The Ministry of Pain (12 page)

I watched her
pricking her finger with the needle and sucking out a drop of blood through a miniature dropper, then sticking the dropper with her trembling hand into the opening of a tiny instrument, following the numbers on the display and entering them carefully into her sugar diary: such and such a date, such and such a time, such and such a sugar content. I watched her cast a worried glance at the clock and open the fridge, take out the makings for breakfast, and lay everything out neatly on the table: two plates, two cups, two spoons, two napkins.

“You make the coffee. I’ve had to cut it out. On account of the sugar.”

I poured some Nescafé into cold milk.

“Warm up the milk. Aren’t you going to eat anything?”

“I can’t.”

“Well, I’ve got to. Regular meals at regular times. That’s the way it is with diabetes.” She sighed.

I watched her crumble the bread with her fingers, the way children do. Another of her new habits.

“You’re observing me,” she blurted out suddenly. “I feel like a guinea pig.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve been observing us since the day you arrived,” she said, switching to the plural.

“That’s not true,” I said.

She picked up a moist scrap of bread and began kneading it into a ball. I felt a lump in my throat. I was going to cry. And then she would, too.

“It makes me feel you’re blaming me for something. You think I’m the reason Goran left you.”

I must not let myself be caught in this trap, I kept repeating to myself. I must not let myself be caught in this trap.

“After breakfast we’ll pack and call a cab,” I said as calmly as I could. I noticed that I, too, had switched to the plural.

“Amsterdam is in the same time zone as Zagreb, isn’t it?” she asked, moving into attack mode.

“Of course it is. You know that.”

“So it’s half past eight there, too?”

“Right, only in Dutch you don’t say ‘half past,’ you say…”

“I don’t know why, but I thought it was one hour earlier there.”

“No. It’s the same time.”

“Well, you should know.” She sighed and added, “I can’t say I like thinking of you there.”

“Why?”

“Those canals, I bet they stink.”

“Not at all.”

“But the water is stagnant. It’s got to stink.”

“Oddly enough it doesn’t.”

“Well, I wouldn’t live there if you paid me.”

“Why not?”

“Because it never stops raining and the canals have rats swimming in them.”

“What gives you that idea?”

“I saw it on television,” she lied.

“I haven’t seen a single rat.”

“You never see anything. Your head’s always in the clouds.”

It was heartbreaking, I thought. The need to give offense as I was about to leave. I was abandoning her, and she had to find a way to punish me. At one time this kind of thing would have driven me to tears, but I’d learned to protect myself. Now it was like water off a duck’s back.

“I’m going to pack,” I said, getting up and heading for my room.

She followed.

“Want to take anything as a keepsake?”

“What, for instance?”

“I don’t know. I’ve got some homemade plum preserves.”

“You made plum preserves?”

“No, Mrs. Buden. And I can’t eat them. On account of the sugar.”

“Then I’ll take them,” I said to make her happy.

She brought out a glass jar in a plastic bag.

“Heavens, will you ever learn how to pack?” she said, smoothing out the clothes in my bag. “Wrap it up in a blouse or something so it doesn’t break. Is there anything else? Any of your things?”

“I don’t need anything, Mother,” I said, zipping up the bag. I glanced at my watch and saw there was plenty of time. “Why don’t you give my things away. Maybe Vanda can use them.”

Whenever I go back, I feel I’m attending my own funeral
(Nevena).

She intentionally ignored what I had said.

I mixed another coffee for myself.

“How can you drink that Nescafé cold?” she asked. “Let me warm it up for you.”

“I like it cold.”

“You always did have a mind of your own…. Why haven’t you phoned for the taxi?”

“There’s plenty of time.”

“It takes them ages to get here.”

“There’s plenty of time.”

She looked over at me, then lowered her eyes. We were both searching desperately for neutral ground.

“Let me take your blood pressure,” she offered. “I bet you never have it taken.”

“Good idea,” I said, though the blow was so stunning I could scarcely breathe.

Whenever I go back, I feel like a punching bag. I ache all over
(Boban).

She brought out a plastic pouch and carefully removed the blood pressure monitor. She wound the cuff round her left arm and pressed the button with her free hand. She watched the numbers flash past to the buzzing of the machine. It was over in a minute. “Your blood pressure is normal,” she said, slightly distracted but serene.

She raised her eyes, starting as they met mine.

“I was just testing it,” she hastened to say, like a child caught lying. “I wanted to see if it was working. Now give me your arm.”

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.

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
: he pulled the plug on Yugoslavia, after all. Nobody else had the nerve. And everybody was dying for it.”

“But what about the aftermath? The responsibility for it all.”

“What concern is it of yours?” And what good are questions like that? Look, in a year or two nobody will remember Vukovar. Or Sarajevo for that matter. Not even the people who live there. So don’t get all hot and bothered. It’s not worth it, believe me.”

“But I do.”

“Tell me, have you ever met any of the émigrés who left after World War Two? Or even the ones who left after the crackdown on the nationalists in ’71? Well, I have. I’ve got an uncle in America, and he introduced me to them. It was like meeting ghosts. They’d go on and on about things that hadn’t the slightest relevance to our lives. It was their perception of time that did it. You change more than your space when you leave; you change your time, your inner time. Time in Zagreb is moving much faster now than your inner time. You’re stuck back in your own time frame. I bet you think the war took place yesterday.”

“But it did!” I said heatedly. “And it isn’t over yet.”

“Well, it is for the people who stayed behind! Your ‘yesterday’ is their ancient history. Remember the émigrés who rushed back from Canada, Australia, Western Europe, and South America after Croatia declared its independence? Croats tried and true. The crooks and legionnaires and hitmen and losers who responded to Tudjman’s clarion call.”

“Exhibits from a provincial museum.”

“Precisely. Well, in a few years we may look like them to the people who stayed behind. So the thing to do is forget, forget everything.”

“Then who will remember?”

“Why do you think people invent symbolic surrogates? To get others to suffer and remember for them.”

“I don’t know if I…”

“Well, let me tell you. Our story is not an easy one to tell. Even numbers tell different stories to different people. What we experience as a deluge, others experience as a shower: a few hundred thousand killed, a million or two displaced, a fire here, a bomb there, a bit of plundering…. Mere bagatelles! More people lost their lives in the floods in India this year.”

“You must be mad!”

“People have no bent for misfortune, believe me. They can’t identify with mass disaster. Not for long, at least, and not even if the disaster is their own. That’s why they’ve come up with the surrogate solution.”

“I don’t understand.”

“More people know that Elvis Presley is no longer with us than that the Sarajevo Library is no longer with us. Or the Muslim victims of Srebrenica. Disaster puts people off.”

“It’s horrible what you’re saying.”

“You ain’t heard nothing yet. Once I get going, you’ll be itching to ditch me…”

He was interrupted by a stewardess announcing the descent into Amsterdam.

“Saved by the bell,” he said with a cordial smile.

I feel more comfortable in Dutch, said Nevena, as if Dutch were a sleeping bag.

“I feel more comfortable in the air,” I said.

My fellow passenger overlooked the remark, as if finding it slightly off-color.

Visibility was perfect—the air clear, the sky blue, the sun shining brightly. The land beneath us was like a matzoh, divided into thin, regular segments. The Netherlands. Malevich’s
White Square
in tens of thousands of cheap reproductions. All at once I realized I had not one single picture of Zagreb in my head. I tried
hard to conjure something up, but all I could muster was a series of fuzzy and, oddly enough, black-and-white images. My subconscious had for some reason whisked my Zagreb files back to the precolor era.

“Tell me,” I said, turning abruptly to my neighbor, “is that Varteks shop still in Republic Square?”

“You mean Governor Jela
i
Square.”