Having heard what Ana had done, Marta went to a lawyer and started proceedings, first to expel Ana and her boyfriend from her apartment and second, to assert her right to buy it under the new legislation. The problem is, however, that until Ana withdraws the claim she lodged with the government Marta won’t be able to buy the apartment and with an ongoing war, this could take forever. It also means that Ana could continue living in Marta’s apartment (which she is doing) until the case is legally resolved. In the meantime, when Marta went to the same Parliament commission, she found that the file containing her application to buy the apartment had simply vanished, together with the rest of her documents!
In essence, Ana has tried to steal the apartment. Not for herself- and this is the point, because this is where her sense of ‘justice’ comes in – but so that she can give it back to the state, to ‘the people’. She is doing a favour to the state by reporting on a person of communist background, and a traitor too, who doesn’t deserve to have such a luxurious apartment. But this tiny, timid, diligent reporter with a special sense of justice and duty has demonstrated a sound instinct for the realities of war too; in her judgement, this has been the perfect chance literally to take the law into her own hands. Never mind the fact that the apartment was entrusted to her or that she didn’t pay a rent for it. At the ‘right’ moment, when Ana saw that it was possible to act according to the new rules of the game, she was able to abandon any moral scruples. Indeed, when she saw the chance for a girl like herself from the provincial proletariat to get something for nothing, she didn’t hesitate. Given the opportunity, aren’t others – refugees, soldiers, ordinary citizens, even a neighbour in the same building – doing the same? The newspapers are full of stories of this kind, people talk about it in local bars and supermarkets, in every neighbourhood there are similar cases. And what happens to them? Nothing. So Ana must have thought, Why not me? She didn’t see herself as someone who would denounce people in an attempt to profit by it, she didn’t see that she was taking it upon herself to judge who should be left without an apartment and for what reason. But most important of all, Ana wouldn’t have dared do what she did if Marta hadn’t been proclaimed a ‘traitor’. In this way, Ana saw no harm done: the people give, the people take away.
When I discussed the matter with a friend familiar with the case she said to me: ‘Are you sure that Ana was wrong in doing this? When Marta’s father was given the apartment it had most probably been taken from a rich Jew, a bourgeois or enemy of the people during the previous regime.’ This is very likely the truth, but on the other hand Marta’s mother’s family house as well as several apartments were also confiscated and no doubt given to someone else in turn – namely, to someone who ‘deserved’ it because of their achievements during the War. If you want to correct historical mistakes and restore justice – which is not the task of the individual anyway, but of the law – the question is how far back do you go and what is the point in doing it if you allow the very same pattern to be repeated?
However, even the ‘revolutionary law’ of Tito’s partisans was different from breaking the law, which is what Ana did. But if one asked Ana, I am afraid she would see no harm in the ‘new bolshevism’ or her own act. In my view she merely behaved as the dutiful, diligent child of communism. By her act she merely showed she had graduated in the revanchism of the proletariat against its class enemy: this time the communist or ‘red bourgeoisie’ itself. Just as she’d been taught in their school.
17
A LETTER TO MY DAUGHTER
Zagreb, 7 April 1992
My dear R,
This morning I went to your empty room. Its tidiness was so strange: your usually unmade bed now covered with a blue quilt, a clean desk (with a sticker: A clean desk is a sign of a sick mind!), a chair without your T-shirts hanging from it, a carpet without at least three pairs of shoes scattered around and your two dogs Kiki and Charlie playing with a yellow rubber ball. I miss you, I miss your voice, your messages written with a lipstick on a bathroom mirror, your little notes that you leave on the table when you come in late at night and which I read with my first morning coffee.
Just today it is nine months since you left the country. Nine months is such a long time, I thought as I sat there for a moment, time for a baby to be born. What a strange thought. Or perhaps not so strange after all because you are now a grown woman and could decide to have a baby yourself. And because what was born in the past nine months was not a baby but a war – a crippled, disheartening child indeed, but we’ve learned to live with it by now. I knew that you would go anyway, you’d leave me, this house, your room where all of your children’s toys and books remain side by side with your evening dresses and make-up. That thought comforts me. Besides, it’s good for you to go away to live on your own and to escape my overmothering you, the typical fault of a single parent. Living on her own will make her stronger, she will see the world, it is good for a young person to live abroad and Vienna is only six hours away: I keep repeating this to myself like some kind of prayer. Except that I know that you didn’t intend to leave so soon and so abruptly, not only me and your room, but your university and, more important, your friends here. You left behind so many things unfinished. You left because of the war.
It happened right after the ‘Slovenian war’ or the attack of what was called the Yugoslav Federal Army on Slovenia on the night of 26 June 1991. It turned out to be only a prelude to the nightmare of Serbian aggression against Croatia and it seems certain that Bosnia will be next. As you know I was in London at that time, glued to a TV screen and a telephone. We both cried. ‘What do I do, mama?’ you said on that first day of the war but I didn’t know what to advise you. What does one say to one’s child when the war begins? I didn’t want you to panic after the army’s attack on Slovenia, even if it is only a hundred miles from Zagreb. One part of me wanted to believe that it was not a real war (whatever that means) because a real war could not happen, it is too stupid, too absurd – an army attacking its own people, it might happen in some South American dictatorship, not in Europe. But there was another part of me that knew this is it and there was no way back. The signs were clear – people already killed in Plitvice and Borovo selo, and the smell of blood that evaporated from the newspaper pages filling the summer air with heaviness, with premonition.
One afternoon, Tuesday 2 July -I remember with the clarity our memory reserves only for traumatic events – we were talking on the telephone and in the middle of our conversation you started screaming, ‘Mama, they are shooting next door!’ I could hear the shots in a garden next to ours; I could visualize the garden and its high wall covered with roses and bunches of grapes hanging on the vine, the way the sun shone through its leaves at that particular moment of the late afternoon. And I could see you standing there, by the window overlooking it, lost and pale, trembling. You dropped the receiver and then I heard your voice, half cry and half whimper, as if you were no longer a human being but a wounded dog. I can hear it now, every sound that entered the receiver on that day, the distant sound of radio news in the background, the tram that passed by the house and the silence, that sudden silence that followed it. Then your boyfriend Andrej’s frightened yet soft voice trying to calm you down. Hush, it’s nothing, it’s nothing he said, but it was too late because that was the moment when the war began for both of us, and we realized it.