How to get rid of Rose

I’ve been trying to get rid of my sewing machine for years. It’s old, I don’t use it anymore, it takes up too much room and it collects dust. It’s got a poetic name – Ruža, Rose. A factory in Zadar, named, as was the wont in those days, after a hero of the National Liberation Struggle – Vlado Bagat, started making them in the sixties. It was the only factory in what was then Yugoslavia that made sewing machines because they were still in demand. Young women, especially in rural areas, would get them as part of their dowry. Lots of women knew how to sew in those days. They had to know because not only was it cheaper to make a dress than to buy one, but there weren’t many clothes stores around anyway, and even fewer that sold dresses. These ‘Bagats’, as we called them, were specially designed. When closed in their cabinet, they looked like a piece of furniture. They were given girls’ names, like my Ruža, or Slavica, Višnja, Jadranka … A little later, electric versions of these machines appeared but they were much more expensive.

A 50-year-old sewing machine was superfluous in an age when nobody sewed or even knew how to sew anymore and when there was an abundant choice of inexpensive clothes to buy. At first I tried to give Ruža to friends and neighbors, all of whom smilingly turned me down. It’s not that it was worthless, they just didn’t need it. I once saw a sign on a street door that advertised sewing lessons so I walked in. There were a dozen sewing machines inside, some of them like mine, so I thought that it couldn’t hurt them to have one more. But the young woman conducting the sewing lessons brushed me off rudely, as if I wanted to sell her my machine. Another time I was watching a television program about women workers from a clothes factory called ‘Nada Dimić’ (this time named after a heroine of the National Liberation Struggle) which had since gone bust, just like ‘Vlado Bagat’. The women were trying to organize themselves into a cooperative and I thought that they might like to have my Rose. But again I was wrong because it had a foot pedal and lacked many of the features of newer models; it wasn’t good enough for them. I was surprised that the woman who spoke to me on the phone made it sound as if they were in a position to pick and choose, but in fact I felt relieved and decided to stop trying to give Rose away. I made only one other attempt, when a friend of mine mentioned that she knew a young woman who earned a living by making cloth toys on a borrowed sewing machine. But I let down the one person who would have been happy to accept my gift. I didn’t call her back and Rose stayed where she was, almost forgotten.

Maybe I deliberately forgot her, because whenever I think that I should move her to the basement, it makes me feel sad. I remember my paternal grandmother, Nonna I called her, who gave me Rose. That was shortly after I had my baby, and in those days she had probably had to set aside a good deal of money to buy it for me. Nonna was convinced that it would come in handy. It can’t hurt for you to learn how to sew clothes on a sewing machine, she said, and, if need be, you can also make them for others and earn a living that way. A woman has to be practical. She knew that from experience. She was born at the end of the 19th century and the premature death of her husband left her with two sons to raise on her own. She worked in a paper factory, grew vegetables and fruit in her garden and kept chickens. She did not have a sewing machine.

Children grow up quickly, she said when Ruža arrived. And she was right. I sewed things for my baby and myself – diapers, clothes, sheets and pillowcases, and I knitted little caps, shawls, sweaters and gloves. I even earned a living from it for a brief period. The women’s magazine Svijet carried patterns from the German magazine Burda, and I learned to copy them onto the fabric. Mind you, I may have been a bit too creative because when my daughter started school she complained that nobody dressed like that – in bright and cheerful clothes. Even her black smock, the obligatory school uniform in those days, was different, and I had to rein in my imagination so that the other children wouldn’t make fun of her.

A woman has to be practical, my mother-in-law, a retired schoolteacher, repeated when she bought me a washing machine that, surprisingly, had no name. The three of us – her son, our infant daughter and I – lived with my in-laws in their apartment. How could two students ever afford to live on their own, let alone buy a place? Yugoslavia wasn’t a consumer society in 1968; a washing machine was a serious investment. You bought it on credit and it took at least a year to pay it off. A washing machine was the prelude to a new age of consumerism, like one’s first television set or a little Fiat 500 car. My mother-in-law had two children and she knew what it meant to wash diapers by hand. After the war, at the end of the forties, there were no diapers to buy, let alone disposable ones. There weren’t any even at the end of the sixties. The first ones to appear were expensive, they fell apart and caused a rash. You need to make life easier for yourself; if you don’t, nobody else will – she said when the machine arrived in the house. She was thinking of men in general, but also of her son who changed the baby’s diapers, fed her and took her out for walks, but did not rinse the poo off her diaper, which, after all, you had to do before putting it in the machine.

The washing machine was more useful than the sewing machine, I think, and I certainly used it more. It died a natural death, which is unlikely to happen to Rose. When we finally moved into our own place, after his parents exchanged their big apartment for two smaller ones, that being the only way we could break out on our own, we bought a new washing machine. Like any new appliance, it was faster, better, more modern. When she grew up my daughter didn’t need a sewing machine because I had never taught her how to sew, and by then it had already become a relic anyway. She had grown up with a washing machine and a color television and a car; for her these were normal things to have around. But when I bought her a washing machine and gave her the money to pay for her driving test, I continued the tradition, now based on my own experience, of saying that a woman has to be practical. It wasn’t that these machines could provide her with a livelihood, if need be, but they did make her life easier.

Nonna lived with us until we went to high school. She cooked, she cleaned and she took care of us because my mother was working and we hardly ever saw her. When she wasn’t needed anymore, suddenly there was no room for her in the apartment where we had all managed to squeeze in perfectly nicely before. Like an obsolete machine, she had served her purpose. She went back to her house in a hamlet outside of town. Our visits to see her, even mine, became fewer and further between. Suddenly I didn’t have time for her anymore, for the woman who had been so good to me, who had never asked anything of me, never reproached me, who had fulfilled my every wish. By the time I realized that her love was unconditional, whereas everyone else’s I had to earn, it was too late.

She lived quietly, she made no demands, and then she fell ill. More as a result of loneliness than old age. Even though she was sick, none of her sons invited her to live with them. They put her in an old people’s home. I visited her once when she broke her hip. I left her lying there in that little room and afterwards cried for hours.

I still haven’t gotten rid of Rose. She lives with me like an indelible stain on my conscience.