She talked about the malady so intimately and with such understanding and concern that she made it sound like a pet dog or cat. She pointed a pudgy finger at various dates, explaining why the sugar level had jumped there and was normal at other times.
“I’ll show you how I measure it,” she said, and added quickly. “How long are you staying?”
“A week.”
“You’re going to be very busy,” she said, pursing her lips.
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve got to get a new ID, for one thing. There’s a new system. The lines are horrendous. People wait a whole day. I almost fainted. And then you have to see a lawyer about your flat. And get a new health card. There’s a new system for that, too. They keep changing things.”
Yes, the nonstop chatter was a sign that she had learned to mask her fear, vague as it was, with words.
When she opened the drawer in the dresser to let me see what the new IDs looked like, I noticed a Berlin picture of Goran and me in the place where she kept the family photographs.
“You should pay a visit to Goran’s parents,” she said, following my glance. “Marko’s not doing well.”
We cleared the table and did the dishes. Then I unpacked and gave her the present I’d brought, a warm housecoat and slippers. Putting the housecoat away in the wardrobe, she showed me the clothes she had bought since I’d last seen her.
“I’ve acquired quite a few new things, not that I have anywhere to show them off.” She sighed. “This one I’ve worn only once, on my birthday.”
Then we watched a Brazilian soap opera, Mother trying in vain to clue me in on the plot. Sitting glued to the screen hour after hour, obsessed with the fates of Marisol and Cassandra or whatever their names were — that, like the chatter, was a strategy of self-defense. Mother had three television sets — one in the bedroom, one in the living room, and one in the room she styled as “the guest room.” This total submersion into the world of cheap soaps, this TV hysteria, TV stupor, this categorical refusal to confront reality had come with the war, when reality sneaked into households in the form of skimpy subtitles, skimpier even than Marisol or Cassandra’s actual lines. That was all the space it was allowed. Soaps were the foam you sprayed on fear to put it out, a foam you applied twice daily, preferably in the company of friends. Mother watched with two neighbors, Vanda and Mrs. Buden. For them the Brazilian anesthetic had become an addiction.
Mother, who had once cringed at the thought of intimacy with her neighbors, could not now stop talking about them, and the ways she referred to them enabled me to establish where they stood on her emotional ladder. If she called them “Mr.” or “Mrs.” (“Mrs. Franceti
on the fifth floor says Croatian Oil has been sold to the Americans”), she had a good relationship with them. If she called them “my neighbor” (“My neighbor Vanda can’t wait to see you”), they were close. If she used their surname alone (“Markovi on the third floor is drunk all the time”), she was less than fond of them. She had gradually made a family of the people she had on hand. (“No great shakes, perhaps, but beggars can’t be choosers. Not at my age. And should anything happen to me, they’ll be here, whereas you…”) It was the gravest accusation she could have leveled at me: her parents were long gone; her brother had died ten years before, her husband at the war’s outset; then I left to get away from her.
She made believe she no longer had opinions, she who had once had an opinion about everything, and whereas she had never paid much attention to other people’s opinions she now seemed to dote on them (“Mrs. Feri says that Amsterdam is smaller than Zagreb”). It was all an act, of course. It was as if she were sitting in an invisible wheelchair demanding respect for her invalid status and granting her favor to all who complied.
“Vanda will be coming at five,” she said. “You might want to shower and change.”
I dutifully trotted off to the bathroom to shower and change.
While the three of us drank our coffee, Mother gave Vanda a vivid report of my life in Amsterdam.
“Tanjica says Amsterdam is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Well, I recently saw a TV documentary and you know it’s more beautiful even than Venice.”
Tanjica says this, Tanjica says that. It was as much a way of getting through to me as it was of making small talk with Vanda.
After Vanda left I took a tour of the flat. I praised the new bathroom cabinet and pointed out she should do something about the yellow stain on the bathroom ceiling. She perked up. It came from a leak in the Ivies’ bathroom, but they were in no hurry to get it fixed. That’s the way people were, wasn’t it now. Causing damage and then denying they had anything to do with it.
“I’ll take care of it,” I said.
She nearly blushed with excitement. You’d have thought my offer was an offer of marriage. I was going to take things in hand, do what needed to be done, care for her. (“Tanjica’s come and taken over, thank God. Thanks anyway, but Tanjica will take care of it.”)
We watched the news, and she filled me in on everything television-related: the new anchorwoman, the master of ceremonies on the new quiz show, the new series.
“You’re totally out of it!” she said. “You might as well have been gone a hundred years.” This was no accusation, however; it was an excuse for a long conversation. And she was right. I was totally out of it. At least life on the TV screen looked totally different.
“I don’t know what to do,” she suddenly sighed. “Everything’s so expensive. I’ve got a pretty good pension, and even I have to worry about making ends meet. I may eventually have to sell the cottage.”
“Go ahead.”
“You mean you wouldn’t mind?” she asked.
She was testing me again.
“I can’t say I wouldn’t mind,” I said, “but go ahead if you think it’s called for.”
“But it’s yours!”
“No, it’s yours,” I said.
“It just sat there all summer. I thought you and Goran would be coming back eventually and would want a place at the seaside, a place where we could spend our summers together. But it makes no sense now. I hate to think of it just sitting there.”
She was embroidering the story a bit. Goran and I had used the Cres cottage only rarely. It was her projection of the family idyll. She had spent the summers there with her husband until he had had a heart attack — at the cottage, as it happened — and from then on she had pretty much stayed away. So it did in fact just sit there.
After a bit more chatter — television again and high prices — she said she was tired, and off she went to bed. She was asleep in no time, like a child. I turned off the TV, turned out the light, and went to my room, the “guest room.”
Draping one of her woolen scarves over my shoulders, I went out onto the balcony and stared into the darkness. I thought of how little there was left of me in the place. A few pictures, some clothes — that was it. Not that I felt pained at the thought. Why should I have expected there to be more? There had been little enough while we were living together: she took up all the space; I was always in a corner somewhere.
Now I was present in frozen, carefully selected fragments. She held absolute sway over her realm, arranging and rearranging its contents as if life were an installation with photographs. The reason she’d held on to the picture of Goran and me was that it kept our relationship going, and as director of the family soap she refused to recognize our separation.
Yes, I’d come “home.” I chewed on the concept like an old piece of gum, trying to extract the last bit of flavor from it. “Home” was no longer “home.” Mother was all that was left. Not only was Goran gone, our friends were gone, too. Many had moved to far-flung parts of the world, and the ones who had stayed behind were friends no more. It was none of their doing or mine. It had just happened.