The Hotel Tito

by Ivana Bodrozic

  Whiteness. First I’m blinded by the unbelievable whiteness of the newly painted rooms. A clean room where no words have yet been spoken; the walls are virginal, there have been no quarrels here, nobody has sobbed in the bathroom, nobody has laughed. We examine room after room closely, walk gingerly on the parquet floor as if it isn’t ours, discuss who will go where, but it all sounds like one of our fantasies, one day when we finally . . . “Here’s your room,” says Mama. I stare, incredulous; into the room I step and close the door behind me. Alone in my room. Here’s where I’ll bring my boyfriend. Here’s where my friends will sleep over. That’s where I’ll put my cassette player. “Come on, we’re leaving,” knocks my brother. From now on everybody will have to knock. I’d stay here all day, but I have no reason to, there’s no furniture yet, we’ve chosen everything and now we’ll go back to our rooms to pack things in big black bags. Just as long as we leave the cockroaches behind—this thought obsesses us. No matter how much we inspect every single thing, blow into the bags to check for holes, we keep worrying they’ll sneak in somewhere, or lay their eggs. Brown cockroaches. They’re thought to be one of the oldest insect groups, fossilized remains have been found that are at least 200 million years old. They have survived to this day thanks to their unbelievable ability to adapt. They feed on human trash and food scraps and have a special penchant for sweet things. They also eat carrion. Meanwhile they transmit parasites and contaminate food. And they emit a stink that often lingers on the food and objects over which they scuttle. By day they hide in nooks and crevices and come out at night. Their flat, oval bodies allow them to squeeze through tiny openings in search of food or to flee from danger. The females lay their eggs and from them larvae are born and metamorphose to adulthood. Every single thing. Again and then once more for good luck.

  Now everything’s a blur. All that matters is we’re moving. When we buy things, it’ll take time for them to be delivered, and until then we have so much to see to. Mama will quit her job at Uncle Grgo’s. She announced this last week after we saw the apartment. Getting there wouldn’t be easy, she’d have to take two buses and a tram. And besides, now we have more money than we did so her job, twice a week, is no longer essential. Mama will be dedicating herself to the apartment—she jokes that she’s forgotten how to cook—and to us, to our new life. Recently Uncle Grgo has been drinking heavily, he always waits for her there after work and then sometimes he goes on and on about Papa, about the bandits, and sometimes he asks, “How have you managed on your own all these years? How can you bear it? Don’t you miss having somebody with you besides the kids?” He usually starts in after a few whiskies and Mama invariably answers, “No one can take his place and nobody’s going to tell my children how to live if their father can’t.” Or she says nothing at all. He tells her, “There are good men out there, you know.” But there he stops and doesn’t push it. He used to joke around, he always joked with me, but the last time I saw him he was solemn. I was on my way to school through the park. I hadn’t seen him for at least a year, he was sitting on a bench, reading the paper; I recognized him straight away, “Well, hello, what brings you here?” He was glad and surprised I’d spotted him. “Hey, kid! My wife went in for a teacher conference and I’m waiting here. How’s school?” “Okay, I guess,” I said, I couldn’t fudge it because his stepdaughter and I were classmates. “Don’t you worry now. Things will sort themselves out, it takes time to settle in, school’s a pain, I know. Your dad’s nickname in school was Blade; you can imagine what he was like, he was the best.” Grgo and I are friends, I’ve always thought so and I’m sorry I have to go; I’d like to sit and listen to him all day long. “Give my regards to your mother!” he called. That was the last time. And then, the shock. Mama called the office. First the phone rang and rang, and then Mladen, Uncle Grgo’s colleague, picked up. Mama cheerfully reported our big news. He congratulated her. Silence. “What happened?” asked Mama. “Listen, I don’t know how to break this to you but Grgo has killed himself.” Mama sat down on the bed and went all small. “How?” she whispered. “Hanged himself. His sister found him. But, I dunno, none of us can believe it. Sure, he was drinking more lately and always talking about how he wasn’t where he should’ve been, that he had no one left, that all his family are six feet under. But, you know, when a person drinks he talks shit. None of us thought . . . The funeral’s on Friday at Mirogoj . . . Goodbye and, again, heartfelt congratulations.” Mama started crying, she groaned aloud and we couldn’t imagine what had happened. He was the only one who’d stood by us, kept alive another piece of Papa. One person less who’d loved him. His loss was the only thing that could distract us for a moment from the apartment.

  His stepdaughter hasn’t been at school the last couple of days. The teacher announced that her stepfather died and we should show her consideration when she came back. The sentiment almost sounded sincere but I know better, I bet she was advised to use those words. They say a person’s died—as if it were from natural causes—even when he’s killed himself. Nobody wants to have had anything to do with somebody who’s killed himself, I get that, it means there’s been a tragedy, a secret, like when somebody’s missing, it’s almost like others blame you for it. How nice it would be just to pass away. To contract a disease you can speak about above a whisper; others pity you but you die peacefully, you know why it’s happening and how you’re supposed to behave. The third day, when she came back, everybody hugged her, they asked her simple questions and spoke in soft voices. I went over to convey my condolences but she couldn’t look me in the eye. She knew I knew and she was probably afraid I’d tell. During fourth period she suddenly bolted from the room; everybody understood why. I got up and went after her to the bathroom. Nobody understood why. I found her, crying. It was stupid now to hug her, but I wanted to say I was sorry. I wanted to say how I felt. I wanted to say that nobody in class would ever hear about it from me. Instead, I told her the worst lie of all: “I know it’s rough for you now, but believe me, it gets easier.” I could see she was moved and from that day forth she treated me differently. For a moment we had something in common.

  We chose the beds, we chose the kitchen cabinets, the dining- room table, six chairs, a sectional sofa. We even chose a still-life painting. All at one store. On it is a slice of watermelon and a few apples, it’s pretty and simple, pastels. These are the kinds of paintings people have in their homes. We couldn’t carry most of it with us, they’d deliver it all soon, we left with only the painting and one of those sleeper chairs, the mattress could be folded up into an armchair, in case somebody needed to sleep there before our things came. “Your brother will drop you off in town so you don’t have take the bus back to the dorm. We’re going to the hotel and I’ll come to the apartment tomorrow to wait for the table and chairs.”

  Not back to the dorm. I’ll sleep the floor, that I can do, but not the dorm. This will be my last night there. I’ve made up my mind and nobody can sway me. I know Mama will have fits, but what can she do about it; just a few weeks, she said, be patient, but I can’t bear it. Not now, not when we have our own place, when I have my own room. I’ll check out of the dorm today. I’ve already packed all my things in two backpacks and a plastic bag, I’m only worried about whether I’ll know where to get off the bus; I haven’t gone there yet on my own. At the dorm everybody knows I’m leaving, I’ve become so close to some of the girls that I’m nearly crying and I promise they’ll come for a sleepover. One of the girls in the room next to mine is a hairdresser and she promised me she’d dye my hair red for free before I left. I’ve been thinking for ages about going red. Ten of us convene in the bathroom. Somebody produces plastic glasses, I’ve brought some bamboo cocktail mix, each will get a sip; cigarettes and potato chips appear. The party moves to the white tiles and grungy showers. I prance around with a plastic bag on my head, I have no idea what Mama will do when she sees me, but that doesn’t matter, a new life begins tomorrow. We giggle and clown and then orange-red water
sluices down the drain, I haven’t seen a thing but I hear gasps, wow, it’s so red. I look up and see somebody else in the mirror, actually this is who I’ve always been, they agree, it looks fabulous. Only when I blow-dry my hair do I see how red I am, how green my eyes are, how pale my face. How broad my grin. I won’t sleep tonight, I’ll say goodbye to everybody and party, and tomorrow, tomorrow is beyond thinkable. Bright and early I’m already at the porter’s desk. I fill out the form, de-register, the matron says they’ll miss me after she asks what have I done to my hair. One backpack behind, another in front, a cap on my head. One more cigarette outdoors by the dorm with the weekend girls. Take care, dorm girls. The driver tells me I’m on the right bus, the trip will take about thirty minutes, he’ll tell me where to get off. Some of the route is familiar, but when I get off the bus I’m not certain which way to go. I wander for a minute and then I see them, the buildings. The buildings form a single complex and our last name is already there, I know I’m home. Apartment twenty-six. I forget the elevator and panting I press the door handle, phew, unlocked, Mama’s here. “Why are you here?” Mama is totally amazed. “I’ve come,” I say. “Yes I see, but this is not what we discussed. Stay in the dorm for another few weeks.” “I can’t go back there,” I say, calm. “Oh I know you want to move in as quickly as possible, but our things haven’t come yet, so wait till we’re ready.” “I cannot go back,” I repeat, enunciating to be clear. “What do you mean, you can’t.” “I de-registered.” “Pardon? De-registered? Now what? Where will you stay?” she asks like she still hasn’t caught on. “Here,” I answer and grin. “Oh, I could strangle you!” Mama relaxes and I realize this is the perfect moment to pull off my hat. “Christ!” shrieks Mama. “What now?” “I tinted my hair, how does it look?” I ask immediately, this is my only argument, it looks good, otherwise she’d have every right to douse me with bleach. “Heavens, could it be any redder? At least you could have warned me, I’m speechless . . .” The buzz of the unfamiliar doorbell. Saved by the table and six chairs. This is the most gorgeous moment of my new life.

  “Fuck you, life, I didn’t sleep a wink,” says my mother to Željka’s over the phone, and Željka’s tells her she smoked a whole pack of cigarettes last night. She asks what she’s up to, and Mama says, “Wall-staring.” Their conversations in a nutshell. My brother usually emerges from his room at two in the afternoon, says nothing, and when he does speak, he says he’s got to get out of here, he’s going to Vukovar, he’ll live there alone. He can’t bear seeing her like this, not her, not me, I’m her spitting image. Recently we’ve been going to Vukovar more often, ever since the identifications began. Every weekend there’s a funeral for somebody we used to know. Our turn hasn’t come yet and it seems it won’t. I get up at night, often I can’t sleep. I’ve got to get out of here, too, as far away as possible, to a place where I won’t feel like I’m going crazy. I might have a disease. Sometimes my heart misses a beat, my hands go numb, I can’t breathe in deeply. I don’t know, maybe Mama has cancer. Everybody’s been getting cancer. Maybe my brother will be killed in a car accident and the two of us will be left alone. She’d never recover. She’d probably die. Maybe Papa’s still alive. He’s been gone ten years. It still happens. A woman from Vukovar was discovered by her daughter in Belgrade in a lunatic asylum. She didn’t recognize her daughter anymore. It would be better not to come back at all.

  Stop, stop it now! These are only thoughts, thoughts can’t hurt. Breathe, breathe, in out. See, it’s easy.

  AFTERWORD

  Ivana Bodrožić’s autobiographical novel The Hotel Tito is one of the most powerful Croatian novels written about the war of the 1990s. It won the Zagreb Kiklop and the Banja Luka-Belgrade Kočićevo pero awards when it was published in 2010. The next year it appeared in a Serbian edition with Rende books in Belgrade, and has since been translated into Czech, Danish, French, German, Macedonian, Slovenian, and Turkish. Bodrožić also writes poetry and short stories, and her most recent novel, The Hole, was published in Zagreb in 2016. The Hotel Tito, called Hotel Zagorje in the original, describes the experience of the author’s family. Bodrožić was born in the town of Vukovar, on the Croatian bank of the Danube River, on the border with Serbia. She and her brother were dispatched to an island on the Dalmatian coast during the summer of 1991 as hostilities began to intensify, and their mother joined them there while their father remained behind to defend Vukovar. That autumn, the Yugoslav People’s Army besieged Vukovar for eighty-seven days, held off by fighters like the narrator’s father. When the army broke the siege and the army and Serbian forces occupied the city, people came up out of the basements where they’d been sheltering from the shelling; women and children were allowed out and a few men managed to break through and escape, but the army took some four hundred men prisoner at the Vukovar hospital and bused them to the Ovčara farm on the outskirts, where soldiers and Serbian paramilitaries massacred the hostages over several days. Ivana Bodrožić’s father was one of those who was captured and murdered; her experiences during the months and years that followed form the core of the novel. After fleeing the Vukovar war zone, the mother and two children in the novel are accommodated as displaced persons at a large conference center and hotel, known as the Political School, in the village of Kumrovec, the birthplace of Josip Broz Tito, president of Yugoslavia for forty years. Before the war the Political School and accompanying hotel facilities were frequently used for Communist Party meetings and other major conferences. For years the family share a single hotel room just large enough for their three beds, waiting to hear whether their father and husband has survived and when they’ll be granted an apartment of their own.

  Geography plays a key role in The Hotel Tito. Vukovar sits on the spot where the Vuka River flows into the Danube. The Danube forms the border between Croatia and Serbia, and it is many miles from Croatia’s capital, Zagreb. When the children travel to the coast they traverse almost all of Croatia by bus. Then they move—first to Zagreb, in the center of Croatia, and, ultimately, to Kumrovec, just a short bus ride outside of Zagreb. Vukovar was far from Zagreb not only in miles, but in sympathy. The narrator is eloquent in her description of her sense of apartness as a displaced person. When the novel first came out it was read in Zagreb as a scathing indictment of the indifference manifested by Zagreb politicians, teachers, and schoolchildren to the plight of the Vukovar people. There was sympathy for a time, but the people of Vukovar were displaced from 1991 until 1997, when their city and the outlying areas were finally re-integrated into Croatia and many of them returned and rebuilt their homes. In the years after 1995, the limbo they were consigned to no longer concerned many of the people they interacted with on a daily basis.

  REFERENCES

  As the novel opens, the author sets the stage for the days leading up to the siege, as she and her brother are packing to go to an island off the coast with other Vukovar children. She makes a number of references, particularly in the opening paragraph, to the ominous political situation. To Croatian readers, particularly those of this generation, these references are far more accessible than they are likely to be to an American or English reader. The narrator, of course, is a nine-year-old child and she also doesn’t understand everything she’s hearing, but the fact that the details catch her attention suggests she has noticed their bite and weight, even if she doesn’t understand them. Her father scolds her, for instance, for singing a song she’s learned from her friends Bora (Bora is a Serbian boy’s name) and Danijel. The song she’s humming is a Serbian ditty boasting of territorial aspirations for a greater Serbia. The word ćale is Serbian slang for “dad” or “papa.” Her father’s irritation with her use of the word and her singing of the song, and his reference to him in “Damn him to hell” (meaning Slobodan Milošević, Serbia’s president) is symptomatic of the tensions of the moment.

  The mention of Meso the monkey (p. 8) is a reference to Stipe Mesić, the last president of Yugoslavia (Jun 30, 1991, to December 6, 1991). Lat
er, he also served as president of Croatia from 2000 to 2010.

  Tajči (p. 9) was a Croatian pop singer in the late 1980s. She represented Yugoslavia at the 1990 Eurovision Song Contest when Zagreb was the host, and her song “Let’s Go Crazy” came in seventh. Her signature hairdo was a cross between Olivia Newton- John’s (as “bad” Sandy) in Grease and Marilyn Monroe’s.

  The song “Moja Ružo” (p. 13) by the Zagreb band Prljavo Kazalište became the anthem of loss during the first year of the war, hence the symbolism of playing it over the radio on the day the Vukovar siege was broken and the city occupied by Serbian forces and the Yugoslav People’s Army. The lyrics describe the death of the songwriter’s mother, Ruža (Rose); the refrain refers to her as “the last Rose of Croatia.”

  Elementary schools and high schools in Croatia run on two shifts (p. 26) one in the morning, running from 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., and the other in the afternoon, from 2:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. One week a child attends school in the morning shift, the next week in the afternoon shift, alternating weeks throughout the school year.

  When the narrator doesn’t understand everything during her conversation with her Italian father about the city of Zadar (p. 53), what she doesn’t know is that before the Second World War, Zadar was an Italian city. Her Italian father’s father, Giuseppe, was presumably an Italian fascist soldier who fought there during the war.

  Kulen (p. 59) is a coveted traditional spicy smoked sausage, often homemade, typical for the cuisine of the region of Slavonia and the city of Vukovar.