Would you care for some rose jelly?
A big bone lay between me and my other grandma, my dad’s mother. Under other circumstances it would have just been a regular beef bone, gnawed clean, yet no one who heard the story ever forgot it, they took the memory to their graves. Though it was no big thing for me, I remember the bone too. I got it when I was turning three, and at that stage in life you don’t really care about the kind of bones people give you.
That grandma of mine, I won’t mention her name, wasn’t happy when Dad married Mom. She wouldn’t have been any happier had he married some other woman; she wanted Dad to stay on his own, that she, his mother, be the only woman in his life. She despised happy and joyous women, women’s frivolity she just couldn’t take, she spent her days pressed up against the window of her room watching them flitting about in the breeze, unharried women who would live and die happy. For her, happiness wasn’t a woman’s word. But the other kind of women, ugly mousy little women, the ones who hid their every curve and would never catch a single male eye, these women were saints, condemned to suffer until death as a consequence. On Judgment Day they will win God’s mercy, be blessed with forgiveness for their sins and those of their drunken roughneck husbands. She thought herself a saint because her husband had abandoned her with a newborn child, my father, for whom she would care a lifetime long, and for his brother and sisters too. They all lived in Nemanja Street in a tiny one-room apartment, half of which was taken up by a piano, the other half by beds. The piano served no practical purpose because no one knew how to play, it was just a symbol that they had once been wealthy, though no one remembered when that was — probably so long ago that every key had long since forgotten its tone. It was an apartment bare of beauty or generosity of spirit. Under the piano was a repository for winter provisions, jars of pickled paprikas, sacks of potatoes, cabbage, all the things other people kept in pantries and cellars.
There’s no way my mom could have ever been a saint for her. My mom smiled, had blond hair, and looked like a woman out of a Socialist film magazine, full of intolerable and irresponsible optimism. Even worse, she was young and pretty, rich in the way you are rich before figuring out that your poverty is eternal. Her very appearance was an insult to my other grandma, and no doubt nothing ever violated the innocence of her room and the sanctity of the gold-plated Christ hanging above the front door more than the moment on a January day in 1965 when my mom walked in, a thousand snow crystals in her hair, filled with a hope that today no one knows the name of. Dad had probably had to beg his mother for hours and days, all the family secrets had to tumble from the high ceilings, he had to pay like never before for her to finally allow the she-devil incarnate to cross her threshold. Grandma was deeply religious, but she was also tone-deaf to the fluttering of the wings of angels; she saw only the devil in a thousand shapes and guises, above all in beauty, in the feminine beauty come to kidnap her beloved one, the apple of her eye, her son.
She sat in her armchair, offered Mom rose jelly, and simpered until her heart turned to ice and her belief in God’s goodness grew, believing the Almighty would protect her and her son, that my mother would disappear just as every temptation God had placed before her in life, testing her heart and its contents, had in the end disappeared. For an hour they sat there across from each other. Dad tried to get a conversation going, which was more a plea for his mother’s mercy, mercy she wouldn’t grant him. She believed in God and everything she did was born of this belief, yet Dad believed in her, tried to break her resistance, not knowing that she would break him, that his love wouldn’t endure long enough for him to understand that life has two beginnings: one at birth, with our first memories, and one that begins with love. What set Dad apart was that he had to kill the first in order to win the right to the second, but it all proved beyond him.
It couldn’t be said he didn’t try though. He left with my mother, leaving his own mother to hold him in her prayers and pray to God he not be led into temptation and that he be untouched by every evil. Some time later, in the Hotel Panorama in Pale, on a beautiful sunny Sunday, he begat me and believed I would save him, most of all from his weakness of character, his lack of steel and resolve, that I would free him from his need to make a decision because with the birth of a child his mother would finally understand that the devil hadn’t entered his life, because you can’t conceive a child with the devil.
Are you sure the boy’s yours? she asked. He’d barely set foot in the room. Yes, he replied, and turned and left. In that instant he believed in himself and not in her, but it was a tepid self-belief, not fiery or cold, and it dissipated before he understood that you don’t give anyone an answer to those kinds of questions, not even your own mother, because the question isn’t about anything to do with you — your child — the question is about you yourself. In any case, he went to see my mom, kissed her, and smiled, giving her a hug much too firm, one meant to conceal doubt, a doubt not easily concealed. Mom looked at him, shaken and speechless, she began to age, her love turning to hate.
I was a big tubby baby on white crocheted pillows, a raspberry mark on my left temple. The neighborhood women said you must’ve had cravings for raspberries or strawberries while you were pregnant. Astonished, Mom conceded yes, I did, I’ve always loved strawberries, and the women nodded their heads and wanted her to feel guilty. In time the raspberry began to grow, and the doctors said it would cover my whole face unless removed, so for six months when I was two they injected saline solution in my temple. That pain remains the clearest memory in my life.
You think this isn’t your son? she yelled at Dad. My real grandpa and grandma were frozen in the next room. I don’t think that, God help me, I don’t think that, he replied and went again to his mother’s. He came back with a year-old potted plant and said this is for our apartment, knowing full well that nothing would ever come of the apartment or the plant. My evil grandma had succeeded in seeing her will be done, but in hearing her prayers, God allowed himself a little joke: He didn’t drive the she-devil from her son’s life, but from the she-devil’s life she drove her son, who, in but a fleeting second, had proven himself unworthy of fatherhood.
This is how it was to be: A God-fearing mother kept hold of her son, yet was forever punished by an unusual twist of fate. By the time I was just a year old my face was well defined — and I looked like my dad. The same head shape and forehead, the same chin, nose, and eyes, even my fingernails were the same shape; other children resemble their parents too but not to this extent, they don’t just resemble one parent. Instead of my dad not being my dad, it was like my mom wasn’t my mom, my face containing none of her beauty, not a single smile or gift. Back then I took completely after him, and when Dad showed his mother my photos, she pursed her lips and fell into an even greater despair at fate’s cruelty. She saw the resemblance in the child’s photos, just as for a lifetime she’d recognized with horror who her son resembled: We were doubles of Grandpa Ðorđe, the man who had ruined her life. His image would now live on until her death and much longer besides, which only went to show that suffering is eternal, enduring even when those who would suffer are no longer around.
And what is it you want from me now? she asked, handing him back the photos. I would like you to see my son, Dad replied. I’ve seen him, and now what?. . I want you to see him in real life, in this room. She didn’t say a thing, just looked at him hoping her silence spoke for itself, that he would get the message and know there were things you simply didn’t say in God’s presence, things requiring caution, which you were to only approach the way you would someone you loved. For her only a mother’s love for her son was greater than God, and from her son she expected nothing less than that his love for her be greater than God.