To My Dead Ones

"These fragments I have shored against my ruins..."

The night before my birthday started with a dream about a fire, again. We were at home in Banja Luka, the flames were all around, not too far -- but somehow I knew we were safe, I knew the fire would die down before it reached us. On the balcony looking onto the school and the field, in the comfort zone of this knowledge, I looked around and realized that it was mostly the 16-floor building next to ours that was engulfed and half-eaten away by the fire. Its façade and structure were peeling off and crumbling down. Suddenly, on the fifth floor a girl of about 4 or 5 was dangling from the remains of a window or a balcony, holding on to something in the blackened wall by one hand, but strangely quiet. A woman's profile darted up above her, and just as the girl lost her grip of the wall, the woman stretched out her hand and caught the falling child by the arm.

I don't know why I sometimes dream about fires; this was the first fire-dream for my birthday. And I like how that girl was quiet, hovering for a few seconds above her death, seemingly knowing something I don't know, and then being pulled up and back to life.

Just before my third birthday, did I dream of anything? It's hard to tell, the mind being such an unreliable (and the only real) source of information. What I do know is that I tried to add to the festivities (it was a big family affair, with even my grandparents who lived 700 km away coming for a visit) by singing. That's my mom with the accordion. And that's Dragan, the son of my dad's colleague from work, and my first ever crush. I wish I remembered what we were trying to sing. In fact, I think I only intruded myself into the frame because Dragan was there, singing a song. I was always following him like a lost puppy, my brown marble-eyes not letting him out of sight, as a tacitly worshipped sacred being in the enchanted and unquestioned world of children (and animals).

A few days before my birthday this year, I was riding my bike leisurely in the Jarry Park, on an unusually mild afternoon. My tall, elongated shadow with two huge eliptical wheels on the concrete path gave me a grotesque, Dali-esque look, and I began to think -- not of birthdays, but of deathdays. When I was 17, my aunt died of a stroke. It was the first close-family death around me, and an early one: Aunt Ljilja was 56. One morning -- it must have been the weekend -- I was sitting up in bed in my pyjamas, writing homework in a small purple school notebook; my brother was still sprawling in his bed next to mine. This was the time when I did school work as soon as I woke up (before breakfast), and when my handwriting was still curvey and elegant. There was commotion somewhere behind the closed doors down the hall, then a few minutes of silence, and then my dad swung the door open and said in a loud, exaggeratedly chirpy adult-talking-to-children-about-stressful-stuff voice: "Come on, kids, get up, we're going to Belgrade, Aunt just died." I was in the middle of a sentence, my hand holding the pen in midair, and never finished it until after we came back from the funeral a few days later. By then, I had mislaid the original pen, and had to resume writing that same piece of homework with another pen. And so, for the longest time, I had the exact record of when my Aunt died, and when death first infiltrated the close ranks of my life, captured in the change of the shade of blue ink in the middle of that sentence in my purple notebook.

Thirteen years later, my other aunt died, also from a stroke; Aunt Mikica was 49, and had been suffering from cancer for a few years. By that point I had already left the country, and received the news in an email from my parents. It was only last year that I found out some details, one of which stayed permanently in my mind. When she was taken ill, her daughter Martina -- who told me the story -- went to the hospital with her in an ambulance car. Aunt's condition was rapidly getting worse, and she couldn't speak any more. Just before she lost consciousness, she grabbed my cousin Martina fervently, and tried to tell her something, something clearly very important, but no words came out. Early next morning she died, and Martina never knew what her mother was trying to tell her in those last moments. She told me all this with a bewildered tiniest smile hovering on the corners of her lips, in the voice of someone who had thought of this same thing every minute of every day, who had accepted the pain as an old friend, and buried the anger and frustration.

Pedalling slowly and elastically through the Canadian autumn in the park, a few days before my birthday, I caught a shadow of a smile fluttering around my eyes. These thoughts are not morbid indulgence in birthday-induced self-centeredness; they are the natural facing back towards the people who came and went before me, whose cycles are complete, and intersect at different points with my rounding one. There are others, too; I can't write about them yet. But as I was cycling in the daze of yellows and reds towards the day symbolizing the source of this spurt of energy called "me," I was thinking of them; I have them in the tips of my fingers as I am typing this. Ljilja, Andja, Mikica, Tomislav, Zlata. You are my inspiration, my secret song, my morning and evening thought; it is with you that I spend my birthday, like many times in the past. You've been pushed out of the center, and I too am being squeezed out slowly towards the peripheries. But as I move forward (or round?), I'm holding you close to me, I'm keeping you next to me, especially and always on my birthday.

Thirty two years after my third birthday