Mama Leone by Miljenko Jergovic Page B

papers, like us for example, like Grandpa who’d love to bicker with Grandma, and Grandma who can’t be bothered bickering, and especially me, because I have to wait until Saturday to go to Profunda, to see the donkeys while they’re sleeping, to walk a circle on the edge of the abyss around the burned out house of Mate Terin and be done with being an outsider from Sarajevo.
    You set a fine example for the boy , says Grandma to Grandpa as he drops a sardine on the paper. He picks it up between his thumb and forefinger and puts it in his mouth, the fine bones crackling like dry pine needles under the wheels of a truck, a greasy splodge in the shape of a sardine imprinted on the paper. Like a photo! Grandpa has snaffled the sardine, but its outline stays on the newsprint. You can see its length and width, the kind of head it had, and the kind of tail. The piece of newspaper looks like a tombstone with a picture of the deceased, the deceased one in Grandpa’s tummy.
    It was dead when Grandma was cleaning it. That sardine was dead even when it was in the fish shop. It was dead as soon as they hauled it out of the sea. What do sardines die from? I asked. They die from air, just like we’d die if someone held us under water , said Grandpa. That means fishermen throw out their nets to drag fish into the open air so they die? . . . No, they catch fish so we’ve got something to eat, and we eat only what is dead . . . What about chard, is that dead too? . . . I think it is, but no one really knows because chard doesn’t have eyes. At least as far as we know, dead things are things that once upon a time moved their eyes . . . There should be fish that cast out nets for people and drag them into the sea and fry them and eat them . . . Where’d you come up with that nonsense? . . . Then we wouldn’t be sorry about eating fish because we’d know fish eat us too. Get it . . . No, I don’t. Why would we feel sorry for fish? . . . Because they were alive, and then fishermen caught them in their nets. If the fishermen hadn’t caught them, they’d still be alive . . . You can’t feel sorry for fish, if you felt sorry for fish, then you’d also have to feel sorry for chickens, and pigs, and calves, in the end you’d die of hunger . . . I don’t care, I’m going to feel sorry for them . . . Suit yourself, feel sorry for them, but you’ll soon see you’ve got nothing to eat . Grandpa was angry now, so I decided to shut up and eat my sardines. He didn’t understand fish, and he wasn’t sad when he saw a greasy splodge on the newspaper, a photo of the sardine he’d just eaten. It was because he’d been to war, and in war people learn what it’s like to be dead and as long as they themselves don’t die, death becomes normal to them. He fought on the So č a front as an Austrian soldier, and then the Italians took him prisoner in 1916, and he says he had a great time back then. He was imprisoned for a full three years, he learned Italian and kept a diary about everything that happened, things he wanted to tell someone but didn’t have anyone to tell. He wrote the diary in Italian, but using the Cyrillic alphabet because the Italians didn’t know Cyrillic and the other prisoners didn’t know Italian, so no one could take a peek at his diary and laugh at his secret longings. The diary is kept in Grandpa’s drawer and the first of his descendants to know both Cyrillic and Italian will be the first to read it. Grandpa’s son, my uncle, and Grandpa’s daughter, my mother, don’t know Italian, so that means that one day, if I learn Cyrillic and Italian, it could be me. Maybe then I’ll find out how soldiers stop caring about fishes’ deaths and why they don’t care about fish even when they’re old and not soldiers anymore, but pensioners who no army in the world would ever send to war.
    Tomorrow was Friday.