as if it was.
Back here, I know every rat-run, hiding place and way out in case of danger.
As kids we all had that knowledge – in our legs more than in our heads, like a foreign language that waited, rolling around in our middle ear, whose hot-blooded Romance melody we had woven into our own, far more languid Slav one. Me, my sister and Daniel, and the boys too, who came to us from the new estates beyond the railway – the Iroquois Brothers’ family and some other outlanders, always with freshly shaved heads in summer. At that time they wanted to be like us, so they gabbled the way we did, differently from their sweet fat mums and hairy dads whose consonants stuck in their gullets and who used to yell, whenever they needed to speak.
We cobbled that language together from what we learned at home from our parents as much as from the unknown translators of film subtitles and dubbed cartoons; the language we’d picked up in the street and from announcers on the News and stolen from Dylan Dog, Grunf, Sammy Jo Carrington and Zane Grey. It was the musical lingua franca from the west of the city and the centre through the Old Settlement and as far as the railway. Wherever there were kids who talked and called to one another. We sought each other out and hung out, there was nothing else to do, and nor did there need to be.
Variations on the game of hide-and-seek offered endless possibilities. Or the game of group seeks group. Back alleys lead through unlocked villas, or through the kitchen of the cake shop with big vats of custard and tubs of ice cream, through dark vaults leading down to still darker cellars. The cellars come to an end in tight passages between buildings, pipes that emerge into bare courtyards with sheets drying above them, steps that end in the sky, garrets on rotten beams, roofs over which we leap to the old castle, then we clamber up on the sea side, dragging ourselves along the edge of the wall, and coming down into the park, under upturned boats in dry berths.
That’s where we found Daniel, the first time he got lost; he had hidden under a boat on the slipway during a game of hide-and-seek and sung to himself so as not to be afraid. After that he kept disappearing and he would stay away for increasingly long spells – because he was no longer afraid, he said.
We thought all our games and wars must be even more exciting than those of the children who grew up in the movies with the cactuses and the big bright sun over the wide prairie. After all, there is a prairie here, too, at the foot of the hill above the cemetery where my father and brother are buried, even though now the path there is cut off by huge houses with hens pecking around them.
It was in a battle on the lunar expanse behind the cement works and old saltpans, between the road and the prairie, that I won my real name, Rusty, because of my red hair. That day I fell three times for justice and liberty, I was a courageous general and that’s the name I call myself – Rusty – in private.
Immediately after the war, through an exchange of volunteers, a precocious first-year student from Heidelberg ended up among us. He had come to interview us for their student radio station about the post-war life of young people in Croatia.
‘You live in a multicultural country...’ he began.
‘No, I don’t,’ I said into the dictaphone, distinctly, as though it was a microphone.
‘Oh, I knows what he means,’ my sister butted in. ‘There’s various nations here, at least two nations in every house in our street, but it’s all the same mangy culture, if you asks me. Only the Chinese can save us from boredom.’
My sister had her own way of being imbued with the spirit of internationalism.
‘Eh,’ said my sister to the lad from Heidelberg, slapping him on the shoulder in a comradely way, ‘before this war we used to play at war with the tourists; then the little Germans and Italians acted Germans and Italians. ’
‘And in this war? And afterwards?’ he cleared his throat and turned the dictaphone towards me.
‘Oh, I don’t know. No one played at these Balkan wars, if that’s what you mean. Fuck it, they all wanted to be Croats.’
‘Yep,’ my sister confirmed.
‘That’s why we played cowboys and Indians.’
‘With the outlanders.’
‘Against the outlanders. You have to have some kind of conflict: cowboys and Indians.’
English and Dutch people had recently settled in our narrow lane, followed by Belgians and French people – I don’t think the Chinese believe that poverty is especially romantic. It was fascinating to watch dwellings stuck together with stone, cement and bird droppings, with worms burrowing through their beams and mice nesting in them, turn into little picture-book cottages. It was a delight for those with a bit of time and money.
All the Chinese people I’ve ever met live in high-rise blocks, I reflected. There are those who value the solidity of construction, I completely get that. They are people who live in settlements like ours all over the world.
'Jesus, these tourists are cracked,’ said my sister before taking her suitcase and going down the hall, saying goodbye to us and disappearing behind the baker’s house, leaving a greasy, pinkish mark on her cup. My sister calls all the westerners who have moved into our street over the last few years, transforming those hovels into pleasant summer-houses, tourists.
'Paint away, carry on painting,' she said, watching our Irish neighbour waving to us in a friendly way from under a paper cap. ‘You’ll never get rid of the damp and woodworm, the stink of burned onions, or the kids on your steps.’
Perhaps that’s why they come, I thought.
The daddy tourists push their children around in buggies, and we see them hanging out washing on the line between houses in the street. They don’t grill fish on charcoal in an old concrete mould or cardboard box in front of their front door with the other men in blue overalls. And they haven’t learned to play cards.
We used to have my father’s Yugoslav National Army officers, but they all married nice girls and evaporated after a while during the last war, or they ran off after some skirt, and their wives went back to their parents’ kitchens, in their unsuitably fine dresses, and later concealed their children’s surnames. We also used to have the working fathers, manual workers, usually from Macedonian or, more often, Bosnian villages, who married bad girls. They stayed on in our street, to drink with their wives and fight with their sons. Or the other way round. They were the only fathers we ever saw, apart from the occasional sailor or a dad working abroad. Every time they came home, those men would find a new bun in the oven.
And then there was my father, not quite like anyone else. He bore the surname of his long-dead mother, and whether his old man had been a Kraut, as people said, no one knew for sure. At home no one talked about that, he least of all. He had this red hair and light skin. Like me and Daniel.
My sister is the image of Mother, she looks like the other women in the Old Settlement: brown velvet, black silk, sandpaper.
Later Daniel transformed that unknown forebear into a soldier of the Third Reich who falls in love with a young virgin in the occupied Town from – to make matters worse, but more interesting – a Partisan family. He returns several years after the war and in a brief and passionate affair he gives her a son. They never see each other again; she dies young of grief, a victim of complex political circumstances.
I
