An Anthology of Croatian Literature

Irena Vrkljan (1930- )

Irena Vrkljan (1930– ) Though born in Belgrade, trained in Germanic studies, and resident more often than not in Berlin, Vrkljan is an important and long-lived figure in Croatian poetry. She has been publishing since the 1950s, with a volume of poetry every several years and more recently with longer and longer prose works. The following is an excerpt from her autobiography, published in Zagreb as Svila, škare (1984) and Marina, ili o biografiji (1985), and translated together in English in The Silk, The Shears, and Marina: or About Biography, S. Forrester and C. Hawkesworth, trans. (Evanston: NWU, 1987): 92–96. An Anthology of Croatian Literature 268 The Silk, the Shears, and Marina: Or About Biography Movement Suddenly I got tired in Zagreb. After fifty-some screenplays—the monthly average was one—I couldn’t keep on writing anymore; I felt as if I was in a rut. I was writing them too easily. The dream of the everyday began, everything flowed smoothly, the time of postwar poverty had passed. Loves quickly went by, I took a taxi even to the television studio, which wasn’t far from my apartment. I no longer had the wish to jump into Stančić’s big shoes—he called them children’s coffins—and to make him laugh while Melita brought in a nice cake and we sat in the living room. Viculin was away on a trip into darkness. The television, money, those were the themes. I had met Erich Kubi in 1951 at an exhibit. He wanted to find something out, I translated it for him, and we soon concluded that I would be the translator of his books. And so I was. Then he told me how in January of 1943 he had escaped ahead of Hitler on a bicycle into Yugoslavia. His girlfriend found a job in Zagreb, he lived off his savings in a little room in Samobor and painted. But soon he had no more money, the relationship with his girlfriend became complicated, and he went away to Split. There he ate only bread and figs; once he sold a picture to some Americans and bought a small, deserted island. He had plans for political work abroad. But he didn’t know the language and soon realized that he could only have a political effect in Germany, and so in December he left Split, with no money, that possessor of a small island. We wrote to each other from 1951 on and saw each other again after many years. I was already divorced; he had come to Zagreb to attend the congress in opposition to the atom bomb. Erich was the first to say to me, “It would be good if for once you saw the life you lead from a distance, from somewhere else.” He sent me application forms for the Film and Television Academy in Berlin. I got an unpaid leave from Zagreb television. I set out and looked for a cheap student’s room in Berlin. The upbringing from coddling to abandonment had come to an end, that childhood, the ruined marriage. I cut the umbilical cord, I was thirty-six years old. The dust fell on the empty room in Bulić Street, the neighbor no longer knocked on the door, the pictures and books gradually turned gray. I left with one trunk and found myself somewhere else. For the first time I was completely alone. The friends who stood at the airport waved to me morosely and without understanding. But I was mistaken too. I didn’t find the distance I was looking for, I was frightened in a strange place. And if I hadn’t found Benno and the possibility of work together, what would have happened then? In the cold and unfriendly corridors of the Academy, I would not have lasted for more than a year. When Irena Vrkljan 269 I greeted people in the morning, everyone laughed at me; when I didn’t greet them, no one noticed me. Not even the secretary Helena, the only person there, could prevent that. The gloom of the city would soon have frightened me, the difficult loneliness of the people, the grumpy women in the stores, the dog’s heart of the streets, the cemented future, that slow ice. I would have quickly gone back to the old nest and there I would have aged. For Vicko would have come to...