E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten
Pavicic Red Water
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-916725-17-1
Verlag: Bitter Lemon Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-916725-17-1
Verlag: Bitter Lemon Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Jurica Pavi?i? (born 1965) is a Croatian writer, scriptwriter, and journalist, living in Split. He has written seven novels, two collections of short stories and essays. His work has been translated into five languages, but Red Water is his first novel to be translated into English. .
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First of all, Vesna remembers the weather.
It was a warm September day, a beautiful day, as if the sky was mocking them in advance. All afternoon, a welcome sea breeze had taken the edge off the Indian summer and as dusk fell a pleasant evening chill stole into the streets, the kitchens and bedrooms, heralding autumn.
Vesna remembers the place, too.
She remembers the house at the top end of Misto in the street behind the church, the house in which she spent most of her life. Closing her eyes, Vesna can see clearly the arrangement of the rooms and everything inside them: the entrance from the small porch at the top of the stone steps; the glassed-off veranda; the living room; the kitchen and its terracotta floor tiles. In the living room stands a table and opposite the table a sofa of worn-out fabric. In the hallway is a metal coat stand, and next to the coat stand a door, the door to Silva’s room, on which Silva has written Keep out.
Vesna remembers what the living room looked like that day: in the corner, a Yugoslav-made Ei Niš television; on the armchair, a pile of washing waiting to be ironed; on the wall, a calendar of Canadian landscapes; and above the kitchen door, an oleograph of Jesus. The Jesus in the picture has watery, sleepy eyes, a bowed head and a wavy beard. His forefinger is raised, as if warning them of what is to come.
That’s what their old house looked like that day – 23 September 1989.
A Saturday. And like every Saturday, they eat dinner together, all four of them around the table, Jakov at the head, Vesna opposite, and their children, twins Silva and Mate, on the side facing the terrace.
That’s how the scene begins, the scene Vesna remembers: all four of them at home, seated around the table, dinner in front of them, the dinner she has cooked – runner beans with garlic, fried whitebait and bread. Just like any other evening. The news is on the television in the corner of the room, dramatic news from exciting times: demonstrations in China; uprisings in Eastern Europe; talk of a new constitution in Slovenia; and calls for reform of the Yugoslav federation.
Everywhere, people speak of politics with a new, restive fervour. But she and Jakov aren’t interested in politics. They firmly believe that if they stay as far as possible away from trouble, trouble will stay away from them.
Vesna remembers everything: the smells, the tastes, the scene. She remembers the tender whitebait melting in her mouth and the beans she garnished, as always, with chopped garlic. She remembers Jakov, as always, eating modestly, taking his time. She remembers Silva greedily devouring the fish, fighting with the bones and spitting them onto the plate. She remembers Mate too, of course. She remembers him eating carefully and calmly, arranging the fish spines at the edge of the plate, lining them up like corpses. Mate always ate slowly, methodically, cutting the food into small pieces as if feeding tiny, invisible Lilliputians.
Four silhouettes, four bodies hunched over the table, tucking into fish and spitting bones. That’s how Vesna remembers that evening, the evening normal life ended.
In September 1989, Vesna and Jakov Vela have been married almost eighteen years. They became husband and wife in the autumn of 1971, on a Saturday three weeks before Christmas in a civil ceremony presided over by the Misto registrar. The reception was held in a hotel restaurant and they spent their first night in a room upstairs. Out of season, the room was cold and damp.
After the wedding, she and Jakov moved into a house in Misto, at the top end of the street behind the Church of the Holy Spirit. They shared the house with Aunt Zlata, Vesna’s unmarried aunt, who would be their housemate for the next seven years.
Quiet and unseen, Zlata lived with them until one afternoon in 1978, when they found her motionless on the kitchen floor, struck down by a stroke. The funeral was quiet and proper, and a week later they emptied her room off the hallway. Zlata’s room became Silva’s. That Saturday in 1989, Silva is still the occupant of the room off the hallway, the room where she keeps her clothes, her knick-knacks and adolescent secrets. On the door, she has hung a sign in English telling the grown-ups to stay away.
Vesna and Jakov moved into the old house, Aunt Zlata’s house, in the autumn of 1971, the day after their wedding. One morning, about a month later, Vesna felt sick and threw up in the kitchen sink before breakfast. The following week, the local doctor informed her that she was pregnant. Not long after that, a gynaecologist in Split broke the good news: she was carrying twins.
To look at Mate and Silva, one could see similarities: in the eyebrows and the profile of the nose, in the same fine forehead and smile lines, lines that suggested stubbornness. But if Mate and Silva were physically alike, in character they could not have been more different. Mate was a sedate and responsible boy, conscientious and cautious, the kind you could rely on and who Vesna knew would support her and Jakov in their old age. Silva was different. Silva was a brigand, Aunt Zlata once said. Silva would go far, Jakov once said, because she always knew how to get her own way.
In September 1989, Mate and Silva are almost eighteen. Mate is in his final year of studies at the shipbuilding school. He plans to enrol in the university shipbuilding faculty the following summer, after graduating. Silva is nearing the end of her economics and administration courses; when quizzed by her parents about her future, she becomes evasive and carefully changes the subject. Both schools are in Split. When he started, Mate was working afternoons in Misto unloading the fishermen’s catch. Not wanting to lose his afternoon earnings, he continued to live in Misto and travelled to and from school. For that reason, Mate wakes at six every day and takes the commuter bus along the coastal road thirty-five minutes to Split. Not Silva. Silva lives in the girls’ student dorm on Cirilometodska in Split. She visits Misto every Saturday, including that Saturday, the last weekend of the summer.
In September 1989, Jakov is forty-two years old. He is already beginning to lose his hair, but he is thin at this point and particularly proud that his stomach is still flat. Jakov is a bookkeeper in a factory making plastic goods. The factory is located in a metal and glass building above the main road, a building that today is little more than a ruin. The factory produces plastic balls, boat fenders and inflatable dinghies. Jakov works in the salary department. He works patiently and conscientiously, with care but without ambition.
After work, after finishing dinner, Jakov likes to relax on the sofa and read the newspaper. Then he goes down to the ground-floor konoba, where previous generations kept wine and tools for working the land but which is now home to Jakov’s foremost passion: amateur radio. Jakov could spend all day long connecting, soldering and sticking, assembling appliances covered with little lights which to Vesna seem to hold some secret magic. When it gets dark, Jakov sits there in the konoba, twiddling dials and talking for hours in English to people he will never see. Vesna sometimes listens as her husband converses with strangers on the other side of the world. She will never understand the point of it, but never would she say that to Jakov. Vesna knows every man needs a hare-brained passion.
In 1989, Vesna is thirty-eight years old. For the past fourteen years she has worked as a geography teacher at the primary school in Misto. Monday to Friday, Vesna teaches the local kids about gulf currents, oil-exporting countries and the river basins of Yugoslavia. Misto is small, so Vesna often runs into her pupils in the street. They say hello in the shop and their parents nod at her in approval when they spot her in church on Sundays.
When she started the job, Vesna believed she liked school and liked children. Fourteen years on, she is not so sure. She is increasingly aware of the stifled irritation she feels when entering the classroom, the way the pranks the children play drive her to outbursts of rage completely out of proportion to the offence. After fourteen years, Vesna has the growing feeling that children are not inherently good.
Vesna will turn forty at the end of the following year. Sometimes, she thinks about that ugly digit, four, about the weight she has put on, how she is suffocating under the monotony of work and a marriage that is peaceful, happy, but boring.
Very rarely, during these moments, does it occur to Vesna that she is at a point in life when she could still do a lot with herself. She could change job or change address. She could lose weight, learn Chinese or change her hairstyle. But such misapprehensions quickly pass. Vesna doesn’t really want change, and she knows that neither does Jakov. They have good lives. Monday to Friday, they do their boring, dependable jobs. In the afternoons they read on the terrace – she a book, he the newspaper – and in the summer they go to the beach. Saturdays, they head down to the shallow marina and buy fish from a fisherman. Sundays, in the yard, they light a fire and...
