Yugoslavia, My Fatherland

21

It was getting harder over the years for the former police chief, Dushan Podlogar to hide the tiny flashes of joy upon my rare visits and at times, he seemed like a real grandfather. But already worn out by diabetes and a weak heart, he began suffering from stomach cancer, and after I had left home in protest, I found only a bed ridden creature to greet me. And Maria too, with a dying husband, didn’t have the slightest desire to offer shelter to a runaway teenager.

Mrs. Podlogar never liked unannounced visits, and when she opened the door to me, she was ready to close it post-haste, thinking I was the postman or a door-to-door salesman. Her astounded gaze couldn’t hide the fact that she would rather see a stranger or even a Gypsy psychic than her grandson with two bags in his hands and a backpack on his back. It seemed that Dusha and I only reminded Maria of her sins, and who knows if she wouldn’t have turned me away, if her surprised gaze hadn’t lasted so long that it aroused the curiosity of the old snoop. He interrupted the awkward silence for us, and shouted from his bed: ‘Who is it? Maria, who is it?’

So Maria had no choice but to let me in, shouting at least three times into the ceiling that Vladan was here. Before she disappeared somewhere inside the house, she had quickly told me the house rules: ‘Dushan’s upstairs. Go say hi to him, just don’t bother him too long, because he’s weak.’

I went up the stairs and found my grandfather barely recognizable. In the three months since I last saw him, he had shriveled like a withered rose. The disease sucked all the sharpness, sarcasm and anger out of him, as well as the life. Now he lay on his deathbed in front of me almost like a sweet and affectionate old man. His eyes looked at me with sincere gratitude, and his hand struggled to touch mine.

‘Vladan,’ he whispered, and seemed happy that I was sitting next to him. He hadn’t the strength to talk much, but when I tried to get up, he squeezed me as hard as he could and barely visibly shook his head. So I sat next to him for almost two hours, before he fell asleep and I could go to the toilet, listening to Maria’s advice that Dushan should rest more, which I later interpreted as her jealousy of his joy over my presence. As soon as he woke, Dushan called me back, and so I sat by his bedside until the evening and at some point started telling him about Dusha’s wedding, about Dragan, her pregnancy and about my never wanting to go back to Ljubljana. I told him everything and he listened, looking at me with affection and, in the end, he took my hand and whispered: ‘Stay here. Stay here.’

When soon after that Maria came into the room and brought him food and drugs, I had to step away, so I wouldn’t see her changing his diapers and wiping his behind, but I could hear from behind the closed door how Dushan summarized my story in a few sentences. For her ears, he adjusted any facts that didn’t favour me, and told her I would be living with them, then ordered her to get the bed in Dusha’s room ready. And when Dushan fell asleep soon after that, Maria officially informed me that my bed was ready, and that she had let Dusha know I was there. She also added that I should go to the shop tomorrow to buy things I liked to eat, because she didn’t know what young people ate.

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And so it was that I spent the last few days of his life with Dushan Podlogar, sitting by his bed, holding his hand and absorbing a little love from his tired gaze. He was wasting away before my eyes, and had more difficulty talking every day, until he couldn’t utter a word, and we only communicated by touching. In exchange for him taking me in, I told him everything about Pula, my friends there, the Golden Rocks beach and the high rocks from which I used to jump into the sea; about the Arena and the fireworks there; my primary school and classmate Mirana, who was my first crush (which was why I broke her glasses); about Maki and the He Man action figure; the shipyard and the large ships that were once built there; about Nedelko’s barracks; about the crazy priest who chased us away from the church playground, where we used to play football, and screamed after us, about our neighbour, Enisa, who used to call me her baby boy, so that I believed, for a long time, that she had given birth to me, rather than my mother. I told him about Emir Muzirović, aka Loza, about Dusha and Nedelko, our trips along the coast and the best pizza in town. All day I told him about various incidents from my childhood, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him about other, less happy times. So my stories always ended before the ‘secondment’ and Shkeljqim’s truck.

One day, Dushan stopped nodding when listening to me, the next day he stopped smiling, the third day he wasn’t able to hold my hand any longer, and the fourth day he passed away, without taking his eyes off me, not even when Maria was in the room. I was sure that she was more hurt by Dushan’s late attachment to me than by his death.

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Following Dushan’s death, Dusha spoke to Maria on the phone several times, but she came neither to the house nor to the funeral. Maria justified her absence to people with silly-sounding words, about how her daughter couldn’t stand cemeteries and that she always got sick during funerals. All this vividly reminded me of the tall tales of Dusha leaving to study in Ljubljana that Dushan used to tell these people. Listening to Mrs. Podlogar repeat her story again and again, I wondered where people found the need to propagate this perfect family image, and whether actually functional families really existed, or were they all just pretend, like Maria and Dushan; pretending all their lives.

Besides us, the funeral was attended by a few neighbours, who came out of a sense of village duty, a few of Dushan’s fellow Partisans, who were counting the remaining survivors, Maria’s cousin’s daughter, Lidia, along with the cemetery workers. It was a modest funeral, without eulogies, songs and other formalities. We put the urn into the niche, Maria crossed herself, a lady lit a candle, and we stood by the grave for a bit and tried to be silent in grief, and then went our separate ways. It snowed softly the whole day and the cold wind blew and the weather was gloomy, just as it should be at a funeral.

Lidia then drove Maria and me back to the house, where we ate some reheated bean and barley soup, and then went to our respective rooms. The phone rang in the afternoon, and Maria briefly described the funeral to Dusha. In the evening, she came to see me and tell me that it would be reasonable for me to go back to my mother now, who probably missed me. I asked her if I could stay with her for two more days, and repeated my promise to go back home several times, until Maria reluctantly accepted.

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Two days after Dushan Podlogar’s funeral, I left my grandparent’s house after a quick goodbye, as if I was off to the shop, to a woman who simply wouldn’t or couldn’t be a grandmother to her grandson. But I didn’t go back to our flat. Instead, I went to a small basement cubbyhole at the edge of Ljubljana, probably similar to the one Dusha had resorted to many years ago. I withdrew all the money I had on my savings account, added a few tolars Maria had stuffed in my hand when I was leaving, and paid the first month’s rent. I explained to the landlord, who showed me around my new home without many words, that I was a student from out of town, that I was studying Roman law and didn’t want to be in a student hall of residence because you couldn’t get any peace there. I also assured him that I wouldn’t be any trouble. But he just dropped the key to my room in my hand, saying that ‘he doesn’t give a shit what I read here,’ but that he would quickly send me back to ‘the God-forsaken place I came from’ the first day after my payment was late.

So, at the age of fifteen, I found myself lying in a cold student room, feeling that life had just cremated me, strewn me to the wind and scattered me to the four corners. I couldn’t see my nest anywhere anymore, and there was no ground where I could land, which I could dig into and slowly penetrate its depths. I was desolate on my little continent, irreversibly separated from the larger one, and I didn’t know how and why I came to be there. Impassable distances separated me from the rest of the world. They had their names, their homes, their families and their spiritual abodes, which defined and determined them. They were from somewhere, they were someone, and they all belonged to someone or something. They knew everything they needed to know about themselves. I didn’t know anything about myself anymore.

I didn’t share my story with anyone, and this made it more fateful than all the slaps and curses it might have brought me. The mercilessness of my situation provided me with the final acceptance of the fact that my father was really dead, and that there was no point in hoping for his miraculous return. Maybe it was an illogical acceptance, but it was in line with the only perception of myself I had left. My identity was only that of a victim; a victim of everything and everyone. I was a victim of an unfair sequence of events that had forcefully dragged me from a full children’s playground, in the middle of an innocent children’s game, into a cold, dark and solitary place, forever removed from this world.

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The next day, when I finally returned to school, I was officially missing, and Dusha and Dragan were looking for me in panic all around Ljubljana, until they found me at a school desk. Poor Dusha literally barged into the classroom out of sheer joy that I was still alive and well, and was hysterically hugging and kissing me, so that my classmates believed, for years to come, that my mother had gone crazy. Meanwhile, Dragan stood at the door, shooting his killer gaze at me, telling me that our friendship was irreversibly over, and that he would never forgive me for scaring his pregnant wife to death, and that he would never even try to understand what brought me to this shameful teenage foolishness.

In the evening, we sat in front of the TV in our small apartment, half filled with Dragan’s parents’ stuff. The three of us listened to the news that the ‘chiefs of the Balkans,’ as Dragan referred to them all, had met in the American town of Dayton, to end the war in Bosnia. None of us were in the mood to be appropriately glad to hear this news, yet it was truly welcome, because with it we could more easily avoid talking about things that were far more important for us. Dusha tried to start a conversation a few times and Dragan, as if predetermined, instantly reacted each time by turning down the TV, but she was always interrupted by an interesting comment or a news correspondent reporting on another historic event.

Sitting there with the Ćirićs, I had the unprecedented feeling that my life was coming to an end, just like the war in Bosnia. Everything was upside-down. I didn’t have a father, a mother, a brother, a grandmother or friends, although in theory, I had all that. But only in theory. In reality, I didn’t have anyone. So I sat there, staring at the TV, hoping that the news would never end. At some point, out of sheer desperation and defeat, I blurted out that I wanted to live alone, and that I felt this was the best solution for all of us.

Dusha probably expected just such a suggestion, and had prepared herself for it in advance because, without much contradiction, she agreed for her and Dragan to pay my rent. The conditions were that I live modestly, was good in school and so on. However, Dragan insisted that if I wanted to live alone, I would have to work, to which I didn’t dare object, probably thinking that Dragan wasn’t completely serious about it.

On the historical day when Slobodan Milošević, Franjo Tuđman and Alija Izetbegović nonchalantly ended the war in the Balkans, with three autographs for their American fans, the three of us signed our own peace agreement, and buried the hatchet. We found ourselves happily sitting in the dark, not knowing what else to do with each other, and so when Dragan turned up the TV again, and we could redirect our attention to Dayton, all three of us were finally relieved.

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The next day, I returned to my student room and a few days later, Dragan found me my first temporary job. I counted traffic. I counted happy people who were freely turning from one road to another in their cars, while I was stuck in one spot. Dragan found me a few more jobs after that, but then I started looking for them myself, which finally drove our relationship to a standstill.

Unlike him, Dusha never, in all these years, found me a single day’s work, and I’m sure she never even tried. I understood this as a kind of a peculiar farewell present from her, and the only evidence of her maternal care and compassion I’ve received since Dayton.

And even that was probably a stretch.