Mama Leone (2 page)

The part of the story that follows I learned back then, from my mom, and it goes something like this. When he finished high school, the same one I'd attend fifty years later, my uncle got the draft. Because he spoke perfect German and had a German grandfather, they put him in a unit formally part of the Wehrmacht but made up of our people. They sent them to Slavonia in Croatia. My grandpa combed the city in a blind panic, badgering one acquaintance after another in one office after another, just trying to get his son out of the army. But of all his connections, only a Communist one proved any good. A friend, a manager in the railways and member of the resistance, told him how it could be arranged for M. to desert his unit and be taken in by Bosnian Partisans a couple of kilometers from his base. Grandpa was all for the idea, but when he relayed it to Grandma, she got scared. For a start she thought in his German uniform the Partisans would shoot her son on sight, and even if they didn't, he'd be sure to lose his head in a Partisan one. More to the point, she was of the view that he was safer being the enemy. Grandpa tried to persuade her, but it did no good. He hollered so loud the whole apartment shook, desperate because he himself wasn't sure what was best, but also because he was certain how it all might end, who had justice on their side, and who would win the war. Mom of course had no idea what all Grandpa's hollering was about, but I'm sure he hollered the exact same thing when I was just
a boy and he told me the story of the Second World War:
Hitler's an idiot. That's what I said right back in 1939. Idiots lose wars, but they kill more people than you could ever imagine. And then that trash Paveli
ć
came along. He sent our kids to Stalingrad and turned them into criminals. He created a shitty little state dangling out a big Kraut ass. That was Paveli
ć
for you, and I knew that from the get-go, but that knowledge doesn't help you any, because it won't save your neck
. I think that was also about the gist of what he yelled at Grandma in the fall of 1971, when he again made the house shake and went as red in the face as the Party flag, and his lips went blue and Mom went up to him and shook him by the shoulders and said
Dad, calm down, calm down
. . . But he wouldn't calm down, he just went on, hollering about Maks Luburi
ć
, who cooked people in boiling water and in March 1945 skinned Grandpa's railwayman friend alive in the house of horror in Skenderija. Then Mom started crying, imploring
Daddy, sweetheart, please stop, for God's sake, I beg of you
. . . Suddenly he calmed down, not for God's sake, but because of her tears. He put a funny face on and said
let us alone you silly woman, can't you see we're talking about men's stuff
. Then he turned to me and whispered
politics isn't for women. They just start bawling. Golda Meir is the exception
. Back then I didn't know Grandpa had tricked me, that he'd actually told me another story, not the one I thought he was telling me. Mom didn't bawl like other women when politics came up. That I know from when I found the box.

Anyway, when Grandpa was done yelling at Grandma, having failed
to convince her to go along with the Partisan plan, which she steadfastly rejected, Grandpa started living months of his own private hell. He'd wake at night, bathed in sweat, with a single recurring thought: that M. wasn't coming home, and that if he did, the sum of Paveli
ć
's and Hitler's crimes would be on his conscience. Grandma was only worried about one thing: that her son stayed alive, the how was no matter. It was in those months she started praying to God.

How they took the news of Uncle's death, whether they cried, yelled, screamed, or just absorbed it in silence, I'll never know. A few months after the liberation of Sarajevo four young guys in Partisan uniforms showed up on their doorstep. Grandma cried, Grandpa held his face in his hands to keep it from crumbling like a ceramic mask. One of the young guys put his hand on Grandma's shoulder and said
don't cry, madam. You've got another child. Look at your little girl. M. talked about his baby sister every day
. My mom, a blond baroque angel, sat on her potty in the corner.

Seven days after my uncle's death, the unit in which he'd been stationed deserted in its entirety and went over to the Partisans. To that point M. had been their only casualty. At war's end three more lay dead. But they were no longer the enemy.

Grandpa and Grandma lived together for a full thirty years after the death of their son, never speaking of him. They held their silence in front of others and probably held it between themselves. Don't expect me to be so banal as to say I know Grandma blamed herself for her son's death. She never once set foot in a church again, she forgot Christmas
and Easter, and only once a year did Grandpa put on his best suit and head to Sarajevo Cathedral for midnight mass. He didn't have much of an ear, but he liked singing the songs heralding the birth of the eternal child.

Grandma didn't decide that God doesn't exist, more that he just had nothing to do with her. She stopped believing in him even if he did exist. Grandpa died in 1972, and Grandma began her dying in the early spring of 1986. She had throat cancer and it got harder and harder for her to breathe. Sometimes she'd call me by M.'s name. They were little slips and I didn't call her on them. Or maybe they weren't little slips at all. By that time I was her only surviving son.

At the beginning of June, an ambulance came and took her to the hospital to die. They cut her throat open, but she still couldn't breathe. She fixed her gaze straight ahead and set her hands together. I smiled like it was all no big thing and that she'd be better tomorrow. But I knew exactly what was going down. Death came slyly and unfairly. It grabbed my grandma by the throat and shook everything left out of her. What was left was the memory of her son. She died during the night of the fifth of June.

Like all old folk, she'd talked about her funeral while still in good health. Under no circumstances whatsoever did she want her photograph to appear in her obituary, over her dead body. But she didn't mention anything about a priest. No one had asked of course. That would have been stupid.

Over her dead body, we got a priest and paid for a memorial service.
I can't explain why to you. Maybe so that God, if he exists, smartens up his act. That's how a friend of Grandma's put it.

I never even visited her grave come All Saints' Day. I can't tell you why. I just didn't ever feel like it. I was sorry she'd died, particularly in such a terrible way; I guess I thought visiting the grave would be to honor such a death. A few days before this most recent war, my friend Ahmed's father died. On my way back from the janazah, instead of heading for the exit gate I decided to take a walk over to the Catholic plots. On the tombstone under which my grandpa and grandma were buried, a huge black dog lay sprawled out in the sun. I sat down beside him, and he lifted his head lazily, looking at me with half-closed eyes. I'd long since stopped caring that no one had believed my first insight and first memory, the one of a dog barking in the hall of the maternity ward the moment before I let out my first scream.
You're the angel, aren't you?
He wagged his tail on the marble a couple of times and sunk back into sleep. My hand followed him.

Through the summer and fall Grandpa recited his last words and got ready to die. To Isak Sokolovski, his Preference partner, he said
I know every card and that's why I'm leaving
. He spun his hat on his index finger, cleared his throat for the last time in Isak's life, and left. To Grandma he said
you sleep, I'm fine. I've been fine for some time now
. She was sleepless until the day he died. To Mom he said
there's no one left. Just the two of us and the darkness
. And then he died. Mom closed his eyes and wrote the words down on a box of laxatives. I was at the seaside at the time, with my auntie Lola, Grandma's sister. I marked the date in the calendar with a little cross. So people would know my grandpa had died. Actually, no, I did it so they'd know I knew my grandpa was dead.

That day Auntie Lola baked some cakes, put a plateful in front of
me, sat down across from me, and placing her elbows on the table said
eat up, little man
. I ate, scared she was going to tell me Grandpa had died. I didn't know how I was supposed to react. Was I supposed to stop eating cakes, burst into tears, ask how he died, shake my head, and say
tsk-tsk-tsk
like I saw Granny Matija from Punta doing the time I peeked out from the pantry, or was I supposed to do something else, something I didn't even know about. I'm only six years old and don't have any experience with the rituals of death. I ate a plateful of cakes and got a tummy ache. I climbed into bed, the blinds were down so it looked like it was dark. I flew a plane through the darkness. I didn't do the
brmm brmm brmm
because the plane was supersonic so you couldn't hear it, but eavesdropped on what Auntie Lola told the neighbors gathered in the kitchen with their gifts of coffee, bottles of rakia, and something else I couldn't see.
The good Signore Fran suffered so, may God rest his soul
, said Ante Pudin.
He's at peace now, but who knows what awaits the rest of us
, said Uncle Kruno, a retired admiral.
The little one might as well be an orphan now; parents today, God save us. Whatever he learned, he learned from his grandpa
, said Auntie Lola. My tummy still hurt. I shut my eyes tight, farted, and fell asleep.

Seven days later, Mom and Grandma arrived from Sarajevo, head to toe in black. I pretended this was normal. They pretended it was too. I was scared Mom was going to start talking about it so kept out of her way. I knew Grandma wouldn't say anything. She wasn't one for starting conversation; she'd leave it up to me and then join in. It was like
she kept quiet about things I didn't want to talk or hear about. There was nothing to say about Grandpa's death, just as there's nothing to say about anyone's death. I had no idea death was a widespread occurrence, that grown-ups talked about it all the time.

Between thunderclaps of his rasping asthmatic cough, Grandpa would every morning repeat
sweet, sweet death
and Grandma would say
zip it Franjo, I'll go before you do
, and so it went every day. I thought other people didn't go on like this, just the two of them, that they were special people because they were my grandma and grandpa, and that everyone else was just a puppet in a puppet theater. When Grandpa died it turned out Grandma was a pretender. I thought she should be ashamed of herself because she'd done something bad. She'd said she would go before him, but now he was dead. You don't really die of your own choosing, but it does have something to do with you, so you shouldn't say you're going to die before someone else if you're not. Later on I forgot about Grandma's shame. Probably because it didn't seem like she was ashamed.

Once we went to visit Auntie Mina in Dubrovnik. Mom said
I don't know if the little fella knows
. I was playing with the garden gnomes and making like I didn't hear anything. Auntie Mina looked at me in silence. She would've loved to ask me if I knew about my grandpa's death, but didn't dare. You don't ask kids those kinds of questions.
The poor old boy peed his soul out
, Mom told Auntie Mina.
The hospital botched the treatment plan. They shouldn't have given him the laxatives. His heart turned into
a rag, into an old scrap of a rag for washing the floor
. The gnome gave me the evil eye. I felt lost in this terrifying world. So it is, fairy tales don't lie after all: my grandpa died without a heart, in its place was a dirty, ugly, smelly square rag like the one we kept next to the toilet seat. I wanted to howl for the horror of it all, but couldn't.

From that day on, whenever I'd go pee, I was scared I was going to pee my soul out. I watched the jet stream, white or yellow, or really yellow when I was sick. I didn't know what a soul looked like, but I was sure I'd recognize it if it whizzed out. Days went by and it still didn't show. Then months. I asked Grandma what a soul looked like. She said a soul doesn't look like anything, that it was just a word for something you couldn't see.
Can you poop your soul out?
I asked, trying to find out what I wanted to know, but trying to hide where all this was coming from, to avoid admitting I knew Grandpa was dead and any opportunity for her to mention it.
What do you mean can you poop your soul out?
she asked, nonplussed.
I mean, when you poop your soul out and die, so you don't exist anymore
, I said like it was common knowledge and highly unusual that she didn't know anything about it.
You mean, can someone die on the toilet? I think you can, but people don't usually die there . . . Where do people usually die? . . . In bed or traffic accidents, or they die in war or earthquakes . . . And the soul, what happens to the soul? . . . Nothing, the soul disappears . . . How can something that exists disappear? . . . Just like jam, it gets used up and disappears . . . Does the soul disappear inside you or go outside and then disappear? . . . Where would it go, it doesn't have
anywhere to go, it's not like a dog being let out. It disappears, ceases to exist, end of story . . . So all in all, you can't poop your soul out? . . . Not a chance, I don't know where you got that idea from
.

This set my mind at ease some. I peed fearlessly and didn't bother looking at the whiz anymore. If you can't poop your soul out then you can't pee it out either. Mom had been talking nonsense to Auntie Mina.

Six months after Grandpa's death, Grandma and Mom suddenly stopped wearing black. It was a Sunday, Uncle and Dad had come over. The table was set with a fancy white tablecloth, like it was someone's birthday or someone was getting married.
Today we remember Grandpa
, Uncle said. I pretended this was normal, like I didn't remember him every day. Maybe I lie when I play Ustashas and Partisans by myself because I'm not a Ustasha or a Partisan and because one person can't be two people at the same time, but they lie worse when they remember Grandpa today, getting out the special plates, cutlery, and glasses, walking around the house in their ties, not taking off their shoes when they come in, doing all the things they never otherwise do and lying that they don't remember him every day. How could they not remember him when he was here all the time, when it was just recently and they haven't forgotten anything, and his umbrella is still there by the coatrack. I was scared of their lies. The lie is alive, I thought. It swallows things up and makes everything different from what it is.