through the summer and fall Grandpa recited his last words and got ready to die. To Isak Sokolovski, his Preference partner, he said I know every card and that’s 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. To Grandma he said you sleep, I’m fine. I’ve been fine for some time now. She was sleepless until the day he died. To Mom he said there’s no one left. Just the two of us and the darkness. And then he 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 auntie Lola, Grandma’s sister. I marked the date in the calendar with a little cross. So people would know my grandpa had died. Actually, no, I did it so they’d know I knew my grandpa was dead.

That day Auntie Lola baked some cakes, put a plateful in front of me, sat down across from me, and placing her elbows on the table said eat up, little man. I ate, scared she was going to tell me Grandpa had died. I didn’t know how I was supposed to react. Was I supposed to stop eating cakes, burst into tears, ask how he died, shake my head, and say tsk-tsk-tsk like I saw Granny Matija from Punta doing the time I peeked out from the pantry, or was I supposed to do something else, something I didn’t even know about. I’m only six years old and don’t have any experience with the rituals of death. I ate a plateful of cakes and got a tummy ache. I climbed into bed, the blinds were down so it looked like it was dark. I flew a plane through the darkness. I didn’t do the brmm brmm brmm because the plane was supersonic so you couldn’t hear it, but eavesdropped on what Auntie Lola told the neighbors gathered in the kitchen with their gifts of coffee, bottles of rakija, and something else I couldn’t see. The good Signore Fran suffered so, may God rest his soul, said Ante Pudin. He’s at peace now, 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 save us. Whatever he learned, he learned from his grandpa, said Auntie Lola. My tummy still hurt. I shut my eyes tight, farted, and fell asleep

Seven days later, Mom and Grandma arrived from Sarajevo, head to toe in black. I pretended this was normal. They pretended it was too. I was scared Mom was going to start talking about it so I kept out of her way. I knew Grandma wouldn’t say anything. She wasn’t one for starting conversation; she’d leave it up to me and then join in. It was like she kept quiet about things I didn’t want to talk or hear about. There was nothing to say about Grandpa’s death, just as there’s nothing to say about anyone’s death. I had no idea death was a widespread occurrence, that grown-ups talked about it all the time.

Between thunderclaps of his rasping asthmatic cough, Grandpa would every morning repeat sweet, sweet death and Grandma would say zip it Franjo, I’ll go before you do, and so it went every day. I thought other people didn’t go on like this, just the two of them, that they were special people because they were my grandma and grandpa, and that everyone else was just a puppet in a puppet theater. When Grandpa died it turned out Grandma was a pretender. I thought she should be ashamed of herself because she’d done something bad. She’d said she would go before him, but now he was dead. You don’t really die of your own choosing, but it does have something to do with you, so you shouldn’t say you’re going to die before someone else if you’re not. Later on I forgot about Grandma’s shame. Probably because it didn’t seem like she was ashamed.

Once we went to visit Auntie Mina in Dubrovnik. Mom said I don’t know if the little fella knows. I was playing with the garden gnomes and making like I didn’t hear anything. Auntie Mina looked at me in silence. She would’ve loved to ask me if I knew about my grandpa’s death, but didn’t dare. You don’t ask kids those kinds of questions. The poor old boy peed his soul out, Mom told Auntie Mina. The hospital botched the treatment plan. They shouldn’t have given him the laxatives. His heart turned into a rag, into an old scrap of a rag for washing the floor. The gnome gave me the evil eye. I felt lost in this terrifying world. So it is, fairy tales don’t lie after all: my grandpa died without a heart, in its place was a dirty, ugly, smelly square rag like the one we kept next to the toilet seat. I wanted to howl for the horror of it all, but couldn’t.

From that day on, whenever I’d go pee, I was scared I was going to pee my soul out. I watched the jet stream, white or yellow, or really yellow when I was sick. I didn’t know what a soul looked like, but I was sure I’d recognize it if it whizzed out. Days went by and it still didn’t show. Then months. I asked Grandma what a soul looked like. She said a soul doesn’t look like anything, that it was just a word for something you couldn’t see.

Can you poop your soul out? I asked, trying to find out what I wanted to know, but trying to hide where all this was coming from, to avoid admitting I knew Grandpa was dead and any opportunity for her to mention it.

What do you mean can you poop your soul out? she asked, nonplussed.

I mean, when you poop your soul out and die, so you don’t exist anymore, I said like it was common knowledge and highly unusual that she didn’t know anything about it. You mean, can someone die on the toilet? I think you can, but people don’t usually die there… Where do people usually die?…In bed or traffic accidents, or they die in war or earthquakes… And the soul, what happens to the soul? … Nothing, the soul disappears… How can something that exists disappear?…Just like jam, it gets used up and disappears…Does the soul disappear inside you or go outside and then disappear?…Where would it go, it doesn’t have anywhere to go, it’s not like a dog being let out. It disappears, ceases to exist, end of story… So all in all, you can’t poop your soul out? … Not a chance, I don’t know where you got that idea from.

This set my mind at ease some. I peed fearlessly and didn’t bother looking at the whiz anymore. If you can’t poop your soul out then you can’t pee it out either. Mom had been talking nonsense to Auntie Mina.

Six months after Grandpa’s death, Grandma and Mom suddenly stopped wearing black. It was a Sunday. Uncle and Dad had come over. The table was set with a fancy white tablecloth, like it was someone’s birthday or someone was getting married. Today we remember Grandpa, Uncle said. I pretended this was normal, like I didn’t remember him every day. Maybe I lie when I play Ustashas and Partisans by myself because I’m not a Ustasha or a Partisan and because one person can’t be two people at the same time, but they lie worse when they remember Grandpa today, getting out the special plates, cutlery, and glasses, walking around the house in their ties, not taking off their shoes when they come in, doing all the things they never otherwise do and lying that they don’t remember him every day. How could they not remember him when he was here all the time, when it was just recently and they haven’t forgotten anything, and his umbrella is still there by the coatrack. I was scared of their lies. The lie is alive, I thought. It swallows things up and makes everything different from what it is.

First we’ll have a teeny-weeny bit of soup, said Mom. She always talked like that when she remembered I was there. When she forgot, then she’d cuss and talk all serious. And then we’ll have the suckling. I got it from Pale, it’s not even five months old, said Dad. I looked at Grandma. She sat there smoking quietly. Uncle was talking about dam-building in Siberia.

My heart started pounding like crazy. Everyone sat there polite as pie reminiscing about Grandpa and waiting for it to arrive — the thing Dad got from Pale. The suckling must have done something really bad, otherwise it wouldn’t have ended up in the oven. I thought we were going to eat a baby and I was sure we weren’t eating it because it was tasty or because it was customary for people to eat a baby in memory of a dead grandpa but because they were warning me what would happen if I were naughty.

I was sweating some as I ate my soup and couldn’t hear what they were talking about anymore. I was completely alone, my heart beating inside my ears, wanting to get out. When Mom cleared the soup plates and said now for the delicacy, I shut my eyes. I tried to take deep breaths, but something caught, and it was like I was sobbing.

I looked up and saw a big round silver platter stacked with slices of roast meat. Dad grabbed a fork, dug it into the biggest bit, and put it on Uncle’s plate. He gave a smaller piece to Grandma, then a bit to Mom, and then he fixed his eyes on me. Gosh, you’re pale. More blueberry juice, more beetroot, and more meat for you. That’s what he said putting a bit of the infant’s flesh on my plate.

He didn’t live with us. Mom and Dad were separated, but he’d come visit once a week or whenever I’d get the flu, bronchitis, a cold, measles, tonsillitis, angina, diarrhea, or rubella. He’d place his stethoscope on my back and say deep breath, now hold it, and I’d take a deep breath or not breathe at all. I assumed Mom and Dad didn’t love each other, but I would have never figured Dad bringing dead babies over for Mom to roast.

Today was actually a first, the day we were all supposed to remember my dead grandpa.

I ate the meat, but couldn’t taste the flavor. When Grandma said eat the salad, I thought I was going to cry, but I didn’t because I was too scared. That night I shouted in my sleep for the first time. When I woke up, Grandma was stroking my forehead. But it wasn’t her anymore, it wasn’t her hand, and it wasn’t my forehead, and I was no longer me. Nothing in my life was ever the same after the day we ate that suckling. For a while I hoped Grandpa wouldn’t have let us eat babies, but later I realized that it didn’t have anything to do with him, that it was just a custom, that people scare naughty children with this one everywhere, because really naughty children end up in the oven.

I never mentioned Grandpa’s death, not even after I accidentally found out that a suckling was the name for a little pig, and not a baby person. It didn’t matter anymore because I’d already started shouting in my sleep, and the shouting continued, the reasons don’t matter, and I don’t even know what they were anymore.

translated by David Williams