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  When I first saw the sea from here, Zora said, when I saw this red Istrian soil, it took my breath away and I said “This is where I’m going to live.” Because of her inordinate, as she put it, love for Rovinj, Zora lost the right to her apartment in Zagreb, and in Rovinj first slept on a hospital bed in an empty room, found for me by Bruno Mascarelli. Bruno was already in Rovinj by then.

  Bruno Mascarelli came to Rovinj in 1948. He was twenty-two. He had studied painting at the Academy in Belgrade and later in Zagreb. Many Italians had left, there were a lot of empty houses, Bruno said, then gradually artists began to come. In summer, the Zagreb student Cesco Dessanti used to invite colleagues to his native Rovinj. Their arrival led to the resurrection of the town, material and spiritual. First Ljubo Ivančić, Edo Murtić, Josip Vaništa, Miljenko Stančić and me, then Slobodan Vuličević and Zora Matić. The atmosphere was brilliant, he said. We all got on well and we all worked.

  I learned Italian quickly, Zora said — the last time we spoke, at the end of the 1990s, in her last abode, this time outside the old town, in a modern two-room apartment in which there still reigned a divinely elusive, almost abstract, disorder: a bath full of incomplete oil paintings on canvas and hardened, unusable brushes, among which rolled shriveled apples, heads of cabbage and half-squeezed tubes of paint. It was possible to paint, she said, already then, in the early 1950s, it was possible to paint. I have only one socialist-realist oil painting made earlier in Zagreb, some weary fighters, she said. Stančić used to come at eleven or twelve at night to see what I was working on. He was a great artist and it’s a great shame that he died too soon.

  As there were no museums in Rovinj at that time, a small but select group, initially with the assistance of the Local Council, set up a department for painters and brought paintings from the National Liberation Struggle, and then from the Red Island and Brijuni the works of well-known Italian and German old masters from the collection of the Hütterott family (and the Hütterott family is a special Rovinj story and how could I fit that in now?), works painted between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a real permanent display. Later, significant exhibitions from the Museum of Art and Crafts and the Yugoslav Academy of Science and Arts were organized, but also many individual and collective exhibitions of painters who are well known today. For two years Zora did all this on a voluntary basis. The Visual Arts Colony of Rovinj was founded, the oldest such colony in Croatia, and it has now been active for more than half a century without interruption. Its instigator was Bruno Mascarelli.

  I wasn’t any kind of instigator, Bruno said. It came about of its own accord, the way cells of societies are formed in life in general. I dragged in the artists, writers and painters who came — some because of me, some with me. There were thirty-seven of us then from Zagreb and between eight and eleven from Belgrade. We were young, full of energy, far from the pressures of convention, open to ourselves and the world, in a movingly inspiring atmosphere. Some of us didn’t have either electricity or running water, coffee was a luxury, and we sent paintings to Rijeka on a boat that sailed around Istria. These were dreams on the scale of Don Quixote and similar attempts to create something. Dreams are important.

  Soon afterward, Zora Matić began to exhibit at home and abroad. As she got old she appeared less frequently, but she had two exhibitions, one in Rovinj and one in Zagreb, and organized an auction of her paintings, all for the children who had suffered in this last war.

  What did Zora Matić paint?

  I have phases, she said. At one time, I did only heads. Those heads and my Istrian landscapes became so phantasmagorical that they began to be entangled with my personal life. I have a lot of expressionist canvases; they were all sold and scattered all over the world, I no longer remember where, nor does that interest me.

  Zora also painted portraits, but portrait-painting is unrewarding, she said. People often don’t recognize themselves and get angry. Once I painted the portraits of three children in Germany. The parents didn’t want to pay me, because they maintained that the portraits didn’t look like their children. When I went back the following year, said Zora, they invited me to see how wonderful my portraits of their children were. And how like them the children now were. But still they didn’t pay me. When I was working in the Croatian Advertising Agency, immediately after the war, I painted portraits of politicians ad nauseam. We did Tito, Ranković, Djilas, Bakarić, we must have made a couple of hundred large paintings. That’s when I got to know Mascarelli. We were both working in the Advertising Agency, in the Yugoslav National Army premises housed in the Dubrovnik Hotel. We painted the leaders and made decorations. We wrote slogans, Zora Matić said, political slogans for parades and celebrations.

  I didn’t have a place to live then, Bruno Mascarelli interrupted, so I slept in the larder of the Advertising Agency, with a Yugoslav flag for a blanket.

  As you see, I didn’t move much out of Rovinj. Bruno soared to the heights, he traveled the world, he exhibited everywhere, and finally managed to get his life into some sort of order. Now he lives between Paris and Rovinj. Bora doesn’t mention him at all in his book, either by name or anonymously.

  Yes, they don’t know me here, apart from in Rovinj, where I’m looked after and spoiled, Bruno chimed in with a smile. Rovinj was always special. Unfortunately, it never had its interpreters. What can be put right should be put right, but it’s not worth even discussing what cannot be fixed.

  Maybe Bora Ćosić was ashamed of inviting me to share a table with those Agram stiffs, Zora said. Maybe he wanted to save me from their dumbfounded expressions, their sneering, perhaps even their disguised contempt. My paths never crossed those of that elite.

  I didn’t study in Zagreb, Zora Matić says. I followed only two semesters at the Academy. In Munich I studied for three and a half years without any grant, without anyone’s help. That was in ’41, when I ran away from Zagreb. Mile Budak gave a speech in the big hall at the old display ground, after which the several hundred people present raised their hands in greeting. I found it comical, so I raised a hand and a foot, first the right, then the left. People around me began to laugh. I was eighteen. I wanted to go to university, but because of that incident, for ages they wouldn’t let me enroll. At the University there was a lecture for prospective students. The hall was full, I came in at the end, and the woman who was giving the lecture pointed at me and said, “If you don’t leave, I’ll have you thrown out.” I realized that it was all beyond a joke. I got on a train and went to Leipzig.

  In Leipzig Zora works in a factory (she doesn’t say which) as a draughtswoman, and with a painter (she doesn’t remember his name) she learns to make landscapes and pointless flowers, she says. It was pointless, Zora Matić says, and goes off to Munich. I had a godmother in Munich, she says, who promised to give me a scholarship, but when she saw that I wasn’t enamored of her Führer, she changed her mind. Then I enrolled in a school for applied art, but since I worked in my own way — the teacher would tell me to draw horses and I would draw my neighbor — they suggested that I go to the Academy. It wasn’t easy there because, due to the frequent bombing, we spent more time mending the roof than painting. I came back to Zagreb in 1944, and then the new government almost shot me because of my sojourn in Germany. I was saved by Anka Špalj, a civil servant in the Ministry of the State Treasury of the Independent State of Croatia.

  Zora Matić sang, she sang beautifully, she had perfect pitch.

  I don’t sing anymore. At one time, when I was with jolly company, I used to imitate the Neapolitans, I’m good at that. I even thought of studying singing at the Academy of Music in Munich, but they said either paint or sing. Now I’m okay. The paintings I left in my apartment have been taken away by some distant relatives, people I don’t know. I see that they sell on the internet for a decent price. Someone always comes along to steal your life. Bora could have mentioned my name in his book.

  Zora Matić
died, as though out of spite, on Republic Day, November 29, 1999. That was her last transgression.

  More than ten years ago, a small band of people from outside Rovinj, that is, summer residents, founded the Society of Friends of Rovinj. A statute was drawn up, the Society was registered, and when I saw that the Society was composed almost exclusively of the Zagreb elite, who get together in their town in any case, because they are presumably lovers of that town as well, I did not join the Society. In that Society (in practice, but also according to its statute) there was not and there is still no room for the other lovers of Rovinj, who really exist, for instance Italians, Hungarians, Slovenes, Serbs, Germans and Austrians, who have also been coming here for decades and staying for long periods. Today the activity of the Society is largely confined to excursions round Istria (when it isn’t quite the weather for bathing), to shared dinners and collecting membership fees.

  When I took that photograph more than thirty years ago, 31 Bregovita was still ours, our family home, as was evident in its shutters, worm-eaten, rotted by rain and baked by sun. Today the shutters are white, freshly painted, the façade plastered, light yellow and almost cheerful. In fact, the whole street has become well mannered, its poverty and the smell of grilled sprats, fried sardines or dried cod steeping in the sun have all ebbed away and boredom has moved in. Tourists thunder down it, they stop by the cellar window behind which is Ada Ban’s bathroom (because opposite it there is an elegant shop selling souvenirs, wine, cheese and truffles, a boutique dominated by an old wind-up gramophone, one of those with a horn, emitting Beethoven, Mozart, Rachmaninoff and excellent jazz, and about whose owners a strange and exciting story could be constructed), these tourists who stop, make a racket, yak yak ad nauseam, thinking presumably that Ada’s window is the abandoned opening of a storeroom, a dark warehouse, where old junk and rusty odds and ends are kept, which is no longer far from the truth. The guides yell, and one particularly in Russian, so Ada and I (when I’m there) think that she is shouting at the tourists, quarreling with them.

  So, one group on the hill, without ever seriously stepping out of their cocoons, visited each other alternately, taking it in turns to treat one another to three-course meals designed to a perverse degree and little glasses of benign gossip with flashes of impatience, so the twittering around the tables would become louder and falsely cheerful, unadulteratedly adulterated. Others, the ones below the visible-invisible demarcation line in Ulica Bregovita/via del Monte, cooked in their unpaved gardens on improvised grills cheap oily fish caught that morning (with the occasional sea bass thrown in), making merry with a guitar, drinking from glasses of various shapes, eating off stained plates from old mismatched sets. All educated plebs. Today, they would be called middle-class losers.

  Of course, for the (petty)bourgeois class moored for the summer at the top of Rovinj hill, peaceful days have now arrived. There are ever fewer members of that class, and so, encircled by the wall of their own vacuity, entrenched in rhetorically saccharine but at times quite bellicose patriotism, they no longer have, as they once did, a group, with whom to spend evenings on the terrace with a view of Mediterranean helichrysum and the starry sky. Some have succumbed to dementia and ended up in hospital or a luxurious home for the infirm and are fading away at last, while their houses are inhabited by new people, unknown to me, among whom can be found the occasional newly fledged Russian tycoon; some of them so old that climbing (and descending) the hill is no longer an option, so instead they spend their summers in apartments in Zagreb, having first dismissed their long-standing seasonal butlers and other domestic help with a humble adieu, mon ami, adieu; they remain, once their young swells, now retired, spending their benign days in the languor of their deflated lives. And the “refuge” of Bora Ćosić’s house is also deserted. The four-meter-long black table with the four-meter-long black benches in the “reception room” (the veranda) of that house, Scaletta dietro Castello 3b, in which there are now Proustian flashes of Bora’s life, that black table is cluttered with objects of short-lived seasonal occupation, the profane everyday: newspapers, read and unread, some foreign, some local, little bottles of body oil, tubes of hand cream and sun cream, spectacles for seeing objects both near and far, an open packet of biscuits, tomatoes of various shapes and sizes, together with grapes, grapefruit, aubergines, red and white onions; the remains of breakfast — melting butter and crumbs, the sad disorder of transience, negligence, which, yes, conjures up tranquil days, but also abandonment, moving backward into selective remembering.

  I, Andreas Ban, am familiar with that house and its many cracks. Now, when I visit my sister, I cannot concern myself with the house, with its innards, its organs, its former brilliance and the story of the way the house, hugging itself, has now closed up. There was light in it, ah, oui, rapid breathing, the everyday crackled, time changed like gift baskets, but also baubles, trinkets, without which days become dense and gray. I, Andreas Ban, could write about the houses I’ve lived in for extended periods, there were at least twelve of them, about the houses in which paintings, chairs, files, photographs, antiques, family heirlooms and other objects bought at flea markets, together with all kinds of odds and ends, mark out the footsteps of several generations of my family, not only their steps but also their paths, well-worn roads which history first churned up, and then leveled in a Machiavellian way.

  But I stuffed my souvenirs into black trash bags and pulled their plastic strings tight. People tend to collect bits of nonsense to remind them of things because it’s easier, there’s no effort, they don’t conjure up walks, scenery, conversations, aromas and touch, there’s no time for that as life flows by, for most people just trundling along. People arrange paragraphs of their lives on shelves and walls, from time to time casting them a frozen smile and saying: Stay there, wait for me. When they switch off the lights, people imagine they will all be together again, reunited with their past, by then already rotten, moldy, stale, crammed into lifeless objects, that they will touch one another again, tell one another forgotten, withered tales. Not a chance. Mementoes die as soon as they are plucked from their surroundings, they disperse, lose their color, lose their pliancy, stiffen like corpses. All that remain are shells with translucent edges. Brain platelets, half-erased, are slippery terrain, deceptive. The mental archive is locked, in the dark. The past is riddled with holes, souvenirs can do nothing to put that right. Everything should be thrown away. Everything. And maybe everyone.

  I would not, as I climbed the hill (struggling to breathe) toward the amputated remains of our parents’ house, I would not have called to mind the many happy days spent in Bora’s Rovinj fortress dietro castello (because I was being stifled by the hydra, not to say the present, that has adhered to my back like a rucksack) had I not, on that path toward Ada’s buried shack, been stopped in my tracks by one of those Madame Verdurins whom Proust made immortal. One of those people, as Bora would say, of the middle-class milieu, who despite the whirlpools of socialism, published her doctorate, found an academic post and a respected social position, but, for all that, retained a limited range of knowledge, and her conversation was wanting in most intellectual disciplines, and, I would add, often in ethical-political-national ones as well. So this personage camouflaged in singsong, coming down the Monte as I was panting my way up, said, You had no business to write a book like that about the town which gave you everything. A home and employment.

  Listen, I exchanged my dolled-up, tucked-in Belgrade apartment (with central heating) entirely legally for this neglected tenement in the small town of Fiume, whose windows don’t fit and through which the north wind whistles and where in winter I sit in the half dark dressed for a ski run down some abandoned, neglected little mountain. In this town “which gave me everything,” I spent five years without work, because wherever I looked, whoever I asked, I was told that I was either insufficiently qualified, or excessively qualified. In this town “which gave me everything” people listened atten
tively to my speech and would often label me with an invented, imagined, falsified allegiance, no matter which, religious, nonreligious, national, anational; in this town “which gave me everything,” my son’s school friends told him that Ban was not a Croatian surname, in this town, where I did all kinds of loathsome little jobs, including writing speeches for the mayor, and when, after all reasonable deadlines had expired, I finally received the most miserable fee imaginable for writing those speeches and took my son out for a plate of ten ćevapčići with onions, and my son said, Thanks, Tata, my stomach clenched like a pump squeezing out poison, although in fact, ever since coming to this town (“which gave me everything”), my stomach had been in a permanent state of paroxysm. I wanted to tell her all this, that woman, but I didn’t, because I am polite, so I shortened my utterance dramatically, so dramatically that even I was astounded by what I said. For years I had been silent, I used to say thank you when acquaintances wished me a Happy Christmas or Easter, about which I don’t give a tinker’s curse, but that changed as well, and now I wish them the same and with a fixed smile say, I neither believe nor celebrate. That way I succeed in deflecting at least a fragment of the everyday aggression of those who attack me.

  That was twenty or more years ago, in the course of marking some day or other in that town of Rijeka, there was a celebration to mark it, in the theater, with the so-called (pickled) crème de la crème present, I wrote a speech for the mayor in which I said (in which he said) that the situation with unemployed youth and the draining away of their brains was spiraling out of control, as it was with the elderly, retired population (which was already then craning over the edges of large dumpsters and itself becoming trash), and the following day in the local newspaper (with tepid pride) I read my lines out of the mayor’s mouth, but right beside those seditious lines, calling for urgent, immediate economic and political changes, there appeared the reaction of the local leader of the right-wing opposition party, in which that commissar pointed out the discrepancy between the words spoken at that theatrical celebration (performance) and the maritime party held by the ostensibly left-of-center party where fine wines and little colorful canapés were served to la crème de la crème while cruising around the bay. On the same day, the person responsible for public relations, the mayor’s right-hand man one might say, asked me to react in my “sharp style” (not in my name of course, but in the name of the Town) to the opposition leader’s “impudence.” I merely gave that PR person back this demand/request — correcting its grammatical and syntactical mistakes, which pierced my eyes — with the comment that in fact and unfortunately on this occasion I agreed with the right-wing party leader. That was when my speech-writing activities ended forever.