The Past Is a Bad Linen Shirt

The sun here, it’s a different kind of bastard. Not like the polite, hazy thing you get in London or New York—that’s a gentleman’s sun, you know, takes its hat off and bids you good day. This one, the Dalmatian one, it’s a thug. It leans on you. It gets right in your face, heavy and mean, and just… presses. I can feel it on the back of my neck, right through the stupid straw hat my assistant, or somebody, insisted on. The one that makes me look like a retired racehorse trainer.

I’m supposed to be here for the—what did they call it? The "Resonance." Some festival they’ve conjured up in the old Roman ruins. They’ve put me on the bill, you know, the "legendary" Ina, one last time for the old country. Fifty years old, and they’re wheeling me out like a vintage car for a parade. Fifty. I remember when fifty was the age of ladies who wore lace gloves and smelled of mothballs. Now it’s me, sitting in a café in Hvar, nursing a glass of tap water that costs more than a bottle of wine used to, waiting for the soundcheck they said was at four but is probably at six or never. This place hasn't changed. That’s the lie they sell you, isn’t it? "The unspoiled beauty." What it really means is the plumbing is still a disaster and the wasps are still the size of your thumb. I got stung by one of those bastards when I was… God, I musta been nineteen. Right on the tender part of my wrist. It swelled up like a balloon, you couldn’t see my watch for a week. A cheap little Swatch, the one with the purple strap. My cousin gave it to me. She was so proud of it, said it was from Switzerland, but it was probably from a market in Split. It left a mark, a little white scar, I used to look at it and think it was a tiny map of some island I’d never been to.

Anyway. That’s not the point. The point is, I shouldn’t be here. I should be in my flat in Zagreb, with the air conditioning on and a glass of something that isn't water. But the money was good. It’s always good. They scrape together the money, you know, from the tourist tax or whatever, because they want the name. Ina. The voice of the nineties. The war-time songbird. That’s what they call me in the press packet. Makes me sound like a canary they kept in a cage during the bombing. A caged bird. A little did they know that caged bird had a coke habit and a ferocious temper. But no, they want the sweet, sad ballads. The ones about the homeland, the olive groves, the men who went away and didn't come back. I wrote half of those because I was angry, the other half because I was broke. The ones they loved were the ones I wrote when I was sitting in a friend’s flat in Rijeka, the windows rattling from the artillery miles away, thinking the world was ending. I was twenty-five, and I thought I knew what ruin was. I was so fucking stupid.

I’m looking at this kid now, the waiter. He’s got that look, the one they all have when they see me. It’s not awe, it’s… calculation. Like he's checking if I'm the real one or a knock-off. The "where did you get your face done" look. I could tell him I've had nothing done, that this is the map of all the cigarettes and all the sleepless nights, but he wouldn't believe me. He’s got a little white scar, too, on his chin. Looks like a cat scratch. And that, right there, that’s what does it. That’s what pulls the thread.

See, that summer. The one I’m supposed to be thinking about, the one the journalist tomorrow is gonna ask about. "Ina, you spent a transformative summer here in your youth, can you tell us about the inspiration for your album Salt Water?" They always ask. They think it was this magical, spiritual thing. That I communed with the sea and the stones and discovered my truth.

Bullshit. The truth is I was here with a boy. A man. A… a mistake, maybe. His name was… oh, it’s on the tip of my tongue. Was it Marko? No, that was the drummer. The one who stole my watch. Or maybe he didn't steal it, maybe I just lost it. My memory is a sieve, I swear to God. I can remember the smell of the suncream he used—this awful, cheap coconut stuff that smelled like a piña colada that had gone bad—but I can’t remember his last name. Or if his eyes were green or brown. They were probably brown. Everyone here has brown eyes. But I remember he had these hands, you know, big and clumsy, like a farmer’s, except he was a painter. A "conceptual artist." He wore a linen shirt that was always unbuttoned one too many and he talked about the "juxtaposition of the natural and the industrial." I thought he was a genius. I was twenty-two and I thought a man who could pour paint on a rock and call it a commentary was a genius.

We were here, in this exact town, or one very much like it. They’re all the same, aren’t they? White stone, blue shutters, and an old woman selling lavender sachets on every corner. That summer, it rained. I remember that clearly. Not the soft, romantic rain you see in the movies. A brutal, terrible storm that came in from the sea and just battered the coast for three days. The power went out. The whole island was just… dark. And I was stuck in a little rented room with this painter guy, and we didn’t have any candles, and the only thing to do was—well, you can imagine. But I also remember, I was hungry. So goddamn hungry, because we couldn't go out and get food. He said the passion would sustain us. The passion, he said, was more important than bread. And I remember thinking, even back then, through the haze of whatever cheap wine we’d been drinking—I remember thinking, "This guy is an asshole."

But I didn’t say it. I stayed. For three days. In the dark. Talking. He told me about his mother, who was a famous opera singer in Zagreb. A lie, I found out later, she worked in a post office. But at the time, I was enthralled. I wanted to be a famous singer, and here was this man, this artist, who said he understood the soul of a performer because he was the son of one. It was a beautiful, perfect lie, and I swallowed it whole.

So, that’s the memory they want, right? The romantic, stormy, artistic awakening. But the thing is, I’m getting the timeline all wrong, or something. Because that storm… that storm happened in 1994, didn’t it? The year I was just a kid, really, still in school. No, wait. That’s not right either. That was the year my father left. We were in Split, not here. My father left for Germany and he never came back. I remember my mother standing in the kitchen, and she was wearing this floral apron with a broken strap, and she was holding a wooden spoon. She wasn't crying. She was just… still. Like a statue. And I was ten years old and I was trying to figure out how to tie my shoelaces, and I couldn't get the bow right, it kept coming loose, and I felt this panic because I was gonna have to go to school and my shoe was gonna come undone and the kids would laugh, and that was the end of the world.

That’s a stupid thing to remember, isn’t it? A shoelace. In the middle of your life falling apart, you’re worried about a shoelace. I still get that panic sometimes. Before a show, I’ll be in the dressing room, and the sound of the crowd is just a low rumble through the floor, and I’ll look at my boots, and I’ll think—what if the lace breaks? What if I have to go out there and my foot feels wrong? It’s the same goddamn terror. It never goes away. It’s just a different size.

So, I think the painter guy, the one with the coconut suncream, he was after the storm. The real one. The one in '94. Because the storm I was just talking about, with the power cut—that was in 2001. Wasn’t it? I was already famous. I had a song on the radio. "The Olive Tree." That was a big hit. And I was here for a magazine photo shoot, not for love. I was with a photographer named Ana, who was built like a rugby player and could drink anyone under the table. She had a tattoo of a scorpion on her shoulder. I remember she dared me to swim in the sea during the storm. She said it would make a great shot. The sea was black and churning, and it was full of trash from the mainland—plastic bottles and a broken chair, I swear to God—and I stood there in my bra and knickers on the pebbly beach, shivering, and the photographer was yelling at me to go in, and the painter guy was watching from the shore, and he was laughing.

No, he wasn't. He wasn't even there. That was just… a noise I made up. I’m combining them. I’m combining all of them. The painter, the photographer, the kid from Rijeka who gave me my first guitar. They’re all just one big face in my head now. A blur of brown eyes and bad linen and broken promises.

The kid at the café is back. He sets down a tiny saucer with a piece of rock candy on it. "Compliments of the house," he says. His accent is thick. "We hope you will sing the old song tonight. The one about the sea."

The one about the sea. They all think it’s about the sea. It’s not about the sea. It’s about the man I lived with in a squat in Ljubljana for six months. He had a fishing boat he’d inherited from his grandfather that he never used, but he used to talk about it all the time. He’d sit on the balcony of that freezing, damp apartment and he’d talk about the sea, about its "brutal honesty." He was a philosopher, or he thought he was. He used to steal my cigarettes. I wrote that song the night I left him. I wrote it on a napkin in a train station, and it was about the way the light looks on the water at dusk, but it was really about the way he looked at me when he was lying. The dishonesty of it. But they don’t want to hear that. They want the pretty lie. So I give it to them. That’s my job.

I smile at the kid. It’s a practiced smile, the one that reaches my eyes but not my soul. "Thank you," I say. "I’ll be sure to."

And I know I’m gonna get the lyrics wrong tonight. I always do on the second verse. I get mixed up. I’ll sing about the "olive groves" when it should be "vineyards." And they won’t notice. They’ll be too busy crying because they remember their grandmother or their dead brother or the war or all of it. That’s my job. To be the mirror for their own nostalgia. To be the big, sad sound they can project their feelings onto. I’m like a human karaoke machine with a better dress.

I look at my watch. The one I have now, a gold thing the label gave me. It’s three-fifteen. Soundcheck is probably at four. But maybe it was at two. I should get up. I should go find the stage, let them fiddle with the monitors, pretend I care about the reverb level on the mic.

But I’m still sitting here. I’m staring at the rock candy, this little piece of amber sugar. And I’m thinking about a different summer. The summer I turned twenty. I was in Dubrovnik, and a boy with a boat took me to a cave. He said he knew a secret place. The cave was full of bats. It smelled of guano and salt. It was not romantic. But I kissed him anyway, because I thought that’s what you were supposed to do. You were supposed to have adventures. And I got a splinter in my foot from the boat's old, rotten wood. I had to have it dug out by a doctor who smelled of rakija. The doctor kept calling me "son" because my hair was so short. I didn't correct him. I didn't care. I was young, and my foot hurt, and I was already writing songs in my head. Stupid little rhyming songs. The kind you write when you think you’re going to be famous.

That’s the memory. Not the painter, not the storm. The cave and the bat shit. And I was there because my father had just sent a postcard from Germany. He was sorry. He was coming back. He never did. But for one summer, I thought he might. So, I was waiting. I was always waiting. I’m still waiting, I think.

I finally stand up. My knees crack. I’m not a young woman. I’m a fifty-year-old woman in an expensive linen dress that’s already wrinkled, and my face is powdered and painted and I’m about to go sing songs about a sea I can barely remember to a crowd of people who will never know the real ones. And the one that’s really in my head, the one about the shoelace and the splinter and the postcard that never came, that one will never be sung. It’s too small. Too stupid. Too true.

I toss a coin on the table—way too much, but who cares—and I walk out into the thug of a sun. I walk past the cafés, past the tourists taking photos of each other in front of the same white stone, and I head for the old Roman theater they've rigged with speakers. I’m late. I was late back then, too. I kept the painter waiting on the dock for an hour, that summer of the storm, or the other storm, or the one that didn't happen. I kept him waiting and when he asked why I was late, I said the strap on my sandal broke. A lie. It was a stupid, tiny lie. The kind you tell because the truth is too boring. The truth was I was trying to write a line for a song, a line about the sea. I never finished it.

I climb the steps to the stage. The sound guy is looking at me with a mix of irritation and awe. "Ina, we were starting to worry," he says.

"Sorry," I say, my hand on the mic stand. "The traffic… was a bastard."

And he’s about to say there is no traffic on the island, but I just smile my practiced smile again. I’m the headliner. They’ll wait. They always wait. The sea is out there, behind the stage, glittering and lying. And I’m gonna sing about it. I’m gonna sing like I own it. Like I’m a part of it. Even if, for the life of me, I can’t remember if the story I’m singing is mine, or theirs, or just a picture I saw once in a dream. I open my mouth, and the first note comes out. It’s shaky. It’s tired. It’s beautiful. And that’s all that matters to them.