The Fig Tree E-Book

Goran Vojnović

• Herausgeber: Istros Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 587

Beschreibung

The Fig Tree is a novel composed of the intertwining stories of the family of Jadran, a 30-something who tries to piece together the story of his relatives in order to better understand himself. Because he cannot understand why Anja walked out of their shared life, he tries to understand the suspicious death of his grandfather and the withdrawal of his grandmother into oblivion and dementia. With all his might, Jadran tries to understand the departure of his father in the first year of the war in the Balkans as he also tries to comprehend his mother, with her bewildering resentment of his grandfather, and her silent disappointment with his father.The Fig Tree is a multigenerational family saga, a tour de force spanning three generations from the mid-20th century through the Balkans wars of the 90s until present day. Vojnović is a master storyteller, and while fateful choices made by his characters are often dictated by the historical realities of the times they live in, at its heart this is an intimate story of family, of relationships, of love and freedom and the choices we make.

Leseprobe

GORAN VOJNOVIĆ

THE FIG TREE

Translated from the Slovene by Olivia Hellewell

First published in 2019 by Istros Books (in collaboration with Beletrina Academic Press) | London, United Kingdom | www.istrosbooks.com

Originally published in Slovene as Figa by Beletrina Academic Press, 2016

© Goran Vojnović, 2020

The right of Goran Vojnović to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Translation © Olivia Hellewell, 2020

Cover design and typesetting: Davor Pukljak | www.frontispis.hr

ISBN: 978-1912545-27-8

This Book is part of the EU co-­funded project “Reading the Heart of Europe” in partnership with Beletrina Academic Press | www.beletrina.si

The European Commission support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s “PEN Translates” programme, supported by Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly co-­operation of writers and the free exchange of ideas.www.englishpen.org

Translator’s Note

There comes a time when the stage of your life appears to be set: you know the characters, the plot is seemingly sketched out ahead of you, and you’ve been cast in your role. But what if we had made other choices? Who would we have been, and where would the plot have taken us? Who, or what, might we be, if we could break free from the scenes that we have found ourselves in?

Sitting in a sun-lit classroom at the British Centre for Literary Translation in July 2019, this is how author Goran Vojnović began to explain the starting point for his third novel, The Fig Tree. I was there with Goran to lead a week-long translation workshop at the BCLT’s Summer School, where along with seven wonderful participants, we would begin to unravel the many threads of this multigenerational family saga. The workshop was funded by the AHRC and formed part of Dr Cecilia Rossi’s Open World Research Initiative project, ‘Literary Translation Workshops: Bridging Communities Affected by Past Conflict’. The workshop was also kindly supported by the Slovenian Book Agency. During that week, the group translated two short sections of the novel, both of which remain unaltered in this published version*.

The opening scenes of The Fig Tree unfold in 1950s Istria, in the relatively early days of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Through narrator Jadran’s eyes, we see the six central characters navigate their changing existential landscapes. These landscapes will undoubtedly introduce new contexts and references to a reader in English, but even as borders are drawn through homes and lives, the novel remains quietly focused on the cracks that can appear between us as people, and the feelings borne of these fates. One episode which might be helpful to contextualise, however, is one that Vojnović depicts through the character of Safet, Jadran’s Bosnian father. In February 1992, not long after Slovenia had declared independence from Yugoslavia, around 25,000 formerly Yugoslav citizens were erased from the register of permanent residents. Those who did not, or were unable to, apply for citizenship in the newly independent state of Slovenia were stripped of all their legal, economic and social rights that had previously been accessible to them as Yugoslav citizens. Overnight, these 25,000 people became ‘illegal aliens’ in their own homes, and would later come to be known as Izbrisani (‘The Erased’).

Another unmistakable feature of The Fig Tree is the use of languages from across the former Yugoslavia. The characters speak Slovene and they speak naški (nashki; ‘our language’, which for these characters would today be known as BCS, or Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian). Safet speaks naški and Vesna speaks Slovene, and many of the characters, like Vojnović himself, experience the world in more than one language. In my translation I considered marking the language shifts in a visual way, such as using italics to denote the naški, but italics already have a very significant function in the novel, as they distinguish between layers of narrative voice (active dialogue in the present, and dialogue as recalled through memory, or perhaps, imagination). I never really considered leaving the naški and providing footnotes, either. I first read The Fig Tree as a reader, without the knowledge that I’d one day be translating it (although the streams of pencil scribble in the margins attest to a hope that I might), and so my approach was always guided by the conviction that The Fig Tree is an immersive, meditative reading experience. So, occasionally, I leave some naški in the text – a song lyric, or a simple hello or goodbye – as a reminder of the novel’s rich linguistic fabric. Where the text dictates that the language being spoken is named, I describe Safet as speaking Bosnian, because we know he is from Bosnia, and likewise with grandfather Aleksandar, I refer to his occasional phrases in naški as Serbo-Croatian, as we know he is Serbian by birth, but living (for the most part) in Croatian Istria. And elsewhere, I ask readers to go with it: even though The Fig Tree is unmistakeably rooted in Vojnović’s world, it is, after all, a book about stories. It’s a book about the stories we tell ourselves in order to make sense of the world around us, even when there is seemingly little sense to be found.

*To Katja Cvahte, Florencia Ferre, Melita Koletnik, Ana Krkovič, Mojca Petaros, Paul Townend and Miha Žličar: the ideas and insight that you all brought to the text undoubtedly made this translation better, and what’s more, made me a better translator. The first paragraph of Chapter IV, part 4, and the first 50 lines of Chapter XVI, is your work.

A Brief Note on Pronunciation

C, ctz (as in pizza)Dolanc (Dolantz)

Č, č & Ć, ćch (as in church)Vojnović (Voynovich); Černjak (Chernyak)

Đ, đdj (like the j in judge)Đorđević (Georgevich)

J, jy (as in yellow or boy)Jadran (Yadran); Jana (Yana)

Š, šsh (as in dish)Saško (Sashko)

Ž, žzh (as in pleasure)Pražakova Street (Prazhakova)

To the two of them

I

The year was 1955, and in the town of Buje, Croatia, Commissioner Risto Marjanović was awaiting the arrival of incoming forest warden, Aleksandar Đorđević, in the manner as was customary for his region. He had laid the table in his office with all the delicacies that his wife Jovana had brought with her from Serbia. The famous cheese curds, pork scratchings, sausage, lardo, apricot brandy – all this awaited Aleksandar, making his way from the neighbouring republic of Slovenia, but who was, by the sound of his name, a fellow Serb; a man with whom Risto could exchange a few words in his mother tongue. Risto had only just taken up the post as Commissioner in northern Istria, but already he longed for home, already he felt conscious that his dear Yugoslavia was home to foreign folk, folk who did, it was true, speak an almost intelligible language, but who nevertheless remained unintelligible to him. They were strange, these people here in Buje. Risto preferred to avoid them, and instead of breathing down their necks, recruiting suitable candidates to the Party, and removing the unsuitable ones from society, he preferred to leave them well alone, to forge their own paths, and above all make sure that they had as little to do with him as possible, and he with them. When he was informed that a young man by the name of Aleksandar Đorđević was coming from Ljubljana, he was cheered by the news, as if they’d announced the arrival of Josip Broz - Tito himself. Something told him that Aleksandar would immediately understand what was wrong with the people of Buje, and that Risto would be able to say things that would not otherwise be permitted within the bounds of brotherhood and unity; that just like him, Aleksandar would notice that it was not possible to speak, nor drink, nor fight with these people in a brotherly way; that he too would see for himself how these people could not be saved by socialism, would understand how it was better to leave them in peace, and not expel the image of God from their strange heads. Risto hoped that he would not have to pretend to Aleksandar that he spent day and night fighting for the advancement of his homeland, and that instead, he’d be able to admit that he preferred to stay in his office, out of sight, with locked doors, pretending not to be there when they knocked; he hoped he’d be able to admit that he preferred to drink his brandy and think about his native lands and about how, if only he could, he’d immediately retreat back to the forest, among the partisans, had his wartime courage not deserted him and had he not become cowardly now there was peace; he hoped he could admit that he waited until dusk every day before creeping around town, the town he crept around like a wartime fugitive, in spite of it being under his command; but he was more scared of these people, these Istrians, than he had ever been scared of the Germans. Risto wanted to tell Aleksandar all of this, though he knew that as soon as they sat opposite one another it would be hard to find the right words, and that he didn’t know this Aleksander at all, who was actually younger than him – for all he knew, this man from Ljubljana was just as strange as the strange people of Buje. Risto even wondered, after a few too many drinks, whether there were any normal people like him left anymore; that perhaps even the people of his hometown, Užice, were different now, that they would also let you speak, uninterrupted, just like they did here, and not only that, but with staring eyes wide open, so that there was no way of telling what they were really thinking. Maybe there’s no longer anyone, anywhere, Risto thought, to whom he could confess his fear of staring eyes like these, that swallowed him like quicksand; no one, to whom he, a political commissar, member of the communist party, could confess that he was afraid of the people who did nothing but stand before him and listen. Aleksandar Đorđević was, for this reason, his final hope; he had to understand it all, he had to know what Risto was talking about, because he was one of his kind and they had to think the same and see things in the same way.

But as he impatiently awaited Aleksandar’s arrival, nibbling at the cold meats and draining his bottle of brandy, Risto could not have known, of course, what kind of person was hiding behind that Serbian-sounding name. He could not have known that Aleksandar Đorđević was not, in any sense, a typical representative of his nationality, for the nationality to which his surname alluded was not something that he could claim at all. Born in Novi Sad in 1925, Aleksandar initially bore the surname of his mother, the nurse and bookseller Ester Aljehin, and his first name, so his mother said, was his father’s. But other than the fact he was born in Ukraine, was supposedly called Aleksandar, and supposedly had the same strong, bushy eyebrows – something which my grandfather always doubted until the day he died – he never learned a thing about his father. For Ester, who inherited a small bookshop in Novi Sad from her father Moš, the war had begun long before the first Nazis marched through Novi Sad; and she began fighting her own battle for freedom long before those who will be remembered by history as freedom fighters. The morose, wet spring of 1937 was cause enough for her to seduce the dentist Milorad Đorđević, convince him to marry her, and then, as Mrs Đorđević, leave her new husband and hometown for Belgrade without the slightest explanation. She arrived in Belgrade as Branislava, finding work as a nurse, which is what she had trained to do, and introducing herself to everyone as Milorad’s widow. She even went to church and lit candles for him; little Aleksandar, meanwhile, had to learn to pray for the soul of a man that was neither really his father, nor really departed, and learnt to attract the pitiful gazes of the women of Belgrade, all so that the image of Mrs Đorđević and her son kneeling before the altar would be engrained as deeply as possible in their minds. Everything in the life of Ester Aljehin, or Branislava Đorđević, was premeditated and predisposed to her one simple aim: survival without humiliation or oppression. Not once did my great grandmother ever feel obliged to introduce herself by her real name, never did she feel the need to be sincere with anyone, and never did a single person earn the right to know the woman behind the mask. She held this world – a world which so flagrantly displayed its vulgar hatred of all that challenged convention – in contempt, and she took particular pleasure in brazenly deceiving it, pretending to be exactly the type of person that this wretched world wanted her to be. She performed her role as one of them with dedication, internalising their ignorance and primitive natures, their fears and prejudices. Like a chameleon she adapted to the surroundings she despised; she would smile politely, curtsey, and perfect her deception with each passing day, until she became lost within it. And all the while, the cunning, calculating, pious Ester Aljehin, who would quietly read Joseph Roth at home to the young Aleksandar in German, gradually vanished behind the fictitious façade of the feeble Branislava Đorđević, who would explain to male admirers in horror that once a married woman, always a married woman, and that they ought to be ashamed of their sinful thoughts. And yet, as she caught sight of the first Nazi uniforms in the city, and when she heard of the mysterious disappearance of Dr. Štiglic, and when she heard whispers of nocturnal goings-on at the old Belgrade marketplace, this Branislava Đorđević was unable to suppress Ester Aljehin’s fear. Fear was what drove Branislava Đorđević from Belgrade, a place where nobody had endangered or threatened her, where no one knew her secrets; yet Ester Aljehin harboured great fear, and an even greater will to survive, and so in the February of 1942, Branislava and Aleksandar Đorđević arrived in Ljubljana, in the hands of the Italians at the time, of whom Ester was for some reason less afraid than the Germans. Besides, the Slovenes seemed less intimidating than the Serbs, mostly because Ljubljana was even further removed from Novi Sad, and there were certainly fewer people among the Slovenes who could know her secret. But her fear did not subside upon arrival in Ljubljana; it only increased, for the Slovenes would stare at her suspiciously, in a manner similar to how the locals of Buje were to stare at Risto Marjanović thirteen years later. It was a suspicion of outsiders, but Branislava couldn’t work out why exactly she was so intriguing to the people of Ljubljana, nor what their stares were accusing her of. And so in Ljubljana, Ester Aljehin withdrew even more. She quietly carried out her duties at the hospital, and after work she would shut herself away in her modest home. She didn’t go for walks around the town, she didn’t go to church, she didn’t go to the square; she certainly didn’t walk amongst others, she made no effort to assume new roles, she had no wish to be part of the crowd, because this crowd was so very foreign to her that it superseded her acting capabilities. And so, in the evenings, Aleksandar would teach his mum Slovene – the language he would speak with school friends, but which she never spoke with anyone. He also taught her Italian, which they spoke at school, and she taught him German, as she had learned from her father. It was the language of the enemy, but it was also the language of Joseph Roth, she explained. Nothing in this world was black and white, the woman who looked askance upon this maddened world would say to him. In her eyes, the world’s conflict was not divided into good and evil, or ours and theirs; the war had ultimately divided the world into Ester and Aleksandar on one side, and everyone else on the other. And from one day to the next she would fight her own war, always on the lookout, Ester Aljehin, eternal prisoner of a fear that first stirred inside her in Novi Sad, 1936, when a man entered her bookshop and said the days of books for some, and pitchforks for others, would soon be over; and that a new order was coming soon. These fears grew within Ester Aljehin, to the extent that in Ljubljana she wouldn’t even let Aleksandar turn on the light anymore; and then she started whispering to herself, and walking home from the hospital at increasing speed, always looking over her shoulder. In late 1944, when Ljubljana was still under the Germans, Aleksandar came home from school one day to find Ester on the floor by the front door. Her heart had succumbed to the fear and she had collapsed in a city that had paid her no attention, that hadn’t known her secret; that hadn’t, and never could have, understood what she, Branislava Đorđević, a former bookseller, widow of Milorad Đorđević, a nurse who performed an exemplary role at Ljubljana hospital, had been so afraid of. But unexplained deaths were not uncommon during those times and no one was alarmed, no one was surprised by the young woman’s heart attack, no one thought it out of the ordinary in these extraordinary times. They came, expressed their sympathies to Aleksandar, and carried on as before, leaving him alone in the flat, where he didn’t dare turn on the light nor raise his voice above a whisper, so as not to startle his late mother.

In lonely Commissioner Risto Marjanović, who in 1955 was waiting in Buje with what remained of the food he had laid out and an almost-empty bottle of rakia, Aleksandar Đorđević recognised the remains of a world that had frightened Ester Aljehin; a world which ought to have been his, but which was anything but; a world which he hated and feared in equal measure. He, Aleksandar Đorđević, an outsider with a local-sounding name, who Risto Marjanović pictured as a future friend – a desperately needed kindred spirit – could not have been a more unsuitable companion for this unhappy man. And Risto likely sensed this the moment Aleksandar stepped into his office. There was something in Aleksandar’s posture, in his serious, silent manner, in how he waited patiently for Risto to start speaking, in his deferential form of address, in everything. Another one of these foreign, incomprehensible people, someone else to hide from and avoid, thought Risto, disappointed; as he examined Aleksandar standing at the door awaiting instruction.

Let’s go. The sooner we find you somewhere to stay, the better.

Risto led Aleksandar across the road to a house that stood at the far end of the main square. Risto opened the door and walked in.

I don’t have the keys, but you won’t need them here. No one will bother you. They’re more likely to run away from you.

He showed him the kitchen, bathroom and bedroom. He opened a wardrobe that was full of clothes.

If you need space, you can move these or throw them away.

Risto took a few dresses down from the rail and dropped them at the bottom of the wardrobe.

Whose are they? asked Aleksandar.

These? I don’t know. Some Italian’s.

But where are they?

Who? The Italians?

Yes.

How would I know? Gone somewhere.

Without their things?

Risto had already run out of patience with Aleksandar and his questions.

Look, tomorrow morning I can send someone to clear out the wardrobe if you want.

I can’t live in this house.

Why?

People clearly live here.

What would you have me do? Build you a hotel? All the houses are like this. They left, we arrived. That’s life.

And what if they come back?

Make them a coffee and offer them something to eat.

When Risto had left, Aleksandar went back into the bedroom and picked up the clothes that Risto had flung on the floor. He hung them back on the rail, closed the wardrobe door and went down to the kitchen. He walked carefully around the table, not wanting to touch anything. In a cup on the draining board he could see, beneath a thin layer of dust, the solidified remains of coffee; on the cooker, the bottom of a pot that was encrusted with burnt bits of food; and in the stove, charred wood lay nestled among small bits of newspaper with sooty edges. His eyes met a light rectangular patch on the wall, the trace of a picture or photograph that used to hang there. Aleksandar imagined it might have been pocketed by someone, perhaps Risto, or someone else who had taken the liberty of entering the abandoned house. He was already tired and went back into the bedroom, but stopped in front of the bed, realizing that he couldn’t allow himself to lie on someone else’s bed sheets. So he lay down on the floor between the bed and the wardrobe, placed his jacket beneath his head, and soon fell asleep. Fortunately, his young body had not yet become accustomed to the comfort previously offered by his soft Ljubljana lodgings.

The next morning, Aleksandar told Risto once more that he could not stay in the house. The Commissioner was, owing to an unbearable headache, sat in the dark behind closed shutters, and with eyes closed explained to Aleksandar that all houses in the town were like that, and that if he would like a new build, he would have to build it himself. Of course, Risto and his pounding head had not been serious, and had merely wanted to get rid of the irksome forest warden as quickly as possible. However, unfortunately for him, the curious young man thought it easier to build a home of his own than move into the home of a stranger.

When Risto realised that Aleksandar had not understood, he opened his eyes and adjusted his tone.

Listen, Đorđević, if we can all move into these houses, then so can you. Understand? Don’t play the saint in front of me. Stop pissing about and get back to your house.

It’s not my house, comrade Marjanović.

Not yours?

No, it’s not.

Everything belongs to all of us now, does it not?

Yes.

So if I say that house is yours, it’s yours.

‘Ours’ is not the same as ‘mine’.

Are you taking the piss, Đorđević?

No.

Come with me.

Risto led Aleksandar out into the street and pointed north.

See that hill over there? That’s the extent of my command. Up to the border. And that’s where you can build your house. So you can see Slovenia from your window.

And thus the pounding head of Risto Marjanović laid the foundations of Aleksandar’s house in the village of Momjan, right on the Slovene border, three miles out of town, thinking that this was the best way to punish the young forest warden for his impertinence.

Precisely one week later, Aleksandar and his pregnant wife Jana were making the three-mile trek from Buje to Momjan. Every few metres or so, Aleksandar would look expectantly in the direction of his wife, expecting a look of disapproval; expecting the tired Jana to stop and ask if her pregnancy had perhaps escaped his memory, and whether they were far from their plot. But on strode Jana behind him, in silence.

Aleksandar knew to be wary of a woman’s silence, and knew that he would not be met with smiles upon arrival at their destination, but he had no choice other than to continue, not wanting to worsen the situation with a careless word. Never, neither before nor after, would the journey from Buje to Momjan seem longer than it did that morning, never were so many steps taken, never would there be so many steps still to take; never had the path ascended so steeply, never had it wound so tightly around the Istrian hills.

In spite of her visible bump, Jana did not tire. However briskly he marched, she would march too, and Aleksandar knew that this could not be good, and he hoped Jana would stop before they got to Momjan, and that before they arrived she’d unleash the words stewing inside her. But Jana was silent, even when Aleksandar stopped and opened his arms.

Here we are.

He pointed to the bay, basking in the sun at the foot of the hill, and with his finger traced the coastline all the way down to Umag, lost in the springtime haze; and he pointed out Buje, which from afar looked to be a tiny, tightly-packed village not much bigger than Momjan; and the Republic of Slovenia, which extended from the foot of their hill.

Like nature kissing my eyes, is how Aleksandar described the view to Risto, wishing to let him know that his punishment had in fact been a blessing. Blessing was the name that Aleksandar, a committed atheist, had given to his plot with the intention of provoking another atheist, more committed than he; not realising that the depressive, desperate Commissioner would not be the first person he would provoke.

Blessing.

Jana never shouted, ever. When she was angry, she would slowly utter single, choice words, one after the other, with long pauses, barely audibly and with a coldness that would send a shiver down all spines in her vicinity. She would stare vacantly ahead, as if the blood had halted in her veins, which roused fear first in Aleksandar, but later in her children, and eventually even her grandchildren. Yet Aleksandar always said that her stare had never been as chilling as it was that morning in Momjan.

Blessing, Jana said, and not a single word more until they got back to Buje; back to the house on the edge of the square, where they would make their bed in the evenings with a mattress on the kitchen floor; where they would take their things out of a box and put them back again; where they would eat and drink out of pans they’d brought with them from Ljubljana, and where they had made their own temporary shelter inside a large, foreign home.

Jana’s single word told Aleksandar everything: it was the story of a pregnant woman’s journey from Buje to Momjan, an ode to the house at the end of the world, and a lamentation for their home in Ljubljana. That word was a rebellion against everything, but in his youthful enthusiasm Aleksandar still believed that he could get Jana onside in this story, and he began to build the house in Momjan, believing that once it was built, she too would find her home there.

Who could say whether what drove him was a desire to stand, for the first time in his life, on his own plot; to finally be able to take refuge in a place of his own and subdue Ester Aljehin’s fear, or whether it was his sheer self-righteousness that motivated Aleksandar Đorđević to trudge the six miles from Momjan to Buje and back, rather than lie in someone else’s bed. That, along with his belief that just because others were doing something, it didn’t make it right, nor acceptable. Whatever the reason, one thing was clear. Day by day, with each foundation stone laid, Aleksandar was beginning to enact the words of his mother; the woman who taught him that it was normal for everyone to lose their minds from time to time, and that submitting to the will of the crowd was not always enough to survive.

Jana did not accompany him to Momjan and instead stayed in Buje. With tiny, barely perceptible steps, she made the foreign house they were forced to inhabit her own. The previous owners’ belongings were moved far from Aleksandar’s sight. She removed the pots from the kitchen, the clothes from the wardrobes, the sheets from the bed, even the curtains and curtain rails were taken down and stored away in the cellar. She stripped the house and exiled its soul, doing everything so that Aleksandar would be able to move into it; while he, meanwhile, carried on putting down roots up there, at the end of a long, winding road to nowhere.

Every stone he laid brought him closer to that small, gifted piece of land, and took him further away from her. With every drop of sweat that dripped from his brow and soaked into the red earth, the more he became absorbed into that world. He could now say that a tiny piece of the world was his: not shared, but his, and his alone. He noted the distinction, and he wasn’t ashamed; indeed, ownership gave him a feeling of justice, repayment for the years of homelessness. He would spend many an evening sat outside, alone, on his piece of land, and he would look out towards the sea, and wonder whether this was the happiness of which people spoke; if this was that contented feeling of simply being; not wishing to be anywhere else, feeling as if you could remain, in complete stillness, without ever having to move again.

Aleksandar and Jana each built a home of their own, and each spent their days enticing one another over. It was a childish game of two premature adults; two immature lovers enacting alternative performances of adult life. His excuse was a childhood spent with Ester Aljehin’s fear, hers was not yet being twenty years old, and their joint excuse was love: a magnetic force that could not be disentangled, and which simultaneously attracted and repelled them, and would keep attracting and repelling them for the rest of their lives.

One morning, Aleksandar decided to take a slight detour from his usual route through the town and stop off at the house, to see Jana. During the day he was usually busy with work, the majority of which he’d find for himself, and so he would often simply be wandering aimlessly around the forests and marking out trees to be cleared, and he’d then spend the afternoon in Momjan, where the house was beginning to take shape. But he felt like disrupting that inevitable pattern, and wanted to surprise his wife with an unannounced visit. For the first time in a long while he stepped into the house, glowing from the midday sun, and could instantly see what Jana had done. There, right before him, was everything that his weary, evening eyes had failed to notice. All those alien objects had vanished, and that strangers’ house was now brimming with the two of them. Their leftovers; their dirty washing; their pots; theirnewspapers.

He went up to the bedroom and saw that the bed was made with fresh sheets of their own, and the wardrobe was home to his shirts and her blouses. The clothes that Risto had discarded on the floor had gone. All traces of the people who used to eat and sleep here were gone too. Finally they were alone in the house, finally there was no one lingering around, no one who would silently creep up the creaking stairs, who would slip between rooms in a blink of an eye.

Now the only thing he saw in the house was Jana, downstairs in the kitchen preparing dinner, hanging washing on the line fixed across the street, between the houses; he saw her leaning against the window and waiting for him to return from Momjan, tired; he saw her getting into her nightdress in the bathroom and standing at the door, whilst he pushed the table to one side and set up the mattress on the kitchen floor – she, waiting for the bed to be ready so they could both lie down. And he knew that the reason he saw her was because his memories had filled every corner of that house and had ousted those other, alien ones. The house had succumbed to them, and he was overwhelmed by a desire to lock himself inside and make love to her, to forget the boundaries of day and night.

Only then did he realise that Jana wasn’t even in the house, and he flew out of the door and ran through the town, panic-stricken, trying to find his pregnant wife.

Jana, meanwhile, was weaving around the walls of Aleksandar’s unfinished house in Momjan, caressing the stones with her fingertips, as if wanting to strip them of his attachment to this place at the ends of the earth; as if she wanted to touch it, feel it, absorb it.

She walked between the walls and imagined him there in the afternoons, competing against the dying light, trying to do as much as he could whilst he could still see; before the dusk fell upon him and his house, and forced him back to the town, back to her. She pictured her husband standing before the bare walls, like a painter before a canvas, trying to paint his own home. Something warm, crackling, with the aroma of simmering stew; with walls as smooth as bare skin. She saw him, enveloped by these walls, with her and their child, hidden away from everyone, and everything, that existed outside of their trio. She’d never asked him how he pictured their home, but now she saw clearly how Aleksandar was shaping their warm sanctuary with his own hands.

And then it started. She clutched her tummy and knew instantly that she would not make it back to Buje, that she would give birth in this very place, in Momjan, by the skeleton of Aleksandar’s unfinished home. She stepped onto the road and glanced around, searching for someone, anyone. But just as when Aleksandar had first brought her here, there was not a living soul to be found. The houses on the street appeared empty, but empty is how the houses in Buje always appeared, even though there were still people living inside. Phantoms that she caught a glimpse of, peeking through the window, or crossing the courtyard in the distance. Sometimes, from across the square, she’d hear indiscernible voices which seemed to be coming from those who had lived in her house, chasing her, the intruder, out; and she’d close the window in fright, and hide in the kitchen amongst a clattering of pans.

But now phantoms were what Jana wanted to see. She wanted to hear their voices, the sound of footsteps on the floor, the scrape of a knife peeling potatoes, the wipe of a cloth along the draining board; anything to betray their presence behind closed shutters. She did not want to believe the eerie silence, nor did the imminent child, and she leapt at the nearest door and started to hammer on it. Her fists pounded against the solid wood as hard as they could, and she thought she might have heard voices, just like the frightening, indiscernible voices in Buje, but carried on knocking, because the imminent child did not know fear, and nor was it afraid of phantoms, and the doors had to open; they had to open for the baby that wanted to come in to the house.

This baby was no intruder; it did not wish to hide itself away – it wanted to be amongst the phantoms and the humans, who it saw as all the same, all discernible; and so it kept on knocking, until finally its calls were answered. Then the tiny eyes of an old lady looked upon the baby and said something indiscernible, but now even Jana was able to discern every word.

Coming up the hill and staggering from exhaustion, Aleksandar caught sight of the old woman standing in the middle of the road. She looked as if she were waiting for him, and he thought he was hallucinating. But he had seen her, and she continued to pace outside her house, silently moving back and forth ahead of him. She disappeared behind the corner, and then she looked straight at him, and beckoned him over. Even hallucinations are better than despair, thought Aleksandar, and he followed the old woman inside, and followed then the sound of a baby’s cry, growing closer as if spellbound, until he was stood next to a stranger holding his daughter in her lap.

A blessing, he said, when the stranger placed the tiny baby into his enormous hands. Blessing, Jana’s exhausted voice could be heardbehind him, and only then did Aleksandar catch sight of his wife on the sofa in the corner. He sat next to her and tried to kiss her, but she pulled away.

Promise me, she said, and stopped short. Her body was still quivering from the exertion she had endured.

Promise me that you’ll never let them move us… all three of us… around the world ever again.

I promise, he said, and kissed her sweaty brow.

Indiscernible voices resounded around the room; voices that cared for them, embraced them, and sang to them. Aleksandar’s eyes sought those of the old lady.

Grazie, donna sante.

For the first time since the war, he spoke in Italian. He broke his own spellbound state and could suddenly understand the voices of the house. Strangers whispered about how beautiful his little girl was, about her mother’s eyes and her father’s lips.

Over the years, this blessing would come to be described by Aleksandar as an omen that determined which of the two houses would become their home. He took it as an omen that their firstborn daughter did not arrive in Buje, but in Momjan – which actually remained her official place of birth. And so the Đorđević-Benedejčič family stayed in Momjan, and left the house in Buje to new intruders.

Jana, on the other hand, preferred to talk of punishments rather than omens; Aleksandar missing the birth of his daughter was punishment from God, punishment for his stubbornness and for forcing his wife to trudge from Buje to Momjan. To which he would respond, every time: If that’s the case, then God’s a bloody fool.

II

1.

I took a book from the footstool, the one my grandad used as a bedside table, and opened it at the page marked by a shred of newspaper. He had never been one for leather, cotton or paper bookmarks, and so rather than between pages they rotted away in untidy drawers and other ransacked corners of his house, while other flat or pointed objects at hand – pencils, toothpicks, coins – would perform the task instead. His later life amounted to the sum of insignificant details: stains encrusted on shirts, clumps of food on plates, different coloured shoelaces, burnt-out lightbulbs, chipped glasses, old biros, out-of-date I.D cards, faded horoscopes, keys without keyrings and keyrings without keys. All of these were tiny trivialities of no consequence – things he was not inclined to waste his limited time on.

Because time was always against him, Grandad never searched the house for things that were designed with a specific purpose in mind, like keeping a page in a book, because he, consistently stubborn, considered there to be plenty of other objects that could do the job – or any other job – just as well. Coffee was stored in a mayonnaise jar, tipped into the coffee pot, stirred with a gas lighter and poured into a yoghurt pot, while Grandma’s beautiful ceramic sugar, salt and coffee jars, gilded coffee spoons and porcelain cups sat gathering dust in the cabinet.

Mum flew into a rage when once he used her driving licence as a bookmark, which along with the book was then returned to the library, only to reappear when the book was taken out again. It was at this point that she furiously went on a hunt for bookmarks – raiding drawers, moving armchairs, wardrobes, and even the fridge; she got under tables and beds, and eventually placed seven bookmarks on Grandad’s footstool with a loud huff, and insisted that he use them. Against all her expectations, he promised that he would.

But Grandad would only read within reach of the footstool in the evening before he went to sleep, and it housed very few of the books he actually read, so it was not long before random things reappeared between the pages, from electrician’s business cards to Jehovah’s Witness leaflets. Usually he would just tear off a piece of newspaper, and once, when he was reading some particularly heavy tome, an obituary and photograph of Julia Morosin could be seen protruding from it for several months.

From the table in the living room, from the arm of Grandad’s chair, from the oven, from the dresser in the hallway, even from the bathroom floor, my eyes were met with Julia’s look of resignation. Many a time I pored over her eighty-seven years, her three daughters and their families, and the days leading up to her funeral, before I’d have to avert my gaze just to be on the safe side, before I rescued poor Julia from her posthumous duties and replaced her – Grandad style – with an article about a regatta.

Yet in spite of the boundless freedom granted to objects in his house, where beach towels would bask on the bedroom floor and dictionaries would relax on the toilet cistern, my scatterbrained Grandad was an incredibly disciplined reader. Never would he stop reading in the middle of a page, least of all mid-sentence. Neither the doorbell nor a stew boiling over on the stove would interrupt his reading. He always read a chapter from start to finish, but if the chapters were too long, he would stop reading at the end of the first sentence on the left-hand side. It was therefore easy to establish which had been the last sentence he ever read in his life.

I opened the book that I’d found on the footstool at the place marked by a piece of newspaper. At the top of the left-hand page was only the last part of the sentence, so I turned back and read the paragraph from beginning to end:

An eventful century or so ago, my paternal ancestors left behind what was then Galicia, the easternmost province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Western Ukraine), and resettled in Bosnia, which had recently been annexed to the Hapsburg domain. My peasant forebears brought with them a few beehives, an iron plough, many songs about leaving home, and a recipe for perfect borscht, a dish previously unknown in that part of the world.

As I read, I became aware of the coroner standing behind me, waiting for me to move out of his way so that he could examine the hypostasis on Grandad’s neck, check the dilation of his pupils and the transparency of his corneas, and establish the time of death; but just like my grandad, I couldn’t stop reading until I’d reached the end of the sentence. It was my obligation: an overdue apology for all the cancelled visits. I knew the apology would not reach its intended recipient, but nevertheless I carried on reading until I reached the final word, and stopped exactly where he had stopped the previous night.

‘It’s rare to see people with a book on their lap. Some women perhaps, but men hardly ever. They like to have magazines and newspapers in their hands, or more likely, a remote control. These are the times we live in. People don’t realise that with the help of books, they create the images of their dreams themselves; that reading develops and tends to their imagination, whereas television thrusts these images upon them. When we read, the images we create are our own, but on TV we’re watching foreign ones. Television programmes violate our dream world. All the pictures that we watch enter into our subconscious, which is why we’re increasingly distracted and restless. The scenes of our subconscious are scenes of horror.’

I turned around to look at the young man from Piran, who had found work on the Croatian side of the border and who stood, most likely as he was trained to do, at a respectful distance from the grieving party and looked at me, tentatively, with sadness. Deaths were his trade and he was relaxed as he spoke, but with a sincerity in his voice that sought to create the impression that for him, every corpse he came to examine was a new story, and that he was yet to succumb to the apathy that comes with routine. It seemed to me, though, that as some post-mortem handbook had taught him, he was deliberately filling the silence which prior to his arrival had flourished around the corpse, and that his clichéd remarks were just one of his professional duties.

I was tempted to break the pattern, to stop politely nodding, and ask him in all seriousness how then, in his opinion, did all those unrealistic, obscure images as described by medieval dreamers enter into peoples’ subconscious in the Middle Ages; what, in his opinion, were nightmares made of, before the existence of film and television; where did our ancient ancestors get all those three-headed dragons and one-eyed cannibals from, if not from the night-time programming on commercial television.

Instead I kept quiet and let him move past me to get to the bed, where Grandad’s body was lying.

Grandad’s death was my first. I turned away from the body lying on the bed and felt terrified. My eyes went flying around the space, searching for a nook where they could rest, but everything around me stared back. Grandad’s glasses for watching television were on the dining table, carelessly discarded on the dirty tablecloth. Beneath the table were several large breadcrumbs, having escaped his palm cupped at the edge. There was a pile of old newspapers in the corner with a basket buried deep inside, having been filled long ago. A single sock hung from the edge of the bed, which he had most likely taken off in his sleep a night or two before. It crossed my mind that his smell was still likely to be inside it, his odour, and a hole or two as well, made by his hastily cut toenails. On the floor beneath the window lay two books, splayed open, having fallen off who-knew-when. On the other side of the room by the television there was an empty glass, probably stuck to the dusty cabinet. The rug was turned up at the corners and I pictured Grandad tripping over it. Two out of four drawers in the chest were slightly ajar, both entrapping some item of clothing. From underneath the sofa I could make out the shadowy outline of a spoon, which he had probably knocked from the table a few days ago without realizing. Or, most likely, he didn’t fancy bending down and simply left it lying there.

Grandad was everywhere, only there, on the bed, was he absent. He wasn’t there behind his speckled grey-green eyes, nor behind his flyaway white eyebrows and beard, which for the first time obediently lay flush against his face. I was sitting right beside his motionless body, almost touching him with my hand, but I had yet to comprehend his death. Everything in the house was as it always had been, so normal. A dense smoky smell was still filling the room, noises in the street drifted by the old windows and particles of dust danced in sheaves of light. At first glance, nothing had changed since my last visit. Except Grandad had died.

I repeated those words to myself, and the coroner confirmed it. Mum nodded.

When Grandma died, everything was different. Only after the funeral did I go back to the house, after Mum had sorted through Grandma’s things and had given the place such a rigorous clean that a photograph above her bed, in which she didn’t even resemble herself, was the only trace of Grandma that was left. That, along with her toothbrush.

Mum believed that death should be no obstruction to life, and that traces of the deceased were to be tidied away as quickly as possible; scrubbed, cleaned and washed, carried out of the house, piece by piece, just as the corpse was carried out before them. Thus, only a day after Grandma died, her clothes were packed into old leather suitcases which atop of wardrobes had been waiting patiently for their final journey; Mum took them to Caritas, put Grandma’s jewellery into a plastic ice cream tub, and gifted it to the neighbours’ granddaughter, and threw the make-up in the bin.

All Grandad could do, meanwhile, was watch in silence; but when Mum brought him two toothbrushes from the bathroom, and asked which was his and which was Grandma’s, he said I don’t know. Thinking that he hadn’t understood, Mum explained that she’d like to throw Grandma’s away, so asked if he could please tell her which was the one he used to clean his teeth. But Grandad persisted with his I don’t know. Mum took no notice of this lie, and repeated her question just as stubbornly, and so Grandad changed his response.

They’re both mine. Put them back in the bathroom.

Then could you tell me which one you like the best? she asked him.

Why?

It doesn’t make sense to have two toothbrushes.

I can have as many toothbrushes as I like.

Would you like me to leave Mum’s toothbrush as a memento?

If I’d have wanted to keep something as a memento, I’d have kept hold of one of her dresses. Or a necklace.

Did I ask you if you minded me getting rid of them?

Yes.

And what did you say? That I should go ahead as I saw fit, no?

Yes.

And now you’re telling me that you’d like to hang on to a necklace or a dress.

I didn’t say that, Vesna.

What did you say then?

If I wanted to keep something as a memento, I said. If.

If that’s not an accusation, what is?

It’s not an accusation.

What is it then?

It’s not an accusation.

Whenever Mum had a guilty conscience, she would bite. She held the toothbrush in front of Grandad’s face.

You’ve got three seconds to decide which is yours, because after that one of these is going straight in the bin.

I like both of them.

Three, two, one…

Mum let one of the brushes fall from her hand and into the rubbish bag in which she was collecting items to be taken away.

Grandad said nothing, and Mum thought this was the end of the toothbrush saga, but when she returned the next day, standing in a cup in the bathroom was a new toothbrush, one that Grandad had bought that morning. He used it to clean his teeth until the day he died. The old one, either Grandma’s or Grandad’s, the one which didn’t end up in Mum’s rubbish bag, remained beside the photograph, never to be used again. Since then, on the edge of the washbasin, two toothbrushes have stood in the red plastic cup, covered in limescale and other grime. And there they still stand.

‘One could not wish for a better way to go. To die in one’s sleep means to die without pain. It’s what we call a royal death.’

So said the coroner, putting his shoes on in the hall. He was one of those persons who removed their shoes even when the hosts insisted that it wasn’t necessary. Mum nodded, I closed the door behind him, and then we went back to Grandad. I was still holding the book in my hand.

‘Every morning he read to her, over coffee. One chapter each morning. Like reading to a child.’

‘Well, she was a child,’ said Mum.

She was. A child with wrinkled hands which gently took hold of you and delicately drew you in close. A child that looked at you with eyes seeking safety, eyes with a childlike curiosity, which were heavily draped in sagging, mottled skin, completely covered in moles.

I remember that child from Aunt Maya’s story, the child that turned to her daughter, who had driven over one afternoon for a brief visit, and accosted her in a quiet, timid, childlike voice.

Excuse me lady, do you know my mother?

Yes, answered my aunt, who had never known her grandmother Maria; a seamstress, who died young from tuberculosis.

Could you call her and ask her to come and collect me? said Grandma. I’d like to go home.

An alarmed Aunt Maya began to call for help; she called out to her father, who she supposed would know how to answer such a question; who she supposed would know what to say to the frail child sitting beside her.

An alarmed Grandad came flying out of the kitchen, but when Maya explained that Grandma would like to see her mother, he turned calmly to his wife.

We’ve called her already, she’ll be here soon.

Maya could not fathom how he had told this lie with such tremendous ease. To her, what Grandad had said was unacceptably deceitful; it was a discourtesy that Grandma had done nothing to deserve. Her father seemed insensitive, and she was shocked to see him so casually invoke his mother-in-law back from the dead.

Whilst she’s on her way, why don’t you play a game with this lady, Gran-dad suggested, going back into the kitchen.

Maya wanted to call out after him, but Grandma got there first.

Do you know how to play hangman?

He read to her every morning. Grandma would sit on the edge of the sofa, leaning forwards over the table, towards the coffee and biscuits, while Grandad sat in the armchair beneath the window. He always held the book in his left hand, while with his right, he would raise his glasses so that he could look beneath them over to her, as if mindful that she might escape whilst he was reading. Then he let go, so that the nose pads were back resting on the tip of his nose, and the letters came back into focus, and he read on. Always slowly, one word after the other, sentence after sentence. When he read, time would lazily disperse around the room, like thick honey rolling over the rims of jars. Heroes fell in love, went their separate ways, were born and died; yet his rasping voice would proceed, undisturbed, never entirely adapted to the tale he was telling. His attention was always on her, poised for any indiscernible movements, waiting for something within her to stir. Yet she would continue to sit motionless, only journeying with her fingertips among the coffee cups, taking a sugar cube or teaspoon, and then replacing them on her lap. This was their ritual; cut off from the rest of the world.

When she listened to his metronomic voice, her inaudible drifts of thought would become tangled in impossible knots, and in pursuit of them she was led to a place where words no longer had meaning, and where thoughts were nothing but obscure images. Her eyes became vacant, her breathing shallow, her hands settled; until eventually she sat suspended in a daze. My grandfather’s breaks were the quietest times of the day. And when he finished, he put the book and his glasses down on the table, and carried the coffee tray back into the kitchen. The only thing he left on the table was her coffee cup. That cup would stay there, in front of her, right until the evening, as a reminder that they’d had their coffee that day, that yet another one of their finite mornings had been spent.

When Grandad returned from the kitchen, he would bring her back round. Sometimes she responded, suggesting that he ought to take the dirty coffee cup away; sometimes she would merely stare back at him searchingly; and sometimes he didn’t wait for a response. The day forged ahead, and it was time for other duties, for other rituals.

You don’t have to be alone to be lonely, he once said to me, though I never understood that sentence back then. Or rather, I didn’t try to understand it. I didn’t take it in; I thought he was talking about himself, that he was talking about Grandma’s drawn-out departure, about the passing of memories, about his despair. Back then, I didn’t think about how much of his consciousness was lost along with hers; I didn’t consider how, without her, there was no more them; that she was the only other one who preserved their story, and that for all those years he had to watch it all vanish before his eyes; that he had to watch himself slowly die away in her.

I never thought about how agonising that moment must be, when you realise that the person sleeping under the same duvet no longer recognises you; when the eyes which once reflected you, in all of your nakedness and goose-pimpled flesh, now see you as a stranger. How you are left, at that moment, so very alone. And so very lonely. Interminably lonely.

I thought, extremely naively, as is always the case when our own selves and our own personal grief are not immediately concerned, that the hardest thing for Grandad was to watch my deteriorating grandma suffer; to be faced with her forgetting on a daily basis, to come up with ways to help her remember to take the green tablets before lunch, and the yellow pills before the black and red ones; to repeat ad infinitum that it was only midday and that yes, if she went to bed now she wouldn’t be able to sleep at night; to introduce her to her own daughter, to convince her that he wasn’t lying and that they really were at home, and the house really was theirs. I thought the hardest thing would be to live in eternal fear, to be scared that whilst you were out queuing for bread or paying the electricity, she would wander out of the back door, which you’d possibly forgotten to lock – because you’re not young yourself, and you also forget things – and that she’d step out, onto the road, alone, and that nobody would see her, because older people are never really seen.

It never occurred to me that the care and compassion were the only things that actually helped Grandad survive; they were the only things keeping his head above the surface of solitude, preventing him from being embedded in a vast world of bitterness. It must have been so tempting to feel cheated; it would have been so easy to give in, but Grandad never did. He never stopped caring, he never lacked compassion.

Mum sat across from me at the table and she seemed unusually calm and considerate. Her only movement was to draw her right hand to her face at irregular intervals, before moving it away again. Her middle and index finger were slumped against slightly parted lips, like the days when they used to hold cigarettes. But every time Mum became aware of the imaginary smoking, her hand would suddenly flop back down onto the table.

‘We should tidy up a bit. People are going to start arriving soon.’