More Than I Love My Life

by David Grossman

  Then a sharp right turn and a shadow falls on her swollen eyelids. She must be in a narrow cranny between two boulders. A cool breeze runs over her face. She slows down. Her body naturally slows. Her skin thirstily inhales the shade and the coolness, the back of her neck tenses for the slap.

  “What happened, whore, why did you stop?”

  The terrain grows rocky and rough. Vera and the warden breathe heavily. Sweat pours. The warden stops. So does Vera. The warden curses because of something Vera doesn’t understand. The warden leans on Vera with one hand and takes off a shoe. The smell of shit spreads. She must be wiping her shoe on a rock. She curses some more, spits. “Turn around, whore.” The warden thoroughly cleans her shoe on Vera’s shirt. Vera hears a cork popping. The warden has two canteens on her belt. Vera hears water trickling. The warden is washing her hands. Now she hears strong, large gulps. Vera’s mouth is dry. Full of sores. Her tongue is thick and heavy. “Maybe she’ll give you a drink,” she says, “maybe she’s kind. Maybe she’s your good mother? No, she’s bad. She’s a bad mother, doesn’t take good care of you.” The warden rolls around laughing. “You’re really something,” she says and gives Vera a friendly whack on the back of her head, “the girls told me you were like this, but I didn’t believe them. Honestly? That’s why I leaped at it when they asked who was going to take you up. Your whole brain is open like there’s no lid, hey? It all spills out.” Vera stops and shrinks back. What the warden just said worries her. “I think I’ve been a little bit not here lately,” she whispers hesitantly, and the warden screeches with laughter.

  Another sharp turn, left this time, and an even-steeper incline begins. They climb up, using their hands and feet, groaning, coughing. Then all at once she’s in an open space. Maybe they’ve reached the top. A refreshing wind, a wind not-from-here, caresses her face. There is also a strong smell of the sea, different from the way it smells when she’s in the barracks with all the women and their stenches. One bucket for thirty girls. Far below she hears waves crashing against the shore. There must be rocks there. A pretty sound, so pretty it hurts.

  “Stand here, whore. Face this way!” A hard slap. The warden coughs—the wet, thick cough of a smoker. She spits.

  “What is this here,” Vera mumbles, “think fast, Vera. What are they going to do with you. Maybe throw you in the sea. The warden hears everything. Watch out for her.”

  “Exactly, whore, I hear everything. Stand up straight and shut up for a minute, I get it. It’s not funny anymore.”

  Sun. The heat fries Vera’s brain. It’ll all be over soon either way. Too many signs. In a few minutes she won’t be. Goodbye memory of Milosz, goodbye memory of Mother and Father, goodbye soulmate Jovanka…Goodbye Nina…Who knows where you are now. What they did with you. If I think about you I’ll die before they shoot me. The warden holds her shoulders from behind and moves her a little to the left, then right again, then slightly back. What is all this, what are these movements, like some dance she’s making her do.

  “Stand up straight, trash.”

  “What is she doing. What does she care how you stand. If only she’d tell you what’s going to happen.” Her stomach turns. She’s sweating, but now it’s a cold sweat. The warden raises Vera’s arms up to the sides. Not satisfied. She holds the arms up higher. Not satisfied. She punches her arms down against her body. She curses. Vera must have made a mistake. Vera herself is one big mistake. “How come a little raisin like you survived out here?” the warden spits out. “Legs straight! Back straight!” Vera puts her legs together. She whispers, “What is she doing? Maybe they told her to take a picture of you before they throw you in the sea.” And with that thought she begins to tremble. Everything in her shakes, even the eyelids, the lips, and what’s left of her beautiful cheeks. Her body is afraid, dying of fear, but she’s not. She doesn’t mind being done. On the contrary. She’s only ashamed that the warden is seeing how cowardly her body is. “Two steps forward, trash.” Vera doesn’t know what she’s walking toward. With the toe that sticks out of the hole in her boot, she feels for the edge. The warden scoffs: “You should have thought of that before you decided to betray Comrade Tito, whore.” “Quick,” Vera yells, breathing heavily. “Who should I think of now? How much time do I have? Where’s Milosz? Where are you, my love, my life? Where is my little Nina, who was thrown out onto the street? Just like that. Took her and threw her on the street.”

  Silence. Vera is unable to guess where the warden is standing. Which side she’s going to hit her from. And if it’ll be a bullet or a fist. In the blazing sun, a circle of coldness darkens around her. The terror of death. It’s not the first time this ring of cold has closed in on her. In the war she was in the forests with the partisans. Twice the Chetniks caught her and sentenced her to death, and she managed to escape. She faked passports and smuggled arms and people, one thousand five hundred people she saved, she and Milosz together, and three times she saved herself from being raped. After the war she and Milosz worked in counterespionage for the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia. She truly did not know fear.

  But back then she still had eyes.

  Something jumps up in her head and she grows sharper, extricates herself from the dullness through which she’s been staring for the past few weeks, since she went blind overnight. Up until that night she withstood it all: the interrogations, the torture, the fake executions, the hunger, the thirst, the hard labor, the temptation to inform, to turn someone in, because that’s what they wanted, names, names. Who told a joke about Tito? Who wrinkled their nose when someone told a joke about Stalin? Even the horrible thoughts about Nina and what might be happening to her on the streets did not break her. But then came the blindness and finished her off. A few dozen women went blind that night, the whole left row of huts. A plague. They brought a doctor from the mainland, who diagnosed nyctalopia: night blindness. Because in the daylight hours the women could see again, and they all got better after being given vitamin A. But Vera never recovered. She could not see at night or day. “It’s your punishment,” Commandant Maria told her, and she would lift Vera’s eyelids with the tip of her whip every morning: “Think very carefully, banda, about what you’re being punished for.”

  In the first few days, Maria and the wardens thought she was lying, faking blindness to get out of working at the rocks. They beat her, starved her, and put her in isolation for ten days, three feet square, no bed, no chair, no window. Concrete floor, four walls, and a bucket. She slept diagonally. What did she care. Even if she ever got off the island, she would never be able to see Nina again.

  * * *

  —

  “Why be afraid?” Vera scolds her miserable body that keeps on trembling. She hopes the thoughts are staying inside her head. For the past few days what’s in her head has been blending with what’s outside it. “But where’s the warden? Behind you? Took a few steps back to gain momentum? And me, how am I standing? Facing the sea or the mountain? Which way will I fall?” Silence. The warden must be having some fun with her. But maybe not, who can tell in this place. Maybe she’s crossing herself? Or praying before she pushes her? Vera sighs. She asks herself if Milosz taught Nina how to fall from a great height without getting hurt. He always used to prepare her, train her for all sorts of imaginary predicaments, and in the end what happened? What happened is that life was more surprising than him. What was it her mother used to say? “God has a big imagination for troubles.” She says goodbye to her mother. They hug. Her mother was taken almost ten years ago, in Auschwitz. Prisoners who’d been in Auschwitz and were brought to Goli Otok said it was harder here. There, it was clear who the enemy was and whom you had to watch out for. Here the method is to turn every woman into every other woman’s enemy. So you can’t trust anyone. Where is the warden? Vera’s body diminishes itself, her back shrinks, the back that is about to take the blow or the shot. Or maybe she’ll shoot her in the head? And which t
hought will be the last one? Milosz, Milosz. She’ll fly up in the air for a few seconds and crash onto the rocks below. She won’t shout. There are women who came to the island pregnant, and gave birth or miscarried, and they took their newborns or fetuses and threw them into the sea. That thought reminds her of Nina again. Since going blind she hasn’t been able to see Nina in her mind’s eye. Instead of Nina’s face it’s always a blurred spot. As if Nina is punishing her, blurring and erasing herself. But now Nina is clear and sharp and smiling, and maybe that’s a sign that Vera made the right decision. That Nina also understands that Vera did the right thing. Here is the beautiful, innocent, trust-filled face of Nina. Here are the pure green eyes, which you can dive into and feel that man is essentially good. Oh, Vera sighs desperately. “You can do it now,” she shouts at the warden, “you can do it, but quickly.”

  “Want a cigarette, whore?”

  Vera groans. A cigarette? Where did she come up with that? From the exact same unexpected place where the punches and the slaps come from, just because someone feels like giving them to you. Or maybe it’s part of the execution protocol? Vera manages to bring in Milosz. She sees him as if he’s standing here next to her. The high, light forehead, constantly teeming with thoughts and ideas. The funny big ears. The incomparable eyes. Milosz speaks in his pleasant voice, with his fast speech, tik tik tik tik, like a man running on a path of stones in a river. “Hey Miko, I knew you’d find me in the end.” “Even in death I will find you, Milosz,” she says with a smile. A match is lit next to her, then the sharp smell of smoke. A cigarette is shoved into her mouth. Her lips shake so badly they can hardly hold it.

  She inhales hungrily. The cigarette stinks, but it gives a good burn. She wonders again if the warden is arranging Vera’s body in this meticulous way so that it falls into a particular place on the rocks. She hears the canteen being uncorked. Maybe they give convicts one final sip. A gurgle of water nearby, down below, near her feet. Water spills. A sharp smell bursts into her nostrils. The smell of wet soil. And not just soil—Vera sniffs longingly—but rich, fertile soil. Where is there soil like that on the island? Did they dig a grave for her?

  “Every two or three hours someone will come and arrange you the right way,” says the warden and knocks Vera’s forehead to straighten her head up.

  “Arrange for what? Commandant.”

  “And you’d better be in the exact same place where I put you, down to the millimeter. Or else you’re done.” The warden pulls the cigarette out of Vera’s mouth and flicks it into the gulf. Vera imagines herself leaping after it. It would be wonderful to fly. To be a burning spark. But apparently they’re leaving her here for a while longer.

  Without the cigarette the sun feels even harsher. Milosz has vanished. Nina has vanished. Her eyelids are puffy, but the smell of the earth is sharp and good.

  “Listen up, trash: the one who comes at midday will take you to the rocks to shit and eat. You get ten minutes.”

  “Yes, Commandant.”

  They’re not going to kill her. Not now at least. They didn’t bring her up here to kill her. Wonderful relief spreads through her body. It was just a scare. She scared herself. Imaginative people suffer more on this island than others. She’s never had much of an imagination. Nor a sense of humor. Before she got to Goli, she wasn’t even capable of thinking about something that didn’t exist. Yet when she got here, she made up an imaginary game that kept her going: she has to roll the rock up the mountain because a pharmacist is waiting for her at the top, with medicine for Nina. Poor Nina is sick, she has a fever. Nothing serious, maybe the flu, or even chicken pox, healthy children’s illnesses. But she needs something for the fever, so that she doesn’t suffer, and the head pharmacist said she’d wait for Vera one more hour, no longer. So now she’s racing against time, not against the rock, the rock is just in her way. And she pushes and pushes, and groans and splutters and pushes. Nina is waiting—

  Until she finally holds her head up and breathes easy, because she’s reached the pharmacy at the top of the mountain, made it at the last minute. The head pharmacist smiles at her and hands her a bag with pills. And now Vera has to roll the rock back down, and that’s the hard part. She has to stand under the rock, which weighs more than she does, and lodge her feet into the ground to stop its momentum and make sure it doesn’t crush her. She’s already seen women here splattered under their rocks, but that’s not going to happen to her. She calculates every step because at the end of the descent, in the field of rocks, Nina is waiting for her medicine. Waiting desperately, and Vera will give her the medicine and see the smile on the little girl’s face. Nina can count on Mother. Then she has to go back and join the line of women pushing rocks up the hill, to the pharmacy that will shut in an hour, to get medicine for Nina’s flu.

  But she was unable to fantasize anything else. Pathetic, her imagination. From the pharmacy to Nina, from Nina to the pharmacy. How could you compare that to Milosz and Nina with their make-believe games, and their fantastical creatures with eyes on the ends of their fingers, and the black bird that only flies over someone who’s told a lie, and all the stories Milosz used to invent. Vera would sit in the next room, darning socks or knitting, wondering where Milosz and Nina came up with these notions. Because with Vera he only spoke about things from life, from reality, about the principles of socialism and class warfare, while with Nina a man from another world came out of him. And how they laughed together, he and Nina.

  Her body stretches out with relief at not having been killed. The cowardly body cracks its joints, takes a deep breath. She yawns, a chain of enormous yawns. She can’t stop herself. The body demands that gaping of the mouth and the deep inhalation. She’s alive.

  “Look at her,” the warden comments, “still has teeth left.”

  * * *

  —

  She tries not to think about the sun. The blazing yellow ball hangs exactly above her head and fries her, vaporizes her. There won’t be a drop of fluid left in her body. Her blood grows thick and slow. The bedbugs lose their mind over this blood. When she worked in the swamps, after she’d just arrived, the leeches clung to her legs, slowly swelling with blood, and then they would pull away, fat and sated. Some women tried to eat them, Vera did, too, but they tasted awful. At least here there aren’t any leeches. But the sun. Women who confessed in interrogations, women who gave names, who told stories, who made false accusations, were given permission to wear a hat, or to turn a shirt or rag into a hat. That was how you could tell who had confessed and started collaborating with the UDBA. Vera and another ten or twelve women were still bareheaded. She was careful not to talk to any of them. They were no less dangerous than the others. And they tried, they exchanged looks with her, blurted words of encouragement, or obstruction, when they passed her on the way up or down the mountain, each with her own rock.

  * * *

  —

  It’s been two or three hours since the warden left her on the cliff top. Or an hour. Who knows. Maybe they’ve forgotten you. She’s talking out loud again. Has to hear a human voice. Why are they making you stand? What kind of work is this, not moving, just being? Is it a punishment? What are they doing with you here?

  And then, when her legs are practically buckling—footsteps. Light and fast, tapping up the rocky path. A warden. Not the one from the morning. Sounds younger.

  “Move yourself, banda, Comrade Tito is giving you a break for food and toilet.”

  Grabs her arm with a strong hand, pulls her away, marches her. They walk. She must put one foot in front of the other. A canteen is shoved into her hand, and then a rough, rusty tin plate. Vera smells bread and potato and something else—tomato? Could it be a tomato? It must be a holiday outside. What month is it? Her dry mouth fills with saliva. Her mind is addled. It’s been more than a year since she tasted a tomato. She mustn’t eat yet. The warden is humming a love song to Josip Broz Tito. V
era bites hard on the insides of her cheeks. A restraining technique. Sometimes the wardens keep them sitting in the dining room, starving, for almost half an hour while they stand there singing their songs, frothing themselves up.

  “Hey, whore, are you really blind?”

  “Yes, Commandant.”

  “Liar. Stinking banda.”

  “Yes, Commandant.”

  “Why are you lying? Comrade Tito doesn’t like liars.”

  A quick shadow passes this way and that in front of her open eyes. A familiar shadow: that’s how the wardens check if she really can’t see.

  “Yaou!” the warden barks in her face. That was also to be expected. As was the punch to her cheek. Don’t cry. Vera doesn’t live here. The smell of tomato is heady. Soon she’ll be given permission and it’ll be wonderful.

  “Did you come here like this, or you got that way here?”

  “Got what way, Commandant?”

  “Blind.”

  “I came here healthy.”

  “I pray you don’t leave here alive. Amen,” she chirps. “You have five minutes, scum. Comrade Tito says bon appétit.”

  The morning’s warden said ten. But the important thing is she’s allowed to eat. Vera crams the tomato into her mouth with both hands. This is no time to save the best for last. She licks and sucks. A soft, overripe tomato, rotten, but bursting with juice and flavor. Her gut is so astonished it starts to bubble. “Is there any paper, Commandant?”