‘Look what she gave me.’
‘Who?’
‘Why, Ala.’
She showed me two wooden combs with folklore motifs and a bottle of Roza rose liqueur. A little card dangled from the neck of the bottle on a golden ribbon, and on the card were the words:
‘Springtime is upon us, the trees are decked in tender young leaves, the fields are a riot of flowers, the nightingales are singing sweetly and amid it all, like Venus among her nymphs, the rose gardens glow the reddest of reds,’ I read out loud.
‘Why are you rolling your eyes?’ she asked.
‘I am not.’
‘That is just the way it used to be,’ she said, taking a staunchly defensive tone. ‘Roses bloomed everywhere. Your grandmother made special preserves every year from rose petals.’
In the wardrobe she kept several hand-embroidered tablecloths. They were gifts from her Bulgarian relatives and friends, and she knew precisely who had embroidered each one: Dia, Rajna, Zhana. The fabric had yellowed and was threadbare along the folds, but the tablecloths, in Mum’s opinion, were priceless.
‘Do you have any idea how many stitches there are here?’ she would ask me, and with solemn importance she would announce a random six-figure number she had plucked from the air.
For years she had an unsightly reproduction hanging on the wall showing an old man in Bulgarian folk costume, smoking a peasant pipe.
‘Throw that out, it’s awful,’ I’d tell her.
‘I am not letting go of the picture! It reminds me of Dad!’ she’d answer, meaning her own father. Grandpa didn’t look at all like the man in the picture. Later, in order to keep the picture from my grasp, she said that Dad (this time meaning my father) had bought her the picture during one of our summer visits to Varna. The picture was deteriorating. I finally used one of her sojourns in hospital to throw it out. She didn’t notice it was gone, or pretended not to.
She kept a wooden doll on her television set dressed in Bulgarian folk costume. The doll often toppled off the TV, but she insisted on keeping it there and nowhere else.
‘To remind me of Bulgaria,’ she said.
The Bulgarian woman had served a function far more important than the chance to speak Bulgarian now and then: she had painted the cupboard. The souvenirs, the ones that were supposed to remind my mother of Bulgaria, could not be compared to the thrill of the cupboard.
Her home had always been her kingdom. When I moved out of Zagreb I no longer had a flat of my own there. Whenever I came back, I stayed with her. More than anything she loved having people visit, yet when they left she would mutter about how they had littered the place with unrinsed coffee cups. She adored her grandchildren, her eyes would well with tears at the mere mention of their names, but after they left she would moan about how long it would take her to get the flat back into order. Whenever I left the country, I would leave some of my things, mostly clothing, there with her. She let me leave only clothes. With time I noticed that even the clothes were disappearing. It turned out she’d given my coat away to a neighbour, a jacket to another, shoes to a third.
‘You didn’t need them any more, and people here haven’t money for nice things,’ she protested.
It wasn’t the things I cared about, it was her obsessive cleaning that bothered me, her maniac insistence that she could not permit anything in her territory which was not to her liking and was not her choice, which was, after all, the real reason why she was so generous in giving my things away.
If I bought a newspaper in the morning it would be gone by afternoon.
‘I lent your paper to Marta, my neighbour. She hasn’t the money to buy a paper. She’ll bring it back. But you’d read it already, anyway.’
When I bought myself food it, too, would end up at the neighbour’s.
‘That cheese you bought – didn’t suit me,’ she’d say. ‘I gave it to Marta’s sister.’
‘And the biscuits?’
‘I tossed them out. They were nasty, the look and the taste.’
She would object if I ever hung any of my clothes in her wardrobe. She left the bottom-most shelf in the shoe cabinet for my shoes. My things in the bathroom took up only a small corner, and she’d immediately protest if by any chance my things mingled with hers.
‘I haven’t touched a thing since you left. Everything is where it is supposed to be!’ were her first words to me whenever I came back.
This only meant that she had fought off the urge to tidy up and put everything in order.
I came often. She couldn’t spend her summer alone, or her Christmas holidays, or, of course, her birthday.
‘You’ll be here for my birthday, won’t you?’
Ever since she’d got sick I came more often and stayed longer. Each time I arrived I could see her beaming with genuine delight. Tears would fill her eyes when I left as if these were our very last goodbyes. But as soon as I was out the door, I knew she would head straight for the broom cupboard, roll the Hoover out, hoover ‘my’ room, put everything back where it was supposed to be, go to the bathroom, take all ‘my’ bits and pieces, the toothbrush, toothpaste, face cream, shampoo, and arrange them in ‘my’ cupboard. She was undoubtedly sniffling all the while, dabbing at the tears, and berating cruel fate for dealing her the destiny of an old age lived alone.
She had lost her feel for cooking, she no longer had the will or the strength, so I took over. But she couldn’t leave it be. She’d come into the kitchen, elbow me in the cramped space, rinse a few dishes, carp that I should do it this way, mutter that I would never learn a thing. The kitchen was the realm of her absolute authority, and she was defending it with her last ounce of strength.
When she heard me on the phone with someone, she’d come into ‘my’ room, she’d ask or say something, raising her voice like a parakeet in a cage, so that I would have to hang up. She did this without thinking, as if not aware of her actions.
‘I have to call the old witch,’ she said, seeing me holding the receiver.
‘Sure, let me finish this.’
‘I called her a couple of times and no one is picking up.’
‘We’ll call her.’
‘Ask Zorana, she’ll know.’
Zorana was Pupa’s daughter.
‘I’ll ask, just let me finish this.’
She stood, clutching the cupboard, and watched me.
‘And Ada hasn’t called.’
‘Aba.’
‘She hasn’t called, either.’
‘She will.’
‘We really ought to call them.’
‘Them’ is her way of referring to my brother and his family.
‘We called them this morning!’
‘Open the balcony store, the room is stuffy,’ she said and padded over to the door.
‘The balcony door,’ I said.
‘There, I’ve opened it.’
She had tidied everything and set it to rights, including the homely piece of junk, the cupboard, which I had brought into the apartment, just as she had been cleaning up and tidying her whole life. Only once, in a conversation about our first house, with its capacious garden, did she admit,
‘I was more anxious that the vegetable beds be hoed in straight lines than I was with what I’d plant or how it would grow.’
Her instalments to the funeral fund had been made regularly for years, so her funeral was fully paid for: her burial with all the formalities was guaranteed. Her mental and emotional territory had narrowed, it was all set out – like a box. Here, in this box, her two grandchildren, my brother and his wife were knocking about, along with two or three old friends (in that order of importance).