I don’t know why I started packing when I got home that Friday from work around 3pm, hastily, cramming things randomly into a suitcase on wheels that had languished, collecting dust, under the window since my last visit to Vienna. I don’t know why I finally chose to sit on that train that has run from Zagreb to Osijek for years now at 5:05pm from platform #1. Scarcely an hour or hour and a half earlier I had been gluing paper-thin gold skin back onto a pudgy, bulbous baroque cherub from a Zagorje parish church, skin that had peeled off all over, exposing the wood beneath, reminding me irresistably of the desiccated muscles of a mummy. Patting his plump little bum, not for a moment did I stop to think of my mother or of the city of Osijek. Frankly, I don’t know what prompted me to go in the end. Nor did I know why, some ten years earlier, I’d chucked a handful of sleeping pills down my throat. To be sure, I do remember the gentle, soothing, effeminate Dr. Risjak, who hovered over me as if I were an ornery little child and said again and again that I should feel free to open up and tell him what was wrong. “Nothing,” I told him again and again, turning my head away. My breath was foul, I couldn’t bear to breathe near his face. I felt ashamed and felt the urge to yell: “You didn’t pump my stomach enough!” But he kept at it – as if that huge nose of his had no sense of smell at all – hovering over me and repeating that “nothing” is not what drives a person to sign off for good, never to return. Finally I looked him straight in the eyes and said: “I was bored.” Well this Friday I was not bored.
Instead of racing to catch the train I could have stayed at my drawing table, I could have spent the whole weekend staining paper with pencil, or picking up a book, curling up with it for three days straight, I could have latched the windows, turned on the fan and blocked out the world, climbed into myself like into a big fat cardboard box. I don’t know why I sat on that train. I don’t believe in the paranormal, though I used to be genuinely terrified of the ghosts which would often visit my grandmother in her little bedroom for almost the whole year before she died. Still, I don’t believe I felt anything, any other-worldly whisper in my ear that Mama would die right when I was sitting on the train somewhere past the town of Koprivnica, when this traveler – who knew no better – thought she was going back to where she’d come from.
But Mama did, indeed, die that Friday while I was sitting in the stuffy compartment of the train as it clattered along for four hours from Zagreb to Osijek. I sat in the compartment and my rear end went numb, and in my lap lay a crossword puzzle, the empty squares of which I filled with crooked letters. Because of the train and the constant jostling. Because of the summer which, in 1999, decided to skip spring altogether, leaving my hands all sweaty and the pencil slipping between my fingers. From under my eyebrows, I would look up now and then at the old man dozing across from me, his head resting on a grimy yellowish curtain that swayed and sometimes flickered over his face. His lips sagged and drool oozed down from the corner of his mouth. He was sallow, angular, and his greasy salt-and-pepper hair was combed back. I thought of Breughel and the wretched, straggling souls in his paintings. The man seemed so wretched and smelly. That’s why I tucked my legs under the seat, so there was no way he could accidentally touch me with the tips of his scruffy, probably never-polished, shoes. Next to me, one seat over, sat an old woman who kept wincing and poking with her tongue at her clicking false teeth. I glanced sideways at her now and then. I was dying to say: “Ma’am, please could you stop that! You’re getting on my nerves! I’d like to yank out those teeth of yours and throw them out the window!” But I didn’t say anything to her. Instead I clenched my teeth, pressed my lips in a tight, straight line. At one moment our eyes met. Lord! Old people’s faces crumple up over time like wax paper, I thought. I gazed into her blue eyes. The old woman, who later introduced herself as Granny Marica, grinned at me. And her eyes flashed; for a moment they looked at least thirty years younger than the rest of her hunchedover, wrinkly body. In a single blink I thought of the nonsense about icy, calculating, piercing blue eyes. Both Grandma and Mama had blue eyes, very nearly the same shade, yet at the same time the two of them were as different as sky and earth. In Grandma’s eyes everything was there for the reading. Sorrow draped them with gray curtains while rage seemed to switch them on with garish-blue light bulbs. If eyes are a window to the soul, then Grandma’s soul, eternally resting with elbows planted on the sill in the manner of inquisitive women, kept vigil over her always wide-open windows. In contrast to her, Mama seemed to have no soul at all. Her eyes were forever watery, a flat blue. That God of Grandma’s had apparently gone a little too far with Mama’s eyes, he made her pupils just a bit overly large, and this made them goggle-eyed, blank, indifferent to the world. I squinted for a moment and before me, in the dark, under my eyelids, appeared the apathetic, somewhat calf-like gaze of my mother, which watched everything and everyone without expression, like a person who glances out the window to check whether or not to take along their umbrella. Who takes notice of the world only when water comes trickling down from the dome of the sky.
Thinking I wanted to talk, Granny Marica introduced herself, launched into gripes about the heat, the drought that was ruining her garden in Retfala, her Zagreb grandchildren and the daughter who’d never come home to Osijek after finishing her studies, but married an Agramer, a proper Zagreb gentleman, though, of course, he was a nice enough man.
I began getting more tense, but not because of Mama. I didn’t know she was dying. I felt nothing at seven twenty-five that evening. Not a twinge. Yet that’s when she died. Weighing on my mind at that particular moment was the subtle way it’s shoved in your face, the way fingers point at you when you come back to the provinces, you return. This accursed, slow-motion four hours of clattering on a train that smells bad, slows to a stop by “every single darn house,” as the grandmothers used to say, as if to prove to you just how far away from everything you’ve gone. I thought of myself when, not yet nineteen, I disembarked at the central Zagreb train station and caught sight of the expansive green sward of the horseshoe-shaped city park designed by Lenuci, and thought, good God, everyone can see I’m not from around here! I was very nearly mortified by the way I chewed my words like chewing gum, by how I made my way slowly along the streets, as if crawling along through slimy furrows of black humus. Later I got over this. I forgot that first feeling, the impression that the “provinces” were screaming from my face. But then, on the train, this all came rushing back and a tenseness took over. No, I never gave Mama so much as a passing thought.
I had been so certain that good old Jozefina was going overboard in that old-lady letter of hers, scarcely literate, with her ornate longhand. I say “old-lady” and “illiterate” because it’s as if old people lose their ear for punctuation over time and their sentences run into each other without periods or commas and become incomprehensible, helter-skelter, just like old-age thinking. I know I chuckled over that letter of hers, with her handwriting in all shapes and sizes, looking at times like lumpy new potatoes, and I thought, Lord, I hope I’m not like her someday. The elderly lay the courtesies on thick, as if they’re forever apologizing, because they can already picture themselves in their caskets, because they don’t want anybody casting aspersions on them once they’re gone – when they’ll only live on in whatever the living still have to say about them. From time to time, should they, by some miracle, be remembered. If they are not forgotten. I pictured Frau Jozefina, stooped and with her eagle-beak of a nose, a dried-up, wrinkly old woman of whom Papa, at some point before his death nearly twenty years ago, said she’d outlive us all. Bury us all. He was joking. Although he was no longer able to laugh, as the cancer had already sucked the air from his lungs. I pictured her fumbling with her ballpoint pen, pursing her lips, frowning, doing what she could to rouse me with her epistle, soften me, lure me back to the house, back to Mama. I pictured her nodding, pleased, like one of those plush little dogs on the back-seat armrest in a car, writing in that ornate script, with her for-me over-the-top flourish: “Your beloved mother is dying dear heart my dear Katarina Keti.” I pictured her as she penned this avalanche of words with no comma, not a single period. I imagined her gnarly fingers trying in every way possible to keep her grip on the pen that slipped, slid, wobbled over the paper, making straggly, uneven letters. It is amusing – though tragic – that while I was on the train my thoughts hardly ever turned to Mama. I thought about Frau Jozefina, Her Ladyship, as Papa liked to tease her. When I finally stepped off the train after nine o’clock that evening, my bottom numb from sitting, the sky was already black. Starless. Everything above me looked like dense black velvet illuminated by streetlamps, shining like the fur of a black hound of the Baskervilles. The sweet scents of early May wafted by me. I caught a whiff of hyacinths and smiled. I remembered Grandma and her hyacinths like a procession lining the brick walk that ran up to the front door. I smiled impulsively, as if catching sight in the distance of a dear, well-meaning old friend approaching me with a warm welcome. But I did not recognize the city that flashed me its smile along with the hyacinths. Everything felt somehow different, ever so slightly different, as if gently pushed aside. The grocery was gone that used to be there by the train station, where students and soccer fans went before leaving for their studies or on their way home, where they guzzled beer and then stumbled about and puked on the trains. I’d seen on the evening news how the grocery store had burned, hit, no doubt, by a multiple rocket launcher, but still I was disturbed by the vacant lot, the absence. I stopped for a moment, set my suitcase down on the pavement of smooth yellow brick and stared at the empty space. I believe my chin dropped slightly in amazement. I believe momentarily I forgot to breathe. From my pocket I took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. The bluish cloud enveloped me and because of it I could no longer catch the scent of the city. I thought of Grandma, Grandma Klara, who would certainly have plucked the cigarette from my lips, flung it down, stomped on it and said: “Nice girls don’t smoke!” She also would have let out something about Greta, the black sheep of Grandma’s otherwise respectable family, who started wearing pants sometime before the Second World War and smoked with a cigarette holder. I smiled at Grandma, who had given up on breathing some twenty years before and dreamt her way to death. One day I’ll paint her, on plywood, in oils, I thought. The painting will have to be staunch and constant like Grandma, who always looked, even in her white lace nightgown, as if that Almighty of hers had hewn her from granite. First I’d thought to walk along Radić Street to the streetcar stop and take it to what I called sometimes the Lower Town, sometimes Unterstadt. But then it occured to me that Mama was at the hospital and the house was empty and I had no key. I remembered that when I left eighteen years ago for Zagreb Mama had been at work and, seething with rage, I had left my key under the door mat. I meant to evoke Mama, who wasn’t there to see me go, I wanted to show her I was slamming behind me for good the door to the house, which remained empty. Pristine, yet empty. So instead I walked toward Divalt Street and the little garden shack where Jozefina had penned her straggly letters and her punctuationless sentences.

The book Unterstadt was published as part of the Growing Together project, co-financed by the European Union.
The book was translated from Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać.