The Museum of Modern Love(11)

‘Pah, no soldier, that one. Italian,’ she said, lifting her chin.

She remembers a boy who sang her a love song in a sea cave in Dubrovnik. He had been a Marco too, probably dead now. Her daughter had this Marco in captivity for seventy-five days. It was a long time for a handsome boy like that, she thought, to be staring down his lens at Marina and the years in her face. Still, for all the MoMA guards observing the crowd, it would be Marco who would dive in front of her daughter to stop a blade or bullet. She was sure of that. For that she almost forgave him the Tom Ford sweater. She knew the lure of beautiful things.

Danica saw leaves burning the ground red and orange. Light running through trees like water. The fabric of her lungs was molten silver and her throat mother of pearl. No fear. No flag. No wind. Hadn’t that been a Rumi poem? She saw ahead a man on a white horse and all the breath went out of her. He rode between trees, dancing between bullets. Vojo!

‘They cannot kill me, Danica,’ he shouted to her. He was young with the eyes of a tiger, wild and full of light. ‘If you believe in something you can never die.’

She had nursed him on her lap. She had staunched the blood. She had rolled him over and saw that his back was riddled with bullet holes.

‘Fill them with tobacco!’ he said, laughing.

Her hands were big and clumsy as she plugged the wounds. She rolled him back and his tiger’s eyes were undimmed.

‘We are the dragons of the past,’ he said.

After the war they had married. She had borne him two children, first Marina and then her brother Velimir. Vojo said to her, his voice raw with ?ljivovica, ‘The age of heroes is gone. Nobody believes any more.’

‘Why would we die for our beliefs when we can live with our doubts?’ she asked, because she wanted to see him smile. If only he still smiled at her.

‘It was all theatre, Dani. You know that. There is nothing left to believe in.’

‘Believe in me. Believe in our children. We have a daughter and a son and they will need everything we can give them.’

He wasn’t a hero then. Not President Tito’s and not hers. He had given all his fight to the war.

She dreamed of him on his white horse, unmoving in a summer field, holding the white flag. The same way Marina had made it look in that photograph. How had she dared to steal her mother’s dream?

‘Dani!’ Vojo called to her. ‘I surrender. I do surrender.’

‘No!’ she cried. ‘Don’t surrender. Never surrender! I could not love you . . .’

But it wasn’t true. She had gone on loving him long after he’d left her for another woman, a younger, more agreeable, less attractive woman; still she had loved him and longed for him to come home.

She remembered Marina, just a girl, asking, ‘What if I can’t be that brave? As brave as Tata?’

‘Are you born of metal or of sand?’ she had asked her daughter.

How deep she had buried her own stories of the war. Why did she never tell Marina when she had the chance? Why did Vojo never say to the children, ‘Look at your Majka—you know what she did?’

Because she was a woman and men did not talk of women in that way after the war. It was as if it had been only a man’s war. And Vojo knew the night sweats and the way she woke up reaching for people who were no longer there, beating at the bedclothes to stop the fire.

In the museum there were so many faces and sometimes when Danica looked at them, every face belonged to her Marina.

‘Run because you can,’ she wished she had told her daughter. ‘Run because you are born of horses and bullets and fire burning the earth and war lighting up the sky. You are born of the people who won. Never forget that.’

At night, while Marina slept, Danica ran as ghosts run, measuring her speed in trees and stars, crossing Central Park and back again.

Some nights she stood and watched her daughter wake to the soft peals of the alarm and drink from a glass beside her bed. Danica saw that Marina was starving for sunshine. For sleep. For days and weeks to rest through the night. But for now there was this hourly ritual to hydrate her body ready for the seven-hour day of sitting and not moving.

Being dead for three years, Danica understood the slow starvation of a life without laughter and friends and conversation.

The alarm sounded again, marking the next hour, and Danica saw Marina wake and untangle herself from her sheets. Danica does not know that Marina has been dreaming of the old apartment in Makedonska Street. She had been hiding in the cake tin until her mother found her and ate her. But Marina had realised that she was a snake, and she slid through her mother’s body and wriggled away across the floor. And there was her father, General Vojo Abramovi?, on a white horse. Marina the snake had cried out, but her voice was made of air.

Danica can hear Marina urinating in the bathroom, then sees her return to bed.

From across the room, Danica says to her, ‘They cannot kill you. If you believe in something you will never die.’

Marina turns and stares straight at her ghost mother. Danica is thrilled. Marina had sensed her!

‘Are you born of metal or of sand?’ she asked, but her daughter was laying her head on the pillow and closing her eyes.

Danica stood sentinel by the bed and, later, when Marina took her seat at the table in the centre of the atrium, Danica took her place on the balcony. She forgets nothing. She notices everything. When I go by I salute her, though she cannot see me.