A Handful of Sand. Marinko Koscec

He neither went back to school nor engaged with the world any more, although a few years later he started leaving the house again. Today you can still see him when he goes out on his walks, twice a day, sometimes in the middle of the night: he’s become the walking landmark of the neighbourhood. His walks are different to those where a person is accompanied by a dog, or takes a trip into the countryside, or has an issue to ruminate on. He’s become a phantom with empty eyes and mechanical movements, and he stopped returning greetings long ago. Sometimes children throw stones at him. When he gets hit, he stops for an instant and a spark of surprise flickers in his eyes, a kind of smile, but then they disappear around the corner in a flash. The years have left their mark on him in a ragged beard which clings to his cheeks, and grimaces which distort his face, but sometimes it seems you could catch a glimpse of something enigmatic inside, perhaps truly Taoistic.

      There were others similar to him, thank God, and I may mention one or two later. Them recognising me as one of their own was largely thanks to my mother. According to generally accepted opinion, she was one of the loonies of the benign sort whom people like to run into in the street because they’re sure to come up with something interesting you can share with your family or flatmates and therefore allow all of you to feel better, more normal, and convinced that the Almighty has had mercy on you after all. You don’t let people like that into the house, of course, but they only turn up on your doorstep rarely anyway, for example with the diabolical insinuation that you’ve poisoned their cat, which they don’t dare to speak openly but just shoot at you with their crazy eyes. To shoo them away you just need to reply in a calm, ever so slightly raised voice: Lady, just move along now. You don’t hold it against them because you’re compassionate and will soon forget the incident; you’ll continue to greet them on the street and inquire after their health, although you know more than enough about them already.

      I’ve never seen a more good-natured, grateful creature in my life than the cat. I found her in the meadow which the neighbourhood children used as a playground and the households as a disposal site: a bristling black kitten with clotted, scabby fur, which for hunger and trembling couldn’t even miaow. It opened its mouth in vain, crying out with its frightened eyes. Mother very nearly jumped out of her skin when she discovered her beneath my bed, but that was the first of only two things where I didn’t give in to her so often extravagant demands: I wept and blubbered and rolled on the floor until I won permission for the cat to stay. Cat was her name because Mother refused to call her anything else, so in the end I accepted it. She slept on my pillow and brought me mice and little birds; I didn’t know how to explain to her that I didn’t want to share them with her. Periodically there was the problem of her offspring to deal with. The first time, while I was at school, Mother incinerated them in the woodstove. You can imagine what it must have sounded like because disconcerted neighbours called the police, and the rest was written in Cat’s eyes. For days she whined softly on the floor by my bed and didn’t care for the food I brought her. With the other litters, Mother categorically refused any discussion: What am I to feed them with? What?! she cried in such a desperate voice that I fell silent. At least she didn’t burn them any more. But she took them away in a sack and I didn’t dare to ask where.

      It would have been an exaggeration to say that Mother ever took a liking to Cat. But when she was poisoned with something which made her vomit yellow mucous for two days before dying, she cried together with me. Cat used to visit the neighbours’ houses, and she particularly loved children. A week before the event, our neighbour Mr Kruhek gave Mother a telling off: the dirty animal had given his daughters fleas, he said.

      On my first day at school, Mother made a name for herself by introducing herself to the teacher as my father. Classical Freudiansm; those aware of the situation might have seen their theories confirmed. For others it served as my first labelling, an indication of what kind of family I came from.

      Father was a concept bound to rear its head sooner or later, precisely because it was so painstakingly suppressed, swept out of everyday use and pulverised–it was meant to lose all meaning. With exemplary obedience, I accepted Mother’s explanation that I was the fruit of momentary weakness, what she called an ‘adventure’, with a Gypsy who had only been in town for a few days with his travelling orchestra. When I started asking questions as a child, that story seemed as convincing as any other, but over time I felt there was too much nebulousness in it to want to correct it. The neighbours also accepted it, although they knew full well what I found out ten years later: that my father wasn’t a Gypsy at all but a man who had led an orderly life alongside them, had bought a little plot nearby and was building a house; but as soon as his wife’s belly began to bulge he chickened out of both challenges overnight, never to be seen again. Mother’s family–there was never any mention of the other side–had no ear for her version of the truth and soon all contact was severed; I didn’t meet a single relative from one side or the other until my grandmother’s death.

      And so my mother’s romantic inspiration gave me the nickname ‘Gypo’. It was underscored by my astonishingly dark complexion, bristly black hair and deep, almost black eyes, which tended to arouse unease in people, the instinct to look away, more than the desire to explore what was inside. I was never ashamed of that nickname, least of all in front of those who used it to demean me and exclude me from their games; for the latter, in fact, I was grateful.

      Mother’s Gypsy was not merely a caprice, however, but also a form of penance. For reasons which were never elucidated, she blamed herself for her husband’s disappearance and intended to expiate it. The collateral damage to me was of no concern to her. In one of her hysterical states, as frequent as they were arbitrary, she uttered with blithe ignorance of the consequences that I was a sorry case; she’d never wanted to have children and everything could have been different if she hadn’t got pregnant; and me turning out the way I did–the cross she had to bear–was God’s way of punishing her. Oh, the curse of my behaviour… That word embodied one of the root evils, which no gestures or avowals to the contrary could dispel. However much I tried to please her, and although my extreme self-consciousness in early childhood severed any inclination to escapades, her use of the term your behaviour designated my certain descent into a career of substance abuse and my predetermined, inevitable matricide.

      God arrived in her life at the same time as me; until then she’d been involved in purely worldly pursuits, but thanks to my birth she found her God. From that point on she never missed Mass and worked tirelessly to equip the house with little holy pictures, statuettes and olive branches. She even lit candles and gave alms at church as soon she had a few coins to spare and our most pressing needs had been satisfied. At work she was rewarded for her spiritual zeal with a demotion–the Yugoslav state frowned on any religious fervour–although cause and effect were not spelt out. She was replaced as municipal cultural officer by the typist, a woman who never finished high school, and Mother was made her assistant. She bore that blow heroically, not flinching from her beliefs despite the objections of others. Her response was to opt out of any effective activity and spend the rest of her working life on go-slow, practicing quiet sabotage, until this was interrupted by the democratic changes in the early nineties; and her job was immediately terminated. Aged fifty-three, in the middle of the war, she found herself on the dole. The only other thing she could do, being a graduate accordion teacher, was to try and make ends meet by giving private lessons, but her skill was anything but appealing at that moment in history; in oh-so-refined Croatia, few things were considered as barbarously Balkan as playing the accordion.

      Mother didn’t even try to arouse my musical talent, but God was number one on the agenda. I went through the complete torture of confession, communion, confirmation, saying the Lord’s Prayer before bed and going on pilgrimages to Marija Bistrica. The merciless woman even managed–undoubtedly through the magnitude of her sacrifice–to have me accepted as an altar boy. But that didn’t last long, thanks to the unavoidable difficulties caused by my sooty black head jutting out of the angelically white habit and my dark hands wrapped around the candle–it reeked of a Satanic diversion.

      When I think back to my childhood, my first association is with smoke, not only from censers but also cigarettes. Mother smoked so much that layers of haze constantly hung in the house, around one metre from the ceiling, which no airing could dispel; she always had at least one cigarette