A Rock of One's Own and Beyond

 It all happens very quickly. So quickly that I feel a sort of guilt about it at first.

It’s already October 8 – her birthday – and even though I usually have a clear idea about how to mark it by now, this time I’m not sure yet. I have an old photo of her: each year I pull a new old photo of her from the vast archives of family photos. But I don’t know yet what I’ll do with it. I dilly-dally, think of this or that, my mind seeming to drift to unremarkable daily details, hesitating to immerse itself in the significance of the date. Then I remember that my father said he would go to the cemetery with my brother and my niece, and immediately I somehow know that this is THE plan. I have no idea exactly where I’m going with this, but I sense that I should follow the sudden rush of micro particles gathering themselves into the body of a still unknown intent, and I do.

I take a photo of the photo, crop out the edges of the invading physical environment existing in my here and now, some 60 years after the photo was taken and 18 years after she died, and send it to my brother, hoping they’ll get it while still at the cemetery. I feel a vague sense of excitement, and a puzzlement over this course of action I’m taking without knowing why exactly but knowing it is the exact action to take. And then I just wait, spending time with the photo itself.

It’s one of those small-size pocket photos, with white uneven and rugged borders – this format must have been popular at the time as we have many similar ones. My mother is in her mid-to-late twenties and is sitting on a rock in the middle of what seems to be a small mountain stream. Unlike many of our family photos, this one has a blank back, with no date or location. But I know where and when this is, approximately. I’ve seen other photos from this period when my parents were not parents yet.  My father was on his first job in Srebrenica in Bosnia, and my mother was visiting from Belgrade whenever that was possible. The photo is black and white, but it seems to be springtime – there is foliage behind her, and what’s most likely the Crni Guber stream flows around the rock she is seated on with a post-winter alacrity. My father’s brown raincoat, which I know from other photos too, lies on the ground next to the stream. He must be the one taking the photo. The waters gushing from the hilly grounds around Srebrenica are rich with all kinds of minerals due to the ore in the bosom of the nearby mountains, mined since the Roman presence a couple of millennia ago. For several centuries, people have been coming to drink this water or wash themselves with it in the hopes of curing various illnesses. The spring named “The Beauty” is famed particularly for the skin-improving features of its water. During one of my mother’s visits, two friends of my parents came along, and they all went to wash themselves with The Beauty’s water.

It always disarms me to see my mother in the pictures which pre-date my existence. I remember many things about my mother – she was my mom for 33 years – but one of the constants was her worry. She was often worried to varied degrees: about my brother and me, about her job, about the situation in the country especially in the 1990s, about her health, about her aging parents who were out of easy reach after she moved to Bosnia with my father, about her brother who was spiraling into the darkness of a failed life…  Seeing her open, fresh, untroubled face with a youthful glow and hopefulness is an unusual sight and it pulls on some fine strings in me and makes me feel motherly and protective towards her. Something that I quickly recognize is her instinctive self-preservation posture suggesting a certain vulnerability despite that bright-eyed youthfulness: she is sitting mildly hunched over, with a light sweater thrown around her shoulders as if she was a little cold or trying to counter a feeling of being exposed in some way. Everything about her radiates loveliness and pureness: the spotlessly white sweater, the starched-collar white shirt, her flat white shoes (perfect for her slender legs but not the type that looks good on mine), the wrist band of the small watch on her left hand chastely resting on her crossed right knee, the gentle grip on the walking stick in her right hand, and above all, her unprepared face caught with a trace of a smiling surprise, light and unburdened by life and its punches packed in the four decades ahead of her.

A ping of the phone punctures through my revery: it’s a photo message from my brother, arriving about half an hour after I sent the photo. I open it and am instantly floored and elated at the same time – not so much because she looks like her (in fact, there are many other photos of my niece where that resemblance is more noticeable) but because of the idea, and the gesture, and the connection created. In the photo, my niece is sitting on the edge of her grandmother’s grave, slightly hunched over, her right leg crossed over her left, her hands on her right knee and a smile on her 7-year-old face, imitating my mother’s pose from the photo which they must have received and seen while they were at the cemetery. They have never met, and Zozi knows of her grandmother only from stories, but they could never be closer than they are now, the young woman in the black-and-white photo transforming magically — through years and decades, joys and griefs, life and death – into the little girl with her eyes sitting by her granite side.

It isn’t much and it is everything: the birthday gift of continuity – a proof of persistence in the forward-moving stream of existence, well beyond the edges of the rock we’re sitting on.

I know how much my mother would love Zozi. I think of how much Zozi senses that love without knowing. I feel how much power one holds at any moment to keep the love running, easily, by doing small acts like this photo-pantomime improvised by me and my brother, without a single word being said.

And it’s another perfect October day without her.