Yugoslavia, My Fatherland

18

‘Dead!’ she said again, after I hadn’t responded to her sudden pronouncement: ‘Dad’s dead.’ As always, I replied to her Slovene words with silence. Maybe she realized that, this time, it wasn’t so much an example of incomprehension as rebellion. Or she wasn’t ready for this situation that she had doubtless rehearsed in her head over the course of months, and so she translated herself instinctively, as if by mistake, for the first and the last time, into the discarded language of her long-dead happiness. Anyway, my mother told me the most shocking news a twelve year old can imagine, and did so in two languages.

Earlier that cold February day, she had bought me a football, which she called a belated gift for all our missed holidays, and had literally forced me to go out to the icy school playground to play with it. There, completely alone, in gloves and a winter jacket, in my guise as the loneliest orphan in the world, I had absentmindedly set about beating an invisible goalkeeper. Empty tarmac platforms, desolate since mid October, gaped around me, as I kicked my new ball, a gift I hadn’t dared wish for, because I had known we didn’t have the money for it. I had suspected that this was her desperate attempt to get me away from the apartment for some reason or other, or to try to help me, in her own way, to fit in with my peers in front of the apartment building. I had even thought that this might be a flash of her maternal instinct, once considered extinct, but I certainly hadn’t thought that it was a way to cheer me up before ruining my day, my week, my year, my life.

So, at minus three degrees Celsius, I had been kicking my new ball around, hands jammed into my pockets, feeling endlessly sorry for this woman who didn’t know how to get close to her child, and ended up buying him a football and sending him into the bitter cold, as part of her master plan to cheer him up a bit. I had even become aware of her irreversibly mislaid sense of reality, her lack of realization that in February sport fields were empty, and shooting at goals in winter boots was no fun at all. I had felt sorry for the woman who, wishing to make her son happy, made a fool out of him.

After less than an hour, I had returned from the field and found her with a tear stained face, which only confirmed my premonition. She didn’t wait for me to take my boots off, for my hands to thaw and for my cheeks to regain their colour. She didn’t wait for me to unwrap my scarf and take the cap off my head, but she just shot:

‘Dad’s dead!’ and then, in case I missed it, ‘Dead!’

I didn’t respond and my face remained unchanged, while Dusha started explaining how he had died. I remember words just pouring out of her, but I wasn’t listening and went to my room, pulled Hashim’s still-intact packet of green firecrackers from under the mattress, and ran back outside. She yelled after me, called for me to come back, but at that moment, I only wanted the world to start cracking. It had to crack, that was all. I felt nothing else.

I think she ran after me, but I was too quick for her, and raced towards the pitch, which was still desolate and easily provided shelter to hide from anyone who could have peeked into my mourning ritual. There were a hundred firecrackers in the packet, a hundred powerful green firecrackers that echoed around the neighbourhood, one after another, as I sat under a tree by the playground, lighting them up and throwing them, my mind a blank. It was cracking, it was really exploding, and it took a nice long time, as some firecrackers were really hard to light up, but I didn’t mind it at all. The lighter I had almost pulled from Dusha’s hands burnt my fingers, but I couldn’t have cared less. I felt the need for it to crack and burst and boom and I wanted never to run out of firecrackers; for them to crack more and more powerfully, as I lit them up more quickly.

I had about ten unlit firecrackers left, when two police officers approached me, pulled me roughly up to my feet, walked me to their car, and drove me straight to the police station. They asked me where I lived, and what my name was. They wanted the phone number of my house, the name of my father and mother, and a hundred other pieces of personal information that I obediently gave them, hoping they would never ask me why exactly I had been sitting there under a tree throwing ninety firecrackers.

I don’t know if Dusha already explained to the police officers over the phone what exactly had happened, but when she got to the police station, she didn’t say a word. She just hugged me and kindly nodded to them. She was probably incapable of speaking, because she didn’t say anything when we got home, either. In the evening, she tried once more to tell me about Nedelko’s death, and also to comfort me, but I wasn’t listening and just let her hug me, thinking that I was comforting her, too. The next morning, we both pretended that we woke to a completely normal day, and didn’t speak about firecrackers, police or deceased fathers. According to my mother, Nedelko Borojević died on 17 February 1992. And that was it.