Mother Dear

Because of What, Not Why · 2.

In the large yard beneath the open window of the office, in the deep shade of the pines, the young men were enjoying their free moments away from the officers. They would have been perfectly content to do nothing at all, to sit peacefully on anything that offered stable support and stare blankly into space.

The soldier they called the Amateur Philosopher named that moment “the fundamental ambivalence of the serenity of the moment.”

Of course, nobody understood him, but that didn’t bother him in the least, because he himself no longer remembered what exactly he had said. His skill lay in repeating any thought quite differently from the first time while sounding just as convincing. The reason was one and entirely harmless: they hadn’t understood him the first time, or the second, or the third. Not any time. Not every time.

Still, he had earned the respect of a few. So one day Dragče¹ came up to him, a boy with a childlike look and a worried expression.

“Let me ask you something, comrade… Does the sun go around the earth from left to right, or the other way around?”

“First a circle to the left, then to the right,” the Amateur Philosopher answered without a trace of hesitation. “What do you need that for, pal?”

“Oh, I’m calculating something,” Dragče muttered, and wandered off lost in thought, spelling out numbers and rehearsing them to himself, as if recalling some mathematical-astronomical definitions and laws of his own.

Nobody told him that the earth goes around the sun. They didn’t keep quiet out of malice, but because it would have spoiled his calculation, which, it seemed, wasn’t standing very firmly anyway.

Philo, as they fondly called the Amateur Philosopher, had no interest in the exact sciences, so he turned to preparing his political speech.

“Comrade soldiers and fellow metallurgists of the spirit! Today, when we speak of the proletariat, we cannot ignore the alloy of consciousness and discipline. For what is the class struggle if not an endothermic reaction between soil and people, where capitalism is the oxidation of humanity, and Marxism is the catalyst of proletarian value!”

Someone in the back row applauded. It turned out he was swatting a mosquito. With a degree of neurotic abandon, frenzied yet steadily precise.

Ćata, the captain’s clerk, closed the window. He couldn’t listen to the speeches any longer, and he had more work than time left before lunch. If there was anything he could change, it was to stop listening to the wisdom of idlers.

Admittedly, he sometimes enjoyed listening to the unimaginable scale of foolishness born of pure boredom while he drew up reports and kept the records. On weekends they would listen to the football match on the radio. Ćata neither loved football nor cared about the score. He was soothed by the announcer’s voice and the murmur of the crowd in the background, applauding, whistling, and reacting to something happening on the pitch that he couldn’t see. He loved that world which existed only in sound.

* * *

The banana peel was headed for the bin. That was the intention and, as far as Ćata was concerned, the only decision he had made correctly that day. The peel, however, had plans of its own. Halfway there some higher law of physics took it over, and it veered left, straight into the bottle of mineral water at the very edge of the desk.

The bottle wobbled. Not abruptly, not cowardly, but with dignity, like a ship going down with its captain staying aboard to the end. And beneath it, on the pile of documents, quiet and certain destruction waited: monthly reports, records, stamped orders, and three days of someone’s life spent on copying.

Ćata didn’t think. His body thought for him, and the body never asked itself whether it was ready for this.

He leapt.

From the outside it lasted a measly second. On the inside it lasted an entire epic. He flew over the chair with arms outstretched, belly first, one leg tucked and the other extended for balance, like an enraged tiger that at the last moment realised it was hunting a bottle, not an antelope. Air whistled in his ears. Dust rose in the rays of sunlight that, by some miracle, broke through the window at precisely that moment, as if some director had ordered the lighting so he could film the scene for maximum theatrical effect.

At that moment it crossed his mind that this was an image the world ought to see. Had he happened to pull his underpants on over his trousers, he would have been a true Superman. As it was, he had only trousers over underpants, as regulations required, and the underpants were, unfortunately, where they belonged. Or fortunately.

As in a film, his life flashed before his eyes. He saw the first time he said “mama,” and Mama cried, and he didn’t understand why. He saw himself fall from the plum tree because the neighbour had scolded him for stealing plums for his brandy, and how the neighbour, instead of cursing him, just stood and watched. He saw himself falling in love with Vesna, whom everyone called Pippi Longstocking, and how she never even noticed him. He saw the first time he endorsed a travel order without a single mistake, but that scene passed quickly, because it was a happy memory, and happy memories always pass faster.

He caught the bottle right at the edge, with the grip a drowning man uses on a straw. His chest struck the corner of the desk, his knee the little cabinet, his elbow the back of the chair. The bottle stayed upright and not a drop spilled. The documentation lay calmly beneath it, dry and utterly unaware that it had been one step from the flood.

He didn’t regret the bruises that would follow, not for a moment. He gloated over cruel fate, to which he had so elegantly shown that he too could turn a situation around. He even thought that perhaps he really should enrol in dance school, since such agility would be put to good use in some Latin salsa. He had never yet dared to admit to anyone how much that rhythm attracted him, lest they brand him a heretic.

And then he simply sensed that something was not right.

* * *

Every piece of documentation has its recognisable shape, smell and colour. There was nothing to explain: he looked at these objects every day, and the captain’s office was his second home. The little cabinet he had struck with his knee in flight had shifted by a finger’s width, and its back panel had given way. Behind it, onto the floor, envelopes had fallen. They had scattered and peeked out shyly from under the cabinet like children who had done something wrong.

Ćata hadn’t noticed them because they had scattered. He noticed them because they had a smell that didn’t belong to this place. Something that belonged neither to this time nor to this space, as if they had arrived from some other office, some other leap year, some other story. On his own initiative, he touched the first one. The paper was thinner than military paper and slightly yellowed with age, and on it was something he had never seen in this room before: a portrait stamp, and the portrait wasn’t Comrade Tito.

The letter was written by hand. With a fountain pen, in dark blue ink, almost calligraphic. He recognised the handwriting at once, although Captain Ćirković mostly typed. Even if that was as rare as the passing of Halley’s Comet. As if whoever wrote it had time. Or as if it mattered to him.

Ćata knew exactly that he shouldn’t read. He knew it with his entire soldierly being, with every scar of discipline etched into a drilled soldier’s mind.

He read the first sentence.

Then the second.

He read the way a hungry man eats: at first in haste, ravenously, then more and more slowly, because he had begun to understand that what he was swallowing wasn’t worth what he had expected but something else entirely. Like a taste that changes on you: you expect cheap salami and realise you have the most expensive caviar from some distant cold sea in your mouth. At the third letter he took off his cap. At the fifth he sat down on the floor, though he wasn’t aware of when. At the seventh he noticed that the hand holding the paper had trembled slightly, and he steadied it with the other. Once he said aloud, “Mother dear,” but only to himself, and for the first time in his life he didn’t know whom he was addressing.

Out in the hallway someone was running and stumbling. Bećiri, no doubt. Ćata did not look up.

He lowered the letter to his knees and ran his thumb along the folded corner to smooth it. Once more he passed his eyes over the lines; he no longer reached for the next one. Nobody had hidden this secret waiting for someone to find it. It had been guarded from other people’s eyes, like something fragile that might break the moment it left the dark. When the voices in the hallway drew closer, he turned the written side towards himself.

The last envelope was at the bottom. Unlike the others, it had neither stamp nor address, only a single name on its face, written so hard that the pen had almost torn through the paper. It wasn’t sealed. Ćata held the envelope between his fingers. Someone had written the letter, put it inside, and paused before the last, seemingly light movement: closing it. Now that unfinished movement waited in his hands.

For the first time that day he felt his palms were wet.

All the letters he had read had led him to this envelope and fallen silent there, leaving him before what still lay between the folded pages. He knew that if he opened it, he would never again be able to look at the captain the same way.

He put it down. Carefully, on the pile of the others, and covered it with his hand.

Only then did he raise his eyes and, with a touch of panic, notice that lunch was long past, and the mid-morning snack behind it. As if some invisible hand had stopped time, then suddenly released the spring on the clock hand and catapulted him into some other time zone. Outside, dusk was falling.

He arranged the envelopes in the order he had found them, put them back behind the panel, and leaned the little cabinet against the wall as if nothing had happened. He switched off the light behind him and left the office. He went down the stairs and, in the half-dark of the corridor, found his way to the dormitory by memory. He lay down in his uniform, pulled the blanket over his head, and tried to fall asleep.

Sleep, however, didn’t take orders, and that evening it did not answer pleas.

The film returned to his mind, but this time it wasn’t his own. He saw dark blue ink and a woman’s name he had never heard before, which now, for some reason, sounded as if he had known it his whole life. He saw one hand writing and one broken heart making up its mind. He saw the last envelope, unsealed and without a stamp, lying in the dark behind the panel, waiting.

And then he heard the other thing: the roll call, that “Comra-a-ades, atten-tion!” which breaks on the second syllable, and the roar of laughter after it. His laughter was the loudest.

He pulled the blanket tighter still.

For the first time, it seemed to him that he understood what the Amateur Philosopher had meant.