The violet fig for Nada Stilinović
When the frost bites hard and the teeth chatter and thick snows fall and no one can come to us and we can’t go to anyone, Grandma says this winter is nothing like the winter of 1943, the thought of which makes me freeze and my heart pound wild because I love the years before my time. That’s when miracles happened, and everything was huge and terrifying. It was a Friday in Zenica that winter when the Old Devil got dead drunk and headed for home. The snow was two meters high and blue in the moonlight, so he thought it was his bed or a duvet. God knows what goes through the head of an eighty-five-year-old who’s spent a minimum seventy-five of them dead drunk, maybe even eighty of them. But he saw that much snow and he just lay down and made himself comfortable, covering himself in it, and with his hands under his head started snoring away. Heaven knows how long he’d been lying there when the miners coming back from the second shift dug him out and got him to the hospital. Alive! Alive, I tell you, and he’d lain in the snow that winter of 1943, and that wasn’t like this winter, bit of frost, bit of snow, nothing much, but a real winter like you don’t get anymore, one I’ll never see in my lifetime again. They took the old coot to the hospital; luckily they didn’t take him home because the next day he got pneumonia, eighty-five years old and a temperature of 104 degrees, but you think that knocked the wind out of his sails? Fat chance! He shuffled to the window and tossed kids some money to get him medicinal alcohol from the drugstore, that hundred-proof stuff, but kids being kids they took the money and scampered. I think that killed the Old Devil and not the pneumonia. Only rakia could kill him, or truth be told, him not having it. He didn’t have the taste for anything else. He might’ve been a drinker, but the alcohol didn’t do him in, it got everyone around him: a first wife, then a second, both younger, then a daughter, another daughter, his sons scattering to the four winds. God knows who and what else that rakia killed, but it didn’t get him. He woke up drunk, went to bed drunk, forged the horseshoes in his workshop drunk, and drunk he laid waste to everything in his path and everything that let itself be laid to waste, all until that winter, the 1943 mother of all winters got him. Sometimes I think it got so cold just to knock the Old Devil off, said Grandma when the temperature fell, shaking with rage and anger, but not cold, because she wasn’t afraid of the cold. The Old Devil was the only person she hated in the entire world, and of all perversions, vices, and weapons, of all human depravities and evils, it was alcohol and alcoholism she had no truck with.
The Old Devil was my great-grandpa and his name was Josip, but Grandma never called him that, he was always the Old Devil, and no one, not even Grandpa whose father he was, ever got angry with her or corrected her or told her how swell it would be if she could call her deceased father-in-law by some other name, the one he was christened with for example, or the one by which everyone in Zenica knew him: Blacksmith Joža the Slovenian. At the mention of his father my grandpa would bow his head and bite his lip, just like his brothers, our uncles Karlo and Rudo, who never forgave him the rakia, nor themselves for having been children not able to save their older sisters from their deaths at my great-grandpa’s careless hand. Whenever the Old Devil came up, you saw the same disposition in Grandma, Grandpa, and Mom’s eyes, a familial mark of Cain, a color that differentiated the Rejcs from other people, a light-gray anti-rakia hue. It marked their lives in different ways, and boy did it mark my life with them. Grandpa would drink two short ones of rakia and even under threat of medieval torture you couldn’t make him have a third, dead sure that if he did he’d turn into the Old Devil. Mom would drink half a beer and already have the fear of God inside her that she was dead drunk and that the Old Devil was there smiling at her from just around the corner. Grandma didn’t drink at all. Not at New Year’s, not at birthdays, never! That was the Rejc family for you, and then I came along. Takes after his father’s side, said Mom. God, father, the kid doesn’t have any Rejc in him, said Grandpa. So it was no surprise I didn’t share the Rejc anti-rakia disposition, I wasn’t even scared of the Old Devil. Actually, I didn’t know anything about rakia, except that it stunk real bad and that the stink reminded me of the hospital, vaccinations, and having your tonsils out. But my great-grandpa, he loomed large all right.
I don’t pay Grandpa’s dead sisters any mind because I can’t, because I don’t know anything about them, just that they’re dead and that they died very young. That’s the only thing anyone ever says about them, and that’s not enough for me to love them and blame the Old Devil for their dying young. He’s the main character and the only character in a story that’s been going on for a hundred years and continues to this day even though he’s long dead, and in this story Blacksmith Joža the Slovenian is like Flash Gordon: Everyone’s afraid of him, but no one can hurt him. This great-grandpa of mine is the strongest and the biggest, so strong and so big that the winter of 1943 had to come along to do him in so he could make a brief exit from the story, but he’s sure to make a comeback one day. I know this because these kind of stories can’t end before I make my entrance, doesn’t matter if I’m five, seven, or eleven years old, one day when I dream of the Old Devil I’ll offer him my hand and say you were terrifying, but I’m not scared of you, and everyone was scared of you except me. I don’t know what he’ll say to that, but I have the feeling he might burp in my face. My great-grandpa, Blacksmith Joža the Slovenian, that’s him for you.
We learned proverbs at school and on the blackboard the teacher wrote: “Everyone forges his own good fortune.” We were supposed to write an explanation of what it meant in our notebooks, so I wrote a story about how my great-grandpa forged his own good fortune and about how forgers of their own good fortune were usually forgers of others’ misfortune because they find their good fortune at the bottom of a bottle of rakia. The teacher called Mom into school for another visit, but Mom didn’t tell me anything, not why she was called in or what the teacher told her, but I saw the red in her eyes and that she was all upset and desperate because of me. The next day the school psychologist turned up in class, stood next to the teacher’s desk, hands behind his back, and the teacher said this is comrade Mutevelić, he’s a psychologist and he’s going to sit in on our class today and see how you’re doing, and after five minutes I could see his eyes were all on me, staring at my head and glancing away when I caught him, and the teacher kept asking me stuff, all smiley and kind like she never was, like I was really sick or something, all kinds of weird questions about things we hadn’t even studied and I’m sure aren’t even in the teacher’s book, like are people good or evil, or who’s smarter, the raven or the fox, or is Videk happy they sewed him a shirt. This Videk is a kid in a lame story, he’s supposed to have walked around naked until some nice folks sewed him a shirt. I replied that good people are good, and that evil people are evil, that the raven is smart because he found the cheese, and that the fox is smarter because she took it from him, but that maybe the fox was dumb because she couldn’t find the cheese herself and that the raven was stupid because he let himself get played by the fox, but that I had no opinion about Videk because I just couldn’t imagine a kid walking around naked and someone sewing him a shirt. When I said the bit about “having no opinion,” I shot comrade Mutevelić a look because I knew he’d be shocked. I know exactly which words are going to shock people as soon as they come out of my mouth, and I know why they’re shocked. When I say “in my opinion,” or when I say “taken in general,” or when I say “characteristically,” everyone acts like I’ve put a suit, tie, and hat on, all fancy. That’s how it is now: Comrade Mutevelić raises an eyebrow in surprise, takes his pad from his pocket, and scribbles something down.