Looking over at buildings that seemed to be looking back at their reflection in a mirror, I tried to make my mind a blank. I enjoyed sinking into the darkness. Then I went to bed, dragging Mother’s scarf behind me. I fell asleep cradling it in my arms like a teddy bear.
CHAPTER 2
“Once I’d left, I could never quite get it together,” said Meliha. “I’m never sure what time it is, know what I mean?”
Time for them was divided into before and after, and while they could reconstruct the before-the-war period with no difficulty, the after-the-war period, which included the war itself, was pure chaos. The simplest question was enough to trip them up.
“You mean when did I leave the country?”
That’s the way they put it, reducing it to the lowest common denominator.
“Right.”
“Well, I didn’t come straight here.”
This is what happened first. Or that. First they did that and went there, and then they came here, to the Netherlands. Exile narratives were dateless. Dates came more easily in Dutch because Dutch officials were forever asking, “When did you first arrive in the Netherlands?” Yet much as they learned to shoot back the answer, the content behind it evaded them. After the war was a mythic time in which it made no difference whether a hundred or two hundred or three hundred years had passed. Too many things had happened in the brief after-the-war period, and their mental clocks went haywire under the strain. Everything had gone haywire; everything had cracked, broken asunder. Place as well as time had divided into before and after, their lives into here and there. They were suddenly without witnesses, parents, family, friends, without even the daily acquaintances with whom we constantly reconstitute our lives, and lacking these tried-and-true mediators, they were thrown back on themselves.
The feeling I got upon entering the room was that by sheer force of will they had held back the hands of the clock. They had lured me into their capsule to delay the thought of death. But death was all around them, their invisible subtenant. The very air reeked of it.
Papa was wearing pajamas and a wrinkled, unbelted bathrobe. A tube stuck out of the open fly — a catheter. I was startled by the lack of self-control it signaled. I could scarcely recognize him: he was thin and unshaven, his complexion was sallow, he had dark circles under his eyes. Mama was in better shape: she was wearing an attractive blouse and had some lipstick on. I was touched by her effort to show me that she at least still had things under control.
I called them Mama and Papa. Olga and Marko had been teachers. They had had Goran late in life. Papa graduated from a teachers’ training college just before the war broke out and had joined the partisans. After the war he had been given a high post in the Croatian Ministry of Education. In forty-eight he made a political slip of the tongue and, like so many others, was sent to Goli otok, Naked Island, where he spent three years at hard labor. After his release he was assigned to an elementary school in a small provincial town. It wasn’t until Goran entered the university that they were able to move to Zagreb.
Papa had always been laconic and reserved: he had learned to keep his mouth shut on Goli otok. Mention of the labor camp and its atrocities was banned until the seventies, and even then not much was said. So basically Papa had kept his mouth shut all his life. He was a good listener, though, and asked the right questions. He was less than demonstrative in his love for Goran; he seemed to have left that side of things to Mama. I think he loved me, too, after a fashion.
And suddenly you couldn’t get a word in edgewise. He talked nonstop, not only asking questions but answering them, too.
“I hear you’re teaching. Have you got many students? I’ve been trying to calculate the number of pupils I had during my thirty years as a teacher. The number Olga had, too. I can’t tell you how much time we’ve put in on it, and believe it or not we never get anywhere. So I said to Olga, Olga, I said, we’ve got a mathematician in the family, haven’t we? Write and ask him to do the calculations.”
“Put it out of your mind now,” Mama said. Then she turned to me and gave me a tug. “Come and give me a hand in the kitchen, will you, Tanja?”
“Now you see what it’s like,” she whispered.
I made no response.
“Talk, talk, talk. Never any letup. I’ve stopped listening.”
“What’s the catheter for?”
“Don’t ask. It just has to be…. Fetch the biscuits from the pantry, will you?”
I was touched by her willingness to share her secrets with me. I opened the doors of the cupboard she dignified with the name of pantry. I was surprised to find the title page of a magazine ineptly taped to the door. It was a picture of Tito in his marshal’s uniform. I always thought Mama and Papa hated Tito, even if they’d put nothing of the sort into words. Papa had spent four years with Tito’s partisans only to land a year later, and for no reason whatever, in the worst of the country’s labor camps. And now Papa’s “hangman” was lolling in domestic bliss amid their modest reserves of rice, flour, onions, and potatoes. They’d decided to rehabilitate him. In Mama’s pantry. Clearly they preferred the Tito years to the current situation, though they didn’t dare say so out loud, just as there had been many things they didn’t dare say during the Tito years.
“When did the logorrhea start?” I asked, taking down the tin box with pictures of shortbread on it.
“I can’t say, really. It came on gradually. But in the end I couldn’t help noticing. He talks to the walls when I’m not in the room. He just keeps talking. I can’t take it anymore. I really can’t. I’ve heard it all a thousand times. I even think I hear him muttering in his sleep.” She bit her lip and added, “I can’t wait for it to end.”
“What about Goran? Does he know what’s going on? How is he anyway?”
“You can read his letters if you like.”
“No. What’s the point?”
She left the room for a moment and reappeared with a snapshot in her hand.
“I shouldn’t show you this, but maybe you’re better off knowing.”
She handed me the picture. It was of Goran and a Japanese woman.
“Pretty,” I said.
“Her name is Hito,” she said with relief. “Papa and I call her Tito. It’s our little joke. Looks nice, doesn’t she?”
Glancing down at the picture again, I felt a twinge of jealousy.
Mama sighed.
“Life goes on, Tanja. Oh, not for us. We’ve had our day. But you children, you deserve a better deal…. Your mother tells me you’re doing well in Amsterdam.”
“Pretty well.”
“You were always at the top of your class.”
I had the feeling she meant to say something else — that she was “on my side”—but couldn’t find the words for it.
“Goran took it hard when you refused to go with him.”
“I know.”
“Time heals all wounds, fortunately.”
Papa appeared at the door.
“What secrets are you two telling in here? I don’t like to be left alone. And what’s that ‘Time heals all wounds’ stuff? You women, you pick something up and parrot it all over the place. Time doesn’t heal wounds; it makes them.”