My mother liked drinking coffee, but did not dare do it in the presence of my father. As soon as he left for work, she would quickly prepare her favorite beverage. This coffee, still almost boiling hot, she would drink reconnoitering through the window, lest he should return suddenly and catch her with the cup in hand. As soon as she had drunk it up, she would wash the cup and put it exactly back in place, making sure there was no traces which would betray her. If she did not spot him returning, and he was suddenly at the door, she would quickly spill the rest of the coffee down the drain and hide the cup, later to wash it rapidly and return it to the exact place. But if he noticed that the cup had been used, if he saw or thought he saw that the cup was not resting in absolutely the same position in the cupboard, he would shout at her.

Their marriage happened simply: they gave her to the first man who asked to marry her. As she had been habituated, in her first family, entirely to the hardest physical labor, she easily found a role for herself in the new home, and my father’s family knew how to exploit her diligence. But, they simply did not possess enough land of their own, for such a pair of working hands, so they sent her off to work for hire, for other people who owned land, and by nightfall she would return with two daily wages. But even this was not entirely to their liking:

– I can’t get my daughters married, because of you! – my father’s mother would criticize her. – Why do you labor so much in other people’s fields; why don’t you work slowly, like everybody else? When people see you in the field, how you step so far ahead of the girls, they will say that the girls are lazy, nonworkers, so nobody will propose to marry them.

– I don’t know otherwise. – My mother obviously felt guilty.

– And, you eat too much – the nana would add. – Let the girls eat first; and for us, whatever remains.

My father spent most of the time on the terrain. He worked in some agricultural firm, whose landholdings were just a few kilometers outside our village. And yet, he claimed that he could not return home each single day. He preferred to lodge in nearby villages, with various widows, or in taverns there, close to loose women. He was not in the habit of bringing any money home.

My father had three sisters. The eldest of them was married and lived in a nearby village. The two younger sisters, though, were still unmarried. When I was three years old, the youngest of them, Mariya, once entered the stable to take care of the cows. My father came in after her, closed the door, and, supposedly, tried to rape her. She struggled, grabbed the pitchfork, and tried to stab him through. Attracted by the screams, her sister Yelena ran into the stable, held Mariya by the hands, and saved my father from the pitchfork. And yet, the family agreed to throw him out of the house. Attempts by neighbors to conciliate them did not produce any real result.

My mother and I found ourselves thrown out into the street, also. Soon Father found, in the village, some dilapidated, half-falling-down building, in which a neighbor stored cattle fodder. This neighbor cleared a part of one room, and placed us behind a canvas curtain which represented a demarcation line between us three and the bales of hay. There we spent something like one year. As if nothing had happened, my father continued with his old rhythm of life, and mother took me along, whenever she went to other people’s fields. The only news was mother’s decision to build a house from her own savings.

Never again, except through an intermediary, did my father communicate with his parents and his youngest sister, and the middle sister was not much in the mood to tolerate him either. And yet, somehow he eked out a permission to build, on a small piece of land inside my grandfather’s front yard, a tiny house. But, as soon as the foundations for this had been dug, aunt Mariya persuaded the grandfather to withdraw the permission, and to forbid us to continue building. And, in fact, grandfather went to Court, and his application was granted: the court ordered that the foundations be filled up, and the courtyard restored to previous condition. Father lodged a complaint of his own, found several witnesses true and false, and overturned the verdict: now he could proceed with the construction. The foundations were re-dug, on them a crummy little room was put together, a cellar was dug under, another little room was added, then, a while later, the third room. Several years later, a first floor grew on top of this. In the meantime, I got a brother. The birth of a male child constituted a valid reason for the grandfather to allow the completion of the house. “You can’t let your grandson drag himself homeless through other people’s backyards, people will laugh at you.” Grandfather was bothered by this prospect – particularly by the possibility of being repeatedly laughed at – so, he softened. And yet, each new room, as the construction of it commenced, meant new litigation. The legal battles lasted eight years – just about the same as the construction of that little house at the lowest end of grandfather’s court yard. And the house was nothing much: small, made of bricks, plastered by the mud that had been originally intended for the village graveyard.

The first time I was solidly beaten was not long after my brother was born. He was a plump, sluggish baby. While I was teaching him to walk, in our courtyard, in one moment I tripped over his small feet, and I fell over him. Although I managed to protect him from any injury, the little boy cried. This upset my father, who ran out of the house, took the boy to his chest, and started hitting me on the head. When I fell, he proceeded to kick me; and he kicked me and kicked me in various corners of the courtyard. My mother wrestled my little brother, who was now all tears, and rushed with him into the house. Forgetting me.

The only person who ever visited us, but only when my father was not at home and when the chances were small that he would barge in, was my aunt. Her courtyard was immediately behind our house. Several windows of our home, including the tiny window of our cellar, looked in the direction of her courtyard.

My aunt was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. I adored her slanted eyes that gave her a veritable Japanese look. If my father did arrive while she was visiting, she would stand up and leave before he could actually enter the house.

When he was going out, my father warned my brother and me to stay inside: not to leave the courtyard, not even to step too close to the gate or fence. And so the two of us, at a decent distance behind the fence, peered out, to see how other children played. One day, while the two of us played, mother was baking bread in the kitchen, and preparing lunch also, so the smell tickled our noses and stomachs. We complained to each other as to how hungry we were, but just then, we noticed two women, strangers, stepping up to our gate and trying to open it.

Mother soon came out and opened the gate. Hearing that the women were looking for her husband, she invited them into the courtyard. The women did come in, sat at our table on the patio, while mother began to cook the coffee. But my brother and I were too hungry to wait for the unknown persons to leave. When I asked mother if we could eat, the younger of the two women asked whose children those were.

– Mine and Zdravko’s. Which other children would call me mother? – answered my mother.

– Sorry, I didn’t know you had children. He told me you and he were alone and in the process of divorce – said the younger woman a bit confusedly and a bit insolently.

It turned out that Father had promised this woman that she would live in our house until his divorce from my mother was complete. Mother drove these two women out of the courtyard, and only then gave us to eat. As she fed us, she was wiping tears from her face. I felt sympathy for her, although I did not understand what had hurt her so much; my younger brother had no idea about any of it.

In the evening, as soon as father returned, mother sent us out into the courtyard. But I heard her ask father about the two women. Father claimed not to know them. Then he started beating her up: the questions had unnerved him.

Translated from Serbian into English by Dr Aleksandar B. Nedeljkovic

Copyright©Alexandria Press, 2006

Serbian version of Svetlana Djordjevic's novel Persecution is to be published by Alexandria Press soon.