It was a stab with a poisoned dagger, unexpected and mean. I don’t know whether father understood, but I did: the moving wasn’t an alternative, but the cause and purpose of the conversation. Marija and Jerko prepared everything—found jobs, gave a deposit for a small flat—and in his inhuman stubbornness my father had released them from the obligation to live with them. He was caught in his own trap, and he knew it. The sloppy apprentice whom he had taught something would leave and work for others, for the competition. His face darkened so much that I feared he would suffer a stroke. But I wasn’t looking at him, I was looking at mother. She was washing the dishes, her back turned to the family drama. When Jerko made his announcement, her face just barely twitched. She knew, I thought, she knew this would happen.

I waited for everything to calm down and then climbed to Marija’s floor. My name was used at the table, father came between me and Marija, and I wanted Marija to know whose side I was on. I knocked and entered the couple’s room. I saw Marija and Jerko holding hands. I can still see them in my mind’s eye. The boil had broken, it was plain to see: they needed so little to be happy, less than anyone I have known or will ever know.

They moved away in June. Father didn’t go out to see them off, mother cried all the time. I was a high-school senior and I knew for certain that I couldn’t live in that house without Marija.
…

‘Want some coffee?’ mother asks. I say yes. Not that I crave coffee, but she needs something to do.

She makes coffee and brings it quickly. She always made good Turkish coffee, dense, sweet, with plenty of brown froth that forms a pleasant coating. She puts the coffeepot on the table and brings three cups.

We sit in silence. We can’t talk because a conversation would be like a minefield. We can’t play the assigned roles because they lead to a precipice. Mother can’t ask me about my job and my company because my career is taboo in this house, a viper’s nest that took me away from family and marriage. She can’t ask me about men, that would be the worst. I don’t want to talk about the demolition because they see the demolished floor as my floor, and I don’t want it to be mine, I don’t want to have anything to do with that pile of rubble, now or ever. Since we can’t talk, mother and I are silent. I only break the silence when it starts being embarrassing.

‘I’d like to see father,’ I say.
‘Don’t wake him up. You’ll see him later.’
‘Where’s Stipe?’
‘I’ll go call him,’ says mother. She gets up, seemingly relieved for having a reason to leave.

She goes to Stipe’s room and closes the door. I hear them talking behind the door, but I can’t make out the words. The discussion is long and obviously unpleasant. Mother comes back alone. She’s not saying anything, there’s no need, I know it all. Stipe doesn’t want to come. He doesn’t want any business with the whore. A whore, that’s what I am to my younger brother, and it’s just one of the things that haven’t changed here.
…

In May 1995, Marija and Jerko moved out, I was about to graduate from high school, and Stipe was in the first year of a vocational school in Makarska. Hungarians and Lithuanians came to Marija’s floor in June, but they disappeared in early July because there was talk of a renewed war.

Stipe and I went to the town in the same morning bus, but I had more work and stayed longer. I don’t know if father told Stipe to spy on me, or if Stipe did it out of his innate spite. Anyway, he saw me that July, two days before my high school graduation, and reported it to father.

What he saw was not something I’d take pride in. From today’s perspective, I’d say that my standards were pretty low at that time. I was with an older man. Stipe was strolling in Osejava park and saw us involved in something quite undignified. He did what little scumbags do: he caught the first bus, ran home and told father everything.

Father started beating me as soon as I crossed the doorstep. I don’t know how long he beat me, twenty minutes or two hours. He started beating me in the hallway, he beat me in the kitchen, he beat me in my room. Swollen and blue, I didn’t leave the house. Except once: two days later, still covered in bruises, I went before the graduation board, graduated and received my diploma. I spent another week in my father’s house, mostly in my room, steering clear of the others. On the sixth of July I took the county grant in Makarska, put my essentials in a sports bag, stole one hundred kuna from father’s wallet and ran away in a bus to Zagreb. The next morning, I went straight from the bus to the entrance exam for pharmacy and passed. I stayed with a girl from Makarska I knew from school. She was one year older and studied theater directing. I spent the Zagreb summer in her place, far from the sea and tourists. I called home. My father picked up the phone the first time, and I hung up immediately. Mother picked it up the next day. I told her that I was in Zagreb and that I would be studying. I refused to tell them where I lived. I don’t know if they were looking for me, but if they were, they never found me.