Chipped

We are sitting in her small living room in an apartment on the fifth floor of the ten-storey building where I used to live when I was a child. My family and I moved into a third-floor apartment when these new buildings were finished, when I was four, and then I lived here until I went to university. But this is the first time I'm in teta Bosa's apartment (in Serbian, Croatian or Bosnian, any aunt-like, well-meaning woman is a teta to a child or a younger person). We knew her a little better than most other neighbours because my brother and her younger son, Dražen, were friends. Later, Dražen was the unofficial "tech guy" in our building, who'd be sent for -- by my mother among others -- to fix any PC issues that no one knew what to do about. Teta Bosa was also the main organizer of the outdoor cookouts during the war in the 90s: since there were frequent and long blackouts, a few women from the neighbouring apartment buildings would make a fire in one corner of the children's playground which we could see from our balcony and cook army-size amounts of stews and soups in huge pots. Her husband, Mile, was permanently sickly and all I remember of him had to do with ambulances coming to get him or to bring him back.

She is clearly moved by my visit and treats me like her own child -- she speaks to me with tenderness and a hint of tears in her eyes, she hugs me, she works herself up into a flurry of small activities making sure I'm comfortable and brings me a huge slab of cheese cake which I eye with concern, knowing I can't eat even one half of it. Although she and I were never close when I lived here, when she looks at me, she sees a daughter she may have wished for and even more to the point, she sees a symbolic reminder of what life used to be before it was shattered into shards: happy pre-war times when we were all neighbours not caring about differences, when she was younger, when her husband was alive, when her sons where still at home and she was their mother, invested with a power she has long since lost. She knows I remember her from then just like I know she remembers me from when I was a carefree child whose mother was still alive.

During and after the war, many things changed. Tossed by the sea of history, people left and came, old neighbours disappeared sometimes even without a goodbye, new neighbours took their place but it was never the same. After my mother died and my father moved away, my brother and I having left long before then, I imagine Bosa felt the old world end and looking at her I can tell she never stopped mourning it, especially after her Mile died and her older son Dragan moved to Denmark with his family and got progressively more estranged.

"My dear child," she sighs, "everything has changed for the worse." She looks somewhere into the distance; there is a piece of cake in front of her but she hasn't touched it. I look around the room: there are framed photographs everywhere, on the walls, shelves and cabinets, photos of children of different ages. I know that Dražen has two daughters while Dragan has several children but I've never met any of these kids and can't tell who's who. She follows my gaze and says, "I have six of them. Six grandchildren, and not a single one is in touch with me. My Mile and I looked after two of Dragan's children as if we were their parents for four years, while Dragan and his wife were busy with their jobs in Denmark. Do you think anyone calls me to ask me how I am? No." She fumbles through her phone. "I don't even know what they look like now -- I only have a few photos of them that Dražen found on the internet. Here, see, this is the oldest one." She shows me a selfie of a young girl striking a young person's classic selfie in-your-face pose, flirting with the camera. It's strange to think that when she was taking this photo casually, it never occurred to her that it will be the only current photo of her which her grandmother will have. "This is my only link with them now." Her voice is dry and tight. This has been the heaviest burden of her life, a crushing weight she falls asleep with and wakes up to, without anyone to share it with anymore. Dražen is the only one who still visits her but he has been mown down by his own life's Furies: his wife divorced him and hasn't let him see the children for fifteen years, he hasn't been able to advance from the position of a parking lot attendant, his older brother borrowed money from him and never returned it, which crippled him financially, a few years ago he lost an eye and is wearing a glass one... A litany of stabs and injuries his mother feels helpless about because she couldn't protect him. She shakes off the heavy thoughts momentarily -- her old friends -- and motions to the cake, "Eat, there's more in the fridge..." Her wish to thank me for remembering her, to do something for me as a relic of that old, lost world, to shower me with attention, is visible, almost palpable but she is also at a loss as there isn't much besides trinkets and words. "I'll never forget you and Srdjan, and your mom and dad... Your mom was such a kind person, she helped me many times." I guess my mother, who was a pharmacist, helped Bosa like many others by getting her a hard-to-find medication when she needed it. "And you were all wonderful neighbours... You're like one of my own." She touches my hand lightly, then gets up, goes to the back room and brings a small bag. "Teta Bosa doesn't have much to give you but here are a couple of things to remember me by." From the plastic bag she pulls out a black wallet-purse and something wrapped up in a crinkly kind of wrapping paper. She half-opens it to show me what it is: a porcelain figurine of a doe with her fawn lying next to her. "They made me think of me and you," she says. I know such figurines very well -- every household I knew used to have a few: little dogs and cats, ducks, and cute children. We had a small collection on display in our living room two floors down from here. After my father moved back to Belgrade from Bosnia years later, he only kept one grey porcelain doggie with sad eyes and a gaze following you wherever you went. This summer our eyes locked a few times and I thought I could detect a look of reproach or possibly pleading in his eyes. 

The doe and her baby are an ochre, sandy colour, with black dots for eyes, noses and hooves. The tip of the doe's right ear is missing, and somehow this gets to me, this chipped figurine, a cheap but unambiguous sign of tenderness and love in an invariably imperfect and cracked world. And then there is no stopping it: a certain, not unpleasant, vulnerability, grief and nostalgia about the past rises inside me like a tidal wave and the world of my childhood stirs to life very beautifully and very painfully. The mismatched furniture of our apartment, the open windows in the summer and the sounds of the school bell from the school below, children running across the green field nestled among apartment buildings, their euphoric voices echoing through the open space, the thick elephantine chimney stack of the paper factory in the distance, my brother and other boys from the hood playing tennis with plastic racquets and sponge balls, me running up three flights of stairs to my best friend's apartment on the sixth floor, the music from the radios on all the floors, the Sunday smell of slow-roasting coffee beans, my father reading the newspaper on the couch under a broken but mended reading lamp, my mother hanging laundry on the balcony while the pigeons eyed her from a safe distance, neighbours greeting each other in the hallways, the elevators in a constant dialectic of getting stuck between the floors and getting unstuck when the president of the tenants' association came with the key, and all of this, all of us, living and breathing the moment in full swing, oblivious of the simple and primitive qualities of the life we knew, which later retrospectives would identify as such.

Bosa and I look at each other and we see all this without having to say anything.

I feel it is time to leave. We've acknowledged the vast vaults of memory and past joys and sorrows in ourselves and in each other and there is nowhere else to go from there. She tells me to come visit again, and I nod although we both know this is very likely the last time we're seeing each other. She insists on seeing me out all the way down and I ask if we can take the stairs instead of the elevator. She understands and we walk down the stairs and along the landings between the floors slowly, almost as a meditation, as if we were paying tribute to something or someone loved and lost. And we are. On the fourth floor the name Arsenić is still on the door that was theirs. Bosa tells me their children now own the flat but are rarely there. Many names are new to me, including the one on the door of the fourth-floor apartment where my school friend Paša lived with her mother and her brother. They left while we were still in high school - they moved to Canada, to a place I could never pronounce properly, Etobicoke. I received a couple of letters from her, describing the movie-like life in North America (they had lockers at school!). We climb down to the third floor, my heart somewhere in my throat. Before I look towards the door that used to be ours, I notice that the name Vukašević is still on the door opposite from ours. "Yes, teta Ana is the only one who still lives there," says Bosa. "Her husband died some years ago and Vladana moved out when she finished school." Vladana was their younger daughter, a little younger than me, but they had an older daughter too, Dragana. She was a year older than me and when I was 16, she got sick and a few months later died in a hospital in Slovenia where she was sent for a specialized treatment. I remember not wanting to go to her funeral -- I was afraid, the way a fragile teenager would be when confronted with the reality of death -- but when my mother said, "You really don't want to go? That is the last thing we can give her: to see her off at her funeral," I changed my mind and went. I remember a letter being read that Dragana wrote while she was in hospital, something about unfairness of life.

We pass that door, and now I have nowhere to look but at #16. I slow down, to have more time. To the right, the doorbell, whose sound once I knew and recognized like a familiar fingerprint. To the left, the red box with the fire extinguisher which, luckily, was never needed while we lived there. And then, the door. Its particular width, the spyhole with the name underneath, the specific shape of the door handle (not the door knob), made it feel like an intimately known face, a face you grow up with and take for granted and never question its role in the texture of your universe. What flashes through my mind like a sprinkle of light is the image of the child me on the other side of this door with my left ear glued to it, listening intently to the sounds of the building's innards, picking up the small hums and creaks, thumps and clangs, muffled noises and distant voices from various nooks and crannies, behind the doors, on the staircase, in the elevator, all the way to the entrance and even to the street, where sometimes I'd pick out the slow and belaboured footsteps of my mother returning from work. She often brought bags full of goodies and once she brought a canary which we then had for twelve years. Then Bosa and I are on the steps I took thousands of times and the second and the first floors are a blur, only sharpened by the sudden recognition of a gap in the railing on the second-floor landing where one of the metal bars has been missing ever since I can remember. We reach the ground floor where the mailboxes are -- for a long time the family that bought our apartment left our name next to theirs on the mailbox but it is no longer there -- and then we exit through the main door which now locks and never did in the past.

To the right of the entrance are the yellow and red rose bushes which Bosa planted many years ago; straight ahead is a sturdy and mature linden tree which was much thinner and more brittle when I was a child and when kids played with glass marbles under it. The heavy late-June sun is pressing down on us but Bosa and I are smiling. "Come, I'll show you my limousine," she chuckles and we cross the street where her ancient Zastava is parked (once upon a time, the most popular Yugoslav-made car). "It's over twenty years old and it broke down again a few months ago. I'm saving money to buy the new parts" she laughs with good-natured self-mockery and levity of someone who is used to things breaking down. "Let's take one for the archives," I say, taking my phone to snap a photo. Bosa poses by the driver's door, smiling warmly and spreading the right hand into a generous salute despite all the brokenness, sorrow and loneliness. 

I leave her there smiling and waving for as long as I'm in view. I feel something in me splinter and chip away, disperse and scatter on this sidewalk, on those steps, in the rustling leaves of the linden tree, waving like little hands from a time that's heartachingly gone and must be left behind.