My parents had a formal wedding and fancy reception, the way immigrant Yugoslavs did in those days in New York. Then they took a honeymoon trip to Miami by bus. My mother later told me how shocked my father was at the racism he saw traveling to the South: “Black people have to ride at the back of the bus, and I am an immigrant and sit where I want?”
When they returned home they settled in the Bronx, first on Creston Avenue near Fordham Road, then Loring Place near the 207th Street bridge to Manhattan, in St. Nicholas of Tolentine parish, where I and my siblings were to go to Catholic school.
I was born in 1952, a year after they married, then my sister the next year, and finally my brother. It was important to my father to have a son. Seven years later another baby girl was born. My parents worked hard to make life easier for us children, to overcome their own difficult pasts, and to build a future for us. I tried to understand them, but the legacy of their suffering brought me suffering too.
My parents argued a lot. Some of their fiercest fights seemed to be about politics and religion or what dialect was the proper one to teach the children. I remember being very quiet as a child, partly because my father worked the night shift and slept during the day. At times my parents’ shouting would overwhelm me. I would retreat and quietly cry. I am content with quiet now. It was how I survived.
We grew up in scarcity. My father didn’t earn much money and he had three children to feed. When Dad brought home an “expired” steak from Horn and Hardart’s one day, it was a treasure. It wasn’t clear how he got it; maybe he simply stole it. He told us they were going to throw it out, so he asked if he could take it home to his family. My Mom broiled it in an electric broiler till the kitchen had a burnt smell. We sat around the table while Mom mashed the potatoes and Dad took his fork and a big knife and carefully carved up the steak. He gave each of us three kids equal portions, he set aside the fat and meat around the bones for himself, and gave Mom a slightly smaller piece than ours. When one of us noted this and she said, “I don’t really like too much meat.”
My parents were involved in what was later considered illegal activity—helping immigrants. People would come for a visit from Yugoslavia and not go back. My mother would feed them and my father would help them get a job. Then these strangers would find a way to stay and have a life here. I remember a short, bald Macedonian man who spoke in a funny dialect I didn’t recognize (not Serbian or Croatian) and reeked of garlic. We would watch him chew whole cloves—it was healthy, he said. For years he slept on a single bed my father set up in the basement of our building near the boiler room. My parents couldn’t get rid of him. He said he was saving money to send to his family in Yugoslavia. One day he asked my mother to take a picture of him beside a shiny red Ford Fairlane parked on Loring Place. He sent the picture home to Macedonia and told them it was his car. Our building, where my parents worked as superintendents, seemed like the Underground Railroad for immigrants.
With his kinky hair, pencil-thin mustache, and dark skin, my father was often mistaken for Puerto Rican. I was glad I didn’t hear people saying that Yugoslavians were lazy, dirty and “they have a lot of children,” although I did hear a lot of jokes about Poles—how dumb they were, mainly. Wasn’t this country built by slaves and immigrants? Yugoslav, Czech, and Polish immigrants had worked in most of the mines in this country in the early part of the century and some relatives of my father’s had even emigrated to Butte, Montana, to work in the copper mines.
Although Puerto Rico had been a U.S. territory a long time ago, it was even difficult for people from there to make it in New York. I remember Dad helping a man named Charlie, a dark-skinned Puerto Rican. Charlie’s big smile and pleasant, calm personality brightened up our small kitchen as he ate with us. My father found him odd jobs and eventually a superintendent position. Charlie eventually was able to get a green card and bring his family to New York. Later I found out that Puerto Ricans didn’t need a green card, so maybe Charlie was Dominican.
The superintendent deal was good for us because we got free rent and phone and utilities, and Dad had the opportunity of getting paid for doing extra jobs in the building. This was added income really necessary for a family of five and then six. My mother did as much as she could to help. She took calls and complaints, she polished the brass doorknobs and mailboxes on Saturdays, and mopped the six floors every week with ammonia and water. I used to like to help her with the brass polishing. It was so satisfying to see the dull fingerprinted boxes become gold and shiny with some rubbing after Mom had spread the milky polish on them.
As superintendent, my father found a lot of things in the garbage and resurrected them for us. One day he told us that someone upstairs in the building wanted to give us a piano. I wanted to take lessons at school, so this was perfect. That piano gave me much solace, and it was a creative outlet, even though it could go nowhere else but in the hallway opposite the door to the apartment. When our youngest sister was just a toddler, she would sit on my lap and we would play up a storm together. Later when we moved, the piano couldn’t come to our new house because, as my father said, “It’s full of roaches!” That was heartbreaking. I loved that piano. I used to imagine myself playing Rachmaninov, throwing my long hair around, with a big orchestra accompanying me at Carnegie Hall.
As a child, I never told anyone about my fantasies. They were my own private world, a world in which I could be in control. I would play out different scenarios, taking the part of people I considered strong figures in the world—conductor of an orchestra, father of a family, a nun teaching a class, president of the United States. I created an imaginary box that I drew the boundaries of. It was my place, sometimes just the size of my body, sometimes the house or school in my stories. It was a hiding place from other children, a refuge from my parents’ emotions. It was enough.
Years later, the sun sparkles on the opposite bank of a river, where I am writing this. I sit on a large rock. The long green grass gleams greener. Rocks expose moss. Water trickles past them without a care. I look ahead and the water stills like imperfect glass.
The slightest ripples reflect everything possible.
Pigeons of Heiden
It’s 1996, fifty-five years after the capture of Yugoslavia by the Nazis and my father’s imprisonment in Germany. I am in Heiden, meeting my German sister for the first time, after learning about her from my mother, long after my father’s death. Monika tells me she has been waiting to hear from our family for a long time. She shows me her scrapbook of pictures of us that my father had sent from New York.
I don’t know why Kosta, my father, kept Monika’s existence a secret from me and my siblings. He had corresponded with her over the years, but he never asked her to come to America, even after her mother died. Perhaps it was because we were poor. The only time she, his first child, ever met him was after the war and before he left for America. Supposedly he asked her mother, Agnes, to marry him and come with him to the U.S. Monika was only four years old at the time. I am struck by how much Monika’s walk resembles my father’s—the dark Yugoslav girl among blond Aryans.
In April of 1941, during the Nazi takeover of Yugoslavia, amid the chaos of hand-to-hand combat, bombs, and gunfire, twenty-four-year-old Kosta, a sergeant in King Peter’s army, riding his horse and using a sword to defend himself, was taken prisoner along with his troops. They were sent to different prisons in Germany, to be used in various ways. My father and other officers were brought to Heiden, a quiet northern agricultural town close to the Netherlands to be farmworkers. Relatively free to come and go within the area, Kosta had a love affair with Agnes, a farmer’s daughter, and Monika was their child.