by Daša Drndic
Fantasies about death and lust are completely alien to my nature, maintains Rudolf Sass; I am convinced that my depression is a result of the physical state I am in.
It was only when I told him that his pruritus could perhaps be a sadomasochistic expression of suppressed hatred for his son-in-law, and possibly for his wife, that Rudolf Sass began to listen to his body and his emotions. You see, said Adam Kaplan to his friend Andreas Ban, the first outbreak of pruritus in Rudolf Sass coincided with investing in those shares at the insistence of his son-in-law, a classic identification of money with the anus — we learned that at grammar school. The uncontrolled scratching with which Rudolf Sass attempted to relieve his anal itch points to the sadomasochistic nature of his conflict. One should also remember that he stole his father’s money for his escape to university, and particularly the episodes from Rudolf Sass’s early childhood when he tries unsuccessfully to help his friend Kari Kriss. All these episodes involve money.
Rudolf Sass brings his first dream to a session with Adam Kaplan. The dream is about fingernails, about the bloody, bitten nails with which Rudolf Sass tries to climb a tall tree, Adam Kaplan says to his friend Andreas Ban. Running away from his wife, Rudolf Sass finds himself surrounded by believers deep in prayer. According to the Talmud, believers are obliged to burn the cuttings from their fingernails, and to examine their nails carefully during prayer. The nail is dead matter, says Adam Kaplan, the nail is a symbol of death, it must be destroyed because it threatens the body and the soul. The bloody bitten nails in Rudolf Sass’s dream symbolize the suppressed aggression he feels toward his wife whom he considers responsible for the loss of their property. The believers symbolize the castration which threatens Rudolf Sass’s superego. And here, finally, the return to his father, concludes Adam Kaplan.
Yes, that return to our fathers about whom volumes have been written and are still being written and will always be written. Fathers who like evil spirits inhabit our bodies even after they are dead, who never really die, who burn with us in the flames of the crematorium, holding us protectively to their chests or sending us dire, threatening looks, sometimes shaking a belt or stick at us. Even when we become fathers, we do not succeed in killing our own. Overcome with a desire for revenge, we kill our fathers in dreams and poems, in plays and stories, in films, to assuage our guilt, we send them prayers for forgiveness. So Rudolf’s father’s fanatical Catholic beliefs pursue Rudolf Sass all his life, they catch him, disappear, then grab him by the throat again. Like a branded beast Rudolf Sass bears the stamp of his family, torn between abandoning himself to his masochistic being and the need to be free from his suppressed anal-sadistic impulses. Rudolf Sass, in life and death united with his mild permissive grandfather and his sadistic father.
But there is another story, unfinished, a hazy story, that undermines Rudolf Sass’s life, the story of his father’s role in the massacre of Šabac, even if that role amounts to the unwillingness to help, the simple refusal to see and silence. Rudolf Sass will never discover whether or how much his father, on the other side of the River Drina, served the Ustasha regime of the Independent State of Croatia, because he never asked anyone or researched anything, because he never had time, is that it? Life pulled its strings which Rudolf Sass obediently accepted, in the end, by anesthetizing his Swiss patients, himself becoming numb, quiet, reconciled to his polished inner being in which he stored his family filth.
Andreas Ban would have called Adam Kaplan, even traveled to Belgrade, to ask him, Adam, what’s happening to me, I’ve lost the key, because Andreas Ban trusts his friend from his secondary school days. But Adam Kaplan is no more. In 1998 Adam killed himself with his father’s pistol.
What now? Should he, Andreas Ban, write something about his own father? Or — about himself as a father? Vain delusions. He had put the puzzle together up to a point, solved the little rebus, and after too many years its images had arranged themselves into a panorama he no longer needed, which he was pushing away and burying. But.
In 2006 or 2007, he no longer remembers when, at the funeral of his cousin Clara who dies of glioblastoma, while the priest is performing his one-act play over the open grave which, with sagging faces, the congregation accompanies like the chorus in classical tragedy, with the singsong refrain of our sins, our sins, Andreas Ban is approached by an elderly woman who in a whisper says, In 1942 my brother, a Zagreb student linked to the National Liberation Movement, served time with your mother in an Ustasha prison, while your uncle, also Clara’s uncle, Dr. Bruno belonged to the university Ustasha command and came to lectures in his uniform. At funerals one learns all kinds of things. One skeleton is laid into the ground, another rises up. Andreas Ban leaves Clara’s burial broken and beside himself. His family too drags with it slimy trails of evil, he too can play this game, before his eyes a cracked family photograph now flickers, a distorted mirror, its silver peeling away. How is it that for sixty years not one of his relatives has ever mentioned the wartime and postwar past of his uncle Bruno, later a scientist of world renown, an expert in the biological protection of agricultural and forest cultures, one of the founders of the postwar Agricultural and Forestry School in Sarajevo, member of the Academy of Sciences of Bosnia and Herzegovina, that uncle Bruno who succeeds in curing his carcinoma of the testes, while metastases slink through his sister, Andreas’s mother Marisa, gripping her and devouring her until they snuff her out. How come, Andreas Ban wonders, but too late, too late, how was it that uncle Bruno ended up in Sarajevo in 1946, when his family, Andreas’s, on both his mother’s and his father’s side, had no connection with Bosnia and Herzegovina? Does the new government send him as punishment, just as many collaborators of the NDH are after the war scattered all over Yugoslavia to bring progress to the remote, devastated or backward regions, the way Lovro Matačić is sent to Skopje in 1948 to develop the musical life there, the Lovro Matačić who in 1941 leaps out of his tailcoat into the uniform of a home-guard lieutenant colonel, and by decree of Slavko Kvaternik is appointed supervisor of home-guard music overseeing all NDH military orchestras and nurturing close friendships with prominent political and military figures in Germany and the NDH.
Throughout the war, noble Matačić, in addition to performing in Croatia, travels through Austria, Germany, Italy and Romania, through countries in which at that time sangre puro* was a sanctity, and at the invitation of another, more significant and greater musical personage of the twentieth century, the famous Wilhelm Furtwängler, stands in front of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra while all over Europe potential geniuses vanish in scorched flakes through chimneys, are shoved into collective pits, rot in forests or hang from town lampposts, while the sensitive urban population, shortsighted and tongue-tied, those who enjoy the power of music to ennoble the soul, clap and chant “encore!” Matačić served his time in Stara Gradiška, and after a five-year enforced stay in Macedonia, continues to rise in his own and others’ eyes until he sails into legend. While Furtwängler is to this day the subject of plays, biographies, historical studies and films, with the aim of disentangling the wartime and postwar entanglements of that egocentric, but indisputably talented and highly educated musical figure, known to some as Monopoleon, whereas in Croatia all that remains of Lovro Matačić is a minor touched-up myth and the Lili and Lovro Matačić Foundation that gives grants to talented young musicians. When Andreas Ban mentions Matačić to acquaintances, they say, No need to poke around there any more, all there is to know about Matačić is known already. Who knows? What do they know?
In December 2004, Andreas Ban is living in Skopje when the Macedonian National Theater puts on an exhibition of photographs, documents, posters and texts on “the life and creative opus of the great Croatian musical maestro Lovro Matačić.” There are gaps in this exhibition, the years 1941–45 are missing, the years when the noble conductor goes to Stockerau in Austria, as depicted in the film “Fighters for Croatia” (1943), and says, You know what, I’m just v
isiting our soldiers to brighten up their lives with music. From what he remembers of that Macedonian exhibition, Andreas Ban cannot be sure that he saw photos of the “supreme military bandmaster” (Matačić), assigned to the Office for the Spiritual Care of Members of the Armed Forces of the NDH, conducting in Vienna a German-Croatian military concert with music ensembles from the German Wehrmacht. Andreas Ban does not remember that exhibition at the Macedonian National Theatre in Skopje in 2004, organized by the Zagreb Lili and Lovro Matačić Foundation and the Croatian Embassy in Skopje, supported by the Macedonian Ministry of Culture, nor does he remember whether he had seen the Easter edition of the paper The Croatian Nation printed in honor of the founding of the Independent State of Croatia, which included a text by Jerko Skračić (Poglavnik, Leader, longing of all Croats, / May the power of Providence forever protect you / Let your firm hand rule over us / Let your firm hand be our Leader!) and musical notation composed by Lovro Matačić for the march “The Song of Croatian Freedom.”
Whom should Andreas Ban ask about his uncle Bruno? Perhaps his family, his Partisan, antifascist family had included other protectors of their own little lives, other adherents, followers — Ustashas. Whom to ask? Almost all of them are dead, including those who are still alive.
Did Bruno collaborate with the Ustashas? Andreas asks his ninety-two-year-old father, now when it is too late. His father says nothing. Andreas Ban asks again. His father says, Many people collaborated.
Why was he sent to Sarajevo? asks Andreas Ban.
I don’t remember, his father says.
Andreas Ban had read somewhere that wars are orgies of forgetfulness. The twentieth century has archived vast catacombs, tunnels of information in which researchers get lost and in the end abandon their research, catacombs that ever fewer people enter. Stored away — forgotten. The twentieth century, a century of great tidying that ends in cleansing; the twentieth century, a century of cleansing, a century of erasure. Language perhaps remains, but it too is crumbling. A great burden falls on twentieth-century man and he drags himself out from under it, damaged. Did Pliny write somewhere that nothing in us is as fragile as memory, that dubious ability which builds and rebuilds a person. Whom should he now ask? How can he sort out that family defeat? Family secrets surface unexpectedly and too late. Whenever a person wishes to remember, up comes oblivion (or death), ready to pounce.
Whom should he now ask?
In 1941 Bruno has a fiancée, Judita, this Andreas Ban knows. Judita is a philosophy student and a Jew. Through his connections, Andreas Ban presumes his Ustasha connections, Bruno sends Judita secretly to Trieste, where for Andreas Ban the story breaks off.
What happened to Bruno’s fiancée Judita? Andreas Ban asks his ninety-two-year-old father now that it’s too late.
Which Judita? his father says.
Perhaps that small, brave, loving gesture goes some way to redeeming Bruno after the war. But as luck would have it, in 1949 Bruno marries Klotilda, an ethnic German about whose past Andreas Ban knows nothing, except that she was blonde, and lucid, methodical, rigid and tidy. Andreas Ban could have called his ninety-year-old uncle Bruno and clarified all those questions, but since after Klotilda’s death her family used lies and trickery to appropriate the burial plot of Andreas’s grandmother, Bruno and Marisa’s mother, so that now he, Andreas Ban, does not know where someone will lay his cremated remains, he no longer communicates with Bruno. When Bruno comes from Sarajevo for the funeral of his sister, Andreas’s mother Marisa, without even once in the preceding two years of her illness visiting her, and people are mourning, many from all over Yugoslavia, friends and Marisa’s former patients, Klotilda does not attend the service but fries veal cutlets, dozens of veal cutlets, calmly and with dedication so as to feed all who later come to the apartment. Andreas Ban does not ask anything then, it is not the right time. Now, when he is fighting a duel with his own body, a duel from which, ah, he knows, he will not emerge the victor, all that remains is for him to pick through other people’s lives to get some distance from his own. Otherwise, Andreas Ban, already lethargic, is waiting for the approaching waters of Lethe to wash over him. Granted with occasional feeble twinges. But, Andreas, you can demolish a city, burn a card, scratch a marble, but you cannot remove a word from a brain, understand?
Klotilda and her family, did they collaborate with the Nazis? Andreas asks his ninety-two-year-old father.
Leave me alone, his father says.
Andreas’s father is now a semi-invalid. He has bedsores. He acquires the bedsores after an operation for a broken hip. When bedsores appear, they are often followed by sepsis from which older patients quickly die. But Andreas’s father holds on, he does not let go. He says, These bedsores aren’t healing, I’ll have them my entire life. How extensive is a whole, an entity? Andreas’s father lives in a state-run old people’s home in Zagreb because he does not have an apartment of his own. Andreas’s father’s second wife and her son assure Andreas and his sister Ada that their father is on his way out, that is why he has to go into a home. He is not on his way out. He cannot get to the toilet so he shits in diapers. That’s all. Andreas’s father calls Andreas and tells him about his fucked-up dignity. About how tired he is. Andreas’s father is completely lucid. His French is still good. And his English is good. When they talk, Andreas Ban and his father occasionally throw Italian words and phrases into their conversation as well. But nevertheless his second wife and her son still put Andreas’s father into that home. Because he can no longer walk, because he is infirm. Now when Andreas goes to visit his father in that home, he meets the sons and daughters of other old and infirm residents, some of whom do not know who they are nor where they are, they just lie like corpses and their mouths gape mechanically as the staff shovel spoonfuls of thin gruel into them.
In the bed next to Andreas’s father lies a former Ustasha whose surname is Boban. He is ninety-seven, after the war he fled to France and has now returned to die in the bosom of his motherland. He is the cousin of Rafael Boban, the half-literate boor and cutthroat, commander of the Black Legion, who used to tour markets before the war selling spangles and tobacco. The Boban in the bed beside Andreas’s father steals other people’s belongings, sweets, sugar, teabags, paper handkerchiefs, sometimes even cash. With tiny, tiny steps he creeps into neighboring rooms and thinks that no one can hear him because he is completely deaf. When the nurses catch him, they just say tuttuttut and shake their heads while he acts dumb. So, willy-nilly, the Partisan and the Ustasha reach a “reconciliation.” In an old people’s home. In silence. In infirmity.
There is also an old woman who often comes into Andreas’s father’s room and wails, Take me home, please take me home. There’s another, she is stylish, but her eyes are empty. She just comes in, stands there and says nothing. Andreas asks her, Is there something you need? and after a pause she says, Closeness. As though she were a Beckett character. Andreas asks her, How old are you? but again she says nothing, says nothing then whispers, Very old, because she does not know, because she does not remember. That woman looks well groomed and her hair is expertly cut.
There is a stench of urine in Andreas’s father’s room.
In that home Andreas listens as the sons and daughters of those lying there desperately call the staff, Please come, Dad has shat himself, Mother has soiled herself. Andreas’s father says, I didn’t pass a stool for three days, then I had a good shit over Christmas. And he says, I go down to the ground floor by myself, in the elevator, in my wheelchair, and play chess in the living room. And he says, We used to play Preferans until our third player died.†
When Andreas comes to visit his father, he brings the strongest combinations of vitamins and minerals to help him hang on to life a bit longer, he gives him pocket money because Andreas’s father says, I’ve never been so poor. Andreas takes his father out of the home in his wheelchair, he takes him out to lunch, they drink good wine, eat scampi co
cktail and laugh. He pushes him through the streets to breathe in the air. They go from bar to bar and smoke. They both have cold hands. Sometimes they reach for each other’s hands and talk, linked together. About the past, about the future, about the music that will be played at Andreas’s father’s funeral: “Lovely land, Istria dear,”‡ play that for me, says Andreas’s father.
Andreas’s father sells the apartment which he worked for together with Andreas’s mother, then gives half the money to his other wife. Then he moves into his stepson’s apartment. His stepson has several apartments and he thrusts under Andreas’s father’s nose a declaration (certified by a lawyer) according to which Andreas Ban’s father agrees to be moved out by the stepson into a home when he becomes infirm or begins to lose his marbles. Andreas’s father signs the declaration. Andreas’s father did not lose his marbles, but he made a fool of himself. Andreas’s father spent his half of the money, the money from the sale of his apartment, on renovating the apartment which he moved into with his second wife, the apartment belonging to his stepson who stipulated how that apartment should look. So Andreas’s father is left without additional funds, with a small pension that barely covers his stay in the state-run old people’s home. Andreas’s father had been a tall, very tall, handsome man. He had a degree in electrical engineering. He was friends with painters and writers. He owned their paintings and books. All that disappeared, the pictures disappeared and the books were thrown out or given away. Especially the books with dedications. Andreas’s father had traveled all over the world, he was well known. He had associated with many political figures, with Tito and Nehru, with Kerensky, with Louis Alojz Adamič, with Nasser, with Nimeiry, with Olof Palme and Urho Kekkonen. Urho Kekkonen gave Andreas’s father a very large transistor, long ago, when transistors had just become fashionable. Ranković§ had it in for him. And some other Croatian politicians had it in for him. It does not matter who, they are dead now. Photographs bear witness to Andreas’s father’s life, Andreas keeps them. The oil paintings are not at Andreas’s place or at his sister Ada’s. Andreas’s father has now shrunk. He has no clothes either. He has no shoes or winter coat or cap or gloves or scarf, so Andreas brings him his own for their “walks.” Because they think, that woman and her son, that Andreas’s father will never go out again. Out of the home, out of his bed, out of that waiting room. So they keep bringing him pajamas and tracksuits. He is very thin and fragile, Andreas’s father. Andreas would like to move his father closer to him, but his father says no. He wants to stew in his own stupidity. He has sobered up and puts up with it. That woman now visits him in the home once a week, as though he had gone on some kind of cure, to a spa. She brings him apple pie. She is bored now, that woman, because she no longer has someone to quarrel with, no one to shout at. She is quarrelsome, pathologically jealous. Andreas and his sister annoy her, she insults them, Andreas’s father’s previous life annoys her. She has hysterical attacks and dreams up vile stories. She is old too, and totally uninteresting. She is not nice to look at, she was never good-looking, and Andreas likes beauty. That woman has a lot of poison inside her. Politically, she is quite fanatical, right-wing. Andreas does not like to be in her company, she makes him tense. In the home, they like Andreas’s father. Andreas’s father is cheerful. Andreas’s father is outgoing, he talks to people, listens to their stories, when he plays chess he wins. Very few manage to work out what goes on inside, in Andreas’s father’s chest, perhaps only Andreas Ban and Ada. What is now going on in Andreas’s father’s chest is pain. And pressure. It seems that Andreas’s father is carrying a pneumatic chamber. He has had enough, Andreas’s father. He says, Leave me alone.