And that’s how it went. Nano would neatly jot everything down, and then when the occasion rolled around he’d be there with two presents, one I’d chosen and a second one that he liked. The second was usually better, better because it was a surprise and there’s no such thing as a bad surprise. A bad surprise is called a disappointment, and a special occasion is not a time for disappointment. I’m not even disappointed with Mom’s practical presents because that’s what I expect from her, and when you expect something it can’t be a disappointment.
The day before a special occasion Mom bakes a cake. When Mom bakes a cake we all have to put our serious faces on and cross our fingers, just like we did when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. Baking cakes is an unpredictable business: Mom mixes the dough, or actually it’s more like she gets a mountain of flour and makes a deep hole in the middle so the flour mountain looks like a snow volcano or a heap of sand and cement to make concrete, and then she breaks the eggs and puts them in the hole. When she’s broken all the eggs, she knocks the mountain over, mixes the flour with the eggs, and starts with her oh boy, what if the dough doesn’t rise, and I laugh at her, but she doesn’t get angry, she just says and that’s the thanks I get. She’s happy because she’s enjoying her anxiety.
The dough kneaded and ready for baking, she covers it with a cloth and waits. Smoking one cigarette after the other, every five minutes she peeks under the cloth and calls Grandma over to say how the dough’s going. Grandma says no, not yet, just a little longer, and then she says ready, and then Mom almost flips out and I’m not allowed to laugh at her anymore. With trembling hands she covers the cake dish in oil and keeps repeating God save me, what if the dough sticks.
As soon as she’s put the cake in to bake Mom starts cussing out our oven. First the upper heating bars are no good, then the bottom ones aren’t working, and then she starts cussing out the company in Čačak that made the oven and looks up at the ceiling, as if she’s looking up at the sky where the whiteware bosses of the world are in a meeting to decide who deserves an oven that might bake a decent cake this New Year’s. Grandma just listens and nods her head. Mom gets on Grandma’s nerves sometimes. She’ll give me a nervous breakdown one day, and later she’ll complain to Auntie Doležal, her and her cakes, and Auntie Doležal clasps her hands and says oh, the young ones, my dear Olga, those young ones, they’ll make a science out of baking a cake yet, and to think I once made five cakes for my Jucika’s habitation and it didn’t faze me none. Jucika was Auntie Doležal’s husband, they killed him in Jasenovac, but she always talked about him as if he were alive, as if he was going to appear on the doorstep in about half an hour, so I felt like I knew Jucika too, and wouldn’t have been in the least surprised if he had actually shown up and said I’m home and Auntie Doležal had again baked him five cakes for this habitation thing.
It riled Grandma most of all that Mom wouldn’t let her bake cakes for New Year’s or my birthday. Other times were fine, but for New Year’s or my birthday, no way. I’m her son, and it was her job to bake her son a cake on special occasions. Okay, you bake them for him then, but quit dragging me up to see whether the dough has risen, Grandma said once, and that made Mom really wild and she yelled back You’ve been hounding me my whole life, burst into tears, and immediately got a migraine. Grandma never again complained about being called over to see whether the dough had risen. Just let it be, said Auntie Doležal.
The most exciting part was when the cake came out of the oven, because then nobody, not even Grandma, knew whether a catastrophe was in the cards. A catastrophe was when the middle of the cake caved in or shrank, so the cake didn’t look like a cake anymore but like something else, it’s hard to say what, but something awfully funny that you weren’t allowed to laugh at, because Mom and Grandma would be there hovering over whatever that something was. Mom would bury her face in her hands like those little slant-eyed mothers when their husbands were killed, and Grandma would start cussing. She never cussed otherwise, just when a cake flopped. And if the cake flopped a replacement had to be made. Then we’d have two cakes for the special occasion: a normal one to serve to guests and a second that tasted normal but looked so bad nobody was allowed to see it except us. We ate that one on the sly before the guests showed up.
Before the New Year of 1977 Nano came over, got his pen and paper out, and again I told him I didn’t need a sewing needle or a locomotive and that we could get straight down to business on the present list. I told him that my relationship to time and its passing had fundamentally changed and that as such, I needed a wristwatch. He wrote it down, went home, and three days later died.
He was in my dad’s ward, in a deep coma, and at the time it was all everyone talked about. I didn’t actually know what a deep coma was, but it meant this New Year’s wasn’t going to be a special occasion and that there’d be no one to take the blame for unfulfilled promises. Up until this point promises had been disregarded or broken because someone had forgotten them; grown-ups were promise-killers, all you could do was look at them, shake your head, and think: But why? Why one more little graveyard, full of unfulfilled wishes and forgotten words strewn on balmy city streets like summer hail that melts in the blink of an eye, leaving nothing but an image behind, a single, tiny, inconsequential image at the bottom of the gaze of all for whom it has fallen like a promise?
Nano couldn’t keep his promise because he was in a deep coma. Mom sat at his bedside for two nights saying things like Nano, sweetie, it’s just started snowing, it’ll be New Year’s soon, it’s already scrunchy underfoot, and soon we’ll be eating this year’s apples. She said all kinds of things to him, watching for an eyelash to flicker or a quiver in the corners of his mouth, because Dad had told her that you never know with a deep coma, that you can’t be sure whether Nano could hear anything, feel her hand, or sense the slipstream of words through the world and the cosmos, along the nerves that lead to the brain, like unstamped letters dropped in a distant post-office box, letters in which we all tell him that we love him.
Dad stopped by every half hour, listened to what Mom was saying to Nano, putting his hand on her shoulder and gently stroking her hair. He was in his white doctor’s coat, a silver fountain pen peering out from a small pocket. In his doctor’s coat my dad wasn’t the same dad as the one without a doctor’s coat. Regular Dad lied, didn’t keep his promises, and was often weak and downhearted. He looked like someone liable to be hit by a car on a pedestrian crossing or prone to spilling plates of soup in his lap. This dad, Dad the Doctor, he was God, Comfort, and James Bond. For him there was no such thing as an incurable illness, nor a life bearing any resemblance to death, not even a life in a deep coma. Every moment was worthy of celebration, and there wasn’t a single moment when you pulled the shutters down on life and said fine, that was that, now I’m dead and I’m leaving. My dad didn’t let people leave, and he was sure Nano’s eyelashes would give the world a signal, that humanity would shudder the moment a lone hair on any one man moved, having stolen itself away from the world of darkness. There are medical truths that serve the healing process and medical truths that confirm that healing is not possible, gravediggers can worry about the latter because I won’t. That’s what he once yelled at drunk Dr. Jakšić, who when we were on a trip to Mount Trebević said that even in the coffins buried in Bare Cemetery, Dobro — my dad — could find a couple of people to declare alive and try bringing back to life.