EEG

by Daša Drndic

  Theoretically, genital self-harm after the death of a parent can happen because of an unresolved Oedipus complex. I shall not elaborate on that theory, because it is fairly straightforward and familiar to most people. When the death of someone close occurs, in some people the sense of guilt (because of anger) blossoms to unbearable dimensions and does not permit grief to creep into the small baggage whose place is on the upper (or lower) shelf of our inner storeroom. The sense of guilt then feeds the already poisonously swollen sorrow and seeks a way out. And there are various ways out: from autocastration, self-harm, mania or depression, suicide, or murder, or writing.

  Father died is a famous, quasi-striking literary opening. If Father died (or, Mother died) isn’t an opening, then it is an ending, the packaging and sealing of an ostensibly resolved guilt, a final leap into the waters of spiritual purification. Everything in between, in the book, in the confession, in the story, is the drawing of that road, the winding path that has to soar into a celestial choral symphony.

  But that is an illusion. There is no spiritual purification, nor does anything fly off into the sky, or if it does take off, it comes back. This settling of accounts with fathers and mothers is not a conversation, but an invented, imagined dialogue with ghosts, with the dead, in fact the monologues of spoiled, infantile sons and daughters who either stamp their feet and scream, or wail: You are to blame for my suffering, for my failures and this is my charge against you — je vous accuse.

  That’s not fair. That cowardly settling of accounts with those who are no longer here. But, if the knots of our fears and hates could be disentangled by the two or three people involved, face to face, while the fathers (and mothers) were still alive, then so many self-pitying stories would remain unwritten, so much (poetic?) fury and so many one-sided accusations unexpressed, so much false solace denied to readers.

  After the death of my father, what is left are film clips, little moving pictures, some cheerful, some less so, little pieces of his life that please or sadden me, which, when I wish, I look at and follow the way a reader follows episodes from the life of fictional or less fictional characters, then closes the book and goes for a walk. My father and I have ended our story together. With a lot of shouting, quarrelling, and reconciliation, our accounts are now clear. When Rudolf shrank (with age), the space around him became light, cleansed and open. I entered that space without fear, making in it a new niche for my son Leo, while my father, tiny at the end, watched our existence from where he was crouching in a corner, his arms open for an embrace and a smile on his face.

  Perhaps I am writing a book about my father, not a book about myself and my father, but a book about his undreamed dreams, about his visions, which, fifty years later (when he was no longer there) became reality, about his loves, about his partisan fighting, about his enduring antifascism and obsession with the idea of fratellanze and convivenze, about his political battles, about his Party disobedience and Party punishment, expulsion from the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, sheepishly withdrawn by that same Party two decades later, licking their own shit, and his friends and political enemies (Ranković, Špiljak, Blažević, Bakarić, et al.) who bugged him from a position of strength when his life was at stake, about his travels, about the food he liked, the books he read, the painters and writers he spent time with, his games of chess and preferans, the languages he spoke, the humility with which he lived, the poverty in which he died.

  When Milošević stole money from the National Bank of Yugoslavia, and Rudolf had already retired and married that shrew, that moral cripple and physical harpy (how could he have been so blind?), he handed Ada and me an account book from the Beogradska Banka with a deposit of fifteen thousand American dollars that no longer existed. Here you are, he said, this is all that your mother Marisa and I saved. The checkbook is here somewhere, twenty or so years have passed, it’s all written down properly, except that the Beogradska Banka no longer exists.

  It is not yet known, although one can guess, and more than seventy years later, by whose directive Rudolf’s brother brought his comrades his own death sentence during the war (in Istria), not knowing what was written in it, and it concerned Rudolf as well, but it is known that at that time within the Party the conflict between the dogmatists and liberals was growing, a conflict that would last until the Party’s collapse and from its center poisonous arrows would fly, “killing” some and inspiring others to defiance and disobedience.

  I haven’t written much about Rudolf. You write about your mother, he used to say, write something about me, he said, opening a recently published book of mine and with a pencil in hand began to read in the hope of finding himself in at least one paragraph. He cut out what was published about my books, whatever he came across, and catalogued it all, organized it, stuck it onto sheets of white paper and placed them in folders, without my having any idea about it. Unlike his other writings, the political ones that had disappeared, I found this insignificant little file tossed in among the small stained blankets that his crazed wife generously gave us.

  I could write about how Rudolf, along with his brother, in 1943, founds and edits the Voice of Istria, whose wartime issues were printed on illegal presses between northern Istria and Gorski Kotar; I could write about his Proclamation to the people of Istria on September 13, 1943: Istria is joining the motherland and proclaims its unification with our other Croatian brothers. Long live Croatian Istria! and here he sponsored the people of Istria, and not the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, which individual political bigwigs found then, and later, extremely irritating; I could write about the way, even as early as 1945, totalitarian minds engaged in orgies, while I couldn’t attack our war comrades, landowners, local leaders and priests, or Italians who had fought with us in large numbers, and the local Party heavyweights, carpetbaggers who sent the “top brass” to Istria to muddy the waters, launched a filthy, virulent campaign laden with fabrication and threats; I could write about the falsified election in the constituency of Poreč-Buzet in November 1953, about which I have already written in one of my books, an election in which, as was rarely the case in the then state, there were as many as three candidates on the list for Istria, one of whom was Rudolf, who, because of his respect for the authority of argument rather than the arguments of authority (the Party) was a nuisance, and so, as later during Milošević’s “people’s happening,” or recently in Croatia during the nationalist demonstration of tent-dwellers and all kinds of ustashoid-fascistic-clerical figures in front of theaters, in squares, outside state institutions or through internet portals, the people were bribed with small change, free transport, food vouchers and barren promises of a better life to persuade them to yell inarticulately, foaming at the mouth. For decades afterward, Rudolf received private letters of repentance, begging forgiveness. I’ve got them, those letters. I could write about how and where we lived in Zagreb in 1948, when Rudolf was an editor with Naprijed Publishers, or how we came back from America in 1953 on the cargo ship Montenegro, while other Yugoslav diplomats sailed on the two queens, Mary and Elizabeth, how we later made furniture out of wooden packing crates (chipboard), which we painted with olive-green oil paint, the way snow fell into our rooms and Ada and I were treated for the first stage of tuberculosis. I could write about Rudolf’s other battles within the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (SK), Federal Committee, I had a lot of struggles within the SK, I was expelled from the Party, then taken back, and twenty years later received written confirmation that I had been right, and the leadership of the infallible Party was wrong. Few people in Yugoslavia received such confirmation. I could write about the way, when he was removed from their immediate high-political proximity, kicking him into the benign sphere of tourism (That’ll shut him up!), he realized his dream of an open Yugoslavia, and within a year visas for all foreign citizens were abolished and real, serious tourism began; I could write about the way, when he was “sent out of sight” for a second time, while the submissive were
sent to diplomatic offices in Paris, London or Washington, Rudolf was posted to Sudan, where in the Nubian desert Yugoslav firms soon began to drill wells and where thousands of lives were saved from hunger and thirst; there is more, but that one life was too small for historical remembrance, however defiant and visionary it was, so not even public television, Croatian Radio Television, deemed it necessary to mark Rudolf’s death.

  There was almost nothing that could get him down. Not war, not Stalin, not Tito, not the Party, because in his battles he was not alone, he had friends, he had Marisa and he had us. And then the woman did it for him, that pathologically jealous shallow bourgeoisie for whom “Istria was far away,” and Zagreb’s Dolac Market close by. And so in the end Rudolf said, All right, what’s done is done, at least I’ll go back when I’m dead. Perhaps that’s the origin of the image that occasionally comes to me before I fall asleep: Rudolf, freshly shaved, in the room with three beds at the old people’s home, sitting on the edge of his bed and greeting me with a smile, his arms wide open.

  Living with Rudolf was stressful. Until we left home, and later to a degree, Ada and I seemed to be in a film with elements of a political thriller, full of terror and horror. A film in which the hero fell into a trap, pulled himself out, only to be ambushed again.

  He died alone, and he was afraid of solitude.

  He approached death in that state-run old people’s home, in a three-bed room where one could only lie, as there was no room even for a chair for visitors. But he would get up, lame as he was, with a barely healed, shoddily operated-on hip, with open wounds from bedsores, he would drop into his wheelchair, roll himself to the elevator and into a communal space where he played chess, and in group therapy sessions made roses and narcissi out of crêpe paper and little drawings of boats on choppy seas. He gave these to us later, because he loved giving, all his life he gave us small gifts, pointless, but in fact with a point, chocolates, keyrings, scarves, caps, badges, and he kept all of that, those little bits and pieces, in the drawers of his desk, and on feast days and birthdays he would ceremoniously hand us books, and shirts and ties for me, I can’t remember what he gave Ada, wrapped in gift paper, excitedly, as though he was the one receiving the presents and not giving them. He also gave us the occasional relatively modest sum of money and then, in the home, we (Ada and I) left him money so that he would at least have some for coffee from the machine, because he had said to us, just once, I’ve never been so poor. As I was leaving, to go back to this place here where I have no one close, not truly close, he would get junk for me from the machine, biscuits and savory snacks for the journey. He also gave me some of the unused disposable hospital scrubs in which they washed him, he had collected a heap of them and gave them away because he had nothing else to give.

  His books vanished. His correspondence vanished. Political and intimate correspondence, and that from friends. I have Rudolf’s letters to me, but that’s not important now, and I have a postcard found long ago (while we were still a family) with Lenin’s portrait, which Rudolf had sent in 1948, from the Fifth Congress of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in Belgrade, to his by then wife Marisa in Zagreb, with “comradely greetings.”

  During the bad times, immediately after Stalin’s Resolution of the Informbiro and Tito’s “No!” when Rudolf was running the information center in New York, he visited American universities and tried to explain the outlines of a visionary path, open, although utopian, which ultimately collapsed, only for a septic pit to be revealed today beneath its ashes. By night he learned English, by day he practiced it; globally speaking, postwar Yugoslav diplomacy was in the first league in contrast to Croatia at the beginning of the 1990s, when for instance the ambassador (a nationalist HDZ Party cadre) held court in Rome for seven years, a man followed on tiptoe by a ghostly interpreter who whispered answers to His Excellency’s anxious question, What did they say, what did they say? when virtually no contacts were made in that neighboring country, apart from its small and insignificant diaspora.

  In New York, our apartment was visited by Earl Browder, Alexander Kerensky, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, Louis Adamič (and many others), bringing their (intimate and political) stories and their books, which later, many years later, I leafed through, although they weren’t among my books of choice. (Borges was becoming fashionable.) But Rudolf would say, Read, it could be useful to you, so I found myself torn between Kafka and Sartre, between Thomas Paine and Dostoevsky, and later, utterly confused, between Lacan gazing at Freud, and Breton and Bataille. Lujo and Zlata Goranin came as well (a small black dog and Zlata’s spaghetti al pomodoro with hard-boiled eggs on top), and there was singing and music. Nothing has remained of those times. That woman, she who like a boa constrictor sucked up Rudolf’s will and everything he left to us — his life before her — that woman cleared away; she threw out his books and his writings, because those times were too large and expansive for her cowardly little patch, and because, right up until Rudolf’s death, they were infused with the breath of beautiful, playful, and to her inaccessible Marisa.

  In the old people’s home, Rudolf did not give up straight away. To begin with he was lively, he had company, and he had rid himself of the idiocies of that virago. These bedsores won’t go away, I’ll have them all my life, he said when he was ninety-two. They separated him from his books, from his writings, from his stamp collections (which they stole after his death, sending us a suitcase full of empty albums), from small decorative objects about which, imagining them, he could have written something during his peaceful days in the old people’s home, they separated him from his pictures, from sculptures by his artist friends, from his clothes, they unhooked him from his life, they took his oxygen, that woman and her son, while he, squinting in one eye (because no one bothered to call in an ophthalmologist or take him to one), he read whatever I brought him — papers, essays, philosophy and the occasional novel. When I arrived, and I came for a day every other week (alternating with Ada), because I had nowhere to spend the night, because I couldn’t afford a hotel, he was waiting for me in a clean tracksuit (he had never worn a tracksuit in his life), sitting on the edge of his bed, shaved and smiling. He would throw himself into his wheelchair and we would leave that house of death at great speed.

  Rudolf didn’t have his own apartment. He didn’t have the money to pay for home care in an apartment that was not his own. Rudolf’s apartment in Rijeka had been sold and he moved into his stepson’s apartment, having previously signed a statement to the effect that, should he one day begin to lose his grip, they, the woman and her son, had the right to put him away, I don’t remember where, somewhere they chose, where people presumably cared for lost souls. Half the money from the sale of Rudolf’s apartment (acquired during his life with Marisa) was in that woman’s account, the other half in Rudolf’s and he used that money until he had used it all up (his pension was less than five hundred euros a month, so then the woman and her son decided that Rudolf really had lost his grip and had to be put away. My dignity has been a bit fucked up, I’ve fucked it up a bit, he told me then, in that home, as we smoked and drank beer in the little café on the ground floor. At the reading of his will, the woman just lied, claimed that Rudolf had sold his apartment and given us the money. Now I’m trying to get access to all payments into her bank accounts, and we’ll see.

  Rudolf remained lucid to the end, he was not losing his grip, and he never lost it. He was just mislaid, they mislaid him. His French was still good, his English excellent, not to mention his Italian. He didn’t have false teeth, or those bridges, or any kind of implant. He was missing one of his fifth and both of his sixth and seventh teeth, but his front teeth, admittedly a bit loose and no longer white, were all there.

  I didn’t like going to the care home because I would run into the sons and daughters of old and infirm residents, some of whom knew neither who they were or where they were, they lay like corpses and opened their mouths mechanically while t
he staff fed them gruel from little spoons. And that frightened me.

  In the bed next to Rudolf lay a former Ustasha whose surname was Boban, he was ninety-seven, presumably he’s dead as well by now. After the war, Boban scarpered to France, and in the 1990s he came back to die on the breast of his motherland. He was a cousin of Rafael Boban, that semiliterate lout and cutthroat, commander of the Black League, which used to go around fairs before the war selling spangles and tobacco. The Boban lying beside Rudolf stole other people’s possessions — candy, sugar, tea bags, tissues, and sometimes also money. Taking small steps, dragging his feet, he would creep into the neighboring rooms, thinking that people couldn’t hear him, because he was deaf. When the nurses caught him stealing, they would just say tsk tsk tsk and turn away their heads. And so, willy-nilly, there was a “reconciliation” between the Partisan and the Ustasha. In the old people’s home. In silence. And impotence.