I wasn’t all that eager to see her, but it rankled a bit that during what was now the months I’d spent in Amsterdam she hadn’t once phoned. I put on makeup for the first time in ages, donned earrings and high heels. Walking down Bloemstraat looking for her house, I felt somewhat abashed at my desire to go all out for her. I wanted her to see me at my best and was using the costume to disguise the true state of affairs.
Ines hadn’t changed a bit. She offered me her cheek at the door, took me by the arm, and led me into the house, babbling all the while (“Tanjicaaaa! Spin round so I can have a good look at you! Why, you look simply marvelous! Like a girl of fifteen! And that dress! Did you get it here? I still pop over to London whenever I need something. You should see Cees fume! ‘What makes you think you can’t find one here!’ he says. Well, you can’t. Oh, they do their best for a pitifully short stretch along the P.C. Hooftstraat, but as department stores go, Bijenkorf is barely a cut above our NaMa…. God! Remember NaMa? Why, any girl from Virovitica dresses better than your average Dutchwoman. You’ve noticed it, too. I’m sure you have.”)
Anyone would have thought that Ines and I were old friends coming together after a long separation, and her nonstop jabber had me believing it, too. I felt I’d fallen down on the job, neglected the friendship.
Ines gave me a tour of the house before we sat down to eat. First she showed me the children’s rooms. (“The children are with Cees’s mother. Piet has just turned seven, and Marijke is three. Here’s a picture of them. Piet and Marica, as I call her.”) The house was spacious and furnished simply, though the walls were covered with paintings by Croatian naive artists (“I wanted something to remind me of home,” she said, noticing my look. “And something to show the Dutch that we weren’t beggars; know what I mean?”). My eyes lit upon the masters of Croatian modernism on the bookshelves: the collected works of Krleža, Ujevi
, Matoš (“I do so like to read an Ujevi poem before I go to sleep. Don’t you? Though you read oodles more than me, I’m sure. You can’t imagine how those children wear me out!”). The curtains on the kitchen windows were made of Slovenian lace, and on the windowsill there was a small wooden shelf housing a gingerbread heart. It was there she put the box of Kraš chocolates in the shape of a Croatian passport, my house gift to her.
“And did he just disappear?” she asked me coyly in the kitchen.
“Who?”
“Why, Goran, of course.”
“He didn’t disappear. He’s in Japan.”
“Are you in touch?”
“No.”
“Who would have guessed it! The model couple! To think it happened to you!”
“Well, it did.”
“Serves you right for getting mixed up with a ‘Miloševi,’” she said jokingly.
I didn’t respond. I was surprised she had remembered Goran was officially classified as a Serb.
“Hey, don’t get your back up! I was only joking. I can see right through you, old girl. You locked him in your heart. He said you’d never part. But he’s now fancy-free. And you have lost the key.”
I couldn’t help smiling at the lines of the old scrapbook ditty, and suddenly the tension was gone.
“If you’d married a Croat the way I did, you’d have had an easier time getting over him,” she said. “You’d be on your second marriage by now.”
“Missed my chance.”
“Vladek went off the deep end the moment we got to Amsterdam. He got into grass and stuff. I mean really into it.” She pronounced the word “grass” as if it were a euphemism and whispered it as if our parents might be listening in.
“Where’s Vladek now?”
“Not even the police know. But I don’t care. He’s not my problem anymore…. Well, let’s have something to eat.”
Cees spoke a pretty decent Croatian. (“See what I’ve made of him? Done a pretty good job, haven’t I? Though it was really his mother-in-law, wasn’t it, Cees? Oh, and by the way, how’s your family doing? I don’t even know who you’ve still got back home….”) Ines kept the chatter up the whole time I was there. The perfect hostess, she put out her best silver (“I put it out for you, to remind you of the way we used to live: it comes from my grandmother”), “our” wine and “our” olive oil (“We go home every summer. We’ve got a sweet little place on Kor
ula. You’ll have to come and see it some time. And we come back laden down like Gypsies with wine and olive oil and prosciutto, everything you can imagine. Cees just loves it there. The kids, too. It means a lot to me for the kids to speak Croatian. And to Mama, too, of course. Mama spends a full two months every year with the kids”). On and on she went about the seashore, the kids, her mother, Cees’s mother, the Dutch. I hardly got a word in edgewise.
In other circumstances I might have been bored, but that evening I found the conversation relaxing. The coy nasal babble was like a balm. For the first time in ages life seemed “normal” to me. Time itself seemed to come together, its stitches healed. I was on firm ground at last, basking in the pleasant warmth of Ines’s words. For a second I thought we were all in Zagreb. True, we were a bit older and we had Cees with us rather than Vladek, but Goran would be right back. He’d just run out for another bottle of wine….
“You must try my poppy-seed cake. I made it just for you. Thank God for the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Otherwise we wouldn’t know what real pastry is, if you know what I mean. I had to bring the poppy seed from Zagreb, too. You can’t find it here anymore, not even from the — what shall I call them? — the Turks.” She clearly expected me to get her mildly racist reference and to approve it with a wink.
“‘Bureks, baklava, and poppy-seed noodles,’” I sang.
“You and your Yugonostalgia,” she grumbled. I was taken aback by the remark. She made it sound as though I were the one who hadn’t stopped going on about the country.
Over coffee Ines switched to the plural.
“We’re glad we were able to help you. It’s so rare people can help one another. And you were up there with the best of them, so I said to Cees, I said, Tanja’s the one to invite. We’ve heard a lot about your students. About that boy, too. Dreadful!”
Again I was taken aback. I sensed the prattle was leading somewhere.
“That boy’s name was Uroš,” I said.
“Every generation has its suicide,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“We had one when we were at the university, remember? What was his name?”
“Nenad.”
“Right. Went off to India, came back and did himself in. His father was a general. It was drug related, I think. God! Remember all the people who made the pilgrimage to India? But you and me, we never fell for all that chakra and mantra stuff, right?”
“Have you found out anything about that student?” Cees asked, cutting off Ines, for which I was grateful.
I told him everything I knew.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” he said, “but I’ve had some complaints from the students about you.”
His words were a punch in the solar plexus.
“What kind of complaints?”