by Daša Drndic
Up until then I knew little about Leila and her family, partly because of our rare and spasmodic, truncated communication, partly because of my lack of interest in Latvia and Latvian history.
Then a hatch opened.
There, in the Bavarian forest, one quiet Bavarian night in which, as my friend the poet Sibila Petlevski says:
Owls hoot and hawks mew, and a fox howls, barks,
Falcons sing as though in a church. The cruel liturgy
Lets you and me know that nothing is any good anymore,
while everyone was asleep, I packed my little suitcase and set off on foot toward the little town whose name I’ve forgotten, in the middle of which there was a little redbrick railroad station, to jump on a train bound for Vienna at three in the morning, because that town virtually ran into Austria. It wasn’t winter, there was no snow, which these days I wish for with such longing, but in vain, because when it snows, silence falls from the sky onto my chest, feathery, tender and soft, a wounding silence, under which all living things collapse, to which all that breathes abandons itself. It was a late rainy autumn, intrusive and threatening.
That was the end of my contact with Leila — until her next visit to Croatia some ten years later and then again, in her and my unsightly old age.
We were supposed to stay with Leila’s family for several days, to walk in the mountains and pick mushrooms in the neighboring woods where, they told me, you could find clitocybe, armillaria, marasmius and beech trunks in which there were pleurotus and boletus. We had planned to pickle some of the mushrooms, I said that I would make risotto from others, to which the family, even Leila’s father, responded Ah, wunderbar. They had given me a little room which must have served as a small storeroom for rejected objects, a little room with a floral carpet and curtains edged with frills, the bed was from the 1950s, too short for me, and the floorboards had been painted with white oil paint. In the corner, in three open cardboard boxes there were outdated small household appliances — a hand nut grinder, a lead machine for hand-mincing meat, a Bakelite telephone, a few Ronson electric razors, a dozen old lighters into which you placed a tiny flint and into which petrol dripped from plastic ampules, there were worn-out Pelikan fountain pens, one with green and black stripes, like the one with which my grandmother Ana had written letters to Tito complaining of social and political injustice, there were Parker pens, and pen holders, there were old slides in small yellow Kodak boxes, which I didn’t open, then some broken glasses frames, there were all sorts of things, narrow metal hair rollers, which you attached with red rubber bands, there was an irrigator pump and necklaces of plastic pearls, little packets of the past, thrown here without order or sense, in which days and years squirmed and collided, little sparks of joy and sorrow, moments of solitude and togetherness, beauty and poverty, sickness and anxiety, some thirty years of some kind of life in the German backwoods below the Bavarian Alps, in a tiny village with fewer than two thousand inhabitants, a past which its owners no longer had any need to conjure up. There were no letters, or documents or photographs, only rubbish, trash, remains, a superfluity of memory that neither upset nor pleased, just a heap of dead objects covered with dust and a thin layer of soot from the furnace on the other side of the room, piles into which new leftovers, new unnecessary things would occasionally leap, because all three boxes were open. And, just as I had begun to put things back into one of the boxes in the same order in which I had taken them out, at the bottom I caught sight of a gray-black case with a swastika printed on the cover. Naturally I opened that little box. In it lay an iron cross of the Wehrmacht covered by a small yellowing note with the seal of the Third Reich. On the note was written the name of Leila’s father, Mazais Arvīds, and: 19/44 p. 3-Mr-45 DK II. At the time I understood virtually nothing of what was written, but later I did. At the bottom of the note was a resounding greeting which made the whole room shake: Heil Hitler! I did understand that.
I knew that, after the war, when the USSR mercilessly transformed Latvia and the other two Baltic states into its own provinces, and transported many of their dissidents in cattle trucks to gulags, Leila’s family had fled to Germany, that they spent two or three years, I’ve forgotten how long, in some kind of refugee camp there and that after that their life started all over again. A new life blurred by memories in which albums from the past lay stored in a cranny of reality, in an archive, which, as always happens, someone some day would nevertheless open.
For me Latvia became a riddle only some ten years later, when a half truth, long unspoken in my family, acquired outlines, when, like wormholes, those penetrations into space and time, into new spaces and a new time, it began to create shortcuts toward a journey, that often dangerous and destructive journey the end of which cannot be seen. But, some years later, all that rubbish, all that rot and rubble settled and we began to step over it, softly at first, trying not to disturb the dust, then we collected the shards of that past, all those splinters, we buried all that debris and moved on.
My mother Marisa met my father Rudolf in Paris. They were both then living in Split, she at 4 Ulica Matošića, he on Ulica Hajduk-Veljko, which was renamed, with the coming of the Fascists, via dei Duchi d’Aosta. She was just seventeen and he twenty-one. She was a pupil at the Girls’ Real Gymnasium and had a blue clothbound notebook with pages for the timetable, printed in two variants of Serbo-Croat and Slovene, just as today in Bosnia and Herzegovina the identical phrase Smoking kills is printed in Latin (Croatian) script, Cyrillic (Serbian) and Bosnian (also Latin script). That notebook, with its blue cloth cover, with the black coat of arms of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia on the first page, was printed in Belgrade at the State Press of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1933. He, my father Rudolf, was studying Electronics at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of Belgrade University and in the summer, during the vacation, he went “home” to Split, not knowing in fact where his home or his house was, because after the Fascist occupation of Istria, as a two-year-old, he had left Pazin with his family in 1921 and lived first in Orebić, then in Makarska and finally in Split where he completed his schooling. She, my mother Marisa, had perfect pitch, two brothers and poverty. Many years later, at the beginning of the 1950s, when Marisa was about thirty and I was already born, Zinka Kunc Milanov was performing in New York at the Metropolitan. Marisa and Rudolf arranged a celebratory dinner for Zinka Kunc and some others, the room was full of guests, pašticada was served, followed by crème caramel, it was all cooked by Grandma Ana, then Zinka Kunc began to sing, and Marisa joined in. I was five, maybe six, and I was totally fascinated by Zinka’s transparent plastic shoes, because she moved as though she was barefoot, as though floating. With their arms around each other, Zinka and Marisa sang “Far away is my Split,” then Zinka threw off her plastic shoes, I took one, examined it, turned it around and upside down, Ada (3) came up, put it onto her chubby little foot and started hobbling about, no one took any notice of us, because Zinka Kunc was singing, someone picked the song out on the piano, and the Zinka-Marisa duet draped itself over each and every one of us in the room like a magic mantle. That duet, that “Far away is my Split” sung by Zinka Kunc and my mother Marisa floated for a long time behind me, sending out bright rays into which I would disappear after deaths began to stalk our lives. But, while the two of them were singing, Zinka’s brother Božidar went wild over Marisa. Turning to her, he shouted Excellent, breathe, a little more, more, that’s it, inhale, pause . . . , waving his arms the whole time. So, perhaps my mother Marisa could have become an opera singer, but she didn’t, there was no money for singing lessons, for conservatoires, and then war broke out, the family moved to Zagreb, my grandfather joined the underground, Marisa too, Grandma Ana altered old clothes into “new” ones, one uncle sheepishly supported the Independent State of Croatia, while the other gave her a hard time.
And Grandma Ana could have been al pari to Coco Chanel or Elsa Schiaparelli, not only did she clothe half of Split, bu
t after the war she sewed evening dresses for opera singers, for painters, for all kinds of high-ranking functionaries, State and Party, and for the wives of diplomats, she made that famous little black dress for Ada when few people in Yugoslavia had heard of little black dresses, because in those days in Yugoslavia girls wore full skirts to below the knee, held up with starched petticoats with a lot of frills, that swayed as they walked.
So, in Split, in her childhood, Marisa did sing. She practiced the piano in the salons of Ana’s rich clientele, when she was allowed in; Grandma Ana had a salon as well, but for dressmaking, with fourteen workers, and she cut out, interfaced and pleated day and night so as to feed us all, three children, herself and her dreamer husband, the anarchist Max Osterman, who read Goethe and Schiller in Gothic, if he was not reading Kropotkin and company. When it was really necessary, when the family income diminished, my mysterious grandfather would drag himself off reluctantly to his barber’s shop, at 3 Plinarska, quite near the street where he lived, at 4 Matošića, and there in his own barber’s salon, he would crossly scrape with a razor the chins of fat gentlemen, for the most part in the late afternoon. And then, with what was then still a jovial step, he would hurry to some theater performance (the theater was nearby as well) or to a secret meeting of anarchists or perhaps to the “‘Anarch’ Workers’ Football Club, known as “Red,” but officially the “Split Workers’ Football Club,” whose president he was from 1919 to 1921, and which was just two doors further down, at 7 Plinarska. Above the door of that building at 7 Plinarska, Split, and, remarkably, still there today, at the time when the blinded, half-educated Croatian right-wingers were fanatically and hysterically hammering plaques (and our heads), there is one with a star carved in the top, with a little hammer and sickle in its center, put up in 1972 by “the members and administrators,” on which it says, in this building in 1912, the split workers’ football club was founded.
While your granddad cooled his balls, as Grandma Ana used often to say of her husband, top models emerged from my salon for the Split gentry to parade them along the Riva. Even during the war, until things became really bad, probably until 1942, my Grandma Ana used to travel to Belgrade for the latest Vogue, in other words, despite the bombs, the trains ran, unlike in this last dirty little war, when all connections, even telephones, between Croatia and Serbia were cut, and when the telephones were not cut, the operators used to interrupt conversations and comment on them or, if they did not like the conversations at all, they would make a threatening comment and abruptly cut them off. So, in spite of our poverty, my mother Marisa was known as one of the most beautifully and fashionably dressed young women in Split, except that her dresses were always “combined,” that is they were composed of the leftovers from Grandma Ana’s clients. In the years of her elderly nostalgia and mournful loneliness, my grandmother Ana would talk about the way Šimun would suddenly burst into their dining room.
Who’s Šimun? I would ask.
Šimun Rosandić, you silly.
We pupils of the Boys’ Trade School decided to found a football club. We played for fun, but also out of protest against all kinds of evil. We pondered for a long time what to call the club, I was the first to think of the name — Anarchist! Later we shortened it to Anarch. That seemed to me the best name, because it contained in it — something else! What else? Ah, let others work it out!
Šimun Rosandić, Grandma Ana would say, used to appear in the dining room, gobble three fritters and ride off into the night with Max. While I sewed.
After the authorities shut down the “Anarch” Football Club for a second time in 1919 (the first time was after the Sarajevo assassination, because the Anarch supporters refused to display a flag with a black flower), the club “repositioned” itself as the Yugoslav Football Club “Yug.” Over the years, “Yug” too positioned and repositioned itself, it was closed down, its premises burned, it changed names, merged with other clubs, this was all described to me (when my Granddad Max was long gone) in her old age by the new-born football fan, my Grandma Ana. But that’s not the current topic.
As Ana’s son, my Uncle Karlo, often used to say, It’s not that Papa wasn’t exactly overjoyed when I was born five months later, which meant five months after the two of them, Max and Ana, had only had a civil marriage ceremony, and as Grandma Ana bore three children, I believed that between Max and Ana there was, however hidden and disguised, nevertheless passion. What is more, in her already advanced old age, forty and more years since my grandfather Max Osterman had given up his melancholy soul in 1944, in Zagreb, aged barely fifty-six, after watching every match, particularly those of the Split club “Hajduk” (where Max Osterman had been a treasurer in 1920), which Ana would follow regularly and knowledgeably, poor Max would stroll into the room, illuminated by flashes of what had been, until 1941, their happy life. Until recently, when I definitively overtook the age of Max Osterman in years, I believed that, in their small Zagreb apartment under the NDH, the Independent State of Croatia, my grandfather’s heart had simply burst with misery and pain — poof! — and that, blissful and finally free, he had joined his cronies, Proudhonists, Kropotkinists, Vanzetti-ists, Durutti-ists and so on, when in fact, I only realized recently (because I hadn’t asked earlier, because I didn’t care) my granddad Max Osterman died of pneumonia, or perhaps tuberculosis, because then, in 1944, in the NDH, the Osterman family had no money to buy streptomycin, which Dr. Zora Voneš would not give him (she would have sold it to him), with her private practice situated then and many years later in the neighborhood, on Medveščak. Smuggling flourished during the NDH, of course, the black market was lively, while people on the whole were not. The Osterman family had nothing to sell, apart from its good name. Max Osterman could not find a job, he roamed the Zagreb suburbs, went to barbershops offering his services, but his barber colleagues were suspicious: Where’ve you been up to now? they asked, because in 1941 some were already in the underground, many were working for the Movement, some were in prison, like the barber Pavešić, some died in camps: the barber Muharem Grozdanić from Ulica Radićeva, others were arrested and then killed in the Jasenovac camp: Milan Uzelac from Ulica Preradovićeva, some were already with the Partisans, and Đuro Peška, Drago Gaži, Ankica Urek and Marijan Hebner had never heard, nor did they wish to, of the Split anarchist Max Osterman.
Max Osterman simply didn’t belong. He was born too early for the Great War, and came to Zagreb too late. Grandma Ana didn’t sew, she just patched what had already been patched, turned other people’s rags inside out, ruined her fingers, clicked her tongue, and when her tolerance snapped she made threats, she beat herself in the breast and shouted, I’ll throw myself out of the window! Then, as the years passed, Grandma Ana, just incidentally, would toss into her story brief episodes from her life, from what was to us a distant time, episodes which now prowl around me, creep into my Rumpelzimmer, adding to the disorder still further. For instance, the formal dance that the “Red Devils,” as they now call themselves, then members of the “Split” or rather “Anarch” Football Club, already renamed “Yug,” organized on Saturday, February 14 (Valentine’s Day), 1920, in the Troccoli café, now the Central restaurant on the Pjaca, inviting workers, laborers and lovers of sport to buy tickets for just fifteen kunas for men and five for women. Bit by bit, it was quite unclear why or because of what, days, nights, years would come into Ana’s stories, with no connection to her or my reality at the time, with no stimulus or obvious, at least to me, associations, as though within the walls of her skull parallel tales were spinning, detached stories knitted into balls of history that floated through some cosmic, timeless time, colliding occasionally with a bang, at others remaining locked in an undefined embrace of suffering, longing, loss, anger, caprice and emotions.
You know, I didn’t just sew, sometimes I’d go out with Granddad.
Yes, I went to the bazaar, shopping, I sewed and fed them all, plus those fourteen little seamstresses, while he
read about revolts in America, about Sacco and Vanzetti, about bombings in Milan in the Hotel Cavour, and in Torino, many dead, and he talked, he didn’t speak much otherwise, about the failed attempts at assassinating Mussolini, all right, I’d join in then, I’d say it was a pity they didn’t succeed, and he would say, a great pity. He read Proudhon, do you have any idea who Proudhon was? He read Bakunin, in 1921, he wanted to go to Kropotkin’s funeral somewhere near Moscow, I said, either Kropotkin or us, he read Pensiero e Volontà by some Malatesta, and when he died back in 1932, he said, now I am going to this funeral, Rome was closer than Moscow. And he went, it was summer, July, my blood pressure went through the roof and I miscarried. He was obsessed with that anarchist Germaine Berton, who tried to kill some right-wing journalist in France, and I was about to give birth to your mama. If it’s a girl we’ll call her Germaine, he said, fuck your Germaine, I said, and I gave Marisa the name Katica, which is just as awful as Germaine, so we changed it later. Afterward, that Germaine killed herself, you see. Is there any football on tonight?
Marisa also swam. We were all swimmers. Marisa swam (I had a photo in which she is smiling while swimming on her back, I also had a small portrait photo of my grandfather Max Osterman from that time, from 1940, the grandfather I had never seen, let alone got to know, now that little picture too has disappeared), so Marisa swam and competed for the Split club, Jadran, our father played water polo in the Jadran club, and at the end of the 1960s I too played for Jadran, until I moved to POŠK, Ada even won some medals, we all swam and in the end — drowned. In those days, with the coming of the Fascists, the Jadran members refused to become part of the Italian league, collectively abandoned their swimming pool in Zvončac and the club disbanded, many of its members joined the National Liberation Movement, and some died in it.