Father resolved other matters with a phone call too. One afternoon Batinić came down to our veranda and called him. ‘How much did you pay to the municipality?’ he shouted. Father yelled: ‘The times of your communists are past!’ ‘Yours won’t last forever either,’ replied Batinić, ‘and your file will not remain in the drawer.’ Father didn’t say a word and simply entered the house.

I was fourteen then. I discovered school and men in the same quarter. Until then, I went through the motions, with perfect grades each year. Then I discovered that school was something else, a window and ticket to a world that was wide and interesting, waiting for me to pluck it.

That summer I freshly noticed some things: firm thighs, strong biceps, hard lumps in bathing suits. Autumn came and I went to secondary school in Makarska. In class, I easily outstripped my classmates from town in the first semester, and I had my first man in Osejava Park. I don’t remember his name and I don’t care.

That’s when I went through hell. My perfect grades were the object of lukewarm pride of my parents, but Makarska awoke father’s unlimited suspicion. As a child, I was allowed to play hide-and-seek in the cove until late hours. Now I had to be home at nine, sit through dinner and gobble warm blitva4. I didn’t have a moment of peace. When my afternoon classes ended, father waited for me at the bus station in Makarska, just to make sure I didn’t wander off. When I hung around the cove, he sent Stipe to watch over me, spy on me. He was obsessed with my virginity, unaware that I had easily and gladly given away that luxury. His virgin was making out with strangers, and his spying and tyrannizing only pushed me further. I ran away after morning classes, I ran away during the break, I took every opportunity and excuse to sneak out of my father’s house to meet a guy. Condoms, pills—I learned it all in two summers, luckily avoided pregnancy, but garnered a fine reputation. I still don’t know whether my father was aware that his fears were well-founded. I only remember that I took a stroll in St Peter Woods one afternoon after school and overheard two guys talking about me behind a rock. ‘Anyone can have her,’ said one of them. ‘Just buy her a beer and you can fuck her.’ When I heard that, I was horrified—but, and I’ll swear it even today, the horror was mixed with some rebel pride.
…

My father continued fighting with me: restricting my wanderings, waiting for me on the bus, spying on me in the town. Still, the real breakdown in our house did not come about from my wildness, but because of the good, submissive, devoted Marija.

Actually, I can’t understand to this day how Marija and Jerko endured as long as they did. I was a teenager, minding my business all day long, seeing their suffering out of the corner of my eye. Nonetheless, I began wondering how much they could take. In winter and early spring they lived above us, on Marija’s floor. But the war subsided and the Czechs returned. Father wanted to rent, so he forced the two in summer to move to the crowded ground floor. Jerko sawed aluminum in the morning and built the second floor with father in the afternoon. Ominously, they used my name for it—Ivanka’s floor.

Listening to father and Jerko working was awful. Jerko had a dreamy, slow character. He was a good man but not too bright. Everything that Jerko did was wrong in my father’s eyes. ‘Don’t measure that, damn you,’ father would say if Jerko tried to measure a lath. ‘Let go of that fucking level,’ we would hear from the workshop, ‘the devil take you, are you finished yet?’ Jerko suffered insults in silence, because father had an unpredictable, wild nature, and he knew the job, while Jerko was only learning. All that time the Czechs took turns on Marija’s floor and soiled Jerko’s marriage linen. The boys from Krvavica came back from the war in body bags, the locals gave a hard time to Jerko, calling him “dodger” and asking “where’s your army file,” so he stopped going out. At the family dinner, he would keep his mouth shut. He would gulp his soup and look for an excuse to leave the table, barely holding down his discomfort. He meekly obeyed Marija, worked in silence, building my floor and coming into my father’s estate—until he cracked.
And he cracked in the summer of 1994, when Marija got pregnant.

Marija and he were often whispering in private that spring, which was noticed by everyone except my father. Then one morning they went down to the kitchen together, like a commission. They waited for father to come back from the town and made him and mother sit down and listen. They announced that they didn’t intend to move down that summer and leave their floor to the Czechs. ‘Marija is five months pregnant’, said Jerko, ‘so we can’t squeeze here any more.’

If they had been more tactful, if they had talked to mother first, everything would have been different, I’m sure of it. As it was, it looked like Jerko was opposing my father, and father would never allow that. He exploded. ‘Others made sacrifices to build your floor,’ he said, ‘and now you’ll squeeze until we build Ivanka’s.’ I wasn’t thrilled with my name being used. I backed away from the family quarrel, but I overheard how it ended. Father and Jerko had a short wrangle, Marija tried to butt in, but father despotically shut her mouth. Then Jerko finally said the thing that caused the situation in the first place. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Marija and I will move to Split then. I’ll get a job in Alumont.’

4 Blitva, green vegetable, similar to spinach, typical for Dalmatian cuisine.