The Long Running Life of Helena Zigon: A True Story in 21 Kilometers 9781501757808

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The LONG RUNNING LIFE of HELENA ZIGON

LONG RUNNING LIFE The

of

H E L E NA ZIGON A True Story in 21 Kilometers Jasmina Kozina Praprotnik

NIU Press / DeKalb, IL

© 2017 by Northern Illinois University Press Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb 60115 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5 978-0-87580-773-7 (paper) 978-1-60909-231-3 (e-book) Book and cover design by Yuni Dorr Translated from the Slovenian by Erica Johnson Debeljak Frontispiece and cover: Helena running by the River Ljubljanica in Ljubljana. Photograph by Marko Praprotnik Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

“WHEN I AM TO O OLD.”

—HELENA ZIGON,

86,

UPON BEING ASKED

WHEN WILL SHE STOP RUNNING.

C o n t e n ts

At the Starting Line

ix 3

KILOMETER ONE | Each Step Counts

11

KILOMETER T WO | But Where Are You, Girls?

17

KILOMETER THREE | The Slope of Love

27

KILOMETER FOUR | In Search of a Safe Home KILOMETER FIVE | The Letter

35 45

KILOMETER SIX | Helena, Is That You?

KILOMETER SE VEN | Will You Embrace Her When You Meet?

59

KILOMETER EIGHT | How Strange Life Turns Out!

67

KILOMETER NINE | The Path to Jail KILOMETER TEN | Moving Out

73

KILOMETER ELE VEN | May I Ask for the Next Dance, Comrade?

119

KILOMETER FOURTEEN | Helena, Think about Something Nice! KILOMETER FIFTEEN | To Ride! To Be Free!

143

KILOMETER SIX TEEN | Supper under the White Lady KILOMETER EIGHTEEN | To Have Time for Yourself

165

KILOMETER T WENT Y-ONE | Where Is My Last Harbor?

171

About How This Book Was Born Thanks

177

155

161

KILOMETER T WENT Y | I Can’t Do It Anymore

129

135

KILOMETER SE VENTEEN | With Such Pleasure and Determination KILOMETER NINETEEN | A Little More

79

109

KILOMETER T WELVE | Three Girls on a Bicycle KILOMETER THIRTEEN | My Mother-In-Law’s Gift

The Finish Line

53

173

167

149

At t h e

s tA rt i n g Line

T O D AY I S M Y B I R T H D AY. A P R I L 1 3 , 2 0 1 4 . I’ve had quite a lot of them already. I am eighty-six years old and I am standing at the starting line of the first Istrian Marathon. For my birthday, I will treat myself to a 21-kilometer run, a half marathon. I can hardly believe I am so old. How fast the years have passed and how much everything has changed during that time. I was born in 1928 in Slovenia, then part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. King Alexander Karađorđević was on the throne. The first radio station in Slovenia began broadcasting as the Radio Ljubljana. Back then, a voice travelling through the air seemed like an unbelievable miracle, but since then, an amazing number of things have changed. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was transformed into the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after the devastation of World War II. And in the smaller war in the 1990s, Yugoslavia itself disintegrated and a new independent Slovenia was born from the ashes. Capitalism replaced socialism, the umbrella of the European Union replaced that of Yugoslavia. And as for technology—well, now that there are computers and the Internet, Radio Slovenia seems like a quaint relic from a very distant past. Change is the one thing that has been a constant in my life. When I run, the world and time slow down and stand still, or at least that’s the way it seems to me. And I like that. I am at an age when I have no interest in rushing. There are many places in the world that provide a concentration of the spirit. A person can lock the door, turn off the light, switch off all communication. My home is that kind of quiet place, but I feel it isn’t yet time to close myself up in it. I don’t want to live in a grave. When I run I feel peaceful, and that is especially true today. I need peace because I want to return to the past. I want to meet once again the people whom I met on the path of my life, greet them, talk to them, and say goodbye to them, perhaps forever or perhaps only until the next time.

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Somehow I sense that I wouldn’t still be here today if it weren’t for the running, and so I know it is right that I choose my birthday as the day to say goodbye to running. It is time to pay off my debt. I am eighty-six years old. Twenty-one kilometers sounds young. But for now, I will have to unite those two words. I have been going on runs when my thoughts glimmered on and off, pushing me forward. Those are the kinds of thoughts I need today because I am afraid. Afraid that I won’t be able to finish, afraid that, soon, I will not just have to stop running one day, but right in the middle of this race.

I have loved running for as a long as I can remember, but I have only run longer organized races for the last thirty years. Before that, women didn’t participate in such events. I remember how it was when we ran to Kumrovec, a village in the northern part of Croatia. This is a really small village, but was very popular in the former Yugoslavia. It is famous as the birthplace of Marshal Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980), the President of Yugoslavia. The birth house of Tito, built in 1860 as the first brickwork house in the village, features the Memorial Museum of Marshal Tito. Schoolchildren from all over Yugoslavia come to honor the Marshal. Actually, the whole village is converted into a museum, with all the houses displaying permanent exhibitions of artifacts related to the life and work of peasants in the 19th/20th century, into which Tito was born. It is not quite a coincidence, then, that it was here that I encountered the injustice: only men were expected to enter the fifteen-kilometer race; for women it was considered too long. That was in 1980, not so long ago. One of my girlfriends, Natalija, wore a disguise so she could run with men. The rest of us settled for the shorter race. But my feelings of injustice were actually coming to term. Those were the years when things were changing. The following year when in Slovenia they opened the marathon to women, I immediately signed up. I ran my first marathon in Kranj, a town not far from my home in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. Up to that moment, I had almost believed the prevailing stereotypes about women and had no plan to become a marathon runner. I was used to winning in my usual competitive field on shorter runs, and so I cautiously signed up for the half marathon. My friend Betka, who hasn’t run for a long time now, scolded

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me, saying that the half marathon was too short, that I should run the full marathon with her. “The full marathon?” I couldn’t believe my ears. I was fifty-four years old. I wanted to know how I would perform on a test that everyone said exceeded the powers and capabilities of women. I did very well, as it turned out, perhaps due to—more than anything else—my determined temperament. I finished the race in three hours and thirty-two minutes. That was the Three Hearts Marathon, in Radenci, the natural spa where the Three Hearts brand name is located. It comes from a source of mineral water discovered already in 1833 by Karol Henn, at the time still a student of medicine. According to a local legend, strange sounds and bubbling coming from the ground were believed to be the sounds of witches cooking soup deep underground. While passing by the mineral water spring in a carriage on the way to nearby Ljutomer, Henn overheard the sounds of the bubbling water. He took some samples of water for analysis and returned to Radenci many years later when he had become a reputable doctor and expert in the therapeutic use of natural spring waters. He bought the property together with the mineral spring, and in 1869 the first mineral water, named Radeiner Sauerbrunn, was bottled from the spring. The same year he bottled the first Radenska Three Hearts mineral water, which was later supplied to the emperor’s court in Vienna and to the pope’s palace in Rome. The mineral water became known for its healing effects, and in 1882 the first guests were welcomed to the health resort and the town later developed into a thermal spa health resort. So it was here in this place of the healing mineral water that I ran my second marathon. And after that, almost all the marathons they organized in Slovenia up to now. The first marathons in Slovenia were held in Kranj, Bovec (in the beautiful Soca valley), and Radenci in the same year, in 1981. But after a couple of years, the organizers of the marathons in Bovec and Kranj had to give up—not enough runners came. Radenci, probably because of the healing water, continued to attract enough runners, and more and more participated from year to year, and also the number of women grew. Many more races followed. In my life, I have run about ten full marathons and so many half marathons I cannot count them. I have run twenty half marathons in Radenci alone and have also run a full marathon there.

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I have run both distances all over Slovenia and the former Yugoslavia: in Kranj, Ljubljana, Bovec, Gorica, Kumrovec, Belgrade, Umag, Bled. I have run in Trieste and Slovakia, even in America. I used to be very fast. People often asked me how I regarded all the young men and women I passed along the way, and I answered that I didn’t. I just ran with all the strength in my legs and hoped that I would be the fastest. From time to time, I received an invitation from a paying sponsor but I always declined. I ran for pleasure, the love of life, and plain old curiosity. I was interested in how I felt when I was running, the rhythm of running, how all those individual steps bring inner peace. I liked to feel the pleasant tiredness after a race, and I also liked the desire for the next race glimmering in the fading fatigue of the previous one. Such sensations were more precious to me than results and rankings. I never wanted to be obligated to anyone. I feared that the sponsors’ expectations would rob me of those precious pleasures, and I still look at it that way today. To be a good person is a lifelong duty, but a duty one has to oneself. To be a good runner should not be for sale. And thus I come to each new race unburdened, with the delight of a child. Only in this way, do we feel pure happiness in our achievements. I have run all of the Ljubljana marathons from the first one in 1996 to the last one in 2013. Regretfully, I ran only half-marathons, because the first time the race was held, I was already sixty-eight years old. Altogether there were fewer than seven hundred people competing at the first Ljubljana Marathon, of which approximately one hundred and twenty were women. Of the total, only eight ran the longer race, fifty ran the half-marathon, and sixty the ten-kilometer race. The night before that race, the organizers held a wonderful welcoming event at the Ljubljana Castle. In the main hall we were treated to a rich variety of dishes, all washed down with champagne. The event was never repeated, which is not surprising, since each year the number of participants expanded and the hall would have been too small for all of us. Still, it is a pity that the celebratory evening could not have grown with our numbers. We felt so magnificent that first night, as if our love of running had some added meaning that was finally understood by our country, or at least by the city of Ljubljana. Now that the Ljubljana Marathon has become an international event, it is even more meaningful because it has become

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the people’s event, and the people are certainly too numerous to fit into the main castle hall. The morning after the celebration, I ran the half-marathon in two hours and two minutes, despite all the champagne. Not so many years have passed since then, but what a change there is! Back then to be a runner was entirely different, much more exotic. It was almost as if people were ashamed of doing something for the sheer joy of doing it, not caring about the result or having a good time. Recreational running was regarded as bizarre. Only the really fast entered races. There were few non-competitive entrants and no slower recreational runners at all. If such people dared to run, they did it secretly, on some lonely forest trail. These pioneers of recreational running dressed in ordinary clothes as if they were going out on a Sunday stroll. In other countries, more leisurely and less fit recreational runners had been participating in marathons for many years before they did here in Slovenia. I ran my last full marathon in New York in 1995. It wasn’t easy to get in. The organizers even demanded an essay in which participants described their running experience. They also asked for an estimation of my time. I wrote that I would complete the race in approximately four and a half hours. I was sixty-seven years old and I succeeded in running the race in exactly four hours and thirty-two minutes. Well, that is the past now. Today, I am celebrating my birthday and I find myself once again on the starting line, at the beginning of a course I have never run, because it is the first time it has been organized. In a way, I am a midwife at the birth of this race, as are all the other runners, without whom it would not exist. This is my first Istrian Marathon—and my last marathon ever. This thought, the one I have been pushing away for several weeks now, forces its way into my mind. It seems I must get used to the idea. After all, you have to stop sooner or later. At one point, somewhere, you must arrive at the final finishing line. But first you have to start, and then there is the long, long run, and only in the end do you arrive at the destination and achieve your goal. In between, there is enough time to wonder what the goal is at all. Such questions are much worse in a competition than the runners who are trying to overtake you. It is so hard these days to even define goals: what should I expect next, what will my goals be tomorrow. And now that my husband Stane passed

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away, I have no one to consult with about it. But I am here now. I had signed up to run this race before. Stane knew about it, he knew I was going to run today, so I am going to, and I will try to be grateful for every step. I do not know some of the sections of the course that awaits me today and I’m looking forward to them especially. It is nice to run along a known course but the discovery of new ones is also something precious. There is something I particularly like at the start of this one: the smell of the sea. Stane, too, loved that smell. I remember how we were always happy when we approached that vast expanse of blue. It took us some time for the senses to grow accustomed to it and for the excitement to fade. Certainly, he would have been here with me today, watching me get ready for the race, seeing me from afar, but feeling me close—if he had not died twenty days ago. Yes, my Stane is gone, without a real goodbye. We were just sitting on the sofa at home talking. We had been sitting like that countless times before, discussing the day, our life together. But on this occasion, he looked at me in a way that I didn’t recognize in him, a look that seemed to see something beyond me, something that was even less visible than the scent of the sea if that was possible. At that moment, he saw more than I did. He hadn’t been feeling well for some days, but he wouldn’t let me call the doctor. He was a wise man. He didn’t want them to take him away. He wanted to stay with me at home, in the peace he was accustomed to. He wanted to accept what life had in store for him, and he remained loyal to me to the very end. He knew how to accept illness, age, and finally death, with peace and dignity. That morning our youngest daughter, Tanja and her husband Tone had come for a visit. When I told her that her father didn’t feel well, she immediately went to him, spoke reassuring words and stroked his forehead. “That’s what I like,” he told her. He didn’t resist death, remaining serene until the end. Later I noticed that he had arranged his things, his papers were all in order, the most important at the top, the savings all transferred into my bank account. The shelves of our pantry were freshly stocked with the food that I liked best. I am old enough to easily go with him. I could. I would have wanted to go that afternoon so we wouldn’t be apart for so long. We had been together for sixty-six years. His passing away weakened my spirit so badly that I felt

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dangerously close to death myself. I just wanted to be with him again, to spend our days as we were used to, in pleasant accord, peacefully chatting as we went about our errands, accepting everything that happened but still curious about what was there ahead of us. After everything I experienced during the past weeks, I can hardly believe that I am standing here at the starting line. When I think that Stane is no longer around, my heart hurts so badly that it is hard for me to even stand up, let alone run. My heart is broken, not to mention my lifelong cheering section has gone and left me all by myself. It is so indescribably sad that I could just sit down on the pavement and die. But I have to run today. Running is what will rescue me. Running is what remained from before, from the time when Stane was still alive. “Run, Helena, run,” I say to myself. “Even if you feel like you can’t, take a few steps, and you’ll find the way. Stane will be waiting for you when you finish.” Stane, my faithful cheering section. He accompanied me to the starting line and waited for me at the finishing line. He always cooked breakfast or lunch for me on the day of a race. “I won’t let you run if you don’t eat up everything,” he would admonish me. He always thought I was too thin. He loved to take care of me, and to take care of our house and the garden around it. If he were healthy, he could have run with me. But he wasn’t—he had suffered from multiple sclerosis since he was forty-two, most of his adult life—but he had made peace with it. So, instead, he was my faithful supporter, happy with everything that made me happy. He was as proud of me as I was of him. He supported me passionately, sincerely enjoying my victories, and I was so grateful to him for that. We were married for sixty years, and, through all that time, he understood that I wanted, that I needed to run, that it was a part of my nature, and that without it, I would be different. I wouldn’t be me. “Stane, where did you go to? Where are you?” That was the question I kept asking myself over and over again, the question that kept tormenting me even when I was surrounded by other people. “Why did you leave me alone? Didn’t we agree that we would be together until the very end?”

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Things had been so good between us. I think that when he left I had only two choices: immediately go after him or use the steps I had used my whole life as a way of connecting each new day. Besides, when I ran, I strongly felt that he could see me even if he was far away. I chose the second option and a few days after his death, I went out to train. Never before had I felt so weak. But that first terrible run was my salvation. And so were all the following ones. All of them were useless as preparation for this competition, but they were all I had. And that’s why I’m here today. I have good shoes and gear. Every couple of kilometers I will get a bit to eat, which will give me additional strength. There are a lot of us waiting to start. A lot plus one more: Stane, who is with me and in me. I feel my legs raring to go. They move in place, making little steps of static impatience. The burden of life is too great. Only in freedom, in movement, are we connected to nature, and in nature things change constantly. The starting line. Stane, we are off!

The LONG RUNNING LIFE of HELENA ZIGON

KILOME TER ONE

eACH STeP COUnTS

A n D S O I R U n T H e F I R S T M e T e R of the first kilometer of the last half marathon of my life. The course is not wide and the runners are practically touching each other. We’re almost like the colorful houses in Slovenia’s bucolic seaside town of Piran, situated on the shore by the Adriatic Sea, so reminiscent of Venice, which by boat is actually not far away: each house for itself, but each right next to the other, thus providing support to his neighbor on either side. I like my fellow runners, because they give me the feeling that I could rely on them if I needed to. I also like the supporters on both sides of the road because I can share my joy with them. They enjoy the race so much; it seems as if our energy was flowing into them. My breathing grows faster, my pulse rises, my legs are grateful that they can finally move. I smell the sea. The music at the starting line cheers me on. The atmosphere is pleasant and I feel good. I am actually enjoying it. Maybe I am running a little too fast. “Helena,” I say to myself, “slow down.” But my legs just carry me. A beautiful run is ahead of me. I especially look forward to Tartini Square, the main square in Piran. This is a medieval town of fishermen in southwestern Slovenia on the Adriatic Sea. Until the mid-20th century Italian was the dominant language, but was replaced by Slovene as demographics shifted. From Piran you can see Croatia and Italy. I haven’t been here for such a long time, though I’ve always appreciated its beauty. I certainly never ran through the square, named after the famous Venetian violinist and composer, who was born here. His most famous work is the “Devil’s Trill Sonata,” a technically very demanding solo violin sonata. According to a legend Tartini was inspired to write the sonata by a

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dream in which the Devil appeared at the foot of his bed playing the violin. Regardless of the Devil, I love this energetic sonata. Remembering it and running now, shoulder to shoulder in a large group of competitors, I feel sheer happiness for the first time in three weeks. The feeling, though still rather faint, is a blessed balm for my heart. As I run, I observe the old town, which, despite all the storms and waves banging against its shores, has persisted for centuries and stands before me in all its glory. “Have I trained enough?” I ask myself. When Stane was still alive and before I broke two ribs, I was extremely diligent. Before training, I decided on the distance I wanted to run and I always did it. If for example, I decided to run ten kilometers and after eight kilometers I was tempted to stop, I said to myself: “No, Helena, you said ten.” That was the iron rule. But twenty-one kilometers today? That is a much longer distance than I have trained for recently, and a lot longer than I feel I can run at the moment. But what can I do? Like a newborn that spends the first days of life sleeping, I will rest tomorrow. Now I must endure. That’s what I decided. Radojka, my friend and supporter, is running beside me. I wouldn’t be here without her. In my current state, I wouldn’t have been able to arrange everything that was necessary to participate in an event like this, from picking up the number in Koper—the biggest Slovenian coastal town, where my finish line was, to getting to Piran on time. All of this was only possible with Radojka’s help, and her company. I am very lucky to have her. I met Radojka in a recreational running group I joined, named Polet, and she immediately became my favorite running partner. We both felt that we somehow belonged together, and we began to meet, especially for doubles races. We encouraged each other. She often told me that it was hard for her to get going and leave her house, but when she thought about how she would tell me that she didn’t feel like running, she just couldn’t do it. She is twenty-three years younger than me. This morning she put on her shoes, got into the car, and made the long drive to get to my place. I never had trouble getting out of the house. When I decide to do something, I just do it. I think that’s the smartest way to live. There should be as little procrastination and putting things off as possible, because there’s

Each Step Counts

5

not a lot of time in life. In truth, there is less and less time, but what counts is what we do in the time we have. And we can do a lot, because in every instant we can take a step. And each step counts. Today I’m going to take a lot of steps. My step is getting shorter, approximately half a meter, so I estimate that I am going to take about forty-two thousand steps today. When Radojka and I train, we run a range of distances, sometimes five, sometimes fifteen kilometers, whatever we decide for that day. The distance depends on whether we are training for a specific event or whether we are just running to maintain our condition. Sometimes I would run a kilometer before we started our run together, just so I would be warmed up. When that happened, Radojka would pretend she was angry, as if it weren’t right that I ran farther than she. But even if I run a kilometer more here and there, she is still younger and faster than me. We both know that I have to make a real effort when running with her if I don’t want to fall behind. After our training sessions we would go for a coffee at the Strmec mountaineering center and talk about how well we had run and how much we planned to run next time. We also chatted about other things. Several months ago I suggested that we sign up for today’s half-marathon. “All right,” she said calmly. “Then we’ll have to start training more seriously.” “A half-marathon right on my birthday,” I said happily the day after we had made the decision. “That can’t be a coincidence.” I looked forward to the goal. It was like a gift. I had enough flowers in the garden and Stane took good care of them. I don’t really care for a birthday cake since I can’t eat too much if I want to stay fit for running. So the best gift would be the actual moment when I ran across the finish line. Then I could share a modest celebration of the achievement with Stane and our two daughters and their families. If only I hadn’t taken the bus the next day! I prefer riding my bicycle through Ljubljana whatever the weather. Though it’s the capital city of Slovenia, Ljubljana is relatively small, without too many hills, and even some good bike lanes. But that afternoon, I had plans to meet my friends Majda, Ana, Ida, and Ruza at the restaurant Pri Jovotu. It was Ruza’s birthday and she wanted us all to go by bus together like we used to do in the old days.

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I wanted to be with the friends I had known for such a long time, so I consented and left my bike at home. When the bus pulled up at the bus stop, I didn’t hold on carefully and lost my balance. I fell awkwardly, with my body hitting the seat in front of me. I didn’t even make it to the celebratory lunch that I had been looking forward to. My ribs hurt so much that I had to turn around and go straight home. “If I had only gone on my bike,” I complained helplessly to Stane when lying in bed, “I wouldn’t have fallen on that bus.” And it only got worse from there. When I couldn’t take the pain anymore, Stane, beside himself with worry, offered me two kinds of pills he took for his illness. He put them on my tongue, and lifting the glass with an exhausted trembling hand, I swallowed them down. Relief came quickly. I actually slept for the next couple of days. Sleeping seemed to help, so I kept taking the pills. Better to simply rest so that my injury, whatever it was, would get better. That’s what I thought anyway. A couple of days later I decided to get up—Radojka was anxiously waiting for us to continue training—but I felt so dizzy I couldn’t even stand. Stane decided that I needed more professional help than he could offer. An ambulance arrived and took me first to the emergency room and then to the neurosurgery. I was put to bed and neurosurgeons began to circle around me. I lay there several days waiting for them to figure out what was wrong with me, and then I decided to go home. I sensed that my dizziness wasn’t because of my fall, but because I wasn’t used to medication, let alone the strong stuff Stane gave me. The doctors observing me suspected something more serious. I finally insisted that I was going whether they liked it or not. If they didn’t let me, I would leave on my own responsibility. And that’s how I left that place and all those people in white who asked a lot of questions and answered so few. I was happy to return to my precious freedom. My dear good Stane had wanted to help me with those pills, but it seems I would have been better off without them. I wasn’t angry with him. For more than sixty-six years he had made my life pleasant, and I could easily forgive him this small mistake. Now I had my own medicine, simple painrelievers. The x-rays had revealed that I had broken two ribs when I had fallen on the bus.

Each Step Counts

7

“Broken ribs,” I fretted. “How will I manage to run a half marathon?” I was seriously worried about it, but I said nothing to the doctors. They had enough work asking me questions like what month of the year it was— as if I had completely lost my mind. It’s a good thing to have them, doctors and medicine, but personally I feel a lot better when they are as far away from me as possible. My broken ribs hurt a lot, but I preferred to experience the pain and have a clear mind than risk the confusion I felt after taking Stane’s pills. Because of this incident, my medical record is now filled not only with information about my ribs, but also with something else: dementia. I was worried that I wouldn’t be allowed to drive. It is true that I prefer to cycle, but I am also proud of the freedom of possessing a driver’s license, and, on a practical level, I often have to drive Stane somewhere. What would he do if I lost my driver’s license? Ride on the handlebars? I couldn’t afford to have it taken away. Coincidentally, my license had to be renewed two days after I left the hospital. I went to take care of all the papers. I was extremely nervous when I went for the medical examination, but the doctor must have recognized me. She asked me when I had run my last marathon and when I would run the next one. Then she checked my eyesight and declared: “You’re in excellent condition. Enjoy running and driving!” I still had to take the rest of the tests, but everything went well, and soon I was driving Stane around Ljubljana on a short errand. My right side still hurt and I had to change gears with my left hand, but I could do it, and I felt certain that all was well again. Stane, as always, felt content next to his reliable driver. So one thing was settled. I had my driver’s license in my pocket. But now another even greater worry hung over my head: how could I possibly run a half marathon? There was still a good month before the race, but I was no longer young. I knew that I needed to accumulate enough training kilometers. There was a time when I wouldn’t have needed to, but things were different now. I had difficulty walking because of my broken ribs. I had to sit down very slowly and in general I moved in a way that an attentive observer would have had trouble believing that I would be capable of making more than a few shuffling steps. What makes a human being human is walking—moving upright through life, gazing at the stars and at the future. One of the first tasks in a

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person’s life is to learn to walk and one of the final privileges in the end is simply to lie down. I was determined to not yet satisfy that final privilege: I wanted to run. “Heal yourselves, ribs,” I sternly instructed my body. “I’m in a hurry. I don’t have much time left.” Experience had taught me that such a conversation with the body can actually work. Around that time, I also got an invitation from Bled. Bled is one of the most beautiful towns in Slovenia, with an Alpine lake resting in a circle of mountains, a castle overlooking the lake, and, in the middle of the lake, a magical island with a church. It is also a place that has great sentimental memories for me personally. The organizer of the Bled Dancing Festival invited me to come to the spring dance and open the whole event by dancing with my chosen partner. Now that would be like old times! How wonderful it would be! The invitation tempted me more than I can say, but I knew it would be more prudent to wait for another invitation next year. What a high price I had to pay for that ride on the bus! “I have to do something to get better as soon as possible,” I told myself. And so I turned down the invitation to the dance. I was determined I mustn’t miss the race. Radojka sensed my determination as well. She called me on the phone and said: “You’re not going to sit at home doing nothing. I’m coming to pick you up.” We went to the same Ljubljana coffee house that we go to after our runs in the city. She lost no time while we waited for our coffee. “You know what, Helena,” she said, “I can see that you can’t run today, but in two days’ time, we’ll meet at the Slovan stadium and you’ll run one kilometer. You’ll be able to do that.” “Do you think I can do that with broken ribs?” I felt afraid and excited at the same time. “And besides, Radojka, what does one kilometer matter when I have to run twenty-one?” But it was what it was. You don’t argue with a friend. So a week after the day I broke my ribs, I put on my running shoes and, with the encouragement of my good friend, slowly started to cover the distance she had determined. I wouldn’t have been able to do more. If it hadn’t been for Radojka, I would probably have stopped running years ago. She is a friend in the true sense of the word, the kind who helps

Each Step Counts

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you get up and get to work. We only needed to look at each other and we already knew when and where we were going to run. I used to run alone, but as the years passed that got harder and harder. I need to run with someone else. An encouraging word carries me a long way, but ultimately I knew that I would have to do it on my own. As it turned out, the first little kilometer in the company of my broken ribs was extremely important. Without the first, there can be no second, or third, or the many more after that. I returned home from those training sessions incredibly tired. My abdomen hurt, so did my back, and my arms didn’t obey me. But slowly things began to get better. I knew fully well what my cautious Stane would say when I told him that I hadn’t cancelled my plan for the event in Istria. He still hoped I wasn’t running. It would never have occurred to him that I would start training for a race with such an injury. Let alone for a half-marathon. Stane seemed more and more preoccupied. I soon found out that it wasn’t because of my broken ribs. Those last nights together we were like an old married couple from some not very funny comedy. I moaned that I couldn’t breathe. He sighed that he was suffocating. I didn’t take his complaints seriously because he had been ill for decades already, and I somehow thought he would live forever. Or to put it more realistically, I was absolutely convinced that he would live well into his nineties. That we both tossed and turned all night was actually pleasant to me. We kept each other company in illness and in health. My thoughts lingered on the coming race. I couldn’t decide whether to give my starting number to someone else or to go myself. Despite the pain and stiffness, I started to look forward to the race as well as to fear it. But I couldn’t stop wondering if I would even manage to make it across the finish line. Radojka will be with me, she will encourage me, I told myself. Slowly, slowly, I started to believe, despite everything that had happened, I might be able to do it. What else could go wrong? Only two days after I had finally begun to look forward to the race, Stane was gone. He died. It is still so fresh that even now I can hardly bear the thought of it. But I am here, and now I need to think about this race even though I hardly know how I got to this place. I feel as if an invisible hand picked

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me up and placed me in Radojka’s car, conveyed me to the starting line, ordered me to run. Stane is dead and I am running. Was it Stane’s hand that carried me here? I can see the board with the number 20 on it. The first kilometer is behind me. The crowd cheers us on. They’re even louder when I run past. If they knew that not only my body but my soul was so gravely injured, they would probably fall silent.

KILOME TER T WO

BUT WHeRe ARe YOU, gIRLS?

AT T H e C O R n e R O F TA R T I n I S Q U A R e I n Piran, the course begins a steep incline. The terrain is different from what I’m accustomed to. I can hardly remember racing up such a steep hill. As I run between the Venetian-style houses, I inhale the musty air that pours into the streets from the cool open cellars. That is the scent of my childhood, the scent of barrels and sour wine. The cobblestone lane winds steeply upward past the church tower and toward the light. Some runners in front of me slow down to a walk, but I keep running. I run extremely slowly, but do not want to switch to a walk. Not yet. I’m only at the beginning of the race and I have to be strong. It doesn’t matter how slowly I go. It only matters that I don’t stop running. Recently, I have had to struggle with all my mental strength against stopping. I run slowly upward and soon I see a light at the top of the dark slope. This symbol surprises me. I will take it as a coincidence. I am still close to the beginning of the race and I know that nothing in life comes that easily. The path opens up to a truly breathtaking view on the left. Then the course dips under a stone portal onto a barren hill beneath a wall. At least we won’t have to continue uphill toward the graveyard. I run through a sunny stretch and onto a winding footpath that slowly descends toward the Bay of Fiesa. The lively colors dancing under the surface of the sea astonish me. I breathe in strongly, feeling even more intensely the salty sea air. I am struck by a sudden gratitude for everything that was and everything that will be and, above all, for the fleeting feeling of happiness that I have now: I am still running. I have to relax. I can hear my breathing. It is so peaceful. My feet touch the ground in an even rhythm. I have chosen well. My shoes are soft and

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comfortable. Everything is all right; the present is serene. Extending in front of me are two and half hours of intense emotions that I must try to make as pleasant as possible. I should be grateful for my slowness. I will enjoy these feelings for twice as long as I used to when I needed an hour less to run the same distance. I often think of my first run. If it hadn’t happened, I might be sitting in an armchair right now complaining. Or more likely, I might not be alive at all. It was 1945. I was seventeen years old. I was walking home from work through Tivoli Park in Ljubljana with a coworker of mine. Some sort of running event was taking place. It was called the Up Hill and Down Dale race. Many of my colleagues were gathered in the park and some tried to convince me to enter the race. “Helena,” they said, “let’s go running!” And so I heard the invitation, so pleasant and ordinary to runners today but back then utterly unknown to me. “Why would I run?” I wondered. In those days, people only ran if they were in a hurry or trying to escape from something. All the same, it didn’t take much to tempt me, as I had been running since my childhood. Wherever I went, I was always in a hurry. I didn’t have a bike so running was the only way I arrived on time wherever I was sent to. “But how can I run?” I protested. “Look how I am dressed, look at the shoes I’m wearing.” My coworkers looked at my loafers and skirt, my blouse, and sweater—I was dressed for work—and waved me off. It will be all right, they reassured me, and so I gave in. I stood on the starting line, the whistle blew, and off I ran. I ran the way I did when I went across the hill to the store, or to fetch kindling in the forest, or to school. The only difference was that there were bystanders cheering me on. That was something new for me, people clapping just because you were running. Even at the starting line there were not many female runners, and I soon passed those few. At one point, I looked back over my shoulder. “But where are you, girls?” I look around me now. How differently we runners are dressed today: how colorful, with our black leggings and bright colorful shirts. But back

But Where Are You, Girls?

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then, we ran in whatever clothes we had. I remember my skirt fluttering between my legs. I was afraid that the buttons on my blouse would fall off and get lost among the roots of the trees. Buttons were a luxury back then but my first victory would be more precious than any button. “I’ll go back and pick them up after the race,” I thought with the blind optimism that characterized the days right after the end of World War II and the liberation of Slovenian land from Italian and German occupation. When I crossed the finish line, I realized in surprise that I had come in first. I won my first race. The prize for my win was also something very precious in those days— an extra ration card. During the war and afterwards we lacked the most basic food, and the authorities tried to manage the situation by delivering food that was stored in national warehouses. The items I was allowed to buy were written on the card. I was extremely happy to get it, because I was always out of nearly everything. They also gave me a pair of shoes—sprinters—that I had never seen before. Marko Rozman, a sports reporter and long-time editor of the sports program on Slovenian national television, placed them in my hands. From then on, I wore them as I ran through the forest. Back then we ran almost exclusively on natural terrain. We never even dreamed of the kind of surface that we run on now, for example, during the Ljubljana Marathon, the wide asphalt streets with all the blinking streetlights. I also received something else after winning that race: an invitation to join the Olympia Sports Association and, along with my membership, I got my first coach, Stane Urek, another important Stane in my life. Stane Urek was a commentator, reporter, editor of programs about sports and recreation, a war reporter, and an excellent trainer. He was an early promoter of healthy living and used his daily radio show to urge his listeners to exercise. At the time, I worked for Gradis Construction Company and my employers were very understanding about my training. Athletic activities were considered extremely important in the firm. The employees of the company went for Alpine walks together, went on Nordic skiing trips, and competed in races and bowling and various trade union events, often even going on overnight trips together. Once we went for the whole week

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to Kranjska Gora, a ski resort in Slovenia, and another time to Pohorje, above Maribor, to train for winter and summer sports. It was the Olympic games for people in the construction trade. We even took part in Yugoslav competitions. I usually finished among the first five in the cross-country ski- and running races. I was extremely motivated and wanted to place among the top three in running races. The best, of course, was first place. I loved it when nobody managed to pass me. It is different today. I’m still stubborn, but above all, I feel grateful that my legs still carry me, that my lungs hold out, that my back doesn’t hurt, that I can run at all. There are many things for which I’m grateful at this moment, but most of all, that my capabilities, despite everything, have not abandoned me. I am looking at all the runners in front of me. I don’t know how many there are behind me, but I suspect I am at the end of the tail of this running column as we calmly approach the little brightly colored Bay of Fiesa. Remembering how beautiful Fiesa was the few times when Stane and I visited, it is surprising that I have not returned. In one day, in this one race, I’m going to visit quite a few places that I thought I would never see again. You must have a good reason to go back to a place, and such reasons fade with time, unless there is a race of course. Because of a race, one returns to many places. Once I won a race, I don’t remember which one, and received a week stay at the Hotel Barbara in Fiesa as an award. Stane wanted to immediately make use of the prize. We paid additionally for him and settled in by the fresh water lake that is separated from the salt water and the walking trails by only a couple of meters. The lake is a remnant of a clay pit next to a brick factory from the first half of the 20th century. Today it is a shelter to various rare species. And we discovered there were many more shelters. During that week, Stane and I walked all the trails that lead from Fiesa to the wider world. We discovered all the various places by the sea, enjoying the air and the Adriatic atmosphere. As we are approaching the little lake now, the onlookers cheer us on. I don’t usually look at the people on the side of the road, but this time I spot a blond-haired boy waving a paper flag, and a little girl, probably his sister, jumping up and down and exclaiming.

But Where Are You, Girls?

15

“Bravo, Helena Zigon, bravo!” While I am reflecting on how wonderful it is that little children know me by name and encourage me, I also realize that I have just put the second kilometer behind me. My speed is about nine minutes per kilometer, which isn’t so bad, given that first ascent. Two kilometers: that means nineteen more to go. But I mustn’t look that far ahead. My goal is the path itself. Let it be a pleasant one. For now, I am doing well. I even feel, because of the gentle descent, that I ran the second kilometer too quickly. How are races different from training? When I am training, I am not in a rush to get anywhere. I can see each and every flower. That’s why I love running in the spring when I can observe nature awakening. I don’t pay that much attention to people when I run; I prefer looking at the beauties of nature. I like running in nature. I only run in the city during organized events. Races are also important as training. I test myself and convince myself that I can do it. Like all people, I sometimes need self-affirmation. I probably needed it more when I was younger. With my success at athletic competitions I proved that I was unjustly considered a loser in my childhood, someone who would never achieve anything. I remember all the races where I competed, especially vividly the races that I won. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a strong desire to win inside of me. I was fast, but winning is not always easy. There are others who are also fast, also striving for the same recognition. Once, in Mirna Pec in the Dolenjska region of Slovenia, I ran a twenty-one-kilometer race over hills and through forests. My friend almost beat me but I wouldn’t let her. I ran and I suffered and I conquered the goal. Afterwards, exhausted, I lay flat on my back. I just had to be first. Is that the only way I could prove that my mother had made a mistake when she abandoned me? I know that my stubbornness must come from somewhere, that it is probably the consequence of the life I had, the circumstances of a vulnerable soul who had been abandoned. Did I want to win simply because I was looking for my mother? What would she have said if she had seen how fast I was, if she had seen me win? Would she have been proud of me? Would she have wanted to keep me?

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Such questions can never be answered. Even the contact I had with my mother in my later years could not fill the emptiness that emerged in my early childhood. But it looks like I knew how to turn that emptiness into advantage. There was no one there to praise me as a growing child, to offer me loving encouragement, so I had to learn how to praise myself and that became handy at every race I ran. “Bravo, Helena,” I told myself, “you’re doing great.”

KILOME TER THREE

THe SLOPe OF LOVe

A F T e R F I e S A , T H e C O U R S e B e g I n S A n O T H e R S T e e P ascent. Before I tackle the slope, I focus for a moment on the sounds of the orchestra that is playing a lively melody. They have chosen a good place for their stage. The scenery behind them offers a view of the freshwater lake that reflects the clouds in the sky. The rhythm of the music helps us onward. I set my course and head up the slope. The organizers call this ascent the Slope of Love. I smile. At first glance, the two words don’t match. And yet there is no love without a climb, no matter what you do. How many different forms of love have there been in my life? Two immediately come to my mind. In the first place it is love through which I accept life with all the good and the bad. I would have given up many times without that kind of love. This is also love that helps me to accept myself. I love this world, and because I am a living part of it, I also love myself. Then, there is love for the one closest to me—for the person whom I let close to me. In my life, that love was an ultra-marathon because it lasted for sixty-six years. Its path was similar to the one I am running today: mostly flat, but with a couple of very steep ascents. I felt exhausted and breathless on those slopes but at the top there was always a clear and beautiful view. With small steps and short breaths, I tackle the hill, which, like most of the runners around me, I would honestly rather walk up. But I am determined to run. I knew that there would be some hills on the course and that one would be extremely steep, but that did not scare me off. I’ll run slowly, small step after small step, but always a runner’s step.

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I have run to the top of Smarna gora—a hill at the margin of Ljubljana, sort of a pilgrimage for local walkers and runners—countless times, and the ascent is far steeper and narrower than this one, not to mention dangerous because of the roots that jut out. But even there, on Smarna gora, where most people slow down to a walk, I always persisted. I know myself well enough to realize that it is better for me to keep running. I must even keep running on this cobblestone hill. It is true that some competitors pass me with their rapid walking technique, but I don’t let that bother me. It is my habit to wish a good race to anyone who passes me, and these days, many people pass me. By the finish line, my voice is hoarse from repeating the words so many times. I don’t always see other racers, but I can hear them, their breathless greetings giving me courage. I wave to them so they know I heard. I like the way they urge me on encouraging me. Like every hill I ran before, I also reach the top of this one. The course becomes flat, then descends and narrows toward a footpath that winds through an enchanting little forest. On the other side, the view opens onto blueness above and below. Before the race started, I was warned about this little wood: I must be careful not to fall, that I would be better off walking through this part. It is true that I am getting on in years, but I often go to the mountains and just this sort of forest path is a pleasure for me. This particular path is so narrow that it is hard to pass, and I have to move aside to make way for my fellow runners. I have always loved these kinds of paths. I could run for hours and hours on them. They are a combination of running course and mountain hiking trail. They give me strength to run. In addition to strengthening my muscles, they allow me to realize once more what I often have in this life: that we must enjoy every obstacle. Only then arriving at the destination is a true prize. It is so obvious: if I do not enjoy the path all the way to the goal, how can I then enjoy conquering the goal itself? So there is no way that I am going to walk on this part of the course. At its end, the pathway joins the winding Strunjan Road. Here viewers on the sideline once again greet the runners. The road is closed to traffic and some onlookers are sitting on the curb, enjoying the fine Sunday morning. I can see by the expressions on their faces that they are feeling the race along with us, and yet they couldn’t quite bring themselves to actually

The Slope of Love

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run in it, though most of them are decades younger than me, some even a half a century. They could run, but if they don’t want to, it is their choice. Who am I to question it? With a lighter step I begin the descent towards the Strunjan saltpans, where saltworks have been active for many centuries. Seeing the still ongoing history on one hand and the people on the other, I continue ruminating on the notion of choice, only now I am thinking not about the onlookers but about my mother. Why did she allow my father to take me away from her? I return, as I have so many times, to the time before I was born.

Ivana Mlinar and Albin Kriznik met at the famous Ljubljana restaurant called Pri Amerikancu. My mother worked there as a waitress, and my father liked to frequent the place. He did so even later when I was a child. I don’t know how long they were together. I only know that my mother had to leave the job when she got pregnant with me. Being out of work she could no longer pay the rent for her room in Ljubljana. She had no choice but to return to her provincial home in Ziri, a small town in northwestern Slovenia, with no job, no man, and a big stomach in which her illegitimate child was growing. She returned to her father, who had married three times, and his current wife. That is how I ended up being born in Ziri, but my life there didn’t last very long. My parents never got married. I guess they didn’t want to be together. It can’t have been easy for my mother. Her father was so angry with her that he didn’t allow her to give birth at home. I was born in a stranger’s house, and I still don’t know who the good Samaritan was who accepted my mother under his roof so that she could bring me into this world in peace. My father stayed in Ljubljana, but when he found out he had a daughter, he came for me. He took me away from my mother, paying no attention to what anyone had to say about it. Did my mother abandon me? Or did my father kidnap me? One thing is certain: my life would have been different if I had been allowed to stay with my mother. If my mother had fought for me, if she had resisted my father, then I would probably speak a different language today. I would probably be living on the other side of the world today, because my mother later emigrated from Slovenia. Yet more important: what would

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have changed in my heart? Would I have still run in my other life? Would I love in the same way, enjoy life, mourn loss in the same way? Whatever the answers are, I didn’t have the choice. My life forced me to be with people who I’d rather not have been with, but I accepted them and even grew close to them. My father told me that he came for me when I was three months old. My mother claimed it was even earlier, when I was hardly two months old. He carried me on a motorcycle—a tiny baby. It must have been a terribly strange sight: my father, who was holding an infant in his arms for the first time in his life, driving with a little baby on a motorcycle. How he protected me during that ride, kept me from falling off, I still don’t know. My father told me that he had stopped at one of the roadside inns along the way. The owner, and his wife probably even more, fell in love with me, such a tiny baby girl, and suggested that he leave me there. They must have been worried, that with such a reckless father something bad might happen to me on the road. Or maybe they realized he had kidnapped me and wanted to return me to my mother. Or did they simply want a child for themselves? Later that couple left for America. If my father had left the baby with them, I would be living on the other side of the world today. Once again, if things had happened only a little differently, my life might have been completely and utterly changed. How many paths open for us in life! It makes me think of Robert Frost’s poem about two roads. At every crossroads, every turn-off or split on the road, we must choose which way to go. Frost could have chosen—-what about those for whom others make such choices? My father liked to boast that he wouldn’t have left me at that roadside inn for all the money in the world. This story suited him because he could pound his chest and say what a good father he was. He kept quiet about the fact that he didn’t end up taking care of me after all. He took me to his parents right away, to Terezija and Anton Kriznik in Brdo, which is now a part of Ljubljana, but was then a small village on the outskirts of the capital. I do not know exactly how his parents reacted to the arrival of their granddaughter, why they decided not to return me to my mother, but to raise me themselves instead. They already had five grown up children, two sons and three daughters. Maybe they missed the sound of children

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around the house, as all of their own had moved out. But whatever the reason, I lived the first seven years of my life in Brdo, in my grandparents’ house. Terezija and Anton had a restaurant and inn that was called Pri Krizniku and was opposite a brickyard. All the workers at the brickyard came to the inn for lunch. The inn had a kitchen, a large room with twelve dining tables and billiards right in the middle. There were also rooms for guests upstairs. In the kitchen, there was a wide flat surface for kneading dough and, of course, a wood-burning oven. A huge linden tree grew in front of the house and behind it a grove of chestnut trees where there was a well thirty meters deep, with ice-cold water. The groundwater was clean in those days. When my grandfather came home from his errands, he always filled a bucket with the cold water and poured it over himself. He believed this helped him stay vigorous and healthy. He needed his strength since he had a busy restaurant to run and no other means of support. Probably the cold water and fresh air really did help him. There was a bocce ball court outside and, when grandfather was in the mood, he invited me to play. I think my grandparents truly loved me, and those were good years for me. I had ducks to care for, and enough emotional attention to thrive during that first period of my life. Maybe the joy and love I experienced in those early years, despite the fact that this happy phase of my life would soon be over, prepared me for the challenges of the future. When I was only four years old, my grandmother Terezija fell ill and died. I was left alone with my grandfather. Only then did it become apparent how many corners of the house my grandmother had supported. My grandfather couldn’t run the inn and restaurant by himself and lost the will to even try. He was soon forced to close the place down. It was a dreadful time for both of us. We missed my grandmother terribly and were soon destitute. From a house where there had always been lots of visitors, where it smelled of good food and happiness—-sometimes too much, as my grandmother had sometimes complained—-only bare walls remained, and, of course, the two of us: a dejected old man and his frightened granddaughter. It only got worse when winter came and we didn’t have enough firewood. We were so cold that I once suggested to him that we chop up my sled, my prize possession, and use it as firewood to warm us up a little. We

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didn’t know how to make things better, and both our hearts and stomachs ached. Where were their grown-up children? To this day, I do not know. Maybe grandfather was too proud to ask for help. Maybe they avoided us and tried to shift the obligations to their father on each other. But whatever the reason, it was the end of my carefree childhood. I learned about another death soon afterwards. That same winter, there was a banging at the window in the dead of night. It was the village messenger who went from house to house with the shocking news that our good King Alexander I of Yugoslavia had been assassinated in Marseilles. He was the king and that was the sole reason for his violent death. And so Death crashed again into my innocent world, Death swinging its scythe, not only in the morning hours when it is time to reap the green grass but at any time at all. We can never know when the next one will fall: whether a king or a simple old woman. That thought never left me again. After a year of barely scraping by, my grandfather realized that he had to change something. The customary year of mourning had come to an end. Grandfather went out for a couple of days and, when he returned, he had a smile on his face that I hadn’t seen since before my grandmother’s illness. We would open the restaurant again and someone was going to move into the house—my new grandmother. He told me that I should call her mother. This new woman and my beloved grandmother had little in common, neither in their appearance nor in their actions. The memory of my grandmother was still too fresh for me to assign the word mother or grandmother to another woman. What made me really angry was that this new woman had the same name as my grandmother. She also was Terezija and, because my grandfather soon married her, she became a Kriznik as well. Terezija Kriznik—but how different from my Terezija Kriznik! And so I called her aunt. We didn’t like each other. Aunt Terezija did not have her own children so it was not surprising that she didn’t have emotions for me, a child yearning for mother’s attention. My grandfather, already over sixty years old, tired of all the bad things that had happened, and full of desire for a new and better life, allowed his new wife who was several years younger to take over the management of the restaurant and the family. Happy that we were no longer alone and that people started to return to the restaurant, he did everything he could to avoid making his

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new wife angry. No matter what she did, the fact remained that he needed her to get his life back on track again. He was a restaurant owner with his heart and his soul, yet, he didn’t know how to do anything else. The restaurant had always been his greatest pride and, without it, he was utterly lost. Returning to his life mission, he welcomed old and new guests alike. But for me, a time began that was no longer pleasant, and more and more often my thoughts wandered to my mother. I began to wonder why I wasn’t with her. Or at least with my father, although it was clear to me that he had no sense of how to take care of his own daughter, his only child. Sometimes he came to see me at the restaurant, although it would have been better if he hadn’t come at all. It was obvious that the offers of the restaurant—food and drinks—gave him far more pleasure than his child, created during a passing restaurant fling. Once he came for a visit with his brother, my uncle. I don’t remember what day it was, why the restaurant was closed, and why my grandfather and his wife were not at home. All I remember is that I was alone in the courtyard in front of the house, when my father and uncle came and asked me for the key to the cellar. I was afraid because I didn’t trust them, and they got angry with me. They broke a window to get into the wine cellar where a veritable treasure awaited them. My father loved wine, and he got drunk that day. Then the two men put me on their carriage and drove away. I screamed out loud, asking them where they were taking me. Fortunately, my grandfather returned during my second kidnapping. I don’t know if he really loved me, or if he took care of me because it was clear that I would never survive with my father, or if he kept me because I helped in the restaurant. Probably it was a combination of all three reasons. One thing was certain: my aunt always knew how to keep me busy. The fact that I was a small child didn’t trouble her at all. I cleaned the stove, scrubbed the kettles, and washed the big cooking pots. “Hurry, Helena!” She always urged me on. I washed up. I served drinks. In the summer, when there were tables and chairs in the courtyard, I was responsible for sweeping and weeding. I also helped in the garden where my aunt grew vegetables for the restaurant, and in the barn where we had horses and cows. When the guests played bocce ball, I raked the sand behind them. I also came in handy when it came to running out for things. We used to need all sorts of things in the kitchen. “Make sure and come back right away,” my aunt would yell after me.

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Even though I often had to go quite far, she expected I would return before I’d left. Sometimes she sent me to the store three times on a single day. The restaurant was almost always open, even on Saturdays and Sundays, which is why we always ran out of supplies. The nearest store was a good kilometer away where the Zabar restaurant stands today. I used to run all the way there even though there was a hill in between the two locations. I could say I started training back then. I learned quite soon that it was better for me if I was quick. I was afraid of my aunt. She had such a fierce look. Each time she looked at me, I could tell she thought I’d done something wrong. That’s why I always hurried. And I always had some job to do. I never had time to play. It is true that my aunt also had a lot of work. She baked fresh bread every day, worked in the garden, took care of the animals, cooked for all those workers, and even did the serving. My grandfather was hardly of any help at all. Like most innkeepers his main job was to bring in the guests and keep them coming back. He did that by greeting them and talking to them about politics late into the night. Certain tasks my aunt and I did together. A narrow path led from the restaurant to the Glinscica stream. We called it Glince in those days. We used to put all the tablecloths onto a cart and push them to the stream to wash them. It was easier than pulling up cold water from the deep well and washing them that way. Later, when my training would bring me along the Vecna pot under Roznik, just opposite the zoo, I used to look over in the direction where the Herzmansky nursery was, and still is, having been passed down from generation to generation. That’s where the Glince stream flows under the second little bridge from the city, and where the water is deepest and cleanest. We used to do our washing there and we weren’t the only ones. It was always very lively. We sang while washing, which made it nicer. The water was cold, our fingers would be rigid from scrubbing, and no matter how much we scrubbed, some of the stains that had been soaked and softened all night long wouldn’t come out. When scrubbing and soaking wasn’t enough, we would beat the cloth with wooden sticks. We worked the material with our Russian machines—that’s what we called our strong and diligent hands—until it was entirely white again, and we did it every second day because the restaurant had only one set of tablecloths. We had

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so much laundry to do that we would only change our clothes when the filth was unbearable. There was always plenty of work to do. My grandfather took care of the purchasing. He went to order beer at the Union Brewery, with a brewing tradition that has been carefully cultivated since 1864, and they delivered it with ice that we kept in the cellar in aluminum boxes. He ordered soft drinks from Pirnat in Nova vas in Ljubljana. They came in small glass bottles with a tiny ball on the top that you had to push down to get the air in. The workers drank beer, wine, or these soft drinks. I remember the workers, how famished they were when they came for their morning snack and later for lunch. After they were sated, they relaxed and played billiards. What pleasure they found in the green felt table and the brightly colored balls! What a wonderful sound the balls made when they cracked into each other! The billiards players were certainly marvelous to look at: the way they held their cue sticks in their fists, polishing them with solemn dedication, chalking their elegant blue tips. When they sat and waited for their turn, they held the cue sticks between their knees. You could sense that the cue sticks were more than just a tool to them, more than equipment, or something practical. They were rather like a child’s favorite toy, a wand that conjures castles in the clouds. They observed their fellow players and loudly commented on their successful strokes or their lost opportunities, while they remained silent about their real lives. It was as if their cue sticks gave them the feeling that their fate lay in their own hands for once. It was a fine thing to watch and listen to all of that. Joy echoed within the walls of the house. It was an entirely male company, but my aunt moved gracefully among them, telling a joke here and there, laughing. A sharp observer, as I was in my rare moments of repose, could see what power a woman’s figure and a feminine laugh could yield. On Sundays, whole families came to the restaurant for lunch. That was the best time because I had the chance to play with other children. My aunt was slightly more pleasant to her young helper on Sundays, but still I had to play furtively and quickly.

When I was seven years old, I felt as if I had a new chance in life. I started to go to school and my father decided it was time that I went and lived with

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him. And so I moved in with my father and his new wife. At that moment, unbeknown to me, a new and much crueler life was about to begin. It was cruel in itself, but even crueler because I could no longer even allow my thoughts to wander to my mother. I did not know whether she was alive or not. Some things remain unclear in life, while others are crystal clear. I run over the smooth asphalt road that winds between the young olive trees down to the sea, offering a view of the geometric lines of the saltpan. It is clearly delineated where one pan begins and the other ends, and it is clear to the traveler who observes them that he may only walk upon the narrow paths in between.

KILOME TER FOUR

In SeARCH OF A SAFe HOMe

T H e D e S C e n T T O W A R D T H e C H e C K e R B O A R D PAT T e R n O F the saltpans is at such an ideal angle that my stride feels pleasantly easy. “How do you manage to keep running?” people often ask me. I might answer that I still want to run away from my childhood when I lived with my stepmother who tyrannized me at every step. My father was a carpenter by profession, employed by the city government in the sewage-engineering department. He lived with the woman who became my stepmother. She was a very angry person and she couldn’t stand me. She couldn’t even bear to say my name. She called me Milena. She said that Helena was a pretentious name and she wouldn’t use it. Her name, which I can also hardly bear to use, was Julija, the same as the beauty who inspired France Preseren, Slovenia’s great romantic poet. The central square of Ljubljana is named after him, and there in the middle of Ljubljana at the point where most people meet stands his statue with his muse Julija above him. Ah, how ill-suited a name for my stepmother! Also, I hate the word stepmother, but unfortunately I cannot avoid it in this narrative. In the beginning, we lived in a small apartment in the Vic district of Ljubljana. Then we moved to Rozna dolina, another neighborhood, not far away. There were only three small rooms in the Rozna dolina apartment: a kitchen, a bedroom, and a pantry with a slanted roof where I slept and in which I was allowed to create my own living space when I was old enough. The interior was extremely modest with an old floor which I had to scrub regularly. Cockroaches liked to come to visit us from time to time, though not bedbugs since they were always there anyway. The house in Rozna dolina was a reflection of the people who lived in it. It was an old building with eight dilapidated apartments. Running water was available only for

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the families on the ground floor. The bathroom was communal. There was a pit latrine in the courtyard. At the top of the building there was a lonely and neglected attic to which a ladder ascended on the outside of the building. Sometimes when my father and stepmother kicked me out, telling me to go visit my grandfather, I climbed up the ladder and hid in this attic. I opened the trapdoor that protected the low-ceiling space from the cold, climbed through the window, and waited for things to get better. It was often very cold. Sometimes I was lucky when my good neighbor Breda saw me and invited me over. On those occasions, I experienced, if only for a short time, a warm home. As for my stepmother, I still don’t like to think about her. At one of our first encounters, she picked up my only toys—a little rolling pin and a tiny hammer—and gave them to her own daughter from her first marriage who did not live with her. That act of theft or plunder of my meager belongings symbolized everything that would be difficult in the years to come. Why was she like that? Back then, I didn’t know anything about sadism, that some people feel more alive when they are tormenting others physically or mentally. But I think my stepmother drew her sense of vitality from my suffering, because she did not get much from her husband, my father, or at least not in the positive sense of the word. And what did she do that was so bad? She monitored my every step. I was not allowed to play in the courtyard with other children. I had to stand on the bench in the kitchen and wait for my father to return home. I was not allowed to sit down, but had to remain standing like a soldier while my stepmother sat by the stove and smoked. When I say that Julija did not draw her vitality from her husband, or at least not in the positive sense of the word, let me explain what I mean. When he was not in jail or with another woman, my father usually came home drunk. I served him dinner, always praying that it would all go calmly, but he would inevitably start arguing with Julija, sometimes even beating her, dishes crashing onto the floor. Conflict apparently gave them a feeling of liveliness and reality, otherwise they surely wouldn’t have been engaged in such idiocy. I would sweep up the shards, feel somehow guilty for their bad mood and for not preventing them from arguing. Sometimes I tried to calm them down, fearing that all of Rozna dolina would hear them, but usually they just sent me off to my grandfather’s in Brdo, and argued even more

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loudly than before. I would go to my grandfather’s with hopes built upon the memories of my first happy years with him, but when I arrived, my aunt almost always sent me back. That’s how it was for me. I went on foot from Brdo to Rozna dolina and back again, three kilometers in each direction, in search of a safe home and a warm person who would take me in, but I never found either one. Sometimes, when I was turned away from both houses, I slept in a barn among the animals. I was a child of the street and to this day I am amazed that I didn’t break down, in one way or another. I believe that what saved me were those first happy years. Otherwise I do not know how to explain why all the unhappiness I experienced did not take away my will to live, my spirit. Even when I was beaten and my whole body was black and blue, I was able to forgive the guilty parties for their unspeakable violence before my bruises turned yellow and faded. I didn’t forget, but I also didn’t let hatred destroy me. Why didn’t I run away to my mother? When my stepmother told my father how much trouble I gave her— though it wasn’t true—he would threaten me: “You devil bastard child, I’ll pack you up and send you back to Ziri!” He was under the influence of my stepmother and believed I was a bad child. Sometimes he beat me so hard with his shaving brush that I had difficulty sitting on the bench at school. I used to think: “How bad Ziri must be if it is worse than it is here?” For me, Ziri was at the end of the world, and I was afraid to even imagine my mother who had let me go. So, despite everything, I stayed with my father and hoped that better times would come. But they never did. My stepmother beat me whenever she had the chance. She tried to do it secretly, but the neighbors often heard what she was doing, and finally they felt so bad about it that they reported her to the police. I was in the third grade when I was called out of the class to talk to a real detective who took me to one of the nearby eateries. He invited me for a cup of cocoa and also ordered a sweet roll to go with it. After I had finished consuming these luxuries, he asked me what I liked to play, what I did at home, how I lived. He knew how to talk with me and so I told him many things. It wasn’t long after this conversation that I was summoned to the court.

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When my stepmother found out, she really frightened me. She told me that I would be taken away and that I would be all alone in the world. She convinced me that I must say nothing about our home life or they would put me in a reform school. I followed her instructions. The detective tried as much as he could to get me to repeat what I had confided in him, but in the end they could do nothing for me but send me home. I don’t know how the neighbors who had been put in such a difficult position by my silence felt about it, but I felt guilty about them for a long time after that. Despite the brush with the police, my stepmother’s anger did not subside. She didn’t hide the fact that she didn’t like me, that she didn’t like me living with them at all, but all the same she always wanted me to help her with the housework. Every day, both winter and summer, she sent me to Roznik to get wood for the stove. Today Roznik is a popular hiking, running, and outing destination for residents of Ljubljana. But at that time people mostly went there to search for wood. The wood had to be nicely chopped, carefully tied into a bundle, and prepared for the stove, so that when she returned from her job, a fire was already waiting for her, and a cup of hot coffee that I made for her myself. It was also my job to wash the clothes. There was only one pipe in the building and I had to carry my father’s, my stepmother’s, and my clothes to the faucet and scrub them under the cold water until they were clean. My father wore strips of cloth wrapped around his feet so they wouldn’t be cold. They got terribly dirty and I had to scrub them endlessly until all the stains disappeared. My neighbor Anka, who had a large kettle for laundry, also went to Roznik for firewood. She was quite old and I used to help her in the woods to make the bundle that she carried home. For some time, she silently watched me as I scrubbed the laundry, and then one day she invited me to her place so I could wash my laundry in her kettle. From that day on, I went to her regularly. That was such a great relief. It eased my hardest work and my father’s foot wrappings got clean in the hot water. My stepmother treated me like a slave. At every opportunity she insulted me, swore at me, and tried to prove that I was not worthy of human treatment. Once I was trying to light the fire and the chimney didn’t pull. I couldn’t get the flame going. She struck me so hard in the shoulder that she broke my collarbone and I could not lift my arm. That was the first time she was really scared she might have gone too far. She gave me a bath, combed my hair, and begged me not to tell my father.

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Some secrets can stay inside of us forever, and others must come out before eternity comes. I remained silent for more than fifty years about that broken collarbone, but at a certain moment all that suppressed anger burst out as if it were completely fresh. That’s when I told my father what his wife had done to me. I don’t know how skillful she had been at hiding her violence. Maybe he knew what was happening, but preferred to look away. Maybe he had no idea, but after a half a century, I told him everything. I told him that I wasn’t guilty for my broken collarbone, that I hadn’t fallen as I was forced to tell him back then, but that Julija had beaten me. What did my father say to me? Nothing. How could he, after all those years of neglect, apologize with a few mere words?

I was thirteen years old when the war began. In April 1941, my grandfather already realized that the war would bring nothing good, neither for the restaurant nor for the world outside, so he sold the house at Brdo, the site of my childhood happiness. He must have had the sixth sense because not long afterwards the Italians occupied Ljubljana. Soon after the initial boasts that they were bringing us fruits of their ancient culture, Mussolini declared Ljubljana a military zone and the Italians ran a fence all around the city, isolating it from the hinterlands with a barbwire barrier. One section of the fence ran just behind the restaurant. Sure enough, circumstances became so bad that the restaurant would not have been able to feed its own, even though a restaurant is usually one of the most resilient establishments in the world. Grandfather used the proceeds from the sale to buy a house on Trzaska Street, named—what a coincidence— after the Italian city of Triest—and he lived there until he died at the age of ninety-five. The Italians renamed the streets of the city, though not my grandfather’s, took away the monuments that symbolized the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and set up Italian signs. We even changed to Italian time, setting our clocks one hour ahead. We celebrated Italian holidays. They didn’t occupy the whole city—the northern lowlands, which were important for the supply of the city, were under the command of the Germans. That is why the city lacked almost everything.

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Leaving the city was strictly controlled, if not prohibited. The only ones who were allowed “to go across the block,” as we called it in our apartment building and elsewhere, were people with special permits and children. The house my grandfather had bought was on the other side of the barrier and I was still underage. Therefore, I was allowed to go and visit him from time to time. On my fourteenth birthday, my stepmother beat me so badly that I decided I would run away from home. To be “safe” on the other side of the fence. I took my school bag, put in some extra clothes, went to the officer at the barrier and asked him if he would let me across to visit my grandfather. My grandfather was happy to see me and it was the first time he had stood up for me in front his wife. I told them about everything what was going on at home. It could be due to the uncertainty of the war times in which we were living, for what I told him made even a greater impression. Anyway, that is how I ended up living with my grandfather for an extended period once again. The buyer of my grandfather’s old restaurant in Brdo sold the place soon after buying it. Its new owner was the Communist Party of Slovenia, which used the buildings for the needs of the Liberation Front, the organization that struggled to liberate Slovenia from the yoke of occupation and also to forward a socialist agenda. The Liberation Front was a political organization that led people during the Fascist and then Nazi occupation, helped them find ways to resist the occupiers. The group brought a Tigl printing machine with a hand crank into a hidden cellar next to the one where we once stored the restaurant’s wine. There was an entry to the hidden cellar through the bathroom, set up in such a way that the door slid on rails into the secret space. Not long after my grandfather moved out, important documents began to be printed in that cellar, all the important national liberation texts, several issues of the daily paper Delo, many of the Liberation Front’s bulletins—Worker’s News, Worker’s Unity, and countless fliers and brochures spreading the word of resistance. The name of the organization was Podmornica, meaning submarine, because ground water was always flooding the place. It was the longest operating illegal printing house in Yugoslavia during the war. Because Podmornica was so close to the Italian barricades, the crowns of our old chestnut trees, which grew between the house and the strongly guarded barbed wire border, offered great cover for bringing out the

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printed material. When the printing press was forced to stop running after two years, workers, hidden by those great chestnut trees, carted out the entire printing press and other equipment and successfully transferred them to another hidden location. Today there is a plaque commemorating the printing press on the facade of the house. Some years ago, I wanted to enter the house where I had spent my childhood, but the new owner wouldn’t let me. Even when I told him that I just wanted to peek into the spaces where I had once lived, he coldly sent me away. What if you try again, Helena, I say to myself almost aloud, as I am approaching the end of the fourth kilometer. I just want to see the house and the restaurant and the big cellar one more time. I do know that the row of chestnut trees is no longer there. The Italians finally suspected something and took them all down. What a pity. I feel so sad when I think of those trees, gone forever because of human foolishness. Certainly similar stupidity has cut even further into the forest of a man.

My father was called up around this time, but he came home again after only a month. His entire unit had been disbanded. I don’t know why because it was the very beginning of the war, but he was allowed to do his job till the end. Since I wasn’t living at home, he waited for me in front of the school, but I always managed to slip away across the barrier where he could not follow me. I didn’t feel sorry for him, since I felt that he didn’t love me anyway. Later when I grew up and got a job, he was proud of me for a while. “That is my daughter,” he would say, but I could never forget that his daughter used to be just a bastard. I was both, the same person, but it was only when he was out of my stepmother’s control that he started to look at me in a different way. When I finished the primary school at Vic, my grandfather arranged for me to go and work for a trial period at the courthouse. The money would have certainly come in handy for my stepmother, but she was not inclined toward good fortune, and she didn’t want me to leave home. She said: “What would they have you for anyway? Scrubbing toilets?”

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I was not strong enough to resist her and just go—I was only sixteen years old—and I didn’t want to scrub toilets anyway. But maybe I missed an opportunity for a good job in a nice office with pleasant people. What would my stepmother say if she saw me running today and all the people standing by the sidelines cheering me on. Nothing. She wouldn’t care, she wouldn’t even see me. She was blind to everything that was beautiful and good. Anything like that went past her unobserved. I look out and see how beautiful the day is. On our left are saltpans of Strunjan. The real salt panners that lived there once are gone, nevertheless, the saltpans I am running by are a living connection to the past. The interweaving of the past and the present is something I often have in my mind. Today could not exist without yesterday—only because we have today we are able to remember the day before.

I don’t judge my stepmother anymore. She probably had no love in her childhood, so she could not love herself, did not know how to. At the corner in Strunjan, I am surprised to see a beer stand. Oh, how I love that drink! Stane took upon himself the sweet duty to always make it available to me. But I enjoy beer in moderation and only after all the work has been done. “Helena, have a beer!” they call from the stand. They know about my weakness. But I haven’t even completed a quarter of the race, so I had better wait a little longer for that sweet taste of beer. My work for today has not been completed yet and I am going to stick to my good habits despite the pleasant invitation to break them. I’ll have a beer at the finish line, when and if I make it there. And then one more beer at home in the evening, which Stane and I used to do, when, tired from the run, I got home. I felt such an enormous sense of satisfaction at those times, even though I was barely able to move from the couch. Now I feel a sharp pain in my heart when I realize that I haven’t had a taste of beer since Stane’s death and that it will be the first time I raise a glass without him. I will have to say a toast to him.

KILOME TER FIVE

THe LeT TeR

I ’ M V e R Y g R AT e F U L W H e n I S P O T A n official nourishment stand on the route. I stop, drink half a glass of water, and eat half a banana. The kind volunteers offer me oranges and a piece of cake. It’s obvious that the cake is homemade. It makes the whole event seem even nicer, even more authentic. I thank them. The banana is enough for now. A long path is extending in front of me and I will certainly stop for nourishment many more times. It makes no sense to fill my stomach too much. Judging by the enthusiasm emanating from these young people, I imagine that next year some of them will want to try to be on our side, to be among those who accept the offered nourishment with so much gratitude. Welcome, new runners, but also bravo to the volunteers. Without their help, there wouldn’t be events like this. They sacrifice their time because they clearly know that when you give yourself to others, you give the gift of good feeling to yourself. I also like to volunteer myself. I am a regular blood donor, having donated eighty times. When my blood travels through the slender needle into the waiting bag, I know that will soon mean life to someone else and I feel grateful for the opportunity to give a part of myself. If we can do something for others, we should. The snack gives me the power that I need to run more easily along the route of the old Porec railroad that used to run from Trieste at the northern tip of Italy to Porec along the Istrian peninsula in Croatia. I never had the chance to ride it, though I could have in my early childhood. The train carried passengers until 1935 when I was seven years old. But in those days, it might have been as far away as Africa. I only visited the seaside much later. I became a volunteer long before that. After I finished lower grammar school, I suddenly found myself with no obligations, and in order to avoid

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staying at home all day with my stepmother, I went to Kamnik, a town at the foothills of the Alps not far from Ljubljana. There was a gathering place there for children from all over Yugoslavia who, for one reason or another, had been separated from their parents during the war. They just called it the camp. I was still almost a child myself, but I went there to take care of other children. I played games with them and read them fairytales. I was sixteen years old and they called me majka, which meant mother in Serbo-Croatian language. I slept in the camp with them and found it extremely pleasant compared with my life at home. That was my first job and I enjoyed it immensely, although I received no pay at all. I spent a year among these children, during which it became increasingly clear that I needed a real job. My stepmother had the same idea. Thinking of the potential paycheck, she found me a job at the bookbinding department of the Ljubljana Bonac Kartonazna factory. That was my first paid job but it was so monotonous that it wasn’t long before I began to think about looking for another one. The children’s games at Kamnik were replaced by long hours crawling by as I placed stickers on boxes. I dreamed about the children that I had left only because of money, and I also thought about the nicely dressed clerks at that courthouse job whom I would never know because of my stepmother. Meanwhile I was placing sticker after sticker on the passing boxes. My bosses were tough people and the relationships among the employees were not pleasant. Even though I received my paycheck at the end of the month, and, believe me, I needed it badly, I sensed that I would not survive at work. Another young girl working there, Bernarda, felt the same way, and we quickly formed a connection. She didn’t think either of us was suited for the job and she quickly found us a new one. We went to work in another department, the drying department, in the same company. It was very hot there, but better all the same. We dried the long tubes on which wool was wound. But soon we weren’t satisfied in that department either so Bernarda kept looking for another job. She had a friend who worked at the Gradis Construction Company and she asked him for help. That is how in 1947, I came to work at the large and well-organized Gradis Company.

When I was young, I enjoyed running, dancing, and cycling, but I also enjoyed going to work at Gradis, the place where I finally found some kind of home. There were seven thousand employees at the company and we had

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construction sites running in almost every town in Slovenia. In those days, Gradis was the largest construction company in Slovenia. Rad was the only larger construction company in Yugoslavia. Gradis was established in 1945, two years before my arrival, at the beginning of the post-war period of reconstruction. The company built new buildings in the country, using contemporary technology and new configurations of organized labor. In fact, there were several organizations united under the name Gradis, all of which were engaged in the planning and construction of large projects. My first job was in the mailroom, then I advanced to the administrative offices, and later to an even better job. I received a regular paycheck and was part of a very good company, but still it wasn’t ideal. These were strange times after the war. There were still political divisions among the people. The new socialist government was paranoid about internal enemies, and, because of the legacy of World War II, remained suspicious of the Catholics. Thus people were often spying and reporting on each other. Once one of my coworkers in the mailroom, a girl with the pretty name of Angela, returned in despair to the office, saying that her superior had yelled at her in front of everyone, demanding that she tell him what she had been doing one Saturday at Brezje, a famous Catholic pilgrimage site. Today, of course, we have freedom of movement, speech, and religion. In those times in Slovenia there were certain destinations that aroused suspicion. The poor girl was terrified. Maybe because I had been brought up in my stepmother’s house, I knew how to stand up for myself. Experience had taught me that a person works against their own interest by remaining silent. When something bad happened to me, I usually bowed to it, but I always fought fiercely for others. In this case, I went to our supervisor and spoke on my coworker’s behalf. “Angela has relatives at Brezje whom she regularly goes to visit. But . . . what were you doing there?” Nothing else happened either to her or to me. That was the only time I confronted my supervisor like that, and, ironically enough, afterwards he often asked me to appear at public celebrations as a representative of the company. He must have been impressed by my courage.

I am running toward the crossroads and see the officials who watch over the runners and redirect the traffic. How kind they are. They never look down on us. They’re here because of us, to make sure that we’re safe.

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They are different from the transit policemen who used to watch over the trams that rode through Ljubljana in the postwar years. These officials were charged not only with protecting the green-and-white trams which sported Ljubljana’s dragon coat of arms that carried so many people back in those days, but also with monitoring all the people who moved through the city: those few who had cars, the ones who still rode horses or carriages, and bikes, and, of course, the children who couldn’t be kept off the streets for fear of criminals. Of course, it was necessary to keep an eye on the trams, but I had the feeling that the police were taking advantage of their situation. Sometimes they started to pick on someone for no reason. When we were on the tram, it often happened that a policeman just randomly stopped someone. I would listen to him, trying to figure out if he was accusing someone who hadn’t done anything wrong. In such cases, I always stood up for them. I wouldn’t allow an innocent person to suffer. I was a rebel with a cause, a rebel with a sense of justice. It isn’t true that you couldn’t speak up. People respected courage. When the tram service was cancelled in 1958, an enormous number of people came to the funeral. I was among them. It was strange that the municipal authorities ended one of the means of transportation that functioned properly at the time. But I could understand that cars were coming into the streets. In those years, many Yugoslav towns and cities with tram systems took these out, as trams occupied a lot of space in an era when it was needed for an increasing number of automobiles. Soon after the last day of operation the tracks were dismantled and the trams were transferred to other Yugoslav republics which didn’t have enough of them. Today I’m running happily in the direction that the volunteer officials show me. There are many different ways one could go, and without the volunteers I might get lost. Besides, there are not as many runners on the course that I can follow now, though Radojka is running right next to me. She will know where to go. I appreciate her help very much. In my life, there have been few times when I trusted someone to show me the way. At each of the crossroads in my life, I asked myself: Is this the right path for me? And if I thought it was, I followed it. If not, I tried to find another one. Today, I trust that the path I am running on is the best path for me. I’m running at my own pace. The course winds upward again. Probably because of that, I can’t stop thinking about the next station where I can eat

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something and recollect my strength. I’m going to stop and calmly drink a glass of water and treat myself to a sweet snack. I’ll stop at every station along the way, I promise myself. I deserve that when I am running. And if someone deserves something they should have it, though, of course, life isn’t always just and generous.

My mother stayed in Ziri. Why did she never come and look for me when my father took me to Ljubljana? I don’t know the answer to that question. Though I do know that she could have found me if she wanted to. There is no doubt that it was hard for her. Having an illegitimate child was not easy at that time. She was ashamed, but she wasn’t the only one who shared such fate. I will never understand why she let my father take me away, since he did not want or know how to take care of me. She must have realized that, because if he had been able to care for me, he would have cared for her, too. If someone took my child away, I would move heaven and earth to get it back. I would go, on foot if necessary, wherever and however far I would have to go. But my mother let my father take me away when I was a tiny infant—on a motorcycle!—and did nothing to get her child back. For a long time, that was the only thing I knew about my mother. My father kept repeating that fact to me all the time. Also my stepmother rubbed salt in the wounds. And so, for years, I lived with the terrible idea that my mother didn’t love me. I had my first contact with her when I was nineteen years old. It was a slender sheet of stationary that brought us together, a letter written in my mother’s neat hand. I can’t help but wonder: does anyone even write letters anymore? I am passed by a runner who is so fast that I can just assume he was late for the start. He is holding his hand to his ear and I realize he is talking on the phone, running and probably telling someone that he is running the marathon, describing the weather and how he feels at the moment. He doesn’t need to write a letter. Such changes always surprise me. There was a time when writing letters was the only way to reach another person living in another place. Letters were so important that sometimes there would even be a notice in the newspaper if a letter had been lost because of a postman’s carelessness or

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because some military incident had stopped a flight before it arrived at its destination. Something similar happened to a letter that long time ago changed the life of a nineteen-year-old girl.

My stepmother worked at the Ljubljana Tobacco Factory. The factory was doing so well that it was able to care for the well-being of its employees, beyond salary and health insurance. They even had a library and my stepmother sometimes brought books home. When I had a chance, I used to read them. I loved to read. Stories carried me to distant worlds. More than in fantasy or adventures, I was interested in realistic characters, especially those who lived in families, or, who through their suffering and heroism ultimately earned a life in a good family. When my stepmother was at home, I wasn’t allowed to even sit down, let alone to have some peace to read. I could only read in secret. I read when I was in motion, not exactly running, but on the tram I used every single moment. Dickens was a great discovery to me. If you read him you will immediately know why. He describes a childhood similar to mine, filled with hardship and abuse. It is not surprising that this was his topic since he, too, experienced hard times as a child. His father went bankrupt and the twelve-year-old Dickens had to go and work in a factory that made shoe polish. His mother was especially cruel to him. Even after young Dickens got the family out of financial problems and his father was released from debtor’s prison, she did not allow her son to return to school. In his books, he describes again and again careless, weak, strange, naïve, stupid, or negligent mothers. Later in my life, I read all of his books, but the first one I took into my hands was David Copperfield. From the very first chapter, I read it with a trembling passion as if the story strummed on the strings of my own soul. To this day, I remember the physical characteristics of the book: each of its three parts had a canvas cover with the title written in gold letters on the spine. David Copperfield is the hero and the narrator of his own life story. When he is seven years old, his mother remarries and his new stepfather, the very strict Mr. Murdstone, moves into the household. Under cover of robust childrearing principles, Murdstone constantly challenges the boy. His mother, a naïve and childish soul, is unable to resist her new husband and his grim sister, although she does love her little Davy very much. The

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only comfort the boy has to compensate for the loss of his father who died before his birth is a collection of books in the attic next to the closet where Murdstone makes him sleep. How astonished I was when I came to the part in the first chapter where Davy identifies himself as a hero and casts the characters of Murdstone and his sister as villains! I was so happy to discover that he did the same thing I did, except that I assigned the evil role to my stepmother. I soon came to the scene where Murdstone administers a test of Davy’s progress in his studies, all the while standing threateningly by with a cane in his hand, thus paralyzing the boy. Murdstone decides that Davy needs to be disciplined and marches Davy off to his room, gripping the boy’s head under his arm. There he proceeds to beat him, paying no attention to the boy’s pleas for mercy. In horrified protest, Davy bites the man’s hand. Murdstone, enraged, doesn’t even look at the child anymore, just continues to beat him senselessly. I wondered: did my stepmother borrow the book to look for an inspiration, to find a recipe how to discipline me more effectively? I went on reading to the part where Davy, having been almost beaten to death, regains consciousness and looks at the reflection of his swollen face in the glass. He is suddenly overwhelmed with the feeling of powerful abjection, disgust, and guilt. I knew that feeling well, feeling of guilt for our domestic quarrels and violence. Just as I was about to continue reading, something fell out of the book onto the floor, something that seemed both hard and soft at the same time, both lightweight and solid. I flinched, thinking that perhaps it was a bookmark tucked in at the most appropriate place. But I was so interested in Davy’s fate that I couldn’t stop reading. I read about how he had to spend the subsequent days locked in his room, not allowed to talk to anyone, his mother not allowed to visit him, how he was only allowed out of his room for the family prayers, how his stepfather positioned him in such a way that he could not see his mother’s terrified face, and finally how several days later he was sent away to a boarding school, without being able to say goodbye to his mother, and how in his first days at the boarding school he had a sign taped to his back, of course, per his stepfather’s instructions. Warning! He bites! It was this written message that reminded me of the thing that had fallen to the floor, the folded sheet of paper, the bookmark. I leaned over

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to pick it up. It was a slender rectangle of parchment-like paper. When it had fallen to the floor, one corner had bent upwards. I opened the sheet and smoothed it so that there would be no sign that I had been reading the book. In doing so, I couldn’t help but notice that the paper was covered with writing. It was a letter. I read the first line: Dear Helena, my darling daughter, I turned over the sheet of paper and saw the following words at the bottom: Your worried mother Ivana

The words brought a terrible and wonderful realization. My mother had been looking for me. She had claimed me as her own, reached out to me. But as I was reading on, it became clear that she had finally resigned to her fate, letting me know she would not write again because she didn’t even know if I had ever received the letters since she had never got any answer. “Do you not answer because you do not want to answer? Or are you no longer alive?” she desperately asked. Her handwriting was neat. Here and there, the line was broken, as if she were shaking, perhaps unable to calm her sobbing. I also started to cry—tears of relief came into my eyes. From the contents of this letter, I realized that my mother had been writing to me for years. My stepmother must have intercepted and destroyed the correspondence that would have been so infinitely precious to me. Perhaps this letter was kept only because she hadn’t had the chance to read it and then destroy it. I was so astonished. As soon as I was able, I wrote back to my mother, briefly, just to let her know what was most important: that I was alive and that my silence had not been my choice. But I was nineteen years old and those nineteen years of life without my mother had left me with scars. Because of this, my letter may have sounded rude and angry. How could it be otherwise when there was so much disappointment and so many questions mixed up inside of me? The one question that came before all the others was: Mother, why did you keep your next three children—that is what you wrote in your letter— and reject me, your first child? How could you do that to me? I allow myself to remember these events and emotions triggered only when I am running. I can more easily bear their burden. When I run, I feel

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a greater sense of belonging and I accept my fate as a part of the natural process of life, which always functions in accordance with our ideas of goodness and justice. Although I spent most of my life missing my mother and also judging her, I am able to understand and forgive her today. But I had to run an enormous number of kilometers, many full and half marathons, to travel from judgment to forgiveness. I had to cycle great distances, climb to the top of many steep hills. The more difficult the trials, the more I liked them, and the easier it became for me to finally accept my life. Today I accept it: what happened happened. To fight against the past is pointless and only prevents one from living in the present. The present— this moment—is all that counts now. I can feel my body. I can feel my breath. I can feel an almost childlike joy of running.

KILOME TER SIX

HeLenA, IS THAT YOU?

M Y M O T H e R A n S W e R e D M Y L e T T e R A n D W e began to correspond. She invited me to Ziri, I should come and live with her. She was quite persistent, but I had mixed feelings. Ziri seemed far away, I had a job in Ljubljana and no one commuted to work in those days. I was also afraid: what if I am unable to suppress all my hidden resentment? It turned out that shortly after my father took me away from Ziri, my mother met another man. She had a child with him, a daughter, Vida, who was two years younger than I. But then Vida’s father also left. There is a Slovenian saying that is similar to the English one, “Three is a charm.” Only the meaning is more ambiguous. Some people say that it means you will get the same result the third time, as you did with on the first and the second. Others think it means that with the third try bad luck will turn to good. Well, my mother must have believed the latter. She met a third suitor, Joze, and this one didn’t leave her. She had two sons with him, Miran and Branko. I stubbornly stuck to my decision to stay in Ljubljana, despite having to live with my stepmother, and not long after my mother and I came into contact with each other, she and her new husband and the three children decided to emigrate to Austria in search of a better life. My mother’s new husband, Joze, was also from Ziri, but had gone to Austria in 1942, during the war. The German authorities sent him somewhere near Salzburg to work as a laborer. In those days, such an arrangement was known as Arbeitsdienst. He was forced to go, it was difficult, but not as bad as the circumstances might suggest. Joze was completely safe from any military engagement and, after two years of working in Austria, his family was allowed to join him. Thus, my mother and her three children left their home in 1944 and went to live with him. After the end of the war,

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they settled into their new home, raised their children, found friends, and Joze got normal employment. They lived an ordinary immigrant family life and felt good in their new environment. And so I had hardly found my mother before I lost her again. It felt as if she had abandoned me for the second time. She went to the other side of what was then a nearly impassable border to settle in a completely different world. Today we can travel anywhere. We can go by car many kilometers in any direction just to have the feeling that we are going somewhere. If I think about it, I have been travelling most of my life in order to participate in one race or another, a mountain hike or a cycling tour. But in 1947, when these events took place, it seemed unimaginable that someone would travel, just like that, to the other side of the Iron Curtain as Winston Churchill famously named the border between Eastern and Western Europe. But three years after that first contact with my mother, fate or coincidence smiled upon me. Through a constellation of fortunate circumstances, I managed to acquire a passport that made it possible for me to cross Yugoslavia’s border. I was having lunch in the cafeteria with my coworkers, with whom I got along very well, and we were discussing various things. We were cautious in those days because we were not really allowed to talk about our dreams aloud as we do today. Nevertheless, I always felt better if I could share my desires with someone, if I didn’t have to hide anything, if I just could be myself. That is why I sometimes confided in those around me that I was twice an orphan—twice, because when I found my mother after so many years without her, I lost her for the second time when she crossed the border to Austria. Among those who heard my story that day was a young man named Nikolaj. He was very moved by it and showed willingness to help me leave Yugoslavia for a short time, to visit my mother in the world of decadent capitalism. I could hardly believe it. Those were the days when people could be sent to forced labor to Goli otok, an island in the Adriatic, for a single careless word. However, this young man gave the impression of being trustworthy and I thought he might just make it happen. All the same, I tried to suppress my hope since, according to my personal circumstances and the political situation at the time, it seemed pretty unlikely that he would succeed. In today’s races, it is completely normal for the runners to help each other. I know if I fall, an unknown runner on my left or on my right would

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immediately come to help me to my feet. This awareness is a big comfort to me. I feel less alone and more connected to people. But life back in those days was not an innocent spring run. It was a race with many obstacles, many hills and hurdles, if not lethally dangerous minefields. Even so, Nikolaj from the cafeteria at Gradis really did help me acquire the documents I needed to apply for a passport, and before I was aware of it, I held in my hand a visa that allowed me to enter Austria, a document which literally opened me the way to my mother for fourteen whole days. Nikolaj never told me how he managed to help me. Apparently he had some connections somewhere. Perhaps he was in love with me—and I probably would have begun to return his emotions because he was so handsome and attentive— if I hadn’t already known Stane. At the time I was arranging everything for my travel, Stane was away for military service. I missed him very much. I didn’t have an affair with Nikolaj, not then or later. By mentioning him here, I express my gratitude to him—though he might not be alive anymore. A foreign country! I had never been abroad. My coworkers bid me farewell as if I would never return. Some certainly thought that I would take the opportunity and emigrate, but I didn’t have a shadow of a doubt. I had decided that I was only going for a visit. Even if my mother turned out to be a wonderful person, even if her husband and children were equally wonderful, I would return home after the visit, partly also because I didn’t want to cause Nikolaj any difficulties. I had plenty of time to prepare for that trip to Austria. And yet, because my mother and I would have to make up for the twenty-one lost years, I felt extremely anxious. I don’t know how my mother lived all that time with her bad conscience, leaving one of her children behind, simply abandoning her first child. Maybe it was hard for her or maybe she didn’t have a bad conscience at all. On top of everything else, I would be in a foreign place, where the people spoke a foreign language I understood, but it was the language of our occupiers. How could my mother leave the land where she was born, and me and all of our ancestors, the place where all of our neighbors speak our mother tongue? I wondered.

By the time I left, Stane had returned from the military service. He took me to the train station and wished me bon voyage. He felt sad that he could

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not go with me, but it was probably better that I went alone. I needed his support, but even more I needed solitude to figure out how I really felt, who I really was. I cautiously decided that since my mother wasn’t expecting me, I would introduce myself as the daughter of a friend in case she seemed initially adverse to me. Perhaps I would come to like her later and reveal my true identity to her then. I sat quietly on the train, observed the landscape passing by and prepared my soul for the encounter. It will be all right, I tried to convince myself. Everything will be all right. They will accept me. After all, I’m one of them. At one point, I decided to stand up and walk the length of the train. I felt the need to see other people, to remind myself that they all have their own stories, and each of those stories was different. We all travel through our lives with our own stories and, in this way, we are all one. A group of elderly men was sitting at the front of the train, and one of them, he could have been my grandfather, addressed me. I had studied German at school so I was able to understand a bit of what he was saying. When he asked me where I was going, I told him my life story. Just that fact shows how agitated I was. Everything was seething just beneath the surface of my skin. My new grandfather—that’s how I thought of him—was extremely moved by my narrative as if by one of Dickens’ tales. He asked me if he could play a side role in my unusual story, which he felt certain was flowing toward a happy ending. It was already late at night when the train arrived in Salzburg. My “grandfather” got off the train with me and accompanied me to a hotel he knew to be reliable. He got me a room, asked the proprietor to take me to the tramway next morning and gave me clear instructions on how many stops to go. He would have liked to help me himself, but he had to continue his journey. “You’ll find her,” he kept saying to me. And he was right, although he would never know it. If such an encounter happened today, we would have exchanged telephone numbers. Then I would call him and let him know how things turned out. Of course, we could have exchanged addresses, but in all that rush and nervousness, we somehow forgot. Today I comfort myself with the certainty that he had a fine feeling just helping me. I spent the night in the hotel room, just dozing, making sure I didn’t oversleep. When the dawn broke, I was too impatient to wait for breakfast.

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The kind hotel keeper took me to the tramway station and told me after how many stops I was to get off and where to go from there. “Left, again left, one more left, and straight to your mother.” When I got off the tram, I walked along the streets of the foreign city and smelled a different morning air. There was a smell of sweet morning rolls and strong real coffee. In Slovenia, we still drank coffee substitute after the war, mostly chicory. Real coffee was a rarity. Eventually, I came into the street and found the number I had written on a piece of paper, wrinkled but carefully safe in my pocket. I remember a narrow pathway that led up to a little house. I remember every step I took toward it and the moment I laid eyes on my mother who was watching me approach from the threshold. “Helena,” she said, “Helena, is that you?” I had come unannounced, but we were so similar that my plan to tell a story about a pretend friend immediately fell apart. She was just slightly taller than me, but in every other way, both face and figure, I was like her younger twin. I was a younger Ivana, she an older Helena. That is why she immediately recognized me as I came down the path. “It’s me, mother, it’s me,” I answered with a faltering voice.

During the days I was in that house on the outskirts of Salzburg, I learned to accept my mother and her family, and they accepted me. I spent nearly two weeks with a person who was so similar to me, and it was a strange feeling, eventually an almost pleasant one. It was nice that people in the streets would see us and would immediately know that we were mother and daughter. My brothers and sister also took me into their family and were very kind. My mother’s elder son, my half-brother Miran, was five years younger than I. As a boy, he had quickly grown accustomed to life in the German-speaking world. Mother’s house was on a lake and, during the day, he invited me to go swimming, and in the evening dancing. Even my stepfather, if that’s what I should call him, was very nice to me. It almost seemed as if the dark cloud that had hovered above me all those long years of childhood had started to dissipate. Maybe it would have dissipated completely, but my path went its own way and the holiday with my new family was too short and was marred in

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the end. I met a boy from Slovenia at the lake. His name was Andrej and he invited me to swim. My mother let me enjoy those happy afternoons, telling she would be waiting for me at home with dinner on the table. I was with an interesting boy in the warm sun on the banks of the beautiful lake. It was fun. I almost felt like a local. Andrej told me about his life, that he was waiting for a visa to go to America where he had an uncle for whom he would work and earn a lot of money. He planned to get rich, to come home, and build a big house with a big garden around it. It was nice to listen to his life story and his plans, until he happened to mention in passing that he was a member of the organization Black Hand. “Black Hand?” A cold shiver went down my spine. That afternoon I politely declined his offer to accompany me home. I went by myself as fast as my legs could carry me. Later that same day, my new family looked at me in surprise when they saw that I already had my suitcase in my hands and was rushing to bid them farewell. My mother wasn’t happy that I was leaving. By then, she very much wanted me to come and live with her. She begged me to stay. “I have to go,” I insisted. “But I’ll come again soon, I promise. Goodbye.” I repeated these words to each of them individually, squeezing their hands, and before long I was sitting on the first train to Slovenia. I trembled all the way to the border crossing, looking around me in anxiety. In those days, we were all terrified of Black Hand. It was a Catholic organization that, during the Second World War and the resistance in Slovenia, launched assassination attempts on political opponents from the ranks of the Liberation Front. Even today, it is considered one of the most secretive organizations in the history of Slovenia. While it was operating, the only thing known about the organization was that it ruthlessly killed its enemies. Before an intended action, Black Hand member left flyers with black palm prints on them. If such a flyer appeared on the fence or on the front door of a house, the residents of the dwelling were usually liquidated the next day. Black Hand was an organization of liquidators and, judging by the extent of their work, there were quite a lot of them. Even Stane had once got a “black hand” marking on his fence and immediately went into hiding. If he hadn’t, he probably wouldn’t have survived. I still felt a mixture of fear and happiness when I arrived at the Ljubljana train station, and who did I see waiting on the platform? Stane! While I

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had been in Austria, he had gone each day to the station to wait for me. He did so although he feared—or perhaps because he feared—that I would never return. I had received a visa for fourteen days, which was a very long time in those days; hence my coworkers’ and Stane’s suspicions that I would stay were somehow justified. But I always knew I would come back. I even returned from my visit two days earlier than I was supposed to, drawn back not only by the meeting with the boy from Black Hand, but by the almost irrational fear that they wouldn’t allow me across the border and back home. Even today, I love coming home after some trip, but in order to get that feeling, you have to go away. That first homecoming was perfect! I fell into Stane’s embrace. I never saw the house by the lake again. My mother wrote to me later, inviting me to come back, sending me pictures of herself, of my half-brothers and sister. But I never considered her invitations seriously, perhaps because I wasn’t able to forgive her completely. Despite the beauty of the visit, we couldn’t really make up for all that I’d missed during my childhood. I did call her “mama” but the word came out of my mouth with difficulty. Mama is someone who picks you up when you fall, who blows on your skinned knee when you hurt yourself, who hugs you and tells that she knows how much it hurts, but the pain will pass. I didn’t have that kind of mother in my life. My knees were often skinned, but I had to learn to blow on them myself, and to keep on running. The runner in front of me who I am watching is a stranger to me, but his strangeness is of a different kind. I don’t know him but with a little effort I could change that. If I ran a couple of kilometers beside him and we had a chance to talk, he would become an acquaintance. That acquaintance wouldn’t be deep, of course, and there is no reason why it should be. The feeling of momentary connection between us would be enough. I would feel warmth in my soul. It was completely different with my mother. That kind of relationship should go from depth to depth, which didn’t happen between us. Some years later my mother emigrated with her whole family to Australia.

Leaving Strunjan, another small seaside settlement, we are running among the fields and meadows, glowing yellow with blossoms, in the direction of Izola. This is an old fishing town, whose name originates from the Italian

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Isola, which means “island.” The course ascends slightly, but so slightly that it is not terribly difficult. I see a solitary house standing in the distance. People stand in front of the house, calling out their greetings. Funny that they don’t come closer to us, I think. It must seem proper to them that the runners hear them, but that they stand some hundred meters from the course. As if they were standing on an island. Perhaps they will dare to come closer next year.

KILOME TER SE VEN

WILL YOU eMBR ACe HeR WHen YOU MeeT?

T H O S e F I R S T K I L O M e T e R S A R e Q U I T e P L e A S A n T, S O M e H O W virginal. We runners are fresh enough, full of sincere hope that the race in front of us will not take too much out of us. The path to my mother was of an entirely different kind. There was little hope and a great deal of effort, and time passed slower than it does during a race. Worst of all, there was so much of it in between our meetings. My mother came to Ljubljana once in the years after that visit to Austria, on a short vacation to see her sister in Kranj. This visit came nearly thirty years later, when I was around fifty years old. I had learned that she was coming to Slovenia one month before she came, and I could hardly believe it was true. As the decades had passed, my resentment toward my mother had decreased. I came to accept my life, including the things that I had missed so much in the early years. I was very excited that she was coming and looked forward to her visit with sincere and clear emotions. In the letter in which she announced her arrival, she expressed a desire that surprised me: she wanted to meet my father. She hadn’t seen the love of her youth since my father had come to Ziri to take me away. Despite that indisputably barbaric act, and despite the fact that she later had another man and married a third one, she told me that she had loved my father most of all. How that was possible remained a riddle to me, but that is what she said, and since she confided it in me all those years later, I believed her. I have to admit that I very much liked the idea that, after all the years that had passed, my mother and father would see each other again. In my entire life, I had never had the experience of seeing both my parents together in the same place. What a thrill it would be to breathe the same air as the two of them, to simply observe them, how they spoke to each other,

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even if it was only small talk. I would finally feel at least a little of what I had missed. It is a strange desire to simply want two people to be in the same place on the same time. Even with my overly lively imagination, I could not imagine this simple thing. I wanted it all the more because I was convinced that their relationship would be completely different from the one my father had with my stepmother. I impatiently anticipated how it would be, wondered what they would say when they met. Would they embrace? Would they be moved? Would they say to each other that everything could have been different? It was also the first time in my life that my mother and I had a shared desire, a shared plan. On the day of her arrival, I said to her: “Today you are too tired after the long voyage. Rest now, and tomorrow we will go together to see father.” At that time, my father had been living alone for two years, my stepmother having died when she was relatively young. After her death, my father and I began to see each other more often and got along better. I often cooked for him or brought him a stew that he could eat over the next few days. On the long-awaited day, I asked him to prepare for my mother’s visit, arrange things, clean up, and also prepare something to eat to offer her, so everything would be the way it was supposed to be. In the morning, he should go out on errands to get the welcome party ready, and in the afternoon we would come to him. Certainly, he was excited. Maybe he was also afraid. Perhaps that is why he went from one of the stores into a bar to fortify himself with a little of the brandy he liked to sip. For courage, he must have thought. I was getting ready to leave work a little early in order to pick up my mother who was waiting for me at home. At that moment, life revealed its unexpected side. Just as I was straightening out my desk and putting my jacket over my best dress, the phone rang. The call was from the emergency room in the hospital. I held my breath. The doctor told me that my father had had a bad fall and that he was in the trauma ward in critical condition. I ran to the hospital, my heart pounding, as if I were running a sprint, even though I could hardly comprehend what the doctor’s words meant. I wondered, for example, if only his face had been damaged and if he would still be able to enjoy a visit in his hospital bed, to reconcile with his unfinished past. I hoped it would be so. But at the same time, I realized the incident was a new proof of my father’s irresponsibility.

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Oh father, how many times have I told you not to do this! a voice cried out inside of me. My mother was waiting at home, agitated, though not because of the accident, for I had not told her about it yet. I first wanted to see my father myself, to be sure he wasn’t too seriously injured. It can’t be that bad, I thought. It was bad enough that he had fallen. I will have enough time to explain everything to my mother later. But I found my father in the emergency room, motionless, connected to tubes. I pleaded with the doctor: “But he’ll be better soon, won’t he?” “It’s very serious,” he responded quietly. “He has a fractured skull.” My legs began to shake. “What do you mean, a fractured skull? He has to meet my mother this afternoon. They haven’t seen each other for half a century!” He hadn’t even fallen off his motorcycle, which, in any case, he hadn’t ridden for a long time. He had arrived home and, on the staircase, his head began to spin. He fainted and fell backwards onto his head. The neighbor called an ambulance, which came quickly and drove my father away. But his injury was too serious . . . “You know, sometimes such injuries . . .” The doctor didn’t even finish his sentence. Feeling extremely downcast, I went home to my mother who was waiting for me, impeccably dressed. I told her what had happened. “Now we have to wait until they call. As soon as he is out of danger, they’ll move him to the ward where longer visits are allowed. Then we’ll have a chance to chat with him. You can talk about what happened when I was a baby, when he took me away. You have to talk to him about that! You owe me that much!” Several awfully long hours passed as we sat in uncertainty at home, waiting for the call. When it finally came, it was from the intensive care unit. “I am sorry to inform you that your father has passed away.” I was overwhelmed with a storm of emotions, sadness and agitation combined with anger. Couldn’t you have been more careful? the voice inside of me cried out again. It was as if he were only capable of causing me suffering. Him or I don’t know who. If only the accident had waited, if only he had fallen the next

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day, everything would have been different. The untold story of my parents would finally have had some sort of conclusion, some clarification, maybe even resolution. But now, I was left for the rest of my life with a dark and unfinished story.

The next day, my mother and I went to my father’s apartment. Instead of visiting my father, drinking hot coffee and eating his very best walnut cookies, we were greeted by a cold and empty flat. The neighbor who had called the ambulance was waiting on the stairway. I asked her to show me where my father had fallen. Her door opened right onto the landing where he had walked past. If you weren’t careful, the door could open and knock you right down. My father didn’t like this neighbor. He told me many times how she was nagging at him. A thought came to me at that moment, a thought that I haven’t been able to get rid of for all the years since. What if, for anger or jealousy (because she knew of the visit he was expecting) she had deliberately opened the door as he walked past her apartment? And so a new riddle lodged itself in my mind. Once again, I would never know the answer. There were no witnesses who could have explained things to me—just as there hadn’t been for the first riddle. During the following days, trapped between thoughts of my father who was no longer alive, and my mother who was right beside me, but almost a stranger, I arranged my father’s funeral and for the disposal of his modest belongings. My father had been a renter. When his landlady learned of his death, she demanded that the apartment be emptied in two days. Because of the rush, I asked my mother to help me. Thus, she came to the other side of the world, not, as we had hoped to tell me about my past—something that was very important to me—but to put into black plastic garbage bags my father’s clothes, both clean and dirty, the books he had read, the dishes in which my stepmother had cooked, old newspapers, and all sorts of other things left in the apartment. We searched high and low for at least one photograph so that I could show his face to my mother and she could more easily imagine what he looked like before he died. But we didn’t find even that small consolation. I had no idea where we should bring all those bags, the sole legacy he had left to his only child.

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Mother and I straightened up in silence. At one point, my crying interrupted the silence. Mother repeated what she had said before: that in all her life she had loved my father most of all. The statement gave me such comfort and happiness. I feared I had imagined it before. “Then why did you go apart?” I asked. The most likely answer was the simplest one: they didn’t want to be together, at least not both of them. Their desire to be with each other was not strong enough to make it happen. Desire is important. Without desire, there is nothing. Without desire, I would stop running, sit down on the side of the road this instant and wait for I don’t know what. For nothing. But I would rather run on. I have completed seven kilometers. The first third of the race is behind me. My desire is to run fourteen kilometers more. Given everything that’s happened in my life, I am thinking, today’s run is a piece of cake! That’s how I push myself on as the course begins a steep ascent. I hear myself panting or am I sobbing? I try to forget the past, to redirect my attention. It was bad enough when all those things happened. And look! How green the olive trees are today, the fig trees, the spruces! How many different shades of green! The trees are luxuriant, bursting with new growth, each new bud opening like the hands of trusting children. Desire swells into future fruits.

KILOME TER EIGHT

HOW STR Ange LIFe TURnS OUT!

I n 1 9 8 5 , T H I R T Y - F I V e Y e A R S A F T e R T H AT F I R S T visit in Austria, I saw my mother for the third time. I had to go much farther this time, all the way to Australia. For thirty-five years, I held in my heart the face that watched me as I crossed the threshold of her Austrian house and then promised that I would return soon. It turned to be one of the longest soons ever. My mother had wanted me to move to Australia, but it was too far for me and above all too late. My roots had sprung up here in Slovenia. I had no desire to move because I had moved around so much in my early childhood and later on. There had been enough pulling up roots back then, and so I never seriously considered the idea as an adult. I hardly thought it would be possible to visit Australia, let alone move there, but my mother remained quite persistent over the years. Some five years after her visit to Slovenia and her failed meeting with my father, she collected enough money, with the help of my half-brother Miran, to buy me an airline ticket, a return ticket, the kind that was open. I could come and go when I wanted, the only restriction being that no more than six months could elapse between arrival and departure. My mother had finally figured out that she wouldn’t be able to convince me by force and that she could not make me feel indebted to her. She realized that we had been virtually estranged for my whole life and that, up until that moment, she had done nothing for me. That year, it was 1985, she must have sensed that her time was running out, and she kept sending letters until I finally consented, and so I left for my third and last meeting with her. Even before I made the final decision to go across the world and visit my mother, Stane and I had discussed various possibilities. We thought

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about how nice it would be if he came with me since we had never spent much time apart during our being together. In the end, we decided that it would be better if he waited for me at home. He was already sick by then and the flight would have exhausted him. I did have many second thoughts because of his illness, but Stane insisted that I go, convincing me that he would be well without me and would be waiting for me. “Don’t you remember how I was waiting for you when you returned from Salzburg?” This time, he knew for certain that I would miss him and would come back. I had just retired at that time and could have stayed as long as I wanted to. I ended up staying for one month. That might sound like a long time, but after so many years spent away from my mother, it was too short. One month could not make up for all the lost years, but at least I was able to say goodbye. Before I left, I wasn’t sure if there was some lingering resentment in me, but the whole time I was in Australia, I didn’t sense a hint of it. She and her husband had built a beautiful house in Tasmania, the only masonry structure there. All other houses were made of wood. No doubt, this was a sign of their connection to the building habits of Slovenia—in Slovenia a house needs to be made of brick to be considered a house at all. Perhaps it was the need for solidity that so many immigrants lack. With those walls, they laid a firm foundation in their new life, and, of course, they built a strong roof over those strong walls. We talked a lot during that month. I got to know her well during our daily errands. I tried to understand how she thought, observe her relationship with her husband, what kind of friends she had, what made her happy and what didn’t. I tried to figure out if there was anything that still connected her to her homeland or that connected her to me. I also socialized with her children, with my half-brothers and half-sister. They took me on several outings and I also went running a couple of times. The climate in Tasmania is extremely mild, like the climate at the Slovenian seaside. Nobody was put off by my enthusiasm for running. They accepted me and my passions. I had a wonderful time, but still some inscrutable quality of my past ate away at me. My mother still wouldn’t talk about it. Because we were both so obviously mature, it seemed that we should be able to speak about our distant past without restraint, and so I asked her about the first months

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of my life. She simply said that my father came, grabbed me, and took me away, and then she fell silent. “How just took me away?” I wanted to know more. “And you didn’t object?” A century had passed, but the theme was apparently too painful. She refused to talk about it. I turned to my half-brother for help. Maybe he knew something, but he had never heard anything about that long-ago event. All the same, he quietly told me that our mother had never had much of sensitivity to her other children either. “It’s true that we lived together, but I have to say she wasn’t really good with us,” he confided in me. “She was an excellent mother in terms of bringing us into the world, but after that she somehow lacked warmth and affection.” He told me this in such an ordinary way, knowing that it would be easier for me not to be hurt with this new information. Still, regardless of whether or not she had been warm with him, he had spent his whole life with her. But I was satisfied with his answer. After a month of living far away from those closest to me, who had never lacked affection in their relationship to me, I wished to go home. I said I hoped next time we met it would be in my home once again. I wanted her to know my husband better, and my daughters and their husbands and children. I hoped that in this way we could continue to become closer. But, in truth, she had never shown much interest or affection in my daughters, as if they were not related to her. She once boasted to me that she put a little money aside as pocket money for all of her grandchildren. “Well, not for all of your grandchildren,” I reminded her. “You have two granddaughters in Slovenia and they have never received anything from you.” She grew silent once again. Did I finally awaken her conscience? Several months after I returned home, my mother died. I like to think she died more peacefully than she would have if we hadn’t had the chance to talk about things. She never had the opportunity to know my daughters better, my grandchildren even less. She is buried in her adopted homeland. Her birthplace, Ziri, could hardly be farther away from her final resting place.

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I sometimes wonder: is rarity the recipe for the pricelessness of anything? I can count the number of times I met my mother on fingers of one hand. But I don’t think so. The more frequently I do something, the more I like doing it. What we cultivate, we also love. Out of sight, out of mind. That is a saying in nearly every language and no doubt there is some truth to it. If there is an enormous body of water in between two people, the end of which cannot be seen, and that can only be flown across at great speed, then it is even truer.

Contacts with my half-brothers and half-sister remained infrequent. The fingers of my other hand are reserved for my meetings with them. Australia is too far away to keep normal relationships. Nevertheless, we managed to be in occasional contact. My half-sister Vida once came from Australia to Slovenia for a visit. At the time, she had a strong desire, despite the enormous geographical distance, to get closer to her people. She had never met her father. She had thought about trying to arrange a meeting with him for many years and, when the time came, she approached me to ask for help. Perhaps she felt closer to me than to her other half-siblings because we had both been abandoned. For whatever the reason, she chose to confide her life secret in me. From my perspective, her father was the man who displaced my father in my mother’s heart, without whose presence my mother and father might have found each other again. If she hadn’t got pregnant by Vida’s father, maybe she would have come to Ljubljana to look for me and my father, and my life would have been completely different. But Vida’s father did exist. He had come to Ziri all those years before and, from his relation with my mother—perhaps a fleeting one or perhaps a more serious love interest—Vida was born. She knew no more than that. I don’t remember how we discovered that her father lived in Skofja Loka, a small and charming settlement about half an hour from Ljubljana. She asked me to drive there and pay him a visit. She didn’t have the courage to do it herself and she was grateful that I was willing to do it instead. She had never set eyes on her real father. I knew well how wrong it was to do that to an innocent child, which is why I wanted to help to rectify the wrong, to make it possible for Vida to actually know her own father, and for her

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father to know her. It was a sensitive task and I tackled it in a serious way. I did some research, asked around and discovered that Vida’s father had another child, the half-sister of my half-sister, though of course she and I did not share a parent. I found out her address and set out to see her. When the woman understood what I wanted—the address of her father and nothing more—she became rude. She was annoyed by me digging into the past to which I had no real connection. She quickly let me know that my mother had been involved with a married man. Vida, my half-sister, was born in this secret relation. After a short but torrid affair, Vida’s father returned to his family in Skofja Loka, and, apparently, it didn’t take him long to forget about my mother, the girl from Ziri. “Please leave us alone,” she pleaded with me. “Don’t dredge up a story that has long since been forgotten.” The woman was clearly uninterested in meeting her half-sister. She said goodbye and slammed the door in my face. After this attempt, Vida never again tried to find her biological father. In the end, she didn’t have the courage to return to her roots. She accepted that things would be better if she left them in peace. If I had been in her place, I would have found my father and told him who I was. Vida was guilty of nothing, and, after so many years, her father might have been happy to know that he had another child. Or perhaps not. It might have complicated the matter of inheritance. Many things might have happened. Anyway, Vida decided to give up on her dreams of meeting her father. It was simply too risky for her. She settled for never knowing what such a meeting might have been like. When I remember these things today and think about my mother, I see that she was really amazing. What a restless life she must have had! Was she so passionate or simply unable to say no, giving herself to every passing suitor? I cannot judge. When I finally got to know her more in Australia, she was too old and also too closed to reveal such intimate things. I think she was simply one of those women who think it is better to be silent, to keep her problems to herself. I am a different sort of person, but what can I do? I will never be able to witness the moments when she met my father or Vida’s father. But in the end, I cannot be dissatisfied. Without these unhappy and fleeting affairs, I wouldn’t exist and neither would Vida. Life finds a way, even though it is not always easy.

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I must be content with the little that I know. That is also valuable and when I ponder all of these events as I am running—as I am doing today— it feels as if I am returning to a child’s treasure chest, a box holding a few marbles, which may not seem valuable to a casual observer, but for me they are like precious gems. Each gem is a memory. How strangely life turns out. It always astonishes me.

Later I returned once more to Australia, to visit Vida in Tasmania. I wanted to keep contact with the land that had adopted my mother as its own. A few years earlier, Vida and Miran had visited me in Slovenia with their families. During that visit, we had all gone on a trip to Austria. We went to see the place where they used to live, the place where we had first met. The lake was still the same enchanting color, but the houses around were newer and of a different style. I took a few pictures with the camera that my half-brother had given me for such occasions. The images of high villas with gardens around, the placid surface of the lake, the sun shining on it, but there is no little house from our childhood. That trip took place during the period when my husband and I were building our own house. We had taken a loan at the bank. My half-brother’s wife had inherited some money and Miran expressed his readiness to help us repay the loan. I didn’t believe him—such words are perhaps too quickly spoken and anyway I don’t believe in gifts that just fall from heaven—but he kept trying to talk me into taking the money. Things were going better in Australia than they were in Yugoslavia, and maybe he was trying to correct the wrongdoing of my mother from whom I had received neither love nor money. But when the trip was over, Miran forgot about his promise. I don’t blame him. I understand that good intentions are one thing, carrying them out another. And, of course, the inheritance was his wife’s, not his. She might have also had some relatives who needed financial help, someone closer to her than her husband’s half-sister living on the other side of the world. But Miran’s intention, though I was skeptical about it from the start, awakened a pleasant feeling in me, the sense of being at least partially included in a nuclear family, something I had missed my whole life. My brother wanted to help me. There was no doubt about that and that made me feel as if I weren’t so alone anymore. In the end, Stane and I paid off the loan on our

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own and lived together in our little house until my beloved husband died and left me alone.

I’m running into the second tunnel, called the Jagodje tunnel. It is a completely different atmosphere inside, damp and dark, water dripping from the high ceiling. The echo of our steps is much louder than their sound outside. I wonder when they built the tunnel. I know it was a long time ago, but it still seems new. The stones are undamaged and perfectly in place. As if the tooth of time has no influence on certain things. My body is truly old, though my thoughts remain as fresh and lively as always. My thoughts are the same as they were when I didn’t have gray hair and my skin was smooth and soft. It’s been so long since my youth. How old I grew in the meantime.

KILOME TER NINE

THe PATH TO JAIL

W H e n I C O M e F R O M T H e T U n n e L I n T O the light, eight kilometers are behind me and thirteen still ahead. This is the moment when the race becomes difficult. But today is April 13—surely I will manage to run thirteen more kilometers. A little more than what I’ve already run and I’ll reach the finish line. I simplify the math, distracted by the fragrant scent of rosemary bushes. People standing on the side of the road descending from the hill to the sea loudly applaud me, and my feet, despite my fatigue, almost dance in response. Since my early youth, dance has been a great passion for me, my first tangible and robust pleasure in life. Ljubljana in its day offered something precious to me, something that meant a lot—the Jenko Dancing School. It was like a miracle for me. I simply adored dancing and, whenever I had the chance, I went to the Jenko Dance Hall near the Dragon Bridge on the Ljubljanica River and danced until the music stopped. I also went to all other dance halls, sometimes directly from one to the next one, following the music to Siska, Vic, Tabor, all the parts of Ljubljana. I even went during the week, right after work. Sometimes I would go and dance for just one hour—tango, waltz, English waltz, and other dances that were popular in those days—and then I rushed home. I was also enthusiastic about the quadrille. I never wanted to miss that. When I went to dance lessons, we always did a quadrille at the end. I pretended to my stepmother that nothing special had happened on the way home, that I had just stayed a little longer at work. During the summer months, it was the best to dance at a place called Svicarija in Tivoli Park, where the Graphic Arts Center is located today.

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Now it is quiet there, but back then it was very lively with music playing every night. Svicarija is such a pretty building with its carved wooden balconies. It was built in 1835 and later became the elite Tivoli Hotel. It was set up by the dancing Kazina Association, which also had a building at Congress Square in the center of Ljubljana. The organization wanted another venue, closer to nature, more suitable for the summer months and dancing in the cool shade of the chestnut trees. There was an inn at Svicarija, and a restaurant with a big summer garden. And why did it have a name that sounded like Switzerland? Because of its appearance, its carved wooden balconies. Even today, though falling into disrepair, it still looks like a pretty Alpine villa. In those days, the visitors who frequented the Svicarija dance hall were beautifully dressed. I had only old dresses. If any of the other ladies asked if those were the best clothes I had, I would say: “Certainly not! I have many different frocks at home, lots of dancing frocks.” The truth was, I only had more worn-out clothes at home, nothing new. But I wouldn’t let my poverty stop me. I simply decided it didn’t matter. If I thought that clothes were all that mattered, I would have had to stay at home. Even after I had started to work, my stepmother tried to keep me under her control, demanding that I be home at eight in the evening. All the same, I often stayed until the end of the dance, sometimes as late as eleven o’clock, and so I was frequently arriving home late, in her view unspeakably late. But I liked to dance so much that I would gladly suffer for it. When I was twenty years old, she still beat me. Sometimes I protected my face with my hands and she interpreted this as resisting her authority and then beat me even more. My own mother was in a distant country so I often asked myself: Where are you, father, to protect me? But he was never there, in the early years because he was a bon vivant, who liked coming home late. Later, he didn’t even come home, because he was in jail. So even if his paternal love toward his only child had been unexpectedly awakened, or an instinct to protect his daughter, he could not have made things better. And why was he locked up? It wasn’t because of a war crime, as was the case with so many others during that time. He had always been a hard worker and nothing more, but he did like to party and one of his drinking

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buddies might have informed on him in those suspicious days after the war. The police came for him one night, took him away, and locked him up. I wasn’t home on the night they came for my father. I was at my first voluntary work in Kamnik. For some reason, I found it easier to accept that they had locked my father up because I was working with boys and girls who were so much less fortunate than me. He told me that he had never done anything bad to anyone in his life, that he was wrongly accused and condemned. Because of that, I believed he would be in jail for only a short spell, until the misunderstanding was cleared up, that there would be a hearing and they would realize that he hadn’t done anything wrong and that he had no bad intentions either toward society as a whole or the individuals in it. I firmly believed that he would soon come home. Despite everything, I still loved him. But the hearing never came. And none of this helped me when someone asked where my father was employed. “He’s in jail,” I answered, as if I were the one who was guilty. Guilt, it seems, is contagious among relatives. A person can get used to many things and, with time, I got used to the fact that my father was in jail. I went to visit him regularly as if I were going to visit him at the hospital. I went on foot, even during the snowy winters. In order to get to him as fast as I could, I often ran the whole way. It turned out that this was another sort of training for me. Sometimes I brought something to him that my stepmother prepared. It was never more than a trifle since the guards didn’t allow us to bring more substantial gifts and there was no money back then for gifts anyway. Sometimes the guards let my father out of his cell when I came to visit. In summer, we were even allowed to sit in the grass in front of the walls of the jailhouse. I spread out a little picnic cloth and we snacked on the things I had brought with me. We chatted about everyday things, about what was happening at home and my job. When we parted, I got used to thinking that my father was just going back to work, a special sort of work where they employ people who are so precious that they are also needed at night, on Sundays and on holidays: where, in other words, they are needed all the time. My father never complained about the conditions in jail to me. He resigned himself to his fate and simply waited for the moment when he would be released. I know it was not easy. Once when he was beaten—and

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such beatings took place on many occasions—he lost his teeth. He made a set of new teeth for himself, out of aluminum. He looked funny with them. I needed a while to get used to that silver smile of his, but, then again, he didn’t smile very often. At least he was able to eat with his improvised dentures. Without them, he would have probably starved. They certainly wouldn’t have worried about one poor eater in jail and so he saved his own life with his resourcefulness. My stepmother visited him very rarely. It was too far for her. She couldn’t handle the distances I could. It was only a short walk from home to her job at the tobacco factory. In any case, she didn’t like traipsing about as much as I did. I remember the one time we went to see my father together. It was winter and on the way home she was so exhausted from walking through the snow that we had to stop at an inn in order to warm ourselves by the stove. We sat there a long while, getting warm, almost until dusk, until my stepmother finally realized that she had no choice: she would have to walk the rest of the way home. She never visited him again after that. She preferred to wait for him at home, pretending that it wouldn’t be long before he returned to her. I went to visit my father so often that one of the guards became fond of me. When my stepmother learned of this, she thought it would be desirable, indeed necessary, for me to reciprocate the guard’s fondness, to go out with him, that, in this way, I could help my father. She thought that with the guard’s help, we might be able to get him released early. The guard even came to the house in Rozna dolina and courted me openly. Once he told me that his mother was very beautiful and he would like his wife to be equally beautiful. “I don’t mean beautiful in the sense that she would be as beautiful as my mother,” he said after a long silence on my part. “I would want her to be beautiful in the same way, and you remind me very much of her.” At that moment, I made up my mind. When I told my stepmother, that I wasn’t going to have anything to do with him anymore, she flew into a rage. “What are you talking about, you spoiled brat!” she screamed at me. “Don’t you understand that he’s working in the jail where your father is?” I credit her, at least that she was trying to do something good for my father. All the same, I didn’t relent. “Your father will still be behind bars and only because of you!” she said to me between clenched teeth. “I’m not for sale,” I answered in despair.

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That was 1945. I was only seventeen years old. My father was released after eight long years. It’s unbelievable really, because today even people who are sentenced for much more serious offenses sometimes have their sentence reduced and are released after only a few years. For example, Vlasto Kopac, the draftsman of the most famous Slovenian architect Joze Plecnik, who, like I, was born in Ziri, and whose excellent counterfeits of travel documents and even money were used for the needs of the Liberation Front and the Podmornica printing operations, went to jail in 1948 and was already released in 1952. True, on probation, but my father didn’t get even that. That’s the way it was in those days. If you were convicted, you accepted your punishment without argument, even if there was no foundation to the charge. There were no appeals to the constitutional court, no concept of human rights. When you got out, you were just happy to be left alone and to be able to get on with your life. We never knew why he was arrested. Neither did he. It seems to me that the more momentous the times, the less important the people. I lived with a bad conscience all the years until my father’s release, believing that if I had returned that guard’s affections, they might have let my father out. Sometimes I even dreamed about it—that my father was already at home, that my suitor had brought him home along with his mother, that she and my stepmother were making plans for our wedding. The echoes of those dreams haunted me for days. My father was in jail from the time I was sixteen to when I was twenty-four—eight long years during my youth. Even today it seems like a long time, although the years pass much more quickly now. Back then it seemed an eternity. When they finally released him, he came home, but not for long. I don’t remember the events or the words that made me realize that jail had changed him. But whatever the case, after his return, he and my stepmother argued even more fiercely than they had before. Although sad, it wasn’t unexpected. There are many people who long for something, and when it happens at last, they fall into a bad humor. Even people who sincerely love each other often end up saying farewell for good after a long separation. That happens because absence makes them more sensitive, and then emotional tension bursts out with only the slightest pretext. When it comes to a disagreement, it is harder for them to restrain themselves even with the best of intentions.

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Whatever the reasons, after his return, my father soon moved in with another woman. I don’t think she was a more pleasant or loving woman. My father wasn’t very good at choosing his companions. After a while, he came back and then he quickly left again, and the pattern kept repeating itself. How terrible were those comings and goings, always punctuated by screaming and yelling, or by angry silence. As an observer of these tormented moves, I often asked myself why he had taken me away from my mother, when he had such poor command over his own heart and the hearts of others. He should have been a loving father, a parent that could be both mother and father, and yet he didn’t even know how to take care of himself. He always chose poorly in life and kept paying for his poor choices. And not only did he pay, I did too. He laid a terribly heavy burden on me. Is that why I like long-distance running? Races where I need endurance and mental strength not to give up, even when everything goes wrong? When the conditions such as the weather or my health all work against the goal that I have set for myself? And yet I continue, with a stubborn sort of happiness, step by step, toward that distant goal.

KILOME TER TEN

MOVIng OUT

I A M A L R e A D Y A B O V e I Z O L A , I n T H e place called Jagodje, a word that sounds like strawberry in the Slovenian language and thus brings a sort of freshness to the midpoint of today’s half marathon. I am happy that nearly half the course is behind me, that in a couple of hundred meters, I will begin the second half. I can feel, with that realization, my steps become lighter. When you are halfway there, you’re safe, because you can’t go back: you are as far from the start as you are from the finishing line. For whatever reason, the halfway mark is always a good moment for me, and such milestones are important. There have been many of them in my life, moments when nothing that followed was the same as it was before. When I was twenty years old, I finally moved into my own apartment. I had some time on my own in Kamnik with my voluntary work, but living independently in Ljubljana struck me as an even more important milestone. At that moment, I began a new life without my stepmother who had embittered my existence for so many years. I found an apartment to share with my friend Zofka and for the first time in my life enjoyed the freedom of pleasant cohabitation. My existence seemed so calm and pleasant, but the period turned out to be laughably short. My stepmother responded with a rage that was almost impossible to escape. She came after me, even bringing a policeman with her, to forcibly take me home again. The two came to the door of my new apartment where my stepmother issued a stern order. “Helena, you’re coming home!” At first, I resisted with all my power. I refused to go since, after all, I was legally an adult. My stepmother insisted that I come with her, urging the police officer to force me physically, but fortunately the man was wise

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enough to see what was happening. I threatened to report him to the local police station, to tell them that he illegally entered my dwelling with no official reason for doing so. My stepmother loudly incited the policeman to take me into his custody, but finally she had to turn away in defeat, realizing that at least for now she had lost her servant girl. After that dreadful incident, living with Zofka seemed even more pleasant. It felt so wonderful to make my own decisions: who I would see, whom I would talk to. It was absolutely marvelous for me, but it ended all too soon. My roommate fell head over heels in love, married, and her new husband moved into the apartment with us. Of course, that gave Stane reason enough to move in with us too. In an apartment where there had been only two, three crowded in, and then four. Despite our wish to remain together, our little commune didn’t last. It was time for me to move again. I put all my belongings back into my single suitcase and wondered: Where to now? Sadly, I landed back with my victorious and vengeful stepmother. Luckily, my job soon sent me out of Ljubljana, first to Jesenice and then to Bled, both in the Alpine region of Slovenia. When I returned, I looked for a single room for myself and amazingly found one for a short time. Stane and I were able to have an hour here or there to ourselves. That’s how it happened that we finally got so close that precisely on Stane’s twenty-fifth birthday—November 7, 1951—I became pregnant. Our daughter was born nine months later on August 7, 1952. I was twenty-three years old. If only I didn’t have to go home again! But Stane could not help me. He was over the moon that we were going to have a baby, but he didn’t know what he could do for me. He wanted to marry me, but first he needed to find an apartment, a home for the two of us and our child. There were so few rooms, let alone apartments, available. With great fear and a heavy heart—because I worried what would happen to my own little child if we lived under my stepmother’s roof—I went back to my father who had only recently got out of jail and was drowning his disappointment in alcohol. Stane gave me some money, as much as he had, to ease the time of my pregnancy and so that I could buy whatever the baby needed. But my unhappy father learned about the money and asked me to lend it to him. When I finally gave in, he was so happy that he went out and celebrated, drinking it all up. Not surprisingly, he was never able to pay me back.

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I am running past the new apartment buildings in Izola. I can tell that some of the apartments are still empty. Looking at them, I can’t help but recall the time when there was an apartment shortage in Ljubljana. It was a period of rapid industrialization and people from the provinces migrated to the urban center for jobs in the factories. Soon there were no rooms in the cities available for the workers. I was still working for Gradis at that time, which meant that at least I was financially independent, and my first pregnancy passed without significant material pressures. But I was tormented by something else. What would happen after the birth? Would everything be the way I wanted it to be? Would I be able to breast feed, diaper, and rock my baby? Or would there be some bitterness inside of me that would destroy my happiness? Would it turn out that, whatever my efforts, I would be similar to my own mother? These were terrible worries and they gnawed away at me. I also thought about names. I wanted to choose the most beautiful name there was. One name seemed especially noble to me: Nives. A very nice, capable, and smart friend from my school days had been named Nives, and I wanted my firstborn daughter to be like her. When I realized that it was a nickname for Saint Mary of the Snows, I reconsidered. In the last minute, I decided to choose a similar name: Nevenka. Maybe that was because hidden in the name was ne vem (which means “I don’t know” in the Slovenian language), the secret that I didn’t know what kind of a mother I would be. When Nevenka was born, I immediately realized that there was absolutely nothing wrong with me. My motherhood felt like unending joy, except of course when Nevenka was sick. At those times, I sat up all night beside her and trembled in terror that she wouldn’t get well. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing her. Soon after Nevenka’s birth, one of my coworkers heard about an empty room in a wooden house intended for workers in the building trade and their families. I pleaded for the room and got it. I so much wanted to get away from my stepmother. I just walked away, carrying the baby in my arms. The room was small and unfurnished, but I managed. I only had a bed and I made other furniture out of fruit crates. My neighbor gave me a stove. Stane bought Nevenka a cradle, and then a real bed, and so we had everything we needed. But this second attempt at liberation was shorttermed. Stane felt that my living conditions were unacceptable. He desperately wanted us all to live together in a better situation. He asked around

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and finally found a bigger room in a house on Jesenskova Street. The tenant had left and the room was available. It was better equipped. There was even a little niche in front of the room where I could leave the baby’s stroller! Unfortunately, a judge and his family lived down the hall from this room, and he wanted the room for himself. After a few months, he used his contacts to force me to move out. Humiliated and sad, I had to return home once again. Stane watched my moves with a heavy heart, but he was as powerless as I was. He lived with his mother and a mentally disturbed sister and there was too little room there for them to take me in. Not to mention that his mother didn’t like me and probably wouldn’t have let me live with her even in the most luxurious of villas. “There’s no way,” she said to Stane, and that was the end of the conversation. Times were hard. I returned to my stepmother and shiftless father. I slept in the mansard beneath the slanted roof, a space that was supposed to be used as a storage room. There was only room for a bed. I laid a board across its side and rested a basket on it and that is where my little daughter lay.

And yet, despite the desperate circumstances, I was happy. I felt twice blessed as a young mother, first with my maternal instinct that manifested itself as a powerful gratitude, and second because of the relief I felt that there was nothing wrong with me. I minded the little creature tirelessly, for hours and hours. I was amazed at the tiny girl’s perfection. I learned from her how to truly enjoy life. During that era in socialist Slovenia, nursing mothers worked half time for eight months after the birth of a child. Mothers who didn’t nurse had to return to full time work three months after the birth. Maternal leave could be extended depending on whether the child nursed or not. Each month, I went to have the baby weighed. If she had gained at least two hundred grams and I confirmed that I was still nursing, they extended my maternal leave for another month. So despite the modest nourishment available to me, I always made sure that I had enough milk. After eight months, I signed Nevenka up at the nursery. Not in my worst nightmares did I imagine that I would allow my stepmother to take care of her. My little daughter didn’t soften her up a bit. She still tormented me.

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Once my stepmother even lured the babysitter—whom I paid for the days every other week when I had to work in the afternoon—to a restaurant. They left little Nevenka home alone and she became all red and hoarse from crying. My father had just moved out, to another woman, and I certainly didn’t expect any help from him. He never said where he was going. So rather than leaving my daughter with my stepmother, I enrolled Nevenka in an afternoon nursery. They would take far better care of her there. But I had to work full time in order to survive. Food was rationed in those days. Although the war had been over for more than five years, quantities were strictly restricted and you could still only get food with coupons. Worse still, I had to feed three adults with my coupons. At least for a half a year, I also received coupons that allowed me to go to the dairy every day and get a half a liter of milk. My stepmother was really mean, and it wasn’t because of any abuse from childhood. I say that because I know that she had good and decent parents. She also had three children of her own. Two died when they were very young. When her husband died, she took her only surviving daughter Milica to her parents, rented a small apartment for herself, and got a job at the Tobacco Factory. She never told me what circumstances led to the deaths of three members of her family, but I was afraid sometimes because of that. Every so often, I wondered if she had helped them along to the other world. Milica was not at all similar to her mother. Even today, I call her my sister. In truth, of course, her mother did not abandon her in as extreme a way as my mother did. She left her with her own mother who took good care of her. My stepmother visited Milica every day since her parents lived nearby. Her visits were short and cool, but at least she was present. Each time she got her paycheck, she invited Milica home for bread with honey and butter. I was only allowed to watch them, my mouth watering. After Milica had eaten, my stepmother would say: “Well, it’s time to go now, goodbye.” That’s how quickly she grew tired of the visit. She had nothing to say to her daughter. She simply wasn’t made to have children. And, in fact, it was probably better for Milica that she was far from her mother who so often struck out of anger without even knowing why. In short, I knew that I really needed to move out. It wasn’t only the psychological torment and fear. Between them, my father and stepmother

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smoked over sixty cigarettes each day, and they drank a lot as well, and yet life went on in that smoky apartment all the same. I went to work, took care of my child, enjoyed her progress, and even ran from time to time, mostly because I didn’t want to be late. I spent as much time with Stane as I could, and that’s how it happened that I got pregnant again and gave birth to our second daughter Tanja. “How can it be,” I asked myself incredulously, “that there is not even one room in this whole wide world for my little family?”

At that point, my stepmother began to waste away and her life, neither beautiful nor healthy, soon came to an end. Her death did not surprise me, and all of us who had anything to do with her breathed a sigh of relief with her passing. We accepted a pleasant death as the Slovenian romantic poet France Preseren once described it—pleasant in the sense that it took her and not one of us. At her funeral, Milica confided to my astonishment that she felt no sadness at all at her mother’s death. “Well, at least, I never had to live with her,” she added. I did feel something. Not sadness, but the relief that you feel when you sense that everything that had been in disorder before will suddenly fall into place in and of itself. After a dark chapter in my life, a new one was opening, a lighter and happier one. I look into the sky. It is not clear, but never mind. My gaze still travels far across the sea, to the shores of another country.

KILOME TER ELE VEN

MAY I ASK FOR THe neX T DAnCe, COMR ADe?

T H e e L e V e n T H K I L O M e T e R I S S O M e H O W A LW AY S H A R D e R . I still enjoy the course, which is now winding among the vineyards, but I cannot run with such ease anymore. The course now slopes upward slightly. I guess it is worth the effort for a good view. Running, at least when it is uphill, is a great effort, but I remember one thing in my life that took me no effort at all: dancing. And just as I am grateful to running for some things in my life, I am grateful to dancing for others. Without dancing, Stane and I would never have come together at all. It happened in 1948 at an event at a Ljubljana dance hall called Jama. I was just twenty years old. He walked in, a tall blond handsome man, drawing the gaze of all the women in the hall. At the very first glance, I felt something special about him. Something shifted deep inside of me. He was different, not only from other young men, but also somehow different from me. I know it sounds cliché, but I saw in him my other half. This opposition must have worked like a magnet for him too. He looked around the dance hall and his eyes came to rest in my corner. In the next instant, he walked straight up to me. “May I ask for the next dance?” he asked. I turned away in embarrassment. Then he asked me again, this time in an even more commanding voice: “May I ask for the next dance, comrade?” My knees were shaking and my cheeks felt hot. But I held out my hand to my comrade and danced with him, and it turned out I didn’t need to be nervous. Our conversation flowed as if we’d always known each other. “You dance well,” he complemented me, and, for an instant, my knees felt weak again. All of a sudden, I was overwhelmed by the desire that this

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dance with my tall, blond, heavenly, blue-eyed partner with the pleasant voice would never end. And my wish came true: after that first dance, we remained on the floor until the place closed.

In 1950, some two years after Stane and I met, a big earthquake hit certain parts of Yugoslavia farther to the south on the last day of the year. Although we didn’t feel anything in Slovenia, our newspapers were full of news and pictures about it. Gradis sent workers to the areas worst hit by the earthquake to help the rescue teams. I didn’t have a family then and all the obligations that go with it. Since so many workers were deployed to the south, the company sent me to Jesenice, a town on the border of Austria, known as the Slovenian home of mining and iron making industries, to work as a secretary. Today it takes a little over a half hour to drive to Jesenice on the new highway, but back then it was considered quite far from Ljubljana. At least, it was close to Bled, the idyllic Alpine lake town where Stane and I liked to go and dance occasionally. Stane was not happy when I moved all the way to Jesenice and we were always apart. By then, he knew what a good time I could have even without him and perhaps he was worried that I would dance away with someone else, maybe forever. In Jesenice, dances were also held in the Slovenian cultural center and I attended them when I lived there even though they were small compared to Ljubljana. Jesenice was a sleepy place and the dancers seemed sleepy too: slower, less passionate, less likely to get carried away. The fact that I came from the capital could also be seen in the way I dressed. My clothing was modest but somehow special. Most of all, my skirts were shorter. I also looked different because of the cosmetics I wore, which I thought went well with my dance clothes. I remember when a coworker and I went all made up to the cultural center and the boys stared at us as if we had drunk blood. They were so unused to cosmetics there. Only girls working in a certain profession would wear them. We certainly didn’t want to be mistaken for that sort of woman, so my friend and I retreated into a dark corner. We were like vampires in the morning sun, not knowing where to hide. But when the music started, the boys approached us and competed for who would be lucky enough to get one of the wildly painted girls onto the dance floor.

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All the same, it would take a long time for make-up to be considered decent in Jesenice. Later, of course, the whole world would change, and why would Jesenice be an exception? Until recently, I still liked to wear make-up in the same way I liked a beautiful dress—because it made me feel more feminine. I am a woman, after all, and I always liked that to be immediately clear. In those early days, however, even putting on lipstick was considered very unusual. For some, it seemed sinful, for others, not harmonious with the ideal of the modern socialist woman. It even once happened in more cosmopolitan Ljubljana that I met a male friend in public who practically begged me to go and wipe the lipstick from my mouth. Then he asked to see the make-up itself and when I pulled the precious lipstick from my bag, he took it from me and threw it in the Ljubljanica River. I was so furious. I had gone all the way to Gorica, a town in Italy, on the border of Italy and Slovenia, to get it and had to pay a lot for it. I would have to wait quite a few years before lipstick arrived in Slovenian stores and applying make-up became something completely normal. It was the same situation for nylon stockings. I also had to go to Gorica to buy them. I bought the kind that were sheer with a seam on the back. How careful I was not to snag them! I wore them only on special occasions and washed them ever so gently. But even so, they still got runs in them. When there were too many stitches and repairs to hide, I would start saving for new ones. During the interval, I went out less often, which was also all right for a change. Some women would draw a black line along the back of their legs when they didn’t have stockings to wear. It is often said that appearance reigns supreme today, that everyone values the external, and there is not enough time to cultivate internal values. But it was the same sixty years ago, except that the official morality of the time suppressed such desires. Now when everything is seen through the prism of money, appearance is just another commercial opportunity, as much for the consumer as for the merchant who sells the products that create a certain appearance. But regardless of the clothes, make-up, and nylons I wore, I enjoyed dance and music so much that when I danced I forgot about everything else. I felt bliss in my soul and my surroundings, enthusiasm for the simple fact that I existed, unblemished happiness at just being. Dance was one of the beautiful things that pulled me out of everyday human existence in

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time—dreaming about the future and mourning the past—and right into the present, the unique and singular moment in which I am alive. I remember especially well the third anniversary of the day Stane and I met. I wanted Stane to come to Jesenice and celebrate with me. It would have been wonderful to go to the most beautiful dancing venue of all: Bled. But Stane bitterly disappointed me. He called me at work and told me he wasn’t coming because he had other urgent obligations. I was terribly upset and sad, but I told myself it would be a pity to stay home alone. I would celebrate our anniversary without Stane—in the best possible way. Dancing! So I found a girlfriend who knew two boys, Bogdan and Miro, both good dancers. We invited them to go with us and they accepted. We went to Bled by train. We danced as long as the music played, until eleven at night. In those days, the buses didn’t run that late. We had to get home to Jesenice somehow and so we decided to walk. We walked for ages under the light of moon. We were young and strong, and thirteen kilometers of unpaved roads only triggered our youthful enthusiasm. We would have walked to the dance and back if we had to. Finally, at three in the morning, we arrived at the house where my friend and I each rented a room. We invited the boys up to have coffee with us. I would make it for them. I was with the two boys in my room and my friend had gone to change clothes in her room. I took my shoes off, because after so many waltzes and kilometers, my sandals were pinching my feet. I put on the coffee, prepared some bread and opened the jam, and talked with the boys about freedom, duties, and life in general. And at that moment, at three in the morning, who appears at the door? Stane. My heart truly stood still. If it were possible to think anything, I would have probably got so agitated that my heart would have never started beating again. “Stane,” I finally spoke as if I were in some sort of stage play. “You came!” Despite his obligations, he had come to Jesenice the night before, and when he found me not at home, he spent the evening nervously waiting in the neighboring room. Confronted with the scene in my room—me barefoot with two young men—he became extremely angry. How could he not? It was the wee hours, and it could be seen by our sweaty clothes and our tousled hair, that we had been dancing all night long. I immediately

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asked my dance partners to go home and reassured the agitated Stane that I had only danced with them, nothing more. “I had no intention or desire for anything else. But it wasn’t fair that you expected me to just stay home alone in my room if you weren’t going to take me out.” He was too hurt. In an attack of wild jealousy, he reproached me with all sorts of things that he had no reason to suspect. Of course, while he had been waiting for me all those hours, he had imagined many things. I couldn’t calm him down so I finally asked him to leave. I said to him: “Stane, I’ve had enough. Go back to Ljubljana. I’m going to keep on living here in Jesenice.” It wasn’t easy for him to have such a stubborn girlfriend. When we argued, I never relented. If he didn’t apologize and offer an olive branch, then sometimes we didn’t talk for a month. Even if he was right, I always expected that he would be the one to apologize and make the step to bring us together again. Today, now that I’m wiser, I would strongly advise against such stubbornness to myself and others. But I didn’t know how to behave differently. In order to survive my childhood, I learned to hold my tongue but I was left with an amazing amount of stubbornness. I had those two things inside of me. Whenever Stane hurt my feelings, even unintentionally, I took it as a confirmation that I was alone in the world and then I also behaved that way. I didn’t have the feeling that mother’s milk gives to loved children, that life is a land of milk and honey. I had taken some optimism from my good grandmother, but apparently it wasn’t enough. Even a superficial unkind word could throw me into a downward spiral, and when that happened, I just went silent. Everyone protects themselves in their own way, whether the danger is real or imagined. Stane sometimes didn’t understand me, but because he was a good person, he would always forgive and apologize, knowing it was better to give up than persist. Later, he came to love me with all his heart and he respected both my desires and my weaknesses. When he went to do military exercises, he had to wear a uniform, and I couldn’t stand it. He had to wear it, but it reminded me of the guards I saw when my father was in jail. I told him that right away and then he always carried civilian clothes with him so that he could change if he was going to meet me. That’s how thoughtful he was.

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But, however stubborn I was, I didn’t seriously think I would stay in Jesenice forever. Even in the early days, Stane meant the world to me, and I had only danced with the other boys. I knew I wanted to be with Stane, that he was the right man for me. That’s why after that night I started to think about leaving my job. I didn’t act immediately because I was having too much fun in Jesenice, but I realized that long-distance love was not going to work—at least not for long. I spent the whole summer saying farewell. Stane calmed down eventually and started to visit me again. When the weather was nice, he borrowed his mother’s bicycle and cycled from Ljubljana but by the time autumn came, he had had enough of the long road between us, the hours of pedaling from Ljubljana to Jesenice and to Bled on top of that. So once again I prepared to pack all my belongings into my single suitcase and get on the train to Ljubljana. At the end of my tour replacing the secretary in Jesenice, the management of Gradis wanted to send me to Vuzenica in the region of Carinthia in the northeast of Slovenia. The work was pretty much the same as what I did in Jesenice, but did I want to move even farther away? I was only twenty-two years old and still free and unmarried, but my decision was firm: No, I am not going to another faraway post. Period. And thus the day came when I left that big well-run company. It was hard to give my notice, but the thought that they would keep sending me here and there, wherever and whenever they needed me, without even asking, was unbearable. So I ended up without a job, but I didn’t wait with my hands idle. I looked for a new job and soon I found a really nice position. My anger at the previously undesired changes was transformed into enthusiasm for my new job. My place of employment would be in Bled, not quite back to Ljubljana, but a little closer, and what a dream job it was. I worked at a health spa where people came from all over Yugoslavia for three or four weeks to recuperate after a variety of ailments. I had my office in the Hotel Jelovica, contact with interesting people, and a decent apartment right next door. My own apartment and my office had a view onto the lake, which pleased me immensely. To this day, I love the water very much. Whenever I took the bus somewhere in my life and spotted the sea, or a river, or a lake through the window, I just wanted to jump right in. To feel the pleasant touch of water on

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my body, how it rinses off any impurity and makes you clean again, fresh, reborn. I love that feeling of cleanliness. But I only learned to swim well during that summer in Bled. On summer evenings, I would often go to swim in the deepest part of the lake. I liked to jump from the high jumping tower—what a thrill!—and plunge into the refreshing water. I wasn’t a very good swimmer, but I wanted to do at least what others did. I never wanted to be left behind. Someone who cannot avoid attracting attention should at least attract it with their achievements and not their shortcomings. That was my motto. I didn’t know how to swim at all when I was a child. I could only do the dead-man’s float and I only dared to do that if the water was shallow. When I was twenty years old, my half-sister Milica invited me to swim at Spica in the Ljubljanica River. There was a public swimming area there. I bought a swimsuit and we went. Milica swam and I just lolled in the shallows. It was obvious I couldn’t do anything else. At one point, Milica wanted to swim to the other shore, though not without me, of course. “Come, we’ll swim across,” she said decisively. “I’d rather not.” “You’ll make it. We’ll be together.” In the middle of the river, she let me go and said: “Now you swim the rest of the way on your own.” There were only two possibilities at that moment: swim or drown. I preferred the former. My anger subsided when I was safe on the other shore and I even felt grateful to Milica for giving me that choice right in the middle of the deep and dangerous Ljubljanica River. For her, it probably wasn’t such a big deal, because she was an excellent swimmer. In her childhood, unlike mine, she had no other duties besides school. She had the time to learn to swim, enjoy, flutter about like a little bird on a branch. But now we were both mature women and she decided that it would be smart if I learned to swim too. In an instant, she made at least one small thing possible that I had missed in my childhood. I learned to swim well enough to get the most out of my stay at Lake Bled. There I mastered enough skills to do more than just splash around. And, of course, I didn’t just swim. Each day I ran around the entire lake. I really enjoyed that six-kilometer course. Sometimes I ran it two or three times without taking a break. It felt like nothing at all to run around it

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again. The tourists that were at the spa for health purposes strolled along the shores. Nobody ran except for me, but many walked, stopping at the cafes by the lakeside, sitting awhile, and then walking on. But I ran and as I ran, I observed the water, the hills, the clouds reflected in the water, and I daydreamed about the happy families that lived or vacationed in the beautiful villas on the lakeshore. Another wonderful thing happened to me at Bled. The dance master Jenko from the Jenko Dance School in Ljubljana was also there, and I regularly attended his dance events after work. Sometimes he even asked me to dance with him. When he opened a big dance at Bled, he always chose me as his partner. It was wonderful but I missed Stane. Fortunately, it was easier for him to come visit me at Bled because it wasn’t as far from Ljubljana as to Jesenice. He rode his mother’s bike. How happy he was to see me after the long ride! First he threw himself into the lake for a swim, rinsing the perspiration from him. Then he dried himself off, sat down, and ate the meal that I prepared for us. Stane had many talents. Among them, he was a wonderful dancer. We were such a good pair that master Jenko once invited us to go to performances and competitions as members of his school team. After some thought, Stane, who had both feet firmly on the ground, said to me: “Helena, we cannot accept the invitation, because we would need nice clothes, and you and I could never afford that.” He thought we needed truly luxurious clothes for such events, whereas I thought ours would be good enough. I was disappointed and Master Jenko resented us a little for having turned him down.

I could have stayed forever at Bled. That’s how much I liked it. I always had the feeling that I was on vacation, and, even better, I had a wonderful job. But after two months of heaven, I went back to Ljubljana because of Stane, who wanted, or I might even say, demanded that I return. It all turned on him finding me an appropriate replacement for the job I loved so much, and soon, extremely pleased, he did find one—at the Slovenian Bureau of Statistics. What a disappointment that was! After an interesting job in a cosmopolitan lake town where I had contact with people from all over the world, I was working behind a typewriter in a dark office. I was grateful to Stane but days of typing with no friendly chatter were definitely not for me.

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“I’m sorry,” I said to my supervisor when I couldn’t take it anymore “but it’s not going to work out.” I kept looking and soon found a job at the Ljubljana Public Transport Service, but I didn’t like that one either. It was hard, but once again I had to repeat the sentence above. At that point, I was offered a new old possibility. I had preserved my connections to Gradis, and when a job opened up there, they offered it to me: “Helena, we’re looking for someone. Come back to us.” I thought: no, I’m not going back. That’s not the way to do it. I always liked to move forward, not back. “I’m not going to Jesenice or to Vuzenica or anywhere else,” I said in the interview. “I’m only interested in working here in Ljubljana.” They accepted my conditions and I went back to my old company where I worked for the next thirty years until retirement. And although I was stationed in Ljubljana, my work took me all over Slovenia. I was employed in the department that dealt with the construction of new apartment buildings and my job was to oversee all construction sites. I had to evaluate whether the work had been done according to plan. If there was something wrong with a newly built apartment building, I made sure that the mistakes were corrected. Although looking for mistakes was not necessarily my favorite kind of work, I made sure things were done perfectly. If they weren’t tip-top, I insisted that the contractor fix them. It would be unfair if I didn’t make a real effort since the buyers had invested not only hope into the new apartment projects, but usually all the money they had, not to mention any loans they might have taken. I was out in the field most of the time. After many years, though, I got tired of all that driving. I had enough of all the gray roads that never ended. I wanted a calmer life. I asked for a new position and became the head of the payroll department. It makes me laugh when I think of how different life was back then. We used to write out payment forms by hand and bring them, also by hand, to the savings bank. We paid salaries directly into the hands of the workers. Literally. In the morning I went to the bank, withdrew cash for more than one hundred salaries, went back to the office to distribute the money into envelopes, and calmly drove around with all that money. I went to the workers at various building sites and simply handed out the envelopes. Today I wouldn’t dare to do that, but I was brave back then. I thought to myself:

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“Nobody knows that I am carrying one hundred salaries in my purse—a kind of large purse—but still.” So once a month, I still drove all around Slovenia. Only now, the workers were very happy to see me. “Helena’s here!” they would shout enthusiastically. I used to bring my two little girls when I was supervising the building sites. We had several large building sites in Maribor and the three of us used to stay for several days in Gradis’s vacation home in the Pohorje Mountains. After I finished work, the girls would be waiting for me. I took the gondola up to the holiday house and we went out into the woods. We walked all over the Pohorje. When I went back to work in the morning, the people in the mountain huts watched over the girls. The freedom they experienced during the day was great fun for the growing girls. Even later, when I was still distributing salaries, I sometimes took them with me, especially the younger one, when the older one was already in school. When I went to Novo mesto, I left her at the spa Dolenjske Toplice. She used to swim in the warm outdoor pool there. She loved it most when snowflakes fell on the water and I completely understood her.

April 13 is a special day for me, not only because it is my birthday. It was also the day when Stane and I went to the magistrate sixty years ago to write our names on the list of people who wanted to get married. We were in such a hurry all of a sudden and so we chose the first possible day: April 18, 1954. Despite the fact that we both wanted to be together when we were off the dance floor, Stane and I were not able to live together for a very long time after we met. We both longed for the time when we could live together, but even after I got pregnant and had a baby, we weren’t able to. Today I might have handled things differently, but at the time I didn’t know what to do. Neither he nor I had learned during our childhood how happy couples lived. Probably both of us were afraid of marriage because we only knew its dark side through our parents. But we held on to each other anyway, and in 1954, Stane finally collected the courage to propose. Our wedding took place when our first daughter, Nevenka, was eight months old. On our wedding day, we took her to Rozna dolina to our neighbors to take care of her for a couple of hours. I told my neighbors that if they saw my father and stepmother, they should tell them I went to the magistrate.

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“Just tell them I went to get married,” I said. I was so happy and I wanted to preserve and cultivate that happiness. I resented them so much at that point that I didn’t even want to tell them myself. I didn’t want them to ruin the day with their bad thoughts, hurtful comments, or interference. It was probably better that way since they wouldn’t know how to celebrate with me anyway. There had been so little happiness in their lives, still less sincere good will, that they didn’t even know how to pretend. I travelled on the tramway to my wedding with my fiancé and our two witnesses from Siska to the magistrate in the Old Town of Ljubljana. How marvelously handy the tramway was! And how fast! You sit down, you enjoy yourself, look around, chat a bit, and you arrive at your destination. You can even flip through a book during your travels. Of course, we could have got married somewhere else, but I wanted to be married right there— at the City Hall. I remember when I came to the center of Ljubljana and walked up the stairs of City Hall for the first time. I was seven years old and my grandfather had taken me on an outing to see the city. Ljubljana was like a fairytale in those days. Well-dressed people strolled through the center of the city, different from the people you saw outside the center, in Brdo or Rozna dolina. Because the city wasn’t so densely built back then, you always caught a glimpse of the natural beauties all around—the hills of Smarna gora, Golovec, Polhograjski Dolomiti. We also used to go often to the Ljubljana Castle. We went on school outings either to the castle or to Roznik. We looked down from the ramparts at all the rooftops and gardens and vegetable plots. We could see all around, all the way to the distant Sava River glittering under the sun. Later, when I was married, Stane and I often went up to Castle Hill, sometimes to the lotteries that were organized every year, and that always promised interesting prizes and pleasant company. I was never among the winners, nevertheless, I always liked going up to the Castle perched on such a nice little hill above the marshy plains. The view from there always reminds me anew of how big the world is and how small we are. But however small we are, it is only right to take big steps in our lives, which is why I felt it was necessary that my choice of venue add weight to this very personal, and yet very big, moment. In its time, that building had born witness to many historical events and had seen many great men, Napoleon among them, and its walls had an ear for history and its secrets.

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Therefore, it seemed to me the only appropriate setting for an event that would mark me for the rest of my days. It may sound exaggerated, but I was really such a modest poor girl in those days and I simply marveled at the world—at its horrors as well as its beauties—and, for me, the old City Hall could be counted among the world’s great beauties. Stane’s best man was his good friend, Tone Zorc. My maid of honor was my stepmother’s daughter, Milica. We had always been fond of each other. Stane bought two rings. I still wear mine, and Stane, a few days before his death, removed his and put it among our memorable documents and belongings. On the day of the wedding, I dressed in my best clothes, a dark blue skirt that I had been given by my cousin, with a white blouse and a dark blue cardigan. The seamstress who lived next to us in Rozna dolina had sewed the cardigan for me. I dreamed about more luxurious clothes, but I was also content with my more modest ones. The dresses I didn’t have were unimportant in comparison to what I would have now: a husband. But Stane . . . wow! . . . wore a very nice suit. His mother always made certain that he was impeccably dressed, but her care was as cold as ice, as were all her words. Whenever she said anything, you could hear the blow of the whip strike so hard enough it made the soul quake. Stane knew her better than I did, and he had been too afraid to tell her that he had a child with me. He was afraid of her reaction, which was understandable since we weren’t married, and he lived at home and didn’t see any possibility of moving out and making a nest for his future family. I found it hard to accept his secrecy. Once we went with friends to Planica to watch ski jumps. At that time—before we were married—I went to pick up Stane, carrying Nevenka in my arms, having decided that his mother could finally know she had a granddaughter. When I showed up at her doorstep with that little bundle in my arms, she was so upset you could see all the blood flow from her face, as if someone had emptied a glass of red wine. “You have a child?” she gasped, completely pale. Then the blood returned in a rush to her face. All flushed, she started to accuse me of getting pregnant on purpose in order to trap Stane. I had no difficulty with that reproach since I was expecting it. I departed, feeling somewhat better about the situation. Not surprisingly, Stane also wasn’t going to tell her about the wedding, just as I hadn’t told my parents. But on the morning of the wedding, he gathered his courage and said: “Mother, today I am getting married to Helena.”

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He didn’t even need to say my name since she knew about me by then and about our child. Maybe he thought that his mother would be struck by some miracle, and in the last minute would warm up to me as his bride. “Married? Today?” She was barely able to catch her breath. “Don’t rush into something like that, Stane!” She tried to gain some time, but a moment later, she fell silent. She was clever in her way. She must have felt that her son had already made up his mind and he wasn’t about to change his plans. “Then come for lunch afterwards,” she gave into fate. “I’ll cook for everyone.” At the ceremony in the City Hall, not only was I married but I also bid farewell to the only thing that I really had from my own mother—the family name Mlinar, which means miller. In the municipal book of marriages, I signed my name for the first time as Zigon, which is close to the meaning of “stamp” or “seal.” I laid down the miller’s stone and took up Stane’s seal. I wasn’t afraid that my wings would be clipped. I believed that together we could fly that much farther, that much higher, than either of us could alone. After the civil ceremony, we didn’t want to go to church for a religious ceremony. Later both of our daughters would be baptized and confirmed but that was just to please my mother-in-law. Stane didn’t approve of such things. He had another worldview. He didn’t like religion at all. When on Easter, we would eat a rich meal and have a holiday potica, the cake that virtually all of Catholic Slovenia ate on Easter Sunday, he would always eat old black bread. I admired his sacrifice: for such a holiday, perhaps old black bread was more suitable. But at the same time, I was loyal to the old ways, especially those that reflected respect for the gifts that Mother Nature offers us. I asked him not to take what I did as a religious ritual, but just as a custom my grandfather instilled in me and that I wanted to pass on to our children. I was determined: “I won’t allow others to look at us and say that they keep a finer table than we on holidays.” In the end, he gave in. Later when his faith in communism wavered, he got used to holiday meals, and even liked to help himself to some of the rich food. It was sometime around 1975, when ugly things took place in the Communist Party in Belgrade. I don’t remember who it was, but one of the leaders had taken advantage of his position and was trading favors.

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Stane was so disappointed, hurt really, that he no longer wanted to have anything to do with such people. He lost his respect for them and resigned from the party. They asked him to come back, but he had his values and it wouldn’t relent. At the wedding lunch at my mother’s-in-law, she didn’t show that she was angry because we had got married or at not being invited to the wedding, or at least she hid it well. Probably it didn’t strike her as unusual since she didn’t invite her parents to her wedding either. Maybe she didn’t even want to be there, and yet despite that first effort at contact and hospitality that day, she never accepted me. She remained cold. Conversation between us never flowed. She didn’t have much affection for my daughters either, her granddaughters. She always was slightly angry and hurt that I had taken her son away. At one point, I got sick of all the feelings of guilt that she forced on me, and I said: “Mama,”—that’s what we called mothers-in-law in those days—“if I hadn’t taken him away, someone else would have. He certainly wouldn’t have lived his whole life with you. Some woman or another would have married him sooner or later. I could have also found someone else but your son wanted to be with me.” What I said to her wasn’t completely true. In fact, in the beginning, I had been more in love with Stane than he was with me. It was because of this that I often went to see his mother and help her straighten up the house and scrub the floor. I thought if she cared for me, he would love me more. I would listen to her and talk to her only and exactly when I felt that’s what she wanted, but still she never accepted me. All my efforts were in vain. It’s difficult to warm up a cold person. For a short period perhaps, but it is impossible to change someone’s character in long term. That is why it is wise to treat a person as if they are better than they actually are. After all, somewhere beneath that cold surface, the small fire of some fine emotion that was extinguished for who knows what reason, must glow in the ashes. If such a person cannot feel warmth, then those who are with this person should behave in a way that spreads twice as much. But my mother-in-law did not know how to accept what was offered. All of my willingness and good spirits were for nothing. Even after our wedding, Stane and I lived separately for several more years. That meant I was still in reach of my stepmother. She also didn’t calm down even after my relationship with Stane was made official. She

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kept right on sabotaging me. So, for example, she wouldn’t let me hang wet diapers above the wood-burning stove. She said the stove was hers, and so my little girl’s diapers were always damp when what she really needed was a dry clean pair of diapers. Stane came up with a good way to help me out of this trouble. He came to me in the morning and picked up the diapers and took them with him to work. He was employed at Delo newspaper at the time, which was located on Tomsiceva Street right across from the Nama Department Store. There, in that place of business, which couldn’t have less in common with babies, he hung the diapers up to dry. He waited until evening and when everyone had left the office, he pulled the wet diapers out of his briefcase and laid them out to dry overnight on the warm radiators. He returned early in the morning before any early birds got to work, picked up the dry diapers, rolled them up, put them in his briefcase, and brought them to me. Then he went back to work and repeated the whole procedure the next day. Yes, life sometime turns out differently from what we imagine. Even though when Stane and I were dating and it sometimes seemed as if we weren’t destined for each other, we realized with time that we were good together. We also realized it took more than good luck—it took effort. And when you try hard enough, some things become automatic, and you don’t have to try so hard anymore. When happiness is rooted in mutual trust, it cannot be harmed by the occasional storm that comes on an otherwise clear day. April 18, 1954. That was when the love story which lasted two-thirds of a century began. Or really it began to be written long before then. The relationship between a man and a woman is like a dance, not in the sense that one steps forward and the other has to step back, but in a way the man should know how to dance well, to feel the woman, and not just the music and his own desires. Sometimes he has to let her go ahead, because he has the feeling that they are leading together, and are thus always in harmony. Stane enjoyed dancing as much as I did. He had good movement, an ear for the music, and rhythm. Yes, I certainly had luck with my partner. He was spinning me around with real joy. I followed his step, and he also respected mine. That’s the secret. After a difficult beginning, everything went well between us. Stane and I became inseparable. We even retired at the same time, and I was never tired of being with him. If only he hadn’t, if only he hadn’t . . . Oh, how my heart hurts!

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I force myself to think about something else. About dancing again! I can run alone. Running in company is more pleasant, but company is not essential. Running is less complicated. You decide and you go, alone, or with one or two more runners, if they are around. Despite the difference, running reminds me of dancing. Both, running and dancing, are for me an expression of joy in life. I have felt the excitement of this joy in all types of dance, even in folk dances. While I was working at Gradis, I asked Master Jenko to come to the company and create a folklore dancing group with some of the employees and he did so. We practiced at work and then went and performed at all the building sites around Yugoslavia. Yes, we danced right there at the construction sites, and how wonderful it was! It was so nice even though there was no proper floor on which our shoes would slide. Instead, we had raw concrete under our feet, concrete that had hardly even had time to dry. But dancing a deux . . . The beauty of two dancing bodies moving in harmony like one single soul always overwhelmed me. How Stane and I loved to dance together as long as we were able to! He really knew how to both passionately and reliably lead me and spin me about, and I could actually feel the gaze of other dancers on me, how they envied me such a perfect partner. But at one point, Stane’s condition advanced too much and he couldn’t do it anymore. That is when I finally also stopped. I was used to having the best partner. I wasn’t interested in anyone else. We put our dance shoes on the top shelf of the closet and started to put on our hiking shoes more often. We hiked the entire Slovenian transversal, walking slowly, but we made it. However, finally Stane’s multiple sclerosis dampened even his desire to admire fragrant wildflowers. After that, he dedicated much of his remaining energy to fight his illness. Besides, he did what he could to help other people with the illness to live a better life. He did research, connected with people, and became one of the presidents of the Center for Multiple Sclerosis in Topolscica. Today, where since the 16th century the thermal spring has drawn those who value its natural power, there is a modern health spa, that offers some relief to those in need. And even when the disease really showed its teeth, Stane still managed to enjoy life.

The thought of marching bands and majorettes that liven up the Ljubljana Marathon comes into my mind. I recall how the music encourages me,

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makes my step even stronger, my posture more upright. Each time I am sorry I have to hurry onward, not being able to watch the majorettes a little while longer. I know how fine and special they feel as they prepare for the performance, because that’s the way my folklore group used to be for me. We danced at constructions sites, they dance in the street. The majorettes have always been there for me on those same wide Ljubljana streets. It is one of the repetitions that gives life impetus, that makes me want to return. When I’m running past the majorettes, I always know that we’ll see each other again, and, in my mind, I wish them many happy performances. Wherever they may be, a year from now they will be back here at our old meeting place. I wish I could listen to the music of the marching band during the whole race. Especially during the second half, its irrepressible rhythm would help to drive me on toward the finishing line. Well, on this run, there are still no majorettes, but the sounds of the wind and the sea create a different kind of orchestra, its music gently caressing my soul. In a solemn yet celebratory mood, I’m running toward Simon’s Bay in Izola. The course descends now and I’m trying to rest a little, while still running, of course. I relax my hands so they swing beside my body. I move my head a little to the left and then a little to the right, and try to run as if only my legs are carrying me. I have to breathe, to gather my energy, as if I were about to perform a dance.

In a stranger’s arms, 1928 (collection of Helena Zigon).

At Communion, 1935 (collection of Helena Zigon).

Stanislav Zigon, 1944 (collection of Helena Zigon).

Happy cross-country run winners, 1950 (collection of Helena Zigon).

Helena loved to climb trees, as well as wells, 1951 (collection of Helena Zigon).

A folklore performance at the Gradis bulding site, 1953 (collection of Helena Zigon).

Helena at 24, pregnant with Nevenka, July 22, 1952 (collection of Helena Zigon).

Performing exercises with a group from the Slovenian cultural center, Koper, 1955 (collection of Helena Zigon).

At the office of the sports publication, Polet, 1955 (collection of Helena Zigon).

A cycling competition Ljubljana-Cerkno-Ljubljana, 1957 (collection of Helena Zigon).

After completing the marathon in 3 hours and 32 minutes, Kranj, October 23, 1982 (collection of Helena Zigon).

Start of the Istrian marathon, Helena on far left, second row, April 13, 2014 (Jadran Rusjan).

Runners on a steep street of Piran (Rok Markun).

Runners with Piran at their backs, April 13, 2014 (Ubald Trnkoczy).

Helena and Stane at home, 2014 (collection of Helena Zigon).

At the finish of the Istrian marathon, April 13, 2014 (Jadran Rusjan).

Helena in pearls (Marko Praprotnik).

KILOME TER T WELVE

THRee gIRLS On A BIC YCLe

I ’ M R U n n I n g T H R O U g H T H e I Z O L A M A R I n A , PA S T the shamefully expensive yachts in which one could live a whole year round in total comfort. But they remain empty most of the time, waiting for the one or two summer weeks when their owners have time for a seaside outing. Then they tie them to the dock again until the next summer, the owners’ only contact with boats being the exchange of complements with others like them. When our daughters were seven and three years old, fortunes finally smiled on Stane when a work colleague told him she was moving. We got an apartment on Dolenjska Street in the building of Raj Cleaning Company, but with no lease. We moved immediately. It wasn’t a beautiful place, but we weren’t choosy, and it was beautiful for us. We were together in our own place for the first time. It wasn’t long, however, before we received notice that we had to leave again. Obviously the apartment was promised to somebody else. We were offered another temporary apartment not far away, also on Dolenjska Street, in the place which once was the cellar of the Sedmica Restaurant. What had just started as happiness soon turned into disappointment. There was only concrete on the floor of this second apartment and everything else was so dilapidated that there was no way we could make a home in it. In reality, it wasn’t a home at all, but a wine cellar. Stane, resigned, said: “We have no choice. Either we take it and live here somehow, or you go back to your stepmother, and I go back to my mother.” “I won’t go back as long as there is breath in my body,” I declared. By the day when the truck came—the kind of truck that used to come to move people and their belongings in involuntary evictions—I had firmly

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decided that I would prevent the move, no matter what it took. I marched to the nearest police station and, firmly, though in great anxiety, spoke to the officer there: “If you make us move, I am going to jump under the train with my two little daughters. If you dare to have these two—including me—three innocent lives on your conscience, then drive us out. If not, leave us in peace.” The police officer listened to me in silence. Then he lowered his gaze, sighed deeply, and finally stood up. He accompanied me back to the courtyard of the apartment and gave the truck driver a signal to leave. My threat worked. I had enough of our dreadful living conditions and I would only move if it made them better.

It was 1958 when we finally got a permanent apartment, a real home. All the time, Stane had been working at the Delo newspaper publishing house, first in a sales department, later he got promoted to the director of sales, and finally to the head of human resources where he stayed until he got retired. Gradis was building an apartment complex for the employees of Delo on Martin Krpan Street in the Ljubljana district Siska. That was what finally made it possible for us to have our own apartment. New, and really and truly ours. It took a few days for me to realize that I wasn’t dreaming, that my family and I finally really did have our own clean and warm home. We were the first to move into the building, so in the early days we were the only living souls in the whole complex. Our first neighbors appeared a short while later. They had wisely waited till the installation of basic furniture. I had been in such a hurry that I didn’t even want to wait for the closets and cupboards to come. It was the first time in my life that I had lived in a proper apartment. We even had a telephone! At the time, telephones were only customary in business and government buildings. They were just starting to install telephones in the apartments of people who were unable to do their job without them. Stane needed a phone outside of working hours and for that reason we got the miraculous apparatus. We had the only telephone in the whole apartment complex. There was also only one in the neighboring complex, in the apartment where a doctor lived. When our neighbors realized we had a phone, they would regularly come to us to use it. They called anyone for any reason or no reason, for no need at all, but just for the sheer thrill

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of it. We wondered how the voice could travel so fast along those wires, transformed into something like electricity, and sound so distinct. I think that up to this day only a few experts on technology really understand this. Such comfort was only expanding. On the top floor, for example, we had a shared washing room where we women did their laundry by hand. After a couple of years, we got a washing machine with a hand crank. That made the laundry somehow easier though there was still a lot of work. When electric washing machines came on the market, Stane immediately began to talk about buying me one. The first ones, of course, were wildly expensive and we couldn’t afford it. Luckily, Stane had his aunt Julija in Italy, and when the price fell a little bit, she helped us to buy one. It took us a very long time to pay back the loan, and, in the end, she forgot a part of it.

We liked visiting Stane’s aunt. She was employed in Italian Gorizia as a companion for a count and his countess. She lived with them in a grand house on the main square in Gorizia, right by the church. She had no family. She got the job when she was eighteen and stayed there till her death. She had her own large room from which the stairs led to the countess’s room. The countess would call her whenever she needed something. She travelled with the couple all around the world. They called her by the Italian version of her name: Giulia. Julija was always looking forward to our visits. She used to tell us stories about the count and the countess, where they had travelled, and what she had seen. Because I spoke Italian—I had learned it at school—I could also talk to the couple. They were really sophisticated and made Stane and me feel like having an estate as they did, and also other properties, such as in Venice, where they had a house. They loved aunt Julija so much that they considered her family. In the end, they invited her for an eternal rest in the family tomb. She was so good to us. She always helped us when we asked her. I would like to bring her favorite flowers to her grave. Maybe I will one day. Maybe one day there will be a Gorizia marathon.

Long before the telephone and the washing machine, the greatest technical invention was no doubt the bicycle. What an incredibly long time ago

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that was! In 1954, four bicycles were imported from the Bosnian Sarajevo: massive, heavy, and awkward bicycles. Only four for all of Ljubljana and its people, many of whom dreamed about bicycles, not only for the fun of it, but because they really needed one. Many people walked long distances each day and some means of transport would have greatly eased their lives. The bicycles were on sale in the Nama Department Store, opposite the main post office in the center of Ljubljana. Of course, they wouldn’t be on sale for long. I was working then for Polet, a sports newspaper. There were lots of reporters working for the newspaper, but I was in charge of subscriptions. My office was in the passage beneath the skyscraper Neboticnik, that was, upon completion, the tallest building in the Kingdom of Yugoslavija, right beside the Nama, and as soon as the news came to the office about the bicycles on sale—I guess someone must have thought it was sports news—I ran as fast as I could to the store. I was lucky and just managed to nab the last bicycle. If I hadn’t been such a fast runner, I would have surely missed the chance. I took special care of my new bicycle, because it was the most precious thing that I owned. I paid one whole paycheck for it. How afraid I was that someone would harm it, or worse still, steal it! I already had Nevenka at that time. I would put her in a baby seat on the bike and drive her to nursery school. How wonderful it was! My hair and my skirt fluttered around me as I flew past the pedestrians. I always felt a little embarrassed because I had something that they surely desired but weren’t able to get. I was also proud of my good fortune and that good fortune could be seen, not only in the metal frame and rubber tires, but on my face with its smiling countenance that gazed toward the future—the future that all too soon would be behind the wheels of my bicycle—reflecting gratitude for all the wonderful things in the second part of my life. It was only when I got a bicycle that it became possible for me to visit my birthplace. I got rid of the idea as soon as it came into my mind. But the next year, the idea kept pestering me and one Sunday morning I suggested to Stane that we all could cycle to Ziri. He had second thoughts. “But how? Little Nevenka on the handlebars, and me on the rack?” Then he thought again. “I could borrow my mother’s bicycle.” My mother-in-law had been given a bicycle by her sister Julija, our aunt in Gorizia. It was an old Italian bike. Stane used to borrow it when he visited me in Jesenice and Bled. We didn’t go that first Sunday. Stane went to his

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mother’s and offered to do some chores in her house and in the garden. While he was at it, he ducked into her cellar. He brought a little container of oil for bicycle chains in his pocket and worked awhile on his mother’s bike: took it apart, cleaned it, oiled it, and put it back together again. The following Sunday the weather was beautiful and we went to visit Stane’s mother. As we were leaving—she had served us tea—Stane went to the cellar to get some apples for his mother. I went outside with Nevenka, got on my bike, and rode ahead. Ten minutes later Stane caught up with us. He was pedaling so hard, as if a swarm of bees were after him. When we were side by side, he said: “I’ve got the bike for now. You make a plan for how to get to Ziri and back.” We stopped and moved the pack that contained our lunch from my bike to his. Our outing to my birthplace had officially begun. I was already pregnant for the second time then, six months on, so you could say that we three girls were all riding on one bicycle. The first day we rode to Crni Vrh above Idrija, a settlement among the hills, whose name literally means “black peak.” “Black” refers to the dark, coniferous woods in a mountain pass. In a motel in those black woods we slept overnight. The next day we continued to Ziri, up and down all those hills. Me pregnant, with my little daughter in a baby seat, pedaling my heavy bicycle from Sarajevo. But I managed. I can’t even say it was that hard. I was cycling away from the dark. I so wanted to see where I was born. What was my first home like? I wondered all the way there, pedaling up the hills, and listening to the squeak of the brakes as I went down. Ziri is a small village and we quickly found the house that I had seen so many times in my dreams, but never in my adult life. I was not actually born there. My mother had left her father’s house to give birth to me, but it is where I stayed for the first few months of my life, before my father took me away. Of course, it was completely different from what I had remembered, smaller and more modest. The garden was less luxurious. There were no fruit trees. We knocked on the door. My heart was beating hard. The door opened. Then nothing. Nothing special happened at all. An old auntie was at home. She showed me where I lay during those first weeks, but she didn’t know much else. Even worse, my visit didn’t please her. She kept shrugging her shoulders as if she didn’t have anything to say to me, still less anything

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to show. Then she went off to her room and closed the door. It was clear that for her the visit was over. I searched in the house for anything that would connect me to my past, but I didn’t find it. I rummaged through my memory, hoping to find something that had a connection to this particular place, but it seemed I had expected too much. I had been too tiny when I left. How could I remember anything? My emotions vacillated between disappointment and curiosity as I looked through the rooms where my mother had rocked me and diapered me during the first and only weeks she had me with her. I tried to act cheerful because of Stane and my daughter. Once I had seen everything that I could, I hid my disappointment, and said: “Fine. We sniffed around here for a while. Let’s move on.” I turned around, opened the door, and stepped across the threshold, and at that moment it dawned: I was in the middle of my dreams, except that they were so terribly diminished! The house that in my dreams had been a manor was, of course, nothing more than a little cottage. The trees that in my dreams had grown up to the sky were ordinary trees. In my dreams, I had the perspective of an infant gazing up at the crowns of the trees as my mother laid me in a cradle. Look, that tiny bird, appeared in my dreams as a great eagle! And that maple tree—were those not little helicopters that moved the leaves, making them swirl up from the ground?—and those marvelous fruit trees that nodded their farewell when my father took me from my mother’s hands. Those powerful walls, the almost cathedral-like windows, and the old wooden trunk—in my dreams, all these things had been so enormous that my encounter with the reality of them wasn’t magical at all, but utterly ordinary, as if I had landed on solid ground.

After the outing to my birthplace, my bicycle was not only my everyday transportation, but also a vehicle for serious competitions. On many occasions, I participated in bicycle races with fierce determination, but I also liked to ride around for no particular reason at all. Whenever I was in bad mood, I got on my bike and pedaled as hard as I could. It always seemed to me that the wind blew away any negative thoughts out of my head. I just had to decide which ones I didn’t want to deal with anymore and then leave them in the air behind me. It suited me perfectly.

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I especially remember the gears on the first Italian bicycle I owned. It was miraculous how easy it was to pedal up hills. How I shifted so elegantly from one gear to the next, even I was astonished at myself. It made me think of a motorcycle. The gears are different but the technique similar. I often competed in the Franja cycling race, which was a part of a weekend of sports events inspired by the Franja Partisan Hospital in the forested hills around Idrija. Just as there had been a secret printing press during World War II in the cellar beneath my grandfather’s restaurant, there, too, had been a secret hospital in the forests for Partisan fighters who had been wounded. The events held in and around the region were named after Doctor Franja Bidovec who ran the hospital. The cycling race was a 155-kilometer course. In fact, I cycled from my home to the starting line and after the end of the race rode back home, which meant a total of 175 kilometers in one day. I must have participated in the Franja race at least twenty times, and on a lot of other nearby cycling races as well. There was another flatter race through Ig in the Ljubljana marshes. How fast we went there! Sometimes I trained on the slopes toward Pance, a settlement near Pugled on one of the hills not far from Ljubljana. It was quite steep there, but beautiful. There were also races organized on Pance, which I really enjoyed. In the autumn, they used to serve roasted chestnuts after the race. If the weather was nice, a lot of cyclists would come, especially on Friday, but they came on any day, even if it was raining. I usually cycled alone, but I never felt lonely. Just like runners, cyclists are completely different today than they were back then. In past days, I sometimes wore a wide skirt when racing. Today all serious cyclists all over the world wear tight padded shorts. I remember when my granddaughter and her husband gave me a jersey and a helmet for my birthday. “Granny,” she said, “you have to be properly equipped.” Well, at the Franja bicycle race, the properly equipped granny was always the oldest. I could always count on getting a medal in my category, usually the one with the prettiest color. It was the same in other races. I won medals because of my age and persistence. The last time I cycled the long distance at the Franja was four years ago when I was eighty-two. The hills did me in but I made it to the finish line. I still participate in the Franja competition. I haven’t yet said goodbye. This year I intend to race again, but on the short course, which is called the Family Franja, only twenty-five

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kilometers long, suitable for the whole family. I know that when I cross the finish line, I’ll say to myself: Is it already over? My granddaughter will certainly enjoy having her properly equipped granny riding beside her daughter—my great-granddaughter. Only one generation is missing; otherwise we’d be four generations riding together. I only hope that in the future no generation will be missing. After I turned eighty, Stane used to worry about me when I went on a bicycle ride and didn’t call. But in truth, he understood me, since he also liked to cycle. In the last months of his life, he liked to use my bike instead of his. He knew that I took care of my bike, that I regularly had it serviced, that all the parts were impeccable, and that nothing unexpected should happen. All the same, once he was riding home from the store and he fell and broke a pedal. He didn’t want to tell me what had happened, he just said: “Well, the sidewalk is alive and well.” Then I managed to get out of him that three passers-by had helped him get up and that it was quite bad. And since he enjoyed cycling so much, I couldn’t keep it from him.

Stane always worried about me. Even when I left my bicycle at home and went running on the nearby Golovec, a beautiful wooded area with a network of well-maintained trails, that surrounds a part of Ljubljana, he always found the reason, especially when the weather was bad, that I’d better not go training. I might catch a cold. Or worse, I would fall. Because of this, I did start staying at home more often and reducing my runs on Golovec. That didn’t make me happy, which is why I signed up with the running group Polet. I paid for the membership fees and then I could to say to him and to myself: “I have to train. I paid and now I have to go so as not to waste money. Anyway, I’m running in a group so I will surely be safe.” Stane smiled and no longer grumbled. I was running with Polet for a long time. Soon they wouldn’t allow me to pay the fees. They gave me the pleasing title of an honorable member. This made me happy, but unfortunately

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right after I got the title, I stopped training so much—maybe because it was free. They also gave me a special medal, which, like all medals, has two sides. In my experience, one is more loyal and diligent if they have to pay membership fees. Nobody is as foolish as to pay and not run. When I realized that I was missing training too much, I decided to start running alone again. I held to the principle that I had to go running if I had two free hours. I put on my shoes and went. And whenever I felt tired, as if I needed a rest or, more often, a coffee, I put on my shoes and went for a run, at least a few kilometers. Afterwards, I returned home, feeling reborn, as if I had drunk two coffees. Perhaps, regarding such things, I am unique. I was always versatile in that way: I ran, cycled, danced, bowled, did rhythmic exercises, sang in a choir, went ice-skating, sailing, Alpine and cross-country skiing. I started doing most of these activities as a grown-up. In my childhood and youth, there was neither time nor money for such entertainment. Is it even possible these days to say too late? I don’t think so. I swam my first hundred meters at middle age. Now, each year, I swim in the race for athletic seniors. The distance that swimmers over seventy years must cover without stopping is one thousand meters, and each year I tease the organizers: “What about for people over eighty? Is there a shorter course?” But they don’t have such a category, even though there are Slovenians like Miki Muster, among others, who is a world champion and record holder in the over-eighty category. So I am hardly unique. This year I will try again to swim the full kilometer. I stood on skis for the first time when I was thirty-two years old and was skiing until I was eighty, when I decided it was time to give it up. I was afraid I would fall, break something, and then would have to stop running as well. And so I stored my ski boots in the cellar. Oh, how comfortable running shoes are compared to ski boots! How soft! All the same, when I cross the finish line today, I will be very pleased and relieved to take my running shoes off. I’m going to lift my feet and wiggle my toes. If I’m lucky, I’ll treat myself to a massage. One can usually do that at the finish lines of these bigger races. Of course, it is always crowded but I don’t mind waiting. I know how to do that, too. A massage will relax me.

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I’ll stretch out in the shade of a tree and lie on my back and give myself up to the able hands of the masseur. All the while, I’ll look up at the crowns of the trees, how they lean down toward me, and I’ll think about nothing at all. I just have to make it to the finish line. Will I?

KILOME TER THIR TEEN

MY MOTHeR-In-LAW’S gIFT

T H e n U M B e R T H I R T e e n . I C A n ’ T S AY I T ’ S been unlucky for me. It is true that in recent years when I have started to run more slowly, it is around this marker that the course becomes somewhat lonelier. The faster runners have all gone ahead, the untrained beginners have hit a wall, as they say, and are walking or have stopped altogether. From this perspective, running is similar to life. At the beginning, there is a lot of action, pushing, surges of energy as you find your tempo. The next couple of kilometers you run with ease, the middle demands more persistence, and when you get to the last quarter of the race, your steps become heavier, and the ranks of runners thinner. Now, as the race enters this phase, my thoughts turn to Stane’s childhood and his early life. His family came from Crni Vrh above Idrija, the area of forested hills in the direction of the sea where the Franja Partisan hospital is. When he was a child, the family moved to Ljubljana, into the house where I still live today. His father had a sister who lived in America. She wanted to return to Slovenia someday, so she sent her brother (my father-in-law) money to buy her a house where she could live after her return. Stane’s parents had very little space in the family house in Crni Vrh, only one little room, and so, with their aunt’s permission, they moved into the empty house in Ljubljana. Temporarily of course, until she came back to Slovenia, but she ended up staying in America and their residence in her house became permanent. Though not for Stane’s father. He had to move out sooner. Stane’s mother, his wife, was a terribly domineering woman. She was ordering everyone around and when Stane’s father resisted her, she kicked him out of the house—and in a way out of his own life.

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I met my future father-in-law in the strangest way. Once, a long time ago, I got a new pair of shoes that tore soon after I bought them. Stane said that his cobbler would be able to fix them and we went to his workshop. Soon after we entered the shop, I sensed that Stane and the cobbler had some sort of relationship. In those days, we never used the familiar form when speaking to people who were older than us. I had observed from time to time a good customer using the familiar form with a craftsman, especially one that was close in age, but I had never seen the craftsman use the familiar form in return. These two were not only on familiar terms linguistically speaking, but the intimacy between them could be sensed in all aspects of their behavior. They acted as if they were veterans who had experienced the war or even captivity together, but no longer mentioned it anymore because their memories were too bitter. Or as if they belonged to the same party, but couldn’t acknowledge each other in public because a craftsman had no business belonging to a political party. Stane told the elder man what to do. The man nodded, suggested something himself, and that was it. He didn’t say goodbye to us, just told us when to come back for the shoes, and turned to his stitching. In half an hour he was done. We took the shoes, thanked him, and left. Only when we were outside did it strike me that Stane hadn’t paid the man–he hadn’t even asked what we owed! I reminded him, saying that we had to go back, but he just waved me away. “Not to worry! He owes me!” he exclaimed. Somehow I didn’t think of what he had once said about a parent’s debt. Only much later, when I accidentally told Stane’s sister what had happened, did I learn that the cobbler was Stane’s father. Oh, how angry I was! I said to him: “You know, my father was a drunkard and even worse, but I never hid him, I never denied who he was to me. Yours just didn’t get along with your mother, a woman who was in his opinion too bossy—which happens to be completely true. Because of that, your father simply couldn’t take living with her anymore. So it is completely unfair that you behave toward him like an ungrateful son, and, however you look at the situation, he’s your father. He will always be your father.” It occurs to me only now that Stane, like me, was the silent type. Whenever a thing was emotionally difficult for him, he simply avoided words. But perhaps my outburst, to which he responded with a shrug, helped,

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because later he invited his hidden father to our home, to visit his son and granddaughters, and we all had a great time with him. Our little daughters were very fond of him. He was good and kind to children. Unfortunately, the conflict with his ex-wife did not diminish with time. Like certain loves, certain hatreds also do not pass. Or love turns to its opposite. Whenever she came to our apartment and spotted him there, she turned right around on the threshold, slamming the door behind her. She wanted no contact with him. She was still so furious with him that she made us an ultimatum: if we wanted her to keep coming to see us, he must not visit us anymore. The anger steamed off of her as she made her demand: “It’s either him or me!” Poor Stane was in such a dilemma. I liked things to be calm and friendly, and would have preferred if only my father-in-law visited us. But we couldn’t just give up on Stane’s mother. We simply tried to make sure that she didn’t know about her husband’s visits. But she suspected all the same and stopped coming. After that, Stane and our two daughters went to visit her at home, and I would go and visit my father-in-law. That’s how we divided our family duties. We usually paid the visits at the same time. When my mother-in-law found out that I was still visiting him, she got angry all over again. She was convinced that he had remarried, though that wasn’t true. He wasn’t even seeing another woman. Once bitten, twice shy, as they say. And so what if he had remarried? It would have been nice for him, and for her as well. They could have finally buried the hatchet. But in truth, my mother-in-law was continuing her marriage with him, though in a negative way. She still wanted to control him, but from far away and with our mediation. I could never understand her behavior. It was so strange to me. If I don’t like someone in my vicinity, I just act the way I am, watch, observe, try not to get in their way. I leave alone the people with whom I don’t want to have any contact. It would never occur to me to try and nurture my hatred, thus hurting myself most of all. I avoided people I didn’t like, while Stane’s mother pursued them, wouldn’t let them out of her grip. She was incredibly stubborn. After some years, my father-in-law fell ill. He went to live in a home for elderly people for a while and he died there. The same happened to my mother-in-law, three years later, in the same home where he died. I always wonder how their lives would have been if they had got along

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well and stayed together. One would have had the privilege of tending to the other, and the privilege of mourning. We who suffered from their misunderstanding buried my mother-in-law next to my father-in-law in the same grave. Now, whether they like it or not, they are lying together, and if they rose from the dead, they would be surprised to see each other. I hope that in the meantime they—and especially her—came to their senses. I think Stane and I did well. In any case, what was truly important remained: their love, although short-lived, produced fruit, and their family continued. However difficult she was, I am grateful to her. She gave me a gift that lasted all my life.

Stane, although living in Ljubljana, remained sentimentally attached to Crni Vrh. That is why he was overjoyed when aunt Julka asked him to look for a little piece of property for her there and build a small house, a weekend cottage. Stane’s roots were in that part of Slovenia and he felt good there. This new connection to the land meant a lot to him. He felt an obligation to cultivate the connection and to introduce it to the next generation so they, too, could be connected to their ancestors. He was not the only bird from this nest—he had some cousins—but he was the only surviving child from his primary family and the only one who had his own children. His sister Ivanka had met an unhappy end. She was just over forty when she had passionately fallen in love, but sadly it was unrequited. She took some pills so she would sleep forever. Even before this tragic love, she was a melancholy spirit, experiencing wild swings between ecstatic impulses and subsequent guilt. After her death, Stane felt she was finally at peace. That was three years before their father died, and six years before their mother. Thus Stane lost all his closest relatives in a relatively short period of time. For this reason, the little piece of land near the village of his ancestors was all the more precious to him. We liked to go on short holidays to Crni Vrh that lost all its blackness in the name, and later we would often go there with our grandchildren. It was great if all four of them could come together. We rambled around the forest, climbed to the top of the hills in the vicinity, ran, and even skied in the winter. Sometimes we spent fourteen days there at a stretch. Stane loved

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family activities with all four grandchildren participating. He woke them up early and they helped to gather firewood and work the land. When they did everything that he had planned for that day, they flew off, like little birds, to their freedom. For many hours they would wander around the villages and the woods. Sometimes I got very worried about where they might be and called out their names into the dark night. Despite the fact that their long absences caused me such worries, I always waited for them with their favorite dishes. Grandmothers are allowed to do that!

Stane also liked living in Ljubljana and felt like a native. We lived in the apartment building on Martin Krpan Street until his mother died. After her death, he was able to realize his lifelong dream about having his own house. He tore down the little house in which he had once lived with an angry mother and a sad sister and got a permit to build a new one. “This will be a happy home,” he said with excitement. I also was very enthusiastic when he showed me the plans. I wanted my own garden, contact with nature, which, of course, was not possible in a block of flats. I was excited but I could hardly believe we would manage to make it. It was 1984, a year of belt-tightening, similar to our current period, in other words, a time not very inclined to investments, which was why I remained skeptical. In those days, a lot of people had started building and then stopped, because they didn’t have the means to continue. An understanding prevailed among most people: It is good to save no matter what costs. Even if you are trying to build a house. We had to be inventive, because there was little money and little material. I knew that both Stane and I could be persistent, and I was curious about whether we would succeed or not. Once again, working for a building company came in handy. Building material was in short supply at the time, but I had an overview of all the suppliers. I could always get to them on a first-come-first-serve basis. Of course, I didn’t resort to actual corruption, but I told Stane what was available and where and he just turned up as the lucky customer. If I were a politician, I would probably be criticized for this, but since I was just one of twenty million Yugoslavs trying to survive under the work-it-out-yourself principle, I don’t think my sin was too serious.

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The house grew quickly. The main floor was masonry, the upper floors wood. We ended up living there for twenty-nine happy years. Our little house and the little garden around it meant a lot to us. Stane went out several times a day to see his plants. Then he went back into the house and rested, then back again among the flowers. In the end, it was very hard for him to work in the garden—he was eighty-nine after all—but the garden kept him alive. Sometimes I wanted to say to him: “Stane, don’t torment yourself, let it go. The plants will grow without you.” But I bit my tongue. I’m convinced that his gardening slowed the inevitable progress of his disease, at least for a few precious years. And who will now tend our daffodils? I can’t just let the garden go to seed. I should run less, hike less in the mountains, and work more in the garden. Or can I manage to do all three?

I am close to the sea now and I can detect this particular smell, not exactly unpleasant, but artificially sweet, probably the smell of the industrial material used in ship construction these days. It mingles with the scent of seaside blossoms and the final effect reminds me of the scent in the dance halls at the end of the night: a mixture of perspiration, perfume, and linoleum. Even more than dancing, I have spent my life running. In the beginning, somehow modestly, though that was not my fault. Men ran twenty-one kilometers, women just two. That was once the difference between the men’s and women’s race in Belgrade, our capital city, the capital of Yugoslavia. The difference was enormous and went entirely unquestioned. For a very long while, it never occurred to me to complain about it. Finally—and it happened again in Belgrade—I couldn’t take it anymore and I pushed back against the status quo. After all, we had travelled six hundred kilometers—and for what?—so we could run a measly two kilometers, and get back on the bus again, and travel six hundred kilometers back home! “Are we girls really going to run only two kilometers? What if we make the course longer?” I asked the organizers. They just shrugged their shoulders, as if they couldn’t change anything. It was only good luck and timing that made things better and allowed us

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women to finally have the opportunity to test our boundaries. As soon as it was possible to run a marathon in Slovenia, I, of course, tried to run the distance. It turned out that the fears of the organizers were exaggerated. I always knew that we girls were strong enough but I somehow accepted the prevailing doctrine for far too long. Stane, thank goodness, wasn’t the kind of man who demanded that a woman had to be in the kitchen. He was happy that I wanted to participate in so many activities. Not only running races, but also Alpine and cross-country ski events all over Yugoslavia. I even raced in a number of ski marathons: for example, the 42-kilomter Trnovski marathon, the thirty-kilometer ski race at Bloke, the ski races at Cerklje in Gorenjsko, Duplje, Pokljuka, and the race-of-three countries—from Slovene Kranjska Gora, across Italian Trevisio, to Austrian Arnoldstein. I also liked combination races: skiing, cycling, and running at the mountain pass of Vrsic, or swimming, cycling, and running at my beloved lake Bled. Stane always supported me in my ambitions. When I had to travel, he stayed behind with the girls and played his role so well that I didn’t feel guilty at all. Stane used to joke: “Helena’s victories are mine. After all, I’m her trainer.” In reality, I was my own trainer, to the extent that I trained at all. Mostly, I just tried my hardest at each event and in between regularly ran an hour or two. That was enough to keep me in winning condition. It was my recipe and because it seemed to work well, I never changed it. I needed maybe three percent more to be at the very top, but I would have had to invest so much to get there. My family life would have suffered, and for what? Not to mention that we didn’t run for prizes or for money in those days. We didn’t have that temptation. I went to some races alone, but usually I went with friends or coworkers. For many years, I ran with a woman from the next office, Maria. It was pleasant to work up a sweat shoulder to shoulder, but toward the end of a race, I always left her behind. In my opinion, that was the right thing to do: we should each be where we belong. It was also a way of showing her respect. She could see how much she still had to try. But, then again, perhaps I am too competitive. Once another friend named Melita ran with me. She was employed at the high court. She was also a fast runner and on many occasions she was right at my heels. Once she even beat me. This is what happened: we were

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racing on Crni Vrh and a cat bit me during the race. Yes, believe it or not, a cat, not a dog. My leg swelled up and it hurt too much for me to run as fast as I normally did. Melita passed me three times that day: the first time, the last time, and never again. After that legendary loss, disappointed runners used to ask me at the finish line: “Where’s that damn cat today?” People often didn’t believe that I did so little additional training. If I don’t count the occasional runs on Golovec and Roznik, my races were my only training. But in a way I ran all the time, whenever I had to go anywhere, to work or on errands or to get my daughters to nursery school. I always wore the kind of shoes in which I could move comfortably and quickly.

I look down at my running shoes. They carry me well. They’re not too worn out. I’ll be able to wear them for some training sessions—I have had to start training recently to stay in shape—and another race or two. Then I’ll have to choose a new pair. I wonder how many running shoes I have changed in my lifetime. Even the ones I am wearing now will not be my last pair, at least I hope not. I would like to try a new model. I love the feeling of running in a new pair of shoes, when it seems that you can run faster and easier. Helena, be good, I encourage myself. First wear these ones until they are worn out, and then you can get a new pair. The marina is now behind me. I am approaching Izola, a beautiful old fishing town, on the northern Adriatic coast. I’m going to experience Izola again, admire its beauties, enjoy its scent, hear the water lapping up on its shores where people sit in the restaurants and eat their lunch. I notice that one restaurant has tablecloths exactly like the ones at my grandfather’s restaurant. Red-and-white checkered cloths. I can still feel, as if it were only yesterday, the rough fabric under my fingers as I smoothed them down. It’s lunchtime. The diners cannot be bothered with us. The pleasure of food is stronger than any curiosity they might have for the passing runners. The delicious aroma of seafood rises from the tables. It’s a good thing that a kind young helper reached out to me at the last nourishment station, offering me water and sweet drinks. I need them now, those kind hands offering me sustenance so I can keep on running.

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The view of Izola’s port with all its charm opens up before me. Fishing boats, both large and small, are moored in the harbor, quietly waiting one next to the other for the fishermen to come and return to sea. I’m running along the smooth stone quay, looking down at my feet where the stones have been shaped and smoothed by the sea. I must be careful not to fall. I think how vulnerable a single stone seems when lying by the water, how the sea polishes the stones, wounding them, diminishing them year after year. But stones are stones, resilient and silent. Every irregularity in the pavement hollows me out a little bit, tires me more. But I must greet the viewers, respond to their happy faces. When the viewers are no longer in sight, I can relax again. When nobody can see me, I allow myself to wear a serious face and concentrate only on the next step. I cannot let my increasing fatigue make me lose focus. Focus is important: a sharp gaze and above all a sharp mind. To have a sharp mind is as important as a life jacket, irreplaceable especially in moments when our gaze grows foggy, and the ground beneath our feet becomes unstable, and we are forced to live by our wits. The stones grow softer as if they could read my mind.

KILOME TER FOUR TEEN

HeLenA, THInK ABOUT SOMeTHIng nICe!

F R O M I Z O L A , I ’ M R U n n I n g T O W A R D T H e C I T Y beach, where people are sitting on the wall and looking down at us. Still paying attention to where I am stepping, I wave back at them. The race is becoming extremely difficult for me now. There are still eight kilometers till the finish line. I have not trained enough. I am exhausted. The finish line is so far away, probably too far way. But what does that mean—far away? And what is too far away? When I used to hear about races and then check the distances, ten kilometers never seemed long enough for me. I wasn’t willing to drive a hundred kilometers for a race that was only ten. I wouldn’t even drive fifty. I would rather stay at home and go to Golovec for a good run. Once I heard about the race in Belgrade that was sixty kilometers long. My friend Nada and I signed up. It was quite a few years after I had travelled the same distance to run a two-kilometer race. That’s why I really itched for this race. Somehow I felt that Belgrade was the most suitable location to try such a long-distance course. It was right at the time that my daughter was celebrating her twenty-fifth birthday and she really wanted me to stay at home. “But, mama, I turn twenty-five only once, and there will be plenty more races.” Races were a constant for me. It really seemed as if I had run an enormous amount of races, so it wouldn’t be such a tragedy to skip just this one. Given that there were more and more so-called ultra-marathons, I thought I would certainly have another opportunity to participate in one, perhaps even a longer one, eighty, maybe a hundred kilometers. So I didn’t go that time, and my friend did. Nada successfully completed the ultra-marathon

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in Belgrade, and when she came home, she paid me a visit to tell me just how astonishing a personal victory it had been for her. That ultra-marathon was like the first swallow. For a long time after that, there were no others. And I liked distance so much: courses where the start and the finish were completely distinct, where at the start you couldn’t even think about the finish, and at the finish you couldn’t even remember the start. Then I am not burdened and I can enjoy the middle in the greatest possible peace. It is as if you ate such a big loaf of bread that you don’t even care about the heels. So, I was tempted by this long distance race of forty-two kilometers. But I said to myself: Helena, twenty-one kilometers of pleasure will be just enough for you. Enough? Now I’ll be satisfied if I can manage to finish it. And I really have had enough. To enjoy the race is what is increasingly difficult. Exhaustion spreads through my body. At my age, one feels the weight of the last month and the month before. My soul, my ribs, my feet, they all hurt. Radojka, who knows that I will need the most help during the last third of the race, begins to intensively encourage me. It is only because of her that I don’t stop. I’ve run thirteen and a half kilometers so far, almost two thirds of the race. Only seven and a half to go. I have to harness my imagination in order to bring some pleasure to my last steps on the way to the destination. It is too soon, and the finish line is too far away. I should not allow myself to think about what I will do after the race, but I can’t help myself. First I’m going to sit down, or, better yet, lie down, take off my shoes and socks, lift my feet up, and this will feel sweeter than anything. Then I’ll get myself a glass of beer. Some runners, and this is especially true of women, suffer from a drop in blood pressure, which causes problems in the digestive system that makes it hard to drink even water. Beer always does the trick for me, but it is not a recipe for everyone. Each runner needs to find the best solution. I know I will have to be quiet for some time because of exhaustion, but when that half a glass of beer is in me, my strength will start to return. That’s when I’ll thank Radojka for her amazing lack of selfishness. She runs exactly my tempo. Shoulder to shoulder, not a single meter in front of me, because she understands what a bad influence that can be on a runner who is losing strength. She doesn’t get bothered if I don’t respond when she speaks to me. She knows that I am so tired, that I can’t do anything but

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run. I cannot exchange impressions, cannot ask how she is doing, I can’t even groan. I run in silence, intent both on the tranquility of the nature outside of me and on the agitation of my inner world. All the same, I know Radojka knows how grateful I am to her. She is twenty-three years younger than I and appropriately has more energy. I am calmed by her springier step next to my tired one. And yet, despite her encouraging words, it is hard for me. I will have to keep trying. The last third of the race is always the hardest. I give myself an order: Helena, think about something nice!

In the past, when I had trained hard, I always thought about how, not too far into the future, I would award myself for my diligence. Enormously. After I missed the Belgrade ultra-marathon, I began to think about running a big traditional marathon. I was thinking about a marathon where more than ten thousand people compete. I couldn’t imagine such a large number of runners. I wanted to know what it would feel like in the middle of such a crowd. It must be a special feeling, to be a small part of such an enormous group, almost like one, but still not melting into it, not sinking into it, remaining an individual, with a clear goal, and therefore, also competing with all the other tiny particles in the crowd. I researched where I should go and it didn’t take me long to make up my mind: I want to go the biggest race, to New York. I am going to run in the New York marathon. I could hardly believe it was even possible to run in such a crowd. But if you want something, then it is important to just decide and do it. So I decided and went to New York. To see what it was like to stand at the starting line of the marathon challenge with so many people. Once again, Stane calmly accepted my decision: “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.” During the days before the race, we investigated the enormous city with its incredible skyscrapers. Then the morning of the marathon came, still almost night really, when I found myself on the starting line. After quite a long time waiting in the colorful crowd, we finally got moving, at first slowly, then getting ever faster. It seemed incredible to me that the streets were so wide that right from the start we could run twenty abreast. It was 1995. I was sixty-seven years old and even now I can still hear the

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exclamations of the onlookers cheering us on. I felt like one bird in a great flock taking to the sky. It was magnificent, so many people together. The air between us felt thick, pulsating with our energy. But even with this sense of elevation, I was pulled back to earth by the cold. That was also an unusual experience for me. It was extraordinarily cold and rainy, and even after the first few kilometers, I couldn’t warm up. I felt as cold as I did while waiting at the starting line. I was still so cold at the fifteenth kilometer that my step was hard, stiff, and it felt like I would never get anywhere. I have to do something, I decided. I’ll turn into the next café that I see on the road and order myself a cup of hot tea. I wanted one so badly, that I could practically feel the hot cup in my cold hands, imagine how the warm liquid would warm me from within, but what I imagined had no physiological effect on me at all. I just kept on shivering. Although I had no money with me, I went into that first café I spotted on the road. It turned out that America, after all, was not the land of greed and profit only. I was served a large American dose of a hot drink. At that moment, the waiters and the customers were like part of the marathon staff, providing free first aid to the cold runners. I thanked them and rushed on. I had to make up for the lost time. But the drink warmed me so much I was able to run with much greater joy and ease after that. I finished in exactly the time I predicted: four and a half hours.

How long will I be running today? I think a long, a very long time, and I won’t stop anywhere for tea. Everything I need is provided for me on the course. And, in truth, I need very little. I just need to hold on till the finish line. My victory will be simply in reaching the goal. I only retired from a race once. Well, twice actually, another time when others made me retire. The first time was at the veterans’ championship in Ljubljana. It took place in the middle of summer and the heat was unbearable. I was competing in a ten-kilometer race around the stadium. The sun struck down on my head, neck, and arms. The sweat dripped from my nose. When I was approaching the final lap, the organizers could see that I had a sunstroke. My head had started to spin and, when I was no longer able to hide my physical condition, they asked me to give in. The second time was at Bled. Again it was extremely hot. I was running the third time around the lake in the Bled Marathon. Fifteen kilometers.

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This time it was not the burning sun, but terrible humidity, so suffocating that we runners were constantly hearing the sound of ambulance sirens. When I hear such sounds, I usually comfort myself with the thought that it is nothing serious, that they are just overreacting to someone feeling a little weak. But during that race, a lot of runners were feeling dangerously weak. On that occasion, they also asked me to stop. I did, but I wouldn’t have if they hadn’t asked me to. That’s how stubborn I am. Let me be stubborn today. Stane, help me with your invisible hand, like the many times you helped me before. I have come so far. Let me make it to the finishing line.

KILOME TER FIFTEEN

TO RIDe! TO Be FRee!

F R O M T H e S H O R e , T H e PAT H T U R n S T O the left and ascends the hill. Because I am so tired, it seems especially steep from a distance, and very long. I am becoming slower and slower. I would like to walk for a few steps, but I know I must not. I cannot allow myself to. It is so hard to start running again. I came to a race, not a walk. If I succeed in getting to the top of this incline, it will be easy sailing to the finish line. I am judging by experience, as I know that after this steep section, the course is entirely flat. Radojka encourages me. She always knows when the encouragement of the onlookers is not enough. She knows that on this slope, I am fighting a hard battle, but I will win it. Like all hills before it, this one has a top, and when I get there I take a little time to catch my breath, and then, relieved, begin to run down the other side. The world is flat again. It was like a somersault. Now I try to relax, breathe evenly, shake out my arms, relax my tense muscles. I imagine that I have wheels instead of legs and they are just rolling down the hill. I can see the next nourishment station on the horizon. Is it the last one? I run toward it and reach out for a piece of banana and some sweetened water, thanking the volunteers, and getting back to work. The last quarter of the race: it will be the hardest part. A mother with a stroller passes me. I like to see parents like that, who raise their children at such an early age to love running. It really pleases me. I also took my little girls in a stroller, but back then strollers weren’t so sporty, strong three-wheelers with reinforced rubber tires. Ours had wiggly little wheels that would probably fall apart on the asphalt if you went too fast. I’m thinking about the last Ljubljana marathon when I ran

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together for a long stretch with a pregnant runner named Jasmina. She told me that she was nine months and four days pregnant. I am truly cheered by the fact that some of the borders erected by society about what a woman should and should not do are finally coming down, including a lot of protective taboos that we don’t even need. Jasmina told me that her doctor said that, from a medical standpoint, there is no reason not to run long distances with such a big belly, that it is only important if her water breaks or she begins to have contractions, she should get to the hospital within an hour. She was ready to do that if necessary. She was clearly safe—her husband Urban was running next to her. I wished her well. I didn’t run when I was pregnant. Everyone would have thought I was crazy. They might have even institutionalized me. The past is a strange land where strange rules prevailed. But I did other things when I was pregnant. I always cycled till the very end. When I was six months pregnant, I went on my second bicycle trip to Ziri. I rode to work until two days before my due date. I wasn’t afraid of anything, or at least anything that was natural, and pregnancy is natural for a female body. My colleagues tried to frighten me with stories of how difficult it is to bring a child into the world, but I was convinced it couldn’t be that hard. I was ready for anything. I thought that if so many had given birth before me and so many would after me, I would probably also make it. I have a high threshold of pain and I can take a lot, steep hills and sharp descents, and that strength came in handy during those births as it also did in other moments of life. I think I can be satisfied with my body. I very rarely go to the doctor. If something hurts, I’d rather wait for it to pass—and it almost always passes. Once when I was at the doctor’s for a regular physical, she said to me: “You don’t need me at all, do you?” “I do like seeing you, but, it’s true, I don’t need you.” I answered. And perhaps I have my difficult childhood to thank for this philosophy. Back then, I got used to not being able to expect anything. I had to be happy for anything good or beautiful that happened, however short it lasted. Or perhaps, because it did last such a short time. But there have been times when I really did want something, and then I made sure I got it. I gave birth in Ljubljana Maternity Hospital. Stane had very much wanted a girl. Before I had the baby, I asked him:

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“And what if it is a boy?” He answered: “We’ll buy him wide pants.” When he held his little daughter in his arms, he was over the moon.

It was the same year that we got our apartment, a few months after we moved in, that I set my sights on something else I really wanted: a motor scooter. I had ridden on a similar vehicle once in my life—when I was two or three months old—and I was curious about what the feeling would be to sit on one now. Stane’s uncle was the proud owner of a motor scooter and one day he rode it up in front of our block. I asked him if I could take it out for a little spin. He agreed, although I could see a flash of nervousness in his eyes. I sat down on the seat and he showed me how to start it and how to steer it. I was off! I didn’t wait for any further instructions, revved the engine and shot forward. The speed sent the blood racing through my veins. With the wind in my hair, I had the feeling I was sitting on a wild bull, holding him by the horns. Suddenly I was overwhelmed with fear: I had no idea how to stop the thing. How could I have known when I had been in such a hurry to ride off? Stane’s uncle could only shout indistinctly behind me—probably exactly the instructions that I needed right then. I pressed on all the buttons that I could see. Nothing. When I came around again, I called out to Stane’s uncle: “Help! I don’t know how to stop!” He ran along beside me and in the end behind me, yelling out to me what I should do. Despite the undignified ending and my awe of such a machine, I absolutely enjoyed my first ride, and I said to Stane afterwards: “I want to have one. I want a motor scooter.” A motor scooter was a rare treasure and there was no real prospect of getting one. The only possibility seemed to get it from Italy. That kind of import was a complicated process, but I asked aunt Julka who had Italian citizenship, if she could help me. She generously said yes and we just had to arrange the purchase. But how? At about that time, the construction union was organizing a trip to Trieste. Ha, right to Trieste, I thought, as if it were meant to be. I’ll just go with them and buy a motor scooter. And so I made a plan. I’ll slip away from

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the organized activities for a short while, skip the sightseeing, get a look at some scooters. If I need to, I’ll find a store that sells used ones and buy one just like that. I had no idea how I would get it back into Slovenia but Julka would help me. She would also help me to pay for it. I had no Italian liras, though I did have some Yugoslav dinars that I had saved and which I intended to give to Stane’s aunt for the liras in which she would pay. Stane, despite his dislike of religion, actually made the sign of the cross before I left, hoping to prevent a catastrophe. He gave me specific instructions: “Buy a used one, but it should be in good shape, and not more than 125 cc. Do you understand? Nothing new and nothing more powerful. It would be very smart if you did what I say.” He had thought about it and was convinced that if I had a new or more powerful scooter, I would go too fast and crash into a ditch or a wall. I listened to him and nodded obediently. Finally, the big day came. I was so excited that I couldn’t hold my tongue on the bus. I confided in my neighbor that I intended to buy a rather large souvenir that day. “A Darwil?” In those days, the Swiss watch Darwil was fashionable. The company had its headquarters in Trieste and I am sure they didn’t spread their name over the whole façade for nothing. “No, a motor scooter!” I responded. “A motor scooter? For what?” “To ride! To be free!” He was so surprised that he spread the word around the bus. A few minutes later, everyone knew. All the boys and grandfathers who knew how to ride asked if they could come with me. It seemed that practically everyone on the bus was either a former racer or a mechanic specializing in scooters. Julka was waiting for me on the main square, and we went, the whole delegation, to choose my scooter. I knew enough Italian to say what I wanted: used, 125 cc. The salesman showed me a couple of models, one of which I really liked, but it needed to be taken on a test run. I hadn’t had my license yet, so one of my colleagues offered to take it out. Off he went, on what was almost my scooter, for a short ride that was so long I thought he would never come back. It was strange and we all wondered what had happened to him. When he finally came back, he said that it didn’t work

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very well, that it had broken down during the ride and wouldn’t start again. I listened to him and began to worry about the quality of any used scooter. Why would the owner want to get rid of it? I wondered. I no longer wanted to take a risk with a freshly polished pile of old metal. The whole delegation concurred. So I headed over to the other part of the showroom, the part closer to the windows, where the new scooters were displayed. It was, after all, no sin to look and these came with a guarantee. I would just look at the new ones for comparison and a better orientation, but, not surprisingly, one of them enchanted me immediately. It was so beautiful, so shiny, with a fine leather seat, unbelievably elegant. It made me feel like dancing. The skilled salesman immediately noticed which scooter had so excited me, but he was an honest man. He told me right away that the model I admired was una macchina bellissima, but that it was also una vera bestia—a real beast—150 cc. On top of everything else, it was way too expensive. But I didn’t let any of that bother me. I asked my colleague with the license to take this one out on a test drive. Once again, he was gone for a long time, and we all thought that the new one had broken down as well. But when he returned, he had a different explanation: “Sorry, I got carried away. She’s such a pici!” Pici was the word we used for something mega, the best! And that pici was what tipped the scales in favor of buying a new motor scooter. Aunt Julka put all her liras on the counter and arranged for how to export it. All the way back on the bus, we could talk of nothing but the wonderful Lambretta. Waiting for me in Ljubljana was a confrontation with Stane. I thought if I got the scooter a little dirty, he wouldn’t see that it was new. And I kept quiet about the price, but I never was a very good liar. Stane was extremely worried because I had bought exactly the kind of scooter he had advised me not to, but there was no way back and he gradually got used to it. The import procedures took some time, but about a month later, we received a message that it was waiting at the Ljubljana Public Warehouse. When he saw the breathtaking beauty, the light blue Lambretta with two leather seats that had no equal in the streets of Ljubljana, he finally forgot about my strong-headed disobedience. On my second ride, this time on my new Italian macchina, I got my second chance to make a mistake. In the interim, I had once again forgotten

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how to stop the thing. On this much stronger scooter, there was nothing I could do but ride it into a wall. I hoped that the law of friction would do its job. The engine did stop and the damage was minimal. I put my foot down right at the last minute. I scraped my knee against the rough façade of the wall and a part of my skirt got embedded under the skin. It came out a couple of weeks later when the wound had finally healed. Stane and I both went to get our licenses, me first. I learned various interesting things at the lessons, for example how many paved and unpaved kilometers of the road there were in Yugoslavia at the time. I actually liked the forgotten feeling of sitting on a school bench. During the driving test, I rode in front of the examiners who were in the car. The driver constantly yelled at me, telling me where to drive. Fortunately, he had a very loud and distinct voice. That’s how I got my license to drive a motor scooter. I was one of the first women in Slovenia to have it. The wonderful feeling didn’t leave me for days after I passed the test. In the end, I suspected that there had to be another reason for this spell. I didn’t discover it at the time. Many years later, reading a certain book, I understood that, with the scooter, I obtained something that I needed as a child. I was discreetly following in the footsteps of my father, that my father’s role as a motorcyclist—and motorcycling was the activity that made him happiest—had moved into me. In the following years, I took Stane on that scooter to all possible destinations in Slovenia, and sometimes even farther. We even went to the Plitvice Lakes in Croatia. Later, at least for short distances, we managed to ride all four of us on the machine, Stane and I and our two daughters. We were pici!

Now the course takes us across the pavement and onto the coastal road from Izola to Koper. The traffic is flowing, but it is too early for high season and the crowds of tourists wanting sea air. Drivers crane over the steering wheels to get a look at us. Now and again, one honks a greeting and encouragement. Cars were once a luxury. Now they are a necessity. Without a car, people could not get to daycare centers, school, work, shopping, to afternoon activities with their children. If someone had told me fifty years ago, that in half a century Ljubljana would have an urban problem—where to put

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all that metal—I would have thought that he was dreaming. Even as late as the mid-sixties, there were many horse-drawn carriages in the streets of the Slovenian capital. When private automobiles began to arrive at the city, I, already spoiled by my motor scooter, started to think about how I would be able to get a car. In a car, two could sit in front and two in the back, not all in a great pile, as we were on the scooter. One day, a coworker at Gradis told me that she was going to take driving lessons. When I heard this, I immediately made up my mind: “I also want to learn how to drive a car. I will go with you. It will be a piece of cake. After all, it must be easier to drive on four tires than on two, and I already know how to look in the rear mirror.” The class was near my job. It started right after work ended. I decided that I would surprise Stane and would tell him only when I had a license to drive an automobile. I was already looking forward to his enthusiasm over how clever I was. So I went secretly to the classes, until one day Stane came to work and discovered I wasn’t there. I had no choice but to tell him that I wasn’t off dancing barefoot somewhere, but was attending driving school. I didn’t know if it would please him or if he thought he would completely lose control over me once I had my license. But he said: “Bravo. I want to get my license, too.” And that’s how we both got our automobile driving licenses on our first try, though I got mine before Stane. It was 1962 when we bought our very first car. We had been on a waiting list for three months when finally, a miracle happened—we got a light green Zastava Ficko. I loved it from the first moment, as if it were a little child. It didn’t bother me in the slightest when one of the doors flew off the first time I drove it. If before we had travelled like a royal family, now we travelled like a royal family with luggage. Driving was a pleasure, since cars were few and far between, and because cars were so rare in those days, we could always find parking. I drove the car to work where exactly five automobiles were parked in the Gradis parking lot, including mine. All the same, I cried when we had to sell my beautiful blue Lambretta in order to make the next purchase. Later we changed the Ficko for a Skoda, the word meaning “pity” or “damage” in the Slovenian language, and the car deserved the name. It was always breaking down. Once I had to drive a borrowed motor scooter all the way to Austria just to buy spare parts. Once it broke down in Italy and

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we had to stay three extra days. Finally, I had enough of all the repairs and took it to a car fair to sell it. A very nice Serbian family bought it. I felt a bit guilty because I sold them such an unreliable machine. We exchanged addresses. We even became friends. It turned out that the Skoda worked well in the Serbian climate. The new owner reported in a letter how well the car was running and where they went. I guess the car was already pretty old and it was just time she settled down. Stane and I bought our next car: a Fiat 1300, and after that a Fiat 110. All of our cars had a shared quality: they didn’t run well in all weather conditions. Stane cared so much for our next car that he would not let us take it out into the street if it was raining, and certainly not if it was snowing. I thought it was funny. “Is the car made of cotton candy? Will she catch the flu?” But he didn’t relent. He felt it was his duty to be the best master of his riches and to protect them from all sorts of unpredictable circumstances. And that is how movable riches were transformed into immovable riches just when one needed them. But in those days, I wasn’t comforted by the humor of the situation. Because of Stane’s attitude, I became very good at running in snow and rain. Finally, I got angry, went out and bought my own car, a little gray Fico, which was a great car, especially in the snow. That car was followed by a Renault 5 and then by a Ford Fiesta, which I’m still driving today. I always wanted to have new cars. I didn’t trust used ones. I’m quite attached to my Fiesta, perhaps because I am at an age when I’ve become conservative and prefer keeping what I know. Loud honking rouses me from my reverie. I suddenly realize that on the other side of the hill and around the corner, Koper lies in the distance. The finish line.

KILOME TER SIX TEEN

SUPPeR UnDeR THe WHITe LADY

T H e R e A R e n O W S I X K I L O M e T e R S B e T W e e n M e and the finish line. What might seem close to a fresh runner seems very far to a tired one. Distances stretch out longer, thoughts grow shorter, and begin to circle around. Do you really need to do this when everything hurts? If you stop now, you only confirm that you accept your imperfection, your weakness, which is completely human, noble even. The half marathon I am running today is no small thing, but Helena, I encourage myself, walking to the icy peak of Mont Blanc was also no small thing, but you managed it. Yes, I once climbed to the highest peak in Europe, to the White Lady, as it is called, 4,810 meters above sea level. I was fifty-four years old. The tireless management of Gradis organized the trip, filling a whole bus with employees. We took a gondola up to 2,500 meters and set up a base camp there. The main obstacle that climbers have to deal with is altitude sickness caused by the lack of oxygen. We had to get used to the thinner air by spending at least one night there. Everyone set up their tents on the flat plain, but Stane, who had accompanied me despite the fact that he had already been very sick, had a special gift. In any situation, he knew how to evaluate things, and he immediately suggested that we set up our tent on a small rise. “On a slope?” I asked in surprise. “You never know what nature has in store for you,” he answered. And he was right. So much rain fell that night that in the morning all the tents on the flat plain had been flooded, but we were dry. It was so much easier to get up and get dressed in my walking gear after a calm dry night. The walk was not put off because of the rain. We had to stick to the plan.

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After that first biblical night, we started our climb from 2,500 to 3,800 meters early in the morning. We walked at a pleasant tempo so that we would all stay in the line. We were well equipped, dressed like bears, with ice cleats and poles. We also had excellent guides. All the same, some of the climbers couldn’t make it. We stopped at an emergency shelter and the ones who were too tired waited there until the next day when we descended back into the valley. The ones who went on had to spend the night after the whole day of walking bivouacking closer to the top. We lay side by side, squeezed close together, because there was so little room. We were cold all the same. The altitude was so high that the temperatures were even lower. If I could have, I would have gone for a run, just to warm up a little, but there was nowhere to go. All around us lay a thick blanket of snow. The next morning, or rather, still night—at one in the morning—we got up and continued the steep ascent, arriving at the peak in time for sunrise. It was not difficult for me to walk, though I was very chilled, as were most of my fellow walkers. One of the guides offered me his parka. I felt warmer then, and to my astonishment, the guide didn’t freeze without his parka. He must have been more accustomed to the conditions than I was. We had a thermos with hot tea wrapped up in clothing. When we wanted to have a toast at the top of the peak, we discovered it was frozen solid. Stane was waiting for us when we returned to the base camp. During our ascent, he had gone to visit a neighboring village where he was excited to see houses carved from ice. Everything in them was made of ice, tables and chairs, and even a bed. But when he saw all that ice, he had a sudden flash that I was going to freeze to death up on that mountain, stiffen into ice that would be covered with snow when winter came. He tried to vanquish his fears, but he couldn’t. He rushed back to the base camp to get rid of the image that had so frightened him. At the base, Stane prepared the only food we had using a portable cooker: mushroom soup from a bag. When I sipped it after my return, it tasted as if it were made from freshly gathered chanterelles and ceps. In his nervousness, Stane had peppered the soup a little too much, and pepper didn’t agree with my stomach, but still, what of it? As a side dish, he offered me—what a miracle!—fresh white bread, a French baguette that he bought in the village bakery. We didn’t have that kind of bread in Slovenia and it took me a while to get used to it. But there is something special in the contrast between the crunchy crust and soft middle. I forgot where he

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had got the beans in pumpkinseed oil and onions. Obviously there was not only a bakery in the village but also a greengrocery. He borrowed a half-liter of wine from another mountaineer, who must have liked to drink. He sweetened it, warmed it, and poured it into our little canteen. He had even found my favorite ice cream in the village, lemon flavored. We both liked that flavor best, even though at summer gatherings people looked at us strangely, as if wondering why we liked such a sour treat. But that was what we liked. All of this bounty was waiting for me on a folding table in front of our tent. Stane, sitting on a round stone, happy and grateful to see me again, greeted me with the words: “The lady in white returns from the White Lady!” That was his way of teasing me for wearing white running clothes and for having white hair. But I didn’t mind the joke, for I could see how relieved he was. From his relief and happiness, one might have thought I had just returned from the dead. That’s how much he loved me.

Gradis knew how to cultivate a good atmosphere among their employees, even among retired ones. When I retired, I was given the task, being such an avid athlete myself, of running the sports program for Gradis retirees. I focused on cycling and walking. There were many enthusiastic hikers, far fewer cyclists. We regularly walked up to Roznik in Ljubljana’s Tivoli Park. When we got to the top, we practiced leaping over hurdles, jumping rope, and training with wooden weights. We took our exercise very seriously. But there were only a handful of cyclists and, despite my enthusiasm, most of the retirees didn’t dare to get on a bike. As a result, I soon cancelled Gradis’s bicycle section, but there were more and more hikers every day. We merged the retiree group from Gradis with one from Kodeljevo, one of the Ljubljana’s districts. They knew we were well organized and asked if they could join us. We filled the whole bus for each outing. To this day, we still go for walks. There are only fifteen of us now, which means that some of us retired hikers have also retired from hiking. It is a strange feeling to see how the time passes, and your friends, one after another, stop or can no longer do the things you used to do together. Will they be waiting for me now, as they did beneath Mont Blanc? We, who persist, who go onward, we are becoming more solitary, more melancholy.

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And gradually we abandon our old habits. Our meetings are becoming less and less frequent. How wonderful were those days when, after a hike, we treated ourselves to a rest around some table, or better yet, some place in nature, sitting on a comfortable stump or at the edge of a forest meadow where everyone pulled out the snacks they had brought from home. We shared all the different foods. I always brought a thermos filled with coffee and a little bottle of schnapps. Every hiker got a sip. “Not to catch a cold,” was our toast. The ritual of drinking from the same bottle bound us close together. Two years ago, when I passed the organizing function on to my successor, the tradition was ended and the hikers started having lunch at restaurants. What a pity to lose such a nice way of socializing! I’ve hiked in the Slovenian mountains my whole life, either alone or with those closest to me. I have gone to the top of Triglav, the highest peak in Slovenia, five times: the first time with Stane, the second time with my friend Milena, the third time with my daughters. They were very young and they jumped around dangerous cliffs above all those abysses. “Nevenka and Tanja, stop! Not there, please! Stay on the path, don’t go that way!” They didn’t obey me and I was afraid they would slip. I just couldn’t relax. As an experienced mountaineer I knew the dangers lurking amidst the rocky cliffs and crevasses. It takes a lot to get to me but that was the most stressful trip I had ever taken. The fourth time I hiked to the top of Triglav, it was with the walking group A Hundred Women on Triglav. It was an interesting experience but I missed the guys. The fifth time, I went with my friend Ani and my youngest daughter. We made it, but we got to the top when we should have already been home. It was high summer and the days were long. We only got on the road in the afternoon after the heat had subsided a bit. We hoped we would get to Vodnik’s Hut, which lies just beneath the final ascent to the summit, before dark. We were in a playful mood and didn’t hurry. We strolled along as if we had been in the city, where we could have always caught a bus if we needed one. Summer, with its power, seduced us. We wandered off the path so that we could closely observe the forest wonders: bark, stumps, needles, undergrowth, roots, even mushrooms.

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Suddenly I looked up and I realized that I didn’t know what part of the forest we were in. It hit me like a bolt from the blue: we were lost. Our playfulness immediately changed into worry. We walked for such a long time that it had got dark. At last, we could walk no more and we crawled under a bush where we decided to wait until morning. My daughter fell asleep on our knees. The two of us nervously guarded her all night, ready to jump up and fight with some animal if we had had to. A person only realizes how long the night in the forest is when forced to be awake through one. When dawn finally broke, we breathed a sigh of relief. Out of the rosy beams, a path marker winked at us from a nearby tree trunk. We were soon convinced that we had somehow managed to stumble onto the right trail. After a couple of hours walking, we arrived at last at the hut below Triglav. That night we stayed in the hut, rested, happy to be in a safe shelter. We were no longer in a hurry and we only climbed to the top of the peak on the last day. On the way down, we filled my rucksack, now from a forest I knew much better, with cep mushrooms I love so much. I cheerfully showed them to Stane when we got home: “It took us a little longer, there were so many mushrooms in the woods!”

KILOME TER SE VENTEEN

WITH SUCH PLeASURe AnD DeTeRMInATIOn AS IF I WeRe RUnnIng FOR THe LAST TIMe

J U S T A L I T T L e M O R e , H e L e n A , Y O U ’ R e D O I n g great. It’s obvious you’re healthy! That is how I encourage myself even though I know it is not exactly true. I’ve hardly recovered from these last months. Mentally I’m in bad shape and I’ve lost a lot of weight. I try to convince myself that running is healthy both for physical and mental stress, but I know there are exceptions. Even I, who will be running from cradle to grave, was once terribly sick. Maybe that is because I retired early. Such things matter, even though people like to say how they can relax, help with the grandchildren, work in the garden. And one day I wasn’t going to work anymore. I had no problem giving up smoking. The habit started at work. In those days, everyone working in an office used to smoke at every single meeting. Smoker or non-smoker, it didn’t matter. The air was filled with smoke. Nowadays I hear that the smoke affects everyone, and that passive smokers inhale an even worse kind of smoke that goes deeper into the lungs. Anyway, I got used to smoking. Only at meetings—never at home!—and when I no longer had those meetings, I had no difficulty giving up smoking, although I did worry that I would gain weight. But instead of putting on a few kilos, I actually started to lose them. At first it didn’t bother me: I thought that the lighter I was the easier I could run. But it didn’t turn out that way. I kept getting weaker and, worse still, all food started to stink. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t eat anything. What’s this? I wondered. I should have a stronger sense of taste as a non-smoker. I can’t possibly be such a bad cook.

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My weight went down from sixty-two to forty-seven kilos. Even before that, Stane had always tried to send me to the doctor, but I was used to his constant worrying. This time, ignoring him at first and coming up with many excuses, I finally relented. I had an acquaintance who was also a runner and worked in a laboratory. I asked her to help me find a good doctor.

I was examined by two doctors and, after their consultation they decided that I should stay in the hospital, in bed. I got frightened. I told them I wanted to go home, to tell Stane I had to stay a couple of days, I wanted to say goodbye to him. They let me do so. “What do you have?” Stane asked me. He didn’t ask what the matter was but what I had. I was terrified, even though I had already had some thoughts about it. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask.” He also preferred not to know. When I got the results several days later, I was afraid to look. I gave them to Stane and I would see how he reacted. I could see right away that he was having trouble not crying. His chin trembled. I still didn’t want to know what the results were like. “Shall I tell you?” “I’d rather you didn’t.” Stane left me alone for a while. I looked out through the window and imagined going for a run. I saw myself down below, running past, away from these walls. I didn’t want to know what was wrong with me. I returned to the hospital for some additional tests. Everyone acted so carefully with me, in a way that I thought was unnecessary. Once again they allowed me to spend the weekend at home. Sitting in my comfortable old armchair, I spotted the file that Stane had left on the table. Maybe I felt braver now. I stood up, approached it, and cautiously took it into my hand. Regardless of how prepared I was, it was such a shock that I couldn’t even cry. Carcinoma stomachi. Stomach cancer. I felt as if a door closed somewhere deep inside of me. My emotions stayed behind it and I felt nothing but numbness. In order not to be carried away by the shock, I had to lock up my emotions. If I threw away the key,

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I would become a stone. For hours, I battled with my defenses. Finally, I opened the door a tiny bit and the emotions poured out: fear, anger, horror, shock, pain. With such immense force that each one crashed the door open. After several hours, the flow subsided and I felt a tiny ripple of hope on the surface. I was able to sincerely say to myself: You’re not the first one, you won’t be the last. You’re going to fight, girl, with all the power you have. You’re one of the most persistent people in the world and you’re a winner. After this gift—a weekend with Stane—I went back to the hospital. “Stomach cancer,” the doctor finally said, “we’ll have to take it out.” “How much?” “You’ll still be able to have a snack, but you’ll never feast again.” “How much is that, doctor? “You’ll have a quarter of your stomach left if everything goes well.” Although I felt sick, I still wanted to go out. I missed movement and nature. Stane was with me all the time. We must have talked about different things, but now I only remember talking about my favorite walking spots on Roznik and Golovec, and about our life when our two daughters were still children. Despite minor differences in the way we experienced the world, which is unavoidable even among very similar people, Stane and our daughters and I lived a pleasant family life. The girls went to school. We went to work. In the afternoons, all of our neighbors from the block got together and improved the grounds. On Sundays, we went on outings and sometimes more demanding hikes. We often went to Roznik, Velika planina, Smarna gora, to the Kamnik-Savinja and Julian Alps, all the most inviting walking spots in Slovenia. We always brought a snack with us, usually potatoes that we roasted on the open fire. We always went out if the weather was good, and being together in nature made life even more beautiful. Like me, my daughters were deeply attached to the great outdoors. On free afternoons, I sometimes asked them to join me for a city walk, but they were never for it. If I suggested Roznik instead, they immediately agreed. The only thing they didn’t do was go running with me. Back then, Roznik was exactly the way it is today, except maybe a little less wooded, as if someone had just raked it. It’s understandable, because in the old days, people used to gather branches and twigs, tie them into a bundle, and carry them home to burn in their wood stoves.

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The girls would even to go to mass with their friends in the church up on Roznik. After Sunday service, we gathered in the restaurant up there and ordered a half liter of wine, and for the children juice with cream. We always had a wonderful time. Tivoli is an exceptionally lovely park, clean and orderly, especially in autumn and spring when it was full of blossoms. I rode my bike through it every day and came to enjoy its beauties. Before my operation, the doctors let me go home for a few days. On the day before my return to the hospital, Stane asked me what I wanted to do. I answered immediately: “I’d like to go for a run.” “You go on. I’ll make lunch.” And he began to prepare a lunch for a special occasion: the last lunch I would eat with my whole stomach. I was running. Not like a cancer patient. Very fast on the flat sections and attacking the hills. I breathed fully, with both lungs, with such pleasure and determination, as if I were running for the last time.

The hospital, a single room, tests, consultations, instructions, more tests, nurses with pills, strange smells . . . Windows that would not open because someone might want to jump. Doors that were always closed because someone might want to try to escape. And then: starvation, the cleansing of the intestines. And finally: thirst and more thirst. The encouraging words of the anesthetist, the hand of a nurse on my sweaty brow, counting down, falling deep into a steep funnel of darkness. Technically, the operation was a success. My stomach almost died—and I really did have only a quarter of it left. The operation was followed by radiation. I was getting thinner and thinner, with bags under my eyes, feeling the nearness of death. Stane and my daughters could not hide their sadness when they saw me. Nobody who saw me then could believe that I would pull through. That is what I thought, all those days lying motionless. Finally, one day, I asked the doctors if they would let me out into the fresh air for a short time. That was not usually allowed, they told me. I waited for Stane and then asked again, saying that he would accompany me. I felt that each tree, each gust of fresh air, each smell from the

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meadows would help me get better. Nature had always been my friend, had always been loyal to me. The doctor finally relented. I was allowed to go home soon after this. Of course, I had to come back. Every round of chemotherapy destroyed me all over again. And yet, when I went home again, I always walked. I walked very slowly. I didn’t take the bus. One of the doctors said that it was only because of my unbelievable physical condition that I survived. I would not allow myself to be carried away by either sickness or healing, two sides of the coin. I walked even when I couldn’t lie down anymore. When the chemotherapy was finally over and I went home to Stane for good, I took advantage, despite my total exhaustion, of the few hours when he was not at home. On those occasions, I did something that was probably mortally dangerous and utterly stupid. I put on my running shoes and went on for a run. I ran slowly. I had to fight for each step I took. I took five and then gave up. I rested, gathered my will, and took five more, and gave up again. But I persisted and when I was able, I ran all the way to Fuzine Bridge and back: approximately six kilometers. Instead of the usual half an hour, I needed more than two. I could hardly make my way rather than almost flying as I used to. I practically had to crawl home, but I made it. The disease attacked me badly, but it didn’t beat me. That run was extremely important for my recovery. From week to week, I strengthened my endurance and after a few months I was the same as I had been before. It was true that with my small stomach I could never eat a lot. But I had learned from my childhood that starving was not such a bad thing at all. Once again I was in a running form. Twenty-two years have passed since then. The cancer never came back. I never realized that it was such a long way to Koper. The beautiful sea on my left, dense traffic on my right. I prefer looking to my left. I admire the dance of the waves. They are so free as they surge against the rocks, breaking into foam on all sides. Again and again, though each time differently. Nothing can catch them. Even the time cannot catch them. It can only take advantage, more or less efficiently, of their flow. The flow of

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time that pulses rhythmically, like the waves in the sea. Running is like the crashing of the waves, rhythmic dancing that never stops. With age, there is less and less freedom, more and more stones. A thought comes to my mind: I don’t want to stop. Nevertheless, I am surprised when I see the board showing that I have completed seventeen kilometers.

KILOME TER EIGHTEEN

TO HAVe TIMe FOR YOURSeLF

T H e S e L A S T F O U R K I L O M e T e R S A R e T O O M U C H for me. It will be hard now to distract myself. I have run out of memories. Most of all, though, I would like my thoughts to just stop. A few scenes keep spinning through my mind as if someone had made a film of my life and the beginning and ending are spliced together in an infinite loop. Instead, I force myself to compile an inventory of all my runs and all the things I experienced during them. There was one race during which I had to shoot with a real rifle. It was in Visnja Gora right outside Ljubljana, around 1965. The race was organized for groups of three, called “trojke.” We had to wear military uniforms and carry a rifle on our shoulders. At some point during the race, we even had to shoot at a target. That was the only time in my life that I had ever shot with a rifle. I didn’t do it very well. I liked neither weapons nor uniforms and I was pleased that this sporting event didn’t keep on. What else? Oh, yes. That time in Visnja Gora there were three sisters who were known to be very good runners. What were their names? Well, whatever, they looked at me at the start, and one whispered to the others: “Hey, we’re going to leave this old lady in the dust, aren’t we?” When I heard that, I ran with all my strength. I didn’t like them referring to me as an old lady, so I decided to set a very quick tempo. But soon we didn’t know where we were going. Some practical joker had turned all the signs around, directing us onto a shorter circle. The organizer noticed the confusion and the race had to be repeated. We all returned to the starting line and I looked at the sisters who had been just nipping at my heels before. They seemed to be out of breath.

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Maybe they’re not so fast after all, I thought. When they fixed the signs, we started again. The sisters were ahead of me for a while, but I caught up with them and passed them. My trojka crossed the finish line first, way ahead of the sisters. When we received our gold medal and I made the thank you speech on behalf of my team, I added: “I want to thank you for the opportunity to show you how good it is to be old!” Oh, how my thighs are burning now . . . I have been in similar situations over the years. Once a group of younger people was watching me and one of them said: “That Helena Zigon is unbelievable. She’s fifty years old and still running.” At the time, I was sixty-five and I thought to myself: Oh, you youngsters, if you only knew that you just made me younger by fifteen years, what would you say then? My age and all the years I’ve been running. How much talk there has been about that. From time to time, I’ve overheard the remark: “That Helena Zigon always has to run.” But I didn’t mind. Why not? I thought. Yes, why not? I also like running uphill. That is why I liked mountain races. The series of events in honor of Franja Bidovec and the Partisan Hospital also included a footrace which was a good example of the kind of mountain marathon I came to like. It took me four hours and forty minutes to run it. When I finished I was given my medal by Doctor Pavla who had worked in the hospital during the war. In the surroundings of Ljubljana, I have run up Smarna gora, Sveta Ana and other steep hills. I have run these hill races so many times and with such pleasure that sometimes I didn’t even know where other runners were. When I came to the top, I was surprised to hear they were calling me to the podium. I have run in the women’s category on Smarna Gora seven years in a row. I needed roughly half an hour to do it. During its early incarnations, we started the race at the restaurant under Smarna gora, later at the Police Academy in Vikrce. Then, for some years, we ran beneath the mountain, across Kuhna, Grmada, almost all the way down again and then

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back to the top. Smarna gora is so steep that it is always a huge challenge, and the challenging ones are the best, just as long as the challenge is bearable and your legs don’t want to stop. Like they are stopping right now. Don’t stop now, I keep telling myself. When the media celebrity Mito Trefalt started his television show about senior athletes, he called the men hooks and the women roots: Hooks and Roots. Each time we met, we were given a new challenge. We were told when and where to show up. There were approximately six hundred runners in the group. We would meet early in the morning, run next to Mostec and up to the top of Cankar’s Hill and back down again. In Mostec, we did a lot of exercises and simply enjoyed ourselves, and there were so many events back then. Sometimes I went to one in the morning and another in the afternoon. Koper, Trieste, Portoroz. I went everywhere. Sometimes I went by bus, especially rented for the runners, sometimes with public transport, sometimes by car. Sometimes I drove alone and sometimes with my husband. Sometimes someone else drove. I must have been extraordinarily motivated, because I always managed to get to the races where I wanted to run. I have wonderful memories of Hooks and Roots. With the founding of the movement in 1978, Trefalt did an amazing thing for recreational sports in Slovenia. It wasn’t just running—he also organized swimming, cycling, and skiing competitions as well as mountaineering outings. In addition, Trefalt encouraged socializing. He organized dances and outings where we would bring food and drink. Each year, he published a club booklet with a list of our names, our addresses, and our professions. I still have the little green volumes and I like to flip through the names, interesting professions, funny old-fashioned telephone numbers. For me, it reads: Helena Zigon, head of payroll accounting, telephone: 67 845. Mito left after fifteen years running the organization and I still miss him terribly. There must be a race somewhere that I’m not going to because I don’t even know where it is. What an awful thought. To this day, I go through the newspaper Delo sports pages to see if there is a race somewhere and am so pleased if there is a piece of information about it. Then I call Radojka or my friend Jurij and ask: “Are you going? Can you pick me up?” Stane and I have subscribed to Delo practically our entire lives, also, of course, because Stane worked there. Until recently, all the employees at

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Delo got the newspaper for free as well as all the supplements and magazines that were published by it. Then things changed. Because we had less time, we cancelled all our other publications and only kept Delo, and we hardly had time to read that in recent years. Stane used to read it in the morning when he had the most strength and I would go through it in the evening, after I had done everything I wanted to do and gone to all the places I wanted to go. The moment I picked up the paper, Stane would stop me with a gentle request: “Wouldn’t you rather talk to me?” I always promised him that I would if he could just wait for me to read the titles of the articles, because if I didn’t do at least that it made no sense to receive the newspaper at all, and I would have to cancel our subscription. He didn’t want that. That everyday reminder was his last link to his past, to the time when he had been at the peak of his powers. That is why it meant so much to him. When Stane was still alive, I went through Delo every evening, a little more carefully through Polet, and we talked about the news. After so many years, we always had something to talk about. Even now, I won’t cancel Delo. May it come into our mailbox every day with my husband’s name written on it. I am still going to find the time to read it, but whom will I be talking to? Stane was hampered by his disease. He took the pain only too well. As the years passed, he became ill with other ancillary illnesses, but he was a fighter like me. Until the very end, he took walks with me on the hills around Ljubljana. We regularly hiked up Smarna gora, and we also made it up higher hills, Komen and others. When he got very ill, his doctor advised him: “From now on, you should be like modern tourists. Sit in the car and admire nature.” But Stane would not listen. Soon it was getting worse—and now he is gone. I am alone.

It is very important to have time for yourself. During a race, I have a lot of time. Today I have been running for more than three hours. I am approaching Zusterna Hotel on the outskirts of Koper. Once again, there are a few people on the side of the road, who spur me on, making it easier for me to run, but it is not easy enough. I am so tired. I just want to stop.

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Three hours of running is an excellent training, the kind of training I haven’t had for years! Well, stop then, just stop. Hasn’t it been enough for today? I don’t know if I can take it anymore. I’m taking a few more steps and I can see the sign: two more kilometers. They really knew where to put it. Radojka turns to me: “Helena, just till that sign, and you are there. You can run two kilometers in your pajamas at midnight.” At midnight maybe, I think, because I cannot talk anymore. A little night air would cool me off. A travelling moon would light my path. A lazy wind would push me along. I would shoot forward, with a rifle on my shoulder, as I did in Visnja Gora.

KILOME TER NINE TEEN

A LIT TLe MORe

I A M R e A L LY S U F F e R I n g . M Y L e g S H U R T so much, I’m afraid I will fall. I lift my feet with great effort to make sure I don’t stumble over the bumps in the asphalt or trip over the roots of the trees. Roots are my friends, just like Trefalt’s roots. But when I am tired, they are dangerous. I know I mustn’t fall. If I fall, I won’t be able to get up. Radojka is right. I ran two kilometers during the worst time of my chemotherapy. There will be people at the finish line. I don’t want them to see how destroyed I am. It wouldn’t be right if I gave the lazier among them an excuse: look, it just doesn’t make sense to suffer so much. Oops! Another bump. I almost slip but I see it. Watch out, Helena! You remember what happened in Ljubljana? I remind myself. On the next to the last kilometer of a race, the last Ljubljana marathon, I was running toward my friend Tof who was standing in the crowd on the last incline under the railway overpass at Bavarski dvor. He was playing an accordion, creating a good mood for the participants. I recognized him and raised my hand, making a little bow, almost as a joke. But my legs did not obey me and I tripped and fell on the ground like an empty cardboard box. I somehow caught myself with my hands so I didn’t hurt myself too badly. I skinned one of my palms. Just before I got up, a photographer took a picture of me and it was published in a newspaper. Under the photograph, there was no caption that explained that I was on the ground for only an instant, and then I got up and ran on. Anyone who saw the picture would have thought that I couldn’t get up, that an ambulance had to take me away. All in all, bad publicity for elder people racing.

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If the length of my step is a half-meter—maybe a little longer—I made 42,194 steps at that Ljubljana race and only one misstep. I courageously raced all twenty-one kilometers of the half-marathon and my victory there had a greater effect than one moment of carelessness. Thinking of that photography—and of the journalist who took it, and the editor who published it—I remember my late stepmother once again. She, too, always saw the worst in people. Each person has something they are not very good at, and those who look for errors can always find them. My stepmother could always find everything wrong about me. But if she had been capable of some goodness, she could have seen in that innocent child a creature who simply longed for a little kindness and attention and who was prepared to give all she could. Given a choice between good and bad, my stepmother always chose bad. I should stop thinking about such things and cheer myself with thoughts of another day instead, when an invitation waited for me in the mailbox. Each year, the magazine Jana selects the Slovenian Woman of the Year, a person who has outstandingly contributed to improving society. Readers can choose among twelve different candidates. One year they asked me to be one of the candidates. This struck me as an incredible honor, and, of course, I accepted. On the day before the ceremony, I met with a journalist and a photographer. We met at the parliament on the day that the award was given and enjoyed a tour of the main hall, sat in the representatives’ chairs, which were quite comfortable. We were photographed for various media. In one of the reports, it was written that one of the oldest candidates had been offered a hand for assistance up the stairs, but had declined and run up the stairs on her own. The ceremony itself was at the Philharmonic Hall, which is one of the world’s oldest institutions of the kind. Its rich history dates back to the year 1701, when the first musical association and main promoter of Baroque music in Slovenian-inhabited areas was established under the name of Academia Philharmonicorum. I always felt elevated by music and, perhaps because of that, I was even more proud of being a part of the event. When I went on to the stage and heard the applause, I was truly moved. The award was given to the investigative reporter Eugenija Carl, but, for me, just being among the twelve finalists was an unbelievable recognition and also encouragement for seniors, if they hadn’t run already, to start running. And if I stop now? What kind of encouragement would that be?

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That thought pushes me on, makes me quicken my step. Of course, adrenaline, which is released before the finish line, also has an important role. The body finds its reserves, even if you don’t have much will left. Maybe it is because it wants the torment to be over as soon as possible. Somewhere not far off, I can see the next sign, although I cannot read the number yet. Just a little more. I go back to praising myself. In such moments, I must not neglect any possible means of motivation. There was another similar event that occurred last year: the selection of the Slovenian of the Year. Same as at Jana Magazine, but this time both men and women were considered. The newspaper Dnevnik’s Sunday edition selected the person who had done the most inspirational work. The ceremony took place at Catez Spa. This time, the winner was Dr. Aleksander Doplihar who runs a clinic for people without health insurance. I was appointed as someone who also did good work, not just running around in circles to satisfy my own desire or, worse, my stubbornness.

All of a sudden, Radojka and I are no longer alone. There are more and more runners around us. Of course, they pass us quite easily, looking like real rockets compared to us. Behind them is a double measure of my kilometers. They’ve run the same course twice. It looks like their legs also hurt, that they are short of breath, but all the same they greet us and rush on. They are hard workers, fighters. I recall what a sixty-year-old well-known humorist said about me a couple of years ago: “Helena, if it weren’t for you, I would surely have gotten more lazy. I have participated in all the Ljubljana marathons, even when they were legitimate reasons not to show up at the starting line. I participated three days after my mother’s death, three days before her funeral. I participated when I had a fever of 39.2 degrees Celsius. Once I had to drive the car 2,400 kilometers to get to the starting line. I have participated so injured that I ran through puddles to soothe the pain in my feet. And how have I resisted the temptation to skip a race? When I open, like any other self-loving person, the website of the organization and scan the name of the participants, I always see your name and the date of birth, and I say to myself: ‘If she can do it, so can I.’” If she can do it . . . The thought almost makes me laugh right now.

KILOME TER T WENT Y

I C An’T DO IT AnYMORe

I H AV e B e e n TA L K I n g T O M Y S e L F F O R three hours, but after the number twenty I say something out loud: “I can’t do it anymore.” As if Radojka already expected these words, she responds immediately: “Oh, yes you can, and you will. We’re almost at the finish line. Come on, let’s keep going!” The calmness of her words gives me new strength. The finish line is just in front of us. The awareness that I am going to succeed again, makes me suddenly strong, overpowers my pain. And yet the thing is not that simple. One of the fans on the sidelines calls out: “Only one kilometer to go!” And I suddenly wonder: is this the twentieth or the nineteenth kilometer? Or the twenty-first? I can’t count anymore. I am lost in a labyrinth of three numbers. I’m trying to concentrate, to think, is it the twentieth kilometer, the one that starts with the number twenty, or does it end with the number twenty, but I can’t figure out the answer. Again and again, I’m floating away from the question into some kind of rhythmic counting . . . I despair of these calculations. I’m trying to focus on the moment. Not to think anymore but just to be in the moment. When I get to the finish line, I get to the finish line. But now is now. Apparently I am too tired not to think about anything. I return therefore to the question of fame. It is strange how many people know me. Even when I am minding my own business in the city center, people stop and greet me, which is sometimes embarrassing. I can hear them calling out my name from behind my back. How is that possible? How is it possible that they know who I am from the shape of my back?

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Maybe I should be grateful to the media for their collaboration, although they sometimes go over the line. I can’t say that I feel somehow special because of my fame. I’m just like other people. I live a very simple life. If I have sacrificed something, I get something else in exchange, which is most precious to me. I receive the happiness that comes with effort. What could be simpler than that? All you need to do is to enjoy doing it. I’m not fooling myself. When I stop running, people will say nice things about me for a short while, and then they’ll forget all about me. They’ll focus on other things. Life goes on. That is why I never forget to say that I run for two reasons: first, I run because it makes me happy, and second, I run because I can. When I am no longer able to run twenty-one kilometers, I will run ten. When I can no longer run ten, I will run five. When I can no longer run even that distance, I will run my own path. Where are you, my pathways?

KILOME TER T WENT Y-ONE

WHeRe IS MY LAST HARBOR?

We ARe RIgHT BeFORe KOPeR! Apparently my thoughts were moving very slowly. I had hardly begun to churn them around when a kilometer had already passed. It also doesn’t hurt as much as before anymore. I feel something new, an almost miraculous strength that I am still going and it is easier for me now to continue. I have run nearly the whole course. I’m trying to remember all the places I was running through, but the names are all mixed up in my head. When did I go through Fiesa? Did I go through Fiesa? Is it even called Fiesa? But my legs really feel better now. They are hurrying like little lambs who sense a lull in the storm. It’s strange how the body recognizes the situation—since it appears that I have used all my strength and am running on my last drops of fuel. Only a few more stops, crossing the span of the bridge, then turning left after the bridge, onto the straightaway before the finish line. After that, it is a straight shot. My skin is flushed with the knowledge that—however unbelievable it seems—I am going to make it to the end. Now I can admit that I was really afraid, afraid that I would have to join the ranks of my fellow female runners, against whom I measured my endurance, strength, and speed in my younger years, who one after another stopped running. Sadly, they were not as fortunate as me. Not just in terms of running, but many of them had many more limitations than I did. Their husbands kept them on a short leash. How could they go to a Sunday race, if they were expected to stay at home and cook for their family, maybe even for a

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mother-in-law. Decent wives and mothers don’t neglect such things. Stane was different. He was an excellent cook, and later my daughters were as well, and that was an advantage for me. My elder daughter was always worrying the most. “Mother, when do you intend to stop running?” she asked me when I was getting to my eightieth birthday. My passions are nearer to my younger daughter and she still sometimes calls me and asks: “Mother, have you already run today?” When I told my husband and my daughters that I was going to celebrate my eighty-sixth birthday by running the half-marathon from Piran to Koper, they just stared at me in amazement, as if to say: “What about us?” I calmly answered them: “You’re all invited. You’re welcome to run with me.” “No thanks,” they responded. “You know, grandma, that not everyone can do what you do. We’ll celebrate your birthday one day early.” Excellent. I don’t like when one celebration has to be supplanted by another. The other reason that I persist and others don’t is that I am a realist. I know that sounds strange. A realist! More like a crazy person! What realist would run a half-marathon on their eighty-sixth birthday? I am a realist because I accept the limitations of my age. There were years when I only felt true satisfaction if I was the first to cross the finish line. Today I will feel true satisfaction even if I am the last to cross.

The finish line is right next to the sea. A light breeze from the sea is caressing my face, on which the perspiration has already dried. I don’t sweat very much anymore—there is not enough moisture in me. I look into the distance with burning, salty eyes. There is no end to the blue surface of the sea. No line on the horizon. I can see the point where the sea touches the sky, there are two giant cargo ships on their voyage to far away countries. Am I not like them? Did I not try to sail through life from harbor to harbor, suffering the power of storms, and, in between, the barrenness of a windless lull? Where is my last harbor?

Where is my last harbor?

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Suddenly, I realize that my legs are carrying me on their own. I no longer have to use my will to move them. The body is a miracle. I can see the archway at the finish line. Only ten meters to go. Run, Helena! I can hear: Happy Birthday to you! The announcer and the onlookers are singing for me. Oh, it is true . . . Right at the line, I raise my arms in greeting and gratitude. And in my mind I add the words: Stane, we did it!

THe FInISH LIne

I W A S T H e L A S T A C R O S S T H e F I n I S H line. But I didn’t quit and I didn’t walk. Not a step. It is my own fault that I didn’t run as well as I should have. I could have run the race faster. But I made a mistake by not holding back at the beginning. My fellow runners pulled me forward, and so I ran the first few kilometers too fast. Certainly, I, more than anyone, know how important it is to begin conservatively, and then later, after the first half, if you have the strength, to run faster. So it wasn’t my best run. It took me three hours and nineteen minutes. But the race was redemptive for me. What better way was there to light a candle for Stane? To preserve his life in our thoughts . . .

I order a well-deserved beer. The first sip: heaven! Bitter sweet—opposites that meet. Then it is my turn for a foot massage. Radojka helps me to get into the line more quickly. The young palms tackle my exhausted muscles and tendons so perfectly that the pain almost disappears. If they could only work on me a little longer . . . Then back to a chaise longue where I am visited by a few reporters from newspaper and television. I tell them it was beautiful and terrible at the same time. That those two qualities can also go together. My renowned Ziri stubbornness helped me to persevere once again.

What if I try to run the full marathon next year? 42,195 meters? Yes, I realize, I would really like to run a full marathon one more time. Not this year, but next year. I will definitely try again.

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Until then, I’m going to participate in short races in Ljubljana and its surroundings—now that the Ljubljana marathon has become practically a social obligation among young people, there is a wide choice of races—and that will be my training. I will also go walking in the mountains. I just have to make sure that I run with moderation and wisdom. I am not so young anymore. While pondering my future plans, I hear my name. I am being called onto the stage. After the distribution of medals, the fastest runners invite me up the little stairs and onto the stage for a piece of cake. Girl, I think to myself as I crowd onto the stage, photographers taking my picture in the company of champions, where has life brought you? It is the biggest cake I have ever had on my birthday, and still too small given to the number of people who have to share it. I just eat a small piece. The race has given me an appetite, because usually I don’t like sweets very much. I think about what I’m going to have for dinner tonight. I won’t overeat, that’s clear, but the meal on our table will be warm. What if I make the same dishes Stane made for me under Mount Blanc? That would make him happy.

A bout h ow t his b ook wAs b orn

U R B A n , M Y H U S B A n D, W H O V e R Y M U C H L I K e S to write, used to ask me—his first reader—why I didn’t write, since my comments made it clear that I understood writing. I always told him that I would only write when the time was ripe. When I was pregnant, I met Helena while running. Talking to her, I immediately got the feeling that hers was a story worth committing to paper. Such a rich life should not remain unrecorded, and yet I wasn’t bold enough to make the suggestion right there and then, while we were running together. Once Helena and Urban, who is also a trainer and the head of Urban Runners (www.tekaskitrener.si), were guests at a public conversation at Prebold. At the end of an interesting evening, the host Janez Vedenik asked Helena one final question: “Helena, when are you going to write a book about yourself?” Helena laughed and answered: “Probably never.” That response kept bothering Urban and when we got home, he said to me: “Jasmina, why don’t you write a book about her, if she doesn’t want to?” He knows me so well that he came up with the suggestion at the very same moment that it occurred to me to tell Helena’s life story by kilometer. And that’s how I knew the time was ripe. I asked Helena and she willingly agreed. We got together throughout the winter of 2013. In more than thirty hours of conversation, I learned her life story. Everyone knows how horrible the ice storms in Slovenia were that year. Even Helena said she couldn’t remember anything as bad as that, although she was around in 1952 when Ljubljana was buried under a two-meter blanket of snow. Every so often while we were talking, an icicle broke off and fell from the roof gutter. It sounded like a shot being fired. But even in such extraordinary circumstances, Helena always arrived on her bicycle. She had to ride several kilometers from the Ljubljana

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neighborhood of Kodeljevo where she lives to the old center of Ljubljana where I live. Despite the cold, she was always bareheaded. She never wore a cap or a helmet because, as she put it, it ruins her hair-do. She was also always dressed very well, with a new bag and shoes that had a slight heel. She always brought something when she came: once it was chocolate pralines, another time the first daffodils of spring. When she arrived, she carefully locked her impeccably maintained bicycle, greeted me, cleaned the soles of her shoes on the doormat, stepped in, started with a little small talk, and then began, at first slowly and then more passionately, to narrate her story. As she went deeper and deeper into the past, her memories became more convinced and convincing, self-confident and dramatic, as if some of the scenes had happened yesterday or the day before. I then arranged the narrative by kilometer, still respecting the general chronological flow, but not preventing Helena from making associative leaps. I recorded all of Helena’s memories and thoughts. I transformed a good two hundred pages of material into a length that would also accommodate visual material: photographs of people, places, and events that were important to Helena. Our collaboration bore additional fruit. Together we visited some of the places from Helena’s life story. So, for example, we were allowed access to the house to which Helena had been taken as a two-month old infant and where she tasted for the first time in her grandfather’s restaurant how it feels when a person does something good for another person. We walked through the courtyard where there once stood chestnut trees, in the shadows of which workers dined around well-laid tables, and through the house and the cellar. In addition to functioning as a wine cellar from which the little Helena used to carry bottles of wine, it also was the secret printing location for the Partisan magazine Podmornica during the Second World War. We made our way down a narrow staircase into the underground chamber and looked around the dim space where printing presses had once churned out the publications that in those terrible times did much to help connect and encourage the people who dared to hope for a better and freer life. The pretty Alpine villa, called Svicarija, where Helena used to go dancing and that at the time we were writing the book was in disrepair, was renovated and in the time that this book was translated into English was

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opened in all its new beauty, the kind of beauty that without words says much also about her renovated past.

Because these are memories that reach so far into the past, it is understandable that some scenes and dialogues are reconstructed. After all, they were warehoused in Helena’s consciousness all these years and returned to Helena in fragments, impressions, flashes, and dreams. At times, the writing was like an archeological dig, excavating the traces of time, shedding a new and clearer light on what has been buried for a long time. But, believe me, such a find is worth the attention of any curious person. There is no memory without honesty, and no honesty without memory. These two are a miraculous pair of shoes allowing Helena to run sometimes against the winds of time, and sometimes with them.

t hAnks

M Y T H A n K S g O e S P e C I A L LY T O H e L e n A , F R O M whom I learned very much about life. And my thanks also to the one that breathed with me the strongest, my husband Urban, who listened to me and discussed Helena’s trials and victories, even in the middle of the night. Thanks as well to my children (Tajda, Oskar and Sofija), who were so understanding during these nine months when I was particularly hardworking. My thanks go also to my slovene editors, Renate and Samo Rugelj, and writer Branko Gradisnik, who gave me many precious advices. Many thanks to my dear friend, Dr. Noah Charney, who encouraged me to try to overcome national borders and helped me find a bridge to readers “overseas.” Thanks go also to Erica Johnson Debeljak and Diana Kobler, who helped me with the translation. My thanks to Amy Farranto, who helped me to bring Helena’s story to the hands of more readers so that it might enter more hearts. Not the least, thanks also to human curiosity, without which I think there would be no writing nor reading.

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