Look at me, Anadolka
Vukota remembers his grandma Rina only vaguely, if he indeed remembers her at all and his memories aren’t just from his mother’s stories. The first image is of Grandma warming herself in front of a grand wood burner, her palms outstretched toward the fire, a glimmering white cap on her head, the kind he had only seen in cartoons, on Olive Oyl’s head from the Popeye cartoon when she went to bed. In the second Grandma Rina is holding a candlestick holder, wiping the dust from it, her fingers trembling, flitting about as if each were soon to turn into a sparrow and disappear beneath the high ceiling of the living room. In the third Grandma is furious, her little cap now crooked, and she’s yelling, barely audibly, if as someone has muffled her every word with a mountain of feathers. In my time a man and woman met under a canopy, not under the covers. That was it, that was the sum of what he knew about his grandma Rina, she had died when he was three, and he had almost never thought of her until the summer of 1992, when the first Jewish convoys left the city, and Vukota remembered that Grandma Rina had been a Jew, and so that made him a Jew too, and under the terms of a new agreement he could leave this war behind.
His mother looked at him, pale and empty, and said you’ve got to be kidding, what do you know about all that. His father, Savo, just shrugged his shoulders, lit one cigarette after the other, and shut up, nothing to say since the first grenades had weaned him off the habit of starting every sentence with “we Serbs.” I don’t know anything, but I’m going to Israel, Vukota replied, his thoughts wandering back to the three images of Grandma Rina, now certain he’d be able to see something, decipher something that had hitherto remained hidden, something that would turn him — who had never been anything — into a Jew.
I am the grandson of Rina Mantova, he said, holding up a yellowed card with his grandma’s picture on it. In different circumstances a membership card for La Benevolencija wouldn’t have cut it as proof of Vukota’s ancestry, but in the mayhem of the present, the people at the Jewish Community offices weren’t particularly interested in who was a Jew and who wasn’t. They put everyone who registered on their lists. As soon as they got out of the city, people would have to settle questions of their Jewishness on their own, there could be no harm done. They had saved lives, and there’s no deception involved there.
When the bus arrived in Makarska, Vukota asked and how are we going to get to Israel? Mr. Levi was surprised: you really want to go to Israel?. . Well, I don’t know where else I’d go. Vukota didn’t want to go to America or Canada; he was afraid of a life among strangers, and if Grandma Rina had been a Jew, then presumably there was something Jewish in him, something that might burgeon and bloom in Israel, magically making a real Jew of him, at home in his own skin among the locals. When you leave home, you have to be something, you need a document and a name on it to protect you. At home you could be Nothing, now you have to become Something. Vukota was worried he lacked the talent for being Something. If alongside his father, Savo, he didn’t know how to be a Serb, perhaps he was incapable of being anything except Vukota, and if he was just Vukota, then it was curtains for him.
He arrived in Israel two months later. At the airport a pair in uniform came out to meet him, escorting him to a third uniform who interrogated him and certified he wasn’t dangerous. This uniform passed him over to a fourth who gave Vukota a five-minute lecture on the State of Israel, handed him a key, an ID card, and a check to get him through the next month or so. Welcome, get yourself sorted, he said, placed his hand on Vukota’s shoulder, and sent him out into the world.
I can sing and play a bit of guitar, he told Albert, who on the second day after his arrival had already asked when Vukota intended to get a job. Albert was from Zrenjanin and had been there three months. Vukota had been assigned to him as a roommate and Albert was supposed to assist with his socialization in their free time. That won’t help you none here. You know how to do anything else?. . Maybe I’d be okay as a waiter. . Be a waiter then, but get down to it on the double. That’s my advice to you. Otherwise it’s curtains for you.
Vukota spent weeks trying to find a job waiting tables, but at the time no one seemed to need staff. Albert grinned, ha, you Bosnians, making life even tougher. When Albert was around, Vukota couldn’t forget for a minute that he was on the edge of destitution, that little by little the ground was being pulled out from under him, the day not far off when he wouldn’t even be able to buy food. He wasn’t capable of becoming a waiter, but worse still, he hadn’t even become a Jew, or he had never been that for longer than the moment it had first occurred to him that Grandma Rina might save his neck. In any case, Albert’s ha, you Bosnians, already sounded like a grenade exploding in the distance, and with every new ha, you Bosnians, it drew ever closer and louder. One day it would go off right here, beside him, and that ha, you Bosnians, would then require an appropriate response. And what might an appropriate response be? Vukota didn’t know, except that if there wasn’t one, he increasingly had the feeling he’d rather smack Albert’s ears than find a million dollars in the street.
This could be something for you, Albert put the newspaper down in front of him. It was open to the Help Wanted page, there was an ad, something about a musical comedy, a film studio looking for young men and women who could sing, preferably from Eastern Europe. Vukota silently took down the number, making out like he didn’t care, while in reality his every muscle was dancing with joy. He hadn’t even called and was already imagining himself pulling up in front of the Hilton in a sporty Mercedes, making his way through a cordon of chicks who were passing out all over the place, like young birches felled by Jehovah’s breeze. Then he’d come visit Albert in this dank room, take a fat wad of dollar bills from his pocket, slap him on the forehead with it, and say, ha, we Bosnians.
The voice at the other end of the line had already picked up, and Vukota hadn’t even got around to being surprised with himself because, hell, for the first time in his life he’d become something, and it was because of Albert; in a fleeting flight of fancy he’d become the worst a man anywhere on the face of the earth could be — he’d become a Bosnian, he’d become we Bosnians. Luckily he wasn’t aware of it, and calmly answered their questions: yes, he’s from Eastern Europe, from Bosnia and Herzegovina, you know, a country in Eastern Europe; yes, he was an excellent singer, he used to have his own band, what do you mean where did he have a band? Eastern Europe of course; it was a punk band, but he knows how to sing Bosnian songs too, no problem at all. .
A few hundred guys and girls were there waiting outside this upholstered green door. Everyone was given a number and got called in according to some system, at first one at a time, and then someone worked it out that the audition would never end, so they started going in five at a time. Listen to those numbers will you, the number 676 surreal to Vukota, all of a sudden everything seemed different from how he had imagined. Instead of hustling his way to becoming a Jew, he had hustled his way to a number.
Fourteen hours later, a fat black-haired secretary squawked in English: 675 to 679, if you don’t get in here now, you’ve missed your chance. He pushed his way to the door, holding his number victoriously above his head. Three guys went in with Vukota, two of them were Russians, no doubt about it, the other one looked like a Romanian, and then there was a girl who was really tall, blond hair and blue eyes like in that story by Isak Samokovlija. At a table sat three men, the one in the middle looked like the director because he was wearing glasses like Steven Spielberg’s, at least that’s how it seemed to Vukota. The director pointed to five chairs, they sat down, he looked at them, rolled his eyes, the fat secretary squawked break time! Vukota started to stand up, sit down! Vukota sat back down. The director and his assistants headed out the back door. The fat secretary followed them.