Yugoslavia, My Fatherland. Goran Vojnović

quickly get her cardigan, drag the lady back inside, or have a smoke himself. He seemed like the sort of person with a great deal of experience confronted by simple questions for which he could not find simple answers. After much deliberation, he decided to head for the stairs. But the old lady stopped next to me, took a cigarette from her pocket, and lit it.

      ‘Want one?’

      I nodded and she offered me her lighter as well. I wasn’t a smoker, but every now and then I had a serious urge to suck some poison into my veins.

      ‘Healthy or sick?’

      ‘Healthy.’

      ‘That makes two of us. These modern kids and grandkids just don’t understand that people are old when they hit eighty, so they bring me here for examinations just so these nitwits can find something, which they do every time. Cholesterol, veins, that sort of stuff. And then these clowns want me to enrol in aquatic aerobics and stop smoking and eating pork roast and who knows what else. Come on, gimme a break. Can’t I die in peace, without them watering me here like a house plant?’

      I was trying to nod at the appropriate moments, to at least appear interested in her story, but the truth is I was so preoccupied that I didn’t even see Dusha walk past, and only caught a glimpse of her when she was ten metres beyond me. I threw the half-burnt stub of my cigarette into the bushes and took off after her.

      ‘Dusha! Dusha!’

      She was at the crossroads by the time she finally turned around and saw me. She wasn’t the sort of person who was easily surprised, and even less likely to show it openly. I hadn’t seen her for months, and I’d obviously been lurking outside of the Polyclinic for her, but she met me without expression, as if I was a walk-on character in a Mexican soap opera. That look would have made me hate her, if I didn’t already hate her for so many other reasons. The only other time I had hated her more was when she decided she would speak Slovene to me. I had insisted on speaking Serbo-Croatian; and rarely with as much as plea­sure as that day.

      ‘What are you doing here?’

      ‘Where is he?’

      ‘Who?’

      ‘I want the phone number, address, anything. I want to know where he is.’

      ‘Who are you talking about?’

      ‘You know.’

      My mother, the Terminator, seemed to be in shock for a moment, a rare occurrence, but then she turned and started to cross the road, as if her plan was to run away from her own son. I hoped she would at least stop on the opposite pavement, but soulless old Dusha kept right on going towards her car, where it was parked on Ilirska Street, as it had been every day for years. Her husband, Dragan, had scored her a permit through his connections with various and sundry ‘southern scum,’ so that Mrs. Ćirić would never have to pay for parking. I knew that she was capable of getting into her shit-yellow Clio and driving home without replying, without a word. As she always had, Dusha simply went into shutdown mode.

      I chased and grabbed her hand, but she wouldn’t stop. It was clear that she really did intend to drive off, and I had no choice but to pull her away from her car, and make her talk to me.

      ‘I know he’s alive and I want to see him.’

      Rather than answering, she tried to shake off my grip. First she pushed, and then kicked, but luckily she didn’t know what she was doing. I held her firmly by the waist, and I waited for her to calm down and stop wriggling like a fool. Dusha was renowned for her stubbornness. At one point she dug her long red nails into my hand. I pulled away reflexively, and we both stumbled back toward the high fence at the edge of the pavement. While she regained her balance, I positioned myself between her and the Clio. Naturally she tried to push her way past me, but I had no hesitation in pushing back.

      I had often suspected that when she shut herself off like this, she wasn’t really herself. But this time I was sure, as she took a few steps back, to sort of get a running start, then literally jumped around me, into the road, in order to get to her car from the other side. Only when I threw myself into her path did she pause. She stepped back onto the pavement, puffing heavily. After a moment, Dusha finally turned to me.

      ‘Come tomorrow during the break and we’ll talk in peace.’

      This didn’t sound like her.

      ‘Promise.’

      ‘I promise.’

      

      Her promise meant little to me, but I knew my mother well enough to know that this was as much as I could hope to get from her. My hope that she really would show up in the morning was because this time it was serious: I needed a piece of information that would mean her coming out of her comfort zone. I also counted on her knowing that I was as stubborn as she, and I could wait indefinitely for her in front of the Polyclinic if necessary. But at that moment her Clio was moving out of sight, and I still wasn’t sure whether I was indeed going to see her the following day, less still that I would manage to extract information from her.

      I was tempted to get onto some obscure city bus, maybe the number ten, and circle the city once or twice, staring out the window, sitting quietly like some forgotten scarf in the company of autistic teenagers on their way home from school. But it was almost three o’clock, and I knew that there would be no seats free. An even if I could find one, the inevitable old lady would come on-board soon enough, drooping supermarket bags in hand, and inform me eloquently with her gaze that I should make myself scarce and yield up my seat.

      So I slowly meandered home, past the Medical Centre, with the honest intention of planning how I would explain all this, or any of this, to Nadia. Or what would I do if, in the middle of a sentence, I realized that I couldn’t tell her anything?

      Though we had been together three years, I’d never managed to completely understand Nadia. I wasn’t sure just what she was doing with me, and how she viewed our relationship. She came from another storybook altogether: a top microbiology student from an orderly suburban family. But more than that, she belonged to a generation cool enough not to worry about the daily forecasts of impending doom. From the moment her pubescent pimples departed, Nadia had never had any problems, or at least none that I (with my inherited insensitivity) could notice. Sometimes I thought she was with me only because a two-metre-tall lifelong unsolvable problem like me would thoroughly complicate her otherwise immaculate life and was, therefore, the only thing missing from her as yet unfinished childhood.

      If I felt anything for Nadia, it was probably gratitude. I was grateful because she didn’t nag me, because she wasn’t interested in my life story, because she didn’t make a fuss that I’d never introduced her to my mother. Her light touch was endlessly appealing, and I was frankly afraid to shatter that with a story about my father, who until recently, had been deceased.

      

      Luckily for me my dilemma was delayed that evening by Nadia’s student obligations. Our little rented flat had been invaded by a pair of classmates from her hometown: aspiring microbiologists Matthew and Nina who, along with Nadia, were drinking all our beers. These three linked studying with the endless freedom won by leaving home, and thus looked upon microbiological studies at the University of Ljubljana as heaven on earth. As I walked in the door, they were in the midst of some crucial discussion, and barely noticed me, so I was able to slip into the bedroom, shut the door, and try to get some sleep.

      My study habits couldn’t have been more different. I enrolled at the uni’ only in order to get my hands on references from student services, and to help my former boss avoid paying out to the state. Years later I’d managed to convince myself that the absorption of knowledge on a daily basis might actually be a good way to bring some semblance of organization and meaning to my melee of a life, so I began, along with a crowd of fellow enthusiasts, frequenting the Faculty of Arts. On the first day they hit me with Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theories, followed quickly by child development psychology, then Slavic mytho­logy. I did ethnology in my first year, cultural anthropology in my third, and was in no particular hurry to continue.