Read an Excerpt
Chapter One SOMETIMES I STALK MY ex-husband.
I open his socials and sift through his photos. I know their sequence like I know the palm of my hand. Better even, because I can never memorize what my palm looks like, how the life line twirls into the love line, how it begins tight and uniform, but then turns ropey. It scares me to look at it, to trace the lines, to see where they might lead me in years to come. But I know Vlaho’s photos by heart. They start with the most recent ones, his son, who turns six in a week, frowning at a drawing of imaginary monsters; and his daughter, an angelic creature just short of four, with the kind of wispy hair that slips through your hands like corn silk. His lovely wife, a blonde with an oversized nose but gorgeously high cheekbones, laughing into the air on their sailboat.
Once upon a time, he told me he didn’t like blondes. He whispered it in my ear, brushing his fingers through my then long, lush hair. We’d been together for maybe a few months, and I’d asked him what would happen when we broke up. If he would find someone like me, or someone exactly the opposite. “That will never happen,” he said. “Besides, I don’t like blondes.”
Lie.
Lie.
I always get stuck on a single photo. It’s not a photo of their wedding day, or the birth of their first child. In fact, it’s probably the least spectacular photo in the album. They’re not even the main subject—whoever took it aimed for their daughter, in focus in the foreground. But behind, her mother is looking up as my ex-husband is passing her a glass of juice, and they share the look. The one I used to be on the receiving end of. The one that had long ago made me feel like I was a pink diamond carved straight out of a rock. And it’s for her.
I remind myself that this was my decision. I let him go, willingly. But despite reason, the image spreads through me like ink in cold water.
The first thing I hear in the morning is the clanks of a spoon hitting the side of the džezva, the same coffeepot that’s been in our family since I can remember, and then some. Always the same six clanks, in even succession, as my father prepares his Turkish coffee. The sound invades my sleep, and I want to scream, Could we not do this for one fucking day?
Six clanks, and then it takes a couple of minutes for the smell of coffee to crawl under my bedroom door. Despite my earlier grumbling, when the aroma reaches me, I’m grateful for it.
Lying sideways, I stare at the shelves and dressers lining the opposite wall. Every morning I tell myself I’ll pack the rag dolls, the snow globe, the bright red-and-yellow babuška, and other knickknacks, and store them in the attic. They have no business cluttering a grown woman’s room. But they’ve been there since my childhood, and on some level, I’m afraid that if I remove them something bad will happen. As if more bad things could happen to me. I’m thirty-eight, single, barely employed, and living with my dad. Sleeping in the same room I’ve been sleeping in since the day I was born, save for the ten years I shared a room with the love of my life.
Vlaho.
Of course I think of him, imagine where he is, what he’s doing. It’s a compulsion, like being unable to look away from a car wreck. If I still had a therapist, which I probably should, I’m sure she’d tell me I’m slightly obsessed, but I can’t help it, filling my days with thoughts of him the same way I used to fill them with his presence. It’s a source of pain that’s somehow become pleasurable. The kind that reminds me I’m still alive.
I see him lying on his back, in his boxer shorts because he never wears pajamas, Marina’s hand resting on his chest, caressing the place over the heart that once beat for me. Then Tena and Maro jump onto the covers like a baby avalanche, their chubby arms and legs flying every which way until they land in their parents’ embrace, the smell of family rising as they lift the covers to tuck themselves in.
In that moment, despite everything, I’m happy for Vlaho. I am.
I focus on the babuška that my grandmother gave me a long time ago, its plump wooden figure, its bright reds and yellows, the typical Slavic ornamentations. In the eighties, before the Homeland War, almost every household in Croatia had one. Now, it’s just a relic of old times, a forgotten little figurine on a shelf. It’s just a doll, within a doll, within a doll, but there should be two more dolls inside her. I lost them, somewhere, sometime. Now, it’s as hollow as I am, and we stare at each other in mutual understanding.
When I make my way into the living room, Dad is already watching the news. “You won’t believe this, Ivona. Our finance minister wants to raise taxes again. The parasite.”
“Good morning, Dad.” I reach for the džezva and pour coffee into my cup, then add a few drops of almond milk. Bogus milk, my father calls it.
“Seriously, how much do they think we can take? We’re the country with the highest tax rates in the world by now.”
I sit at the dining room table instead of next to him on the couch. His ability to get worked up over events he has no control over can be strangling. Mom was different. She couldn’t care less about politics. Instead, she obsessed over things on a smaller scale. A tear in the couch upholstery, a mark on the hardwood floor. She and Dad canceled each other out beautifully. She couldn’t understand his fuming over state affairs any more than he could understand her boiling over household ones, their respective fires eventually dwindling to embers. Now that she’s gone, there’s nothing to stop him from rambling.
Dad turns the TV off, throws the remote on the couch. “Screw the lot of them. They’re ruining this country, one tax at a time.”
I focus on the garden outside, the bare branches of the hibiscus, and the always green, leafy top of an olive tree swaying in the salty bura wind.
Dad limps around the kitchen counter and pours himself another cup of coffee. It must be his third by now. Per his neurologist, he shouldn’t be drinking more than two cups after his stroke, but I’ve stopped warning him. It falls on deaf ears.
“Where are you off to this morning?” he asks, taking stock of my outfit.
“The bank.”
“Because of Lovorun?”
“Yeah, Lovorun.” Funny how the taste of a word can change with circumstances. Lovorun used to melt on my tongue like honey, a magical place from my childhood where I spent school holidays with Baba––my maternal grandmother––eating grapes and blackberries straight from vines and brambles. A place where things grew, beautiful and strong. For a while after, it turned salty, like grief. Now it tastes like curdled milk.
A few years after Mom died, Dad made a unilateral decision to turn Baba’s old estate into a heritage hotel. “This place has a soul. Tradition and history seep from it,” he said, “and tourists will eat that right up.” Never mind that the renovation ended up chipping away at the very soul of the place, no matter how careful Dad was to preserve it. Turning a humble peasant abode into a luxurious villa will do that to a place.
“I have a meeting with the personal banker. I’ll try to get another extension on our loan,” I say, even though I know the effort will be futile. Vlaho told me as much when we talked the other day, and he should know. He works at the bank and knows its policies inside and out.
Dad nods, his right hand trembling as he raises the cup to his mouth. He steadies it with his left. I avert my gaze, because I know it bothers him when I see all the ways his body is failing him.
Dad used to be a presence one couldn’t ignore. One of those people who would change the energy in the room as soon as they entered. It wasn’t his physical appearance that made people take notice of him, though he is tall. It was his confidence, the way he took up space, claimed it as his own. When he spoke, people listened with gazes of hypnotized cobras.
I didn’t like that aspect of him, the attention he garnered, the opinions he bestowed with little consideration for those opposing ones, but there’s always a subtle pang when I notice the absence of that power in him, when I see how his illness has reduced him to a man who can’t even control his own shaking.
“Did I ever tell you how rampant insolvency was back in the nineties?” he asks.
Of course, he’s told me, not once but so many times we could recite the story in unison. It’s such an old people’s trait, regurgitating past events to the same unfortunate listener over and over again, and he’s not that old.
He launches into the familiar tale of how those banking leeches asked him to declare bankruptcy when he himself was owed money, how they had a bureaucratic, backward way of looking at business because Croatia had just emerged from communism, and many people and companies were struggling with switching to free market. Not Dad, though. He’d been made for capitalism, and when it finally came to Croatia, he took to it like a lung to breath.
Outside, a single ray of sunlight cuts through a cloud and falls on my hands, folded around the cup in front of me. My father’s words blur into the background, and that distinct sense overcomes me, when I’m both inside my body and not there at all, like my skin is a mere husk and I am absent from where I should be inside it. And the thought that always follows: How did I end up here?
All those years ago, I blew out into the world like a dandelion seed looking for a place to take root, the horizon ahead immense and unlimited. And then, somehow, cruelly, I landed right back here, being preached to the same way I used to be preached to when I was eight.
“I went in for the meeting at the bank with an Excel sheet on a floppy disk.” Dad’s words sharpen in my ear. “None of them used a computer regularly and had no clue how to use Excel. I tossed the floppy onto the table and demanded they check out the numbers. It took them half an hour to find a person who could even open the damn document.” He chuckles, and drones on about how he persuaded the bankers to give him time until he managed to pocket some money from his own debtors, how he convinced them that great things awaited his company, and how they were swayed, partly because of his imposing personality, and partly because of his, then unparalleled, computer skills.
He puts his cup in the sink. “Have you done your prep work?” he asks.
“Yeah.” I run my finger around the rim of my cup, not meeting his eye. Any amount of prep work wouldn’t help us now. Times have changed, I want to say. There are policies and structures in place that weren’t there in the early years of capitalism. But I know better than to voice this. Everything was the hardest, toughest, the most difficult when my father had done it.
Which is not without merit, I guess. Dad kept his construction company alive through the war, when no one in their right mind was building anything. He kept it alive through all manner of financial crises that swell like tsunamis here in Croatia, huge waves sent from elsewhere that leave our economy floundering years after all the other countries have recovered. If he hadn’t had a stroke, I’m sure he would’ve found a way to finish the Lovorun project too. Instead, the task of converting my baba’s old estate into a hotel fell on me. Then the prices ballooned and the project stalled, and now we owe money, and simultaneously need money to finish the project so we can make money to return what we owe.
Dad walks by me on his way back to the living room where a new bout of television-watching is about to commence. He kisses the top of my head. “You’re a smart girl. You’ll do fine.”
Only I’m not. And I won’t.
Potential, people used to say to my parents—teachers, friends, strangers on the street. The girl has so much potential. I used to believe that great things awaited me. I was reading before I’d turned four. I could calculate before I was five. I recall this vividly because my brother paid me to do his math homework when he was in first grade. I would do the adding and subtracting in his workbook and he would pay me in small coins, gum, and Snoopy stickers. I’ll never forget the day my mother found out about our ploy. Before she started yelling and sent me to my room, there was a moment when she looked at me as if she’d never seen me before.
I understood then that knowledge bore power. It made people take notice.
The story became a part of the family lore, something my mother complain-bragged about to the three neighbors she always had coffee with. And I became ravenous, hoarding words and their meanings, facts, and trivia. I wanted more of that power, more of that sense of self. Striving became a hook in my chest, always lurching me upward.
But I’ve learned the hard way that book smarts mean nothing here. Neither would street smarts, if I had any. It’s a special blend that works here, the bureaucratic smarts, paired with a talent for wielding connections and bending rules. Better yet if it comes with a penis.
I can’t remember the last time someone said I had potential. But the thing about potential is that it doesn’t go away. If you fail to realize it, you don’t simply lose it. Instead, it sediments inside you, like tar or asbestos, slowly releasing its poison.
