Not a Fairy Tale, But… There Are Witches

03 Aug Not a Fairy Tale, But… There Are Witches

Not a Fairy Tale, But… There Are Witches
Chapter Six
Written by Heni Erceg
Voiceover by Marija Drndić

My Slavko

She called me somewhere in the mid-80s with a request to promote her book. At the time, I was a journalist at Television Zagreb, and she was at the Zagreb weekly Start. It was recognition at first sight; I almost knew Holograms of Fear by heart—her first novel about pain, fear, and the fragility of life, themes that would follow her throughout her life—written after her first kidney transplant in America. As one of the pioneers of feminism, she already had a book of essays behind her, Deadly Sins of Feminism, written at a time when the mere mention of women’s rights raised the hackles of influential males. In a deeply patriarchal society, she dared, along with several female colleagues, to tell women: I want this! I can do this! Whatever the cost. And she paved the way for today’s young women.

She was my friend. And my hero. Life with illness never killed her eternal optimism and humor, her care, and her “threats”: “Don’t you dare call me if you don’t go to the doctor”—a reproach I listened to a hundred times due to my own negligence regarding my health. She bore so many health problems heroically; we trembled when she was put into an induced coma in Sweden due to severe COVID, only for her to literally return to life over the following months, learning to walk, to work… and from that experience, brilliant pages of text emerged about “life” in a Swedish hospital.

She endured her persecution in the 90s with equal heroism, when the most shameful text in Croatian journalism was published about her and several other female journalists: “The Witches of Rio.” The so-called investigative team of the weekly Globus wrote reams about her origins, her private life… She did not accept that Croatian nationalism was the only valid answer to Serbian nationalism; she warned of a regime leading Croatia in the wrong direction and was, of course, declared a traitor. This was naturally followed by a ban on working in Croatia. Fragile yet strong, she turned on her heel and left for Sweden with her husband, journalist Richard Swartz, and continued writing for influential foreign media.

But the persecutors who believed she had left never to return were mistaken. No, she never truly left Croatia. She continued to defiantly collaborate with the proscribed Feral Tribune, in whose library she would publish some of her books, while giving me interviews for the same paper. Witty as she was, she told me about a trip to Germany for a book fair, when all her “colleagues”—the writers—sat on one side of the plane so as not to be near her, the “contagious” one: “I thought the plane was going to tip over,” she said.

Her resistance to every form of totalitarianism was her natural state, just as it was when she left her parental home at only 19 and went her own way forever, hippie-style, carrying her newborn daughter, Rujana. The same applied to her life with pain and illness, which birthed so many novels themed around the female body, physicality marred by sickness, and her interest in strong women who, though successful themselves, lived lives in the shadows of great husbands, like Frida Kahlo or Milena Einstein. I had to read all her books while they were still in manuscript form; she wanted a second opinion before the book went to the publisher.

A tireless worker, she wrote more than 20 books, all translated abroad, making her our most translated female writer. My hero, whom no physical misfortune—and they are hard to count, including another kidney transplant—and no government could stop. She wrote boldly about the sinister nature of nationalism and the traumas of war. Her book They Would Never Hurt a Fly is a story about a war criminal, the young Dražen Erdemović, whose trial in The Hague she followed, but also about the banality of evil and the fatal obsession with nationalism.

Curious and playful, she traveled across Europe, writing books about Eastern Europe and Yugoslav communism. How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed is a title that best describes the author herself, who—despite the hardships and the merciless persecution in the country where she was born and which she represented to the world through a series of books—never stopped laughing. She never fell into depression or accepted my melancholic thesis that all our efforts were in vain (džaba krečili). Not even when she witnessed a new wave of Ustashism in Croatia; instead, she boldly opposed it through her texts in Jutarnji list, in a way that was so natural to her.

Her friendship was not ordinary; paradoxically, she was the one who took care of me, while I trembled over every one of her new hospital visits. We used to wander through Zagreb boutiques in search of some eccentric piece of clothing, only to conclude that in her Sovinjak, a village in Istria, and in my wilderness on Šolta, we didn’t really need more than those few old rags we wore in the summer. Yes, we laughed a lot, because how else could she have survived all that weight—both the burden of her illness and the sickness of society—without humor?

This May, as usual, she went to her Istrian oasis. She told me about her beautiful garden and looked forward to the fresh edition of another book, Why I Never Learned to Cook. She was well, truly well, happy in her solitude, envying me for my swimming. And then, that morning, she went to Buzet to get groceries, and she was fine…

Then, that afternoon, she was gone. Slavenka Drakulić has left us. And I don’t know how to accept that my Slavko is no longer here.