Mama Leone (30 page)

The voice from the loudspeaker announced the flight and Osman thought:
time to go, beautiful
. The redhead opened her eyes, catching his glance with her green eyes and reaching for her little suitcase. If she'd only known what he was thinking she'd have said something reproving, but she didn't say anything, she just left. Though he didn't need it anymore Osman took out his passport, and then his plane ticket; the most important stage in his journey was over. Everything that happened from now on would be just the orderly closure of duties life had set down for him.

His dead father was waiting for him in Zenica. He was laid out on the red floor of the house, surrounded by women with their heads covered, all kneeling, quietly speaking the words of a prayer. Osman stopped and immediately wanted to take a step backward, but he thought:
hey, c'mon, that's my father, I'm his son
, and he moved forward. The women
didn't interrupt their prayer,
I can't go in now
, he stepped back, banging into the door, a whispered
sorry
escaping his lips. Luckily there was no one there except his dead father and the women at prayer, and perhaps God.

Without tears he buried his father. He lowered the coffin into the grave with the hand closest to his heart, trying to remain as invisible as possible as the priest bade farewell to the deceased. Later a few people he didn't know offered him their hands and left without having looked him in the eye. He returned again to his father's house, which smelled of winter, old shoes, and Preference cards. He sat on the sofa, held his face in his hands, and long and slow dragged his fingers down toward his chin. When his middle fingers made it to the jawline, it was all over.

He locked the house and left the keys with a neighbor. The house needed to be sold, but he didn't know how you went about this sort of thing anymore, and didn't actually care about the money. He couldn't go back to Alabama with money in his pocket. If he'd already renounced his former life, he couldn't now return to his new one with earnings from his father's death. Hamid, the neighbor, asked what he was supposed to be guarding the house from, and until when. Osman said he didn't know, Hamid shrugged his shoulders. There was nothing much to be said or debated; silence is probably best when you don't know what more to say.

Passing by the stadium Osman heard the voices from the bingo hall. There was a time when the Zenica bingo hall was the biggest in Yugoslavia.
Every first of the month the miners and railway workers would come and burn through their pay packets in a matter of hours. Osman went in and bought three cards: one for him, one for the redhead, and one for fate. He ordered a double rakia, sat at a table, took out a pen, and rolled up the sleeves of his suit jacket. If one of the three cards comes up trumps, he'll tear up his plane ticket, throw his passport in the Bosna, and go back to Sarajevo and find the redhead. He'll never think of his brother and Mary Kentucky again. That's what he decided, convinced it was his human and divine right, that no one could stop him and that he wasn't doing anything wrong because it was all up to chance, and chance is neither good nor evil, chance can't put you in the dock, just like no one can indict a man who accidentally gets in the way of a bullet, leaving behind a widow and three kids.

The fatso caller drew the balls from the barrel and read out the numbers. Osman's own card and the card of fate remained unmarked, but the redhead's numbers kept coming up. Osman felt a booming in his head, the kind of excitement you feel before a final spectacular jump, he was already in love, the redhead wasn't only the most beautiful woman in the airport waiting area, now she was his. He imagined his arrival in Sarajevo, knocking on her door and their embrace, one she would welcome as perfectly normal, because without a word or a memory she would know who he was, why he had come, and what he was meant to be in her life. He'd crossed all the numbers on her card bar one, but the caller didn't call it out. The next one wasn't hers
either, nor the one after that, nor the third, fourth, fifth, six, or seventh. . . Osman reconciled himself to his bad luck as fast as he had accepted the good, the excitement disappearing from his stomach, which was already stone cold, like it had been over his father's grave. He waited for someone to finally shout
bingo!

Bingo!
shouted an old man in a beret who looked like Zaim Muzaferija and got up to meet fatso, the caller.
Congratulations Mustafa
, with a hearty swing fatso shook the old man's hand. The old man smiled sheepishly as if his luck had all been a set-up. Osman crumpled the card up and stuffed it in his jacket pocket.

Darkness had already fallen over Zenica. He headed toward the bus station kicking a can in front of him. The can rang hollow on the asphalt, and Osman felt like a fifteen-year-old who still believed it was possible to cheat his own life but couldn't remember how. Maybe a man needs to be careful not to let life cheat him. What would happen, for example, if tomorrow – actually, the day after tomorrow – he turned up at Mary Kentucky's house and caught her in bed with Omer.

If it were possible to believe something like that, if only for a moment, a moment as fleeting as the flap of a hummingbird's wings, Osman would never return to Alabama. But as things stood, his brother's present was going to be a marked card from the Zenica bingo hall with just one number missing, an inconspicuous seven that Osman will remember for just a short time, before it disappears along with the flame that burns and leaves no trace.

Vukota remembers his grandma Rina only vaguely, if he indeed remembers her at all and his memories aren't just from his mother's stories. The first image is of Grandma warming herself in front of a grand wood burner, her palms outstretched toward the fire, a glimmering white cap on her head, the kind he had only seen in cartoons, on Olive Oyl's head from the Popeye cartoon when she went to bed. In the second Grandma Rina is holding a candlestick holder, wiping the dust from it, her fingers trembling, flitting about as if each were soon to turn into a sparrow and disappear beneath the high ceiling of the living room. In the third Grandma is furious, her little cap now crooked, and she's yelling, barely audibly, if as someone has muffled her every word with a mountain of feathers.
In my time a man and woman met under a
canopy, not under the covers
. That was it, that was the sum of what he knew about his grandma Rina, she had died when he was three, and he had almost never thought of her until the summer of 1992, when the first Jewish convoys left the city, and Vukota remembered that Grandma Rina had been a Jew, and so that made him a Jew too, and under the terms of a new agreement he could leave this war behind.

His mother looked at him, pale and empty, and said
you've got to be kidding, what do you know about all that
. His father, Savo, just shrugged his shoulders, lit one cigarette after the other, and shut up, nothing to say since the first grenades had weaned him off the habit of starting every sentence with “we Serbs.”
I don't know anything, but I'm going to Israel
, Vukota replied, his thoughts wandering back to the three images of Grandma Rina, now certain he'd be able to see something, decipher something that had hitherto remained hidden, something that would turn him – who had never been anything – into a Jew.

I am the grandson of Rina Mantova
, he said, holding up a yellowed card with his grandma's picture on it. In different circumstances a membership card for La Benevolencija wouldn't have cut it as proof of Vukota's ancestry, but in the mayhem of the present, the people at the Jewish Community offices weren't particularly interested in who was a Jew and who wasn't. They put everyone who registered on their lists. As soon as they got out of the city, people would have to settle questions of their Jewishness on their own, there could be no harm done. They had saved lives, and there's no deception involved there.

When the bus arrived in Makarska, Vukota asked
and how are we going to get to Israel?
Mr. Levi was surprised:
you really want to go to Israel? . . . Well, I don't know where else I'd go
. Vukota didn't want to go to America or Canada; he was afraid of a life among strangers, and if Grandma Rina had been a Jew, then presumably there was something Jewish in him, something that might burgeon and bloom in Israel, magically making a real Jew of him, at home in his own skin among the locals. When you leave home, you have to be something, you need a document and a name on it to protect you. At home you could be Nothing, now you have to become Something. Vukota was worried he lacked the talent for being Something. If alongside his father, Savo, he didn't know how to be a Serb, perhaps he was incapable of being anything except Vukota, and if he was just Vukota, then it was curtains for him.

He arrived in Israel two months later. At the airport a pair in uniform came out to meet him, escorting him to a third uniform who interrogated him and certified he wasn't dangerous. This uniform passed him over to a fourth who gave Vukota a five-minute lecture on the State of Israel, handed him a key, an ID card, and a check to get him through the next month or so.
Welcome, get yourself sorted
, he said, placed his hand on Vukota's shoulder, and sent him out into the world.

I can sing and play a bit of guitar
, he told Albert, who on the second day after his arrival had already asked when Vukota intended to get a job. Albert was from Zrenjanin and had been there three months. Vukota had been assigned to him as a roommate and Albert was supposed
to assist with his socialization in their free time.
That won't help you none here. You know how to do anything else? . . . Maybe I'd be okay as a waiter . . . Be a waiter then, but get down to it on the double. That's my advice to you. Otherwise it's curtains for you
.

Vukota spent weeks trying to find a job waiting tables, but at the time no one seemed to need staff. Albert grinned,
ha, you Bosnians
, making life even tougher. When Albert was around, Vukota couldn't forget for a minute that he was on the edge of destitution, that little by little the ground was being pulled out from under him, the day not far off when he wouldn't even be able to buy food. He wasn't capable of becoming a waiter, but worse still, he hadn't even become a Jew, or he had never been that for longer than the moment it had first occurred to him that Grandma Rina might save his neck. In any case, Albert's
ha, you Bosnians
, already sounded like a grenade exploding in the distance, and with every new
ha, you Bosnians
, it drew ever closer and louder. One day it would go off right here, beside him, and that
ha, you Bosnians
, would then require an appropriate response. And what might an appropriate response be? Vukota didn't know, except that if there wasn't one, he increasingly had the feeling he'd rather smack Albert's ears than find a million dollars in the street.

This could be something for you
, Albert put the newspaper down in front of him. It was open to the Help Wanted page, there was an ad, something about a musical comedy, a film studio looking for young men and women who could sing, preferably from Eastern Europe.
Vukota silently took down the number, making out like he didn't care, while in reality his every muscle was dancing with joy. He hadn't even called and was already imagining himself pulling up in front of the Hilton in a sporty Mercedes, making his way through a cordon of chicks who were passing out all over the place, like young birches felled by Jehovah's breeze. Then he'd come visit Albert in this dank room, take a fat wad of dollar bills from his pocket, slap him on the forehead with it, and say,
ha, we Bosnians
.

The voice at the other end of the line had already picked up, and Vukota hadn't even got around to being surprised with himself because, hell, for the first time in his life he'd become something, and it was because of Albert; in a fleeting flight of fancy he'd become the worst a man anywhere on the face of the earth could be – he'd become a Bosnian, he'd become
we Bosnians
. Luckily he wasn't aware of it, and calmly answered their questions: yes, he's from Eastern Europe, from Bosnia and Herzegovina, you know, a country in Eastern Europe; yes, he was an excellent singer, he used to have his own band, what do you mean where did he have a band? Eastern Europe of course; it was a punk band, but he knows how to sing Bosnian songs too, no problem at all . . .

A few hundred guys and girls were there waiting outside this upholstered green door. Everyone was given a number and got called in according to some system, at first one at a time, and then someone worked it out that the audition would never end, so they started going in five at a time. Listen to those numbers will you, the number 676
surreal to Vukota, all of a sudden everything seemed different from how he had imagined. Instead of hustling his way to becoming a Jew, he had hustled his way to a number.

Fourteen hours later, a fat black-haired secretary squawked in English:
675 to 679, if you don't get in here now, you've missed your chance
. He pushed his way to the door, holding his number victoriously above his head. Three guys went in with Vukota, two of them were Russians, no doubt about it, the other one looked like a Romanian, and then there was a girl who was really tall, blond hair and blue eyes like in that story by Isak Samokovlija. At a table sat three men, the one in the middle looked like the director because he was wearing glasses like Steven Spielberg's, at least that's how it seemed to Vukota. The director pointed to five chairs, they sat down, he looked at them, rolled his eyes, the fat secretary squawked
break time!
Vukota started to stand up,
sit down!
Vukota sat back down. The director and his assistants headed out the back door. The fat secretary followed them.