I’m Going to Live a Hundred Years!

 

 

Essay by Katarina Radović

 

 

Written as part of the project I’m Going to Live a Hundred Years!, December 2024

 

 

 

I didn’t want to die – I wanted to live to my 100^th year!

 

I was born in 1920 in Knjaževac, a small town in Eastern Serbia, part of the then Kingdom of Yugoslavia. I married once, and have two children, three grandchildren and two great grandchildren.

 

I died in 2013 in Belgrade, the capital of the Republic of Serbia (as what was left of the country was then called), on the night of a Tango Festival, as my dear granddaughter K., dancing till the break of dawn, slowly and unknowingly accompanied me to the Other World. I didn’t want to die, of course – I wanted to live up to my 100^th year. I admit I had always been very much afraid of death. I passionately clung to life, with all my nails and every remaining tooth. In the last few years of my increasingly horizontal life, I couldn’t sleep at night, and kindly requested those caring for me to leave the light on in my bedroom all night long.

 

Now I am ‘sleeping’ in a sound but dreamless dormitory of the Valley of Death, miles away from my family, in the sole company of my daughter’s prematurely deceased second husband. Poor man, he had died quite young owing to excessive alcohol abuse, so his coffin had been laid at the bottom of the burial pit, before mine was subsequently placed on top of his. There is, however, space on top of mine to be filled with, one day, with a third coffin. Thank God, my first companion has a good sense of humour (even if he can’t drink anymore), and we have a lot to chat about. Apart from making me laugh, he is also a good listener. The most important thing is that I didn’t want to be buried next to my husband. But I’ll come back to that later. 

 

Charles de Gaulle and ‘the eternal dark’

 

Before my birth, Time must have been infinite and inexhaustible, just like it is now after my death. It seems to me I had been living in a certain cloudy ‘luminance’ between two eternal darknesses. And this grew cloudier, because, amongst the many other illnesses and conditions I suffered, I lost my eyesight, or the most part of it. That’s why my granddaughter K. always teased me: “How come you cannot see my face properly, but can still recognise banknotes?” I suppose I have kept my awareness of the value of money, even after dying. Regarding this trait, there is certainly a genetic element in the family. At my funeral, my beloved son, whom I hadn’t seen for some years before coming here, complained out loud about the expensive choice of coffin and the cost of the Orthodox choir arranged at the last minute. As I was being lowered into the ground, he exclaimed, in that sarcastic nasal tone of his: “But she’s not Charles de Gaulle!”

 

As for my ‘seeing’ here, in ‘eternal darkness’, many may be tempted to ask me: What is death like? What happened to my soul? And what about Heaven or Hell? That there is, indeed, another world, is proved by the fact that I’m speaking to you from here right now. At least, I can say I believed I had always been a devout and practicing Christian. But I have no intention of tempting anyone’s faith. I would prefer to stick to my own personal circumstances and narrate only what had taken place before my moving in here.          

Days of the Golden Barrel

 

Back in my early youth, my family had been one of the most prosperous in the region, and greatly influenced by patriarchal values. I was the first-born of three children (two girls and a boy) and we were all submitted to a rather strict upbringing. Hard work was the driving force of everything, but accompanied by a sort of provincial extravagance. My father had possessed a lot of land in and around the town, an old electric grain mill, a big general store, a vineyard where we used to play as children, and the famous tavern called ‘The Golden Barrel’, where, as a young girl, I once proudly barged in on horseback to the astonishment of all the men seated at the tables (it was a place reserved mostly for men – and perhaps, it was rumoured, for ladies in the exercise of the oldest profession). And whilst my mother was an extremely pious and modest woman, often sharing the work load with her many servants in our big household, my father did not refrain from indulging in his passions, one of them being hiring local gypsy brass bands to follow him through the town, but always playing their music from the other side of the street.

 

I must say that we had a happy childhood and adolescence, although none of us three children really got on very well with each other. It has remained a family trademark to this day, passed on from one generation to the next. For example, I’ve heard many times that my son and daughter (even my grandchildren) put the blame on me for the family being so dysfunctional. And to be honest, this is causing me a lot of distress now.

 

Syphilis – and the love of my life

 

At the age of 15, I was sent to the French nuns’ school in Belgrade, reserved for privileged children, including the daughter of the then prime minister. Between activities, such as playing the piano and learning a variety of artistic and manual skills, my mind was occupied with the thought of a young man I had met just prior to leaving my hometown. We had met only a couple of times and exchanged several letters. And I thought I was in love. But it was thanks to some gossip coming from my aunt, who was probably concerned about my further education, that I was led to believe the poor man had once contracted syphilis! In those days, it must have been cause for great shame! And, honestly, I had not even known what it really meant. Sadly, in spite of all this, I had decided (and remained true to my decision until my dying day) that this young man, whom I hardly knew, was the love of my life. 

 

A passionate gambler

 

After only two years of school attendance, I came back home for summer holidays, and fell in love again! This time with the very handsome and respected history teacher at the local gymnasium, twelve years older than myself. And that was the man I married, at the age of 17, and with whom I had my two children. I was rebellious enough to quit school. I was too young and naïve. And, as it turned out, the handsome teacher had actually married my family’s dowry – and I had married a passionate gambler.  

 

In my declining years, usually in solitude, I reflected a lot on my past. But I recall one occasion when I was sitting with my granddaughter K. in my Belgrade apartment kitchen, cramped with much furniture and many unnecessary trinkets, and telling her about some details of my life for the first time ever. I don’t know how I came to recount to her my first ‘honeymoon’ night and the misery I experienced when, after a long maidenly wait for my groom to finally arrive at the hotel bedroom from the poker salon downstairs, I felt so rejected and desolate seeing him come in and first gaze for a while through the window in silence, and then crash into bed and fall fast asleep, his back turned to me. At that moment, I intuitively knew that I had made a very big mistake. But there was no turning back.  

 

And now, in the depth of my pit, where I have much more time to replay my life’s film, I am sure that I haven’t told anyone else about this humiliating episode. Not even my coffin neighbour. I’ve long ceased to believe in love. And perhaps that’s why I often repeated to my granddaughter K. that marriage is simply a matter of interest and respect. For that reason, I thought I was giving her good advice by advocating that she should marry, for example, an established doctor or engineer. I’m still concerned about her economic stability as an artist. 

 

My life’s cross

 

However, the first few years of my marriage were not all that bad. Or, was I too much in love – infatuated, to be exact? Plus, it helped that we were very well situated. In the years prior to and during World War II, we lived at a much higher standard than most. Even when the Kingdom had ceased to exist and the war was taking its toll, there was always enough to supply everything for the family. And to be quite fair, the laws of ‘interest and respect’ that governed my marriage also seem to have applied to our relations with those officers of the German occupying army who were billeted with us.   

 

Anyway, as regards the positive legacy of my marriage, I can at least say that my late husband taught me a lot about the history of the Balkans, and that my children have always loved and respected him as an affectionate and supportive father – until later on, of course, when he suffered a stroke and ended up in a wheelchair for the last ten years of his life ‘non compos mentis’. Sadly, I can now see that they have always much preferred him to me, despite all my sacrifices as a wife and mother. And on the negative side, I can say that the relationship with my late husband was the experience I have regretted most. He was my life’s cross, and I was carrying it way too long.  

 

Tito and a pair of shoes

 

After the war, Tito’s Communism cast an enchantment over almost the entire Yugoslavia, which then became known as a federation of six republics. But at those times, guns were still in operation, although in different ways. One was pointed at my father’s head on a certain day, as part of the property nationalisation programme. Sign! That was all that was left for him to do, if he intended to keep on living on his disgracefully diminished estate. All my family’s industrial assets and much of the farmland were confiscated by the state, whilst, owing to the economic crisis, my marriage dowry’s value shrank in the period of ten years to such an extent that instead of buying a mansion I had to satisfy myself with a pair of shoes! That was my first big financial flop. Anyhow, Tito was never discussed in our family afterwards.

 

My father had come to the rescue and sold a plot of land, in order that my husband, our small children and I could move to our new house in town. As a civil servant, i.e., school teacher, my husband was forbidden to celebrate the Slava (the annual feast of the family’s patron saint – in our case, St. Nicholas). So, we had to perform it incognito, with the priest coming in and leaving through the backdoor, while the window shutters were fully closed lest the communist authorities should spot the church candle flickering inside.

 

My reward

 

Not many years later, our family ‘idyll’ disintegrated and I became something like a semi-widow. And while I had to take care of my wheelchair-bound husband, and my own son and daughter, I was also often forced to look after children from other families in order to make ends meet. At the time, my sister had already obtained a university degree and was living abroad, married to a rich diplomat, while my brother was slowly finishing his studies in Belgrade, and had started travelling the world with the extra funds our parents always kept aside for their favoured male heir.

 

At 47, I finally assumed the status of an official widow, and my late husband’s pension became my well-deserved reward for all my suffering. Both of my children were already finishing their studies in Belgrade, and living with their respective spouses. During my few years of solitude, I travelled here and there around Europe (to ‘see the world’, as they say), and also received a marriage proposal from a longtime friend, with the invitation to move to England. But how could I have possibly accepted that? What would other people have said? Instead, I decided to sell my house and relocate myself to Belgrade to be closer to my children.

 

The tower – and the new ordeals

 

The real estate agents had promised me the tenth floor in a newly built communist-style apartment block in New Belgrade, but on my arrival, it happened to be the fifteenth. I suppose that was to give me a wider view from the ‘cage’ I enclosed myself in, overcrowding my little world with mementos of both pleasures and pains, which, for some reason, gave me a sense of security and comfort, and also of long-lost opulence. It was where I remained till the end of my days, excluding a number of summers which I spent in what was a share of my parents’ old house back home. I also suppose that my character had hardened a lot by that time, to the point of resembling the concrete which the tower building itself was made of.

 

Perhaps I was getting ready for a period of new ordeals, a long series of serious illnesses, chronic and acute, from a stroke (after which I had to learn how to speak again) to a heart attack, a gallbladder stone surgery (the doctor said he’d never seen such a big stone!), and later on a hip surgery, on through glaucoma and hearing loss, to various allergies and minor bone fractures, which often ended in exaggerated family dramas. I even remember my son once telling me mockingly: “You’re indestructible! You’ll never be able to die; when the time comes, you’ll have to pay someone to finish you off!”.

 

Cry wolf and the vanishing son-in-law

 

I have to admit now that I found myself ‘dying’ quite a number of times, even though with little success. But it was often thought of as me crying wolf. Perhaps I could afford it, because under the communist regime, health insurance was free and I could have the ambulance called at any time of day or night. Or perhaps I was seeking attention, unconsciously resentful that my children had built their own families. Plus, I sincerely disliked both my daughter-in-law and my first son-in-law. Could it be that, deep down, I expected my children to care for me, in the same way as I had cared for them when they were young – in a kind of transactional way? I was, perhaps, more selfish with regard to my daughter, to whom I became closer, after my son and his family had moved to Italy.

 

Ever since the beginning of my daughter’s marriage with K.’s father, I was against that union. He was a good and happy father at the beginning, but as the years went by, he was less and less present (presumably chasing skirts instead) – but could that have been so because I myself was often too present? For example, whenever they went for an excursion out of town, I would impose myself upon them, and insist on sitting in the front passenger seat of the car, next to my son-in-law, with my daughter and granddaughter at the back, as if I was the centre of their universe. I even remember secretly checking his car mileage sometimes in order to try to calculate where he was going when he wasn’t going to work. At the end of the day, he must have felt my antipathy for him. So I don’t blame him anymore for going off with another woman.

 

Rabbit stew

 

After my daughter had legally separated from K.’s father, I must admit I was quite relieved, and I welcomed her and the little K. to come and live with me. K. was 7 then, traumatised after her parents’ divorce, and I tried hard to give the best example of a good and sympathetic grandmother. But it wasn’t always that I succeeded. Was my excessive ‘presence’ for my granddaughter in fact a form of ‘absence’? Also, let’s be honest about this: will she ever forgive me for ordering the liquidation of her beloved pet rabbit while she was away on holiday with her mother, in order to make her a delicious stew, and (by mistake) letting her see the rabbit’s tanned skin hanging on the balcony line on her return? 

 

The photograph

 

At the age of 65, I lost my younger brother, when he slipped and fell from a cliff in Turkey while trying to take a photograph of his travel companions, dying instantly with the camera in his hands. Oddly enough, the camera remained intact, and it became my granddaughter K.’s first tool on her voyage as a future photographer. Then my daughter and granddaughter moved in to my late brother’s apartment in the old part of the city, and I remained alone in my tower cage. It was the time when my coffin neighbour appeared in my daughter’s life.

 

Balkan bloodshed, banks and social appearance

 

Somehow, we all of us together passed through K’s adolescence and schooling, and later education in England. As I well remember, it was one of the toughest periods economically, aggravated by the ongoing 1990s Balkan bloodshed, the gradual disintegration of Yugoslavia and the UN embargo on Serbia. After I had sold my parents’ house, I was foolish enough to deposit a great amount of the inherited capital in local banks. Those funds remained confiscated for years, and began to be given back to people in microdoses, and only after the ghastly communist regime had been overthrown around the turn of the millennium. So, that was my second financial fiasco. But I was still sensible enough to keep some of the cash at home, and I kept it stashed away in some most bizarre places. I remember once laying on a hospital bed and describing to my daughter who came to visit me where to look for the hidden money, which was needed for my hospital expenses. She couldn’t believe it! But I believed in my own prophecy that “One day I’ll be stuck in bed and will have to pay someone to look after me” (not “finish me off”, as my son had joked!). Unfortunately, it happened to be the case.

 

However, I do have some good memories from my cage period. I liked to go out whenever and as long as my feet could support me (I even travelled to the seaside while still in good shape), and I had friends and cousins to speak to on the phone or exchange visits with. I also liked to sew, and was very proud to show off my new dresses (social appearance was very important to me!). And when I felt lonely, I would listen to classical music on the radio, or play patience again and again over coffee and some sweets whose shelf-life had long passed. Because nothing was to be thrown away!

 

Least of all, myself! Therefore, I still tried to continue keeping up the family and other life rituals as much as possible. Even when I didn’t feel quite well, I organised all the family gatherings to the best of my abilities. But the atmosphere of almost every holiday we spent together also had its gloomy and depressing side, because, even though I don’t feel like admitting it, I often behaved like a grumpy despot and insisted on having everything under full control. I can now understand why my granddaughter K. disliked our holidays. But it would be unfair to say that sometimes there wasn’t a bit of humour too. Perhaps, black humour. Moments like when, in the last few years of my life, we started celebrating our St. Nicholas slava with me lying horizontal, and a few guests seated around my bed, listening to my life anecdotes while the food was being served.   

 

It had all become just too expensive

 

As I was getting older and weaker, and approaching my final repose, I seem to have chosen my daughter to be my chief caregiver, although I employed a series of 4 caregivers who lived with me 24/7. Three of them literally ran away, unable to put up with my difficult character. Only one stayed till the end. But it was as if I wanted my daughter to carry me on her shoulders all the time (she was my scapegoat, poor thing!). I remember, a few months before I was to depart, that I phoned her on a cold winter night to come over urgently, because I was not feeling well (I was ‘dying’ again!), and I said I would pay for her taxi fare. She wasn’t feeling well herself, or was possibly tired of me, and asked me if I could kindly pay for her taxi back home too. I said: “I can’t feel my pulse at all, it’s stopped.”. But, as I refused to pay for her return fare, I told her not to come, and I postponed my dying. It had all become just too expensive.

 

All loves hurt

 

And so, it was when I was 81 that my granddaughter K. began her studies in photography and, from then on, she often photographed me in various situations. In the beginning, I didn’t quite understand why, but I didn’t mind. She was, of all the family members, the only person I could really talk to and the one I trusted the most. She would often ask me questions and I would tell her stories in minute details. And, as the years went by, I understood that she was interested in my life, in my pain – the pain of a body deprived of everything, lonely and fragile, but a mind fully sound – and in my insistence on living on despite everything.

 

One of our last conversations, only weeks before my death, was about the pain of love: “Why does love have to hurt?”, she asked, comparing it metaphorically to cats mating and the pain the female cat feels after the post-coital withdrawal of the male cat’s strangely barbed member. I didn’t know the answer to such a tricky question, except that all loves hurt. Or, that I supposed I was not lucky enough in my life. And I think that only now is she trying to really understand me.

 

The new world

 

In the end, for my granddaughter K., I was a kind of history incarnate of almost the entire century which had elapsed on this doomed land, where five countries replaced each other one after the other (each becoming smaller than the one before), but with little hope of real progress. I remember how on my 93^rd birthday – my last, I exclaimed in fervour, “I’m going to live a hundred years!”. But now I’m asking myself why I wished for that. What more could I have done, even if I had stayed? I was already an exhausted remnant of the past… And seeing the new world as it is from this blind corner of mine, I can’t see that hope, I’m sorry! Be that as it may, I don’t feel depressed, I’m only trying to muse about what I did right and what I did wrong, and what I could have done better…  

 

But it’s already night now. And maybe tomorrow there will be another day. I’d like to sleep, because as my father used to say: “A man is not a man if he wakes up after dawn!”