More Than I Love My Life

by David Grossman

  “Of course, just say the word. I’ve got some with pink flowers on it—is that good enough for your ass, Your Highness?”

  Vera feels around. Touches a rock. Puts the tin plate down on the ground, crawls away on all fours. She remembers to take the canteen. Memorizes the number of steps and the direction. Crouches, pulls down, knows the woman is watching her. This would have been inconceivable once.

  She has a moment of indecision. What’s more urgent, drinking or pissing. The smell of urine is sharp and concentrated and makes her a little dizzy. There are maybe three sips left in the canteen. The water runs out long before the thirst. Fortunately she has no trouble with constipation. Some of the women here lose their minds because their time is measured on a clock. She wipes with her hand, then the hand on a rock. There’s almost no soil on the island. All that’s left from the winds are barren rocks. Even a leaf of grass you can’t find here. Vera crawls back to the plate. It is kicked toward her by the toe of a shoe. The potato is practically raw, but it’s big. She chews fast. How long does she have left? Mimi the cook used to make restani krumpir for little Vera. Roast potatoes. Just the name makes her salivate. She shuts her eyes and eats a potato cooked in its skin and mashed and fried in golden butter and garnished with curls of crispy fried onion. But the potato in her mouth makes the sound of an apple. Well then, she’s savoring an apple. Who said she lacks imagination? She chews the apple and sees her childhood home, the kitchen shelves lined with jams and compotes, pears and plums and cherries boiled in water and poured into large canning jars. Tomato juice cooked until it boils, then poured carefully into bottles. She chews compulsively. She’s an alchemist. Turning the potato into roasted red peppers marinated in oil with lemon and garlic. Into cucumbers pickled in the sun with dill. Into sausages smoked in the backyard. She smiles with her whole mouth. She is eating game meat marinated in spices for a whole week, not a moment less, so that it loses the gamy, wild flavor…Her head spins from the aromas. There is no warden. There are no bedbugs. There are no dead eyes that see only black with white flashes. There is no room in Belgrade with two doors and three colonels in uniform who tell her: You have three minutes to decide. Two. One. There is no thought that leaves her brain singed with a horrific mistake as large as life itself.

  “Time’s up, whore. Get up.”

  “But I didn’t drink yet, Commandant. There wasn’t enough water in the canteen.”

  “Your problem.”

  And she’s moved again. A little to the right, back to the left. Small step forward, two back. This warden isn’t pleased either. “Move your ass, whore. Stand here!” A marionette, a marionette, but in which play?

  “From now until they come to arrange you again, you don’t move, understand? Don’t even breathe!”

  “Yes.”

  Mistake. A slap, and a spit. Saliva dribbles down her arm. Abundant.

  “Yes, Commandant. Sorry.”

  “And what did I say?”

  “Don’t move and don’t breathe, Commandant.” The sun bores through her shaved skull. There are parts in the brain that bubble like boiling water, and there is one place where she is suddenly sharp and alert, a partisan, a forest creature that will not miss a chance: the sips the warden took from the canteen before she spat on her. Four or five, it was. You could hear the water filling her mouth before she spat.

  “Someone will come at sunset to take you back down to the barracks.”

  “Yes, Commandant.” The warden’s spit is crawling into the crook of her elbow, but the warden is in no hurry.

  “Tell me something, but answer from the heart: You and your friends, did you really think you were going to bring Stalin down on us to beat Comrade Tito?”

  “Yes, Commandant.” If only she’d leave already, get out of here. When Vera worked in the swamps, they used to drink the polluted water. They stood there for days on end in the water, pissing and shitting in it, and then drank. The thirst beat out the fear of typhus. The warden’s spit slowly drips down Vera’s arm. She feels it sliding down cold, then warming, then slowly drying. Evaporating.

  But the warden is intrigued: “So how did they not kill you on the spot, hey? How did they take pity on you? Were you a high-up’s cunt?”

  “No, Commandant.”

  “Traitors like you should die.”

  “Yes, Commandant.” Just make her go already, please, please, let there be a miracle.

  “That’s what I always say. Comrade Tito is too kind, leaving scum like you alive.”

  “Yes, Commandant.”

  “Polluting our homeland’s air.”

  “That’s true, Commandant.”

  “Remember: don’t budge, don’t breathe!”

  “Yes, Commandant.”

  Footsteps. Quiet. She must have left. But even if not, it’s a lost cause. The tongue probes over her arm. Reaches as far as it can, all the way to the crook of the elbow. Nothing. Dried up, evaporated. The skin dry and salty.

  * * *

  —

  Soon after sundown, a warden comes to take her back to the barracks. Vera can barely stand. The women in the barracks are curious. They want to know where she was, what she did all day. They know she can’t talk. There are informers among them, and there are wardens disguised as prisoners, and there are provocateurs working full-time for the UDBA who have the ear of “the decapitator” in Belgrade.

  Women circle around her, bump into her as if by mistake. Whisper. They just want her to tell them if it’s harder up there than with the rocks. If she gets breaks. If she’s alone. If she can see—or hear—the men working in the quarry on the other side of the island. Or at least smell their sweat in the wind? She doesn’t answer. Drinks four mugs of water, falls on her bed, and sleeps. Until they come to wake her before sunrise.

  Again they take her, the only one from the whole barracks, and again they position her. Stand this way, no that way, scum, move here, straighten out, arms up, arms down, spread your legs, close them, don’t move now, understand? Yes, Commandant. You don’t move until someone comes to rearrange you. Again the canteen is uncorked, and Vera’s lips open like a newborn’s, and the water is poured on the ground by her feet, and the smell of wet soil, and droplets on her arms, and they all evaporate before she can lick them.

  Over the next hours, the next days, every so often, she hears from a distance, from the sea, the sounds of an engine. A boat or a ship sailing from the island to the mainland or to one of the nearby resort islets. Perhaps the passengers suntanning on the deck notice the tiny figure standing with its arms spread wide atop the bald mountain. They assume it’s a statue. Or a little human-shaped lighthouse. Perhaps Commandant Maria put her up here so that the people on the boats would see her and think she was a symbol of something. But of what? What does she signify? The figure of a small woman. From afar she must look like a child.

  Suddenly a twisted thought stabs her: she is a memorial. A monument to Nina. They put her up here because of Nina. Because Nina was thrown onto the streets. This way everyone sailing on a luxury ship will see, and they will know the punishment meted out to someone like her, someone like Vera, a woman who loved too much.

  * * *

  —

  Two hours later, at 4:15 a.m., I wake up feeling tight in my chest. Waves of anxiety flood over me. I lie waiting for the heart palpitations to subside. For a few minutes I am prey to all sorts of thoughts and pictures. Even my agreement with Meir—not to think bad thoughts about myself before 9:00 a.m.—doesn’t work this time.

  Nina is in a deep sleep. Vera is pressed up against her in a fetal position. I touch Vera’s shoulder lightly, and she opens one eye, puts on her glasses, and sits up briskly, without asking, without complaining. I wrap her in Meir’s sweater, which I brought to take fortifying sniffs of, and remember to grab a new notebook—I’ve already filled two—and at the last minute I also deci
de to take my stopwatch, which I carry whenever I’m on a set, hanging around my neck on a string; it can’t do any harm.

  Vera waits by the door, still not asking anything. All I need is one look to understand that she knows exactly what is about to happen. I don’t let my excitement take over (which leaves me with only the nervousness). There is work to do, and we are going to do it. Nina rolls over and reaches out to my side of the bed. Looking for me. It’s me she’s looking for in her sleep. We stand watching, mesmerized, as her hand probes, trembles, relinquishes. She sighs in her sleep and we hold our breath: What will we say if she wakes up? How will we explain it?

  We tiptoe out. I feel overcome with disgust. Enough, enough with the lies. We go down to the lobby, which is dark and bare apart from one spot of light on the front desk, and another above a planter containing a grand, regal coleus. I drag an armchair over for Vera, sit her down, and run to the elevator to call Rafi. A moment before the door slides shut, I take a picture of her on my cell phone: a little old woman in the depths of an empty lobby. I go up to the third floor. Looking in the elevator mirror, I see a horse. In my state of shock, I formulate a fast, objective verdict: large, brawny woman with dark bags under her eyes. Slightly gruff femininity. Thus determines the script girl who examines me for three floors without blinking, without pitying (but that’s also because of the puffy vest and the cargo pants with all the functional pockets). In short, the face of a producer is what I’ve got now. I leave the mirror with a neigh and knock softly on Rafael’s door, which he opens in a second. He’s dressed for work. The Sony is on the bed.

  It’s as if he’s been sitting up all night, waiting for me to come get him.

  In the elevator, I manage to squeeze out a smile, and he immediately reads me: “Is everything okay, Gili?”

  “Everything’s fine.”

  “Nervous?”

  “A little.”

  “Well, with good reason.” He spots the new notebook, orange, spiral-bound. “You’re not writing enough.” I remind him that I was busy shooting the whole way here. “Still,” he retorts, “the details, the little details.”

  “About the little details…”

  “What about them?”

  “Was Stalin really planning to invade Yugoslavia in ’48?”

  “I don’t know. But that’s what Tito believed. And there were signs. That’s why he set up the Gulags, or whatever they call them here, for Stalin’s supporters and spies.”

  “And in your opinion, were Grandma and Grandpa really Stalinists?”

  “Vera and Milosz? She’ll eat you alive if you so much as suggest the possibility.”

  “But you—what do you think?”

  “My rule of thumb is to always believe her.”

  I laugh. “That must make life easier.”

  He mumbles something about people keeping questions bottled up for years until they no longer have the guts to ask them. It’s clear he’s not talking about Stalin and Tito.

  In the lobby we quickly get organized. We position Vera so that she’s well lit. Drag another armchair over for me. During my absence she had time to take off her sweater and comb her hair (it’s thinning, have I written that? her pink scalp shows through beneath it, like a fledgling that has yet to sprout a feather), and of course to put on lipstick, mascara, and a little blush.

  “Such a lady, Grandma.”

  “Lady, schmady. A girl should always look spick-and-span. I say this to you, as well.” She eyes my pile of hair, all curls and springs. “Birds could build a nest up there,” she adds.

  “Grandma,” I say, “you know what we want to do now, right?”

  “Well, yes.” She takes a deep breath. I straighten her collar, smell her sharp perfume (she had time for that, too), tidy her hair in the back, covering the sparseness. She finds a speck of dirt on my shirt. Her hand smooths over my arm and for a moment holds on to it. The atmosphere feels strange, like the moments before an execution, when the convict and the executioner smoke a cigarette together.

  I start off by looking for a way to soften her up. “Now, Grandma, before we begin, I want you to tell me one nice thing about you and Milosz. Doesn’t matter what, just a few words.”

  “About Milosz? I already told you everything.”

  “Then tell me again, something little, something funny. I need to hear that before we start.” In fact this is a variation on an old trick I learned from Dad: a second before clapping the board, I go over and whisper a few words in the actor’s ear. A key image from the scene, or a line from a poem that evokes it. Not all directors love that, but hey, this is my film.

  And it’s my grandmother.

  Vera gets right into the game: wrinkles her face, hums a quick few words to herself, puts on a smile. The trick worked. “We used to dance a lot, me and Milosz,” she says. I ask for details. “When Milosz got healthy from tuberculosis and all the plagues he had, and we went back from his village to Belgrade, and we had a beautiful apartment, and I wasn’t yet pregnant, and so happy we were both together…We used to pull down the blinds and put on the record player and dance for hours! We had same movements, and same rhythm, like twins, and we spun in the same moment…”

  Rafi gives a thumbs-up. From his perspective Vera is completely in the mood; we can start.

  “And Milosz used to sweat so pretty, Gili. He had smooth skin, maybe I told you once, without one hair, skin like suede. And after he was out in the sun, he was like a Negro…”

  Rafi, behind her back, points to his watch and slashes his finger across his neck, but you try stopping Vera when Milosz is in the air.

  “And we would have fun with friends, and they would shout to see me dance, and do you know how I danced? On the table, I did csárdás! Here there were glasses, and I danced between them, and one glass did not drop to the floor! And I hold up my skirt…”

  Well, my little trick has spun out of control.

  “To this day, you know, I love to hear ‘Magical Moments’ on the radio. They put on songs that Milosz and I danced, tango and slow fox, and every time they give a song like that, I can’t resist and I dance with him, and tears come from my eyes.”

  “Lovely, Grandma, that’s great. Exactly what I wanted to hear.”

  “Really?” She grins. “So I helped you?”

  “A lot! Now let’s talk about that other thing, you know.”

  “Oh, yes.” She sinks back into the chair.

  “Grandma, I can’t go to that island without us talking.”

  Rafael adjusts the angle at which the armchairs face each other.

  “But what if she comes down?” Vera whispers. “Isn’t it better that we do it in Rafi’s room?”

  “I hope she does come,” I reply.

  “No, no, no! It will kill her!”

  “She has to know,” I insist, even though for some reason I’m slightly less confident now.

  “Has to?” She whips my knees with the sleeve of my sweater. “How can she has to if she doesn’t know she has to?”

  “She does know,” I repeat what I whispered to her at night, “she knows even without knowing.”

  “Not possible. Either you know or not know.”

  “Grandma, listen to me: everything Nina does, everything she says, every time she breathes, everything that hurts her, everything that’s screwed up for her, it all comes from that place.” Vera pushes my words away with a cluck of her tongue, and I feel like grabbing her and rattling her to make something finally penetrate. “It’s her life, Grandma! She has to know what her life is made of!”

  She gives a long, dismissive sigh, and I know I’m right, but I sound like a Girl Scout troop leader.

  “And you know what really bothers me more than anything, Grandma?”

  “Well, let’s hear.”

  “That I’m not completely sure who you’re pr
otecting in this secret—her or you?”

  “Me? Gili!” My grandmother flares up, horrified. And for one long, effervescing gaze we are enemies, heart and soul, and it’s intolerable.

  “All this talk about how a person must always know the entire truth, and must, how you say it, come to terms…That’s all very nice, Gili, and very clean and moral, good for you”—she claps her hands for me three times—“but I’m saying you cannot suddenly come to a sixty-three-years-old woman and say, Listen, honey, what you thought is not exactly how it was, and all your life you are actually living in a mistake.”

  “In a lie,” I correct her.

  “No! No! Lie is when someone wants to hurt you. And here is maybe, maybe, just someone who had no choice.”

  Rafi signals at me to tone it down. He’s right. If we get embroiled in an argument, she’ll clam up.

  “And I tell you something more, Gili, and you should remember very well what I say: if she knows, she will not want to live—she will not want to live! I know my daughter.”

  “How about letting her decide for herself? She’s not a child!”

  “If she knows, she will go back to be like a child.”

  “So it’s better to leave her in a lie until the end?”

  Vera holds back. She blinks frequently. In her fading eyes I can read: It’s not for much longer.

  She crosses her arms over her chest. Rafi makes a winding-up motion with his hand.

  “Okay, I understand. All right. Vera, please tell us what happened.”

  “Not like that”—she slams her palm on her thigh—“do not talk to me like that!”

  “Like what? How was I talking?”

  “Like you don’t already know me.”

  We both breathe heavily, feeling bruised. It’s hard for her; it’s hard for me. It’s hard for me knowing it’s hard for her.

  “Come on, Grandma,” I say, my voice slightly cracking.

  “Gili…” She cups me with her eyes, in the place where I always feel it most.

  “I’m sorry, Grandma, I’m very nervous. Let’s do this. Tell me what happened.”