Mama Leone (21 page)

Auntie Doležal clapped her hands. I was surprised: In the end nothing happened in her story. There was nothing about what happened to Forgetful, whether she was alive today or whether she grew up and stopped her forgetting. There was no end to the story because it just got bigger and bigger like the circles around a stone thrown into the sea; there's always another circle around the other circle, and inside one thing forgotten there was always another and no one can count all these forgotten things because forgotten things can't be counted. It's like they don't exist and they never existed, but if you're Forgetful and everyone knows that you of all people are the forgetful one, then you start to count and write all the forgotten stuff down.

I looked at the wall, Auntie Doležal asked
did you like the story?
but I couldn't answer because I was trying to remember something that I knew yesterday but had forgotten today. I didn't know what it was, but I'm sure there was something and that I had forgotten it.
Did you like the story?
Auntie Doležal repeated.
Wait a second, Auntie
, and again I tried to remember.
Okay, I'm waiting
, she said.

You forget things because they're all different. If they were the same, you wouldn't be able to forget them. If her mom had sent Forgetful to the store to buy the same things every day, if Forgetful had to take the same books to school every day and take the same wool to her
grandma's, then she wouldn't have forgotten anything.
I'll build a castle for Forgetful! . . . So, you liked it then? . . . No, I didn't like it, but I'll build a castle where she'll live by herself and it's all going to be the same and she won't be able to forget anything in it and no one will remind her of her forgetting
.

There was a ding-dang-dong. Grandma was back from the podiatrist.
Uff, my Micika, that's a relief. You have no idea how much of a relief that is
, she said, and Auntie Doležal made another coffee, I wolfed down the last biscuit, and then we went home. I don't remember how Grandma and Auntie Doležal parted, I don't remember if it was sunny when we left and I don't remember if Auntie Doležal watched us from her window and if we waved to her from the tram stop. I'm sorry I don't remember because we never saw her again.

The ambulance came for Auntie Doležal on a Monday. That morning the neighbors had found her on the ground floor, a bag of groceries in her hand – bread, milk, biscuits, and lettuce – just standing there. They said hi, and every time she'd startle but not say hi back. Then she climbed the stairwell, going from door to door and then back down to the ground floor. It was afternoon by the time she rang the Kneževi
ć
s' bell and said to Snježana, the girl who was my father's intern at the hospital,
I've lost my way!
Snježana was confused and asked
where did you lose your way, Auntie?
Auntie just smiled and said
I don't know
, and then Snježana called the ambulance.

First the doctors thought Auntie Doležal had had a stroke and that's why she had forgotten everything, and then they figured out she was
perfectly healthy and that there was nothing wrong with her. So they thought Auntie Doležal had suddenly gone senile, but you can't go senile overnight; yesterday you remember everything and today you can't even remember where you live. Then they made some inquiries about whether Auntie had any relatives and discovered that Jucika was dead and that Auntie's daughter, Vera, was also dead and that Auntie's brothers and sisters were also dead, and in the end it turned out that we were all Auntie Doležal had left.

Mom went to the hospital and Dr. Muratbegovi
ć
said to her
madam, I'm afraid we don't have any reason to keep her in, and given she doesn't have any family the only thing we can do is put her in Jagomir
. Mom bawled Dr. Muratbegovi
ć
out because Jagomir was a nuthouse, and Auntie Doležal wasn't nuts, she'd just forgotten everything.
Forget it, I'll take care of her
, she said and took Auntie Doležal back to her apartment.

Auntie, do you remember me?
Mom asked when they were in the tram.
I won't lie to you. I don't remember . . . And do you remember Olga, Auntie? Olga's your best friend
. Auntie just shrugged her shoulders and turned away. She looked out the window, rain was falling, and her eyes became moist and she was ashamed about being so impolite that she couldn't remember her best friend.

From that Monday on Mom visited Auntie Doležal morning and night. Auntie sat in her armchair the whole day through, reading the newspaper and doing the crossword. No one could ever figure out how she'd forgotten absolutely everything about her life but hadn't forgotten
anything she needed to know to solve the crossword. She'd forgotten her Jucika but in crossword clues she knew that a bay was a horse.

Do you want to come to Auntie's with me?
she asked Grandma just the one time, and Grandma said she didn't because all that mattered was that Auntie Doležal wasn't hungry and that she's clean, and that everything else was last year's snow and would never come back. She wasn't sad about it, but she would have been sad if she'd gone to Auntie's and Auntie didn't recognize her. That's my grandma for you, she lets things take their course, but she remembers everything Auntie Doležal has forgotten. Every time Mom comes back from Auntie's, Grandma talks about her Micika; she talks about lots of stuff Mom and me never knew. For example, right after the Second World War, when Grandma and Grandpa lived in Yugoslav People's Army Street next door to Auntie Doležal, there was an earthquake in Sarajevo, not a big one, only the black chandeliers swayed a bit, and Grandpa was taking a shower. When he felt everything shaking around him, he ran out of the bathroom, and with everything still shaking he ran out of our apartment soaped up and birth naked, hopping down the landing yelling
what's going on, what's going on
. Auntie Doležal stood in the doorway of her apartment and clasped her hands together, because to her Franjo was stranger than the earthquake. It was days before he could look her in the eye, and days before she could look my grandma in the eye. When the shame had passed and the earthquake was just a funny memory, Auntie Doležal said to Grandma
goodness gracious your Franjo's hung like a horse!

Or when our cat Marko disappeared, also a few years after the war, and Grandpa paced the yard in front of our building for days calling him home, Auntie Doležal said she felt like crying when she saw him from her window so distraught because he knew the cat was never coming back, but that he needed to call him because you can't let one of your own vanish just like that and admit to yourself that they're gone and never coming back. Marko was the smartest cat in the world. He'd sit on the linoleum at the top of the hallway and wait for Grandpa to come home from work, and Grandpa would give him a shunt with his leg and Marko would slide all the way to the bathroom. For years after Marko's disappearance, Grandpa, on his way in from work, would wave his leg in the air and mutter
Ej Marko, Marko
, but this didn't get anybody down as much as Auntie Doležal.
Micika was terribly sensitive to Franjo
, says Grandma, and Mom puts her finger to her lips,
psssst!
, so Grandpa doesn't hear.

Every day when Mom came back from Auntie Doležal's Grandma would tell a new story about her friend, and in two months we'd heard her whole life story, and then one day the stories stopped. Mom stayed longer and longer over at Auntie Doležal's because she'd started forgetting that she needed to pee, she'd forgotten how to wash her face and hands, and she'd even stopped speaking. She just sat there with the same crossword on her knees, pencil in hand, staring at the empty wall. Mom had to bathe and dress her, and Auntie Doležal completely surrendered as if she were a little kid and didn't know what was being done to her.

In the end she didn't even remember how to sit up, so one morning she just lay there in bed and never got up again. Mom tried to get help from the hospital, but the nurse could only come twice a week, so she had to take care of Auntie Doležal all by herself. Auntie Doležal's life was over, and she was just waiting to die. Grandma didn't smile anymore, and she didn't talk about Auntie Doležal either, and Mom took sick leave because she had to be with her the whole day through. Auntie Doležal was like a little baby who had to have her diapers changed every so often, but unlike a baby she was never going to be a grown-up again.
How is she related to you
, the doctor who gave Mom the sick leave asked, and Mom told him Auntie Doležal wasn't a relative, but that everyone needs someone beside them so that they die like a human being.

She died just before the New Year, Mom, Grandma, and the neighbors went to the funeral. We bought Auntie Doležal a little wreath, the cheapest one. It was the only wreath on her grave, and all the other graves were covered in them. Luckily Auntie Doležal couldn't see this because if she had it would've definitely made her sad. The lone wreath would have reminded her that she had been left all alone in the world and didn't have anyone except us. In actual fact, there was nothing for her to forget, because all she'd now forgotten was already long gone: her father with the iron cap on his head, Jucika, the Sarajevo Partisan, and Vera, who twenty years ago had fallen asleep on the beach at Opatija and never woke up.

I think that on that Monday, on the way home from the store, Auntie
Doležal forgot all of us on purpose, the living and the dead. She even forgot where her apartment was on purpose and who all the people in the pictures were and whose fountain pen had been lying on the writing desk for the last thirty years, even the guests she'd bought the petit beurre biscuits for. She turned into Forgetful, and everything she once remembered she left to us to look after.

That day I started building a Lego castle for Queen Forgetful. The castle is the same from all sides and there won't be anything in it that you can forget. There's one hundred rooms all the same, just for her to live in, Forgetful, who in the meantime has become a queen because she forgot the most in the whole world and her kingdom has grown so much that there isn't one that can match it. The kingdom is so big it is the envy of all the kings in the world, and you just wait and see how they're going to envy it when my castle is finished.

If they were cherries shining red beneath the window when I shut my eyes, or if they were something else – maybe I'd caught a fever – I don't know anymore. But if they were cherries, then it was June, the second half of June, when the tree in our yard bore fruit, always a month later than the trees in the heat of Herzegovina. Our cherry tree had survived a cold winter and that made the month delay seem almost heroic. Even if they weren't cherries and it wasn't June, the gist of the story remains the same, clear as day in the photos themselves. There we were standing and crouching on the terrace in our short-sleeved shirts and T-shirts: my auntie and uncle, my cousin Vesna and her husband, Perti, my mom, Grandma, and me. In some pictures there's only Uncle and Grandma, in others Vesna and Grandma, or Mom and
Grandma, Grandma and me . . . If I showed you the pictures now and hadn't told you anything about them in advance, you'd think we were some hippie-dippie family who'd picked Grandma as our household chief or guru who had to be in every photo, and that the only thing the rest of us cared about was having our presence with her recorded for eternity. Maybe there's some truth in that, but I don't want to talk about it because I love my grandma too much and if I admitted you were right I'd spoil the rest of the story.

It was a Sunday, that I'm sure of, because in our house guests always came over on Sundays. This was probably how things were before I was born, so my family just kept it that way even after everything changed. I'm not actually sure, but it doesn't matter in any case. The fact is that the guests had come from all over: Uncle and Auntie had come from Moscow where Uncle was a rep for the Zenica steelworks, and Vesna had come from Helsinki where she lived with Perti, but he hadn't come from Helsinki, he'd come from Vladivostok. I don't know what he did in Vladivostok, but I remember Grandma saying
poor fellow, he's been at the end of the world
. For some reason she thought the end of the world was terrible.

We ate lunch, talked over the top of each other, and Auntie called me
Miki
, dead set that every child had to have a nickname, and I remember feeling somehow privileged that in addition to my real name I'd gotten another one besides. Grandma looked at me reproachfully every time Auntie said
Miki
. She didn't like the nickname, but I'm not sure how
that made it my fault. Uncle poured himself a whiskey he'd brought from Moscow,
it's from Beryoshka, only foreigners buy stuff from Beryoshka
, and then he slapped himself on the forehead:
uh shit, I forgot the camera
. We weren't too bothered though, fine, he'd forgotten the camera, we kept talking over the top of each other and he did too, but every fifth sentence he'd throw something in about the camera, like
what a bloody donkey leaving it behind like that
or
my brain obviously checked out when we left
. Soon everyone was upset about the camera, so I made like I was upset too and tried to tell the story of how I once forgot my sneakers for PE, but no one wanted to listen.

We'll call Dobro, he's got a camera
, said Mom. She picked up the phone and fifteen minutes later my dad arrived with a camera already loaded with film. Uncle quit his anxiety act, which let everyone else relax too, he poured Dad a whiskey, told the Beryoshka story again, and then he said
now, everyone on the terrace, light's best there
. We took our marching orders, probably scared his anxiety might come back if we jerked around. Dad was photographer for the day. He took pictures of us in all combinations, but no one took a picture of him. He's the only one who doesn't have a picture with Grandma. I wanted to ask why someone didn't take his picture too, but shut up in time. When your parents are divorced you've always got to shut up in time because what you'd like to ask might make your elders stutter and blush or make them want to say or do something to please you, and then you feel like a whipped-cream pie that's been standing in the sun all day and they all say
oh, what
a lovely cake
. Actually, I know what would've happened if I'd asked. Dad would've had his photo taken with Grandma but either the laboratory wouldn't have developed it or no one would have wanted to have it.