The part of the story that follows I learned back then, from my mom, and it goes something like this. When he finished high school, the same one I’d attend fifty years later, my uncle got the draft. Because he spoke perfect German and had a German grandfather, they put him in a unit formally part of the Wehrmacht but made up of our people. They sent them to Slavonia in Croatia. My grandpa combed the city in a blind panic, badgering one acquaintance after another in one office after another, just trying to get his son out of the army. But of all his connections, only a Communist one proved any good. A friend, a manager in the railways and member of the resistance, told him how it could be arranged for M. to desert his unit and be taken in by Bosnian Partisans a couple of kilometers from his base. Grandpa was all for the idea, but when he relayed it to Grandma, she got scared. For a start she thought in his German uniform the Partisans would shoot her son on sight, and even if they didn’t, he’d be sure to lose his head in a Partisan one. More to the point, she was of the view that he was safer being the enemy. Grandpa tried to persuade her, but it did no good. He hollered so loud the whole apartment shook, desperate because he himself wasn’t sure what was best, but also because he was certain how it all might end, who had justice on their side, and who would win the war. Mom of course had no idea what all Grandpa’s hollering was about, but I’m sure he hollered the exact same thing when I was just a boy and he told me the story of the Second World War: Hitler’s an idiot. That’s what I said right back in 1939. Idiots lose wars, but they kill more people than you could ever imagine. And then that trash Pavelić came along. He sent our kids to Stalingrad and turned them into criminals. He created a shitty little state dangling out a big Kraut ass. That was Pavelić for you, and I knew that from the get-go, but that knowledge doesn’t help you any, because it won’t save your neck. I think that was also about the gist of what he yelled at Grandma in the fall of 1971, when he again made the house shake and went as red in the face as the Party flag, and his lips went blue and Mom went up to him and shook him by the shoulders and said Dad, calm down, calm down. . But he wouldn’t calm down, he just went on, hollering about Maks Luburić, who cooked people in boiling water and in March 1945 skinned Grandpa’s railwayman friend alive in the house of horror in Skenderija. Then Mom started crying, imploring Daddy, sweetheart, please stop, for God’s sake, I beg of you. . Suddenly he calmed down, not for God’s sake, but because of her tears. He put a funny face on and said let us alone you silly woman, can’t you see we’re talking about men’s stuff. Then he turned to me and whispered politics isn’t for women. They just start bawling. Golda Meir is the exception. Back then I didn’t know Grandpa had tricked me, that he’d actually told me another story, not the one I thought he was telling me. Mom didn’t bawl like other women when politics came up. That I know from when I found the box.
Anyway, when Grandpa was done yelling at Grandma, having failed to convince her to go along with the Partisan plan, which she steadfastly rejected, Grandpa started living months of his own private hell. He’d wake at night, bathed in sweat, with a single recurring thought: that M. wasn’t coming home, and that if he did, the sum of Pavelić’s and Hitler’s crimes would be on his conscience. Grandma was only worried about one thing: that her son stayed alive, the how was no matter. It was in those months she started praying to God.
How they took the news of Uncle’s death, whether they cried, yelled, screamed, or just absorbed it in silence, I’ll never know. A few months after the liberation of Sarajevo four young guys in Partisan uniforms showed up on their doorstep. Grandma cried, Grandpa held his face in his hands to keep it from crumbling like a ceramic mask. One of the young guys put his hand on Grandma’s shoulder and said don’t cry, madam. You’ve got another child. Look at your little girl. M. talked about his baby sister every day. My mom, a blond baroque angel, sat on her potty in the corner.
Seven days after my uncle’s death, the unit in which he’d been stationed deserted in its entirety and went over to the Partisans. To that point M. had been their only casualty. At war’s end three more lay dead. But they were no longer the enemy.
Grandpa and Grandma lived together for a full thirty years after the death of their son, never speaking of him. They held their silence in front of others and probably held it between themselves. Don’t expect me to be so banal as to say I know Grandma blamed herself for her son’s death. She never once set foot in a church again, she forgot Christmas and Easter, and only once a year did Grandpa put on his best suit and head to Sarajevo Cathedral for midnight mass. He didn’t have much of an ear, but he liked singing the songs heralding the birth of the eternal child.
Grandma didn’t decide that God doesn’t exist, more that he just had nothing to do with her. She stopped believing in him even if he did exist. Grandpa died in 1972, and Grandma began her dying in the early spring of 1986. She had throat cancer and it got harder and harder for her to breathe. Sometimes she’d call me by M.’s name. They were little slips and I didn’t call her on them. Or maybe they weren’t little slips at all. By that time I was her only surviving son.
At the beginning of June, an ambulance came and took her to the hospital to die. They cut her throat open, but she still couldn’t breathe. She fixed her gaze straight ahead and set her hands together. I smiled like it was all no big thing and that she’d be better tomorrow. But I knew exactly what was going down. Death came slyly and unfairly. It grabbed my grandma by the throat and shook everything left out of her. What was left was the memory of her son. She died during the night of the fifth of June.
Like all old folk, she’d talked about her funeral while still in good health. Under no circumstances whatsoever did she want her photograph to appear in her obituary, over her dead body. But she didn’t mention anything about a priest. No one had asked of course. That would have been stupid.
Over her dead body, we got a priest and paid for a memorial service. I can’t explain why to you. Maybe so that God, if he exists, smartens up his act. That’s how a friend of Grandma’s put it.
I never even visited her grave come All Saints’ Day. I can’t tell you why. I just didn’t ever feel like it. I was sorry she’d died, particularly in such a terrible way; I guess I thought visiting the grave would be to honor such a death. A few days before this most recent war, my friend Ahmed’s father died. On my way back from the janazah, instead of heading for the exit gate I decided to take a walk over to the Catholic plots. On the tombstone under which my grandpa and grandma were buried, a huge black dog lay sprawled out in the sun. I sat down beside him, and he lifted his head lazily, looking at me with half-closed eyes. I’d long since stopped caring that no one had believed my first insight and first memory, the one of a dog barking in the hall of the maternity ward the moment before I let out my first scream. You’re the angel, aren’t you? He wagged his tail on the marble a couple of times and sunk back into sleep. My hand followed him.
How I started shouting in my sleep
Through the summer and fall Grandpa recited his last words and got ready to die. To Isak Sokolovski, his Preference partner, he said I know every card and that’s why I’m leaving. He spun his hat on his index finger, cleared his throat for the last time in Isak’s life, and left. To Grandma he said you sleep, I’m fine. I’ve been fine for some time now. She was sleepless until the day he died. To Mom he said there’s no one left. Just the two of us and the darkness. And then he died. Mom closed his eyes and wrote the words down on a box of laxatives. I was at the seaside at the time, with my auntie Lola, Grandma’s sister. I marked the date in the calendar with a little cross. So people would know my grandpa had died. Actually, no, I did it so they’d know I knew my grandpa was dead.