A Handful of Sand. Marinko Koscec

topic. He regularly reports about the rotten fruit they slip him at the market and the obligatory misunderstandings about the change. But medical issues are still the major topic, and if we leave them it’s virtually only to talk about the weather. At this time of year, that boiled down to the remark that the weather outside was nasty, really nasty. If it was summer, it would have been nasty inside as well. Unbearable. I wouldn’t have disagreed. We’d sit quietly by the TV for a bit because we haven’t played ludo for thirty years or so.

      That evening I happened to see a feature on the exhibition of a former fellow student from the Academy. Today he’s a big-time artist, the gallery owner explained with a playful smile: not only intriguing as a personality but also dynamic in the market place. Then a critic spoke in front of one of his pictures about its inner necessity and about reality growing into an elusive fascination; the tangible vanished in the immeasurable yet gained new quantifiability through abstraction. He mentioned a shifting luminosity rising from the depths and crystallising in a seething turmoil, in wellsprings of resistance and reflection. Here we saw broad vision and deep resonance, a blend of abrasive energy and sweet intimacy.

      I had to rub my eyes. The pictures were deceptively similar to those he’d begun to paint in the middle of his studies just for fun, as a way of mocking minimalism: each had two or three small squares or triangles, perhaps an arrow or a curvy line, a bit like Kandinsky for bathroom tiles. But their titles were long and enigmatic like Bursting from their Blue Embankment, Bareheaded Brownies Behold the Beanstalk. He made an intelligent impression, which the feature confirmed. Not only did he dazzle critics, the reporter noted, but his clientele was in the specific milieu of footballers and models. Art lovers of this calibre would willingly sacrifice ten thousand kunas and more for a picture, the artist himself admitted in the only original snippet we heard. The camera focussed for a second on a glass of champagne being filled.

      Some are born with a champagne glass in their hand and sooner or later it will be filled. And whatever happens in life, they’ll still have their champagne to sip. I have a little theory of my own which I’m coming to believe in more and more: that my father was born with a talent for suffering. Something big just had to come along to trigger that potential and really get him going. There had always been material in abundance, albeit scattered and subject to wear. But the real thing, the capital-E event worthy of full commitment, came in the form of my mother’s death: he seized it with all his remaining strength and devoted himself to it entirely. But over the years, imperceptibly, it stole away once it had done its job and raised him into a state of permanent hypnosis. He mentions Mother less and less, and her grave is overgrown with weeds, because what he now sees is the very essence of suffering, cleansed of external substances.

      My own substances and substrates didn’t overly impassion me. Whatever made its way down to me through the genetic gutters didn’t reach my erogenous zones. On my mother’s side, there wasn’t much to whet one’s archaeological appetite anyway. All she inherited from her parents was the vocation of primary school teacher, which she gladly gave up for my future. Her family moved to the city after the Second World War from an area which had been outside the Independent State of Croatia and occupied by the Nazis–this was fortunate because the Germans didn’t put them on an extermination list. They died fairly young of normal human ailments. We had them buried back in their village and visited their graves from time to time. In 1995, the sons of the Croatian Army’s ‘Operation Storm’ thoroughly ‘liberated’ the ramshackle house and daubed a sign on the crumbling walls: OCCUPIED DO NOT BLOW UP. This was quite superfluous because no one intended to expropriate the ruins, but it did happen a few years later when the government presented its refugee resettlement programme.

      Father’s family tree was more ramified, but his parsimonious nature also meant that he was no storyteller. I only knew the basics. But in the middle of my studies, while going through Father’s things, I chanced upon my grandfather’s notebook. It wasn’t intended for me or anyone else. Grandfather had evidently kept it in an attempt to clear his head. His aim had been to set down what was real and true amidst the mess of images and voices which besieged him towards the end of his life, taking complete control and deleting his life’s present tense. The truth as laid down by Grandfather’s hand was a hotchpotch of brainwaves jotted down as they came, without order and without concern for occasional contradictions. I needed this about as much as the girl George in Dead Like Me needed the toilet seat to come down and hit her on the head. Still, I showed a sensational, hitherto unseen ability to relate to the family’s nitty-gritty. I adopted all those basics, integrated them into my foundations and took them along with me as life’s luggage. Or rather, they adopted me and shaped me a posteriori to fit into an already tailored dress.

      Grandfather’s father grew up in a family of Jewish tailors, and later innkeepers, on German soil. The notebook didn’t trace the family roots back any further. It mentioned a boarding house on the shores of an unnamed lake, which my great-grandfather lost at cards. Allied with alcohol, his gambling passion consumed all other real estate and even created debts which left him no other choice than to secretly relocate to some backwoods. In the chaos of the First World War, he managed to move with his wife and my very small grandfather. Zagreb played the role of backwoods impeccably. No one looked for him there and he was able to start afresh with the acquisition of property, and its squandering.

      He found work with a textile dealer. As the years went by, he was allowed to manage the business and later bought the shop in Kačićeva Street. Apart from fabrics, he also traded in sugar, lard, coal and timber. He would often lose his stock to others in games of chance. He played cards almost every night, in German, Hungarian, Czech, Yiddish or a mixture of all those, soaked in wine. Great-grandfather learnt only as much Croatian as he needed for his transactions with local farmers. Games were broken off due to excessive drunkenness. Then they sang, retold their exploits and other’s misfortunes, and let out animal-like howls. Some drunkards had to sleep the night on the floor until they were brought new clothes because they’d pawned everything down to their underwear. The apprentices would come in the morning and sweep everything out onto the street: sawdust, broken glass and dead-drunk bodies. They would take great-grandfather home in the horse-drawn cart and put him to bed.

      He quickly realised the value of having a private wine cellar, so he set one up in the premises next door. Then he bought the whole house and extended his business to renting out rooms. Things happened here which mellow-mooded gentlemen are inclined to desire in the middle of the night. Women from the annexe were part of the shop’s decor, tasked with topping up the glasses and sitting on customers’ knees. Grandfather learnt to sit on their knees at an early age, the notebook boasted. He grew up quickly, married at eighteen and immediately had a son, and another on the eve of the war. The elder, my father, spent a good part of his childhood helping out in the shop. The basement of that so educational business complex is today a macrobiotic food shop.

      Great-grandfather was more inclined to the nocturnal aspects of entrepreneurship than to dry, academic business. Until Grandfather came of age, the day-to-day management was run by the apprentices, who sometimes lined their own pockets. If there was a profit, my great-grandfather looked the other way; otherwise he sacked them regardless of their diligence. A fanatical follower of his own instinct for happiness, every now and then he zeroed the business results and was left without a single bale of fabric, sack of flour or barrel of wine. Then he started from scratch again. I ask myself if he perhaps did that intentionally or because of a subconscious instinct to undermine whatever he’d built.

      He was a great admirer of the Teutonic spirit: its breadth and firmness, its cult of vitality and personal expansion. A self-taught philosopher, he particularly esteemed German idealism. And he loved music, above all else, especially Wagner’s operas. He rarely got up before noon, and until then all noise was banned in the house, including kitchen clatter and children’s voices. But as soon as he opened his eyes he would start to sing arias from operas or military marches, whose words he would playfully, lasciviously change. That was a signal that one was allowed to talk at normal volume, and also for the beginning of preparations for the ritual main meal. He also sang while he shaved, then donned a fresh, starched white shirt which was waiting on the coat-hanger, while on the table was a little glass of rakija. Kein Glas mehr! he admonished, although rivers of wine had flowed the night before.