6 May 1992, Wednesday - Erased

“I made some enquiries. There are 300,000 erased people just in Europe, ten million around the world. I never would have thought that authorities would so readily resort to this method. The public doesn’t protest against it. Until it happens to them, nobody is interested, then it’s too late,” Mark said and grimaced. “I have to get ready for a meeting.”

They stood in the middle of the corridor in the office building and the lift door closed behind them. The morning acquired a blue hue as it tried to look in through the tinted windows, installed in the years when architects discovered air-conditioning and swore that the human hand would never again open a window.

“I need to go myself, I’m off to breastfeed, Tania is on the morning shift today. The editor, though...”

Mark looked away and sighed. Though he was close to fifty, there were certain situations when his face became ageless – while solving problems and admitting mistakes, for example. He had called her the night before and heard how her meeting with the editor had gone. He had kept interrupting, asking for details, apologised when he went to find a pen, was basically vexed and confused the whole time, and finally said he would look into it.

“The editor was a bad suggestion,” he said. “I didn’t have enough to work on. I can’t go through the secretary or our PR department, you understand, I need to do it on my own and around a few corners. I’ve never really dealt with the media here myself and I wasn’t aware...”

“That he was such a spineless shit?” Zala asked.

“The papers are state-owned. The authorities appoint editors. If he has a good relationship with the current authorities, it doesn’t mean it will hold if the government changes. Though they say he always manages to find his way. Between you and me, he’s an ass-kissing toad. But that’s what all successful editors in your country are expected to be.”

“What an idealistic sucker I’ve been! If only I’d been blonde!”

He smiled and his eyes sparkled amidst the fine wrinkles.

“You were when I first saw you!”

On their third date, he had brought along a photograph taken at a carnival party at the nursery school. His friend, the one whose daughter Mark had picked up from school that one day, had put it up on the wall in the office because of his daughter, dressed up as a ladybird. But behind her was a Little Red Riding Hood in a yellow wig bought at the supermarket. Zala and her friends normally thought up a new costume every year, but that year she had taken the easy route and worn her costume from the previous year. Mark had said he thought he’d seen her somewhere before when he walked along that path at the nursery school and then spent a few days trying to figure out where, until he found the answer right in front of him at the office. He brought the photo, still in its frame, and held it in front of her. “Yes, that is me,” she said, then started to laugh without really knowing why; maybe out of embarrassment or because of his obsession with analysing everything; either way, he was clearly no romantic. No talk whatsoever of previous lives, of fate, of what was meant to be, what he knew would be, and all the other phrases common to her bad relationship. He used the word “priming” which she didn’t know and he tried to explain, though she still had to look it up in a dictionary, which gave her a choice between ‘cover a surface with a first coat of paint’ and ‘prepare for firing or detonation.’ Clearly, these were not literally what Mark had had in mind, but at the same time they perfectly described what was to come.

After their fourth date, they slept together. Zala had desired him for a long time by then and the tingle was intensifying to pain, though she had promised herself she would show some restraint (she had ended her bad relationship only a month earlier), imagining that she needed some time for transition and stabilisation.

They had sat in a restaurant, no longer able to talk, merely gazing at each other, and his pupils had darkened. He had worn a black sweater pulled right up to his chin, the first millimetre of stubble already defying his morning shave, exposing lighter white patches, just like his hair. He kept his lips closed tightly and hid the excessively white teeth that locals always used to identify American tourists or pensioners who had returned to their home turf from beyond the Pond. His grey eyes had fixed upon her face and appeared to darken.

“As you know, I’m married,” he said and Zala’s gaze focused on his ring. He put his hands on the table, as if on display. She wondered, ‘Did he put that on just now?’ Had he removed it before their previous dates? and realised that he hadn’t. She had not seen it because she didn’t want to.

“My two children are grown up, but I will not get a divorce.”

“Yes, I know,” she said dryly, with an attempt at self-assurance, since he was looking at her questioningly.

“And I will not have any more children,” he added.

“Why are you telling me all this?” she asked and felt as if her vocal cords were working independently.

“Because you’re at an age for children.”

“You men...”

He shook his head.

“Biology.”

At that moment, without desiring him any less, she had hated him.

“I’m not the right man for you at this time,” he said.

“Come on,” she said, “who are you to decide what’s right for me and what isn’t?”

He nodded. “Perhaps this is just a rational explanation. I’ve noticed we can always find an explanation if we look for one. The more desperate we are, the more stupid it can be, and we will still believe it.”

She stared at him for a while before nodding. “Now this I did not expect coming from your analytical brain.”

“Should I get the bill?” he asked.

She nodded.

“And get them to call a cab?”

She smiled. His warning spurred her along with the advice given by her friends at the end of her last relationship: you need to go wild, get over it, forget it. In the morning, when the alarm clock rang and she looked around a strange bedroom, she thought that the girls were probably right – she had had plenty of stabilisation over the last decade. Especially as they had bid farewell to sex quite early into her last relationship…

Now Zala’s eyes engaged with Mark’s as they had on that evening, and they only flinched when the lift stopped once again at their level and a few businessmen stepped out into the corridor.

Baffled, Zala looked away, reproaching herself for getting carried away. He should still be angry with her, and she kept telling herself she had already got over him.

He had to clear his throat in order to speak. “I talked to a lawyer and he says that the law was passed and you were given time to put in an application.”

“I didn’t know!”

“They didn’t exactly go out of their way to inform people. But they are legally covered in this respect. If you take them to court, it could take years, with an uncertain outcome.”

“They can’t just take my child away like this!”

“No, true. The lawyer will make enquiries into your case. But legally, you are both foreigners...”

“And we can be sent to Kragujevac? So the Director of the Clinic was right?”

He nodded. A wave of anger overcame her. This man, this... man of hers... former man of hers... of a few months, now stood before her, solving a problem. She was merely another issue and a series of possible solutions ticking away inside his large skull, on top of this so very American body. Seeing them arrive in their checkered shirts and trousers, kids throughout Yugoslavia used to say they were so big because they only ate galofak, antibiotic supplement-fed chickens. He looked after his body with a daily trip to the gym and complained about how hard it was to find a good one in Ljubljana, especially one that would open early in the morning and extend its operating hours late into the night. The body cult was only just appearing among the locals.

Her hostile expression startled Mark.

“What’s wrong?”

“Everything!”

He switched his briefcase to his left hand. The lift arrived with a new load of businessmen in suits. The sun, struggling to penetrate the building, had for now to content itself with depositing its warmth in the thick glass.

“I don’t know... don’t you have a heart at all?” she said.

He looked at her with confusion.

She did not want to explain to him the whole wave of thoughts being pushed forward by her anger. This problem-solver had found a new, difficult case, and had set about solving it, something he liked to do. He was paying attention to it, enquiring, looking for information, he was now in the analytical phase or something like that, as he had once explained to her. He would try out various hypotheses, all at once, but the one thing he was incapable of realising was that the problem was not the numbers or serpentine trains of thought, but his child. She was furious, her eyes hissed at him. At the same time, some part of her had already begun to find excuses for him: he was a man, he hadn’t carried him inside him for almost nine months, he hadn’t given birth to him, he hadn’t had him put on his chest, all wet and slimy in incredible colours that shocked her and stopped her hands with the fear that she might damage him, so small and helpless. He wasn’t breastfeeding him and he hadn’t had him taken away from him.

A woman in a suit walked past and, sensing the tension between them, almost stopped, only to quickly turn her head away and continue down the corridor.

“What should I do?” Zala asked.

“I suggest you leave him in the hospital for now.”

“No!”

“You can still go to breastfeed him. You have your acquaintance there. If the Director wants him for herself, they’re certain to look after him well. You must remain mobile, get around, solve the situation. Please, leave him there for now!”

She agreed with him, but reason was like a tiny island, just the tip of a volcano.

“OK,” she whispered, lowered her head, then looked up and lunged forward, throwing her words like darts at his face.

“I hate this business, I-know-it-all-solve-all-problems voice of yours!”

He stepped backward.

“Zala...”

His slightly prolonged first ‘a’ of her name always made her weak at the knees.

“I’m sorry.”

“OK, let’s think what’s next. I’m still asking around, collecting information. But is there, in spite of everything, anything you might still be able to do about your documents in Kragujevac? You could get Serbian citizenship there, and then apply for a residence permit in Slovenia. Do your parents know anyone, do they have any copies of documents, do they know anything about it?”

“But...”

“Yes, I know, you’ve fallen out. But you know, desperate situations...”

She nodded.

He looked at his watch.

“This will clearly be one of those less prepared meetings, but I still don’t want to miss it. Although... I spend most of my breaks on the phone, making enquiries. It is interesting that when I mention the Erased, everyone knows something, but nobody is willing to go into it. They groan, ‘Yes, yes,’ and change the subject. We’ll speak?”

“Yes. Thanks!”

His right hand started to rise, as did hers. They realised it and stopped, shifting on the spot a while, tearing away from each other like bees from sweet nectar.

He turned round and took the first step.

“Mark,” she said, “one more thing. I was thinking last night. This will sound really stupid now... though last night it seemed like a great hope... I was even able to sleep, for a while at least. He is a writer, do you remember, I told you about him? A well-known dissident, a moral person, always in conflict with the regime. He was put in prison. He writes so well about women... since editors seem to be such bought-off bastards, what about him?”

“OK, write down the name and surname for me, give me a day or so and I’ll try to sort something out.”

* * *

The apartment blocks had been built in the early 1970s, stuck like toothpicks into a patch of green land and although the authorities had promised a fantastic future, this did not include cars. When they appeared anyway, they took over all the green that was left between the buildings and devoured any remaining children’s playgrounds.

The only thing left was the basketball court. Boys were pushing each other to get to the ball and a couple of girls giggled as they hurried past them. Zala stopped for a moment at the bench and peered up at the façade. She didn’t have to count the floors; Mother and her neighbour showered their balconies with flowers that climbed along the concrete guard and hung out of baskets dangling from the ceiling. They looked like colourful eyebrows that met in the middle, each refusing to keep to their own side. The remaining nine storeys below and the few above participated only with the odd sad-looking flowerpot, but most had fallen victim to the apparently contagious fashion for glazed-in balconies.

Since she had moved away, the lift had been fitted with a separate internal door that she still had to close manually. The contraption didn’t stop squeaking all the way up.

Mother opened the door and the first thing she did was glance over her shoulder, back at the clock on the kitchen wall.

“I’ll leave before the hour is up,” Zala said. Mother had told her years ago that, since he’d retired, Father always took a two-hour walk in the morning. Zala called to check that she had remembered the time right. Father swore by order, and time was understood to be its foremost representative. For this reason, he would go around adjusting all the clocks in the apartment according to the clock ticking away on the screen before the evening news and, occasionally, when he noticed a discrepancy, he would also call the phone company’s automatic service, where a fragmented female voice would give him the accurate time. Father’s thick fingers carefully holding the jagged knob on the back of the wall clock came vividly to mind. His gaze concentrated entirely on the task: he held his breath and stooped his broad shoulders.

“You know what he’s like ...” Mother said. “Come in. We’d better chat before he gets back from his walk. I’m sorry.”

She led her past the framed commendations on the wall, all bearing the coats of arms of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav People’s Army. In pride of place hung a picture of Marshal Tito in uniform. Hands crossed, he held a pair of white gloves and his wedding ring sparkled alone, away from the medals on his chest. He looked old and tired, as if he were listening to a speech at a funeral and wondering what they would say about him.

The corner seating still dominated the kitchen, standing against the oak-coloured wooden panelling, with a single socket right in the middle where the black lead of the portable radio was permanently plugged in.

“Coffee?” mother asked and grabbed the jezve.

“No, thanks. Something’s up with my stomach. I’ll have some water.”

“You’re just like your father, all tense and nervous. I have something for you, I’ll find it before you leave.”

“Sit down,” Mother gestured toward the corner. She poured two glasses of water and they sat on either side of the radio that was quietly transmitting popular ethnic polkas and waltzes, another sign of Father’s absence.

They picked up their glasses simultaneously, then also smiled at each other at the same time. In this shared moment, Zala suddenly felt like a child again and it embarrassed her, as if her life were made up of fragments from the past and she was unable to connect them with her present or future.

“I mostly drink water lately, too,” Mother said. “It’s healthy. Do you remember Dr Bregant who drank seawater and then ran for seven days, six hours, and I can’t remember how many minutes to cover a thousand kilometres? That was a Slovene record!”

“No.”

“Well, you never were interested in sports,” Mother sighed, sipped on the water and put down her glass.

“Mother,” Zala began, “I have my birth certificate at home stating that I was born in Kragujevac. I mean, I knew that anyway. But do you by any chance have any other documents, do you know anyone at the town hall there?”

“Nobody. In Kragujevac, your father had the greatest jealousy attacks; I didn’t even dare go out of the apartment. You were just a baby, so, logically, you wouldn’t remember, but your father would sometimes come rushing home from work, just to check up on me. I asked him what had got into him, since I had only just given birth, but he just snarled. Later, when we moved, he calmed down. It’s odd, now that you’ve reminded me, how he was never that jealous before or later. He was always just how a man should be if he loves you, but not that obsessively. He did once send a soldier to check and see what I was doing, and a few minutes later, came running himself to make sure nothing was going on with this soldier. As if it had even crossed my mind. It took thirty hours to give birth to you, I was all ripped up, and never wanted to see a man again...”

Zala tapped her palm on the table, disconcerted, “It’s all right, Mother. Thanks. I was just asking.”

“And how are you? Work alright?”

Zala sensed a valve within that wanted to burst open and release all that had built up inside. She managed to restrain herself without too much effort. Mother and she had not been close for a long time. Mother was not like some other women of her age, who appeared drained of life. When she had been laid off after a few years of working in Slovenia, one of the many in the first round of forced retirements with which the state masked mass dismissals and salvaged its statistics, Mother had taken up gardening and maintaining her flowers on the balcony. Among the plants she became animated, but in the apartment, at the stove or near Father, she switched into a different mode of operation, anaemic, sculling through the daily grind. She never wore any make-up and Zala was tempted to ask her whether it was because Father did not allow her to, but it seemed too personal a question for their silence. She dyed her hair, very amateurishly and rarely, the roots never needed to fight for their existence. Age spots had started appearing on her hands, though to Zala she seemed still too young for them. She hoped that she herself would not get them so prematurely, and promised herself she would enquire about a cream for it at the pharmacy, surely they must have invented something. The next moment it occurred to her that she was supposed to be saving her child and here she was thinking about hand cream; she punished herself by biting her bottom lip. Mother’s broad face was full of a kind of tranquillity and her skin, which must have been oily in her youth, had aged well because of it. At the same time, she had put on just enough weight to prevent the wrinkles from really taking over.

“Yes, everything is fine, thanks,” Zala said.

“I’m glad about that,” she said. “These are strange times, we need to look after ourselves. Have you noticed all the pollen? I can’t recall plants blooming this much ever before! On the news they keep saying everything is normal, but when they say that on TV you know it isn’t. This is the only thing you can be certain of. There might even be a chemical war, now that we are independent, who knows? The human body can take a great deal if the head holds out. Because everything is in the head. But I just have to say it. You seem to be a slightly odd shape, sitting there like that. You seem a bit fat around the belly, do you drink a lot of beer?”

“No, no, no. I told you, I’m already dieting.”

Mother looked at the clock on the wall.

“What about you, will you win this year?” Zala pointed toward the balcony and the flowers pushing into the kitchen through the open door.

“Well, you see, that’s one of those decisions that you just have to accept. They are difficult but you have to.”

She pouted, “That cow...”

She gestured toward the wall. “We’ve been competing for years for the best kept balcony in the neighbourhood. How worked up I would get about it! I even got a stomach ulcer! So this year I moved to a new category. And she is no longer a rival. Now I can sleep in peace.”

“A new category?”

“Yes, carnations. With a little help from a book... Come, I’ll find it.”

She carefully shifted herself from the corner seat and went toward the corridor. Zala followed. Father’s uniform still hung in the built-in cupboard, not a single speck of dust on it. There was something in the corner that looked like a bag for carrying a mess kit, or perhaps a gas mask. In the bedroom, one of the walls had an image of Tito sitting down at his desk writing, and the wall opposite, above the double bed, carried a black–and-white picture of a couple in wedding clothes. They looked young and happy, not like her parents, and she wondered bitterly, ‘Who are those two? Where have they gone?’

A plastic doll with rag clothes and scruffy hair sat on the bed with its legs spread. Zala remembered it, the ultimate socialist fad that everyone had to personally bring from Italy. When laid down flat it would say “Mama.”

She moved backward into the corridor and let Mother search through the books. From this distance, she could only read the backs of large thick books from the Military Encyclopedia through Yugoslav Tourist Jewels , to the last one, Tito – Our Hero. She stepped toward the closed door past which they had just walked and held the handle.

Her room.

Former. Her former room.

She slowly opened the door. She would feel embarrassed if Mother were to catch sight of her.

The timetable from her last year at the nursery school teacher training college was still stuck on the back of the door. Everything else had also remained unchanged. The bed was made, the walls were still adorned with posters of punk and rock bands, yellowed and disintegrated by time. The wardrobe was closed, a notebook still on the desk and books on the shelves. She looked at the lock on the door; the key was no longer there. The only thing that had ever really bothered Father was gone. She would come from school, run past a yelling Father, and turn the key. He would bang on the door. She knew he could always break it down, but he restrained himself.

She must meet him today. After all these years, all the arguments and fights which inside her head she won, had slowly settled and disappeared into a kind of indistinguishable haze since she’d left home, just like everything to do with her bad relationship after that ended. Then she had become pregnant and this had revived her thoughts about Father. The pubescent conviction that she had nothing to do with her parents and that she was an entirely new creature created from nothing had given way to wondering what characteristics the child might inherit. She hoped for Father’s energy and strength, but not his stubbornness and narrowmindedness. What would she take from Mother? It took her a while before she remembered: the simplicity of making decisions. One needs to make a decision: between husband and daughter, between hydrangeas and carnations, so let’s do it – a decision without regrets and agonies, what a gift! But Father had remained Zala’s main preoccupation. Her body was changing, being filled out with a new body, flooded with hormones, memories came bubbling to the surface and with them also Father’s image. His bad temper, his outbursts; she began to understand him but could not forgive him. Every time she had come across a father such as she thought she deserved, she became furious about the father she actually had.

She shut the door.

Mother was still shuffling around the books and moving the sliding glass panels of the bookcase.

Then it dawned on Zala: father never missed the evening news, he must have heard about the law and the erased! He was on his way back and she needed to talk to him. She began pacing the apartment. How often she had imagined this moment, their first meeting in years, the collision of two rams, as her mother called them. But now she hardly had the strength to walk.

Until now, Zala had interpreted all that her father had said to her, down to the last word, however harsh and exaggerated, as his wish to set her on the right path. That regardless of how their opinions diverged, he wanted what was good for her.

But in this case, he had known of the state’s mandate, and he hadn’t told her. His silence was an act of evil.

How could he have done something like this to her?

During all his shouting and scolding, despite her fear of his physical strength – there was something bull-like in him when he hit the wall or the doorframe – she had always felt that he loved her.

And – something she would never have admitted before she was close to giving birth – she hoped he also knew that she loved him.

“Here!” Mother came out of the bedroom holding a small booklet. “Read this, it will help you too!”

* * *

She reached the mailboxes in the foyer. Under them, a cardboard box overflowed with unwanted junk mail and flyers. In a long sweep, she threw the book on top of the pile and continued down the stairs.

Before the front door closed behind her, she quickly turned round and ran back to the box. She picked up the booklet and stuffed it into her parents’ mailbox.

* * *

She sat on the bench waiting. For a long time, she observed a pair of schoolboys pushing each other about, the heavy schoolbags on their shoulders making them lose their balance and stagger around, more than the actual shoving. A young mother with a stroller neared the building and Zala tried to keep her eyes on her own shoes but didn’t manage it. She saw it all: how the woman rang the bell and a young man in a tracksuit came running up to the door, took charge of the stroller while she picked up the child and kissed it on the cheek, how the child began to cry and she began to speak softly to it, how they went into the building and the man carried the stroller in after them.

She realised she was leaning against the back of the bench with her chest, so she turned round and straightened up. From the corner of her eye, she caught sight of an old man who was barely managing to drag his feet past her; he walked stooped, as if trying to lean on the air in front of him with every step.

She glanced toward the basketball court, and the pair of giggling girls walked past again. The boys instantly increased the pace of the game, stopped passing the ball and went into solo action, each taking shots from impossible distances.

“What are YOU doing here?” a familiar voice shouted in Serbian. Zala jumped and began to stutter. She looked around. The voice must have been Father’s; she had recognised it instantly, though it sounded hollower, as if there was something missing. The vocal cords aiming for more than they were capable of.

There was nobody else around apart from the old man who had walked past her.

“Father?”

“Uh? Did I not ask you something?” he shouted and at first she thought, ‘He can barely speak?’ and then, ‘Half of him is missing!’

His nose protruded from the skin that had pasted itself to his skull; his frame had retained its breadth and height, but there was not very much left on it. His clothes had not got smaller and he appeared almost lost inside them.

“Father?” she kept repeating, as she came closer.

“You need money, do you?”

She stood right in front of him, as he yelled from what remained of his figure, a kind of half-shouting that didn’t reach further than a few metres. He was raging because he didn’t want to see himself in her face. He was afraid of what he might see in her eyes: pity.

“What is wrong with you?”

“So did that fuckhead of yours swindle you dry and you remembered your old man?”

“You are sick.”

“You always kept telling me that. Tell me, what’s new!”

“Don’t be silly? You are thin as a rake. What’s wrong with you?”

“Why should you care? But if you want to know: here, I’m falling to pieces, just like Yugoslavia.”

Zala remembered all the enemies Father had spent his life expecting: the Russians, the Americans, the Italians and the Germans, even the Albanians and the Bulgarians. He even viewed certain African countries that Tito had begun visiting with some suspicion, their only mitigating circumstances being their distance. They were called ‘blues’ and ‘reds’ on manoeuvres and would always be defeated. Father was excited every time, as if it had not all been prearranged. Manoeuvres were right up his street because he liked things to be in order. Zala suspected that war could be far more chaotic and Father would probably not like it at all, even though he had always called himself a soldier at heart. All the preparation, training, tactics, shelters, equipment and all the rest that would stop the enemy. A threatening world out there that Father had never wished to venture into, content with the natural beauties Yugoslavia had to offer, from Mount Triglav in the North down to the River Vardar in the South. He had never wished to travel beyond the borders of Yugoslavia, especially after hearing terrible stories about officers on private holidays being kidnapped by foreign intelligence and tortured to extract valuable information from them. By the time Zala finally began to wonder what a plain old sergeant could possibly know that would be of any use to a warring nation, she no longer wanted to travel with her parents. He had only ever given in once and had taken Zala and her mother to Trieste, been disgusted by the queues at the border, the customs officials who scornfully checked their car, the Italians who swore at them and made fun of them. “Proud! Stay proud!” he had told his family, so next time they had set off alone, by train, without the car and the pride.

Zala was overcome with sadness, crying on the inside: none of those enemies had come, despite the whole of Father’s generation waiting for them. They watched the borders but the slaughter began from within.

“You have cancer, don’t you?” she said.

“Various kinds. Take your pick. How much money do you need?”

“Stop going on about money! That is not what I came for.”

She realised she was shouting and looked around. The basketball players seemed not to have taken notice. She felt she was sliding into the tracks of the arguments they had always had and knew she would be doing him a favour if she behaved in the same way as when he had been strong and well.

But he wasn’t.

She had been preparing for this fight, going over it in her head, portraying herself as an adult with a strong personality, returning to finish what she was incapable of finishing in her teens. Time had not stood still and her teens were but a distant memory. The Father of those years was no longer. He tried hard to hiss at her and tell her off, to accuse her, but his eyes remained listless, his body shaking. In truth, he was not arguing at all, just creating a pretence, calling up his old self, offering it to her, to abuse, to scold, to finally beat.

“Indeed, you are like Yugoslavia,” she said, on the verge of tears.

“You began it all, Slovenes!” he tried to shout.

“Kragujevac,” she said calmly.

“What about Kragujevac?”

“Is everything in order with your documents?”

The mask fell away. She could hear wheezing with every breath.

“Let’s sit down,” she said and they sat down, each on their own end of the bench.

“Kragujevac? The Erased? Did you know about the law?” she repeated.

“Yes.”

“Didn’t you put in an application?”

A trace of the old quick temper burst to the surface again.

“I took an oath once, an oath to Tito and to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia! I will not take another! Look at what they have done with our country, the fucking bastards! When I watch the news, it is worse than if they were torturing me in the flesh! Tito would never have allowed all this. Or the erasure. Tito would have put all these Slovenian politicians in front of a firing squad.”

“All these politicians of today are Tito’s youth,” she replied and changed the subject. “Do you have a passport?”

“Yes. A Yugoslav one.”

She nodded. “The country no longer exists. Nor does its citizenship. Do you have a Slovene one?”

“I don’t want one.”

“Right. Suit yourself.”

They remained silent and stared ahead.

“And why didn’t you tell me about the law?”

Slowly, he turned toward her. She could feel him turn. They gazed at each other. His features were softened by pain.

“Fucking bastards,” he whispered. “It can’t be. They erased you Slovenes too? Their own people?”

She nodded. “Yes. I have been left without citizenship. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I never thought of it. They talked about the law for foreigners. What kind of a foreigner are you, when your mother is Slovene?”

He fell silent, and after a long while asked quietly, “Did I fuck things up for you?”

“No, I’ll sort it out. How can you go to the doctor’s without health insurance?”

Another trace of the old quick temper. “What do you mean? I’d never go to those quacks! I’ve seen enough of such cadre in the army. All they’d do is cut away, they have their white gowns and knives, so they think they are butchers.”

He ran out of air, wanting to say too much at once. Zala instinctively held his shoulders as she would a child at nursery school in an attack of stubbornness and it occurred to her that she should use the same tactics, by diverting his attention, asking for example, ‘Tell me, what sound does a cow make?’ and the child would forget what he was making a fuss about, but all she said was, “Breathe!”

He calmed down and slowly caught his breath.

“Does it hurt?”

“Forget it, it’s fine. I get pain killers. A friend goes to the doctor’s and keeps complaining about his back, so they give him a prescription.”

Zala slowly moved her hand away, afraid of how easily his clothes yielded so that her hand could feel the bones beneath. “Did I fuck things up?”

“I said I’ll sort it out. As you say, I am Slovene.”

“Are you still with that loser?”

“No.”

He looked so miserable, she handed him a gift. “You were right as far as he was concerned.”

He smiled with satisfaction. “Father always knows. Do you have a man?”

“Yes.”

“Does he have a good job?”

She flinched as she realised the mistake she had made. She could not speak until she forced the image of her son to vanish from before her eyes.

“Oh? No, no! I’m single.”

“Shit. I was hoping I would live to see your wedding and a grandson. Why you had to waste ten years with that piece of shit, I will never understand.”

She wanted to say, ‘Me neither!’ but this much agreement between them was too much for the first encounter after such a long time.

They remained silent.

“Look,” he said, “look over there!”

He raised his hand and pointed to the parked cars. A big, black jeep was parked diagonally across two disabled parking spaces.

“People like that are on the up, thieving bastards,” he said. “And you women just encourage them further. As I was going out for my walk today, I saw it had a note tucked behind the wiper. Torn out of a school notebook. ‘Call me!’ it said, with a phone number and heart drawn with a pink felt tip. Damn bastards! I couldn’t stop thinking about it!”

The black paint glistened in the sun, until the shadow of a cloud slowly moved overhead.

“Father,” she said, “you just have to accept that you can’t do anything about it. All you are doing is getting worked up and angry inside.”

Her fingers recalled the memory of the shoulder that was now just a mass of bones.

“Fuck it,” he said. “That’s one you’re right about.”

His voice was hard and barely audible. A tear began to gather in the corner of her eye, and she wiped it away quickly, checking if Father had seen. He was looking toward the parked cars and beginning one of his monologues.

“Tito was right when he said that we would not withstand a direct attack from the Russians or the Americans. That we needed to change to guerrilla type operations. This is the only way that this nation can defend itself against anyone!”

She thought how this was all that had remained of her father, fragments of old speeches that he blasted day in and day out at his soldiers. Sadness gripped her heart. Was he about to tell her that a wet army overcoat, a greatcoat, could hold a full seven litres of water? She had never understood why, in this nuclear age, her father saw this woolly fabric known as č oja as one of the great Yugoslav technological achievements.

Father pointed to the black car. “Just now, as I was coming back here, I moved the note onto that old Fiat 500 in the corner.”

Zala’s shoulders began to shake and, from a distance, it was impossible to tell whether she was crying or laughing.

* * *

“Identification please!”

Nikola jumped and his cigarette fell out of his mouth. When he saw it was Zala who had sneaked up behind him, he began wildly stamping his foot on the butt.

“I can’t believe it! I am the practical joker here, not you! What are you doing to me?” Zala froze mid-laughter.

“I’m sorry! I don’t know what came over me! I wanted to see you, so I came here, to your ‘workplace.’ I saw you, judging the women coming out of the town hall. You look at them as if they were pieces of meat. Perhaps that annoys me?”

“Oh no! First you scare me witless and now this feminist shit! What have I done to deserve it?”

“OK, I won’t do it again, I promise. It really isn’t like me at all. Sometimes I surprise myself.”

She was having fun: the feeling of guilt rose up again. On the way to the town hall, she had even stopped in front of a shop window, until a sharp pain had snapped her to attention. ‘What are you doing? Your child is alone and helpless, while you’re looking at a dress?’

She didn’t know to what degree her face made her look suspicious, so she hurried along.

“I have to give it to you, you’ve found yourself a prime pick-up spot here.”

“No man likes to be alone in misfortune. And also becomes more willing to give.”

“Willing? Man? You mean a female man?”

He lit a cigarette and ostentatiously turned his nose up.

“Do you ever take a day off?”

“It’s closed on Sundays and public holidays, so I stay at home,” he said, concentrating on his lighter, with the flint producing sparse sparks.

Zala waited for him to take a draw and then slowly asked, “Home?”

“Ooops!” was all he could say.

“You have an apartment, don’t you? You lied to me!”

He found something astonishingly interesting on the tips of his trainers and could not take his eyes off them.

“Are you even erased?”

“I am, that I am.”

She observed him for a long time and then asked, “Where were we? Show me your ID card?”

Nikola opened his empty hand and returned the question, “And your ID, madam?”

“Zala Jovanovi ć ! Surname given by father, name chosen by mother.”

“We can’t just take your word for it. Identification please.”

Zala too opened her palm.

“Passport?” she said.

Nikola showed his left hand. Zala did too.

“Health insurance card?” they both said simultaneously and showed each other their open palms.

“Here, check my work card too.” Zala turned her hand again.

“Hey, not fair, I never had one of those.”

“I no longer have a job either, though my boss is great and I think she will sort something out. Perhaps I will just have to work illegally?”

“In the same place where you worked legally up until last month?”

“Yes. This business of being erased can’t last for long. People won’t allow it.”

“You think so? Nobody gives a damn until it happens to them. By then it’s too late.

Welcome to the shithole.”

“What do you live off?”

“Part-time work. Illegal. And I steal the odd bike, not the very expensive ones, ones that the police don’t give a fuck about. There, see, I have told you all as it is. I feel strange for doing so.”

“Let’s go to your place.”

“You don’t believe me? No problem, you’ll see it’s all true. It’s easier if a girl invites you round to her place, than if you invite her to yours. Pity, you know. That is why I didn’t mention the apartment. There must be one small lie, otherwise the man is just not interesting. Let’s go.”

They set off across the bridge to the other side of Ljubljana, past the railroad station and continued on to an old housing development of apartment blocks, with even older apartment buildings in between them. The yellow pollen was everywhere, covering their shoes as soon as they veered off the trodden central part of the pavement. On the way, Nikola spoke only once, when a pair of youths in shell suits and fake gold chains round their necks came in the opposite direction. They waved and greeted them, shouting across the road and when they had gone by, he looked at Zala and said, “This is what gets to me. Did you see them? My friends can walk about dressed normally because they have citizenship, but I have to pretend to be a well-dressed Slovene, fuck it. How low must one stoop?”

He shook his head and continued grumbling under his breath.

A few minutes later, they came to an empty road. A man and woman carrying some groceries proceeded over the crossing, ignoring the red man. Zala began to follow, but Nikola held her upper arm and pulled her back. She turned towards his sad eyes and realised: they had to obey every single law.

As they waited, Zala raised her face to the sun, hoping to rid herself of the indefinable feeling that had been building up inside her, a mixture of anger and revulsion with herself. Here she was, walking along, even joking, with Nikola, when she should be devoting every second to saving her child from the claws of the Director. After a few days of breastfeeding in the broom cupboard every morning and evening, she’d begun to feel that it was part of her normal routine, as if it always had been and always would be. Now she felt disgusted with herself, with the way she had been forced to nurse her son in hiding, and her compliance with it. At the same time, Zala knew these feelings would pass, and that it was the small routines of her days that prevented her from being crushed by it all. She remembered the books she had read in the past, how warmly they had embraced her, even when Father was ranting away in the kitchen. She hoped Mark would be able to arrange a meeting with the writer; he would be someone whose voice people would listen to. Anyone who wrote like he did simply had to be listened to.

“Right, here we are!” Nikola said. They stood outside an apartment building with a dilapidated façade and a large park around it, littered with dog shit.

“Now look!” he said and pulled a bunch of keys from his pocket. He fiddled with them until he picked out a dark green one and used it to unlock the front door.

They entered the building and walked up the first flight of stairs to a long corridor. The door on the left opened just enough for a puffed-up red face to peer at them. It looked like a bloody stain surrounded by veneer. They glared at each other, and the man instantly shut the door marked CARETAKER. Zala could sense his gaze on the back of her head as they went past. Nikola extended his thumb and thrust it toward his mouth, gesturing at the same time behind his back, as if to say the caretaker was a drunkard.

Once they reached the first floor, he once more fiddled with the keys until he picked out a blue one.

It didn’t fit the lock.

Nikola seemed puzzled, looked at the keys in his open hand, tried another, then another….

“Aha!” Zala said.

Nikola blushed, once more grabbed the blue key and tried to push it into the lock.

“Your father has a very Slovene-sounding name!” Zala commented and Nikola stared at her in bewilderment. “Janez Gorenjc?” she said ironically.

“What Gorenjc?”

“Look!”

“Eh?” His mouth dropped, as he read the engraved name plate.

The name suddenly retracted to make way for its embodiment - a man with a moustache and a fat stomach. He looked like one of those tradesmen who did just enough to live on the money and spent the rest of their time talking in the local pub.

“What is it? What do you want in my apartment?” he shouted, and Nikola retreated backward.

“I’m sorry, but I...”

All Zala could do was watch. Everything was happening too quickly. All the sense organs could do was take note. A smell of stuffed peppers wafted from the apartment.

“Don’t come again!” Janez Gorenjc hissed so loudly that his moustache shook.

“But...” Nikola made another step backward and hit the railing. This awoke him and he looked at the other two apartments on the same floor, half shutting his eyes to read the names on the other doors and gaped. “Hey, this is my apartment!”

“Really?” The man pulled up the left sleeve of his flannel shirt threateningly and roared at the top of his voice, “CARETAKER!”

The red stain above a blue work coat was already standing at the bottom of the stairs.

“Yes, Mr Gorenjc?” he said, in a docile voice.

Mr Gorenjc didn’t even look at him. “Whose apartment is this?”

“Yours, Mr Gorenjc!”

Nikola’s fury was building up, “What’s up with you two? Are you crazy? This is my father’s apartment, I live in it!”

“Really?” the man raised his chin. “Listen, kiddo, your father is a member of an enemy army. He has no business in Slovenia.” Then he turned to the caretaker for the first time. “Isn’t that right?”

“That’s right, Mr Gorenjc,” the stain nodded, not daring to even approach the first step.

“I can’t believe it.” Nikola shook his head. “You broke in and changed the lock. You stole my apartment.”

“And now you add slander to insult. The apartment was empty when I found it.”

“How was it empty when I...”

Mr Gorenjc stepped out into the corridor, his stomach taking up half the stairway.

“Listen to me, kiddo, you don’t exist. You have disappeared. You are not in Slovenia, nobody knows where you are. The apartment is empty.”

Nikola lunged at the man and landed on the end of a punch that returned him to his starting point. For a moment, it even seemed he might fall backwards over the railing, but he caught his balance and pressed his hand against his cheek.

Mr Gorenjc came close and pressed against him with the top of his gut.

“Will you go to the police? Will you go to court? You don’t exist. Fuck off! Get out of here!”

As he turned toward the apartment, Zala beat him on the back with her fists. To no effect.

“You thieving bastard! Taking advantage of other people’s misfortune!”

He pushed her away like a fly.

“Who else’s should I take advantage of, my own, or what? Who are you anyway? Are you one of them? Will you go to the police? Ah?”

Zala took a step forward.

“Will you go to the police?” Mr Gorenjc kept provoking her, grinning at her with the entire breadth of his yellowish teeth. “Go ahead!”

Zala stopped.

His grin widened; previously there had been a slight shadow of doubt there, but now he knew for certain.

“In fact,” he said, “Mr Caretaker, why don’t YOU call the police – you are responsible for peace and order in this apartment block, aren’t you?”

“Right away, Mr Gorenjc.”

In long steps, the caretaker quickly dragged his slippers toward his own apartment.

Zala clenched her fists and teeth until she began to tremble. Her muscles tensed, calling for a fight to right the injustice she had just witnessed. Father had once told her about a sergeant who stole food from the kitchen with the excuse that this was, after all, the People’s Army, which meant it was also his, and that everyone did it anyway. Father had reported him and the sergeant was excluded from the corps and had to ask for a transfer.

He stole food, this guy was stealing an apartment.

“What about my stuff?” Nikola asked.

“Ha, you want your stuff?” the man growled. “Here is some stuff, take this! And get out of here!”

* * *

They walked with their heads down all the way back to Zala’s apartment. Nikola carried a small, fake-leather bag with the silhouette of an airplane and the lettering Jugoslovenski Aerotransport , out of which stuck the handle of a badminton racket.

When they reached the apartment, he sat on the sofa, supporting his head with his arms, staring at the floor.

Zala made him coffee, but he didn’t touch it.

“Do you play badminton?” she tried to force a conversation.

He replied like a robot. “No. Why do you ask?”

She gestured towards the bag and the racket handle.

Nikola stared at it for a long time.

“That’s not my stuff. It’s his old junk.”

* * *

She found some cheese in the refrigerator, sliced it and put it next to the untouched coffee. Zala tiptoed around, feeling it would be inappropriate to make any noise. Whenever the phone rang, she rushed to pick up. Vlasta called to see whether they could meet up in the evening, for a ‘chatter’ as she called the regular Wednesday meetings. Mark called and they arranged to meet for lunch. There must have been something different in her voice, something reserved, or she just spoke more quietly, but she sensed he knew she was not alone and that it hurt, though, of course, with that analytical reasoning of his, he was aware there was nothing he could say. He hung up fast.

Zala felt she was climbing a steep mountain side. She could bear the strain of it, as long as she was moving from one hold to the next, slipping occasionally, like with the editor, but continuing to climb. But then came times for bivouacking, when she couldn’t do anything but wait.

Waiting was the worst. She kept checking the time, counting the minutes and longing for that broom cupboard and the close contact with the little body savouring her milk. She was in no state to read, but she went to the bookshelf and stroked her hand across the backs of the books. She had forgotten to ask Mark whether the meeting with the writer was being arranged. She had all his books and whenever a play of his was staged, she always got tickets for the first night. The front rows in the stalls were reserved for political bigwigs, but she indulged in a first-row balcony seat and would clap until the final echoes of the departing audience.

She realised she was staring at the clock. She could only think in surges. She would start on a theme and then the storm ripped it away, replacing it with another, sometimes just for a brief moment involving a third, her body trying to follow. She clenched her fists and bit her lips, sensing a cold sore bubbling at the left corner of her mouth. Frequently, her head twitched, as if she had dozed off and couldn’t recall what she had just been thinking about. She hoped that she had perhaps fallen asleep, even briefly, though she didn’t feel in any way refreshed.

“This is no longer a game, this is serious,” Nikola said and absently reached for his coffee. He drank it all without realising it had long since gone cold. Zala brought a chair and sat opposite him. “It was intended to be.”

A smug voice inside her was glad that somebody finally knew how she felt.

“They started off well with this new country, good on them! But do you remember…” he was becoming angry and Zala accepted his awakening with relief, “before they got their independence, how they went on about the killings after the Second World War? Implying how, as early as 1945, the communist state committed such a crime at its proclamation. Killing prisoners of war, a moral stain, do you remember?”

“I do.”

It was a subject about which Father had informed her through the wall of her room. Whenever it was mentioned in the news, he would begin to thunder about traitors and collaborators. Used to his vocal acrobatics, she would continue to do her homework unfazed.

“Then they get their own country, and what happens? First thing they do: erase people! As long as I can remember, they’ve whined that this nation was too small, only two million people! Obviously, they want it even smaller.” Nikola was agitated and began waving his arms about.

Zala breathed a sigh of relief and encouraged him by nodding. Let him get angry, wake up, get his survival instinct going.

“If this was the war, they would just shoot us all, just like they erased us now, fuck it, we’re at the dawn of the twenty-first century where a computer replaces the machine gun. Modern times. Fucked up, but modern. Is this business with us not a moral stain, or what? Are these people even capable of starting afresh, without immediately shitting down their own legs? They come out of one pile of shit and say, let’s turn a new page! There, now we have turned it, let’s shit on it. Now, with this shit we really can start anew, can’t we? Is that how it goes?”

Seizing a piece of cheese, he bit into it, as if attacking an enemy. He hadn’t stopped talking so choked on the cheese, coughing desperately until Zala patted his back and he was able to catch his breath.

“There,” he said. “And now we, the Erased, are hitting each other too.”

She moved her hand along his shoulder and squeezed it reassuringly, before letting go.

“What now?”

“I don’t know. You can sleep on the sofa. The spare keys are hanging by the door.”

He looked at her, standing above him. “Until they come for your apartment.”

She moved away and turned pale.

“They won’t.”

“How do you know? Who can vouch for it?”

They stared at each other. Another veil across Zala’s eyes fell to the ground, ripped to shreds. The caretaker had probably told his drinking buddy at the bar about an apartment with a tenant living there illegally and Mr Janez Gorenjc had the idea. How many people were capable of coming up with a similar profitable scheme, but were held back by laws and penalties? How long would it take before they realised that there were people who simply couldn’t call the police, regardless of what happened to them? That they could steal their homes, beat them up, even rape them, and the victims wouldn’t call the protectors of the law, because the law had excluded them? That from now on, Zala and all who shared her fate, were dependent on the kindness of strangers, of people like themselves, with no support or legal framework, under state orchestrated coercion.

* * *

“Nothing!” said Meta, Vlasta, and Nana, one after the other, as if they were at a school recital.

“Nobody knows anything.”

“Nobody knows anybody who could...”

“They’ve all heard something.”

They were sitting in a coffee shop that was one of the last bourgeois strongholds as perceived by Socialism. Dark wood, mirrors on the walls, a display cabinet with cakes and pastries, some of which appeared wilted and stale. The waiter had probably been trained by making him watch an episode of some English TV series with a butler in it, with the sound switched off. He moved like something out of a film and turned up his nose in a fitting manner, but spoke as if he had been teleported from a village fete:

His “Whatcha havin’?” could well have been the reason that, years ago, they had picked this coffee shop for their meetings, a place where they could chat and forget about their men, as they said, though they spent a surprising amount of time talking about them. At first, Zala had maintained that her bad relationship was going well, that he was writing a novel that publishers were showing an interest in. She, herself, believed this to be the case. When she stopped believing, she was so embarrassed she could only utter the odd cliché about how an artist needs his time and stuff like that. Vlasta once added, “And a strong woman to pay his keep!” because she had seen a documentary about Tolstoy the day before. All of them had nodded in agreement, which encouraged Vlasta to begin explaining how artists sometimes behave in peculiar ways, some even run away to abandoned railway stations in just their night shirt. Zala had never talked to them about Mark; he was, as they said, an in-between-man, a break between two serious relationships. But they all soon understood by the sparkle in her eyes and her posture, that this was a secret worth keeping and pestered her to share it, without managing to break her silence.

The waiter was used to them and joked with them frequently. “Whatcha havin’?”

They giggled and told him they had all they wanted and would not be needing anything else. He smiled, winked at them, and wandered off through the half empty shop, frequented mostly by pensioners reading their newspapers, to the area where chess players sat, hitting the clocks without taking their eyes off the board.

“Are you sure they haven’t made a mistake just in your case? These computers, being introduced everywhere...” Meta asked.

“No, they haven’t. Thank you all,” Zala said. “Is it really possible that we are so totally without connections? What have we been doing with our lives so far? I also called everywhere there was to call, and nothing.” They looked at her sadly.

“What will you do now?” Vlasta asked.

Since she had been keeping Mark a secret, she could not begin explaining about him now. She didn’t even dare to think that this might be one problem he could not solve.

He must be good if his company sent him all around the world.

They stared at her so gloomily that she had to say, “I have a plan. I’ll sort something out.”

She was lying and they knew that she was lying, but they also knew that she was doing them a favour, after all they were friends. Friendship is a joint utilization of power; helplessness reduces it to group regret.

“If you need money, we can collect...” Meta offered.

“Or food...” Nana was being practical.

“No, I still have enough.”

“A good thing you have somewhere to live,” Vlasta said, and Zala flinched at the memory of Janez Gorenjc and the punch with which he paid for his apartment. She should tell them, but would they ever believe her?

Vlasta, who always knew about everything on TV, continued, “In America, they sleep on the streets, just as well that here we all own our apartments. Oh! This is a bit random, but do you remember that guy we met when we went skiing...”

“The one from the solarium?”

“Yes, the extra tanned one!”

“Well, he...” she continued, as Zala’s attention was swept away like a whirlwind. She could no longer take in the space around her, the people, each with their own words, movements, and difficulties, the chairs that creaked occasionally. Empty tables, glasses that Whatchahavin was putting down on the counter, in front of the opening that went through to the kitchen. A tangy, musty smell of old age and cleaning products, air freshener that brought only a fake smell of spring, despite the real one outside drowning in yellow, with traces of the pollen brought inside on people’s shoes. She could not take in all of this, only small details, a mouth opening and closing in front of her, hands gesturing, heads swaying. Sounds did not compose into words and parts did not form into bodies. She was surrounded by strange creatures: there was something solid stuck between herself and them, something impenetrable that could suck her inside at any moment.

* * *

Carefully, she opened the door to her apartment. Nikola had left the lamp on the windowsill on for her; she found him sound asleep on the sofa.

The door struck against something metallic. At first, she could not compose the curves into an object, but once her eyes became used to the half-light, she saw a beautiful woman’s bicycle, decorated with a cherry-flower pattern.

She stroked the frame and smiled.