When I came back to Amsterdam I decided that instead of renting an apartment again, short-term, as I had before, it was time to provide myself with more stability—and I resolved to do this almost subversively, as if stealing my own wallet, with a feeling of both victory and defeat. There may have been a cautious voice in my mind calculating that I’d been wandering from place to place for too long now, high time I settled down. Had the sheer whiteness of the New York store and that sudden attack of sobs tugged a thread inside me? I don’t know. All I know is that I brought the pure white of my new home to a searing white psychotic heat. White curtains of hand-tatted lace, white towels, white linen bedding, white walls, white floor- and wall-tiles in the kitchen and bathroom, white shelves . . . Everything was white, basic white, like oblivion. It was only later that the stains appeared.
4.
I read the great works of world literature in high school—Jane Austen, Dickens, Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert—and found that all of them were actually about money, just as the relations among the characters were governed only by money, though our literature teachers told us otherwise. Writers like Dickens may owe their great popularity during their lifetime precisely to the way money motivates everything in their novels, something the vast majority of readers can grasp. With modernism, money slipped out the backdoor of literature. True, Virginia Woolf in her oft-quoted essay A Room of One’s Own does say a woman cannot be a writer if she has no room of her own and a minimal income of 500 pounds a year. This assertion has been a magnet for the attention of the literary public for nearly a century. Indeed, ever since the essay was first published, somebody, every so often, comes up with the idea of converting the sum of five hundred pounds to today’s standard of living.
So I had the room, but not the yearly 500 pounds. And then, in addition to my one room, I found myself in possession of another, thanks to the caprice of a gentleman, an admirer of my writings, who left me some property in his will. This made me uneasy; I couldn’t remember when anybody had given me anything more valuable than a book and a bouquet of flowers, and now out of the blue—a house with a garden in a village I’d never heard of. I’m not one who often hears of villages anyway, the thought of life in the countryside had never attracted me. The only village I was familiar with was the English variety, the kind I watched on BBC shows in the PBTP (Property-Buying Television Programs) category. The programs had charming titles (Escape to the Country, To Buy or Not to Buy, Safe as Houses, and so forth) and the narrative structure was much like that of a porn film: a good-looking young agent takes a middle-aged, retired couple around to see two or three properties in the English countryside. The middle-aged couple and the young agent tour the houses and in the end there’s a final “mystery” house. My mystery house was in a Croatian village, not in England. Life may also write novels, but it varies the geographic setting and cultural surroundings that anchor the story, and these fundamentally set each novel apart from all the rest.
My first thought was to decline the gift left to me by this man I hardly knew, but the tax I was to pay if I were to take ownership was negligible and the lawyer persuaded me that to refuse such a thing was simply foolish. So there it was, I acquiesced, signed the papers, and set the whole story aside for a time. At the moment of his death, the old gentleman had, apparently, had no next of kin. His Zagreb apartment was left to a caregiver who’d been looking after him for years. He’d read my books with interest, or so he claimed in the handful of letters he sent me. This was something I did not find flattering; first one must get to know one’s reader and his literary tastes before knowing whether to take his praise to heart.
And that was that. Even my lawyer couldn’t tell me anything more about the old gentleman. Some people are so self-contained that they take even their own shadow with them to the grave, while others make a museum of their life, in which even the needle they used to sew on buttons is prominently displayed.
5.
Even now, more than forty years after his death, I can summon to my memory the dark-purple stain that was an object of fascination for me when I was small. I don’t know how things imprint themselves on our memory, whether we choose what we remember or it chooses us. Father refused to speak of the war, the Second World War. He spoke, in fact, very little. He never mentioned his parents. They died in the war, was all he’d say, slapping with his tone a non-negotiable kibosh on the subject. My interest in my grandparents was buried with that sentence. He joined the Partisans when he was barely seventeen. He didn’t relish talk of that, either. He came out of the war with German shrapnel lodged in his leg, with a wound that never healed and a stain the hue of rotten flesh. He refused to have the shrapnel removed and insisted it didn’t bother him. I had no idea what shrapnel was, and that’s probably why the story so shook my childish imagination. The blemish aroused no disgust in me or fear for my father. I studied it with curiosity, as if studying a map. The stain was big simply because I was small. Father died before the age of forty-nine. And so he was buried with German shrapnel in his leg and a Partisan star engraved on his gravestone. The shrapnel in his body was a metaphor, but I understood that only many, many years later.
Mother outlived him by thirty years. Over all those years she managed to expunge him almost completely from my memory, though I doubt she meant to. Mother came by her victory honestly: she lived much longer than Father had and, unlike him, she told stories. I knew all her stories about close family, distant family and the very distant cousins, her acquaintances, family friends, neighbors from the building where she lived. Those people, thanks to her stories, became a part of my extended family, at least for a time. Only in the last years of her life did she begin to concoct little make-believe tales, erasing people from her mental circle, although many of them were dead anyway, many she hadn’t seen for years; with time she saw fewer and fewer people. Women were gradually given the advantage on her list, particularly those who were no longer alive. Men, unlike women, faded, dropped off the list, or the ink of her suspicious nature blotted them. He was not a good man, she’d say for some poor fellow who was long since gone and buried, exactly as if she were chairing a celestial committee. She was not religious, indeed she despised the church. I think she was simply beginning slowly to pack and select in her mind’s eye whom she would be “taking with her,” and whom she wouldn’t.
And yet, though he was a very, very good man, I am not sure Father would have been included in her mental circle. Perhaps she erased him at the last moment before death erased her; perhaps she was punishing him for abandoning her to live alone for thirty years. Because we, her children, were only a comfort to her when we were able to be at her side.
6.
Whenever I came to Zagreb I stayed at Mother’s. After her death, the apartment was gradually emptied of furniture. Friends, neighbors, neighbors’ friends took things, whatever each of them needed. When the big wardrobe was pulled away from the wall, ugly, old, ragged wallpaper was exposed that had been hidden behind it for years. This wallpaper flapped—like a white flag signalizing surrender—a long time in the half-emptied apartment until, during one of my Zagreb stays, it dared me to begin. I replaced the windows, because pigeons had nested in the outdoor housing for the Venetian blinds and nothing could drive them out. The new windows helped, but the pigeons kept flying into the wall above, seeking a way back to the space they’d conquered and that had been their home for so long. I glued rows of plastic spikes to the sill and this stopped the pigeons, but only for a time. I had new kitchen cabinets installed, renovated the bathroom, painted the walls and woodwork white, had the parquet floors sanded. The absence of character, the ascetic feel, the lack of furniture all soothed me. Except for Mother’s books, nothing in the apartment was hers any more, nor was it mine. The whole space had an anesthetizing effect. Only sometimes, at dusk, from the corner of the dining room, by the window, where before there was a broad sill on which Mother had kept pots of flowers, I’d have the impression
I could hear rustling. The sound came from an invisible cage around which an invisible canary fidgeted nervously. Its beady black eye seared into me like a white-hot needle, penetrating straight to the malleable core of never-healing shame. At one moment (when she was the same age I am now) I had given Mother a canary. At first she was bemused, she’d never kept pets, she felt they were unhygienic, but then she understood. I’d brought her the canary to keep her company, a canary is just the pet for a woman her age, I thought (did I?). They give senile women rubber baby dolls at old peoples’ homes and the residents rock them for hours, anesthetizing themselves with the rhythm. Why are doctors and therapists so certain that a doll is the woman’s one and only toy? Why was I so sure the canary was the best choice?
I was writing her off. Humiliating her. I remember her surprised, slightly slanted gaze and the color of her eyes: light brown flecked with amber. It was the look of a little girl who’s been dropped from a game, a moment of youthful protest flashed in her eyes that was soon stilled . . . She swallowed the insult with grace, accepted the canary dutifully as a blow she didn’t know how to parry, and then with time she grew used to it and even loved the presence of the bird. Whenever I called her from abroad, I would always ask after the canary, it was silly but, surprisingly, it helped: we were winding the wool of our conversations around something living, painless and light, around a surrogate that eased the ache.
7.
The village was known as Kuruzovac. It was some thirty miles south-east of Zagreb. I borrowed a car from an old friend . . .
“Are you sure you don’t need it?”
“Yes, I am. What would I do with it, anyway. It’s silly to sell it for a song but right now I don’t even have the money for gas . . .”
“Should I pay you something for the loan?”
“No need. When you bring it back, fill up the tank, that’s all. And we’ll be happy as the day is long,” she said.
The phrase—happy as the day is long—sounded oddly out of place, although there was nothing wrong with it. Maybe it’s that I hadn’t heard it said in a while so it sounded odd, maybe there was something off with me. Too often, the words and sentences said by people I was talking to and strangers on the street or on a tram sounded weird. They came popping out from everywhere like broken springs. I hadn’t spent time in Zagreb in years, I reasoned to console myself, although this wasn’t, in fact, exactly true: I came two or three times a year and each time I’d stay for at least a month. The language, as ordinary people spoke it, had been infiltrated by something unnatural, out of kilter, insecure. It was perhaps the occasional word, phrase, or use of dialect, such as Kajkavian, for instance, where it didn’t quite sit, or a twinge of inner insecurity that drove the speaker to pause for just a second before they said what they were about to say, and this mental hiccup reflected in an ugly way on what they said. The intonation had changed, young people had their own cadence now, the pace of speaking had changed, too. The Croatian dubbing of children’s cartoons and animated features, American teen TV series, the gallop of ads and radio, all this had sped up the Croatian language over the last twenty years. The inflection and pace sounded to my ear like ungainly novelty.
My questions began the moment I landed in Zagreb with the intention of finally having a look at the house. Didn’t I catapult myself abroad twenty-two years ago without a thought, even once, for what would become of me, where I’d go, how I’d fare moving forward? Didn’t I leave then, forsaking my home and crumbling domicile because the air was so thick with hatred that it couldn’t be breathed? And now, look, lured with a nubbin of cheese I was crawling steadily toward the same old mousetrap. What was I thinking! Home? What home! Why, I have a home in Amsterdam, don’t I? Friends? What friends? Didn’t my friends write me off, watching silently—as the powers-that-be batted me about: they the cat, I the mouse—showing an indifference that iced the blood in my veins? Did they ever wonder where I was going, would I be back, did I need any help? Look, after all the years we’d spent as friends they weren’t interested in these trifles. So what about later? Did they ever seek me out? Isn’t twenty years long enough to think, at least once, of one’s lost friends? And what about those who declared open season on me, what about the hunters who harvested a trophy pelt from my hide, weren’t they still at the very same posts they’d occupied in the newspapers, at the university, on TV, in the publishing companies, yes, my colleagues? Didn’t the booksellers refuse to display my books for years on their shelves? Didn’t the journalists follow my every—barely published—book with a tomblike silence or fling their inflated, ignorant bile at it? Had any of them ever apologized for the long years of loathing? And what about the innocent in this whole story, the young people who hadn’t yet had time to be infected by the hatred. Would they ever invite me to join them and set things straight somehow? Wasn’t it they, obediently upholding the rules they’d inherited in the vicious social games, who erased me from university curricula, secondary-school reading lists, anthologies, textbooks, publishers’ catalogues? What about my colleagues, editors, publishers? What about the publisher of mine who, during the rapid-fire changes in government, leapfrogged from publisher to chief of the Croatian police force and pounded, one night, drunk, at my front door, demanding that I open up? The rush of power had gone to his head as it did for so many and he sought the cure for his sense of intellectual, professional, or sexual inadequacy in a substitute, a revolver. What about my colleague who—smack dab in the middle of a crowded tram car—accused me of betraying my homeland, milking the other travelers as his eager audience? What about my female colleagues, did they show solidarity? Didn’t they hasten to publish barbed texts in which there were no statements grounded in reality but only naked envy wrapped up in quasi-argument? They, too—“the girls”—stabbed their penknives into the bloodied flesh. They relished the smell of blood every bit as much as “the boys” did, and, following the boys, they flung feathers in collective retribution at the tar smeared all over me. Didn’t all that, and so much more, happen then and was happening still today after a full twenty years, with the same doltish obduracy? If so, what was I thinking, plunging back in? Had I come back for a new slap in the face, fresh spittle that would slather my cheeks like pigeon shit, a new blow to knock me breathless when my righteous “volunteer,” my illiterate executioner, no longer even knew why he was doing it? He stares at me with his dull gaze, his mouth slack, saliva dribbling out the corners, he musters the spittle, works it around with his tongue as if it were a piece of hard candy, and then—splat!—gloms it onto my cheek like a llama. And I wondered. Was I addicted to the humiliation? Was what I needed an even bigger dose, perhaps? And if not, then why the hell didn’t I break this habit once and for all?
I am overstating my case and my importance; they’d never even noticed I was gone because they hadn’t known I’d been here in the first place, and besides, hadn’t I moved from address to address enough times by now? Why, then, was I tugging at their sleeve, and what, exactly, did I have in mind? Hadn’t I been doing just fine where I’d settled, and wasn’t it a little peculiar that I kept coming back so persistently? Each time has its music, and time had passed me by, twenty years was a whole age ago, everything that was making me itch had happened in the last century, and back then, for God’s sake, people were dying. I should have been glad nothing so awful happened to me, look, war is war, the war is over and done with, people have put it behind them now, they’ve stepped into the new century, the new millennium, there are other, young faces on the media screens, new entertainers, new TV anchors . . . And, of course, new writers. So why, then, would I matter? Had I ever had anything nice to say about them in my writing? Hadn’t I refused to be a Croatian woman? Hadn’t I refused to be a Serbian woman? So what was I after? It wasn’t their fault I hadn’t taken sides at a moment that required only that, the taking of sides. And didn’t I declare, if you please, several times in public that I was a nobody? So what did I expect? Be my guest, ma’am, be a
nobody, heh heh, don’t let us stop you from being a nobody, heh heh, go live with your nobodies, write your nobody books, find your nobody readers, but us—git-git, shoo shoo!—give us a break!
It was a sunny day in late April when I went off to scout out the house I’d inherited. I brought with me a flashlight, a sleeping bag, a blanket, bedding—just in case I decided to spend the night—and a few other practical necessities. I drove along back roads and this had its up side: the sky arched above me, bright blue, and a slide-show flashed by my window: green, dandelion-sprinkled fields, flowering fruit trees, villages with hopelessly ugly houses. My gut resistance melted as I caught sight of purple lilacs cascading in clusters over the fences in the rural yards, and I capitulated when to the surface of my memory floated the image of the thumb on a child’s hand, working back and forth to make a crease in the skin. Into the crease was poked a lilac floret and the crease, by squeezing together the folds, held the little blossom upright. That was how, when we were little girls, we carried flowers around in the thumb crease, holding our hands out before us like tiny trays bearing crystal goblets—the lilac florets. We were junior acrobats plying our trade with rapt attention: the floret must not tip over. That sudden image left me breathless when it surfaced from the depths of my recollection to gulp in air, to remind me that in childhood, everything was a close-up and in high resolution—every blade of grass, ant, and leaf, every detail—I drank it all in thirstily, with attention and delight. It was a time of lilacs, a time of little wonders.
8.
The house looked far better than I’d expected. It stood at the end of a row of houses and was set back a little from the road that wound through the village. A short, unpaved turn-off led up a gentle rise to the house. It was all of wood, the sort of rustic log cabin one seldom finds intact any more. It had a capacious porch and I already could imagine myself sitting out there, staring at the blue (sky) and green (field) ribbons on the horizon. As I turned the key in the door, a powerful thrill coursed through me. The view of the interior, which I could see from the threshold, however, made it obvious that somebody was living there. I put down my silly “girl-scout” bundle and went into the kitchen to open the refrigerator. There was food on the shelves, milk, butter, eggs . . . In the living room, which opened onto the kitchen, there were a small table with a television set, an old sofa, and an armchair. I picked up the remote and clicked on the TV. It worked. There was a desk and shelf in the living room with a small, but unexpectedly good selection of books, and, what’s more, I noticed a few of the most recent Croatian translations. On a side table by the sofa I noticed an older edition of Krleža’s novel On the Edge of Reason, the same edition I had. On the ground floor was a bedroom and a bathroom with a toilet. The bed was unmade. I went on up to the attic where, clearly, nobody was staying. Up there were built-in closets, a big mattress, and a half-bath. The toiletries in the downstairs bathroom suggested that the intruder was a man.
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