The Umbilical Void

The Absurd Tale of a Man Who Arrived Midstream

The Beginning Without a Beginning

Meet Ante, sixty-two years old. His life began thirty years ago, when he simply appeared at the age of thirty-two. He had no memory of school, no memory of parents, no memory of first jobs, first kisses, or even his own childhood. There was nothing behind him but a wall of blankness. He just was.

He arrived one morning in a small Zagreb apartment as though he had always lived there. The furniture was already scuffed, the curtains already faded, the smell of yesterday’s stew lingering in the air. A woman stirred coffee at the stove and turned to him without surprise.

“You’re late,” she said, sliding a cup toward him. “Drink before it gets cold.”

Her name was Marija. His wife. At least, that’s what everyone — and she herself — insisted. He had no memory of proposing to her, no memory of meeting her, no memory of a wedding, and there were no photographs in the apartment to prove it. But she spoke to him with the calm assurance of someone who had always been married, and he accepted it because he had no choice.

At the table sat a girl of seven, sullen and restless, her hair tied back with a red ribbon. She looked up at him with impatience.

“Finally,” she said. “Tata, can you tell her I’m not eating this?”

She called him Tata — father — as if the word belonged to him. Her name was Ivana. She had existed before Ante, and he knew it. He had not witnessed her first steps, her first words, her first anything. He had simply arrived into her life when she was already seven, and yet she treated him as if he had always been there. Ante could not reconcile it, but nobody else seemed troubled by the paradox.

He sipped his coffee, bitter and hot. Marija set bread on the table and smoothed Ivana’s hair with mechanical tenderness. The rhythm of a family was there, but it felt rehearsed, like a play where he had been dropped into the lead role halfway through the second act.

In those early years after his appearance, Ivana would sometimes test him. She would say things like, “Do you remember when I broke my arm? You were so scared, you carried me to the hospital.” Ante would freeze, searching for a memory that wasn’t his. Marija would cut in: “Eat your soup, Ivana.” And the conversation would move on, as if the slip never happened.

Years later, after the war, a son arrived: Marko. This time, Ante remembered — or at least, he thought he did. He remembered the hospital smell, the paperwork, the nervous way Marija held the child. Marko’s life belonged fully to the world that had begun when Ante did. There were no missing pages, no phantom years. Ante clung to that memory as if it proved his own existence.

But in 1992, in that kitchen, there was only Marija at the stove, Ivana at the table, and Ante sitting with a cup of coffee that tasted like someone else’s morning. He was thirty-two years old, with a seven-year-old daughter and no idea how he had become her father.

And nobody — not Marija, not Ivana, not the neighbors who nodded at him in the stairwell — seemed to think this was strange.

Family in Mid-Stream

At sixty-two, Ante still moved like a man who had never grown into his own skin. He woke every morning in the same flat he had appeared in three decades earlier. The wallpaper had been replaced once, the refrigerator twice, but the hum of the place was the same: tired, functional, and hollow.

Marija was still there, though age had crept across her face in a way it never had across his. He felt old, yes, in his bones and joints, but not in the way she looked at him. She looked at him as if she had endured something he had never endured, as if she had carried memories he did not share.

Ivana was thirty-seven now. She had a husband, two children of her own, and a streak of bitterness that seemed permanently lodged in her voice. Whenever she visited, she treated Ante with a kind of impatient courtesy, the way one treats an absent-minded uncle who had failed to show up when it mattered most.

“You never came to my graduation,” she once said at Sunday lunch, picking at her plate.

Ante had stared at her, confused. “Which graduation?”

“High school,” she snapped. “University. Take your pick.”

Marija cleared her throat. “Eat your salad, Ivana.”

But the words stayed. Ante didn’t remember those ceremonies because, for him, they had never happened. Ivana had been seven when he appeared. Everything before that belonged to someone else, to a version of him he had never been.

Marko was thirty now, working a job in IT that nobody quite understood. He was softer than Ivana, less accusatory, but there was a distance in him too. He had been born after Ante, but even his childhood blurred strangely. Ante remembered holding him as a newborn — or thought he did — but the memory had the flatness of a dream. There were no smells, no sensations, no details. Only the knowledge that Marko existed.

The four of them gathered around the same table, year after year, as if nothing were missing. Yet everything was missing.

Conversations often collapsed into silence. Ivana would start to say, “Remember when—” and then stop herself, glaring at Ante. Marko would try to bridge the gap with small talk about football or gadgets. Marija would pass the breadbasket as though that were the most important ritual of all.

Ante sat there, nodding, chewing, pretending. Pretending he had lived a life that stretched back further than thirty years. Pretending he had carried Ivana in his arms as a baby. Pretending he remembered how he and Marija had met, where they had courted, how they had built this family.

But deep down, he knew. He knew he had appeared at thirty-two, already married, already a father, already set in a life that had started without him. He was not a man with a missing half — he was a man with no half at all.

The family tolerated this strangeness the way a city tolerates potholes: grudgingly, resentfully, but without fixing them. Life went on. Meals were eaten. Birthdays were celebrated. Holidays were endured.

And Ante, in the middle of it, remained a man out of time — a father to one child he could never remember having, and to another whose existence felt like a dream he was told he had dreamt.

The City of No Past

Zagreb was a city of ghosts, though nobody called them that. Ante walked through it every day, past shapes and structures that seemed to belong to another dimension.

On his way to work he passed a row of grey apartment blocks in Novi Zagreb. They were vast, rational, and somehow humane—built with playgrounds, courtyards, and shops tucked beneath them. They felt lived-in, but never explained. People simply said, “It’s just concrete. Don’t look too hard.”

When Ante asked once who had built them, his neighbor shrugged. “Nobody important. They were always here.” The answer was given without irony, as if the buildings had sprung from the ground like mushrooms.

Further along, he passed a monument: a giant concrete form rising like an open flower in a field. Its surface was cracked, moss crept along its edges. Teenagers smoked at its base, tourists snapped photographs, but nobody in the city ever mentioned it by name.

Ante would stop sometimes, staring up at the curves of stone. He felt something stir in him, a heaviness in his chest, as though the structure were demanding he remember something he had never lived. He once asked a colleague about it.

“What is that thing?”

The colleague frowned, lowered his voice. “Just a ruin. From before.” And then quickly changed the subject to football.

The city was full of such things: plaques with dates that belonged to a time Ante had never known, streets named after figures whose faces were blurred in photographs, abandoned factories with slogans fading on their walls. He could not connect to them, but he could not ignore them either. They pressed in on him, silent and insistent, reminders of a history he had been born too late to claim.

Once, on a tram, he overheard two foreigners marveling at the architecture. They spoke in English, snapping pictures of a brutalist university building. “It’s magnificent,” one said. “Like a sculpture you can live in.” Ante felt embarrassed, even irritated. For him, it was just another backdrop, another object from the world that had begun without him.

That night he told Marija what he had heard. She shrugged. “Foreigners are always like that. They see meaning where there isn’t any.”

But Ante couldn’t shake the feeling that the city was speaking to him in a language he should understand, a language he had lost before he ever knew it. Every street, every building, every monument whispered: You are incomplete. You are living in a half-life.

And Ante, walking home through the corridors of concrete, felt it was true.

The Job That Always Existed

Ante had always worked at the office. At least, that’s what they told him.

When he first appeared at thirty-two, his nameplate was already on the door: Ante Kovač, Department of Records. A desk piled with files awaited him, and colleagues greeted him with nods of routine familiarity, as if he had been there for years. Nobody trained him. Nobody asked him who he was. He was simply expected to get on with it.

And so he did.

The work was simple, mechanical, endless: reading forms, stamping them, placing them into files, sending them down to the archive. The papers were always dated after 1991. Anything earlier was automatically rejected, sometimes quietly destroyed, sometimes shredded with loud finality.

Ante once asked why.

His supervisor, a balding man with watery eyes, looked startled. “Why? Because nothing existed before that.”

“But these papers—” Ante held up a form with a date of 1989.

“Clerical error,” the supervisor interrupted sharply. He plucked the paper from Ante’s hand, fed it into the shredder, and smiled with a kind of nervous finality. “Better now.”

Everyone in the office worked like that: efficient, unquestioning, as if memory itself were a bureaucratic mistake. The break room was filled with talk of weather, football, politics—but never history. When dates slipped out, they were quickly covered with coughs or laughter.

One afternoon, a young colleague leaned over Ante’s desk. “You’ve been here forever, haven’t you?” she said lightly.

Ante froze. “Forever?”

“Well, since the beginning.” She winked, as if it were a private joke, then walked away.

The words lodged in his head. Since the beginning. The beginning of what? His beginning? The office’s beginning? The country’s beginning? He couldn’t tell. It was all the same line, drawn thirty years back, behind which everything dissolved into fog.

He found himself staring at the archives more and more often. Rows of shelves, thousands of folders—all beginning in 1991, none before. The silence of those missing years was louder than the rustle of paper.

Sometimes, in a drawer, he would find something that didn’t belong: an old passport with a red cover, a black-and-white photograph of a parade, a typed letter dated 1978. Each time, his hand trembled as he held it. Each time, he felt the pull of something bigger than himself.

And each time, he slid it into the shredder, listening to the blades grind history into confetti.

At night he would dream of the shredded pieces reassembling, floating through the air like snow, spelling out words he almost understood. He would wake with the taste of dust in his mouth, his hands aching as though he had been carrying something heavy.

But in the morning, he returned to his desk, stamped the papers, and fed the silence.

Children of a Gap

The strangest thing about being a father was not that Ante had children. It was that he had two of them, and they belonged to different timelines.

Ivana, thirty-seven, was the impossible one. She carried with her a whole cargo of memories Ante could not share. She spoke of her childhood with the certainty of someone who had lived it—because she had—but not with him. For her, he was always there, a father who tucked her in, who scolded her, who carried her on his shoulders during parades. But Ante had not been. Those recollections belonged to another man, another version of himself that he had never inhabited.

Whenever she visited the apartment, she had a way of cornering him with casual cruelty.

“Do you remember when I learned to ride a bike? You ran behind me all the way down the street.”

Ante shook his head. “No. I wasn’t—”

Ivana’s voice turned sharp. “Don’t start. You were there. You just forget.”

Marija would intervene, her voice tight. “Enough. Let it be.”

But Ivana’s eyes lingered on him with contempt. She looked at him as though he had betrayed her, as though he had abandoned her somewhere in the fog of history.

Marko, thirty, was different. He was the child Ante could at least claim. Ante remembered—or thought he remembered—his birth, the small form in Marija’s arms, the fragile weight of him against his chest. Yet even those memories felt artificial, too smooth, like scenes rehearsed for him by someone else.

Marko never accused him of forgetting. He accepted the world as it was, with a shrug and a joke. “Dad, you’ve always been strange,” he said once, laughing. “But it’s fine. You’re still my dad.”

Ante clung to those words like a lifeline. With Marko he could play the role of father without constantly bumping into the hole in his own life. They watched football together, drank beer, argued about referees. It was ordinary. Comforting.

But even with Marko, the cracks showed. At a family dinner one evening, Ivana brought up a story from before—her school play in 1989, the costume Marija had sewn, the bouquet Ante had given her afterward. She asked him, casually, cruelly, “What flowers did you bring me that night?”

Ante stared at his plate. His fork trembled.

Marko tried to save him: “Dad’s not good with flowers. He probably just grabbed whatever they had at the kiosk.”

But Ivana pressed on, her voice sharp with accusation. “No. He knew. He always knew what I liked.”

Ante felt the table tilt, his stomach clench. He wanted to scream that he hadn’t been there, that he had only appeared in 1992, that he had no right to her memories. But the words stuck in his throat.

Marija broke the silence with her steady, practiced tone: “Eat your soup.”

And that was the end of it, as it always was.

In his heart, Ante knew: he was a father to both of them, but only half a father to each. One daughter who looked at him as an impostor, one son who accepted him as a placeholder. The gap between them was not years but entire worlds—before and after—and he was stranded in the middle, belonging fully to neither.

Friends Without Histories

Every Saturday, Ante met his friends at a smoky café near the market. They were all about his age, men with worn faces and thinning hair, the kind of men who looked like they had seen too much—except none of them had seen anything at all, not before their thirties.

There was Jozo, a retired electrician who swore by his beer and the merits of Dinamo Zagreb. Stjepan, quiet, who always fiddled with his lighter. And Dragan, who laughed too loudly, as if to drown out something.

Their conversations were always the same: football scores, the price of petrol, complaints about politicians. It was surface-level chatter, a carousel of clichés. But every now and then, something slipped.

One afternoon, Jozo leaned back in his chair and said, almost wistfully, “When I was a kid—” He stopped. His face went pale. The others froze. For a moment, the air was thick, as though the café walls had ears.

“What were you saying?” Ante asked carefully.

Jozo shook his head. “Nothing. Forget it.” He raised his glass and drained it in one swallow. The others looked away politely, as if they hadn’t heard.

That was the rule among them: slips happened, but they were never acknowledged. Each man carried fragments—images, sensations, maybe even memories—but they were treated like dangerous contraband.

Once, Stjepan confessed in a whisper, “Sometimes I smell coal smoke. Like a furnace. I don’t know why. It feels… old.”

Ante nodded, though he had no answer. He too had sensations he couldn’t place: the taste of cheap red wine, the sound of marching bands, flashes of color and concrete in his dreams.

Dragan, ever the joker, slapped the table. “We’re all cracked in the head, eh? Better not talk too much. People will think we’re communists!” He laughed loudly, but the others did not join.

They sipped their drinks, pretending nothing had happened.

The café itself seemed to belong to the same amnesia. Its walls were yellowed with smoke, photographs of footballers from decades ago hung crooked, their faces fading. Nobody mentioned the dates. Nobody admitted the players had once been young men too, now long dead.

Ante often left these meetings unsettled. He told Marija once, “They’re like me. They don’t remember.”

Marija’s face hardened. “Don’t be foolish. Everyone remembers. They just don’t talk.”

But he knew better. His friends weren’t forgetful—they were like him: men whose lives had begun midstream, who carried the silence of the missing years like an invisible scar.

And together, they pretended this was normal.

The Dreams

At night, Ante dreamed of things he couldn’t possibly know.

The first time, it was just colors. Violent reds, slashes of black, a canvas that seemed to burn from within. He woke with the smell of smoke in his nostrils and paint under his fingernails, though his hands were clean.

Then came the shapes. Concrete wings rising from a valley, massive, jagged, impossible. They soared into the sky as though some giant bird had tried to take flight and been frozen mid-beat. Ante stood beneath them in the dream, small and trembling, while a voice whispered: Remember.

Another night, he wandered into a vast hall where enormous tapestries hung from the ceiling, heavy with wool and hemp, brushing against his shoulders like curtains. The threads formed cathedrals, forests, caverns—spaces so immense he felt swallowed by them. He reached out to touch one, and it pulsed like a living thing.

He woke drenched in sweat, heart hammering.

When he told Marija, she dismissed it. “Dreams are just noise,” she said, rolling over in bed.

But Ante felt the opposite. They weren’t noise at all. They were fragments—messages leaking in from somewhere he wasn’t supposed to reach.

The dreams grew sharper. He saw children running across wide squares, waving flags of red, singing songs in a language that was his own but carried cadences he couldn’t quite recognize. He saw men in uniforms marching, crowds cheering, buildings half-built, cranes swinging overhead.

And then, sometimes, there was blood. Faces shouting. Sirens. Shadows. A sudden void that swallowed everything, leaving only silence.

He stopped talking to Marija about them, but the dreams clung to him during the day. At work, stamping forms, he would catch himself sketching shapes of concrete wings in the margins. At lunch, the taste of cabbage soup would trigger a flash: a long wooden table crowded with strangers, smoke rising from a stove, a song sung out of tune.

Once, in the café, he blurted out to his friends, “Do you ever dream of before?”

The table went still. Jozo stared into his beer. Stjepan lit his lighter, clicked it shut, lit it again. Dragan laughed too loudly, the sound bouncing off the walls.

“Dreams are just dreams,” Jozo muttered finally.

But Ante knew they weren’t. They were the missing pieces, bleeding through from the black hole in his life. They weren’t memories—he could never claim that—but they were too vivid to be nothing.

And each night, as he closed his eyes, he feared the dreams a little more. Because if he kept seeing them, if they kept coming, then maybe he wasn’t just a man who appeared at thirty-two. Maybe he was something worse: a man who had lived before, and lost it.

The Confrontations

It was Ivana who finally snapped. She was thirty-seven now, sharp-tongued, impatient, with the kind of weariness that made her look older than her age. She came over one Sunday afternoon with her two children in tow, set a bag of groceries on the table, and said, without preamble:

“Why do you lie to us?”

Ante froze. He had been cutting bread, the knife hovering midair. “What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.” Ivana’s eyes were like flint. “All my life, you’ve pretended. Pretended you don’t remember. Pretended you weren’t there. But I know you were there. I remember you. You carried me on your shoulders at the May Day parade. You yelled at me for breaking the window with a ball. You taught me to tie my shoes.”

Her children stared at her, then at Ante. The room was suddenly too small.

Ante shook his head. “Ivana… I wasn’t there.”

Her voice cracked. “Then who was it? Who tucked me in? Who kissed me goodnight? Who took me to school every morning?”

Marija, washing dishes, slammed a plate down. “Enough.”

“No, not enough!” Ivana turned on her mother. “You let him do this! You let him act like he doesn’t remember, like none of it happened. It’s sick. It’s insulting.”

Marko, who had been silent, cleared his throat. “Maybe Dad just… doesn’t remember. Maybe it’s not his fault.”

Ivana wheeled on him. “Not his fault? He erased half his life! Our life! He abandoned it like garbage.”

Ante gripped the table. “I didn’t erase anything. There was nothing before.”

The words fell heavy. His grandchildren blinked at him, confused. Marija stood rigid, drying her hands, refusing to look at him.

Ivana laughed bitterly. “Do you hear yourself? ‘Nothing before.’ That’s insane. There was everything before. You just don’t want to admit it.”

Ante wanted to shout, to insist on the truth as he knew it—that he had appeared at thirty-two, that there had been nothing before, no cradle, no classrooms, no parades. But the words sounded ridiculous even to him, absurd in the face of Ivana’s tears.

Instead, he whispered, “I can’t remember.”

Ivana grabbed her bag, her children trailing behind her. At the door, she turned back, eyes wet and furious. “No, Tata. You won’t remember. That’s worse.”

The door slammed. Silence filled the flat.

Marko stared at his father, pity in his eyes. “Why do you always do this?”

Ante opened his mouth but nothing came. He had no answer.

The Outside World

The first time Ante really noticed it was in Zadar. He had gone for work, some mindless paperwork about zoning, the kind of thing that never seemed to matter but always needed a stamp.

Walking through the city, he passed a row of postwar buildings—long slabs of glass and stone, sharp angles softened by salt and time. To Ante, they were just buildings. They had always been there, like the sky or the sea.

But ahead of him stood a group of tourists, cameras dangling from their necks, pointing excitedly.

“It’s beautiful,” one woman said in English. “Modernist, but with a touch of Brutalism. Look at the proportions!”

Another nodded vigorously. “This whole district is a masterpiece. I read about it in a book—post-war reconstruction, visionary stuff.”

Ante stopped, bewildered. He looked at the same buildings and saw only peeling paint, cracked concrete, old men smoking on benches. He wanted to tell them: You’re mistaken. There’s nothing to see here. These are leftovers, ruins from before.

But they snapped photos, cooing with delight, while he stood there like a man who had never learned to see.

It wasn’t just Zadar. In Zagreb too, he had seen them—foreign students sketching Novi Zagreb’s blocks, architecture professors guiding groups through Split 3, tourists posing at monuments in the middle of forests.

One day on the tram, he overheard two backpackers whispering in awe about a spomenik they had visited. “It felt like landing on another planet,” one said. “Like alien ruins.”

Ante felt anger boil in him. To them it was exotic, photogenic, an Instagram backdrop. To him it was nothing—worse than nothing, it was absence. A hole in the narrative.

That night, he brought it up at home. “Why do they care so much about these old buildings? About those monuments?”

Marija sighed, folding laundry. “Because they don’t know better. They think it’s history. For us, it’s just… embarrassment.”

“But it’s there,” Ante insisted. “Doesn’t that mean something?”

She looked at him with a mixture of pity and irritation. “It means nothing if nobody wants it to mean anything. Don’t think too much. You’ll make yourself sick.”

Ante fell silent, but the unease grew. The foreigners treated his city as if it had a memory, as if the streets were alive with stories. He, who lived there all his life—well, all his thirty years—felt like a trespasser among ruins he could not read.

And sometimes, standing in front of a monument or staring up at a block of apartments, he wondered if maybe they were right. Maybe the city remembered even if he did not. Maybe the stone itself carried the weight of what had been erased.

But if that was true, then what did that make him?

Cracks in Reality

It began with a file.

At work one morning, a stack of documents slid onto Ante’s desk. He stamped them automatically—birth certificates, property deeds, the usual stream. But one folder was different. Its pages were yellowed, the type uneven, the date unmistakable: 1976.

He froze. That year was not supposed to exist. Not in his office. Not in his world.

The certificate was for a child’s birth—Ivana Kovač, daughter of Ante Kovač and Marija Kovač. His name, in black ink, written fifteen years before he had ever appeared.

His hand trembled. He shoved the paper back into the folder, carried it to his supervisor, and stammered, “This shouldn’t be here.”

The supervisor glanced at it once, face tightening. Without a word, he fed it into the shredder. The blades growled, tearing the page into ribbons. He looked at Ante. “Clerical error. Forget it.”

But Ante couldn’t forget.

That night, the dreams returned with more force. He saw himself younger—much younger—sitting in a smoky tavern, drinking cheap wine, arguing politics with strangers. He felt his lungs ache with laughter, his fingers stained with ink. He woke gasping, hands shaking, the taste of sour wine still on his tongue.

The cracks spread.

Walking past the monument with the concrete wings, he swore he heard voices. Children’s laughter. Singing. The air was heavy with echoes. He turned to a stranger beside him and asked, “Do you hear that?”

The man looked at him blankly. “Hear what?”

Another time, waiting at a tram stop, he caught sight of his reflection in the glass. For a split second, it wasn’t the face of a sixty-two-year-old man—it was a younger version of himself, grinning, cigarette dangling from his lips. When he blinked, it was gone.

Marija noticed the change in him. One evening, as he sat staring at the wall, she said, “You’re unraveling. Stop digging.”

“I don’t understand,” Ante whispered. “How can there be proof? Documents, memories, fragments? If there was nothing before, why is it all still here?”

Her voice was sharp, almost panicked. “Because you weren’t meant to remember. None of us were.”

The words chilled him. None of us.

He realized then that it wasn’t just him. The silence, the evasions, the sudden changes of subject—everyone was complicit. The whole society had agreed on amnesia. They all played along, insisting there was nothing before, even as the ruins and records whispered otherwise.

The cracks were not just in Ante’s mind. They were in the world itself.

And they were widening.

The Realization

It happened quietly, not in a burst of revelation but in a slow, suffocating clarity, the way fog dissolves and you realize the landscape has been there all along.

Ante was sixty-two years old, but he was also thirty-two. Both facts sat on his chest like weights. He had lived three decades, yes, but he had also not lived the ones before. That gap — the great absence — wasn’t just his alone. It was the country’s.

He saw it everywhere now. In Marija’s silence, in Ivana’s bitterness, in Marko’s uneasy loyalty. In his friends who joked too loudly, who lit their lighters and stared into their beers whenever the past came close. In the office, where whole years were shredded daily, reduced to paper snow.

The realization was simple, brutal, undeniable:
They had all been born midstream.

Not in the natural way of babies and births, but as ready-made adults with ready-made histories stapled onto them. Houses fully furnished, jobs already waiting, children dropped in at convenient ages. The old world had not ended—it had been cut away, amputated, like a diseased limb. And the new one had started from zero, with them as its actors.

Ivana’s accusations made sense now. She wasn’t just angry at him. She was angry at the theft. Her memories had been stolen, rewritten, grafted onto a father who had never been there. Ante was the stand-in, the replacement. And she knew it, even if she could never prove it.

The monuments, the buildings, the streets—they were fossils of the erased world, left standing but stripped of names, like shells of creatures whose bodies were long gone. Foreigners could marvel at them, sketch them, photograph them, because they weren’t infected by the lie. But locals had to look away, pretend they were meaningless, lest the illusion collapse.

Even the dreams made sense. They weren’t dreams. They were leaks. Spillage from the before, bleeding into the after.

And the final cruelty was this: everyone knew, but nobody admitted it. They lived with the silence the way a family lives with an alcoholic uncle—acknowledging him only in glances, in nervous laughter, in sudden changes of subject.

Ante walked through the city like a man seeing it for the first time. The concrete wings. The brutalist towers. The tapestries of thread and color. They weren’t alien at all. They were his, theirs, everyone’s. Proof of a history amputated, proof of a world that had been.

At sixty-two, he whispered to himself: “We didn’t begin thirty years ago. We just agreed to pretend.”

He didn’t tell Marija. He didn’t tell Ivana. He didn’t even tell Marko. Because what would be the point? The whole machinery of silence was stronger than truth.

But as he passed the monument again, moss crawling over its surface, he stopped and placed his hand against the cold stone. He felt its weight, its presence, the undeniable persistence of what had come before.

For the first time in his life, he let himself cry. Not for himself, but for the years that had been stolen, for the generations that had been erased, for the memory that lingered in concrete even if it had been erased from flesh.

Then he wiped his eyes, straightened his coat, and walked on. Because tomorrow he still had to get up, go to the office, and keep stamping papers for a world that pretended nothing had ever existed before it.

The Children of Forgetting

It was a Sunday afternoon when Ante found himself sitting on a bench in Maksimir park, his two grandchildren chasing each other across the grass. They were young, bright-eyed, full of energy, their laughter rising like birds into the air.

They stopped suddenly, out of breath, and one of them—little Luka, only eight—ran over to Ante, tugged at his sleeve, and asked, “Dida, what was it like when you were a boy?”

The question struck him harder than any accusation Ivana had ever thrown.

He opened his mouth. The air caught in his throat. He could have lied—he could have spoken of marbles in the street, of running barefoot through fields, of long summer days by the river. He had seen such images in his dreams, borrowed from someone else’s life. But he couldn’t.

“I wasn’t a boy,” he said finally, softly.

Luka giggled. “Everyone’s a boy once!”

The other grandchild, Ana, came running up. “Don’t be silly, Dida. You must’ve been small too!”

Ante forced a smile. He patted their heads, watching their faces glow with certainty. They were the future, unburdened, unquestioning. For them, the gap didn’t exist at all. They were born into a world that had already erased its past so completely that they couldn’t even conceive of the question.

And yet, when Luka ran off again, Ante felt the sting in his chest. He realized the amnesia wasn’t just his—it was hereditary, systemic, passed down not by silence but by absence. His grandchildren would grow up in a country that had amputated its history, where questions about before were treated as nonsense, where monuments crumbled into moss and meaning only for strangers with cameras.

He looked at them one last time, their laughter echoing through the trees, and whispered to himself:

“They won’t even know what was stolen.”

For a moment, he thought he might tell them the truth—that he had simply appeared at thirty-two, that nothing came before, that the world they lived in was built on an erasure too vast to grasp. But he didn’t. What good would it do to plant in them the seed of doubt, the ache of absence?

So instead, he sat back, hands folded in his lap, watching them play. He smiled the smile of a man complicit, a man who had finally understood his role.

The lie would continue. The silence would endure.

And the children of forgetting would grow up never knowing they had forgotten anything at all.

Afterword

Ante never existed, but he’s everywhere.

He’s in the uncle who refuses to talk about the seventies because he “doesn’t remember.”
He’s in the politician who pretends Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Slovenia all fell from the sky in immaculate conception, untouched by blood, concrete, or common history.
He’s in the teacher who rips the pages out of the textbook.
He’s in the neighbor who lowers his voice whenever someone mentions Tito, or Partizani, or the factories that used to give entire towns their pulse.

He’s in all of us who play along, stamping papers, shredding dates, nodding at monuments while pretending they’re meaningless hunks of stone.

Year Zero isn’t a theory. It’s not metaphor. It’s a lived condition. A fever that rewrote the timeline so everyone suddenly “appeared” in the 1990s with no prologue, no baggage, no past.

And the absurdity is that we accept it. We accept that architects like Džamonja built spaceships out of stone, but we walk past them as if they were cow sheds. We accept that Murtić painted fire across canvases, but we shove his name in the attic because he said the wrong thing at the wrong decade. We accept that Buić spun cathedrals out of thread, but we left her legacy rotting in bureaucracy until France embarrassed us into remembering her.

We don’t inherit memory—we inherit silence. And silence is not neutral. Silence is violent. It erases. It amputates.

Ante cried because he finally understood that. That the absence wasn’t his personal defect. It was the system. The agreement. The great unspoken pact: that nothing existed before.

But you and I know better. The concrete still stands. The canvases still burn. The threads still hang. The world remembers even if we pretend not to.

The question is: will we keep living like Ante, playing father to children who know we weren’t really there, shredding the files of our own lives? Or will we finally admit the obvious—that the past happened, it mattered, and it’s still here, staring us in the face?

The lie of Year Zero is comfortable. It makes life tidy. But it makes us ghosts in our own cities.

And if we keep going like this, then the children of forgetting—those laughing in the park, those growing up without even the sense that something is missing—won’t just inherit the silence. They’ll inherit nothing at all.