We present an extract from Monumenta, the debut novel by Lara Haworth.
Olga Pavic's house has been requisitioned.The council will bulldoze it.Her home will become a monument to a massacre. But Olga cannot ascertain which massacre. Three different architects visit, each with a proposal to construct a different monument, to memorialise a different horror. Olga can’t allow them to unearth the secrets held in this space, not until she reunites with her children for a final dinner. Her aspirational, distant daughter, Hilde, and her secretly queer son, Danilo, both reluctantly agree to fly back to Belgrade.
Within an atmosphere of razor-sharp political surreality, Monumenta offers a tender tale of familial love and loss.
What Massacre? Which One?
The letter arrived on Tuesday. Olga made a face at her own name, printed on the envelope. Olga Pavić. She had always hated her name. It reminded her of dogs. When she noticed the official stamp in the top left-hand corner, BELGRADE CITY MUNICIPALITY, she felt the sudden, violent nerves that often overtook her when faced with opening a letter, nerves that resulted in envelopes, and their contents, being ripped down the middle, as if she'd been forced to open the emergency exit door on an aeroplane mid-flight. Branko had been infuriated by this tendency. He’d bought her a letter knife, hoping it might cure her, but it didn’t, only resulted in a more precise defilement.
Today was no different. The nerves boiled up in her head, producing a temporary blindness, and before she knew it she had two halves of a letter in her hand.
She laid them side by side on the table in the hall and waited for her head to cool down.
She read the letter.
Read it again.
'What massacre?’ she said, eventually, to the empty house. ‘Which one?’
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Listen: Lara Haworth talks Monumenta to the Field Ramble podcast
Marko had recently purchased a telephone that announced, on a little screen above the number keys, who was calling. He found it absurdly pleasing. It had removed an entire category of anxiety from his life, that of the unknown caller. Today the phone rang and the name Olga Pavić scrolled across the screen: grey letters on a sea-green background, dolphin skin glimpsed underwater. Olga’s name was like that for him, a dolphin, all the mysterious things he had never done, never touched. But at last, and perhaps this was his age, he no longer minded never having done, or touched. He looked down at the lilac trees, seventeen storeys below.
He picked up the phone. ‘Olga Pavić!’ Caller ID was still a magic trick.
She sounded hysterical. Although he knew that wasn’t a word he was supposed to use to describe women any more, Franka had told him. But how else to describe it? Her voice kept rising and rising. He watched a plane flying across his window and asked her, silently, to be calm.
Wait, he said, finally, interrupting her. ‘What massacre? Which one?’
‘That’s what I said,’ Olga said and hung up.
Next, she called Franka, and then Darko, then Andrej, then Aleks. They all asked the same two questions, and she found herself becoming tired.
‘If I knew that—’ she said to Aleks before hanging up.
The light in the hall darkened. The doorbell rang. She opened the front door, surprised for a moment that it was still real.
‘Franka told me.’ It was the postman, Luka, Franka’s husband. He was breathing in a difficult way. Olga stood and watched as he pressed a fist against his chest and gasped for air, feeling momentarily exiled from her own drama.
‘I had this terrible feeling,’ he continued, at last, ‘when I had the letter in my hand. My bicycle swerved in front of a tram, I was noticing things on the street I never normally do, fragments of glass, a beautiful yellow weed, like the world was trying to tell me to stop, to not deliver this letter.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Olga. Luka was dramatic. He couldn’t help it. It was his way of reminding her, and everyone, that he had been an actor, until he acted in a play twelve years ago that the city council found problematic and was forced to retrain as a postman. He wore his municipal uniform, and his great sadness, like a costume, and Olga forgave him for performing her own panic attack to her.
Luka leant heavily on the municipal steel handrail that led up the concrete steps to the front door. ‘How can they do this?’
Olga shrugged.
Luka sat down on the steps and got out his cigarettes, gave one to Olga.
‘I won’t make coffee,’ she said.
‘No,’ he said. They smoked their cigarettes. ‘
The question I have is why,’ said Luka. ‘Why your house, why not next door, why not mine?’
‘Probably this happens all the time,’ said Olga, motioning to Luka for another cigarette.
‘For airports, yes, for new apartment buildings, for motorways, but not this! Do they know something we don’t know? What, is this an ancient burial ground or something?’ He stared, eyes bulging operatically, at the concrete beneath his feet, daring it to make signs of disturbance, or malevolence.
Olga closed her eyes. ‘It feels like a joke Branko would play on me.’ But this was impossible. Branko was dead.
Luka looked behind him, through the open heavy front door to the hallway. Light burned in a grid on the blue tiles. It looked like the antechamber for terrible news. ‘You will have to call Hilde. And Danilo.’ He turned back to look at Olga, and the mixture of fear and affection in his eyes was not performed at all.
Olga looked down the steps towards the lilac-lined street.
Two hours later, Olga picked up the phone to call Hilde. She stalled for a moment, pressing the receiver to her nose. It smelt of lacquer and something bitter – earwax or cherry stones. The phone must have been at least twenty years old. Her hand spasmed gently as she dialled her daughter’s number. Hilde. Perhaps that’s why she had moved to Germany, because they gave her a German name.
Hilde picked up after three rings, her voice, as always, a flat, affectless hotel lobby, where the lifts to progress any further into the building had been destroyed. By Hilde.
‘The house has been requisitioned by the city,’ said Olga. ‘Our house. The one where you grew up.’ Her daughter did not so much get on her nerves as make her nervous, like a child; somewhere along the line of her mothering the dynamic had been twisted, reversed. Her words came too fast, too desperate. ‘It is going to be turned into a monument. To the massacre.’
There was a long silence, punctuated by what sounded like a landslide, or a building falling down, but whether this was something real happening in Germany, in earshot of Hilde’s phone, or a projection of how she felt about Hilde, she couldn’t say.
‘I want you all to come here for a final dinner.’ Olga hadn’t expected to say that. The words were a surprise.
Monumenta is published by Canongate.
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