I gave her my arm. Her fingers, thick with age, took hold of it and wrapped the cuff around my upper arm. The monitor was in her lap. She gripped it in both hands. Then she pressed the button and three eights appeared on the display. When they disappeared, she carefully pressed “start.” We said not a word. I felt a swelling in my arm. We listened to the humming of the machine and followed the rise and fall of the numbers on the display. As the numbers came to rest, I had a sudden desire to remain in that position, just as I was, forever.
“You’re normal,” she said, removing the cuff. “You’ve got nothing to worry about.”
That was our farewell hug and kiss. The blood pressure monitor was a visible substitute for something invisible, a bloody umbilical chord, all fresh and shiny like a metal string. Our blood pressure was normal, our heartbeat even. At that moment we had told each other everything we had to say.
I called the cab. It came immediately. She saw me to the elevator. I kissed her on the cheek. I took a deep breath, inhaled the fragrance of her skin, and entered the elevator without releasing it.
“Love you!” suddenly wafted in to me. In English. She must have picked up the phrase and intonation from the American movies she watched on television. I was touched: she had never before used those words to me, never told me I love you. And now that melodious American “love you” in a cracked voice, perhaps, but brimming with everything she wanted to say and didn’t know how. It went straight to the solar plexus. I imploded.
Through the narrow, diver’s-mask window in the elevator door I could see her touching her cheek with her hand. She could only have been brushing away a tear. As I pressed the button, I could hear her shuffling off in her slippers.
“Love you…” I thought I was singing back to her, but what came out of my lips was rather more like a whimper.
CHAPTER 4
I bought a few boxes of the requisite chocolates at the airport duty-free shop. The well-known Kraš brand came in a box embossed with the Croatian coat of arms and designed to resemble the new Croatian passport.
After takeoff I felt a vague sense of relief. Leafing through the in-flight magazine, I stared blankly at the list of destinations, then dipped into articles on Istrian truffles, the beauties of Korcula, the meteoric career of pianist Ivo Pogoreli
, and the latest successes of tennis champ Goran Ivaniševi.
I’d accomplished nothing during my seven days in Zagreb. I hadn’t obtained a new ID; I hadn’t contacted a lawyer. Of course, the flat was a lost cause: there were thousands of similar cases. Besides, I was not particularly fond of the things we’d left behind. True, I missed the books, Goran’s and mine, but even if the current tenant had agreed to give them back I wouldn’t have had room for them.
I had, however, persuaded the tenants living in the flat above Mother’s to find a handyman to take care of the ugly yellow stain on her bathroom ceiling. I had also left Mother some money for similar emergencies and bought a new tap for the sink.
During my seven days in Zagreb I had watched seven episodes of the Brazilian soap opera. I learned who was who in the extended family of characters. At least one of Mother’s three television sets was on from the moment she got out of bed.
“It gives me the feeling I’m not alone,” she said by way of self-justification.
“Why not try reading?”
“I can’t. It makes my eyes hurt.”
“Get new glasses.”
“I did, but it didn’t help. It’s like I had sand in my eyes.”
I’d made no phone calls: I had no one to call. I’d skimmed through the numbers in my old address book, and once I even picked up the receiver and dialed the number of a former friend, but before anyone could answer I put the receiver down. I was relieved.
I’d thought about Mother. About how she defended her turf. What mattered most to her was that the stain be taken care of, the tap stop dripping, the curtains be clean, and life take its normal course. But she was a fighter, too, and she had found an enemy: sugar. She refused to recognize any other: she was too weak now; she would have lost the battle. So she had staked out her territory, and there she reigned supreme.
The picture of Goran and me was in the china cabinet in Mother’s living room. Seeing it there had made me realize how close her “exhibit” was to the ones I saw in the living rooms of émigrés. Émigré souvenir exhibits did not express nostalgia for a former life or the native country; on the contrary, it expressed lack of same. All the gingerbread hearts, peasant-shoe ashtrays, miniature Dalmatian or Montenegrin caps, handmade embroideries and lace, leather drinking gourds, and Adriatic shells were so many minuscule shrines, Lilliputian graves marking the end of a way of life, an unequivocal choice and a willingness to accept the losses that choice entailed.
Whether I had accepted them I couldn’t say. What I can say is that throughout the week I spent there I was constantly ill at ease. Not so much when I was with Mother as when I was outside, in the street. I wandered the streets of Zagreb with an invisible slap on my face, viewing things slightly askance, like a rabbit, and hugging the facades of the buildings for safety’s sake. Everything looked run-down and gray, now mine, now alien, now former.
I never told Mother I’d tried to get a new ID. The thing was, I couldn’t find the office. Even though I’d been to the building several times before, even though I knew the area intimately, even though I have a good sense of direction, I couldn’t find the place. When I asked for directions, people pointed to the left and to the right, but I still couldn’t find it. I kept circling the narrowly circumscribed space — two or three streets at most — untilpanic suddenly overflowed my inner spaces and I burst into tears. The refugee trauma, the equivalent of the sudden disappearance of the mother from a child’s field of vision, had surfaced where I’d least expected: “at home.” The fact that I’d managed to get lost in an area I knew like the back of my hand filled me with horror.
I recounted the incident to the passenger sitting next to me on the plane. He was from Zagreb and maybe a few years my senior, an architect by trade. He had left Zagreb in 1991. He was on his way back to America, where he had found work with a firm and settled down.
“I thought I was out of my mind.”
“How come? You had every reason to get lost,” he said. “So many street names have changed.”
“But the streets are the same.”
“Not if they have new names,” he said.
“Still, I can’t believe it happened.”
“A minor blackout. Too many changes in too short a time.”
“But how could I get lost in my own city?”
“What if Zagreb is no longer your city.”
“Zagreb will always be my city,” I said stubbornly, hearing how ridiculous it sounded.
“Next time take the trouble to learn the new street names and everything will be just fine. The sooner you forget the old ones, the better.”
“You think that’s easy?”
“Not in the least. I can see how upset you are about it. I used to be, too. But I got over it. Or rather it took care of itself. Because they’ve written us off. Me, you, all of us who’ve left. All right, we’re dysfunctional, but we don’t count. We’re a negligible minority. Look, you’ve been home now. Did you get the impression that people are particularly disturbed by the events of the past ten years?”
“I don’t know.”
“People were relieved in ’ninety-one. Life in the old Yuga had been tough on a lot of people, dog eat dog. There was always some damn goal you had to work toward: the radiant future or this or that reform. And those cursed neighbors poking around to see whether your hens were laying more eggs than theirs. So a lot of people breathed a sigh of relief when the old Yuga broke up: they could pick their noses, scratch their asses, put their legs up on the table, turn their music on full blast, or just sit and stare at the box. The Croats kicked out the Serbs, the Serbs kicked out the Croats and beat up the Albanians. And the poor Bosnians — well, they’ve been written off like us émigrés. By both Croats and Serbs. True, the place is riddled with criminals now, and the criminals are making fools out of the lot of them, but they still think they’re better off than before: the criminals are their own at least, and nobody’s setting impossible standards. They should be grateful to Miloševi