Читать книгу Baba Yaga Laid an Egg - Dubravka Ugrešić - Страница 9

She often phoned the ‘old witch’, especially now that she was no longer able to go and visit her. Pupa was my mother’s oldest friend not only in terms of age, but in how long the two had known each other.

‘If it weren’t for the old witch, you wouldn’t be here today,’ Mum would say and repeat the family legend about how Pupa, as a newly minted resident, assisted the obstetrician when my mother was in labour. (‘Lord, what a hideous child,’ Pupa said when they pulled you out. My heart sank with fright. But you weren’t at all ugly, that was just the old witch having a giggle!)

‘Ah, Pupa! Her life has not been easy,’ Mum would say, pensively.

Pupa had been in the resistance movement, she had joined Tito’s Partisans and fought in the Second World War. She went through all sorts of things; she nearly died several times, and was furious at her daughter, also a doctor, claiming that all her troubles were her daughter’s fault. Without her, the old witch groused, I would have died quite nicely long ago.

She weighed barely eighty pounds, walked only with a walker and was half-blind – she saw the world only in blurred contours. She lived alone, obstinately refusing to go into a home for the elderly or live with her daughter and her daughter’s family. Neither would she agree to having a paid helper live with her. There was nothing, it turns out, to which she would agree. So her daughter was forced to come by every day, and there was a cleaning lady, who she often replaced, who came daily. Pupa sat there in her flat, with her legs tucked into a huge furry boot, an electric leg warmer. Sometimes she would turn the television on and stare at the blurred images on the screen. And then she’d turn it off and sniff the air. Neighbours, ah, those damned neighbours were piping rotten gas into her flat again through the central heating system. That was her phrase, ‘rotten gas’, because the whole building stank of rot from it. She drove the cleaning lady to search every nook and cranny of the flat, to see if there wasn’t something decaying somewhere, a dead mouse, or food, but the cleaning lady swore there was nothing. Except for the rotten gas there was nothing else which troubled her life. The problem was her death: it simply wouldn’t come. If it had crawled in through the central heating system, she would have gladly given herself over to it. Death doesn’t smell. It is life that stinks. Life is shit!

She’d sit in an armchair with her feet tucked into the big fur boot, sniffing the air. In time the fur boot merged with her and became a natural extension of her body. With her closely cropped hair, a birdish, beak-like nose, she’d elegantly curve her long neck and direct her grey gaze at the visitor.

‘I have told her a hundred times, let me die,’ she’d say, heaping the blame on her daughter. That was her way of apologising for her condition.

‘Do you know what she has come up with now?’ Mum said in a lively tone as she hung up the phone.

‘What?’

‘Every day she orders pastries by phone from a local pastry shop. She has been eating five big slices of cream pie at a sitting.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘I suppose she thinks the sugar in her system will rocket off the charts and do her in.’

‘Surely she’s not thinking that. She must still remember something from her years as a doctor.’

‘I’m telling you, every day she eats slices of cream pie.’

‘So, how are her sugar levels?’

‘Nothing. Between five and six.’

‘Rotten luck.’

‘And she’s fired the cleaning lady.’

‘Why?’

‘Must be the lady wasn’t doing the job properly.’

‘How could Pupa tell, she’s half-blind!’

‘Good point. There, I wouldn’t have thought of that.’

Then she added gleefully, ‘As far as cleanliness goes, the old witch used to be worse than I was. I don’t remember anyone going into her house in their shoes. All of us were given rag pickers at the door.’

‘Rag slippers?’

‘Yes, I suppose the rag pickers have gone.’