Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

Birds in the Treetops Growing by My Mother’s Window

The air in the New Zagreb neighbourhood where my mother lives smells of bird droppings in summer. In the leaves of the trees out in front of her apartment building jostle thousands and thousands of birds. Starlings, people say. The birds are especially raucous during humid afternoons, before it rains. Occasionally a neighbour takes up an airgun and chases them off with a volley of shots. The birds clamour skywards in dense flocks, they zigzag up and down, exactly as if they are combing the sky, and then with hysterical chirruping, like a summer hailstorm, they drop into the dense leaves. It is as noisy as a jungle. All day long a sound curtain is drawn, as if rain is drumming outside. Light feathers borne by air currents waft in through the open windows. Mum takes up her duster, and, mutter ing, she sweeps up the feathers and drops them into the bin.

‘My turtledoves are gone,’ she sighs. ‘Remember my turtledoves?’

‘I do,’ I say.

I vaguely recall her fondness for two turtledoves that came to her windowsill. Pigeons she hated. Their muffled cooing in the morning infuriated her.

‘Those repulsive, repulsive fat birds!’ she said. ‘Have you noticed that even they have gone?’

‘Who?’

‘The pigeons!’

I hadn’t noticed, but sure enough, it seemed that the pigeons had fled.

The starlings irked her, especially their stink in the summer, but in time she reconciled herself to them. For, unlike other balconies, at least her balcony was clean. She showed me a messy little spot near the very end of the balcony railing.

‘As far as my place is concerned, they are filthy only here. You should see Ljubica’s balcony!’

‘Why?’

‘Hers is caked all over in bird shit!’ says Mum and giggles like a little girl. A child’s coprolalia, clearly she is amused by the word shit. Her ten-year-old grandson also grins at the word.

‘Like the jungle,’ I say.

‘Just like the jungle,’ she agrees.

‘There are jungles everywhere these days,’ I say.

Birds are apparently out of control; they have occupied whole cities, taken over parks, streets, bushes, benches, outdoor restaurants, subway stations, train stations. No one seems to have noticed the invasion. European cities are being occupied by magpies, from Russia, they say; the branches of trees in the city parks bow down under their weight. The pigeons, seagulls and starlings fly across the sky, and the heavy black crows, their beaks open like clothes pegs, limp along over the green city swards. Green parakeets are multiplying in the Amsterdam parks, having fled household birdcages: their flocks colour the sky in low flight like green paper dragons. The Amsterdam canals have been taken over by big white geese, which flew in from Egypt, lingered for a moment to rest and then stayed. The city sparrows have become so bold that they wrest the sandwiches from people’s fingers and strut brazenly about on the tables in outdoor cafés. The windows of my short-term lease flat in Dahlem, one of the loveliest and greenest of the Berlin neighbourhoods, served the local birds as a favourite repository for their droppings. And you could do nothing about it, except lower the blinds, draw the curtains or toil daily, scrubbing the splattered window.

She nods, but it is as if she is paying no attention.

The invasion of starlings in her neighbourhood apparently began three years earlier, when my mother was taken ill. The words from the doctor’s diagnosis were long, alarming and ugly (That is an ugly diagnosis), which is why she chose the verb ‘to be taken ill’ (Everything changed when I was taken ill!). Sometimes she would get bolder, and, touching a finger to her forehead, she’d say:

‘It’s all the fault of this cobweb of mine up here.’

By ‘cobweb’ she meant metastases to the brain, which had appeared seventeen years after a bout of breast cancer had been discovered in time and treated successfully. She spent some time in hospital, went through a series of radiation treatments and convalesced. Afterwards she went for regular check-ups, and everything else was more or less as it should be. Nothing dramatic happened after that. The cobweb lurked in a dark, elusive cranny of the brain, and stayed. In time she made her peace, got used to it and adopted it like an unwelcome tenant.

For the last three years her life story had been scaled back to a handful of hospital release forms, doctors’ reports, radiological charts and her pile of the MRIs and CAT scans of her brain. The scans show her lovely, shapely skull planted on her spinal column, with a slight forward stoop, the clear contours of her face, eyelids lowered as if she is asleep, the membrane over the brain like a peculiar cap, and, hovering on her lips, the hint of a smile.

‘The picture makes it look as if it is snowing in my head,’ she says, pointing to the CAT scan.

The trees with their dense crowns growing under the window are tall, and reach all the way to my mother’s sixth-floor flat. Thousands and thousands of little birds jostle for space. Close in the hot summer darkness we, the residents and the birds, evaporate our sighs. Hundreds of thousands of hearts, human and avian, beat in different rhythms in the dark. Whitish feathers are borne on gusts of air through the open windows. The feathers waft groundward like parachutes.

Some Of The Words Have Got Altered

‘Bring me the…’

‘What?’

‘That stuff you spread on bread.’

‘Margarine?’

‘No.’

‘Butter?’

‘You know it’s been years since I used butter!’

‘Well, what then?’

She scowls, her rage mounting at her own helplessness. And then she slyly switches to attack mode.

‘Some daughter if you can’t remember the bread spread stuff!’

‘Spread? Cheese spread?’

‘That’s right, the white stuff,’ she says, offended, as if she had resolved never again to utter the words ‘cheese spread’.

The words had got altered. This enraged her; she felt like stamping her foot, banging her fist on the table or shouting. As it was, she was left tense, fury foaming in her with a surprising buoyant freshness. She would stop, faced with a heap of words, as if before a puzzle she could not assemble.

‘Bring me the biscuits, the congested ones.’

She knew precisely which biscuits she meant. Digestive biscuits. Her brain was still functioning: she was replacing the less familiar phrase digestive with the more familiar congested, and out of her mouth came this startling com bination. This is how I pictured it working, perhaps the connection between language and brain followed some different route.

‘Hand me the thermometer so I can give Javorka a call.’

‘Do you mean the cell phone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you really mean Javorka?’

‘No of course not, why ever would I call her?!’

Javorka was someone she had known years before, and who knows how the name had occurred to her?

‘You meant Kaia, didn’t you?’

‘Well, I said I wanted to call Kaia, didn’t I?’ she snorted.

I understood her. Often when she couldn’t remember a word, she would describe it: Bring me that thingy I drink from. I usually knew what her thingies were. This time the task was easy: it was a plastic water bottle she always kept at hand.

And then, she began coming up with ways to help herself. She started adding diminutive words like ‘little’, ‘cute little’, ‘nice little’, ‘sweet’, which she had never used before. Now even with some personal names, including mine, she would add them. They served like magnets, and sure enough, the words that had scattered settled back again into order. She was particularly pleased to use words like these for the things she felt fondest of (my sweet pyjamas, my cute little towel, that nice little pillow, my little bottle, those comfy little slippers). Maybe with these words and phrases, as though with spit, she was moistening the hardboiled sweets of words, maybe she was using them to buy time for the next word, the next sentence.

Perhaps that way she felt less alone. She cooed to the world that surrounded her and the cooing made the world seem less threatening and a little smaller. Along with the diminutives in her speech the occasional augmentative would jump out like a spring: a snake grew to be a big bad snake, a bird into a fat old bird. People often seemed larger to her than they really were (He was a huuuuuuge man!). She had shrunk, that is what it was, and the world was looming.

She spoke slowly with a new, darker timbre. She seemed to enjoy the colour. A little crack showed up in her voice, the tenor became a touch imperious, with a tone demanding the absolute respect of the listener. With this frequent loss of words the timbre of her voice was all she had left.

There was another novelty. She had begun to lean on certain sounds as if they were crutches. I’d hear her shuffling around the house, opening the fridge or going to the bathroom, and she would be saying, in regular rhythm, hm, hm, hm. Or: uh-hu-hu, uh-hu-hu.

‘Talking to someone?’ I’d ask.

‘No one, just me. Talking to myself,’ she’d answer.

Who knows, maybe at some point she was suddenly unnerved by the silence, and to chase off her fear, she came up with her hm-hm, uh-hu.

She was scared of the dying and that is why she registered deaths so carefully. She, who was forgetting so many things, never missed mentioning the death of someone she knew, either close to her or distant, the friends of friends, even people she had never met, the death of public figures that she heard of on television.

‘Something has happened.’

‘What?’

‘I am afraid it will be a shock, if I say.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Vesna’s died.’

‘Vesna who?’

‘You know Vesna! Second floor?’

‘No, I don’t. Can’t say I’ve ever met her.’

‘The one who lost her son?’

‘No.’

‘The one who was always wearing all that make-up in the lift?’

‘Really, I don’t.’

‘It only took a few months,’ she’d say, and snap shut the little imaginary file on Vesna.

Her neighbours and friends had been dying. The circle, mostly women, had shrunk. The men had long since died, some of the women had buried two husbands, some even their own children. She would speak without discomfort of the deaths of people who hadn’t meant much to her. The little commemorative stories made therapeutic sense; relating them she fended off the fear of her own dying, I suppose. She evaded, however, any mention of the death of those nearest to her. Her close friend’s death was followed by silence.

‘She got so old,’ she said tersely a little later, as if spitting out a bitter morsel. Her friend was almost a year older than she was.

She threw out all her black clothes. Before, she would never have worn bright colours; now, she was forever wearing a red shirt or one of two blouses the colour of young grass. When we called a taxi, she refused to get in if it was black. (Call another cab. I’m not getting into this one!) She tucked away the pictures of her parents, her sister, my father, which she used to keep in frames on the shelf, and set out the photographs of her grandchildren, my brother and his wife, pictures of me and beautiful pictures of herself from her younger years.

‘I don’t like the dead,’ she told me. ‘I’d rather be in the company of the living.’

Her attitude towards the dead changed, too. Earlier they had each held their place in her memories, everything was set out in a tidy manner, as in an album of family pictures. Now the album was disintegrating and the photographs were scattered. She no longer spoke of her late sister. On the other hand she suddenly began mentioning her father more often – who was always reading and had brought books home, and who was the most honest man on earth. Yet she was compelled to bring him down a peg. The memory of him was permanently tainted by the greatest disappointment she had ever known, an event she would never forget, and which she simply could never forgive him for.

The source of the memory was altogether disproportionate to the bitterness with which she spoke of it, or so at least it seemed to me. My grandparents had some good friends, a married couple. When Grandma died, these friends looked after Grandpa, especially the wife, Grandma’s friend. My mother once happened on a scene of tenderness between the woman and my grandfather. Grandpa was kissing the woman’s hand.

‘I was sickened. And Mother said over and over: “Take care of my husband, take care of my husband!”’

It is highly unlikely that Grandma said anything of the kind. She had died of a heart attack. This pathetic plea – Take care of my husband, take care of my husband! – had been inserted into my dying grandmother’s mouth by my mother.

There was one more image that overlapped with the ‘sickening’ scene of the hand being kissed, and this was an image that my mother could not easily dismiss. When she was in Varna for the last time, Grandpa asked Mum to take him back with her, but she – drained by my father’s protracted illness and the gruesome throes of his dying, and then finally his death – feared the burden of the obligation, and refused. Grandpa spent his last years abandoned in a home for the elderly.

‘He tucked a little towel, my gift to him, under his arm, turned and went back into the house,’ she said, describing their last encounter.

It would seem that she had smuggled the towel into this last image. We always brought a pile of gifts every summer for my mother’s Bulgarian relatives. It wasn’t just that she liked giving things to people, she also liked this picture of herself: she would come back from the Varna she had left so many years before, feeling like the good fairy after distributing the gifts she had brought. I wondered why she had inserted that towel into the farewell scene with her own father. It was as if she was lashing herself with it, as if the towel he tucked under his arm was the most terrible possible image of a person’s decline. Instead of undertaking the grand, sincere gesture, which would have meant jumping through troublesome and time-consuming bureaucratic hoops with little guarantee of success, she stuffed a towel into Grandpa’s hand!

Her need to taint her dead was something new. These were not feasts but snacks, focused only on details, which I was hearing for the first time, and, indeed, she may have fabricated them on the spot to hold my attention and confide a secret she had never told a soul. Perhaps the fact that she was in possession of information relating to the dead gave her a glow of satisfaction. Recalling her late friends, sometimes, as if she’d just then decided to take their grades down a notch in the school records, she’d add importantly: I never took to him; I never liked her much either; They didn’t appeal to me; She was always stingy; No, they were not nice people.

Once or twice she even made as if to taint the image of my father, who was, in her words, the most honest man she’d ever known, but for whatever reason she relented, and left him on the pedestal where she herself had placed him after his death.

‘You weren’t exactly crazy about him, were you?’ I asked cautiously.

‘No, but I did love him.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he was so quiet,’ she said simply.

Dad was, indeed, a man of few words. And I remember my grandfather as being a quiet man. It hit me for the first time that both of them were not only quiet, but the most honest men Mum had ever known.

It may be that with this tainting of the memory of the dead she was easing her feeling of guilt for things she hadn’t done for them but might have, her guilt for what she had let slip by. She camouflaged her lack of greater attentiveness to the people closest to her with a hardness in judgement. She simply seemed afraid of caring more for others. At some point she had been scared of life just as she was scared of death. That was why she held on so firmly to her place, her stubborn coordinates, and shut her eyes to the scenes and situations that moved her too deeply.

Onion should always be well sautéed. Good health is what matters most. Liars are the worst people. Old age is a terrible calamity. Beans are best in salad. Cleanliness is half of health. Always discard the first water when you cook kale.

It may be that she had asserted things like this before, but I had paid no attention. Everything had got smaller. Her heart had shrunk. Her veins had shrunk. Her footsteps were smaller. Her repertoire of words had diminished. Life had narrowed. She uttered her truisms with special weight. Truisms gave her the feeling, I suppose, that everything was fine, that the world was precisely where it should be, that she was in control and had the power to decide. She wielded her truisms as if they came with an invisible stamp of approval, which she smacked everywhere, eager to leave her mark. Her mind still worked, her feet still moved, she could walk, though only with the help of a walker, but walk she did, and she was a human being who knew for a certainty that beans are best in salad, and that old age is a terrible calamity.

Are You Alive and Well?

She often phoned the ‘old witch’, especially now that she was no longer able to go and visit her. Pupa was my mother’s oldest friend not only in terms of age, but in how long the two had known each other.

‘If it weren’t for the old witch, you wouldn’t be here today,’ Mum would say and repeat the family legend about how Pupa, as a newly minted resident, assisted the obstetrician when my mother was in labour. (‘Lord, what a hideous child,’ Pupa said when they pulled you out. My heart sank with fright. But you weren’t at all ugly, that was just the old witch having a giggle!)

‘Ah, Pupa! Her life has not been easy,’ Mum would say, pensively.

Pupa had been in the resistance movement, she had joined Tito’s Partisans and fought in the Second World War. She went through all sorts of things; she nearly died several times, and was furious at her daughter, also a doctor, claiming that all her troubles were her daughter’s fault. Without her, the old witch groused, I would have died quite nicely long ago.

She weighed barely eighty pounds, walked only with a walker and was half-blind – she saw the world only in blurred contours. She lived alone, obstinately refusing to go into a home for the elderly or live with her daughter and her daughter’s family. Neither would she agree to having a paid helper live with her. There was nothing, it turns out, to which she would agree. So her daughter was forced to come by every day, and there was a cleaning lady, who she often replaced, who came daily. Pupa sat there in her flat, with her legs tucked into a huge furry boot, an electric leg warmer. Sometimes she would turn the television on and stare at the blurred images on the screen. And then she’d turn it off and sniff the air. Neighbours, ah, those damned neighbours were piping rotten gas into her flat again through the central heating system. That was her phrase, ‘rotten gas’, because the whole building stank of rot from it. She drove the cleaning lady to search every nook and cranny of the flat, to see if there wasn’t something decaying somewhere, a dead mouse, or food, but the cleaning lady swore there was nothing. Except for the rotten gas there was nothing else which troubled her life. The problem was her death: it simply wouldn’t come. If it had crawled in through the central heating system, she would have gladly given herself over to it. Death doesn’t smell. It is life that stinks. Life is shit!

She’d sit in an armchair with her feet tucked into the big fur boot, sniffing the air. In time the fur boot merged with her and became a natural extension of her body. With her closely cropped hair, a birdish, beak-like nose, she’d elegantly curve her long neck and direct her grey gaze at the visitor.

‘I have told her a hundred times, let me die,’ she’d say, heaping the blame on her daughter. That was her way of apologising for her condition.

‘Do you know what she has come up with now?’ Mum said in a lively tone as she hung up the phone.

‘What?’

‘Every day she orders pastries by phone from a local pastry shop. She has been eating five big slices of cream pie at a sitting.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘I suppose she thinks the sugar in her system will rocket off the charts and do her in.’

‘Surely she’s not thinking that. She must still remember something from her years as a doctor.’

‘I’m telling you, every day she eats slices of cream pie.’

‘So, how are her sugar levels?’

‘Nothing. Between five and six.’

‘Rotten luck.’

‘And she’s fired the cleaning lady.’

‘Why?’

‘Must be the lady wasn’t doing the job properly.’

‘How could Pupa tell, she’s half-blind!’

‘Good point. There, I wouldn’t have thought of that.’

Then she added gleefully, ‘As far as cleanliness goes, the old witch used to be worse than I was. I don’t remember anyone going into her house in their shoes. All of us were given rag pickers at the door.’

‘Rag slippers?’

‘Yes, I suppose the rag pickers have gone.’

Cleanliness is Half of Health

From our house, unlike Pupa’s, guests left with their shoes cleaned! My mother would sneak out to nab the shoes that visitors had taken off and set by the door when they came in and she’d take the shoes to the bathroom, where she’d rinse the dust or mud off the soles.

She was obsessed with cleanliness. A glistening flat, freshly laundered curtains, a gleaming parquet floor, freshly aired rugs, a wardrobe in which all the clothes were neatly folded, perfectly ironed linens, clean dishes, a bathroom that sparkled, windowpanes without a single smudge, everything in its place – all this gave her great satisfaction. She terrorised us – my father, brother and me – with cleanliness when I was small. Her daily cleaning rampages were accompanied by the phrase – We don’t want to smell bad the way… – and then she’d give the names of people who, apparently, smelled very bad. Lack of cleanliness was invariably coupled with the word ‘disgraceful’ (Disgraceful! That filth is disgraceful!). When I was small she would box me into the corner with a crate, and on the crate she’d arrange my toys. I stood trapped in the corner until the daily cleaning was done.

The last time I heard that word (Disgraceful!) and that intonation was three years back, during our last visit to my father’s graveside. We usually went there together, and if she couldn’t go, she’d send my brother and me.

‘It’s disgraceful the way people treat their tombs,’ she said pointing to nearby tombstones, and then she added,

‘Here, let’s rinse it one more time.’

To rinse it was to splash the tombstone with water. The whole job of cleaning the stone was arduous. You had to keep taking a bucket over to a water fountain that was not near by, and keep lugging bucketfuls of water back. Usually we scrubbed the tombstone with a brush and detergent, and she’d splash it with water over and over, but this time my mother was not satisfied.

‘So, a little more,’ she commanded.

The path from Dad’s grave to the cab stand was a long one, and she was walking along it, leaning on me, for the last time, though we had no idea then.

‘Now this one always sparkles,’ she said at a tomb we always passed. ‘But these others have been so neglected. Disgraceful!’

In hospital Mum confided in me that she’d sneaked out at night and gone back to the house.

‘Impossible. How?’

‘I slipped out and took a cab.’

‘What did you do at home?’

‘I quickly tidied everything up and then came right back here.’

‘I was at home the whole time; if you had come home, I would have noticed. You dreamed it.’

‘I did not,’ she said, a little anxiously.

I came to hospital every day. The first thing she’d ask when I appeared at the door was,

‘Did you tidy up the flat?’

Over the last three years we have often had to call an ambulance. It is the easiest and quickest way to sidestep the elaborate bureaucratic procedures and get my mother admitted immediately to hospital. We called an ambulance once when she was in a crisis. As the nurses, supporting her under the arms, were guiding her to the lift, Mum ducked down, spryly, and snatched up the plastic rubbish bag by the door, left there to be taken down and tossed into the bin.

‘Ma’am, please!’ shrieked the doctor, catching sight of her.

When I asked her to tell me something from her childhood, now she would answer curtly, describing it as happy.

‘What was happy about it?’ I’d ask.

‘Everything was clean, and Mother did us up so nicely.’

In hospital, with a tube in her mouth and an IV in her arm, she never let go of her handkerchief. She was constantly dabbing her lips. When she had recovered a little, she immediately asked me to bring her a clean pair of pyjamas:

‘Don’t bring them if they’re not ironed.’

Three years ago – when she sank quite suddenly into a lethargy – I took her first to a psychiatrist, probably unconsciously postponing the day I’d have to take her to hospital, which was what happened immediately thereafter.

The psychiatrist followed the routine.

‘Your first and last name, ma’am?’

‘Vacuum cleaner,’ she said softly, her head bowed.

‘Your name, ma’am?’ the psychiatrist repeated, this time more sharply.

‘Well… vacuum cleaner,’ she repeated.

I was flushed by a wave of idiotic embarrassment: I cannot say why at the time I felt as if it would have been easier to bear if she had said ‘Madonna’ or ‘Maria Theresa’.

While she was in hospital – where instead of the harsh judgement of the psychiatrist (Alzheimer’s!) her diagnosis turned out to be more ‘amenable’ – I began to wage my own battle, in parallel, for her recovery. I found someone willing to work from morning to night. He stripped the wallpaper that had nearly fused with the concrete. We painted the walls in fresh pastel colours. We redid the bathroom, laid new tiles and mounted a new mirror. I purchased a new washing machine, a new Hoover, I threw out the old bed in one of the rooms, and bought a bright-red modern sofa, a colourful new rug, a new pale-yellow wardrobe. On the balcony I set out potted plants in new flower pots (which were flourishing that year late into autumn!). I cleaned every corner of the flat and discarded old, useless things. The windows shone, the curtains were freshly laundered, the clothes in the wardrobe were neatly folded, everything was in its place. For the first time I felt I knew what I dared throw away, and what I should keep, and that is why I resisted the urge to toss out a homely old house plant with only a few leaves and left it where it was.

In the upper drawer of the dresser I left untouched the things she treasured: an old watch which had supposedly belonged to my grandfather, my father’s medals (the Order of Brotherhood and Unity with Silver Wreath, the Order for Valour), an elegant box with a sizeable collection of compasses and a Raphoplex slide rule (my father’s things), a key to the mail box from an earlier flat, an old plastic alarm clock with dead batteries, a box of Gura nails (judging by the design probably from East Germany), a silver-plated cigarette box, a Japanese fan, my old passport, opera glasses (from her trip with Dad to Moscow and Leningrad), a calculator with no batteries and a bundle of announcements of Dad’s death, held with a rubber band. I carefully polished the old silver basket-shaped bonbon dish, in which she kept her jewellery: a gold ring, a pin with a semi-precious stone (a gift from my father) and costume jewellery, which she called her pearls. Mum’s ikebana arrangement, the pearls tumbling out of the bonbon dish like writhing snakes, had stood for years in the place of honour on the shelf. I washed all of her dishes carefully, including the Japanese porcelain coffee service she never used. The service was intended for me. (When I die, I am leaving the coffee service to you. It cost me a whole month’s wages!) Everything was ready to welcome Mum home, each thing was in its place, the house glistened to her taste.

My mother came home and walked importantly around her little New Zagreb flat.

‘What have we here! This is the sweetest little surprise you could have given me!’

Come Here, Lie Down…

‘Come here, lie down,’ she says.

‘Where?’ I ask, standing by her hospital bed.

‘On that bed.’

‘But a patient is already lying on it.’

‘What about over there?’

‘All the beds are taken.’

‘Then lie down here, next to me.’

Although she was delirious when she said those words, the invitation for me to lie down next to her stabbed me painfully. The lack of physical tenderness between us and her restraint with expressing feelings – these were some sort of unwritten rule of our family life. She had no sense of how to express feelings herself, she had never taught us and it seemed to her, furthermore, that it was too late, for her and for us, to change. Showing tenderness was more a source of discomfort than of comfort; we didn’t know how to handle it. Feelings were expressed indirectly.

During her stay in hospital the year before, just after she’d turned eighty, my mother’s false teeth and her wig got their little hospital stickers with the name of the owner. She asked me to take the wig home (Take it home so it won’t be stolen). When they removed the tube, I took her bridge from the plastic bag with her name and surname on it and washed it. Every day after that I washed her false teeth, until she was able to care for them herself.

‘I washed your wig at home.’

‘Did it shrink?’

‘No.’

‘Did you set it on the, you know… so it wouldn’t lose shape?’

‘Yes, on the dummy.’

My attention to her, to her intimate affairs, meant, I figured, far more to her than physical contact. I asked the hospital hairdresser to come and cut her hair short, and she liked that. The hospital pedicurist trimmed her toenails, and I tended to her hands. I brought her face creams to hospital. Her lipstick was her signal that she was still among the living. For the same reason she stubbornly refused to wear the hospital nightgown and insisted that I bring her own pyjamas.

We went to a café near her flat for her eightieth birthday. She went through her customary routine: she got carefully dressed, put on shoes with heels, her wig, her lipstick.

‘Is it on right?’

‘Terrific.’

‘Should I pull it down a little more over my forehead?’

‘No, it’s better as it is.’

‘No one could tell it is a wig.’

‘Never.’

‘So, how do I look?’

‘Great.’

We sat in the café, outdoors, until a summer rain shower sent us inside.

‘How could it rain on today of all days! My eightieth!’ she complained.

‘It’ll pass in a minute,’ I said.

‘I get rained on for my eightieth birthday,’ she protested.

We sat in the café for a long time, but the rain did not let up.

‘We’ll take a cab! I cannot allow myself to get wet!’ she complained, though the chance that there would be a taxi willing to drive us 150 metres was slim. She was anxious about the wig. I protested that the wig would be fine.

‘I could catch my death!’

We called a cab. Her inner panic burned down like the candles on the birthday cake, which she blew out several hours later, in the company of her friends.

For the last thirty years, since my father died, she has withdrawn into her home. She was left standing there, caught off guard by the fact that he was gone, at a loss for what to do with herself. Time passed, and she continued to stand there, like a forgotten traffic warden, chatting with neighbours, while with us, her children, and later, her grandchildren, she complained about the monotony of her life. She despaired, often her life seemed a living hell to her, but she didn’t know how to help herself. She blamed us for a long time, her children: we had pulled away from her, we had left home, we no longer cared about her the way we used to, we had alienated ourselves (her phrase). Her list of refusals grew from one day to the next: she refused to live with my brother and his family (Why? So I can serve them, do all the cooking and washing?!), or to trade her flat for one in their neighbourhood (I’d be doing nothing but babysitting every day!), or travel with me while she still could (I’ve seen it all on television!), or on her own (I’m not setting out, alone like a sore thumb,with everyone watching!); she often refused to join us on short family get-togethers and excursions (You go ahead, it is too much for me!), spend significant time with her grandchildren (I’m old and sick, I’d do anything for them, but they tire me out!), with people her own age (What am I supposed to do with those old biddies!); she refused to talk to a psychologist (I’m not crazy, I don’t need a shrink!), pursue a hobby (What is the point? Consolation for dimwits!), revive neglected friendships (How can I socialise with them, with your father gone?), until finally she made her peace. She settled into the house, venturing forth only to take walks around the neighbourhood, go to the market, the doctor’s, a friend’s for coffee. Ultimately she went out only for a brief stroll to a little café at the nearby open market. Her firmly held opinions on small matters (Too sweet for my taste! I suppose I was raised to love spicy food!), her pugnacity (I will never wear those pads, I’d rather die. I am not some helpless little old lady!), her demands (Today we wash the curtains!), her candour (In hospital they were all so old and ugly!), her lack of tact (This coffee of yours smells awful!) – all were signals of an underlying anguish that had been smouldering in her for years, an ever-present sense that no one noticed her, that she was invisible. She did her level best to fend off this frightening invisibility with all the means to hand.

Once, during a family Sunday afternoon, I took some pictures of all of us in relaxed poses. I photographed her, my brother, my brother’s wife, the children, all of us together. And then I thought I’d take one of my brother’s family, just the four of them. They lined up, and at the last moment, with breathtaking agility, Mum shouldered her way in.

‘Me too!’

Every time I happened across that picture, it took my breath away. Her face, thrust into the frame, and her grin, both victorious and apologetic, melted away the heavy doors of my forbidden inner sanctum, and I would dissolve, if the verb ‘dissolve’ can describe what happened inside me at those moments. And when all my strength, the strength of my every nerve, was spent in sobs, I would spit out a tiny breathing body, five or six inches across, no larger than the smallest toy doll, with a shapely skull planted on the spinal column, a slight forward stoop, eyelids lowered as if asleep and, hovering on her lips, the hint of a smile. I’d study the fragile tiny body in the palm of my hand, all wet from tears and saliva, from some vast distance, with no fear, as if it were my own small baby.

The Cupboard

The first thing that caught my eye was the cupboard. I had picked it up by chance, during a previous visit, at a Sunday antiques fair. An old piece of homely, country furniture, with one of its sides fashioned at an angle. The old paint had been stripped, and in that lay its only value, in the old wood, stripped of paint. The cupboard had now been painted clumsily in off-white oil paint, and it stood there in the room like an admonishment.

‘This is the little surprise I told you about.’

She had mentioned in several phone calls that a little surprise was waiting for me at home, but I had paid no attention. This was a ploy of hers, she often used little secrets and little surprises as a lure, so I generally assumed that there was not much behind these promises.

‘Who painted it?’

‘Ala.’

‘Ala who?’

‘The young Bulgarian woman you sent me.’

‘As I remember, her name is Aba?’

‘Like I said, Ala.’

‘Not Ala, Aba!’

‘Fine, but why so angry?’

‘I’m not angry.’ I lowered my voice.

In fact, it bothered me. Not because of the cupboard, but because of the whole strategic operation she had undertaken out of her dislike for it. She could not bear the thought that this unpainted piece of junk was standing there in her flat; this was something out of her control, and she didn’t dare say so to me. In the past she would never have let things like that come through the door. Now, what with the new situation, she was more tolerant. But when the young woman showed up from Bulgaria, the first thing Mum came up with was this brilliant idea. She let Aba think, I assume, that I had intended to paint the cupboard myself, but had been pressed for time; how she would already have painted it herself, but, regrettably, she was no longer able to because of her illness. I assume she added that I would be so pleased when I saw the cupboard painted exactly the way I’d wanted it. I was guessing that she managed to talk the startled guest into painting it for her. It turned out that it was Aba, not Mum, who had done it – actually the two of them decided to cook up this little surprise for me.

‘I can’t imagine why she hasn’t been in touch lately,’ she worried.

‘Why would she?’

‘Since she left she has written several times. I got a few postcards from her.’

‘Really?’

‘She even called.’

Aba was a young woman from Bulgaria who had written to me a few months earlier by email. A Slavic scholar, apparently a fan of mine, she had read everything I’d written, spoke Croatian well, or Serbo-Croatian, or Croato-Bosno-Serbian, and by the way she was eager to hear what I thought of all that, since language is, after all, the writer’s only vehicle, n’est-ce pas? (N’est-ce pas? What was with the French?!), and she would love to talk to me about the language question, and about so many other things, of course, should I find myself in Zagreb over the summer. All in all, she hoped I would set aside some time for her. She was going to have loads of time. She had been given a grant to spend two months in Zagreb and had been invited to participate in the summer Slavic seminar in Dubrovnik. She would absolutely love to meet me, she had been dreaming of the moment ever since she read my first book. No, she didn’t know a soul in Zagreb, this was going to be her first time in Croatia.

The first thing that occurred to me was that this young woman from Bulgaria might be just the person to keep my mother company. Mum had been moving in a narrow circle for far too long; a new face would perk her up. She would love having the chance to speak a little Bulgarian, I wrote in my email. And moreover, I added, if Aba was having trouble finding a place to stay, she could stay in ‘my’ room in my mother’s flat. I sent her Mum’s phone number and address. I, regrettably, was not going to be in Zagreb during Aba’s visit. My suggestion should not obligate her in any way, of course, and I would understand if it might even sound a little insulting since my mother is an elderly woman, though that was in no way my intent.

Evidently it turned out quite differently. Aba stopped in frequently to visit, as Mum boasted, and the two of them became fast friends.

‘Ala is so wonderful, such a shame you weren’t here to get to know her. I have never met such a marvellous creature.’

By her voice I could tell she meant it.

‘She is very, very kind,’ she said, touched.

The habit of repeating a word twice when she wanted to draw attention to it was new, just as was her custom of dividing people into kind and unkind. The ones who were kind, were kind, of course, to her.

‘Look what she gave me.’

‘Who?’

‘Why, Ala.’

She showed me two wooden combs with folklore motifs and a bottle of Roza rose liqueur. A little card dangled from the neck of the bottle on a golden ribbon, and on the card were the words:

‘Springtime is upon us, the trees are decked in tender young leaves, the fields are a riot of flowers, the nightingales are singing sweetly and amid it all, like Venus among her nymphs, the rose gardens glow the reddest of reds,’ I read out loud.

‘Why are you rolling your eyes?’ she asked.

‘I am not.’

‘That is just the way it used to be,’ she said, taking a staunchly defensive tone. ‘Roses bloomed everywhere. Your grandmother made special preserves every year from rose petals.’

In the wardrobe she kept several hand-embroidered tablecloths. They were gifts from her Bulgarian relatives and friends, and she knew precisely who had embroidered each one: Dia, Rajna, Zhana. The fabric had yellowed and was threadbare along the folds, but the tablecloths, in Mum’s opinion, were priceless.

‘Do you have any idea how many stitches there are here?’ she would ask me, and with solemn importance she would announce a random six-figure number she had plucked from the air.

For years she had an unsightly reproduction hanging on the wall showing an old man in Bulgarian folk costume, smoking a peasant pipe.

‘Throw that out, it’s awful,’ I’d tell her.

‘I am not letting go of the picture! It reminds me of Dad!’ she’d answer, meaning her own father. Grandpa didn’t look at all like the man in the picture. Later, in order to keep the picture from my grasp, she said that Dad (this time meaning my father) had bought her the picture during one of our summer visits to Varna. The picture was deteriorating. I finally used one of her sojourns in hospital to throw it out. She didn’t notice it was gone, or pretended not to.

She kept a wooden doll on her television set dressed in Bulgarian folk costume. The doll often toppled off the TV, but she insisted on keeping it there and nowhere else.

‘To remind me of Bulgaria,’ she said.

The Bulgarian woman had served a function far more important than the chance to speak Bulgarian now and then: she had painted the cupboard. The souvenirs, the ones that were supposed to remind my mother of Bulgaria, could not be compared to the thrill of the cupboard.

Her home had always been her kingdom. When I moved out of Zagreb I no longer had a flat of my own there. Whenever I came back, I stayed with her. More than anything she loved having people visit, yet when they left she would mutter about how they had littered the place with unrinsed coffee cups. She adored her grandchildren, her eyes would well with tears at the mere mention of their names, but after they left she would moan about how long it would take her to get the flat back into order. Whenever I left the country, I would leave some of my things, mostly clothing, there with her. She let me leave only clothes. With time I noticed that even the clothes were disappearing. It turned out she’d given my coat away to a neighbour, a jacket to another, shoes to a third.

‘You didn’t need them any more, and people here haven’t money for nice things,’ she protested.

It wasn’t the things I cared about, it was her obsessive cleaning that bothered me, her maniac insistence that she could not permit anything in her territory which was not to her liking and was not her choice, which was, after all, the real reason why she was so generous in giving my things away.

If I bought a newspaper in the morning it would be gone by afternoon.

‘I lent your paper to Marta, my neighbour. She hasn’t the money to buy a paper. She’ll bring it back. But you’d read it already, anyway.’

When I bought myself food it, too, would end up at the neighbour’s.

‘That cheese you bought – didn’t suit me,’ she’d say. ‘I gave it to Marta’s sister.’

‘And the biscuits?’

‘I tossed them out. They were nasty, the look and the taste.’

She would object if I ever hung any of my clothes in her wardrobe. She left the bottom-most shelf in the shoe cabinet for my shoes. My things in the bathroom took up only a small corner, and she’d immediately protest if by any chance my things mingled with hers.

‘I haven’t touched a thing since you left. Everything is where it is supposed to be!’ were her first words to me whenever I came back.

This only meant that she had fought off the urge to tidy up and put everything in order.

I came often. She couldn’t spend her summer alone, or her Christmas holidays, or, of course, her birthday.

‘You’ll be here for my birthday, won’t you?’

Ever since she’d got sick I came more often and stayed longer. Each time I arrived I could see her beaming with genuine delight. Tears would fill her eyes when I left as if these were our very last goodbyes. But as soon as I was out the door, I knew she would head straight for the broom cupboard, roll the Hoover out, hoover ‘my’ room, put everything back where it was supposed to be, go to the bathroom, take all ‘my’ bits and pieces, the toothbrush, toothpaste, face cream, shampoo, and arrange them in ‘my’ cupboard. She was undoubtedly sniffling all the while, dabbing at the tears, and berating cruel fate for dealing her the destiny of an old age lived alone.

She had lost her feel for cooking, she no longer had the will or the strength, so I took over. But she couldn’t leave it be. She’d come into the kitchen, elbow me in the cramped space, rinse a few dishes, carp that I should do it this way, mutter that I would never learn a thing. The kitchen was the realm of her absolute authority, and she was defending it with her last ounce of strength.

When she heard me on the phone with someone, she’d come into ‘my’ room, she’d ask or say something, raising her voice like a parakeet in a cage, so that I would have to hang up. She did this without thinking, as if not aware of her actions.

‘I have to call the old witch,’ she said, seeing me holding the receiver.

‘Sure, let me finish this.’

‘I called her a couple of times and no one is picking up.’

‘We’ll call her.’

‘Ask Zorana, she’ll know.’

Zorana was Pupa’s daughter.

‘I’ll ask, just let me finish this.’

She stood, clutching the cupboard, and watched me.

‘And Ada hasn’t called.’

‘Aba.’

‘She hasn’t called, either.’

‘She will.’

‘We really ought to call them.’

‘Them’ is her way of referring to my brother and his family.

‘We called them this morning!’

‘Open the balcony store, the room is stuffy,’ she said and padded over to the door.

‘The balcony door,’ I said.

‘There, I’ve opened it.’

She had tidied everything and set it to rights, including the homely piece of junk, the cupboard, which I had brought into the apartment, just as she had been cleaning up and tidying her whole life. Only once, in a conversation about our first house, with its capacious garden, did she admit,

‘I was more anxious that the vegetable beds be hoed in straight lines than I was with what I’d plant or how it would grow.’

Her instalments to the funeral fund had been made regularly for years, so her funeral was fully paid for: her burial with all the formalities was guaranteed. Her mental and emotional territory had narrowed, it was all set out – like a box. Here, in this box, her two grandchildren, my brother and his wife were knocking about, along with two or three old friends (in that order of importance).

I was in there, too, of course. Sometimes she seemed to love our talks on the phone even more than our conversations in person. As if she felt freer over the phone.

‘I am sitting in your chair,’ she’d say, referring to my desk chair, ‘and looking at the flowers on the balcony and thinking of you. If you could only see how the flowers are blooming! It’s as if they’re weeping because you left.’

And then, as if shaken by her giddy sense of freedom, she would add in an unnaturally bright tone,

‘Goodness, how empty my life is!’

She had snapped shut almost all of her emotional files. One of them was still slightly open: it was Varna, the city of her childhood and youth. That is why she let the unknown woman from Bulgaria into her realm with such ready warmth.

Mother’s Bedel

As They Came, So They Went Away

‘I can hardly wait for you to come to Zagreb and tell me all about how it was in Varna! I can hardly wait,’ she repeated excitedly during every phone conversation. I could recognise in her voice the routine excitement she always expressed the same way: I can hardly wait.

I rehearsed versions of my report in my mind. Maybe it would be better to tell her I had stayed in Varna for two days, that the weather had been bad, which was true, and that I had hardly seen anything. Or should I tell her that with the help of a kind Varna policeman I had been able to locate her Petya, who looked well, beautiful in fact, had sent her regards, but, unfortunately, couldn’t write, because she was having difficulties writing. Her son, Kostya, who, by the way, had stopped drinking, was looking after her with genuine devotion. And Varna, Varna was so wonderful, but I hadn’t brought her any pictures because I pressed the wrong button on that new digital camera.

‘I don’t recognise anything here,’ she said, peering at the images on my computer screen. ‘Is that Varna?’

She was surprisingly cool and collected. Of the wall that separated the school yard from the street, she said, ‘No, that wall wasn’t there before. Something new.’

Amazingly she was not as disappointed by the grey scenes of the city beach as I had been.

‘That city beach was never very nice. Do you remember how we always preferred to go to Asparuhovo and Galata? The water was cleaner there.’

When I next visited I urged her to look at the photographs again. She seemed to have forgotten she’d seen them the first time. Her comments were identical, and her indifference troubled me. I had not received the anticipated ‘payment’ for my service as a bedel, the emotional reciprocation from her end. Then again, maybe I hadn’t deserved it. I had clearly done the job badly. I had brought back nothing from my pilgrimage, and received nothing in return. I can’t tell whether she had erased the Varna file in her memory, or had saved it somewhere else, but I was sure that neither she nor I would be opening it again any time soon.

This time I noticed that she had changed the way she walked. She was trying to stand a little straighter when she pushed her walker, and to lift her feet a little more with each step.

‘That is what Jasminka told me, to lift my feet.’

Jasminka was her physiotherapist.

We went, as usual, to her favourite café at the marketplace for coffee. She went in with the walker, stubbornly refusing to leave it outside (I don’t want anyone stealing it!). People had to get up and move their chairs to let her pass. I think she was not unaware that her arrival at the café with the walker was causing a fuss.

‘When you aren’t here with me, the waiters lend me a hand. They are all very, very kind. People are generally very kind, especially when they see me with the walker,’ she said.

She always ordered the same thing, a cappuccino, and Kaia or I would bring her a cheese turnover, a triangular piece of pastry, from the shop two steps down from the café. Without her ritual turnover and the cappuccino, the day wouldn’t function. If the weather was bad and she couldn’t go out herself, someone else would bring the turnover, and the cappuccino would be made at home.

After she sat for a bit, she had to go to the bathroom. She came back from the bathroom upset.

‘How could that happen to me! The prettiest little old lady in the neighbourhood!’ she grumbled.

She refused to wear the incontinence pads with the same obstinacy that she refused to wear flat-heeled orthopaedic shoes for the elderly (I can’t bear them! I have always worn heels!). Someone had told her she was the prettiest little old lady in the neighbourhood. A year earlier she would have been insulted by a similar sentiment, but now she was pleased to say it over and over: Everyone says I am the prettiest little old lady in the neighbourhood! It is true that she said it with a hint of irony. She used the phrase as an apology for her clumsiness and as a request to respect her ‘exceptional’ age. The incontinence was the worst insult her body had come up with for her. And she was irked by her forgetfulness (No, I did not forgot!) yet ultimately she relented (Maybe I forgot after all?) and finally she made her peace with it (It is hardly surprising that I forget things nowadays. I’m eighty years old, you know!).

‘If this happens again, I’ll kill myself straight away,’ she said, indirectly asking me to say something to console her.

‘It’s perfectly normal for your age! Look on the bright side. You are over eighty, you are up and about, you are in no pain, you live in your own home, you go out every day and you socialise. Your best friend, with whom you drink coffee every day, is ten years younger than you. Jasminka visits you three times a week. Kaia brings you breakfast, lunch and dinner every day, and she is an excellent cook and keeps you on schedule with your medical check-ups. Your doctor is only five minutes’ walk from your house, your grandchildren visit you regularly and love you, and I come to see you all the time,’ I recited.

‘If I could only read,’ she sighed, although she had little patience for reading any more, aside from leafing through newspapers.

‘Well, you can read, though, it’s true, with difficulty.’

‘If only I could read my Tessa one more time.’

She was referring to Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

‘As soon as you decide, we’ll go ahead with the operation. It is a breeze to remove age-related cataracts.’

‘At my age nothing is easy.’

‘I said a breeze, not easy. Do you want me to buy you a magnifying glass?’

‘Who could stand reading with a magnifying glass?!’

‘Do you want me to read you Tess out loud? A chapter a day?’

‘It’s not as nice when someone else reads to you as when you read for yourself.’

She responded to all my attempts to cheer her up with obstinate childish baulking. She’d give way for a moment (Maybe you’re right), but the next instant she would clutch at some new detail (Ah, everything would be different if I could only walk a little faster!).

‘I have changed so much. I barely recognise myself.’

‘What are you saying? You haven’t a single wrinkle on your forehead.’

‘Maybe so, but the skin sags on my neck.’

‘The wrinkles on your face are so fine they are barely visible.’

‘Maybe, but my back is so hunched.’

‘You’ve kept your slender figure.’

‘My belly sticks out.’ she complained.

‘Sure, a little, but nobody notices,’ I consoled her.

‘I have changed. I barely recognise myself.’

‘Can you think of anyone your age who hasn’t changed?’

‘Well, now that you ask,’ she’d relent.

‘What were you expecting?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Your beloved Ava Gardner, for instance.’

‘Ava was the most beautiful woman in the world!’ she said firmly, but with a hint of melancholy, as if she had been speaking of herself.

‘Ava died at the age of sixty-eight.’

‘You’re kidding!’

‘No, really, she had a stroke. Half of her face was paralysed. Near the end of her life she was penniless, so Frank Sinatra paid for her medical expenses.’

‘She? Broke!? I can’t believe it.’

‘Yes, she moved from the States to London. She was isolated there, she was probably no longer able to earn anything. Her last words to her servant Carmen were: “I am tired,”’ I said. ‘Story has it that Frank Sinatra locked himself up in his room for two days when he heard that Ava had died. They say he sobbed uncontrollably.’

‘Well, and so he should have!’ she said. ‘Such a little man, nothing much to look at, scrawny, a shrimp. Next to her he looked like a frog!’

‘What about Mickey Rooney?’

‘Why Mickey Rooney?’

‘Well, he was her first husband.’

‘Well, that Rooney was a shrimp too! Such an exquisite woman and around her she had only dwarves.’

‘Ava was only four years older than you.’

‘Ava was the most beautiful woman in the world!’ she repeated, ignoring the comment about the difference in their ages.

‘Take, for instance, Audrey Hepburn.’

‘That little woman? The skinny one?’

‘Yes. She died at sixty-four.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘And Ingrid Bergman?’

‘What about Ingrid Bergman?’

‘She died when she was sixty-seven.’

‘She was a little clumsy, but still exquisite.’

‘What about Marilyn Monroe? Marilyn was a two-month-old baby when you were born! And she died at thirty-six!’

‘Marilyn was my age?’

‘Your generation! You were both born in 1926!’

It seemed that the fact that she shared her year of birth with Marilyn Monroe left her cold.

‘What about Elizabeth Taylor?’ she asked.

‘She just celebrated her seventy-fifth. They wrote about it the other day in the papers.’

‘I can’t believe Liz is younger than me.’

‘A full six years!’

‘She, too, was a beautiful woman,’ she said. ‘There aren’t any more like her today.’

‘You should see her now!’

‘Why?’

‘They took a picture of her in her wheelchair for her birthday.’

‘How much older am I?’

‘Six years.’

‘Five and a half,’ she corrected me.

‘Just think how many operations she had,’ I added.

‘She had trouble with her spine.’

‘And alcohol, then those unhappy marriages.’

‘How many times was she married?’

‘Nine. When they reported her birthday celebration they said she may marry a tenth time.’

Mum grinned.

‘Hats off to her!’

At last we were talking. We chatted about Liz as if we were two good friends chatting about a third. I’m supposing that Mum was pleased to hear all that information. Liz was seventy-five and had her picture taken in a wheelchair. Mum would be turning eighty-one in another month or so, and she was not in a wheelchair. She wasn’t even fat.

‘I suppose beauty and fame don’t mean a thing,’ she said, relieved.

The expression on her face suggested that this time she was satisfied with the balance in her life.

‘Do you know what Bette Davis said?’

‘What?’

‘That old age is no place for sissies.’

‘Well, it isn’t,’ she said, heartened for a moment.

She often thought of herself as younger than she was. Once when she slid like this into a different, younger age, she addressed me as ‘Grandma’.

‘What, are you asleep, Grandma?’

She slid back and forth in time. She no longer knew exactly when different things happened. She would have been happiest to stay in her childhood, not because she thought of those years as the brightest period of her biography, but because her feelings in that period were ‘safe’, long since formulated, sealed, related many times over, chosen to be a repertoire which she was always able to offer her listeners. She retold the little events and details from her childhood in the same way, with the same vocabulary, ending with the same points or more often with the same absence of a point. It was a sealed repertoire which could no longer be corrected or changed, at least that was the way it seemed, and at the same time it was her only firm temporal coordinate. Sometimes, it’s true, harsh images would surface which I was hearing for the first time.

‘I was always afraid of snakes.’

‘Why?’

‘Once we went on an excursion to a wood and stumbled on a big old snake. Dad killed it.’

‘I hope it wasn’t poisonous!’

‘It was a price snake.’

‘You mean a dice snake?’

‘Yes, it was a big bad old snake and Dad killed it.’

She used to call my father, her husband, Dad, while she usually referred to her own father as Grandpa. Now she was using Dad to refer to her father.

Three years had passed since she’d been given the ‘ugly diagnosis’. Would there be another year? Two? Five? Bartering with death suited her (If I could just stick around for my grandson’s birth! If I could see my grandson start first grade! If I only have the chance to see my granddaughter start school!). There was one thing for certain: she had taken care of it all, wrapped everything up, everything was ‘neat and tidy’, it was ready. She sat in life as if she were in a clean, half-empty doctor’s waiting room: nothing hurt, nothing moved much, she was waiting to be summoned and it was as if she no longer cared when it would happen. All that mattered was her everyday rhythm: Kaia came over at 7:30 a. m., she ate her breakfast while watching the morning television programme Good Morning, Croatia, then she got dressed and went out to the café for her cappuccino and cheese turnover, her slow return home with little chats along the way with neighbours, then waiting for Kaia to bring her lunch at about 1:30 p. m., then an afternoon nap, then Kaia with her dinner at about 6:30 p. m., dining with her favourite television show, The Courtroom, and then the television news, then off to bed. Kaia came three times a day and went with her for the walk to the café where they had their coffee together. Jasminka came three times a week, helped her with little exercises and to bathe, neighbours dropped in every day, she saw her grandchildren once a week, usually on Sundays. I called her at least three times a week, and I often came to Zagreb, staying several days or more.

She was sleeping more than she used to. Sometimes she slept so soundly that she wasn’t even wakened by the phone ringing or my banging on the door. When she lay down she took the same pose as on her CAT scans, her head tilted a little forward. She lay there peacefully, relaxed, with a hint of a smile on her lips. Sitting in the armchair she would often dip into a brief, deep sleep as if slipping into a hot bath. I happened upon her when she was asleep, sitting in front of the blaring television, her head bare, duster in hand. Then she opened her eyes, slowly lifted the duster, a small brush on a long handle around which she’d wrapped a soft rag, and wiped the television screen clean of dust. Then, spotting a smudge on the floor, she got up and slowly, shuffling, she went to the bathroom, moistened the rag, wrapped it around the brush, went back and sat down in the armchair again, and from there she wiped up the smudge.

‘Buy me those sphincters, they are the best,’ she’d say.

‘You must mean Swiffers, Mother.’

‘Yes, we’re out of them.’

I had been bringing her those boxes with the magical soft cloths, which were ‘death to dust’ (Those cloths are death to dust!). Shuffling around the house, she wielded the light plastic handle with a Swiffer cloth wrapped around the rec tangular base, and with slow movements she wiped the dust off the walls, the furniture, the floor. The bright sun shone through the lowered blinds and splashed the floor with golden specks. She stood there in the middle of the room sprinkled with shafts of sunlight, her hair cropped close to her shapely head, her pale face with slightly slanted light-brown eyes and her lips surprisingly still full, awash in the sun as if it were an abundance of gold coins. A million particles of dust were afloat in the air around her, shimmering. She’d wave the handle through the air to chase them away, but the golden particles remained. And then she’d sit in the chair again and sink back into sleep. The golden dust swam around her. Sitting like that under an array of sun specks, surrendered to sleep, she looked like an ancient slumbering goddess.

Once, when she started awake, she said, groggily,

‘Do you know what my mother once told me?’

‘What?’

‘That when she was giving birth to me there were three women standing there by her bed. Two were dressed in white, and the third was in black.’

‘Do you suppose those were the Fates who determine your destiny?’ I asked, cautiously.

‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘Most likely mother was suffering from the labour and hallucinated them. Two in white, one in black,’ she mumbled, and sank back to sleep.

During those fifteen days in March 2007, the sunrise was so lavish and bright that we had to lower the blinds every morning. The air had the smell of spring. My mother’s balcony was neglected; the soil in the flower boxes was dry.

‘We should buy some fresh loam and plant some flowers,’ I said.

‘We will be the first to have flowers in our building!’

‘Yes, the first.’

‘Yes, pelargoniums.’

Sparrows settled onto the balcony railing. That was a good sign; Mother was convinced that this year there wouldn’t be a swarm of starlings.

‘Those pests are gone,’ she said.

‘Which pests?’

‘You know, the darlings!’

‘Starlings are birds, darlings are your grandchildren.’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘What did you say?’

‘That the pests are gone.’

Then she added, with an air of mystery,

‘As they came, so they went away.’