Mama Leone

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Mom took the package out of the bag and unwrapped the paper. There, in the middle of our dining-room table, lay an enormous beef bone, picked perfectly clean. It was whiter than white, no traces of meat or blood, as if someone, the Almighty for example, had created it exactly that way and sent eternity out a message: “You shall be a bone and nothing else, you shall have no purpose nor meaning, you shall not procreate, nor shall you be either dead or alive.” Mom held her face in her hands so it wouldn’t shatter, and Grandma sat down. Grandpa said right then, and they all stared motionless at the bone.

  Let me see, let me see, I ran around the table yelling. I couldn’t know something bad was happening because nothing had actually happened, nor did I sense their anger or sorrow because they weren’t angry or sad. Maybe they were white and cold, maybe they, at least now in retrospect, resembled that white bone on the fancy black veneer of the table. Useless and beautiful in equal measure, the bone was a final evil after which no good could ever come. For my mom the bone was the abyss at the end of the road; a sign she should turn around and start out on a new path, if there was indeed one she could ever envisage, sure from the very start that a bone for her son wouldn’t be waiting at its end.

  Give it to me, give it to me, I howled, but they wouldn’t give me the bone. Grandpa picked it up, stood for a moment in front of the trash can – either the bone was too big, or he realized such things weren’t for the trash – then headed outside with it. I can imagine him walking through Metjaš with this ginormous beef bone, people scrambling out of his way, seeing in his eyes and from what was in his hand that he was mad. He carried it off somewhere, I’ll never know where, and returned half an hour later. I cried because they hadn’t given me the object of my affection.

  The next day Dad asked Mom what his mother had given me because she hadn’t wanted to tell him, but Mom didn’t say anything. She didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t something you could put into words, and had left us more confused than all the dead pianos in the world.

  I never went to that room again, nor did I ever see that other grandma of mine. I don’t even know how she died or where she’s buried, or whether Dad ever showed her my pictures again. If he did, she must have been a bit relieved. As I got older I looked less like him and she would have been able to believe God had quit testing her and answered all her prayers.

  The violet fig

  for Nada Stilinović

  When the frost bites hard and the teeth chatter and thick snows fall and no one can come to us and we can’t go to anyone, Grandma says this winter is nothing like the winter of 1943, the thought of which makes me freeze and my heart pound wild because I love the years before my time. That’s when miracles happened, and everything was huge and terrifying. It was a Friday in Zenica that winter when the Old Devil got dead drunk and headed for home. The snow was two meters high and blue in the moonlight, so he thought it was his bed or a duvet. God knows what goes through the head of an eighty-five-year-old who’s spent a minimum seventy-five of them dead drunk, maybe even eighty of them. But he saw that much snow and he just lay down and made himself comfortable, covering himself in it, and with his hands under his head started snoring away. Heaven knows how long he’d been lying there when the miners coming back from the second shift dug him out and got him to the hospital. Alive! Alive, I tell you, and he’d lain in the snow that winter of 1943, and that wasn’t like this winter, bit of frost, bit of snow, nothing much, but a real winter like you don’t get anymore, one I’ll never see in my lifetime again. They took the old coot to the hospital; luckily they didn’t take him home because the next day he got pneumonia, eighty-five years old and a temperature of 104 degrees, but you think that knocked the wind out of his sails? Fat chance! He shuffled to the window and tossed kids some money to get him medicinal alcohol from the drugstore, that hundred-proof stuff, but kids being kids they took the money and scampered. I think that killed the Old Devil and not the pneumonia. Only rakia could kill him, or truth be told, him not having it. He didn’t have the taste for anything else. He might’ve been a drinker, but the alcohol didn’t do him in, it got everyone around him: a first wife, then a second, both younger, then a daughter, another daughter, his sons scattering to the four winds. God knows who and what else that rakia killed, but it didn’t get him. He woke up drunk, went to bed drunk, forged the horseshoes in his workshop drunk, and drunk he laid waste to everything in his path and everything that let itself be laid to waste, all until that winter, the 1943 mother of all winters got him. Sometimes I think it got so cold just to knock the Old Devil off, said Grandma when the temperature fell, shaking with rage and anger, but not cold, because she wasn’t afraid of the cold. The Old Devil was the only person she hated in the entire world, and of all perversions, vices, and weapons, of all human depravities and evils, it was alcohol and alcoholism she had no truck with.

  The Old Devil was my great-grandpa and his name was Josip, but Grandma never called him that, he was always the Old Devil, and no one, not even Grandpa whose father he was, ever got angry with her or corrected her or told her how swell it would be if she could call her deceased father-in-law by some other name, the one he was christened with for example, or the one by which everyone in Zenica knew him: Blacksmith Joža the Slovenian. At the mention of his father my grandpa would bow his head and bite his lip, just like his brothers, our uncles Karlo and Rudo, who never forgave him the rakia, nor themselves for having been children not able to save their older sisters from their deaths at my great-grandpa’s careless hand. Whenever the Old Devil came up, you saw the same disposition in Grandma, Grandpa, and Mom’s eyes, a familial mark of Cain, a color that differentiated the Rejcs from other people, a light-gray anti-rakia hue. It marked their lives in different ways, and boy did it mark my life with them. Grandpa would drink two short ones of rakia and even under threat of medieval torture you couldn’t make him have a third, dead sure that if he did he’d turn into the Old Devil. Mom would drink half a beer and already have the fear of God inside her that she was dead drunk and that the Old Devil was there smiling at her from just around the corner. Grandma didn’t drink at all. Not at New Year’s, not at birthdays, never! That was the Rejc family for you, and then I came along. Takes after his father’s side, said Mom. God, father, the kid doesn’t have any Rejc in him, said Grandpa. So it was no surprise I didn’t share the Rejc anti-rakia disposition, I wasn’t even scared of the Old Devil. Actually, I didn’t know anything about rakia, except that it stunk real bad and that the stink reminded me of the hospital, vaccinations, and having your tonsils out. But my great-grandpa, he loomed large all right.

  I don’t pay Grandpa’s dead sisters any mind because I can’t, because I don’t know anything about them, just that they’re dead and that they died very young. That’s the only thing anyone ever says about them, and that’s not enough for me to love them and blame the Old Devil for their dying young. He’s the main character and the only character in a story that’s been going on for a hundred years and continues to this day even though he’s long dead, and in this story Blacksmith Joža the Slovenian is like Flash Gordon: Everyone’s afraid of him, but no one can hurt him. This great-grandpa of mine is the strongest and the biggest, so strong and so big that the winter of 1943 had to come along to do him in so he could make a brief exit from the story, but he’s sure to make a comeback one day. I know this because these kind of stories can’t end before I make my entrance, doesn’t matter if I’m five, seven, or eleven years old, one day when I dream of the Old Devil I’ll offer him my hand and say you were terrifying, but I’m not scared of you, and everyone was scared of you except me. I don’t know what he’ll say to that, but I have the feeling he might burp in my face. My great-grandpa, Blacksmith Joža the Slovenian, that’s him for you.

  We learned proverbs at school and on the blackboard the teacher wrote: “Everyone forges his own good fortune.” We were supposed to write an explanation of what it meant in our notebooks, so I wrote a story about how my gr
eat-grandpa forged his own good fortune and about how forgers of their own good fortune were usually forgers of others’ misfortune because they find their good fortune at the bottom of a bottle of rakia. The teacher called Mom into school for another visit, but Mom didn’t tell me anything, not why she was called in or what the teacher told her, but I saw the red in her eyes and that she was all upset and desperate because of me. The next day the school psychologist turned up in class, stood next to the teacher’s desk, hands behind his back, and the teacher said this is comrade Mutevelić, he’s a psychologist and he’s going to sit in on our class today and see how you’re doing, and after five minutes I could see his eyes were all on me, staring at my head and glancing away when I caught him, and the teacher kept asking me stuff, all smiley and kind like she never was, like I was really sick or something, all kinds of weird questions about things we hadn’t even studied and I’m sure aren’t even in the teacher’s book, like are people good or evil, or who’s smarter, the raven or the fox, or is Videk happy they sewed him a shirt. This Videk is a kid in a lame story, he’s supposed to have walked around naked until some nice folks sewed him a shirt. I replied that good people are good, and that evil people are evil, that the raven is smart because he found the cheese, and that the fox is smarter because she took it from him, but that maybe the fox was dumb because she couldn’t find the cheese herself and that the raven was stupid because he let himself get played by the fox, but that I had no opinion about Videk because I just couldn’t imagine a kid walking around naked and someone sewing him a shirt. When I said the bit about “having no opinion,” I shot comrade Mutevelić a look because I knew he’d be shocked. I know exactly which words are going to shock people as soon as they come out of my mouth, and I know why they’re shocked. When I say “in my opinion,” or when I say “taken in general,” or when I say “characteristically,” everyone acts like I’ve put a suit, tie, and hat on, all fancy. That’s how it is now: Comrade Mutevelić raises an eyebrow in surprise, takes his pad from his pocket, and scribbles something down.

  The boy is very clever for his age and has a rich vocabulary, but his emotions are completely childlike and along with his undoubted intelligence they’re an explosive little cocktail. That’s what comrade Mutevelić told Mom, and amazingly that’s what she told me, word for word, probably because she’d just read something in her book You and Your Child about the value of periodically shocking me with psychoanalytic findings or what grown-ups think of me. I’m not that smart, it’s just they expect me to be dumb . . . Who expects that of you? . . . The teacher and comrade Mutevelić. They asked me whether Videk is happy someone sewed him a shirt. You only ask that kind of thing when you want to make someone look like a retard . . . Why did you write that everyone forges their own good fortune and others’ misfortune? . . . I didn’t write that, I wrote that Great-grandpa was a blacksmith and everyone around him misfortunate. That’s what I wrote, I didn’t write anything about anyone else because I didn’t have time and because I don’t know anything about any other blacksmiths . . . Do you really have to write down what you hear at home? You could make something up . . . You mean, I could lie about something? . . . Not lie, make up . . . And what in your opinion is the difference between making up and lying? . . . Liars lie and writers make things up . . . So who writes and talks about stuff that really happened then? . . . For chrissakes, I don’t know, historians probably, but that’s not the point right now, try outdoing yourself and biting your tongue every now and then.

  That’s how my first encounter with a psychologist played out: A very unpleasant experience and one I’d very much like to avoid in the future, although my reputation in class skyrocketed afterward because everyone figured that comrade Mutevelić was there because of me and figured it was because I was either really crazy or really smart, but no one was able to solve that particular dilemma, apart from Šandor, the class bonehead, who was repeating the grade and gave me a hiding every day after Mutevelić’s visit, presumably having decided that crazy or smart, I deserved a thrashing either way.

  Given that the Old Devil and the family fear of rakia and alcoholism was at the root of everything, I decided to carefully monitor my family’s relationship to alcohol, make a few notes from time to time, it being obvious that inebriety was key and that I had to act with caution in the face of their fears. As soon as Grandma or Grandpa got scared about something, I’d get bawled out for not sharing their fears. Then I’d have to be scared of all the things I wasn’t scared of, and given I couldn’t stop being scared of the stuff I really was scared of myself, I had to carry around my own fears and their fears besides, which, I’m sure you’ll agree, is a rather unpleasant state of affairs when you’re five, seven, or however many years old.

  I noticed that our pantry was full of alcohol: homemade slivovitz and grappa; dozens of bottles of brandy and cognac; two liters of whiskey; vodka, gin; bottles of white, red, and rosé wine; menthol and chocolate liqueurs; Macedonian mastic and Greek metaxa . . . The bottles were neatly arranged and unopened, apart from the grappa and the whiskey, at the ready for when guests came. The bottles belonged to long-forgotten wakes and birthday parties, or were New Year’s presents from the time before I was born. When someone dies, the neighborhood comes to say how sorry they are and people bring bottles of alcohol, which then get stored in the pantry forever. Everyone knows we’re pretty much a nondrinking household, but tradition is tradition, and people cling to funeral rites most faithfully of all because even if they make no sense they’re still not for messing with because death is a time when the living have to be good to each other, and you’re best when you do something of no use to anyone, which makes it all the more moving.

  The menthol and chocolate liqueurs were presents for Mom when she was really young and before I was even born. On one of the bottles there was a tempera heart and arrow with Mom’s name and the name of some guy in it. This is a happy memory for her, which I don’t get at all. How can a bottle of liqueur be a happy memory when she’s terrified of alcohol? Do you think that heart is the happy memory? Nice: a memory written on a bottle full of fear.

  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, cherri
es, 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.