Pupa often dreamed about how nice it would be if someone were to take her to Greenland and forget about her, lose her the way one loses an umbrella or gloves. She had reached a stage where she was unable to do anything any more. She was like a rubber plant, moved from place to place, carried out onto the balcony to have its fill of air, brought into the house so as not to freeze, regularly watered and dusted. How could a rubber plant make decisions or commit suicide?
All primitive cultures knew how to manage old age. The rules were simple: when old people were no longer capable of contributing to the community, they were left to die or they were helped to move into the next world. Like that Japanese film in which a son stuffs his mother into a basket and carries her to the top of a mountain to die. Even elephants are cleverer than people. When their time comes, they move away from the herd, go to their graveyard, lie down on the pile of elephant bones and wait to be transformed into bones themselves. While today hypocrites, appalled by the primitive nature of former customs, terrorise their old people without the slightest pang of conscience. They are not capable of killing them, or looking after them, or building proper institutions, or organising proper care for them. They leave them in dying rooms, in old people’s homes or, if they have connections, they prolong their stay in geriatric wards in hospitals in the hope that the old people will turn up their toes before anyone notices that their stay there was unnecessary. In Dalmatia people treat their donkeys more tenderly than their old people. When their donkeys get old, they take them off in boats to uninhabited islands and leave them there to die. Pupa had once set foot on one of those donkey graveyards.
She who had helped so many babies into the world, cut who knows how many umbilical cords, who had so often heard a child’s first cry, she at least deserved to have someone sensible extinguish her, the way lights were extinguished in houses so as not to waste electricity. That is what she kept trying to explain to Zorana, but Zorana had resolved to respect medical rules rather than show any empathy.
Zorana did not understand her. Zorana, who had spent her whole life accusing her, Pupa, of not understanding her. To start with Pupa had resisted and defended herself, then for a long time she had felt guilty, then finally she admitted that Zorana was right, at least in one respect: no, she really did not understand. She could not, for example, understand why Zorana agreed to live with a husband who was a notorious creep. Some eighteen years ago something in him had responded to the call of Croatian nationhood, and he had vehemently supported the government of the time, shouting from the rooftops that all Serbs should be slaughtered, and suggesting in passing that neither Muslims nor Jews had much more appeal. Overnight, the man had become an anticommunist and a devout Christian, hung Catholic crosses round Zorana’s and the children’s necks, and a portrait of one of his ancestors, an Ustasha cut-throat, on the wall, and, what do you know, his zeal paid off. He was appointed manager of a hospital, slipped deftly into some kind of financial embezzlement, and they – Zorana and he – became part of the newly minted Croatian elite, who Pupa had watched on television, while she still could, at New Year receptions hosted by the President of the state, at concerts and at exhibition openings. And the creep went so far as to accuse her, Pupa, ‘and her commie friends’ of being to blame for everything, being part of ‘a bloody Yid conspiracy’. And when he said something ironic about Zorana’s father, calling him his ‘stupid Serbian father-in-law, who had the good fortune to be in his grave’ – Pupa threw him out of her house. This was more than fifteen years ago, and the creep had never set foot there again.
Sometimes she felt that Zorana was punishing her, that she was keeping her alive so that she would at last ‘open her eyes’ and realise how much things had changed and that her life and values no longer had anything to do with the new reality. Meanwhile she, Pupa, was spared ‘the great revelation’ by ordinary old-age cataracts. She could no longer read or watch television; she felt as though she was living at the bottom of a well. And it was not only that the world around her had become invisible: she herself had become invisible. And only one sweet creature in this world was able to see her…
She sat in her wheelchair, imagining that snow was falling round her. She watched the fat flakes in the air and was surprised not to feel cold. The snowflakes kept on and on falling, and she imagined hibernating under a snowy blanket, until the spring, until it got warm and the snow melted. And she could already see a little heap of her own white bones, appearing out of the melting snow.
4.
Beba and her body lived in a state of mutual intolerance. She could not remember exactly when the first hostile incident had occurred. When she put on the first ten pounds? Perhaps her body had already taken control by then and nothing could prevent it from continuing to conspire against her. And she had imagined that taking ten pounds off would be a simple matter; she would start the campaign the very next Monday. Or was it when she came face to face with her image in a mirror and discovered to her great surprise that she was in a body that was not her own, and that it was a body that she would have to continue to bear as a punishment? Her breasts, which had been neither large nor small, had become big and then too big, and then so huge that things happened like this morning, when she was leaving her massage… A sullen Russian jerk with spiky hair, flanked by two similar jerks, had remarked: ‘Ai, mamaaa, tytki kak u gipopotama!’[2] confident that she would not understand Russian. But Beba had understood; insults don’t need translation.
Her shoulders were deformed by the weight of her breasts, and had acquired deep clefts; her upper arms were as bulky as a dock-worker’s and dragged her neck after them. She had always had a neck of a respectable length, and now all of a sudden it had completely disappeared. The upper part of her body had begun to swell, a thick layer of fat had built up round her waist, like an old-fashioned rubber ring, on the upper part of which big Beba was wedged, while the lower part of her body, from the waist down, had begun to taper off. Beba had also acquired a new behind, one of those sad, flat behinds that could belong to an old woman or an old man. The only thing that had not changed were her calves, and her forearms, from her elbows to her wrists. Beba’s face, which until a few years before had been appealing, oh, it too was taking its revenge! Fatty sacks had formed round her eyes, and her once lively blue eyes had sunk dully into subcutaneous fat. Jowls had appeared on her lower jaw, dragging her mouth downwards. Her hair had grown thin, and her feet had become two sizes larger. Originally a thirty-eight, Beba now took size forty shoes. The only thing that she took a bit of care over were her toenails, and had she not gone regularly to a pedicurist, her feet would have turned into – hooves. And her teeth?! What had they done to her? She had spent her whole life in a dentist’s chair, in the hope of preserving healthy teeth, but she had not succeeded. Yes, her body was exacting cruel revenge, nothing belonged to her any longer.
To be fair, she was still trying to improve the situation. She had begun to wear a ‘minimiser’ corset, which reduced the size of her bust, then large earrings, strikingly long scarves, big brooches, big rings, all with the intention of deflecting the critical observer’s gaze from her bust to these details. She was rarely parted from her necklace, a ribbon with a large, round, flat stone with a hole in the middle hanging from it. And the strategy worked; most people would tend to fix their eyes on that stone. Yes, she was gradually turning into what she found repellent: one of those bleached old hags with cropped hair, their faces overcooked from tanning in cheap solariums, their hands mottled with swollen veins and aged freckles, decorated with strikingly cheap rings and thick rhinestone bracelets. And as for their ears, those sorrowful, elongated ears drawn down by wearing too many heavy earrings…