How I Started Shouting in My Sleep — Web Exclusive
By Miljenko Jergović
Translated by Stela Tomasevic; David Williams
Throughout the summer and autumn, while he was getting ready to die, Grandpa kept uttering his last words. To Isak Sokolovski, his bridge partner, he said: “I know each and every card, and that is why I’m leaving.” He spun his hat on his index finger, cleared his throat for the last time in Isak’s life and left. He said to Grandma: “You sleep, I’m fine. I’ve been fine for a long time now.” She could not sleep a wink again until the day he died. He said to Mom: “There’s no one left, just the two of us and darkness.” Then, he promptly died. Mom closed his eyes, and wrote the words down on a box of laxatives. I was at the seaside at the time, with my Aunty Lola, Grandma’s sister. I marked a cross on my calendar next to the date. It’s only then that Grandpa’s death became real. Actually, no, I did it so they would realize that I knew my Grandpa had died.
That day Aunty Lola made some cakes, put an entire plateful before me, sat across from me, placed her elbows on the table and said: “Eat, my child.” I kept eating, afraid that she would tell me that Grandpa had died. I didn’t know how I was supposed to react. Would I have to stop eating the cakes, cry, ask how he died, shake my head and go “tut, tut, tut,” like I saw Grandma Matija from Punta do when I was spying from the pantry, or would I have to do something that I wasn’t even aware I had to do, because I was only six and had no experience of mourning rituals? I ate the entire plate of cakes and got a tummy ache. I lay down in the bedroom, the blinds were down, so it looked like it was dark. I flew a plane in the darkness. I didn’t go “brmm, brmm,” because the plane was supersonic so you couldn’t hear it. Instead, I listened to Aunty Lola in the kitchen talking to the neighbors who had brought packets of coffee, bottles of grappa, and something else that I couldn’t see. “How he suffered, poor Fran, God rest his soul,” Ante Pudin said. “He is now at peace, but who knows what awaits the rest of us,” said Uncle Kruno, a retired admiral. “The little one might as well be an orphan now. Parents today, God help us, what he’s learned from his Grandpa, he’s learned,” Aunty Lola said. My tummy continued to hurt. I shut my eyes tightly, farted, and fell asleep.
Seven days later, Mom and Grandma arrived from Sarajevo. They were both dressed in black from head to toe. I pretended this was perfectly normal. They too pretended it was normal. I was afraid that Mom would broach the subject, so I wandered around the house avoiding her. I knew that Grandma wouldn’t say anything. She never started any conversation: she would let me say something first and then she would continue. I think that she always avoided subjects I didn’t want to hear anything about. There was nothing to say about Grandpa’s death, just like there’s nothing to say about any other death. I had no idea how widespread a thing death was and how much grown-ups talked about it.
Each morning, in the midst of his rasping, explosive asthmatic cough, Grandpa would repeat “Glorious Death,” and Grandma would say: “Be quiet Franjo, I’m bound to go before you,” and this would happen every day. I thought that other people didn’t talk like that. I thought it was just between the two of them, that they were special people because they were my Grandma and Grandpa, and all other people were only puppets in a puppet theater. After Grandpa died, Grandma turned out to be a cheat. I thought that she should be ashamed because she had done something bad. She said that she would go before him and, now, he had died first. You can’t necessarily will yourself to die, but there is some of your will involved in this, and you simply shouldn’t say that you will die before someone else, if you’re not going to. Later on I forgot about Grandma’s shame, probably because she didn’t seem to be ashamed of herself.
Once, while we were visiting Aunty Mina in Dubrovnik, Mom said: “I don’t know if the little one knows.” I was playing with the garden gnomes and pretended not to hear anything. Aunty Mina watched me silently. She would’ve loved to have asked me if I knew that my Grandpa had died, but she didn’t dare. You don’t ask children things like that. “The poor man peed his soul out. At the Kosevo hospital they gave him the wrong treatment. They shouldn’t have given him the laxatives. His heart became a rag, an old rag you use to wipe the floors.” The gnome gave me the evil eye. I felt lost in this terrible world. It seemed that fairy tales didn’t lie after all: my Grandpa was left without a heart, with a dirty, ugly, stinky square rag, like the one stuck tucked in the toilet. I wanted to howl with horror, but I simply couldn’t.
From that day on, whenever I went to pee, I was afraid that I would pee my soul out. I watched the stream of urine: it was white or yellow or a dark yellow when I was sick. I didn’t know what a soul looked like, but I was sure I would recognize it if it came out. It didn’t appear for days. Then months. I asked Grandma what a soul looked like and she told me that it didn’t look like anything, since it was only a word for something that wasn’t visible. “Can it come out when you go to the bathroom?” I wanted to know. I wanted to find out about what interested me, but I didn’t want to reveal the beginning of the story, to have to say that I knew Grandpa had died or to give her cause to say anything about it. “What do you mean by ‘Can it come out when you go to the bathroom?’” she asked, but did not look concerned. “Well, it comes out of you on the toilet, and you die, you don’t exist any more,” I said this as though it was obvious and that it was odd that she didn’t know anything about it. “Do you mean whether you can die on the toilet? I think that you can, but it’s not where people usually die.”
“And where do they usually die?”
“In bed, in traffic accidents, and people can die in wars and earthquakes too.”
“And the soul? What happens to the soul?”
“Nothing, it simply disappears.”
“How can something that exists disappear?”
“Just like jam, it gets used up and there isn’t any more.”
“Does the soul disappear inside or does it go out and then disappear?”
“Where would it go? It has nowhere to go to. It’s not a dog that goes out. It disappears, it is no more, and that’s that.”
“So it can’t come out of you when you go to the bathroom?”
“Of course not, I don’t know where you’re getting this from.”
I felt a lot better after that. I peed without fear and I didn’t even look at the stream any more. What Mom told Aunty Mina was nonsense.
Six months after Grandpa’s death, Grandma and Mom suddenly stopped wearing black. It was a Sunday, and my Dad and Uncle came. The white tablecloth for special occasions was laid, as though it was someone’s birthday or wedding. “Today we will remember and commemorate Grandpa,” my Uncle said. I pretended that this was perfectly normal, as though I didn’t remember him every day. Maybe I do lie when I play Ustashas and Partisans by myself because I am neither an Ustasha nor a Partisan and I can’t be two people at the same time. Their lies are worse though when they remember Grandpa. They set the table using their best china, cutlery, and special glasses, walk around the house in their ties, not taking their shoes off, not doing any of the things they normally do and lying that they didn’t remember him each and every day. How could they not remember him when he was there all the time, when it wasn’t so long ago and when they haven’t forgotten anything yet. His umbrella is still there by the coat rack. I was frightened of the way they lied. I thought that a lie was alive. It swallowed things and could change the way things were.
“First we’ll have an itsy bit of soup,” Mom said. She always spoke like that when she remembered I was there. When she didn’t, she would swear and talk seriously. “Then we’ll have a suckling. I brought it from Pale; it’s not even five months old,” Dad said. I looked at Grandma. She calmly sat there smoking. Uncle was talking about the construction of a dam in Siberia.
My heart started beating wildly. Everyone sat there serenely, remembering Grandpa and waiting for “it” to come out of the oven. Dad had brought it from Pale. This suckling must have done something very wrong, why else would it have ended up in an oven? I thought that we were going to eat a baby and I was certain that we weren’t eating it because it was tasty or because tradition dictated that you had to eat a baby in memory of a grandpa, but simply to warn me what could happen if I didn’t behave.
I sweated profusely while I ate my soup. I no longer heard what they were saying. I was entirely alone, with my heart beating inside my ears and trying to burst out. When Mom took the soup plates out and said, “And now the speciality,” I shut my eyes. I tried to take deep breaths, but I choked, as though I were sobbing.
I looked up and saw a large round silver platter with cuts of roasted meat. Dad took a fork, picked up the largest piece and placed it on Uncle’s plate. He put a smaller piece on Grandma’s, then on Mom’s, and then he looked at me. “See how pale you are? More blackcurrant juice, more beetroot, and more meat,” he said and placed a piece of the child’s flesh on my plate.
He didn’t live with us. Mom and Dad had separated, but he came once a week or when I had the flu, bronchitis, a cold, measles, tonsillitis, diarrhoea, or rubella. He would place his stethoscope on my back and say, “Breathe in, don’t breathe,” and I would breathe or not breathe. I assumed that Mom and Dad didn’t love each other, but I never thought that Dad would bring us dead babies and that Mom would roast them. In fact, he had never done it before that day, when we were all supposed to be remembering my dead Grandpa.
I ate the meat, but I couldn’t taste it. When Grandma said, “Eat that salad,” I thought I would cry, but I didn’t because I was afraid. That night, for the first time ever, I shouted in my sleep. When I woke up, Grandma was stroking my forehead. But it was no longer her, it wasn’t her hand, nor was it my forehead, and I was no longer me. After the day we ate that suckling, nothing was the same in my life. For a while I hoped that Grandpa would not have allowed us to eat babies, and later on I understood that none of this had anything to do with him, that it was part of a tradition, and that it was how naughty children were frightened everywhere, since even naughtier children ended up in the oven.
I never mentioned Grandpa’s death, not even after I found out by accident that a suckling was a baby pig and not a baby human. This was no longer important, because I had already started shouting in my sleep. And the shouting continued, the reasons for which aren’t important, nor do I know what they are.
Miljenko Jergović was born in Sarajevo in 1966. Poet, novelist, and journalist, he wrote for the Sarajevo daily Oslobodjenje and served as the Sarajevo correspondent for Dalmatian Weekly. His first book of poetry, Warsaw Observatory, won two prestigious awards in 1988. He has written several novels, including Mama Leone and Buick Riviera. His work has been published throughout Europe.
Stela Tomasevic was born in Belgrade in 1963. She studied literature at the University of East Anglia. She has translated numerous works of non-fiction from the Croatian and from the French. She currently works for the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia. David Williams is the translator of Karaoke Culture (Open Letter Books, 2011) and a number of other essays by Dubravka Ugrešić, which have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Paris Review, A Public Space, The Baffler, and Salmagundi. He is currently completing his Ph.D. in comparative literature at the University of Auckland with a dissertation on Ugrešić's post-Yugoslav writings and the idea of a post-1989 "literature of the eastern European ruins."
Original text: Miljenko Jergović. Mama Leone. Zagreb: Durieux, 2000.
Published with the permission of Archipelago Books. Mama Leone will by published by Archipelago Books in 2012.