2 May 1992, Saturday - Erased

The child was born at six in the morning and Zala wondered if his arrival had been accompanied by the traditional May Day marching band. On the First of May every year, her father had woken her up at half past five, fully dressed in his uniform. He would pick up a checkered blanket from the sofa and wrap it around her when she started shivering from the cold. Zala begged him to let her sleep, but he always refused with a “No, son!” – the greatest possible compliment a Serb father can utter to his only child who is not a son.

Before her sleepy child eyes, the night slowly peeled away, revealing the outlines of apartment buildings, supports holding up balconies, and the occasional cars parked below. Covered in the dawn dampness, anything metal remained faint, as if composed of the mist. The birds were still silent. Father would put his arm across her left shoulder and allow her right side to warm up against him.

First, they would sense a kind of tremor that tickled them up through their slippers, then came the sound, the metallic wave arising somewhere at the far end of the row of apartment blocks.

Father’s fingers gave her a squeeze and she suddenly lifted her head to attention, by then completely leaning against the source of warmth.

“They’re coming,” he would say in Serbian, the language he always used. If anyone teased him about the only language he spoke, in a country of many languages, his reply would depend on his mood. “Speak Serbian and the World is your oyster!” he would say. Or, “This is the official language of the Army and I’m a soldier even when I am not in uniform!”

They stood on the balcony, the only people on the entire block to do so, and watched the brass band musicians in their uniforms march along in a swaying rectangle. As they disappeared into the distance, Father would recite a few sentences, the same ones every year, about the First of May, International Workers’ Day, about the workers’ struggle and how Marshal Tito was at the forefront of this struggle. Afterwards, Zala was allowed to go back to bed. As he covered her with the blanket he would add, “Son, if you were a boy, I’d wake you up early every day, so you’d get used to army life.”

This thought always made her feel better. Though she envied boys who could simply pee wherever they happened to be, when they needed to, while girls had to hide somewhere or run off home.

Now, as she leaned against the window in the maternity ward, observing the flags drooping from the lamp posts after a holiday that had been much wetter and cooler than usual, she was surprised that she recalled the marching musicians as both large and tiny figures, closer and further away, and then realised why: with her father an officer, they were often re-stationed to different apartment blocks and complexes, changing to floors higher up or lower down, with the tide of her growing up years.

She straightened her gown, wondering why hospital clothing had to be so baggy and plain. Was it just so that one size really did fit all? Could beauty not fit the masses?

Returning to her bed, Zala stared at her son’s tiny head with its pulsating lips and wondered what the difference might be between dreams two days after birth and those inside the womb. He looked as if he was sucking on milk, though without the wiggling, searching, turning away and grunting of when he was awake.

‘Two days!’ she thought. ‘Two days!’

She was amazed at how far away the birth already seemed; she could not get over her awe at this creature, though it felt like he had been with her forever. The woman on her right was already breastfeeding and the two opposite were still asleep. She looked at the one in the corner whose mouth curved downwards even in sleep. She cried almost continuously and whenever her baby’s mouth so much as touched her breast she began shaking her head, saying she had no milk, that she couldn’t…she wouldn’t. At night, she complained that she couldn’t sleep, that the newborns should be kept in a separate room like in other hospitals, that she needed quiet to rest, that the visitors were too noisy…that… Her husband kept bringing her flowers, so many she didn’t know where to put them, pushing them away with the back of her hand, saying they were full of germs.

Zala was glad she wasn’t like that, that she was stronger than her, but instantly felt guilty for thinking it. She tried to exonerate the woman: what if she had had a difficult childbirth? Zala’s delivery had been easy, far less painful than she had imagined, though she had discovered long ago that pain is not something one can imagine or remember. Still, she did not wish to start a conversation with the weepy woman, as though her misery might be contagious.

She turned back to her own son.

‘A name, now I will finally have to decide on a name.’

At six months, she had gone to the library and found a baby name book. At seven, she went through the telephone directory at the post office. The problem remained: was she looking for a Slovene name or one that could also sound Serbian? Boris, for example, was one that her father would also accept.

It was all about him; she was trying to please someone to whom she had not spoken in ages. She had given birth to a son, and to her father that was the ultimate thing a woman could do. Had he been there at that moment, she would have slapped him.

Zala Jovanovi ć : her father’s Serbian surname and a very Slovene-sounding first name. Had that been a small victory for her mother – a woman who always supported her husband and stood by his side, even through his greatest follies? Even through that final argument. Zala did not regret her decision even now. It had taken her years to pluck up the courage; years in which sufficient anger had built up inside her.

Ten years later, both she and Father remained true to their word: they had neither seen nor spoken to each other since. Zala wondered whether he ever thought about her, whether in his head he continued to argue with her as she did with him. She would see Mother just before All Saints’ Day on the First of November, when they would tidy the grave of her parents. This was another of those Slovene customs that Father didn’t want to hear about, though he still accompanied his wife to the cemetery once a year. It was the most colourful spectacle of life in Slovenia: graveyards smothered with a kaleidoscope of candles and bouquets, people standing about at the graves, eyeing each other’s clothes, counting the candles and summing up the value of the flowers. Smugly, they acknowledged the ostentatious wreaths and gossiped about those conspicuous by their absence. After the tour, they made their way to the parking lot where they spent time dissecting the success of kith and kin, however distant, as well as of friends and acquaintances. They scrutinised their cars, making judgements about how successful their lives might be. Was that Father’s moment of shame? An old Zastava 101? When Mother once suggested they borrow a car, Father ranted around the apartment all night. It would not have been much of a transgression; after the First of November each year there was talk of people taking out ruinous bank loans in order to dress and drive expensively. Mother’s cousin was a second-hand car salesman and used to say how the most expensive models were only sold in the week before All Saints’ Day.

Zala always visited the grave a day earlier to help her mother pull up the weeds. Crouching and plucking away at the plants, staring at the gravel, they had little to say to each other.

“How are you?”

“Fine. You?”

“Fine.”

A long silence before Mother, in passing added, “Father is fine too.”

Instead of a parting handshake they simply showed each other their earth-brown and plant-green stained palms and nodded in greeting as they left.

For Zala, giving her son a name that would not (also) be a Serbian name would mean severing the last contact with her father. She was overcome by fear whenever she had thought about this in previous months. In their final quarrel, Father had hit her and, in retaliation, she’d scratched his cheeks. She had left home shortly after that, swearing he’d only ever be a name to her. Now this person whom she no longer thought about, or wished to think about, had surfaced once more, unnerving her with the memory of shouting and words sharper than knives, though she could not even remember the reason for them.

‘Does he look at all like him?’ she wondered without knowing the answer. The other women in the room and their visitors attributed every feature of their baby to a member of the extended family: father’s nose, aunt’s eyes…with the inevitable jokes about the milkman and the postman. She didn’t dare stroke his surprisingly thick black hair in case it woke him up, but she again felt relieved that he was not fair. Hiding the identity of the child’s father had become second nature to her and she shunned the memory of the flash of sunlight through the still wet dishevelled hair, the manly hand holding the towel, the long fingers that…No!

She stared at the tiny fingers on the sheet. ‘The little guy has his father’s fingers,’ she thought, all of a sudden feeling his absence.

‘Another person who knows nothing about you!’ she thought as she looked at the baby and added, ‘You will have a different childhood than mine, I swear!’

She wasn’t sure whether she had perhaps said this aloud and looked around, concerned.

The door flew open and the doctors making their rounds marched in. Without greeting, they stopped at the first bed and the Consultant gave a feeble nod and whispered, so that the younger man and woman who had come in with him leaned forward, their white gowns forming a pyramid-shaped tent.

Zala sat on her bed. She wondered whether she should lie down but didn’t move. The group in white advanced to her bed next, the doctor glanced at her fleetingly and, for a brief moment, held his gaze; the raised brow and satisfied smile letting her know that this was a compliment, that despite the circumstances in which he came across her, he still considered her someone to be tempted by. He radiated the self-confidence of a still handsome man close to sixty, who made up for his waning appearance with an increase in status and wealth. His grey hair fell across his head in long slick waves, erupting right above the ear in wild tufts resembling a shaving brush. His tan stood out from the sallow spring paleness of most of the town’s population after a winter of absorbing the mist. Zala expected the glint of a thick gold chain, but didn’t see one; the doctor might have adopted the Latin lover look, but not entirely its tackiness.

He looked at the female intern to his left, his gaze once more lingering briefly, then, without any of the same interest, glanced at the young man on the other side, before returning his attention to the chart he had unclipped from the bed rail.

“An easy birth, a healthy child, home on Monday, providing there are no complications. By the way, the child’s name hasn’t been noted. You were given the form?”

“Yes. But I’m still trying to decide… Can I…”

“All right, all right, you’ve got till Monday.”

He smiled somewhere to the side, more to the female intern than to Zala.

He held the notes out like a tray, the two heads approached obediently, then he re-hooked the chart and they crossed the room. The scent of his expensive aftershave stayed with Zala, keeping her company.

‘A healthy child!’

She recalled the sleepless nights when her belly had begun to grow and there was no longer enough space inside her, so she had to go to the bathroom frequently during the night. Very rarely did she go back to sleep straight away; most often she had gazed through the gaps in the blinds at the steady glow of streetlamps, sporadically intensified by the headlights of a car. At first, she had believed ghosts only crawled out of the darkest corners of the room but, during the last month, she had had the impression they were hiding in her limbs, in the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet. Fragments of news or scenes she had witnessed throughout the day: a disabled person in a wheelchair, a developmentally challenged child, an amputee, all floated before her eyes, turning her heart to ice. Laying her hands on her belly, she tried to feel not only the life inside her but life as a whole. The gynaecologist’s reassurances remained locked outside the gates of night. Only the morning light brought them back to her.

‘A healthy child!’ She smiled and became aware that the intern had not followed the doctor, but was still looking at her.

“Aunt Zala...” she whispered, sneaking a glance at the white-coated pair behind her.

Zala stared at the suddenly familiar features whose youthfulness seemed at odds with the white gown and the hospital.

“It’s me, Tania, your neighbour’s...”

“Oh! Tania! I didn’t recognise you! How you’ve grown!”

Zala was also whispering and tried to get up quickly, then realised her centre of gravity had shifted. She swayed and the intern grabbed hold of her arm.

“We haven’t seen each other in ten years!” said Tania.

“You’re a doctor!”

“Not yet, only in my fourth year!”

Halfway across the aisle, on his way to see the last woman in the room, the Consultant scowled at Tania.

“Ten o’clock at the coffee machine!” Tania whispered and ran along.

* * *

Zala laid the baby across her shoulder and walked the corridor in the ritual of trying to get him to burp. The child seemed so light that she dared not take her eyes off her own hands, both to make sure she was actually still holding him and to avoid clutching him too hard. She felt his warmth through his clothes and his tiny fingers curled into tight fists.

Her dressing gown cord had come undone and she felt where the loose robe exposed her skin. She held her son carefully with her left hand as she tried to do it up again.

“You can give the child to me,” said a deep voice behind Zala’s back, and for a moment, she thought she was being addressed by a man. The woman stood there without extending her hand, holding her arms almost parallel to her bosom, secured inside a full coverage bra which held everything firmly in place.

“Mrs Avber, Director of the Maternity Clinic. Glad to meet you,” she added with a nod. Everything about her radiated control, from her hairstyle that, with the help of various chemical substances, seemed to defy gravity, to her starched collar, white suit, and black shirt, her thin necklace that disappeared into her shallow cleavage, and her stiletto-heeled shoes. An excessively thick layer of powder covered her face like snow over a landscape, muffling any expressions, though the owner had probably only wished to disguise her age. Zala felt as if the woman’s piercing eyes were probing her, continuously digging up new matters that she wished to hide. They had once lived in an apartment block where the lady living above them had owned a cat with such eyes. Zala had never dared even to stroke it. She covered the baby with both hands and her gown came entirely undone.

The director’s lips puckered slightly in seeming disapproval.

Zala sensed that her body was reluctant to let go of the child, but reason intervened. For fourteen years she had worked as a nursery school teacher and met new parents every autumn. After a couple of years, she noticed that she always formed her opinion of them, good or bad, within minutes. In cases of the latter, she would try to persuade herself otherwise – if they were so polite, surely they must be good parents, for example. Over time she realised that her initial impression rarely deceived her and she began looking out for it, trying to extend and preserve it within, right until she got home, where she could revive, dismantle, and analyse it in peace. In her sixth year of working, she had met a mother who struck her as a thief. She remained alert for months whenever the woman brought or collected her child from the nursery, before remembering that her face reminded her of a woman who stole from them during Father’s stint in Bitola, and stopped believing in her instinct. It was then she had stopped believing in her instinct. What if it were no more than memories of faces and past experiences? But there were times, like now, when those feelings were loud and clear.

There was nobody else around in the corridor and the woman was waiting. Reason won, and Zala carefully placed her son in the waiting arms.

Hurriedly she covered herself up, tied the cord, and reached back for the child.

“Thank you!”

The woman nodded.

“A beautiful boy! Healthy and handsome... you are very lucky!”

“I know, thank you.”

The woman remained silent, her eyes still probing, and Zala shifted her feet nervously. A part of her rued her own submissiveness that wouldn’t allow her to leave; after all, this woman standing in front of her was the boss. ‘Would I have handed the child to a cleaning lady?’ she asked herself and remembered how she had needed to make a conscious effort at the nursery school not to be too obliging to the headmistress.

“There is…” the woman began and let her sentence extinguish like a match.

“What?”

“Are you a foreigner?”

“What do you mean?”

“I thought…you don’t have any visitors…and…” she gestured toward the child, “there is also no father...”

“My friends have gone on holiday to the coast. They invited me to come along, but I refused, just in case, and it seems I was right,” Zala almost stuttered as a voice inside her screamed out, ‘Too many words! Too many!’ She gulped and added, “I’m from Ljubljana.”

“Oh.” It sounded like the falling of the guillotine.

‘Is this something she learned or was she born with it?’ Zala thought, amazed at the woman’s air of authority. ‘If it can be taught, where can I learn it?’

‘But,’ a tiny voice added, ‘would you then still be you?’

“You are not in the records,” the Director of the Clinic said emphatically, with a somewhat exaggerated tone of sympathy.

“What do you mean? How can that be?”

“You are not on the computer…”

“I don’t know…” Zala tried weakly, before adding more firmly, “It’s always been fine before.”

The Director lifted her palm, right next to her own body as if unwilling to give anything away. “Don’t worry, we’ll sort it out. You’re in good hands.” She folded all but her index finger and waved it as she turned toward the baby. “Goo goo.”

* * *

Zala could not take her eyes off Tania’s shoulder-length hair. It swayed when she bent to take the coffee from the machine and then again when she passed the tea over to Zala. When she realised she was staring, she averted her eyes.

Tania had been four when Zala first saw her in the corridor of the block of apartments they had just moved to. Babies are of little interest to teens – the most these small creatures can expect is an occasional contemptuous glance. Tania would look at the floor, grab a tuft of her hair and stick it in her mouth. Her chin moved as if she were munching away on chewing gum.

Tania’s mother had once spoken to Zala in the lift and asked her whether she would be prepared to look after her daughter on the days when both she and her husband worked the afternoon shift. “It doesn’t happen that often. I would pay you…” she sounded apologetic. Zala would have refused had it not been for an incident the previous week, when she had asked her mother for money to buy an Indian dress that she had been looking at for some time in a shop window in the centre of town. When they had moved to Slovenia, Mother had got a job and finally had an income of her own; she very proudly counted out the banknotes to her daughter and added, “Don’t tell Father!” As Zala had run down the stairs, holding the money between her fingers, she had bumped into Father, who immediately grabbed her by the wrist and accused her of stealing. She explained how she had come by the money and Mother confirmed her story, but Father’s mistrust was so hurtful that when she went to buy the dress, she did so mechanically, like a billiard ball on a pre-calculated trajectory, and never actually wore it after that. She realised that she had to get money elsewhere, not from her mother’s pay, and that it shouldn’t be linked to emotions: flattering her mother or pleasing her father with manly behaviour. She wanted money as a way to buy things, not sentiment. The only way was for her to earn it herself.

Babysitting Tania became her first job and, in the end, had led her to her chosen profession. Despite finishing school at the top of her class with her name added to a wall of honour on a building she would never see again, in a town she never wished to return to, Zala chose not to go on to college. Instead, she enrolled in a nursery teacher training course, the fastest way to her own salary and independence. For she’d had a second realisation, just as simple: it is hard to say no to the person who feeds you. Especially when that was his main argument in every fight.

For the first few evenings, all little Tania had done was chew on her hair, left and right side alternately. To begin with, Zala sat beside her watching TV, but then a strange thought had occurred to her: she had the job, why not do it properly? She found a stack of children’s books and began reading them aloud. After a while, her charge had approached her cautiously and, hiding behind a lock of hair, peeped at the illustrations.

In Socialist Yugoslavia, working people would gather in bars and coffee shops, brag about their laziness and praise each other for a badly done job. As an adult, Zala remembered the moment when she had decided to actually take her work seriously and wondered: was she simply set in her ways, or held hostage by her father’s genes? Anything Father did, he did passionately, according to the ‘JR’, as he used to say, Job Rules, resolute down to the very last dot, especially if it came at the bottom of an exclamation mark. Orders, duty, fist on the table , to the very last drop of sweat. Consistent also at home, in a role befitting a man from the Balkans: lunch exactly on time, the cutlery always positioned in precisely the same place, down to the millimetre, after lunch a beer in hand, commanding the sofa and TV, following sports programs loyally and the news obsessively.

The apartment where she looked after Tania was still full of boxes from when they had moved in and Zala found it reassuring – life was, after all, also possible in spaces without military discipline. When, almost a decade later, she had moved into her own apartment, she first tried Tania’s parents’ formula but spent so much time looking through and tripping over boxes that she, not without frustration, switched to a milder version of her father’s regime.

Once she had got used to Zala, Tania became a chatty child and only hid behind her hair when she was sent out to play in the yard by her parents; at the time, it was normal for children to stay out all day and come home only to sleep. Once, as Tania stood near a group of kids, not daring to join in, a teenager had pulled her hair from her mouth so hard that Tania screamed for help. Though she hadn’t been looking after her at the time, Zala rushed into the yard and kicked the attacker in the groin with all her strength so that he rolled about on the ground, moaning and gasping for air. In the lift, she had wiped away Tania’s tears and passed on some knowledge she had acquired from young gypsy girls at the other end of Yugoslavia: in their groin, men have something that comes out to torment you if you don’t stop it in time with a kick.

“Did you become a nursery teacher?” Tania asked, passing her tea in a plastic cup and smiling. Her features still felt childish, as if holding on to the hope that they might eventually compose into beauty. For now, each had a beauty of its own, but the whole seemed to be missing something. ‘Perhaps only self-confidence?’ Zala thought and hoped that her degree and the addition of a title to her name tag would help Tania.

“Yes, I did. You were my first client.”

“You were a great teacher!”

“Thanks. And you?”

Realising she wasn’t being clear, Zala added, “Sorry, I meant to ask whether you intend to work with kids, in paediatrics?”

“No, probably not. But we have to work in every department for a while. So, you still don’t have a name for the baby?”

“I don’t have a name, but I do have a list.”

They both laughed. Feeling it melted away some of the awkwardness, they prolonged the laughter.

Zala stirred the tea with a plastic rod and felt Tania’s eyes fixed on the hand with which she was holding her drink. Her gaze slid down her ring finger without having anything to focus on. Tania realised her eyes had lingered a little too long and blushed. Her hand moved upwards and Zala thought of the hair, but at the last moment Tania resisted and grabbed her stethoscope instead, fiddling with its rubber tube.

“I’m not married,” Zala explained genially.

“Sorry…I noticed you didn’t have any visitors…that’s why I wondered.”

Tania’s eyes filled with pity, stirring Zala’s readiness for confrontation. She could never stand people feeling sorry for her.

“My decision,” she said. “You’ve seen the forms?”

Tania squeezed the stethoscope with both hands.

“I have.”

Her hair swayed seductively. Zala sometimes had attacks of silly thoughts – she’d been tempted to laugh once at a funeral, or burp in church – but she always contained herself. She did this time too, but the thought itself was funny – what if she was to grab a lock of Tania’s hair and stuff it into her own mouth?

Tania seeemed uneasy and the edge of her coat trembled over her jeans.

“With a job like this, I’m planning on having kids late too,” she said and immediately realised she had once again put her foot in it. Her eyes widened.

Zala burst out laughing. She had to lean on the coffee machine and wipe away her tears. The stitches in her groin protested painfully.

“Hormones... it must be my hormones…” she just about managed to utter and continued laughing until Tania’s stiff crust also cracked and softened.

“I keep saying the wrong things!” Tania exclaimed and joined in the laughter.

“Yes, here you are! Always the cleverest kid on the block! And the most diligent! Cheers!” Zala raised her tea and they toasted with their plastic cups, so soft that the contents splashed all over their fingers.