My mother is an office worker during the day, and types at night. His is also an office worker during the day, but she sews at night. She isn’t a seamstress, but she makes things for whoever needs something, colleagues, neighbours. The only work the husbands can manage is household stuff. And even then, only shopping and cooking, not ironing or cleaning, that’s beyond them. Both help the wives with their work, my father puts carbon paper with the typing paper before she rolls it into the typewriter, and then sorts out the number of typed copies for delivery, and his father hems the clothes, and both are pitiful.
That’s what I was thinking when I saw his father Frane hunched over in the living room armchair, cross-stitching some of the clothes – that he was pitiful. My father didn’t look so pitiful to me because I was angry with him, I fought with him and hated him and told him it was his fault that he was sick because he drank, but when I saw his father, I realised that mine was pitiful, too. But I didn’t ask myself what I was doing in this house which was just like mine, where the mothers slaved away and the husbands were sick, whether it was their fault or their fate didn’t matter, and where you felt bad so you got out; no, I felt at home, I was glad we were so alike and I saw this similarity as an argument to use against my mother – the man I chose was the right person.
She had already met them, Danica and Frane, and she liked them, they are good people, our kind, they were struggling like us and had nothing, she said, she had no complaints about them, they were fine – but their son wasn’t.
Why not, I jumped on my mother, I wanted to hear her arguments, so that I could knock them down, because every argument can be knocked down, and my mother knew it, so she didn’t give me any, because that would have been the end. Because what she knew, what she sensed, what the angels had whispered in her ear, would turn into fear, into a foreboding, a constant worry, a desire to protect her daughter from anybody who could take her away, into her own bad experience that she’d passed on to her daughter, it would be anything but the truth she felt in her heart – that this man was going to destroy me. Or at least would try to.
But like all stupid twenty-year-olds I had decided to get my way, because you’re indescribably stupid when you’re barely twenty and haven’t yet experienced anything except in your imagination, based on the stories you’ve read in books which you see as real, though they’re not, and you project yourself into the story as if it’s going to be yours, but you haven’t had life’s robotic principles instilled in you for some sort of protection, principles based on logic, on controlling bad karma, bad karma can’t be avoided but its blade can be blunted if it is not too extreme, so I extract my mother’s arguments out of her like a dentist pulling teeth, which he will then throw away.
It’s not normal to flunk every single grade in high school and then pass them all privately, says my mother, embarking on a battle she has lost before she started, so she doesn’t wage it openly, face to face, loud and clear, no, she does it in passing, while doing something else, she tosses the words out in passing, over her back, in the kitchen, the heart of the house, where, as usual, we’re talking, she throws them into her daughter’s gaping jaw because the daughter is now a beast – and it’s also not normal to study for two years and not pass a single exam, I’d think about that if I were you, she says, already defeated by the resistance she’s meeting.
The daughter is shocked, they had told her mother these things half-jokingly, as something completely unimportant; did he finish high school, yes, did he enrol in university, yes, did he travel around Italy for two years, yes, so how was he supposed to pass his exams if he was travelling in Italy, he’s still young, he’ll catch up, anyway you were the best student in your school and look at how you wound up, a clerk and a typist, I don’t spare my mother a thing, look at how many geniuses flunked their year and were the worst students in their school, it takes talent to resist established thought – where did I pick up these stupid phrases, I wonder today, when I have to pay the price for them – now that he’s with me you can be sure he’ll pass his exams, we’re already working on it, I reel off the words in defence of the man who is right for me, the man I haven’t slept with yet, he’s not yet my lion, but I’m defending him like a lioness.
At the same time, I remember, it occurs to me that he never told me anything about his time in Italy except that he stayed with a cousin from Split, who lives in Rome, not a word about all the wonderful things he saw, about the amazing architecture, about the paintings and museums, about Michelangelo or the pope, that’s ancient history, he said putting an end to the conversation, and I guess he hugged me and said I was beautiful so who needed Italy? I admire him for having travelled at all, when I haven’t, for having seen things, when I haven’t, for having experienced things, when I haven’t. I don’t even have a passport. The other thing that went through my mind was how it was strange that he couldn’t speak a word of Italian even though he spent two years in Rome and other places in the country, and that Leon, whom I’d already met, with his goatee, eagle-eyes and mocking smile, had said to me: if he saw Italy, then I’m the pope, to which I took mortal offence and went on the attack, saying what kind of a friend tells such lies. That’s Leon, he said, he likes to provoke.
He didn’t learn the language, what he did was look, he said, Italy is for looking, for getting drunk on culture, not for wasting time on learning the language, and if I had any doubts they were quashed by his parents, Danica and Frane, who confirmed those two lost years there, two serious people crushed by life who certainly wouldn’t lie. And later it was also confirmed by Renata, his married cousin from Rome, when she briefly visited Zagreb and stayed for lunch. A beautiful, elegant woman, obviously rich, and wearing designer clothes.
Now, when I remember them talking about Italy in that cramped living room, crammed with furniture, where the sofa bed was pulled out for the son at night, and then folded back again in the morning, where the father sewed the hems, coughed and watched television, and the mother worked the sewing machine, like my cousin Julia, or peered smilingly from the kitchen where she cut clothes using Burda patterns – I see that they were stiff, that they exchanged confused glances, that they were constrained, and that they used few words because they hadn’t been taught how to lie or how to deceive people, they are the ones who had been deceived, but they did it all the same, they did it because they had to, because they were forced to by their one and only son, of whom there were both afraid.
VI.
His parents will leave the apartment so that what has to be done can be done, he has seen to that. I don’t ask him anything, I’ve got my own problems, my own fears of all sorts of things, I wish I could call the whole thing off. But it’s too late now.
We arrive at the flat while they’re still packing, searching for this and that, and everybody feels awkward. Except, maybe, him. He’s irritated that they’re still there, scowling as he sits in father’s armchair and lights a cigarette. His father is asthmatic, so smoking is confined to the balcony, but not now, now he’s the boss. He’s pretending to browse through the newspaper. I’m sitting on the sofa with the green slipcovers that still haven’t lost their shape. I’m sitting there all tense, my legs pressed together under the maxi that had sealed my fate. At least this part of it. I hear them moving around the apartment, in the hall, the bedroom, the bathroom, talking softly, whispering, I can sense a growing fear, but I don’t understand it because they’re in their own house.
They never go anywhere, as if they were stranded in this flat, on some kind of rock, up on the third floor with no elevator, his father can barely gasp his way up, he wheezes so loudly that you know he’s coming even before he reaches the door. And when he walks in, he coughs for a long time, in the cramped hall. Everything in the place is cramped, all the rooms, even the balcony, where you can’t even fit a chair. The bedroom would be spacious if it weren’t stuffed with furniture, a huge double bed with an ottoman at the end where they sit to put on their shoes, along with walnut wardrobes, heavy and dark, as if designed to make life difficult, to cast a pall over it, even in your own flat. As if life outside weren’t hard enough, with all its demands, shakeups indignities, political pressures and constant evil. In nice weather even this dark room would be brighter if you could open the window, but you can’t. Nearby is a leather factory