by Lana Popovic
“Ah, no?” I made a show of looking around as if I had some actual method for gauging light. “Seems like a pretty standard-issue early-morning gradient, to me. But I’ve never really, uh, examined light all that closely. I don’t think.”
“Gradient!” She clasped her hands together, delighted. “Excellent word. Clever, too, then, and not just so lovely to look at. No wonder . . .”
She murmured that last bit low, like a secret to herself, but I could catch the pain behind it.
“I’m sorry,” she said, mistaking my baffled silence for embarrassment. “I’m babbling like an idiot. It just feels so odd to be back here again, after so long. It all seems so slovenly, somehow. And the smells . . .” She took a deep breath, her nostrils flaring. They were absurdly perfect, precise as blown glass. It seemed like such a silly thing to notice, yet there I was, admiring them. “I’m not sure if I even like it here, anymore.”
“Are you from around here, then?” I asked, curious. She had a touch of the lazy Montenegrin drawl to her accent, though nowhere near as strong as mine. Compared to the Serbs’ crisp speech, we all sounded like we were talking around a mouthful of honey.
“Not exactly here, but close enough. Much closer than where I’ve been, anyway, and all this looks more familiar than not.”
It occurred to me that this woman might be at least three-quarters batshit. Talking to her was kind of like riding a Tilt-a-Whirl, but I’d always liked those. “Maybe you know my mother, then? Jasmina. She owns this café.”
The woman’s lips twitched. The table rattled between us, so loudly I looked down to see if she had jostled it with her knees. But both her feet were on the ground, in dainty silver thong sandals. In contrast to the slender straps, her feet were roped with veins and knotted with bone spurs, the nails thick and unpolished. The table gave another solid rattle. Maybe a column of trucks lugging produce from Turkey was rumbling down the highway outside the city walls. Sometimes the stones carried the vibrations from the road.
She took another long breath and set both hands on the table, wrists crossed, a languorous movement that vaguely reminded me of someone, but that I couldn’t quite pin down. “As it happens, I do know her a bit,” she said. “I wonder if she remembers me. Do you think she might be free to say hello?”
“I can go take a look,” I offered. The chances of my mother prying herself away from her kitchen to chat with a near stranger were hilariously slim—and I would bear the brunt of her irritation, to boot—but I found that for this woman, I was willing to take the risk. “Who should I say is asking for her?”
“Tell her it’s Dunja.”
“Dunja . . . ?” I coaxed, eyebrows raised.
“Just Dunja. If she remembers, she’ll know.”
I could feel her gaze still on me as I slipped back into the café, but I didn’t mind. Despite the sunglasses, I hadn’t caught anything but kindness in the way she watched me, and something even deeper, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It felt almost like familiarity, but it couldn’t have been that. We’d never met before; I wouldn’t have forgotten someone like her.
Mama was rolling out phyllo dough in the back room, muscles coiling serpentine down her bare arms as she pressed her weight into the rolling pin. Nev wasn’t there; she’d probably fled out back for a cigarette, like she did whenever she saw us snarling at each other. There was a dusting of flour high on one of Mama’s cheeks, and her short, square fingernails were outlined in white.
Watching her, I imagined my heart encased with ice, like I always did when I had to deal with her after one of our flash-pan fights. Sometimes it was suspended in a laser-edged block, a perfect, transparent cube of clear and red. Other times I thought of a murkier slab, with just a smear of crimson behind dense whorls and eddies. I liked thinking about the shape that sheltered my raw heart, kept it safe.
She caught sight of me from the corner of her eye and straightened. “Where have you been?” she demanded. “Are you serving a four-course meal out there? Filling out an application for our Michelin stars? I need you to start slicing strawberries.”
“Someone’s asking for you outside,” I replied, grateful that my voice didn’t even tremble.
“If it’s Marijana, the rent isn’t due for another week, so she can go straight to hell until then. And stay there, too, if possible,” she added sourly. “Humanity would rejoice as one.”
“It isn’t anyone we know. Some woman named Dunja. She wouldn’t give me her last name.”
Mama went so still I took a reflexive step back from her. It was uncanny, the way a snake freezes the split second before it strikes. She turned so pale that even her lips drained of color, and with her eyes wide and unfocused she was somehow even more beautiful, like a silent-movie heroine in a grayscale world.
For a moment, neither of us moved. It was so quiet I could have sworn I heard both our hearts thundering.
I broke the silence first. “You . . . you have flour on your face.”
She blinked, her eyes clearing as she focused on me. Moving like a marionette, she swiped a jerky hand over her face, missing the chalky patch.
“Let me get it.” I approached her warily. She still held the rolling pin in one hand, her knuckles white with the force of her grip. But she wet her lips and gave a single nod, so I reached up and brushed it away with my thumb. When she still didn’t stir, I moved to tuck back a stray curl that had come free of her braid. She caught my wrist with her free hand, and I choked back a yelp; her hands had always been steel-strong from her work in the kitchen.
“Leave it, Iris,” she commanded. “And stay back here. I had better not see you come out.”
“Why? Who is she? What—”
“No questions. This has nothing to do with you. She has nothing to do with you.” Mama looked through me, as if I had no business existing with her in this moment. “She can’t be here, and if she is—” She cut herself off, dragging her hand down her face until the iron mask of composure settled back over it. “You stay in here, Iris, if you know what’s good for you.”
Dropping the rolling pin, she swept out into the front room. I didn’t follow her, but I pressed myself against the doorjamb of the kitchen, peeking out until my line of sight aligned with the front door and the tables outside. From there, I could see my mother advance on Dunja, and the tremble in Dunja’s fingers as she laid them over her lips.
In the next instant, Dunja sprang out of her chair and they practically lunged into each other’s arms. I clapped my hand over my own mouth; I had never seen Mama hug anyone so ferociously, her head tucked into the smaller woman’s shoulder, Dunja stroking my mother’s crown of braids and whispering into her ear.
Then my mother wrenched herself free and began shaking her head.
“You have to go back!” I pressed my cheek against the doorjamb, straining to hear my mother’s fierce whisper. “Please. I know I promised, and I know I did it wrong, and I’m so sorry for it all. But you promised, too. So keep your end, please.”
I couldn’t hear Dunja’s low reply, but I saw her shake her head and reach slowly into the pocket of her silken white harem pants, cuffed at the ankle, and withdraw something that glinted in her grip. She offered it to my mother, who shook her head again, tucking both hands behind her back like a child about to have her palms striped with a cane.
Dunja tilted her head to the side, beseeching, hand still extended. Finally, Mama took a single, furious step forward and snatched whatever it was off Dunja’s palm, dropping it into her dress pocket. Then she spread her empty hands—are you happy now?—and whirled on her heel to march back toward the café. In between the bouts of rage and defiance strobing across her face, it was the well-deep sadness that threw me most.
Whatever had just passed between them, it had left my mother devastated.
FIVE
MAMA DIDN’T SPEAK MORE THAN TEN WORDS TO ME AFTER that. She’d disappeared deeply into herself, but it was a dangerous, time-bomb kind of stillness,
like a very long lit fuse. I was full to bursting with curiosity, but it wasn’t like I could ask her what had happened between her and this odd and beautiful stranger she clearly knew.
By the time Malina arrived for her shift, Nev had mangled some half-assed excuse for leaving early, and I’d have happily molted out of my own skin just to get away from Mama. I could see Malina assess our moods in her instinctive manner, her eyes flicking back and forth between us. She began to sing quietly, as if she couldn’t help it, a skirling, eerie melody I recognized as a new variation on her theme for danger.
This one had the distinctive three-note refrain that tied it to our mother’s mood. I’d heard it hundreds of times before: when Mama smelled smoke on me as I sat down next to her for dinner; when she caught me stealing nips of the expensive brandy from her larder so Malina and I could have birthday shots when we turned sixteen; when I brought home one piebald kitten after another and begged her to let us keep it.
But this melody had a new overtone, a counterpoint that captured my own tangled reaction, my discomfort and curiosity and deep desire to get the hell out of the café. And something below it, too, a subterranean thrum like shifting tectonic plates, something ancient and feral clawing its way through widening cracks.
It sounded like our mother was trapped, somehow, and very, very much afraid.
Malina kept humming even as she plucked an apron off its rusty hook and tied it around her waist, over a floor-length skirt splashed with marigolds and peonies like a watercolor. The flowing, lacy white peasant top she wore over it bared her creamy shoulders, and a kitschy little vial hung around her neck, tiny bass and treble clefs floating in sparkling water. In my opinion, most of Lina’s outfits made her look like she spent her free time twirling in meadows and saluting the sunshine with her face, but then there were the shoes. While I wandered around in flats and flip-flops and generally didn’t dwell much on my feet, Lina gleefully lost her mind over anything strappy and high-heeled and sassy-bright.
“Stop it,” I hissed to her as she sidled up next to me and reached for a scrap of sweet dough in her usual scavenging way. I tried to eat as little as I possibly could at our mother’s café, but Lina’s fingers wandered freely into pie fillings and frosting, as if staging a silent protest against Mama meant nothing in the face of something sweet. “It’s just making things worse.”
“What things, Riss?” she whispered back. “It feels terrible in here. What’s been—”
“If you’re going to mumble like schoolchildren behind my back, at least call your sister by her proper name, Malina,” Mama snapped, slapping her spatula against a cutting board. We both flinched. “She’s not an animal, much as she does look like a cat in heat today.”
Ris meant “bobcat,” and out of all of Malina’s nicknames for me, Mama hated that one with an especially concentrated passion. Maybe it cut too close to home, reminded her of all the things that pissed her off about me. The feline temperament, the defiance, some sort of invisible dander that Mama was particularly allergic to.
Malina gave my outfit a once-over, eyebrow quirking and one shoulder rising as if to say, eh, she’s not wrong.
Traitor, I mouthed at her.
Slut, she mouthed back.
She already said that, I traced into the spill of flour in front of me, then smoothed it out again. Get new material.
Her eyes softening with sympathy, Malina dropped a little kiss on my shoulder before I twitched away from her. She frowned at me, hurt, but hers wasn’t the comfort I needed now.
“So, I’m leaving, since Lina’s here,” I announced.
“Go ahead.” Mama’s voice was so distant and dim she may as well have been miles away. Or at the bottom of a deep ditch, the hate side of my brain whispered.
I snagged my little backpack and zipped outside, taking a deep breath of sunlit stone as soon as I was out the door, the tension in my shoulders easing a notch. I hadn’t seen Luka since he’d come back from Belgrade last week to help at his father’s nargileh café for the summer, but he’d texted me earlier to let me know he’d be waiting at our spot for lunch. Seeing him was the only thing I could think of that might possibly salvage the day.
It was too steep to take my bike up to the fortress with me, so I left it locked at the café and set out on foot. The street that led to the back entrance of the Old Town veered right, onto the path that would bring me outside the walls. There, I found the stone steps that wound up the mountain to the still-watchful ruins of Saint John’s Fortress. It brooded above us like some crumbling, stolid sentry, built by the Illyrians and reinforced in the sixth century by Emperor Justinian to keep guard over the Old Town below.
My thighs burned by the time I reached the first level of the ruins. The secluded little bit of rampart that Luka and I had claimed years ago was several levels farther up, though below the castle tower itself. I was almost out of breath as I reached the last bit of trail I’d have to take, so hair-raisingly narrow that tourists never thought it led to anything, and locals had more sense than to attempt. I’d flattened my back against the cliff wall and edged there so many times over the years that the sheer drop beneath me barely even registered in the pit of my stomach.
Luka was already there as I inched my way into the little aerie of crumbling stone we’d discovered together, lounging on the rampart. “Lithe” wasn’t a word I’d ever thought to use for any other boy, especially one as tall as he was, but it fit him, the way he draped himself over things as if they were his just because he was touching them.
I barely had time to set my backpack down before he swung himself off the wall and folded me into a bone-grinding hug. “Miss Iris,” he murmured into my hair. He smelled different than I remembered, amber and pine resin, a warm and spicy soap I might have liked if it hadn’t been so foreign. “So good to see you. They don’t provide cliffside service like this in the Belgrade restaurants, let me tell you. And the Serbs say we’re the peasants.”
“Oof,” I squeaked. “Let go, or you’re going to crush me and there won’t be any such service in your childhood home, either.”
“Good point.” I could hear him smile. “Can’t kill the fair maidens of my childhood home. Otherwise, why would I come back?”
He gave me another squeeze before letting go, and we unpacked the food I’d snuck into my backpack for a makeshift picnic. I was beginning to think he’d forgotten when he carefully plucked a little package wrapped in tinfoil from his back pocket and offered it to me, one lean cheek creasing as he smiled. He always brought me a new flower when we met. Jade vine, ghost orchids, sprigs of fuzzy bottlebrush, and once even something called a chocolate cosmos. Rare, exotic flowers that couldn’t possibly grow in the region, that I had no idea where he found.
He didn’t know what they meant to me—I hadn’t shared the gleam even with him, as much as I’d sometimes yearned to have him see the best of me—but he knew I loved them, and it was enough.
I unwrapped it carefully, peeling back the layers until I found a perfect, still-living blossom inside, its petals moist with the water trapped beneath the foil. It was some kind of lily, creamy yellow that deepened into red as if dipped on the ends, and tiger-speckled along the inside with red flecks. As soon as my gaze softened it fractured into a starburst, a miniature firework of yellow upon yellow, a whirlpool of crimson flecks swirling around the minuscule black hole that was the flower’s deepest inner point.
“What is it?” I breathed, like anything over a whisper might disturb the churning bloom. “Where did you find it?”
“It’s an Italia Asiatic lily, and like I’d ever tell. I love when you see a new one for the first time,” he added softly. “It’s like a baby looking at something it’s never seen before. I don’t think you ever look at anything else like that.”
“I’m glad you choose to find it endearing,” I murmured back, still caught up with the contained, gorgeous explosion on my palm. “As opposed to strange and unnerving. That’s the consensus around thes
e parts.”
“Nah. They just think that about your face.”
I set the flower gently back into its foil cradle, then reached out and smacked him on the back of the head.
“Don’t beat me, woman.” He caught my hand and twisted it until I yelped. “At least not until after the food.”
I sat back against the dusty stone, watching him as he ate in his fastidious, starving way, both of us cross-legged on the sun-warmed floor of the aerie. He was wearing city clothes, fitted jeans and a Lacoste shirt with something that actually looked like an alligator emblazoned above the breast pocket, instead of a black-market knockoff like everyone around here wore. His dark hair was much shorter than it had been the previous summer, before he left for college, and his face more angular than I remembered.
He’d been lean-faced and handsome even as a little boy, with those same watchful eyes, a startling light hazel beneath black lashes and the thick, dark eagle wings of his brows. He was eleven and I was nine when we met, the day he punched our most notorious mouth breather in the face for calling Luka’s mother a child-stealing Roma. Later, I crept up to Luka and wiped the scrapes on his knuckles with a corner of my T-shirt while he watched me with solemn eyes.
After that, Lina and I had become inseparable from Luka and his sister, Nikoleta, who was a grade below us. We formed our own little group of half castes, an island of bright color. When we got older, the girls who’d once whispered about his Romany mother began to notice very actively how handsome Luka was.
But even if there wasn’t so much as a kiss between us—and there never was—I was still the girl who’d touched him first.
“Hey,” he said, startling me out of my thoughts. “Why you being so quiet, Missy? And you’re not eating anything.”
“Even the culinary treatings of Jasmina the Peerless get old, believe it or not,” I said, shrugging a shoulder. “Unlike her spectacular bitchery. She likes to keep that fresh for me.”
