Mama Leone (18 page)

There's no way my mom could have ever been a saint for her. My mom smiled, had blond hair, and looked like a woman out of a Socialist film magazine, full of intolerable and irresponsible optimism. Even worse, she was young and pretty, rich in the way you are rich before figuring out that your poverty is eternal. Her very appearance was an
insult to my other grandma, and no doubt nothing ever violated the innocence of her room and the sanctity of the gold-plated Christ hanging above the front door more than the moment on a January day in 1965 when my mom walked in, a thousand snow crystals in her hair, filled with a hope that today no one knows the name of. Dad had probably had to beg his mother for hours and days, all the family secrets had to tumble from the high ceilings, he had to pay like never before for her to finally allow the she-devil incarnate to cross her threshold. Grandma was deeply religious, but she was also tone-deaf to the fluttering of the wings of angels; she saw only the devil in a thousand shapes and guises, above all in beauty, in the feminine beauty come to kidnap her beloved one, the apple of her eye, her son.

She sat in her armchair, offered Mom rose jelly, and simpered until her heart turned to ice and her belief in God's goodness grew, believing the Almighty would protect her and her son, that my mother would disappear just as every temptation God had placed before her in life, testing her heart and its contents, had in the end disappeared. For an hour they sat there across from each other. Dad tried to get a conversation going, which was more a plea for his mother's mercy, mercy she wouldn't grant him. She believed in God and everything she did was born of this belief, yet Dad believed in her, tried to break her resistance, not knowing that she would break him, that his love wouldn't endure long enough for him to understand that life has two beginnings: one at birth, with our first memories, and one that begins with love. What
set Dad apart was that he had to kill the first in order to win the right to the second, but it all proved beyond him.

It couldn't be said he didn't try though. He left with my mother, leaving his own mother to hold him in her prayers and pray to God he not be led into temptation and that he be untouched by every evil. Some time later, in the Hotel Panorama in Pale, on a beautiful sunny Sunday, he begat me and believed I would save him, most of all from his weakness of character, his lack of steel and resolve, that I would free him from his need to make a decision because with the birth of a child his mother would finally understand that the devil hadn't entered his life, because you can't conceive a child with the devil.

Are you sure the boy's yours?
she asked. He'd barely set foot in the room.
Yes
, he replied, and turned and left. In that instant he believed in himself and not in her, but it was a tepid self-belief, not fiery or cold, and it dissipated before he understood that you don't give anyone an answer to those kinds of questions, not even your own mother, because the question isn't about anything to do with you – your child – the question is about you yourself. In any case, he went to see my mom, kissed her, and smiled, giving her a hug much too firm, one meant to conceal doubt, a doubt not easily concealed. Mom looked at him, shaken and speechless, she began to age, her love turning to hate.

I was a big tubby baby on white crocheted pillows, a raspberry mark on my left temple. The neighborhood women said
you must've had cravings for raspberries or strawberries while you were pregnant
. Astonished,
Mom conceded
yes, I did, I've always loved strawberries
, and the women nodded their heads and wanted her to feel guilty. In time the raspberry began to grow, and the doctors said it would cover my whole face unless removed, so for six months when I was two they injected saline solution in my temple. That pain remains the clearest memory in my life.

You think this isn't your son?
she yelled at Dad. My real grandpa and grandma were frozen in the next room.
I don't think that, God help me, I don't think that
, he replied and went again to his mother's. He came back with a year-old potted plant and said
this is for our apartment
, knowing full well that nothing would ever come of the apartment or the plant. My evil grandma had succeeded in seeing her will be done, but in hearing her prayers, God allowed himself a little joke: He didn't drive the she-devil from her son's life, but from the she-devil's life she drove her son, who, in but a fleeting second, had proven himself unworthy of fatherhood.

This is how it was to be: A God-fearing mother kept hold of her son, yet was forever punished by an unusual twist of fate. By the time I was just a year old my face was well defined – and I looked like my dad. The same head shape and forehead, the same chin, nose, and eyes, even my fingernails were the same shape; other children resemble their parents too but not to this extent, they don't just resemble one parent. Instead of my dad not being my dad, it was like my mom wasn't my mom, my face containing none of her beauty, not a single smile or gift. Back
then I took completely after him, and when Dad showed his mother my photos, she pursed her lips and fell into an even greater despair at fate's cruelty. She saw the resemblance in the child's photos, just as for a lifetime she'd recognized with horror who her son resembled: We were doubles of Grandpa Ðorđe, the man who had ruined her life. His image would now live on until her death and much longer besides, which only went to show that suffering is eternal, enduring even when those who would suffer are no longer around.

And what is it you want from me now?
she asked, handing him back the photos.
I would like you to see my son
, Dad replied.
I've seen him, and now what? . . . I want you to see him in real life, in this room
. She didn't say a thing, just looked at him hoping her silence spoke for itself, that he would get the message and know there were things you simply didn't say in God's presence, things requiring caution, which you were to only approach the way you would someone you loved. For her only a mother's love for her son was greater than God, and from her son she expected nothing less than that his love for her be greater than God.

You have to do this for me
, Dad tried to convince Mom. She lit her third cigarette even though two already burned in the ashtray.
You have to, after this everything will be different
. She didn't believe him, but at the same time she knew she'd have to accede, the strength of her resistance having no bearing on a decision made long ago. Yes, of course, she'll bathe her son, get him scrubbed up, make him the most beautiful little boy in the world, and take him to that woman who happens to be his
grandmother, as unbelievable as it seemed and regardless of it having been long clear there was no place for grandmothers and grandchildren in this story because it was a story that had ended long ago, in a time that had nothing to do with Mom, a time when the notes from that piano perhaps still resounded.

You're coming with us, right?
Dad turned to my grandma and grandpa. In her black Sunday best Grandma sighed like you sigh before starting a big job. Grandpa just shook his head:
I'm not going. If you ask me why I'm not going, I'd have to say I don't know, but I think I'm old enough to not do anything I don't want to. You're young, attend to it yourselves
. Although he probably didn't understand what old Franjo was telling him, Dad didn't insist, nor did he respond. In actual fact, he was probably a bit relieved. Better not to have witnesses like Grandpa in life if you're not prepared to man up, because they can destroy your entire world with a single wave of their hand. Grandpa could be gruff, and though everyone attributed it to his asthma, Dad suspected his gruffness was of a different kind, the gruffness of a man who didn't forgive others things he hadn't forgiven himself. Whatever went down in the room with the piano, it was better it happened without old Franjo.

I sat on my dad's knee. On their knees my grandma and my mom held little coffee cups with flowery saucers, the other grandma smiling from her armchair. The silence was much bigger than the room, bigger than the piano, and bigger than every silence the living are capable of keeping among themselves. Words came out without order or purpose.
I'm very glad to finally meet you
, said my grandma,
would you care for some rose jelly?
replied the other grandma, and then an age passed before anything else was said.
You have a beautiful grandson
, my grandma finally managed,
and why didn't your good husband come
, the one in the armchair volleyed back. No one knew how long this went on, but it went on all right. I eventually fell asleep looking at the cross above the doorway and the man pierced with nails, frightened because I didn't know who he was. In memory he became a symbol for that room, where only a piano, a cross, and a crone lived, my wrong grandma, who had never gotten up out of that armchair in all my life, so I didn't even know if she could walk.

I woke up in the car. Mom had me in her arms, Dad was driving, and my grandma was holding the handgrip, beating her big nose in the air to the rhythm of the road. Thinking I was asleep, they didn't talk. Mom tried to peek into a plastic bag holding something wrapped in white gift paper. The next fifteen minutes were the last hope for saving her marriage. When we'd left, my other grandma had jumped out of her armchair and said
I've got something for the little one, he's growing up now
, and taken a plastic bag from the fridge and given it to Mom. She looked like someone who had almost forgotten something really important. For Mom it was a small but endlessly important detail, a sign maybe all was not lost, that her mother-in-law's love had, in spite of herself, found a way to creep from the darkness and free itself from the chains in which it had been bound since the time the piano was still young.
In that fifteen minutes Mom forgave her everything, chiding herself her lack of compassion for the woman's misfortune, for having only thought of herself and the child who lay dozing in her lap, for never thinking how that woman had once, long ago, held such a child in her arms, totally devoid of hope in the man whom she loved.

Grandpa was waiting for us at the dining-room table. Old train timetables, beekeeping manuals, and a Hungarian dictionary lay strewn out before him, all to help pass the time quicker, so he wouldn't think so much about us or fall to his fears for the mission on which his wife and daughter had set out.
How was it?
he took his glasses off the moment we came in.
Let us catch our breath
, said Mom.
Now we'll see how it was
, said Grandma and reached for the plastic bag.
Wait!
Mom grabbed her hand.
Fine, I'm waiting
, said Grandma and put the bag down. Grandpa raised his eyebrows and went with the flow. This was unusual for him, but this was an unusual situation; everyone except me knew a life was splitting in two here, my mom's life for sure, but maybe another life was involved too, my life, which, truth be told, had just begun, so hadn't yet gotten that far.

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.

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.