Grandpa was reading the paper, Grandma cleaning the fish. Dearie, listen to this, said Grandpa looking at Grandma through his glasses. In research undertaken in 1923, the noted scientist von Hentig concluded that earthquakes had an effect on the internal secretion of fish and their behavior, and that artificial convulsions could in no way explain the phenomenon. Animals obviously react to a unique geophysical phenomenon preceding the earthquake, one that culminates in the quake itself. He read really slowly, word by word, to make it sound more serious, but I knew Grandpa was just playing serious, only reading it out loud to get Grandma going, but not too much, just a little bit, just enough for her to start bickering. He’d always needle Grandma into a little bicker when he was in a good mood.
She raised her eyebrows and curled her lips, as if surprised to hear about the fish and the earthquakes, but she continued preparing the fish for lunch all the same. I knew she knew what he was up to, that he just wanted her to say fine Franjo, I’m preparing the fish, and you’re reading about earthquakes. Then he told her about the importance of knowing when there’s going to be an earthquake because you have to be prepared and that it would be good if she could check the internal secretion of those sardines she was fixing. That’s how it was supposed to go, but it doesn’t because Grandma just raises her eyebrows and acts all surprised.
He keeps looking at her for a while, like a rascal; sometimes she says to him what are you giving me that rascal look for, and that always makes me laugh because my grandpa is seventy-five years old, and there’s no way he can look at her like a rascal, but ever since Grandma started calling it the rascal look I call it that too. Grandpa goes back to his paper, heaves a deep sigh, and forgets about the rascal look because his needling didn’t work out.
It’s Fishermen’s Night on Saturday, I say. Grandpa doesn’t bat an eyelid, and Grandma keeps cleaning the fish. Are we going to celebrate?. . We don’t have anything to celebrate, we’re not fishermen, but if it’s fish you’re after, you’ll be eating fish in about half an hour. . But there’s free fish from the grill on Saturday. . You were going to pay for these ones, right?. . It’s not the same, those ones are from the skillet, on Saturday they’ll be from the grill. . All right, you go celebrate. . Can I stay until after dark?. . We’ll see. If the other kids do, you will too.
Grandpa read the paper through lunch; he’d grab a sardine with his fingers and eat it all in one go, from head to tail, the fish bones making a crunching sound between his teeth, they’re good for you, think of the calcium! He’d leave the tails to the side so he knew how many he’d eaten. Grandma looked at him unimpressed, and I thought about what would happen if I ate a whole sardine, just like that, without picking the bones out and said I was thinking of all the calcium. I swear that when I’m big I’m going to read the paper and eat sardines whole, and no one will be able to say or do a thing about it. I don’t care what I’m going to be when I grow up, I couldn’t care less if I’m going to be a pilot, a butcher, or a forestry expert like Uncle Postnikov, all I care about is that time goes by really fast so I can be like Grandpa and eat sardines head, bones and all, put my glasses on the end of my nose, and read the paper. That’s the important thing, to learn to read the paper, see what’s going on in the world, particularly on a day like today when it’s been really boring here and we ate sardines from the skillet, not from the grill. The world is so big that there are always people who weren’t bored, so the papers write about those people, and the people who are bored read the papers, like us for example, like Grandpa who’d love to bicker with Grandma, and Grandma who can’t be bothered bickering, and especially me, because I have to wait until Saturday to go to Profunda, to see the donkeys while they’re sleeping, to walk a circle on the edge of the abyss around the burned out house of Mate Terin and be done with being an outsider from Sarajevo.
You set a fine example for the boy, says Grandma to Grandpa as he drops a sardine on the paper. He picks it up between his thumb and forefinger and puts it in his mouth, the fine bones crackling like dry pine needles under the wheels of a truck, a greasy splodge in the shape of a sardine imprinted on the paper. Like a photo! Grandpa has snaffled the sardine, but its outline stays on the newsprint. You can see its length and width, the kind of head it had, and the kind of tail. The piece of newspaper looks like a tombstone with a picture of the deceased, the deceased one in Grandpa’s tummy.
It was dead when Grandma was cleaning it. That sardine was dead even when it was in the fish shop. It was dead as soon as they hauled it out of the sea. What do sardines die from? I asked. They die from air, just like we’d die if someone held us under water, said Grandpa. That means fishermen throw out their nets to drag fish into the open air so they die?. . No, they catch fish so we’ve got something to eat, and we eat only what is dead. . What about chard, is that dead too?. . I think it is, but no one really knows because chard doesn’t have eyes. At least as far as we know, dead things are things that once upon a time moved their eyes. . There should be fish that cast out nets for people and drag them into the sea and fry them and eat them. . Where’d you come up with that nonsense?. . Then we wouldn’t be sorry about eating fish because we’d know fish eat us too. Get it. . No, I don’t. Why would we feel sorry for fish?. . Because they were alive, and then fishermen caught them in their nets. If the fishermen hadn’t caught them, they’d still be alive. . You can’t feel sorry for fish, if you felt sorry for fish, then you’d also have to feel sorry for chickens, and pigs, and calves, in the end you’d die of hunger. . I don’t care, I’m going to feel sorry for them. . Suit yourself, feel sorry for them, but you’ll soon see you’ve got nothing to eat. Grandpa was angry now, so I decided to shut up and eat my sardines. He didn’t understand fish, and he wasn’t sad when he saw a greasy splodge on the newspaper, a photo of the sardine he’d just eaten. It was because he’d been to war, and in war people learn what it’s like to be dead and as long as they themselves don’t die, death becomes normal to them. He fought on the Soča front as an Austrian soldier, and then the Italians took him prisoner in 1916, and he says he had a great time back then. He was imprisoned for a full three years, he learned Italian and kept a diary about everything that happened, things he wanted to tell someone but didn’t have anyone to tell. He wrote the diary in Italian, but using the Cyrillic alphabet because the Italians didn’t know Cyrillic and the other prisoners didn’t know Italian, so no one could take a peek at his diary and laugh at his secret longings. The diary is kept in Grandpa’s drawer and the first of his descendants to know both Cyrillic and Italian will be the first to read it. Grandpa’s son, my uncle, and Grandpa’s daughter, my mother, don’t know Italian, so that means that one day, if I learn Cyrillic and Italian, it could be me. Maybe then I’ll find out how soldiers stop caring about fishes’ deaths and why they don’t care about fish even when they’re old and not soldiers anymore, but pensioners who no army in the world would ever send to war.