Mama Leone Read online

  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.