Pantomime
In the early 1995, my family moved to Germany and shortly after we arrived my daughter was born. The Bosnian War had been raging for three years, and the Dayton Peace Accords were in the news. People fleeing the violence of war had scattered across Europe. With a new baby and a toddler, I was grateful when a friend suggested I hire a Bosnian woman to clean my house. Years later, I still think about her.
Published Spring-Summer 2014. The MacGuffin. Vol. XXX, No. 3. Schoolcraft College, Livonia, MI.
The house feels solid under Hana’s feet as the door slams shut behind the woman who lives here. Hana takes off her black street shoes and slips her feet into worn canvas Plimsoles. She unbuttons her one good sweater and folds it carefully and lays it on top of the plastic bag that she uses to carry her house shoes on the bus. Down in the tiled laundry room she finds the cleaning supplies just where the woman showed her the first day. By the sink there is a red bucket with a sponge mop standing up in it. She knows from last time that the mop is useless; the sponge has begun to tear away from the metal plate that anchors it to the handle. She will have to clean the floors on her hands and knees and she feels a spurt of satisfaction when she thinks of this. She loads the red bucket with rags and spray bottles, puts on the rubber gloves and climbs the marble stairs.
On other days, earlier days she pretended that this was her house, her kitchen, her floors but the fantasy always ended when she started in on the woman’s bedroom. The pictures are there, gathered into frames, propped up on the dresser, the nightstands, the windowsill. There are wedding pictures of the woman and her husband flanked by parents and siblings all grinning from behind the faint sheen of glass. Pictures of children in swimming pools and at the beach. Pictures of people posed on ski slopes and around Christmas trees. It is like a shrine that room, to everything the woman left behind when she came to live in this house in Germany. Hana cleans the room quickly. The eyes of the woman’s family follow her.
Today, Hana starts with the bathrooms because it is the part she dreads most. Other people’s curled hairs, other people’s stains. But the woman who lives in this house with her husband and her boy and her baby has not left a trace of dirt. There isn’t a speck of toothpaste splattered on the mirror or a stray hair in the shower drain. Hana swishes disinfectant in the toilet bowl and straightens the stack of diapers and the towels on the shelf.
In the boy’s room all the toys are put away and the bed is made. She holds her thoughts to one side like a curtain as she lines up the stuffed animals from largest to smallest across the foot of the bed and then dusts. She vacuums and opens the window and rolls down the heavy wooden Rouladen to beat her cloth against it.
Lately, it has become a challenge to find the dirt in this woman’s house, to show her a place that has escaped her notice, a place where she has let down her guard. The friend who arranged this job for her told a joke about the Americans. “They clean for their cleaning ladies,” she said.
And it is true. Hana cleans for other Americans. One of them sits her down at the kitchen table and makes her coffee. Another sends her into the garden to play with the children and she can hear the sound of the vacuum cleaner running inside. They still pay her when she leaves and she knows the name for what they are doing though she pretends not to. But in this house, it is as if the woman who lives here is afraid of what Hana will find.
By the time Hana arrived this morning, the woman had already strapped the boy and the baby into place in the back seat of the car. She followed Hana back into the front hall and opened the tall coat cupboard and took out two plastic sacks. One sack bulged with a dozen used baby bottles; the other held several packages of new latex nipples and two large cans of formula. In the pantomime of women who share only the barest thread of common language, the woman explained that Hana was to take these with her when she finished. She meant for Hana to give these things to the mothers in the refugee building where she lives.
Hana nodded and tears rushed her eyes but not for the reason the woman was thinking when she reached out to squeeze Hana’s arm. Not because she was grateful for the gifts. She was thinking of the money she would make when she set these out on a blanket in the market on Saturday and sold them.
When her son sees her kneeling on her blanket in the market, he avoids her eyes and shuffles off with his friends toward the video arcade. She tells herself he is embarrassed by her bad German. He doesn’t like her to come to his school either, though it doesn’t seem so long ago that his teachers had to pry them apart at the gate. He is twelve now and does not ask anymore when they will be going home.
In Doboj, she had worked as a telephone operator at the district police headquarters. Her husband was a schoolteacher and her mother-in-law looked after their son. They had a color television and a Fiat and took vacations every year to the Dalmatian coast. When the war came, the chief of police warned her that the Serbs would claim Doboj and she would do well to leave. Her husband joined the Muslim defense force but she was practical and began to store money away, small amounts in many small places. Then her husband was injured and the Serb warned her again that Doboj would fall soon. She raided her hiding places and paid him everything she had to help her escape with her husband and son. She was allowed only what she could carry and she could tell no one. Two days before they were to leave, her husband died. Some said it was a broken heart. Hana said he was just stubbornly refusing to leave the village. She took her son and boarded the train for Zagreb while the others were at the funeral.
In the woman’s kitchen, Hana scrubs the stainless steel sink and runs the garbage disposal just to hear the sound. She wipes the counters and then gets down the smallest glass from the cupboard and opens the refrigerator. It is not what she expects from an American. No Coke, no candy bars, no cartons of ice cream. She pours a glass of apple juice and sits down at the table.
The woman has left one hundred Deutsch Marks on the table. There is also a note that indicates the next time Hana should come, as if Hana could not make out on her own the pattern of every other Wednesday.
As she sips the juice, she notices the radiator. It is tucked under the marble windowsill and it is coated with a thick film of sticky dust. There is one like it in every room. She abandons the juice and the table; she takes up a rag and the bottle of cleaner. She means for the woman to notice the dirt on her cloth when she comes home. She will let it dangle from her cracked red fingers. And then she will beckon the woman down to the basement where the decapitated sponge mop rests in the red pail. She will point and say, “You must buy a new mop,” in her own language, and the woman will understand everything Hana has seen.
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