, having attained that ideal equilibrium between the unwinding of her thoughts and the takeup of the TV images which she could follow even without reading the subtitles. For my part, I liked the particular equanimity the film maintained in me. Just when a close-up penis appeared on the screen, filmed from such an angle that an undiscerning viewer could think it was a rock or a rhinoceros or some part of anything at all, my mother came into the room to collect Ekaterini’s plates from dinner.

  ‘What are you two watching
?’

  Silence.

  ‘I asked: what are you two watching?’

  ‘No idea,’ I had to reply, since it didn’t occur to Ekaterini to move her eyes from the screen.

  ‘My God, Mama, you really have gone loopy! You stare at something and don’t even know what it is!’ Lucija said.

  ‘I do know,’ Ekaterini replied, twisting her mouth slightly, which meant that her daughter was annoying her. But Lucija either didn’t notice or didn’t understand her mother’s signs.

  ‘All right then, so what are you watching?’ She stood there with the plates in her hands, dripping soapsuds, while the screen showed one and the same scene, as if frozen.

  ‘We’re watching “The Chinese Method”,’ Ekaterini said, this time with pride.

  ‘Really!’ Lucija puffed in blanket disapproval, using the occasion to emphasise that we were idling while she was working.”

  Carol asked me to tell this story at every party just so as to hear it again, and even at family gatherings – those more or less silent documentaries on American conservativism. The reactions were largely the same – mild shock and laughter. Only Aunt Mary condemned such family relations; she said she had known all along that they’d be like this, based on this one story.

  ‘Are your parents divorced?’ she asked meaningfully. She knew they were.

  ‘They’re happily divorced,’ I tried to smooth her ruffled feathers.

  ‘Pardon?’ Aunt Mary was now even more perplexed, but left open the small percentage of a possibility that my English wasn’t so good after all.

  ‘I mean, they’re successfully divorced,’ came my amended reply, which dispelled any doubts as to my competence in the language, and opened up a whole range of mainly moral issues.