Mama Leone

You’re the angel

When I was born a dog started barking in the hall of the maternity ward. Dr. Srećko ripped the mask from his face, tore out of the delivery suite, and said to hell with the country where kids are born at the pound! I still didn’t understand at that point, so I filled my lungs with a deep breath and for the first time in my life confronted a paradox: though I didn’t have others to compare it to, the world where I’d appeared was terrifying, but something forced me to breathe, to bind myself to it in a way I never managed to bind myself to any woman. Recounting the event later, first to my mother, and then my father, and as soon as I grew up, to friends, they brushed me off, said I was making stuff up, that I couldn’t have remembered anything, that there was no way I could’ve started drawing ontological conclusions the first time I cried. At first I was pissed they thought me a liar, and I wasn’t above spilling a few bitter tears, hitting myself in the head, and yelling you’ll be sorry when I’m dead! With the passing of years I calmed down, having figured that this world, of which I already knew a little and could compare with my experience and my dreams, was predicated on mistrust and the peculiar human tendency to think you a total idiot whenever you told the truth and take you seriously the second you started lying. This aside, relatively early on, when I was about five or six, I came to the conclusion that everything connected with death was a downer and so decided to shelve my threats of dying, at least until I solved the problem of God’s existence. God was important as a possible witness; he’d be there to confirm my final mortal experience and he could vouch for me that I hadn’t lied about the one in the delivery suite.

Does God exist? I asked my grandma Olga Rejc, because of anyone I met in those first six years of my life, she seemed most trustworthy. For some people he does, for others he doesn’t, she replied calmly, like it was no big deal, like it was something you only talked about all casual and indifferent. Does he exist for us? It was most diplomatic formulation I could manage. The thing was, I’d already noticed how my family placed exceptional value on my socialization efforts and loved me talking about stuff in the first-person plural: when are we having lunch, when are we going out, when are we coming down with the flu. . at least at the outset I thought questions of faith would be best set in this context. For me, God doesn’t exist, she said, I can’t speak for you though. It was then I learned about truths you only spoke for yourself and in your own name. I was pretty okay with all this, though less than thrilled I hadn’t been able to resolve the God question off the bat.

Ten years later I still wasn’t straight with God, but I’d figured the moment Grandma decided he didn’t exist. It was early spring, everyone was out somewhere and I’d stayed back at home alone. As usual I started rummaging through their wardrobes. I never knew what I was looking for but always found something, something linked to the family, Mom and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa, something they’d tried to hide from me from some reason. Their private histories were so dark, or at least they thought them so, and my investigative spirit so very much alive, that after a few months’ work on their biographies I knew way more from my secret sources than they ever told or admitted to me in the rest of my life put together. My starter’s curiosity soon turned into an obsession, and then into a mania. I’d be disappointed if I didn’t turn up something juicy or dirty. I wanted proof my father was a homosexual, my mother an ex-tram driver, Grandpa a spy or at least a gambler who’d lost half of Sarajevo in a game of Preference. I loved them all, you have to believe me, but even more I loved the little testimonies of things they’d wanted to hush up so they’d make it into heaven — if only in the eyes of their son and grandson.

But that was the day I discovered the false bottom in the big bedroom wardrobe. I lifted up the base and found a carved wooden box, a round glass container, and a green folder full of documents. I laid everything out on the rug, heaved a sigh, and opened the box. It was full of dirt. Regular brown dirt with little stones and blades of long-dried grass that disintegrated to the touch. They won’t be planting flowers in this dirt, I thought, and then, not without some trepidation, sunk my fingers into the box to explore. But there was nothing there, just pebbles, grass, and all this dirt. You wouldn’t believe the amount of dirt that can fit in a wooden box. Much more than you’d think. You want to picture what I’m talking about, then tomorrow grab a cardboard box — I mean, I doubt you’ve a wooden one at hand — go to the park, and fill it up with dirt. You won’t believe your eyes!

I moved on to the glass container. It held a pocket watch, a ring (it was too big for my ring finger, I tried it on), this miniature metal figurine of some saint, a tie pin, and a little booklet by Anton Aškerc, printed in Slovenian, the pages the thinnest I’ve ever seen. The only other things were these two green army buttons with spread-winged eagles, which gave me the heebie-jeebies because I had the feeling I’d seen them somewhere before.

Before opening the folder I stopped to think of all the stuff you’re not supposed to know about in life. I wondered about the secrets that have to stay secret so the world makes some kind of sense, but since I couldn’t remember any, I decided to push on. The folder contained three bits of paper. A birth certificate in the name of M.R., a baptism certificate in the name of M.R., and a telegram that read: “We hereby inform you that private M.R. perished in battle against a Partisan band on September 10.”

M.R. was my uncle. I knew he died in the war, and I knew he wasn’t a Partisan, but I’d never dreamed that he was the enemy.

I put everything back in its place and closed the wardrobe. Closing it, I knew nothing in my life would ever be the same as before I discovered the false bottom. I also knew my investigations into the family were over. Now it was time for asking questions, but only of those who questions wouldn’t hurt and who could answer them without leaving a bloody trail in their wake.

I waited for days for my chance, but it never came. Grandma almost never left the house, and when she did Mom wasn’t there, and Mom was the only one I could ask. She didn’t know her brother. She was born four months before he died, and although he never saw her, he gave her her name. Grandpa had wanted to call her Regina, but M. wanted his sister named after a tree native to Bosnia. The tree’s native to other countries too, but we didn’t care about other countries because they were just places Grandpa, Uncle, my father, and everyone else went to war.

I went to see Mom at work. Can we have half an hour alone? She frowned, and I could already tell what she was thinking: he’s going to admit he’s a druggie, he’s got some girl pregnant, he got his fourteenth F in math, he’s a homosexual. . I wagged my index finger left-right, though we hadn’t yet said a word. I sat down. Everything’s fine, just give me a second. But Mom just got more wound up. I had to get it out before she jumped out the window and broke her leg. Me: I opened the wardrobe. Mom: It had to happen sometime. Me: I found something. Mom: What? Me: Everything. Mom: Even the dirt? Me: From the grave, right? Mom: Please, just one thing. Don’t ever tell her. Me: I know. I came to you.

The part of the story that follows I learned back then, from my mom, and it goes something like this. When he finished high school, the same one I’d attend fifty years later, my uncle got the draft. Because he spoke perfect German and had a German grandfather, they put him in a unit formally part of the Wehrmacht but made up of our people. They sent them to Slavonia in Croatia. My grandpa combed the city in a blind panic, badgering one acquaintance after another in one office after another, just trying to get his son out of the army. But of all his connections, only a Communist one proved any good. A friend, a manager in the railways and member of the resistance, told him how it could be arranged for M. to desert his unit and be taken in by Bosnian Partisans a couple of kilometers from his base. Grandpa was all for the idea, but when he relayed it to Grandma, she got scared. For a start she thought in his German uniform the Partisans would shoot her son on sight, and even if they didn’t, he’d be sure to lose his head in a Partisan one. More to the point, she was of the view that he was safer being the enemy. Grandpa tried to persuade her, but it did no good. He hollered so loud the whole apartment shook, desperate because he himself wasn’t sure what was best, but also because he was certain how it all might end, who had justice on their side, and who would win the war. Mom of course had no idea what all Grandpa’s hollering was about, but I’m sure he hollered the exact same thing when I was just a boy and he told me the story of the Second World War: Hitler’s an idiot. That’s what I said right back in 1939. Idiots lose wars, but they kill more people than you could ever imagine. And then that trash Pavelić came along. He sent our kids to Stalingrad and turned them into criminals. He created a shitty little state dangling out a big Kraut ass. That was Pavelić for you, and I knew that from the get-go, but that knowledge doesn’t help you any, because it won’t save your neck. I think that was also about the gist of what he yelled at Grandma in the fall of 1971, when he again made the house shake and went as red in the face as the Party flag, and his lips went blue and Mom went up to him and shook him by the shoulders and said Dad, calm down, calm down. . But he wouldn’t calm down, he just went on, hollering about Maks Luburić, who cooked people in boiling water and in March 1945 skinned Grandpa’s railwayman friend alive in the house of horror in Skenderija. Then Mom started crying, imploring Daddy, sweetheart, please stop, for God’s sake, I beg of you. . Suddenly he calmed down, not for God’s sake, but because of her tears. He put a funny face on and said let us alone you silly woman, can’t you see we’re talking about men’s stuff. Then he turned to me and whispered politics isn’t for women. They just start bawling. Golda Meir is the exception. Back then I didn’t know Grandpa had tricked me, that he’d actually told me another story, not the one I thought he was telling me. Mom didn’t bawl like other women when politics came up. That I know from when I found the box.

Anyway, when Grandpa was done yelling at Grandma, having failed to convince her to go along with the Partisan plan, which she steadfastly rejected, Grandpa started living months of his own private hell. He’d wake at night, bathed in sweat, with a single recurring thought: that M. wasn’t coming home, and that if he did, the sum of Pavelić’s and Hitler’s crimes would be on his conscience. Grandma was only worried about one thing: that her son stayed alive, the how was no matter. It was in those months she started praying to God.

How they took the news of Uncle’s death, whether they cried, yelled, screamed, or just absorbed it in silence, I’ll never know. A few months after the liberation of Sarajevo four young guys in Partisan uniforms showed up on their doorstep. Grandma cried, Grandpa held his face in his hands to keep it from crumbling like a ceramic mask. One of the young guys put his hand on Grandma’s shoulder and said don’t cry, madam. You’ve got another child. Look at your little girl. M. talked about his baby sister every day. My mom, a blond baroque angel, sat on her potty in the corner.

Seven days after my uncle’s death, the unit in which he’d been stationed deserted in its entirety and went over to the Partisans. To that point M. had been their only casualty. At war’s end three more lay dead. But they were no longer the enemy.

Grandpa and Grandma lived together for a full thirty years after the death of their son, never speaking of him. They held their silence in front of others and probably held it between themselves. Don’t expect me to be so banal as to say I know Grandma blamed herself for her son’s death. She never once set foot in a church again, she forgot Christmas and Easter, and only once a year did Grandpa put on his best suit and head to Sarajevo Cathedral for midnight mass. He didn’t have much of an ear, but he liked singing the songs heralding the birth of the eternal child.

Grandma didn’t decide that God doesn’t exist, more that he just had nothing to do with her. She stopped believing in him even if he did exist. Grandpa died in 1972, and Grandma began her dying in the early spring of 1986. She had throat cancer and it got harder and harder for her to breathe. Sometimes she’d call me by M.’s name. They were little slips and I didn’t call her on them. Or maybe they weren’t little slips at all. By that time I was her only surviving son.

At the beginning of June, an ambulance came and took her to the hospital to die. They cut her throat open, but she still couldn’t breathe. She fixed her gaze straight ahead and set her hands together. I smiled like it was all no big thing and that she’d be better tomorrow. But I knew exactly what was going down. Death came slyly and unfairly. It grabbed my grandma by the throat and shook everything left out of her. What was left was the memory of her son. She died during the night of the fifth of June.

Like all old folk, she’d talked about her funeral while still in good health. Under no circumstances whatsoever did she want her photograph to appear in her obituary, over her dead body. But she didn’t mention anything about a priest. No one had asked of course. That would have been stupid.

Over her dead body, we got a priest and paid for a memorial service. I can’t explain why to you. Maybe so that God, if he exists, smartens up his act. That’s how a friend of Grandma’s put it.

I never even visited her grave come All Saints’ Day. I can’t tell you why. I just didn’t ever feel like it. I was sorry she’d died, particularly in such a terrible way; I guess I thought visiting the grave would be to honor such a death. A few days before this most recent war, my friend Ahmed’s father died. On my way back from the janazah, instead of heading for the exit gate I decided to take a walk over to the Catholic plots. On the tombstone under which my grandpa and grandma were buried, a huge black dog lay sprawled out in the sun. I sat down beside him, and he lifted his head lazily, looking at me with half-closed eyes. I’d long since stopped caring that no one had believed my first insight and first memory, the one of a dog barking in the hall of the maternity ward the moment before I let out my first scream. You’re the angel, aren’t you? He wagged his tail on the marble a couple of times and sunk back into sleep. My hand followed him.

How I started shouting in my sleep

Through the summer and fall Grandpa recited his last words and got ready to die. To Isak Sokolovski, his Preference partner, he said I know every card and that’s why I’m leaving. He spun his hat on his index finger, cleared his throat for the last time in Isak’s life, and left. To Grandma he said you sleep, I’m fine. I’ve been fine for some time now. She was sleepless until the day he died. To Mom he said there’s no one left. Just the two of us and the darkness. And then he died. Mom closed his eyes and wrote the words down on a box of laxatives. I was at the seaside at the time, with my auntie Lola, Grandma’s sister. I marked the date in the calendar with a little cross. So people would know my grandpa had died. Actually, no, I did it so they’d know I knew my grandpa was dead.

That day Auntie Lola baked some cakes, put a plateful in front of me, sat down across from me, and placing her elbows on the table said eat up, little man. I ate, scared she was going to tell me Grandpa had died. I didn’t know how I was supposed to react. Was I supposed to stop eating cakes, burst into tears, ask how he died, shake my head, and say tsk-tsk-tsk like I saw Granny Matija from Punta doing the time I peeked out from the pantry, or was I supposed to do something else, something I didn’t even know about. I’m only six years old and don’t have any experience with the rituals of death. I ate a plateful of cakes and got a tummy ache. I climbed into bed, the blinds were down so it looked like it was dark. I flew a plane through the darkness. I didn’t do the brmm brmm brmm because the plane was supersonic so you couldn’t hear it, but eavesdropped on what Auntie Lola told the neighbors gathered in the kitchen with their gifts of coffee, bottles of rakia, and something else I couldn’t see. The good Signore Fran suffered so, may God rest his soul, said Ante Pudin. He’s at peace now, but who knows what awaits the rest of us, said Uncle Kruno, a retired admiral. The little one might as well be an orphan now; parents today, God save us. Whatever he learned, he learned from his grandpa, said Auntie Lola. My tummy still hurt. I shut my eyes tight, farted, and fell asleep.

Seven days later, Mom and Grandma arrived from Sarajevo, head to toe in black. I pretended this was normal. They pretended it was too. I was scared Mom was going to start talking about it so kept out of her way. I knew Grandma wouldn’t say anything. She wasn’t one for starting conversation; she’d leave it up to me and then join in. It was like she kept quiet about things I didn’t want to talk or hear about. There was nothing to say about Grandpa’s death, just as there’s nothing to say about anyone’s death. I had no idea death was a widespread occurrence, that grown-ups talked about it all the time.

Between thunderclaps of his rasping asthmatic cough, Grandpa would every morning repeat sweet, sweet death and Grandma would say zip it Franjo, I’ll go before you do, and so it went every day. I thought other people didn’t go on like this, just the two of them, that they were special people because they were my grandma and grandpa, and that everyone else was just a puppet in a puppet theater. When Grandpa died it turned out Grandma was a pretender. I thought she should be ashamed of herself because she’d done something bad. She’d said she would go before him, but now he was dead. You don’t really die of your own choosing, but it does have something to do with you, so you shouldn’t say you’re going to die before someone else if you’re not. Later on I forgot about Grandma’s shame. Probably because it didn’t seem like she was ashamed.

Once we went to visit Auntie Mina in Dubrovnik. Mom said I don’t know if the little fella knows. I was playing with the garden gnomes and making like I didn’t hear anything. Auntie Mina looked at me in silence. She would’ve loved to ask me if I knew about my grandpa’s death, but didn’t dare. You don’t ask kids those kinds of questions. The poor old boy peed his soul out, Mom told Auntie Mina. The hospital botched the treatment plan. They shouldn’t have given him the laxatives. His heart turned into a rag, into an old scrap of a rag for washing the floor. The gnome gave me the evil eye. I felt lost in this terrifying world. So it is, fairy tales don’t lie after all: my grandpa died without a heart, in its place was a dirty, ugly, smelly square rag like the one we kept next to the toilet seat. I wanted to howl for the horror of it all, but couldn’t.

From that day on, whenever I’d go pee, I was scared I was going to pee my soul out. I watched the jet stream, white or yellow, or really yellow when I was sick. I didn’t know what a soul looked like, but I was sure I’d recognize it if it whizzed out. Days went by and it still didn’t show. Then months. I asked Grandma what a soul looked like. She said a soul doesn’t look like anything, that it was just a word for something you couldn’t see. Can you poop your soul out? I asked, trying to find out what I wanted to know, but trying to hide where all this was coming from, to avoid admitting I knew Grandpa was dead and any opportunity for her to mention it. What do you mean can you poop your soul out? she asked, nonplussed. I mean, when you poop your soul out and die, so you don’t exist anymore, I said like it was common knowledge and highly unusual that she didn’t know anything about it. You mean, can someone die on the toilet? I think you can, but people don’t usually die there. . Where do people usually die?. . In bed or traffic accidents, or they die in war or earthquakes. . And the soul, what happens to the soul?. . Nothing, the soul disappears. . How can something that exists disappear?. . Just like jam, it gets used up and disappears. . Does the soul disappear inside you or go outside and then disappear?. . Where would it go, it doesn’t have anywhere to go, it’s not like a dog being let out. It disappears, ceases to exist, end of story. . So all in all, you can’t poop your soul out?. . Not a chance, I don’t know where you got that idea from.

This set my mind at ease some. I peed fearlessly and didn’t bother looking at the whiz anymore. If you can’t poop your soul out then you can’t pee it out either. Mom had been talking nonsense to Auntie Mina.

Six months after Grandpa’s death, Grandma and Mom suddenly stopped wearing black. It was a Sunday, Uncle and Dad had come over. The table was set with a fancy white tablecloth, like it was someone’s birthday or someone was getting married. Today we remember Grandpa, Uncle said. I pretended this was normal, like I didn’t remember him every day. Maybe I lie when I play Ustashas and Partisans by myself because I’m not a Ustasha or a Partisan and because one person can’t be two people at the same time, but they lie worse when they remember Grandpa today, getting out the special plates, cutlery, and glasses, walking around the house in their ties, not taking off their shoes when they come in, doing all the things they never otherwise do and lying that they don’t remember him every day. How could they not remember him when he was here all the time, when it was just recently and they haven’t forgotten anything, and his umbrella is still there by the coatrack. I was scared of their lies. The lie is alive, I thought. It swallows things up and makes everything different from what it is.

First we’ll have a teeny-weeny bit of soup, said Mom. She always talked like that when she remembered I was there. When she forgot, then she’d cuss and talk all serious. And then we’ll have the suckling. I got it from Pale, it’s not even five months old, said Dad. I looked at Grandma. She sat there smoking quietly. Uncle was talking about dam-building in Siberia.

My heart started pounding like crazy. Everyone sat there polite as pie reminiscing about Grandpa and waiting for it to arrive — the thing Dad got from Pale. The suckling must have done something really bad, otherwise it wouldn’t have ended up in the oven. I thought we were going to eat a baby and I was sure we weren’t eating it because it was tasty or because it was customary for people to eat a baby in memory of a dead grandpa but because they were warning me what would happen if I were naughty.

I was sweating some as I ate my soup and couldn’t hear what they were talking about anymore. I was completely alone, my heart beating inside my ears, wanting to get out. When Mom cleared the soup plates and said now for the delicacy, I shut my eyes. I tried to take deep breaths, but something caught, and it was like I was sobbing.

I looked up and saw a big round silver platter stacked with slices of roast meat. Dad grabbed a fork, dug it into the biggest bit, and put it on Uncle’s plate. He gave a smaller piece to Grandma, then a bit to Mom, and then he fixed his eyes on me. Gosh, you’re pale. More blueberry juice, more beetroot, and more meat for you. That’s what he said putting a bit of the infant’s flesh on my plate.

He didn’t live with us. Mom and Dad were separated, but he’d come visit once a week or whenever I’d get the flu, bronchitis, a cold, measles, tonsillitis, angina, diarrhea, or rubella. He’d place his stethoscope on my back and say deep breath, now hold it, and I’d take a deep breath or not breathe at all. I assumed Mom and Dad didn’t love each other, but I would have never figured Dad bringing dead babies over for Mom to roast. Today was actually a first, the day we were all supposed to remember my dead grandpa.

I ate the meat, but couldn’t taste the flavor. When Grandma said eat the salad, I thought I was going to cry, but I didn’t because I was too scared. That night I shouted in my sleep for the first time. When I woke up, Grandma was stroking my forehead. But it wasn’t her anymore, it wasn’t her hand, and it wasn’t my forehead, and I was no longer me. Nothing in my life was ever the same after the day we ate that suckling. For a while I hoped Grandpa wouldn’t have let us eat babies, but later I realized that it didn’t have anything to do with him, that it was just a custom, that people scare naughty children with this one everywhere, because really naughty children end up in the oven.

I never mentioned Grandpa’s death, not even after I accidentally found out that a suckling was the name for a little pig, and not a baby person. It didn’t matter anymore because I’d already started shouting in my sleep, and the shouting continued, the reasons don’t matter, and I don’t even know what they were anymore.

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Words flowed in cascades, gushing over the edges of the world being born, making laughter, lots of laughter, echoing through all our rooms and the biggest of all, the room under the sky, the one where we’re all still ourselves, and so speak words out of joy, words superfluous and with no connection to the world or to the pictures in which we live and which cause us pain. Only words cause no pain, in them there is no sorrow, they take nothing from us, and never leave us on our own in the darkness.

On my first birthday Mom went back to Sarajevo; I stayed behind in Drvenik between Grandma and Grandpa, between stone walls and below high ceilings with spiders crawling along them, hanging by the barest of threads, free as the air, and lying on the bed, completely still, as if bound to the earth, I understood that the difference between me and them, me and the spiders, was one of eternity, and that I would always remain down here, lying on my back gazing up at them, and that nothing, only words, could help me get closer. Someday I’ll say that that’s where I go, up there, that I hang by a thread like they do, that at night, when Grandpa and Grandma are sound asleep, I live among the spiders and that’ll be the truth, they’ll be words, everyone believes in words, and it’ll be no matter that I’m stuck to the bed and that I’ll never be able to jump high enough to stay up with the spiders. In words I could do anything, even before I knew how to say them.

I’m three years old crouching bare-bottomed in the sea shallows in front of our house. Old Uncle Kruno is coming down the street, calling to me what are you up to Signore Miljenko? I’m happy about being a signore, but I know he’s only joking. I’m catching crabs, I reply, and Uncle Kruno laughs because he hears something else; he thinks I’m saying I’m watching wabs, because I can’t say words beginning with c properly. He doesn’t know I’m just saying that I’m catching crabs, because actually I really am just watching them, I’m scared of their claws, but what I’m saying is the truth. He goes away thinking I’m catching crabs.

Six months later I caught my first crab, his claws were weak and he was really mad and tried to get my finger, but his claws only tickled me. I pulled one off, then the other, but he kept thrashing his legs, not like he was hurt but like he was still really mad. Then I pulled his legs off; he had lots of legs, more than I knew how to count. I left him with just one and put him down on a rock. He wriggled across, but he couldn’t walk. I didn’t know if he was still mad. I looked for his eyes but couldn’t find them, maybe a crab doesn’t have eyes; they don’t know how to talk, maybe they can’t see anything either. I picked up a rock and banged him with it. He splattered everywhere, but he didn’t have any blood in him, he was yellow inside. That one crab turned into lots of pieces, but none of them wriggled. Then the waves carried them off somewhere, washing from the rock any trace that a crab had ever been there.

The day Mom came back from Sarajevo I decided to show her the crabs. I’d already told her that I catch them, and she’d just nodded her head and said yes, yes, that’s my boy, but for her words were something else. Everything she said you had to be able to be see, and she only believed in words when there was a picture to go with them. I didn’t like that about her, but then I realized that everyone, really everyone was like Mom, and that only Uncle Kruno believed I was catching crabs if I just told him so. I got a plastic bag and went down to the shore where there were lots of crabs, I caught some and put them in the bag, Mom called me inside, yeah, just a little bit longer, but she didn’t ask what I was doing, she thought I was playing, and when you play, for her that’s like you’re doing nothing, she never thought I’d ever catch crabs because she didn’t know how to catch them.

I crept back in the house, opened the drawer where the knives and forks were kept, and tipped the crabs in. They were all alive and started crawling over the silverware. It’ll be lunchtime soon, Mom will set the table because that’s what she always does when she comes back from Sarajevo, here she is, opening the drawer, now Mom’s screaming, Mom bursts out crying Dad, look at this, Grandpa puts the newspaper down, jumps up from his chair, looks in the drawer, and laughs your boy was out catching crabs. Mom looks at me, her eyes are big like the biggest blue Christmas tree decorations; she won’t get mad at me, she can see how little I am, but I can do something she can’t and that she’ll never be able to do, I catch crabs for her, I catch them so she’ll believe me and won’t think my words are things that don’t exist.

Then Mom goes back to Sarajevo again. It’s winter, I’m scared of the dark, there’s no power, but there are two lights in the room: the brown light of the gas lamp and the blue light of the gas stove. The blue light is like night snow, but actually it’s hot. Grandpa lights a cigarette, he’s all wrinkly; when he sweats, beads run down his wrinkles, and his face turns into rivers running through a gray-gold land. When he sweats, I can imagine a whole crowd of people building houses on his face, sitting in the dark and sweating like him; on Grandpa’s face lives another little grandpa, who also sits in the dark, lights a cigarette, rivers run down his face too, and next to them live even smaller people and even smaller grandpas, and they too sit in the dark, in blue and brown light, next to their grandsons who on their grandpas’ faces see crowds of even smaller people and even smaller grandpas. Only we don’t live on somebody’s face, we live in the big wide world, in which everything is real and terrifying.

The rooms of our house in Drvenik are full of pictures. Most of them were painted by Popa Lisse, my cousin Mladen’s grandpa. They’re of Drvenik, the same one where we live today, but lots smaller and somehow weird, like you’re looking at it with eyes full of tears. The pictures are real, the houses in them are real and so are the people who live in the houses, but you can’t see them because they’re inside. I’m inside our house in Popa Lisse’s paintings too, I’m just lots smaller, weird, and invisible. When I look at them before I go to bed, I always know that come the morning I’ll be outside the pictures again and that I’ll be looking at the real, big Drvenik. The paintings were only done so that at night we don’t forget we’re in Drvenik and don’t get surprised when we go outside again.

Above the bed where I sleep there’s a little picture with my mom in it. Mama was my first word, I said it looking up at her face above my head, and when Mama would go to Sarajevo, I’d point at the picture and say Mama, Mama, and then it was hard for Grandma because she didn’t think it was Mom in the picture but couldn’t tell me that because she thought I’d start crying. That’s what she told me later, and I thought that was funny. Why would I cry when I know it’s Mom in the picture and that nobody else in the whole world looks like that, nobody else’s mom, just my mom. She looks down at me from the picture, she’s far away and wants to tell me something, but she’s so far away that not even a single word can be heard between us, and she’ll keep looking at me until she comes back to Drvenik or we go to Sarajevo.

The picture isn’t in Sarajevo, only in Drvenik, and I only look at it when Mom’s not here. The picture is like a word you whisper in someone’s ear, a word no one else in the whole world hears, it exists only between her and me, and others think it doesn’t exist; others think it’s someone else in the picture, because they don’t see the picture with the eyes of the person it was meant for. I lived and grew up in Drvenik without Mom, but she was scared of the dark when I was scared of the dark, she dreamed of a boogeyman when I dreamed of one, she felt everything I felt because she was in the picture and only in the picture was she so pretty and so still.

The summer we went back to Sarajevo for good Grandma and I walked down Tito Street. In a shop window there was a big book with the same picture on it, Mom’s picture. Under her head it said Vermeer. We stopped, Grandma didn’t say anything, we just waited. I felt a great sorrow welling up inside me, one where tears don’t flow from your eyes but jump out like fireflies. I knew what Grandma was thinking: she couldn’t tell me when I was one, or three, or five, but here we go, now I’ll see for myself. I was pretty blue because she didn’t understand anything, for her time passed in a different way, and pictures and words were tied to each other in chains and she thought what I was now seeing would change the picture I’d looked at ever since I’d said the word Mama and pointed to her because I still thought there was no difference between what I saw and what those closest to me saw.

That was my mom, I said to Grandma. Do you want us to buy the book?. . What do we want the book for?. . For the picture. . I don’t need it, I’ve got one, my mom’s in it. The story about the picture ended that very moment. Nobody ever mentioned it again because it filled the adults around me with a pain I didn’t even know about or ever myself feel. They felt guilty about me not having grown up with my mom every single day and they thought I was unhappy because of that, or that as a punishment they would be unhappy. And maybe they really were unhappy, it’s just that their unhappiness was no big thing for me because it didn’t have anything to do with me, or our lives, but with the fact that their eyes weren’t right for the picture. I couldn’t understand why at least Mom couldn’t recognize herself in it; it was like she’d let some passing angels frame the face above my bed.

I was in my third year of elementary school when for the first time I opened a heavy thick book with History of Visual Art written on it. I saw the picture again on page 489, it was called Girl with a Pearl Earring, and it said that it was painted in the year 1665. I thought about how big and strange the world was: three hundred and two years before I pointed my finger at the picture and said Mama, someone had seen me lying on my back in a dark room watching spiders dawdle along the ceiling, dangling in the air, and they had painted my mom.

I didn’t pull the claws off crabs anymore, and I didn’t smash their bodies in the shallows; I resigned myself to not knowing anything about them and not being able to see their eyes, I knew they didn’t have any blood and that they weren’t like me, but another world had already closed shut above my head, one in which every word had an exact meaning and every one of them could frighten and hurt. I didn’t see Mom in the picture anymore and I ached for all the dead crabs.

What will Allende’s mom say

School began on the sixth of September, the teacher said fall’s here kids, pencils, paper out, down to work. I looked out the window at the sunny summer day, why fall when it’s not fall I thought and started lying: “Trees are stripped of their leaves, rain pours from the clouds, a sleepy dog shuffles at my feet.” That was about it. I hadn’t the foggiest what the teacher wanted to hear about the fall and what else I could peddle to her. I put my hand up. Miss, did you bring an umbrella?. . Excuse me?. . I was wondering if you brought an umbrella. . Why do you want to know? Write your essay, time’s running out. I wrote: “The teacher passed by. She didn’t have an umbrella because she’d forgotten and left it at home. I said hi and asked: ‘Miss, look’s like fall’s here, don’t you think?’” I signed my work and handed it in. The teacher was surprised that I’d finished so soon; actually she didn’t act that surprised, more like the essay must be no good. I’m just a second grader and haven’t yet figured out how things work at school — the shorter and less descriptive your essay, the lower your score. Let your imagination run wild, show a little spark, don’t just say “fall” — say the soft, sumptuous, auburn fall, that’s what she told me the next day after she gave me a D. But in my imagination fall’s not soft, sumptuous, and auburn, it’s fall and that’s it, I protested. That afternoon the telephone rang, the teacher, wanting to speak to my mother and asking her to come to school the next day for a talk. What’ve you done? She frowned like she was going to throttle me, I didn’t do anything, I just said that for me fall wasn’t sumptuous and the teacher gave me a D. . If the teacher says it’s sumptuous, then it’s sumptuous, my mother concluded pedagogically. I opened an encyclopedia called The World Around Us to the page where there was a picture of the circus: trapeze artists on the trapeze, a lion jumping through a flaming hoop, an elephant standing on its hind legs, and a man in a striped suit with a gigantic mustache holding big black weights above his head. I’d had a bellyful of the fall and the first day of school, I wanted to see a circus. Actually, I didn’t want to see a circus, I wanted to join one and perform, as a lion, elephant, or giraffe, and felt so cruelly trapped in my human body. Unfortunately I hadn’t read Sartre yet and didn’t know anything about existential angst. I only found out what that was all about when I actually didn’t have it anymore, because by then I myself had turned into a ball of existential angst, and the fall really was soft, sumptuous, and auburn. Fall for an A plus.

The television news starts at eight, quarter to eight is the cartoon, then the ads, then a watch hand circles the screen for a full three minutes, then a globe dances in rhythm to a symphony and cosmic rolls of thunder, continents float by, the world begins with giant Africa and little Europe, then come the two Americas, the vast silent ocean and Asia, by the symphony’s end Africa and Europe are back, and then Mufid Memija’s face, his tie in a bulky knot, a piece of paper in hand, the latest from Santiago de Chile, the presidential palace is still holding out, the military junta’s forces are advancing, the truck drivers’ strike continues, Salvador Allende has sent out a dramatic appeal to all Chileans and the international community. . Are we the international community too? I ask Grandma. On the one hand we are. . On which hand aren’t we?. . On the hand you’re waving in front of the screen so I can’t see anything.

I got an F in math and immediately decided to keep it quiet. Parent-teacher interviews aren’t for another fifteen days. That’s how long Mom won’t know. I already felt like a prisoner on death row with only fifteen days left to live. Luckily I was only seven, and when you’re seven fifteen days seems like fifteen years. A long and slow stretch lay ahead of me; the older I get, the faster the time will go by, it’ll speed up like a big intercontinental, intergalactic truck, until it goes so fast I won’t be able to catch up, so it’ll get way out in front of me and it’ll seem the biggest part of my life was back then, when I was seven years old. A quarter of a century later I’ll have the experience of a seven-year-old who accidentally fell into a machine for premature aging. Having kept quiet about the first F, I’ll keep quiet about all the next ones too, until I get tired and old, until I finish school and Mom ends up getting bored with worrying about my Fs.

I’d come home from school with a secret. I thought they might be able to read the secret F on my face. Mom couldn’t, she didn’t read what was written on my face, same goes for Dad, he didn’t dare read it because he was only here to visit his son, but Grandma, she definitely could have read it, but she doesn’t care about my Fs. She’s already sitting in front of the television, it’s almost eight, she’s smoking anxiously, waiting for the news to start. Chilean President Salvador Allende has been killed in the presidential palace of La Moneda, says Mufid Memija, bless his poor mother, says Grandma. A man with a mustache and a helmet on his head enters the palace.

Augusto Pinochet, says Memija, fascist pig, says Grandma, who’s that, I ask, he killed Allende, says Grandma, why didn’t we defend him?. . How were we supposed to defend him from Sarajevo?. . Well, didn’t he ask us to?. . What, who did he ask?. . Us, on the one hand we’re the international community. . Well, on the hand that we’re the international community, on that hand we did defend him, bless his poor mother. . Who’s Salvador Allende’s mother?. . I don’t know, poor thing, she’s probably not alive. . Why wouldn’t she be alive?. . She’s better off not alive if they killed her son. . And what if they’d killed her, would it be better if he wasn’t alive?. . No, that’s different. Sons should outlive their mothers. I looked at my mom. She wasn’t paying the news any mind. She was sitting at the kitchen table and eating beans. She’s just got back from work, and when Mom comes home from work she usually eats beans or she has a migraine, and will skip the beans, go to her room, pull the blinds, and lie down and groan so we can all hear.

Why was Salvador Allende killed? I ask her. She puts the spoon in the bowl, leans her elbows on the table, and rests her head in her hands: because fascists killed him. It is, of course, all clear to me, when fascists kill, you don’t ask why they kill; she looks at me, somehow full of pride, she’s young, and in those years young mothers were happy when their sons asked about Salvador Allende. Death didn’t give me the creeps then; death still had a certain allure, still just a scratch on the face of the earth. Fall was just a scratch too, soft, sumptuous, and auburn. I didn’t know anything about beckoning death, and I wasn’t superstitious either, so I didn’t know you shouldn’t mention death too often and invite it in, but in any case I still didn’t ask Mom whether she was going to die before I did or if she’d watch pictures on television from La Moneda Palace, like Allende’s mom. That’s if Allende’s mom was still alive of course, and I’m sure she must be when Grandma’s been dreading it so much. Everything she ever dreaded always happened.

Saturday came around, Mom was vacuuming the house and I was playing with a plastic pistol. I don’t know who I was playing war against, probably against Pinochet. Mom bent down and tried to vacuum the dust under the couch. I went up to her, pressed the pistol on her temple, and pulled the trigger. She dropped the vacuum cleaner hose, stood ramrod straight, her face in horror. I thought she was going to hit me, she didn’t, tears were streaming down her face, she ran out of the living room yelling Mom, Mom. Grandma was sitting on the terrace reading the newspaper. I knew I’d done something terrible, but that I wasn’t going to get a hiding. I slunk into the hallway, tiptoed to the terrace door, and peeked out. Mom was sobbing convulsively, her head in Grandma’s lap, Grandma was caressing her and saying it’s all right, it’ll be all right, calm down, it’s nothing. . How is it nothing, I gave birth to a monster. I went back to the living room, opened the encyclopedia to the page with the circus, but I didn’t see anything. It was hard for me to look at anything. If I’m a monster, something scary is going to happen.

Why did you do it? Grandma asked me. Mom was at work so we were alone. Because of Allende’s mom. . What’s Allende’s mom got to do with your mother, why did you shoot her?. . I was just playing. . What were you playing?. . Chile. . You were playing Chile and shot your mother?. . I was Allende. . Allende didn’t shoot his mother, for God’s sake! I’d never seen Grandma like this, she was deadly serious, but not angry, just really sad. You said it would be better if Allende’s mom weren’t alive, I was already messy with tears. I said that, but Miljenko. . Well if you said it, what did I do wrong, I was just playing Allende and just wanted his mom not to be alive. I’d never been so inconsolable. Don’t cry, Allende was good and would never have killed his mom. . Why not if it’s better she weren’t alive. I didn’t even notice that Grandma was getting more and more upset with every sentence. Sons never kill their mothers, ever, not even when it’s better, because it’s never better when sons kill their mothers and now give Allende a rest, play something else, play Partisans and Germans, kill them if you want to kill someone, but don’t you ever shoot your mother again.

By the afternoon everything was fine. Mom had forgotten I’d shot her and was quietly eating her beans. I’d quit playing Allende and was waiting for the evening news on television, for news from Santiago de Chile. At some soccer stadium Pinochet had cut a guitarist’s fingers off, a friend of Allende’s, and it was then I swore I’d never play guitar.

On the fifteenth day, just before Mom was going to find out about my F in math, the teacher brought a new pupil into the classroom. This is Ricardo, she said, he doesn’t speak our language, but he’ll learn. Small and dark, Ricardo sat in the back row, his hair so dark you’d almost think it was blue. Ricardo is from Chile, the teacher filled us in when it was homeroom, but now he’s from Sarajevo too, and so I ask that you treat him like he’s always been from Sarajevo. I didn’t understand what she meant, though I figured it must be something really serious. Before Ricardo learns our language I’m going to learn how to treat people who’ve always been from Sarajevo. It was very important to me. Because of Salvador Allende and because of his mom. I’m going to ask Ricardo if Allende’s mom is still alive, if she is then we’ll play La Moneda Palace, Pinochet will try and kill Allende again, but Ricardo and me will save him. The main thing is that I hear what Allende’s mom says when they try to kill her son again.

No schlafen

In the mornings someone eats our dreams, gulping them down and swallowing up the little creature of darkness, the little creature of dawn, the hours that disappear in sleep or in preparation for death, a time sure to come and to leave nothing behind, neither an object nor a memory, not a single trace of a path on which I might light out like the brave prince who heads into the forest in search of something lost that might save the kingdom. In the moments before waking the little creature of darkness slips from the head, the heart, and the room, hurriedly departing this world, always sloppy and running a bit late, always forgetting something, leaving something behind, and this something is what I remember in the morning. I keep it as my dream stolen from the darkness, from the slinky creature just departed. Sometimes I see his little black foot slipping out my bedroom door, see him dragging a little suitcase covered in stickers saying Amsterdam, Berlin, Novosibirsk, and Sarajevo. . Sarajevo, the precious Sarajevo of my dreams, a gigantic city, the most gigantic in the world because it’s the only one I know, because I’m just four years old, and because last night’s dreams are in that little suitcase, heading off into another world. But they’ll be there to meet me one day, up in the sky, a sky that doesn’t exist. They’ll be there to meet me, a me who will no longer be, in a room like this one, furnished only with these dreams, the only trace of me.

I don’t like sleeping. I fight sleep with all my might, but all my might isn’t yet all that much. Grandma pulls me to her chest and says c’mon, time for schlafen, and I yell so that the whole house, the whole street, and the whole gigantic city can hear — no schlafen, no schlafen. She pays me no mind but carries me to my room and lies me down in bed, even though I’m still howling no schlafen. I can’t hear what she’s saying anymore, she’s betrayed me, she doesn’t get it. She thinks I don’t know anything, that my tears are just a little boy’s tears and that what I’m saying is just an overtired grizzle. Grandma doesn’t know anything about the terror that sneaks out when she puts me under the covers. I’m asleep before she’s even tucked me in, and then I’m alone, sinking down into a world not mine, where my loneliness is the biggest in the world. It won’t mean a thing when one day you leave me; you can leave me now, whenever you like, I’ll just shrug my shoulders, because nowhere will I be so alone, nor will any world be as distant as when I am alone in that strange world of dreams. I dream of things I know nothing about, I dream of horrors and terrifying ghosts, of fears that will some day run me down. I dream everything I’ll ever live to see. One day I’ll see a man lose his head in the middle of the street and then I’ll say, hey, I dreamed that when no schlafen, no schlafen, no schlafen ricocheted all over this very city. I dream every night and in my dreams try to let out a scream, so that someone might hear me, so that someone might come get me and take me outside, but I don’t let out a sound. I’m as quiet as the grave probably is, my grave or someone else’s, it doesn’t matter. I keep quiet and dream away until morning, until the moment I start to forget and wake up. Then Grandma looks at me, and I smile at her, as if it were nothing, as if nothing terrifying had happened. She says blessed are the children, they forget everything, children don’t remember a thing, and she really believes it and thinks I’ve just forgotten my dreams and woken up all smiley.

Grandma’s going to Russia. Why aren’t I going? I’m not going because I’m still little. It’s stupid to take little kids on such a long trip, it’s not worth the effort. I’m not going because I’d just forget everything I saw. That’s what Mom and Grandma say. I sit in the corner sulking, playing with my little model Volkswagen Bug and promising myself that I’m going to remember all this. One day I really will drive a gray Bug like this one, in the real world and on real streets, but I can’t know this yet. I’m four years old and I don’t know anything about my future because the future hasn’t happened yet. One day when I’m on a real road driving a real Bug it’ll be hard to figure what has actually happened. Have I grown up or just shrunk so much that now I can fit into the little car I was playing with the day Grandma was going to Russia and I was blue thinking I have to remember, I have to remember, I have to remember. . Because if I don’t remember, then she’ll never take me anywhere with her, I’ll never go to Russia and I’ll never see myself in fancy photos from overseas.

Let’s go to sleep, said Mom. I open my mouth, wanting to say something. I want to yell no schlafen but I can’t because she didn’t say it right, she didn’t say time for schlafen, and that’s the deal, they’re the magic words that make me yell. Now I just button up, my mouth half open, a look of horror on my face, no longer registering a thing. She puts me to bed, kisses my cheek, says good night, and leaves. I can’t close my eyes because I know that if I close them I’ll stay this way forever, and I’ll never again fight against sleep, I’ll get weak and helpless and believe there are battles lost in advance and wars unworthy of tears.

When Grandma was in Russia my dreams weren’t scary. They were just sad. Little wooden boats sailed through them, all the fishermen wearing straw hats like my grandpa. The tiny boats sailed and sank, and as they sank, the old men on board didn’t lift a finger, they vanished from the surface as if there were no difference between the world above and the world below, as if nothing really mattered in the vast salty ocean of my dream, the water salty like the salt of my tears when I lick them from my hand, keeping an eye out that no one sees because if they see me licking my tears they’ll know I’m done with my sulking.

When Grandma was away I woke up without a smile. Mom noticed and was downhearted. For her it was proof enough that I loved Grandma more than her because, you know, I smiled to Grandma in the morning. God, my mom was so immature and silly. One day she’ll say to me if only I were twenty-eight and knew what I know now, but I won’t say anything to her because I don’t want to hurt her, but I could tell her what I’m now telling you: Mom, you’re stupid — stupid, stupid, stupid — you just needed to say c’mon, time for schlafen, time for schlafen, and I would’ve smiled to you in the morning too, and it would’ve never crossed your mind that I loved you any less.

Grandma came back from Russia with a dead fox around her neck. The fox had glass eyes and a plastic snout. Poor little fox. The next time Grandma told me I wasn’t allowed to kill ants because they’re someone’s children I asked her is the fox someone’s child too, but she never replied. She was cooking lunch and couldn’t answer absolutely every question, but the questions she didn’t answer because she was cooking lunch were always the most interesting ones. Russia is gigantic, she said, gigantic and cold, and from her bag took a wooden doll inside which there was a smaller wooden doll, inside which there was a smaller doll, inside which there was a smaller doll, until a sixth wooden doll you couldn’t open came out. But I was sure there must have been a wooden doll inside her too because I couldn’t see any reason why there wouldn’t be. Then one by one I had to put the dolls back inside each other, and when I was done Grandma put them on a bedside cabinet as an ornament so we could forget about them and one day put them in a cardboard box and store them in the attic. When people die, they’re put in graves; when things die, they’re put in the attic. One day things go from the attic to the city garbage dump, but that usually only happens after the people who put them in the attic are put in their graves. At four I only know about the start of this long journey. I know about people in graves and things in attics.

Grandma put me to bed again. She said c’mon, time for schlafen, let’s go, and I yelled no schlafen, and she said you haven’t changed at all, I thought you’d be big boy when I came back from Russia. She wanted to sound mad, my grandma, but she was actually just sad. I’ll never be as big as she wants me to be and I’ll never tell her what was going on back then, and I won’t tell her everything I remember either, that I haven’t forgotten a thing and that she should have taken me to Russia with her, I’ll never get to any of that because Grandma will die and go in the grave, and when she goes we’ll clean up the apartment, and the attic too.

I had terrifying dreams again that night, and I wanted to yell but couldn’t, because as always the little creature of darkness popped up from somewhere and took my dreams away before I woke up, but this time he left something behind. It was a dream of a scary black man who in the distance, from the top of our street, was coming toward me with a big black dog. In my dream I thought look, it’s the boogeyman, he’s going to hurt me or make me disappear, but look, a big black dog’s coming and he’s going to gobble up the big black man, but then an even bigger black man’s going to show up with another big black dog and the dog’s going to gobble up the bigger black man after he has hurt me or made me disappear. I woke up smiling.

That day we went to Drvenik, where Grandpa was waiting for us. He gave Grandma a kiss. He didn’t usually do that. He kissed her because she’d just got back from Russia. I learned that people kiss each other when they come back from a big trip or if they haven’t seen each other in ages. While I was in Sarajevo and Grandma in Russia, Grandpa had made a new friend. He told us about him on the way home. The story went that Grandpa was walking to Zaostrog and wanted to sit down on a bench because he was tired, but his friend-to-be was already sitting on the bench. Grandpa asked politely if he could sit down, but his friend-to-be didn’t understand. So Grandpa asked him the same thing in German, and his friend-to-be answered and that’s how they met. His name is Ralph, an American who has a big German shepherd. Grandpa thinks Ralph is a spy, but Grandpa doesn’t care. We all have to work, all that matters is that we do our work well. Ralph’s in Makarska at the moment, but he’s coming to visit this afternoon.

Around four o’clock a big black man arrives, leading a big black dog. He offers me his hand, shaking my hand seriously as if I were an adult and as if he knew I like it when people shake my hand like I’m an adult. Then I make for the dog, but Grandpa says wait! so I stop. Ralph goes up to the dog, whispers something in the dog’s ear, and waves me over. The dog’s name is Donna. I sit down in front of Donna, put my hand on her forehead, and say Donna, you’re an American boy. . Donna’s a girl. Grandpa corrects me. . Donna, you’re the first American girl I’ve ever met and I love you. Everybody laughs. Grandma translates what I said into German for Ralph. Ralph laughs like a giant out of a fairy tale ahahahaha. . ahahahaha. . ahahahaha. Donna looks at me, her snout resting on the kitchen tiles, her eyes blinking, and I know she knows and understands why I love her. She remembers my dream because I remember it too. She was in my dream, but she hadn’t been sleeping, so the little creature of darkness couldn’t steal me from her memory. Donna gobbles up scary black men, that I know. But why would she gobble up Ralph, he’s Grandpa’s friend. He’s black, but he’s not scary. Then I was sure that Grandpa was right. Ralph isn’t a scary black man. Ralph is a spy.

The next day we went with Ralph and Donna to Dubrovnik. We drove in his Cadillac, which if you saw it from a distance looked like it was made out of silver, but it wasn’t, it was metal like all the other cars. The Cadillac glides like a ship, Grandma told Auntie Lola when we got to Dubrovnik. I was sitting under the dining table and Donna was lying in front of me. We kept quiet. She because dogs don’t talk, and me because at that moment I was the prince from the beginning of the story, the master of an endless kingdom and there wasn’t anything that wasn’t mine. I sat and waited for Donna to do something, to creep into my dreams and make me their master. For a long time I thought Donna had cheated me that day, because she didn’t do anything.

Ralph and Donna came the next year too, and then Ralph started sending postcards from all over the world, from distant cities and islands none of us had ever heard of. He sent his greetings to Grandpa and Grandma and never forgot to mention that Miljenko’s American girlfriend says hi too.

When we hadn’t received a postcard for more than six months Grandma asked what’s Ralph up to? He hasn’t been in touch for ages. Grandpa just shrugged and sighed. Another six months went by and again Grandma asked the same question. After four stretches of six months went by Grandpa said who knows, maybe Ralph died. He was all alone in the world, he probably died in some hotel somewhere. Then I wondered what had happened to Donna and for a long time I hoped she’d show up again somewhere, my American girlfriend, at least in my dreams. I think I’ll always think that. When one day I see people losing their heads in the middle of the street, then I’ll know that only Donna had saved me from these kinds of dreams.

The kid never panics

It’s June already, my birthday was seven days ago, and yesterday I discovered the world of split shadows. It was like this. We arrived in Drvenik, Grandma and me, and as soon as we got there she said go on, go and play, and I knew why she so was quick to get rid of me. She wanted to pick up the phone, ring Dad in Sarajevo or my uncle, Mom’s brother, or someone else she could have a serious talk with, someone as worried as we were, because the day after my birthday Mom had gone to Ljubljana for an operation. Dad said it’s nothing serious, but two sharp lines creased Mom’s face, two crevices between her eyes. She said you never know, it could get bigger. Dad said and that’s why you’re going to Ljubljana, to be on the safe side and so that it doesn’t get bigger. Grandma asked well, what is it exactly, and Dad said nothing, just a tiny bump on the cervix. I sat under the table pretending I was building a Lego castle for Queen Forgetful, but I actually wasn’t building anything, I was eavesdropping and trying to understand what was going on. But I didn’t understand anything. Instead, a vast freezing emptiness swelled in my chest, right there under the bones where we breathe, where the heart beats. I didn’t know what it was. It wasn’t a space holding old fears or guilt at something I’d done, but something strange and new, something I couldn’t figure out because there just wasn’t anything there. But I felt it swell, pressing against my bones, this vast freezing emptiness, dissolving into dead air, into a shadow hovering over my heart and the grown-up hearts of Grandma, Mom, and Dad, my heart that now shares terrifying and serious things with others. Bump is a nice little word, like tummy and mommy, but it means something terrible. Words like this didn’t exist before. Before this bump everything little was harmless and sweet, tiny to the eye and pretty to look at, but this had all changed. It changed the day after my birthday when I was eavesdropping on Grandma, Mom, and Dad. The time of little things and their goodness had come to an end. From now on the world would no longer hide in diminutives, no longer reside in their little lost paradises, in Lego cottages or on tiny ottomans upon which the dreams of secret princesses lay scattered.

Grandma’s on the phone now. I thought it over as I traipsed past the stone Dalmatian houses. I wasn’t just walking, I was stamping, really getting into it. I wanted to stamp right over the top of whatever was lodged in my head. Mom had gone far away, all the way to Ljubljana, and she was in the hospital, having an operation. You go to the hospital to get well, not to get sick, Dad said when they were going to take my tonsils out. But why do they take your tonsils out in Sarajevo and you have to go to Ljubljana because of a bump? Because a bump is so terrible that you have to go far away, like in a fairy tale where they cross seven mountains and seven seas to get well. But not all long journeys have fairy-tale endings. A fairy tale is a fairy tale because it’s a story with a happy ending, it’s just that happy endings don’t happen very often and people don’t usually live in them. There isn’t enough room for everyone. In fairy tales there’s only enough room for a couple of old kings, for their good, bad, and clever daughters, and for the queen and a few witches, but not for people, the millions of millions of people. There isn’t enough room for my mom either, who isn’t a queen or a princess but just a regular mom who works in accounts, suffers from migraines, and sings on Saturdays, enveloped in steam and water until her hands have finished doing the washing that isn’t allowed to go in the machine. If Mom has gone far away, all the way to Ljubljana, she must be totally lost. She’ll never come back because her life isn’t a fairy tale, she gets two creases between her eyes and thinks bumps can get bigger. My mom isn’t Snow White, Cinderella, or Queen Forgetful. She isn’t coming back from Ljubljana, she’s going to stay there forever and come back to us dead, just like the people who don’t get well at the hospital come back dead, because you can easily lose good health in white corridors and green boiler rooms, in the smells of chloroform, ether, and medicinal alcohol, in places where the air reeks of worry.

That’s what I was thinking as I started following my shadow. It was moving along the asphalt a little behind me. I could see it out of the corner of my eye but didn’t want to turn my head toward it. I wanted to watch it sort of in passing, to not change anything, just to keep seeing it. When I moved along the white stone wall a little, half the shadow disappeared from the asphalt and climbed up the side of the house. Up to my stomach I floated along the asphalt, my chest, neck, and head making their way along the house. My shadow split in two, but I stayed as one. You see, a shadow isn’t actually an image of a person that always follows him, tracing his every move and being just like him. A shadow splits in half. But I wouldn’t have felt or noticed a thing if I hadn’t been looking. It keeps following me; it’s just that its life isn’t mine anymore.

I turned around and marched back the other way. The shadow moved a little out in front of me. Heading home, I stayed close to the wall, my shadow still split in half, Grandma was probably done on the phone. Mom’s woken up from the anesthetic, she said. The bump’s gone?. . Yes, it’s gone, but what do you know about that? Were you eavesdropping again?. . No, I just overheard. . You’re not allowed to listen to your elders’ conversations. . Why? Because they’re sneaky?. . No, because you don’t understand them. . When will I understand them?. . One day, when you grow up. . Are they really that scary?. . Who’s that scary?. . Are all grown-up conversations as scary as yours?. . No, our conversations aren’t scary, you don’t understand them. . A conversation about a bump isn’t scary?. . No, it’s just a conversation about an illness. . Why am I allowed to listen to conversations about my bronchitis but not about a bump?. . Oh boy, no more conversations about bronchitis for you, you little devil, look at the mess you’re in. Go wash your face and hands, and don’t ever let me see you in such a state again. Grandma grabbed the frames of her glasses, just like she always did when she wanted to show me she was angry.

I lay tucked in up to my neck, staring at the ceiling, listening to her voice. She was reading me White Fang. Ten pages every night. We were already halfway through. White Fang is a wolf who thinks and feels, and scary things happen to him just because he thinks and feels. It’s not a fairy tale and that’s why I’m scared there won’t be a happy ending, but today I don’t listen to Grandma’s voice. I don’t remember sentences and I don’t feel like I’m White Fang, because to listen to the story of White Fang I need to feel like White Fang, because when you don’t do that the story doesn’t work. In fairy tales you don’t feel like a prince, princess, old king, brave knight, or Queen Forgetful, just like in fables you don’t feel like a fox or a raven, but in true stories you need to feel like White Fang to understand what happens to him. Fairy tales and fables are made up, but true stories actually happen. If they haven’t happened, then they happen when we listen to them, or when we learn to read one day and we read them. They happen to us when we’re reading the story, and this means we have to have lots of courage because stories don’t always have happy endings, and because you have to kill your fear so you can live in the story. Life in a story is more beautiful than life in real life because in a story only important things happen and because in stories there aren’t any of those days when nothing happens and the world is as empty as the white dates in the wall calendar.

Will Mom be back from Ljubljana before we finish White Fang? I interrupted Grandma as she was reading. I don’t think so, we’ve got eighty pages left, and that’s eight days. Mom will be back in about fifteen days. . Are you allowed to know how a book ends before you’ve read it?. . It’s allowed, but then the book isn’t very interesting. . Have you read White Fang before?. . Yes, at least five times. . And you always forget the end?. . Well, I don’t actually forget it, but it’s as if I don’t know how it’s going to end and the ending might change. . I don’t want anything bad to happen to White Fang before Mom comes back from Ljubljana. . Why do you think something bad’s going to happen to him?. . Because good things only have to happen in fairy tales. Otherwise they don’t. . Who told you that?. . No one told me. I just know. . Well, I didn’t know that. . You’re just pretending you didn’t know. . No, I really didn’t know that. I’ve never thought about it. . Well, have you ever thought about why shadows split in half so half of you is on the asphalt and half of you on the wall? Grandma looked at me, closed the book, and said she was sleepy. That was weird. She had never been sleepy before I fell asleep. I didn’t know about after because I’d already be asleep by the time she went to bed. That night it was different. Grandma was scared Mom was going to die, I knew it. I knew exactly what she was thinking. If Mom dies, we’ll be left alone, her, Grandpa, and me, and they’re old, and old people are scared of being alone with children because they think one day they’ll close their eyes for an afternoon nap and never open them again, and then the children will be left alone, helplessly trying to phone someone, hollering to the neighbors, but always end up waiting there all alone next to their grandpas and grandmas. Children shouldn’t be alone because loneliness is something grown-up; we grow up so that one day we can be completely alone and no one has to worry about it. That’s what Grandma was thinking when she pretended to fall asleep before me.

In the end she really did fall asleep. In her sleep she wheezed like a big mouse. She breathed in through her nose, and then puffed out through her mouth. You could really hear a puff. Only she slept like this. I know because I’d already slept in the same room as all of them, lying awake as they slept. Mom was a quiet sleeper, but once she said a word in her sleep. I asked her what did you say last night? and she looked at me like she’d brought an F home from some school of hers. But even she didn’t remember her dreams because the little creature of the darkness came to visit her too. Dad slept smacking his lips and grinding his teeth. His sleeping was funny. It was like he was trying to make someone laugh with his sleeping, or like someone wouldn’t let him go to sleep unless he first made them laugh. Uncle snored horribly, and for a whole night I was seething.

But none of them slept puffing, not even Grandpa and he’d lived with Grandma for more than fifty years and he even said that in fifty years two people become very alike. But he coughed in his sleep because of his asthma.

I heard a last puff. A lot of time went by and I was waiting for a new puff, but it never came. I wasn’t really scared, but I was starting to get a little bit worried. I mean, Grandma was still breathing and she was still alive, but I didn’t think this was enough. I was worried something wasn’t right. I sat on my bed and wanted to wake her up, but for some reason didn’t dare. You need to be tough because only when you’re tough does everything work out. You’re not allowed to panic — oh boy, she’s not breathing, or maybe you just can’t see it ’cause it’s dark — I don’t know what’s going on, but somehow she’s not moving anymore. That’s it, here we go, I’m going to scream, but I’m not allowed to scream. If I scream, Mom won’t come back from Ljubljana, and I’ll be left on my own before I grow up, but that’s not allowed because children aren’t allowed to be left alone, just like they’re not allowed to kill ants, and they’re not allowed to cross the street without looking left and right. They’re not allowed to scream, that’s panicking, and I don’t get panicky, the kid never panics, my mom tells her work colleagues, and when she says it, she’s all aglow, my mom who’s in Ljubljana at the moment. The kid never panics is the nicest thing she ever says about me and if I scream now she’ll never say it again, and I’ll just be a regular kid, a kid you can’t say anything about, and I’ll spoil that story from Dubrovnik from when I was two and a half when Nano lost me at the Pile Gate and I calmly made my way to Auntie Lola’s place, the length of the Corso and around behind St. Blaise’s. I’d knocked on the door and Grandpa had opened it and asked where’s Nano? And I said Nano got lost and quickly got it in that it wasn’t my fault he got lost. They were all proud of me then, and Mom said the kid never panics for the first time, and when we got back from Sarajevo she told Dad how Nano got lost, and then Dad said my big boy and that’s how the legend began, the one they still tell to this very night when I’d rather howl, but I’m not allowed, or this whole world made up of Mom in Ljubljana and Grandma who’s not breathing in the dark will be destroyed, just like I destroy Queen Forgetful’s castle when I’m bored.

That time in Dubrovnik I did something bad. I didn’t burst out crying in the middle of the Pile Gate like other children, and I didn’t because I was scared of crying in front of so many strangers and I was ashamed about being left alone. Others would have cried and they wouldn’t have been scared or ashamed. Being scared and ashamed is no good and it’s better to burst out crying. It’s definitely braver. I couldn’t because I’m a coward and that’s why I went to Auntie Lola’s and gave it my all to remember the way, even though I’d always walked it with someone else. But I remembered. It was the longest journey I ever made in my life. When I’m a thousand years old like an old king, even then I’ll never go on such a long journey because when you’re two and a half there isn’t a longer journey than the one from the Pile Gate to St. Blaise’s.

You know, I’d never even thought about it before. I liked them thinking I was a kid who never panics, but the truth is I really am a scaredy pants and I get ashamed, and when this happens I make journeys that kids who cry in front of a crowd of strangers would never make. But my mom doesn’t cry either and she isn’t that big. She’s smaller than Grandma, Grandpa, and Dad, and she gets ashamed and is always scared of this or that. She takes her fears out on all of us, on me most of all, and we all love her when she’s ashamed. Shame is something worse than fear, but it’s nice to watch. Mom would have found her way home like me if Nano had lost her at the Pile Gate, she would have found her way back no matter how far it was, I know that for sure because you can spot fear and shame really easily, much more easily than courage, and that’s why I know Mom better than anyone else and that’s why I always know what she’s capable of. So anyway, if she knows how to get back from the Pile Gate on her own, she’ll find her way back from Ljubljana. Ljubljana is much closer because Mom is much older than me and she’ll make it back easily. She’s scared and ashamed and that’s why she can’t stay in Ljubljana, she can’t die, the bump can’t hurt her, the rules for big people don’t apply to her. Fairy tales exist for the scared and ashamed because in them people cross seven mountains and seven seas just so they won’t be scared and ashamed.

I breathed a sigh of relief. My face is wet, my back and stomach too. If I’ve cried, I didn’t cry down my back, everyone has to believe I’m telling the truth there. Grandma has to believe me too. Is she breathing? I can’t see anything, but if she’s breathing I’ll tell her in the morning that everything is fine with Mom. Actually, I won’t tell her anything because I don’t think she’ll understand, just like she didn’t understand the thing about split shadows. But I’ll show her that tomorrow, and she’ll just have to wait for Mom, she’ll have to worry for the whole fifteen days until Mom comes back from Ljubljana, and then I’ll tell her I knew the whole time. I’ll tell them all, Dad and Uncle and all those worriers on the phone who call when I’m not around, and I’ll tell Grandma, and Mom, I’ll tell them that only I knew, only I knew she had to come back. Tomorrow we’ll keep reading White Fang. I’m brave enough for any sad ending.

If only Grandma would let out a little puff, then I’d fall asleep, my first time after her.

That nothing would ever happen

We lived from one special occasion to the next in a happy and ordered world, sometimes sick with feverish kids’ sicknesses and sometimes with serious grown-up ones, in a world in which everything had its place and moment in time. Don’t run before you can walk, Grandma used to say. We didn’t know what she meant, or maybe some did, but they weren’t saying, so I kept running because time passed by so slowly. I couldn’t wait for it, I had to hurry, get out ahead, skip the good-for-nothing days because they weren’t special occasions.

You couldn’t buy ice cream in the winter back then. It disappeared from the confectionaries in the first thick November fog and only showed up again in April. Why don’t people eat ice cream in winter too? Because ice cream gives you a sore throat. They were looking out for us, making sure we didn’t get sick for no reason, and that every day had its place in the calendar and time in the seasons, that we would never think that we were alone and abandoned, forsaken like the faraway countries we heard about on the radio. Young slant-eyed soldiers were dying in those countries, a little machine gun in one hand and a tiny baby in the other. That’s how they died, leaving behind little slant-eyed wives to hold their heads in their hands and grieve in their funny incomprehensible language.

I laugh whenever I see little slant-eyed mothers next to their little dead husbands on the TV. Saigon and Hanoi are the names of the first comedies in my life. I spell them out loud, letter by letter, laughing my head off. Those people don’t look like us, and I don’t believe they’re in pain or that they’re really sad. Words of sadness have to sound sad, and tears have to be like raindrops, small and brilliant. Their words aren’t sad, and the tears on their faces are too big and look funny, like the fake tears of the clowns I saw at the circus. I’m just waiting for Mom and Grandma to leave the room so I can watch Saigon and Hanoi and have a laugh. When they’re there I’m not allowed to laugh because Mom will think I’m crazy, and Grandma that I’m malicious. Craziness and malice are strictly forbidden in our house. Great unhappiness is born from malice; malicious children put their parents in old folks’ homes, never thinking that they themselves will one day get old and that their children might bundle them off to old folks’ homes too; Grandma and Mom were scared of malice and craziness because they were born old and with fears I don’t understand, but I knew one day I’d have my turn; it’ll happen the day they say I’m a grown-up, the day I run when I first meet someone who’s crazy, because craziness is infectious, just like all the sicknesses and misfortune in this city. When you grow up and have your own house and your own children, then you can do whatever you like. But in my house you won’t. Grandma loved the little slant-eyed mothers and pretended she understood them.

I get really careful in the run-up to special occasions like New Year’s Eve and my birthday. I don’t even laugh when I’m on my own; I keep my mouth shut like the angels on Grandma’s postcards, and I squint to see if I’ve already grown wings or if I still need to wait a bit. I never know what those two are going to get me for my birthday or New Year’s, only that Grandma’s presents are always better. She buys me books — encyclopedias and picture books — and Mom always gets me practical stuff. Practical stuff is stuff that they were going to have to buy anyway, but instead of just getting on with it without all the pomp, they wait for special occasions and give them to you all wrapped up in shiny wrapping and expect you to get excited. But who can get excited about socks, undies, undershirts, and winter slippers? Mom expects me to get excited about her presents. If I don’t, it means I’m malicious. There’s no such thing as everyday stuff for her, not even socks, everything’s a special treat, you have to earn everything in life, you have to bust your gut. If you listened to her you’d think humanity would go naked and barefoot if everyone told their mother that undershirts and slippers don’t cut it as birthday presents. But I pretend to be excited about her presents because if I don’t she gets angry and starts with the nurturing stuff. When she cranks up the nurture rant it’s much worse than when she gets a migraine. Mom’s kind of nurturing is out of books called You and Your Child and Your Child Is a Personality. She bought them from a traveling salesman, spent a month reading them, and then decided to put her foot down about my nurturing. Luckily she doesn’t have time to stick at it, so unless I remind her, she totally forgets the whole thing. Nurturing amounts to Mom screwing up her face and repeating the same sentence ten times, wanting something from me without ever actually saying what it is. The less I understand, the happier she is because then she thinks she’s being strict, and no strictness means no nurture. For me strict nurturing involves keeping your mouth shut, saying yes, nodding your head and not asking any questions because there’s nothing to ask because you don’t understand anything.

For special occasions Dad gives me model railway, motorway, city, and chemistry sets, all with thousands of little pieces. Then we sit down on the living-room floor and open the box. Dad puts his serious face on and starts scratching behind his ear, spreading the thousands of little pieces out on the rug. I watch him and he’s as funny as the little slant-eyed mothers, and he gives me a nod that says trust me and starts putting the thousands of little railway pieces together. He knows what he’s doing, and I like watching him put it together much more than I like the railway itself. Mom thinks he likes this stuff so much because when he was a boy they didn’t buy him toys, so he never got a chance to play his little heart out and now he’s making up for it. I don’t think she’s right. If that’s how it was, he’d buy toys for himself.

Nano gives the best presents. He’s not actually Nano, his name is Rudolf Stubler, but nobody calls him that. Nano is Grandma’s older brother and once, a long time ago, he studied math in Vienna. Today he spends his time exploring far-off cities, going hiking, beekeeping, and playing the violin. We see him in photographs: Nano in London, Nano in Paris, Nano in Berlin, Nano in Moscow, Amsterdam, Kiev, Prague, Rome, Florence, Madrid, and Lisbon. They know Nano in all these cities because their buildings and bridges, cathedrals and skyscrapers have their photos taken with him. They don’t have any pictures of their own without him, without him these cities are just postcards, and postcards aren’t real cities, they’re just letters with photos where nothing is real. Nano stands waving in front of the Trevi Fountain, a coin in his hand and a wish in the coin. We don’t believe the wish, Grandma says wishes don’t come true in water, but that doesn’t matter because the Trevi Fountain believes in wishes, and so Nano tosses a coin in and has his picture taken, so we’ll know what Rome looks like. Nano comes over before every special occasion, puts a pen and paper down on the table, and says come on, tell me what you’d like for New Year’s, doesn’t matter if it’s a sewing needle or a locomotive, leave it up to me to see if my financial means stretch. Only Nano uses phrases like financial means, because he talks to me like I’m a grown-up, so I talk to him like he’s a grown-up too: For a start I need to say that I don’t want a sewing needle or a locomotive. I can borrow a sewing needle from Grandma, and I’d need a driver’s license for a locomotive. . Very well, let’s see, how do you feel about musical instruments?. . I think I’m tone-deaf and that it’d be a complete waste of money. I’d prefer something that might stimulate my intellectual development. . What do you think would be most appropriate?. . I’m not sure, perhaps a volume on world history, an encyclopedia of sports or of the animal kingdom. . Got it, I’ve made a note. And where do you stand in regard to sporting activities?. . I’ve already got a bike, and I don’t need a ball because somebody might steal it. Don’t get me roller skates because only girls go skating, and I could fall and break my neck. . How about a chess set?. . Well, perhaps, but a wooden one. I think I’ve outgrown plastic.

And that’s how it went. Nano would neatly jot everything down, and then when the occasion rolled around he’d be there with two presents, one I’d chosen and a second one that he liked. The second was usually better, better because it was a surprise and there’s no such thing as a bad surprise. A bad surprise is called a disappointment, and a special occasion is not a time for disappointment. I’m not even disappointed with Mom’s practical presents because that’s what I expect from her, and when you expect something it can’t be a disappointment.

The day before a special occasion Mom bakes a cake. When Mom bakes a cake we all have to put our serious faces on and cross our fingers, just like we did when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. Baking cakes is an unpredictable business: Mom mixes the dough, or actually it’s more like she gets a mountain of flour and makes a deep hole in the middle so the flour mountain looks like a snow volcano or a heap of sand and cement to make concrete, and then she breaks the eggs and puts them in the hole. When she’s broken all the eggs, she knocks the mountain over, mixes the flour with the eggs, and starts with her oh boy, what if the dough doesn’t rise, and I laugh at her, but she doesn’t get angry, she just says and that’s the thanks I get. She’s happy because she’s enjoying her anxiety.

The dough kneaded and ready for baking, she covers it with a cloth and waits. Smoking one cigarette after the other, every five minutes she peeks under the cloth and calls Grandma over to say how the dough’s going. Grandma says no, not yet, just a little longer, and then she says ready, and then Mom almost flips out and I’m not allowed to laugh at her anymore. With trembling hands she covers the cake dish in oil and keeps repeating God save me, what if the dough sticks.

As soon as she’s put the cake in to bake Mom starts cussing out our oven. First the upper heating bars are no good, then the bottom ones aren’t working, and then she starts cussing out the company in Čačak that made the oven and looks up at the ceiling, as if she’s looking up at the sky where the whiteware bosses of the world are in a meeting to decide who deserves an oven that might bake a decent cake this New Year’s. Grandma just listens and nods her head. Mom gets on Grandma’s nerves sometimes. She’ll give me a nervous breakdown one day, and later she’ll complain to Auntie Doležal, her and her cakes, and Auntie Doležal clasps her hands and says oh, the young ones, my dear Olga, those young ones, they’ll make a science out of baking a cake yet, and to think I once made five cakes for my Jucika’s habitation and it didn’t faze me none. Jucika was Auntie Doležal’s husband, they killed him in Jasenovac, but she always talked about him as if he were alive, as if he was going to appear on the doorstep in about half an hour, so I felt like I knew Jucika too, and wouldn’t have been in the least surprised if he had actually shown up and said I’m home and Auntie Doležal had again baked him five cakes for this habitation thing.

It riled Grandma most of all that Mom wouldn’t let her bake cakes for New Year’s or my birthday. Other times were fine, but for New Year’s or my birthday, no way. I’m her son, and it was her job to bake her son a cake on special occasions. Okay, you bake them for him then, but quit dragging me up to see whether the dough has risen, Grandma said once, and that made Mom really wild and she yelled back You’ve been hounding me my whole life, burst into tears, and immediately got a migraine. Grandma never again complained about being called over to see whether the dough had risen. Just let it be, said Auntie Doležal.

The most exciting part was when the cake came out of the oven, because then nobody, not even Grandma, knew whether a catastrophe was in the cards. A catastrophe was when the middle of the cake caved in or shrank, so the cake didn’t look like a cake anymore but like something else, it’s hard to say what, but something awfully funny that you weren’t allowed to laugh at, because Mom and Grandma would be there hovering over whatever that something was. Mom would bury her face in her hands like those little slant-eyed mothers when their husbands were killed, and Grandma would start cussing. She never cussed otherwise, just when a cake flopped. And if the cake flopped a replacement had to be made. Then we’d have two cakes for the special occasion: a normal one to serve to guests and a second that tasted normal but looked so bad nobody was allowed to see it except us. We ate that one on the sly before the guests showed up.

Before the New Year of 1977 Nano came over, got his pen and paper out, and again I told him I didn’t need a sewing needle or a locomotive and that we could get straight down to business on the present list. I told him that my relationship to time and its passing had fundamentally changed and that as such, I needed a wristwatch. He wrote it down, went home, and three days later died.

He was in my dad’s ward, in a deep coma, and at the time it was all everyone talked about. I didn’t actually know what a deep coma was, but it meant this New Year’s wasn’t going to be a special occasion and that there’d be no one to take the blame for unfulfilled promises. Up until this point promises had been disregarded or broken because someone had forgotten them; grown-ups were promise-killers, all you could do was look at them, shake your head, and think: But why? Why one more little graveyard, full of unfulfilled wishes and forgotten words strewn on balmy city streets like summer hail that melts in the blink of an eye, leaving nothing but an image behind, a single, tiny, inconsequential image at the bottom of the gaze of all for whom it has fallen like a promise?

Nano couldn’t keep his promise because he was in a deep coma. Mom sat at his bedside for two nights saying things like Nano, sweetie, it’s just started snowing, it’ll be New Year’s soon, it’s already scrunchy underfoot, and soon we’ll be eating this year’s apples. She said all kinds of things to him, watching for an eyelash to flicker or a quiver in the corners of his mouth, because Dad had told her that you never know with a deep coma, that you can’t be sure whether Nano could hear anything, feel her hand, or sense the slipstream of words through the world and the cosmos, along the nerves that lead to the brain, like unstamped letters dropped in a distant post-office box, letters in which we all tell him that we love him.

Dad stopped by every half hour, listened to what Mom was saying to Nano, putting his hand on her shoulder and gently stroking her hair. He was in his white doctor’s coat, a silver fountain pen peering out from a small pocket. In his doctor’s coat my dad wasn’t the same dad as the one without a doctor’s coat. Regular Dad lied, didn’t keep his promises, and was often weak and downhearted. He looked like someone liable to be hit by a car on a pedestrian crossing or prone to spilling plates of soup in his lap. This dad, Dad the Doctor, he was God, Comfort, and James Bond. For him there was no such thing as an incurable illness, nor a life bearing any resemblance to death, not even a life in a deep coma. Every moment was worthy of celebration, and there wasn’t a single moment when you pulled the shutters down on life and said fine, that was that, now I’m dead and I’m leaving. My dad didn’t let people leave, and he was sure Nano’s eyelashes would give the world a signal, that humanity would shudder the moment a lone hair on any one man moved, having stolen itself away from the world of darkness. There are medical truths that serve the healing process and medical truths that confirm that healing is not possible, gravediggers can worry about the latter because I won’t. That’s what he once yelled at drunk Dr. Jakšić, who when we were on a trip to Mount Trebević said that even in the coffins buried in Bare Cemetery, Dobro — my dad — could find a couple of people to declare alive and try bringing back to life.

On the morning of the third day Nano heaved two deep sighs and stopped breathing. Life ends with a sigh, that’s no surprise at all. When I sigh I say to myself okay, fine, let’s start again from the beginning. Sighs are like sleeping, they separate life into a thousand thousand pieces, and before going to bed you put them together and that’s how memories are made. There’s no sighing or sleeping in memories; in memory life is whole again. When death came Nano sighed, told the deep coma well that’s that, and left without saying goodbye. The deep coma waved to him, but Nano didn’t see it, so it was left there with its hand in the air. Nobody ever says goodbye to deep comas when they leave.

Dad hugged Mom and whispered we lost him. Mom cried a little on his white coat, then Dad called Dr. Smajlović over and said exitus, and Dr. Smajlović looked at his watch, took out his fountain pen, and entered the exact time of death in Nano’s hospital notes. Even though they straight-out forget it, don’t have to tell anyone, and nobody ever inquires about the hours and minutes in question, the exact time of death is very important to doctors. In a filing cabinet somewhere there’s a file with the time of death written down, just in case it becomes important one day as some details in life do. Auntie Doležal is of the view that one day God is going to assemble all souls and assign them grades. The time of death in one’s hospital notes is just waiting for that day, even though we live in communism and none of the doctors believes God exists. But like our own, this belief is a little shaky. So, who knows, maybe Nano will appear before God and maybe God’ll say so often you used to say I didn’t exist, and now you’re not in the least surprised to see me.

Dad and Mom went outside. He took out a packet of cigarettes, and Mom said look how much snow there is already. The snow was as thick as the pillows in the rooms of gentle giants, falling without pause on Mom’s black jacket and Dad’s white doctor’s coat. By the time they’d each finished their cigarette their shoulders were covered in snow, and if a bird had chanced overhead, they would have looked as white as each other, my mom and dad, and the bird would’ve thought them two creatures of winter, in love.

Mom said go, you’ll catch cold, and he said no; I think in that instant he was ready to remain in the snow forever, just to hear her say that go, you’ll catch cold a few more times. A love sometimes returns like a word you believe to be true, then it flies away and never comes back; but in its wake it leaves a brilliant trail, which gives a winter morning a certain meaning, and so even after a farewell a little hope remains — let’s say the hope of stumbling upon the magic word, even if it comes after a death and the sacrifice of a Nano.

A taxi arrived and Dad asked do you want to see him again? They went back inside, the taxi driver opened his newspaper and switched the meter on. Nano’s pillow was gone, Mom looked at him but didn’t cry, she just stood there silently, not moving, at a loss. She’d seen her uncle for the last time and knew that from now on she’d only be able to imagine his face or look at him in photographs. He was dead, and she’d seen him for the last time in her life. When she leaves this room, something in her will be forever, just as death is forever. My mom felt a little dead, something she’d later repeat quite often. There was no sadness in the story, just astonishment in the face of how little it takes for one to bid farewell to the world, just a single glance, how much one sees each day for the last time in one’s life, unaware, not thinking, goodbyes the furthest thing from one’s mind.

Dad went up to Nano, placed his hand on his forehead, and said the last gentleman. Every summer he’d play Preference with Nano in the gardens in Ilidža, and Nano would tell him stories about Vienna and the beautiful Jewesses who in the fall of 1917, as the dual monarchy crumbled, would open their ladies’ umbrellas, their ankles so slender and angular, so fragile you had to approach them on tiptoes in case they would break. Dad didn’t know anything about Vienna or Viennese women. He grew up in a harsh, hard world in which you had to guard your refinement and sensitivity, and for him Nano was someone from another world, one where things of beauty seemed inherent and certain, where now forgotten words still existed, a world where such things could be preserved. That morning my dad only managed to remember the word gentleman.

So in the end I missed out on the wristwatch. Nano was buried the day after Christmas, Mom baked her cakes, and everything was ready in time for a strange celebration at which nobody celebrated anything, but because of me, she and Grandma decided we couldn’t just skip New Year’s. They went around the house all in black, the mood not festive in the least. I don’t understand this! I never understood how they didn’t know how to celebrate and grieve at the same time: celebrate the special occasion and grieve because of Nano’s death. With them it was always one or the other, as if they were scared someone was secretly watching them, testing the depth of their grief and the height of their celebration. When Nano died they wouldn’t have paid any mind if I laughed at little slant-eyed mothers, but they weren’t on the news anymore. The war in Vietnam was over, and other wars didn’t make the news in the lead-up to New Year’s. What a shame! If I’d laughed Mom wouldn’t have started with the nurturing stuff. That was a sure bet.

Dad came over on New Year’s Eve, bringing something with a thousand pieces. He sat down in the middle of the room and began putting it together. I sat down next to him, my hands on my knees, waiting to see what it would be. I wanted his building to go on and on, that we would stay here forever, in this room, on this rug, that the whole world would wait until we were finished, that nothing would happen before Dad had built whatever he was building, that time would stand still too, that everyone would look at their watches believing everything comes to an end, that eventually they’d see what he’d built, that it would be and stay like this forever and that nothing would ever happen anymore.

My dummy dear

Dad brought the kitten home. It’d been meowing in a doorway up on Koševo in the late-November rain, a little black kitten the size of a child’s hand, one eye open, the other closed. Kittens are born with their eyes closed; sight only comes when they’ve sniffed and licked the world around them, once they know what they’re going to see. Dad had it in his pocket, I had to, he said, it’s okay, said Mom. Grandma fetched a saucer of milk and an eyedropper. Placing the kitten in her lap, she turned it on its back and fed it, drop by drop, while Mom and Dad discussed its chances of survival. Grandma didn’t say anything, not then, and not in the days to follow. I’d head off to school and she’d be there with the dropper in her right hand and the kitten’s head in her left, and when I came back she’d be doing the same. And so it went for days. It was three weeks before the kitten began to drink milk on its own, to explore the house and to purr. When her other eye opened we knew she would live.

In those years the seasons marked the comings and goings in our house just like in children’s books. Spring: Mom takes the rug out into the yard, throws it over a clothesline wire, beating it with a wicker paddle. The blows of my tennis-playing mom resound and the dust flies everywhere, every blow a thunderclap. Other moms are out beating their rugs too and the whole city reverberates, the air dusty like the heart of an old watch, every ray of sun visible. The sun circles the earth to the rhythm of a thousand blows, the city a heavenly disco. In the broad light of day all the angels and all the saints gaze down to see what’s up as moms beat their rugs in the early spring. Or the summer: Footprint traces in the fresh asphalt, I become famous with every step, each imprinted forever. Sweaty I enter the cool of our house, so good in the summertime, its coolness a contrast to the heat of the whole steaming world outside. I’ll be off to the seaside soon and already miss the house. I’m going away, that I’ll be coming back is no relief because there’s no coming back worth such a leaving. Autumn: The house is fragrant, the rain falling outside our steamy windows. Paprikas, tomatoes, cabbages, and floury apples jostle about the floor, we’re making winter preserves, warming ourselves with their scents and colors, warming ourselves on the feeling of immortality among all this food to see us through the winter. Now we can sleep like bears and dream big long bear dreams, until with the first days of spring, warmed, we wake from our slumber.

With the cat the first fateful month entered our house: February. She was already a year and a half, her coat shone in the light, a cat ready for the catwalk at a world expo of miniature beauty. She was asleep on top of the television, but occasionally opened her eyes, eyeballing us huddled there in front of the screen with our hands in our laps, as if she didn’t like what she saw, as if bestowing a magnificent contempt upon us all. And then she just disappeared, leaving the house and not coming back for three days. On her return she was matted and muddied, one ear bitten. She went straight for her feeding tray, meowed her way around the house, and then curled up under the table to sleep. Been out whoring have we? said Grandma. The cat opened one eye, but under the eyelid was another she didn’t deign worthy of opening. She was smug; February had come.

Two months later Mom was in a flap, we’re going to have kittens. Grandma scowled in Dad’s direction, and he scratched his head, the guilty party. I was peeing myself with joy. What are we going to do with so many kittens? It doesn’t matter, kittens don’t eat much, they’ll live with us, but next year when February comes there’ll be more kittens, and that’s okay too, even that many kittens don’t eat much. A thousand kittens don’t eat as much as Grandma, Mom, and me, let alone Dad when he comes to visit; he eats more than a hundred cats put together.

At the beginning of May the cat tried to sneak into the linen cup-board, get out! Grandma trailed her, then she slunk under the bed, get out! Then she tried my toy box, get out! Grandma shunted her from one hiding place to the next, and I didn’t get it. She picked up the cat and set her down in a box of rags in the broom closet. That’s that, she said. What?. . Doesn’t matter what. We sat there watching TV, Mom was flicking through the newspaper, and I forgot about the cat until I heard this weird meowing. It’s started!. . What’s started? I jumped up. Come take a look, said Grandma knowingly. Don’t want to, I was a little bit scared. Come on, nothing’s going bite you. . Do I have to?. . Oh to hell with you if you don’t want to! But I did sidle up, peering out from behind Grandma and Mom. The cat was meowing, looking Grandma straight in the eye, but this time she wasn’t sneering, just inquisitively staring what’s this, what’s happening to me, I haven’t a clue, why didn’t anyone teach me about all this, why didn’t you tell me? But Grandma just nodded her head and whispered everything’s okay, it’s okay, everything’s going to be okay.

Look, the first one! Mom yelled. A little lump that really didn’t look much like a kitten popped out of the cat. Then she remembered what to do. She licked the lump until it became a furry something. The tiny kitty was as big as a key ring. Look, there’s the second one! It’d been ten minutes. Look, the third!. . the fourth!. . the fifth!. . Look, the sixth! Mom was hollering as if she were the courtier at a royal feline court and it was her job to announce the number of neonates the queen had borne to city and state.

Now she needs peace and quiet, Grandma commanded, and Mom exited the broom closet obediently. I was proud of Grandma; it was like she had this infinite feline or maternal experience. But my pride was short-lived, because three days later something happened that I’ve never told anyone and which I spent years trying to forget. The season of great deaths had to come, so I could start processing it and add my offering up to the time when the seasons and February disappeared, and all victims became something we could speak freely of until we made someone cry or fly into a rage.

Where are the kitties? I asked. They’re gone, she said. How come they’re gone, where are they?. . I don’t know, they’re gone. . The cat’s looking for them, where are they?. . I don’t know, they’re gone. . You do know! I screamed, you know where they are, go get them!. . I can’t go get them, they’re gone, Grandma had turned pale and was trying to get away from me. Bring the kitties back, shame on you!. . I can’t bring them back. . Bring them back, stupid! I was crying now, bring them back you bitch, bring them back or you deserve to die. . Grandma clammed shut, looked away, and tried to disappear every time I’d come near. Something terrible had happened, but I didn’t know what. Something so terrible that I wanted to say the most vile things to her, but luckily I didn’t know how to say them; if I’d known I would have, I would have killed my grandma with words.

When Mom came home from work she found me whimpering under the writing desk, doubled up like a fetus. The cat roamed the house, meowing in search of her children. But her children weren’t there. Grandma sat in the living room staring at the wall. She didn’t make lunch that day. Mom crouched down beside me repeating my name, but I didn’t respond. I didn’t want to say anything, or I couldn’t, I don’t remember anything else. She wanted to run her fingers through my hair, but I moved my head and hit the wall. My forehead bled; tears mixed with blood. The blood was sweeter than the tears, but it burned my eyes. Mom was crouched there trembling. Grandma stayed where she was. Grandma wasn’t there. I hope she never comes back, I thought.

She’d drowned the cat’s children in the washbasin and tossed them in the garbage. I’ll never do that again! she said to Mom, never again, those kittens have cost me half my life. I made like I didn’t hear them and that I’d forgotten everything. That’s the best thing to do if you can’t forget anything. I couldn’t forget those kittens.

Grandma had fed the kitten with an eyedropper, had given her a life already lost and taught her things only grandmothers can teach people and cats, had helped her give birth, and then she killed her children. I couldn’t understand that; I’ll never understand it, even though one day, along with a world and a city that had lost the seasons of the year, I’d get used to living with death and with exile from a life without death.

Ten years later Dad brought a puppy to the house, black and less than a month old. We’ll call him Nero, said Grandma. For the first few weeks Nero stayed in the house with us, until Schulz, the super, built him a wooden kennel in the yard. By the time he’d grown up Nero had a split personality: one minute he was a guard dog on a chain in the yard, the next he was a household pet sprawled out on our living-room floor. He was a good dog and a stupid one. Though he liked everyone he’d still bark his head off; he even liked cats, but they didn’t like him. The only thing Nero hated was the hedgehog that lived in our garden. He’d go wild when the hedgehog trundled the yard at night, pricking his snout on its quills, his muzzle frothing. Grandma used to say myohmy, my dummy dear, and he’d yelp and whine at a world where there were hedgehogs and a dog couldn’t live without constant stress. That’s what my mother so wisely observed.

The three of us felt pretty guilty the days and nights we left Nero in his kennel, down in the yard. We were actually fine with it when he slept up with us, but for some reason it was unacceptable he switch from being a guard dog to a household pet. I don’t know why we didn’t want him as a pet, but I fear we gave him a kennel and chain because we thought he was dumb, that it was beneath us to live with an idiot. Or maybe we thought we’d be less tied to Nero if he was farther away. I don’t know what it was all about, why we banished him from our daily lives.

Grandma passed away in early June, out in front of his kennel Nero howled the whole night long. At dawn I went down to the yard, it was a full moon, everything lit up. I sat down to give him a hug; faithful, four-legged Nero. My grandma was dead, but I couldn’t howl like him; it was as if the dog was sadder than me. Though he lived on a chain, he’d lost something I could never be conscious of, something I obviously didn’t even have, so my loss could never be like his. I took him in my arms, trying to make the sadness mutual, to take on a little of his grief, a little of his goodness, so that I too might be ennobled by this late-night grief and for a moment enter a better heaven, a dog’s heaven, where there’s no place for people, because such a heaven doesn’t have anything to do with God but with friends who die in dogs’ eyes.

Six months later, on the coldest day of the year, worried about Nero I hurried home from university. He was still in his kennel because I hadn’t let him in to warm himself by the coal stove. No one had looked after the animals or plants since Grandma died.

Nero wasn’t out in front of his kennel. He wasn’t inside either, nor was his chain. I found him dead, hanging over the neighbor’s fence. He was stiff, eyes half open. I lifted him up, a cold, furry object. I tried to close his eyes, but it didn’t work. They stayed open. I saw the empty and vacant eyes of death, nothing there, nothing of the world or hope; everything that had once lived there gone, never to return. This is what the eyes of all the dead look like. I didn’t ever need to see them again, because every man or woman who had ever lived and now lived no more had Nero’s eyes.

It took me three hours to dig a grave in the frozen earth and bury my dog along with his chain. Why with his chain, like he was a galley slave! said Mom. She wasn’t wrong actually. Nero really was our slave; he appeared at the wrong time, to people who didn’t deserve him and who he couldn’t save. Sometimes there really is no hope for us until we’ve strangled the very last thing we have left, that which will haunt us more than any horror or suffering to come.

If you can see it’s a car, tell me

That there in the picture, that’s a toy box, but when I want it to, it stops being a toy box and turns into a car. I wake up early when all the others are still asleep, wrap a sandwich in a checkered napkin, and write a letter, even though they haven’t taught me to write yet. The letter’s for them, but they don’t have to read it. I’m leaving one because it’s the thing to do, because everyone who suddenly goes off somewhere leaves a letter behind. I write how I’ve had enough of them, that I’m never coming back and that I’m going to a place where there aren’t any other people, and I’m going to stay there forever, and be rich, with a real car and a real train, a real pistol and real cowboys and Indians, and Partisans and Germans, who I’ll play war against and beat whenever I want, and when something needs rescuing, like when Sava Kovačević saved the high command or when Chief Big Bear sent smoke signals to the world so that stars might fall to the earth, but the Gold River would never fall to the white man. I’m going because they tricked me again, I don’t know how, but they tricked me, just like they do every time they know I don’t want to go somewhere, and I’m going to cling to the table leg with all my might and scream my head off, and no one’s going be able to tear me loose, because I know that wherever they’re taking me something’s going to hurt like hell, or something else is going happen to make me sorry I ever let go of that table leg. I leave the letter behind for them and on top of it the big key to the cellar. That’s my key and they can give it to whoever comes to take my place.

I sit down in the box, there’s not much room with all the toys, but I’ll manage because I’m big and by myself. I turn the car on and drive off. Brrmmm, brmmm, mmmmmmm, I drive far away, and my lips vibrate and go dry. I can’t even lick my lips because then the brrmmm, brmmm, mmmmmmmmm will stop and the car too, and then they might catch up with me and take me home or turn the car back into a box. Once I’m off and driving I don’t stop until lunchtime when Grandma comes to get me and says c’mon you little moppet, you’ll wreck your throat screeching away in that box. Then my car vanishes, and all the kilometers I’ve driven too, France, Germany, and America vanish, all the countries I’ve traveled, the cowboys and Indians vanish, and so does Sava Kovačević and the high command and the Sutjeska canyon, which smells of darkness, menthol candies, and explosives. I’m back in the yard from which I set off into the world, in the toy box I turned into a car, a car that vanishes the moment someone who can’t see it comes along, like Grandma or Mom, because for them a box is always just a box, and nothing ever turns into something else.

What’ve you been doing? Mom gives me that look moms give their little boys when they’re a bit peculiar but aren’t allowed to know they’re a bit peculiar. Maybe the look’s got a different name, I don’t know what it is, but I know when I answer I’ve got to really be smart to make it go away. I was playing driving. . That’s nice, and how does playing driving work?. . You just sit in the car and drive. . And what’s this?. . It’s a letter, I left it for you so you wouldn’t get worried. . And what does it say? She was looking at the wavy inked lines that looked like the ocean or a doctor’s scribble. How can you ask me that, you’re the one who knows how to read, not me. You should know what it says. . It looks to me like it doesn’t say anything, there aren’t any words. . There aren’t any words because I was playing. When I’m playing nothing’s for real, because I don’t have a real car and I don’t know how to write. . Why don’t you play with other children?. . Because they don’t know how to play driving.

Mom gives Grandma a dirty look and I know that tonight, when they think I’m asleep, they’re going to spend hours whispering and stinking up the cellar with cigarettes, arguing about whose fault it is and why I spend every morning in a cardboard box, snorting and spluttering like — ohmygodsorry — a dimwit. I’m not exactly sure what the word means, but I figure it’s really bad to be a dimwit because I’ve noticed they only say it when they have that look reserved for little boys who are a bit peculiar.

The photo where I’m in a cardboard box, I mean, in my car, driving to America, was taken by a German guy last summer. Back then I was afraid of having my picture taken. Actually, that wasn’t what I was afraid of; I was afraid of injections, and every week they’d trick me into having an injection, so I started pretending I was scared of having my picture taken too. As soon as I spotted someone with a camera I’d burst into tears and run for my life. Put a camera in front of me and I was even prepared to jump into the sea, and I was only three and a half and didn’t know how to swim, that’s how much I pretended about being scared of having my picture taken. I kept it up for months, and they all tried, Mom, Dad, even Grandpa, until one day this German showed up, because Grandpa used to translate tourist stuff for them, and the German crept into the bushes and hid there until I got into the car, and just as I was about to turn the ignition he jumped out and snapped. I let out a howl but it was already too late.

The German sent the photo from Germany, and Grandma put it in an album to show guests. Some aunties from Sarajevo who I didn’t know, but were important and had gray hair as blue as the sea — I didn’t get it how something could be gray and blue at the same time — said uuuu, what a sweet little boy, he could be in a fashion magazine, and I was so embarrassed that I’d lower my head, shrug my shoulders, and hide my eyes. So they’d see I was a dimwit and leave me in peace. When they gave me a hug I’d go all floppy like a chicken just come from the butcher’s, and let them pinch my cheeks with their thumbs and fore-fingers, all the while their gray heads blue like the sea smelling of pickled paprika, roses, and high fever.

It was hard for me to hit the road after the photo, because it got tougher and tougher to turn the box into a car, because that photo, where it was clear as day that I wasn’t in a car but an ordinary cardboard box that used to have little packets of cookies in it, was always in front of me. Photos are like grown-ups because they show everything in a way that can only make you get all worried; in photos everything looks like it’ll never change, like it’ll never turn into anything else. Nothing is as you imagined and it never will be, the only thing you can be sure of is that in the picture you’ll look confused, confused smiley or confused angry, because your eyes see everything differently to how the camera sees it, and now they’re there in the photo without all the stuff you’ve imagined, and the whole world appears exactly as it would if there were no one who played and no one who made anything up, there’s just the eyes that once saw other stuff and now are confused because that stuff’s not in the photo.

I lie in the dark and can’t stop my breathing, I can’t sleep, and I can’t be here when morning comes. Tomorrow I’m going a long way away and I won’t be back. I’m never coming back, and I’ll never again look them in the eyes, nobody who knows, not Grandma or Grandpa, not Mom or Dad. It’s all finished with them. I said to myself if only they were dead, but I know they won’t die and that they’ll grab my head and force me to look them in the eyes, and in my eyes they’ll look for me, their child, the one they can do anything to if they think it best for him. I don’t like them doing what’s best for me because everything that’s best for me makes me cry and turn into something I don’t know the name of, but it looks like a box that turns into a car and then back into a box; I’m that box when they do what’s best for me.

In the morning I’ll hop into the car and go far away. I’m going to screw my eyes shut tight and then open them and take a good hard look. If it’s still a box and not a car I’ll set off on foot, taking only the essentials, just the stuff I won’t be able to do without when I get where I’m going: my little yellow spade, my teddy bunny, and my winter sweater. Everything else I’m leaving behind for them, for the child they get to take my place and who won’t be called Miljenko, because from tomorrow on they’re going to cry whenever anybody says Miljenko. I know they’re going to cry; they’re going to cry like they do when someone dies, but I’m not going to die, I’m simply going to leave. But I’m going forever, and when you go forever it’s like you’re dead for those who remain.

It all started on a Saturday. Mom and Dad arrived from Sarajevo, and Grandma said the kid hasn’t been on the potty for three days. Dad raised an eyebrow — three days? — and I was already scared, but I pretended I couldn’t hear anything and continued building a castle for Queen Forgetful, my heart pounding hard. I thought they were going to grab me by my hands and legs and cart me off to the hospital or some other place, some big toilet where nurses, paddles in hand, scare little boys into pooping. But nothing happened. Dad gave me a hug and said my little man, and Mom said you’re not having any more chocolate ’cause chocolate blocks you up, giving Grandma another dirty look like she was about to scream at her for stuffing me with chocolate, but Grandma hadn’t, and we all well knew that. Grandma says that bananas and chocolate are luxuries and that we should eat spinach and carrots because spinach is good for the blood and carrots for the eyes, but best of all, they’re not luxuries. A luxury is something you should be ashamed of because Mom and Dad work from morning until night and we can’t indulge in luxuries and eat bananas and chocolate, because Mom and Dad could lose their jobs because of bananas and chocolate, and then we’d die of hunger like those black people because we’d all have to live off Grandpa’s pension.

On Sunday Dad went to Makarska but came back before lunch. They were really good at the medical center. Not a problem, what are colleagues for, how about a cup of coffee, how are things in Sarajevo, just a minute, the nurse will bring it out to you. And they didn’t charge me a thing, he said. I slunk under the table thinking: if he calls me to come out in that wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly voice I’m gonna yell and get ready for a fight because that wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly voice always means one thing — an injection’s coming my way. If he calls me to say I’ve got to take a pill, then I’ll come out because it’s beneath his dignity as a doctor to lie to a patient and be there waiting with an injection instead of a pill. That’s what he once said and I took him on his word.

I waited anxiously, not letting out a peep. And they knew I was waiting and were all silent too. Dad got up from the table, took a glass, and filled it with water. He crouched down next to the table, but I was already pressed up against the wall. Here you go, this is a pill for constipation, you gotta take it, you gotta drink up, he said as if he were scared of me. Actually, I think he was a little scared that I was going to start howling, and I was sure he’d spent ages dreaming up that word constipation, which didn’t even exist, he just dreamed it up so I’d believe he was talking to me like I was a grown-up.

Anyway, I took the pill and drank up. Grandma asked when it should start working and Dad said if nothing’s happened after twenty-four hours and six pills, then. . I froze, because he didn’t say what would happen then, and I already knew it was going to be something terrible and that’s why he interrupted himself, so I wouldn’t hear. They’re going to take me to the hospital to see the surgeon and he’s going to cut my tummy open and take all the poop out.

Grandma asked you want to go potty? But I didn’t. A bit later she brought the potty over, c’mon, sit down, maybe you’ll go poopoo, so I sat down, but nothing happened. C’mon, squeeze a little, she said. Mom rolled her eyes, and Dad said it’ll all be fine, and Grandpa sat there the whole time chuckling to himself, trying to keep it down so no one would hear him and Grandma wouldn’t call him an old hillbilly. The thing is, for Grandpa everything to do with farting, the toilet, and going to the shittery, which is what he used to say when someone — usually me — needed to go poop, was the funniest thing ever, and he’d laugh like he was retarded because he thought nature invented these things to give people something to smirk about and make women get embarrassed.

I spent all day yesterday sitting on the potty, and the whole day again today, right there in the middle of the room, trying to make the impossible possible. I didn’t feel like going poop because I just didn’t feel like pooping, and it didn’t help any that I was so scared of what would happen if the pills didn’t work and I wouldn’t be able to poop even if I wanted to.

Things went downhill after the TV news when Dad got his doctor’s bag out. As soon as I saw it I was on my way under the table but ran straight into Mom’s lap. Her skirt didn’t smell like lavender anymore but fear. Mom was as strong as a villain and I fought her, kicking and screaming, but someone lifted me up in the air. I didn’t see who because my eyes were shut and I was screaming. First I howled let me go, let me go, then I tried I need to poo, I need to poo, where’s the potty, but they didn’t believe me or say anything. I kept howling, but they went quietly about a business they’d agreed on in advance and there was no change of plan, not even if my bones started breaking and all the color ran from my face and everything broke into the tiniest little pieces, into Lego blocks you could build a whole new person out of, someone who could go poop every day and who you didn’t have to catch in the air like a butterfly and get that colored stuff all over your fingers. They got me down on the bed, Dad said what’s the matter, there’s nothing to worry about, it’s not going to hurt and I was sure that something terrible was going to happen. As soon as they say it’s not going to hurt, it only means one thing: it’s going to hurt like hell, because whenever he or some other doctor says that something’s not going to hurt, it always does.

They took my undies off and flipped me on my tummy. Mom was holding me so tight I couldn’t move. I turned my head to look at the injection, but then I saw that Dad didn’t have an injection in his hand, there wasn’t a needle in sight; he was holding something red, which looked like a pear, a rubber pear, and instead of a stalk it had a little thin see-through tube. It looked way scarier than an injection, so I screamed my lungs out. Mom turned my head back the other way, and I felt someone holding my bum, pulling it apart and sticking something up there inside me. Though there were no bombs, cities silently crumbled in my pounding heart, they’re sticking something up there, but why? Stuff’s only supposed to come out of there, don’t they want me to poop? Why are they putting more stuff up there? And then the stuff they were squirting up my bum expanded, hot, wet, and strange. It burned and stung and kept expanding, and I was full of this strange stuff, and there was more and more of it, and I thought it was never going to stop and that I’d just keep getting fuller and fuller with that stuff until I burst or admitted something they hadn’t even asked me yet.

Grandma came over and said now be a good boy and sit on the potty. If you get up on the potty we won’t ever have to do this again. But this wasn’t my grandma, it was a German telling a member of the resistance that he’ll quit the torture if he betrays his comrades. I spat at her, but she didn’t hit me. I sat on the potty and looked at the floor. Something gushed from me onto the tin pan below, gushing out of me against my will, the same way it went in. Are you done? someone asked. I bit my lip and looked at the floor. He’s done, someone said. I kept staring at the floor. Someone lifted me off the potty and wiped my bum. I didn’t say anything, just looked at the floor, and when the floor wasn’t there to look at anymore I shut my eyes. They sat me down on a chair. I looked at the floor. Go play, someone said. Put him to bed. Everything will be fine tomorrow, said someone else. I just sat there looking at the floor.

Now I’m lying in bed and waiting for the morning so I can finally get going. You can’t leave at night because it’s dark, which means you can’t see where you’re going, and my car doesn’t have any headlights. I’m going to have another good look at that photo and see if I can see me sitting in a real car and not a cardboard box that used to have packets of cookies in it. If you can see it’s a car, tell me. If you can’t, I’m going to have to take my spade, my teddy bunny, and my winter sweater and set out on foot. If I stay, I’ll have to look at the floor for the rest of my life, never say anything, not telling apart the voices talking to me.

When someone gets really scared

Donkeys sleep at Profunda, that’s what we whisper so the old folk don’t hear, because if they heard, then we’d be in for it. Profunda is out of bounds, because that’s where little Vjeko went and fell and broke his neck and there was a big funeral, the procession went from one end of Drvenik to the other, from Punta to Puntin, and then it went up on Biokovo, where the cemetery is, and everyone cried because the body was a little one, and when the body is a little one, really everyone cries. When it’s a big one, the only people who cry are those who loved the dead person or those who love those who loved the dead person. No one had been to Profunda since then, no one even knows what’s there anymore, but by the time three years had passed since Vjeko’s funeral, the wonders of Profunda had gotten bigger and bigger. Then the big gest rumor of all started going around, the one about the donkeys sleeping there at night.

Profunda used to be Mate Terin’s house, but then the war started and the Italians came and they set Mate’s house on fire. No one knew why they did it, why his house, and why they spared everyone else’s. Maybe they just wanted to make an example of someone, show how tough they were, and they picked Mate’s house by chance. Mate hung himself when he saw the remains of his house, and because he didn’t have a wife or children, or any relatives except a brother who lived in New Zealand who never wrote to him, there was no one to grieve for Mate or to repair his house when the war finished. All that remained were big rough walls, white as snow, all traces of fire washed clean by the rain. The burned stone had gone white, much whiter than it was when it was a house.

You get to Profunda from the hillside above because the house is dug into the earth and cut into the rock. You can jump onto the ruins from the rock above and walk the walls on which the roof once stood. Actually, you could only do that until little Vjeko fell and broke his neck.

We’re gonna do it on Saturday, said Nikša, but we gotta wait ’til it’s dark. There were five of us, four locals and me, who wanted to be a local, but to them I was an outsider, the Sarajever. This meant I always had to prove myself more, just like I had to prove myself more when I was in Sarajevo because I was an outsider there too, a Dalmatian outsider. For half the year I spoke Dalmatian and the other half Sarajevan, but no one trusted me because they all knew that I’d always be going back to where I wasn’t a Sarajevan or a Dalmatian, where I’d speak like I wasn’t one or the other.

On Saturday it’s Fishermen’s Night, that’s a village festival, and they don’t make anyone go home, mothers, babies, or grandpas, and so we’re going to make the most of it and go to Profunda, to see where the donkeys sleep and walk on the walls and check the whole place out, but only the brave among us of course. Scaredy-cats don’t have to walk the walls, but I’ve got to use my chance, because if I miss it I’ll always be the outsider from Sarajevo and no one will ever believe me when I speak like a Dalmatian.

Grandpa was reading the paper, Grandma cleaning the fish. Dearie, listen to this, said Grandpa looking at Grandma through his glasses. In research undertaken in 1923, the noted scientist von Hentig concluded that earthquakes had an effect on the internal secretion of fish and their behavior, and that artificial convulsions could in no way explain the phenomenon. Animals obviously react to a unique geophysical phenomenon preceding the earthquake, one that culminates in the quake itself. He read really slowly, word by word, to make it sound more serious, but I knew Grandpa was just playing serious, only reading it out loud to get Grandma going, but not too much, just a little bit, just enough for her to start bickering. He’d always needle Grandma into a little bicker when he was in a good mood.

She raised her eyebrows and curled her lips, as if surprised to hear about the fish and the earthquakes, but she continued preparing the fish for lunch all the same. I knew she knew what he was up to, that he just wanted her to say fine Franjo, I’m preparing the fish, and you’re reading about earthquakes. Then he told her about the importance of knowing when there’s going to be an earthquake because you have to be prepared and that it would be good if she could check the internal secretion of those sardines she was fixing. That’s how it was supposed to go, but it doesn’t because Grandma just raises her eyebrows and acts all surprised.

He keeps looking at her for a while, like a rascal; sometimes she says to him what are you giving me that rascal look for, and that always makes me laugh because my grandpa is seventy-five years old, and there’s no way he can look at her like a rascal, but ever since Grandma started calling it the rascal look I call it that too. Grandpa goes back to his paper, heaves a deep sigh, and forgets about the rascal look because his needling didn’t work out.

It’s Fishermen’s Night on Saturday, I say. Grandpa doesn’t bat an eyelid, and Grandma keeps cleaning the fish. Are we going to celebrate?. . We don’t have anything to celebrate, we’re not fishermen, but if it’s fish you’re after, you’ll be eating fish in about half an hour. . But there’s free fish from the grill on Saturday. . You were going to pay for these ones, right?. . It’s not the same, those ones are from the skillet, on Saturday they’ll be from the grill. . All right, you go celebrate. . Can I stay until after dark?. . We’ll see. If the other kids do, you will too.

Grandpa read the paper through lunch; he’d grab a sardine with his fingers and eat it all in one go, from head to tail, the fish bones making a crunching sound between his teeth, they’re good for you, think of the calcium! He’d leave the tails to the side so he knew how many he’d eaten. Grandma looked at him unimpressed, and I thought about what would happen if I ate a whole sardine, just like that, without picking the bones out and said I was thinking of all the calcium. I swear that when I’m big I’m going to read the paper and eat sardines whole, and no one will be able to say or do a thing about it. I don’t care what I’m going to be when I grow up, I couldn’t care less if I’m going to be a pilot, a butcher, or a forestry expert like Uncle Postnikov, all I care about is that time goes by really fast so I can be like Grandpa and eat sardines head, bones and all, put my glasses on the end of my nose, and read the paper. That’s the important thing, to learn to read the paper, see what’s going on in the world, particularly on a day like today when it’s been really boring here and we ate sardines from the skillet, not from the grill. The world is so big that there are always people who weren’t bored, so the papers write about those people, and the people who are bored read the papers, like us for example, like Grandpa who’d love to bicker with Grandma, and Grandma who can’t be bothered bickering, and especially me, because I have to wait until Saturday to go to Profunda, to see the donkeys while they’re sleeping, to walk a circle on the edge of the abyss around the burned out house of Mate Terin and be done with being an outsider from Sarajevo.

You set a fine example for the boy, says Grandma to Grandpa as he drops a sardine on the paper. He picks it up between his thumb and forefinger and puts it in his mouth, the fine bones crackling like dry pine needles under the wheels of a truck, a greasy splodge in the shape of a sardine imprinted on the paper. Like a photo! Grandpa has snaffled the sardine, but its outline stays on the newsprint. You can see its length and width, the kind of head it had, and the kind of tail. The piece of newspaper looks like a tombstone with a picture of the deceased, the deceased one in Grandpa’s tummy.

It was dead when Grandma was cleaning it. That sardine was dead even when it was in the fish shop. It was dead as soon as they hauled it out of the sea. What do sardines die from? I asked. They die from air, just like we’d die if someone held us under water, said Grandpa. That means fishermen throw out their nets to drag fish into the open air so they die?. . No, they catch fish so we’ve got something to eat, and we eat only what is dead. . What about chard, is that dead too?. . I think it is, but no one really knows because chard doesn’t have eyes. At least as far as we know, dead things are things that once upon a time moved their eyes. . There should be fish that cast out nets for people and drag them into the sea and fry them and eat them. . Where’d you come up with that nonsense?. . Then we wouldn’t be sorry about eating fish because we’d know fish eat us too. Get it. . No, I don’t. Why would we feel sorry for fish?. . Because they were alive, and then fishermen caught them in their nets. If the fishermen hadn’t caught them, they’d still be alive. . You can’t feel sorry for fish, if you felt sorry for fish, then you’d also have to feel sorry for chickens, and pigs, and calves, in the end you’d die of hunger. . I don’t care, I’m going to feel sorry for them. . Suit yourself, feel sorry for them, but you’ll soon see you’ve got nothing to eat. Grandpa was angry now, so I decided to shut up and eat my sardines. He didn’t understand fish, and he wasn’t sad when he saw a greasy splodge on the newspaper, a photo of the sardine he’d just eaten. It was because he’d been to war, and in war people learn what it’s like to be dead and as long as they themselves don’t die, death becomes normal to them. He fought on the Soča front as an Austrian soldier, and then the Italians took him prisoner in 1916, and he says he had a great time back then. He was imprisoned for a full three years, he learned Italian and kept a diary about everything that happened, things he wanted to tell someone but didn’t have anyone to tell. He wrote the diary in Italian, but using the Cyrillic alphabet because the Italians didn’t know Cyrillic and the other prisoners didn’t know Italian, so no one could take a peek at his diary and laugh at his secret longings. The diary is kept in Grandpa’s drawer and the first of his descendants to know both Cyrillic and Italian will be the first to read it. Grandpa’s son, my uncle, and Grandpa’s daughter, my mother, don’t know Italian, so that means that one day, if I learn Cyrillic and Italian, it could be me. Maybe then I’ll find out how soldiers stop caring about fishes’ deaths and why they don’t care about fish even when they’re old and not soldiers anymore, but pensioners who no army in the world would ever send to war.

Tomorrow was Friday. There was only one more day until Saturday. C’mon, I’ll show you something you’ve never seen before, said Nikša. We set off for the old camp ground, to the little wooden hut where they used to keep the sun umbrellas, and sat down on old beer crates. Nikša dropped his pants. He didn’t have any undies on; he was older than us and everything on him was bigger, the thing he wanted to show us too. Check this out! he said and pulled the skin up. I’d never done that, but I was sure it had to hurt. He put the skin back down and pulled it up again; my throat tightened like it did when they used to take me for my vaccinations. He repeated the up-down thing with the skin a few more times, that’s gotta hurt, I thought. Everyone was silent, waiting to see what might happen next. Nikša said look, it’s getting bigger! And it really had gotten bigger, but it was big before too.

I was scared and looked over at Zoran and Miro, but they were dead still, staring at the action between Nikša’s legs. Nikša breathed faster and faster, and everything on show got redder and redder. I was scared what was going to happen next, actually most of all I was scared because Zoran and Miro were just sitting there watching not worried about a thing. Then I remembered I was an outsider from Sarajevo. I jumped up off the crate and took off outside.

I don’t know whether they burst out laughing or yelled that I was a scaredy-cat, I don’t know anything, because I just ran and ran and ran and didn’t stop until I got home. What’s wrong, speedy, you’re covered in sweat, said Grandma. I was doing athletics! I gasped convincingly. She saw me and she saw Dane Korica on his way home from the Munich Olympics. I was dying of happiness because I’d made it home and had managed to lie like a champion. I lie best when I’m happy.

On Saturday I woke up dead set that I wasn’t going to leave the house. I’m not going outside until we go back to Sarajevo. Grandpa had gone to Zaostrog, I’d said I wasn’t going with him, Grandma asked are you sick? I said I think I’m sick, and she said well, you’re not going to Fishermen’s Night then, I said I didn’t want to well, well, you really are sick, she said, and fetched the thermometer. You don’t have a temperature. Where does it hurt?. . I don’t hurt. I’m just feeling a bit sick and I don’t want to go outside. . Did you get into a fight with someone yesterday?. . No. Nothing happened yesterday, I just don’t want to go outside today, and not tomorrow either. . Why? Are you going to be sick tomorrow too?. . If I have to go outside I will be. . You’ve decided to never leave the house ever again?. . I’ll go outside as soon as we’re back in Sarajevo. . Did someone say something mean to you?. . No, but I’m a little bit scared. . Of what?. . Of the donkeys that sleep at Profunda. . Have you been to Profunda? Grandma shot out. No, I haven’t, and I’m not going to go either, because I’m not leaving the house. Do donkeys really sleep at Profunda?. . What donkeys? You know there isn’t a donkey left in Drvenik. . Last year there were three, Mijo’s, Dušan’s, and Stipe Alača’s, that must be them. . God, where’d you get that from, those donkeys are long gone!. . Where are they then?. . They were taken to Makarska. . What are they doing in Makarska? Grandma sighed and looked at the ceiling, mumbling something like ohjesuschristsaveme and then said fine then, I’ll tell you, but don’t you dare start bawling! There’s nothing there at Profunda, it’s just a ruin like any other, full of brambles. The donkeys were sent to the slaughterhouse because nobody wanted them anymore.

I closed my eyes, my heart was really pounding; fine, I’ll suck this one up too. No more questions? I shook my head. But I’m not going out until we’re in Sarajevo. Grandma didn’t say anything else, but I knew she was thinking that tomorrow I’d change my mind and tear off out of the house. That was what I was most afraid of because I knew there was no way I could tell her that the real reason I can’t go out is because something I saw had made me really scared, something others could watch, but I couldn’t, and that’s why I can’t go outside.

Am I a Sarajever? I followed her into the kitchen. No, you’re a Sarajevan. People from Sarajevo are called Sarajevans. . Is that good, to be a Sarajevan?. . It’s good to be whatever, it’s good to be from wherever. . Then why do they say I’m a Sarajever?. . Who says that?. . Zoran and Nikša. . They say that because they don’t know anything about it and they’ve never been out of Drvenik. . And why do they call me a Dalmatian in Sarajevo?. . For the same reason. Because they’ve never been out of Sarajevo. . And why do we always move?. . Because Grandpa has asthma and has to spend lots of time at the seaside. Besides, it’s good to move around because then you’re in lots of places at once, the place where you really are and the place where you’ve come from, and if you don’t like it, you could always spend the whole year with your mom in Sarajevo. . Promise me you won’t force me to go outside until we get back to Sarajevo. . Fine, I promise, but only if you tell me why you don’t want to go outside all of a sudden. . I don’t want to because they keep calling me a Sarajever, I lied and went to my room. I always leave like that when something is really important, because as soon as I go, Grandma takes everything I’ve told her more seriously. I threw myself on the bed too, just in case, burying my head in the pillow and waiting to see if she’d come. When she came in, I pretended to be asleep. She pulled the covers over me and crept out.

I slept through Fishermen’s Night and the mission to Profunda. Actually I slept right through everything that happened after that, everything I didn’t want to see. I spent the whole seven days before we went back to Sarajevo in the house or the yard, playing by myself. One night I ran across the road, to Uncle Postnikov. He got his sketch pad and felt-tip pens out and drew snow, snowy villages and snowy cities. Uncle Postnikov is eighty years old, a Russian who once, a long time ago, fled the revolution. Why? I asked him. Because I was scared, he said, calmly sketching a reindeer-drawn sleigh with a girl on it wearing a big brown hood, her long blond hair peeking out from underneath. When you’re really scared, you have to run. . And never go back?. . I don’t know, I couldn’t go back. . Why?. . Because of those who weren’t scared, the ones who stayed. . I’m never going back either. . Where are you never going back to? he asked, surprised. I’m never going back to the old campground, I said to Uncle Postnikov. If it’s because you’re scared, then we’re the same, he answered, and turned to a new page where the whole of Moscow was to be drawn.

The sky is beautiful when you’re upside down

The world is beautiful when it’s turned upside down. The sky beneath me means I could walk on it, and the top of our house in Drvenik is pinned to the sky and it’s like our house is going to topple over on its side because it’s resting on a single tip where the two sides of the roof meet, but the house doesn’t topple over, nothing happens, there’s just my laughter and wishing it would stay this way forever, that the sky stays forever under the soles of my feet, that I’m tickled by clouds of sheep, that I can walk across the sun like I do across the steamiest August asphalt, that when night falls the stars will prickle me like the sand on the island of Brač, like the shingle where Ismet Brkić is building his weekend house. I want it to stay like this forever. Squealing in delight I scream no, no, don’t let me down, but Uncle Momčilo isn’t listening, and the world spins around me a couple more times and then everything is back to normal. The concrete yard is beneath my feet, the sky high above, and our house is sitting like all the other houses, the walls rising up to the roof. There, high in the air, everything gets thinner and smaller, because in this world everything on the ground is wide and everything up high narrow, and that’s how it’ll stay if I can’t get Uncle Momčilo to grab me by the ankles and hold me upside down, to give me a little joggle so I can see what it’s like when sky and earth quake, but nothing collapses, when everything stays anchored and beautiful, and there’s no pain that might kill the miracle in your eyes.

Uncle Momčilo used to be a colonel, but he’s been retired from the military twenty years or something. When he retired he was younger than my mom is now. Grandma says it was because of Ðilas, and saying it in her hush-hush voice means there’s no way I’m to ask what because of Ðilas means, because then something might happen to me because of Ðilas, or Grandma will get mad because I’ve put her in a sticky situation. Because of Ðilas is my name for a sticky situation, and that’s the way it’s going to be when I grow up too. When something bad happens, and all I can do is shrug my shoulders in the face of a mountain of trouble and wait to see how things play out, I’ll think: Here we go again, it’s all because of Ðilas. And that’ll calm my nerves some, because I’ll remember Uncle Momčilo who was the first to show me how beautiful the sky is when you find yourself upside down.

Uncle Momčilo built the house next door to ours. His house isn’t an old Dalmatian house, just a regular tourist one. Zero aesthetics, says Grandma, a whiff of the barracks and that’s how they build their weekend houses. I don’t understand what she’s talking about, and what I don’t understand is hard for me to remember. I sit on the floor building a castle for Queen Forgetful and repeat after Grandma a whiff of the bawacks and that’s how they build their weekend houses. . Oh shut it you, little devil, and don’t you go around saying that to people because if I hear you, you’ll never set foot in my house again. And it’s barracks, not bawacks. She often does that: says something, and the second I repeat it after her or ask her a question she’s already threatening me that I’ll never set foot in the house again or that she’s going to skin me alive.

Uncle Momčilo has a wife called Auntie Mirjana. He’s got a son called Boban too, but I’ve only ever seen him once in my life. Boban is short and fat, and he’s got a squeaky voice and doesn’t look like a grown-up even though he goes to work and drives a green Fiat 1300. Auntie Mirjana bakes bread rolls and cooks baked beans. Bread rolls and baked beans are the two best things to eat in the whole world. Auntie Mirjana loves it when I ask her when are you going to bake bread rolls again? And she always brings me some the next day, and Grandma gets mad and says you little scallywag, the woman’ll think you’re a little bread piggy, and then I tell that it’s not bread I like but bread rolls. You buy bread at the supermarket, and you bake bread rolls in the oven. Grandma says that bread rolls are actually just bread. Grandma isn’t lying, I know that for sure, but I don’t believe the meaning of some words, because any word can mean what I want it to mean, just like it could to her if only she weren’t so grown-up and worried someone might punish her if a word means something to her that it doesn’t to them. I hear the words bread roll and I’m flat-out hungry, I hear the word bread, I couldn’t care less.

Auntie Mirjana taught me how to walk. I was nine months old and it was my first time in Drvenik. Grandma was cooking lunch, Mom had gone to the bank in Makarska, and I was with Auntie Mirjana in their yard. She held my hand and said c’mon, left leg, c’mon, right leg, now left leg, now right leg, and then she yelled Olga, Olga, Miljenko’s walking. Grandma ran out holding a knife for gutting fish, oh no, not now when Javorka’s in Makarska. . Maybe we shouldn’t tell her, Auntie Mirjana worried. Out of the question, you can’t keep such things from the mother, said Grandma.

Mom came back on the afternoon bus, Auntie Mirjana said watch this, lifted me up by my fingertips, and I was away. Mom burst out crying and scooped me up in her arms, my boy, my big boy, and then I started to cry. She was supposed to be crying out of happiness, why I was crying I don’t know because I don’t remember a thing.

Today everyone says that Auntie Mirjana taught me to walk and it’s a really big deal for them, but bread rolls are a really big deal for me, and so is Uncle Momčilo teaching me how to look at the world from upside down.

It’s a shame when people only see each other once a year, aging so quickly in each other’s eyes, Grandpa said. Franjo, believe me, you haven’t aged a bit, said Uncle Momčilo. Get off with you, the old fossil’s mummified like Tutankhamen, said Grandma. And you, Miss Olga, you just get more beautiful with age. . Oh please, Momčilo, mocking old ladies doesn’t become you. I wear every wrinkle as a memory, and you know, I remember a lot. That’s why I don’t go senile, because every single one reminds me of something.

They repeat the same story year after year; one year the old fossil is mummified like Tutankhamen, the next he’s as shriveled as a dry plum, and the one after that he’s embalmed like Lenin, everything else stays the same. They lie and they’re happy when they’re lying, and I’m happy when I lie too, it’s just that everyone gets mad at me but there’s no one to get mad at them. I don’t get mad because I can see that they’re somehow sad. Grandma’s sadness is in the corners of her mouth, Uncle Momčilo’s in his eyes, Grandpa’s in his nose. Each of them is sad where you can see the sadness best, and they’re sad because they really can see each other getting older. For grown-ups, old age is reason enough for sad mouths, eyes, and noses, because they think it’s better to be a child, and no one can convince them otherwise.

We didn’t come by ourselves, said Uncle Momčilo. Momir is with us, Auntie Mirjana folded her arms. Who’s Momir? I asked. They’d thought I wasn’t there again because I was building a castle for Queen Forgetful. They looked at one another, startled. Grandpa shrugged his shoulders, Auntie Mirjana raised her eyebrows, and Grandma said you know, Auntie Mirjana and Uncle Momčilo have a grandson now. . Good for them, I answered coldly and returned to the castle, which had been under heavy snow for right about three seconds now.

I don’t want to see him. . But why not? He’s a baby, baby Momir. . What do I care? You go, I’m not. . But Auntie Mirjana has baked bread rolls. . Good for her, I’m not hungry, I don’t care. So Grandma and Grandpa went to see baby Momir, and I stayed with my castle and everything suddenly went quiet. I’d never heard such silence. All you could hear was a big summer fly and my breathing. I stared at the wall and listened. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, just like that, but then it was more choppy inhale, long exhale, choppy inhale, long exhale, and then came the flood. I thought about Auntie Mirjana’s bread rolls and how I’d never eat them again. I was all alone, but my loneliness wasn’t mixed with fear, it was loneliness mixed with sadness; mouth, eyes, and ears, all sad. I didn’t have anyone anymore, they were all with baby Momir.

When Grandpa and Grandma came back I was already sitting in the broom closet, there behind the heavy curtain where Uncle kept the oars and motor for the dinghy. Here you go, Auntie Mirjana sent this along for you, said Grandma and held out a bread roll wrapped in a white cloth. I took the bread roll, hot and heavy, and put it in my lap. But I didn’t want to eat it. I can’t eat on such sad occasions. I can just stare at the tips of my toes, listen to my breathing, shake my head at every question I’m asked, a rusty old buoy no one’s ever going to tie their boat to.

How about a walk in the clouds, Uncle Momčilo came over as soon as I woke up. I looked him straight in the eye and didn’t say a thing. I know you want to. It’s our thing, just between you and me. No one else knows how beautiful it is. . I will if you promise me something. . If I can do it, I can promise you, shoot, just don’t forget that I’m not Il Grande Blek or Commandante Mark. . Promise me you’ll never show Momir how to walk in the clouds. Uncle Momčilo went quiet and put his finger to his bottom lip, like he always does when he’s thinking. You know, this is a complicated business. I mean, you’ve caught me on the wrong foot, on my left foot. You see, the thing is, I wanted to ask you something about that, and now I don’t know how to begin. . You mean, you won’t promise me. . Wait a second, that’s got nothing to do with it. It’s something else. I need your help, but I don’t know how to explain it to you. . Promise me you’ll never show Momir how to walk in the clouds, I repeated, word by word, slowly because my inhale had gotten choppy, and Uncle Momčilo’s face had shattered into a thousand pieces, flashing in brilliant strips of light, the rays with which tears begin on a sunny day. Of course I promise you, but I also want to ask you to promise me something. . Promise you what?. . You know, I’m already an old man, and when Momir grows up a little bit, I’ll be even older and weaker, my strength will have gone, you understand, so if I may, I’d like to ask you something, if it’s not going to be too big a problem for you. . C’mon, just tell me what I need to promise you. I wanted to be serious because Uncle Momčilo was really jumpy and it seemed like I was his only hope. I’d like you to promise me that you’ll show Momir how to walk in the clouds. You’ll be big and strong by then, and you’ll be able to show him, and because I taught you how to walk in the clouds, I can’t ask anyone else. That’s it, that’s what I’d like to ask you, if it isn’t too big a problem.

That night, my promise to Uncle Momčilo went to the top of my list of priorities in life. I needed to be strong, to be really, really strong, to be so strong that when baby Momir isn’t a baby anymore I’d be able to teach him how to walk in the clouds because his grandpa can’t teach him. And he can’t for two reasons: The first is that he promised me he would never teach him, and the second is that people get older and in old age they lose their strength, so one day they become children who need someone to show them how to walk in the clouds, but no one shows them because it’s impolite to grab old people by the ankles and hang them upside down. There are lots of impolite things that could make the whole world happy. I don’t mean burping, because burping has never made anyone happy, and you only burp because you’re asking for trouble and risking a box on the snout. I was more thinking of all the beautiful things forbidden to old people. My grandpa would definitely be happy if someone picked him up by his ankles and flipped him upside down, so one last time he could see how beautiful the sky is beneath our feet.

I decided that first thing in the morning I’d go over to Auntie Mirjana and Uncle Momčilo’s, take a look at baby Momir, and expertly assess how much time I had before I’d teach him to walk in the clouds.

You’re funny, be funny for us again

It’s hard to believe there are Germans who catch colds. Take Hans for example: He pulls into Drvenik every February, parks his camp trailer, doesn’t bother unpacking but just strips to his swimming trunks, throws his clothes on the backseat and a towel over his shoulder, and dashes off to the beach. Grandma says Hans is as ugly as a bulldog with his stubby legs and shoulders as broad as three non-German men. I like Hans because he’s funny, and he’s funniest when he runs through Drvenik in his trunks on the first day of February, wheezing like a locomotive, tearing down the pier, and plopping into the water — really, he just plops. Hans doesn’t jump in feet- or headfirst; he throws the length and breadth of himself into the water, the same way other people happily flounce onto a soft bed that’s been waiting for them a good long while.

The Drvenik kids all gather on the pier, cheering Hans on as he battles the waves and the wild, unfazed whether it’s blowing a southerly or a northeaster — and there’s always something blowing in February. Hans doesn’t care about the cold either, whether the peaks of the Biokovo range are dusted in snow or crabs have frozen in the shallows. Hans just swims, yelling ah fucking son of a bitch as he goes, and the whole of Drvenik, from Ćmilj to Lučica, knows the crazy Kraut has arrived and opened the goose-bumps and winter swimming season. When Hans swims, everyone who spots him out there in the sea gets goose bumps too.

The first few years people thought Hans was going to drown, it was just a matter of time before his heart stopped or the waves carried him off, but in time they got used to his ways. People figured that the world was full of all sorts but that only Germans were this sort; the miracle was that they had cold blood, as if they were fish and not people. Whenever someone caught a winter cold they’d think of Hans, because Hans never caught cold, because Hans didn’t care about the cold and he’d plop into any February sea.

Every winter Grandma fretted about our bougainvillea. That’s a flower that once lived in the ancient forests of the Amazon and was brought to Europe by a Frenchman. Europe is dry and cold for a bougainvillea, so it always needs protecting from drought or the chill, at least until it shoots up into a big rambling vine with pink-and-violet flowers. Someone should actually take it back to the jungle, but since no one knows where that is or how much a ticket costs, my grandma is in charge of protecting it from cold and drought; in February she wraps it in netting and plastic bags, and in August she gives it plenty to drink.

She’d just finished wrapping it when Hans ran past. You poor wee thing, where on earth has the wind blown you, she said to the bougainvillea. She doesn’t think the flower understands but knows plants don’t really die because a seed or root always remains, but Grandma wants to save this bougainvillea’s life all the same and carps on about how it’s going to flower beautifully and be such a pretty sight. This is a lie: She’s not thinking about beauty or pretty sights, she’s just afraid that one morning she’ll find a dead frozen plant in front of the house, and that this will give her the feeling you feel for everything that’s dead but was once alive. She’d like our bougainvillea to be like Hans, and she’d like Hans to be like our bougainvillea. A flower shouldn’t have to suffer cold and drought, and a German wouldn’t make a fool of himself if he were a little more sensitive to the cold and didn’t go swimming in the wild winter sea.

Franjo, the Kraut’s back, she said coming inside. Grandpa puts the paper down and asks if there’s any beer without waiting for the answer because he already knows there isn’t any because there’s never any if Hans isn’t here, so he takes his wallet and heads for the store. Hans and Staka will be over before the hour’s up. That’s how long Hans needs to plunk in and dry off and Staka to sort out the camp trailer. Grandma calls them Krauts even though Staka is from Smederevo and isn’t a Kraut at all, but Grandma’s in the habit of giving joint names to everyone who comes to visit: our relatives from Zenica are Zeničanians, Auntie Mirjana and Uncle Momčilo are the Nikoličs, Uncle Ismet and Auntie Minka the Brkićs, Uncle Postnikov and Auntie Borka the Postnikovs, and Rajka and Božica the rubes, so it never takes much to know who’s over. Hans and Staka’s family name is Kirchmayer, so it’s easier to call them the Krauts than the Kirchmayers.

Hans comes in hollering Hey Franjo, what’s up, what’s down, and gives Grandpa a hug, backslapping him so hard I always notice how full of dust Grandpa’s back was before Hans beat it out of him. Madame Olga, you just get more beautiful, like Greta Garbo in Ninotchka, Hans bows and kisses Grandma’s hand. Only Hans and actors in black-and-white films kiss women’s hands, I mean, maybe there are other people who kiss them too, but not in my life. Then he comes up to me: you’ve still got blond hair, if you’re blond the next time I see you I’ll teach you German so you can hit on a Berlin girl. He takes me in his arms, throws me in the air, and catches me. Every time I’m scared I’ll get stuck up on the ceiling and stay there like the saints in Sarajevo Cathedral.

Staka stands to the side smiling, just waiting with a bag full of presents. She always gives me a bar of Braco chocolate because she thinks I’m the little boy on the cover, and I always tell her that I’m not, but it never helps. That’s Staka for you: She believes what she believes and that’s the end of it. Grandma says she couldn’t be with Hans if she were any different, but I don’t get what that is supposed to mean. Why couldn’t she be with Hans otherwise? I don’t know, probably she couldn’t be his wife or couldn’t travel to Drvenik with him unless she was sure that I was really the boy on the chocolate packet.

The only time Hans stops shouting is when he talks to Grandma and Grandpa in German. Then he’s quiet like everyone else. He says he didn’t learn to speak our language but to shout it, and that if he had to speak it, he wouldn’t know a single word. Nobody believes him when he shouts that, but everyone laughs. Staka laughs along too, and I think that it’s real love when you can laugh along with someone even though you see them every day and you’ve lived with them your whole life or maybe a bit less.

Hans became a German soldier when he turned eighteen and he came to fight in Yugoslavia. When I was little, two, three, four, I’d always look out for Hans in Partisan films because no one ever told me they were all actors and that in a film nothing’s real, but even then I knew none of them were Hans because they all died and Hans was still alive. Hans, were you at Sutjeska, I ask him. I was, I was, Hans yells, twice, with Staka and without Staka. . And did you kill Sava Kovačević?. . I didn’t, I shot up into the treetops, you know, into the pines. I was afraid of killing. . So who killed Sava Kovačević?. . I don’t know, there were lots of Germans, and when there are lots of people, it’s hard to know who’s killing whom.

When the war finished, Hans got taken prisoner. He worked building a factory in Smederevo, Partisan Staka keeping watch on him through the crosshairs. Back then he didn’t know how to shout in our language, but there, from a distance and staring down the barrel of a machine gun, he told Staka he loved her, and when she somehow understood what he was saying she loaded the gun and sought permission from Commandant Joža Beraus to execute the prisoner. He said there had been enough killing, confiscated her rifle, and decreed that henceforth she had to keep guard unarmed. Staka bridled and burst into tears, and Commandant Joža gave her a hug and said lassie, you’re fifteen years old, and you’ve got no idea what that weapon’ll do to your sweet little finger, the one that wants to pull the trigger. You’re angry with me now, but one day you’ll say thank you, Uncle Joža.

So it went, Partisan Staka guarded the prisoners, and every morning Hans clutched at the air in front of his chest, made the shape of a heart with his fingers, and blew the heart to Staka. She got mad and reported him to the commandant and got a chiding for her trouble: you should be ashamed of yourself, are you a Skojevka or are you not? You’re there to guard the prisoners, not to worry about their flirting. Things went on like this a whole six months, until one day Hans wasn’t a prisoner anymore and showed up at the construction site in an ugly gray suit and with an army satchel on his back. He stood before Partisan Staka, took a piece of paper from his pocket, and read aloud: I apologize if I offended you, but I loved you and loved it most when you were on guard to stop me escaping. I will always remember you.

Staka spat at his feet, but not hard: just hard enough for him to get the message that she was a Partisan, and that he’d been an occupying soldier. Come the next day she was desolate without him. My heart has gone, she said, and someone reported her. Enough’s enough, said Commandant Joža, I’ve had it up to here with bloody kids who want to kill one minute and fall in love the next. He sent Staka packing, her Partisan days were over.

Hans left for his city, but when he got there his street, his parents, his sisters, none of them were there anymore; everything lay in ruins, and what wasn’t in ruins was dead. Without a single living relative, Hans was left all alone. Back then I could have been a German or a Chinaman, it was all the same, you’re nothing without your kin. Staka was the only one Hans had, so he swung his step back to Yugoslavia. They put him straight in jail. Hans told them he wanted to be a Communist. They asked him why he wanted to be a Communist, and he said it was because of the working class and because he’d been left all alone in the world, and as a good Communist he wouldn’t be alone anymore. They said very well then, you can stay in Yugoslavia, but don’t let us catch you spying. Hans said he wouldn’t spy and headed for Smederevo to look for Staka.

I don’t know what happened next, just that in the end they got married, and that Commandant Joža Beraus was their best man. At the wedding they sang “All men will be brothers” and began the life that came after the one where Hans had been a fascist and Staka a Partisan who wanted to write his death sentence. I don’t quite know how all this came to pass and neither do Grandpa and Grandma. Grandma says they’re both crazy, and Grandpa says they’re not crazy, it’s the times. They philosophize like this after Hans has drunk all the beer, given us our hugs and kisses, and gone off with Staka to sleep in their camp trailer.

It’s not actually a camp trailer because Hans has concreted around it and built a little hut alongside. In front of the house Staka has planted a lemon tree and an oleander tree and roses and marigolds. It’s such a motley mix that Grandma says it’s as ugly as Hans himself and I say it’s as funny as Hans himself. Their weekend house is the strangest place in Drvenik and the building inspectorate has twice come from Makarska to demolish it because they think it’s an eyesore scaring off tourists, but they didn’t demolish it because Hans has a building permit. They said signore, don’t yell at us, and then they left. Grandpa says they’re just looking for a loophole in the law and that in the end they’ll demolish Hans and Staka’s little hut, and Hans says that much worse things could happen, and it would just mean he and Staka would have to start a new life. Hans thinks there’s only one thing for every misfortune or unpleasantness suffered: to begin a new life. Grandpa says this is brave, and Grandma says that it’s dumb.

It’s such sorrow we don’t have children, says Hans, everything is peachy, but that’s so sad. Then it’s like the cat’s got Grandma’s and Grandpa’s tongues, and they look at their hands laid out on the table as if they’re somehow guilty or have done a number on someone because they’ve had three children. There’s joy without children too, says Grandpa. Of course, of course there’s joy, but there’s so much sorrow without children, Hans howls back. You know, children grow up, get married, and leave, you end up on your own again, Grandpa tries to get Hans to quit it. You can be happy on your own too, but without children, without children, there’s such sorrow, Hans nods his head. You get older and forget you brought them into the world, Grandpa sticks to his tune. Whether you forget or not, there’s still joy, but Franjo, buddy, there’s such sorrow without children, Hans howls back, and I know that all hell’s going to break loose any minute. Grandpa’s getting edgy — his asthma, according to Grandma — and boy does he go for it when he finally blows his top.

He bangs his fist on the table knocking over Hans’s beer. Grandpa’s bellowing in German, Hans grabs his hand, I’m crying, God what’s wrong with me, why am I crying. I’m crying because I’m scared, I’m scared because Grandpa’s knocked Hans’s beer over, and Hans is cute and funny, he’s Grandpa’s friend, and now Grandpa’s yelling at him, Grandma’s hugging Staka, Staka is smiling like someone who’s misplaced their smile, no one notices me, and Grandpa just keeps yelling, Hans grabs his other hand, saying something to him softly in German in a voice much quieter than Grandpa’s now hoarse one, and I don’t understand anything, not a thing.

Grandpa’s breathing heavily and I’ve hidden myself under the table from where I’m sneakily looking at Hans. Hans has his head in his hands and his elbows on the table in the puddle of beer. His face is serene like he was dead, just his droopy bottom lip quivering sometimes, like a tamarisk leaf in the wind. Grandma’s gone into the yard with Staka. Nothing happens for a while: It’s just the two of them, one who’s breathing, the other with a lip quivering in the wind. I want to slip outside, but they’d see me. They must think I’m not here. And it’s better I’m not here. Sometimes it’s so good you’re not here that you really wish you weren’t there until everyone starts to smile again.

A tear runs down Hans’s face, turns at the nose, and descends on his plumpy tamarisk lip. Then there’s a second drop on the other side of his face, again turning at the nose and falling on his lip. Then a third and a fourth. Hans is funny even when he’s not making a joke, like something sweet and dear that makes you smile. I’m sorry, Franjo, I didn’t know, I just wanted to say how sad it is without children, I didn’t know I’d upset you. It seems Hans can actually speak our language quietly. You didn’t upset me, it’s just the southerly, and that I can damn hardly breathe, said Grandpa, and you, little man, out from under the table, scram. Eavesdropping on your elders’ conversations, you’re a bloody disgrace.

I ran into the yard. Grandma was showing Staka our bougainvillea. Staka was stroking a leaf with her index finger, the same finger she’d wanted to kill Hans with. I’m going to play, I said, and ran out onto the road. Grandma whispers lucky the little one doesn’t understand German. I heard that because I always hear her when she’s whispering. She doesn’t know how to whisper so I don’t hear. However quiet or far away she is, I can always hear her whispering, and when you whisper it’s because there’s a secret to be kept, it’s just that this time I don’t know what the secret’s about, what I wasn’t supposed to hear, why it’s lucky I don’t understand German, what Grandpa yelled at Hans and why he got so mad at him just because Hans said how sad it was without children. I can’t make head or tail of any of this, but one day I’ll find out and then I’ll tell everyone.

The next year the building inspectorate demolished Hans’s weekend house. I mean, they demolished the hut, the camp trailer they hauled up on a big truck and carted off to Makarska. The concrete foundation, mangled roses, and uprooted oleander and lemon trees were all that was left. Grandpa phoned Hans and Staka in Smederevo. He said don’t cry, my dear, and then switched back to German. I only understood two words, Kamerad and Freunde. The first he said coldly, the second warmly, so I thought the second word sounded lovely and meant something like see you soon, and the first word sounded cold and meant something like they found a loophole in the law and demolished your house. But Hans wasn’t afraid of cold words, just like he wasn’t afraid of the cold sea. Hans is never cold. He’s not even cold when crabs freeze in the February shallows.

Hans and Staka never came to Drvenik again. Idiot Kraut, he says you can never go back where they demolished your house, said Grandpa, sitting down to write Hans a letter. What do you want to say to Hans, dictate it to me, and it was then I had to compose my first letter: Dear Hans, thank you for not killing Sava Kovačević, it’s cold here like the cold when you sit with your bare bottom in an empty bath. We’ve all caught colds without you. You’re funny, be funny for us again.

When I die, you’ll see how many better people there are

The almond trees bloomed in February and Grandpa said here we go again, spring in midwinter. He said that every February, never getting used to winters finishing so early at the seaside, the rules of nature of a lifetime no longer applied. The rules didn’t apply because he wasn’t in Travnik, where in February the snows fall on Mount Vlašić, and he wasn’t in Sarajevo, where they cover Trebević, Igman, and Tolmin, the whole world a whiteout. He was in Drvenik now and the only things to go white were the blossoming almond flowers, which he called the buds of spring. He’d sing snow falls on the buds of spring and we’d all think nostalgia had got the better of old Franjo, and that he was summoning his native soil to leap the Biokovo range and cover the sea in snow. Do you think the sea will ever freeze over? I ask. I don’t think so, but it’s possible. . Does something that’s possible ever happen?. . Of course such things happen. That’s why we say it’s possible. . So the sea will freeze over?. . I don’t think so, but let’s say it does. What’s it to you?. . Well, then we could walk across the sea to Sućuraj. You could buy a newspaper and then we’d come back. . We can buy a newspaper here. . Yeah, but it’s not the same. We’ve never walked to Sućuraj, but if the sea froze over we could. . That wouldn’t be a good thing. The fish wouldn’t have any air. . But they don’t need air. What do they need air for when they don’t breathe?. . They need air. You’ll learn this stuff at school. If the sea froze over the mackerel would die, and then what would happen to the dolphins, it’s not worth thinking about. Dolphins are like humans, they come out of the water to breathe. . Where do they get out, on the beach?. . No, they jump up above the surface, breathe, and then dive back down again. They’re very practical. . Why don’t they come right out, wouldn’t that be better than all that jumping?. . They’d die if they were always out in the air. Their skin needs the sea, their lungs the air. They don’t live in the sea or out of it, they live somewhere in between. . Like we do?. . What do you mean, like we do?. . You know, we don’t live in Sarajevo or in Drvenik, but somewhere in between, because you’d die of asthma if we were always in Sarajevo. . You could put it like that. I’d die because I’d be breathing fog and smog. . And do dolphins feel sorry they’re not always out in the air?. . Why would they feel sorry about that?. . Because you’re always sorry about not being in Sarajevo and that you don’t get to see the snow fall or the whiteness of the mountains anymore. . I’m not sorry about that. . Then why do you start singing about snow falling on the buds of spring the minute the almond flowers blossom?. . Because that’s my song and I’ve got every right to sing it, even if it doesn’t snow and the sea never freezes over.

Grandpa tells everyone he doesn’t fear death. When he’s coughing away in the morning thinking he’s never going to catch his breath again, he murmurs oh death, sweet death, as if he were wooing it because he’s fallen in love with it, but death’s not interested. Does death hurt? I ask. I don’t care if it hurts, just as long as it doesn’t suffocate. Grandpa doesn’t believe in pain and so nothing ever hurts him. Any kind of pain is something strange, like it’s got nothing to do with him. When he had a tooth out he told Leitner the dentist, our neighbor, take it out, but no injections, and Leitner said to him but Mr. Rejc, it’s not the Middle Ages. Grandpa ignored him and said I don’t care what age we’re in, so Leitner took his tooth out just like that and Grandpa didn’t even clench his fist in pain. My Franjo’s no hero, said Grandma, he’s just scared of the anesthetic. . I’m not scared of anesthetic, I just want to know what’s happening to me.

But Nikola, who’s from Ćmilj, he’s afraid of pain and dying and anesthetic. He comes over to see Grandpa and says Signore Franjo, I’m a dead dog am I, and Grandpa replies Nikola, buddy, get yourself off to the doctor, and Nikola mopes: I can’t, I don’t know if I’m more scared or more ashamed. After that Grandpa doesn’t say anything, just pours him a rakia and they just stare at each other until Nikola drinks up and leaves. Nikola comes over to our place so someone actually looks at him because in the village people have been looking straight through him for years. They go by him looking at the tips of their toes or out to sea, giving Nikola and his fears and his shame the widest berth. Some people say hi and look away at the same time, but most just make like he’s not even there, like he’s committed some terrible crime and you can’t forgive his just being alive.

Nikola’s got tuberculosis, and in Drvenik tuberculosis is a disgrace. He doesn’t go to the doctor because he’s ashamed and because his family won’t let him out of the house in any case. Everyone knows what he’s got, but it’s still better the doctors in Split don’t find out, that way at least the story doesn’t spread all the way there. When someone has tuberculosis in Sarajevo or in other cities, they aren’t ashamed and neither are their families, they just go to the doctor, stay in the hospital for a while, and go back home happy and healthy. A disgrace in the city is different from a disgrace in the countryside. In Drvenik it’s a disgrace Nikola’s got tuberculosis, but in Sarajevo it’s a disgrace when someone pees in the building hallway and they catch him.

There will be heavy rains this spring, that’s what Grandpa reads in the newspaper. That’s not good news for people with sick lungs. He and Nikola have both got sick lungs, but Nikola’s problem is infectious and Grandpa’s isn’t. His asthma is his business and he can’t give it to anyone else — except I could inherit it because he’s my grandpa — but Nikola could give his tuberculosis to anyone, especially if they blew their nose with his handkerchief. Once Nikola took his hankie out of his pocket and I got shivers up and down my spine. I wanted to grab it and blow my nose so bad. I’m scared of pain and the doctor and I don’t like being sick, but I wanted that hankie, and if Nikola had accidentally dropped it I would have grabbed it and got sick. It’s like when I’m standing on a really high balcony. I always want to jump, even though I wouldn’t like to be dead. Putting your nose into Nikola’s hankie is an adventure, but I know that I won’t because we’re not daredevils, we’re people quietly and politely getting on with our lives, and we don’t go looking for the real devil; he shows up on his own account. Daredevils spend all their time daring the devil, trying to catch him by the tail, but he gets away, and they just laugh and that’s why they burn bright and die young and are always a burden to everyone.

It’s really been raining a month now. Grandpa’s finding it hard to breathe and he’s always real pissed. Grandma says it won’t be his heart, asthma, or kidneys that kill him, but his impishness. Only Grandpa and I have impishness, but everyone yells at me because of mine and I have to scram so I don’t get it on the snout, but they never say anything to him when he’s being impish, they just stay out of his way, everyone except for Dad when he comes from Sarajevo. He’s always testing Grandpa for something, holding his hand and checking his pulse, tapping him with his finger, looking him up and down, and even though Grandpa answers all his questions he’s even more pissed when Dad goes. He’s pissed because he’s kept something to himself and now he feels guilty about it. Asthma is for Grandpa what a cake-baking disaster is for Grandma: It’s something that chanced upon him one day and made him sick, but it didn’t just happen to him all willy-nilly but because he’d done something wrong and because in life in general he didn’t know the ratio of flour to milk to eggs or something else you make life with, so that’s why he got asthma, to torture and suffocate him and it would always be his own fault. It’s always worse when it’s your own fault because then you’re even more pissed with everyone else. And there’s something more besides: Grandma can hide her baking from guests and no one ever knows about it, but Grandpa can’t hide his asthma from anyone because we all hear him wheeze when he breathes. There was a time when roosters woke people in the morning in Metjaš and Drvenik, but now my grandpa’s cough does the job. He coughs away and all the while fathers are tying their ties, mothers are getting ready for the office, and fishermen are returning to shore.

It looks like Nikola died, said Grandma when she came back from the store. What do you mean — it looks like he died, Grandpa asked. That’s what it looks like, nobody wants to say anything but they’ve all gone to Lučica, the whole village is there. The road to Zaostrog has probably collapsed. . Can we go to Lučica too, I asked. No, we can’t, looking at a dead man isn’t like going to the circus. It’s always like that, the minute something interesting happens in Drvenik I’m not allowed to see it and they always tell me it’s not a circus, that it’s not for my eyes and it would be better if I put a sock in it and quit asking my questions. I’m going to miss all the important stuff, so when I’m in Sarajevo and they ask me what’s up in Drvenik I’ll only be able to say I don’t know because my grandma and grandpa didn’t let me see if there was anything up.

The next day I found out what happened to Nikola. All the kids were talking about it so I just made like I knew it all already and hung on their every word. He took ill where the highway makes a sharp bend and sat down on a rock even though it was raining. He felt so bad he preferred getting wet to walking. Then he started to cough up blood. There was more and more blood and it rained harder and harder. In the end he coughed up all the blood inside him, but the rain was so hard it washed the blood away and half the highway turned pink like someone had melted the Pink Panther and poured him all over the road. Blood goes from red to pink in the rain and that’s why it’s better to bleed in the rain because then you don’t scare anyone. Nikola wouldn’t have been scared, or at least less scared than if he’d bled on a sunny day when all the colors would have been brighter and there would have been nothing to make the red blood go Pink Panther pink.

He was dead when they found him. He sat on the stone, his face as white as lime and smiling like an angel. I don’t know how angels smile, but that’s what Granny Tere said Nikola’s smile was like and she always goes to church so she knows how angels smile. Nikola was smiling because he was dead and wasn’t scared or ashamed anymore, so he could finally smile again, like back when he didn’t have tuberculosis. People smile when they think something’s funny but it’s nicest to smile when it’s nothing to you. Something was up, you were in pain, suffocating and worrying, and then it’s nothing and it’s funny because it’s nothing and you think there was nothing there to start with, you just got a bit anxious and thought you were in pain, suffocating and worrying.

The next day they took Nikola up into the mountain and buried him in the cemetery on Biokovo, out from which you can see the whole vastness of the sea; the sea beyond Hvar and Pelješac, beyond Korčula, beyond Vis, all the way to Italy. In the end, beyond everything there is still the ocean, but out there it gets round. When you’re up on Biokovo, when you’re at the cemetery, you understand why once upon a time people thought the earth stretched out flat: that’s because they’d never climbed Biokovo and couldn’t see the ocean is round, and if the ocean is round, then the earth is round too. I think the cemetery is built so high, right up there on Biokovo, so when the living bury the dead they can take comfort that they know what the dead didn’t. When someone in Drvenik dies, you learn that the earth is round.

Grandpa and Grandpa went to the funeral and came back all red. After the rain a fiery sun had beat down; Grandpa was furious and breathing heavily and cussing Nikola out for not dying some other day, like some sunny day so that when they buried him it would be raining, so the funeral procession wouldn’t have fried climbing up Biokovo and baked all the way down. No one cried, said Grandma. They’ve washed the shame from their hands, said Grandpa, disgusted not by the shame that was no more — by Nikola — but by the living, now all relieved there was no one in Drvenik with tuberculosis anymore.

Fine, I’ll take you to see where he died, said Grandpa and reached for his umbrella. There had been five days of rain and I couldn’t wait for it to stop. I wanted to see the place of death and was worried the highway wouldn’t be pink anymore like a melted Pink Panther. And my worry was well-placed: The asphalt was black, like any other highway. I looked around and everything looked rainy and normal, no trace of a special place for dying, no sign of anything Nikola must have left for us so we’d know where he died.

That’s where he sat down, Grandpa pointed to a white rock where the number 480 was written under a red line. It means he died on the four hundred and eightieth kilometer of the highway, but that doesn’t matter. Nikola’s gone, no story, straight to bed. You happy? We can go home now. Actually I wasn’t that happy. I was confused. I thought there would be a mark at the spot where he died; maybe the highway wouldn’t be pink but at least there’d be something giving away that someone had been there and then suddenly wasn’t there. If there isn’t something like that, then there’s also no reason for someone to die and when there’s no reason for someone to die, then the sadness is much bigger than a little cry and bye-bye. Then you would never stop crying when someone you loved died.

Why do people die?. . They die because they get old and because if people just kept being born and didn’t die there wouldn’t be enough room on earth. . It would be better if no more people were born and people didn’t die. . Why would that be better?. . Well, because then only people we know would be alive, who were good, and new people who we don’t know wouldn’t come along and make old people die. . How do you know those new people wouldn’t be better than the old ones?. . No one is better than you. . Nonsense, of course there are people better than me. There are lots of people better than me, you just haven’t met them yet. You’ll see when you grow up. . I’ll see when you die?. . Yes, you could put it that way. When I die, you’ll see how many better people than me there are. Your friends will be better, the woman you marry will be better, and your children will be better. They’ll all be better than me and one day you won’t be sad about my death anymore. . You’ll die for those better people?. . Yes, and you’ll die for those better people too. The important thing is we die in the right order and children don’t die before their parents.

He’d never spoken for so long and so quietly and calmly. He let the umbrella down and shook it out. The drops splashed all over the kitchen tiles and all over Grandma’s hair. He did it deliberately and smiled. You old fool, said Grandma without even looking at him. She doesn’t have to look at him to know why he shook the umbrella out on the tiles and all over her hair, and he doesn’t have to see her eyes to know she’s not mad. Even when he doesn’t shake the umbrella out, he knows she thinks the same thing — old fool — it’s just there’s no reason to say it aloud. They’re happy because in the rainy season when it’s tough for people with sick lungs so some people have to die, that it was Nikola who died, who no one said old fool to, and who didn’t have anyone to shake the umbrella out on. There are big crowds in places where people die; it’s like at the bus station with everyone pushing and shoving, so when you look from afar, it seems everyone wants to get on, but actually they’re pushing and shoving to not get on, to hang around until the last bus comes along, which you climb aboard because the crowd’s gone, because you’ve got a ticket in your hand and there’s no one left to say excuse me to if you stay alive.

I beg you, don’t let her jump

It was summer, wildfires burned red beneath the Biokovo range, fire-brigade sirens wailed, people ran with containers full of water, the sea smelled of Coppertone and glimmered in the colors of a petroleum rainbow, and we packed our things in the Duck, our Citroën, and got ready for the journey to Sarajevo. Grandpa had died eight months ago, I’d finished first grade in Drvenik, and now we could head happily home. Sarajevo would be home now, the time of a little Sarajevo, a little Drvenik was over. It was all over with Grandpa’s asthma too, and from now on we’d only go to the seaside as tourists. Drvenik wasn’t our home, which is what I’d thought; it was the home of Grandpa’s illness, like a hospital where you go to get well but everyone knows you’re going to die there in the end.

We’re leaving forever. I have the feeling we’re leaving forever because that’s the only explanation for why we’ve packed our winter sweaters and shoes in the trunk and we’re not leaving anything behind except the feeling we’re never coming back. If we do come back it’ll be as folks on vacation, folk just passing through, all nervy because they’re dead set on making the best out of their vacation, so they yell at each other and drag other people’s children along by the ears. I feel sick thinking that next year we’ll be tourists too, and already feel like a little German who’ll run screaming out of the water when he sees a crab among the rocks and gets marched off to the medical center in Makarska if he stands on a sea urchin. There are three tiny black dots on my big toe, three sea urchin spikes from three years ago. I didn’t tell Grandma and Grandpa I’d stepped on a sea urchin because then they would’ve heated a needle in a flame, which is a terrifying sight. It would’ve hurt like hell if they took the spikes out with that, so I tried myself with my fingernails, but they wouldn’t come out, so now I’m taking the three spikes to Sarajevo with me as a memento and proof that I’ll never be just a regular tourist.

We drive slowly through the village and we pass people with inflatable mattresses and a girl wearing a rubber ring with a duck’s head around her waist, half girl, half duck. People we know line the roadside, Auntie Senka, Uncle Tomislav, Granny Tere, they wave to us because they know we’re not leaving like we do every year but we’re leaving forever. Grandma waves back and I lower my head because I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed because something important in our lives is happening and everyone knows about it. Important things are supposed to happen in secret. We should have slipped away in the night while everyone was still asleep, so that no one saw or heard us or knew we’d gone. They might’ve thought we’d never been there in the first place. In actual fact, we should have made our exit as if we had died too.

Uncle Naci is driving us, my uncle from Ilidža. He’s got whiskers, glasses with black frames, and size thirty-nine shoes, and he looks to me like a French table-tennis player who’s always going to lose to a Chinaman in the end. He turns around and asks are you sad, I say no, I’m not sad, and stare out at the tiny heads of bathers in the glistening sea, two yachts far from shore and Hvar still farther off, right out there on the horizon where earth and sky meet, where Hvarians live, who, before they took me to the island for the first time, I thought were half human, half Martian.

I don’t know if I’m sad, I just know that I’m scared, but I’m not admitting to one or the other. One shouldn’t ask such questions, and when I grow up, the first chance I get I’m going to say one shouldn’t ask such questions, because there’s only one answer, there’s only no, no, no, there’s always only no, I’m not sad, I’m not scared, I’m not anything, and now everyone can smile themselves to death and jump for joy and have everything fall out of their pockets and jingle on the asphalt because for the zillionth time someone said they’re not sad and not scared, but everyone well knows that that’s exactly what you say when you’re sad and scared but don’t dare tell.

Down there in the pines, poor little Fićo’s down there, I tap Uncle Naci on the shoulder. Fićo, who’s that?. . He’s not a person, he’s a car. He flew off the highway last summer and nobody’s come to get him yet. . Maybe that’s because he’s just a wreck and he’s no use to anyone now. . No, that’s not the reason. It’s because Fićo doesn’t have any family anymore because they all died, the driver and the two passengers. . Poor things. . No, last summer they were poor things, but now Fićo is the only poor thing. They took them to Bjelovar and buried them there because they were from Bjelovar, but Fićo stayed down in the pines, even though he’s from Bjelovar too. I saw his license plates. . Doesn’t matter where a wreck’s buried. A wreck is just a heap of junk. . Fićo isn’t a heap of junk, he’s a poor little Fićo and he was their car. Someone loved him once. Uncle Naci shrugged and the Duck shrugged with him — there you go, now let him say the Duck might be a heap of junk one day too — just like grown-ups always shrug when they don’t understand something and you have to explain it to them. Nothing is forever, so what if someone used to love him. Now he’s a heap of junk, end of story, he said. Are dead people a heap of junk too? I asked, and I knew what he was going to say in reply, just like I knew that dead people actually meant my grandpa. Quit your babbling, Grandma cut in, and Uncle Naci just drove and kept his mouth shut all the way to Sarajevo.

The city was steaming and empty. The river stunk like a million people had forgotten to flush a million toilets. I came to the conclusion that someone had to be responsible for all of this, or that I was being punished for something I hadn’t done but for which I’m being punished anyway, and everyone knows about it and now treats me like I’m a jailbird or a prisoner of war on some Pacific island, in a film where Japanese people scream and shout, women write letters, and Lee Marvin lies tied up in the sand, the sun burning his eyes. Poooo! I said as we passed the National Library. You little brat! Mom tried to hit me, but I moved out of the way in time. She’s been pissed since we arrived. Don’t think she doesn’t love you, Grandma whispered. I made like I didn’t hear her; I moved farther away, dead set I wasn’t going to say anything else. That I was never going to say anything else ever again. I don’t care if the Miljacka stinks, she can yell all she likes, anything can happen, but I’m never saying anything ever again.

The whole problem is that my mom is scared of me. She’s not scared of me per se, she’s scared because she’s got a kid. She wasn’t scared before because Grandpa was alive, because we were apart a lot and then she could see how I was growing up. When someone’s always there with you, you don’t notice how much they’re changing, they’re always the same to you and you only see their bad sides. Since we came to Sarajevo forever, Mom and I have discovered each other’s bad sides. I don’t know all the bad things she’s discovered about me and I don’t want to think about all the bad things I’ve discovered about her, but it’s like we’re really disappointed in each other, and that most of all, we’re disappointed because we’re scared. In the fall I’ll be going to Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević elementary school; I don’t know anyone there and I don’t want to get to know anyone. I want to be invisible and only show up every now and then, show my face to my dead grandpa for example, who is nice because he keeps quiet and doesn’t get angry, he doesn’t do anything, but he still exists somewhere, in my head, in Mom and Grandma when they avoid opening the wardrobe where his ties are still hanging, still crumpled in the spot where he tied the knot.

Dad arrives like the guy from the ads on TV. He takes something out of his pocket or briefcase, says something important, and for the rest of the day this sets the tone for all of us. This is possible because Dad only comes over once a week so he has six days to think something important up. Today we’re going to take a good look around our local environs and we’re going to drink miracle water from a special spring, just for us men, he said, packing us into the Renault 4. I felt a little like puking but tightened my tummy to stop it slipping out, and when a bit slipped out I’d swallow it. You need to puke? Mom asked on the approach to Olovo. No! I said. That was a mistake. I shouldn’t have opened my mouth: The second I opened it I puked right down Dad’s neck while he was driving. He just sunk his head down a little bit between his shoulders, his neck getting shorter somehow, and kept driving until we got to the first road-house. He stripped off his shirt and went over to wash it at the hose. He was wearing an undershirt that looked like a fishing net, his gray hair poking out everywhere from underneath. From behind my dad looked like a monkey someone had dressed in a human undershirt for a laugh. Don’t worry about it, said Mom, but for chrissakes, next time don’t lie, if you need to puke say you need to puke, it’s fine. I was real surprised neither Mom nor Dad was mad at me. Normally they get mad about much smaller stuff. When you say you’re fine, act tough and make like there’s no way you’re going to puke, no one holds it against you even if you do. I don’t know why it’s like that, but the next time I need to puke I won’t let out a peep either.

Let’s hit the road, said Dad. The shirt was on a hanger hanging out the window to dry. Mom kept looking back to see how I was doing, and Dad drove in his undershirt, from behind looking like those truck drivers you see in American films. A stranger who caught a glimpse of us at that particular moment would’ve thought we were a happy family who did everything in life together. In actual fact, maybe back then we were a happy family, and maybe our life consisted of two parts that alternated back and forth, on and off, something like that. In the first part they were divorced and lived their totally separate lives. She was sore because he was how he was and because fate had had her meet him, and he was sore because he hadn’t known how to hold on to her and had done everything wrong, and grown men aren’t allowed to do everything wrong. Only Mom and Dad knew the truth about that first part, nobody else, and if they did tell other people anything about themselves and their dead marriage, then — and this I’m sure of — they only told lies or said things to shift the blame. In the other part of their life, which occurred once a week or twice a year, the two of them were a happy family, bound to me like horses tied to a waterwheel plodding one behind the tail of the other, never touching the whole day through.

We arrived in Kladanj. The hotel was empty; the receptionist stood at the counter, head resting on the guest book, asleep on his feet. The waiter was whistling one of those songs where there’s a couple who love each other, but one is sick and the other gloomy. He carried a big silver tray, his face contorted in a grimace, and it appeared a distinct possibility that when the song was finished, he was going to slam the tray against the wall, rip his waiter’s jacket off, and throw himself in the river, heartbroken that whatever had happened in the song had happened. I don’t understand why people sing and whistle those kinds of songs if afterward they’re going to feel so bad they want to smash stuff.

What can I get you? the waiter said, having forgotten to change the expression on his face. Two coffees and a Coca-Cola, said Dad. We’re out of Coke! the waiter shot back. Fine, a cloudy juice then, Dad quickly recovered. Coffee, coffee, and a cloudy, the waiter translated the order into waiters’ language, and showed up a couple of minutes later with his tray balanced like a circus act. The coffee cups and juice glass slid from one end of his tray to the other, but they never collided, and he didn’t spill a drop either. Pleased with himself, he completely forgot the song with the sick and gloomy lovers.

There’s a pool behind the hotel, shall we take a look? Dad knew this place well. Mom didn’t care either way. C’mon, c’mon, I jumped up. The pool was big and blue, that blue color you only see in swimming pools, but there was no one in the water and no one just hanging out. Full to the brim with water, a totally deserted pool stretched out before us. Up above there was a diving board as high as a skyscraper. Shame we don’t have our swimming gear, I said. It wouldn’t be allowed, Dad hurried, and Mom gave him the look you give people when you’ve caught them lying like a dog. Dad was sorry he ever mentioned the pool, because even though it was impossible, he now thought we were going to strip off and jump in, and that he’d have to stand there on the edge and simper, and that we’d try and get him to jump in too and then he’d have to dream up an explanation and excuse why he can’t. The thing is, my dad can’t swim, and he thinks I don’t know that. Mom told me ages ago that he never learned to swim and that he’s ashamed about it. She told me that he’s even more ashamed because he suspects that I can, but he’s too embarrassed to say or ask anything. He’s made such a fine art of not swimming I never notice what I already know, so we can be in Drvenik for fifteen days and the whole time it seems perfectly natural he never goes in the water.

Nice diving board, said Mom, and then went and climbed right up to the top. Fully clothed, one step at a time, she walked slowly out along the board, which was trembling and wobbling under her weight. When she got to the end she looked down and spread her arms wide as if she was going to fly away, but then slowly let them fall. Dad looked up at her, beads of sweat lining his forehead, he opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something, and he did want to say something, but he didn’t know how, or whether to say it to me or to her. Mom spread her arms wide again, the board trembled beneath her, she laughed at the depths below, and then let her arms fall, happy, like someone who has scaled a great height and now really feels they’re on top of everything in their life and that nothing bad can happen anymore, because people are tiny as ants, houses are small like they’re made out of Lego blocks, and there isn’t a single problem or fear that doesn’t shrink from such a height.

Is she going to jump? I asked, not caring that she was still in her clothes, high up there, and that water is hard when you hit it from that high. I didn’t care that my mom could smash like a glass object or come out of the pool dripping wet, in her bright skirt and her shoes, her hairdo all messed up, even though when that happens Mom gets depressed, takes Lexilium, and says she’s old and already halfway gone, her best years behind her and that nothing beautiful will ever happen to her again. I wanted her to jump so bad, just as she was, so that in the pool she’d turn into something else and then climb out, or that the sleepy receptionist and desperate waiter would drag her out, that we’d call an ambulance, that she’d lie on the edge of the pool, that Dad would check her pupils and take her pulse, happy and relieved to have her back on dry land, and that on dry land you don’t need to know how to swim.

Is she going to jump? I asked louder so he couldn’t say he didn’t hear me. I don’t know, she shouldn’t, his voice sounded like he’d been hauled in front of a firing squad and he’d wanted to die bravely, but what can you do, he’d shit his pants. Why shouldn’t she, of course she should, why did she climb up there if she’s not going to jump?. . It’s awfully high, and she’s still got her clothes on. . So what, her clothes will dry out, why doesn’t she just jump? I was impatient and enjoying his fear; I wanted it to go on and on, that she would stand up there and spread her arms wide, that we would torment him until he burst out crying. She was tormenting him for her own reasons, probably because of a truth she’ll never tell anyone, and I was tormenting him because I was enjoying it. I was tormenting my dad like I torment ants, removing their little legs and wings, watching how they thrash around trying to walk with a missing leg as though it were still there, because they’re ashamed someone might notice, that other ants might notice they’re missing something, and that in the ant world they’re never going to be what they once were. I beg you, don’t let her jump, Dad stammered, begging me for the first time, the first time in my life, that is — it had never happened before because he was big, and I was a kid. I had already known that this day would come, the day when fathers beg their children, I knew it from the story of my grandpa’s dying, the one I wasn’t supposed to know but did because they didn’t know how to keep anything secret, because they’d always mess up thinking I was asleep or that I couldn’t hear what they were saying behind closed doors. Grandpa lay on the bed where I’d slept since we came back from Drvenik, they brought him from the hospital because he wanted to die at home. Maybe he thought he wouldn’t die if they brought him home; you can’t die among things that remember you being alive. Mom sat at his feet, sometimes he brought his middle and index finger to his lips, I beg you, give me a cigarette, he said, no Dad, you’re not allowed to smoke, she replied, though she knew it didn’t matter because when someone’s going to die, nothing can damage their health anymore. They stayed there in silence for half an hour, he’d bring his fingers to his lips, the only sound the rustling of starched bed linen. No one knew why Grandma starched the linen, maybe so our every movement, including our very last one — before sleep and before death — left a rustle behind. Then he repeated I beg you, give me a cigarette, and she yelled all stroppy don’t be crazy, Dad, you’re not allowed to smoke, because she thought she had to hide death from him. Grandpa looked at her with his blue eyes, our blue eyes. There aren’t many people in the world with blue eyes, but our whole family has them. Don’t you be crazy, I know it all already and beg you to the high heavens, give me a cigarette, he said. Mom says he said it with a melancholic inflection in his voice, but I don’t believe her because I know Grandpa yelled with all the might of the dying, and that there was no melancholic inflection because one thing he couldn’t stand was horseshitting. She lit a cigarette, took a drag, and gave it to him, his last cigarette, the cigarette for which he as a father had had to beg his child. One day I saw a young guy and his girlfriend in front of the Hotel Europa, first they kissed and then she lit a cigarette, took a drag, and held it out to him. One day when I’m grown up, if I ever see a guy and girl do that again, I’ll tell them that you’re not supposed to do that and that they should wait until they’re on death’s door before they start that stuff.

So that’s how it was then, in my eighth year of life my dad had already begged me for something. Instead of feeling grown up, fear took hold. What do you mean — I beg you, don’t let her jump. If she wants to jump, she’ll jump, what’s it got to do with me, leave me out of it, I didn’t talk her into climbing up there, I was furious with him because he was scared and so weak, and because he’d begged me in that voice I beg with when I’m scared and weak and they’re going to do something terrifying to me. But that begging never works, and no one ever pays it any mind, not even he who now expects me to make amends for the fact he never learned to swim, or me to make amends for something else, something I can’t grasp, just like he can’t grasp a single one of my fears.

Why don’t you climb up there and beg her not to jump, I suggested to him like it was perfectly normal and pretty weird he hadn’t already thought of it. Dad didn’t reply, he just stared up in the air at Mom every now and then waving her arms, her smile so broad you’d think she was going burst out laughing like she did watching Charlie Chaplin films, and that she’d fall off the board. Get up there and tell her not to jump, she’ll get soaked, and maybe she’ll smash to pieces if she jumps, I tugged at his sleeve. He bit his bottom lip and yelled Mom’s name. She made like she didn’t hear him, or maybe she really didn’t hear him, and then he headed toward the diving board, his legs shaking and knees knocking like kids’ knees when they try and jump from the fourth step. He climbed up the board itself, slowly he climbed, my terrified, non-swimming dad, the dad who was scared of heights, scared of his ex-wife at heights, she who had become so strong she was taking her revenge on him and probably didn’t know why. He’s climbing up there because I told him to and because he hadn’t managed to come up with a reason to wriggle out of it. He’d lost his mind, which until that point had got him out of ever going in the sea without me thinking it weird, always having an excuse for every attempt to get him in the water, the kind of answer only big, serious fathers were capable of.

Hey, wait, what are you doing, I’m coming down now, yelled Mom when she saw him halfway up the metal stairs. She turned around on the board as if she did it every day, like there wasn’t a great height below her. A moment later the three of us were standing next to the pool and everything began to fall back into its old familiar rhythm, one in which every fear lay sleeping at the bottom of our hearts, at the bottom of a big black cave, not coming out unless a devilish someone prodded one out.

We went back to our waiter. Are you drinking and driving? Mom was confused. The waiter brought a double grappa for Dad and cloudy juices for Mom and me. That went: cloudy, cloudy, double grappa. Dad said I don’t usually drink, but today I need one, and Mom didn’t ask why do you need one today. She just said there probably won’t be any cops.

After that we went to the spring and drank our fill of the special men’s water. Are you going to become a man now? Mom laughed, it’s a bit late for me. . But for me it’s not, I said and drank another glass. Dad didn’t say anything, he drank in big grown-up gulps, gulps that could have swallowed the ocean if it wasn’t so salty. I remembered the sea and Drvenik, and that I’d never live there again. This life, this Sarajevo-and- nowhere-else life was very serious, and I already didn’t like it because in this life lived fears no one understood. Everyone had their own fears and loaded with these fears they collided with others for whom they meant nothing, were just a plaything. I had the feeling I knew what it meant to be a grown-up.

We went back to the car, the shirt was already dry. Dad put it on, you’re not going to puke, are you? he laughed, and I looked at the ground and didn’t say anything because I knew I was sure to puke, that’s how it had to be, and they’d be happy because of it. I couldn’t escape, there’s never anywhere to escape anyway, you can only lie a little, and just never in hell open your mouth when they ask you if you need to puke, or if you’re scared, or if you’re sad. Yes, and you don’t need to explain to anyone why a poor little Fićo is a poor little Fićo and why fathers aren’t allowed to beg their children.

Mom sighed like Marija in the village of Prkosi

On the last day of fall we’re going to Pioneer Valley. That’s what we agreed, doesn’t matter if it’s raining cats and dogs and the heavens themselves open, a deal’s a deal, that’s what Dad says. The three of us are going to Pioneer Valley, and we’re going to look at the lions, monkeys, and other animals. They’ll be brought indoors on the first day of winter and put in secret sleeping cages, where they’ll stay until the first day of spring. Until then only the zookeepers will see them because animals don’t like being watched while they’re sleeping. Their wanting to sleep alone needs to be respected. We’ll see them at the very end, on Sunday afternoon, and when we go, the zookeepers are going to lead them into the secret sleeping cages, Pioneer Valley will be locked up and the keys given to the mayor, who’ll look after them until spring comes. Then we’ll come back, the animals and us, and see the changes the winter has brought. I’ll never see the lions as a five-year-old again, because in the spring I’ll be six.

It’s so foggy you can’t see your finger in front of your nose, said Grandma coming back from the market. I made it there and back from memory because I couldn’t see where I was and would’ve thought I was nowhere if I hadn’t remembered the way. Now let them say I’m senile. She put her shopping bag on the floor, a head of lettuce and a leek that looked like a palm poked out, but there was nothing in there for me, and if she’d bought spinach too it was going to be a really yucky Sunday. Luckily we’re off to Pioneer Valley, and besides, it doesn’t pay to prematurely get anxious about lunch.

C’mon, wakey wakey! Grandma searched the bed for Mom. Mom always pulled the covers up over her head, hiding under the duvet so you really needed to search the bed for her if you wanted to wake her. Mom murmured something, and Grandma beat the white linen with her hand, like a blind person looking for their wallet in the snow. C’mon, wakey wakey, why am I always the youngest here, yelled Grandma, get up, it’s foggy outside, I made it back by memory, so try putting that one about my sclerosis on me now. Mom poked her nose out, as tousled as Mowgli when he was growing up among the animals, who’s been telling you you’re sclerotic?. . I don’t remember right now, I’ve forgotten. Then they started joshing, no harm intended and not really wanting a proper fight, just a little Sunday-morning bicker, because we’re all at home on Sunday mornings and that’s when everyone gets to play their games.

Grandma’s game is called I’m not senile and what happens is that she walks around the house talking about all the things she remembers and has caught Mom forgetting because then she can say and they say I’m senile. Grandma’s other game is called I’m not deaf and is often played at the same time as I’m not senile. Mom invented both games because she’s freaking out that Grandma might stop remembering stuff and go kooky like old people often do, waking up one morning and asking things like who are you and what am I doing here. So Mom checks her sclerosis every day and gets blue and a bit pissed when she notices Grandma has forgotten something. Grandma’s the only one who’s not allowed to forget anything, because then Mom will think her sick and old, and then Mom will walk tall like a national hero, beat her fists on her chest like King Kong, and swear to her colleagues, Uncle, Dad, Grandpa, and other relatives that she’s ready to care for her mother to the death, to bathe and clean her if need be, and that she couldn’t care less if her own mother, having gone totally senile, doesn’t remember her. These stories get on Grandma’s nerves, mainly because she’s the one who looks after Mom and me, makes us lunch, cleans, and irons, while Mom just prepares herself for a heroic age Grandma thinks will come, God willing, the day little green creatures land on earth. Grandma wins the I’m not senile game because she really doesn’t forget anything, or at least she doesn’t forget more than Mom and I forget, but she always loses the I’m not deaf game. It goes like this: Mom says something, and Grandma doesn’t reply; then Mom says the same thing over, and Grandma says sorry? — at which point Mom screeches at the top of her lungs, a screech so loud hikers up on Mount Trebević could hear it, to which Grandma replies quit your bawling, I’m not deaf! Then Mom says why can’t you bloody hear me then? At which point Grandma mutters something and it’s clear to all she’s lost the game. Of course, to make the game work Mom has to screech at the top of her lungs, because if she just raises her voice a little she won’t be able to tell Grandma she’s deaf and can’t hear a thing.

Mom’s Sunday games are I’ve got a migraine or look at the state of the place, we’re cleaning under the rugs today. I like the first game better because then Mom spends the whole day lying in bed whining, sighing, and grasping for the barf bowl. As long as she keeps it up, I can go about my business building a castle for Queen Forgetful and flicking through the encyclopedia, I’m just not allowed to shout, but that’s it, everything else is okay. In our family migraines are passed from generation to generation, from head to head in actual fact, so we can’t remember an ancestor who didn’t get migraines. Mom says our ancestors who didn’t get migraines were actually monkeys, and that their heads started hurting the moment they became human. Grandma says that if she got a migraine, she’d lock herself in the bedroom, put earplugs in, draw the shades, and let the kids smash the place up, just so long as they leave her in peace. I can’t figure why I’m not allowed to smash stuff up when my mom has a migraine. You’ll see what it’s like, Mom would say, the joke isn’t going to pass you by, and after you’ve had your first migraine you’ll understand everything your mother has suffered in life.

Mom’s other game look at the state of the place, we’re cleaning under the rugs today is a pure catastrophe. The game involves shunting wardrobes around the house, taking the rugs out into the yard, cleaning floors and windows, Radojka the cleaning lady coming over and my mom playing Alija Sirotanović until Radojka goes home and Mom gets tired — which is when the game is called off. But this doesn’t mean the rugs are put back on the floor and wardrobes shunted back in place. No way! The mess lasts at least another ten days, and then we live in a state of emergency, sleeping in our beds in the middle of the room, not watching television because we don’t have anything to sit on and because the screen is covered in curtains taken down to be cleaned. Mom gets really uptight when we play this game and no one’s allowed to say anything to her because then she just starts screaming and crying and talking about the past. In the past everyone maltreated Mom. I don’t know a single member of our close or extended family who hasn’t maltreated Mom and who she doesn’t rail about because of that. Only I never maltreated her in the past because in the past I wasn’t even born, but apparently I’m making up for that now.

Today isn’t a day for Mom’s migraines. Today we’re going to Pioneer Valley. Dad’s coming for us around noon, lunch has been put back to four, which means we’ll have a whole three and a half hours for looking at the animals. God, father, look at the fog, Mom said, almost pressing her nose up against the windowpane trying to see out. But there was nothing out there, just fog and milk and the boughs of the cherry tree beneath the window disappearing into the milk rather than growing from the trunk. What did I tell you? Grandma replied. What did you tell me?. . That it’s foggy out. . I don’t know, I don’t remember, I was still asleep. . Fine, play the smarty-pants then. . I’m not playing the smarty-pants, I was asleep and didn’t hear you, Mom was getting snippy, and that was always dangerous because her snippiness could finish with us not going to Pioneer Valley. But luckily Grandma bit her lip. Grandma always bites her lip when a ring girl starts strolling around the apartment with a sign saying “Fight Time, Round One,” because she doesn’t have the strength for a fight of fifteen rounds. She’s mature and experienced, but Mom is young and up-and-coming and would knock her out by the third round.

Maybe you should give Pioneer Valley a miss after all, Grandma stared at the foggy whiteout outside the window. I don’t know, I really don’t know, Mom drank her coffee and lit her first cigarette. Here we go, you’re going to back out on me again, I put the last block on the top of the tower where Queen Forgetful was holding her parents prisoner. No one’s backing out on you, be reasonable, take a look at the weather, Grandma wasn’t falling for it. What do you care, you’re not going to Pioneer Valley, it’s all the same to you what the weather’s like. . Yes, yes, it’ll be all quite the same to me when you come down with bronchitis and I have to look after you.

Dad arrived fifteen minutes before noon. We’re going to Pioneer Valley, right, I got it in before Mom and Grandpa could open their mouths. If that was the deal, let’s go, he replied. The two of them looked at each other. Mom sighed like our national hero Marija Bursać when she was injured in the village of Prkosi and headed off to play the martyr. Outside there was either a light rain falling or it was the fog turning into drops of water, I don’t know, but the whole thing looked like a ginormous cloud had come down on the city, covering the roofs of the houses and the streets as if we’d ordered a giant duvet for Sarajevo so we wouldn’t have to climb out of bed.

There was no one at Pioneer Valley. The ticket seller in the entrance kiosk was dozing, and some young guy puttered by on a two-wheeled cart loaded to the brim with bluish-looking meat, singing seaman sons are always so late ashore, and poor mothers weep forever more. As he passed by he said good day, folks, make yourselves at home. Dad turned after him like he was about to cuss, and Mom gripped her handbag and said Christ, do they have to hassle me when I’m at the zoo too. Then they both shut up, and I shut up too because I already felt a little guilty.

The monkeys were surprised to see us. They scratched their heads and looked at Dad as if seeing him for the first time. Looks like they’re into you, Mom teased. And why wouldn’t they be? Dad made like he was lost in thought. The guy on the cart came by again: it’s strictly forbidden to feed the animals, he shouted, and then continued on with his singing. Oh get lost, bully boy! Dad yelled after him. He’s just doing his job, said Mom. The guy turned his cart around and came back. Who are you telling to get lost, huh? His light-blue eyes looked like they’d been found at the bottom of an Olympic swimming pool and he seemed really dangerous. Who do you think you are, talking to me like that? Dad took Mom and me by the hand and led us off toward the lion cage, but the guy caught up to us, cutting us off with his cart. I can throw you out of here, you know, I could punch your lights out too, he shouted. Get out of my way or I’ll call your boss!. . You know what, old fella, the boss can kiss my ass. His eyes were popping out of his head at Dad like he’d seen a heap of shit. Then not waiting for a reply he took off.

Mom sighed and shook her head, Dad breathed through his nose, snorting mad. We stopped next to each cage, but I didn’t feel much like looking at animals anymore. It occurred to me that none of us knew why we were here. Mom and Dad didn’t even look at the animals. Dad just stood in front of the cages, stared at the bars, and shut and squeezed his eyes together like he was going to fire a bullet from each, or maybe a thunderbolt, and Mom just looked up in the air, high above the lions and tigers, all in the hope someone might finally notice her sacrifice, or someone would attack her so she’d at last be able to defend herself. The fact was, she was itching for a fight. I wanted to say I felt like going home but didn’t know how to begin. I’d spent seven days laying the groundwork for our visit to Pioneer Valley, how was I now supposed to say I didn’t want to look at the animals anymore?

As we crossed the bridge, a little stream flowing underneath where ducks swim in the summer, Mom tried to take Dad’s hand, but he made a quick long stride and got away from her. That was the sum of his courage. She wasn’t his wife and he had every right to let her fall into the stream, and he wasn’t her husband and she had every right to hate him for bringing her to Pioneer Valley in such fog. I didn’t want to get mixed up in their relationship; as a matter of fact I wasn’t interested in their relationship, though it felt a little weird when I thought about the fact that I was the child of two people at opposite ends of the earth who are completely different and total strangers to each other. If we each have our own star like it says in “Cinderella,” then their stars are so many light-years from each other that no one could even be bothered counting them.

Dobro, she said quietly, taking me by the hand. He turned around unsure what she meant, whether that dobro meant fine or whether she meant his name, which was also Dobro. The accents had gotten lost in the fog, so you only heard how estranged they’d become from each other, and I knew they’d rather go home, each their own way, if only I wasn’t there between them, silent, prolonging their horror. But they have to stick one beside the other until the very end, until we’ve been around all the cages and done all the things that this Sunday, the last day of fall, has in store. Even if they don’t have anything in common anymore, they still can’t run away from each other because I’m here as a memento of a time when they still had things in common. I won’t let them forget this because I’m here, in this fog, in Pioneer Valley, as a guarantee the two of them will never go senile and never forget what they meant to each other, why they separated, and how estranged they seem to everyone who sees them together.

We got to the cage with the llama, my favorite animal and the main reason I wanted to go to Pioneer Valley. I love the llama because he spits at his visitors. Running away from his spit is the best time you can have in the whole zoo. After he spat at me for the first time in my life, I wanted to be a llama. Instead of growing up and becoming a doctor like Dad or an accountant like Mom, I wanted to turn into a llama and spit on people I didn’t know from morning to night, and for this to make them laugh and make them happy.

The llama stood in mud to his knees and stared at us. Hey, llama, I shouted. Hey, llama, spit! Spit, llama, spit! He didn’t move, didn’t gather a ball of spit in his mouth, he looked like someone who’d never spat at anyone because tears were running down his snout, real big tears, like the tears of a grown-up kid. The llama’s crying. . He’s probably crying because of the mud, Mom said. Dad didn’t say anything.

We headed for the exit. I turned to look back at the llama, hoping he’d be watching us. He wasn’t watching; he was just staring at the spot where we’d been standing and was crying. You could see his tears from ten meters away. You could see them for as long as you could see the llama. I didn’t know whether to believe the llama was crying because he was standing in the mud. Maybe he was crying because of something else. I don’t know why, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t know something like that even if I saw my mom or dad crying. People are alone when they cry and no one knows anything about them. Only when I cry everyone knows why I’m crying because I always tell them. When I grow up, I’m not telling them anymore. That’s the rules.

My shift starts soon, Dad said and headed off toward the hospital. Mom nodded, and that’s how it ended. We got home and there was a plate too many set at the table. Dobro didn’t come, said Grandma, even though she could see Dad wasn’t there. Maybe that’s what being senile is: saying things that are obvious but which you should keep to yourself. He had to go to work, Mom made a martyr of herself for our senile Grandma. How was it at Pioneer Valley?. . It was nice. The llama didn’t spit, he just cried, but we still tried to have a nice time.

Would you care for some rose jelly?

A big bone lay between me and my other grandma, my dad’s mother. Under other circumstances it would have just been a regular beef bone, gnawed clean, yet no one who heard the story ever forgot it, they took the memory to their graves. Though it was no big thing for me, I remember the bone too. I got it when I was turning three, and at that stage in life you don’t really care about the kind of bones people give you.

That grandma of mine, I won’t mention her name, wasn’t happy when Dad married Mom. She wouldn’t have been any happier had he married some other woman; she wanted Dad to stay on his own, that she, his mother, be the only woman in his life. She despised happy and joyous women, women’s frivolity she just couldn’t take, she spent her days pressed up against the window of her room watching them flitting about in the breeze, unharried women who would live and die happy. For her, happiness wasn’t a woman’s word. But the other kind of women, ugly mousy little women, the ones who hid their every curve and would never catch a single male eye, these women were saints, condemned to suffer until death as a consequence. On Judgment Day they will win God’s mercy, be blessed with forgiveness for their sins and those of their drunken roughneck husbands. She thought herself a saint because her husband had abandoned her with a newborn child, my father, for whom she would care a lifetime long, and for his brother and sisters too. They all lived in Nemanja Street in a tiny one-room apartment, half of which was taken up by a piano, the other half by beds. The piano served no practical purpose because no one knew how to play, it was just a symbol that they had once been wealthy, though no one remembered when that was — probably so long ago that every key had long since forgotten its tone. It was an apartment bare of beauty or generosity of spirit. Under the piano was a repository for winter provisions, jars of pickled paprikas, sacks of potatoes, cabbage, all the things other people kept in pantries and cellars.

There’s no way my mom could have ever been a saint for her. My mom smiled, had blond hair, and looked like a woman out of a Socialist film magazine, full of intolerable and irresponsible optimism. Even worse, she was young and pretty, rich in the way you are rich before figuring out that your poverty is eternal. Her very appearance was an insult to my other grandma, and no doubt nothing ever violated the innocence of her room and the sanctity of the gold-plated Christ hanging above the front door more than the moment on a January day in 1965 when my mom walked in, a thousand snow crystals in her hair, filled with a hope that today no one knows the name of. Dad had probably had to beg his mother for hours and days, all the family secrets had to tumble from the high ceilings, he had to pay like never before for her to finally allow the she-devil incarnate to cross her threshold. Grandma was deeply religious, but she was also tone-deaf to the fluttering of the wings of angels; she saw only the devil in a thousand shapes and guises, above all in beauty, in the feminine beauty come to kidnap her beloved one, the apple of her eye, her son.

She sat in her armchair, offered Mom rose jelly, and simpered until her heart turned to ice and her belief in God’s goodness grew, believing the Almighty would protect her and her son, that my mother would disappear just as every temptation God had placed before her in life, testing her heart and its contents, had in the end disappeared. For an hour they sat there across from each other. Dad tried to get a conversation going, which was more a plea for his mother’s mercy, mercy she wouldn’t grant him. She believed in God and everything she did was born of this belief, yet Dad believed in her, tried to break her resistance, not knowing that she would break him, that his love wouldn’t endure long enough for him to understand that life has two beginnings: one at birth, with our first memories, and one that begins with love. What set Dad apart was that he had to kill the first in order to win the right to the second, but it all proved beyond him.

It couldn’t be said he didn’t try though. He left with my mother, leaving his own mother to hold him in her prayers and pray to God he not be led into temptation and that he be untouched by every evil. Some time later, in the Hotel Panorama in Pale, on a beautiful sunny Sunday, he begat me and believed I would save him, most of all from his weakness of character, his lack of steel and resolve, that I would free him from his need to make a decision because with the birth of a child his mother would finally understand that the devil hadn’t entered his life, because you can’t conceive a child with the devil.

Are you sure the boy’s yours? she asked. He’d barely set foot in the room. Yes, he replied, and turned and left. In that instant he believed in himself and not in her, but it was a tepid self-belief, not fiery or cold, and it dissipated before he understood that you don’t give anyone an answer to those kinds of questions, not even your own mother, because the question isn’t about anything to do with you — your child — the question is about you yourself. In any case, he went to see my mom, kissed her, and smiled, giving her a hug much too firm, one meant to conceal doubt, a doubt not easily concealed. Mom looked at him, shaken and speechless, she began to age, her love turning to hate.

I was a big tubby baby on white crocheted pillows, a raspberry mark on my left temple. The neighborhood women said you must’ve had cravings for raspberries or strawberries while you were pregnant. Astonished, Mom conceded yes, I did, I’ve always loved strawberries, and the women nodded their heads and wanted her to feel guilty. In time the raspberry began to grow, and the doctors said it would cover my whole face unless removed, so for six months when I was two they injected saline solution in my temple. That pain remains the clearest memory in my life.

You think this isn’t your son? she yelled at Dad. My real grandpa and grandma were frozen in the next room. I don’t think that, God help me, I don’t think that, he replied and went again to his mother’s. He came back with a year-old potted plant and said this is for our apartment, knowing full well that nothing would ever come of the apartment or the plant. My evil grandma had succeeded in seeing her will be done, but in hearing her prayers, God allowed himself a little joke: He didn’t drive the she-devil from her son’s life, but from the she-devil’s life she drove her son, who, in but a fleeting second, had proven himself unworthy of fatherhood.

This is how it was to be: A God-fearing mother kept hold of her son, yet was forever punished by an unusual twist of fate. By the time I was just a year old my face was well defined — and I looked like my dad. The same head shape and forehead, the same chin, nose, and eyes, even my fingernails were the same shape; other children resemble their parents too but not to this extent, they don’t just resemble one parent. Instead of my dad not being my dad, it was like my mom wasn’t my mom, my face containing none of her beauty, not a single smile or gift. Back then I took completely after him, and when Dad showed his mother my photos, she pursed her lips and fell into an even greater despair at fate’s cruelty. She saw the resemblance in the child’s photos, just as for a lifetime she’d recognized with horror who her son resembled: We were doubles of Grandpa Ðorđe, the man who had ruined her life. His image would now live on until her death and much longer besides, which only went to show that suffering is eternal, enduring even when those who would suffer are no longer around.

And what is it you want from me now? she asked, handing him back the photos. I would like you to see my son, Dad replied. I’ve seen him, and now what?. . I want you to see him in real life, in this room. She didn’t say a thing, just looked at him hoping her silence spoke for itself, that he would get the message and know there were things you simply didn’t say in God’s presence, things requiring caution, which you were to only approach the way you would someone you loved. For her only a mother’s love for her son was greater than God, and from her son she expected nothing less than that his love for her be greater than God.

You have to do this for me, Dad tried to convince Mom. She lit her third cigarette even though two already burned in the ashtray. You have to, after this everything will be different. She didn’t believe him, but at the same time she knew she’d have to accede, the strength of her resistance having no bearing on a decision made long ago. Yes, of course, she’ll bathe her son, get him scrubbed up, make him the most beautiful little boy in the world, and take him to that woman who happens to be his grandmother, as unbelievable as it seemed and regardless of it having been long clear there was no place for grandmothers and grandchildren in this story because it was a story that had ended long ago, in a time that had nothing to do with Mom, a time when the notes from that piano perhaps still resounded.

You’re coming with us, right? Dad turned to my grandma and grandpa. In her black Sunday best Grandma sighed like you sigh before starting a big job. Grandpa just shook his head: I’m not going. If you ask me why I’m not going, I’d have to say I don’t know, but I think I’m old enough to not do anything I don’t want to. You’re young, attend to it yourselves. Although he probably didn’t understand what old Franjo was telling him, Dad didn’t insist, nor did he respond. In actual fact, he was probably a bit relieved. Better not to have witnesses like Grandpa in life if you’re not prepared to man up, because they can destroy your entire world with a single wave of their hand. Grandpa could be gruff, and though everyone attributed it to his asthma, Dad suspected his gruffness was of a different kind, the gruffness of a man who didn’t forgive others things he hadn’t forgiven himself. Whatever went down in the room with the piano, it was better it happened without old Franjo.

I sat on my dad’s knee. On their knees my grandma and my mom held little coffee cups with flowery saucers, the other grandma smiling from her armchair. The silence was much bigger than the room, bigger than the piano, and bigger than every silence the living are capable of keeping among themselves. Words came out without order or purpose. I’m very glad to finally meet you, said my grandma, would you care for some rose jelly? replied the other grandma, and then an age passed before anything else was said. You have a beautiful grandson, my grandma finally managed, and why didn’t your good husband come, the one in the armchair volleyed back. No one knew how long this went on, but it went on all right. I eventually fell asleep looking at the cross above the doorway and the man pierced with nails, frightened because I didn’t know who he was. In memory he became a symbol for that room, where only a piano, a cross, and a crone lived, my wrong grandma, who had never gotten up out of that armchair in all my life, so I didn’t even know if she could walk.

I woke up in the car. Mom had me in her arms, Dad was driving, and my grandma was holding the handgrip, beating her big nose in the air to the rhythm of the road. Thinking I was asleep, they didn’t talk. Mom tried to peek into a plastic bag holding something wrapped in white gift paper. The next fifteen minutes were the last hope for saving her marriage. When we’d left, my other grandma had jumped out of her armchair and said I’ve got something for the little one, he’s growing up now, and taken a plastic bag from the fridge and given it to Mom. She looked like someone who had almost forgotten something really important. For Mom it was a small but endlessly important detail, a sign maybe all was not lost, that her mother-in-law’s love had, in spite of herself, found a way to creep from the darkness and free itself from the chains in which it had been bound since the time the piano was still young. In that fifteen minutes Mom forgave her everything, chiding herself her lack of compassion for the woman’s misfortune, for having only thought of herself and the child who lay dozing in her lap, for never thinking how that woman had once, long ago, held such a child in her arms, totally devoid of hope in the man whom she loved.

Grandpa was waiting for us at the dining-room table. Old train timetables, beekeeping manuals, and a Hungarian dictionary lay strewn out before him, all to help pass the time quicker, so he wouldn’t think so much about us or fall to his fears for the mission on which his wife and daughter had set out. How was it? he took his glasses off the moment we came in. Let us catch our breath, said Mom. Now we’ll see how it was, said Grandma and reached for the plastic bag. Wait! Mom grabbed her hand. Fine, I’m waiting, said Grandma and put the bag down. Grandpa raised his eyebrows and went with the flow. This was unusual for him, but this was an unusual situation; everyone except me knew a life was splitting in two here, my mom’s life for sure, but maybe another life was involved too, my life, which, truth be told, had just begun, so hadn’t yet gotten that far.

Mom took the package out of the bag and unwrapped the paper. There, in the middle of our dining-room table, lay an enormous beef bone, picked perfectly clean. It was whiter than white, no traces of meat or blood, as if someone, the Almighty for example, had created it exactly that way and sent eternity out a message: “You shall be a bone and nothing else, you shall have no purpose nor meaning, you shall not procreate, nor shall you be either dead or alive.” Mom held her face in her hands so it wouldn’t shatter, and Grandma sat down. Grandpa said right then, and they all stared motionless at the bone.

Let me see, let me see, I ran around the table yelling. I couldn’t know something bad was happening because nothing had actually happened, nor did I sense their anger or sorrow because they weren’t angry or sad. Maybe they were white and cold, maybe they, at least now in retrospect, resembled that white bone on the fancy black veneer of the table. Useless and beautiful in equal measure, the bone was a final evil after which no good could ever come. For my mom the bone was the abyss at the end of the road; a sign she should turn around and start out on a new path, if there was indeed one she could ever envisage, sure from the very start that a bone for her son wouldn’t be waiting at its end.

Give it to me, give it to me, I howled, but they wouldn’t give me the bone. Grandpa picked it up, stood for a moment in front of the trash can — either the bone was too big, or he realized such things weren’t for the trash — then headed outside with it. I can imagine him walking through Metjaš with this ginormous beef bone, people scrambling out of his way, seeing in his eyes and from what was in his hand that he was mad. He carried it off somewhere, I’ll never know where, and returned half an hour later. I cried because they hadn’t given me the object of my affection.

The next day Dad asked Mom what his mother had given me because she hadn’t wanted to tell him, but Mom didn’t say anything. She didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t something you could put into words, and had left us more confused than all the dead pianos in the world.

I never went to that room again, nor did I ever see that other grandma of mine. I don’t even know how she died or where she’s buried, or whether Dad ever showed her my pictures again. If he did, she must have been a bit relieved. As I got older I looked less like him and she would have been able to believe God had quit testing her and answered all her prayers.

The violet fig for Nada Stilinović

When the frost bites hard and the teeth chatter and thick snows fall and no one can come to us and we can’t go to anyone, Grandma says this winter is nothing like the winter of 1943, the thought of which makes me freeze and my heart pound wild because I love the years before my time. That’s when miracles happened, and everything was huge and terrifying. It was a Friday in Zenica that winter when the Old Devil got dead drunk and headed for home. The snow was two meters high and blue in the moonlight, so he thought it was his bed or a duvet. God knows what goes through the head of an eighty-five-year-old who’s spent a minimum seventy-five of them dead drunk, maybe even eighty of them. But he saw that much snow and he just lay down and made himself comfortable, covering himself in it, and with his hands under his head started snoring away. Heaven knows how long he’d been lying there when the miners coming back from the second shift dug him out and got him to the hospital. Alive! Alive, I tell you, and he’d lain in the snow that winter of 1943, and that wasn’t like this winter, bit of frost, bit of snow, nothing much, but a real winter like you don’t get anymore, one I’ll never see in my lifetime again. They took the old coot to the hospital; luckily they didn’t take him home because the next day he got pneumonia, eighty-five years old and a temperature of 104 degrees, but you think that knocked the wind out of his sails? Fat chance! He shuffled to the window and tossed kids some money to get him medicinal alcohol from the drugstore, that hundred-proof stuff, but kids being kids they took the money and scampered. I think that killed the Old Devil and not the pneumonia. Only rakia could kill him, or truth be told, him not having it. He didn’t have the taste for anything else. He might’ve been a drinker, but the alcohol didn’t do him in, it got everyone around him: a first wife, then a second, both younger, then a daughter, another daughter, his sons scattering to the four winds. God knows who and what else that rakia killed, but it didn’t get him. He woke up drunk, went to bed drunk, forged the horseshoes in his workshop drunk, and drunk he laid waste to everything in his path and everything that let itself be laid to waste, all until that winter, the 1943 mother of all winters got him. Sometimes I think it got so cold just to knock the Old Devil off, said Grandma when the temperature fell, shaking with rage and anger, but not cold, because she wasn’t afraid of the cold. The Old Devil was the only person she hated in the entire world, and of all perversions, vices, and weapons, of all human depravities and evils, it was alcohol and alcoholism she had no truck with.

The Old Devil was my great-grandpa and his name was Josip, but Grandma never called him that, he was always the Old Devil, and no one, not even Grandpa whose father he was, ever got angry with her or corrected her or told her how swell it would be if she could call her deceased father-in-law by some other name, the one he was christened with for example, or the one by which everyone in Zenica knew him: Blacksmith Joža the Slovenian. At the mention of his father my grandpa would bow his head and bite his lip, just like his brothers, our uncles Karlo and Rudo, who never forgave him the rakia, nor themselves for having been children not able to save their older sisters from their deaths at my great-grandpa’s careless hand. Whenever the Old Devil came up, you saw the same disposition in Grandma, Grandpa, and Mom’s eyes, a familial mark of Cain, a color that differentiated the Rejcs from other people, a light-gray anti-rakia hue. It marked their lives in different ways, and boy did it mark my life with them. Grandpa would drink two short ones of rakia and even under threat of medieval torture you couldn’t make him have a third, dead sure that if he did he’d turn into the Old Devil. Mom would drink half a beer and already have the fear of God inside her that she was dead drunk and that the Old Devil was there smiling at her from just around the corner. Grandma didn’t drink at all. Not at New Year’s, not at birthdays, never! That was the Rejc family for you, and then I came along. Takes after his father’s side, said Mom. God, father, the kid doesn’t have any Rejc in him, said Grandpa. So it was no surprise I didn’t share the Rejc anti-rakia disposition, I wasn’t even scared of the Old Devil. Actually, I didn’t know anything about rakia, except that it stunk real bad and that the stink reminded me of the hospital, vaccinations, and having your tonsils out. But my great-grandpa, he loomed large all right.

I don’t pay Grandpa’s dead sisters any mind because I can’t, because I don’t know anything about them, just that they’re dead and that they died very young. That’s the only thing anyone ever says about them, and that’s not enough for me to love them and blame the Old Devil for their dying young. He’s the main character and the only character in a story that’s been going on for a hundred years and continues to this day even though he’s long dead, and in this story Blacksmith Joža the Slovenian is like Flash Gordon: Everyone’s afraid of him, but no one can hurt him. This great-grandpa of mine is the strongest and the biggest, so strong and so big that the winter of 1943 had to come along to do him in so he could make a brief exit from the story, but he’s sure to make a comeback one day. I know this because these kind of stories can’t end before I make my entrance, doesn’t matter if I’m five, seven, or eleven years old, one day when I dream of the Old Devil I’ll offer him my hand and say you were terrifying, but I’m not scared of you, and everyone was scared of you except me. I don’t know what he’ll say to that, but I have the feeling he might burp in my face. My great-grandpa, Blacksmith Joža the Slovenian, that’s him for you.

We learned proverbs at school and on the blackboard the teacher wrote: “Everyone forges his own good fortune.” We were supposed to write an explanation of what it meant in our notebooks, so I wrote a story about how my great-grandpa forged his own good fortune and about how forgers of their own good fortune were usually forgers of others’ misfortune because they find their good fortune at the bottom of a bottle of rakia. The teacher called Mom into school for another visit, but Mom didn’t tell me anything, not why she was called in or what the teacher told her, but I saw the red in her eyes and that she was all upset and desperate because of me. The next day the school psychologist turned up in class, stood next to the teacher’s desk, hands behind his back, and the teacher said this is comrade Mutevelić, he’s a psychologist and he’s going to sit in on our class today and see how you’re doing, and after five minutes I could see his eyes were all on me, staring at my head and glancing away when I caught him, and the teacher kept asking me stuff, all smiley and kind like she never was, like I was really sick or something, all kinds of weird questions about things we hadn’t even studied and I’m sure aren’t even in the teacher’s book, like are people good or evil, or who’s smarter, the raven or the fox, or is Videk happy they sewed him a shirt. This Videk is a kid in a lame story, he’s supposed to have walked around naked until some nice folks sewed him a shirt. I replied that good people are good, and that evil people are evil, that the raven is smart because he found the cheese, and that the fox is smarter because she took it from him, but that maybe the fox was dumb because she couldn’t find the cheese herself and that the raven was stupid because he let himself get played by the fox, but that I had no opinion about Videk because I just couldn’t imagine a kid walking around naked and someone sewing him a shirt. When I said the bit about “having no opinion,” I shot comrade Mutevelić a look because I knew he’d be shocked. I know exactly which words are going to shock people as soon as they come out of my mouth, and I know why they’re shocked. When I say “in my opinion,” or when I say “taken in general,” or when I say “characteristically,” everyone acts like I’ve put a suit, tie, and hat on, all fancy. That’s how it is now: Comrade Mutevelić raises an eyebrow in surprise, takes his pad from his pocket, and scribbles something down.

The boy is very clever for his age and has a rich vocabulary, but his emotions are completely childlike and along with his undoubted intelligence they’re an explosive little cocktail. That’s what comrade Mutevelić told Mom, and amazingly that’s what she told me, word for word, probably because she’d just read something in her book You and Your Child about the value of periodically shocking me with psychoanalytic findings or what grown-ups think of me. I’m not that smart, it’s just they expect me to be dumb. . Who expects that of you?. . The teacher and comrade Mutevelić. They asked me whether Videk is happy someone sewed him a shirt. You only ask that kind of thing when you want to make someone look like a retard. . Why did you write that everyone forges their own good fortune and others’ misfortune?. . I didn’t write that, I wrote that Great-grandpa was a blacksmith and everyone around him misfortunate. That’s what I wrote, I didn’t write anything about anyone else because I didn’t have time and because I don’t know anything about any other blacksmiths. . Do you really have to write down what you hear at home? You could make something up. . You mean, I could lie about something?. . Not lie, make up. . And what in your opinion is the difference between making up and lying?. . Liars lie and writers make things up. . So who writes and talks about stuff that really happened then?. . For chrissakes, I don’t know, historians probably, but that’s not the point right now, try outdoing yourself and biting your tongue every now and then.

That’s how my first encounter with a psychologist played out: A very unpleasant experience and one I’d very much like to avoid in the future, although my reputation in class skyrocketed afterward because everyone figured that comrade Mutevelić was there because of me and figured it was because I was either really crazy or really smart, but no one was able to solve that particular dilemma, apart from Šandor, the class bonehead, who was repeating the grade and gave me a hiding every day after Mutevelić’s visit, presumably having decided that crazy or smart, I deserved a thrashing either way.

Given that the Old Devil and the family fear of rakia and alcoholism was at the root of everything, I decided to carefully monitor my family’s relationship to alcohol, make a few notes from time to time, it being obvious that inebriety was key and that I had to act with caution in the face of their fears. As soon as Grandma or Grandpa got scared about something, I’d get bawled out for not sharing their fears. Then I’d have to be scared of all the things I wasn’t scared of, and given I couldn’t stop being scared of the stuff I really was scared of myself, I had to carry around my own fears and their fears besides, which, I’m sure you’ll agree, is a rather unpleasant state of affairs when you’re five, seven, or however many years old.

I noticed that our pantry was full of alcohol: homemade slivovitz and grappa; dozens of bottles of brandy and cognac; two liters of whiskey; vodka, gin; bottles of white, red, and rosé wine; menthol and chocolate liqueurs; Macedonian mastic and Greek metaxa. . The bottles were neatly arranged and unopened, apart from the grappa and the whiskey, at the ready for when guests came. The bottles belonged to long-forgotten wakes and birthday parties, or were New Year’s presents from the time before I was born. When someone dies, the neighborhood comes to say how sorry they are and people bring bottles of alcohol, which then get stored in the pantry forever. Everyone knows we’re pretty much a nondrinking household, but tradition is tradition, and people cling to funeral rites most faithfully of all because even if they make no sense they’re still not for messing with because death is a time when the living have to be good to each other, and you’re best when you do something of no use to anyone, which makes it all the more moving.

The menthol and chocolate liqueurs were presents for Mom when she was really young and before I was even born. On one of the bottles there was a tempera heart and arrow with Mom’s name and the name of some guy in it. This is a happy memory for her, which I don’t get at all. How can a bottle of liqueur be a happy memory when she’s terrified of alcohol? Do you think that heart is the happy memory? Nice: a memory written on a bottle full of fear.

If someone in our house dies, or someone else falls in love with Mom, there won’t be any room in our pantry for anything but bottles of alcohol, and soon there’ll be so many we’ll have to keep them under the bed or in the coat cupboard. It’s all because of the Old Devil. He’s the ghost in the pantry and it’s no matter he died in 1943 and everyone’s always thought he was buried forever in Zenica Cemetery. But he wasn’t going to be banished from the pantry until someone else turned to the drink. Me, for example! What if I became an alcoholic? I asked Grandma. At six years old? She was shocked. Not right now, a bit later. . How much later? Oh, to hell with you, become whatever you like, just wait ’til I’m dead. . I didn’t say I will become an alcoholic, but what if I did?. . And why, pray tell, would you be an alcoholic?. . Well, how about so someone empties all those bottles from out of the pantry.

That weekend my uncle from Zenica came and took all our alcohol away. He parked his Volvo station wagon in front of the house and spent an hour loading it with bottles. Everyone was in a crappy mood, Mom and Grandma most of all, so I wasn’t allowed to ask anything, not even what he was going to do with all those bottles of brandy, cognac, vodka, and wine, and the menthol and chocolate liqueurs. He took Mom’s happy memory away too, her heart and the guy’s name written inside it. Grandma wiped the shelves down and covered them with bright paper. There, now there’s much more room for ajvar and paprikas, she said, but I was sorry about the bottles. Maybe because I felt that one day I really could’ve drunk them all up, and maybe I was sorry because the ghost of Blacksmith Joža the Slovenian — my great-grandpa, the Old Devil — had been so violently tossed from our pantry.

This year we’re going to put a rum pot on, Grandma solemnly announced and put an enormous five-liter ceramic pot on the table. It had funny Gothic letters on it, words written above drawings of pears, apples, cherries, figs, and grapes that weren’t yellow or red but green like grass or the cover on our couch. Rum pot is fruit for wintery days, that’s what they told me, and I’ll only get to eat it if I’m good and I display maturity in all possible situations. I don’t have the foggiest idea what maturity in all possible situations is supposed to mean, but I solemnly promised that I’d give it my all because I was really into this rum-pot thing because you made it with rum, and rum is alcohol, and that seems to have slipped Mom’s and Grandma’s mind. Or something else was going down; I didn’t know what, but I’d find out in the fall, at the beginning of November when the rum pot was opened.

At the end of May, right around my birthday, Grandma filled the pot with rum and tossed half a kilo of strawberries in. She spread her arms, said all done, and threw me out of the pantry. Fifteen days later we were in the pantry again, she opened the pot, tossed two handfuls of cherries in, spread her arms, and again said all done. She also said all done when the figs, apples, cantaloupes, watermelons, pears, and grapes were ripe and ready. If you really want to know, I think spreading her arms and saying all done were part of the recipe and that for the rum pot they’re just as important as the fruit and rum. I’m not sure if everyone can say those words and spread their arms in that particular way, but if your rum pot doesn’t work out, you can more or less be sure the recipe is lost for all time because I’ve obviously forgotten some tiny detail or secret ingredient, and by the time you read this my grandma will already be dead, so you won’t be able to ask her.

On the eve of the twenty-ninth of November a big snow fell, and on our Independence Day the temperature fell to minus twenty. The hare’s been looking for his mom tonight, my mom declared, today’s the day for rum pot, my grandma concluded; my heart beat like crazy. I could smell the rum before Mom had even opened the pot. There’s no greater surprise than a first time, this I know well, because everything that has ever happened to me for the first time was great, and luckily the world was still full of first times and you just had to be a little patient and another first time would roll around. Flags had frozen on the flagpoles outside, the red of the Party and the red of the republic, between them the state tricolor. All was quiet, icy, and calm, not a breath of wind, and the flags, well they hung there as if made of steel or like someone had frozen them at the height of their flapping so they had to wait along with me, eyes wide open, nostrils flared, and fists clenched for the rum pot to be set on the table, in midwinter, on this coldest of all days, which also happens to be our Independence Day, the fruit of last summer, the fruit of boiling-hot days when everything burst with life, now preserved in rum, in that terrifying alcohol, so that another first time would come to pass.

I got one fig, two cherries, a slice of apple, and three strawberries. That’s too much for you, said Grandma, you’re not going to get drunk on us, said Mom, but I looked at the fruit in my bowl, a little disappointed. The fruit had lost all its color: the figs and strawberries were brown, the cherries black, the apples almost gray. Instead of fruit, what I saw looked like the corpses of fruit; dead fruits that hadn’t been eaten when it was their time, fruits that didn’t continue life in our tummies and veins, in hearts remembering them and palates tasting their sweetness. Someone had left them to die, to see in Independence Day dead and soaked in rum.

I held the end of the table with my fingers and stared at the bowl. I didn’t know what to do, from which side or fruit to start. What’s wrong?. . They look like eyes to me. . What kind of eyes?. . Like the eyes in formalin at the medical faculty. Mom shot Grandma an angry look: See what Dobro’s done. . Oh Jesus Christ, said Grandma. I’m telling you, he’s got a screw loose. . What can I do about it?. . You let him take him there. . What could I do, ban him? I’m not his mother and his father.

So you see, there were problems before I’d even tried the rum pot for the first time, and it was all Dad’s fault because he’d taken me to see the organs in formalin. He thought I should see that stuff and there was absolutely no reason why kids shouldn’t see parts of former people, and maybe he thought I’d get interested in medicine and follow, as Auntie Doležal liked to say, in his footsteps. Instead, everything dead and fake started to remind me of organs in formalin, from my cousin Regina’s plastic dolls, which looked like spleen in formalin, to pickled paprikas filled with cabbage, which in see-through jars looked like brain tumors in formalin, to fruit from the rum pot, which looked like eyes in formalin. I didn’t get what the problem was and why something wasn’t allowed to remind me of something in formalin, but it was obvious that asking was out of the question, that I was just supposed to smile and act dumber than I really am.

Grandma grabbed my bowl and scraped the fruit back into the pot. It doesn’t remind me, it doesn’t remind me! I howled, but it was already too late. You’re not getting drunk on me, said Grandma. Go do some math, said Mom. I lost it and started braying. Afterward I always tell myself that I’m not allowed to do this, but it’s no good, I start bawling at the critical moment, I just squawk louder and louder, and my nerves go floppy like slithery noodles in beef soup and it’s blindingly obvious I’m not going to achieve anything because they don’t care about my tears, it’s like I’m a fascist in a Partisan film, but what other option do I have when they do this sort of stuff to me, especially on our Independence Day when we’re supposed to love each other more than on other days because it’s a public holiday and everything is supposed to be flashy like it is on TV.

I kept the squawking up for hours, but they didn’t want to listen, they just quietly went about their business. I stopped when Mom started doing the vacuuming. The insult was bad enough as it was, and the vacuum cleaner sounded like it was mocking me, almost perfectly imitating my voice. Anyone would have thought the vacuum cleaner and I were performing a traditional song from the Far East, from the Siberian wastes or the Mongolian desert or somewhere.

I shut up and went on an anger strike. I didn’t look at them the whole day, answering questions briskly and coldly and only those of an official character, for example, how many classes we had at school tomorrow and whether my PE gear needed washing, Mom said little bastard, look at him sulking, and I sucked that insult up too. She tried being all cuddly before I went to sleep, but I pulled the duvet over my head in a huff and waited for her to leave.

I was angry the next day too. After lunch Grandma asked would you like some rum pot? And I could hardly wait to tell her no, it’s disgusting!. . Excuse me, how is it disgusting?. . It’s not food, it’s al-co-hol — al-co-hol. I’m not a boozer and I don’t need al-co-hol. I broke it up into syllables and looked her straight in the eye. She can’t do anything to me because whatever she wants to say, the Old Devil is going to dance before her eyes, my great-grandpa Blacksmith Joža the Slovenian is going to wake from his grave, my great ally for the day.

Fine, you don’t have to have any, more for us. I snortled out my nose and tried to smile cynically. I practice that smile all the time, for situations when I don’t know what to say or need to shut my mouth so I don’t get it on the snout, but I always get the impression that I don’t do it that well, that to them it looks like I’m going to burst out crying instead of into a smile.

I didn’t try the rum pot that year. I refused it even when I’d quit being angry, even when guests came, even when Nano was here for New Year’s and said c’mon, try a little of mine. I couldn’t break now, even though I wanted to try that dead fruit and the alcohol in it and find out why the fruit died and what my great-grandpa had enjoyed his whole life and what Grandma, Mom, and Grandpa were so desperately afraid of.

Grandma made the rum pot the next year too, she spread her arms, said all done, the whole routine repeated right down to the grapes, the last fruit to go in, and the first icy days of fall when the pot was opened. Grandma said try this fig, for my sake. It was then I gave in because it was a fig and figs are a special fruit for my grandma. Everything to do with figs was tender, quiet, and distant, buried in some long-lost time, and if she went back to that time, she’d become unsteady and unsure of herself, a little girl, my grandma the little girl, because for her all the figs in the world were from Dubrovnik, from the Dubrovnik where she grew up going to an Italian school and looking out to sea from Boninovo. The sea was without end, and life itself had no end, and so at the ends of life and the sea, the only thing in which she was still a child was those figs, in the most beautiful of them all, the violet Ficus indiana, the fruit in which my grandma lives without a single disappointment in life, without a single great pain of adulthood where things stop being childlike and nothing ever happens for the first time. Grandma bore children and buried the first of them, Grandma loved Greta Garbo, her silence and her blue eyes, Grandma delivered grandchildren and buried the first of them, Grandma loved Grandpa and buried him too, Grandma hated the Old Devil because the Old Devil had brought Grandpa only suffering in life and Grandma couldn’t allow it that someone she loved suffered. This is what I was thinking when she said try this fig, for my sake, or that’s what I thought much later when I was growing up fast and more and more things were for the last time and fewer and fewer for the first time. That fig is lodged in my brain from a different time and it belongs only to her and it will stay that way forever.

The dead fig from the rum pot was my first alcohol in life. I don’t know what it tasted like, I don’t remember or I don’t want to remember because with these kinds of memories you risk a comrade Mutevelić showing up and crapping on about how intelligent you are and how you’re going to explode like a bomb one day because you cry for no reason, even though you know your tears are silly, do no good, and that no one understands them. I don’t mean tears of rage but the other kind, the kind that made me eat that fig. But for me the snow didn’t seem like a deep blue duvet under the icy moonlight, the duvet under which Blacksmith Joža the Slovenian lies sleeping.

A castle for Queen Forgetful

Auntie Doležal told me the story about Queen Forgetful. It was Friday and it was summer, and we’d come over to her place for coffee. I mean, Grandma had come over for coffee, I was just going along for Sombrero candies and petit beurre biscuits, which at Auntie Doležal’s place were all soft, not a single crunch left in them. Mom said it’s because Auntie Doležal’s biscuits are stale and they’re stale because no one eats them except me, because she doesn’t have anyone come visit her and eat biscuits and she only buys them because everyone has to have biscuits for when guests come over, but the less guests come, the softer and soggier the biscuits, like someone’s been crying on them.

As soon as we arrived I got stuck into the biscuits, trying to snaffle them all up so Auntie Doležal would have to go the store and buy some new ones, muttering to herself the whole way God help me, guests on the doorstep and not a biscuit in the house, which is what my grandma always says. But better this God help me than Auntie Doležal’s biscuits get even soggier because she doesn’t have any family left and we’re the only ones who come visit her.

My Micika, I can hardly walk, Grandma bellyached, a brown coffee spot on the tip of her nose. Auntie Doležal pretended not to notice it because it’s impolite to notice such things, even when the person is your best friend. You don’t need to tell me, when I walk it’s like someone’s banging nails in my feet, Auntie Doležal brushed her off and stepped out of her slippers, take a look, it’s not even two weeks since I went to the podiatrist. . I never find the time to go, it’s always look at this, look at that, move this, move that, go there, come here, and days and months go by, and I’ve got corns like — Godforgiveme — I fell from the tree yesterday. Grandma was rambling and a new coffee spot had formed next to the last one. Olga, why don’t you nip to the podiatrist now, the little one can stay here, it won’t be boring here with me, will it now? Auntie Doležal turned to me. No, no, I hurried, hoping like hell Grandma wouldn’t remember that it’s impolite to leave kids with other people. There was no way I wanted to go to the podiatrist with her, because I went once and it was a terrible thing. I was sitting in the waiting room and a mother came in with a little girl a bit smaller than me, and then some guy in a white coat showed up, like he was a doctor, but he wasn’t, and the girl started to bawl, and he put some metal thing up against her ear and it popped and the girl screamed, and then he put it up against her other ear and there was another pop, and then the girl and her mother left, the girl holding her hands over her ears screaming her head off, and I was scared stiff thinking the guy in the white coat might come for me next to do the same thing. Then Grandma came out. What was that? I asked. Nothing, ear piercing. . Ear peeing? I blanched. Not peeing, piercing. Peeing, piercing, it was all the same, let your guard down for a second and you’re in for it. The girl had come in all smiley and went out howling in pain. The bottom line is that I’m not going to the podiatrist with Grandma again unless I really have to.

Auntie Doležal was uncomfortable the moment we were on our own. I was sitting on the couch, and every little thing, every chair and cupboard grew before my eyes, all so immense, dead, and dusty. It was as if we were in a museum where no one had lived for thousands of hundreds of years and that Auntie Doležal was the guardian of a secret bounty and framed yellowed photographs of serious-looking people in funny uniforms. In one picture there was a man with long twirly whiskers and something funny on his head, something like an iron hat with a spike on the top. Who’s that?. . That’s my dad, Auntie Doležal brightened up, because I wasn’t scared of all her dusty stuff anymore. He was a soldier and fought for Czar Franz. . And he wore that thing on his head when he fought?. . He did, I think he did, it was actually part of the uniform. . Did Czar Franz’s other soldiers wear that thing on their heads too?. . I don’t know, probably. . They really wore those same iron hats on their heads? I really was surprised because I couldn’t imagine someone running around with that sort of thing on their head. Well, I’m not at all surprised they lost all those wars.

Auntie Doležal smiled thinking me pretty witty and smart for my age, and me, I was just uncomfortable because she was uncomfortable, so I searched the place for something similar for us to talk about, just not something belonging to her dead husband. They’d killed him in Jasenovac and you weren’t allowed to talk about him with Auntie Doležal. Actually, it was allowed, just no one wanted to, just like Auntie Doležal didn’t want to talk to Grandma about the little brown spot on the tip of her nose. The polite thing to do was to shut your mouth and hope Auntie wasn’t thinking about her Jucika, even though almost everything in her apartment reminded you of Jucika, and all his stuff was exactly where it was when they came for him.

I had the impression everything was Jucika’s so we weren’t allowed to talk about anything. Auntie Doležal held her hands in her lap and waited, I had to say something but didn’t know what. Auntie, how about telling me a story? I remembered that grown-ups expect these sorts of requests from children and made a face like I wanted to hear a story more than anything else in the world and I’d be heartbroken if she didn’t tell me one.

Auntie Doležal fidgeted a bit, but the discomfort was gone. She just needed to remember a story and then everything would be all right and it wouldn’t matter that there weren’t any toys or picture books in her apartment and that sitting here like this was as strange and new to her as it was to me. I don’t know many stories, I’ve forgotten them, but here’s one about a girl called Forgetful. Auntie Doležal folded her arms on her chest and felt herself very important, the kind of importance grownups feel when they tell stories, which is why children beg them to tell stories in the first place. It’d been a long time since Auntie Doležal had told anyone a story so she felt even more important. Forgetful forgot everything. When her mom sent her to the store, she couldn’t remember what she was supposed to buy, when she went to school, she forgot her books, when she went to visit her grandma in the village, she forgot to bring her knitting wool. Forgetful forgot everything you could possibly forget, but she never forgot her forgetting and this made her very unhappy. She knew that others always remembered or would go back for what they had forgotten, but she was lost and all on her own because absolutely no one forgot so badly that they couldn’t remember what they’d forgotten. So Forgetful decided to write down everything she might forget. She wrote down what she was supposed to buy at the store, that she had to bring her books to school, and that she needed to take her knitting wool to her grandma’s. But the more Forgetful wrote down, the more things she had to forget. For every single thing she wrote down and remembered there were another ten she had to write down, and another hundred for those ten. The world was so big and forgettable that in the end Forgetful came to the conclusion that there was nothing else in the whole world except the things she forgot. This made her even unhappier and she spent all day waiting for good fairies, but they never came, so she waited for angels, but they never came either. Actually there was no one else around but her mom and dad who’d look in on her every now and then and say, Oh, Forgetful, Forgetful, you’ve forgotten everything again.

Auntie Doležal clapped her hands. I was surprised: In the end nothing happened in her story. There was nothing about what happened to Forgetful, whether she was alive today or whether she grew up and stopped her forgetting. There was no end to the story because it just got bigger and bigger like the circles around a stone thrown into the sea; there’s always another circle around the other circle, and inside one thing forgotten there was always another and no one can count all these forgotten things because forgotten things can’t be counted. It’s like they don’t exist and they never existed, but if you’re Forgetful and everyone knows that you of all people are the forgetful one, then you start to count and write all the forgotten stuff down.

I looked at the wall, Auntie Doležal asked did you like the story? but I couldn’t answer because I was trying to remember something that I knew yesterday but had forgotten today. I didn’t know what it was, but I’m sure there was something and that I had forgotten it. Did you like the story? Auntie Doležal repeated. Wait a second, Auntie, and again I tried to remember. Okay, I’m waiting, she said.

You forget things because they’re all different. If they were the same, you wouldn’t be able to forget them. If her mom had sent Forgetful to the store to buy the same things every day, if Forgetful had to take the same books to school every day and take the same wool to her grandma’s, then she wouldn’t have forgotten anything. I’ll build a castle for Forgetful!. . So, you liked it then?. . No, I didn’t like it, but I’ll build a castle where she’ll live by herself and it’s all going to be the same and she won’t be able to forget anything in it and no one will remind her of her forgetting.

There was a ding-dang-dong. Grandma was back from the podiatrist. Uff, my Micika, that’s a relief. You have no idea how much of a relief that is, she said, and Auntie Doležal made another coffee, I wolfed down the last biscuit, and then we went home. I don’t remember how Grandma and Auntie Doležal parted, I don’t remember if it was sunny when we left and I don’t remember if Auntie Doležal watched us from her window and if we waved to her from the tram stop. I’m sorry I don’t remember because we never saw her again.

The ambulance came for Auntie Doležal on a Monday. That morning the neighbors had found her on the ground floor, a bag of groceries in her hand — bread, milk, biscuits, and lettuce — just standing there. They said hi, and every time she’d startle but not say hi back. Then she climbed the stairwell, going from door to door and then back down to the ground floor. It was afternoon by the time she rang the Kneževićs’ bell and said to Snježana, the girl who was my father’s intern at the hospital, I’ve lost my way! Snježana was confused and asked where did you lose your way, Auntie? Auntie just smiled and said I don’t know, and then Snježana called the ambulance.

First the doctors thought Auntie Doležal had had a stroke and that’s why she had forgotten everything, and then they figured out she was perfectly healthy and that there was nothing wrong with her. So they thought Auntie Doležal had suddenly gone senile, but you can’t go senile overnight; yesterday you remember everything and today you can’t even remember where you live. Then they made some inquiries about whether Auntie had any relatives and discovered that Jucika was dead and that Auntie’s daughter, Vera, was also dead and that Auntie’s brothers and sisters were also dead, and in the end it turned out that we were all Auntie Doležal had left.

Mom went to the hospital and Dr. Muratbegović said to her madam, I’m afraid we don’t have any reason to keep her in, and given she doesn’t have any family the only thing we can do is put her in Jagomir. Mom bawled Dr. Muratbegović out because Jagomir was a nuthouse, and Auntie Doležal wasn’t nuts, she’d just forgotten everything. Forget it, I’ll take care of her, she said and took Auntie Doležal back to her apartment.

Auntie, do you remember me? Mom asked when they were in the tram. I won’t lie to you. I don’t remember. . And do you remember Olga, Auntie? Olga’s your best friend. Auntie just shrugged her shoulders and turned away. She looked out the window, rain was falling, and her eyes became moist and she was ashamed about being so impolite that she couldn’t remember her best friend.

From that Monday on Mom visited Auntie Doležal morning and night. Auntie sat in her armchair the whole day through, reading the newspaper and doing the crossword. No one could ever figure out how she’d forgotten absolutely everything about her life but hadn’t forgotten anything she needed to know to solve the crossword. She’d forgotten her Jucika but in crossword clues she knew that a bay was a horse.

Do you want to come to Auntie’s with me? she asked Grandma just the one time, and Grandma said she didn’t because all that mattered was that Auntie Doležal wasn’t hungry and that she’s clean, and that everything else was last year’s snow and would never come back. She wasn’t sad about it, but she would have been sad if she’d gone to Auntie’s and Auntie didn’t recognize her. That’s my grandma for you, she lets things take their course, but she remembers everything Auntie Doležal has forgotten. Every time Mom comes back from Auntie’s, Grandma talks about her Micika; she talks about lots of stuff Mom and me never knew. For example, right after the Second World War, when Grandma and Grandpa lived in Yugoslav People’s Army Street next door to Auntie Doležal, there was an earthquake in Sarajevo, not a big one, only the black chandeliers swayed a bit, and Grandpa was taking a shower. When he felt everything shaking around him, he ran out of the bathroom, and with everything still shaking he ran out of our apartment soaped up and birth naked, hopping down the landing yelling what’s going on, what’s going on. Auntie Doležal stood in the doorway of her apartment and clasped her hands together, because to her Franjo was stranger than the earthquake. It was days before he could look her in the eye, and days before she could look my grandma in the eye. When the shame had passed and the earthquake was just a funny memory, Auntie Doležal said to Grandma goodness gracious your Franjo’s hung like a horse!

Or when our cat Marko disappeared, also a few years after the war, and Grandpa paced the yard in front of our building for days calling him home, Auntie Doležal said she felt like crying when she saw him from her window so distraught because he knew the cat was never coming back, but that he needed to call him because you can’t let one of your own vanish just like that and admit to yourself that they’re gone and never coming back. Marko was the smartest cat in the world. He’d sit on the linoleum at the top of the hallway and wait for Grandpa to come home from work, and Grandpa would give him a shunt with his leg and Marko would slide all the way to the bathroom. For years after Marko’s disappearance, Grandpa, on his way in from work, would wave his leg in the air and mutter Ej Marko, Marko, but this didn’t get anybody down as much as Auntie Doležal. Micika was terribly sensitive to Franjo, says Grandma, and Mom puts her finger to her lips, psssst!, so Grandpa doesn’t hear.

Every day when Mom came back from Auntie Doležal’s Grandma would tell a new story about her friend, and in two months we’d heard her whole life story, and then one day the stories stopped. Mom stayed longer and longer over at Auntie Doležal’s because she’d started forgetting that she needed to pee, she’d forgotten how to wash her face and hands, and she’d even stopped speaking. She just sat there with the same crossword on her knees, pencil in hand, staring at the empty wall. Mom had to bathe and dress her, and Auntie Doležal completely surrendered as if she were a little kid and didn’t know what was being done to her.

In the end she didn’t even remember how to sit up, so one morning she just lay there in bed and never got up again. Mom tried to get help from the hospital, but the nurse could only come twice a week, so she had to take care of Auntie Doležal all by herself. Auntie Doležal’s life was over, and she was just waiting to die. Grandma didn’t smile anymore, and she didn’t talk about Auntie Doležal either, and Mom took sick leave because she had to be with her the whole day through. Auntie Doležal was like a little baby who had to have her diapers changed every so often, but unlike a baby she was never going to be a grown-up again. How is she related to you, the doctor who gave Mom the sick leave asked, and Mom told him Auntie Doležal wasn’t a relative, but that everyone needs someone beside them so that they die like a human being.

She died just before the New Year, Mom, Grandma, and the neighbors went to the funeral. We bought Auntie Doležal a little wreath, the cheapest one. It was the only wreath on her grave, and all the other graves were covered in them. Luckily Auntie Doležal couldn’t see this because if she had it would’ve definitely made her sad. The lone wreath would have reminded her that she had been left all alone in the world and didn’t have anyone except us. In actual fact, there was nothing for her to forget, because all she’d now forgotten was already long gone: her father with the iron cap on his head, Jucika, the Sarajevo Partisan, and Vera, who twenty years ago had fallen asleep on the beach at Opatija and never woke up.

I think that on that Monday, on the way home from the store, Auntie Doležal forgot all of us on purpose, the living and the dead. She even forgot where her apartment was on purpose and who all the people in the pictures were and whose fountain pen had been lying on the writing desk for the last thirty years, even the guests she’d bought the petit beurre biscuits for. She turned into Forgetful, and everything she once remembered she left to us to look after.

That day I started building a Lego castle for Queen Forgetful. The castle is the same from all sides and there won’t be anything in it that you can forget. There’s one hundred rooms all the same, just for her to live in, Forgetful, who in the meantime has become a queen because she forgot the most in the whole world and her kingdom has grown so much that there isn’t one that can match it. The kingdom is so big it is the envy of all the kings in the world, and you just wait and see how they’re going to envy it when my castle is finished.

That we all have one more picture together

If they were cherries shining red beneath the window when I shut my eyes, or if they were something else — maybe I’d caught a fever — I don’t know anymore. But if they were cherries, then it was June, the second half of June, when the tree in our yard bore fruit, always a month later than the trees in the heat of Herzegovina. Our cherry tree had survived a cold winter and that made the month delay seem almost heroic. Even if they weren’t cherries and it wasn’t June, the gist of the story remains the same, clear as day in the photos themselves. There we were standing and crouching on the terrace in our short-sleeved shirts and T-shirts: my auntie and uncle, my cousin Vesna and her husband, Perti, my mom, Grandma, and me. In some pictures there’s only Uncle and Grandma, in others Vesna and Grandma, or Mom and Grandma, Grandma and me. . If I showed you the pictures now and hadn’t told you anything about them in advance, you’d think we were some hippie-dippie family who’d picked Grandma as our household chief or guru who had to be in every photo, and that the only thing the rest of us cared about was having our presence with her recorded for eternity. Maybe there’s some truth in that, but I don’t want to talk about it because I love my grandma too much and if I admitted you were right I’d spoil the rest of the story.

It was a Sunday, that I’m sure of, because in our house guests always came over on Sundays. This was probably how things were before I was born, so my family just kept it that way even after everything changed. I’m not actually sure, but it doesn’t matter in any case. The fact is that the guests had come from all over: Uncle and Auntie had come from Moscow where Uncle was a rep for the Zenica steelworks, and Vesna had come from Helsinki where she lived with Perti, but he hadn’t come from Helsinki, he’d come from Vladivostok. I don’t know what he did in Vladivostok, but I remember Grandma saying poor fellow, he’s been at the end of the world. For some reason she thought the end of the world was terrible.

We ate lunch, talked over the top of each other, and Auntie called me Miki, dead set that every child had to have a nickname, and I remember feeling somehow privileged that in addition to my real name I’d gotten another one besides. Grandma looked at me reproachfully every time Auntie said Miki. She didn’t like the nickname, but I’m not sure how that made it my fault. Uncle poured himself a whiskey he’d brought from Moscow, it’s from Beryoshka, only foreigners buy stuff from Beryoshka, and then he slapped himself on the forehead: uh shit, I forgot the camera. We weren’t too bothered though, fine, he’d forgotten the camera, we kept talking over the top of each other and he did too, but every fifth sentence he’d throw something in about the camera, like what a bloody donkey leaving it behind like that or my brain obviously checked out when we left. Soon everyone was upset about the camera, so I made like I was upset too and tried to tell the story of how I once forgot my sneakers for PE, but no one wanted to listen.

We’ll call Dobro, he’s got a camera, said Mom. She picked up the phone and fifteen minutes later my dad arrived with a camera already loaded with film. Uncle quit his anxiety act, which let everyone else relax too, he poured Dad a whiskey, told the Beryoshka story again, and then he said now, everyone on the terrace, light’s best there. We took our marching orders, probably scared his anxiety might come back if we jerked around. Dad was photographer for the day. He took pictures of us in all combinations, but no one took a picture of him. He’s the only one who doesn’t have a picture with Grandma. I wanted to ask why someone didn’t take his picture too, but shut up in time. When your parents are divorced you’ve always got to shut up in time because what you’d like to ask might make your elders stutter and blush or make them want to say or do something to please you, and then you feel like a whipped-cream pie that’s been standing in the sun all day and they all say oh, what a lovely cake. Actually, I know what would’ve happened if I’d asked. Dad would’ve had his photo taken with Grandma but either the laboratory wouldn’t have developed it or no one would have wanted to have it.

The next week the guests went back to Moscow and Helsinki, leaving us with three complete sets of pictures, one each for Mom, Grandma, and me. In other circumstances one complete set would have been fine because we all lived together and didn’t fight over photos. Mom got some albums, put the photos in, and by the next day we’d forgotten we’d even had our pictures taken.

On the thirteenth of December of the same year, the phone rang at half past two in the morning. I woke with the first ring and waited with closed eyes for what was going to happen next; there was a second ring, then a third, fourth, and fifth, then Mom’s sleepy voice said hello and then a suddenly awake yes. She’d never gone from being asleep to completely awake so fast. Yes. . I can hear you. . Yes. . Yes. . When. . How is he. . Is she there. . Oh my God. . Fine. . All right. She put the receiver down without saying goodbye. She flicked the light on in my room, I opened my eyes, the light straining them, her face was gray and somehow taut, she spoke like she’d been wandering the desert for days without water: pull yourself together, Vesna’s dead. I was hurt by what she said, that pull yourself together. It was the first death in the family directly communicated to me. I was eleven years old.

I don’t know how she told Grandma that her granddaughter was dead, but later Mom said she’d feared for Grandma’s heart. We all thought Grandma had a weak heart. That’s actually what the doctors had told us, but it turned out they had it wrong. Her heart could withstand what the strongest in the world couldn’t. It swallowed the sadness like a big snake swallows a rabbit, and kept beating, and we never saw anything on her face, just sometimes a tear would fall when she was watching television. But she didn’t cry.

The next day the three of us went to Zenica. The wake was at Uncle’s apartment and all the mirrors were covered in black shawls. I didn’t know any of the guests. Mom sunk into her brother’s embrace. Grandma held my hand tight. I was big enough for this sort of stuff, but still too small to offer Uncle my hand and say a few of those weird sentences people say in these situations. I felt really awkward, the angst in Uncle’s apartment smacking me around and eating me up. I sat in an armchair with my head down, just wanting it to all be over as soon as possible. People took turns crying. Uncle was beside himself, but there was always someone ringing the doorbell, offering Uncle their hand, and he’d just cry again and again and again. The terrifying flood of grown-up tears made me fear life for the first time, not life, just the growing up. I didn’t cry for years because of his tears. Actually, I didn’t cry until the war, but ever since then I can almost cry on demand. I mean, if you were to say to me now cry for five seconds, I’d cry for five seconds. I can do that sort of thing like a party trick. You need tears, I’m your man. I’m not telling you how I make them come, it’s my secret, a little trick of the trade. Just like fakirs and their secrets when they lie on a bed of nails, I’ve got mine when it comes to crying. But that’s all a different business, at the time of this story I sat dead still in a giant armchair trying not to look at Uncle’s crying because I couldn’t imagine him without tears anymore.

I didn’t get around to thinking of Vesna, although I should have, and I should have because I loved her. She was fifteen years older than me, but because I didn’t have any brothers or sisters, she was my sister; we said my sister on my uncle’s side. Anyhow, that’s who she was to me and how I felt when she was alive. When she died, I was an only child again.

It was already night when people stopped coming and when everyone who didn’t belong to the inner circle of grief left. I was still sitting there in the armchair. Uncle was flushed red, veins cursing in his forehead, next to him sat Auntie, but she wasn’t crying, across the way sat my mom and she wasn’t crying either. She said to Grandma Mom, go lie down. With neither words nor tears Grandma left the room in complete silence. It was the only time in my life Grandma left a room and didn’t look at me.

Uncle was crying again. He started to say my darling child’s gone, and this summer I forgot the camera, I thought we could all have one more picture together, that she could have one more picture with her grandma before Grandma dies, my child, my darling, darling child. . He hid his face in his trembling hands. Auntie hugged him like you hug a little kid or how every man would want the woman who loved him to hug him. It should have been a distressing sight, but in that instant I couldn’t grieve and I couldn’t love him; he, my uncle, had just explained something that in the world of grown-ups was probably normal but in mine wasn’t. He wanted to take a picture of Grandma with us all because he thought she was going to die. As soon as he could think that, it was like he killed her, and like he wanted to take our picture with someone dear who was already dead, who appears like a hologram, beamed into our hearts, forever captured on tape, and then she goes and disappears like dreams disappear in the morning when you wake up or later when you don’t remember them anymore.

The night we grieved for Vesna the world of grown-ups was but another world of horror. Of course I forgave Uncle his betrayal, but I never liked those photos. When I look at them today, I only notice Grandma, her dancing face blind to the deception, as we were all smiling next to her, unknowingly participating in her funeral, burying her alive, just so we could have our picture taken with her. No one spared a thought that Grandma was scared of dying and that for her it would be forever.

I see Vesna’s hand on Grandma’s shoulder. It’s a young hand, as young as I’ll never be again. Today I am five years older than that hand. And this is a kind of deception and betrayal too. How can I be older than my cousin if she was born fifteen years before me? I’m scared, I’m so scared that one day I’ll also do what my uncle did that summer, when something turned red, cherries or not cherries. Or maybe my betrayal was under way the moment I became older than Vesna.

Where dead Peruvians live

Auntie Lola used to live in Peru. It was before I was born and Uncle Andrija was still alive. They got their passports in Belgrade, they bought ship passage and plane tickets in Split, and that’s where Uncle Andrija bought a newspaper — as a memento, because they thought they were never coming back and needed to remember the day they left. On the front page there was a bold headline: COMRADE NIKITA SERGEYEVICH KHRUSHCHEV’s SECRET PAPER. They came back two years later.

The altitude was ttttterrible, sputtered Auntie Lola. Higher than Jahorina? I asked. Ttttwice as high!. . And were there big snows and was it twice as cold as on Jahorina?. . No, there was almost no snow and it wasn’t very cold. . Why did you come back then?. . Because the altitude was ttttterrible. . And did everything look really small from up there?. . No, everything was big, but at such a ttttterrible altitude there’s no air. . Is there a lot of smoke and clouds?. . No, there isn’t a lot of anything. There’s just no air and it’s all empty there. And you, you little dork, quit jerking me around. If I ssssay that the altitude was ttttterrible, then that’s that, end of sssstory.

You couldn’t hold a conversation with Auntie Lola for very long. As soon a conversation started getting interesting she’d start a fight. That was just her nature: cantankerous. And when someone’s cantankerous, you have to be mindful of this because they can’t do anything about it. Cantankerousness — at least how Granny Almasa from Ulomljenica used to explain it — is a sign that someone’s from a better home and that not even life itself can change them. Auntie Lola was the only cantankerous one in the family and generally speaking she’d fought with everyone except Grandma because we, to my regret, had never worried too much about who was cantankerous and who wasn’t.

Auntie Lola and Uncle Andrija had a son called Željko. He was a pilot. He graduated from the Royal Air Force Academy in Belgrade, and when the war started he became a Home Guard pilot in Rajlovac. It was never hushed up in our house; we didn’t even bother with hushed voices, because Željko was our only family hero. One day he’d defected to the English in his plane. We’ve got photos of him in his RAF uniform next to Big Ben, and Tower Bridge, and playing golf on some meadow with men dressed in white.

But we shut up about Željko when Auntie Lola came over. I was under strict instructions to not ask anything about him, but as soon as she left Grandma started her stories. When the Allies bombed Sarajevo near the end of the war, Željko had been in one of the planes. Afterward he said Auntie, I was really careful not to hit your house. Grandma always repeated the line and then added little sop, how was he going to be careful, he well knew you can’t be careful about anything from that height.

In the spring of 1945, Željko flew over Europe and saw everything. He saw Berlin, which was no more, Warsaw, which was no more, Dresden, which was no more, Auschwitz, which was also no more; come to think of it, how did he see everything when everything was no more? It would be better to say that he didn’t see anything or that he saw nothing, but Grandma didn’t think like that. Half-closed eyes, her gaze gently raised like she was talking about angels and birds, she’d tell of everything Željko saw from above, it was as if back then he’d taken care of some really important job for the whole family and now the rest of us had inherited that picture of Europe from May 1945 and we all had to follow Grandma’s lead and repeat sentence by sentence, city by city, camp by camp everything Željko saw. Today when I hear the word Europe, everything Grandma said Željko saw assembles before my eyes, and it can’t be helped; from a great height I dream a Europe frail and real, through the eye of an old aircraft, a Europe scorched and devastated, beautiful and small, enveloped in barbed wire, telegraph poles ripped out, a Europe of a thousand tiny cities, little boys digging through the ruins, little girls hugging exhausted soldiers and giving them flowers, a ruin of Europe without the dead and wounded because you don’t see them from such a height, they’re buried in the ground, hidden in hospitals.

Željko brought peace to Europe and Željko bombarded Sarajevo, but he never wounded or killed anyone. That’s what we believed because we need belief like soldiers need bouquets of flowers. Having brought peace, in August 1945 Željko got drunk with some pilot friends, and was drunk when he took off from Zagreb Airport. Airborne a short time, he died in Zagreb Hospital. The son of Auntie Lola died an ally, not the enemy, so you could talk about his death. We talked about it often, it was as if his death had offered someone salvation, it was as if Željko had to die so that my uncle M.R. could find peace beneath the earth even if he never managed to find it in his parents’ hearts.

Željko is buried at the Boninovo Cemetery in Dubrovnik, in a tomb full of old skeletons for which no one grieved anymore, only the very eldest among us remember who they once belonged to. Auntie Lola and Uncle Andrija seldom visited the grave of their only son; in actual fact they only went on All Saints’ Day because you had to go that day, it was the custom. I didn’t know why that day, but I know both of them went, and that probably they didn’t want to, and that they probably wanted to put as much distance as they could between themselves and that grave, so they moved to Peru.

They didn’t write or get in touch with anyone, one day they just came back. It was pretty high over there and there wasn’t enough air, the living can’t survive without air, Grandma said, as if to justify Auntie Lola’s coming back, and it was then I thought there were only dead people in Peru, and that Lima was a city of the dead where Auntie Lola and Uncle Andrija had got lost by mistake, and that they had to come back because the living can’t live with the dead, so they justify themselves and their coming back and explain it away by saying that there’s no air. I dreamed of Lima and Peru and the dead, but in my dream they were calm, friendly, and smiling; I flew above them and then I began to fall, I fell a long time, children grow when they fall in their sleep, I was growing and happy in my dream among the Peruvian dead and the condors, dead birds in a land of dead people who my Auntie Lola and Uncle Andrija had seen with their living eyes. A condor’s wingspan is as wide as this room, Auntie Lola spread her arms in the living room, the biggest room in her Dubrovnik apartment, and I believed her.

I believed everything and from this grew the world I have in my head and today it resembles what I believed it to be back then. In vain I imagine a Europe without detonated cities, barbed wire, and the expanse of a charred Auschwitz, but there is no such Europe in my head, there’s no room in it, because I’d first need to get rid of this old one, but it doesn’t work, just like I can’t get rid of Peru, the land of dead people and condors with no need for air, whom the living visit only sometimes and only by accident — Auntie Lola and Uncle Andrija — and the living me, in my dream. Željko is sometimes alive, the Allied pilot who belongs to our whole family, he soars above us, looking at us as we are now and how we might be in our thoughts and dreams. If only he’d let us know what we look like from such a great height and whether we’ve changed in any way, or whether we are as beautiful and sad as Europe in May 1945.

When I try and hunt him down in the sky and the ground beneath my feet moves, the same way my cities and homelands move and disappear, and my native soil becomes a Europe without the soldiers little girls greet with flowers, when I search the sky for the living Željko, I feel how easy it is to be someone else; it’s like going into a changing room in some big department store and after two minutes leaving as one of the thousands of faces I can imagine because I know they exist and that they live someplace far away; just not in Peru, because only dead Peruvians live there, and the parents of dead sons who need air.

Mama Leone

You have to remember this! I said. What do I have to remember? Mom asked. I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to myself. She held me by the hand, deeply frustrated that she isn’t a mother like other mothers, and her son isn’t a son like other sons, because he mostly talks precocious garbage. You’re not allowed to talk to yourself. Thinking’s okay, but not talking, you’ll be nuts before you know it. She’s obviously wound up, so I just nodded my head. When she’s wound up I nod my head so she doesn’t start yelling, doesn’t start her ranting and raving and I end up getting it on the snout. For me the word snout is yuckier than any box on the ear. Mom just had to say snout and it was message received loud and clear. You’ll get it on the snout grossed me out so much I would just shut my trap.

We walked along the seashore, almost to Zaostrog. She held my hand, never letting go. She thought I’d disappear if she let me walk on my own. Mom was like moms aren’t allowed to be. She didn’t feel enough like a mom, so out of fear, she put it on. Actually, she was most scared that maybe I was more of a grown-up than she was, a kind of mini-forbear who’d popped out of her uterus by mistake, just wanting to check up on her and how she was doing in life, put her through an exam she was bound to fail. So she played at being a grown-up and put me in my place with stuff about me going nuts if I talked to myself.

I noticed she was holding back, expecting me to say something, something for her to pounce on. I bolted my tongue to the roof of my mouth, silent as the grave, breathing real quiet so she couldn’t make words out of my breathing. But she couldn’t help herself. What do you have to remember?

I had to choose a strategy fast: either to pretend I didn’t understand the question, or to make her think that the whole time I’d been thinking about what it was I had to remember. I have to remember a precise moment in time, the moment three scents came rushing to me: the scent of the sea, the scent of the pines, and the scent of olive oil.

She stood there, let go of my hand, a look of shock on her face but a harmless one. She smiled and said you’re my son! She hugged me tight and asked who’s your mom, who do you love most?

This was already way past stupid and I don’t remember what happened next. I don’t remember if we went to Zaostrog. Maybe we went to the confectionary for cake or to the diner for an ora, an orange lemonade that I called oratalismaribor, like in the ads. I don’t know if we sat inside because Mom couldn’t smoke in the open air, or if we sat outside because she wasn’t so anxious and jumpy that she needed a cigarette, or if we went back the same way by the sea, or if we took the main road. . I don’t remember any of this, nothing at all. I’ve forgotten everything after who’s your mom, who do you love most, and I’ll never remember. That part of my life is dead. My mom killed it.

Fifteen years later, I was twenty-two, and I’d had a terrible fight with Nataša at a campground. You’re so awful when you talk to me! she said, her face turning into revulsion itself. No one before or after her could do that, turn their whole face, ears and everything, into an expression of revulsion. The horror cut my legs out from under me, my sweetheart turned monster. But she wasn’t gross or disgusting, it’s not like she transformed into a festering boil that would have made me leave any sweetheart in the world. Just her face turned into revulsion, like a kid turns into a rat in a horror film. Normally I’d put my hand on her shoulder and pull her toward me; she’d try and break free and in the breaking free she’d go back to her old self. She had to smile and come back, because the old Nataša always came back.

But I was shitty that day on Korčula. I turned around and stormed off. By the fifth stride I didn’t know where I was going. I wanted to stop but couldn’t, there was no point in going any farther, yet no point in stopping either, so I just kept going and going and going. . Of course it hurt that Nataša didn’t come after me. She stayed put in front of the tent or wherever she was at that moment. She didn’t put her hand on my shoulder. She never did that, nor would she ever. I wanted to hate her for it. When you’re on an island it doesn’t matter how shitty you are, or if you don’t actually know where you’re going, you hit the sea eventually. I stopped at some jagged rocks, as cutting as a final decision, the waves lapping stroppily as a big boat passed the island. You could see little people on the boat waving to someone. I was lonesome because they weren’t waving to me. Or maybe there was some other reason I felt lonesome, however things were I remember that that’s exactly how I felt, and it was then I became aware of the three scents: the scent of the sea, the scent of the pines, and the scent of olive oil.

My God, why do I do it to myself! I said aloud — or maybe I just thought it, I don’t know — but by then I was already running back, across the rocks, through a stand of pines, through the camp, trampling on people’s towels and getting caught on guy ropes. Nataša wasn’t there in front of the tent. She wasn’t inside either. I ran for the water fountain and spotted them both from ten meters away, Nataša and the fountain. Nataša was cleaning a big round tomato, and a few people were waiting in line behind her. I didn’t have time to stop. I couldn’t change anything. I had really run, it’d been a good long run and it seemed like I’d been running for hours. Yet those ten meters were the longest. I remember every split-second, every drop of water on the smeared surface of the tomato, every drop that fell at her feet. Like at every campground on the Adriatic, there was mud in front of the water fountain. But I didn’t even slow down through the mud, splattering myself, the people in line, and her, who’d started to turn around. This splattering and turning around went on and on, but she didn’t quite make it around in time, she couldn’t see who was coming, she didn’t know it was me, that I was throwing myself at her. Then it was us falling in the mud, the tomato falling from her hand, her letting out a short, sharp cry, me lying above her, me lying on top of her and holding her tight.

Get off me already! she said, careful that not a single word, not a single sound rang harshly, and in that moment itself everything, her body, hair, muddy clothes, breathing, gave her away as wanting me to stay. I couldn’t let her go because I thought she’d disappear, just like everything had disappeared from Zaostrog so long ago. I wanted her to stay silent, for her to stay here, immortal in this moment and never again, in the mud next to a water fountain, in a campground on Korčula, half a meter from an abandoned tomato no one will ever slice. The tomato dead the instant it fell from her hand.

Five years passed in the blink of an eye. Nataša was in Belgrade, and I was in Sarajevo. The war was raging. The war of my life, the only one I remember and the only one in which it seems that I’ll die, yet remain alive, undamaged and whole, like some kind of Achilles who didn’t even get hit in the heel. The phone lines were down. I was in the Jewish Community Center at the Drvenija Bridge. All around there were people waiting for a connection, in front of me a ham radio operator with a funny machine like something out of the Second World War. From the machine you could hear the hum of all the world’s oceans, the cracking and creaking of every shipwreck, all at once. A voice surfaced from between and beneath the waves. The voice said she’s asking how are you?

I turn to the operator: I’m good, how are you? He almost swallows the microphone: he’s good, how is she? I repeat, he’s good how is she? receiving you. And then again the cracking of ancient ships, the roar of the waves, the terror of the seamen: she’s good, what should she send him? I’m not too cool with about fifty people listening in on my conversation. I lean down and say to the operator send me newspapers and bacon! He quivers invisibly from the breath in his ear and continues have her send newspapers and bacon, I repeat, newspapers and bacon! The whole room bursts out laughing, probably about the newspapers, and the voice from the other side crackles she’s thinking of him and wants him to be careful! The time had come for the conversation to end. People were waiting in line, and I had one more sentence to say, one worth more than every silence, one that had to do the same thing as the hug in the Korčula mud. I was frozen in terror confronted by words, words, words that I could say, ones I didn’t have to say, words that seeped like sand from a smashed hourglass, like mercury on the wooden floor of a chemistry lab, like a little death growing inside me, the death of a tomato next to a water fountain. It was then I remembered it, the tomato, I’d thought it had died, but it hadn’t; it appeared one last time, falling from her hand, it came back to me, right here now as I sent my cry in the stormy night, because on the other side there’s no one anymore, there’s no me, no campground, no Korčula, no fight, no face turned to revulsion, a beautiful precious revulsion that is no more. . I didn’t move my lips down to the manly ear, nor did I whisper. I said in a loud voice, like we were really there, in her living room, alone because the general and his wife had gone to the seaside: I love you more than anything in the world! The operator turned to me. He saw my face for the first time ever. I’d always been at his back. He’ll probably never see me again. That you’ll say yourself, he whispered, taking the headphones off, me sitting down in his place. The hum was much louder in the headphones. I didn’t know where my words were going nor who was listening, the kind of waves they were being lost on or whether there was a momentary lull from which they might be clearly heard, as clearly as they would, just this once, be spoken: Nataša, I love you more than anything in the world!

The Jewish Community Center cried like people do after a good theater performance. Everyone cried, men and women. A single sentence made so many people cry. That sentence had a weight to it, but only for he who had said it and she who had heard it. At that very moment everyone else could’ve snoozed away or picked their noses, fired their machine guns, prayed to God, or spoken some commonplace truth, words to save the world, but instead they cried, probably because at that very moment they too were bidding farewell to their lives, another little death already eating at them. Today I don’t remember a single one of those crying faces.

I don’t remember the important moments, I forget them the second I say you have to remember this. Life would be long if I remembered more. I’ve forgotten almost everything. Except when I was running from the shoreline to the campground or being careful that Mom not say snout. Everything else is gone. Things that are gone divide into those I’ve managed to preserve in memory and those that have become a series of my little deaths. These deaths are like gray marks on an old map. Unless it’s another India, nobody actually knows what’s really there. I managed to preserve in memory the sentence I love you more than anything in the world, but I didn’t know how to love someone more than anything in the world, and I didn’t want to know that fear wasn’t the best ally to have in life. Nataša stayed in Belgrade for a time, then she went to Canada because I never got in touch again. I tried that I love you more than anything in the world at different times and it felt as banal as a ham radio operator translating words across waters and oceans, every I becoming he, every you becoming she. Or something like that. Whatever, no one ever cried again.

I turned on the radio a little while ago, God only knows the station, but it was playing “Mama Leone” so it definitely wasn’t one of ours. The scent of the sea, the scent of the pines, and the scent of olive oil rushed to me once more, all at the same time, as did everything those scents gave off. I don’t know what the song’s got to do with all this, but there’s definitely some connection, it’s from something I’ve forgotten, from one of those little deaths. I need to find a place for “Mama Leone” somewhere here, but I don’t know where or how because there’s no room left in the story I’m telling. There never was. In the meantime my mom has become a real grown-up mom, and I’ve become her son. Not some forbear. She doesn’t say snout anymore, but sometimes things sound like that.