Mama Leone Page 20

  Nana Barbara had wanted to show Azra Venice, believing the child would remember her by the city for the rest of her life. In seven days she was to see Azra off on an airplane that would take her to Boston, where her uncle Mehmed, a computer scientist, lived, with whom Azra would live too, with him and his wife, Nevzeta, in a big house with a yard full of cats and dogs. The truth was that Nana had only heard about the one dog, but she had told Azra there were at least ten to make the leaving easier on the child, and so she wouldn’t cry because Barbara Veronesse couldn’t stand tears. Tears were all that remained of her own daughter and she wanted to avoid them, even if she had to make up all the cats and dogs in the world. With her granddaughter leaving, she would return to Sarajevo, and then what would be, would be; if we have to die, let us die where we belong, where we’ve lived our whole lives.

  Aldo tapped the old woman on the shoulder, who opened her eyes to see Azra bent over the seat throwing up. My child, she searched her handbag for a tissue, the Italians had squashed into their corner, palely looking on, Azra was crying, the conductor came in and asked Grandma something, she replied, and Azra choked Grandma, don’t leave me, she squeezed her hand, I won’t, sweetheart, I’d never leave you, just relax, Azra threw up again, it’s nothing sweetheart, you just had a bad dream, the girl with the water came, trying to catch Azra’s eye and make her smile, yet the child didn’t see her, but Grandma, I don’t want cats and dogs, Barbara Veronesse struggled to breathe, the child threw up again, who knows where she’s getting it all from, the doctor came in mumbling something in a foreign language and pinched Azra’s cheek, Grandma, don’t let me go, Barbara Veronesse started to get dizzy, God, just not now, don’t kill me now, she closed her eyes, she just had to close her eyes a little, Azra cried, the doctor murmured, someone held Barbara’s hand, someone held both of Azra’s hands, Azra screamed and lost her voice, let’s go home, please Grandma, let’s go home to Bistrik, Barbara Veronesse remembered her piano, the brothers would open the monastery windows when she played, when Brother Ivan died she had played Eine kleine Nachtmusik the whole night through. Don’t cease God’s work, a young seminarian had told her, and she had played until five in the morning when Brother Ivan’s soul expired; she felt someone trying to take her pulse, she couldn’t hear Azra anymore, the child must have stopped crying, must have calmed down, a silence grew from all sides, as big as Trebević and as wide as Sarajevo, she tried to open her eyes but couldn’t, Barbara Veronesse’s eyelids were as heavy as the big red curtains at the National Theater and didn’t want to rise. Mi aiuti, per favore, his voice was shaking, she felt someone grab her feet, someone grab her shoulders, she was lying down, signora, signora, somebody had undone the buttons on her blouse, someone was slapping her face, someone’s hands were pressing violently on Barbara’s chest, they must have taken the child out of the compartment, signora, signora, there was a humming in her ears, she remembered the Bistrik stream and how it flowed when she was a little girl, she could tell apart every stone at its bottom, the hands pressed her chest in the same rhythm as the Bistrik’s flow, and with each press the stones would jump from the bottom, just look how light they are, like they aren’t stones at all but full of air, before sinking again, the water so deep you could drown in there in the fall, who had drowned? Barbara Veronesse was afraid, she was so terribly afraid that she opened her eyes and saw a big sweaty forehead with glasses. Azra wasn’t beside the window anymore and the water was gone. That calmed her, it calmed her so much she no longer even needed to sigh. Signora, signora, come sta, come va, signora, the bald face shouted. Barbara opened her mouth, smiled, and said ho freddo, ho molto freddo and closed her eyes. The doctor took Marco’s coat and covered her with it. For some time he held the wrist of Barbara Veronesse, the retired piano teacher from Sarajevo, and then he slowly laid her hand on her chest and with his fingertips, as if he was scared of waking her, placed the coat over her face. His eyes were full of tears. At that moment all the doctors in the world detested him, him, the doctor who cried.

  In the next compartment Aldo and Marco tried to laugh, Gianni performed a pantomime for Azra. He played a man building a house, but the bricks kept falling down, then a man trying to change a light-bulb, then a man doing something else, he tried everything, but Azra just watched him, the nausea had passed and she didn’t want to cry, she was in wonder at this mute world, seemingly at peace with it. In this mute world there was no Nana and no Bistrik, but neither were there people who lived their whole lives in foreign languages.

  Like a little girl and an old dog

  The sky above Surčin is low and heavy. Drunken angels have installed themselves on the clouds somewhere high above and are now celebrating, oblivious that they’re sinking lower and lower, that they’re about to hit the ground, among the plowed fields, where the Vojvodina plain begins and forgotten pumpkins freeze. The plane has just broken through the clouds, and here it is, growing, bigger and more real than when the story began. In a few seconds it’ll touch down, the landing gear has long been extended, and the captain just needs to say those few words of signing off, of welcome and the weather, the hoping we’ll see you again.

  Marina is sitting in a fourteenth-row window seat looking out. Her gaze is empty; she can’t see what she was wanting to see, nor can she even remember what it was she’d wanted. Marina is on her way home for the first time in three years. Actually it’s not home, it’s just where her parents live and where her things are, things she doesn’t need anymore or perhaps never needed, things not for junking because wherever they are means you’re home. She’s never lived in Belgrade apart from the several months between their leaving Sarajevo and her leaving for Canada. But still she tries to recognize the ground beneath her, the runway expanding like it might swallow the plane, the screech of the wheels as they touch ground; she searches for the code to a former world, to which, as the story goes, she belongs.

  It’s cold outside, she inhales, catching on the air the faint scent of petrol and a hint of frozen winter grass, but this is all. Nothing she knows, nothing that after so much time would make you say hello again, I’m back, take me in again for a little while.

  They don’t know her time of arrival. She couldn’t bring herself to tell them; who could have handled a meeting in the airport terminal, voices echoing to eternity, thousands of eyes rubbernecking at scenes that are none of their business, a situation where you have to stand, hug, wave your arms, wipe away tears, swallow pounding hearts, no sitting or lying down, no way, no cushioning your head, because it’s an airport, people spit on the floor, you can’t sit or lie down, crying’s no good in a place like this, what would everyone think, each with his own opinion and explanation of the spectacle. When in the hour of greatest weakness and vulnerability, in the midst of sorrowful joy, people find themselves under a stranger’s gaze, in a stranger’s imagination, they risk spilling like water, their fates draining down into whatever strangers have dreamed up for them.

  On the bus she closed her eyes, wanting to sleep the exact duration of the journey. She opened her eyes every few minutes, in fear of a stranger’s touch or that someone might think her unwell and want to help her the way people do here when you’re unwell – with a series of kindnesses and offers of assistance that make you feel even more unwell. Every time she opened her eyes she’d see something different. Apartment towers at the city’s edge, women at an improvised market, one of them holding a box of matches and smiling, yellowed buildings and a poplar, young guys smoking in front of a movie theater, a house with a sign saying “Kolobara.” It wasn’t necessarily a single city. It could have been ten different cities, one for each opening of her eyes. Each was equally unfamiliar and unknown and only a queasy childhood premonition told you that in some way, distant but real, you belong to this scene; this same premonition reminded Marina of her anxiety when she used to go into a supermarket where a bitchy check-out woman, without asking, would give her a piece of bubble gum in place of her small change, at least until
Marina was old enough to fire back lady, what do you think, is this appropriate behavior, but the premonition might have easily reminded her of something else, not that it mattered; Marina just didn’t want anyone touching her or talking to her. Ideally your entrance into such worlds would be invisible, and you would stay that way, not uttering a word until you had established possible connections to your past. Spoken in such places, words disappear into dark spaces where you’ve never been in your life, or where you were once but have since departed, and then those words return when you want them least, to a world where you really are, and wound you.

  She got off the bus and still hadn’t said a word, but she would have to speak to the taxi driver. He’s a little guy, stumpy and greasy-haired. Marina said Senjak and showed him a piece of paper with the name of the street written on it. She coughed, surprised by the tone of her own voice. The taxi driver was silent, a city full of people passed by, strangely making their way through the dust clouds, as if they were the clouds upon which those drunken angels sat perched over Surčin. In the coming days Marina will watch the dust, turbid and impenetrable, and when they speak on the phone, she’ll tell Him that covered in dust Belgrade looked like Macondo in the final chapter.

  Before the taxi gets to Senjak, it’s probably a good time to explain who He is. She hasn’t seen Him since leaving Sarajevo, and at the time, He was her boyfriend. Today she doesn’t know what He is to her, but they are in touch from time to time, presumably because they never said their goodbyes and so have endured like baffling chronic illnesses endure, the ones that don’t kill you or cause you pain but hang around until you’re dead all the same. They could meet, but probably won’t – although they want to – they’ll probably never see each other again. If they passed each other in the street they wouldn’t recognize each other. Marina doesn’t know why things are the way they are, perhaps because sometimes people can become destroyed cities to each other.

  Her father’s name was written on the door. She raised her finger to the bell and then paused. Between her finger and the round red button was a space barely wide enough for a piece of paper, but she didn’t press down. How does this go, she used to say aloud when she had an unsolvable math exercise, easy as pie, said a voice she was no longer sure was her father’s. She heard footsteps inside, and what she thought was the clattering of plates, she could have been standing there for hours, her index finger pointing at something, if only that would have been the end of the matter, if only something painful or deathly hadn’t clattered from the other side of the door, beckoning her back into a life she had sloughed off.

  The bell didn’t sound like a bell. It squealed like a little computer with an empty battery, the doors burst open; her mother, wrinkles, wrinkles, wrinkles, a face that had fallen like a sail at half-mast, the voice still the same, her words ones that once annoyed Marina, arms enfolding, arms holding tight, Marina says wait and smiles, her smile broad and painful, her father white and gray, her father huge like the tallest tower of cards, his face firm like the face of a father should be, always firm, that’s how he thought he should be. Just don’t talk about yourself, just ask stuff, smother and drown them in questions, admit nothing because anything you say will hurt them. They’ll talk, they talk in stops and starts, they don’t know how to talk to a daughter after three years, you don’t learn that sort of thing anywhere, who would’ve thought they’d need to know something like that, if they’d known they would have learned, there must be a way to do it, there must be a manual somewhere, people know about this stuff, they have to, why are you so skinny, her mother’ll ask her, there she goes, leave her alone, her father says, he’s proud of his young daughter as if she were a son, because he doesn’t have a son, hence the leave her alone.

  Where’s Astor? she asked, heading to the living room. A black cocker spaniel lay in an armchair, already a fourteen-year-old, watching this strange woman on her approach with her grimace ever shriller, who is she and what does she want, strangers never grimace at him like this, he took a long look at Marina, she looked at him and knew he didn’t recognize her. At that moment she wasn’t hurt Astor didn’t recognize her, nor was she when she was telling Him about it later, but she couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t one day hurt, so she tried not to give it much thought, just said her dog hadn’t recognized her, not a hint of sadness in her voice, but it brought a sadness out in Him.

  She had been fourteen when Astor came into her life. Today she is twice as old, making her as old as a little girl plus an old dog. That’s about how she had felt in Belgrade at her parents’ side, in a different life, one neither frenetic nor euphoric, but gentle and slow, so you felt the pain all the more acutely the second it drew near. Astor had been the end result of the deepest grief, perhaps still the deepest she keeps. The grief ’s name was Hefest, a brown cocker spaniel that had been hit by a car in Grbavica and had spent the night dying in her room, in her lap. It was then she made a wish that she would never again get close to death, that she might run from everything precious and dear before it disappeared. Her father buried Hefest in the yard of the Viktor Bubanj barracks, and it was then for the first and only time in her life she saw her father cry.

  I’m going to take him for a walk today, she said, grabbing Astor’s collar and leash, noticing they were new, and leading him out in front of their building. It was something she’d done a thousand times in her life, and now she had to do it again, to feel like it was no big deal and that she could live without it, that it was something she didn’t need to remember, something she had to forget, and the only way she could do so was to again, after so much time, take a dog that no longer recognizes her, because it’s already much older than her life, for a walk in the park, which isn’t actually the same park, but that doesn’t matter. The park too was so full of dust you had to sneeze it out, to give yourself a good shake before boarding the plane, shake loose all excess; dust, walking the dog, whatever. Astor, she shouted, the dog didn’t turn around, Astor, he waddled on like an old man, one leg in front of the other, but still fast enough that she had to break into a jog to catch him. Astor, Marina screamed, fuming mid-park that not only did the dog not recognize her, he held her in contempt. It was a sudden strange reflex from a former time, Astor was again her business, again her dog, and he shouldn’t behave like this because what good is a dog like this, what’s the point taking such a dog for a walk if this is how it’s all going to end. In that instant Astor shot a random glance back, saw Marina’s scowl and furious waving, turned around, and again, slowly, step by step, like a good little doggie, returned to her knee.

  Uff, I forgot to tell you he’s stone-deaf, it’s been more than a year now, said her mother, busy fixing a lunch that would today nourish Marina’s skinny limbs, and together with the next five to come would be a message to the world where her daughter was returning. Astor was again in his armchair, his head resting on his paws, looking at Marina with that senile sadness, one full of miscomprehension of those who would so constantly and so animatedly explain something. She could still feel traces of rage; in fact it seemed that this time her anger was moving slower than its source. She needed to change something urgently but didn’t know what. It would be best to go now, to get on a plane today and disappear. But of course she won’t. It’s only right to stay another five days, and then take off among the angels and onward to a world where she wasn’t beholden to anything, anything good or anything evil, where not a single one of her deaths existed.

  Marina lived in Vancouver. She had gotten her Canadian passport a month ago and could now travel wherever she wanted. The process of becoming a Canadian citizen had lasted three years. As the Canadian authorities see it, that’s how long you need to forget everything you might call home and accept that home no longer exists or at least that home isn’t where you were born.

  She worked in a shoe shop and once a month had an appointment with the caseworker responsible for her resettlement and integration, a Vietnamese woman who repeated over and
over how she knew life under communism was tough, offering only a handful of rice a day. Marina would nod her head, smile in confirmation, yes, a handful of rice and nothing more besides. The Vietnamese woman was quickly convinced that Marina’s integration and socialization would be perfect, and that soon she wouldn’t even remember the many a horror of a system that forced everyone to wear the same uniforms.

  She lived alone, she tried falling in love three times, every time she said I love you, I love you, I love you, it was like she was saying oh, that’s so great at a dozy rest-home tea party. Not obliging her to anything, that’s about what it sounded like. Then she would take off with barely an explanation, leaving behind confused young men lifting pairs of foggy glasses with their index fingers as if it were a rainy day.

  In the free world you can live completely alone and never feel like something’s missing. And so Marina ended up alone in Vancouver, surrounded by a mountain of shoes, like a Cinderella who after midnight had realized that not even a prince was much of a win in life, at least not in this country.

  A few nights before the trip to Belgrade she’d had a dream in which someone was missing; one of the three, Astor, her mother, or her father, was absent, but in her dream she couldn’t work out who. One moment Astor and her father were there, the next her mother and Astor, the next her father and mother, the next Astor, her father and mother, but as a pair, not as a threesome. She desperately tried to account for all household members, but there was always someone missing. She phoned her sister in Los Angeles and tried to tell her about the dream; she didn’t understand it, she said my kid has a cold and I gotta go to work. Marina put the receiver down guiltily and looked at the clock, in Zagreb it’s four in the morning, she wanted to call Him, but how do you call someone in Zagreb at that hour to tell them about a dream from Vancouver.