More Than I Love My Life

by David Grossman

  She was given her clothes and belongings—some of them—that had been taken when she came to the island two years and ten months ago. She was also handed thirty-four undelivered letters from Nina, and two from her sister Mira. From these she learned that an UDBA officer who’d been fond of Milosz had made sure Nina was sent to Mira on the day Vera was imprisoned.

  By the time of Vera’s release, Commandant Maria was no longer at the camp. A few weeks after their hilltop encounter, she’d been transferred to a new job in a different camp. There were rumors that even the UDBA found her murderous penchant too much. “After all,” Vera was told by a kibbutz member from the Yugoslavian group, thirty years after the events, “the Goli Otok camps were intended for reeducation, not for killing.” But even after three decades, Vera still believed that something in her had been murdered on that island.

  * * *

  —

  Night. Almost 2:00 a.m. A righteous thunder-and-lightning storm. We talked, oh how we talked, so many questions were asked and answered, so much we said. We’ve never talked like that, in every permutation and combination, until sleep reaped us all, or so I thought, because I suddenly hear Vera whispering, probably so as not to wake Rafael and me: “You didn’t tell me what it was like at your aunt Mira’s yet.”

  “Maybe you didn’t want to hear?”

  I can feel Vera’s feet stretching the blanket down. Rafi rolls over and somehow slips out from under the blanket and turns on the camera.

  “Why are you filming?”

  “So we’ll have it.”

  “Let him film, Mom.”

  “If it doesn’t bother you…”

  Nina signals to Rafi that it’s all right.

  Rafi murmurs that it’s so dark he can only record sound anyway. I’m angry at myself for not insisting on bringing a sun gun that would have given us some precious light. Nothing is how it should be.

  “Wait,” I catch a ride on Rafi’s coattails, “in that case, I’ll write.”

  “In the dark?” Nina wonders.

  “Whatever comes out comes out.”

  “Write, film,” Vera grumbles, “I can’t be bothered to argue with you.”

  “Forget about them, Majka, that’s not what matters now.”

  * * *

  —

  Vera arrived in Belgrade in the early morning and went straight to her sister’s house. She knocked on the door. It was seven-thirty. Her sister Mira opened the door, shrieked, and hugged her. Vera said she could see Nina over her sister’s shoulder, sitting on a stool, drinking a glass of milk, and staring into space. Nina was nine and a half. According to Vera, Nina shot her a cool and utterly mature glance, and said into the room, “Vera’s come back. What a sight you are.” Vera wanted to explain that working with the rocks had made her muscles bulge and distorted her physique, but something in Nina’s eyes petrified her and kept her quiet.

  Nina remembered their meeting completely differently. She remembered that when she saw her mother at the door, she jumped up and shouted, “Mama! Majka!” and ran to her, and they stood hugging and crying with joy. Vera insisted that Nina did not get up and certainly did not hug her. And that she, Vera, also did not go over and hug Nina, for some reason. Nina finished drinking her milk and went to school. In the afternoon she came home, did her homework, and went out to play in the yard. Here, too, Nina’s story diverged: she didn’t go to school that day, she spent the whole day with Vera. They went to a movie together—she couldn’t remember which one—and then to a café, where they “talked for hours” and occasionally sang songs from Nina’s childhood. That whole first day they almost never mentioned Milosz, Nina recounted with surprise, and this was confirmed by Vera. There was one other thing they agreed on: Vera’s sister Mira did not believe a word of what Vera told them about Goli Otok. She told Vera that if she didn’t shut up, she and her husband would have to ask her to leave.

  Rafi recorded, I wrote.

  The story split off again in their account of the night: Nina said they slept in one bed, head to feet, and couldn’t stop talking and laughing and crying, until Vera’s brother-in-law, Dragan, came in his underwear and yelled at them to be quiet, and then they giggled hysterically. Vera had a different version: the hours went by and they lay awake in bed, in terrible silence. Vera couldn’t tolerate it. She asked, “Are you a good pupil?” Nina didn’t answer. Vera asked, “What is four times four?” Nina pretended to be asleep. Vera asked again. Nina answered, “Sixteen.” “Good. What’s five times seven?” Nina answered. And they went through the whole multiplication table. Nina did remember “something with math,” but she was sure Vera had tested her at the café.

  As for the rest of the time, their currents of memory united. They were in the narrow bed, the aunt and uncle had fallen asleep, and Vera asked, “Is there something you want to ask me, Nina?” Nina said there wasn’t. Vera remembered that Nina’s voice sounded cold and foreign. She felt as if a frost had enveloped the girl her daughter used to be.

  Vera asked again, “Is there anything you want to ask me?”

  “Why did you and my dad both leave me on the same day?”

  “Because the police put us in prison,” Vera replied.

  Nina asked in a trembling voice, “Who did you and Daddy love more than me? Who did you leave me on my own for?”

  “The police put us in prison,” Vera repeated.

  “And you couldn’t get out?”

  “No,” said Vera, and in some sense that was true, but it was also the beginning of the lie that would grow and branch out until it strangled all of us.

  * * *

  —

  After a long silence, Vera asks, “Were you unhappy there, Nina? With Aunt Mira and her husband?”

  “Yes, you could say that.”

  “What was it like, my girl?”

  And I—we—hear her story for the first time. The aunt and uncle had no children of their own, and she was not the girl they wanted. They hit her over every little thing, locked her in the cellar for hours, didn’t let her eat at the table with them, instead put her on a stool in the corner. She would run away from home and “chatter,” as she put it, with Serbian soldiers from the nearby military base.

  Vera is incensed: “Mira and your uncle Dragan, even though they are in graves, they still don’t forgive me that I made a child with a Serbian.”

  It also turns out—the wonders never cease—that in the years she was living with her uncle and aunt, she really did join a gang of lawless boys, all Serbians. She was small and thin and fast, and apparently indifferent to peril. She would crawl into houses through tiny windows and open the door for the boys. And she never got caught. If other things happened to her with them—she did not tell us. We did not ask.

  * * *

  —

  The rain is no longer a meteorological phenomenon: it has distinct volition. It has a purpose. Waterfalls cascade through all the holes in the roof. We huddle together between the tributaries. Once in a while the thunder rolls over us like a train with lots of cars and makes the barracks shudder.

  “But there’s something I still don’t completely…,” says Nina.

  “What? Ask me.”

  “You told me so much about Goli and the other camps, and about the women’s island you were on, Sveti Grgur—”

  “I wish I kept quiet, but I couldn’t. I was exploding inside.”

  “But do you know what I was thinking?”

  “When?”

  “Just sometimes.”

  “What were you thinking?”

  “That there’s one thing you never told me.”

  “A thing I didn’t tell? I told you everything, my girl. I told you too much.”

  “For example, you never told me how you even got here. What happened before you—”

  “I told you. I came on Punat,
they opened a big door down below, and we all spilled out like dead fish into the sea.”

  “But what happened before that, Majka? Before Goli. Before the Punat?”

  “What do you mean? We had our ordinary life, a good life, until one day…”

  “But when they took you to the UDBA, did they interrogate you? Did they accuse you of something? Was there a trial?”

  “There were interrogations. Trial—no.”

  “Did they let you say anything?”

  “What do you mean ‘say’?”

  “Explain, defend yourself? Did you have a lawyer?”

  “Lawyer? Are you crazy, my girl? Fifty thousand people they throwed like dogs with no trial in Tito’s camps. Only here, in Goli camps, maybe five thousand persons died. Killed or suicide. So you ask about lawyer?”

  “Tell me from the beginning. Everything.”

  Vera sighs and elongates her short stature. They are still under the blanket, sitting close together, almost cheek to cheek, still not looking at each other. Rafi is recording. “What is there to tell? It was the morning after your father, you know, hanged himself. They came to take me to interrogation, a man with leather coat. Still when we were at home he started questions, said they know everything about us. That your father and I were pro-Stalin and enemies of Yugoslavian people. And what are your ties with NKVD? And who of your friends in Russia came to you? And did you listen to Moscow? Did you listen to Budapest? Even asked why we gave you Russian name, all sorts of nonsense. Then he took me in a black car to army hospital, and there, well, it happened like always.”

  “What happened? I want to know.”

  “That’s how things happened back then. They did not care about truth. They just wanted me to sign for them that I admit your father was enemy of the people, and I would not do it, and that’s that—off to Goli.”

  “But who were they? Do you remember them? Their faces?”

  Hey, I whisper silently to Nina, that’s not the right question! Who cares who they were?

  Vera also seems surprised. “Who were they? What do you…They were three colonels. One I remember, with a bald spot kind of, and he had actually sympathetic face. Spoke nicely to me.”

  “And you…Hang on, what was I going to…Did you ever try to find out where he is now?”

  “God forbid, Nina! I don’t even want to see their shadow! Even if they were the last person on the world, I won’t talk to them!”

  “You see, I’m the opposite of you. I would look for them and find them, even buried under the ground, and I would come and…and…”

  “Well, and what? Shoot them with gun? What?”

  “No, but I would throw it in their face.”

  “Throw what?”

  In the window, a three- or four-jointed bolt of lightning frenetically cuts the sky.

  “What, Nina?”

  “Me.”

  Silence. Vera breathes quickly.

  “What…What do you mean, you?”

  “And Gili,” Nina says, “and everything that happened to her because of me.”

  She said it. Rafi recorded it.

  “Enemies of the people?” Vera hits her own thigh angrily. “I should sign that we were spies for Stalin? That we wanted to kill Tito? Liars!” On the wall above Rafi’s head there is a scratched slogan: con tito. Vera juts her chin at it, snorting: “ ‘With Tito we’ll build socialism,’ my ass!”

  “So you didn’t sign for them…,” Nina mumbles, looking suddenly exhausted.

  “How can I sign something that isn’t the truth?”

  Sign already, I whisper again silently, and we can all go home, and draw the blinds and mourn Milosz, and ourselves, and together we can slowly repair what is repairable.

  Nina gets out from under the blanket. Vera gathers more and more of it over herself. Nina kneels next to her, holding her hand. “But Dad was already dead…” Her voice is thin and feeble again. “And if, say, you would have tried, say…to offer them…maybe they would have…No, that’s a silly thought.” She snorts softly. Right in front of our eyes she is retreating, turning into a faded draft of herself. “But sometimes, Mom, I wonder—”

  “Wonder what, Nina? Don’t keep inside your belly!”

  “What are you so angry about, Mom.” Her voice is hollow.

  “Not angry, Nina. Just my head is exploding from this talk. Like I’m being interrogated again.”

  Nina sits on the cold floor, distractedly stroking the blanket on Vera’s tiny body. “No one’s interrogating you…What is there to interrogate? Who even has the right to interrogate you…No one has been through what you went through.”

  “No, Nina, you don’t understand—in the contrary! Interrogate, ask anything. It’s good. I need to talk.”

  “But understand that I’m not interrogating you. Just trying to do something…To understand, to repair backward a little.”

  “You cannot repair backward. That you already know.”

  Nina looks at me and I at her.

  “What happened, happened,” Vera mumbles, “and that is what you live with.”

  “But let’s say, Mom, I’m just asking, even so, if they had, for instance…”

  “What are you asking? Say directly, Nina.”

  “No, I was just thinking: if they had—”

  “What? What could they offer me?” Vera shouts bitterly and pounds her fists on her lap. “What could I give them for not to betray your father? To not let them dirty him and to prove to them that I say the truth? What did I have to give them?”

  Silence. Vera and Nina glare at each other. At the edge of my nerves I can feel them getting swept toward a blind, dark spot, which only they can see in each other’s eyes.

  “Ah…” Nina emits a strange voice, light as a feather, as if somewhere inside her, with unimaginable tenderness, something has clicked into place.

  “My head,” Vera murmurs, pressing her temples with both hands.

  Nina shuts her eyes and her head falls back. Her thin eyelids flutter with alarming speed. As if in an instant she has fallen into a deep and total and dream-filled slumber, and in her sleep someone is slowly running a hand over her forehead.

  Then she opens her eyes. “No, I have to get out of here.”

  “It’s pouring,” says Rafi, “I’m going with you.”

  “No, no, no one is going with me! I need to be alone. To breathe. Have to breathe. Just tell me one thing,” she says, getting up, darting around the room aimlessly, and I can’t help thinking of the headless chicken I’d wished her to become. How could I have been so cruel.

  “Tell me, Mom,” she practically shouts, “couldn’t you have at least asked them to let me come with you?”

  “What?”

  “Couldn’t you have asked them to let me come with you?”

  “Where?”

  “Here. To Goli.”

  “For me to ask UDBA to take you, too? Are you mad? Never there was a child on this island, never! And I not for any fortune in the world would take you to this hell!”

  “But that way we wouldn’t have been apart,” Nina says as she walks to the doorway.

  “What?”

  “That way we would have never been apart.”

  “How?”

  “Because we’d have been together, here.”

  “But why on earth would they agree…It’s not possible, Nina, no, it’s not…They never took children to Goli.”

  “I know. I read all the books about Goli.”

  “Even in imagination I don’t want to think that you would…No…That is the most horrible for me. More horrible than me myself being here.” She gives Nina a terrified look: “Again I must ask you, and answer me with clear heart, Nina, and not with spite: Was it so bad for you at my sister and her husband, that you would want to come to this he
ll?”

  “You really don’t understand, do you?”

  “I know how they treated you, but—”

  “It has nothing to do with them.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “All the time, every minute you weren’t with me, I wanted to be with you.”

  “Even if they would kill me, Nina, I wouldn’t ask them—”

  “I would have gone to the pit of hell with you,” Nina whispers from the doorway of the barracks, “just to be with you all day and all night.” She runs her hand up and down the door hanging on one hinge. “That’s all I thought about. To be with you, to be with you.”

  Vera looks down. All this is beyond her strength.

  “Please don’t follow me,” Nina says and walks out.

  The air seems to be pulled out with her.

  So stifling.

  The rain and wind are going wild, as if new prey has been tossed at them.

  “She doesn’t want to know,” Vera says to herself, “she doesn’t want to know.”

  “I’m going out,” says Rafi.

  “Dad, no. Please. Let her be alone.”

  “She’ll end up doing something to herself,” Vera murmurs.

  Rafi and I sit on the wet concrete floor, in opposite corners. I lose my mind with worry for her.

  * * *

  —

  Suddenly Vera speaks: “They buried him under a number in cemetery near Belgrade, and after I came back from Goli, I wrote letters to Tito to let me bury my husband. Maybe twenty letters I wrote, and finally Tito asked Moša Pijade—his Jewish deputy—Who is this woman who is not afraid of Tito? Give her already her husband, but she must do it alone.”

  Every time a bolt of thunder or a pelt of rain shakes the barracks, a spasm of pain runs through Rafi’s face. He’s stopped filming. I signal for him to continue. There are sounds here that I can use as voice-over, and there is Vera’s story.