Miljenko Jergovic - Mama Leone

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 intelligent 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.

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.