I went to the town of N to do what I had been trained to do: teach. I was a teacher like so many others except for one thing: I had gone to the school and the town of N from — Goli otok.
Papa’s confession was infused with his experience as a political prisoner on Goli otok for his Cominform sympathies. It had completely derailed him: even after his release he did not feel absolved. While he was “inside,” “absent from life,” while he spent “all day, every day carrying a ten-kilogram rock up a fifty-meter incline and, if the guard happened to be in a good mood, dropping it to the ground for a moment’s respite before proceeding back down the incline with the rock in tow,” the people on the outside had learned, ever more shamelessly, to “pick the state’s pockets.” He called his postprison life posthumous and himself “the corpse,” forced to hide his Goli otok past like a case of syphilis. He felt exiled from life on other accounts as welclass="underline" he had lost his partisan status (at one point he describes how he was stripped of all military honors) and was no longer a Communist (he had been expelled from the Party). All he was now was a “schoolmaster.”
Tone and mood varied: self-pity would yield to a schoolmasterly sermonizing or the indignation of the true believer or the activism of the provincial social worker — cum — political functionary. At first I thought he was addressing a set of invisible prison walls, but before long I realized that his true audience was neither his future progeny nor Tito nor the Party nor the secret police nor the Yugoslav state nor the brutal Goli otok guards; it was the small town where he had taught.
What gradually emerged was a picture of everyday life in the Yugoslav provinces during the fifties and sixties. Papa gave a minute description of how after several years as a teacher in N he started renovating the dilapidated school — cementing over the muddy courtyard, then gathering some discarded boards and putting up a workshop; how much later, when he had become head of the local university-extension branch, he undertook the construction of a House of Culture and the creation of a Workers Society for the Arts; how he set up an amateur theater group for which he managed to acquire real floodlights; how the first cinema came to be built and how they procured films for it; how they founded the first genuine public library and reading room and how they financed books for it; how they put new life into the much neglected municipal park; how they built a secondary school complex and the first swimming pool; how they organized a basketball club; how they instituted the first music school….
The pages devoted to his pupils were particularly warm. At one point he recounted having misspoken and said “Go up on the board” instead of “Go up to the board,” and while his back was turned the pupil thus bidden had taken him at his word. “The boy had removed the blackboard from its wooden stand and, to the great merriment of the class, stepped onto it. That boy eventually earned two university degrees.”
Upon retirement — he had moved to Zagreb by then — he received the standard symbolic gold watch for having done his duty, but he was deeply wounded that no sign of gratitude came from the town where he had spent the best years of his life.
At the very end of the “book” Papa devoted inordinate space to descriptions of the various cupboards, wardrobes, and shelves in his life, from childhood to old age (coffins belonging for him to the same category). He was especially expansive on the bookshelves in the Zagreb flat, out of which all kinds of documents, posters, and medals were wont to fall. One such document praised him for his “selfless educational endeavors on behalf of the younger generation during the War of National Liberation,” another for his “selfless endeavors to develop and strengthen the social and cultural life of our country.” Yet another was called “The Partisan Teacher Certificate.” (“It reminded me of the days when the three Rs were taught to the roar of German bombers in one direction and Allied Flying Fortresses in the other, of cannon fire in the distance and machine-gun fire close at hand. Our pupils would sit beneath a tree with slates in their laps and chalk in their hands, learning words, reading, and doing sums under the watchful eye of the partisan teacher….”)
One day I started riffling through those yellowed documents and what did I find but a single sheet of paper with the state seal at the top. And what did I see but my name and the fact that I was being awarded a medal for service to the nation. I sat there thinking to myself, “What kind of a nation can this be if I’ve done it enough of a service to deserve an award and have all but forgotten I received it?” Yet as I sat there holding that sheet of paper, suddenly, in a flash, the fear of having wasted a life went up in smoke. My eyes ran down the text and sure enough there it was. It might as well have happened yesterday….
I arrive in Zagreb with no idea what I’m doing there, but dressed up to the nines, tie and all (not even my worst enemy could have devised a greater torture). The auditorium I’m ushered into has a ceremonial feel to it — people are whispering, looking expectant, there’s not a smile in the place — and then the director of the University Extension Association of Croatia walks onto the stage, a sheaf of important-looking papers under his arm. “The first certificate for major contributions to the consolidation, growth, and further development of education and culture in the Socialist Republic of Croatia goes to…” and he reads out my name.
Papa belonged to the generation that truly believed it was building a brighter future. He had joined the partisan movement as a convinced anti-Fascist and felt he had won the war. If he had ended up in a camp for the politically unreliable, it must have been because he had stated somewhere in public that he refused to accept the existence of Stalinist camps. Upon his release, “unshaken in his convictions,” he went back to “building a better tomorrow,” but by the time he retired he had lost his illusions — hence the “books.” There he lined up the shades of the people who would eventually bring down everything he had believed in, many of whom, too weak to withstand the herd instinct, were members of his own generation. And once he had put down everything he knew, he threw open the window to take a deep breath and examine the ruins. Time had regressed. He was back where he had started from. It was wartime again. There were camps and barbed wire.
I wondered whether anyone would ever read what he had to say. The grandchildren he hoped for, should he have any, would speak Japanese. Olga, who had heard it all a thousand times over, was more concerned about when she would be able to paint the walls white. Over the years Papa had turned from victim to torturer and turned Mama into a mother confessor whom he constantly battered with words.
I could just picture Papa plastering the walls with his plaints, sending out signals no one wished to receive, justifying his existence, whining, rehearsing the slights to which he had been subjected, tracing list after list of them in the air, galled by disillusion and petty, filthy, human betrayal. I pictured him standing in the middle of the room in his striped pajamas — the tops unbuttoned, the catheter sticking out of the bottoms — emitting swarms of kamikaze-fly words splatting the walls and leaving blood specks behind.
I thought of Goran, too. Goran like his father nurtured his share of slights. He had doubtless dragged them to Japan with him, smuggling them across the border like a cache of jewels. Like his father he had been tainted (“tainted” is a word his father uses somewhere) by the experience of exclusion. Expunge — eliminate — delete — expel — excommunicate — ban — interdict — keep out — shut out from — prohibit from — banish — erase — exclude…And out goes Y-O-U!