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  Peter, Peter, handsome Pete, buy shoes for my pretty feet, and you’ll make my life complete!

  My girl’s front teeth are missing, oh, there’s nothing like her kissing!

  I look at the trees above, you are my first true love.

  My legs may be bandy, but I’m really handy, give me a try, you’ll want me till I die.

  I can’t wait to bury my old ma, and bring home my little Sara!

  Die, my darling, I’ll join you in the ground, through our coffins our hands will be bound.

  If there is anything good about this yelping and wailing, it’s that it blends into an amalgam of linguistic variants, Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian, with even the occasional Slovene or Macedonian word, so that, at least temporarily, for the duration of an intercity bus ride, its insipid sentimentality overwhelms the belligerence of many people in these parts.

  Nothing but repetition, all sorts of things are repeated, the worst are TV and radio commercials filled with absurdities, screeching hysterically Turbolax — for regular evacuation of the bowels! just when I sit down in front of the screen with a sandwich and a glass of wine. And then:

  Lose 100% of your weight in 30 days.

  Problems with passing urine? Prostamol Uno — an efficacious treatment for inflammation of the prostate, Prostamol Uno! It’s easy to be a man.

  Then comes a jingle: then:

  Crunchy wafer, Milka chocolate is something special for a bit of good cheer . . . Milka Crispello, improves the mood, crunchy and light. Save your memories in a CV photo album. Visit the website www.cv.hr to make your own CV photo album, because our memories are important. The best-known international writer has inspired millions throughout the world. Jana, water with a message from Paulo Coelho . . .

  A few days ago, I asked a shop assistant whether they had a particular cheese and she said, We had that cheese yesterday, we’ll be getting that cheese again in two days, it’s very popular, you know, it’s a reasonable cheese, sells immediately, if it doesn’t come the day after tomorrow, it will come a day later and by evening there won’t be any left, because . . .

  I said, Madam, stop, and she said, You should see a doctor.

  Now, as I am composing this story, I shall be able to tell my son: Here’s a window onto madness. Our planet is a cosmic madhouse, said Goethe as much as a hundred years and more ago, to which Nietzsche, while he was still of sound mind, before he was assaulted by Spirochæta pallida, lues, or syphilis, added: With individuals madness is rare; but with groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. Like those who spend months camping in tents in the middle of capital cities, because their lives have lost all sense, because there are no more wars, because for them only war gives life meaning, because for them, it is only because of death that it is worth living, that’s what the priests who visit them say, but that will pass as well, life will forget them, whatever that life is like, because let me repeat once again what Giono said long ago: There are no heroes, the dead are immediately forgotten. The widows of heroes marry the living only because they are alive and being alive is a greater virtue than being a dead hero. There are no heroes after a war, there are only the lame, the crippled and disfigured from whom women turn away; only fools are left. After a war, everyone forgets the war and those who fought in it. And that is right. Because war is useless and one should not make a cult of those who dedicated themselves to the useless.

  For this curtailed, mutilated age, there is no point in spreading its image. There is no longer any point in sewing up, patching, joining, putting more fragments into our panoramic frame, because all the components are rotten, in a state of decay, incompatible. The empty spaces are so great that they can be filled only with new empty spaces — which are nothing, an enormous elusive nothing, that das Nichts of Heidegger’s. So, yes, let’s make it simple.

  It is good that books are disappearing, they too are getting smaller. Often the fattest books are the thinnest. Ironed, with no creases, tidily folded and put away, they are ready for disuse.

  Yes, the cheese seller said, You should see a doctor.

  I found her in a bad way. Buried in the cellar of the family house we had sold for peanuts in the early 1990s to some Italians. That’s what prices were like then, pitiful. Probably because of the war. The house is worth twenty times more today. And even if it had been left the way it was, with rickety old windows, a half-rotten wooden floor, a bathroom hastily put together right beside the kitchen, decorated with bright-red oil paint, that house would be worth twenty times more today (and it is). Foreigners became greedy, because foreigners like small Mediterranean towns, especially if they’re run-down by capitalist standards — they think they’re exotic. Like the people who live in them, also run-down, that is to say branded with the seal of socialist poverty. It’s a bit different nowadays. Tattoos are fading. Life in these little Mediterranean towns was cheap for foreigners. Back then. Some twenty years ago.

  Today, the house is a renovated, expanded, serious house on the top of a hill, some hundred meters from the sea, with a view of the sea. That’s worth a lot. A view of the sea drives people crazy — in a positive sense, it calms them, but it disturbs them too. There must be some atavistic link between the eye, the soul and water, extensive waters of mystic depths and an inaccessible, dark bottom. Some connections quiver, are inexplicable.

  The house is dry (apart from the cellar), in a small town sometimes steeped in dampness, it is a sunny house, several centuries old, made of stone and tall — the tallest on the street, with a terrace that looks out over the town, the bay, the islands and the open sea, with windows on the street side as well, so it’s a house with both outdoor and indoor space. It would be simple and in literary terms banal to say the house is like a person, because just as there are different houses, so there are different people, then one would have to describe the person whom this house resembles. There’s no time for that here, and no need. This house also has attic windows through which the bell tower of the church is visible, so close that one could ride on it. At night, when it’s hot, the maestral blows in from the sea and lights tremble on the water, it creeps in through all the cracks (for no house can be completely sealed) and gets under the skin of the house, and the house breathes. And it is quiet.

  The basement in which my sister Ada Ban lives does not look out at anything, in fact it looks at used-upness and tedium. At the occasional roof in the distance, somewhere down there, at the occasional façade in the distance and at other people’s illegally grafted-on terraces and balconies, and, although the basement has a concrete yard, my sister hardly ever spends time in it, because she is surrounded by tourists who from on high look down at Ada, buried there. And the owners of those old houses are all inland owners from the new Croatia who do not know how the little town breathes, or how it dreams, or what it remembers, not to mention its crannies or its secrets. Like aggressors, like bandits, the new arrivals invaded the town and set about wounding it, tearing at its tissue, rummaging through its organs and its languages, so that today in summer the town becomes a blown-up, botoxed puppet, submissive and dumb. In winter, thank God, the town awakes from its summer stupor, from this drugged state, embraces its in-laws and, somewhat heavily, stretches and smiles, not thinking of the ordeal that awaits it the following summer.

  One of these people exploited a three-meter gap between his hovel and that yard of ours, paved it over and built a kitchen and toilet there. In the stone wall that separates his place from ours he made an opening for extracting the human bodily stench, which was then wafted through the Ban family’s garden and settled on the table where we ate. Later that man, who died recently, covered over his toilet ventilation with an ordinary white ceramic tile, and that little tile now stands out among the huge, centuries-old gray blocks — upright marker stones with weathered edges.

  We sold the house because we had nothing to live on. In the new Cr
oatia. My father, Ada and I. Our mother Marisa had long since turned into dust and was now seeping out of her corroded tin urn in Belgrade, instead of in Split.

  It used to be lively in that house, it was noisy and cheerful. People ran up and down the stairs that cut through the three levels of the building, quarreled over the use of the single cramped, ugly, socialist-style bathroom with tiles that kept falling off; people shouted, dried cod was beaten flat, black risotto cooked, fritters fried, bean pasta was prepared in a large pot on a worn stovetop with burnt, rusty rings, and carried down into the garden, which was then not paved, it was overgrown with weeds, but with a white early summer fig tree in the lower right-hand corner and an old loquat planted in the center. (The fig was cut down and the loquat died, one summer it dried up and, cracked with age, bent over and collapsed.) Dozens of liters of Teran wine from Motovun and Istrian Malvasia flowed, there was singing, there were a lot of people of all kinds, from fishermen and politicians to doctors and chess players, there were writers, the only people who didn’t come were those (few) city slickers from Zagreb, from the top of Rovinj hill. Because that house at 31 Bregovita (Hill Street) in Rovinj was the demarcation line between two worlds, and has remained so to this day in a somewhat impoverished, lopped, insignificant and already worn-out way.

  On the terrace, shoddily built — everything about this house was largely improvised and botched — we played preferans until dawn (“we” being three close water polo friends, one of whom was Adam Kaplan), then we went for a night swim, and at dawn for warm meat pie. When our parents were not about we’d bring home women for a night, and Ada the occasional lover, in the morning the house quivered with unfamiliar footsteps, bent under the warmth of naked bodies, supple and sunburned, wanton.

  Now, the house is old. A tired house, restored, but worn out. The Italians on the upper floors are old, their guests are old, Ada, down in the cellar, is old. Upstairs, the walls have been spruced up, new bathrooms built, the electric wiring replaced, the house has been made up, a gaudily dressed lady past her prime, and so few know what her pulse is now like, what (if any) memories haunt her and in what dust they disperse.

  Somehow it happened, not at all by chance, I believe, that this visit of mine to my sister Ada and the stump of our outlawed house coincided with the publication of a book about tranquil days in Rovinj by the excellent writer Bora Ćosić. The book mentions this same little Rovinj street, Bregovita, which, it is very important to mention, because of history, because of the past, because of remembering, because of the people in that little town who do not live on the hill, but down below, in the belly of the old town, where the sun often does not reach, where there are no gazebos or verandas, where mold settles on the lungs, where cats yowl at night and sometimes rats gnaw at the trash, it is important to mention that this steep, stone street is also called via del Monte, just as for decades all the streets in this town have had two names, which used to grate on the ears of some people in power at the beginning of the 1990s, so there was almost a premiere here of the chiseling away of street names, but that was left after all for the appalling Vukovar performance twenty years later. In those days Istria shouted, Tudjman go home! and thus saved the streets and identity cards and Italian schools and Italian kindergartens and Marshal Tito Square. Those up there, intoxicated with stinking Croatdom, persevered in carrying out “small” corrections, so they changed the name of the heroine Roža Petrović (whose eyes were gouged out by Italian Fascists, but nevertheless, blind as she was, she carried on knitting socks for the Partisans, including a pair for our father) to Ruža Petrović, so that now the little street that bears her name is somehow additionally crippled, blinded even though that little alley is indeed short and blind.

  There’s a constant palaver with streets, with their naming and renaming. In the small town of Rovinj, before this last war, the main street was called Beogradska, and the only cinema the “Beograd.” Now Beogradska is called what it should be, Carera, because Rovinj is really Rovigno, and there’s no cinema, all that remains is the modified name of the little café, Cinema Café, beside the place where the cinema once was, while the building itself has been adapted to house a German bank. Films are shown in the little baroque theater built way back in 1854, when it bore the name of Antonio Gandusi, then a famous actor of the Novecento, born in Rovinj.

  All right, we won’t go on about history now. Although history, that of Rovinj for example, is very rich and fascinating, but quite unknown to many of its perennial (uninterested) summer visitors.

  The top of Bregovita, here, the top of via del Monte, is occupied in summer by members of the old Zagreb (Agram) elite, which in my opinion is no longer any kind of elite because it has grown moldy. That elite almost never talks about the history of Rovinj, or of Istria, just as it doesn’t talk about the inhabitants of Rovinj who live (or lived) in this little town, although they include internationally famous painters, there are also writers, there are doctors, architects, dozens of scholars, so the “elite” (on the hill) would be able from time to time to invite them to their tables (if only metaphorically), for otherwise they are “profiles” which interest the “elite” (on the hill) à la Madame Verdurin, more as profiles than as people. However, since that elite has degenerated with time, becoming hidebound, it increasingly eavesdrops on what is happening in that artistic field, while it hears and sees ever less, and ever less well. During the tranquil days in Rovinj, there live what could be called colorful — quite unusual — judges, fishermen, shopkeepers, custodians, and so on, unknown to the “elite,” for them nonexistent.

  For instance, that “crazy, brilliant painter” who moved from one abandoned Rovinj house to another, the painter Bora Ćosić wrote about in his book as having left a house that he bought in chaos and tatters. Yes, she left paints and a mess after her, the confusion and disorder of a wild nature, cosmic and human. In his book about the tranquil days of Rovinj, Bora Ćosić mentioned “my friend,” but without calling the painter by her name. Now that painter is dead, so she can’t tell her friend that all her disorder, in life, in space, internal and external, all her painterly disorder, was in fact what Bora described in the catalogue of one of her exhibitions: a dread of the whole of existence. My friend, the joyful Zora Matić.

  The fact that in his book about the tranquil days of Rovinj Bora Ćosić forgets to mention the names of people (who had been) close to him upset me, because I now name people fanatically, too weightily for literature, that is, unnecessarily, obsessively, because I see more and more clearly that this, their name, is perhaps the last cobweb thread that separates them from general, universal chaos, from the cauldron of turbid, stale mash.

  So, in that book, a little essay about three small wooden horses waiting in vain for the day when they will be able to leave the wall in Bora’s porch and trot off to freedom, is a touching and charming little essay, but there is no mention in it of Ljuba Gamulin, who brought him both the horses and the story about them one summer evening and built them into the wall. I was there and I remember that enchanting moment.

  Yes, Zora Matić lived in Bora’s house, in the house into which he had imported an aesthetic of order, an aesthetic of controlled civilization, while hers, Zora’s, was an expressionist aesthetic, distorted and at times painful. Zora Matić lived in our house after it was abandoned at the end of the 1950s by Bruno Mascarelli. In that house, our parents’ former home, there wasn’t a single beam into which Zora had not hammered at least a hundred nails. She hung her own and other people’s lives from them. In that house at 31 Bregovita, Bruno Mascarelli left a whole wall covered in a charcoal drawing — of an Istrian fireplace, and it kept Zora warm in winter. Zora’s story is long and this is not the place for it, or perhaps it is, if this is a story, if this is going to be a story of people who fall outside frames.

  Ever since she could remember, Zora had wobbled on the edge of that frame, those frames of lives, at times withdrawing — returning �
� into the picture, and then overflowing out of it again.

  Zora Matić came to Rovinj in 1954, from Zagreb. She was thirty-one years old. In Zagreb she had worked as the director of a company, Dekor, which she founded in 1949. The People’s Front of Yugoslavia had given her the task of finding premises for the company, which was meant to undertake artistic/crafting activities, on condition that the premises must be in the main, Ilica, street. Given that in Croatia for at least two and a half decades tons of reinforced concrete have been poured over the past, it’s likely that few readers know what this People’s Front was. So, in brief. The People’s Front is the name of the international alliance of democratic parties opposed to the establishment of fascist regimes. The concept came into being in the 1930s, during the period of aggressive politics in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. In Croatia those politics were endorsed by left-wing intellectuals (Krleža and co.), and supported by individual members of the Croatian Peasants’ Party, so the People’s Front is mentioned also in documents of ZAVNOH, the State Antifascist Council of the People’s Liberation of Croatia. After 1945, because of its organizational breadth but also its political authorization, it initiated and led all educational projects, and coordinated the work of cultural-educational societies.

  Right, back to Zora Matić.

  So, at the beginning of the 1950s, Zora goes from building to building (in Ilica), looking for a location for the Dekor company, she peers through keyholes and finally comes to a building housing the Jadran cinema, she goes into the courtyard and on the first floor, also through the keyhole, she sees an enormous hall, with quantities of washbasins. She informs the relevant people in the People’s Front and the People’s Front requisitions the space, although the owner of those washbasins, Zora tells me, is a friend of the influential communist politician Bakarić, so the decision is to an extent (briefly) held up, on Party instructions. However, the hall is nevertheless “mobilized” and in it all conceivable artists, as Zora puts it, obtain space to work. In the new Croatia, Dekor was privatized, then placed into liquidation, and finally it disappeared.