ZAGREB CHILDHOOD

THE YARD BEHIND THE BUILDING

Nobody lets the children play there anymore, beside the garbage bins and tricycles, in the narrow space beside a low barrack, out of which come men in green overalls. Nevertheless, it is still, at least partly, an old-fashioned backyard: as testifies a double stand for carpet beating, calling forth the image of a distressed cleaning girl, a figure who once carried the heavy roll from one of the floors of the building, floors too numerous for that backspace, squeezed between the barrack and a row of garage-sheds made of planks and corrugated roof panels, with some occasional stubborn tree that keeps growing by the fence or in the large open coal hole that looks like a pool.

There lay deposited all those moments in which we shout and wave from little back balconies. – Come down! – And down there stands a small girl in a checkered apron, wanting some company, or a bunch of children playing courtyard games. There is a lot of running, but movement is not all: “the black queen” and “mouse-steps counting the hours” call for images made of words.

However, the old-fashioned idea of a space behind a building, where more private but still common life of residents is going on, is already vanishing here. The yard is crisscrossed and crammed with more practical functions: municipal waste service’s offices, makeshift garages, and beyond them the big yard of he fire department premises and health facility for the neighbourhood. Of course, children are not allowed to swim in the fire department’s pool, filled up with water at the beginning of summer, soon covered with petals and leaves. Beside the trees around the volleyball court – resounding with voices of firemen playing – there are some birches in a triangle of grass in a corner; we could easily imagine more plants, a whole park with a swimming pool, here, right in the city center, but still, we are proud of our peculiarities: we live where the firemen are.

But there is a night yard too, a bottomless crater, with always the same pattern of illuminated windows. What is behind those three in a slant row, a staircase? Or some very special step-room? And how do you come to that little house on the roof? Is it a home of the elevator, a place for it to stay when it finally manages to escape all the calls? Never lit, black shape on the blue background. On the other side, a row of most reliable window panes, every evening they shine like lighthouses – for us not to collide with pure darkness? With the roof terraces of the fire department garage, where the grass grows? Green, green roof – which is black now: black insulation, black strips of metal on the edges, a serious, very serious roof, for serious times that have come. But back then, the grass was blue in the night, dark, dark shade of blue, as the music will be that comes later, when I outgrew the yard games, the black queen and the mouse-steps counting the hours.

…

No, it’s not the bourgeois Berlin Charlottenburg from the beginning of the terrible century, it’s a building that belongs to the university teachers in a rapidly growing socialist city; it’s build some fifteen years after the war, in the year of my birth. And university teachers are young, mainly from other towns, I don’t know how many of them had grown up, as my dad, among the Zagreb poor, and were buying a decent housing for the first time. At some point the price had risen for some reason, we didn’t have enough money, so your mum asked your grandfather and he sold a vineyard. Did he really sell it, or was it a reappearing archetypal image: one by one, the vineyards turn into the residential square meters of grandfather’s children, with the majority of vines fallen for his only son? Vineyard was very far from our city, but maybe we should, even with this great delay, dedicate one place in the apartment to its memory – at least paint some vine leaves on the wall of the little back balcony?

COLOUR ORANGE

Life was happening in color orange. New kitchen furniture was orange, orange were the ornamental peppers we had on the window sill when the fall was approaching; orange colored was the teapot with wooden handle and flat lid which would become so hot when the tea was made that it might burn your fingers. And the light in that kitchen was the clear light of the wide sky, as seen from the fifth floor: deep blue by the end of the day, almost green at sunset after the storm, white in the days of snow.

There were mum’s names for colors that couldn’t rise up to the bright visibility of the world and fell back into the realm of words. The rug was old gold. But what is the color of old gold? And what is actually reseda? Color of ice, color of white coffee, color of honey? The riddle of cerulean. Thy sky is blue, the sea cerulean?

Orange was obvious an undeniable. Color orange were three light armchairs in the living room. And the two woolen blankets; in the summer one of them was mine, in the winter both. Orange were suns I drew on big sheets of paper, again and again. World was singing in color orange.

SOLAR SYSTEM

It was a small system, with just a couple of celestial bodies. Our apartment as the sun on which we live (from time to time scorched by its rays), and its satellites, each with a name: Forth Floor, where my friends live, Skyscraper – next door – where live some other children who come to play in the backyard. The shop on the corner was called Fruit Store, the other one Non-Stop. Fruit Store was there from the beginning, Non-Stop was opened at some point in my early childhood, bringing the revolutionary invention of self-service into our quarter. Then came more distant orbits: Park – Theatre – University (library) – Botanical (garden). Except for the Park, names of those places precede their true meanings: “Theatre” is a huge lawn with flower beds, “University” is also some sort of park with fine gravel for walking and daisies for picking, but “University” are also green owls on the big roof that can be seen from our back balcony. “Botanical” is turtles, a pool, and a little bridge. Every one of these places very clear in its separateness.

There was an unforgettable moment when I suddenly realized what and where is Gundulićeva Street. Suddenly, it was settled firmly in the space, and I knew I won’t lose it again – the town came into being.

The park on the farthest orbit of our system – called by its street, Dalmatinska – has an airplane and a rocket for climbing. That’s not a playground as others; it’s a runway for take-off into the stories about outer space. Day of my birth is marked by astronomical spectacle of total solar eclipse, the year by the first man in space; my childhood is a time when everything, even time itself, goes upward, when curves of all diagrams are rising, with no standstill or decline.

There were other solar systems, separated from ours by interstellar space, through which one may travel in a tram. Mum’s school in the part of town called Trešnjevka (experimental high school, she would say proudly), my kindergarten in the Upper Town. Each with its own satellites.

MUMMY

In a big, really big book we could see what sort of houses the Egyptians built.

The tale about the Egyptians is a tale about the past, and the tale about the past is a tale about mummies. And mummies, those dead people wrapped in bandages, are horrible for some reason – because of their deadness? because of the weight of time shoveled above them? And when, in a museum, you see that unwrapped dark flesh that resembles wood, and you feel a weird smell, and look at a face that once – oh, when? – was alive, no wonder you can’t sleep without the light that comes into your room from the hall through a door made of glass.

Much later I would realize that the fear was entirely justified: the past is horrible. The war that went on from mum’s thirteenth to seventeenth year was one such horrible mummy, sometimes wrapped up, hidden by bandages of time, carefully unwrapped and wrapped up again, always under the bed, always in the closet. Its dead face is the face of mum’s sister whose body came home separated from the head, its torso belongs to the boy whom mum was forbidden to love, because his family was “on the other side”, its feet – gentle, childish feet – belong to her baby sister who had to fight, throug long years to come, the nightmares born in the bombardments f, its hands are still holding the gun under my mum’s chin, while a voice, that also belongs to the mummy, keeps repeating: tell us! where is your father? There are mummies like that in every house, under beds and closets, each different, in different states of wrappedness, different phases of preservation, decomposition – the world of mummies, unavoidable and dreadful. And of course it would grab your foot when you get up in the dark, trying to get a glass of water, in a dead of life.

(four fragments from the book Zagreb Childhood in the Sixties, translated by the author; photo by Petar Gunjača)