Mother was home and the fact that her bag, full of papers with numbers, ornamenting every page with cold, heartless art of calculus, looking like it had just landed on their kitchen table,was still waiting to be explored later, told her that she too had probably just gotten home as well, now every other day working the long overtime.
Hope had grown up with the image of her mother bending her spine for countless hours, after she would wash and dry and put away the dinner dishes and do the same thing with her and her brother, preparing them for the bed.
Peaking from underneath her bedpost, Hope wondered for what seamed like years, what strange stories those magical papers had.
Her brother, who on good days would plain ignore her and on bad ones use her as a punching bag, had for reasons unknown, indulged in his tender side by reading her stories in their room every night, and Hope gleamed listening to him thinking, that if brother could come up with such magnificently wonderful princes, battles and damsels from his funny little dots in this thin,tiny, treacherously torn book, what magical world could her mother show her if she were to come and read from her, big, beautiful, boisterously bright fluorescent mountains of sheets of paper, that in her between three and four year old mind developing under the shadow of a sleeping giant kneeling at that nod in the fabric of time somewhere in the greenest part of Lika's bossom, were both towering like the Himalayas and had countless treasures hidden inside.
***
Funny how, growing up, our memories of early childhood get filtered and condensed into tiny flashbacks of pure emotion which pop up without notice, triggered by that just perfect set of coincidences into our boringly well-structured and organized adult minds.
Snow is a big deal when you're looking at the world from closer to the ground.
She remembered trying to hold her hand out till the fingers went numb in an attempt to actually see a snowflake melt. It was getting dark and in the dinarides the only thing separating you and the wolves is the tiny patch of barren , rocky ground on the other side of the fence that holds the woods from swallowing up the house.
The silence that wrapped around like a comfort blanket, the wind that seemed to hold its breath, the night that was having a time-out before it entered, the ground beneath her feet that bent inwards to hug, they all waited for the millisecond that lasted forever to end.
A tiny moment of no real importance which only contained a four year old girl stopping the world and touching magic.
***
Hope held out her hand looking through her mother working in the kitchen, disregarding the fact that only an insane person would expect to catch a snowflake in June, sitting inside.
And the world stopped again.
***
It is impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when she became old enough to realize that the papers had no magic stored in them .
Numbers instead of words.
Accuracy in place of affection.
Matter over imagination.
Sum replacing open conclusions.
And a mother who knew not how to hug.
Well, so what.
***
She loved her children with the love that you could never match up, even if you stacked every single gold bar that Fort Knox kept one after another, all the way up to the sky.
Equally cold on the surface, with chilling precision biting the hand that touched.
***
You only needed to develop a taste for her quirky way of showing it, and you were fine.
Hope had gone through this period of two of them alone in their home, due to her father working days and nights and brother being away, trying not to disturb the little everyday routine of reality that her mother hid her emotions in, the fears tucked away safely under the carpet of things you are supposed to do in your life, and repeat them in neat order until you die.
And what is not there, may only be hidden, look behind the decoy cellophane wrapping of mechanisms of fear.
It is the easiest thing in the world, blaming our misfortunes on our miserable parents, and Hope had no intention of ever doing that.
In fact, Hope had long ago decided that she was never going to be restricted by lack of anything. Life was about movement from the day she she strutted down her first path, and each new place was one step closer with every courageous wobbly walk that grew steadier with each brave new step along the neverending road that her life was from that day on.
Nomads of the socialist society and family in service, all four of them had severe attachment issues, with friend like mileage counters, left behind in a place before this one and forgotten upon arrival to the one after that.
Just passing through, was how her life had been lived so far.
***
Mom was the quietest girl ever, the middle child in a row of three children her grandmother had in less than three years. A boy, a girl and another one, to her husband who was some big shot farming union party official.
All land belonged to individual farmers, but the running of it was secured in the hands of the socialist structures. Things never went as bad as Soviet communal living in a kolhoz, but there was trouble ahead for anyone who dared point out any aspect of individual property and the rights of ownership in a society that celebrated collectiveness out loud.
Grandpa Martin, who spoke with heavy Hungarian accent and drank himself blind before he even left the house in the morning, had decided to abandon the screamish lot of his family and marry his complementary Hungarian secretary and start a new similarly drunken life.
Mom, of course, never talked about any of this.
Linguistic competence regarding ability to express emotions –zero to none.
The source of information was Hope’s vivid aunt Maja, who made up for her sister’s muteness on all things concerning their childhood with vivacious conversating sessions of descriptive memorabilia when Hope would stay with her, explaining in detail how grandma was a fierce piece of work dynamite woman, and the point in grandma's life when she went from town socialite to scrubbing toilets to feed her children overnight, how the three leftover kids would be marched in front of the other children in the catholic afterschool and screamed at and punished with canes for being ’illegitimate bastards’ - the bullying that intensified after grandfather Martin managed to swiftly secure himself a guiltless church divorce, in spite of infidelity so obviously flaunted around for all to see and, fearing his position in the Party, pretend it never happened.
Baaaa-stard baaastard baaastard.
How the only time they saw their father was when grandma took them to beg for food one cold winter when no one could spare her a job to earn it – and how his new wife answered the door in a wild flowered minidress, and he only came out and stuffed a few banknotes in greandma's blistered palm shouting abuse and smelling of smuggled cigars and cognac.
Baaaaastard. Baaaaaaastard.
You will go to hell baaaaaaaaaastard.
No wonder mom was the way she was – restricted and seemingly numb, in her sisters words ’great to talk over the phone, but do not make a mistake and ask her to come over and expect her to be able to talk face to face like that'.
***
Hope and her aunt sometimes joked how even with a professional soldier in the house, her mother was the sharpest shooter around.
Somewhere sometime long ago once Hope had dug up and read those love-proclaiming tearjerker postcards written to her father from the distant Germany where mom was with her team preparing for the Olympics. She was a promising athlete, and her choice of sport - air rifle and gun - coupled with her impeccable character, were about to take her far.
And then she met my father.
Young cadet in an uniform, sharpest looking tall, handsome, and irresistibly blue-eyed, and mom's virginity fell victim to his charm that same night
Instead of aiming for the medals, some eight months later she was in labor pains and her brother’s big head coming to this world between her twitching legs had signaled the end of her sports career, and pretty much the end of her mother ever again daring to attempt to have fun in life.
Once was more than enough.
***
So it was never about how mom didn’t love her children. It was just unfortunate set of circumstances that she never had anyone to teach her how to speak her love out, how to hug, kiss, pat, spank or cuddle her daughter, or her son.
It was her fear of another failure and more bullying that forbid her to show her love.
Show me so that I can show you back is how interaction between humans happens.
With no one to quote on the subject, Hope was almost the exact replica of her parents.
*******
They have struggled through what most other people would just run away screaming from if given the summary of the years that were to come up front.
Her parents endured the blessing of a mixed marriage, which, back then, meant they could count on relatives gathered for one of the holiday feasts to start throwing punches after only a couple of hours of being civil.
There was always politics to sift through and centuries of hating thy neighbor to chew on and sense to be beaten into equally drunk and numbed by too much food relative-opponent of different religion.
One such joyful occasion had resulted in Hope acquiring her mark – a sharp scar that was cut straight into her right brow, with eyebrow and its curve broken in two permanently, making her soft face somehow instantly rememberable to most people.
Add a touch of imperfection to a perfect face, and it no longer seems unreal in its beauty, it becomes human.
That night she learned that rage was what made furniture fly.
***
Father’s harsh mountain warrior genes only made things worse, and contributed to the mess Hope was to be.
Her paternal grandfather was a Muslim miner from Bosnia, who, due to the shortage of marriageable women in his own village, had to go across the mountain and fetch himself a Serbian bride. It was common practice to unload an extra daughter to the first man showing interested who called, greeted with joy in a household with seven girls and only one son.
The fact that she was to marry outside of own religion and convert bothered no one.
The need to get rid of an useless extra female mouth to feed surpassed the interest of faith by far.
So grandmother Evica, seventeen at the time, converted, and married the awkward man they only showed her glimpse of through a curtain, before the deal was sealed by elders spitting in their hands and shaking them instead of a signature on this convention contract.
The marriage only lasted about three months, when father’s father , after a drunken graveyard shift and on his way home from the mine, was waving goodbye to his pals and realized that he had misplaced his nice, shiny and polished newly- issued-just-last-week hard hat.
That was trouble in those days.
Biiig trouble.
All things, beautiful and useful and those not, were the property of The Party.
People, too.
They were not quite as highly regarded as the machinery, but the cult of belonging was under no circumstances to be questioned. Losing any item belonging to the Mother Ship - The Party, would have been grounds for disciplinary hearing and interrogation.
Even jail, or if the political climate was right - wrong actually, one would have ended up doing serious gulag time for an offense as insignificant as raising the hand at the council meeting at the wrong moment.
Fearing dire consequences of his forgetfulness, which in those murky days was readily interpreted (and punished) as subversive and against the order of the universe in accordance to Marx, he returned down to the mining tunnel, found his tragic prop - the hard hat with pretty much no effort, but, on his return , in drunken stupor, managed to slip and fall down an unsecured open shaft.
Probably sober, but definitely dead, still holding the hat in his arms, her grandfather the Muslim was gone, and yet, this didn't prevent him from causing future troubles in the lives of his descendants.
Grandmother Evica was promptly returned to her family, minus the wedding bribe and plus Hope’s unborn father who was almost as good as a bastard.
Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaastard .
Son of a sheitan. Bad seed.
****
That is how her father got his Muslim family name, orthodox faith, and enough emotional baggage to pass on to his ever more complicated offspring he was about to start having upon marrying Hope's visibly pregnant mother, six months after the life changing date at the nicely decorated Community center Friday dance night.
*****
Never truly accepted by his family or countrymen, viewed always as an outsider, he was sent off to ’study army’ in the big city, far away from the family inheritance that was understandably divided between more appropriate heirs - ones whose faith and origin was spelled out in their proper Serbian names.
That is why Hope had, from a very early age, clearly understood the reverse, dark side of the story of multiethinic paradise that her country was portrayed to be.
The other side of the shiny medal of the brotherhood and love.
Someone should have shoved that stinkin' badge of honor up your nationalistic arses long time ago, you bunch of enthusiastic hypocrites, perhaps then non of this bloody war lunacy would be happening now.
***
Their lives were like a torn, tangled web of balancing out counterbalancable family fragments, that moved through time and universe with them, like a dog chasing its tail, caught in the perpetual reflex it knows not how to stop before its too late and it goes mad.
She never asked ,but she knew how her father wanted to belong more than anything, and probably ended up leading the life of a nomad and rearing her to be a wandering spirit in his deepest effort to try to fit himself and all of them into a normal family blueprint he carried in his heart.
In an dislocated attempt to patch up his own broken down identity, perhaps, from then earliest recreatable memories, Hope recalled his long, serious speeches of how the family was always more important.
More important that what, she once asked
More important than life.
More important than you, me or us.
Then how did I end up like this, feeling I was born all alone and on my own to fight to stay alive with no one by my side?
****
Hope had grown up with the image of her mother bending her spine for countless hours, after she would wash and dry and put away the dinner dishes and do the same thing with her and her brother, preparing them for the bed.
Peaking from underneath her bedpost, Hope wondered for what seamed like years, what strange stories those magical papers had.
Her brother, who on good days would plain ignore her and on bad ones use her as a punching bag, had for reasons unknown, indulged in his tender side by reading her stories in their room every night, and Hope gleamed listening to him thinking, that if brother could come up with such magnificently wonderful princes, battles and damsels from his funny little dots in this thin,tiny, treacherously torn book, what magical world could her mother show her if she were to come and read from her, big, beautiful, boisterously bright fluorescent mountains of sheets of paper, that in her between three and four year old mind developing under the shadow of a sleeping giant kneeling at that nod in the fabric of time somewhere in the greenest part of Lika's bossom, were both towering like the Himalayas and had countless treasures hidden inside.
***
Funny how, growing up, our memories of early childhood get filtered and condensed into tiny flashbacks of pure emotion which pop up without notice, triggered by that just perfect set of coincidences into our boringly well-structured and organized adult minds.
Snow is a big deal when you're looking at the world from closer to the ground.
She remembered trying to hold her hand out till the fingers went numb in an attempt to actually see a snowflake melt. It was getting dark and in the dinarides the only thing separating you and the wolves is the tiny patch of barren , rocky ground on the other side of the fence that holds the woods from swallowing up the house.
The silence that wrapped around like a comfort blanket, the wind that seemed to hold its breath, the night that was having a time-out before it entered, the ground beneath her feet that bent inwards to hug, they all waited for the millisecond that lasted forever to end.
A tiny moment of no real importance which only contained a four year old girl stopping the world and touching magic.
***
Hope held out her hand looking through her mother working in the kitchen, disregarding the fact that only an insane person would expect to catch a snowflake in June, sitting inside.
And the world stopped again.
***
It is impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when she became old enough to realize that the papers had no magic stored in them .
Numbers instead of words.
Accuracy in place of affection.
Matter over imagination.
Sum replacing open conclusions.
And a mother who knew not how to hug.
Well, so what.
***
She loved her children with the love that you could never match up, even if you stacked every single gold bar that Fort Knox kept one after another, all the way up to the sky.
Equally cold on the surface, with chilling precision biting the hand that touched.
***
You only needed to develop a taste for her quirky way of showing it, and you were fine.
Hope had gone through this period of two of them alone in their home, due to her father working days and nights and brother being away, trying not to disturb the little everyday routine of reality that her mother hid her emotions in, the fears tucked away safely under the carpet of things you are supposed to do in your life, and repeat them in neat order until you die.
And what is not there, may only be hidden, look behind the decoy cellophane wrapping of mechanisms of fear.
It is the easiest thing in the world, blaming our misfortunes on our miserable parents, and Hope had no intention of ever doing that.
In fact, Hope had long ago decided that she was never going to be restricted by lack of anything. Life was about movement from the day she she strutted down her first path, and each new place was one step closer with every courageous wobbly walk that grew steadier with each brave new step along the neverending road that her life was from that day on.
Nomads of the socialist society and family in service, all four of them had severe attachment issues, with friend like mileage counters, left behind in a place before this one and forgotten upon arrival to the one after that.
Just passing through, was how her life had been lived so far.
***
Mom was the quietest girl ever, the middle child in a row of three children her grandmother had in less than three years. A boy, a girl and another one, to her husband who was some big shot farming union party official.
All land belonged to individual farmers, but the running of it was secured in the hands of the socialist structures. Things never went as bad as Soviet communal living in a kolhoz, but there was trouble ahead for anyone who dared point out any aspect of individual property and the rights of ownership in a society that celebrated collectiveness out loud.
Grandpa Martin, who spoke with heavy Hungarian accent and drank himself blind before he even left the house in the morning, had decided to abandon the screamish lot of his family and marry his complementary Hungarian secretary and start a new similarly drunken life.
Mom, of course, never talked about any of this.
Linguistic competence regarding ability to express emotions –zero to none.
The source of information was Hope’s vivid aunt Maja, who made up for her sister’s muteness on all things concerning their childhood with vivacious conversating sessions of descriptive memorabilia when Hope would stay with her, explaining in detail how grandma was a fierce piece of work dynamite woman, and the point in grandma's life when she went from town socialite to scrubbing toilets to feed her children overnight, how the three leftover kids would be marched in front of the other children in the catholic afterschool and screamed at and punished with canes for being ’illegitimate bastards’ - the bullying that intensified after grandfather Martin managed to swiftly secure himself a guiltless church divorce, in spite of infidelity so obviously flaunted around for all to see and, fearing his position in the Party, pretend it never happened.
Baaaa-stard baaastard baaastard.
How the only time they saw their father was when grandma took them to beg for food one cold winter when no one could spare her a job to earn it – and how his new wife answered the door in a wild flowered minidress, and he only came out and stuffed a few banknotes in greandma's blistered palm shouting abuse and smelling of smuggled cigars and cognac.
Baaaaastard. Baaaaaaastard.
You will go to hell baaaaaaaaaastard.
No wonder mom was the way she was – restricted and seemingly numb, in her sisters words ’great to talk over the phone, but do not make a mistake and ask her to come over and expect her to be able to talk face to face like that'.
***
Hope and her aunt sometimes joked how even with a professional soldier in the house, her mother was the sharpest shooter around.
Somewhere sometime long ago once Hope had dug up and read those love-proclaiming tearjerker postcards written to her father from the distant Germany where mom was with her team preparing for the Olympics. She was a promising athlete, and her choice of sport - air rifle and gun - coupled with her impeccable character, were about to take her far.
And then she met my father.
Young cadet in an uniform, sharpest looking tall, handsome, and irresistibly blue-eyed, and mom's virginity fell victim to his charm that same night
Instead of aiming for the medals, some eight months later she was in labor pains and her brother’s big head coming to this world between her twitching legs had signaled the end of her sports career, and pretty much the end of her mother ever again daring to attempt to have fun in life.
Once was more than enough.
***
So it was never about how mom didn’t love her children. It was just unfortunate set of circumstances that she never had anyone to teach her how to speak her love out, how to hug, kiss, pat, spank or cuddle her daughter, or her son.
It was her fear of another failure and more bullying that forbid her to show her love.
Show me so that I can show you back is how interaction between humans happens.
With no one to quote on the subject, Hope was almost the exact replica of her parents.
*******
They have struggled through what most other people would just run away screaming from if given the summary of the years that were to come up front.
Her parents endured the blessing of a mixed marriage, which, back then, meant they could count on relatives gathered for one of the holiday feasts to start throwing punches after only a couple of hours of being civil.
There was always politics to sift through and centuries of hating thy neighbor to chew on and sense to be beaten into equally drunk and numbed by too much food relative-opponent of different religion.
One such joyful occasion had resulted in Hope acquiring her mark – a sharp scar that was cut straight into her right brow, with eyebrow and its curve broken in two permanently, making her soft face somehow instantly rememberable to most people.
Add a touch of imperfection to a perfect face, and it no longer seems unreal in its beauty, it becomes human.
That night she learned that rage was what made furniture fly.
***
Father’s harsh mountain warrior genes only made things worse, and contributed to the mess Hope was to be.
Her paternal grandfather was a Muslim miner from Bosnia, who, due to the shortage of marriageable women in his own village, had to go across the mountain and fetch himself a Serbian bride. It was common practice to unload an extra daughter to the first man showing interested who called, greeted with joy in a household with seven girls and only one son.
The fact that she was to marry outside of own religion and convert bothered no one.
The need to get rid of an useless extra female mouth to feed surpassed the interest of faith by far.
So grandmother Evica, seventeen at the time, converted, and married the awkward man they only showed her glimpse of through a curtain, before the deal was sealed by elders spitting in their hands and shaking them instead of a signature on this convention contract.
The marriage only lasted about three months, when father’s father , after a drunken graveyard shift and on his way home from the mine, was waving goodbye to his pals and realized that he had misplaced his nice, shiny and polished newly- issued-just-last-week hard hat.
That was trouble in those days.
Biiig trouble.
All things, beautiful and useful and those not, were the property of The Party.
People, too.
They were not quite as highly regarded as the machinery, but the cult of belonging was under no circumstances to be questioned. Losing any item belonging to the Mother Ship - The Party, would have been grounds for disciplinary hearing and interrogation.
Even jail, or if the political climate was right - wrong actually, one would have ended up doing serious gulag time for an offense as insignificant as raising the hand at the council meeting at the wrong moment.
Fearing dire consequences of his forgetfulness, which in those murky days was readily interpreted (and punished) as subversive and against the order of the universe in accordance to Marx, he returned down to the mining tunnel, found his tragic prop - the hard hat with pretty much no effort, but, on his return , in drunken stupor, managed to slip and fall down an unsecured open shaft.
Probably sober, but definitely dead, still holding the hat in his arms, her grandfather the Muslim was gone, and yet, this didn't prevent him from causing future troubles in the lives of his descendants.
Grandmother Evica was promptly returned to her family, minus the wedding bribe and plus Hope’s unborn father who was almost as good as a bastard.
Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaastard .
Son of a sheitan. Bad seed.
****
That is how her father got his Muslim family name, orthodox faith, and enough emotional baggage to pass on to his ever more complicated offspring he was about to start having upon marrying Hope's visibly pregnant mother, six months after the life changing date at the nicely decorated Community center Friday dance night.
*****
Never truly accepted by his family or countrymen, viewed always as an outsider, he was sent off to ’study army’ in the big city, far away from the family inheritance that was understandably divided between more appropriate heirs - ones whose faith and origin was spelled out in their proper Serbian names.
That is why Hope had, from a very early age, clearly understood the reverse, dark side of the story of multiethinic paradise that her country was portrayed to be.
The other side of the shiny medal of the brotherhood and love.
Someone should have shoved that stinkin' badge of honor up your nationalistic arses long time ago, you bunch of enthusiastic hypocrites, perhaps then non of this bloody war lunacy would be happening now.
***
Their lives were like a torn, tangled web of balancing out counterbalancable family fragments, that moved through time and universe with them, like a dog chasing its tail, caught in the perpetual reflex it knows not how to stop before its too late and it goes mad.
She never asked ,but she knew how her father wanted to belong more than anything, and probably ended up leading the life of a nomad and rearing her to be a wandering spirit in his deepest effort to try to fit himself and all of them into a normal family blueprint he carried in his heart.
In an dislocated attempt to patch up his own broken down identity, perhaps, from then earliest recreatable memories, Hope recalled his long, serious speeches of how the family was always more important.
More important that what, she once asked
More important than life.
More important than you, me or us.
Then how did I end up like this, feeling I was born all alone and on my own to fight to stay alive with no one by my side?
****
Posts
