The dead fig from the rum pot was my first alcohol in life. I don’t know what it tasted like, I don’t remember or I don’t want to remember because with these kinds of memories you risk a comrade Mutevelić showing up and crapping on about how intelligent you are and how you’re going to explode like a bomb one day because you cry for no reason, even though you know your tears are silly, do no good, and that no one understands them. I don’t mean tears of rage but the other kind, the kind that made me eat that fig. But for me the snow didn’t seem like a deep blue duvet under the icy moonlight, the duvet under which Blacksmith Joža the Slovenian lies sleeping.
A castle for Queen Forgetful
Auntie Doležal told me the story about Queen Forgetful. It was Friday and it was summer, and we’d come over to her place for coffee. I mean, Grandma had come over for coffee, I was just going along for Sombrero candies and petit beurre biscuits, which at Auntie Doležal’s place were all soft, not a single crunch left in them. Mom said it’s because Auntie Doležal’s biscuits are stale and they’re stale because no one eats them except me, because she doesn’t have anyone come visit her and eat biscuits and she only buys them because everyone has to have biscuits for when guests come over, but the less guests come, the softer and soggier the biscuits, like someone’s been crying on them.
As soon as we arrived I got stuck into the biscuits, trying to snaffle them all up so Auntie Doležal would have to go the store and buy some new ones, muttering to herself the whole way God help me, guests on the doorstep and not a biscuit in the house, which is what my grandma always says. But better this God help me than Auntie Doležal’s biscuits get even soggier because she doesn’t have any family left and we’re the only ones who come visit her.
My Micika, I can hardly walk, Grandma bellyached, a brown coffee spot on the tip of her nose. Auntie Doležal pretended not to notice it because it’s impolite to notice such things, even when the person is your best friend. You don’t need to tell me, when I walk it’s like someone’s banging nails in my feet, Auntie Doležal brushed her off and stepped out of her slippers, take a look, it’s not even two weeks since I went to the podiatrist. . I never find the time to go, it’s always look at this, look at that, move this, move that, go there, come here, and days and months go by, and I’ve got corns like — Godforgiveme — I fell from the tree yesterday. Grandma was rambling and a new coffee spot had formed next to the last one. Olga, why don’t you nip to the podiatrist now, the little one can stay here, it won’t be boring here with me, will it now? Auntie Doležal turned to me. No, no, I hurried, hoping like hell Grandma wouldn’t remember that it’s impolite to leave kids with other people. There was no way I wanted to go to the podiatrist with her, because I went once and it was a terrible thing. I was sitting in the waiting room and a mother came in with a little girl a bit smaller than me, and then some guy in a white coat showed up, like he was a doctor, but he wasn’t, and the girl started to bawl, and he put some metal thing up against her ear and it popped and the girl screamed, and then he put it up against her other ear and there was another pop, and then the girl and her mother left, the girl holding her hands over her ears screaming her head off, and I was scared stiff thinking the guy in the white coat might come for me next to do the same thing. Then Grandma came out. What was that? I asked. Nothing, ear piercing. . Ear peeing? I blanched. Not peeing, piercing. Peeing, piercing, it was all the same, let your guard down for a second and you’re in for it. The girl had come in all smiley and went out howling in pain. The bottom line is that I’m not going to the podiatrist with Grandma again unless I really have to.
Auntie Doležal was uncomfortable the moment we were on our own. I was sitting on the couch, and every little thing, every chair and cupboard grew before my eyes, all so immense, dead, and dusty. It was as if we were in a museum where no one had lived for thousands of hundreds of years and that Auntie Doležal was the guardian of a secret bounty and framed yellowed photographs of serious-looking people in funny uniforms. In one picture there was a man with long twirly whiskers and something funny on his head, something like an iron hat with a spike on the top. Who’s that?. . That’s my dad, Auntie Doležal brightened up, because I wasn’t scared of all her dusty stuff anymore. He was a soldier and fought for Czar Franz. . And he wore that thing on his head when he fought?. . He did, I think he did, it was actually part of the uniform. . Did Czar Franz’s other soldiers wear that thing on their heads too?. . I don’t know, probably. . They really wore those same iron hats on their heads? I really was surprised because I couldn’t imagine someone running around with that sort of thing on their head. Well, I’m not at all surprised they lost all those wars.
Auntie Doležal smiled thinking me pretty witty and smart for my age, and me, I was just uncomfortable because she was uncomfortable, so I searched the place for something similar for us to talk about, just not something belonging to her dead husband. They’d killed him in Jasenovac and you weren’t allowed to talk about him with Auntie Doležal. Actually, it was allowed, just no one wanted to, just like Auntie Doležal didn’t want to talk to Grandma about the little brown spot on the tip of her nose. The polite thing to do was to shut your mouth and hope Auntie wasn’t thinking about her Jucika, even though almost everything in her apartment reminded you of Jucika, and all his stuff was exactly where it was when they came for him.
I had the impression everything was Jucika’s so we weren’t allowed to talk about anything. Auntie Doležal held her hands in her lap and waited, I had to say something but didn’t know what. Auntie, how about telling me a story? I remembered that grown-ups expect these sorts of requests from children and made a face like I wanted to hear a story more than anything else in the world and I’d be heartbroken if she didn’t tell me one.
Auntie Doležal fidgeted a bit, but the discomfort was gone. She just needed to remember a story and then everything would be all right and it wouldn’t matter that there weren’t any toys or picture books in her apartment and that sitting here like this was as strange and new to her as it was to me. I don’t know many stories, I’ve forgotten them, but here’s one about a girl called Forgetful. Auntie Doležal folded her arms on her chest and felt herself very important, the kind of importance grownups feel when they tell stories, which is why children beg them to tell stories in the first place. It’d been a long time since Auntie Doležal had told anyone a story so she felt even more important. Forgetful forgot everything. When her mom sent her to the store, she couldn’t remember what she was supposed to buy, when she went to school, she forgot her books, when she went to visit her grandma in the village, she forgot to bring her knitting wool. Forgetful forgot everything you could possibly forget, but she never forgot her forgetting and this made her very unhappy. She knew that others always remembered or would go back for what they had forgotten, but she was lost and all on her own because absolutely no one forgot so badly that they couldn’t remember what they’d forgotten. So Forgetful decided to write down everything she might forget. She wrote down what she was supposed to buy at the store, that she had to bring her books to school, and that she needed to take her knitting wool to her grandma’s. But the more Forgetful wrote down, the more things she had to forget. For every single thing she wrote down and remembered there were another ten she had to write down, and another hundred for those ten. The world was so big and forgettable that in the end Forgetful came to the conclusion that there was nothing else in the whole world except the things she forgot. This made her even unhappier and she spent all day waiting for good fairies, but they never came, so she waited for angels, but they never came either. Actually there was no one else around but her mom and dad who’d look in on her every now and then and say, Oh, Forgetful, Forgetful, you’ve forgotten everything again.