Erased by Miha Mazzini
Slovenian fiction
Original title – Izbrisana
Translator – Gregor Timothy Čeh
Source – Review Copy
It is always great after a long time to catch up with a writer whose previous books you have enjoyed; that is the case with Miha Mazzini. I had reviewed two of his earlier books twelve years ago. I loved both of them, so when I was offered his latest book to review, of course, I said yes. This book is a bout a piece of Slovenian history I didn’t know anything about, and that is what happened not long after they became a country in itself, which was when a number of people, 25,671, were erased from the state records, and this is the story of one of them, Zala. Miha heard the story of the erased, he said, and had expected many other writers to write about it, but when they didn’t, he did!
Ljubljana had been thoroughly cleansed by the rain that Sunday morning. The inhabitants had left for their weekend houses and dachas, half towards the coast, half into the mountains. The tourists had not yet arrived; the war was still raging on in the neighbouring states of the former Yugoslavia (translated into only a fingerprint’s distance on the map) and it scared visitors away.
Zala stood by the window and looked out. She missed being active, missed her usual morning walk after the May Day holidays through the empty town, across Tivoli Park to the forest and toward Rožnik Hill. Evidence of the previous night’s traditional celebrations was littered everywhere, empty bottles and patches of drying vomit. At the top of the hill were the remnants of a bonfire, a thick circle of blackened ash; when once she had stuck her fingers into it, she had been burnt. Binmen climbed slowly out of small trucks, stretched themselves and looked despondently at the mess they were called to clear up before the hung-over population began to wake
As she heads to the hopsital
The book opens with Zala having a baby and heading to the hospital to give birth. This is where her troubles start. As she arrives, there is a problem; they can’t find her on the computer. By this time, she is deep in labour, they take her and let her have her baby, but what follows is a number of days where she is told that her baby could be taken from her. her because neither of them has papers or is in the computer system. This leads to a Kafkaesque journey through bureaucracy that isn’t helping her, from the Hospital directors to the local authorites don’t have an answer and the doors seem to be closing for her from aproaching the media and other things to highlght her plight and what is going happen to her son will she be able to be a mother to him will she be a slovenian again who will sort this all out?
The Director raised her head calmly and said, “I have been expecting you,” as if the door had not almost fallen off its hinges.
Zala was still holding firmly onto the handle, the grounding of her rage.
“Sit down!”
“What is wrong with my baby?”
“Look…” the woman supported her chin with her hand, “we are not just experts here, each in our own field, but we are also people. We need to make sure that everything will be all right with the child. Do you not agree?”
“But what is wrong?”
“Nothing. My husband is..”
Her lips began to wrinkle, as if juggling a rotten pip and Zala realised that what bonded the Director and the Doctor as a couple was her need to subdue and his childish acceptance.
Nonstop work composed of tiny victories and escapes, life transtormed into continual coexistence, both at home and at work
She is told she isn’t in the system
Miha has a real talent for pacing in his book. This is like a thriller, a real page turner as we find out how she is trying to firstly get her citizenship back and thus be a mother to her son or lose him and lose herself as she is caught in a lot of red tape and to go back to the old “That’s life title of Jobsworth’s bureaucrats going by the book. It is like a real-life Kaka story, Z caught up in a maze of small officialdom. What would you do ? It also says in the book that this has happened for a number of people around the world, and there are still people in Slovenia trying to sort their identity out. I found this article by Miha about the Erased. is also a screenwriter and has made a film of the book. I hope to watch this at some. If you like Kafka-like thrillers with many twists and turns set over a few days, this is the one for you. What would you do if you were the one erased?
Good heavens, this sounds monstrous.
I’ve heard stories about people trying to reclaim their identity after identity theft, but this is a whole ‘nother thing.
It’s not the same, but it reminds me of the nightmare time I had with government bureaucracy when I was trying to get my father into aged care. They had brought in a computer system that required 100 ‘identity points’, easy to do for you and me because we just present cards with photo ID like a current driver’s licence or a passport, and then some proof of residence papers like a gas bill or whatever. But my father didn’t have any of those. My mother paid all the bills and everything was in her name. The last time he had a valid passport was in the 60s when we came to Australia, and he hated driving and had never had an Australian licence. In the end it was a good thing I had kept them as a memento, because I had to take in the well-out-of-date passport and the one drivers licence he’d had from 40 years ago, and the officer helping me rang up Head Office and said she could clearly see that my father was who I said he was, and so they gave her some code to override the computer screens, and it all got sorted out.
The thing is, I was able to sort it out because I had money. Not money to bribe anyone, but money to be able to sit inside my house with a cup of tea and a jigsaw to do while I waited (literally for hours) on the phone to tell my story to yet another bureaucrat, and I had the kind of phone where the money didn’t run out. But how homeless people, or people with poor English, or refugees whose documentation is fragmented, how do they get on — especially if they only have pay-as-you-go phones?
I don’t think the people who design these computer systems have enough experience of life beyond the norm to imagine the sort of problems some people have, just proving who they are.
It was much easier in the past. When I got engaged the first time, I applied to Somerset House for my birth certificate. But months and months went by and there was no sign of it. It still hadn’t come the week before the wedding and I was in a panic, but in the end all I had to do was make a statutory declaration that I was who I was, and I was born on such-and-such a date, and we got married no problems. The certificate arrived six weeks afterwards!
The times have changed if you lose your identity these days for a computer click there is less and less paper evidence of people being alive I’ve got my birth certificate a few years ago as I hadn’t any photo if I hadn’t a passport or a driving
Licence then luckily I have a driving licence and a passport that need renewing soon
Well don’t forget!