EEG

by Daša Drndic

  But it was not good. Before Alfred Rosenberg, before the soldiers of the Wehrmacht, as I’ve said, the soldiers of the Soviet Union came into Latvia.

  Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume was an excellent craftsman, he made more than three thousand instruments, and he created violins in the style of Stradivarius and Guarneri, as well as perfect copies of them. But, Frida Landsberg knew. Back then, in Paris, in the summer of 1939, Frida would sometimes let her violin slip from her hand, but never from her sight, so when Marisa, after she had first eaten the cheap potage du jour with Karlo, Rudolf and Frida, and for dessert the famous Chantilly cream in the always crowded Chartier in Montmartre (7 rue du Faubourg), when Marisa asked her, Is your violin valuable? Frida said, No, it’s just a good imitation, with an excellent sound.

  Rudolf returned to Belgrade to study, and during the March demonstrations in 1941 he was arrested and beaten up in prison by the police agent Kosmajac, after which he went to Split and set about organizing a rebellion in Istria. In August 1940, Karlo returned to Split from Riga, half-mad. Marisa, who had joined the Split organization of the League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia as early as June 1941, went with her family to Zagreb, registered to study medicine, plunged into the underground, but the tracker dogs caught her, in the Ustasha prison at 9 Ulica Franje Račkog she was tortured by the investigator Kamber, she was extracted from prison by her other brother, then, according to unverified stories, a Home Guard university employee or member of the University Ustasha Command, as it was already called then, who, again according to the principle of hearsay, used to come to lectures in uniform, the Ustasha one, or perhaps she was saved by an “ustasha,” communist youth guard, I don’t know.

  In 2006 or 2007, I no longer remember which, at the funeral of my cousin Clara, the one who died of glioblastoma, while, over her open grave, the priest performed a playlet, which the audience, their faces long like the chorus in an ancient drama, accompanied with the singsong refrain, Culpa, mea culpa, I was approached by an older woman who told me in a whisper, In 1942, my brother was a Zagreb student connected with the National Liberation Army. He was with your mother in an Ustasha prison, and your uncle and Clara’s uncle, the engineer Bruno, belonged to the University Ustasha Command and used to come to lectures in uniform. So, at funerals you learn all kinds of things. One corpse is laid to rest in the earth, another climbs out.

  In the 1960s no one in my family mentioned the wartime and postwar past of Uncle Bruno, later an internationally known scientist, an expert in the biological protection of agricultural and forest cultures, one of the founders of the postwar Agriculture and Forestry Faculty in Sarajevo, a member of the Academy of Science and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, that Uncle Bruno who succeeded in curing his carcinoma of the testis, while metastases crawled through the body of my mother, his sister Marisa, constricting and devouring her to extinction. How come, I wondered, only too late, too late, how come Uncle Bruno was in Sarajevo in 1946, given that my family, on either Marisa’s or Rudolf’s side, had no connection whatever with Bosnia and Herzegovina.

  Grandma Ana had told me that in 1941 Bruno had a fiancée, Judita, who was studying philosophy, that Judita was a Jew and that, through his connections, which I suppose today were Ustasha connections, Bruno secretly moved Judita to Trieste, where all trace of her was lost. No one in our family ever mentioned Judita again.

  Recently, an Ustasha pass fell out of my benign notes of that time, from which the name of the bearer had been cut off. Why was this pass amputated? Who did it? Why did I have that pass and to whom did it refer? Did that pass have any connection with Bruno’s getting Judita to Italy? I haven’t any answers, and I no longer have anyone to ask.

  Does that upset me?

  No.

  Did Bruno collaborate with the Ustasha? I asked my then 92- year-old father, now that it was already too late. My father said nothing, I asked him again, my father said, Many people collaborated.

  Why did he go to Sarajevo?

  I don’t remember, said my father.

  What happened to Bruno’s fiancée Judita? I asked my then 92-year-old father, now that it was already too late.

  Who’s Judita? said my father.

  I read somewhere that wars are an orgy of forgetting. The twentieth century archived vast catacombs, subways of data in which the researcher gets lost and in the end abandons the search, catacombs into which ever fewer people go, buried — forgotten. The twentieth century, the century of great spring cleaning which ended with cleansing; the twentieth century, the century of cleansing, the century of erasure. Didn’t Pliny write somewhere that nothing about us is as fragile as memory, that dubious ability that a person constructs and deconstructs? Whom can I ask now? How can I resolve this family puzzle?

  Does it matter to me now?

  No. It’s just interesting.

  Four years passed, laden with dreams, deaths, betrayals, murders, political intrigues, poverty and illnesses, four years after which one day on a scrap of newspaper a message from Rudolf arrived in Zagreb, Ulica Medvedgradska: If you are still with us, get in touch. Grandma Ana was making a wedding skirt with wide shoulder straps for Marisa out of my grandfather’s, the by-now-late Max Osterman’s gray, shabby woolen trousers, on her old Singer (there it is, at Ada’s), and turning the collar on a worn-out shirt, which she had bleached, for Rudolf. A new life was beginning.

  Why did Karlo Osterman come back from Riga in 1940 half-mad? No one in our family ever spoke about that episode from his life, probably no one knew anything, if they did know, it was a fairly limited knowledge. In any case, after the war Karlo Osterman established one family, then divorced, then he established a second family, while I played water polo, read philosophy, mercilessly expended my youth and was sufficiently uninterested not to ask. But, after that nocturnal stress that occurred to me forty years ago in the dark Bavarian forest in the house of the Latvian Mazais family, I began to compose a picture, bit by bit, not exactly with dedication, I had my own life, and many parts of the puzzle were missing, in fact my jigsaw was full of holes, so that I could not “round off” the figure of Uncle Karlo, let alone that of Frida Landsberg, and so not their truth either, the way stupid written and unwritten literary laws demand. Am I “rounded,” existentially and artistically, intimately and publicly? Who is ever and anywhere rounded, and is it necessary to be “complete” and rounded in order to exist — to live — in a complete and rounded way? Unbelievable idiocies.

  When I began to look into it, of the older Ostermans, only my grandmother Ana was still alive. Karlo died when I was not yet twenty, my other uncle lived far away, then Marisa died, and Rudolf hadn’t a clue about any of it, he barely remembered Paris in 1939, its image having been clouded by the approaching war. After she had buried two of her children (Karlo and Marisa) in the space of a few years, Grandma Ana lived with me for two spells, dejected and impossible, first after Karlo’s death, before our parents were in the earth, and then after Marisa’s, when she was no longer at home, when my father had married again.

  After Karlo:

  She woke early, later she realized there was no need, so she woke increasingly late. She made coffee, washed and went back to bed. She left the bath dirty, because, spherical as she was, she could not bend over the edge. You fix the bath, she would say, I’ll make you stuffed squid. She followed me around, she accompanied me through the apartment, talking the whole time. She had a strong voice, piercing, her sorrow notwithstanding. To start with, she drank coffee with real French cognac, the brand wasn’t important, then she moved on to coffee with local brandy. Then she developed a mild jaundice, so didn’t drink anything, not even wine with water. She ate a lot of soft cheese, the fattiest one, from Srijem, along with dollops of yoghurt with a soft roll crumbled into it, because of her teeth. She couldn’t chew very well, she mostly sucked her food, mashing it against her palate. I don’t know why, she had perfectly decent false teeth, which gave he
r a natural smile. My body needs calcium, she would say. Then she’d launch into the story of her impoverished childhood, of her mother who remarried and died young, of her miserly aunt with whom she later lived, of having to muck out the donkey and eat stale bread, always the same, as though I were listening to the fairy tale of Cinderella.

  She put carrot into everything she cooked, and sometimes sugar as well, so her dishes were orange and sweet, and greasy, she used an unimaginable amount of oil. Neither she nor I needed those lunches, but she had to amuse herself with something, so she cooked, crocheted, and sometimes she would sew, small things, little cushions.

  She had attended an Italian school. She read Grazia, Grazia was fashionable at that time, then she would relate the international gossip in great detail. She had been to America, seen the Empire State Building and Niagara Falls. She had been in Egypt, in Luxor and at the Aswan Dam, from where she had brought back little models with the marble head of Nefertiti, which she later gave to the doctors. But she did keep one head. Put this model on my grave, she said. We put the model on her grave and later someone stole it, of course, because we had just put it there, we hadn’t secured it.

  Grandma Ana had bought that grave when Max Osterman died back in 1944. Everything I have, including that grave, has been made by my hands, my needles and my ten fingers, she would say. It’s a nice grave, in the middle of Mirogoj Cemetery in Zagreb, 128-II-297, with a respectable black marble slab, an elegant and serious grave, which is no longer ours, which was stolen by Magda from Medvedščak.

  When my grandfather, the barber, wigmaker and anarchist Max Osterman died in Zagreb in 1944, Grandma Ana sold his wigs. So they don’t fray, so that moths don’t nest in them, but she kept some of his books, which later I took. For example Hamsun’s Hunger, bound in white leather.

  Ana’s other son, the one who went on living for a long time, studied peacefully and obediently during the time of the Independent State of Croatia, nothing could thwart him, no kind of war, nothing could deter him from his scientific path. He was the one who buggered up the business with the grave on Mirogoj.

  If I got angry, Grandma Ana would say, Holy Mary, il diavolo is in your corpo. She often called on the Holy Mary, although she quarreled constantly with the Church. The older she was, the less she believed, Oh, those priests, they just pull the wool over your eyes, she would say, then she’d start enumerating the illegitimate children of well-known priests and lawyers who strolled around Split and saying who resembled whom like two peas in a pod, and she’d end every tirade with If God lies, genes don’t. Then she’d move on to Paganini, she adored Paganini. He also had the diavolo in his corpo.

  Paganini drove his audience wild. He could break three strings on his violin and play on only one. He was as capricious as the capricci he composed. He did pizzicato now with his left hand, now with his right. A great gambler and hothead. And do you know why il Ponte dei sospiri is called il Ponte dei sospiri, do you know what that means? Answer me!

  She would say that there’s also a Ponte degli Schiavoni, she mentioned forests chopped down in the time of the Venetian Republic, then she would give me recipes for brodetto, for cremeschnitte, for black risotto, for floating islands, for boletus mushrooms with cream Write it down, she commanded, it’ll come in handy. When a new woman came into my life, she would sit her down opposite herself and interrogate her for hours, then she’d say: Take care, tutto ti prometto finché te lo metto, and when we were alone, she would whisper to me, as if to a confidante, She hadn’t washed her hair, or Her skirt is badly made, or She has a forced smile, watch out.

  Then there was a phase when she cried the whole time. Oh, my son, what a life, she’d whimper, although I wasn’t her son. Her hands were as soft as feather pillows, her fingers like jam rolls, and between those fingers she would squeeze her handkerchief, rolled into a ball, wet and slobbery, she never wiped her eyes with it, only her nose. The lenses of her glasses were cloudy and greasy. She rubbed antirheumatic creams into herself and smelled of menthol, then with those greasy hands she’d prop herself against the walls, leaving marks everywhere.

  She had unreasonably white skin. White and smooth, she had an excess of skin without any fuzz.

  As long as her son Karlo and daughter Marisa were alive, Grandma Ana didn’t wear black, she had dresses for going out and a suit of pure silk, blue. She had lilac and green shantung blouses. Gray skirts of thin material. On the left side of her chest, she wore a white-gold brooch with diamonds. Later, when she moved in with me, she waddled through the rooms in a thick, black, synthetic-wool jumper with a lot of little bobbles like burrs. Her wardrobe seemed to have vanished into thin air. What was left were on the whole nightdresses, winter ones — white, light-blue and pink, made of fustian — which she called baroque, and summer ones — poplin, edged with lace. She used to relate TV programs to me, especially political and cultural ones. She liked Peter Brook, she followed football, she supported Hajduk Split.

  On the anniversary of the death of her son, my Uncle Karlo, she went to the hairdresser, for the first time in twelve months. She had a perm, then she cried. I said, It suits you, you look tidy, she went to the bathroom, in front of the mirror she turned her head a bit to the right, a bit to the left, then she announced, Yes, I’m completely different.

  She was forever writing to someone and she received replies to those letters of hers. She had a Pelikan pen, with thin green and black stripes. One day she said, Teach me Cyrillic, it annoys me that I don’t know it. She was seventy.

  Two summers passed. Then she declared, I’m myself again now, I’m going home.

  Then my mother’s illness and my mother’s death happened. Grandma Ana was with us again for a while, with me and Ada, then she went back to Ulica Medvedgradska in Zagreb, but she was never herself again.

  It was raining again when we buried Ana. There was mud again, Mirogoj Cemetery mud this time, in Zagreb, not the New Cemetery mud, in Belgrade. There was barely anyone there, the relatives had thinned out. There was just one son left, Bruno, he came. His wife came too, the blonde, blue-eyed Hilda, the sister of Magda from Medvedščak, both half-German or half-Czech, it doesn’t matter which. (Neither Bruno nor Hilda is with us now, but Magda still is.) Magda didn’t come, why should she? The children of Ana’s still-living son Bruno didn’t come either. We came, the children of Ana’s dead children. The four of us. Hilda organized everything. She gave Ana’s furniture to the Red Cross, Hilda arranged the letters written to Ana by her dead children and her living grandchildren in piles and gave them to those who were present, together with postcards. That was all. Someone bought Ana’s apartment and settled in. We dispersed. We spread out through various towns of the former Yugoslavia.

  It was a nice apartment, Grandma Ana’s, not comfortable, in an unusual building. Strange people lived there, very poor and orderly. They had white linen curtains in their kitchens, and on the walls above their large, wood-burning ranges were pinned cloths with blue or red embroidered sentences such as Housewife, to gossip less you must learn, so your dinner doesn’t burn, with which the housewives washed and cleaned things or prepared meals. Some apartments had tiled stoves, some didn’t. No one in the building had a bathroom, just a toilet. The building had three stories and an attic and nice wooden shutters. On each floor there were two two-room apartments, and in the attic six bedsitters accessed via a kind of dark concrete platform. The rooms in the attic had no water, they had low ceilings and dual-purpose furniture with at least two sofas. There was a tap in the hall over a square white enamel washbasin. The building smelled of mlinci and pork fat. It had a circular stone staircase and woodsheds in the communal courtyard, it was enclosed by a wrought iron fence. At the front, beside the entrance, there was a shop selling colonial goods, with silk sweets in tall jars. Mad Emilija lived on the second floor, she sat on her balcony because it was the only apartment that had a balcony facing the street, the other balconies were on the
inside, facing the woodsheds and nobody sat on them, they were very small. So, on the semicircular balcony on the street side sat mad Emilija, muttering and pointing at the passersby below. Her feet were wrapped in dirty rags, she was all dirty, disheveled and toothless, but not old, in fact she was young, except that wasn’t obvious. Another person living in the building was someone who later became a prostitute, we had gone to the same school. There was also a woman whose son died at roughly the same time as Ana’s, so she and Ana mourned together. Later they quarreled and stopped speaking to each other. Mrs. Herman lived in the attic. She had a good-looking husband who collected alarm clocks in that little attic room and who was the train dispatcher with five beautiful railway caps, dark blue. Their little room tick-tocked from all directions, and the window was small, very small. Whenever I came to Zagreb from Belgrade, I went to Ana’s grave. Twenty-five years passed. Now I’m in Croatia, I don’t need to visit the past, not old buildings, or cemeteries.

  I’d sometimes go to a Zagreb funeral, if I had to. Then I’d call on Ana. In the end, I’d just go to that building. Ulica Medvedgradska is completely different nowadays, there are new buildings, there are luxurious shops, Medvedgradska looks like an old lady with ten face lifts, all pulled in and stretched, sick inside. There are no children outside. Ana’s apartment has a bathroom now, tiled all over. The range has been destroyed. They’ve widened the hall. There’s a lot of bulky furniture. All expensive and vulgar.