Catherine the Great and the Small

By Olja Knežević

Catharine's tragectory in life is accompanied by failures in love, family traumas and an incredible romance with handsome Sinisa. The novel takes us through turbulent times in the Balkan region, from the eighties to the present day, portraying growing up in the twilight of communism, and giving intimate insights into all that happened to the region after that.
Carefully crafted characters and masterful, dynamic storytelling place Catherine the Great and the Small in the company of the very best of novels , which speak about the reality of their geographic setting and are remembered for their convincing, strong, maladjusted characters. Catherine is certainly one of them: a powerful female voice seeking her place within her family, among friends, in the cities she lives in, and constructing her unique identity as a daughter, granddaughter, friend, mistress, wife and a mother.
'The splendid language of this novel is skilfully and vividly translated, and the narrative is compelling. What is also striking is the portrayal of the characters with all their flaws and foibles (and who gain our sympathy perhaps particularly because of them). This inclusiveness of vision towards both characters and places – without judgement, rejecting nothing – is a special quality. It is the viewpoint of our greatest organ of perception, the heart, a territory that Olja Knežević knows well and has made her own.' Morelle Smith, Scottish Review
'This is not a they lived happily ever after novel, not least because they lived happily ever after all too often does not happen in the real world. Catherine struggles, she falls, she fails, she picks herself up, she carries on, for herself and those she loves, and, somehow, she does not get the perfect situation but makes an accommodation with those around her, keeps her head help up high and marches on. We can only wish her well.' The Modern Novel

• Language: English
• Publisher: Istros Books
• Release date: Jun 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781908236418

Olja Knežević

Born in Podgorica, Montenegro, Olya Knežević graduated from Capistrano Valley High school in California. She has a BA in English language and literature from the University of Belgrade and an MA in creative writing from Birkbeck College in London. She lived in London for ten years before moving to Zagreb, Croatia, where she currently lives with her family. She is the author of two novels and one book of autobiographical short stories.

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Olja Knežević

Catherine the Great and the Small

V.B.Z. ZagrebIstros BooksBiblioteka Na margini

BOOK SERIES

NA MARGINI / ON THE MARGINS

book no. 11

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF:

Drago Glamuzina

MANAGING EDITOR:

Sandra Ukalović

Olja Knežević

Catherine the Great and the Small

PUBLISHER:

V.B.Z. d.o.o., Zagreb

10010 Zagreb, Dračevička 12

tel: [phone], faks: [phone]

e-mail: [e-mail]

www.vbz.hr

FOR CO-PUBLISHER:

Istros Books

Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square,

London, WC1R 4RL

e-mail: [e-mail]

FOR PUBLISHER:

Mladen Zatezalo

EDITOR:

Susan Curtis

PROOFREADER:

Charles Phillips

GRAPHIC EDITOR:

Siniša Kovačić

LAYOUT:

V.B.Z. studio, Zagreb

PRINTED BY:

Znanje d.o.o., Zagreb

May 2020

E-BOOK:

Bulaja naklada, Zagreb

ORIGINAL TITLE

Marina Šur Puhlovski

Katarina, Velika i Mala

Copyright © 2019 by Olja Knežević and V.B.Z. d.o.o.

Translation © 2020 for UK edition Paula Gordon and Ellen Elias-Bursać

copyright © 2020 for English edition:

V.B.Z. d.o.o., Zagreb

This book has been published with support from

the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia.

ISBN: 978-1-908236-40-1 (print)

ISBN: 978-953-52-0320-9 (ePub)

ISBN: 978-953-52-0323-0 (mobi)

Olja

Knežević

Catherine

the Great

and the Small

Translated by:

Paula Gordon and

Ellen Elias-Bursać

V.B.Z. Zagreb

2020.           

I am Catherine the Great, hiding away in a small room.

We have proclaimed this small room an office. English people call a room of this size a broom closet. The English people are spoiled, or so my husband and I say, even when they’re poor. That’s our attitude all year long right up to Christmas, when the bitter cold sets in. Then we marvel at them running around town in the howling wind, going about their business as usual, bald men without hats, women wearing ballet flats without socks, everyone sleeveless, and again we remember where we’ve come from: a small Mediterranean country where as soon as the north wind blows, no one goes outside, where everyone leaves work early – noon at the latest – with the excuse of attending funerals and paying respects.

The small room has become a workroom.

My husband says we should build a new life out of the contradictions of our personal origins and mindsets. We shouldn’t be layabouts or crybabies. I agree, even though I have begun to hold plates as if they were butterfly wings, pinched between my thumb and two fingers. Every weekend, at least one slips from my fingertips, numb from poor circulation, and shatters. Weekends are an accumulation of separations, the lowest point of concentration, early evenings unmoored in strange cities much colder than I’m used to. At those moments, my thoughts turn to home – yes, I even say home, sweet home to myself – and I miss everything and everyone, but most of all, my grandmother. When I lived with her, she didn’t let me help her with work around the house. I never got the hang of it, though I haven’t done any other type of work in this city for a long time. Granny bubbles up to the surface more and more often: When, for instance, from out of my dressing-gown pocket I pull a half-wrapped, linty butterscotch or an accidentally washed, disintegrating banknote to shove into the hands of my children while they grimace and complain, because really, they didn’t mean that when they said they wanted a sweet or asked for spending money. I hear Granny speaking when, instead of quarrelling, I take a deep breath and let out a sharp: Mm hmm, miscreant. And here she is at the end of the day, taking my left hand and using it to pull the duvet up over my hips, up to my shoulders, covering me so that my kidneys don’t fall off from the cold overnight, as she used to say instead of good night. But these days I call her only on her birthday and the most important holidays, New Year’s Day and May Day.

Today I didn’t sweep up the bits of broken plate from the floor of the kitchen in our fifth apartment in a foreign country. Terrazzo moderno, the estate agent said as she opened the door to the kitchen during the tour of the flat. She pronounced the letters T, R and O the English way. I pretended to be in control of everything happening to me and imagined that I, if I’d had the choice, would have picked those very same terrazzo moderno tiles. Three bedrooms and a living room, plus this workroom set at the far end of an angular hallway. On the tenth floor, with the immensity of the metropolis all around us. Life has never promised anything to anyone, all of this is a gift from heaven and I am grateful, even if my only anchor is a rickety table painted the colour of yellow sponge cake. Hunched over this table, I write for myself and myself alone, much to the amusement of my household. An extravagant hobby, that’s for sure, they say, and they chuckle. Writing one’s memoirs, a hobby worthy of an empress, of Catherine the Great. None of them will be sweeping up the bits of broken plate.

In this city of dreams, I’m not seeking adventure, I’m not on the lookout for a soulmate.

CATHERINE

THE SMALL

1.

It’s the beginning of summer, 1978. Grown-ups tell us we are the lucky generation, we should be disgusted by revenge and butchery, we should break the cycle. And they teach us: When they throw stones at you, throw bread to them. Good old Communism, we agree after a huddle in front of the building, to answer stones with bread − the finest social system in the world. We had never read the Bible. It was not available to us, and besides, word got around that it was boring, and Marietta, who would know, confirmed it. An old book for old people, she said. Her father was an army man, but her mother was from Pula, in the Republic of Croatia, and kept a Bible hidden under Marietta’s winter clothes.

It’s the beginning of summer and only the most experienced guerrillas, like me, hide from the gendarmes in the smelly alley next to the burek shop. We press up against the piss-stained wall, keep quiet and breathe into our cupped hands; in the heat, the smell of ground meat and onions hangs thickly around us, a smell that keeps our enemies at bay. Grown-ups we don’t like, grown-ups like Marietta’s father, try to convince us that the shop owner fills his burek pies with ground-up cats.

No, we don’t say gendarme like they do in France, we pronounce the g like the dg in fridge. Guerillas and gendarmes. We all call the game cops and robbers in front of the grown-ups. They ask us if it’s where we hang out with friends or somewhere else that we heard people singing rabble-rousing World War II Chetnik songs. My grandmother asks me this, she’s who I’m most scared of, and that’s why I hide the word gendarme from her, it sounds like Chetnik to me. I don’t know what songs she means − I listen to Boney M and practice dance moves with three of my girlfriends. Ra-Ra-Raspuchin, lava-rava-wash-machine is how we sing it all wrong.

I am in love with one of the gendarmes. I want it to be him who finds me in the eternal gloom of the alley by the burek shop. If he finds me, if he approaches me from behind, so I have to turn around suddenly to face him, I’ll kiss him on the lips. Who cares that I’m so skinny and have a bad haircut? I know how to kiss; my pillow can vouch for it. I use everything I have: my lips, teeth, tongue, hands, hips and breath − and when imagining myself in the act, my whole body trembles from the force of imagination.

It’s June, school’s just broken up, and the dirt is already cracked from the heat, resembling chunks of aged cheese from the farmers’ market. We tasted this dirt, literally. As little kids, when we were hungry, we tried chewing the dry earth that looked like cheese to us, we all did, and now we laugh about it. In the early afternoon, the smell of dirt mingles with the smell of rubbish from the plastic bags tossed near the building entrances, with the smell of petrol from overheated cars, along with the smell of musty pink and white oleander blossoms. That’s when we go inside for lunch. Things simmer down in the evenings, even the oleander has a delicate smell then, and we tell each other the fragrance is a trick − the white flower is probably poisonous. But we still lick the blossoms, and we lick the leaves, defying destiny under the heavens chock-full of big, fat stars, which watch us from above, follow us, are astonished by us and love us, as do our mothers watching from their balconies across the neighbourhood.

Well, other mothers, anyway. My mother is ill, she’s in the hospital. I’m the only one of my friends in this situation. Enisa told me this makes me unusual, but it actually means I always feel sick to my stomach, and maybe a little ashamed. I like it better when my mother’s home, even if I hear her moaning and throwing up, because she’s a fountain of life in my little family. Without her help, my hair doesn’t look like it’s been intentionally cut in a punk hairstyle, it just looks mangy. Mum’s hands are a greenish yellow, and so are her feet, which I am not supposed to see, but I always look at them before she slides them into her slippers because she wants to sit, she tells us, and not lie down while Dad and I are in her room. She wears a lot of make-up and she wears a wig when she expects us to visit. All around her are lavender-coloured bottles of Yardley deodorant, which she sprays on herself and her squeaky hospital mattress to try to cover up the complex stench of her illness.

It’s good, I always recognize those cheerful footsteps of yours, she tells me, so I pull myself together quickly. I’ll need a new bottle of Yardley. She gives me a scrap of graph paper. Here’s a list of things to buy for me. The list is illegible, just scribbles on paper, lines that scare me, arrows pointed at my eyes. Dad stands behind me, he sees that the paper doesn’t have any real words on it, and he squeezes my shoulder with his beefy hand, a sign that I shouldn’t say anything about it.

But aren’t you coming home soon? I ask her. The May Day Festival is coming up. We’re practising a dance number to a Boney M song. I’m the man in the group. I took your white hat and Aunt Mela adapted Dad’s white summer trousers to fit me perfectly.

Mum waves the thought away with her greenish-yellow hand. I am so sorry, she says, I don’t think I’ll be out of the hospital by then. Ask Mela to give you an Afro-style cap A hairdo before the performance, she knows how. And well done on your part.

Only Marto from the green building knows how to do those moves. He taught me. His father won’t let him perform with us.

My father laughs at that, and Mum hugs me and wants me to sit next to her. She’s so happy that I haven’t turned into the child of a sick mother, she tells my father. We have made a special young lady of her, a strong girl, she adds and kisses me. She doesn’t know that I am repulsed by her hospital bed, the room full of needles and tubes, the rolls of gauze and cotton batting flecked with pus and blood; my nostrils are filled with the sharp smells of the medical border-zone between life and death.

I didn’t know I was losing my mother forever; they failed to explain this to me. That summer I caught only snatches of information that directly affected me. I’d ask if she would still be in the hospital when I packed for my seaside summer camp, because if she would, I’d leave behind the ugly black crocheted button-down granny jumper, the one with the bat sleeves, which my mother said made it a hippy jumper, perfect for summer evenings. It took me a long time to forgive myself for those hospital visits, during which I sulked, bragged and kissed her only when she insisted because I was off to a rehearsal or to play outside. For her sake, I had to get through seventh grade with excellent marks. Father had told me the year before, adding Maybe she won’t make it to your middle-school graduation, while he fished a cigarette out of the red-and-white pack in his shirt pocket, lit it, and stared into the distance. Explain to me, I wanted to yell, what exactly does that maybe mean? What are the odds, I wanted to know. Mum was so young − the youngest and most fun-loving mum of all my friends’ mums. Can’t she just break free from this horrible disease and run away? How did she even end up sharing a hospital room with old women, some of whom even get to go home again because they only have pneumonia?

Cancer, damn it, cancer, I heard my father say to someone over the phone. And then: I don’t know any more what part of her isn’t affected. Not sure how to behave, he started acting the part of the gloomy Byronesque hero, brooding about life, and especially death, while my mother languished; he tried to find some sense in it, but he only became more and more isolated in his personal bastion of knowledge, at the philosophy department of the Nikšić Teacher Training College.

And now here I am at the end of eighth grade. My father, having quit smoking in the meantime, is fit as a fiddle. He uses expensive lotions on his face and is about to have a son with another woman. Still young, with a black moustache − which he grew out to cover his soft upper lip and laugh lines and look stern.

Before Mum ended up in the hospital, Dad often brought students home with him; they sat in the living room and smoked freely, copied out underlined passages from Dad’s mimeographed handouts; Mum would offer them something to eat, but they only wanted coffee. They talked to me about music. You’re fierce with that punk hairdo, they told me, you’re way above kids your age. I took it to mean they thought I was on their level, and I beamed − how great was that?

A little Patti Smith, said one student.

Philosophy lovers were rare, practically illegal. Communism was the crown of all philosophies. And I wanted to be like someone called Patti Smith and live in the Chelsea Hotel in New York. Fierce indeed.

My mother, who took me to parks and sneaked with me into other people’s gardens to steal bulbs, who taught me to draw all sorts of flowers and trees, would, all too soon, get so weak that her hand made jagged and broken lines on paper. She wasn’t even able to write down an ordinary list and wouldn’t live to the age when one learns to sit still and enjoy gazing at the violets.

My mother didn’t live to the age I am now, not even close, but already she was, as fate decreed, old enough to die. The illness advanced quickly, but Mum continued to wear make-up − a lot of it, like other young women did at the time. She wore a wig as if she were in a play, and she insisted on sitting with us, not lying down, when we came to visit, because she wanted to be closer to us, she said, she wanted to feel our energy, which she’d been a part of, too, until just recently, until she became weak and out of breath, as if she had climbed up to meet us from the depths of the earth, and then sat on the very edge of her own grave.

Mummy, I wanted to tell her, nobody likes me, fix my hair. Look at it, it’s awful, all the old people think I’m a boy: Hey, son, go on, get me some smokes and a newspaper? I’m a girl! I always correct them, but they just shrug. I don’t have any coins. Keep the change.

We all wore cotton T-shirts and jeans. The shirts and the jeans had Levi’s tags on them, like we were in the West. That, we heard, was something kids in the Soviet Union couldn’t even dream of. Over there, with these things, and with chewing gum, you could buy a house with what they were worth in rubles − but who’d want to live in the USSR? We got the shivers thinking about the enormous expanse to the east, where the dark would swallow you in the blink of an eye. Gulag, gulag, we whispered, imagining a goulash made of human flesh. Our social system is completely different, we said, parroting the grown-ups. We would rather live in Bari, or anywhere in Italy, if not London or New York − even Pula, where Marietta’s mother was from. That girl Marietta was the best at French skipping: she had skinny legs, sick skinny, we said, and she whistled through the air on those legs, decisive, precise, but gentle − swish, swish − she could jump over the elastic even when it was around our necks, and the elastic never broke skin or drew blood. I can still hear her mother calling her at noon from the balcony to come home for lunch, which astonished us because we had just eaten breakfast. And she ran fast. Her father, one of the nameless fathers who will forever be only army men, used a stopwatch to time her at a hundred meters and announced the results out loud: Twelve-point-zerooo-five, we’re getting faster. We’re right behind you, Little Miss Šteker, guard your medals! Who’s Miss Šteker? we asked. Martina Šteker, record-holder for the one hundred metres, Marietta answered. I bet she gets the hiccups every day when my dad says her name.

That June she said they were moving back to Pula. She showed us pictures of the lit-up Roman amphitheatre; talked about the film festival, how all the actresses went around topless, and no one laid a hand on them or even said a word.

***

I’m alone in the building entrance. All the guerrillas have been found except me. I’m tired of hiding; I move my skinny body away from the piss-stained wall. I decide to turn myself in, sad because I think no one wants to find me, that is, capture me, the way they capture the other girls, showing they like them by grabbing their breasts or bottoms. I don’t yet have those fleshy features. A man’s shadow fills the doorway. I hold my breath. Is this the maniac from our part of town, the paedophile who loves boys? Maybe he’s been stalking me, thinking I’m a boy.

Kaća? Phew. Someone who knows me well enough to use a nickname, the voice of one of my cousins.

I’m hiding, leave me alone, I say.

Kaća, come home with me. Your dad’s waiting.

What’s going on?

Why do you always ask so many questions? Don’t be a pest.

He’s not yelling, which is unusual, considering he has the personality of a nervous teenager. His nickname is even Jumpy Two. Jumpy One died young, he was killed, driving too fast, trying to break the neighbourhood speed record to the coast, to impress a girl known as Flamenca, who soon after that got married and disappeared.

Hey, just come with me, says my cousin, Jumpy Two.

Outside the building entrance I see everybody, the guerrillas and the gendarmes. They’re standing there, heads bowed.

Kaća, says the boy I’m in love with and whom I’d been planning to kiss impetuously. He comes up and hugs me. I’m really sorry, he whispers. Oh, the all-encompassing warmth of his embrace. My skin tingles from the heat.

What are you sorry about?

We look at each other, he’s uncomfortable. He takes a deep breath: Y-your mother died, he says, and kisses me on the cheek. The kiss makes me happy. A brief moment of happiness before a long stretch of grief.

Nah, Mum’s just really ill, maybe she passed out from the pain, she can’t have died-died, I tell myself as I enter our flat. The cousins are there, and neighbours, and Marietta’s mother, who is clutching to her breast her famous Bible, which I stare at for a very long time. This is not a good sign, I conclude, but still − one good sign is my dour granny clucking her tongue in the hallway at my mother’s choice of wallpaper, patterned like fireworks.

Who wouldn’t get sick from this wallpaper? she asks under her breath. She’s my mother’s mother − surely the wallpaper wouldn’t matter so much to her if her youngest daughter had actually died-died?

My cousins kiss me, wipe their cheeks with one hand and mine with the other. At least four sandpapery palms brush my face and I have not even begun to cry. My ill-tempered granny and I are the only ones not crying.

Your mother died in the hospital, they tell me.

Your father looked for you, they say, he waited for you but he had to go to the hospital without you.

I told him to go without you, Granny says crossly. Enough of dragging you around hospitals.

Alone in a hospital room, such a shame. They all sigh.

Dad and I are supposed to feel a little shame. At that time, people died in their own beds. But this husband hadn’t even considered bringing his young wife home. And look at me! I was making a fool of myself, twitching and wiggling around on stage at the May Day Festival, imitating a black singer no less, while my mother succumbed to a fatal disease.

Don’t worry, they console me and stroke my bristly hair. She had no idea she was alone, that’s what the doctors said.

She’s blessed now in the kingdom of heaven, says Marietta’s mother and smiles through her tears. And you, child, just let the dead bury the dead.

All of you are babbling, says Granny, agitated. "No one knows a thing. The doctors don’t know and neither do the messengers from the kingdom of heaven. Everyone’s guessing. How could we possibly