was made her assistant. She bore that blow heroically, not flinching from her beliefs despite the objections of others. Her response was to opt out of any effective activity and spend the rest of her working life on go-slow, practicing quiet sabotage, until this was interrupted by the democratic changes in the early nineties; and her job was immediately terminated. Aged fifty-three, in the middle of the war, she found herself on the dole. The only other thing she could do, being a graduate accordion teacher, was to try and make ends meet by giving private lessons, but her skill was anything but appealing at that moment in history; in oh-so-refined Croatia, few things were considered as barbarously Balkan as playing the accordion.
Mother didn’t even try to arouse my musical talent, but God was number one on the agenda. I went through the complete torture of confession, communion, confirmation, saying the Lord’s Prayer before bed and going on pilgrimages to Marija Bistrica. The merciless woman even managed–undoubtedly through the magnitude of her sacrifice–to have me accepted as an altar boy. But that didn’t last long, thanks to the unavoidable difficulties caused by my sooty black head jutting out of the angelically white habit and my dark hands wrapped around the candle–it reeked of a Satanic diversion.
When I think back to my childhood, my first association is with smoke, not only from censers but also cigarettes. Mother smoked so much that layers of haze constantly hung in the house, around one metre from the ceiling, which no airing could dispel; she always had at least one cigarette burning, frequently more. She would forget them in the rooms and light a new one as soon as she noticed she had one hand too many. She got up for a smoke at night, too, woken by the lack of nicotine. Smoking merged with her being to such an extent that you no longer perceived a cigarette in her hand as an object; it could only be seen as an absence in the rare moments she wasn’t smoking–then Mother lacked something.
Towards the end of her religious phase, her devotion escalated to the point that she toyed with the idea of bequeathing the house to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. That was the second and last time I stood up to her, threatening that I would go away and that she would never see me again. But soon afterwards she broke with churches and all taints of religion; it being a time when people started pushing and shoving to get in the front pews, when those who had once persecuted the Lamb of God now eagerly held their mouths up to it at communion, and religious devotion shifted from being a reactionary stigma to a guarantee of virtue and patriotism. Ostensible piety inundated Croatia to such an extent that even garments, massage chairs and luxury yachts were renamed with a Christian epithet. The Jesus figure on the cross at the bottom of our street repented for our sins day and night; his fans soon had him gilted and put up a little tin roof so he wouldn’t get wet. Really, hardly anyone had taken any notice of him before, and now almost no one passed by without instinctively crossing themselves: not even the drunkard who lived somewhere near the top of the street and left his bicycle there every time his heroism only sufficed to lug himself up the hill, nor the other Jesus fan, a tea-totaller who beat his wife so badly that she had to be rushed to hospital on at least two occasions.
After the changes, new traffic regulations were introduced in our quarter and a one-way sign was put up next to the crucifix, not a metre away. It’s at exactly the same height and has an arrow showing which direction to drive. I don’t know if the local authorities and their staff are aware of how fraught that semiotic combination is. Coincidental or not, you have to admit the message is powerful: passers-by are confronted with a crucifixion–a drastic reminder that the rules of the road are to be observed; and immediately next to it, following the stick-and-carrot principle, is an upward-pointing arrow showing what is in store as a reward for obedience.
* * *
Christmas was designed as a punishment for those who don’t experience a sense of unification with God’s love, or their own love. It’s supposed to be the culmination of cheerfulness and hope for an even more cheerful afterlife which they’ve been beavering away for all year, a sentiment now represented by baubles and angels dangling from a dead conifer. I can’t decide what makes Christmas more unbearable: the warm putrefaction of this year or the usual soppy snowflakes.
That evening I dropped in to see Father. I could see from the street that it was dark in the kitchen, which was enough to trigger the darkest forebodings. I rushed breathless up the stairs. The TV set suffocated the living room more than casting it in a bluish light. It took a few seconds for me to make him out on the couch: one hand hanging to the floor, his head thrown back, and his mouth wide open. From up close it was clear he wasn’t breathing. I was stunned and my heart felt as if it would break. I grabbed him by the collar, shook him, and he opened his eyes. He gazed through me for an instant and then choked up, gasping for air. This happened to him from time to time–he would stop breathing when he fell asleep. But never before had he so staunchly, so pedantically, staged a respiratory shutdown.
I gave him his eye drops. His cataracts were growing diligently. Sooner or later he’d need an operation, but for the time being he brushed the prospect aside. The good side of it was that his impaired vision didn’t bring any major disadvantages; there were no longer any particularly precious sights for him in this world.
When I told him I was moving out, exactly fifteen months ago, he didn’t have any objections. Or if he did, he didn’t dare to state them. If he’d had a sliver of lucidity left, he would have seen what his condition had done to me. It had penetrated me to the core and turned me into a black hole. But he just kept on going, perhaps aware of what he was doing to me but powerless to prevent it. Unable to help himself and to accept my attempts to help him. No one can help anyone. That’s easily said, and I knew it all those years; but still I let myself be fettered, remaining in the embrace of his sorrow. As we know, time heals sorrow. His responded well to the treatment, was tamed, and grew over time into our own domestic monster.
Mother died in the summer of ninety-one when I was eighteenth, less than a month after Father’s appointment as a minister in the Government of Democratic Unity. That came about due to the Reconciliation: ex-Communists and Catholic conservatives alike welcomed a Jew in the cabinet so they could demonstrate their inclusiveness. He himself didn’t give a damn about reconciliation and the blossoming of democracy. He was already weary, preoccupied with his untimely ageing. But the offer flattered his vanity and he accepted the position like a medal awarded at retirement for sufferings endured. It’s safe to say that no one remembered his time as minister, and the Jewish bit was a half-truth at best. Religion was never mentioned in our family, let alone practiced–his ‘Jewishness’ and my mother’s nominal Orthodox Christianity existed purely on paper. That was almost the only thing I ever agreed about with my parents.
After all, I didn’t consider them capable of any sensible conversation, nor did they show even the semblance of a desire to comprehend where I was at. We lived under the same roof but on different planets. At least up until the day when Father, eavesdropping on my phone conversation, learnt that I’d lost my virginity. I was fourteen. I heard that, he growled, dashed into the room wild-eyed and laid into me with fists and feet. Mother didn’t lift a finger or say a word to stop him. When the ‘lesson’ was over, she took my head in her lap and stroked it until I’d cried my very last tear. Then she quietly closed the door behind her.
Still, her death probably would have well and truly crushed me if Father hadn’t made it there first. It was already hot and sultry in the morning, that July Sunday. Around four in the afternoon, I heard a smashing of crockery in the kitchen and then a despairing Oooh, oooh. Father was kneeling on the tiled floor, his face grotesquely twisted. Between the palms of his hands he held my mother’s face; unlike his, it was calm and almost serene, more beautiful than ever.
A face so different to mine that people viewed us innumerable times in disbelief: her soft, fair hair, blue eyes and milky complexion, and me downright swarthy. She had especially large, doe eyes. At forty-four, her beauty was fully intact and easily interrupted ministers’ conversations, turned heads 180 degrees, and caused nervous grimaces in other women. Allegedly it was the cause of one broken marriage and
