Читать книгу Baba Yaga Laid an Egg - Dubravka Ugrešić - Страница 20

‘I can hardly wait for you to come to Zagreb and tell me all about how it was in Varna! I can hardly wait,’ she repeated excitedly during every phone conversation. I could recognise in her voice the routine excitement she always expressed the same way: I can hardly wait.

I rehearsed versions of my report in my mind. Maybe it would be better to tell her I had stayed in Varna for two days, that the weather had been bad, which was true, and that I had hardly seen anything. Or should I tell her that with the help of a kind Varna policeman I had been able to locate her Petya, who looked well, beautiful in fact, had sent her regards, but, unfortunately, couldn’t write, because she was having difficulties writing. Her son, Kostya, who, by the way, had stopped drinking, was looking after her with genuine devotion. And Varna, Varna was so wonderful, but I hadn’t brought her any pictures because I pressed the wrong button on that new digital camera.

‘I don’t recognise anything here,’ she said, peering at the images on my computer screen. ‘Is that Varna?’

She was surprisingly cool and collected. Of the wall that separated the school yard from the street, she said, ‘No, that wall wasn’t there before. Something new.’

Amazingly she was not as disappointed by the grey scenes of the city beach as I had been.

‘That city beach was never very nice. Do you remember how we always preferred to go to Asparuhovo and Galata? The water was cleaner there.’

When I next visited I urged her to look at the photographs again. She seemed to have forgotten she’d seen them the first time. Her comments were identical, and her indifference troubled me. I had not received the anticipated ‘payment’ for my service as a bedel, the emotional reciprocation from her end. Then again, maybe I hadn’t deserved it. I had clearly done the job badly. I had brought back nothing from my pilgrimage, and received nothing in return. I can’t tell whether she had erased the Varna file in her memory, or had saved it somewhere else, but I was sure that neither she nor I would be opening it again any time soon.

This time I noticed that she had changed the way she walked. She was trying to stand a little straighter when she pushed her walker, and to lift her feet a little more with each step.

‘That is what Jasminka told me, to lift my feet.’

Jasminka was her physiotherapist.

We went, as usual, to her favourite café at the marketplace for coffee. She went in with the walker, stubbornly refusing to leave it outside (I don’t want anyone stealing it!). People had to get up and move their chairs to let her pass. I think she was not unaware that her arrival at the café with the walker was causing a fuss.

‘When you aren’t here with me, the waiters lend me a hand. They are all very, very kind. People are generally very kind, especially when they see me with the walker,’ she said.

She always ordered the same thing, a cappuccino, and Kaia or I would bring her a cheese turnover, a triangular piece of pastry, from the shop two steps down from the café. Without her ritual turnover and the cappuccino, the day wouldn’t function. If the weather was bad and she couldn’t go out herself, someone else would bring the turnover, and the cappuccino would be made at home.

After she sat for a bit, she had to go to the bathroom. She came back from the bathroom upset.

‘How could that happen to me! The prettiest little old lady in the neighbourhood!’ she grumbled.

She refused to wear the incontinence pads with the same obstinacy that she refused to wear flat-heeled orthopaedic shoes for the elderly (I can’t bear them! I have always worn heels!). Someone had told her she was the prettiest little old lady in the neighbourhood. A year earlier she would have been insulted by a similar sentiment, but now she was pleased to say it over and over: Everyone says I am the prettiest little old lady in the neighbourhood! It is true that she said it with a hint of irony. She used the phrase as an apology for her clumsiness and as a request to respect her ‘exceptional’ age. The incontinence was the worst insult her body had come up with for her. And she was irked by her forgetfulness (No, I did not forgot!) yet ultimately she relented (Maybe I forgot after all?) and finally she made her peace with it (It is hardly surprising that I forget things nowadays. I’m eighty years old, you know!).

‘If this happens again, I’ll kill myself straight away,’ she said, indirectly asking me to say something to console her.

‘It’s perfectly normal for your age! Look on the bright side. You are over eighty, you are up and about, you are in no pain, you live in your own home, you go out every day and you socialise. Your best friend, with whom you drink coffee every day, is ten years younger than you. Jasminka visits you three times a week. Kaia brings you breakfast, lunch and dinner every day, and she is an excellent cook and keeps you on schedule with your medical check-ups. Your doctor is only five minutes’ walk from your house, your grandchildren visit you regularly and love you, and I come to see you all the time,’ I recited.

‘If I could only read,’ she sighed, although she had little patience for reading any more, aside from leafing through newspapers.

‘Well, you can read, though, it’s true, with difficulty.’

‘If only I could read my Tessa one more time.’

She was referring to Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

‘As soon as you decide, we’ll go ahead with the operation. It is a breeze to remove age-related cataracts.’

‘At my age nothing is easy.’

‘I said a breeze, not easy. Do you want me to buy you a magnifying glass?’

‘Who could stand reading with a magnifying glass?!’

‘Do you want me to read you Tess out loud? A chapter a day?’

‘It’s not as nice when someone else reads to you as when you read for yourself.’

She responded to all my attempts to cheer her up with obstinate childish baulking. She’d give way for a moment (Maybe you’re right), but the next instant she would clutch at some new detail (Ah, everything would be different if I could only walk a little faster!).

‘I have changed so much. I barely recognise myself.’

‘What are you saying? You haven’t a single wrinkle on your forehead.’

‘Maybe so, but the skin sags on my neck.’

‘The wrinkles on your face are so fine they are barely visible.’

‘Maybe, but my back is so hunched.’

‘You’ve kept your slender figure.’

‘My belly sticks out.’ she complained.

‘Sure, a little, but nobody notices,’ I consoled her.

‘I have changed. I barely recognise myself.’

‘Can you think of anyone your age who hasn’t changed?’

‘Well, now that you ask,’ she’d relent.

‘What were you expecting?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Your beloved Ava Gardner, for instance.’

‘Ava was the most beautiful woman in the world!’ she said firmly, but with a hint of melancholy, as if she had been speaking of herself.

‘Ava died at the age of sixty-eight.’

‘You’re kidding!’

‘No, really, she had a stroke. Half of her face was paralysed. Near the end of her life she was penniless, so Frank Sinatra paid for her medical expenses.’

‘She? Broke!? I can’t believe it.’

‘Yes, she moved from the States to London. She was isolated there, she was probably no longer able to earn anything. Her last words to her servant Carmen were: “I am tired,”’ I said. ‘Story has it that Frank Sinatra locked himself up in his room for two days when he heard that Ava had died. They say he sobbed uncontrollably.’

‘Well, and so he should have!’ she said. ‘Such a little man, nothing much to look at, scrawny, a shrimp. Next to her he looked like a frog!’

‘What about Mickey Rooney?’

‘Why Mickey Rooney?’

‘Well, he was her first husband.’

‘Well, that Rooney was a shrimp too! Such an exquisite woman and around her she had only dwarves.’

‘Ava was only four years older than you.’

‘Ava was the most beautiful woman in the world!’ she repeated, ignoring the comment about the difference in their ages.

‘Take, for instance, Audrey Hepburn.’

‘That little woman? The skinny one?’

‘Yes. She died at sixty-four.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘And Ingrid Bergman?’

‘What about Ingrid Bergman?’

‘She died when she was sixty-seven.’

‘She was a little clumsy, but still exquisite.’

‘What about Marilyn Monroe? Marilyn was a twomonth- old baby when you were born! And she died at thirty-six!’

‘Marilyn was my age?’

‘Your generation! You were both born in 1926!’

It seemed that the fact that she shared her year of birth with Marilyn Monroe left her cold.

‘What about Elizabeth Taylor?’ she asked.

‘She just celebrated her seventy-fifth. They wrote about it the other day in the papers.’

‘I can’t believe Liz is younger than me.’

‘A full six years!’

‘She, too, was a beautiful woman,’ she said. ‘There aren’t any more like her today.’

‘You should see her now!’

‘Why?’

‘They took a picture of her in her wheelchair for her birthday.’

‘How much older am I?’

‘Six years.’

‘Five and a half,’ she corrected me.

‘Just think how many operations she had,’ I added.

‘She had trouble with her spine.’

‘And alcohol, then those unhappy marriages.’

‘How many times was she married?’

‘Nine. When they reported her birthday celebration they said she may marry a tenth time.’

Mum grinned.

‘Hats off to her!’

At last we were talking. We chatted about Liz as if we were two good friends chatting about a third. I’m supposing that Mum was pleased to hear all that information. Liz was seventy- five and had her picture taken in a wheelchair. Mum would be turning eighty-one in another month or so, and she was not in a wheelchair. She wasn’t even fat.

‘I suppose beauty and fame don’t mean a thing,’ she said, relieved.

The expression on her face suggested that this time she was satisfied with the balance in her life.

‘Do you know what Bette Davis said?’

‘What?’

‘That old age is no place for sissies.’

‘Well, it isn’t,’ she said, heartened for a moment.

She often thought of herself as younger than she was. Once when she slid like this into a different, younger age, she addressed me as ‘Grandma’.

‘What, are you asleep, Grandma?’

She slid back and forth in time. She no longer knew exactly when different things happened. She would have been happiest to stay in her childhood, not because she thought of those years as the brightest period of her biography, but because her feelings in that period were ‘safe’, long since formulated, sealed, related many times over, chosen to be a repertoire which she was always able to offer her listeners. She retold the little events and details from her childhood in the same way, with the same vocabulary, ending with the same points or more often with the same absence of a point. It was a sealed repertoire which could no longer be corrected or changed, at least that was the way it seemed, and at the same time it was her only firm temporal coordinate. Sometimes, it’s true, harsh images would surface which I was hearing for the first time.

‘I was always afraid of snakes.’

‘Why?’

‘Once we went on an excursion to a wood and stumbled on a big old snake. Dad killed it.’

‘I hope it wasn’t poisonous!’

‘It was a price snake.’

‘You mean a dice snake?’

‘Yes, it was a big bad old snake and Dad killed it.’

She used to call my father, her husband, Dad, while she usually referred to her own father as Grandpa. Now she was using Dad to refer to her father.

Three years had passed since she’d been given the ‘ugly diagnosis’. Would there be another year? Two? Five? Bartering with death suited her (If I could just stick around for my grandson’s birth! If I could see my grandson start first grade! If I only have the chance to see my granddaughter start school!). There was one thing for certain: she had taken care of it all, wrapped everything up, everything was ‘neat and tidy’, it was ready. She sat in life as if she were in a clean, half-empty doctor’s waiting room: nothing hurt, nothing moved much, she was waiting to be summoned and it was as if she no longer cared when it would happen. All that mattered was her everyday rhythm: Kaia came over at 7:30 a. m., she ate her breakfast while watching the morning television programme Good Morning, Croatia, then she got dressed and went out to the café for her cappuccino and cheese turnover, her slow return home with little chats along the way with neighbours, then waiting for Kaia to bring her lunch at about 1:30 p. m., then an afternoon nap, then Kaia with her dinner at about 6:30 p. m., dining with her favourite television show, The Courtroom, and then the television news, then off to bed. Kaia came three times a day and went with her for the walk to the café where they had their coffee together. Jasminka came three times a week, helped her with little exercises and to bathe, neighbours dropped in every day, she saw her grandchildren once a week, usually on Sundays. I called her at least three times a week, and I often came to Zagreb, staying several days or more.

She was sleeping more than she used to. Sometimes she slept so soundly that she wasn’t even wakened by the phone ringing or my banging on the door. When she lay down she took the same pose as on her CAT scans, her head tilted a little forward. She lay there peacefully, relaxed, with a hint of a smile on her lips. Sitting in the armchair she would often dip into a brief, deep sleep as if slipping into a hot bath. I happened upon her when she was asleep, sitting in front of the blaring television, her head bare, duster in hand. Then she opened her eyes, slowly lifted the duster, a small brush on a long handle around which she’d wrapped a soft rag, and wiped the television screen clean of dust. Then, spotting a smudge on the floor, she got up and slowly, shuffling, she went to the bathroom, moistened the rag, wrapped it around the brush, went back and sat down in the armchair again, and from there she wiped up the smudge.

‘Buy me those sphincters, they are the best,’ she’d say.

‘You must mean Swiffers, Mother.’

‘Yes, we’re out of them.’

I had been bringing her those boxes with the magical soft cloths, which were ‘death to dust’ (Those cloths are death to dust!). Shuffling around the house, she wielded the light plastic handle with a Swiffer cloth wrapped around the rec tangular base, and with slow movements she wiped the dust off the walls, the furniture, the floor. The bright sun shone through the lowered blinds and splashed the floor with golden specks. She stood there in the middle of the room sprinkled with shafts of sunlight, her hair cropped close to her shapely head, her pale face with slightly slanted light-brown eyes and her lips surprisingly still full, awash in the sun as if it were an abundance of gold coins. A million particles of dust were afloat in the air around her, shimmering. She’d wave the handle through the air to chase them away, but the golden particles remained. And then she’d sit in the chair again and sink back into sleep. The golden dust swam around her. Sitting like that under an array of sun specks, surrendered to sleep, she looked like an ancient slumbering goddess.

Once, when she started awake, she said, groggily,

‘Do you know what my mother once told me?’

‘What?’

‘That when she was giving birth to me there were three women standing there by her bed. Two were dressed in white, and the third was in black.’

‘Do you suppose those were the Fates who determine your destiny?’ I asked, cautiously.

‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘Most likely mother was suffering from the labour and hallucinated them. Two in white, one in black,’ she mumbled, and sank back to sleep.

During those fifteen days in March 2007, the sunrise was so lavish and bright that we had to lower the blinds every morning. The air had the smell of spring. My mother’s balcony was neglected; the soil in the flower boxes was dry.

‘We should buy some fresh loam and plant some flowers,’ I said.

‘We will be the first to have flowers in our building!’

‘Yes, the first.’

‘Yes, pelargoniums.’

Sparrows settled onto the balcony railing. That was a good sign; Mother was convinced that this year there wouldn’t be a swarm of starlings.

‘Those pests are gone,’ she said.

‘Which pests?’

‘You know, the darlings!’

‘Starlings are birds, darlings are your grandchildren.’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘What did you say?’

‘That the pests are gone.’

Then she added, with an air of mystery,

‘As they came, so they went away.’