My mother is still nervous, she must have gone through an entire packet of cigarettes by now. She expects an answer from me, but I don’t have one, I can see that with each day of the war her insecurity is mounting and they are multiplying, becoming even more distant and anonymous. They won’t give her Father’s pension; this has been going on for months. The fact that he had died before the war started and that he was a Croat – so is my mother, incidentally – makes no difference. For the time being, the retired Federal Army personnel, and their widows as well, will not be given their pensions. There are promises that the new government will regulate the matter. She no longer knows what to expect: maybe she will be evicted from her apartment, the apartment is army-owned, in an army-owned building. In the autumn of 1991 when the first air-raid sirens were sounded, the rumour spread that the snipers hiding in the army apartment buildings shot civilians in the streets. The papers claimed that there were about 2500 snipers in Zagreb. Although never officially confirmed, and even denied a month later, this piece of information was carried by all the newspapers with a maddening conviction which left no margin for doubt, almost to the point of proclaiming a lynch-law. At that time most active Federal Army officers, particularly those of other nationalities, had already left Croatia (or transferred to the Croatian army). People moved into their empty apartments at will until the government took control of them. The tenants who remained in such buildings lived as if under siege, waiting for an ominous knock on the door. Their children were scared of going outside to play or of going to school. Now my mother is afraid that she will be evicted, she trusts no one, keeps listening to the news, chain-smokes and has trouble sleeping. The war is everywhere and is different for each.
‘Maybe I should have the tombstone changed before this happens,’ she says uncertainly, not looking at me. Now her voice is soft, as if she is begging me to agree. She can sense my disapproval, perhaps even rage. But what do I know of her fear when she approaches the cemetery, opens the iron gate and treads carefully among the graves with a faltering step. Can I possibly imagine what she feels at the moment when she lifts her eyes to look at Father’s grave?
I think of Father often these days. He died of a heart attack when he was sixty-seven. He was worn out by his long illness, near the end even breathing was too much of an effort. He wasn’t able to go to or from the haemodyalisis on his own; a hospital attendant would pick him up and carry him all the way to the second floor, he was so light. On sunny days he would sit on a small balcony looking out to sea. We have been told he died like that, looking through the open balcony door in the hospital checkroom. The hospital is high up on the hill, facing the harbour. That day he had just got dressed, he did not complain of any pain as usually. When the cleaning woman entered the room, she found him kneeling against a sofa with arms spread, his face turned to the sea. The last thing he saw were the ships on the sun-lit expanse of the sea.
During my rare visits in the last few years, I could hardly recognize his small, wrinkled face which seemed to shrink, as if his skull was beginning to wither while he was still alive. We seldom found anything to talk about. Politics perhaps, but this would invariably start us quarrelling. He was a communist, of ‘the idea is fine, only the practice stinks’ type. Although Father had grown softer with the years, for me he remained the same rigid man he had always been. The man who got used to pushing people around in the army, the man from whom I ran away from home while I was still practically a child. Standing close to him, I could smell his musty olive-grey uniform which I hated. It was a heavy smell of wool impregnated with the stench of the army canteen, stale tobacco and linoleum, dusty files and the official car. Sometimes, when Mother would iron his uniform over a cloth soaked in water and vinegar it seemed to me I could trace out his entire life in the cloud of steam that billowed from the iron. He went to trade school and loved soccer, bicycling and dancing. In 1942, as a twenty year old, he joined Tito’s partisan army. His elder brother was already there, their mother followed them. He fought in the mountains of Gorski kotar, he saw his friends being killed in battle or freezing to death on Matic-poljana. Nobody knows the things he saw. Never, ever, did he speak about the War. Mother has only recently told me that long after the War was over, for five years maybe, he would writhe and sob in his sleep, and then wake up suddenly gasping for air, drenched in sweat, as if he had just dreamed his own death. In their wedding picture he wears his naval uniform; a handsome young man with blond wavy hair combed neatly back. He had to ask permission from the army command to marry my mother, since her family was not ‘politically suitable’, that is it was a ‘class enemy’. And Grandfather and Grandmother were reluctant to give their daughter away to a man in uniform, the uniform which to them meant the uncivilized men from the woods – partisans. Unable to reconcile themselves to the fact that she wouldn’t have a church wedding, which was not permitted to an army officer but meant so much to my mother’s strong Catholic family, they were to feel resentment to the end of their lives. My grandmother arranged for me and my mother to be baptized secretly; it must have been a kind of revenge. No matter how hard my father tried, he was never good enough for them. The word ‘officer’ was always spoken with contempt.
Sitting across from my mother, in the place where he used to sit, for the first time I feel close to my father. It is only now that I can grasp the futility of his life, frittered away by history. Like a mirror, it reflects the entire period between the two wars, the last one and the present one, the time when people like him believed that communism was possible. In the mid-sixties he took off his uniform and went to work for a furniture retail company, but he remained a member of the Communist League, believing he owed that much to the party which had transformed the country and pulled it out of poverty and backwardness. Nevertheless, he used to turn off the TV set in the middle of the news programme even before Tito’s death in 1980. They’ve screwed it all up, he would say about his former comrades. His idealism was long gone, the country was falling apart and the communists were refusing to let go of power; that was obvious. Father sat over the spread-out papers and grew old, sinking together with the state he had helped build. He died in the middle of November, 1989, the month and the year that marked the beginning of the final collapse of the communist system. Thank goodness he died – said Mother a couple of months later – this would’ve been the end of him. For her family, she has been guilty of being his wife; for the communist state, she was guilty of being from another class; and now, when he is dead, she is guilty again. The guilt by relation she had been saddled with in distant 1947 is today still hers to carry. Yet, she cannot understand how her dead husband can possibly be the enemy of the new Croatian state. ‘Why did they take my pension away?’ she says. ‘What will I live on?’
Night falls. It is dark, I can no longer see her face, only the glowing tip of her cigarette. She does not turn on the light. She says it’s because of the war, the air-raids, but I know that she is in fact saving electricity. It seems to me Father is here, with us – the man whose past needs to be forgotten now. But he is not the only one: now the time has come to count the dead again, to punish and to rehabilitate. This is called ‘redressing the injustice of the former regime’. In the spring of 1990, the monument to the nineteenth-century Croat hero Duke Jelacic, removed by the communist government after World War II and relegated to what was known in the official lingo of the day as the ‘junkyard of the past’, has been returned to its original place; Republic Square has been renamed after him. The name of the Square of the Victims of Fascism, where once stood the notorious Ustashe prison, has also been changed. The names of virtually all major streets and squares in the cities throughout Croatia have been changed – even the names of cities themselves.