We agreed on green tea at, I confess, my urging, after the waiter reeled off a list of ten varieties, which represented, he remarked, only a small fraction of their supplies in the kitchen. Silence reigned around the table while we were waiting for the tea, as is often the case. Daniel Atijas was absorbed by the view, his lips moving only now and then, as if they were retrieving long-forgotten sentences. Ivan Matulić’s grandson sat with his head bowed as if regretting, suddenly, having consented to come with us, though no gesture confirmed this: no twitching of fingers, biting of lips, crossing of legs. He did nothing but be quiet, which is, of course, the most common sign of the worst agitation. I pretended to zero in on reading the menu, peeking furtively over the top and around the edges, though I did find the dessert section absorbing. Had I not been with Daniel Atijas and Ivan Matulić’s grandson, that list could have brought tears to my eyes, but as it was, I had to restrain myself, especially because the waiter was already approaching our table with a tray on which he had plates, fragile cups, spoons, a tea pot, a milk pitcher, a sugar bowl, and a bowl of scones. Ivan Matulić’s grandson looked up only after the waiter, having served the tea, had moved far enough away, and said it would be best, perhaps, for him to apologize first. Yesterday, he said, at the very beginning he had broached a subject that had been bothering him, but later, he said, as we all knew, that beginning was irreparably damaged, and where there is no beginning, there can be no end.
He stopped, looked at us, sipped his tea. He had already spoken, he said, of how he had felt like a prisoner, how he had suffered the pressure of his limited ethnic choices and fled the Croatian language as if it were a ball of fire. Language truly is fire, said Daniel Atijas at that point, except that while some succeed in escaping fire, no one escapes language. Ivan Matulić’s grandson said he knew nothing about that; his goal at the time had been to get as far away as possible from his parents’ tongue, the umbilical cord that was threatening to kill him, or so he was convinced. As soon as he graduated from secondary school he moved out of his parents’ place and rented a house with friends in the older, rundown part of town. To his great surprise, he said, his parents did not protest; they even helped him furnish his room as nicely as possible. His mother, he said, shed a tear or two, but there were no recriminations or quarrels. He was his own man and could do what he wanted with his life. He did not, however, he said, do anything much with it; at first he took every job that was offered, collapsing into bed at night, dead tired, rising the next morning a wretched soul who could hardly wait for each day to pass. Later things got better, he said: he managed to complete a few college courses and focus on accounting, and he got a job in a large petroleum concern, convinced all the while that he was building impenetrable walls around himself with something which, he said, could be described as a sense of Canadian identity. And then, he said, the war broke out in Yugoslavia, and something changed. He began following the news, feeling queasy, recognizing in himself Croatian words that he was convinced he had long since forgotten.
He couldn’t explain just what had happened, he said, but it was as if he were rid of something, as if he had shed one skin and acquired another, as if he were both forgetting and renewing himself, becoming something he had never been. Even then he had no thought of returning to his family home, but he remembered several old acquaintances, started going to church, frequented two or three cafés; and his world acquired a dimension, which, if someone had asked him earlier, he would have firmly asserted did not exist. Immediately, and he had to say this, he began meeting people who tried to persuade him to go off and fight for Croatia, but though he considered it seriously, particularly while the hostilities were under way against Vukovar and the bombing of Dubrovnik began, he still couldn’t see himself in uniform or, even less, wielding a weapon, though those thoughts, slowly but surely, brought him to the idea that he should go to Croatia as a member of a humanitarian organization, as, ultimately, three years later, he did. Now that he was talking about all this so readily, he said, in this old-fashioned hotel with a cup of fine tea before him, how interesting it was that all those years he had never once given a single thought to history. All of it existed for him only in the present, as it was unfolding, and none of it had anything to do with what had gone before, or, at least as far as he was concerned, it was connected only to whatever event had immediately preceded it; in all these years nothing had found its way to him, least of all the articles appearing from time to time in the daily and weekly press that claimed to be espousing an objective, historically founded interpretation of events in Croatia and Yugoslavia.
Ivan Matulić’s grandson nibbled at his scone and sipped his tea. History had never, he said, meant much to him, for, after all, he had grown up in a time with no history, in a country without a history, on a continent where study was more and more often seen as assembling fragments; there was no interest in the past, only in the present and, possibly, the future, since the past, history, could exist only as continuity, as a totality in which everything, whether a person wanted this or not, was interconnected. For that matter, said Ivan Matulić’s grandson, it was not historical quandaries that had prompted him to give up on the idea of going to the Croatian front but that one night in the middle of Calgary he saw a group of young men of Croatian descent beating up two young Serbian men, and while the shouts and groans climbed skyward and blood gushed down shirts and trousers, he hid in the shadow of a garbage container and vomited, holding his own forehead with his left hand the way his mother had held him long ago when he was small. When the sirens of police cars wailed, he fled with the others. Then he understood, he said, that he was not meant for war but for peace, and this momentarily renewed his faith in his shaken sense of belonging to Canada, though soon he lost it again. The passion with which he embarked on exploring his Croatian heritage surprised everyone — himself and his parents included. His father made no secret of his joy when he started taking an interest in the news, asking for explanations, taking an eager part in collecting financial and material support for Croatian refugees, and especially when he asked his father to speak with him every day for at least an hour in Croatian.
He felt elated — there was no reason to hide it — at the thought that the thousand-year-old Croatian dream was finally coming true, just as he felt hatred, he said, for all those who stood in the way of that dream. Now he was ashamed of this, but then, he said, then it was a blindness that let him see nothing else. His life became an obsession with the idea that after spending years in the absence of history, he should be where history was happening, even if it wasn’t on the front lines, at the very front, but somewhere in the rear, for he knew, he said, that history was written in many places at once, and that each of these was every bit as important, regardless of whether all the events would make it into the history books and regardless of what they would leave out. And so it was, in the fall of 1994, that he found himself in Zagreb. Only two months later, however, frustrated by his desk job and the constant refusal of his superiors to send him into the field, he quit. By then he had contacted relatives in Osijek and Split, and all he wanted, he said, was to be closer to the country and the people who, he was convinced, were making him a happier and better man than he had ever been before. He was not blind, he said, and he wouldn’t want us to think he had never noticed certain negative things going on in politics and culture, but he was inclined to embrace the position espoused by one of the Croatian officials when he was still working and taking part in meetings with representatives of the government. When a democracy is young, said the official, the pills are bitter. This was, in fact, said in response to accusations from the opposition that the government had introduced near-blanket censorship.