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There is an old woman who I met in 2008 in her underwear during a heat wave in Zagreb, four years later, and the woman walked slowly down the stairs in her underwear, another heat wave, excited to greet not her daughter, not me, but her grandson.

In the tiny room in the tiny apartment, the old woman and the young boy make trains out of pillows that go from one end of the room to the other.

He asks her, “Why is it dark outside?” She says, “It’s natural.”

I step out on the balcony with her to smoke a cigarette (she smokes seven and counts them out each day in a jar), and she lifts her face to the wind and says, “Not good. Wind. Means hot tomorrow.”

We step back inside and she tells me about her mother who died in this apartment, bleeding in the brain, and how only two decades ago no one was cremated in Croatia, and from America, expatriate families sent ashes back to be scattered here and no one knew what they were – seasoning? They sprinkled the ashes on roast and ate it all up. “This is not an anecdote,” she tells me.

Now cremation has come to Zagreb, but you must bury the urn, it’s the law. The families conspire to take home ashes in plastic baggies to spread them where they will. It’s their law.

We walk back inside to the house that is stifling and I leave the door open. “NO,” she says, “The draft.” (The godforsaken draft that bedevils Europeans.) Tanja puts the fan on #3, and the old woman says, “No, not number 3, it will explode.”

And later, hooched down against the wall as she likes to sit, the old woman tells me that when Tanja was a little girl, she was always telling her you can’t touch this, you can’t touch that, and Tanja said, “Mami, when you die, I will touch everything.”

Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 19th, 2012 at 8:04 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.