in the middle of the night: of Božidar being swallowed up by wheels bigger than himself and thrown out like a rag doll, and of him lying on his belly, eyes wide open, with the blood from his nostrils conquering the snow in a starlike stain. The only other thing I remember is the man who shook me and yelled to me that I should go home, which I finally did, still believing that Božidar would just blink, wipe his nose and get up.
That man, who had been at the other side of the intersection, was the only witness, and he stated at the inquest that he’d seen me and Božidar standing together at the curb. That was enough for different stories to spread through the school and the neighbourhood suggesting that I’d pushed Božidar onto the street or tripped him while he was running. And it was enough to make Božidar’s father come to our door, distraught, with his distress further fuelled by alcohol. What the hell are you hiding him for? he cried and swore, Let me ask him what bloody well happened! Mother managed to stop him at the doorstep and send him away, with tears of both sympathy and determination to protect me, and threatened to make heavy weather to anyone who needled me by alluding to the event. Moreover, she stopped the investigators molesting me and taking me to court as a witness, and also prevented the psychiatrists from poking around in my head. She spent many nights by my bed watching over me in the months which followed.
From then on I always detoured Božidar’s street as if it were cursed. The seat next to me in class remained empty until the end of primary school.
* * *
Father’s condition was stable. That meant he couldn’t think of a single part of his body which didn’t hurt, but no pain was excruciating enough to make him forget the others.
It was incomprehensible that I’d lived with him for so many years. I would rather have gone to have a wisdom tooth pulled out than visit him, and yet the whole time I was rankled by an emptiness I seemed to have left there. So I forced myself to go once a week. I showed up, that was all I could do for him. That cheered him up, for three or four seconds. Then it would be back to moping. We don’t hug, not even when we say goodbye. Basically we avoid physical contact. We’re full of respect for the air between us and careful not to infringe it. We don’t touch on difficult topics, in fact hardly any at all, because when he runs into a gap in his ever more impoverished vocabulary he doesn’t know how to get round it. He stays all frowning and stares into that void–oh what do they call it…–until I help by changing the topic. He regularly reports about the rotten fruit they slip him at the market and the obligatory misunderstandings about the change. But medical issues are still the major topic, and if we leave them it’s virtually only to talk about the weather. At this time of year, that boiled down to the remark that the weather outside was nasty, really nasty. If it was summer, it would have been nasty inside as well. Unbearable. I wouldn’t have disagreed. We’d sit quietly by the TV for a bit because we haven’t played ludo for thirty years or so.
That evening I happened to see a feature on the exhibition of a former fellow student from the Academy. Today he’s a big-time artist, the gallery owner explained with a playful smile: not only intriguing as a personality but also dynamic in the market place. Then a critic spoke in front of one of his pictures about its inner necessity and about reality growing into an elusive fascination; the tangible vanished in the immeasurable yet gained new quantifiability through abstraction. He mentioned a shifting luminosity rising from the depths and crystallising in a seething turmoil, in wellsprings of resistance and reflection. Here we saw broad vision and deep resonance, a blend of abrasive energy and sweet intimacy.
I had to rub my eyes. The pictures were deceptively similar to those he’d begun to paint in the middle of his studies just for fun, as a way of mocking minimalism: each had two or three small squares or triangles, perhaps an arrow or a curvy line, a bit like Kandinsky for bathroom tiles. But their titles were long and enigmatic like Bursting from their Blue Embankment, Bareheaded Brownies Behold the Beanstalk. He made an intelligent impression, which the feature confirmed. Not only did he dazzle critics, the reporter noted, but his clientele was in the specific milieu of footballers and models. Art lovers of this calibre would willingly sacrifice ten thousand kunas and more for a picture, the artist himself admitted in the only original snippet we heard. The camera focussed for a second on a glass of champagne being filled.
Some are born with a champagne glass in their hand and sooner or later it will be filled. And whatever happens in life, they’ll still have their champagne to sip. I have a little theory of my own which I’m coming to believe in more and more: that my father was born with a talent for suffering. Something big just had to come along to trigger that potential and really get him going. There had always been material in abundance, albeit scattered and subject to wear. But the real thing, the capital-E event worthy of full commitment, came in the form of my mother’s death: he seized it with all his remaining strength and devoted himself to it entirely. But over the years, imperceptibly, it stole away once it had done its job and raised him into a state of permanent hypnosis. He mentions Mother less and less, and her grave is overgrown with weeds, because what he now sees is the very essence of suffering, cleansed of external substances.
My own substances and substrates didn’t overly impassion me. Whatever made its way down to me through the genetic gutters didn’t reach my erogenous zones. On my mother’s side, there wasn’t much to whet one’s archaeological appetite anyway. All she inherited from her parents was the vocation of primary school teacher, which she gladly gave up for my future. Her family moved to the city after the Second World War from an area which had been outside the Independent State of Croatia and occupied by the Nazis–this was fortunate because the Germans didn’t put them on an extermination list. They died fairly young of normal human ailments. We had them buried back in their village and visited their graves from time to time. In 1995, the sons of the Croatian Army’s ‘Operation Storm’ thoroughly ‘liberated’ the ramshackle house and daubed a sign on the crumbling walls: OCCUPIED DO NOT BLOW UP. This was quite superfluous because no one intended to expropriate the ruins, but it did happen a few years later when the government presented its refugee resettlement programme.
Father’s family tree was more ramified, but his parsimonious nature also meant that he was no storyteller. I only knew the basics. But in the middle of my studies, while going through Father’s things, I chanced upon my grandfather’s notebook. It wasn’t intended for me or anyone else. Grandfather had evidently kept it in an attempt to clear his head. His aim had been to set down what was real and true amidst the mess of images and voices which besieged him towards the end of his life, taking complete control and deleting his life’s present tense. The truth as laid down by Grandfather’s hand was a hotchpotch of brainwaves jotted down as they came, without order and without concern for occasional contradictions. I needed this about as much as the girl George in Dead Like Me needed the toilet seat to come down and hit her on the head. Still, I showed a sensational, hitherto unseen ability to relate to the family’s nitty-gritty. I adopted all those basics, integrated them into my foundations and took them along with me as life’s luggage. Or rather, they adopted me and shaped me a posteriori to fit into an already tailored dress.
Grandfather’s father grew up in a family of Jewish tailors, and later innkeepers, on German soil. The notebook didn’t trace the family roots back any further. It mentioned a boarding house on the shores of an unnamed lake, which my great-grandfather lost at cards. Allied with alcohol, his gambling passion consumed all other real estate and even created debts which left him no other choice than to secretly relocate to some backwoods. In the chaos of the First World War, he managed to move with his wife and my very small grandfather. Zagreb played the role of backwoods impeccably. No one looked for him there and he was able to start afresh with the acquisition of property, and its squandering.
He found work with a textile dealer. As the years went by, he was allowed to manage the business and later bought the shop in Kačićeva Street. Apart from fabrics, he also traded in sugar, lard, coal and timber. He would often lose his stock to others in games of chance. He played cards almost every night,
