Page 25 of Slanting Towards the Sea

TWENTY-TWO

FOR A TIME AFTER my mother died, Vlaho did his best to put me back together. He lay next to me stroking my back while I stared at the wall, mourning the mother I no longer had, the mother I had never had, the mother I would never be.

He cooked for me on the days he wasn’t working and tried to lighten my mood by bearing small gifts.

A book on olive oil production, a special blend of coffee, a packet of roasted chestnuts from the vendor near the town bridge.

At night, he would press himself next to me, and whisper in my ear, “Don’t worry, baby, we’ll get through this.

It’s going to get better.” Platitudes that made me close up even tighter.

Sometimes, he would try to paint the future for us, a bright one, but I could hear him struggling between words, each turn a road we couldn’t take.

“We will travel,” he would say, because he couldn’t say we would have children, but we didn’t have money for traveling, and he knew me well enough that he could hear me calling him out on this even if I wasn’t saying anything.

“We’ll build a small house on one of Zadar’s islands and spend our weekends and vacations there,” he’d say.

Which only reminded me that he had weekends and vacations, because the rest of the time he was working, while for me the time was always the same, a block of indistinguishable minutes, hours, days.

Slowly, it must have dawned on him that it wasn’t wise to paint such a rosy vision of our future, and maybe it even dawned on him, as it had on me, that we didn’t have much of a future at all.

On some nights, he would reach for me the way he used to, the need growing inside him, obvious in his heavy breath and lingering touch, but this reaching felt useless now that I knew it would lead to nothing, a mere carnal chore, and most times, I would just stiffen against his touch, and he would pull back, and turn toward the ceiling, and I would feel the weight of his disappointment sitting heavy on top of him.

In those moments, I hated myself for not being able to give him what he wanted, but there was also a spiteful part of me that almost rejoiced in his pain. He should suffer too, I thought. But no amount of his suffering ever felt enough, he would never suffer as much as I did.

His mother called often, and sometimes, after catching up, he would grow serious, monosyllabic in his answers, and he would slant his body away from me so that I couldn’t hear what she was saying, and then he would try to look casual as he got up and went to our room, as if to look for something.

But I could hear him whisper-consoling her, telling her that he liked his life the way it was, that he did have a family, that he knew she was alone, with him living so far away, his father being away for work, with Ane gone, and he was sorry that was the case, but that couldn’t be helped; there was nothing he could do about it.

And he would end the call, but wouldn’t come out of the room for minutes more, and I could feel him suspended between the rock and the hard place, and I hated the fact that I was the hard place.

His mother’s words came to me often those days, that request that had shocked me into stupor on the day of my mother’s funeral.

I wished I could yell at her, strip her of humanity the way she had stripped me, and tell her how utterly unfair and selfish her request had been.

That day had felt like its own kind of death, her words a rogue wave that slammed me into the sharp rocks below the surface, cutting open, letting blood, mauling me.

I had been so angry for so long because of this, but the truth is, after that first tumble, the wave started receding, and what was left was this: a glint of relief.

Slowly revealing itself, over time, in the rare moments I was ready to look.

A way out of this agony. For both him and me.

Even though it had been building gradually, the last of the fog lifted in an instant, and in this one moment I knew, beyond any doubt, that I had to divorce him.

It was a Saturday morning, four months after Mom’s death, and as always, the town filled with people for Saturday ?pica, the aimless ritual of cruising around, showing off cute outfits and made-up hair, pretending not to be posing for the photographers who were snapping shots they would later upload to online galleries titled Walk Around Town .

These galleries that everyone pretended not to care about, but secretly hoped to be caught in.

The frivolity of this ritual annoyed me, but I liked going to the town’s center on Saturday mornings for reasons all my own.

When I was a child, my mom frequented the farmers market there on Saturdays.

She worked Mondays through Fridays and the farmers market closed on Sundays, so this was the only time she could do her shopping.

She’d take me with her to help carry the plastic bags filled with vegetables and fish and meat, a full week’s worth of provisions.

The bags would strain the muscles in my arms until I worried they’d snap off, and the handles would dig so deep into my palms that it would take hours for the grooves to recede.

After we’d lifted the heavy load into the trunk of our car parked on the city wall, we would descend back into town, where Mom would treat me to a slice of cake while she had her coffee and a cigarette.

I don’t remember us talking much, apart from her always asking if the cake was good, but there was a shared closeness in those minutes.

After she died, I felt a need to reenact this ritual from my childhood. I thought it was more fitting to honor her this way than by bowing over her grave. And Vlaho liked that this was something we could do together, that I was agreeing to leave the house and be with him.

It was August. Vlaho and I had coffee on the old Roman Forum and were weaving our way through throngs of tourists on Kalelarga, the main and widest street in the old town, when we ran into one of his colleagues, an office-mate from the days when Vlaho first started working at the bank.

The man was pushing a stroller, a toddler sleeping inside, and his wife held both her palms against her visibly pregnant belly.

Vlaho shook hands with him, and introduced me, and the man introduced us to his wife. Her smile was wide and her skin seemed to be shimmering in the noon sun. The expression “pregnant women glow” sounded true to me for the first time.

“Congratulations,” Vlaho said. “I knew you had a baby, but didn’t know there was another on the way.”

“Yeah,” his colleague said, “we’re not getting any sleep anyway, and let’s just say we’re on a mission to get out of the diaper phase as soon as possible.”

I traded a fake smile with his wife. It annoyed me, this bragging by way of soliciting sympathy. Poor you , I almost said, I can’t imagine how hard that must be .

But what Vlaho did next imprinted itself on me forever, marking the beginning of our end.

He kneeled down to look into the stroller, and put his hand over the sleeping child’s ankle, tenderly, the way a flower falls into a grave.

It lasted only a second, but there was such warmth to the gesture that it split me in half.

I had never seen Vlaho show interest in other people’s children, and after the diagnosis, he’d been adamant that he was fine with us not having any.

But in that moment, I saw that he carried inside himself the immense potential, if not desire, to become the world’s best dad.

For the first time, I could see his mother’s point clearly. And the worst part was, I agreed with it.

The realization might have been lightning quick, but acting on it took time.

I couldn’t just tell Vlaho I was leaving him.

He would never have accepted my reasoning.

So I bided my time, slowly receding, the way the tide retreats from the shore.

My inability to find a job had already built a barrier between us; I only had to deepen it.

And I did. I “forgot” about his next birthday, and I “wasn’t in the mood” to celebrate any of our many anniversaries.

I went to Lovorun more often, even when there was nothing to do, and never asked him to come with me.

I pretended to have a headache on Saturday mornings so as to avoid going for coffee together.

I refused to go with him to Cavtat for the All Saints’ holiday, saying I needed to visit Mom’s grave, which of course I didn’t end up doing.

And he took it all in stride, because he understood that the diagnosis, and my mom’s death on top of that, had devastated me, and he was giving me time.

I had known he would, I’d counted on it.

I had seen him give all the time in the world to his mother, hovering, waiting for something to change.

I had known the essence of him, is what I’m saying.

And I used it against him.

The day I told Vlaho I wanted a divorce was a bleak November day.

We were eating lunch in silence—there had already been so much silence for so long between us.

I looked at him over the mist rising from the hot chicken soup, that face I loved so much, and I forced myself to utter the words: “I don’t want to be married anymore. ”

He must’ve not taken it seriously, because he raised the spoon to his mouth, emptied it, swallowed. “What are you talking about?” He put the spoon down.

I told him I didn’t love him anymore. It took my all to keep a blank face through the lie, to him who knew what every twitch on it meant. But the shock must’ve blinded him to the nuances of my expression. “You can’t be serious.”

“It’s been happening a long time now. Coming on gradually, for years.

You must have noticed. I—I’m sorry.” And to illustrate my point, I could easily summon all the distances growing between us ever since we moved from Zagreb, his career and the lack of mine, his reproductive health, and the lack of mine, but between these tentpoles of our unhappiness, hundreds of hours of missed connections, intimacies turned down, conversations not being had.

He stared at the wall, his eyes turning hazel behind the veil of tears. My heart squeezed and I almost balked. But the small voice kept saying, You’re doing it, you finally said it! If you hang on for just a minute, you will have set both of you free.

Thus began the long months of back-and-forth. Our relationship undulating like a wave.

Him, trying to reach me. It can’t be true. You’re the love of my life, and I know I’m yours. I know it even if you’re saying it’s not true. A love like ours can’t just disappear. Please, Ivona, look at me. Look me in the eye and say you don’t love me.

His anger when he couldn’t get through to me. Why are you doing this? Why are you pushing me away? Won’t you at least try? Is what we have not worth putting in a tiny bit of effort?

The bargaining. What if I take an unpaid leave and we go somewhere, reinvent ourselves? What if we move back to Zagreb, where our love was strongest? What if we go to Tarifa, or someplace else—you choose!—and start anew?

The devastation. Him curling up in a ball, his shoulders heaving. These were the moments that were the hardest for me, that tested my resolve the most. Seeing him like that, I couldn’t help wrapping my body around his, eager for it to convey what I’d banned myself from saying through words.

We would make love in those moments, the kind of love we had never made before, the desperate, beseeching kind that left our souls bare and flesh tender and achy.

And as we lay in the exhaustion of it, the wave would start again.

I know you love me. I know your soul, and you couldn’t make love to me like this if you didn’t.

And I would reach deep into the cruelest part of myself, one that resented him for all my losses, and tell him that I did care for him, but didn’t love him the way he deserved to be loved. Not anymore.

Having your heart broken is a clean, even righteous kind of pain.

But intentionally breaking the heart of someone you love—there’s no filthier, uglier task.

It felt as though I had taken my own essence—the deep feelings, the empathy, the compassion—and mangled it into something morbid and disgusting.

The kind of person I hated, the soul I didn’t want to call my own.

It was on anger that this ordeal finally ended.

We were having breakfast, and he declared that he’d gotten us plane tickets, a surprise trip to Madeira, where there was a botanical garden I’d always wanted to see.

It would be our first plane ride, and mark the new beginning of our life and he didn’t care that he’d spent our last savings on it.

I didn’t even look at him when I said no.

And for a moment, he didn’t say anything back, but I could feel his frustration swelling, so overpowering that it made me look at him.

His face was at once distraught and livid, and he reached for a pen lying on the table, and stabbed his thigh with it.

He froze, as if he too couldn’t believe what he’d done, but then a new influx of resolve came from somewhere deep within him, and he stabbed himself again. Again and again.

I yelled for him to stop, and ran to him, dropped to my knees to pry the pen from his hand.

Once I did, he just sank into the chair, stunned.

And I was stunned too, because I’d never seen him like this, never thought him capable of inflicting self-harm.

I went to take the alcohol from the cabinet, horrified at what he’d done, at what I’d made him do.

The pen had left small blue punctures in his skin.

I ran a cotton ball over them, disinfecting them, and he didn’t even wince.

He felt unreachable, out of it, and this is when I realized my presence there wasn’t making the transition easier for him, it was making it harder.

That evening, I packed up and left.