Mama Leone by Miljenko Jergovic

said someone else. I just sat there looking at the floor.
    Now I’m lying in bed and waiting for the morning so I can finally get going. You can’t leave at night because it’s dark, which means you can’t see where you’re going, and my car doesn’t have any headlights. I’m going to have another good look at that photo and see if I can see me sitting in a real car and not a cardboard box that used to have packets of cookies in it. If you can see it’s a car, tell me. If you can’t, I’m going to have to take my spade, my teddy bunny, and my winter sweater and set out on foot. If I stay, I’ll have to look at the floor for the rest of my life, never say anything, not telling apart the voices talking to me.

When someone gets really scared
    Donkeys sleep at Profunda, that’s what we whisper so the old folk don’t hear, because if they heard, then we’d be in for it. Profunda is out of bounds, because that’s where little Vjeko went and fell and broke his neck and there was a big funeral, the procession went from one end of Drvenik to the other, from Punta to Puntin, and then it went up on Biokovo, where the cemetery is, and everyone cried because the body was a little one, and when the body is a little one, really everyone cries. When it’s a big one, the only people who cry are those who loved the dead person or those who love those who loved the dead person. No one had been to Profunda since then, no one even knows what’s there anymore, but by the time three years had passed since Vjeko’s funeral, the wonders of Profunda had gotten bigger and bigger. Then the biggest rumor of all started going around, the one about the donkeys sleeping there at night.
    Profunda used to be Mate Terin’s house, but then the war started and the Italians came and they set Mate’s house on fire. No one knew why they did it, why his house, and why they spared everyone else’s. Maybe they just wanted to make an example of someone, show how tough they were, and they picked Mate’s house by chance. Mate hung himself when he saw the remains of his house, and because he didn’t have a wife or children, or any relatives except a brother who lived in New Zealand who never wrote to him, there was no one to grieve for Mate or to repair his house when the war finished. All that remained were big rough walls, white as snow, all traces of fire washed clean by the rain. The burned stone had gone white, much whiter than it was when it was a house.
    You get to Profunda from the hillside above because the house is dug into the earth and cut into the rock. You can jump onto the ruins from the rock above and walk the walls on which the roof once stood. Actually, you could only do that until little Vjeko fell and broke his neck.
    We’re gonna do it on Saturday , said NikÅ¡a, but we gotta wait ’til it’s dark . There were five of us, four locals and me, who wanted to be a local, but to them I was an outsider, the Sarajever. This meant I always had to prove myself more, just like I had to prove myself more when I was in Sarajevo because I was an outsider there too, a Dalmatian outsider. For half the year I spoke Dalmatian and the other half Sarajevan, butno one trusted me because they all knew that I’d always be going back to where I wasn’t a Sarajevan or a Dalmatian, where I’d speak like I wasn’t one or the other.
    On Saturday it’s Fishermen’s Night, that’s a village festival, and they don’t make anyone go home, mothers, babies, or grandpas, and so we’re going to make the most of it and go to Profunda, to see where the donkeys sleep and walk on the walls and check the whole place out, but only the brave among us of course. Scaredy-cats don’t have to walk the walls, but I’ve got to use my chance, because if I miss it I’ll always be the outsider from Sarajevo and no one will ever believe me when I speak