EEG

by Daša Drndic

  There was also an old woman, a long-term resident, who used to visit Rudolf’s room, she would dig herself in beside the door and wail, Take me home, please, take me home. There was another woman, quite refined, but with empty eyes. She would come in, turn to Rudolf, and say nothing. I would ask her, Do you need anything? and after a long pause she would say Closeness. Every time. As though she had stepped out of a Beckett play. I would ask her, How old are you? She would just stand there saying nothing, then whisper: Very. In the dayroom I would always find an old man with a small, dilapidated address book, crossing out the names of those who were no more. Then he’d say, I must call him. In the end he could have thrown the address book away. There was no one left.

  There was often the stench of urine in Rudolf’s room.

  In the home I heard sons and daughters frantically calling the staff, Please come, nurse, father has soiled himself, mother has soiled herself, at which Rudolf would say, I didn’t pass a stool for three days, then I crapped on Christmas Day. One day he told me, Our third preferans player has died, so I filled the breach, we played until midnight, I got to Rijeka at four in the morning.

  I brought him the strongest combinations of vitamins and minerals so that he’d hang onto life for a little longer, but toward the end he lost interest. To start with, we went to nearby restaurants for lunch, we drank good wine, ate salted cod and laughed. I pushed him in his wheelchair so he’d breathe in the fresh air, because in the home it was doled out to them in droplets. We moved from café to café ad nauseam, so as to go back as late as possible. Sometimes our hands would be cold. Sometimes we would place our hands on each other’s hands and talk, knitted together like that. About the past. About the future, about what music would be played at his funeral, “Beautiful land, beloved Istria,” play that for me, he said, and Elis Lovrić did it magnificently, first at the crematorium in Zagreb, where some people looked at each other in surprise, and then in his Istria, where some people wept. Rudolf’s last interview for an Istrian newspaper bore the title “Good luck, Istria of mine!” In Zagreb, the cremation was a caricature. All right, a delegation of Istrians came, Zvonko, his other roommate from the home, came, Buda Lončar came and bowed to him, my heart broke, afterward, in the cold, Buda waited for a taxi but none came, either for him or for us, it was cold, it was February. There was no wake, as Ada and I had nowhere to invite people, and we didn’t know most of those people, I don’t think that Rudolf had invited them either, most of them were friends of the “grieving” widow and her latest home-help, because she kept having new ones. The Istrians went straight back, so that Ada and I, our children and Jadranka from our childhood went to eat lamb and potatoes baked under a lid in a quiet restaurant where there was a fire burning in the grate. Then we parted.

  But the wake in Karojba was festive. Rudolf sat nearby, “his” Malvasia wine was drunk, “his” prosciutto and goat’s cheese, crostini and fritters were eaten, his people proposed toasts. Half of Istria came to the funeral in Karojba. I brought Rudolf from Zagreb to Rijeka. I let him spend the night in the living room, where there were books, a Turkmen carpet and souvenirs which he had given me. The next day I took the bus that goes around Istria, I put my father on the seat beside me (the urn was wrapped in maroon corrugated paper, as though I was carrying a panettone) and took him for a drive, his last sightseeing tour of the towns, villages and hamlets he had visited on foot who knows how many times during the war, whose people he loved, to bid them farewell.

  The woman didn’t come to the real funeral, the Istrian one, of course. What? she said, Get my shoes dirty in that mud! Now she wants some kind of share in the ownership of the grave in which my great-grandfather, my great-grandmother, my grandfather, my grandmother and my father, with their long and painful Istrian stories, lie. She says that half the grave belongs to her, but the grave isn’t ours at all, it is Istrian, protected, because after the war Rudolf, his brother, and my grandfather made a gift of the land in Karojba where there is now a school and a basketball court, and their family home in Pazin, around which a wallpaper factory was built, and so on, and in return dead Rudolf acquired 2x1 meters of red Istrian earth in which he could disintegrate. The woman also generously declared that she was willing to come to an agreement with us over the ownership of the Karojba grave, but I don’t know how she’ll negotiate over something she says doesn’t exist. I told her that she could jump straight into that grave if she wished, although I might, I said, bring Marisa from Belgrade to lay her beside Rudolf, because that was love, and then in court that woman feigned a heart attack, which was in fact an ordinary hysterical attack, and even though she was ninety years old, unfortunately she didn’t drop dead.

  She also wanted to come to an agreement about the pictures she had stolen, only I don’t know how because she didn’t intend to give them back, not even the one that Rudolf gave me for my birthday when he was in the home. Go and take Božena Vilhar’s carnations, he said. Of course I didn’t go, that’s not my style, and it’s debatable whether that woman would have let me into her son’s apartment, because when we came for what belonged to us by order of the court (and which she gave us), she had placed her son and her nephew at the door like Cerberuses and had thrown Rudolf’s old suits into the hallway, not, of course, his evening attire, his dinner jacket, nor his winter coat (which I could have used), she had shoved into cardboard boxes the moldy pillows and blankets which Rudolf had put over his knees in the home, all with the sticky remnants of food that had fallen out of his hands toward the end. I immediately sent Rudolf’s clothes to flooded regions, I washed the blankets, which I now use to cover my knees in winter when I sit in my tenement, often in the half dark.

  What will she do with Božena Vilhar? She has no idea who Božena Vilhar is, she certainly doesn’t know who her husband, Janez Žirovnik, was, known as Osman in the partisans. I’ve known Božena and Osman since my childhood, I’ve been to see them in Opatija countless times, I’ve listened to Osman and Rudolf’s partisan stories, once when I got lost in Trieste and didn’t have any money (I was eighteen), Osman came to get me and took me for melanzane alla parmigiana. He gave Ada a gold brooch for her wedding. I know where, in which building, Božena Vilhar, then Ružić, was living in Sušak in the 1930s. I remember happy evenings spent as Marisa and Rudolf, Božena and Osman rummaged through their past, when they sang and danced, both here and there. I could say things about more or less every oil painting that now hangs on the wall of that virago’s apartment. For instance, about Joza Janda, Vilko Šeferov, Bata Protić, Beba Galović, Šana Šotra, Mirko Počuč, Franc Slana and Dora Plestenjak, Sabahudin Hodžić, Ivan Radović, I knew them all, they all sat at our table, I went to all their exhibitions, I was in their studios, in their apartments, I knew what kind of clothes they wore, the way they laughed and what angered them, while, at the discussion of the will, that harridan announced that those paintings were all stolen Jewish property, which left Ada and me speechless, astounded, so stunned, flabbergasted, appalled at the dark mind of a grasping hysterical old woman that we didn’t say a word. When we came to our senses and decided to sue the bitch, the lawyers told us, It’s too late now. Let it go, the woman’s mad. She’s not mad, she’s loathsome, because later, when I told all this to the judge at the hearing, she addressed Ada and me in that shrill voice of hers, Vermin, Serbian vermin!

  There’s a story about a certain Frau Kutowski who was placed in a Berlin asylum in 1987, believing that she was Anita Berber (the Anita Berber on the painting by Otto Dix), that notorious Anita Berber (later she had a plaque dedicated to her on the building in which she lived), a nude dancer, drug addict, scandalmonger of Weimar Germany, who after the Great War became world famous and who, in 1928, aged twenty-nine died of tuberculosis. Through her delusions, Frau Kutowski, fat, ugly and old, in her interactions with the hospital staff and other mentally ill patients, stole someone else’s life, wormed her way into the subversive pulsing, into the defiance and self-destr
uctive revolt of Anita Berber, disturbing her surroundings anew. Frau Kutowski was the actress Lotti Huber in Rosa von Praunheim’s film Anita: Tänze des Lasters (Anita: Dances of Vice). There, that’s Rudolf’s widow losing the plot, imagining that she is Marisa, that before her no one had shared any kind of life with Rudolf, except that Frau Kutowski’s mission was to expose human depravities, while she, that real-life, not cinematic fiend, in the madhouse of our age, had no such mission.

  For Rudolf’s funeral in Istria, someone had made little cushions on which we were supposed to lay his medals. What medals! screeched that woman, There aren’t any medals. Whoever saw medals being placed on a coffin! she yelled. There, in that Zagreb crematorium, there were no little cushions or medals, while in Karojba there were only little cushions. The medals were later miraculously discovered, allegedly in the attic: those from the National Liberation War (Commemorative), those from subsequent services to the Federal National Republic of Yugoslavia and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, of the first and second order, one from the Presidents of Egypt (Nasser), Sudan (Nimeiry) and Finland (Kekkonen), from the Prime Ministers of Sweden (Palme), Italy (Pertini) and so on. I shall sell them, I’ll sell them all abroad, to collectors, because no one here in Croatia needs them, no one cares. (I’ll keep the Commemorative medal.)

  In the home, Rudolf had no clothes to go out in, only those rags to wear in the house: pajamas, two tracksuits, a cardigan, and slippers. They thought, presumably, that woman and her son, that Rudolf wouldn’t be going out anymore, out of that home, that bed, that waiting room. He had no shoes, no winter jacket, no cap, no gloves, no scarf, so I brought him all of those things, my own, so that he’d have them for our “walks.” Toward the end he became thin and fragile. I wanted to move him to my place, or into a home in Pula or Rovinj, he would have been near us there, near his Istrians, one summer I organized a stay for him in the Rovinj home — in our old house he would have been imprisoned again — it’s a humane home in the center, with beautiful grounds, on the way to the wood and the sea, and I imagined myself taking him in his wheelchair to see his friends, to the shore, to the swimming pool where he would swim again, because nothing hurts in water, in water one is light and blessed, I imagined us sitting on a terrace, in a tavern, eating squid, black risotto, polenta or fuži, offering him a last shred of life, that still undamaged (but suppressed) little island of happiness. He didn’t want to come. Perhaps he was afraid of that woman’s hysterical scenes, perhaps he didn’t want to be a burden to us, perhaps he wanted to wallow masochistically in his own foolishness.

  From the outside it wasn’t possible to see or hear what was happening in our father’s chest. But Ada and I knew. What was happening was pain, pressure. In his chest, it seems, Rudolf was again carrying a pneumatic chamber, a small space with doors and windows through which he watched the air in it becoming thin and stifling. He’d had enough.

  He couldn’t kill himself with his pistol, because his war pistol was at first at my place and is now in the museum in Pula. He couldn’t throw himself out of the window, that would have been unnecessarily dramatic and created all kinds of complications for others. He opted for pneumonia.

  Two weeks before he died, we went out to lunch, he crumbled bread and collected the crumbs on the table. Recently he had been collecting crumbs, scraps of paper, any little bit of rubbish he noticed, then he would start straightening crooked objects, coasters, notebooks, newspapers, putting things in order, keeping things under control. I watched with surprise and unease. Two weeks before he died, as I was leaving, he said, We won’t see each other again. A tear glistened in an eye, I no longer remember whose, his or mine, we hugged and I left.

  A week later I got a telephone call: Rudolf has a high temperature and pneumonia. His roommate, Zvonko, the one who came to the Zagreb funeral, told me, He sat in the cold bathroom, wet after being showered. He didn’t want to dry himself. Leave me alone, he kept saying.

  I went back to Rijeka to collect some things, some clothes, with the intention of going to Zagreb the next day. I had a fever that climbed up to 41 degrees Celsius. I lay in bed, unable to get up for a week. I called Rudolf every two hours, he spoke less and less, I asked the staff at the home to take him to hospital, they said, He won’t let us, he won’t go. Ada went and moved Rudolf to the Pulmonary Department.

  On February 20, 2013, Rudolf called me. He said, Andreas. I asked questions, I talked, I spoke: nothing, silence at the other end. And heavy breathing. I caught the next bus to Zagreb. He died ten minutes ago, said the doctor.

  It’s all okay. I’m sorry that I didn’t keep him company as he went, that I didn’t stroke his forehead, his cheek, that I didn’t say anything to him. I did to Marisa. I talked to Marisa and she heard me. I held Marisa’s hand when her head drooped. I’m sorry that I didn’t get to say “Tata” to Rudolf. For decades I hadn’t called him Tata, just Rudolf or, in moments of suppressed tenderness, Rudi. Old as he was, and in a bad way, I just found it grotesque to call him Tata, but now I miss that, which is all the more pathetic.

  I recently read Dragan Velikić’s Islednik (The Investigator). In this excellent book, the middle-aged narrator talks about his mother angrily, sometimes almost accusingly, but the whole time calling her Mama, which bothered me at first, from a literary point of view, it seemed somehow soft to me, exaggeratedly tender, too sentimental, then I shuddered.

  The book is also about Istria and some houses in Pula, so it is all the closer to me. Because I too have a building in Pula (that asylum), about which I might say more at some stage. In Velikić’s book, the narrator says that when she moved into a home, Mama imagined that she was no longer in Belgrade. She began to speak in the Croatian variant. Often during my visits she would hurry me to leave so as not to miss my train. In her head she moved from town to town. The last time I saw her, she was living in Rijeka. She had partially adopted the Fiume dialect. She asked me when I was going back to Belgrade. Which hotel I was staying in. As we parted, she took me by the hand and said, in dialect: When you come again, don’t forget to bring my notebook. It’s got the addresses of hotels in it. Without it I can’t travel anywhere.

  I shuddered (frightened?), because I understood that in this book the narrator is investigating other people’s lives, those close to him and not so close, to reach his own, and that in every search facts are not enough, facts are dead without compassion, without feeling and a bit of personal suffering. And, again, I saw that our umbilical cord wraps around this planet on which we walk, thinking that we are alone and abandoned.

  Dear Mama, concludes the hero of Velikić’s novel, soon I’ll be speaking the Fiume dialect.

  And, like Rudolf before his death, I collect crumbs. Scraps of paper, small coins, shreds. My gaze is constantly drawn to the ground, as soon as I catch sight of anything I get up, stop what I’m doing and pick up the grains, the fragments, the slivers and lay them on my palm. I straighten objects, bring them under control — crooked chairs and tables, mats, plastic and cane blinds. I create order.

  Marina Tsvetaeva said: How did the heart break and how was it that

  It didn’t break.

  Now I have time at a time when I don’t have any time.

  I want to have my eyelids lifted to see better. I’m only half looking. But if such an undertaking entails a general anesthetic, I’ll have to wait. That carcinoma of the breast operation was a walk in the park compared to when my appendix burst and its rotten contents spilled through my insides. I should have died, but, there, I didn’t. In hospital, on drips and intravenous injections of antibiotics, I lasted ten days, it was summer and the mercury soared to 40° Celsius, we didn’t get clean sheets because, they said, the woman who worked in the laundry had gone on holiday, only one shower in the department functioned, the one in the women’s bathroom, maybe they thought men didn’t wash. After that operation I puffed up, I was like a clown, I almost took off.

 
Then everything settled down, came back to normal. I deflated to a decent static state. Sometimes I even hear my heart beating.

  I swapped places with Ada. I said, You miss the city, you go there, you’ll have my books and memories of a previous life. Ada said, I don’t need memories, but she went. Just like that. That city holds nothing for us, no recollections, no old images, no joys and no sorrows. We can read its history, we can sometimes study it, we can hear about it and watch the inhabitants of that city falling into a trance over their own memories. In that city we wear ready-made clothes, new, ironed, that never fit the way they should, they rub like newly bought shoes or starched shirts.

  I buried myself in Ada’s Rovinj cellar. I painted the walls, made a new bathroom, changed the windows, threw out the old furniture, I’m gradually settling in. I go for walks. The woods are full of pines, I collect pine nuts. I pick mushrooms and asparagus. I have (old) friends, I play preferans, I play chess. A few days ago I caught myself singing. Occasionally Leo and Đoja come, Ada comes as well, we sit in the garden and laugh. We are together, the remnants of the Ban clan. Then I cook for all of them, that makes me happy; I grill little gilthead fish, I fry squid, we eat maneštre and chard, I make pesto from my pine nuts; I get Teran wine from Tonije from Motovun, Malvasia from Franc from Poreč, Ricardo brings me grappa.