Miljenko Jergovic - Mama Leone

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.