My mom was my biggest supporter. After I’d already left Zagreb, anonymous fellow-citizens would terrorize her on the telephone.
“Is that Mrs. Ugrešić?”
“Yes,” my Mom would reply.
“The mother of the writer Ugrešić?!”
And when my naïve mother would proudly answer that it was indeed “Ugrešić-the-writer’s mom” on the line, they’d launch into the most vile diatribe imaginable. Once, a self-declared representative of the small town where I was born announced to her that they, the townspeople, were disowning me.
“How can they disown you, they’re not your mother!” she joked to me.
Other times she’d grumble. .
“Stop with all that ‘writing,’ they’ll take my pension away because of you,” she’d protest.
“Would you rather they take your pension away or see me at a reception for Tuđman?” I asked, putting her to the test.
“I’d die of shame if I saw you on television with Tuđman, which wouldn’t be a bad thing, because then I wouldn’t need a pension any more,” she’d reply, and we’d both burst into laughter.
Sometimes I’d get down about everything, not knowing how to cope with others’ hatred.
“Imagine how you’d feel if they loved you!” mom would cheerfully console me.
And then sometimes she’d again get down, grumpily asking herself why fate had given her, of all people, such a stubborn daughter.
“Imagine what it was like for Joseph Brodsky’s parents!” I’d blurt out.
“Yes, but you’re not Brodsky!” she’d shoot back.
And we’d both break into mutually reassuring laughter.
Now, from that mess — where on one side “the facts” take the form of a nonsensical heap of newsprint, and on the other sits my “deformed” memory — my mother emerges as the rare face of common sense. And if someone were to push me up against a wall and force me, after so many years, to respond to the nonsensical question of whether I have a Croatian homeland at all, I’d respond that I do, that it is my mother, a Bulgarian. To my deep sadness, mom recently departed the world of the living.
12. Pigeon Chasers
Let’s go back to where we began, to the photograph of the professor thumbing his ears at me, and the headline letting me know that I wasn’t “chased away.” Asked whether he follows what I write these days, he responds, “Since she’s been abroad, no. On the one hand, it’s a question of personal relationships, and on the other, the fact that she willingly left here. She wasn’t expelled, nobody drove her out, she left to take up a scholarship. . I wasn’t prepared to accept her essayistic work. We parted company the very moment she started to think of it as her ‘war’ abroad, and began promoting herself as a dissident, an exile.”[11]
The professor could have responded to the question by simply admitting that he wasn’t familiar with my work since I went abroad. It would have been a less than flattering response for a professor of literature, but an understandable one all the same. Although they didn’t ask him whether I had willingly left Croatia, whether I was expelled or driven out, he felt the need to lie. He qualifies my literary work as essayistic (how would he know if he hasn’t read it?) and says that he parted company with me (falsely implying that there had been a dialogue) the moment I started thinking of my essayistic work (unworthy of intellectual attention) as a war conducted from abroad (I shot from the pen hunkered in a foreign bunker). In the considered opinion of this respected expert in the literature of the Russian avant-garde, I apparently promote myself as a dissident and exile (my position is, therefore, fake, inauthentic).
Why does the professor get off on all of this? How is it that, after a good eighteen years, when the bonfires have already gone out, he suddenly plucks up the courage to publicly strike a match, employing the same rhetoric as his predecessors? Of course, back then he secretly blew the flames, but only now has he decided to break his silence. The professor knows only too well that he lives in a milieu where people have no moral principles, but, that said, they do have the milieu. As Miroslav Krleža put it, it stinks among the people, but at least it’s warm. And the professor prefers the warmth. Fear of exclusion from the group is evidently one of the most powerful human fears, such fears being inculcated when one is first excluded from a children’s game, a children’s birthday party, or left out by one’s classmates. Fear of exclusion from the group is the basis of every fascism. No one is exempt from this fear, and the professor is no exception.
Why did Globus choose the headline “Dubravka Ugrešić Wasn’t Chased Away”? Globus needed the professor’s authority to confirm that eighteen years ago its investigative team really was in the right. But why now? A short time before the interview was published, Globus lost the lawsuit that it had dragged out for a full seventeen years. Apart from having to pay out a small amount in damages for “burns” I received in the media bonfire, the terms of the settlement also obliged Globus to publish the judge’s decision in full. Publishing the ruling would mean a public admission of moral defeat, something Globus has successfully avoided for years. Instead, Globus published the interview with the professor. The headline—“Dubravka Ugrešić Wasn’t Chased Out”—rings out like a definitive verdict, letting everyone know who wears the pants in the Croatian home.
In the very act of expressing public contempt for his former student and long-time collaborator, the elderly professor dispatched a hoary pedagogical message: every individual act of disobedience (she left willingly!), every rebellious voice must be punished. The milieu is good and righteous, and its prodigal daughters and sons (essayists, dissidents, exiles) deserve every reproach. The elderly professor — the editor of an anthology bearing the inspiring title Heretics and Dreamers, a promoter of Russian avant-gardists and the literary term the poetics of dispute—sadly missed his mark. Rather than a moral arbiter, he served as a mere pigeon chaser. A pigeon chaser?!
My Zagreb apartment had a large balcony, which, being constantly overrun by pigeons, wasn’t particularly attractive. My neighbors had the same problem. No one had any idea of how to get rid of the nuisance. One day an injured pigeon appeared on my neighbors’ balcony. The neighbors felt sorry for it and nursed it back to health, and in return, the pigeon, a female, became as loyal as a household pet. Then one day she brought a “boyfriend” home to the balcony. The neighbors also accepted the “boyfriend” and regularly fed the couple. As a sign of his gratitude for the regular crumbs, the “boyfriend” became a “policeman,” diligently expelling other pigeons from the balcony. The elderly professor threateningly gnashed his blunt beak in my direction, feebly flapping his wings. He did so in return for a few empathetic crumbs thrown to him by the hand of the warm Croatian hearth.
There is another interesting pigeon-related coincidence to speak of here. After my willing departure from the university, the Glossary of the Russian Avant-garde changed its name to the Zagreb Glossary of Twentieth Century Culture. Why the change? I’m certain the professor initiated this little repositioning. In the political context of the time, Russian Avant-garde had an irritating ring. For Christ’s sake, somebody might think that an elite group of international Slavic scholars was scheming its way around Croatia, advocating the return of communism, revolution, the avant-garde, lobbying for the Russians and who knows what else. At the time, Croatia was screaming into the ether that it was a European and a Catholic country, that it was the sacrificial shield defending European culture from the hordes of invading Orthodox barbarians. Naturally, the scholarly team and its field of research remained the same, only the name changed. The eventual danger that someone might have lumped the professor in with the “Eastern bandits” because of Bulgakov-the-Orthodox-Christian or Malevic-the-Serb was skillfully averted. There was one other significant innovation. A certain Ivan Golub (which in Croatian means “pigeon” and is a fairly common name), a theologian, lay minister, and poet, was tasked with writing the customary introduction to the Zagreb Glossary of Twentieth Century Culture. How did Ivan Golub manage to join a team of scholars working on the Russian avant-garde? Ivan Golub symbolically performed the same role as the ever diligent Croatian priests of the day (a role they still perform today): he poured holy water over everything — newly purchased hospital equipment, new kindergartens and schools, newly-asphalted roads, new tractors, newborn babies. In his introductions (not lacking in expertise I might add), Ivan Golub blessed and poured holy water over this literary and scholarly anthology, exorcising all manner of impurities, not to mention “witches” of all stripes. All things told, the professor found a priest, the priest found a professor, and together they were stronger.