Aunts and Autumns

Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives. ("Reference Back," Philip Larkin)

The narrowness of a shallow-lit drab autumn day occupies the living room, punctuated only by small flurries of falling leaves, giving up and downspiralling by the window looking onto the empty street. In the silence of the unarticulated dread of something unavoidable approaching, a small but brusque sound asserts itself. Past the coat-hanger (with a crumpled paper ball hanging on a thread -- one of Kitty's first toys), past the fake mantle piece (with various greeting-cards, glass coasters from several trips, flat pebbles from a Cretan beach, and a menu from a Belgrade restaurant), past the rows of dictionaries, encyclopedias, and anthologies --the clearly-defined mechanical sound wells in surges from an old-fashioned fake-gilded alarm clock, carrying its full belly on two rounded little feet in one square of IKEA bookshelves.

Its two delicately thin and pointy hands have small fluorescent elements in them so they could glow in the dark; roman numerals, golden-yellow against a black circle for each, are lining up the inner circumference of the clock, like a spread of dark petals. Just underneath XII, there's "EUROPA" written in small capital letters, and just above VI, in even smaller letters, "2 JEWELS." Tiny beads of fluorescence are underneath each number. There is something olden about this clock's appearance, especially about its lonely-person's-home sound that absorbs and dictates simultaneously the autumness of the day. It was my aunt Cana from Kragujevac who gave me this clock a couple of years ago when I was visiting with my father, but when I was packing to go back to Montreal that summer, I decided to leave behind a number of "not immediately necessary" things, so the alarm clock stayed in Belgrade with my father (I only asked him to put it away if my Aunt came to Belgrade, which he duly did). This summer, though, when I came for a visit again and saw it, round and patient and waiting, I knew I needed to take it with me. So we took it to a watchmaker who cleaned and fixed it, and this time I brought it with me.



And now here it is, displaced on its IKEA bookshelf square, thousands of contexts away -- but emitting the same vibes, perforating the silence with the same code, occasionally (when all other sounds coincidentally die down) overwhelming the living room.

My first thought even before I look at it, is of Aunt, of course. She couldn't quite remember how long she'd had it when I asked her about it; she knew that it was either Uncle or their son -- both truck drivers who drove long distances, to Bulgaria, and Russia, and Italy -- who brought it for her from one of the trips. Both are also dead now. Uncle, a tall and strong mountain of a man was a die-hard smoker, and died of lung cancer, in hospital, only one month after they found it; Misha, their son, died the following year from an asthma attack, in his truck, on the Bulgarian border while he was coming back home. He was 26, and he was Aunt and Uncle's second child to die. Their first was only 12 when he didn't survive a heart surgery. Aunt spent most of her life alone, waiting for her men to come back from trips that sometimes lasted for months, but this new kind of being alone is different. It's aloneness with a certainty of never ending; a fruitless, futile aloneness. So she goes to the cemetery every morning, then sits in her house with the curtains closed, smokes, coughs and watches TV soaps religiously, surrounded by trinkets such as the clock she gave me which give off a sourish odor of a life gone by.

The same odor of diminishing perspectives and closing-in spaces that would hit you on the nose as soon as you entered the minuscule apartment of another aunt of mine, Aunt Marica, who, after Uncle Panta's death, lived alone until the end of her days surrounded by old black-and-white retouched wedding photographs mounted on the walls, snow-white starched laced doilies thrown over arm-rests, and relentless silence-deepening ticking of an alarm-clock like this one. Come to think of it, my grandmother's neighbour, in a small Belgrade apartment building where I lived while studying, had the same name, and everybody called her "Aunt Marica" although she was no one's aunt. I remember the day her husband died: she rang the doorbell all flushed and in a rush and told my grandmother that her Sima collapsed and she couldn't wake him up. My grandmother, an iron-willed woman who got divorced in the 1950s and brought up her two sons single-handedly, flew upstairs with Aunt Marica, and with all the doors and windows open in the small building, I could hear my grandmother slapping the unconscious Sima and calling his name loudly and somewhat angrily, it seemed. Later the ambulance came and took him away, and Aunt Marica continued to live alone in their neat and square apartment, where every table had its proper table-cloth, and all the horizontal surfaces were filled with little objects and figurines. And a ticking alarm clock, much too loud for its own good.

It was one late-autumn afternoon when I was walking home from school that I felt for the first time with unshakeable certainty that I too will have to die one day. There was something in the feeble light of the expiring day that shrank it and boxed it in; there was something in the broad-brimmed chestnut trees, naked and lined up far ahead into a diminishing perspective finalized in a dot, that put a lid on your existence, and made you aware of it. Made you aware of the downsizing ahead of you which will become more palpable every autumn; made you almost feel -- even at 12 -- the narrow days towards the end, closed off in a miniature space (all that's left of your life), interspersed with tatters of memories clinging to small objects on shelves, punctuated by relentless ticking of an alarm clock.