4 May 1992, Monday - Erased

Zala knocked on the door just below the ON-CALL DOCTOR sign, shyly at first, then a few seconds later, with more determination. She could not bear the silence, grabbed the handle and pushed. Her every move was exaggerated, her night fear transformed into a new driving force.

The Consultant looked up from the pile of forms. Upon seeing Zala, his furrowed brow and furious expression scattered like a firework cascade of tiny lights. His face began a search for the appropriate expression, shifting from strict professor to charming seducer, and eventually settling into a blankness. “What is wrong with my child?”

“Nothing. It is just...”

“What?”

Zala slapped her hand on the desk and the doctor pushed away on his chair, as if wanting to wheel to safety.

“Some tests...”

“What tests?”

“...and problems...”

His ambivalence fuelled her anger. She pushed forward. She felt a pain at the base of her belly but would not stop. Sliding along the edge of the desk, she almost fell over a potted plant and ended up right next to the doctor. She towered above him.

“What kind of problems?”

She could see claws between his and her own face and for a moment turned her gaze toward them. A bewildering fraction of a second later, she recognised her own hands, ready to gouge at his eyes and flesh.

When she looked back at him, he too was staring at her fingers.

“You’d better talk to my wife.”

“To whom?!”

Only now did he look at her with a growing astonishment in his eyes, his face taking on the expression of a child who has been wronged, as if to say, you are only accusing me in ignorance of a fact known to everyone else.

“The Director,” he added.

* * *

The Director raised her head calmly and said, “I have been expecting you,” as if the door had not almost fallen off its hinges. Zala was still holding firmly onto the handle, the grounding of her rage.

“Sit down!”

“What is wrong with my baby?”

“Look...” the woman supported her chin with her hand, “we are not just experts here, each in our own field, but we are also people. We need to make sure that everything will be all right with the child. Do you not agree?”

“But what is wrong?”

“Nothing. My husband is...”

Her lips began to wrinkle, as if juggling a rotten pip and Zala realised that what bonded the Director and the Doctor as a couple was her need to subdue and his childish acceptance. Nonstop work composed of tiny victories and escapes, life transformed into continual coexistence, both at home and at work.

“...the expert,” the Director added and concluded, “Let us leave the child’s health to him. I would not wish to take on that responsibility. Would you?”

Zala began to inhale deeply and every breath alleviated her rage and gave her strength. Suddenly, without realising how, she was sitting and holding her hands on the lacquered desk. This was a trick, an excuse, but she could not mount the strength to resist it. Her shoulders sagged and her gaze wandered to a large, framed photograph of a smiling bride on the desk. At first, she thought it might be the Director in her youth, but as it was a colour photograph, she deduced it must be the woman’s daughter. The young woman wore a heavily beaded gown, too heavy for her thin frame, and all that was left of the groom was a hand in a dark sleeve around her waist. Zala wondered whether the daughter knew of her mother’s censorship, whether she ever came here, whether, to her, the way the photo had been cut up seemed normal. A smaller picture next to the wedding one showed a white poodle on a velvet cushion, head raised, as if waiting for a shave.

The Director nodded. “For a while at least, let us leave medicine aside. There is another problem.”

“What kind of a problem?”

“You owe us 448,000 tolars.”

She pronounced the numerals differently to words, passionately, smacking her lips with every digit, before releasing it into the world.

“How? But...”

“You are a self-funding patient.”

“But...”

Zala heard a note of weariness in her own voice, and she knew it all, from what needed to be said, to what the Director would say, from how it all began, to how it would all end, regardless of how successfully she tried to defend herself.

“You are a foreigner. From Serbia.”

Once more, the woman’s apathy riled Zala. “Are you crazy or what? I was only born in Kragujevac. We moved away when I was three months old – for the last twenty years, I’ve lived only a few streets away from here!”

“According to the computer...” the Director interrupted Zala’s onslaught before it happened, “you are a foreigner.”

She leaned forward with a barely audible grunt.

“Look, we have asked for an explanation from the Social Insurance department. They were closed over the holidays and the weekend, so we are unlikely to get an answer today, but you can come and ask again after lunch. If not, tomorrow for sure. I can understand you are agitated, but that won’t get you anywhere.”

For the first time, the Director took her gaze off Zala and began looking at the framed diplomas on the wall.

“Believe me, I only want the best for you,” she said under her breath.

* * *

Is he alive?

(He’s warm! Breathing! Looking around! Crying!)

He is.

Will he feed?

(Lips searching for her nipple.)

He will.

Zala could not take her eyes off the child. The women around her were packing their things, exchanging addresses, their children crying, relatives waiting, someone urging one of them to hurry up because the parking ticket was about to expire, but all of this seemed distant, as if behind a veil. Every time the baby gulped she felt a tingling sensation, as if her son was being sewn onto her to console her. There can’t be anything wrong with him when he is as hungry as this!

A nurse came and handed each of the other women a form.

“Fill these out, enter your child’s name, you’ll receive the birth certificate by mail. This is also a questionnaire about how satisfied you were with our services. Thank you and see you next time!”

The woman who had been occupying the bed next to Zala, and whom she had never really noticed, spoke in a deep voice that resonated as if coming from the bottom of a barrel.

“This is my fifth. I’d rather cut my husband’s dick off than see your lot again.”

The woman who had been moaning throughout her stay nodded emphatically.

* * *

“Any developments?” Zala asked, as she sat down in the Director’s office.

“You now owe us 600,000 tolars.”

Zala tensed and her eyes narrowed, but the Director’s face did not suggest she was making fun of her. Perhaps she was obsessed with numbers and interested in nothing else? Not money in terms of what one can do with it, but the actual number on the bill? At the nursery school there were always some, at least one every year, who would walk halfway across town to save a tolar toward buying a car and, indeed, most of them worked in banks or as accountants. Was the Director another such person?

For the first time, Zala looked at the woman with some interest. Not as someone in charge, nor as an obtrusive factor, but as a human being. She closed her eyes and waited for an image; it didn’t always work, but whenever she tried to remember first encounters, she could surprisingly often resurrect an image beneath her eyelids that would encompass the essence of the initial impression.

Ice, ice. And something underneath it. What was it?

“I know it’s a large amount,” the Director said. She had misinterpreted the closed eyes.

“I have nothing to do with this computer of yours. Call my workplace. Call...”

“I know.”

“A technician, at least!”

“I know. I know. Please, madam, try to understand me. I am responsible for order and fiscal discipline in this institution. I cannot, you must realise, just release you... I mean... we cannot keep you here, this is not a prison. But if you just leave, who will pay your bill? Will we ever see you again? You have no citizenship, no permanent address, nothing.”

“Give me the form, I want my child to have a name.”

“The forms are given to mothers upon departure.”

“I will sue you!”

“What for? Believe me, everything here is done by the book.”

The ever-faster exchange of sentences stopped. Zala no longer knew what to say.

The grievance over money owed took her back to ancient quarrels between Mother and Father. The entire country had been taking out loans to buy houses and holiday homes. Mother would of course have been happy to go along with this, but Father insisted upon the rule that one should earn something before spending it, so they were stuck in a tiny apartment provided by the army.

“Have you called your parents?” the Director asked.

“No, I will not call them,” Zala replied, more dryly than she had intended. Her interlocutor nodded in her omniscient manner.

“The child’s father?”

“The child has no father.”

Yet more nodding, tinged with fatigue. The woman turned toward her picture frames and Zala could not make out whether she was looking at the daughter or the dog. Slowly, she began to talk.

“My parents helped me, though my husband was already earning good money by then. We are an old, well-off family, but despite this it was sometimes hard. You are a nursery school teacher. Alone. Without your parents, without the baby’s father. Listen, this is Slovenia. In this respect we are like Italy. Families either live together, or they do not survive. Do you want the statistics? Boys leave home at 35.2 years of age. And I’m also in a position to know how statistics can lie. Women are getting older before giving birth. Let’s do the sums. Give birth at thirty-five and the son stays at home for another thirty-five. So the mother is seventy. What if it isn’t the son who leaves at all, but her? She goes into a retirement home while he stays on in the family home – the house they built with their own hands, just as a home should be built. Now I will exaggerate a little, but this is basically true: here we do not inherit genes, but bricks. Where is your home, the place around which your entire family could rally?”

Zala didn’t know where this monologue was leading. In a sudden flash she realised that the Director’s long speeches were probably the closest the woman could get to kindness and that she was now stacking the words in front of her as proof of a special closeness and favour. She stared at the smiling face in the photograph and thought about how often the daughter had had to listen to such speeches. Had the son-in-law already walked out, leaving behind only his hand in a suit sleeve?

The Director continued, “The family is the foundation of everything; it is the only way we survive. Here it is not the individual who looks for and finds a job, it is looked for and found by their family. Because we are a small nation and do not move around. We know that families are forever and that they will always stand by each other. We exchange favours, remember them, and note them. Our sins too, they are committed forever. Does your father not have any connections?”

Zala knew she should not answer, especially not with the truth, but an inner defiance took over.

“My father,” she stressed every word separately, “was a First Class Sergeant in the Yugoslav National Army.” She wanted to add that this was the lowest rank in an army that no longer existed, but managed to skip that part. “Mother a housewife and a factory worker, now retired. You know madam, we might not be one of your established families, but I am in no way ashamed of that.”

She expected the Director to comment curtly on how, being as proud as she was of them, she wasn’t in contact with her parents, but instead she asked a new question. “Does the child’s father not have any… connections?”

“He does.”

The Director observed her for a while and judged that Zala was not lying. Wrinkles of suspicion appeared around her eyes and she leaned as far back as the backrest allowed her.

“Everything I am saying is in your own interest. What if the child falls ill? You are not even insured yourself.”

“I told you that...”

“I know, I know, we are working on it. But your debt is growing. Both the child’s and yours. You will have to get used to the fact that there are two of you now, and this means double expenses.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“That you can go to sort out your legal matters and leave the child with us.”

“Never!”

“Sorry, but I am telling you exactly what your own reason is telling you: the expenses are double if you also stay here.”

“We shall both leave! I will start making some phone calls and borrow the money.”

“Fine. That will solve our accounting problem, but not my moral one.”

“What?”

“How can I possibly hand an innocent child over to a foreigner without residency status, without a permanent address? Do you really think I am so inhumane and lacking in social sense that I would release an innocent being into the care of someone who does not exist? And let me be honest, perhaps it is time to think about... though you ought to sleep on it, because at this point it will seem terrible... in your situation...” She paused and stared piercingly at Zala for a long time.

“Have you ever thought of putting the child up for adoption?”

* * *

Zala grabbed the phone receiver as if it were a lifebelt on a stormy sea. Her heart was pounding and there was something wavering in its beat, something hesitant, as if it might falter at any moment. She wanted to repeat the number in her mind, afraid that she might forget it, but then allowed her fingers to do their work.

After the third ring, she sensed his breath preparing to utter a greeting and for a moment it seemed as if his scent, his soft skin, shaving cream, deodorant, the salt from the droplet of his sweat that fell onto her skin as they made love, the warmth of his breath, all enveloped her. It was too much to take and, though she had consoled herself that she was immune, that it was all forgotten, she slammed down the receiver, and the machine produced a loud crack as if it was about to shatter.

No.

Growing up, her friends had called her ‘Stubborn Zala’, but at twenty-five, her New Year’s resolution had been to try to be less stubborn. She still hadn’t spoken to her father, but had softened her approach to everyone else. How much practice and willpower this softening had demanded of her! She saw it as a way to cleanse herself of Father; of his Serbian obstinacy. Inat : when you deliberately do something that harms you, and at the same time shout, “Look at me! Look at how I destroy myself!” Zala saw stubbornness as little more than clinging to a world that had already passed.

Despite everything, she could not bring herself to dial again. She lifted the receiver and stared at it for a long time. A circle of tiny holes through which a wave from the past could burst, so huge that it could crush her and wash her away.

She needed to sort this out on her own.

* * *

‘I must not look suspicious,’ she thought and instantly realised she was being so; she lowered her head, pushing it right into her shoulders and leaned across, curling over the baby in her lap.

She could never judge distances well – was it twenty or thirty metres to the exit? Beyond the waiting area where women sat on benches talking and children rushed up and down the aisles, their mothers ordering them through gritted teeth to come back and keep still. Behind the double glass doors, next to a sunny patch, cars driving along the road and pedestrians casting shadows onto the pavement, stood a security guard, yawning. One of those men, who in his teens had discovered he had a plain, non-descript face and worked out hard enough to obtain a fitness-magazine body. All this strength, pacing up and down at the entrance, shifting its weight from one leg to another, too bored to even hold the door for a woman trying to get her stroller inside. He turned around and gazed out onto the street.

Why he had not been there when she arrived? Nighttime is when they should have a security guard, not the middle of the day. And at a maternity clinic, what for?

She made a step forward, stopped and returned to the corridor. She could stand indefinitely in front of the partition door, but sooner or later she would become suspicious. She looked at her son, who was fast asleep. She had delayed her departure until she had fed him and rocked him long enough for him to burp, spit up a little, and calm down.

‘Perhaps I should find a side exit?’

This would mean crossing the territory of doctors, nurses, and admin staff, ruled over by the Director and her husband.

Zala watched as a little boy in shorts negotiated some coins from his mother, then ran across to the vending machine next to the wall. He skilfully pressed all the right buttons, the machine made a whirring sound, and the metal lever moved along. The can of fizzy drink he’d selected started to tilt... and got stuck.

“Oh!” the boy cried and looked at his mother. She was cradling a baby in her arms and shrugged her shoulders as if to say, sort it out yourself.

The child hit the plastic display with both hands. The can didn’t move. He began tapping alternately, drumming away. The loud banging drew the attention of everyone, including the security guard.

Fed up, the boy kicked the machine with all his strength.

“Hey, what are you doing?” the security guard shouted.

“It won’t give it to me!” The boy moved away from the machine, evaluating from under his brow how much of a threat the guy in uniform posed to him.

The man smiled, looked at the women in the waiting room, raised his left eyebrow and, his shoulders swaying as if he was kneading the air around him, walked up to the boy.

“It probably thinks you are underage. Let me try.”

There was little sign that the audience appreciated his joke, though it had brought a satisfied smile to his own face.

The guard put his left hand round the machine and leaned against it with his shoulder.

“Watch,” he said to the boy and pushed, tilting the entire machine.

“Just like a woman: if you handle her gently, then she’ll give you what you want.”

He glanced across at the women, who ignored him and returned attention to the weight he was holding.

Zala was already walking. She kept her eyes on her shoes, placing one tip in front of the other, the patterns and joints on the linoleum rushing past her. She heard the can fall and the boy cheer enthusiastically, the door only a few metres ahead.

Someone was crying.

The baby in her arms.

She looked at the open mouth and was overcome with immense anger. She felt her right hand twitch and throw the blanket over it to muffle the sound, then she realised what she was doing, this was her child, she must not harm him...

“Hey, hang on, that’s... where are you going with that child? Hey, stop!” the security guard shouted.

Zala ran. She felt the clumsiness of her feet, unused to running, the pain in her groin that came with every step, her balance upset by the child in her left arm and the bag she had thrown over her right shoulder. Like two weights, they swivelled around her, preventing her from reaching the door.

She extended her right hand, about to grab the door handle, when she jolted to a stop. The guard had caught the strap on her bag, he was already pulling her back . She slipped her hand through it, but he had now grabbed her sleeve.

“Come back! You are not going anywhere with the child!” he shouted and held her upper arm so firmly it felt as if he was crushing her muscles against the bone.

“Let me go!”

She turned around. The security guard was yelling to the on-call nurse, “Hey, call the Boss!”

The figures on the seats froze, the boy holding the can of drink in his hand stood with mouth wide open, and only upon a repeat order from the guard did the on-call nurse move, as if awakening from a trance, to lift the receiver with her right hand and press the button with her left.

Without the slightest chance, Zala tried to free herself. The baby screamed.

She struck the door with her back and it opened out onto freedom. ‘So close!’ A sense of injustice, a surge of power, then she used all her strength to kick the security guard in the groin. His eyes popped open, his breath chirped in his throat, he fell to his knees but did not let go. He grabbed her with his other hand and as the baby almost slipped out of her grasp, she swayed and dropped to her knees in order to save her son; Zala found herself on the floor staring at the security guard.

“How dare you! Oh no, you won’t!” he managed to utter, as she grabbed his hair with her right hand and pushed him to the ground. He howled but didn’t let go. He turned his head and hid it between his shoulders, shouting, “Oh no, you won’t!”

Zala couldn’t break free.

The Director was standing at the door of the maternity clinic, her face horrified.

* * *

Zala sat in the police van and could not take her eyes off her handcuffed wrists.

A thought began to grow within that she tried to suppress and restrain within her body, though she knew that it would sooner or later reach her reason: they had taken her child.

She stood up, caught her balance, and looked through the grated window. She saw houses in the distance and fields and paths in the foreground. They drove past a sign that read LJUBLJANA with an arrow pointing toward the direction they had come from.

The roofs of the houses slowly sank into the grass.

* * *

The Inspector’s head looked like an egg pretending to be a person. It was so satisfied with its own success that its features bulged with self-congratulation. The inspector pushed the knot of his tie firmly against his neck to prevent the collar of his uniform from opening up and revealing the truth. His fair hair receded toward the back of his head, leaving the top with a covering of fluff, so fine and fragile that the man had to move slowly and carefully not to lose it. He looked rather like one of those Chinese wind-up toys that was about to run out of steam. At the nursery, some children were so impatient that they would grab the slow-moving toy and wind it up again even before it had fully stopped, something Zala thought about now. She wanted to get this over fast and return to her son.

With his stubby, pink sausage fingers, he held the form that Zala had studied it for a long time.

“Zala Jovanovi ć , place of birth: Kragujevac. Serbia.”

“Yugoslavia,” Zala corrected him.

“Yugoslavia is gone. No more. Slovenia has been independent for a year, if you will,” he said and Zala tried in vain to find a note of mockery in his voice.

He nodded for a long time, the fluff on his head swaying but not falling off.

“The situation in Serbia is really bad now, isn’t it? I understand, you want to join Europe, don’t you?”

He looked at Zala.

“Things are going to get even worse!”

For the first time, Zala realised that she could explain all she wanted, but there would never be an explanation. The same thing, over and over again. Why were they all obsessed by Kragujevac? A strange sensation in the pit of her stomach, much like a sponge being wrung out over a sink, was draining her strength.

“Father worked there and I was only born there. We moved from there when I was three months old,” she said.

The inspector nodded again.

“When did you cross the border?”

Zala stared at him for a long time with a mixed feeling of helplessness and all this being a mistake; she had found herself in the wrong conversation.

“What do you mean? Most recently? I went to get some pregnancy jeans from Trieste last winter, before that, in August, when I went on holiday to the Croatian coast.”

The inspector stared at her disappointedly.

“You are making fun, aren’t you? These are serious matters, you know. No fooling about with the authorities. Please, answer honestly and not in a roundabout way. I am not making these things up; procedures demand that I ask these questions and you are obliged to answer all of them before we sign the statement. When did you cross the border?”

‘Roundabout way? What is this man going on about?’ Zala thought.

“Why are you asking me?” she said. “You know perfectly well that you picked me up from the maternity clinic.”

He found another piece of paper and studied it for a while.

“That’s right. You gave birth when you were already in Slovenia, isn’t that so? Our health system is so much better than what you have down in Kragujevac, no wonder you wanted to come across the border. It is understandable – Slovenia is a developed country and has become a destination for illegal migrants.”

“What is it with you?” Zala exploded and noticed that the inspector’s eyes twitched nervously. ‘He doesn’t dare look at me!’ she thought.

“Immigration is a huge problem in Europe and we should be aware...” he began to lecture, his eyes still twitching, looking away and looking back at her again, as if his eyeballs were the captives of a strong magnet.

‘He is looking at my tits!’ Zala decided and lowered her chin.

She saw two patches on her top, slowly expanding. Milk was oozing from her nipples, filling her bra and spilling over; it was feeding time. Zala felt such a sharp pain in her breasts that she had to bend over. Added to the fear of losing her child was the embarrassment of sitting before an absolute stranger in soaked hospital clothing. Exposing her by trickling down her front instead of nourishing the one it was meant for.

“You are in our country illegally and this is why we have brought you here to the Centre for Asylum Seekers,” the inspector said, avoiding eye contact. “Now we need to follow the standard procedures, so please cooperate.”

“Do you not understand what I am saying?” she banged her fist on the desk, making her breasts shake and release a new flow of milk. “True, I wasn’t born in Slovenia! You’re right about that! But my mother is Slovene! I finished nursery teaching college here, I work here, everything!”

“But you do not have citizenship or a permanent address.”

“What do you mean, I don’t? Has everyone gone mad? That is your mistake, not mine!”

A slight blush appeared on the inspector’s face.

“It is not a mistake. We need to correctly carry this procedure through to the end.”

“What? What end?”

“Where did you cross the border? Please, don’t create problems, I’m just doing my job.

Answer the questions for the statement.”

A storm of conflicting emotions rose within Zala. Resisting embarrassment, she decided to fight. She leaned back, broadening her shoulders. The patches grew so large they merged and the inspector was still staring at the papers in front of him. The fluff drooped and the room’s fluorescent lighting highlighted the patches underneath it, making them look like black blades.

Zala gazed beyond and stared at the coat of arms that took up almost the entire wall.

“Look at me,” she said.

The inspector raised his head swiftly, his eyes skipping across the wetness of Zala’s breasts.

She covered them with her hands.

“You can put this soaked shirt into your report as evidence that I swam across the River Sotla on the border with Croatia.”

* * *

The women turned toward her and all conversation ceased. To Zala, it seemed as if she was in a long, drawn-out dream that should have ended long ago. Slowly, she looked at the groups in the room, black women on the left, Arabs in front of her, Chinese on her right. She shuffled but stopped after the first step. Where should she go?

She stayed at the entrance and the guard closed the door behind her. She escaped her cellmates’ curiosity by moving her gaze to the TV screen in the corner. Her mother’s parents, dead for so long that they lingered as mere shadows in her memory, had placed a house shrine in the exact same spot in their living room, a crucifix with a tiny figure of Jesus set amidst flowers and a permanently lit candle in front. But here the flames were flickering on screen, windows of buildings turned to flaming gaps, roofs caving in with thunderous cracks. The announcer talked about the Serb bombardment of Sarajevo, then the footage switched to smoke rising from a medieval fortress.

“Despite the ceasefire, fighting continues in Croatia. The Croatian Army has overrun the blockade of Dubrovnik, Serb and Montenegrin forces have withdrawn, and with this the bombardment of the old city has ended,” the newsreader concluded, reappearing on screen with a ready smile, and added, “Now for the sports news!”

The women stared at her.

Zala covered her soaking shirt with her hands.

Only a few hours ago, she had been breastfeeding at the clinic, and now... The feeling that this was not real would not go away. In three days, she had become used to the metal frame of hospital beds, the blue hospital gowns, and was thankful she had brought her blue slip-ons with her. She had bought them in Trieste, just to take to the clinic. Now she remembered all the things she had planned for the first few days after leaving the clinic and could only gape in astonishment over the turn of events. Her head hurt, as if her brain was crashing against her skull, trying to come to terms with reality through pain. These women, with whom she had nothing in common, could not be part of her story; they had nothing to do with the child she had been waiting for, the child who was now not here.

One of the black women went across to the lockers and returned with a T-shirt. She pressed it into Zala’s hand and first pointed to the bathroom, but then held her arm, pushing her along to get her moving.

Zala closed the door and looked at herself in the mirror for a long time. She leaned forward and, wanting to see as little as possible, touched the glass with her forehead. She kept her eyes closed. She wished she could just fall asleep. At least sleep carried with it a promise of awakening.

She opened her eyes and moved back. The white tiles could well have been in the hospital, but the grilled window, the overflowing rubbish bin and the stench, too powerful for any detergents, reminded her of what had happened. Tears began to flow before she even started crying. They poured like the milk from her breasts, faster and faster. She groaned quietly and found the sound of her own voice comforting. A sound she could create herself, at least one thing she could control.

‘I can’t stand this, just let him lie there!’ She heard Mother’s voice so clearly it made her turn around. How young she must have been! They were watching TV somewhere during a trip. Boxing. And then Father said something about fighters always getting up, real warriors always returning to the fight. It didn’t matter if they won; what was important was that they got up, even if they were all bloody and smashed up when their coaches tossed a towel across their shoulders. Zala had voiced agreement with her father at the time but secretly wondered if it wasn’t better to just stay on the floor and let things finish there.

“This is not a boxing match,” she said out loud to herself. “It is not!”

This memory, awakened here, right in the middle of this alien place and life, seemed so naïve she would never share it with anyone. At the same time, it filled her with hope. She felt how her gaze was beginning to focus and how her brain was determined to find a solution. ‘What if... what if...” gnawed away inside her head as she removed her hospital top and threw it toward the bin. She found some paper tissues, undid her bra, wiped it and then washed herself. She began by squeezing her left breast, but the milk resisted, it would not flow into the drain, it was meant for a mouth that awaited it, so she must, must, get all this over with and return. Then the right breast. The soggy bra felt cold on the skin. She filled it with paper tissues and also stuffed some into her pockets for spares.

* * *

“Good,” the egg-headed inspector said. “You have cleaned yourself up; now we can continue with the standard questioning, right? So, where did you cross the border?”

“Idiot,” Zala thought and only by the offended expression in front of her did she realise that she was thinking aloud.

“Come on, please, cooperate. It will be easier for both of us. The state has its own procedures and my job is to make sure they are followed properly. I didn’t write the questions, but I must ask them. Where...”

“What will happen to me and my child?”

The man shifted uncomfortably in his seat, staring at the paper in front of him.

“Those we know where they come from are sent home. You will be handed over to the Croats and they can send you to the Serbs.”

“The Croats and Serbs are at war!”

“Slovenia has nothing to do with that.”

“I have nothing to do with Serbs or Croats. Neither does my son. I am Slovene. I always have been. Listen, even when Father was posted to Bitola in Macedonia, the kids there made fun of me because I was Slovene. I was Slovene when we lived in Rijeka in Croatia too. When I went shopping in Trieste, the Italians scorned me because I was Slovene. Then you bring me here because I am not Slovene enough? Are you mad?”

“Please, try to cooperate. It’ll be easier for both of us.”

“What’ll be easier? Filling out the form? And what then? You’ll throw me and my baby across the border into a foreign country that’s at war and where I don’t know anyone?”

“You all say that, it is logical that you would, isn’t it?”

“So,” Zala collapsed back into the chair and stared for a long time at the inspector who held his ballpoint pen in his hand, waiting for the first answer to the questions on his form.

“So,” she said again and when he began to open his mouth, she interrupted him. “Then we must say good-bye?”

“When you answer...”

“So.”

“Where did you cross the border?”

The image of Father in front of a punching bag. ‘Careful, you need a trick! You must divert his attention.’ And then something about the opponent. All his life, Father had done everything to be ready for the enemy when they came, whoever it might be.

Zala put her left hand over her eyes and bent over in her chair, moaning. The inspector stood up.

“Are you feeling ill?”

She watched her right hand, how it almost reached the floor, and could sense the body towering above her. Then she lashed out with all her strength, sending the inspector back into his chair, reeling, though managing to hold on, groaning with his hand on his cheek.

“Believe me, this departure is more painful for me than for you,” she said, gaining the strength to add, “don’t you think?”

* * *

Zala kicked the grate and it hurt. A part of her was comforted by the pain and she wanted more, but the remainder won with the thought that she could do stupid things once she had gotten herself out of this shit. The Chinese woman sitting on the bunk bed shook her head and groaned in a high-pitched voice, “Ay, ay, ay,” adding in broken English, “Why are you such a nervous person?”

Zala stared at her for a long time, shoulder-length, crow-black hair, lines at the corners of her mouth that bore traces of the entire journey she had made, and a face that appeared strangely flat but kind at the same time.

Zala realised how long it was since she had spoken English, since last August. Since her holiday on the Adriatic islands after which Ljubljana seemed like another world, grey and dull. “I cannot talk right now, please, don’t.”

The Chinese woman ignored her plea.

“You are white? You are from here? Phone! No problem! Phone!”

“What phone? Who can I call?”

“Someone, he sign for you. He live with you.”

Egg-face appeared in her memory and she felt the sting of the slap she had given him on the palm of her hand, such a sweet sensation. ‘The asshole, he didn’t mention that! He would stick to the rules, wouldn’t he!’

“They never told me,” she told the Chinese woman.

“Ay, this State. The State no tell. You must know all. Call. Phone. You are white. Gypsies? No phone for Gypsies. Gypsies sent straight back across border, straight away. You...”

She pressed her finger against her.

“You, telephone!”

* * *

Had someone asked her at the time she left home what her parents were like, she would have said her father was a pain in the butt and her mother a hapless victim who had to put up with him. Mother only dared complain when Father was at work and, even then, never really mentioned him. She would, for example, look at a burnt-out light bulb and say, “Someone will have to change that, but it will, as usual, take a long time...” or she would move a chair back into its place and say, more or less to herself, “Someone should occasionally tidy up after themselves.” But when Father came home from work, Mother’s first sentence was directed at Zala. “Move out of the way, your father is tired!” or something along similar lines. Once her anger had waned, Zala slowly realised that, in fact, Father replaced burnt-out light bulbs as soon as he noticed them and that he always straightened his chair and everything else after using it.

Zala was by then already in a relationship with a man who never raised his voice or ordered her around, and believed she had made progress in life, that she had, so to speak, managed to rise to a higher level by breaking the domestic pattern. (Indeed, at the time she read New Age books and a few times joined some of her colleagues at seminars as a girl without make-up or deodorants). Then she began picking up dirty underwear in the bathroom and realised that she had simply switched to a different type of being ordered around: from Father’s frank military approach, to the mild sighs and complaints of her partner. With yellow piss-stained underwear in her hand, she saw Mother from a different angle for the first time. What if she was the gentle hand that turned the marble figure of her husband? Mother had often said, “You two are so much alike!”

Of course, when Zala finally fell out with her father, Mother had unequivocally sided with him. But during their annual grave weeding, Mother never reproached her and never suggested Zala ought to apologise to her father.

* * *

Mother was waiting for Zala on the front steps of the Asylum and didn’t speak, even when they got in the car and pulled out of the parking lot. She paused at the exit, looking to the left for a long time and to the right for even longer. Zala also checked both directions just in case, but the marshy landscape to the south of town was deserted and Mother eased the old Volkswagen Golf out onto the main road, toward Ljubljana. The car smelt of Father, his blond tobacco that he got from Montenegro, his aftershave, and the indeterminate stench of his military uniform, a mixture of sweat and mould. Zala felt as if she was sitting in her childhood and could barely hold back the tears.

They both knew they needed to talk but didn’t know where to start; pressing, unspoken words heaped themselves up between them. With her left hand, Mother kept straightening the collar on one of her favourite pink blouses. Zala had had to explain to her a number of times how to reach the detention centre and what exactly it was. She had obviously made her point since Mother appropriately wore the skirt she kept only for visits to the town hall and polling booths, basically all official dealings with the State.

“Where am I taking you?” Mother finally asked.

“My place.”

Mother breathed a sigh of relief, then, comprehending how that might look, tightened her lips and glanced across at her daughter.

“Don’t worry, Mother. I have an apartment. I bought it when the new housing act came into effect. I own it. Everything will be fine.”

“But I signed...”

“I know. That you will support me. It won’t be necessary. I do still have a job.”

“But why, then...”

“The State made a mistake.”

Mother looked at her with surprise and kept staring, so when the car started swerving across the road, Zala had to grab the steering wheel.

“What do you mean, the State made a mistake?”

“Mum, all of a sudden, I’m not in any of their computers. I will go to the town hall tomorrow and sort it all out. Don’t worry.”

Mother continued to stare at her, as if the mask on the person sitting next to her had suddenly cracked to reveal an alien underneath. Zala remembered how one evening a long time ago, she forgot in which town, they had watched an American film about a man falsely accused of a crime who had to run and at the same time prove his innocence. When Mother made some bedtime cocoa, Zala had commented on how terrible it would be if something like that happened to you.

“Something like what?” Mother asked.

“Being falsely accused!”

Mother had stared at her for a long time with the same face, one Zala had not seen for too many years, until this journey across the marshy landscape.

“If you haven’t done anything wrong, they can’t accuse you of anything,” Mother had said finally, astonished by the impossible thoughts her daughter came up with.

“You saw for yourself, in that film...”

“Ugh,” Mother waved her hand dismissively. “Films! Trust the Americans to think of such a stupid plot, just so they can sell it!”

She remembered the genuinely childish astonishment on Mother’s face whenever there was talk in the past of political trials, of people confessing to unimaginable deeds and Zala always wondered, ‘Mother grew up at a time when Communism was hard and cruel; how could she have such faith in the fairness of the State?’ Was this her own conviction, or something she had caught from Father, who was ready to doubt everything apart from Tito, who he adored, and his army in which he served?

Mother stared straight ahead along the deserted road. Zala could bet on her thinking about what sin her daughter had committed to draw the attention of the State. In the end, she must have decided that she didn’t want to know.

“Just as well you called while your father was out on his walk.”

“I deliberately waited until then.”

“That at least. You know what he is like.”

A bitter voice inside Zala wanted to shout out, ‘He doesn’t change the light bulbs? He doesn’t tidy up?’ but she remained silent and wondered whether the eight-year relationship with her own softer ruler permanently put her off people like this. It widened the gap between her and her mother – a gap that as a child she could jump over easily, but over time required longer and longer strides and did not always end with a safe landing.

They arrived at the first houses; Ljubljana on its fringes was like any other capital, large car dealers and service buildings. Remnants of puddles along the tree-lined road vanished, leaving yellow crusts of fallen pollen.

“This mistake, by the State...” Mother wasn’t going to give up that easily, “It won’t keep happening, will it...?”

“No, it won’t. Don’t worry. This is the first and last time. I’ll sort it all out tomorrow. Don’t worry.”

“Aha,” Mother said, her sigh not really in keeping with the tone of the conversation.

They didn’t speak again until Mother pulled up to Zala’s apartment building.

“You’ve gotten fatter,” she said, as Zala was getting out of the car.

“True, but I’ve already lost some weight. Thank you!”

Zala wanted to open the door, but something else was bothering Mother, so she waited.

“Zala, please, don’t start fighting again with your Father. He is...”

She looked at the pine tree cut-out air freshener hanging from the rear-view mirror as if trying to find the right words written on it. She found none, so simply nodded at her daughter.

“I won’t. Don’t worry,” Zala said. “Thanks for signing for me.”

She held out her hand to touch her mother’s shoulder, but by then, Mother was already looking through the windscreen so intently, assessing the geometry of turning around in the drive, that Zala just pushed the door shut.

* * *

Zala only stopped when the water had turned cold. She observed her goose pimples and the postnatal flab around her belly and remembered how in the last years of her ‘bad relationship’ as she called it, she would spend longer and longer under the shower. First, she would pick up all the scattered clothes and throw them into the laundry basket, soak those that the washing machine had given up on, then wash her hands with soap for a long time over the sink, before stepping into the shower cubicle. She would close her eyes under the stream of water and when her skin warmed up, slide her thumb downwards beyond her belly button and begin to stroke herself. The first time with a sense of guilt, knowing that the man she was living with was sitting on the sofa in the room next door, holding a can of beer and watching football on TV. A couple of years into the relationship, she had realised she hadn’t found herself a partner, but a stereotype, a cartoon figure, something out of an illustrated comic book. By then, she went into the bathroom with much greater confidence, sometimes more than once a day. She had become rougher with herself, especially whenever she mulled over ways of how to get rid of this person. She’d heard that love made you blind, but nobody had warned her that the blindness went on for so long.

This scheming had always ended with a sense of fear, and fear took her to the shower, without any plan ever coming from it. How often had she started a conversation with him that just didn’t take off, met with one obstacle or other, or a counterattack, and then evaporated into disinterest. “Yes, yes.” Another sip of beer. She had hoped for a man to set her free; in the end, she had needed to set herself free before such a man arrived. She closed her eyes and shivered with the cold. Stars fell across the redness beneath her eyelids. ‘Should I call him?’ she wondered and rejected her own thoughts. ‘No, tomorrow, the town hall, the nightmare will end.’

It wasn’t his help she needed, but some closeness. Her family had moved so often that she’d learned as a child that while friends are great, you are forced to leave them behind and as the years go by it’s harder to find new ones, maybe because of bad experiences, or higher standards. All that remained of these friendships were letters and finally only New Year greeting cards with signatures which she struggled to put a face to. It was Zala who usually delayed her replies, her hand held back by a sense of pointlessness.

Mother had a sister who had moved to America, so her cards came for Christmas and always had colourful stamps on them. The sister’s family visited them only once. Father took some time off work to show them all the beauties of Yugoslavia that could be crammed into one-day trips. Beside underground caves, the sea, and the mountains, he had also included hydroelectric plants and monuments to the fallen soldiers of the Second World War. Even at these monuments, the sister-in-law and her American husband had continued taking their incessant snapshots. Father insisted on speaking Serbian, Mother could not speak a word of English, her sister’s children barely knew a few words of Slovene. They hadn’t taken Zala along because there was no more room in the car with most of the back seat taken up by a cooler bag. As they left, the brother-in-law shook hands with everybody, pressed up against them and repeated twice “Hug, hug!” before pushing a one-dollar bill into their hand. Once they were through border control at the airport, Zala’s father tore the dollar into pieces and threw it on the floor. When the pieces did not do what he expected, blowing around in the wind instead, he tried to keep them down by spitting on them. He cursed the Americans and his only comfort was the rumour that Yugoslavia, too, was developing an atom bomb. For a long time afterwards, he kept mentioning the underground airbase at Željava, saying that the Americans were incapable of building anything like it. Zala kept her dollar and used it as a bookmark for a while, until it got lost in one of those books she had stopped reading with a guilty promise that she would, at some point, return to it.

Father’s family was a greater mystery. He often talked of various first and second cousins, knew all the endless family connections, but the names never put to actual faces. They rarely visited that tiny Serbian village where his family lived and when they did, Father wore his uniform every time. There was always plenty of food and drink, but everything remained unspoken. Only later, after Zala had fallen out with her father, had she thought back on Grandma’s hints about an apartment they used to own in Belgrade and how Grandfather, a teacher, had been forced into exile, and understood the story of a middle-class family whose property was seized by the Communist authorities and who were sent away to a village school. Then their eldest son – Zala’s father – had decided to join the military and, worse than that, chosen Tito as his ideology. In the military apartment blocks where they lived, the newspaper Komunist stuck out of the post boxes every Friday. Zala would see other people’s copies stacked untouched in the piles of waste paper they collected for recycling; her father would read his copy cover to cover.

She wished that her friends would return from their holiday on the coast. Wrapping the towel round her head like a turban, she put on a dressing gown. ‘Perhaps they’ve already called here? Perhaps they went to the hospital?’

She opened the bathroom cabinet and grabbed the anti-stretchmark cream. She squeezed some into the palm of her hand, undid her gown and, staring at the reduced belly at first and noticing the lines, began to cry. She had to make a great effort to stop and spent a long time washing off the cream under the tap.

Zala stepped into the bedroom and stared at the cot. The paper bird mobile swayed, disturbed by her opening the door. The feeling that none of this was real hit her so hard that she thought perhaps something was physically wrong with her. She held the cot railing and stared at the unruffled whiteness.

‘Are they bottle-feeding him? Will he wean off my breast milk?’

At the thought of someone else breastfeeding him, she ground her teeth. Among all the baby paraphernalia she had acquired before going to the hospital was a breast pump. She began using it regularly, worried she might lose her milk before she got her child back. The vacuum pump milked her mechanically, a machine without emotions. She remembered her baby’s lips and wept.

After feeding him for the first time, how she had stared at her own nipples, elongated as never before!

Her breasts felt heavy again, she had to move. Gazing at the dried red stain on the carpet, she went into automatic mode. Her legs took her to the bathroom, her hand grabbed the red plastic bucket, she squirted some cleaning liquid into it and added the still cold water until the foam was about to spill over the edge.

She knelt on the floor and began rubbing the stain with a scrubbing brush.

‘He was in this blood, in this liquid.’

She scrubbed in long moves that left dark patches in their path and the stain just became messier and messier. The white foam acquired a pink tinge. She rubbed with both hands, backward and forward, she began to get cramps, and all she could see was a sea of blood, hers and his, expanding, about to take over the room, the apartment, her world.

She screamed, to herself at first, but then she fell sideways onto the carpet, bit into the synthetic fibres and could no longer hold back. She sobbed, not caring what the neighbours might say. There was some consolation in the void that the weeping opened up inside her.

When she could no longer cry, she just lay there, blinking slowly.

The doorbell rang.

“Zala, are you at home? Open up! It’s us!”

Zala wanted to leap up but contained herself. She looked around, the stain, the empty cot, she pushed her fingers into the carpet and held her breath.

A second voice she didn’t immediately recognise, “We’re back from the seaside!”

And a third that must have been Nana’s, “Are you home?”

They rang the doorbell again.

This time she instantly recognised Meta’s voice. “They said at the clinic that she had been discharged.”

“Where could they have gone?” Nana wondered.

It was Vlasta’s turn, “Psssst. Perhaps they’re asleep. We can come back later.”

The steps disappeared into the distance and the loneliness grew.

* * *

Zala watched Tania stepping out into the evening air, that promised summer walking toward the bus stop. She seemed tense.

“Hey!”

“Zala! Where did you disappear to?”

Zala looked around nervously. “Let’s walk!”

They set off.

“How is my baby?”

“Fine,” Tania smiled. “I go to see him often. All the tests are also fine.”

“Please look after him.”

“Of course. Why did you leave?”

“Who said I left?”

“The Consultant. Without paying, he said.”

“The Director set me up, I am sure of that.”

Tania stopped, “What do you mean?”

Zala wanted to explain, but her throat locked. Here before her still was the little girl who had trusted her. What was important now was to ask her the favour. Even as the sentences formed inside her head, she knew that Tania would find them almost impossible to understand. “Tania, there’s been a mistake. There’s no record of me on their computer. Tomorrow, I’ll go to the town hall and sort everything out and then return to get my baby. But for now, I have a favour to ask of you.”

“Fire away.”

“Can we go back and you bring me the baby so I can breastfeed?”

Zala saw each minute feeling that crossed Tania’s face: from consent, instinctive and trusting, to second thoughts that stopped her even before she nodded.

“If I am caught...”

“You won’t be.”

She moved back a few inches and Zala had to control herself not to grab hold of her jacket and pull her closer.

“Please! All I want is to feed him!”

Tania began gasping, as if drawing in burning hot air. She raised a hand and grabbed a lock of her own hair.

Zala put a hand on her shoulder, trying not to cry.

“Please.”

“Right. Go round the back of the building where the delivery entrance is, you’ll see. Wait for me there.”

* * *

Zala stood between two vans in an otherwise empty parking lot and stared at the metal door without a handle on the outside.

When Tania opened the door without the baby, her empty hands all Zala could see, her heart nearly stopped until a sort of reflex half-cough started it up again.

“Everything is fine...” Tania said, “Just...” She averted her eyes.

“Inside, come, please come and feed him inside.”

Zala sighed with relief that all was fine with her baby, but she felt a mixture of emotions toward her former charge. She had not thought for a moment of grabbing her child and leaving, and a part of her was enraged that Tania didn’t trust her. But she acknowledged, with some satisfcation, that the girl had grown clever in practical ways that would help her in life.

Zala thus sat inside a tiny space full of cleaning materials on a jumbled pile that included a chair, a ladder, and a plastic cone covered with an old rag. The smell of the cleaning chemicals combined in her nostrils and left a sour taste in her mouth. There was not enough room for both of them, so Tania stayed by the door, with seeming relief. She must have felt bad about being so mistrustful, though Zala did not reproach her for it.

The baby’s mouth latched onto her nipple and he began suckling. Zala’s stomach cramped and she almost cried out, but the pain dispersed into a tingling sensation and she was filled with peace and a feeling that things were as they should be. She could stare forever at the tiny face before her, and a part of her remembered a different tingling sensation and a much bigger mouth and tongue pressed against her nipple, moving away and returning to it before moving down her body. She strained to flee the memory but the simultaneous sense of excitement and calm stayed with her, a combination she had never experienced before.

She watched the tiny face and tried, at least in memory, to take it with her. His nostrils dilating as he sucked. His smell, incomparable with anything else. She pressed the back of her index and middle fingers against his cheek, he grimaced at the interruption, shuddered, reattached himself to her nipple and suckled. One of his eyes rolled across to one side and she worried he might be cross-eyed. When he finished feeding, she pressed him against her, the narrowness of the cupboard allowing her only to shuffle her feet slightly. Then Tania opened the door.

“Please, hurry up,” she said.

Zala ignored her nervousness.

“He is full, let me take him back, please.”

“Just a bit longer. At least let me feed him in the evening too. Since when is there a security guard at reception?”

“Since the last few days. The Director said it’s because of minor thefts, but that’s something we occasionally had anyway.”

Zala didn’t tell her that the guard was there for her, she no longer doubted this.

“Is he there at night too?”

“Yes, she hired a security firm. Come on, hurry up! He’s stopped drinking!”

Zala wanted to extend the moment and pressed the tiny face toward her breast, but she could no longer cheat. The baby yawned widely and a drop of milk dribbled from the corner of his mouth.

“He’s asleep, let me take him back.” Tania stretched out her arms.

“No!” Zala instinctively turned away.

“I knew it, I knew! Zala, what are you doing to me? Please don’t. Please. Zala! The nurses know that it was I who took the child and if he’s missing, they’ll come looking for me. What am I supposed to tell them?”

Tania’s voice acquired a higher, almost hysterical pitch, but her hands didn’t dare grab the baby, so she held Zala’s shoulders.

“The Avbers... the Director and the Consultant... an ancient Ljubljana family. Always in the right party, Communists before, Democrats now. He is my tutor and I still need to take an exam with him. I really cannot do this to my parents, letting things go wrong, putting my medical career in jeopardy. Please. You will take him home tomorrow! Please! You know yourself how hard my mother and father worked to provide for my studies! Did you look after me all those years only to destroy me now? You will get the child tomorrow! He will just stay here one more night! Please!”

Images flashed before Zala’s eyes, all at once: the tiny girl next door, biting away at a lock of her hair; her parents who, besides paying Zala, also always gave her some sweets or a piece of cake to take home; the hopes they had pinned on their daughter, praying she would never once have to hold a broom or a hammer like they did, that she would have a career that everyone needed, wanted, and respected. At the same time, her brain was telling her that she could not run through the hospital holding her kidnapped son with Tania shouting at her heels, past the nurses, the doctors, and especially past the security guard.

She looked at the baby, and her brain ordered her hands to act. Nothing happened. With a deep groan, she eventually pushed the child into Tania’s arms, barely able to hold back her tears.