5

It’s usually best to call my father in the evening, around eight o’clock – after he’s eaten but before he’s done with the day. If I call too late, he will already have his head propped up in bed and his neck will be in that position where his voice sounds constricted, faint and worn out. It’s also a good idea to ask him what he’s doing before getting into the reason for the call. What I’m doing? he will say, reminding me that still, after fifty years in the United States, he’s not perfectly fluent. Usually he’s just finished eating, or he’s reading the news, or in some stage of going for or just returning from a long walk. My father still walks a good few miles every day, climbing the steep San Francisco hills where he still lives, in the North Beach neighborhood. I miss walking those hills with him – it’s something we used to do whenever I was in town.

Tonight he’s just come back from his walk and he’s having a “nice, big glass of water,” he says. “Remember, water cures everything,” he laughs. It’s an inside joke that holds a slight sting. I used to get migraines in high school and heavy periods. When I would have to tell my father I didn’t feel good he would say, “Just have a big glass of water and forget about it!” At the time, it was a scolding, and I would feel ashamed and dismissed for saying I hurt. Illness never meant anything but weakness, and it was all in the mind, he would tell us.

I reflect on this as I think back to what my grandmother described as rampant illness during those years in the camp. I was able to ask her once about the camp, when my German was good enough to ask questions and her German was good enough to answer them. I think back to the irony of that conversation – both of us speaking a language together that was not our own about a personal history so intimate. My grandmother was telling me about her first child, my father’s older brother, who died because there was no food, and how she got Typhoid and all of her hair and teeth fell out and she almost died. She begins to tell me about God and why I should make sure to go to the church when my aunt, my father’s youngest sister who has been eavesdropping on the conversation enters the room to tell me that’s enough. “This is very painful for your Omi,” she says firmly. “Time for bed.”

But now it’s my father who has gotten as old as my grandmother, and we are talking on the phone, in English. I ask my father how it happened that they left Serbia after they were released from the camp. Because these events were never discussed outside of a sentence or two, and outside of that one brief conversation I had tried to have with my grandmother, I had always thought the family left Serbia due to displacement after the war had ended. From what I had been taught in school about World War II, people were just being divided up and sent around to areas of Europe and that our family had been sent to Germany at random. Through the research for this thesis in applied linguistics, I am looking closely now at my family’s migration, and it’s apparent that I am learning of the depth of my family’s story for the first time.

“Well, you know, after the war, Yugoslavia became a communist place,” my father says. “It was after the war, you know? And Tito was in power then and Serbia was not the same place anymore,” he continues. “And the government gave people of our ethnicity – of this so-called German ethnicity, you know... The government gave us an option which wasn’t really an option you know. It was like we want you out of here,” my dad says.

I hear the faucet – he’s getting himself a glass of water, certainly.

“And this was when – right after you were released from the camp?” I ask.

“No, ah –“ I can hear the shortness in his voice. I know it’s too much to try to sort out for someone who hadn’t been there. “We had been out...” he’s counting back. “We had been out maybe for four or five years. I remember I had to go to school and I was just punished all the time you know, because now I wasn’t a proper Serb like the other Serbian kids. So I was punished in the classroom for this. I was just a kid, but you know there was so much anger and there was this whole movement going on towards this ethnically pure Serbian society.”

“So what happened where you eventually left?” I’m trying to make it simple, but it’s not simple. None of it.

My father describes how there was a seemingly endless amount of papers that his mom had to go back and forth on the train to Belgrade in order to get to satisfy the requirements for the local government – that it was the government that had decreed that certain groups of people had to leave but then put all sorts of requirements they had to satisfy in order to go. “They were just bleeding the people financially. We were all poor people. Poor people who maybe spent their entire week’s wages for one of these required papers,” he says, his voice trailing off. “You know, my father was making maybe three thousand dinars in a month, and a pair of shoes was ten thousand dinars,” he recalls. “So, you know, that was the situation.”

My father says that when they had finally paid enough money for the government to be satisfied, they were given a box.

“I remember the box we could take. You could take anything you wanted as long as it would fit in the box. The box was maybe two feet by four feet, you know. And my parents didn’t even know where they were going.” My father is shuffling around now – the big glass of water is gone now, and he’s moving around the cramped rent-controlled apartment that he shares in North Beach. It’s a clear night in Portland, as I move from where I have been sitting on the couch in my own house – to the front porch, and I imagine the light outside his window is similarly clear.

My father says that his mother filled this box with feather blankets – the equivalent of a bunch of sleeping bags. She was worried about the kids, now with two little girls as well as my father who was about eight or nine years old. “If they were going back to a camp like before,” my father says, “mom was worried about the cold.”

There is a long silence. I’ve learned that I don’t always have to break the silences, but they are painful. “I don’t know how they handled all of this with little kids. I don’t know how my mom and my dad did everything they did,” my father says, almost to himself.

I say something to ground the conversation. It’s hit a sharply sad pinnacle and I’ve learned that depending on my father’s mood, a glimpse back to the present moment is something that sometimes works for us to continue. I say something about how having kids adds a whole extra layer to all the things that are going on and we talk about that for a moment – about me and my sister when we were kids and about our kids now, my father’s grandkids. At some point it’s okay to continue with the memories.

My grandparents, my father and his sisters were put on the train with their box of blankets and sent to a UN DP (or Displaced Persons) camp in Bavaria, Germany. Here my father seems to have more shareable memories. There were meals in the UN camp once a day and you would go stand in line with your bowl. “It was just like Oliver, you know?” He laughs. I can’t believe it. That movie. That was like me. I was maybe nine years old and it was just like that. At some point, they gave people a list of names of German cities and towns and asked people to choose which one they wanted to go to.  

“I mean nobody had any idea where they were. My dad, Opi, you know, was actually really smart and he went and bought a map of Germany with his last money. He bought this map to see if he could figure out the best place to go. He looked at the map, I remember, and he saw the towns close to the river and that is how we ended up in Cologne, you know? And it turned out to be a good place of all the places, maybe. I mean, back then it was not a nice place, it was all bombed out, you know. But there were jobs.”

My father tells me that at first they were in an eight by fifteen room in government shelter with other families. All five of them in an eight by fifteen room for the first year or two, and they had to get evaluated periodically by the social services there in Germany. “Eventually we qualified for a one-bedroom apartment with a shared shower in the hallway that we had to use coal in order to heat up the water and then you had to scrub the shower clean for the next person,” he says. “I mean my mother felt so proud of that apartment,” he laughs. “It was basically an SRO, you know? Like really awful, but it was the first time since we left Serbia – since before we had gone into the camp in 1944, ten years before -  that we had something of our own.”

**

I’m in the Caffé Trieste in San Francisco where my father used to hang out in the late sixties – where he met my mother. My mother loved to tell the story of how she met him in the Trieste wearing a pajama shirt from the Salvation Army, but you didn’t know it was a pajama shirt did you? She would say every time she told the story. Do we have to talk about this again? He would say, glaring at her, and she would laugh.

Every time I return to my hometown, the Trieste is still here, full of life, the slamming of the brown and white espresso dishware on the chipped marble counter. It still has the same old photographs on the same plaster walls. The wooden phone booth in the middle of the seating area with its accordion style door that used to house a working phone is still here. All the old timers are still here, as my dad refers to them, joking that today he’s one of them now.

It was here in the late seventies where I would draw on napkins while my father talked to guys who would come in with long hair and make jokes. I didn’t know why at the time, but my father was in the early stages of building what would become a business and he was making some of his early connections to people who knew how to do plumbing and electrical work. They were also no doubt living on the fringes like my dad, without structured jobs, looking for cash and opting for the flexibility of fast money by way of small projects that suited their lives and the skills they had with their hands. Some of them had drug problems or were otherwise down on their luck I would realize later, and they would talk to my dad about their problems. I could tell sometimes my father was angry at one of them, or frustrated, but mostly the conversation was boring to my young ears and I would drift off into daydreams drinking my orange Italian soda and eating my almond ring pastry.

I apparently used to stand on the mosaic tables and sing cowboy songs in my cowgirl outfit with my hat and pleather fringe skirt. I don’t remember this but I do remember Olga, the old Italian matriarch with her loud voice and big embrace. When I wasn’t singing, the place roared with Puccini and the banter of the neighborhood. I would watch my father command conversation with his thick dark furrowed brows that I loved to draw like waves on my napkin. After what seemed like hours, we would leave and go to the neighborhood hardware store – the one that was eventually left to collect dust in the wake of the new Home Depot chain store out in South San Francisco.

My father stopped frequenting the Trieste during the eighties when he no longer had time and I was in school. There was a tension too between my father’s drinking buddies and being a present father and as the story goes my mother made him choose and stay away from that world as much as possible. But now, after my mother’s passing, back on his own in North Beach, he’s there again, visiting with a few of his old acquaintances from those days. It’s unusual to see that he has shared some of himself with them – unusual for my father, perhaps a bit more trusting in his eighties. I don’t know most of their names but they light up when he tells them I am his daughter. My father’s life in all of its parts has been a secret to those in his life – his past was a secret to us as children and his family is a secret to these men.

“Your dad’s a real survivor,” one says to me, off to the side, under his breath. “I know,” I say.