The Scars of the Erasure_web

Erasure_4a 10.1.11 20:29 Page 8080 THE SCARS OF THE ERASUREwhere I played basketball with friends. After basketball, I went straight home; I was homeby nine o’clock in the evening at the latest. Basketball became my life, my escape from asituation that felt like prison. Basketball, home, basketball, home, that’s how my dailylife looked for several years. And today I regret one thing that I couldn’t realize. I’d certainlytrain to become a basketball player, but I couldn’t do it without documents.My friends would invite me to come with them to the seaside and I’d reply to theeffect that I didn’t know yet, maybe, possibly, if possible, probably another time, but infact I knew that I wouldn’t be able to go, because I didn’t have any document needed tocross the border. They would go but I stayed in Slovenia, ten or eleven years. Like everychild, I missed the seaside, my grandma. My grandma in Bosnia, where we used to gofor holidays before that, was very old, and I only wanted her to live, not to die, so thatI could see her once again. My grandpa died in 1994, but I couldn’t go to the funeral –it was very hard for me. We were locked in this country. I felt literally like a prisoner. Icouldn’t go anywhere – it was such a strange feeling.My mum didn’t speak about it a lot, because it hurt her so badly. Most of all, sheworried how she’d manage to provide a livelihood for her two children as a single mother.Before the disintegration of Yugoslavia, she worked in a bar in Ljubljana, but she slippedwhile cleaning the floor, fell on her back and seriously injured it. Her treatment and recoverylasted a long time. Next time it was she who was cleansed from the register, andnobody slipped while doing it. She lost her job. It was only some time later that she cameacross another job in a restaurant, at her friend’s, where she worked illegally in the kitchenor helped with serving. She too had to hide. When work inspectors came in, she’d hideanywhere. She often told us how she ran away to escape them. She had to find her wayaround to earn money. She worked all day long to be able to buy bread for us. I spent allmy New Years alone at home with my sister. I can remember how I called her on thephone and cried because I missed her, as any child would. But she worked for two dayson end. To earn money. And when she came home she wished us a happy New Year andwent to sleep straight away because she was so tired. It was hard on us at that time.For more than half a year we ate only bread and milk. From time to time mymum got aid packs from the Red Cross. Child benefits and other benefits didn’t exist.But the bills came in regularly, for the apartment and utility costs, but it was impossibleto pay them. During the period when my mum didn’t have any income, my ingenioussister, still a child at that time, would bring food from the shop now and then. I mean,she took it without paying for it. She stole it. So that we could eat. She would bring paté,ragout, spaghetti. And we were so happy then.We didn’t have health insurance in the meantime. If I was ill, I waited for it togo away. If I sprained my ankle playing basketball, or tore something, if my leg swelled,I put some ice and waited for it to go away. My mum, soon after she obtained the permanentwork visa for foreigners, got seriously ill. She had a tumor; they removed herkidney, then other illnesses followed, she got thrombosis and St. Anthony’s fire, andnothing went away. She has open wounds on her leg; she is fifty-four and she cannotwalk without crutches, and she has a level one disability pension. Nobody can give herback her health.