Slavenka Drakulić - The Balkan Express - Fragments from the Other Side of War

Who is she talking about? Who are they , who are the people my mother is afraid will demolish or damage my father’s tombstone? Every Sunday she goes to the cemetery in the small town on the island of Krk where she was born, about thirty kilometres from the port of Rijeka, where she has lived almost all her life. She usually takes a local bus at ten in the morning and returns at one in the afternoon. She does it regardless of the weather, as if in response to a command. There she cleans the graves of her husband and her son, who died just a month before his father: they are right next to each other. The graves are covered by black marble; dry pine needles and cones drift across them. Then she puts fresh flowers on the graves. From the cemetery she can see the bay. Sometimes she sits and watches the bay and the small town on the hill. But she avoids going up there; rather, she waves down the bus passing near the cemetery and returns home.

I know she does not fear for her son, there is a cross on his grave just like on all but one of the graves – my father’s. She is troubled by the red star, the communist one, carved in my father’s tombstone. The grave is well out of sight, in a shady spot by the cemetery’s northern wall, and the star tiny, almost invisible. But it is the only grave with the star and all the locals know it. She is tormented by the thought. I tell her I don’t know whether someone is going to tear it down, it is possible, everything seems to be possible now. And this will have nothing to do with my father being a Federal Army officer – when he died, officers were not yet the enemies of the people, so he died in time – but with the star, the symbol of the former regime and the Federal Army attacking people in Croatia today. I try to imagine the face of the person who might demolish or damage the tombstone, the face of the star-hater. Or several of them. Could it be the local storekeeper, or the young butcher, or the man from the gas station? In the town there are a few fishermen, a dozen or so retired men who bask in the sun by the newsstand like lizards, the Community Centre secretary (what do they call this place now?), an electrician, a harbour master. Otherwise, there are few newcomers, mainly migrant workers from inland. My mother knows them all, she went to school with them. She knows their children and their grandchildren too. My father also knew them, although he came from Rijeka. Every day he used to play cards with them in the taverna, they came to his funeral and afterwards held my mother’s hand. Who, then, could do it, I wonder? But at the same time I am aware that the question is pointless. When she says them , my mother does not mean anyone in particular. She is not talking about individuals, she is talking about the situation that generates hatred. The war. She is talking about what the war looks like in a small, isolated place on an island where everybody knows everybody, where there are no strangers and people start to search for the enemy in their minds – even a dead one, even symbolic, even carved in stone.

My mother is still nervous, she must have gone through an entire packet of cigarettes by now. She expects an answer from me, but I don’t have one, I can see that with each day of the war her insecurity is mounting and they are multiplying, becoming even more distant and anonymous. They won’t give her Father’s pension; this has been going on for months. The fact that he had died before the war started and that he was a Croat – so is my mother, incidentally – makes no difference. For the time being, the retired Federal Army personnel, and their widows as well, will not be given their pensions. There are promises that the new government will regulate the matter. She no longer knows what to expect: maybe she will be evicted from her apartment, the apartment is army-owned, in an army-owned building. In the autumn of 1991 when the first air-raid sirens were sounded, the rumour spread that the snipers hiding in the army apartment buildings shot civilians in the streets. The papers claimed that there were about 2500 snipers in Zagreb. Although never officially confirmed, and even denied a month later, this piece of information was carried by all the newspapers with a maddening conviction which left no margin for doubt, almost to the point of proclaiming a lynch-law. At that time most active Federal Army officers, particularly those of other nationalities, had already left Croatia (or transferred to the Croatian army). People moved into their empty apartments at will until the government took control of them. The tenants who remained in such buildings lived as if under siege, waiting for an ominous knock on the door. Their children were scared of going outside to play or of going to school. Now my mother is afraid that she will be evicted, she trusts no one, keeps listening to the news, chain-smokes and has trouble sleeping. The war is everywhere and is different for each.

‘Maybe I should have the tombstone changed before this happens,’ she says uncertainly, not looking at me. Now her voice is soft, as if she is begging me to agree. She can sense my disapproval, perhaps even rage. But what do I know of her fear when she approaches the cemetery, opens the iron gate and treads carefully among the graves with a faltering step. Can I possibly imagine what she feels at the moment when she lifts her eyes to look at Father’s grave?

I think of Father often these days. He died of a heart attack when he was sixty-seven. He was worn out by his long illness, near the end even breathing was too much of an effort. He wasn’t able to go to or from the haemodyalisis on his own; a hospital attendant would pick him up and carry him all the way to the second floor, he was so light. On sunny days he would sit on a small balcony looking out to sea. We have been told he died like that, looking through the open balcony door in the hospital checkroom. The hospital is high up on the hill, facing the harbour. That day he had just got dressed, he did not complain of any pain as usually. When the cleaning woman entered the room, she found him kneeling against a sofa with arms spread, his face turned to the sea. The last thing he saw were the ships on the sun-lit expanse of the sea.

During my rare visits in the last few years, I could hardly recognize his small, wrinkled face which seemed to shrink, as if his skull was beginning to wither while he was still alive. We seldom found anything to talk about. Politics perhaps, but this would invariably start us quarrelling. He was a communist, of ‘the idea is fine, only the practice stinks’ type. Although Father had grown softer with the years, for me he remained the same rigid man he had always been. The man who got used to pushing people around in the army, the man from whom I ran away from home while I was still practically a child. Standing close to him, I could smell his musty olive-grey uniform which I hated. It was a heavy smell of wool impregnated with the stench of the army canteen, stale tobacco and linoleum, dusty files and the official car. Sometimes, when Mother would iron his uniform over a cloth soaked in water and vinegar it seemed to me I could trace out his entire life in the cloud of steam that billowed from the iron. He went to trade school and loved soccer, bicycling and dancing. In 1942, as a twenty year old, he joined Tito’s partisan army. His elder brother was already there, their mother followed them. He fought in the mountains of Gorski kotar, he saw his friends being killed in battle or freezing to death on Matic-poljana. Nobody knows the things he saw. Never, ever, did he speak about the War. Mother has only recently told me that long after the War was over, for five years maybe, he would writhe and sob in his sleep, and then wake up suddenly gasping for air, drenched in sweat, as if he had just dreamed his own death. In their wedding picture he wears his naval uniform; a handsome young man with blond wavy hair combed neatly back. He had to ask permission from the army command to marry my mother, since her family was not ‘politically suitable’, that is it was a ‘class enemy’. And Grandfather and Grandmother were reluctant to give their daughter away to a man in uniform, the uniform which to them meant the uncivilized men from the woods – partisans. Unable to reconcile themselves to the fact that she wouldn’t have a church wedding, which was not permitted to an army officer but meant so much to my mother’s strong Catholic family, they were to feel resentment to the end of their lives. My grandmother arranged for me and my mother to be baptized secretly; it must have been a kind of revenge. No matter how hard my father tried, he was never good enough for them. The word ‘officer’ was always spoken with contempt.