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 passed uneventfully: my sister was growing, learning to speak, learning to be sad; my mother became reticent; and I was going through all those adolescent things: the deepening of the voice, rebelling, reading (The Stranger, The Trial, The Metamorphosis); falling in love (a Nina, until her father forbade her seeing me). But I participated in all this half-heartedly, as if it were all happening to someone else and I was watching it with languid amazement. No one was visiting us and we were going nowhere. Only Slobodan would call once in a while ("Your father is locked behind walls with desperate men, my boy, and your mother needs all the support she can get"). Once a month, we'd go to see Father. We'd sit on the bench in the prison yard, even in the winter, exchanging petty information about our walled-off lives, too aware of the gaze of the remote guards and the sharpshooter in the watchtower. In the spring of 1979, Mother and Father sat on the bench, for two hours, mainly mute, while I was catching stray butterflies for Hanna, and morose prisoners, staring at each other's napes, revolved around a guard (chanting: "Left-right! Left-right!"). When we came back home (after a two-hour ride in a bus full of drunken, vomiting soldiers) Mother burst into tears while unbuttoning her (black) shirt, sat on the chair and wept for hours, ignoring my repeated questions, pushing me away.
In September 1979, I wrote my first poem, in less than an hour, as if hallucinating. The poem was entitled "The Loneliest Man in the World." It was about Sorge and it was more vicarious self-pitying than anything else. I'm translating it (in fact, only the first of ten tedious stanzas) from memory, for I annihilated the notebook (with other, much less memorable, poems) at the peak of the campaign of self-loathing and destruction (which also included shaving every single hair on my body) in my late teens:
I wanted to show it to my father, next time we went to visit him, but he was ill and he only wanted to know about the Afghanistan events (political prisoners could not watch the news). This time we met him in a miasmic room, with a small window looking at the women's prison. He was escorted by a guard, whom he nicknamed "Barabas," and who would help him get up or walk ("You can put me back on the cross now, Barabas"). The prison uniform was dangling from his now scrawny shoulders. "I shrank," he said. In January 1980, Father was released from prison, diagnosed with brain cancer, curled into an old man, with most of his teeth missing. He could wear my clothes, and the wedding ring was sliding down his finger -- he took it off. We rearranged our place and put the TV in the bedroom, Father taking hold of the remote for the rest of his life. He'd watch TV (mainly the news) all day, sucking a banana, occasionally passing out and then waking up from listless dreams. On his good days, he'd be drinking strong-scented tea and tell us stories about his USSR journeys: about Ukrainian weddings, everybody dancing kolomiyka like there's no tomorrow; about nuclear submarines that could stay for days under water (crews going blind); about riding camels in Kazakhstan; about wheat fields spreading as far as you could see and beyond. Every day, he was getting smaller and smaller, as if flesh was being squeezed out of him like toothpaste. On May 4, Comrade Tito died. He had been ailing for a long time and they had had to amputate his leg. We were, for days, repeatedly shown footage of (monopedic) Comrade Tito smiling, surrounded by glowing doctors (happier than anyone that he was alive), a wrinkleless sheet covering his retained leg. Sirens began wailing at 15:04. I looked through the window and saw everything still: people stood motionless on the street, cars were paralyzed, as if someone had stopped the film in the projector. On the black TV screen white letters emitted: "Comrade Tito has passed away" -- no voice-over, no images shown. Sirens stopped wailing. I looked at the street and everybody and everything was gone, as if the ground had gaped open and swallowed it all. "I suppose this is Judgment Day," my father said and turned off the TV. "I suppose this is the end of it all." |
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