I.

This is the third day that I haven’t left the house, except to take the dog out, early in the morning, as soon as it’s light, and again late at night, when it’s dark, it’s out and back in, no walking, no running, he just does his business and it’s back to our refuge before anybody can see us. Because I look a wreck in my faded track suit with its sagging knees, unwashed, my cheeks practically ashen because I haven’t eaten a thing in three days, except for the cubes of toasted stale bread that my mother left in the oven for breadcrumbs before she took off. I dip them in the pan with what remains of the pork drippings from this winter; we already ate all the crackling.

You can buy ready-made breadcrumbs in the store for nothing, you don’t have to bother making them, but it’s a sin to throw bread away, says my mother, the memory of poverty always close to the surface, so, she grumbles, since we have no chickens to feed, she makes breadcrumbs. But you’ve never kept chickens, I remind my mother, who was born in a town, in the city centre actually, two tram stops away from the main square, like me, like her mother and her mother’s mother; chickens are not part of our family lore, you can’t cite them, not even when talking about being thrifty.

But being thrifty has proven to be useful to your daughter, I say to my mother, who isn’t here, as if she were still sitting at the kitchen table playing Patience, which she started doing when she retired, when life stopped before it had even begun – to the daughter who is incapable of going to the local shop let alone cooking, but there are always your breadcrumbs, I smile, and my mother understands, even though she’s absent, even though she ran away from the horror of my marriage, she hears everything even when she’s not here; you can count on her as if she were here. The secret of breadcrumbs.

I give Tanga the cooked giblets that I froze. Thank God we’ve got reserves, you won’t starve, I say aloud, thinking that without them even the dog would starve, she’d be on a diet of toasted bread cubes, because her mistress is incapable of doing anything – except drinking wine – my mother corrects me with concern but without reproach; because this mother doesn’t do reproach.

It’s red wine, Dalmatian Pharos, twelve-and-a-half per cent alcohol, says the label, but it doesn’t get me drunk, it’s as if the alcohol turns into water in my mouth, every drunk’s nightmare.

I’ve switched on the TV, hoping that it will bring me out of myself, but it’s no use, I can’t follow, I can’t connect one scene with the next, nothing makes sense, even sleep doesn’t seem to want me, although I occasionally snap out of the doldrums, not knowing where I am, as if I had dozed off.

At one point somebody rang the doorbell, it’s a terrible moment, an assault, I went rigid in my chair, who’s that breaking in, and Tanga runs off barking to chase away the intruder, but it’s no use, violence has taken hold of the bell so I open the door, foaming at the mouth.

And standing at the door is a girl, barely eighteen, I figure, barely of age, or maybe not even, and she’s in tears, trembling, saying she’s lost, she has no place to go, she doesn’t know anybody here, not a soul, she says, and I wonder what that’s got to do with me, why me, how did she wind up at my door, and then I learn from her confused talk that she’s been in this flat before, even slept here, last summer, she says (where was I then? at the seaside, I decide), when she came to Zagreb with the amateur theatre of Pula that Aunt Višnja runs; aha, Aunt Višnja, my mother’s “client”, so she’s the connection with this poor girl whom I can’t take in, not into the flat or into my heart, such are the times.

As soon as Tanga sees how miserab