KAKO CES SAMA - ON MY OWN by Marija Rakić Mimica
Translated by Tatjana Radmilo
“Fuck, why?” my mother screamed when I told her for the first time that I was leaving my husband.
I’m not happy, how’s that for a reason.
She was sitting on the sofa, her hair in a mess, dressed in a white robe with a cigarette in her hand, constantly scratching her face in a nervous way, like an allergic puppy.
“How are you going to survive on your own?” she looked at me as if I told her that I intended to travel to Mars on my own, in a laboratory manufactured jet aircraft.
I don’t know. Fuck it, I don’t know how I’m going to survive on my own.
Hell, I don’t understand what it is with pushing the concept of women’s independence and then troubling us with the idea that we have to handle all life situations without anybody’s help. For one thing, I don’t know how to top up oil in my car on my own. Once I made a mistake: as I was nervously pulling out a dipstick and putting it back, looking for markings for minimum and maximum, I was wiping it with a cloth and oil dropped all over the engine. Or wherever. I don’t know car parts and I don’t plan to know them. Later, while I was driving, I was waiting in panic for the smoke to start rising form under the hood, which I barely know how to lift up; last time I tried to do it, something got stuck and then I hysterically pulled it up and down until I forced it to open. Then I gaped at the engine with no comprehension. Since then, I just kindly ask a gentleman at a service station to check my oil, water and tyre pressure, I pay him and go in peace. Why should I do everything myself? There are people from different walks of life, I do too many things myself anyway, in addition to raising a six-year-old girl starting school in September.
I’m not afraid of loneliness. I’m scared of time that is ahead of me: shock reflected in confusion and real physical pain I feel because I’ve lost my partner (which I could compare to his Godforbid! death), anger and pangs of conscience, that I try to hide away from my child by acting as a monkey with a wide, unnatural smile whenever I see her around, meanwhile, I cry as I wash my face in the morning or most often when I’m in the car, so I’m actually making an effort, as my psychiatrist says, to channel my emotions in a meaningful direction. I’m scared of anxiety and panic attacks which incapacitate me for daily activities, leaving me walking around my apartment as a frightened roe deer, my minds focusing on things, such as where I’m going to live to how I’m going to pay new rental and cover monthly overheads, purchase of a new car because the current one is on the death bed, just like my marriage.
I’m lying. Most of all, I’m scared of the time after I submit request for mandatory consultation of spouses to the Social Welfare Centre. After that, I’ll be waiting for their summons while thousands of thriller scenarios with elements of horror will be going on in my mind: a socialist room with rotting and damaged brown furniture, my spouse and I sitting on wooden battered chairs, waiting for a blonde lady, her hair tied up in a casual bun and her red glasses perched on top of her nose, to acquaint us with legal, psychological and social consequences of divorce, the importance of child’s welfare when such a decision is adopted and preparation of joint parental custody plan. She’s going to tell us all about it, she’ll help us to learn everything. Without looking us straight in the eyes once.
***
“Have you thought about what you want to do with your life’” Zoran’s question caused in me a sensation similar to that when I teach a new lesson and accidentally scratch the board with my nail, making my arms and legs shivery and goose-skinned.
No. I’ve no idea what I want from my life. I’m even surprised that I know what I don’t want. I don’t want to be married. I don’t want to be a part of this legally and socially arranged union of two people, imposing on me rights and obligations, I don’t want to comply with socially conditioned need to “belong” to somebody and thus regulate my sexual and biological drives all for would-be feeling of security. I haven’t planned or imagined my future in this way, in my naive twenties I had no idea what it meant to live with a man, to have a child, to raise it with compromises, or how co-existence with somebody’s virtues and faults or everyday consideration of somebody’s shortcomings and constant attempts at preservation and nurturing of love looked like. And finally brutal realization that all you have shared for years with somebody, closest to you in this rotten world, just collapses and is no more. Not suddenly, but gradually the desire to correct all the things bothering you when it comes to his behaviour, habits or life energy, that I fell in love with, and later sucked me out of all my energy that the only thing left for me was to run away. So, I ran away, killed it all in a single blow.
“All right, we’ll talk about it”, I lie to him now, just as I’ve been lying to myself for the last two years. This is just a common marital crisis, I hear the voices in my head, I had so many sessions of psychotherapy on my own, making hysterical sobbing, wiping my nose and loud swearing while behind the wheel of my car a wonderful routine. You talk to yourself; nobody bothers you and nobody pretends to listen to you.
“You’re lying”, he said and put down the phone.
***
Although I proposed to go our separate ways amicably in order to end the divorce proceedings farce as soon as possible, Zoran didn’t agree with Ema living with me and seeing him on a regular basis so he filed a suit, supplementing it with a report on mandatory consultation, not older than six months and proof of participation at the first family mediation meeting. Mediation at the Social Welfare Centre, preceding the divorce was worse than I had imagined it: the lady neither had a bun nor red glasses, but an austere and thin face with no visible traces of a smile, and her role was to try to improve communication between the spouses in order for us to jointly analize how and when the problems had occurred and which causes had led to our separation, to acquaint us with legal, psychological and social consequences of the divorce. Yada yada yada. Zoran was sitting next to me, without talking to or looking at me even once, and the lady was addressing him much more often than me because he was mostly giving moral lectures and monologues on my infidelity and not respecting the man, that I, rightly said, had chosen for myself. He was talking to such excess that at one moment I just decided to keep quiet and observe a vein on his forehead, looking like a gossamer thread, becoming more and more visible as he was getting upset while talking that he couldn’t have come to any kind of agreement with me because I hadn’t wanted to accept any of his proposals, I wanted Ema only for myself and I wasn’t giving him a chance to be a father to his girl.
I can’t stand monologues and bloody gossamers on his forehead. I stopped talking again: at that moment, when I finally decided to leave, I still kept silent as he continued with preaching from his honourable altar and calling for mediation because I didn’t want Ema moving every week, I wanted her to have a home. I didn’t plan to forbid her seeing her father, I was not a demon, as he presented the image of me to these outsiders, who had been included into our intimate circle by pure chance and had no feelings for us, for the break up of our love and fear of my girl, who currently didn’t know whether she would live with Mom or Dad. You ego-tripping male, I’ve just fallen out of love and am taking care of my child.
***
I went through mediation at the Croatian Mediation Association, the famous one that was conducted out of the Social Welfare Centre, and in which the role of mediator was allegedly irreplaceable, while if you asked me, I would gladly replace the lady nodding her head at every word of my soon to be ex-husband, and ignoring me because I had no respect for father figure and just waiting for the two of us to come to an agreement so that she could go and have a cigarette in the kitchenette, holding it in her manicured and bony fingers, as she closed on yet another case, with any other human being having a little piece of heart and soul. I would like her to stop for a moment and ask us how and where did our love disappear. Somewhere along the way, I would say to her, between romance killing routine and mid-life crisis.
During my divorce proceedings, I pretended to be a human being in front of my child: crying mostly in the toilet or in the car, cursing his father’s mother only when she was not around me, loudly wondering at my stupidity and naivete only in solitude, for a while, I was officially and seriously damaged woman. After summer holidays, Zoran gave up on his request for shared custody; due to unknown reason, Ema’s welfare, I guess, somehow became irrelevant when he realized what it meant to live with a child on his own, he offered me cash payment for the apartment we had lived in and all joint investments in property, that he had inherited from his parents, and a new modern car, that we had bought six months before I left, in order to travel over Europe during winter school holidays.
Although after twelve years, I finally bought two-tiered red and white curtains for the living room and refurbished most of the rooms with lighter shades and more modern furniture, I didn’t stay in that apartment much longer. Some mornings, before going to work, I would have coffee on the balcony, that I completely adapted to myself and in each sip I would feel the taste of our life that was, when I always poured coffee in two cups, and the cherry tree in our neighbour’s garden suddenly became so small and thin, as if it had never spread its kitsch crown into our apartment.
I decided to by a new apartment during the second semester of Ema’s fourth grade, when we decided that we didn’t want to live in the suburbs any more so we would look at several apartments a week in the city centre and looked forward to each new apartment as if it would be our home. We decided to buy a forty meters square apartment in Bačvice. During moving, when I was pulling out a box with our things from one of the last lorries, I saw a neighbour on the balcony next to ours, waving at me and smiling with distrust.
“Neighbour, are you going to carry it up all on your own?” she cried out, leaning over the rail, while her false, homemade perm suddenly vibrated.
“Yes, I am”, I said and smiled to my girl, holding the entrance door to the building for me.