You have to do this for me, Dad tried to convince Mom. She lit her third cigarette even though two already burned in the ashtray. You have to, after this everything will be different. She didn’t believe him, but at the same time she knew she’d have to accede, the strength of her resistance having no bearing on a decision made long ago. Yes, of course, she’ll bathe her son, get him scrubbed up, make him the most beautiful little boy in the world, and take him to that woman who happens to be his grandmother, as unbelievable as it seemed and regardless of it having been long clear there was no place for grandmothers and grandchildren in this story because it was a story that had ended long ago, in a time that had nothing to do with Mom, a time when the notes from that piano perhaps still resounded.
You’re coming with us, right? Dad turned to my grandma and grandpa. In her black Sunday best Grandma sighed like you sigh before starting a big job. Grandpa just shook his head: I’m not going. If you ask me why I’m not going, I’d have to say I don’t know, but I think I’m old enough to not do anything I don’t want to. You’re young, attend to it yourselves. Although he probably didn’t understand what old Franjo was telling him, Dad didn’t insist, nor did he respond. In actual fact, he was probably a bit relieved. Better not to have witnesses like Grandpa in life if you’re not prepared to man up, because they can destroy your entire world with a single wave of their hand. Grandpa could be gruff, and though everyone attributed it to his asthma, Dad suspected his gruffness was of a different kind, the gruffness of a man who didn’t forgive others things he hadn’t forgiven himself. Whatever went down in the room with the piano, it was better it happened without old Franjo.
I sat on my dad’s knee. On their knees my grandma and my mom held little coffee cups with flowery saucers, the other grandma smiling from her armchair. The silence was much bigger than the room, bigger than the piano, and bigger than every silence the living are capable of keeping among themselves. Words came out without order or purpose. I’m very glad to finally meet you, said my grandma, would you care for some rose jelly? replied the other grandma, and then an age passed before anything else was said. You have a beautiful grandson, my grandma finally managed, and why didn’t your good husband come, the one in the armchair volleyed back. No one knew how long this went on, but it went on all right. I eventually fell asleep looking at the cross above the doorway and the man pierced with nails, frightened because I didn’t know who he was. In memory he became a symbol for that room, where only a piano, a cross, and a crone lived, my wrong grandma, who had never gotten up out of that armchair in all my life, so I didn’t even know if she could walk.
I woke up in the car. Mom had me in her arms, Dad was driving, and my grandma was holding the handgrip, beating her big nose in the air to the rhythm of the road. Thinking I was asleep, they didn’t talk. Mom tried to peek into a plastic bag holding something wrapped in white gift paper. The next fifteen minutes were the last hope for saving her marriage. When we’d left, my other grandma had jumped out of her armchair and said I’ve got something for the little one, he’s growing up now, and taken a plastic bag from the fridge and given it to Mom. She looked like someone who had almost forgotten something really important. For Mom it was a small but endlessly important detail, a sign maybe all was not lost, that her mother-in-law’s love had, in spite of herself, found a way to creep from the darkness and free itself from the chains in which it had been bound since the time the piano was still young. In that fifteen minutes Mom forgave her everything, chiding herself her lack of compassion for the woman’s misfortune, for having only thought of herself and the child who lay dozing in her lap, for never thinking how that woman had once, long ago, held such a child in her arms, totally devoid of hope in the man whom she loved.
Grandpa was waiting for us at the dining-room table. Old train timetables, beekeeping manuals, and a Hungarian dictionary lay strewn out before him, all to help pass the time quicker, so he wouldn’t think so much about us or fall to his fears for the mission on which his wife and daughter had set out. How was it? he took his glasses off the moment we came in. Let us catch our breath, said Mom. Now we’ll see how it was, said Grandma and reached for the plastic bag. Wait! Mom grabbed her hand. Fine, I’m waiting, said Grandma and put the bag down. Grandpa raised his eyebrows and went with the flow. This was unusual for him, but this was an unusual situation; everyone except me knew a life was splitting in two here, my mom’s life for sure, but maybe another life was involved too, my life, which, truth be told, had just begun, so hadn’t yet gotten that far.
Mom took the package out of the bag and unwrapped the paper. There, in the middle of our dining-room table, lay an enormous beef bone, picked perfectly clean. It was whiter than white, no traces of meat or blood, as if someone, the Almighty for example, had created it exactly that way and sent eternity out a message: “You shall be a bone and nothing else, you shall have no purpose nor meaning, you shall not procreate, nor shall you be either dead or alive.” Mom held her face in her hands so it wouldn’t shatter, and Grandma sat down. Grandpa said right then, and they all stared motionless at the bone.
Let me see, let me see, I ran around the table yelling. I couldn’t know something bad was happening because nothing had actually happened, nor did I sense their anger or sorrow because they weren’t angry or sad. Maybe they were white and cold, maybe they, at least now in retrospect, resembled that white bone on the fancy black veneer of the table. Useless and beautiful in equal measure, the bone was a final evil after which no good could ever come. For my mom the bone was the abyss at the end of the road; a sign she should turn around and start out on a new path, if there was indeed one she could ever envisage, sure from the very start that a bone for her son wouldn’t be waiting at its end.
Give it to me, give it to me, I howled, but they wouldn’t give me the bone. Grandpa picked it up, stood for a moment in front of the trash can — either the bone was too big, or he realized such things weren’t for the trash — then headed outside with it. I can imagine him walking through Metjaš with this ginormous beef bone, people scrambling out of his way, seeing in his eyes and from what was in his hand that he was mad. He carried it off somewhere, I’ll never know where, and returned half an hour later. I cried because they hadn’t given me the object of my affection.
The next day Dad asked Mom what his mother had given me because she hadn’t wanted to tell him, but Mom didn’t say anything. She didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t something you could put into words, and had left us more confused than all the dead pianos in the world.
I never went to that room again, nor did I ever see that other grandma of mine. I don’t even know how she died or where she’s buried, or whether Dad ever showed her my pictures again. If he did, she must have been a bit relieved. As I got older I looked less like him and she would have been able to believe God had quit testing her and answered all her prayers.