Majka and Sina

And I think for those of us who have crossed borders–the artificial beginning is interesting to me. There is a clear-cut: old life, that's old country, and here's there's new life, new country."
–YIYUN LI

As she wrung the water out of the mop, Emina hummed to herself a medley of choruses from childhood songs. The floor was painted concrete, quick and easy to put together – but difficult to clean.

The metal door creaked open then slammed shut. Gojko strutted in as he usually did, but this time more hurriedly. He was a pain at times, but she was always happy to see him. “Gojko,” she acknowledged his presence.

“Joe, Mother. English, please.” He spoke into the air, pulling his duffle bag out from under his cot.

She eyed his stocky frame as she slopped the yarn-headed mop onto the floor. A few drops of water splashed on to her house dress – too big for her, but comfortable. They had had this conversation before, and it had become part of the routine of living in this place. She would tease him a bit. “Okay, Joe-Gojko, you seem to be going somewhere. Let me guess – where this time? Australia? New Zealand?” Then she remembered his most recent machinations. “Oh, wait a minute. What happened to Germany?”

“Never,” he snapped, throwing balls of socks into the bag. “I’ll never ever go to Germany.”

The last thing she had heard was that his friend Milo had arranged a visa wedding with a distant German cousin – or so he said. What Gojko would have to do, how much he’d have to pay, was anyone’s guess. 

With a slight smile she said, “Oh, no, you’re leaving that poor girl at the altar?”

He responded with a silent glare.

A car pulled in close to their portion of the A-frame – the rabbit hutch, she called it when they were first brought there. The engine sputtered and wheezed. She recognised it as Milo’s old Volkswagen and watched as Gojko stuck his head out the door and yelled, “Deset minuta. Okay?”

Having finished with the floor for now, she took out a tattered rag and dipped it into a vinegar-soap mixture she had created herself and kept stored in olive jars. She had several olive jars of soapy concoctions.

“Majka,” he interrupted her routine. “I’m not staying here. And I’m not coming back. Not this time.”

For a man of twenty-seven he was such a boy, so full of unrealistic dreams and unable to do much more than play cards and smoke cigarettes with the other men-boys. Since he returned from the war he’d only managed odd jobs – delivering packages, painting houses and the occasional days of hauling bricks at a construction site. Of course, she couldn’t take him seriously. But she, his majka, felt obliged to play along. It was like being an actress playing the same role again and again with slight variations. She would start as the pleading mother. “But things have changed, sina.”

“What changed?” he snapped. “Nothing changes. The war is over and twelve years now we live in these filthy barracks. This vetse, this…” He strained to think of the English words.

“Shit hole,” Emina piped in.

“Shit hole. Thank you,” he said. “Look at you cleaning all day. We wear clothes of strangers. We eat food from Red Cross. We wait in lines to take shower, wash hands, pee and shit.”

She switched the conversation back into the language of her head, the language the government was now calling Bosnian. “Things have changed – others are leaving. They have found good work and they left. Soon it will be our turn. You need to have some patience.” Her voice was thin and unconvincing, even to herself.

He shook his head and continued scavenging for things to pack. “Where’s Ivo’s box?”

Straightaway, the question angered her. “What do you want with Ivo’s things?”

“You don’t understand.” He spoke quickly. 

She knew he was serious this time. He had never asked for Ivo’s things before. The shoe box contained the few items of Ivo’s Emina managed to collect before their home collapsed around her – a model car that he assembled with his father, a couple of ties that he wore to his job at the supermarket and a silver watch given to Ivo on his eighteenth birthday. From time to time when she couldn’t sleep, she would dig into the box and hold each item, inhaling the musty smell in the ties that once smelled of clean aftershave. 

As she gazed at Gojko, who was rummaging through a donated child’s dresser, she noticed a shadow in a corner – it looked like by a spider’s web. How could she have missed that one? She had wiped the walls down only two days ago. And what did Gojko mean about her cleaning all of the time? She certainly wasn’t going to live like a filthy refugee. Before the war, she and her husband had been professionals, a teacher and a lawyer – people who lived in clean homes with patio gardens.

She suddenly realised what Gojko was after. “Where are you going? You’re not thinking of going to America again, are you?”

“Majka, no. Just where is Ivo’s box?”

She didn’t believe him. “It’s very difficult to get into America. They have a lottery system for immigrants. And if you try to go in through the Mexican border, they’ll shoot you dead.”

“I’m not going to America,” he said firmly. “I’m going to England.”

Relief. “Ah, now I understand. Do give my regards to the Queen.” Chuckling to herself, she returned to her olive jar, dipping the cloth inside and wiping ferocious circles on the Formica top. England was closer. If he didn’t make it, he could return home like the dog that had gone astray and went back to his master for food. This was just like the other times – but the idea that he wanted Ivo’s things still rattled inside her. The mere mention of Ivo’s name was a new wrinkle. She couldn’t remember the last time Gojko even uttered his elder brother’s name – it was always he as in he would have liked that, or his as in it’s his birthday today.

The vinegar smell overpowered the flowery soap smell. It was after all cheap soap – another of the donated products. It had only the slightest fragrance of carnations – everything about it was cheap. Perhaps that’s why she needed to apply it every day – especially along the metal rim, where she could see breadcrumbs and miniscule pellets of dark oil and food particles rolled together. 

“Majka,” Gojko’s meek voice said from behind her. 

She put the cloth down and realised that he had been staring at her again, watching her as she cleaned. The shoebox laid open on the cot with the ties and back wheels of the model car visible. On Gojko’s left wrist, the silver watch band caught a bit of caged light from the ceiling.

“You cannot take that!” Her anger rushed heat into her face. She lunged at him, clawing at his arm. He pushed her away, looking wildly at her as if she had gone mad. She stepped heavily toward him again. This time he grabbed her arm and twisted it behind her back, causing her to spin. She shook and panted, suddenly held prostrate with two hands behind her back. He learned to do that in the army, she thought. What a monster he had become.

“I have to go now, Majka,” he whispered into her ear, his face nuzzling into her shoulder. She could feel the warmth of his breath on her skin and smell the bitter-sweetness of cigarettes.

“You cannot take your brother’s watch. He’ll need it when he comes back.”

Gojko’s voice whispered heavily, “We both know he’s not coming back. I need the money to pay the transport man.”

She spoke briskly, “Smuggler you mean. The refugee smuggler. He’s just a crook. He’ll take your money and leave you stranded somewhere.”

He let go of her wrists and pushed her away. “That’s the chance I’ll have to take.” He hoisted the duffle bag over his shoulder.

In Emina’s eyes he appeared to be a man instead of a boy. How did that happen? Was she too busy cleaning to notice? She had to speak to him as she would a grownup – that was for sure. “I don’t want you to go. I don’t want you to leave me here with your father dead and Ivo missing.”

He gave her a glare as if she had harmed him with words. “You can come with me.”

“No, no, I’ll wait for Ivo.”

He shook his head and rolled his eyes.

She needed another tactic and reached far. “I’m needed here as a translator for all those foreign reporters.”

“What reporters?” He looked straight into her face. “I haven’t seen foreign reporters here in ten years at least.” He paused to think for a moment, then smiled at her. “Okay, I’ll go by myself. I’ll get a good job and send you money and you can come later.”

She smiled back, but couldn’t find the words in English or Bosnian to say that this was impossible.

He continued, “Or maybe, you use the money to move out of here. Hmm? Move to Zagreb.”

“I don’t like Zagreb. I’ll move out when our home is rebuilt,” she said firmly.

“But the last time they built it, it was bombed again. They won’t rebuild it again.”

She stooped to the floor and clutched at the damp cloth that had dropped in her frenzy to get the watch. The entire room, their one-room house, needed cleaning. It was greasy, dusty, disgusting. Unfit for humans. She resumed the circles over the Formica table top. 

Her son’s his eyes transfixed upon her. He finally spoke, “I’ll send you a big postcard from Buckingham Palace.”

That was her cue. “Okay, okay, big shot,” she chortled her words as her eyes focused on the grit under the metal rim. “Give my regards to Prince Charles and don’t forget to rub Prince Harry’s head for good luck.”

She could hear the metal door clang shut and the muffled sound of Milo’s engine spurting as it started up again. For just a fleeting moment, she envied her sina, her son – he had the ability to leave.

Paola Trimarco is a writer and linguist. Her short stories have been published in several literary magazines and some of her stage plays have been professionally performed with the support of Arts Council England. One of her essays was shortlisted by Wasafiri Magazine for their Life Writing Competition 2014. As a linguist, she has authored four textbooks, including Digital Textuality (2015, Palgrave Macmillan), and she has had her research published in several books and journals. She is also a regular contributor to the Literary Encyclopedia.

Creativity in Fiction: Oates’s Blonde and Dear Husband

Joyce Carol Oates’s novel Blonde is a fictional account of the life of Marilyn Monroe and is studied for the ways in which it has crafted fiction with non-fiction and stylistically for its use of multiple points of view. Blonde follows a form of writing that has marked much of Oates’s work, namely, fictionalising of contemporary American events, such as in her novel Black Water (1992), which re-enacted the Chappaquiddick case involving Senator Edward Kennedy, and Zombie (1995), a novella about serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. 

The novel breaks from traditional historical fiction by employing complex narrative devices. Much of the story is told in an intimate third person narrative focussed on Norma Jeane, Monroe’s real name to which Oates has added an ‘e.’ This point of view is interspersed with passages taken from Norma Jeane’s journal in the first person. There are also dreamlike chapters which seem to come from Norma Jeane’s subconscious. Some passages take a more poetic and distant perspective of the ‘Monroe’ story, the reinvented Norma Jeane. Occasionally, the narrative switches to first person accounts from minor characters, such as a reporter and a surfer.

The story starts poetically in a prologue on the subject of death in 1962, the reader knowing that it refers to Marilyn Monroe’s untimely death:

There came death unerring. Death not to be dissuaded. Death-in-a-hurry. Death furiously pedalling. Death carrying a package marked *SPECIAL DELIVERY HANDLE WITH CARE* in a sturdy wire basket behind his seat.

As if a film flashback from the grave, the narrative restarts with Monroe’s childhood as Norma Jeane in 1930’s Los Angeles. There she is raised briefly by her mother and does not know the identity of her absent father. After her mother is hospitalised with mental illness, she ends up in an orphanage. This is followed by a foster home, where Norma Jeane’s developing female body creates tension between her foster parents. Her foster mother deals with this by pushing her foster daughter into marriage at the tender age of sixteen. 

Norma Jean grows into Monroe and it is her relationships with men that dominate the novel and fix the story into a chronological narrative. After her first divorce, her next significant relationships were with Hollywood residents, Cass Chaplin, who was Charlie Chaplin Jr, and Eddy G, the son of Edward G Robinson. This a manage a trois is historically only rumoured to have happened. Although it was with the two men that Monroe became addicted to sleeping pills and had an aborted pregnancy, her relationship with them is depicted positively through Norma Jean’s eyes: “She never felt so content. Never so happy.”

For other men in Monroe’s life, Oates plays with the reader’s knowledge of celebrities and has given them sobriquets reflecting the public perceptions. Her second husband, the baseball player Joe DiMaggio, is “the Ex-Athlete”; her third husband, Arthur Miller, is “the Playwright”; and President John Kennedy is simply “the President.” With each relationship, the objectification of women is further explored, as Monroe becomes the “mammalian Marilyn” and “the Blonde Actress,” removed further from herself as Norma Jean.

Throughout the story there is also an elusive character called The Dark Prince. The reader is told that this prince is not present in her childhood. “Even in daydreams, even with her eyes shut hard, Norma Jeane could not imagine him. He would be waiting for her in the movie dream: this would be her secret happiness.” At one point the name Dark Prince is given to a photographer, named Otto, who makes a small fortune from photographing her in the nude for a calendar (although she only earned $50). But the maturing Monroe later realises that Otto cannot be a Prince since he’s “a pornographer and a pimp.” The name of the Dark Prince is also ascribed to the actor Marlon Brando, who is one of the few men in Norma Jeane’s life not to have a sexual relationship with her. This search for a prince plays with the view that American society has nourished the idea that every woman wants to be princess.

Like Blonde, Dear Husband, a collection of fourteen short stories, departs from conventions of the short story genre with three epistolary stories and two stories that borrow their characters, names unchanged, from real life. 

“A Princeton Idyll” is written as a series of letters between two women, a retired housekeeper and the granddaughter of a once famous professor, the latter is inquiring about her deceased grandfather. This exchange of letters uncovers a world of greed and perversion. ‘Dear Joyce Carol’ also employs lettering writing. Here the author breaks the wall between fiction and non-fiction and is potentially autobiographical. This story chronicles the mental deterioration of an admirer of the author, who receives the disturbed letters, but never replies. The fan’s letters reveal an arrogance in a way that provides humour. “Dear Husband” is a fictionalised account of the infanticide carried out by Andrea Yates, a much-publicised case in the United States. Told in a letter to her husband after the murders of their five children, Lauri Lynn’s ramblings and self-justification reflect upon the role of women as wives in a supposedly post-feminist society, alongside the way the mind can distort religion; throughout the letter Lauri claims ‘God instructed me’. As with other stories from this collection, social satire mixes with violence and mental fragility.

Another fictionalised history, “Landfill” tells of a missing college student whose body is found in “amid mounds of trash, cans, bottles, Styrofoam and cardboard packages, rancid raw garbage, stained and filthy clothing” as the result of a fraternity hazing. While this story deals sensitively with the grieving parents and the mystery and callousness behind their son’s death, it has been criticised for its mixing of fact and fiction. Identifiable as being based on a true-life story, Oates has changed the location of this event, but has retained the original date of the fraternity murder. 

The “The Heart Sutra,” the lover of a famous poet who has long suffered under the weight of the poet’s celebrity, suffers even more at his sudden departure. As the poet is meditating and chanting at a Zen Buddhist retreat in the Adirondacks, his lover reviews their life together. In these reminiscences, fictional and real characters are mixed. The poet Derek Walcott is a friend of a poet, but he makes himself unreachable to the poet’s lover. The reader is taken along this psychological exploration of fame, love and raising a small child from birth, as it becomes slowly apparent to the reader that the lover plans on killing their child, as well as herself. 

This playfulness of form and subject gives the collection texture and style, alongside the emotional intensity characteristic of Oates’s work.

Paola Trimarco is a writer and linguist. Her short stories have been published in several literary magazines and some of her stage plays have been professionally performed with the support of Arts Council England. One of her essays was shortlisted by Wasafiri Magazine for their Life Writing Competition 2014. As a linguist, she has authored four textbooks, including Digital Textuality (2015, Palgrave Macmillan), and she has had her research published in several books and journals. She is also a regular contributor to the Literary Encyclopedia.

Trimarco. P. "Blonde" by Joyce Carol Oates. The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 23 November 2015

Trimarco, P. "Dear Husband: Stories" by Joyce Carol Oates. The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 06 March 2015