“Grandma, I’m sorry, but I have to ask. Did you ever hear about girls the UDBA threw on the street?”
“No.”
“Not a single one?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they said something about one or two. Maybe it’s all rumors. That was a time of rumors.”
“And what happened to them?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did the rumors say?”
“I didn’t hear.”
“Grandma—”
“Can we go on now?” she practically shouts. Her lips tremble and she does not wait for approval. I suddenly realize how badly she needs to tell this story—for it to be heard at last, to fully exist in the world.
Precisely because of how open and frank everything is now, I feel that a giant mistake is amassing: Why are we filming this conversation behind Nina’s back? Why even now, a moment before we go to the island to finally cleanse ourselves of what’s been polluting our family for three goddamn generations—what are we doing instead? What are we doing to her again?
“And they said to me: ‘Novak Vera, think careful one more time. You have one minute to think.’ And I again said: ‘I don’t need even one second.’
“And the doctor colonel said: ‘You choose dead man over living girl? What sort of mother are you? What sort of woman are you? What sort of person are you?’
“I told him: ‘I am not a mother anymore, I am not a woman, I am not a person. I am nothing. Mother and woman and person Novak Vera is dead. You killed her reason to live. I won’t sign for you. Do what you want.’ ”
“Sign it!” I bark uncontrollably. This time Vera hears me. She leans back and gives me a long, dark glare. She nods her head with bitterness and disappointment, as if having discovered that beneath all my servile layers there is treachery in my blood. As if she’s always known that at the pivotal moment I would betray her.
I remember what she told me when I was a young girl: “Don’t let them twist my story against me.”
That moment—
How there can suddenly emerge, out of that familiar, beloved visage, the face of a stranger. An enemy. Because we’re at war, Grandma Vera and I. That is clear. Her eyes warn me not to cross the line. Beyond it lies desolation, homo homini lupus, with no preferential treatment for grandchildren. But this time I don’t give in: I look her straight in the eye and watch her face pull back into sharp angles, and for the first time since she began telling the story, perhaps even since I’ve known her, I detect fear.
An unruly particle of her mind that was chained and muzzled for almost sixty years seems to have slipped out of her control, and it’s screaming inside her head—What did you do? Good God, Vera, what did you do.
“The doctor colonel goes to the right side door and opens it, and there stands the one with the black coat, and someone hits my head from behind, I don’t know who, and I walk to the one with the coat, and he grabs me, hard, like this—” She grips her arm and shows the camera. “And I want him to take me to Nina, to tell her what happened, so she will know to stay with Jovanka for a few days, and then Jovanka will take her to my sister Mira, or to my sister Rozi…”
She chokes up. She resumes talking but chokes again. Swallows down the tears.
“But the man with the coat says to the driver: ‘Take the whore straight to jail.’ ”
She sinks back in the armchair, her shoulders drooping. “My sweet Ninotchka,” she whispers to the camera, to future-Nina who has popped up again, “how can I sign it? How can I tell everyone that your father was a traitor?”
“Because he’s dead,” I answer, “and Nina is alive.”
“Milosz was not a traitor, Gili.”
“How could you, Grandma?”
“I loved him.”
“More than you loved your daughter?”
“More than I loved my life.”
I can’t take it anymore. I get up and pace around the empty lobby in circles. When I walk past my father he whispers, “Ask her if she would do the same thing today.” I go back and sit down opposite her.
She leans toward me, hiding her mouth with her hand, and whispers, “And you? Didn’t you commit suicide once because of a man?”
“But I didn’t kill another person.”
She flinches as if I’d slapped her. She lights another cigarette and offers one to my father. Not to me. She orders him to stop filming, and he obeys. Her hands are shaking. What am I doing to her? If she acknowledges what she did, she will crumble into a heap of sawdust right here. Rafael shares the cigarette with me. We both quit smoking years ago, after his heart attack, but now we pounce on the opportunity to singe our tongues and the roofs of our mouths.
“I am not a liar,” Vera murmurs to herself in the smoke, “not a liar. I even once in my life never lied! So maybe one single time I did not tell Nina all the truth, but that was for her good, so that she wouldn’t—oh, look who’s here!” she exclaims and coughs out smoke that engulfs the three of us. She waves. “Hello, Nina, honey, we’re over here! Good morning, how did you sleep?”
Nina steps out of the elevator. Disheveled, a little dazed, yawning. “How long have you been here?” The suspicion wakes up long before she does, scrunching up her eyes.
“We were just shooting something to prepare for Goli,” Rafi explains with a helpless chuckle. His expression makes him look ugly. Vera and I follow suit with our own helpless chuckles. We stink of dishonesty. “Grandma was telling all sorts of anecdotes before we go to the island.”
“Oh.” Nina’s nostrils widen. She picks up information from the air and filters it through, but she’s still too sleepy to decipher it. She takes the cigarette from Vera’s hand. “But when did you come down? I didn’t hear a thing. Is there any coffee? My head is exploding from the whiskey.”
Rafi and I dash over to the empty reception desk and ring the call bell. A sleepy clerk says he’ll try and find something, but there’s no real chance because the kitchen isn’t open yet. Rafi and I lean on the counter, looking back at Vera chatting with Nina. “What whiskey?” he asks, but I ignore the question. Nina says something; Vera throws her head back and laughs.
“I didn’t get to ask if she’d do the same—”
“I noticed.”
“It’s too bad you didn’t remind me before.”
“Yes.”
“And you knew that’s how it happened, didn’t you?”
“How what happened?”
“That they gave her a choice.”
“Yes.” He enlists all his powers not to avoid my eyes.
“So in fact you knew that Nina wasn’t just abandoned.”
“What…I don’t understand.”
“That she was abandoned and betrayed.”
That word stabs him deep down inside.
“Do you understand? She didn’t just abandon her daughter—she betrayed her. Her own daughter, my mother. She betrayed her.”
“Yes. That’s what it is,” he murmurs to himself, “abandoned and betrayed.”
The two women are in a cloud of smoke that curls up to the lamp above them. Vera smokes with short, frequent drags. Nina—slowly, pleasurably. She runs a questioning look over us. Rafi and I signal to her that there’s a problem with the coffee. She signals that maybe we should go out and find a café. We signal: Okay. She signals: Just let me finish my cigarette. She inhales lustily. Rafi and Vera and I swallow her up with our eyes.
That strange, evasive quality of hers.
She is here and she is not here. Seen, but also remembered.
* * *
—
After three or four days, or a week, who knows, who can remember, a new warden takes her up. She leads Vera by a rope, and walking behind her is almost tolerable, with no collisions and no falls, as if the two of them have learned to coordinate thei
r steps. Judging by her voice, this warden is very young, and judging by the funny, drawling accent—she’s from Montenegro. It’s hard to believe how garrulous she is. She’s been through her reeducation. Been through all the stages. She started off like Vera, as one of the bojkots, the women considered nonhuman and shunned in every way, advanced to the bandas, the scum of the earth gang members, and got all the way to the brigadas, the ones who confessed to crimes they did or did not commit, agreed to act as informers, and were taken back under the wing of Comrade Tito.
The warden is cheerful: she’s getting out of here soon. She will train as a seamstress and get married. She already has a groom waiting in her village. He’s a little chubby, but a good man with a desirable vocation: he’s a cooper. They’ll have five kids. Vera listens to the pretty sounds she makes as she talks, but she’s constantly on guard: this warden can’t really be talking to her like this. Vera should stay quiet and not even listen. Stop any thoughts from popping into her head and escaping out of her mouth.
When they get to the top, the young girl laughs happily at the view of the wide-open sea, and Vera’s breath stops at the sound of her voice.
It’s like she’s a child, Vera thinks.
“Let’s see, whore,” says the warden sweetly, “do you already know where to stand in the morning?”
Vera shakes her head and points to her eyes.
The girl laughs. “I forgot. I’m such a nitwit. Stand here. Now don’t move!”
“Commandant,” Vera whispers, “why am I here?”
“What do you mean ‘why’?” She lands a single blow on Vera’s chest, but not a very hard one. Just going through the motions.
“What are they doing with me? What am I doing here?”
Silence. Now she’s really gone too far.
“Didn’t they tell you?”
“No.”
“No one told you?”
“No.”
She laughs in surprise. One can imagine her strong white teeth and her red gums. “Then why should I tell you?”
Vera bets the whole pot: “Because you’re a human being.”
She hears a breath cut off in an instant. Like a baby’s short whimper. There is something about this girl that, on Goli Otok, is almost inconceivable. “Look, it’s not…I’m not allowed…” And then a quick whisper into Vera’s ear: “Commandant Maria’s plant is up here, you know that, right?”
“No.”
“They didn’t even tell you that?”
“No.”
“Commandant Maria brought it from home.”
“Home?” Vera has never considered that Commandant Maria might have a home. This is all very confusing. And what does she mean, a plant? What is a plant doing here?
“She’s from a village near Rijeka.”
“But what for?”
“What do you mean ‘what for’? So it’ll grow.”
“What?”
“The plant. Her sapling.”
“I don’t understand,” Vera whispers in despair.
“Nothing grows in this place, right?” The girl says what Vera already knows. No sapling could set roots in these barren rocks.
She hears the canteen being uncorked. Water pours out plentifully. A few drops spray onto her arms. She licks them thirstily, knowing this warden won’t hit hard.
“Is it big?”
“What?”
“The plant.”
“You have a lot of questions. Enough, shut up, whore.” Vera pictures her young face scrunched up in the anger of regret at having been tempted into kindness.
“Please, Commandant, just tell me that, I have to know.”
“It’s tiny,” the warden grumbles. “I’ll gouge your eyes out with a teaspoon if you tell anyone we talked.” Then she laughs. “Well, you don’t have eyes anyway. Now don’t move, do your job here and shut up, understand?”
“But what is my job?”
The girl leaves. Vera doesn’t even wait for her footsteps to get far away before she hunches down. The smell is dizzying. Wet, rich soil, soil from another world. She does not have the courage to immerse her hands in the soil and stir it around. She quickly stands up, frightened and happy. She stretches her arms out. Who ever thought there could be such hunger for earth? She hears herself laugh. It’s been a long time since she heard that sound.
There is a little plant here. The thought delights her, excites her. As if a baby had been placed in her arms.
* * *
—
At night a woman pushes up against her on the bench. Vera wakes up, startled. They must be coming to take her. Interrogation, or worse. The woman silences her with a touch to her lips and whispers: “I know what you’re doing up on the mountain.”
“Who are you?”
“Never mind. Don’t shout.”
“How do you know?”
“Wardens talk. There’s a plant up there, isn’t there? A sapling? Something of Maria’s?”
Vera keeps silent. She has no doubt that this woman is an informant. Someone trying to get her in trouble and earn a few points.
“Get out of here,” Vera whispers, “or I’ll shout.”
The woman’s voice flows hurriedly into her ear: “When I got to the island and ran between the two rows, you were the only one who didn’t spit at me.”
Vera connects the voice with the face and body. A tall, noble-looking woman, thin as a skeleton, with crazy, frightening blue eyes. She ran through the lines holding some sort of round instrument close to her chest, probably a mandolin. They all saw that she was trying to protect the instrument, and this inflamed them even more. They hit her so she dropped the mandolin, and kicked it viciously until it shattered. Vera got ten lashes because she was only pretending to beat the woman.
“She put together a place up there,” the woman whispers into her ear, “Maria. Her own private whore-house with a sea view. She brings girls at night.”
Forty lashes, this conversation could cost. No one makes it out alive, or sane, after forty lashes.
“And she said she wants to see a little green up there.”
Vera doesn’t understand. “At night?”
“Why not? Or maybe it smells good? Did you smell it?” A deep breath, warm vapors on her ear. The woman sighs. Vera’s body slackens slightly. A forgotten emotion is mingled in that sigh. The woman whispers: “Goldman. Professor of musicology, Goldman Erika. Nice to meet you.”
Vera is dying to say she’s also pleased to meet her. To taste the words of politeness. She says nothing.
“From the minute I heard there’s a plant on the island,” the woman says softly, “I felt better immediately. Like there’s hope of getting out.”
Vera tries to understand what she’s hearing. The woman’s words don’t always cohere into intelligible sentences. After the last weeks on the mountain it’s hard to conduct a logical conversation. Logic, in general, is a demanding and exhausting affair. You have to sustain a chain of facts that come in a particular sequence. Vera turns her face, searching for the woman’s ear. “But what am I doing there?”
Again the dance of the faces, she has to turn her face to the wall, so that the other woman can whisper in her ear: “Didn’t they tell you?”
“No.”
Someone in the corner of the barracks, near the bucket, cries in her sleep. She promises this is the last time she’ll be late for school. The two women freeze. Vera feels the woman’s beating heart on her back.
“Just tell me,” the woman whispers, “did you touch it?”
Vera is astonished. It hadn’t occurred to her to touch it. Nor to smell it. So powerful is the fear of the wardens.
“Touch it once for me. Promise.” The fervor of her whisper tells Vera it might have been this request that made the woman take such a risk. Vera is despondent
at the thought of how cowardly she herself is. She hadn’t even dared to smell it. A familiar taste of error sours inside her. Of the wrong choice. Of a terrible incompatibility with reality, reality as it is known by everyone else. Goldman Erika suddenly kisses Vera on the earlobe, on the cheek, a soft kiss and then another, painfully pleasant, and in an instant, moving as smoothly as a little animal, she slips off Vera’s bed and vanishes.
The next day at dawn, after the warden has watered it and positioned Vera and left, Vera tries to focus her gaze on it, but all she sees is darkness with the occasional crack of white. She must not move. She tries to smell it from where she was positioned, but the scent of wet earth is strong and fills the air. She distractedly touches her earlobe, her cheek, the spots where she was kissed, and suddenly Milosz flickers inside her—just for an instant, but that’s enough for her. He has finally come. He took his sweet time getting here.
All at once she drops to the ground, squats on her heels, and feels around until she touches a little mound of stones. She runs both hands over it as though she were blessing a child’s head. With her fingers she studies the mound. It’s arranged in a circle. The plant must be in its center. She still doesn’t dare touch it. It’s enough for her to know that it’s here. She carefully enters the circle with her fingers and touches the damp earth, but is instantly driven to a frenzy and sinks her fingers all the way down to their roots. A feeling of marvelous abundance floods her. This soil—such ample goodness. Whoever touches it will be protected from evil. She holds her muddy fingers up to her face and inhales deeply. She puts a damp clod on her tongue and dissolves it, and without thinking she swallows and splutters and laughs. Her fingers are drawn back into the circle, and now they hover over something soft and delicate and slender.
A small, short plant. Tiny leaves. After months of pushing rocks, her fingers are rough and crude, and she can barely feel the leaves. That is why she touches them with the inside of her wrist. Unbelievable softness.
She strokes them, without pressing, she doesn’t want to cause any harm, God forbid, but she touches enough so that something of the plant, a faint, unfamiliar aroma, will cling to her fingers.
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