BAZHE ® - EXCERPTS - CHAPTERS

CONTENTS of Damages by Bazhe:

1. FATHER

I was calling the cat from the back porch when the telephone rang. It was 7:10 A.M. Another desperate salesman, I thought, as I caught the receiver at the front of the third ring.

“Hello?”

“It’s Mother. Your father just died. Ten minutes ago. At one o’clock. He was lying on the couch, asking me if lunch was ready. Then he was gone. Just like that. An easy death.” She paused, then said in a sharp whisper, “Listen, the rela­tives and neighbors will insist that you fly here immediately. No need for it. Don’t listen to them. You can’t make it anyway. The funeral is tomorrow at two. If they suggest we put Father in the morgue, so you’ll be able to attend the funeral, say you have something very important to do at work and your boss won’t let you leave. Be persistent. Say you’ll come for the forty days of mourning. I can’t talk. They’re all around me. And remember. We are free now. He is gone.” Mother finished her statement emphatically, then fell silent.

Mother’s silence was not the kind that moves you when someone close per­ishes. It was an ordinary silence, not one filled with grief, but an empty one. And I struggled not to break it, compressing my cry deep into my stomach, feeling I would betray her by any display of emotion for Father.

“Won’t you need any help, Mamo?” I muttered softly, as if the relatives and neighbors might hear me. I still carried an intense phobia of them. They had never liked me, never tried to understand me.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be all right. You just stay where you are. Don’t dwell on this. Do what you have to do. No need to fret over unplanned trips to morgues and funerals. He’s dead. It’s over. I can’t talk. Here, they’re coming to talk to you. Bye-bye, my gold.”

“Bye-bye, Mother.” Condolences offered in familiar tones of phoniness emitted from the other side of the wire. I said exactly what Mother told me to the relatives and the neigh­bors, ever sensing the protectiveness of the woman who didn’t bear me yet har­bored a triumphal maternal instinct that put to shame that of most biological mothers I had known. And that definitely put to shame my father, who had never possessed such a force, never had the capability as a male, as a hunter.

That day, April 22, 1996, I felt like a bird without wings. My painting, my cat, my books, the TV, nothing was to my liking. We are free now. He is gone. The words stayed with me as I walked through the garden I was designing, a replica of the one I had known in Europe. The botanical product of my nostalgia took me back to my childhood and to Father, so I left and strolled towards the downtown area.

Morristown, New Jersey, is nothing like most bedroom communities, nests of alienated, busy people, and failures of human architecture and lifestyle. The fact that it had a center you could walk around appealed to me. More nostalgia. Mor-ristown’s resemblance to my hometown hit me, and I began to cry. With sorrow over Father’s death? Or joy over my liberation? I’m the only master, I almost yelled. The conflict was so intense it was almost physical, as if the feelings could rake through my body like my cat’s claws would through a kill. Was it a sin to feel joy when His authority was gone forever? I began to realize that Father’s death was more important than anything that had happened to me—even my coming to America. On that day, everything began to change.

When your father is wasteful, drunk, stupid, poor, and ugly—simply a loser—it is easy to imagine that he might harm you one day. When your father is responsible, sober, smart, powerful, and handsome—simply a winner—it is harder to comprehend why he is hurting you. You realize that society’s idea of a successful person can, in reality, be a failure. Then you question society’s values, what really distinguishes a loser from a winner, and you realize that society can be wrong: that a father’s love has nothing to do with peoples’ perception of success or failure.

When Father died, I realized that my entire relationship with him was a revolving game of continuous attempts to win his heart, to love him in any way I could, to make him recognize my efforts, and to make him show his gratitude and love. But, like many fathers, he kept his love hidden in his heart. My father was a man who had a natural talent for ruling people. He was tall, dark, and clas­sically handsome, like Tyrone Power, had the body of a football player, and his expression could freeze your blood. He was a militant and a Communist official who, like any official, loved the system that allowed him to wield his power, yet was manipulated by it and became its slave.

Father’s mother was married twice and had thirteen children: seven from the first marriage, six from the second, and several stillborn. Only Father and four of his sisters reached adulthood. His father was a farmer and a candle maker on the side. Grandmother was mean, a workaholic, and a perfectionist. She was an excel­lent cook, but remained extremely picky and demanding, especially later to her daughter-in-law, my mother. Father respected her fanatically. Not a word could be uttered against her. I knew her only from the family portrait. She was frighten­ingly ugly, and I tried to avoid being around the wall where the picture hung.

Father and his siblings, some as young as five years old, were rousted out of bed every dawn to work in the fields. Often, he had to do hard labor on an empty stomach. As a small child, he would go to church and cry and pray to Jesus and the rest of the Holy Family for a piece of bread. When nothing changed for the better, he gave up on God and religion. It was long before he became a Commu­nist when he realized that there were two major types of people: the exploiters and the exploited. He swore to himself that one day he’d fight against the privi­leged and build a new, more just system. His harsh upbringing and my grandfa-ther’s abuse, however, damaged his soul greatly and made him recalcitrant, someone who was hard to deal with.

When he was in his twenties, as a member of the proletariat, my Father got involved in illegal activities directed against the king of Yugoslavia. When World War II began, he joined the partisans’ resistance against the Germans and their allies: the Bulgarians and the Italians, who shared Macedonia, helped by the Albanians and Greek fascists. He fought them fearlessly, and soon he was pro­moted to captain. After the war, he was elected president of our county and later nominated to be a minister in the state government. His mother did not want to move to the capital, Skopje, and therefore he turned down an opportunity to have lots of money, power, and a residence in an elite neighborhood. Several months later, grandmother died at the age of 94, and Mother was stuck in the province. She never forgave Father for that.

As the President of Prespa County, Father was the law. He ruled with an iron hand, demanding absolute submission from his subordinates. They despised him. Nonetheless, he was respected. He always helped the poor and the blue-collar workers, not forgetting his own roots. Father was the most honest man I ever knew. Like many others, I admired his modesty and dignity. He never took advantage of that power, turning himself into a greedy bureaucrat, like most of his fellow officials and politicians, who sank into the pervasive corruption that ended up destroying the concept of socialism in Yugoslavia. He never took a thing that wasn’t his, which he hadn’t earned. He strictly obeyed Marshal Tito’s slogan: “What’s alien, don’t touch; what’s yours, never give up.” We could’ve had a private tutor, a mansion, a chauffeur, and many other privileges, but he refused them, he didn’t even own a car. Mother constantly complained about his humble way of living and thinking. She fought hard with him whenever she purchased new things for the house but always managed to keep them, so she could show off and make our home more glamorous. Our manicured garden was the most beau­tiful in the county, signifying that we lived in the chief official’s residence.

Father was handsome and powerful, yet he could not control his anger and his embarrassing, dominating temper. Mother was young and beautiful, yet she traded her happiness for status. And they had me: an adorable child, who pos­sessed not even the slightest resemblance to them, yet always tried to be a part of their tense marriage. People were jealous of our “perfect” family, yet they had no idea what was going on inside that most splendid union.

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