10 May 1992, Sunday - Erased

She lay in bed, replaying the events of the evening before.

The door that had seemed so heavy when she entered the broadcasting corporation building had almost flown open on its own as she left. The doorman, following her every move, had held something out for her. It had taken her a while to realise he was returning the ID card she had given him. Waving her hand dismissively, she had stepped outside, glancing at the pavement for any pieces of broken glass on the ground. There weren’t any: at least she had not broken that kind man’s glasses.

She had not been able to stop then – the impetus of rushing into the studio and her appearance in front of the cameras had not wanted to subside. She had walked so fast her breathing had hardly kept up. There had been no moon, the clouds that had lingered in the sky all day deciding to extend their stay into the night. The pub where she had stolen the ID card had closed for the evening.

Walking down to the river, she had found a homeless man sleeping on the church steps. The bronze statue of a poet stood motionless on its plinth, the muse above his head exposing a peculiar breast. Becoming aware of a warm dampness coming from her own breasts, she had stopped halfway across the bridge and thrown the soggy nursing pads into the river. She had found a fresh pair in her handbag, looked left and right and placed them inside her bra.

When a police car drove past with its siren on, its flashing blue lights illuminating her, she had wanted to jump out of the way, to hide, but then had defiantly held up her face, the energy in her ready to explode.

As she had crossed the road, an orange delivery van had driven out of the side street. Its tires screeched first because of the sharp turn, then because of its brakes. A hot breeze had wrapped her skirt against her legs and a smell of asphalt and burnt rubber had risen to her nose. The driver had yelled, “Bitch, what the fuck are you standing in the middle of the road for?”

He changed gears, the mechanism clicking, and he reversed back to the petrified Zala, stopping right next to her. She had watched the window slide open and his raging youthful face lean toward her.

“What are you staring at? You thinking of snitching on me to the boss? I don’t give a fuck! Go and report me if you want, my name is Goran Jelkovi ć !”

He had put his foot on the accelerator, leaving a cloud of bluish smoke behind. Zala had stared at the disappearing lights with astonishment. ‘A surname ending in -i ć ! Jelkovi ć ! And he dares to shout and argue, risk someone calling the police, he can behave normally. -i ć ! Jelkovi ć !’

A tiny voice inside her had muttered that this man’s accent marked him a ‘southerner,’ that he couldn’t possibly have been in Slovenia long, whereas she, a Slovene at birth... ‘Injustice! Injustice!’

Ashamed of herself, she had lowered her head and run away.

* * *

She rolled over in bed and thought about how easy it was to behave as an adult if everything went as planned. She had long held the belief that, if she did everything right, everything would be alright in return. The world of ‘everything’ was of course Mother and Father, both dissatisfied with her in their own way. Mother always hinted that she could do things better, and Father firmly believed, and shouted, that she could do more. In between the two, Zala had built inside her a sense of right and wrong. She knew it should have been triggered when she got involved with Mark, a married man, but it hadn’t been. Perhaps because his wife and children had been no more than a photograph she had once caught a glimpse of.

* * *

The doorbell erased the remnants of her dreams. She jumped up: no time to look for her slippers.

‘They have brought me baby Marko!’ Hope sounded inside her. She was already unlocking and pulling the door open.

Father stood before her, his head lowered. Hope had already been extinguished from her face.

“Come in,” she said.

He raised his head. “Son...”

As he came through the door, she shook right down to her toes. ‘Son’ was his greatest and rarest praise. Occasionally, women coming from the south of the country to sell fruit and vegetables at the market also cajoled her with ‘son,’ and every time she shuddered and rushed past. During puberty, she had once snapped at her father that she was a woman all the time, even when she behaved according to his wishes. He had insisted that this kind of naming had existed long before both of them and would for a long time yet, and she could be as ‘cocky’ as she wanted, but nothing would change – she had felt like seizing that thick neck of his and strangling him. How did he always manage to find the words to infuriate her?

She checked the time: seven, of course. He had risen at six as if he were still serving in the army, done his exercises, shaved, had breakfast, and walked round to her place. Now it was time for the troop inspection.

He sat on the edge of the sofa, still staring at the floor.

“Coffee?” she asked and thought she saw him nod.

All she found in the refrigerator was a small block of cheese, from which she had to cut off the mouldy base. She offered slices of it on a wooden board, but he didn’t touch it. He placed his bony fingers round the coffee cup as if he wished to absorb its heat.

“Son...” he started again.

She had to work her way through old grudges. Her body was eager to go, ready with patterns of speech not used for a long time and – she had thought – forgotten, but she restrained herself.

This was not that Father. This was his spirit. He could no longer argue or fight. March or roar. He could only sit with his head stooped.

All those hours she had spent arguing with him in her head... now she stared at him in astonishment and disappointment. ‘What? This is it? The great match is not to happen? Ever?’

Part of her lamented the cancelled battle, while another part breathed relief. Somehow her lungs opened, air flowing more smoothly through her windpipe. She raised her palm. “Father...” she began.

He looked at her with hazy eyes set amidst his yellowish skin. He really was no longer that Father, but he still reminded her of the man who had carried her round on his shoulders, who once smashed his fist against a door instead of her.

She didn’t know how to continue. All she hoped was that he wouldn’t say ‘son’ again. He looked at the floor.

It occurred to her that in preparing for her TV appearance, she had not once thought about the fact that her parents would also see it. Not least Father. Fortunately, the state broadcast didn’t transmit twenty-four hours a day and had news bulletins at regular intervals, otherwise he would have stayed glued to the television night and day.

Naively, probably inappropriately, she longed for an embrace. She wondered, not without hope, whether he might have similar thoughts. He began fidgeting with his hands. She did not dare risk rejection.

He smelled of an aftershave sold at newsagents – Black Cat or Cut Hay, something like that. By continuing to use it, he was declaring that Socialism wasn’t over, that he could live without expensive aromas and Western products. He wouldn’t even switch to Italian pasta.

The scent pulled her back: she was small again, the world passing by over his shoulder. A minaret on one side of the road, a church belfry on the other. She’d clung so hard he had had to loosen her tiny fingers. Someone singing in the septuple meter of Balkan folk music. Apricot sellers shouting after them. Summer smells lying heavy on the town. Then a drop of saliva fell from her mouth –a dark stain spreading on Father’s army cap. The world disappeared. All she could do was stare at the mess, hoping it would dry before he noticed.

Even then, she’d been afraid of him.

She blinked back to the present. Was he able to distinguish fear from love? Obedience from respect?

She tried again. “Father...”

He sighed and she wanted to cry.

She knew he had come here because he could not put up with Mother’s moaning. In her head, the essence of Father was predictability. He comprehended order as love, wanted to give as much of it, as often as possible. The old man before her could yet surprise her and she hoped he would. She was facing her connection to the past, to her youth, to herself. How few people she had by her side; how many did she even need? A tingling sensation spread from behind her neck. She had always equated solitude with independence and now saw the difference for the first time.

He looked up. “Do you have a photograph? He’s a son, a grandson, yet on the TV you only showed that...”

He was trying to find the right word for the ultrasound image she had held up to the camera in the studio, because that was all she had.

“...that computer zilch.”

“I don’t,” she said and restrained herself not to lengthen the sentence, “...not even that.”

He stared at her for a long time and in his eyes, beyond the saggy skin and bald skull, he was still the old, harsh officer. It dawned on her that she used to stare into his eyes seeking tenderness, but that this time she was searching for the last remaining traces of harshness, before weakness took over.

“Where is your man?” he crackled, when he really wanted to shout. He banged on the table and she had to hold on to the coffee cup. The wood took it calmly.

The disappointment and despair in his voice scorched her. His grievance that he had to be here instead of in his grave. That there was no man to take on his battle and protect his daughter. That he had not only lost the country won by dead partisans, but also his heir.

Should she now tell him, the die-hard communist, that he was asking about an American?

* * *

She spent the afternoon walking downtown, the streets deserted, as if people had simply evaporated. Father had once shocked her with stories of a new bomb that “disappeared” people and left “material goods” untouched. Neutron, was it? She could not remember. Once when she was walking with Mark – always without physical contact and never in public–he had said, “In the US. it’s the rich who leave town on the weekend – here it’s everyone.” She explained to him the basis of Socialist Yugoslavia and the wild surge in building on foreign credit that had happened around 1970. Everyone had built themselves a house or at least bought an apartment, many also a weekend house or two. Her father was dependent on military postings and transfer orders, so he’d never had a place where he could stick his spade. His colleagues had solved the problem by building in their home towns, planning to return after retirement, something Father never mentioned.

From Bitola, she remembered the markets and the promenade, the evening walks, families in their Sunday best, Father always in uniform. Then Rijeka, the sea, the Sunday market, the Korzo. Then Ljubljana, her first year at Nursery School Training College, and general laughter when she asked where the promenade was. There wasn’t one, because it was not the thing to do. A sign of decency and good behaviour was to go to the mountains or down to the coast, where you could drink till you dropped and then, sobered up, somehow return to work on Monday morning. For a Slovene, you couldn’t be you where you lived. Mark commented that where they lived, they had to pretend to be Austrian. It hurt to hear him, a foreigner, speak ill of her nation; only she as a local was allowed to do so.

She found more people near the hospital, all walking in the same direction,necks craning slightly as they looked up at the buildings, their wicker baskets covered with napkins, small bouquets of flowers held awkwardly. They were dressed in ill-fitting clothes, bought a long time ago, the material incapable of keeping up with growth and weight changes. People from the countryside, coming to visit their relatives at the hospital in town. She picked up pace and caught fragments of their conversation on the way. “He was operated on”, “it won’t be long now”, “just as well he divided his estate”.

She stood outside the hospital main entrance, thinking about Mark. She didn’t dare enter: perhaps American colleagues also visited their hospitalised friends on Sundays, something she couldn’t know.

Lost in thought, she found herself outside the maternity ward entrance without knowing how. A large family was visiting, the father barely managing to control the children, each half a head shorter than the previous one, just as God had sent them. The mother brought the new baby into the sunshine, and they all had their photograph taken, so clumsily that the shadow of the flagpole fell right across them.

There was no security guard around. Her heart stopped and she thought of hitting her chest to jump-start it again. Had Baby Marko been put into temporary foster care? Was that why the Director no longer saw the need for a security guard? Then a hope: perhaps the police had already arrived? The authorities must have heard about the conspiracy of these respected people and had reacted, the child was safe, they would call her tomorrow, the first day of the working week, once the state mechanism started up again.

An old woman, whose age rendered her invisible, grabbed her hand as she waited to cross the road.

“Miss, I saw you on TV. Don’t worry. God will sort it all out!”

She winked at her and slowly staggered away with the help of her walking stick.

Zala returned home with a sense of emptiness and listlessness. She felt like eating but was incapable of defining the senses alternating between hunger and thirst. She kept opening the refrigerator and staring at the empty shelves, as if expecting it to fill itself. The thought of going to the shop repulsed her. She tore away from the refrigerator and walked around the apartment. Her friends called and congratulated her on her appearance, told her how they had cried when they saw her. It all seemed too much, she wanted to lie down, pull a blanket over her head, just get through the day as quickly as possible until the morning papers came out. She didn’t dare not answer the phone, what if…