More Than I Love My Life Read online

  “Right, I will tell.” She sits up straight and puts her hands on the armrests. “Rafi, is the cinematographer running?”

  * * *

  —

  “In September ’51, Milosz was in some horse race and he broke a shoulder bone, and he was half his body in a cast. He had sick leave, but went every day to visit his soldiers on the cavalry team. Then, one morning when he was home, phone call. His general calls him urgent. And he went, and did not tell me what happened there.

  “But next morning, Milosz gives to Nina a ring. And I said: Are you crazy? How will we pay our bills? You see, Gili, that was only on twelfth of the month, and we were already in big restrictions! At four in the morning I used to go and stand in line for bottle of milk for the girl! For first leather pair of my shoes I stood in line day and night and day! Before that I had shoes of canvas that fold up like an accordion and the water all gets in…”

  With outrageous distraction, she extends her legs and arches her left foot this way and that, eyeing it delightedly. And I remember how, as a little girl, I used to watch her, study her, having no other teacher for such things. I remember the way she smiled back then: the smile of a woman looking at her own lovely feet.

  “And in that time, for example, so you can understand, Yugoslavia sent train cars full of frozen eggs to Czechoslovakia. Then ties were cut, and there was left one wagon in Belgrade at the train station, and they said citizens could come with bowls and take eggs, because they are leaking out of the wagon. And we went the three of us and took a whole egg, and all the way we laughed about the omelet we would make for all of us. So in such conditions Milosz goes out and buys a ring and gives to Nina?”

  Rafi and I glance at the elevator every so often.

  “The next day general calls him again. Milosz went first to buy wood and coal for winter. In his thought he was already preparing for me to be alone in winter, and then he said to me: The plaster cast scrapes my shoulder. Maybe you can put something in, at the top, something like bandage? And foolish me, I stuffed in bandages between the cast and his body.” She shakes her head, as if still in disbelief. “At night he asked me forgiveness, because he has to write something urgent, and he sat in the kitchen and wrote about twenty pages. For Nina. Told her about the life he had, since his childhood in the village, and the school where he went in the city, and then the army and world war, and how we both rescued partisans from quislings, and he also wrote about me, very lovely things…How we met at the party, and how he waited for me at the station, he wrote everything so that Nina will know, and they took all that away from me, the UDBA, a few days later, when they searched the house. In my interrogation they read me his letter to Nina from beginning to end, trying to break me, but I wasn’t moved even one muscle in my face—”

  Rafael asks us to stop. Something in the lighting is bothering him. Too many shadows on our faces. He moves the armchairs again so that they’re facing each other and closer together.

  “Another thing he asked that evening—that Nina should go to sleep in our bed, next to him, and only then he moved her to her bed. Idiot me, I saw all this and did not understand he was saying goodbye to his life—how could I not understand?”

  Her birdlike chest rises and falls quickly. I’ve never heard her retell these things like this. Not in such detail, not in this melody.

  Here it is again, the powerful moment in a documentary film, when the interviewee, in the course of being filmed, changes her contract with the director and with herself and, without meaning to, begins to give herself genuinely.

  “Next morning he says goodbye to me, gives kisses to me and to Nina, and goes to see the general, and he doesn’t come home. It’s two in the afternoon already, and I phone the minister of interior, but they say—No one here, everyone went home. With us, if Milosz was late home even one minute, he telephoned. I can already feel: something happened. I quickly take the bus to his friend, another colonel, and he looks at me: ‘The army’s security service took him, but we’ll get him out, don’t worry.’ I do worry. Of course I worry. I run to see the minister’s deputy. So you understand, because Milosz was commander of Tito’s cavalry team, we knew all the crème de la crème, and this deputy I also knew from a holiday we were once together, and he even looked at me very nicely behind his wife’s back. Never mind. So they tell me: ‘Deputy is hunting. Come tomorrow.’ I come tomorrow: ‘He’s at a doctor outside of town.’ I understood then. Thank you very much.

  “On Wednesday, seventeen October, I woke up Nina early and said to her: I’m going to look for Father. You get up now and eat breakfast that I made you, and I will comb your hair, and then you go straight to Jovanka and eat lunch and stay there with her girls until evening, and then I will come for you. Nina was sleepy and didn’t understand why she had to get up so early, but she ate everything, didn’t leave bite on the plate.”

  “Excuse me for a minute, Grandma, and Dad. Let’s pause. I’m just thinking—have we totally given up on Nina’s idea?”

  Vera is annoyed at the interruption. “Which idea?”

  “Of talking to future-Nina. To the Nina who will exist one day.”

  The three of us say nothing. If we’re not addressing future-Nina, we must be filming something that’s not going to end up in her film. Something that she won’t be made aware of.

  “I suggest we let Vera decide,” Rafi says.

  Vera thinks. Scrunches up her face. And then the authoritative wave of the hand: “Let’s first go on, and in the end we decide.”

  “In the end? But we have to decide now if we’re doing it or not.”

  “Where was I?” Vera skips over my question. “I see her like it’s now, sitting at the table in blue pajama, drinking milk…Really, such a good girl she was.”

  Vera has made up her mind.

  “She finished eating, got dressed, and I made her braids and wrote a note to Jovanka. When she left the house, I looked from behind the curtains, which I never did, but that day something went through my belly, to look at her, to see how she walks and how she skips down the sidewalk on hopscotch the children left, and how her body is lovely and small, and that she is like dancing when she walks.”

  Silence. Terrible weight. She sighs, bows her head. It is grief, this thing cutting through me now deep in my stomach. For the first time, grief for the child Nina. For the future she would not have. For the person she would never be. For me. I hand Vera a tissue, but she pushes my hand away.

  “I am not embarrassed for my tears!”

  “Film’s running,” Rafi murmurs.

  “Suddenly I see standing outside this big man with leather coat, and I instantly thought he was from security services, and there was also a black car with engine on and black windows. And that man looks at Nina and nods his head at the black car, and still I had in my head—why is he looking that way at my girl? Why is he making sign about her to the driver? But also I thought: He’s come to tell me that Milosz is getting out! After one minute he knocks hard on my door, and me, such an idiot, I say, ‘Oh, thank God you came! Come in, would you like some tea?’

  “He walks in, takes off his gloves, looks around the apartment, does like this with his gloves on his coat sleeve, and sits down, and suddenly he’s nice—”

  Vera demonstrates for the camera, mimicking the manners of a gentle, considerate man: ‘Do you smoke, ma’am?’

  “ ‘Yes.’

  “ ‘Then first light a cigarette. Good. I’m sorry to inform you that he tried to commit suicide.’

  “I shout: ‘What? Is he alive or dead?’

  “ ‘I cannot tell you now. Come with me. You will receive all information at the military hospital, but before we leave there are some things I must know about ties you had with Russia.’

  “And for maybe half hour he asks questions and I answer, I don’t remember what, don’t know anything. He asks about Rus
sia, about Stalin, about spies that we supposingly were. It all gets mixed up in my head, I barely hold myself, until finally he says, ‘Now we go. Take what you need for a long time.’

  “I don’t take anything. Only coat and bag. My whole body shakes. We go outside. The driver with black glasses sits in the car, and the man with coat suddenly shouts: ‘Lie down, whore! So nobody sees you!’

  “We get to the army hospital, it’s all very fast, running, shouting, suddenly we stop and he says to me: ‘You go in this door and I wait for you here, and it’s best for you and your girl that you tell the right answer.’

  “Answer to what? To who? He doesn’t say.

  “I go inside the room where a doctor colonel is standing, and two other colonels, who afterward I understood were army lawyers.

  “They greet me nicely: Hello, ma’am, sorry for your loss. The one who is tall with bald head reads me a government document: ‘Yesterday at sixteen-twenty hours, on sixteen of October, the guard left for one minute only, to the bathroom, and in that time Novak Milosz took out of his plaster cast some bandages and tied them together and hanged himself from the bed. His head was so badly twisted that he cut his neck and we could not help him. And we now request that you sign for us that you and him are Stalinists, and that you renounce your husband as enemy of the people, as Russian spy for Stalin.’ ”

  “Wait, Grandma, slow down. I don’t understand: They wanted you to confess that you were a Stalinist?”

  “Of course they wanted!”

  “And?”

  “And what? I didn’t confessed.”

  “Because you weren’t.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Look, Gili, I was even willing to sign for them that I am Stalinist and that I’m also Satan himself, but not that Milosz is Stalinist and enemy of the people. Not that! Never!”

  “I’m trying to understand: Because you were unwilling to say that Milosz was a traitor, just because of that, they sent you to Goli Otok?”

  “Yes.”

  So I wasn’t wrong and I wasn’t hallucinating. When I lay in the ICU with no blood in my veins, she told me. Perhaps she thought I was unconscious. Perhaps she thought I was going to die and she wanted to finally get it off her chest.

  In all the years since then, I’ve known it, I’ve felt it, but I didn’t have the courage to ask her if it was true.

  “Anyway they cared about me less,” she says now, “they wanted Milosz. He was important, he was a big hero in World War Second, he was the commander of cavalry for Tito, and they wanted only for his wife to say before everyone that Novak Milosz is a traitor and supporter of Stalin against Tito.”

  “And if you’d said it?”

  “Said what?”

  “I don’t know…That he, say, supported…”

  “Gili!”

  “I’m just asking, Grandma. Let’s say you—”

  “Absolutely not! There’s no let’s say! My husband was not a traitor! He was idealist! And the most honest and pure man!”

  “Yes, of course, we know that—”

  “No, you don’t know! No one knows like me. Only me in all the world knew what a soul he was! And only I can say about him, no one else is there for him, Gili, and that is why I will not sign for them even if they throw me on Goli, even if they kill me, even if they take Nina—”

  She stops. Her eyes are on fire. Her small head trembles with fury.

  “But let’s say, Grandma, let’s just say you were willing to state that Milosz had betrayed them—would they really have let you go?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe yes. That’s what they said.”

  “And you would have gone home to Nina?”

  “Maybe. Yes. But then Milosz would be considered an enemy—”

  “We know, but—”

  “What is ‘we,’ Gili?” She peers at me over her glasses. “Is this also some interrogation?”

  “No, it’s just Rafi and I who want to know. Let’s take a step back, Grandma.”

  Even calling her Grandma sounds grating.

  “Ask.” She takes out her compact mirror and tidies herself. “Ask, go on.”

  “I’m asking again, because I have to understand. You wouldn’t say that Milosz was a traitor, and that is why they put you on the island?”

  “What choice did I have?”

  I give her an anguished look.

  “Rafi.” She talks to him, but her eyes are on me. “You promise me, yes?”

  “Promise what?”

  “That what I say here is absolutely not going in the movie Nina wanted.”

  Rafi doesn’t answer. The loyalty of the orphaned little boy wavers. I skewer him with a look, but Vera is also good with skewers.

  “Look”—he squirms—“I think we ought to have this material for once in an organized, comprehensive form.”

  “So you don’t promise me?”

  “I suggest we not make that decision now.”

  Her hands tighten on the armrests.

  Rafi asks, “Do you want to go on?”

  “I don’t know anymore what I want and what I don’t.”

  Interesting response, I note. “Come on, then.” I lean over and slowly stroke her arm up and down, our family’s Reiki treatment. “Tell me exactly what they said to you.”

  “Is that so important now? They said things.”

  “Yes, it’s important. It’s the most important thing.”

  “Then ask.”

  “What happened in that room?”

  “What happened there? Let’s see…That tall officer, with bald head, he said to me—and this I remember every word: ‘We are honest with you, ma’am, the situation is that because your husband himself did not say one word in interrogation, did not confess anything, then he has no charge, and you can demand his pension for you and your daughter, but that is only if you sign for us.’

  “I said: ‘You want me to say instead of him that he is a traitor?’ They said: ‘Yes.’ I said: ‘And what else?’ He said: ‘Nothing. Just that tomorrow it will say in Borba and in other two or three newspapers that Novak Vera renounced enemy of the people, traitor Novak Milosz.’

  “And they see me quiet, and the lawyer colonel says, ‘Novak Vera, here in this room are two doors. One on the left is to freedom and to go home to your girl, and one on the right is to Goli Otok prison for many years with hard labor. You have now three minutes to decide.’

  “And my brain, it’s dead. My whole body is not alive. Prick me with a pin, Gili, I feel nothing. Milosz is dead, my great love is dead, what more is there for me to want.”

  She digs through her bag for a cigarette. Fishes out a crumpled pack of Europa. I haven’t seen her smoke in years. I think about little Nina, who by that morning hour had probably reached Jovanka’s house.

  “Then the doctor colonel says: ‘You maybe have not understood. You maybe want to drink some water and think more clear.’

  “ ‘I don’t want anything, only to die.’ ” She can’t light the cigarette and I help her.

  “ ‘Listen, Novak, again I tell you we are showing our cards to you: for reasons of security we do not want anyone to know that he died with us. He will be buried in the grave of unnamed. After you sign for us, you take your daughter and go with her to live in different city. You just give us here on paper a little scribble, and then you are forbidden to talk about it all your life. Even with your daughter you must not say anything. Now you have two more minutes to think.’ ”

  “Go on, sign already,” I hear myself suddenly murmur in a ghostly voice. Rafael is horrified, but Vera is so lost in her story that she doesn’t seem to have heard me.

  “I told them: ‘I don’t need two minutes or half minute. I will not renounce my husband. My husband I loved more than my
life. My husband never was enemy of the people. You do what you want.’ ” She ashes into the lid of the cigarette pack.

  “Then the second colonel, not the tall one, said: ‘If so, then you go tomorrow on the ship to Goli Otok. You know what is Goli Otok.’

  “ ‘I know.’

  “And he said: ‘Nina, your girl, will be on the street.’

  “I said: ‘That is your decision.’

  “He told me: ‘No, that is only your decision.’

  “I said, ‘I ask you very much, kind people: Nina has nothing to do with this, Nina can go to my sister Mira, or to my sister Rozi, or to my friend Jovanka. She must not be on the street.’

  “And the colonel said again: ‘Listen to me, woman. You will go to Goli Otok with hard labor, and Nina, your lovely little girl, will be on the street, I give you my word. And the street is the street.’ ”

  Vera puts her hand to her chest.

  “Grandma, would you like to take a break?”

  “No. I want to tell.”

  During my inglorious career I have been, among other things, a researcher on several documentary films. Over and over again I’ve seen interviewees standing at this crossroads: either reveal the dark secret, or perpetuate the lie. It’s amazing how many—mostly people on the verge of death—choose disclosure, simply because of a conviction that the truth must be preserved in some place in the world.

  “Gili, what do you want to ask?” says Vera.

  I gather up all the strength I don’t have. “Tell me, Grandma, what did that mean, ‘she’ll be on the street’?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think.”

  “I don’t know.”

  I try a different approach: “You said you asked them not to involve Nina?”

  “Correct.”

  “Do you think, say, that you should have asked for a little more?”

  “I asked as much as I could. That was the most I could.”

  “Yes. But maybe if you’d just been a little—”

  “I don’t know how to beg.” She purses her lips. Looks away from me.