Slavenka Drakulic, born in Croatia (former Yugoslavia) in 1949, is the author of five novels and five nonfiction books. She is a contributing editor to The Nation and her essays have appeared in The New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, and the New York Review of Books.

How We Survived Communism & Even Laughed

Perennial

You Can't Drink Your Coffee Alone

She is dead. Her grave is covered with ivy and tiny blue forget-me-nots. A candle is burning; her mother must have been here recently. But I haven't been here - not once since the day she was buried, five years ago. It's not that I've forgotten her, just the opposite: I could not face it, her death, the absurdity of it. In August 1985, when she poisoned herself with the gas from the stove in her new apartment, she was thirty-six years old.

I don't know how to tell Tanja's story or even why it should be important. She wasn't a hero; sometimes I think she was a coward. The many fine threads that connected her to life simply unraveled one by one so that she chose death over life. Before she let the gas run, she sealed all the doors and windows with tape and washed the dishes. To this day, I am not sure whether I should resent her for this tidiness in preparing her own death or take it as a last sign of her wish to go on, to live. I see her standing over the kitchen sink, compulsively washing as if it is the most importantthing to do at thatat moment, because it will postpone what is to come soon - the loneliness of death. When she died, it looked like it was one more unhappy love story. It was somehow easier for people not to think too much of it, not to look for the other, less obvious side of it. It was safer to reduce her suicide to a cliche.

That winter her lover died. He died during open heart surgery, but a surgeon, his friend, said he wouldn't survive anyway; his heart was too weak. 'Worn out,' this is the expression he used. They were both journalists at the same newspaper. He had a wife working at a public library and a teenage daughter, and wouldn't leave them. 'I admire him for his loyalty to his family,' Tanja used to say, and I could not tell whether she really meant it or whether cynicism was her way of dealing with this fact. The summer before his death, she got pregnant. With two divorces behind her and no children, she wanted his child badly. But it so happened that his wife was pregnant at the same time. He stopped seeing Tanja. Devastated, she didn't have the strength to have a baby all by herself and had an abortion. When he heard that she was no longer pregnant, he returned to her. She took him back. A few months later, his wife gave birth to a little girl, whom he adored.

The winter started badly. The gray smoggy air felt as if one was breathing in dirty cotton. She wrote an article that kicked up a lot of dust. It was against nationalizing all privately owned pinball machines on behalf of the stateowned lottery company. 'If today we take away pinballs, because we believe they are doing the work instead- of their owners ... sometime soon we might nationalize privately owned trucks, because they too are working instead of their owners. Or close private hairdressing shops - for what ishand co combing or haircutting compared to the work done by one single electric hooded dryer, not to mention curlers, shampoos, conditioners, hair-spray, etc.' She cleverly and humorously compared the case of pinball machines with the case of a Soviet citizen, Vasili Mihailovich Pilipenko,and the polemics in the Soviet press that very summer about whether he could or couldn't keep the horse that he had found and reared. In Byelorussia, the law treated draft animals as an unlawful source of enrichment without work. To a foreigner, this article would look very innocent. What harm can writing about pinball machines do? But we hadbrought to perfection the social game called 'reading between the lines,' so of course it was understood that her article was not about pinball machines, but about the pri vatization of the economy. Yugoslavia has passed throughdifferent stages of economic reform. One of the stages was privatization, letting small businesses develop by private investment in order to heal the economy. But times were changing, the economic policy was taking a different turn. Read through ideological glasses, her article was clearlypolitical. In fact, her political mistakes were severe. First of all, she took the 'capitalist' orientation of the state seriously, ie, allowing the development of private small business, and she defended it. Then she insulted and ridi-culed the judicial system by showing that the parliament in the Socialist Republic of Croatia - as in every one-party state - is only a formality. Her article, naive as it seems today, speaking 'only' about pinball machines, revealed the functioning and hypocrisy of the communist state. She mocked it, and she had to be punished for that.

After a week of 'consultations' (an expression for talks with the party heads about the most recent instructions on editorial policy in newspapers or, in effect, unofficial censorship) the editorial board of her newspaper published a hundred-and-fifty-word boxed statement entitled 'Explanation from the editors' - as far as I remember, perhaps the. last of its kind. It was not unusual, though. This practice was a hangover from the past, when editors were directly responsible to the party man, a censor, for articles. But it was also an efficient instrument for settling accounts with the 'enemies of the people,' in other words whoever wrote against (or rather, not according to) a party policy, so editors didn't give up the practice easily. Later on, it served foreliminating 'disobedient' journalists. In Tanja's case, it looked as if the editors were explaining to the public the severe 'error'. that had occurred in the newspaper. But everyone knew that it was their token sackcloth and ashes, a declaration written for the party bosses, not for the public: The editorial board ...