More Than I Love My Life

by David Grossman

  “I went with my parents-in-law, Milosz’s parents. They came from their village with horse and carriage and with a coffin they made. My mother-in-law wove beautiful kilim rug, lots of colors. We came to the cemetery of the unknown. I looked until I found him, number 3754, and I took off the top stone with a shovel, and I knew him immediately from the teeth and jaw, how people always thought he was smiling. Our wedding ring was gone.” Her speech is staccato, one word does not touch the next. “There were bones there and lots of leaves and mud. I cleaned all that off him and put him inside a sheet, and brought him to the carriage and put him in the coffin on the kilim, and we traveled to the village. One word we did not speak all the way. After we were traveling for maybe an hour, my mother-in-law says, ‘What are you made of, Vera—iron or stone?’ And I thought in my heart: Of love for Milosz. I said nothing, and we spoke no more until we got there and until we put him in ground of his village. I had to do it. I could not leave him under a number. And I knew no one else would do it. So this way Milosz has a grave with a name, which Nina can visit, and Gili, too, if she wants, and also Gili’s boy or girl, which maybe there will be one day. I had to do it so that everyone in the world will know there was such a Milosz, there was one person who was thin and sick and not very strong in his body, but a hero and idealist in his soul, and the most pure and deep person, and my friend and my beloved—”

  * * *

  —

  When we couldn’t take any more, and were about to go out and look for her, Nina came back. She faltered into the barracks, wet and frozen. She could barely stand up. We hurried over, wrapped her in the blanket, rubbed her back and chest and neck, her stomach and legs, with six hands. Each of us contributed something—dry socks, a shirt, a scarf. She stood between us with her eyes closed, shivering, almost falling over. I warmed her hands by blowing on them, her long and slender fingers. I massaged her neck and shoulders. Rafi kneaded her with massive force. I could see it was hurting her, but she didn’t say a word. He soundlessly muffled a sob.

  She slowly thawed out under our touch, then opened her eyes.

  “Cry,” she said to Rafi softly, “cry. There are things to cry over.”

  * * *

  —

  As I write now, it is eight years after that night. I try to imagine what happened to her while she was alone outside the barracks. I see her walking quickly, then running, up and down the paths of the abandoned camp, going into huts, running to the beach and touching the black water, running back to the field of boulders. She knows her way around this place, perhaps more than any of the cities and houses she’s lived in and left or fled. Here is home; that is clear. It’s a hellish home, but it is where her longings and pleadings and pain were directed all those years. Here is where her soul was deposited. Here, I think, is where Nina was when she was gone.

  She tires out. Walks through the rain, indifferent to it. Trips over stones and gets up. Mumbles Vera’s words over and over again: “What could I give them so as not to betray your father?” “Me,” Nina splutters, “I am what she gave them so as not to betray Dad.” Every time the thought strikes, it launches her again like an electrical current. Unbearable pain bursts out in every limb, all the way to the tips of her body. She runs again, incapable of standing. Of course Vera gave them herself, too. Almost three years of hard labor and torture. “But it was me she sacrificed,” Nina murmurs, tasting the words, as I do along with her. We are suddenly together out there, the pair of us swept along in the storm like two leaves, the abandoned girls whose bitter blood never clots. “She could have chosen!” Nina yells into the wind. “They gave her a choice, and she chose, her love chose, and I knew, I felt it all these years, under my skin I knew. I wasn’t crazy, I knew.”

  I imagine her stopping at once, looking around in wonder, like a newborn who has come into the wrong world.

  For a moment the island comes to life. As if giant floodlights were switched on with a roar and everything was bathed in light. Women in prison uniforms run, shouting. Screaming with pain in interrogations. Sometimes laughing. Sometimes even joking around with the wardens. Roll calls, and megaphones, and lashes, and choruses of women singing songs of praise for Tito.

  When Vera comes back to the barracks after being interrogated, Nina tends to her wounds. When the wardens force Vera to stand all night next to the kibla, the bucket where the prisoners relieve themselves, Nina stands next to her. When Vera chops wood brought to the island for heating and construction, Nina runs for some goat fat to spread on the ax. What’s left of the fat, they stealthily rub on their cracked lips.

  * * *

  —

  “If I were thirty years younger,” Nina said after we finished kneading and rubbing and thawing her, “I’d get pregnant by this rain.”

  We laughed warily. We did not completely understand. Of all the things in the world, that’s what she chose to tell us? She looked at me, smiling. “I’m hungry. Starving.”

  I gave her the last apple and a few rice crackers. Vera dug through her bag and fished out sandwiches for us all, God knows when she’d made them and how she’d known to keep them for this minute. We wolfed them down. We laughed at ourselves and at our hunger. Nina laughed with us. Her eyes glimmered. What happened to her outside? I couldn’t understand. She was a different person, I sensed. Something in her had changed, released. Everything in her was suddenly exposed, naked, strong. On her face I saw neither anger nor vengeance. I searched. Neither resentment nor hurt pride. What I found was huge relief. Clarity.

  “Mmm,” she said with her mouth full of mozzarella and tomatoes, “what a wonderful sandwich.”

  “Enjoy it,” said Vera, “you can have mine, too.”

  The wind died down. The rain stopped. It had been quiet outside for several minutes. The storm seemed to be abating. Nina sat in an almost dry corner of the barracks, covered thoroughly with the blanket, sated and warm. She smiled at Rafi. “What a night…”

  He went over and knelt next to her. They talked quietly. She laughed. He hugged her to him. Honestly, it was a little annoying, after this whole night, for them to share secrets. Her hand drew something on his knee. His large paw gently stroked her head.

  “Come, Gilush,” said Vera and packed up the napkins and put them in her handbag, “we go for a little walk. There are still places we haven’t visited.”

  “But why don’t we all go together? I thought we’d go up to the cliff together—”

  “Gili, honey, do you need every little thing explained?”

  And only then did I understand, idiot that I was.

  We left them in the barracks and walked to the shore. We stood facing the sea. It was dark, but the moonlight shone through the clouds. We crossed the field of boulders. In the dark their terrifying presence was even more colossal. We stood at a three-way crossroads: to the men’s camp, to the quarry, to the mountain. I asked Vera if she would go up to the cliff with me. She laughed. “Ninety-years-old woman will go up hill!”

  But it was hard for her. Both because of the terrain, and because something in her had weakened. I lit the way with the Red Cross flashlight. We circumvented the large puddle and found the path. It was narrower and steeper than I’d imagined. Where it was possible, we walked arm in arm, and sometimes fully embraced. In the narrower parts she walked in front of me, and I kept stroking her back and neck. I made my touch on her as soft as I could. Every few steps we stopped and waited for her breath to steady. Twice I suggested we go back down, but she refused.

  She remembered everything that had happened to her on this path fifty-four years ago. She said she could have done it with her eyes closed, and not just because she was blind back then. At a certain point she regained her strength and simply dragged me after her, this ninety-year-old woman. Her tiny body was carried ahead. Her body and everything it had been through.

  And then we were at the summit, and we breathed
a sigh of relief, just as she had described. Cool darkness surrounded us. We could hear the sea down below. Vera whispered that she’d never been here at nighttime.

  She became very quiet, clenched her fist to her mouth. She held on to me hard and showed me the place where she’d stood for almost two months. With her finger she drew the little circle that had surrounded the sapling. I positioned my feet outside the circle, in one of the places where she’d stood casting her shadow. It was not easy to fit into her little shoes.

  The sea pummeled the rocks. Vera sat down on a large hewn stone, looking very old again. I said we would not talk now, and that I wanted to stand there until the sun rose, and even after.

  I stood for maybe an hour. Very slowly, as if in prayer, I ran the story about my grandmother and the sapling through my mind. Every time I opened my eyes, I saw her looking at me with a steady gaze, conveying a current of something to me.

  Then we heard Nina and my father calling us from below. We drew them up to the mountaintop. They came, out of breath but also slightly glowing, and sat down on a rock next to Vera. Nina leaned on Rafi. The backpack with the tapes we’d filmed was slung over her shoulder, and I saw that this made her happy and proud.

  Even when they arrived, I did not abandon my post on the cliff edge. I felt that Vera was pleased by this. Once she got up and corrected my position: “Here is where I usually stood in the afternoon,” she explained. Nina asked, “What is that? What are you doing?” Vera said, “I had a little plant here that I took care of, we’ll talk about it when we get down.” Nina, with a forced smile, said, “I see there are stories I haven’t heard yet.” And again the heart pangs I felt every time Nina stumbled on an invisible barbed wire.

  The sky grew lighter and Rafi started filming again. Nina got up and walked around, approached the edge of the cliff and looked down at the sea, pulled back, and looked again. She said into the gulf: “I don’t think I’ve ever been this happy.” Then she looked at me. “Gili-Gili, it’s good that you came to be with me here, Gili.”

  “Yes, I’m glad I came.”

  And she said, “This place is slightly my home, after all.”

  Vera shook her head and suggested we walk down. “We’ll talk about everything there,” she said, “I want to be down below already.”

  But Nina seemed not to have heard her. “I want to film you all,” she said. She took the Sony from a surprised Rafi and laughed. “Let me feel like it’s my movie, too.” She asked which button to press, and he showed her. I saw the disquiet in his eyes. She asked what the flashing red light meant, and he said the battery was almost dead. She had two or three minutes left, at most.

  My body tensed. I wanted to go over to her, but I couldn’t. I didn’t have the strength to move. She looked at us through the little screen on the Sony, walked in a circle around us, and filmed.

  She walked lightly, floating. I remembered what Vera had said about the morning when they took her in, and she watched Nina dance down the street, skipping over the leftover hopscotch chalked on the sidewalk.

  Nina ran the camera over Vera and Rafi and me. With each of us she moved from head to feet, slowly, as though she were conducting a sort of system scan on us. And perhaps that is exactly what she was doing.

  “You see, Nina,” Nina suddenly spoke to future-Nina, “now we’re all here together, your mother, and your daughter, Gili, and Rafi. And you were with us on the whole voyage, too.”

  There were thin strips of light in the sky, like a hand with its fingers spread out. Nina filmed them.

  Vera repeated, firmly and irritably, that we should go down. “The sun here, as soon as it comes out, it burns. Five minutes later it’ll be fire.” In the growing light, her face was becoming gray and lifeless.

  “One more minute, Majka,” said Nina as she filmed. “Rafi, my precious, my love.” She smiled at him through the lens and he returned a confused smile. “All the love you had for me…You know, don’t you?”

  “Know what?”

  “That it’s the greatest gift anyone ever gave me.”

  He bowed his head and swallowed heavily.

  She looked happy, radiant. Her bright, dreamy happiness confused me.

  “And you know, don’t you?” she asked him again.

  “Know what?”

  She stopped and stood close to the edge. “That better than this moment, it will never be.”

  Rafi said, “Of course it will, Nina.”

  And I heard her say quietly, to herself, “I suddenly want time. Loads and loads of time.” Her face changed abruptly. I saw the struggle and the dreadful indecision, and I silently shouted one single shout, and she looked at me as if she’d heard.

  With one swift motion she took the backpack off, shut her eyes, held her arm all the way out, and dropped the backpack into the abyss.

  I heard the camera shatter on the rocks. There was silence, then a whoosh of waves retreating. Nina collapsed all at once, fell on one knee at the edge, stunned by what she’d done—or by what she hadn’t. I reached her at the same moment my father did, and together we pulled her back, into us.

  * * *

  —

  By the time we reached the bottom, frightened and holding on to each other, I knew I would not allow everything we’d made on this journey to be lost in the depths. Later, for years, every time I was drowning in grief over my lost film, I would tell myself: If there are no pictures, there will be words.

  But years went by before I was able to sit down and write.

  And meanwhile things came and filled up my life.

  We named the little one Nina. She’s five and a half.

  She is my speck of earth.

  Ours.

  Acknowledgments

  Eva Panić Nahir, who inspired the character of Vera, was a well-known and admired figure in Yugoslavia. She is the subject of a monograph and a biography, as well as a Serbian television series conceived by author Danilo Kiš, in which she recounted the horrors of Goli Otok. That was the first time the public was exposed to the history of Tito’s gulags, which had been silenced and denied up until then. Eva became a symbol of almost superhuman courage, epitomizing the capacity to sustain one’s humanity under the harshest conditions.

  Eva first told me her life story more than twenty years ago, and repeated it many times since. She and I developed a profound friendship. It was impossible not to like her, and not to be in awe of her power and humanity. It was also difficult, at times, not to balk at her principled and hermetic rigidity. She wanted me to write her story, and that of her daughter, Tiana Wages. One of the most precious gifts of this book was my acquaintance with Tiana’s wisdom, optimism, and bravery. Both women were generous enough to grant me the freedom to tell the story but also to imagine and invent it in ways it never existed. For this—for the liberty of imagination and invention—I thank them from the bottom of my heart.

  My gratitude also goes to the author and translator Dina Katan Ben-Zion, who guided me when it came to the Serbian and Croatian languages and their echoes in Vera’s Hebrew.

  To the filmmakers Dan Wolman and Ari Folman. To Elinor Nechemia, continuity girl and script supervisor. Profound thanks to my friend the director and film scholar Aner Preminger for his help and devotion. Thanks to close friends and family members who read the manuscript and offered suggestions and improvements. They all gave generously from their time and experience. Any errors in the book, on any topic, are mine alone.

  I thank my guides on my journey to the Arctic region, and those who joined me on my travels to Goli Otok, above all my sharp, opinionated friend the historian Hrvoje Klasić.

  The family of Rade Panić, Eva’s first husband, hosted me warmly in his birth village. The small but cohesive club of Eva’s fans in Belgrade—Tanja and Aleksandar Kraus, Vanja Radovanović and Planinka Kovačević—welcomed me and revived past times for me
.

  Thank you to Eva’s beautiful family: Emily Wages, Yehudit Nahir, and the illuminating Smadar “Smadi” Nahir. Profound gratitude to the directors Dr. Macabit Abramson and Prof. Avner Faingulernt, for their moving film, Eva.

  For their generous assistance, I thank Seid Serdarević, my Croatian publisher, and Gojko Bozovic, my Serbian publisher.

  Thanks to Ženi Lebl for her wonderful book, The White Violet (Ha’sigalit Ha’levana, Am Oved, 1993), and to Aleksandra Ličanin, who wrote Two Loves and One War of Eva Panić Nahir and led me through Eva’s childhood streets in Čakovec.

  And of course thanks to Dr. Van de Velde, author of Ideal Marriage, and Prentice Mulford, author of “The Law of Marriage,” both of which appeared in a joint volume translated into Hebrew by M. Ben-Yosef, whose words are quoted here (and yes, it is a real book).

  The facial expressions of everyone I spoke to on this journey seemed to change when they spoke of Eva. Her vigorous, turbulent spirit and her uncompromising personality, at once tender and absolute, live on palpably, four years after her death, in anyone who was fortunate enough to know her.

  David Grossman

  February 2019

  A Note About the Author

  David Grossman was born in Jerusalem, where he still lives. He is the best-selling author of many works of fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature, which have been translated into thirty-six languages. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the French Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Buxtehuder Bulle in Germany, Rome’s Premio per la Pace e L’Azione Umanitaria, the Premio Ischia International Award for Journalism, Israel’s Emet Prize, and the 2010 Frankfurt Peace Prize.