Read an Excerpt

Costly Illusions

A Novel

iUniverse, Inc.

CHAPTER 1

My Croatian hometown was the first free royal borough in Croatia, recognized as such by the Hungarian-Croatian king, King Andrew II, in 1209 by a document that made it the economic and military center of Croatia. The citizens have always been proud of this historical fact. Because of Turkish raids, the town was built defensively around an old fortress, constructed in the eleventh century by a prominent aristocratic family with an unpronounceable name. Over the centuries, the fortress had several owners, one of whom also built the town hall. With the arrival of Jesuits, a school and several convents were founded. The ornate baroque style of the churches and its many buildings became characteristic of the town. In the middle of the eighteenth century, it was the capital of Croatia. As the official residence of the ban (the viceroy), it became the residence of many Croatian noblemen as well. A fire in 1776 was so destructive, though, that the legislative and the executive institutions were moved to Zagreb.

Nobody lives in the fortress now. It is a museum filled with antique furniture, drapes, paintings, books, and documents. The fortress is surrounded by a park whose pebbled paths meander around the stone walls, spotless and unspoiled, as if they were scrubbed each morning with soap. The grass and the flowering shrubbery appear tended with utmost care. Within the greenery, wooden benches almost as old as the castle record many a love story hurriedly and haphazardly carved into their seats. The park is a popular retreat, a sanctuary and refuge from the present day's busy life and its everyday worries. People come here in the hope that the castle's calm demeanor and permanence will rub off on them, instill in them a special identity through its particular place in history.

When I was in elementary school, my friends and I often played in the park. We called the fortress stari grad, which means "the old castle." In winter, when covered in snow, the castle grounds were our favorite sledding site. During summer, a retired high school teacher of history gave spontaneous and improvised tours of the grounds and the museum. He particularly liked explaining things to children, and was always ready to take a group of us through the winding, ominously creaking staircases. Impeccably dressed in a suit and a bow tie, he would limp ahead of us, enthusiastically punctuating each creaking step with his cane. His explanations, though historically correct, were also amusing because he embellished them with jokes and anecdotes. Most of them included stories of his pet bird, whom he had taught to speak and sing. But what I remember best was opening a secret drawer in a magnificent cabinet decorated with inlaid mosaics and wooden curlicues.

"Alexandra, pull that drawer out," he said as he pointed to a knob on one of the cabinet's drawers.

I approached eagerly and tugged on the knob, pulling out the drawer.

"Abracadabra," he exclaimed. "Watch what happens now!" With a flourish, he pushed a hidden button on the side of the drawer. To our delight, another drawer sprang out on the opposite side of the cabinet with a distinct ping.

"Do it again!" we demanded.

"Abracadabra, here it goes again," he chanted, his sparse gray mustache vibrating in tempo.

Each time we were on a tour with the teacher, we made him demonstrate the secrets of that cabinet. We never tired of the ping of the secret drawer springing out.

After the museum tours, the teacher would wave goodbye with his cane and walk home, limping along. Left alone, we would sit in the grass, eating cherries and plump, sweet apricots from the trees in our backyards. The cherry pits turned into missiles, playfully aimed at one another's faces. Each hit was accompanied by boisterous laughter, and a miss with a desire to try again with better aim. All apricot pits were collected and saved to be cracked open with a rock and eaten later. The insides tasted like almonds.

The town hall, an impressive building dating from the sixteenth century, is the oldest town hall in Europe. During my childhood its doors were always open, but I do not remember ever going inside. I do remember some of us standing on its wide steps throwing rose petals and rice at a young just-married couple. The bride was one of my best friends, who got married right out of high school. The main square in front of the town hall has the requisite café. In the summer multicolored umbrellas shield the tables and the people drinking beer or coffee or eating ice cream. In the winter, the square is cleared of snow before any other street or sidewalks. Walking to school in the morning, we seldom crossed it, but on the way home, no longer in a hurry, we lingered in there almost every day.

The café in the main square did not have the best ice cream. The best ice cream was served in a shop owned by Ahmed, a Muslim, who came from the republic of Macedonia (not the Greek region) after the war. His daughter Zekhia, who was my age, often served ice cream in his shop. She gave us extra-large scoops and just as often, with an air of deliberate forgetfulness, did not charge. Ahmed was a large, good-natured man with unruly black hair and a drooping mustache. His boisterous laughter was the loudest, happiest laugh I had ever heard. He and his family were my father's patients, and if I happened to visit his shop while he was there, he would come out from behind the counter, energetically shake my hand, and offer me free coffee, free ice cream. Later, he would thrust a package of cream pastries into my hands.

"Alexandra," he would say, "I still owe your father for his last house call when my wife was sick. Here, here, please. Take the pastries. And say hello to your father."

Unwillingly burdened and embarrassed, I would run home, impatient to open the package.

Ahmed was not the only one who recognized me as my father's daughter. Mostly it made me uncomfortable, since I did not actually know all the people who greeted me so effusively and with various messages for my father. I tried avoiding such meetings with varying success, and later, in high school, I really hated being recognized and so easily identified. I was hardly an obedient child. In high school, after classes, my friends and I couldn't wait to be out in the streets, impatient to light our forbidden cigarettes in a place where we would not be recognized by pesky adults, who would butt into our business of being teenagers. As the daughter of one of the town's favorite physicians, I was invariably recognized and my parents were invariably informed of my transgressions.

As far as smoking went, I smoked my first cigarette the summer before second grade. Several of us, the usual group of girls and boys, had spent the summer in our dusty town and had played war games in the park of the old fortress. This was just a few years after World War II, when the war games were still the most popular entertainment. On that day, nobody wanted to play a German soldier, a very unpopular role. Everybody wanted to be a partisan, the freedom fighter. We left our make-believe weapons—tree branches—in a pile on the path leading to the street and went to my house, since it was the closest. We entered the yard, hoping for an inspiration for a new and a more challenging game.

The cherry tree had shed some leaves, so one of the older boys suggested we roll the dried ones into cigarettes. He produced matches for the game to be more authentic. Cherry-leaf cigarettes were cumbersome, and when lit they produced a wet and pungent smoke, so I had the bright idea of going into the house in search of real cigarettes. My parents did not smoke, but my mother's brother, the younger of my two maternal uncles who had his meals with us every day, did smoke, and I knew where he kept his cigarettes. With care not to alert any of the adults in the house, I sneaked into the dining room, grabbed the pack of unfiltered cigarettes, and pulled out a few to take to my friends. We lit one and took turns in smoking it.

My recollection of what happened next is hazy. I only remember that later in the afternoon, when I felt sick and had vomited, my mother was very concerned and impatiently waited for my father to come home. When he did, he tried to find out what had happened.

"Seka"—that was my nickname and meant sister—"tell me what you have eaten today. What did you have for breakfast? Did you eat anything else?"

"No, I did not. I did not eat anything. I played with my friends."

"Did anybody give you any candy, ice cream, a sandwich?"

"No, no, no. No candy, no sandwich, but I ... Oh, nothing."

Petrified of the punishment for smoking, I started to cry. My father, concerned by the vomiting, rang the mother of one of my friends to further investigate the cause of my sudden illness. He soon learned that my friend was also sick at home and had admitted to smoking a cigarette. That day was the first and the last time I saw my father furious. As he hit me once with his belt, he shouted, "Now you will really have something to cry about."

In his younger days my father's hair was dark. He wore it parted on the left side, combed and neat. His blue eyes were shaded by generous eyebrows, making his features manly, but his slightly upturned nose gave him a good-natured expression. I remember him more often with a playful smile on his face than angry or pensive. His teeth were small and his lips thin, but the general impression was of an open, attractive man. He did get angry, but whenever my sister and I misbehaved, he pleaded with us to change our ways, to improve, with sorrow in his eyes, as if he were disappointed beyond belief that his children should exhibit such unbecoming behavior.

To my regret, this expression of sadness and pity in his eyes is the one I remember most vividly. Since my father was a calm, rational, understanding person, it probably means I disappointed him more often than not.

As a doctor in postwar Yugoslavia, he was very busy and worked around the clock. During the morning he worked in a clinic. After eating lunch, the main meal of the day, he spent the afternoon in his office at home. The office had a separate entrance and a waiting room. People would wait to see him for hours. Most of them were from the surrounding villages, and they traveled to town by foot or horse carriage. Few people owned cars.

We had help in the kitchen and my mother did not always cook, but the main meal of the day was substantial, although it did not always include meat. On Sundays we had the obligatory chicken soup with homemade noodles, fried or roasted chicken, oven-roasted potatoes, and a salad from the vegetables grown in our garden. My father did not consider eating a terribly important activity. He liked desserts, anything sweet, and carried chocolate and candy in his pocket. He was a permissive parent, not demanding. My mother was demanding and inconsistent with praise or punishment—mostly punishment in my case. My father did not punish, but usually tried to explain that certain types of behavior were not acceptable and then provided alternatives.

My father loved the opera. As a medical student he earned extra money singing in the Zagreb opera choir, but at home he rarely sang. On the rare occasions when he did, it was delightful to listen to his warm baritone voice, especially to his lullabies. One of them was particularly memorable. The words were from a poem by the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov, about a soldier home again from a battle who sings a lullaby to his son, telling him that he was safe now that his father was back. I sang the same lullaby to Jason when he was a toddler, and to my utter delight Jason sang it to his children.

My father read all kinds of books, novels as well as medical textbooks, and a variety of newspapers, sneaking the reading in between patients. There were always newspapers in our house. He read them after the midday meal if he had the time, or on Sundays when he did not see patients. We were one of the few families who had a telephone. The stupid thing rang all the time, but my father patiently answered all calls, gave advice, or went on house calls. In the evening he would ask my sister and me about school, talk about his patients, and tell us jokes. He liked company, but even though my parents were popular and were often invited to dinners or other events, they did not often entertain at home. The people who came for social visits, often without any special invitation, were served wine, plum brandy, or Turkish coffee. There was always a piece of cake or cookies to accompany the drinks. It was unthinkable not to offer refreshments to any visitors.

I do not remember when, but at some point my father became the president of the anti-alcoholic society and stopped drinking wine at home. This may have been a protective gesture, so he would not have to drink the wine he was served when he went on house calls. Our town was surrounded by vineyards, and almost everybody who was anybody had a vineyard, though they were more for weekend retreats than to produce a large quantity of wine. We did not have a vineyard. Despite his love of nature, my father did not want to cultivate a vineyard, which required too much hard work, what with weeding, spraying, pruning—every weekend. My father preferred books, chess, and music on weekends. The wine produced from the vineyards surrounding our town was almost undrinkable, although everyone thought their wine was best and bragged about each year's crop—that this wine was superior to the one from last year.

Wine was on every table, and we all started drinking rather young. At private high school parties we drank wine, never beer. There was beer, but in bars and cafés people drank white wine mixed with soda. It took some effort to get drunk on that, but even those not terribly persistent succeeded often. In any case, my father did not like or drink wine, unless it was from Dalmatia. Dalmatian wine was difficult to get in the years after the war, so becoming the president of the anti-alcoholic society gave him an opportunity to educate against excessive drinking and the excuse to refuse bad wine.

My father loved Turkish coffee and never refused a second cup. Once when I was small, I asked him what it tasted like and could I try it. He let me sip from his cup. The liquid was dark and oily and tasted very bitter. I did not like it at all and could not believe he actually drank more than a cup of this awful beverage every day! What I did not realize was that my father, who was normally very generous with sugar in his coffee, had put none into the cup of coffee he offered me.

We sometimes fought over the daily newspaper. I was after the comics, the daily horoscope, and the crossword puzzle. During my high school years there was not a day that I did not finish the crossword puzzle. We did not have a television set. Nobody did. At the end of the fifties I saw the first television set. A group of people had gathered in front of a shop window that sold household appliances, and curious, I stopped to see what was going on. There was a television set, the very first in our town, showing a soccer game.

At home we listened to the daily news on the radio. The BBC international news was my father's favorite. We listened to soccer games, and, of course, we listened to music. Classical music and not so much the country music. But we did listen to popular music and had favorite performers. This was also music to dance to. I do not remember whether we had a gramophone. Possibly we did, because my mother was status conscious and would have considered it a must. My father was oblivious to status and could converse with anybody on any level, joking with the villagers and laughing at their crude jokes with loud enthusiasm, or arguing with his friends—and with me.

As soon as I was aware that I had opinions, I argued. I argued in school with friends and at home with my father. We argued about religion. He was not religious and never went to church. We argued about politics. He was a moderate and argued against my liberal views. When they started with Sunday Marxist seminars that I was expected to attend, he argued against my going and against Marxism in general. Whenever I argued an opposite viewpoint, he had an expression of mild disappointment. He was eloquent, rational, and calm in those discussions. And knowledgeable. He would patiently explain why he thought my arguments were insufficient and lacked conviction. I learned from these discussions, proud that he considered it important to argue with me. My mother never participated in any of our discussions, unless they were about mundane topics such as whether to practice piano, or when to go to bed, or what to have for lunch. I learned less from those discussions.
(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Costly Illusions by Vesna Grudzinski Sutija. Copyright © 2013 Vesna Grudzinski Sutija. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---