Anka

We are never too old to make surprising discoveries about our own family.  I always knew that my best-beloved grandpa Milan had a sister named Anka who lived in Buenos Aires, who he hadn't seen in decades, and that it was his dearest wish to see her one more time before he died.  All of that I knew, plus the sad circumstances she found herself in in Buenos Aires before she died, but other than that I knew next to nothing.  I didn't know the tragic and romantic story behind the one-dimensional person I'd been told about.  Somehow my mother and I stumbled upon the subject of Anka a few weeks ago and I have been living with it ever since.  It's a story which deserves to be shared, so I couldn't think of a better post for the real beginning of my blog.

Anka was one of the eldest children in a family of 10 or 11, my darling grandpa being among them.  Their parents died very young and left Anka as the caretaker of them all.  She was a great beauty with a sparkling and vivacious personality, but she had an elder brother who abused her cruelly, in ways which are now lost to time, and made her life at home a misery.  A friend of hers had emigrated to Buenos Aires and beguiled her with tales of the beauty and magic of the place.  This friend had shown Anka's photo to a male friend who immediately fell in love with her astonishing beauty and offered to marry her without even a meeting.  After one too many instances of abuse, Anka fled her hometown of Omis in Croatia (then Yugoslavia) and escaped to Buenos Aires, her heart filled with hopes and dreams of whatever fate might hold for her there.

The young man who was enamored of her was alas not to her liking, but with her beauty and charm she had no shortage of suitors, and shortly met a handsome, dashing boat captain, also Croatian, with whom she fell madly in love.  The two of them made a gorgeous couple and were married in no time.  Soon a son was born, Dushko, and their happiness was complete.  However, it was not to last long, for Anka's handsome husband died young of a heart ailment.  She never forgot him or got over him, she never remarried.

Although she had her beloved son Dushko, he married a cold-hearted woman who was as grasping as she was devious.  They all lived together in the family home, a lovely house in the best part of Buenos Aires.  However, Dushko's wife kept whispering in his ear, "your mother is old, she will become forgetful, people could take advantage of her, we must secure the house to make sure she doesn't get swindled out of it and we end up homeless."  Anka of course wanted nothing but to make her son happy and secure, and, suspecting nothing, she gladly signed the house over to them.  She couldn't have foreseen the tragic consequences: that her beloved only son would die young of cancer and leave her at the mercy of a heartless, venal shrew.  This awful daughter-in-law promptly threw Anka out of the only home she had known and placed her in a nursing home with no air or ventilation, where she shared a room with several others.  Thus this lovely, gentle woman found herself alone, surrounded by strangers in a place that was colder than any she'd known, despite the fierce heat of the Buenos Aires summers scorching her lonely room.

It was thus that my grandfather found her when he was able to achieve his dream of visiting her once before he died.  He had not seen her in all the long decades since she had left Omis as a young and beautiful girl with her entire life and future so full of promise, shimmering ahead of her, with one exception.  She returned to Omis just once in the intervening years, shortly after I was born, so at least I did get to meet this extraordinary woman, though sadly I have no recollection.

My grandfather was able to realize his dream of visiting Anka in Buenos Aires before he died, courtesy of my boyfriend, Dan, who in his generosity and greatness of spirit gave that gift to my grandfather, and not only to him, but also to my grandmother, my mother and my aunt, Anka's nieces.  In the end my grandmother was paralyzed by her fear of flying and stayed behind, which was fine because she and I had such a great time going to movies and spending oodles of time together.  But the rest of them larked off to Buenos Aires, with a pit stop in Rio, and we got to live vicariously through them.  Once they got to Buenos Aires, they found that the administrators of the nursing home had not told Anka that her brother was coming; they thought it would just be a lovely surprise.  When they went into her room to tell her she had a surprise visitor, her still-luminous eyes grew wide, and she asked, "is it my brother?"  I wonder if that was a symptom of her great longing to see him or if she had a premonition, but of course I will never know where those words came from.

My grandpa, mom and aunt were appalled at the state in which they found Anka.  She had only one friend in the world who still visited her regularly, Sabina.  This dear and loyal friend told my family that she would gladly take Anka into her home and care for her, only she didn't have any room.  My amazing boyfriend stepped in to wave his magic wand again, and provided Sabina with the funds to have an annex built onto her home in which to house Anka.  The moment this annex was built, Sabina rushed to the nursing home, only to find Anka's bed empty, her disappeared.  Her awful daughter-in-law had gotten wind of my family's plan and, determined to hold on to Anka just in case this was a plot to wrest the house away from her (or whatever other sick ideas were in her head), she had spirited her away to another home.

Undaunted, this true and faithful friend Sabina went knocking on every nursing home door in Buenos Aires, until one day she found Anka again.  She explained the situation to the people in charge and told them Anka's family in the United States wanted her with Sabina, and she begged their cooperation.  Some were sympathetic, others felt it was not their place and saw the daughter-in-law as the proper guardian and were loathe to participate in what they viewed as deception.  Still, Sabina promised Anka that she would return for her the next day, and hurried to prepare her home for Anka's arrival.  She went back to get her as soon as she possibly could, but she was too late.  The witch had triumphed once again, and this time for good.  Though she spent hours and days and weeks searching, though my family repeatedly contacted the consulate and the diocese, Anka was gone forever, beyond anyone's reach.

My family was notified some years later that Anka had died, but even then was denied the knowledge of where she had been buried, where was her grave.  Now it is far too late to do anything that could help my beautiful great-aunt, but I often fantasize about flying down to Buenos Aires, taking some local authorities with me, and marching to the door of this woman who I now view as evil incarnate, grabbing her by the throat, and forcing her to tell me where my great-aunt is buried, so that at least in death she can know that she is not forgotten.  

I feel such a deep sense of grief and despair when I think of her final years, abandoned and all alone in some godforsaken nursing home or who knows what kind of place, wondering where was anyone to visit her, to take her in their arms and assure her that she was not alone, that she was loved and cherished, and her life was not worthless.  Did she have any idea that my family was desperately trying everything they could to find her, Sabina was searching every nook and cranny of that once-beautiful city, now so out of reach to her it might as well have been Calcutta, pounding the pavement every day?  I am so very fearful that she had no idea, that she thought everyone had just forgotten and discarded her, though I fervently hope she knew the situation with that wicked daughter-in-law, so hopefully was able to place the blame exactly where it belonged.

In order to escape her desperate, lonely existence, she must have traveled in her mind's eye back through the decades and envisioned the breathtakingly beautiful young girl she once was, setting sail for the enticing, unknowable new world, stars in her eyes, sparkles of sunlight dancing like fairies on the waves, transporting her to a life she could only dream would be filled with joy, romance, and a happy ending.  I hope with all my heart that these and other happy visions of the all-too-brief good years of her life sustained her and buoyed her through that infernal darkness, and I hope her last thoughts were filled with the joy of her pending reunion with my darling, precious grandpa, her other loved ones, and of course of her handsome, dashing captain.  I hope she died with a smile on her lips, and I hope that she knows how much she was and is loved, that she was not forgotten during her life, and is not forgotten now.

Losing My Virginity

I never thought I'd have a blog.  It seemed like something for people who actually had something to say and were not afraid to say it.  As for me, I often feel as if I have not much of any import to say, I'd rather listen.  But then again, through the years so many people have complimented me on my stories and my way with words.  And then today there it was, at the end of a blog I looked at ("The Londoner," quite fun), a shimmering, glimmering, enticing invitation: "start your own blog, we'll show you how, click here."  I could not resist.  Like so many English majors working in retail, or some such menial job, I've always dreamed of being a writer, of having people read my words, especially if I could come up with some worth reading.  Certainly starting a blog seems much easier than getting Random House to publish my first book, as an ex boyfriend has done (lucky him, have been pea-green with envy for many years now).  Not sure if these will be worth reading, but here it is, my very first blog post!  Who knows if there will be more to come, but I sense that this is the start of something that might well continue for a while.  However for now I have to go eat a piece of cake since it's already late afternoon and I feel the need for a pick-me-up before hitting the gym.  If a girl's going to eat cake, she had better have a gym membership at the ready.