Mama Leone Read online

  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 int
elligent 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 fo
rgotten 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.