Ekaterini

by Marija Knezevic

  When you come back from America, people inevitably ask why you’ve come back. No one asks those who stay there why they’ve stayed; that’s self evident. It’s best to say the first thing that comes to mind because there’s no understanding America unless you’ve spent a certain time there. The story about my dramatic separation from Carol would then really make it sound as if I’d lost my mind. Which isn’t completely out of the question. I left, bequeathing her my stories. She probably still laughs today when she thinks of the Chinese Method, and others. I left because I didn’t want to become an American – I wasn’t interested in the ‘new life’ which begins by erasing the ‘old’. In any case, my stay in America and with Carol was the best American film I knew. Ekaterini lived on my letters and opened them with ceremony after first ritually lighting a cigarette reserved for the occasion.

  It’s All Greek to Me

  Honestly speaking, phrases and idioms are the backbone of every language. So much is fickle and changeable, but phrasal constructions are rather more aloof. Carol came to Greece just to assure herself that I’d be going back to America with her. She was justifiably concerned that I might decide otherwise; not only because of the bombardment and ‘that whole syndrome’ only we can understand, as she put it, but also because I had fused ever more with the landscape of sea, hills, olive trees and Greek diminutives. I, Merula, should have been ashamed how much I was enjoying that clime now, too. Carol was snapping away with her camera all the time, it seemed, and counting what she called the ‘stabs’ of the jellyfish and mosquitoes. On the plane, she told me the final count – twenty-one. In America she drummed together her friends and relatives and did a slide show for them on her trip to Greece. The title was ‘It’s All Greek to Me’. In Serbian we compare something incomprehensible with ‘Spanish villages’, and the Spanish say: Me suena a chino. China. The name of another country is often a synonym for a distant, inhospitable land. Nomen est omen.

  * * *

  Despite the existence of books, films, eyewitnesses and science, there are some things you can only learn from firsthand experience. As a rule, these are the most important things. Journalists call them ‘crucial moments’, history dubs them ‘times of upheaval’, but ordinary people struggle to survive and have no time to think up names. In less difficult times, people are afraid of disease. ‘As long as we’re alive and healthy!’ they say when greeting each other in the street or on the phone. The wartime watchword is simpler: ‘Thank God we’ve survived the day.’

  ‘Every day is a celebration of life,’ I wrote on a pack of cigarettes in some waiting room. I don’t recall if I’ve ‘used’ that sentence for a book, as writers say. I only know that it’s one of the few I remember, and which I wrote myself. I have a better ear for foreign words and can live quite comfortably with quotes. When I studied in America, it struck me that the death of the author was the dominant theme in all the so-called humanities. The author Michel Foucault is held to be the originator of this idea. Professor Goodson considered it his greatest academic success to have been personally acquainted with Foucault. And while he enthusiastically varied one and the same thesis about the triumph of the discourse over the text, I thought of my poetess friend and our walks by the Danube. She’s one of the rare spirits in this day and age who don’t hold that prose is more serious than poetry, and that poetry is like a growing pain to be remedied by the maturity of the sentence. Mirjana Božin is far too devoted to her art to occupy herself with anything other than haiku poetry. She walks the trapeze of life, managing to make out her own unique, individual path and then to follow it, overcoming the ‘social currents’ and ‘latest trends’ with a smile. I thought of Mirjana while Goodson, with Foucault’s assistance, buried all authors except the Chinese. He couldn’t remember their names. Many years before that funeral, Mirjana said, as if it had long been common knowledge, that all poetry really belonged to the people. I cited her in my Master’s thesis titled ‘Identity in Border Areas’.

  For me, that thesis is linked to the bombing of Yugoslavia. My final academic commitments and the attack on my country virtually overlapped. As a result I had pain in my eyelid and lost seventy-five percent of the vision in my left eye. Carol took me to the best ophthalmologist, and he examined me for one and a half hours. He dictated to his assistant: ‘Patient under great emotional stress. Originally from Serbia. Impairment of the optic nerve. Keep under observation.’

  From that day on, I began to notice that people in difficult situations express themselves exclusively in monologues. Trapped in the conviction that they have to have their own opinion, stance and judgement, they don’t notice that it makes things even worse for them; they don’t hear the others.

  * * *

  Lucija: ‘I’ve been telling you for months that they’re going to bomb us, and you claimed they won’t! Did you see that now? What do you say now?!’

  Luka: ‘That’s nothing. They know what they’re doing.’

  Professor Gudson: ‘Outrageous!’

  Carol’s father: ‘Probably it’s necessary.’

  Carol’s mother: ‘The world’s gone crazy.’

  Carol: ‘I’ll write to Clinton! You don’t have to keep calling home every morning and evening. Just call in the morning and you’ll find out if something has happened.’

  Me: ‘What?!’

  One section of the Serb community in America: ‘We’ll blow the shit out of ’em!’

  Another section of American Serbs: ‘Don’t call me. I’ll call you when I’m able to talk.’

  The majority of Americans: ‘Where on earth is Kosovo? Is the bombing close to your house? We’re praying for your family.’

  Patricia, a friend from Zimbabwe: ‘They called and told me that war has started there too.’

  The Latinos: ‘We sure know what that’s like. Long live peace!’

  Noam Chomsky: ‘Yet another demonstration of America’s military humanism.’

  Aunt Mary: ‘Come and stay with us over Easter. It’ll do you good to think less.’

  E-mail from Belgrade: ‘It’s better you’re not here.’ E-mail from Belgrade: ‘What a shame! You’re missing so much here!’

  E-mail in Serbian: ‘I live for your letters.’

  Panagiotis, Ekaterini’s nephew in Thessaloniki: ‘Send your parents and your aunt here immediately! I’ve found a way of getting visas.’

  Me: ‘You’ve got one day to get ready – tomorrow you’re leaving for Greece!’

  Lucija: ‘I’m not going anywhere! We’re in the same boat as everyone else! Besides, who will look after the flat, and all your books?’

  Luka: ‘I want to, but she doesn’t.’

  Ekaterini: ‘Listen to your daughter for once in your life!’

  The Border

  When she heard she was going to Greece, she stopped being afraid of death. She no longer paid any attention to the sirens, the bombs or Lucija’s fretting that she’d rather die straight away than be tormented like this. ‘They were torturing her? Just her – her daughter? Typical!’ Ekaterini thought, but she soon forgot it again, like the order of medication for her heart and blood pressure which had been laid down for decades.

  She broke free of her fear of the end – the fear of fear. She didn’t dare to admit how wonderful she felt in those few days; she let her daughter pack for her and think that she had finally become numb to wars, that she had long since stopped caring about life but simply wouldn’t admit it, and that nothing in the world could get her away from that TV. She listened to Lucija’s words as if they came from far away, and that’s where they stayed. Once more she was seized by the call of the road, like in the old days before her heart and blood-pressure medication and before Lucija’s ruthless, meticulous regime designed to keep her alive at all costs. But this trip, she suspected, was different to those before. It felt to her like a reward – as if she had endured all these years just for this trip; it had all the inklings of a return.

  * * *

  ‘Mama, have you got eve
rything?’

  ‘Yes, I have.’

  ‘How do you know if you haven’t even looked at what I’ve packed of your things?’

  ‘You worry too much, my child. I’ve got all I need.’

  ‘Like those slippers?! Surely you’re not going to wear them on the trip?’

  ‘But you said we’d be going by taxi. And Panagiotis will be waiting for us at the border with that big American car of his. Besides, shoes just rub and give me blisters.’

  ‘You could at least put on something else instead of that dressing gown, it really looks impossible.’

  ‘Who cares what an old lady wears? Leave me in peace. You should unwind a bit, you’re very tense.’

  ‘Well, what do you know! Bombs are raining down on us, I have to organise the whole trip, I even have to take Luka with us because his daughter so ordered, and you wonder why I’m tense?!’

  ‘Everything will be fine, you’ll see. Panagiotis will take us to the sea. And your daughter will come. There’s always a nice side to things.’

  ‘I’m sure there is! It’s just that it always falls to me to struggle with the other side, and I don’t get to see the nice one!’

  Lucija was right, in her own way. Before the bombardment, both of them had been down with the flu. She had had to go and pick up prescriptions despite running a high temperature herself because the emergency services were inundated with flu-related calls in those few days and an age limit was set: people over fifty had to make do as best they could. In a feverish haze, she had dashed about to collect the medication – each set of pills in a different pharmacy. The neighbours helped at first, but when calamity and great misfortune coincide you can’t expect devotion from anyone. One kind neighbour brought them food for two days. On the third, Lucija went out into the winter day and queued for groceries. They’d lost their appetite. The two of them gnawed at a leg of chicken for two days. In that fatal symbiosis it’s impossible to establish who first came to the conclusion that she didn’t care any more. Why go on living? The bombardment which soon followed brought no answer. It just turned the question into a statement.

  Lucija nearly had a nervous fit when Luka arrived with three travel bags.

  ‘Gawd, you really are barmy – we’re fleeing, not emigrating! Is there anything you haven’t brought with you?’

  Luka was silent during their four months as refugees. Only when someone asked ‘Where am I going to find a needle and thread now?’, ‘If only I had an extra coffee pot!’, ‘I could really do with that sharp little knife now’ or ‘How do you expect me to conjure up an anti-rheumatic plaster?’ would he silently reach into one of his bags and, like a magician, produce the desired item.

  After they had defied the laws of physics and all squeezed into the Volkswagen Golf, the taxi driver crossed himself and started the engine. He’d take them to the border for two hundred marks. Lucija had managed to save four hundred from the small amounts of money I sent them in my letters, sometimes ten dollars, sometimes twenty, although at least half the money disappeared in the bowels of the postal system. Delayed by the ever more frequent air-raid alarms, they finally made it to the border town of Dimitrovgrad. From there they could see Bulgaria and feel a premonition of Greece.

  Their negotiations with the Bulgarian border police lasted five days. Officially the borders were open, but in reality no one from rump Yugoslavia could leave the country, with the brief exception of being able to cross into Hungary, unless they also possessed a foreign passport. Panagiotis waved with Schengen visas on the other side. To no avail. Lucija declared this the stupidest thing she’d ever done in her life – to die at the Bulgarian border. Ekaterini knew it was just a question of days until they’d be able to cross this border too.

  Luka had no time to ruminate. He had debts. As well as making rounds of the border and doing minor bits of shopping, he had been entrusted with walking his mother-in-law, whom he hadn’t spoken to for ten years, to every meal at the hotel restaurant. Sometimes they needed a whole hour for the three flights of stairs. Although in slippers and dressing gown, Ekaterini behaved like a dignified guest of the most renowned hotel. She’d stop to say hello to every chambermaid and ask how she was. She smiled at everyone. At the table she sat up straight, ate slowly, and made sure to dab her mouth with the serviette after every mouthful. She drank only water. But a bottle of Metaxa was waiting in her room.

  On the fourth day, Luka came back from the restaurant alone.

  ‘What’s happened to Mama?’ Lucija cried.

  ‘The old bird has flipped her lid.’

  ‘What? How has she flipped her lid?’

  ‘She wants a sponge and a toothbrush.’

  ‘I don’t get it...’

  ‘She told me to tell you that she won’t come back to the room unless we buy her a sponge and a toothbrush. I’m just the messenger.’

  ‘Is she out of her mind?!’

  ‘Should I run and ask her?’

  ‘Aaargh, your stupid humour is the last thing I need! This is worse than the bombardment! To think that I had settled down so nicely in the last ten years.’

  ‘So what are we going to do?’

  ‘Go to the shop and buy her what she wants. Do what you can just to get her back to the room. Afterwards I’ll ask her how she plans to have a bath here with just cold water!’

  ‘They’re already warming up a saucepan of water for her in the kitchen.’

  ‘You people really are crazy! No, I’m the mad one – mad for putting up with you lot all these years! Get going, so you’re back sooner rather than later and we can get that over and done with too!’

  On the fifth day they crossed the border without any problems. Lucija couldn’t believe it. Ekaterini rejoiced that she’d be going to her country clean and with fresh breath. Luka lugged the suitcases and bags. They walked to Panagiotis’s Chrysler Jeep. They didn’t spend any time on hugging and helloes; they left that for later and hurried in case the Bulgarians changed their minds. When they had gone some distance from that border and were well on the way to the next, Lucija asked for a cellphone so she could call me. Panagiotis put on a Theodorakis’ CD to relax to. Luka looked out the window so as to later vividly describe all the landscapes to me, on our walks by the sea. Ekaterini humbly requested a Greek cigarette.

  Tuzla

  The Chrysler jeep sped along the northern Greek coast road. Panagiotis wanted to entertain them, to distract their thoughts from the cruise missiles, sirens, invisible planes and borders. He told them about having passed a rally-driver course and demonstrated the value of his diplomas. He sang to Pavarotti, whom he had now put on specially for Lucija, in the hope that he was more effective than Theodorakis, and overtook one vehicle after another, racing ahead to the next whenever they were alone on the road for a moment. Lucija prayed that they not come to grief on that crazy stretch of highway where she knew a hundred and seventy Greeks are killed every summer because of driving just like that. She reflected on how human suffering can be divided into the stupid and the less stupid. Panagiotis took enjoyment in pressing different buttons and explained the gadgetry built into the vehicle in detail; he boasted that the priests of Mount Athos also placed orders – that car was so good, and without match. He spoke a mile a minute. The Greeks really know how to enjoy themselves. ‘We’re all children of Piraeus,’ Ekaterini thought, as she defied the vanilla aroma of the fir-tree-shaped air freshener dangling from the rear-view mirror and sniffed the air by the window to smell the sea.

  ‘Orfani is a lovely place, you’ll see! Peace and quiet – that’s what you need,’ Panagiotis encouraged them to endure the hundred and twenty kilometres from Thessaloniki.

  ‘How are you doing, Mama?’ Lucija asked sternly, in Serbian.

  ‘Mia hara,’ Ekaterini replied, which roughly means ‘excellent’.

  ‘Sure, even Greek shit is sweet to you,’ Lucija muttered under her breath just in case, because Panagiotis was even more of a magnet for foreign languages than Luka.r />
  ‘How much horsepower does this jeep have? Translate that for him,’ Luka dared to ask Lucija’s expert assistance.

  ‘I’ll be darned if I’m going to translate that!’

  ‘What he say?’ smiled Panagiotis, doubly radiant whenever he heard Luka’s voice. For him and many other young men who knew him from his Dorćol period, Luka was a lifelong idol.

  ‘He asked something about horses,’ Lucija translated nervously. ‘Hey, no one is thinking of our daughter! The poor thing is sitting over in that American wilderness and worrying. Give me that mobile so I can call her!’

  ‘Here!’ Panagiotis crossed all borders with the same smile and the speed of 140 km/h. ‘Tell her we’re going to Tuzla!’

  ‘I’ll tell her we’ve crossed the Bulgarian border into Greece. What do you mean Tuzla? Tuzla is in Bosnia. She might even think we’ve been deported there!’ Lucija slowly came to her senses and realised an important truth about her life situation – she was the only sensible person, constantly surrounded by a gaggle of air-heads from different countries.

  * * *

  They came to long for anything that reminded them of home: waking up peacefully in the morning; a bed you could leave all day and didn’t need to make; morning coffee and that hazy gaze which slowly separates sleep and waking life. And just one day without plans and the obligation to think about things. Or several days like that. ‘What did I do wrong that I have to atone by spending my whole life in this travelling circus?!’ Lucija asked herself in all earnest.

  Then a turnoff came into view and a sign which read ‘Tuzla’. The three ‘refugees’ were startled – were they in Bosnia after all?! Panagiotis laughed. ‘Don’t worry, it’s the Turkish name left over from Ottoman times,’ he explained. ‘The name of the town was officially changed a few years ago. They just haven’t got round to replacing the sign.’