by Drago Jancar
That made Ma laugh, just like my sister said—she got out her Hollywood grin at the wrong time. She had nice teeth, with a golden incisor at the bottom. Sometimes she’d tap her fingernails against her teeth to check that they were firm and healthy.
“Ma looks like a smiley on acid,” I told my sister on the phone.
“What did I tell you,” she replied, blowing smoke into the receiver.
I found Xanax, Prozac, Normabel, Praxiten, Sarafem, and Apaurin on the floor under the kitchen cabinet in a candy tin together with Band-Aids, aspirins, and throat lozenges. She didn’t even try to hide them like my sister thought she would—or maybe Ma knows that one of the best ways to hide things is not to hide them at all. And yet, last winter she threw everything out; I saw it happen.
“How on earth does she get the stuff?” my sister fumed.
It’s not terribly hard, I thought to myself. Half the student dorm was on vodka or wine and Valium, other sedatives, and other substances you could allegedly only get on prescription. It was cheaper than candy. A Rasta from the second floor had a plastic bag; the principle was “reach in, and whatever comes out is yours,” my roommate told me.
“The problem is that every jerk who doesn’t want to wash his hair thinks he’s a Rasta,” I remember saying.
“Leave her Lorisan so she can sleep,” my sister advised. “Whatever else you find can go down the toilet.” I flushed several times; a blue Prozac tablet kept bobbing back up. Finally it too disappeared.
I’m swinging on the balcony and can see over the roofs. Neighbors greet me from the street and I wave back.
When she came from the west—first a minus, then a mole—and finally appeared from behind the baker’s, I waved to her too. The moment she came through the door I said, “Ma, I’ve decided to stay a while. Can you take Danijel’s things out of my closet?”
She stood in the bathroom in front of the washbasin, scrubbing her hands with soap under a stream of hot water.
“All right,” she answered, turning off the faucet and wiping her hands on the coarse old terry towel.
“No point watering the plants, they’ll scorch in a jiffy on a day like this,” she added, absorbed in her own thoughts.
I saw it clearly—everything changed faster and more fundamentally than me. I spent the last few years treading water while everything else sped along and grew. I only rarely got to go home; whenever I went downtown, to the western part of the city where my sister lives, I’d get stuck at the sparkling showroom, the garish exterior of a smashed and stolen world. Entering that city is a digital adventure; around familiar corners there lurk gangs of conspicuous, siliconed Barbies. Wafts of adrenaline penetrate and corrode my lungs.
I visit the big concrete beaches with their deck chairs and cocktail bars, the marinas with moored Russian yachts bigger than the houses in our street, and the hotel complexes with their barriers and security; a sea of rubble and broken glass, excavators and trucks; steel skeletons and smooth prisms of black opaque glass, whose metallic flash on a hot day makes you envy the blind. I pity the birds, dolphins, and flying fish—such sights must horrify them when they launch out of the sea or come down from the sky.
The city’s east is an industrial zone. The east is one hulking shipwreck. The shipyard with its tall green cranes, warehouses, the cement factory, and the neglected ironworks, and behind that huge junkyard, at the edge of the peninsula, the faded façades of Staro Naselje with its post office and church and the murky mire of the polluted port—a laughable little town beneath the distant high-rise blocks that blink down to us at night . . .
. . . to me and Ma sitting on the balcony drinking lukewarm beer from plastic bottles, or eating melon, with the fan on the balcony railing pretending to be wind. Neighbors who don’t have air-conditioning sleep on fold-out sofa beds out on their terraces, whole families. They take position and start watching TV as soon as the Dnevnik current-affairs program begins. Nothing has changed here, nothing has moved on. Perhaps this is the only speck of the world that I know, my home base, my sanctuary, my snail shell. Despair plus asylum, a little island of happiness in the tepid, bitter liquid—25% More, Free!—with maybe a puff of air from the sea, but not what you’d call a breeze.
The oleanders, capers, and bougainvillea in the courtyards are in flower. And ginger Jill has a streetlamp like a star in each eye.
On evenings like this, the world and the city are not divided into east and west, but, like in the primordial brain of an animal, into north and south. Urbi et orbi. That is the message of the moss, the compasses and wind roses, the migratory birds, the rhythms to which people rise and dance, the kinetics of language divided into hemispheres, the eels and smelts so engrossed in fucking that you can walk right past them as they writhe and thrash in the shallows, the migratory birds, mapa mundi, the Luna and the North Star, and the line in the hills that the Spanish broom grows up to . . .
Then everything can seem okay, and sometimes that’s the same as if it really is.
“When the pension rebate comes I’ll do up the grave,” Ma said, cutting the melon with a blunt knife.
She’d also sold some shares and was going to deposit the money into my bank account.
“It might help you finish university one day.”
“Okay, but I’ll keep it for when I’m retired,” I said. “Then I’ll be able to go to the moon, though I imagine your shares won’t be enough to cover more than a few minutes of moonwalk, at the going rate . . .”
“At least you’ll be able to go there,” she concluded. Preoccupied and nodding, she took her slippers out from behind the green curtain that separated the kitchen from the improvised catch-all space, a kind of dining room cum living room that we call a tinel.
“That old baby!” my sister complained one day, meaning Ma. “Have you noticed how her cheeks have started drooping? Like a basset!”
“Cate Blanchett thinks wrinkles are good,” I said. “They give you character.”
“Cate Blanchett thinks . . . Jeezus, Dada, what’s that got to do with it?” she huffed, taking a sip of her coffee, and then delicately wiping a stray brown ground from the corner of her bright pink mouth.
“You’re hungry,” the green curtain called. “But there’s no fresh bread. Albano closed early and I didn’t manage to get any. Just a sec, I’ll make you some French toast.”
I don’t like French toast, why can’t you remember that—I was about to say. But then I changed my mind: “Oh, yes please!”
The clang of metal plates, the breaking of eggs, and the gurgle of milk came from behind the curtain.
“Did you know that swallow fish molt when they return from the north to the south? Their feathers fall off, and they grow scales and fins so they can swim again.”
Sometimes I tell her nonsense like that just for fun.
“After Chernobyl anything is possible,” she answered as she whisked the yolks, milk, and sugar. “Miškovica from Donja štrada has just had a child from three fathers.”
I know every rathole, shelter, and emergency exit.
All of us have that knowledge—in our legs more than our heads. Like the foreign language hiding like a stowaway in our middle ears, and we grafted its temperamental Romanic melody onto the trunk of our own, relatively staid Slavic. The boys from the new housing projects across the railroad track who came to stay with us in the summers—our cousins, the Iroquois Brothers, and some other “outskirters,” always with freshly shaven heads—wanted to be like us, so they soon talked like we did, different to their sweet, fat mamas and disheveled fathers whose vowels stuck in their throats; whenever the men absolutely needed to talk, they brought out nothing but strangled bellows, as I recall.
We knocked together our tongue from what we learned at home from our parents and from the anonymous translators of subtitles and dubbed cartoons. That Croat-American mishmash picked up off the street, cribbed from the Dnevnik anchorman and stolen from Dylan Dog, Grunf, Sammy Jo Carrington, and Zane Grey was
our gangsta rap, our lingua franca from the west and center of the city, via Staro Naselje, and up to the railroad track—wherever there were kids who yakked and yelled. We followed each other around and lived like hobos; there was nothing else for us to do, but that was all we wanted, as I recall.
There were endless combinations and permutations to our games of hide-and-seek. Or when we played group hide-and-seek. Back entrances led through unlocked courtyards or through the kitchens of pastry shops and ice-cream parlors with their pots of pudding and vats of gelato, through dark, arched alleys that led down to even darker basements. Cellars became narrow lanes between the houses, pipes led into bare courtyards with sheets drying high above, stairwells that ended in the sky, attics with rotten beams, roofs we jumped over to get to the old castlet, where we scaled its seaward side, edged along the top of its walls, and slid down into the park beneath the twisted ships in the dry dock.
That’s where we found Danijel when he got lost the first time; he was hiding under a boat and singing to himself to keep up his courage. Later he ran away often, and each time he was gone for longer because he wasn’t frightened anymore, he said.
I bet everything we did there, all our games and wars, were more exciting than the childhood of a savage who goes by the beeches in the forest or the cocoa trees in the jungle—which they have in Baranya, too—or by the cactuses and the sun in the prairie.
The prairie is up in the foothills, above the cemetery where my father and brother are buried, but most of it has given way to a sprawl of dilapidated houses with strutting chickens.
Once I fought a battle in the lunar landscape behind the cement factory and the old saltworks, between the street and the prairie, and there I won my true name, Ruddska, after my reddish skin. That day I fell three times for justice and freedom, was braver than Boudicca, and even today I still call myself by that name—Ruddska.
During a volunteer exchange in the mid 1990s, immediately after the war, we had a precocious freshman from Heidelberg here. He interviewed us for their student radio station about the postwar life of young people in Croatia.
“You live in a multicultural country . . .” he began.
“I don’t!” I declared into the tape recorder like a speaker in some televized debate.
“Yeah, but I know what he means,” my sister butted in. “There are various ethnic groups here, on our street there are at least two in every house, but it’s all the same culture—shitty culture, if you ask me. Only the Chinese can save us from boredom.”
In her own way, she embodied the spirit of internationalism.
Soon British and Dutch, Belgians and French began moving into our narrow alleyways. I guess the Chinese don’t find poverty all that romantic. It was fascinating to watch old dwellings rudely fashioned from stone, cement, and guano—their beams alive with maggots and nesting mice—transform into quaint picture-book cottages. Beauty for those with time and money to spare.
All the Chinese I’ve ever met live in high-rise blocks, I thought. But some people prefer durability—people from suburbs like ours the world over.
“Hey,” my sister said to the guy from Heidelberg, giving him a friendly whack on the shoulder, “when we played war games with the tourist kids before the war, the little Germans and Italians played the Germans and Italians. One of them even cried, for Christ’s sake!”
“But what about during the war? And afterward?” he cleared his throat and pointed the tape recorder at me.
“I dunno. No one played the Balkan wars, if that’s what you mean. Everyone wanted to be Croats, for fuck’s sake.”
“Yep,” my sister confirmed.
“That’s why we played cowboys and Indians.”
“With the outskirters.”
“Against the outskirters. There always has to be someone to fight, you know? Cowboys and Indians.”
TRANSLATED FROM CROATIAN BY WILL FIRTH
[ESTONIA]
TÕNU ÕNNEPALU
Interpretation
She rose from her armchair, where she had been waiting for me. I was running slightly late, because I had misjudged the distance, thinking it shorter than it was, as always happens in Paris (I somehow always manage to reduce the city’s dimensions to the scale of Tallinn and Tartu); I was out of breath from my quick pace, even emphasizing it somewhat so that she would see I had hurried all the same. With her first words, she was able to erase the embarrassment of my excuses without further ado; to create a kind of natural, almost comradely atmosphere. I was in seventh heaven. I was certain she knew who I was, because in any case, Denis S. had told her about me. I quietly hoped that perhaps she had even seen my films, and perhaps they had left an impression on her. If so, she would then be the first person I’d met in Paris who had seen them. I’ve generally gotten used to the idea there that all of the people shuffling around me have never seen The Railway Watchman’s House, nor do they want to see it, and if it were shown to them by force, then they would give it a shrug at best. I’ve once again become accustomed to being a nobody. Liz Franz was able to rise from her armchair and walk up to me, was the first to extend her small hand in such a way, with such an expression, that all at once I became someone again—all of my suppressed vanity and self-awareness came back in a rush.
I don’t remember what we talked about. We waited there for a Le Monde journalist, Nicole Zand (that was her pseudonym), who was supposed to do an interview with Liz Franz for which I was meant to act as interpreter. She was running late herself, so quite a heart-to-heart took shape between Liz Franz and I right there in the hotel foyer. She seemed so simple and natural to me. I gazed upon that short woman with bobbed hair, who had risen from her low armchair so gracefully and nimbly, and had walked toward me—it was as though I had known her for years. Which, in a certain sense, was indeed the case. Naturally, I didn’t come right out and tell her about how I would cry and masturbate while listening to her record at the age of fourteen. And I still haven’t told her that, in all honesty. Still, I think she could surmise it. Somehow. And immediately.
Interpreting (interprète) turned out to be very easy. After exchanging the first polite formalities, it became clear that Nicole Zand spoke quite decent Russian, and the two women continued speaking without my assistance; I was only able to help Madame Zand on a couple of occasions, when she couldn’t remember some expression and had to search for it via French. Liz Franz spoke Russian with a very heavy accent; I was amazed how purely she pronounced every word when singing. Apparently, it was a question of will, of style.
Madame Zand was an older Jewish lady with dyed red hair, quite lively and nervous. Her husband had worked for years as the Le Monde Moscow correspondent. They had been to Tallinn, too. It was during the sixties or seventies. She had been astonished by the old, prewar European/German aura there. All of those little ladies wearing hats and sitting in cafés, eating cream pies. She wanted to know whether Estonia was still like that, now that it was becoming free again.
I noticed that Liz Franz replied quite tersely and stalely, but Nicole Zand liked her answers and burst out laughing several times. Liz Franz was apparently used to giving interviews and knew what would have an effect, what would go into the article and what there was no point talking about. She never went into details, never dwelled on nuances, and always replied directly and without mincing words, although perhaps not entirely honestly (when I think back to it now). I was enthralled by her “performance.” At the end, she suggested to Nicole Zand that she also speak with “our young, renowned cineaste,” by which she meant me. Nicole Zand cast me a quick glance sizing me up, and gave me her business card, even writing her direct number on it, asking that I get in touch. (Once, that business card actually did turn out to be very helpful.)
When Madame Zand had left, Liz Franz made an effortless proposal for us to go to a café somewhere and have a bite to eat—she was dreadfully hungry, apparently. No-no, I shouldn’t worry, she made a gesture of refusal—her record label would pick up the
tab, even for me; that was their agreement. Truly—from the very beginning, Liz Franz showed exceptional discretion and skill at disguising her charity. She asked me to be her guide: apparently, while she had indeed been to Paris once before (I now know that it was with Umberto; back then, I didn’t know about Umberto yet, or really anything about Liz Franz’s life at all—all I knew was that she lived in Rome), she had a poor knowledge of the city. So, I played the expert and took her to Place de la Contrescarpe, in order to show her the picturesque rue Mouffetard Market. Contrescarpe’s cafés were incredibly chic, in my opinion—on cold, gray days, I dreamed of sitting there in the warmth behind the glass and eating this or that, the entire square smelling of it, while drinking a hot, fatty café crème.
Even so, I didn’t dare to order anything other than a chicken salad: the names of many items on the menu were completely unfamiliar to me. Luckily, Liz Franz didn’t demand that I translate the menu, but instead ordered a salad Niçoise right after me—a salad that, by the way, she only picked at; so much for her ravenous appetite. I, in any case, cleaned my plate entirely. We also drank red wine at Liz Franz’s suggestion: a toast to our acquaintance. I don’t remember any part of our conversation, only that we talked nonstop; evening had already descended long ago, we had ordered more wine, and she hadn’t picked up on the fact that I was quite drunk. All of a sudden, however, she looked at her watch and shouted, horrified, that it was imperative for her to go—the head of her record label was apparently already waiting back at her hotel. Which didn’t mean that we picked up the pace on the way back. Liz Franz never ran anywhere.
All in all, my obligations as Liz Franz’s interpreter in late January 1991 were quite easy to fulfill. As I had hoped, I was able to sit next to her at lunches and gorge. A true interpreter doesn’t eat, but interprets; however, Liz Franz spoke with her label head in Italian (true, in a rather stiff Italian), in even stiffer German with some new tablemate (but Liz Franz was never ashamed of her linguistic deficiency—she spoke as she spoke), and, naturally, in Russian with some Russian comtesse, who was as shriveled as a dried plum and decked out in gold, with shining eyes. For some reason, there was always a Russian comtesse or princesse, a countess or a duchess, at the table. Liz’s label head apparently had some particular weakness for them.