Mama Leone (22 page)

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.

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: C
OMRADE
N
IKITA
S
ERGEYEVICH
K
HRUSHCHEV's
S
ECRET
P
APER
. 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.