by Lana Popovic
She sighed behind me. “Riss—”
“I’ll see you later.”
I could feel her eyes heavy on my back as I left.
TWO
OUTSIDE, THE MORNING WAS FRAGRANT WITH THE SPICE of the oleander drifting from the back garden. Our bicycles leaned together against the chain-link fence. Above them, a warm rainbow of bougainvillea clung to the links, fading like twilight from fuchsia to orange, yellow, and peach before nestling into the green of stems and leaves.
I paused for a moment as the flowers burst into their usual spectacle. Each separate blossom multiplied, over and over, until the tangle burgeoned into sparkling symmetry, a fractal sphere like a honeycomb. I saw these flowers every morning, fiercely grateful that their dazzle never dimmed. That was my gift, my variant of the gleam. I didn’t just see flowers; I saw them to the nth degree. Each bloomed into a little galaxy that I could cup inside my palm, the sticky stars of its pollen caught between my fingers. Petal nested within petal, each level of the pattern cradling tiny versions of itself, stamen and pistil and vein and leaf swirling in concentric patterns like a nautilus shell.
It hadn’t always been just flowers. When I was younger, the whole world had bloomed for me. Sunlight through summer leaves had spiraled into a blaze of gold and green, an infinite pillar of fireflies swarming into the sky. Pebbles and stones beneath my bare toes would whirlpool into cream and slate and gray. Even the crosshatch of tanned skin on the back of my own hand would fractal for me, layering like dragon scales.
Back when Mama still let us practice the gleam together—eating the moon, she always called it, like something out of a fairy tale, like the three of us were strong enough to swallow the sky—I’d even been able to share what I saw with both of them. Even the memory of that happiness was painfully fierce, a bubble of vast joy that strained my lungs. In the summer dark of the garden, the sigh of leaves and crickets stirring the silence around us, Mama would let me bloom balls of tinsel or twine, handfuls of beach glass and jars filled with seashells, bowls clicking with tigereye marbles. When I made each explode into fractal fireworks between us, Mama would slip one of the moon-shaped truffles she made for those nights into my mouth—dark chocolate, sea salt, and a sweet curl of jasmine, the taste of the summer night dissolving on my tongue. Then Lina’s song would settle over us, her triad of voices clear and lilting as a flute, the precise pitch of wonder.
We had been so beautiful together, reflecting one another like a family of mirrors.
The word for “witch,” veštica, meant “deft one,” and that was what we’d been: deft in beauty, versed in its tastes and sounds and textures as it wove like a ribbon through our fingers. It was an heirloom we carried in our blood, a legacy of magic passed down from womb to womb. All the women in our family had it.
Some had even died for it.
Lina and I had been seven when Mrs. Petrović next door saw one of my fractals bloom. Maybe our light laughter had woken her, quiet as we always tried to be, or maybe she’d caught a thread of Lina’s song in her sleep and it had drawn her to the window. The next morning, Mama had trotted us next door and talked her down easily, with a basket of warm trifles from the café and her own cool and perfect poise. Lina and I had been playing with firecrackers, she lied smoothly, because we were young and silly and overly bold, too used to running free during the long hours she was gone. Yes, the colors were very unusual; she thought maybe that kind was called a snapdragon, wasn’t that charming? No, of course, sweet names were no excuse for such a fire hazard, and her without a man to tame that unruly garden in the back. We should still have known better, and now we knew never to do it again.
It wasn’t until she brought us back home that her hands began to shake. She had us kneel with her on her massive sleigh bed, its swooping wooden headboard polished to a honey gleam; Čiča Jovan had made it for her from reclaimed wood. She’d let us sleep in it with her on the nights we ate the moon together, and it had always felt to me like the safest place in our little house.
But now, the devastation that swept over her face when she turned to us made my stomach drop, Lina’s clammy fingers curling into mine like a reflex.
“That was the last time,” Mama said, running her tongue over her teeth. The movement pursed her lush mouth and bared the strong, Slavic bones of her face: a squared jaw and cheekbones that cleaved air, a bold but dainty falcon’s nose. The large, thick-lashed gray eyes she shared with me and Malina sparkled oddly, and I suddenly realized what it was—she was trying not to cry. “No more eating the moon for us, not ever. I should have never—I’ve let you both practice for too long. A little longer, and I won’t be able to hold on to you. There’ll be no tamping you down.”
“But why?” I demanded. “Who cares if she saw me? She looks like a shrunken head.”
Malina smothered a snicker next to me. “Smells like one, too,” she whispered.
“Quiet,” Mama snapped. An electric eel of fear raced down my spine, leaving a hot flush in its wake. Lina dropped my hand in shock. Mama never spoke to us so sharply. Even when she was at her wits’ end, her low, throaty voice only dipped lower, softening like a velvet warning.
Her gaze flicking between us, she knelt so we were face-level with her, gray eyes meeting gray. “You know we have no family,” she said. “I’ve told you that much. The three of us, all alone in the world.”
“And Čiča Jovan,” Malina added. Only we got to call him “čiča,” Old Man Jovan. From us, it was both affectionate and respectful, the next best thing to calling him our grandfather. “That’s why you named the café after him. Because he’s like our deda.”
“Yes, as good as a grandfather—maybe even better—though he isn’t blood. But before I had you, I had a twin sister of my own, and a mother, too. They would have been your blood, your aunt and your baba. If they had lived.”
Lina’s breathing went shallow beside me. I could see Mama’s turmoil, but my sister could feel and hear its buzz. That’s what our mother sounded like, Lina told me later. Like she’d swallowed a beehive, a high-pitched panic of wings and stingers.
“What happened to them?” Lina asked, and from the pained way she said it I knew she felt it already, and that it was terrible.
Mama was still young enough then that we could sometimes read her face, and I could see the splitting inside her, the battle between tell and don’t.
“Ana and I were eighteen,” she said, her voice colorless and thin like onionskin. “Ana fell in love that year, even though your grandmother forbade it. Love makes us even brighter than we are, until the gleam grows into a roman candle, impossible to contain. Everyone can see us shine with it, then, and it’s the nature of the human beast to fear what it doesn’t understand.”
I struggled to make the pieces clasp together. “But didn’t our grandmother love our grandfather?”
“She never loved him,” Mama said. Her face had smoothed out flat, until she looked just like she sounded. “That’s why she thought it was safe to accept when he asked her to marry. And why she thought it would be safe to stay with him, once Ana and I were born. We lived in a mountain village many hours from here; Tata raised goats to make cheese, and Mama brewed medicines. And perfumes too, the prettiest you ever smelled, so fine they made you feel things.”
“The way your treats make people think of places?” I asked. That was our mother’s gleam: the sights of the world translated into flavor. “Was that Grandmother’s gleam?”
“It was,” she said. “Ana’s was bigger, and much more wild. When she danced, it was like watching legends come to life, paintings that breathed and pulsed to the heartbeat of her steps. And when she fell in love . . .”
Mama’s eyes grew distant with the memory, soft and diffuse like the fog that sometimes gathered above the slate waters of the bay. “She danced and danced. Love stoked her flame, and she showered the sparks of her gleam all over everything, until they spread to your grandmother and me. That’s what it’s like, when the w
omen in our family eat the moon. We’re bound to one another, braided together. And when we catch fire, we burn as one.”
“And then what, Mama?” Malina said. Her hand had crept back into mine.
Mama’s gaze sharpened back into focus. “Then, we all grew stronger. Your grandmother stopped blending her perfumes, but even still, the house was full of the most wonderful scents; they simply rolled off her, like sea spray from the water. I stopped baking, but your grandfather said he tasted sweet and savory things even when he’d eaten nothing for hours, tastes that made him think of places he had never been. As if ghosts were feeding him morsels. He muttered constantly about vila women and witches, and wore an evil-eye bracelet to fend off curses.”
She worked her jaw back and forth, then drew her full lower lip, softer even than Malina’s, through her strong white teeth. “And one day he walked in on Ana dancing. I was outside in the barn, but I saw him drag both of them out of the house, Ana by the hair, Mama by the arm. Mama had tried to come between them, to lull him with one of her quieting scents, but it only made him more furious. How long had we all been bewitching him, he wanted to know. Were Ana and I even his daughters, or children of demons?”
I barely understood what she meant, but bile welled in my throat all the same.
“Mama saw me cowering in the doorway, and screamed at me to run. And I did—but not until I saw him drag them to the precipice, the cliff’s edge Ana and I had always been forbidden to go near. And he threw them over”—Lina and I both flinched hard—“like they were nothing. I stayed, frozen, until I couldn’t hear them screaming anymore. I’ve never taken you up to the mountains, but they’re terribly tall. It was a very long way down before the sound stopped carrying. Once I finally moved, I ran far and hard until I reached this little city. And here our Čiča Jovan found me, and took me in.”
Malina pressed against my side, both of us trembling. The questions had blackened and curled up inside me, and all I wanted was for Mama to stop.
She fixed us in her feather-lashed gaze and put a light hand on each of our cheeks. Her fingers were so cold I could feel their chill leach beneath my skin. “Do you understand me? Ana fell in love, and then she was seen. If a father could kill his own child because she gleamed, what do you think a stranger would do to you? That’s why you never let anyone see you. And that’s why we take care to never, ever fall in love.”
I found my voice again, a rusted wire in my throat. “But Mama, I don’t want to stop,” I said, digging my nails into my palms. Even then, the power to bloom was the one thing, the best thing I had. Where Lina was sweet-tempered and tender, I was stark and sharp, fashioned of edges. I wasn’t already deft in Mama’s kitchen like Lina was, school bored me to misery except when it came to poems and stories, and I didn’t have a whisper of our mother’s easy charm.
On top of it all I looked like a thing apart, some prickly offshoot of my mother’s and sister’s languid beauty. What would I be without the gift? Would I even belong with them? “I could learn to be so careful, I promise I could, if you just teach me. Only ever in the dark, like you said. But please, Mama, don’t make us stop.”
“It’s not just about you,” she said, soft. “You’re so bright, you’ll make all of us too easy to see. Beauty is our birthright, but only as long as we do it safely. I’ll find you some other way to bloom, something that won’t show you for what you are.”
She lifted a hand as if to touch my cheek again, and I flinched away from her fingers. Her hand stilled in midair; maybe that was the moment she first turned herself to winter.
IN THE TEN years since, I’d lost everything but the flowers, and I wasn’t even sure why those hadn’t faded. It had been like going color-blind, or growing scars inside my eyes. My world had gone so flat that sometimes, nothing but the magma roil of the glass furnace in Čiča Jovan’s workshop felt even remotely real.
And yet here I still was, same as ever, stuck with Mama and the café. Because what else was there to do, for me? Where else was there to be?
I unlocked my bike from the fence and swung my leg over the rickety two-speed Schwinn, and the bougainvillea fractal faded away. Pressing my feet into the groaning pedals, I set off along the Škurda, the stagnant little river that trickled by our ramshackle, whitewashed old house. As I cut a left along the Adriatic Highway toward Cattaro’s Old Town, I could already catch the brine of the bay, glimmering beneath the limestone cliffs across the water. Our city nestled in the deepest recess of the Gulf of Cattaro, a pool of the Adriatic two inlets removed from the open sea. The mountains circled the bay like hands cupping a palmful of water much deeper and more dazzling than the sky—a solid ring of verdant rock broken only by the narrow thread of the Verige Strait.
Past the bridge over the second leg of the Škurda River, the Venetian ramparts surrounding the Old Town came into view. Old Cattaro had been settled by the Romans around 160 BC, and a thousand years later the stone city still clustered behind the ancient walls, a mosaic of gray blocks and red roofs against the cliffs that soared above.
Outside the blackened walls, I slid off the bike to walk it beside me through the Sea Gate. Tuđe nećemo, svoje ne damo, proclaimed the inscription carved into the stone above: “What belongs to others, we do not want; what is ours, we will never surrender.” The entrance opened into the Arms Square plaza, with its medieval clock tower and stone shops, cafés, and hotels with wrought-iron balconies and green shutters. Bike tucked tightly against my side, I navigated through the warrens of the streets, passing boutiques and bakeries and jewelry shops until I emerged into the sunlit square of the Cathedral of Saint Tryphon.
A vague pall of incense always hung over the square, even with the sweeter smells emanating from Café Tadić across the way. I secured my bike to the little post Čiča Jovan had nailed for me by the café door and found him already inside at the glass dessert display, in his neatly pressed slacks, matching waistcoat, and blinding white shirt. Not quite one of the vintage three-piece suits he still wore from his time as a man about town in Belgrade, but close; he was the only person I’d ever known who dressed formally for comfort. Even at seventy, he was still striking in a weathered, leonine way, his snowy hair thick and swept back like a wave crest from a bold forehead, blue eyes piercing beneath craggy, bushy white brows.
He was leaning heavily on his “battle cane,” the dragon-headed, warrior-king’s cane he’d carved for himself when his left hip gave out and he’d had to have it replaced four years ago. In his other hand he held one of my mother’s specialty burek, a savory goat-cheese pastry studded with pine nuts and drizzled with honey. He bought one almost every morning, as much to see his honorary granddaughters as to sample Mama’s flavors. “I only have so many days left,” he always said. “And I’ll be damned if I miss any opportunities to start them with my girls and the best burek in God’s great world.”
“But we’re a European country,” he was saying now to Mama, stoutly. “Still part of the European Union, part of the world, my girl. What the giants do affects us as much as anyone else. We have to care.”
“Why?” my mother replied, leaning on the counter. Her dark hair was braided into a gleaming crown, and she wore one of her slim sheaths, dove gray beneath her stained apron. She propped her chin on her clenched fist, and I was surprised to see how white her knuckles were. “The rest of us should be so lucky to have that much strength, to do anything we wanted without being afraid. And look, instead, how small we are. What does it even matter what we think?”
I lingered in the doorway, intrigued by my mother’s interest. She’d never shown any zeal for global affairs, and she was right about us; even by Southeastern European standards, Montenegro was such a tiny country, a little kingdom of mountains. All of five hundred thousand inhabitants hemmed in by Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Albania, with the Adriatic Sea lapping against our western coast.
My mother seemed to remember herself then, and the usual mantle of nonchalance settled ba
ck over her shoulders. Her face took on that lazy, indulgent look I knew so well, the one she used when men swaggered into her shop and bent over backward to pretend that she didn’t fluster them. Some of them cursed too much, while others were so stilted and formal it was as if each time they met her was the first. Others plied her with current events, as if the doings of the world held enough mass to offset her gravity.
“I don’t know, Jovan, really,” she said with a languid shrug. “These mountains have kept us for thousands of years; even the Turks couldn’t take them from us. What use do we have for the rest of the world? No matter what, my little café will still be here, won’t it? And as long as I’m here, so will be your burek. What more can any of us ask?”
She gave him a sweet, close-lipped smile, and I could practically see his blood pressure spike. It infuriated me that she did this even to Čiča Jovan, who was almost family, as if she couldn’t restrain herself from showing off. He didn’t deserve to be plied with her tricks just for sport.
Jovan cleared his throat. “True enough, true enough.” He backed away from her reluctantly, clutching the little package so tightly grease began to seep through the waxed paper, and nearly ran into me. “Ah, Iris, good morning! Didn’t mean to trample you, sweetheart.”
I smiled at him, giving him a quick, tight hug before tucking myself into the corner to let him by. “All limbs intact, old man. And make sure to eat that while it’s hot.” I gestured to one of the two iron tables at the opposite corner, arranged beneath my little bougainvillea glasswork sculpture; our other four tables were outside in the square. “Maybe take a seat with us and enjoy it here today? We love the company so early in the morning, don’t we, Mama? It’ll be hours before anyone else comes by.”
She gave me a quick, flicking appraisal, from toes to temples. I’d been getting the Arctic blast of her silent treatment for two weeks now, since I accidentally stirred salt rather than sugar into a meringue and ruined a whole batch of her snowdrop kiss cookies. It would have been only a day’s worth of fury if Malina had done it, but Mama’s deep freezes were traditionally reserved for me. An offense was the best defense, as they say—whoever “they” were, I felt like we understood each other well—and I could see by the pretty flush rising along her cheekbones how deeply my clothing choices offended her.
