by Ivan Srsen
* * *
I’ve been reluctant to leave my apartment ever since the Croatians got their own state. I moved to Zagreb from Ljubljana forty years ago for work; as a Slovenian, I had no trouble getting permanent residency and Croatian citizenship, and I didn’t feel like going back to Slovenia; my pension allowed me to lead a quiet life.
Early each morning, Mishko and I would go out for a walk. We’d head up the stream to the Remiza neighborhood near the tram depot and back again, doing all we had to do in the lines of trees and shops along the way, and then shut ourselves in the apartment again. I spent years putting together my memoirs; everything around me changed or was destroyed so rapidly that writing was the only thing that kept me from losing my mind.
But after those grenade attacks I didn’t even feel like doing that anymore.
Over the next few days, Mishko and I watched the children from the kindergarten bringing up sand in little wooden wheelbarrows and, bit by bit, filling in the craters and holes made by the drunk heroes.
But at home in the apartment Mishko whined. He didn’t want to drink and he wasn’t hungry, so that wasn’t the problem. I stroked him and kept asking him what hurt; Mishko was older than me (if you converted his age to human years) and I was afraid he was going to die soon.
I felt helpless. For want of a better idea, the next Friday I decided to do some serious spring cleaning. I reread my scribbling—memories of people who had mostly passed away. Several pages were dedicated to Mishko’s mother, Gloria. What a lovely dog she had been! Zagreb was a complete city back then, in the midseventies, when Gloria ruled the streets of our suburb, Trešnjevka, roamed the embankments and railroad tracks all the way to Kustošija, the next suburb, and caught huge, gorged rats. The neighbors fed her as much as I did. The whole of Trešnjevka was hers!
I tore out those pages about Gloria and laid them under Mishko’s rug.
The next day, in the still of Saturday morning, I went out with a boxful of my notebooks—my “albums,” as I called them with self-deprecation—and looked for a spot in the playground that couldn’t be seen from the street. The kids had done a good job in the last few days: there was sand everywhere and I felt like I was walking on a beach. Everything had been smoothed over, and only the biggest craters could be vaguely glimpsed.
Mishko stayed in front of the fence, as if he knew he’d only bother me now. I finally found my hole and placed the papers in it. They didn’t burn for long. If I was a smoker I wouldn’t even have managed to finish my cigarette. When the fire died down, I mixed the ash into the sand and left the playground to take a walk with Mishko.
The road, the posts, and the roofs were all damp, but the sky was a clear light blue; the world was waiting for the rise of the great sun. We headed for Selska Road. The old Trešnjevka workers’ hovels on our left-hand side, dirty and decrepit, were slowly but surely collapsing. It wouldn’t take long: the wave of “urban renewal” was steadily sweeping over Trešnjevka too, and four- and five-story buildings were shooting up everywhere, each in its own color, with empty apartments behind huge windows.
Mishko dashed off farther along the street, through the garden of one of the little old houses where weeds now competed with the daffodils and violets. I waited for him with an uneasy feeling, as if I’d sent him on a robbery. Within a minute he was back at my side, disappointed—he’d found nothing that interested him there.
We came to the intersection and crossed the road right away, taking no notice of the traffic lights as we rushed to our park. The sun’s rays were touching the tops of the tall, slim chestnut trees and reflecting off the highest panel of the monument. Mishko immediately disappeared into the bushes that bordered the park. Although the benches were gleaming with the damp morning dew, a woman was sitting drowsily on one of them.
The monument stood out like an enormous totem pole. I loved that memorial to the fallen fighters of the national liberation struggle in World War II. Bronze and expressive, it pictured fearless, self-sacrificing heroes in prison, agitation, battle, and dance. The liberation of the people was displayed in four separate reliefs, like a story from bottom to top, with one version on the front and another on the back. The bottom relief showed the sufferings of a prisoner behind bars, above it was a mother fleeing with her little girls, and the reverse showed a young Communist activist; the flame of struggle burned at the third level, with a woman charging the aggressors’ rifles on the one side, and a man doing the same on the other; but the radiant light of progress, industrialization, and urbanization shone at the top of the monument, and on the reverse everyone had joined hands and was dancing in a ring.
Although the benches were still damp, I sat down on one of them and watched the rays of light caress the molded images of our suffering civilians and fighters, old but still full of avant-garde crispness, sharpness, and intensity.
The monument was too much for the war-fraught nineties. A Partisan in one of the reliefs, who was giving the three-finger salute in the ecstasy of agitation, had now lost his thumb. That didn’t happen in the war of national liberation, but in the last one, the Croatian war of independence, since the three fingers were the sign of the Serbian enemy in the 1990s. Some zealot acting in the rear (I personally suspect Žarko, the lathe operator, who worked nearby) had sawed off his thumb, a good four meters above the ground. The consolation was that Žarko’s workshop wasn’t doing very well, so he didn’t have the tools to bring down the whole monument.
The sun’s rays pierced the chestnut trees’ branches, and now the light stabbed me straight in the eyes. I had to find another bench, so I moved a little closer to the old lady. Only now did I notice her cigarette, which she held unlit between naked fingers sticking out of ragged winter gloves. She was singing something in German in a drunken sort of way, but beautifully and melodically. I ignored her until, after some time, she spoke to me.
“Do you know who I am?”
“Yes,” I mused, in the mood for a bit of repartee, “a streetwalker past her prime.”
“Oh, far off the mark,” she replied with only a cluck of disapproval, as if I hadn’t said anything particularly rude. “Do you see that little girl on the monument skipping around between all those sad-looking women in head scarves? That’s me, the ballerina!”
“Er, yes,” I said, not wanting to get into an argument. The little girl really stood out, as if she had been cast there before us, cheerful and looking forward to the five-year plans of the future, wearing a short, airy skirt like a spring daisy.
“Would you like to walk me home? I live just here on Meršićeva Street. I’m Jelena Lengel,” she said, as if the name should mean something to me.
“Nice to meet you. I’m Anton, just Anton.”
Rays of sunlight now rained down on us from all sides, reflecting off every puddle and dewdrop running down the monument’s metal frame. Jelena began to sway after just a few steps.
I pulled her along behind me, and then put my arm around her even though she complained. We crossed the road and started walking along Meršićeva Street in the shade of the massive, dilapidated three-story buildings. I’ve always found that row of residential houses off-putting and rarely had the courage to go near them; everything there was dark and daunting, like an old barracks.
But there I was now going up the stairs in one of those buildings with my new “lady friend.” On the third floor we entered her apartment through its broken door and staggered to the bed by the window.
Pungent perfume hung heavy in the air. I sat down on a chair, and she started to undress as if she was alone in the room.
The window faced west, so the small room was now without sunlight. Her bra fell, and with it her sagging breasts. Illuminated only by the pale gleam from the window, they seemed to be covered with blue blotches. And just like that, she collapsed half-naked onto the bed.
I managed to cover her with some blankets. I tried to close the shutters but they didn’t work. When I turned round, my gaze fell on a photograp
h on the wardrobe: it was of Raša and Jelena, and they looked happy, like a son with his mother, or even worse—husband and wife. But it could hardly have been a wedding photo because Raša was wearing his Ustasha cap and Jelena had a hat like a little old Zagreb lady. The only curious thing was that, instead of pearls, she had a dog collar around her neck.
That made me feel sick and I was about to leave, but I noticed Jelena was staring at me.
“Ah, you’ve seen Raša, the Ustasha. That’s a scene from the film where we met. They found us here in the neighborhood and we both had small parts. Ever since then I’ve been wearing the dresses they gave me as a present. But I lost the hat or drank it away, I don’t remember.” She laughed until she started coughing. “In the film I was the wife of some lawyer who went off to join the Partisans, and as punishment Raša made me tag along behind him like a dog. I had to sing German songs for him.”
“So Raša stayed an Ustasha and you stayed a dog.”
“Don’t say that.” She began to sob. “He used to come and see me afterward too, with a leash. It was lovely, and he never beat me. But I was too old for him. It couldn’t last.”
“No,” I remarked, not knowing what to say after all that. I looked at the photo again for a while. A cinematic wedding indeed.
The old dog finally fell asleep, and I pulled the blankets up over her breasts.
* * *
On Sunday, Mishko and I discovered that Blato Restaurant on Selska Road was open. It had never opened on a Sunday before. The waitress said it was because this was a special weekend. I didn’t want to ask what made it so “special.” At noon, I left Mishko at home to gnaw on his beef bone and went back to Blato, where I treated myself to two servings of brodetto with polenta and washed it all down with half a liter of Plavac from Korčula.
Then I went to the park again. When I gazed at the monument now it looked like a fish set upright, albeit in four sections, without head or tail. The fish is a symbol for Christians, but does it have significance for Communists too?
I couldn’t resist the temptation, so I crossed the street again and started walking along Meršićeva. Without thinking, I made for Jelena’s building and was on my way up the stairs when I heard people making noise down in the courtyard. It sounded like they were chanting, “Death to fascism—freedom to the people!” That was enough to make me go back down to street level in search of those like-minded fellows and find a way through to the large inner area.
I was a little frightened and, as if I’d brought it upon myself, a black Labrador sprung at me from out of a bush. But it didn’t bark; it only sniffed at me and then bolted off wherever it was going; it had probably been drawn by Mishko’s scent on my pants and shoes. I went in between a long line of old wooden huts overgrown with greenery and flowers. Hopelessly rusted satellite dishes alternated with gleaming white ones on the low roofs. People lived here, that was plain to see: bright-colored rags and gym shoes were out drying on makeshift fences, children’s toys lay in the grass next to chairs . . . The woodsheds were in an even worse condition and looked like they would collapse at any moment if they weren’t being held up by the high metal fence of a handball court. The wooden slats, plastic sheeting, and pieces of corrugated iron on their roofs were succumbing to gravity.
The shouts were coming from one of these rows of woodsheds. At the open door of one of them, a dozen or so young guys were standing around drinking beer out of cans and smoking. I said hello as I came up, but they just looked at me blankly. Music was blaring and I recognized the refrain: “Fuck the government, fuck politics!” The crew took that without any emotion and just nodded in time to the beat.
Soon I had a beer in my hand too. A nice feeling. I found somewhere to sit. Another part of the group was sitting on the stairs of the common toilet block. Everything was falling to pieces, but the toilet cubicles were still in use, judging by the smell.
A figure with long, plaited hair caught my eye. He was wearing a tattered green army jacket. He had probably noticed me staring at him—the beer was starting to take effect—and he spoke to me: “Howdy, neighbor!”
“Howdy!”
“Death to fascism!” he yelled in greeting before taking a swig from his can.
“Freedom to the people!” I shot back.
He broke into a laugh. “Hold on, are you really a neighbor?”
“Yes, from Tango!” I teased him.
Then everything seemed to stand still.
“Are you some kind of provocateur?” he probed, and two guys stood up over at the stairs.
“Spying, huh?” one of them snarled.
“No, kids. I’ve got something to tell you. The Ustasha from Tango blew up our local playground.”
“No shit?” two of them cried together. Someone turned off the music.
“Well, it is shit. What can I say? Pointless destruction.”
“Oh no!” the long-haired guy went, and then he thundered from the stairs so everyone could hear him: “Comrades! A playground in our neighborhood got demolished while we stood here drinking. The Ustashas don’t care about kindergartens, or children. This has gone way too far. I propose we settle the score with Tango tonight!”
“Fuck Tango, fuck Tango!” rang out all around.
“Everyone take a stick or pole from the woodshed—we’re taking action! See you all at seven at the monument!”
And, like a little army, everyone dispersed in the blink of an eye. A little old man came up to me, extended his hand, and said with a smile: “Bravo.”
* * *
At seven, I led the others silently through Trešnjevka. It was Sunday evening without a living soul out, and all the blinds were lowered. We muttered obscenities to each other to keep our spirits up.
When we arrived at Tango, I went in last “for tactical reasons,” after the dozen others armed with sticks—I was the only one who’d keep on living there, after all.
When I entered, the waitress threw herself at me as if she had seen the Savior. It was Tilda, high as a kite as usual. The pounding music from the speakers went straight to the brain.
I don’t know how many times I’d argued with her about it. “But it’s techno,” she’d say, as if that was sufficient explanation and it couldn’t be any other way. She mostly arranged to have shifts where she could work alone; then she’d invite her girlfriends, the rhythm would be sped up, forcing me to come out of the apartment, and I’d find them shaking and quaking at the bar, absently, like automatons.
“Anton?” she looked around, bewildered. “Was there a match? Did we get trounced?”
“There are no matches on Sundays, Tilda. Only church mice play soccer on Sundays,” I gibed.
“Where’s the fash?” yelled Marjan, the leader of my antifascists. And then, in a softer voice: “So are you alone here, Tilda?”
“Y-yes,” she stammered. “They were here yesterday and threw grenades around. Anton here knows. But that was the first time in a while—they prefer pubs downtown, and that’s where they meet now.”
“I should have known,” Marjan groaned.
“Come on, crew, never mind,” I said melancholically, but then again I was relieved. I’m not exactly street-fighter material these days. “Regardless, I really appreciate it—I’m glad to have guys like you in the neighborhood.”
We sat down at the tables. Tilda came up and took everyone’s orders with a humility I hadn’t seen in her for a long time. She even put on some different music, I think it was hip-hop.
I stood at the bar, following her movements and the rhythm. Most of all I liked her tattoo, with its dark blue tendrils snaking up her neck to her right ear.
* * *
I was onto my sixth beer, the crew from Meršićeva Street had dispersed, and I was pestering Tilda, when my friend Jelena Lengel turned up at the door. She was dressed in exactly the same clothes as when we met back in the park.
And she was already quite blotto.
“Where’s my pretty boy?” She looked me angri
ly in the face and hit me with a stifling cloud of her aromatic chemicals.
“You mean costumed Raša?”
“I mean my fine-fingered darling!”
“The lover of kindergartens?”
“What are you talking about, idiot? Get off my back!” she shouted.
I pulled her toward me and said into her ear: “He went and got himself another ‘love on a leash,’ you know. Someone who not only sings like you but also plays the accordion. And male, so he can hump him in the ass.”
“You animal! That’s bullshit!” she screamed.
But I was just starting to have fun. “We burned him up, the Ustasha bastard, and we used the ashes to fill the crater he made in the playground.”
“Bullshit, bullshit!”
“Come and see then.” I took her by the hand and led her to where I had burned my papers. “Look!” I scooped up two handfuls of ash and threw them into the air. The burnt smell spread as the ash wafted down.
“You scumbags! You killers!” She fell to her knees and dug her hands into the sand.
I was satisfied with my little game; I finally had something go my way.
She crawled on the ground, choking on her tears.
I pushed her away with my foot. I skirted the house, avoiding the bar, and went into my apartment. As I closed the door I felt triumphant, as if I had finally won the battle.
* * *
But I went outside again just twenty minutes later and lifted her up. She was shivering and had sand in her hair, on her cheeks, and under her fingernails.
I took her to the apartment. We went into the bathroom and filled the bath with hot water. Mishko darted around us, happy to have company.
She went along with every move I made, without the slightest resistance. I looked at her haggard blue breasts as she sank into the suds.
She laid there in the bath and stared at the ceiling, as if unconscious.
I got undressed and climbed into the bath at the opposite end.
She looked at me as if seeing me for the first time.
“All the hairs on your chest are white,” she said, and dabbed froth on my shoulders. “Epaulettes,” she added, “decorations.” She kept putting handfuls of froth all over me. “You’ll liberate me—you’re my Partisan.”