versed speech intended to make you feel as ashamed as possible of your own incompetence, stupidity, and lack of respect for things that were above you. But I couldn’t get beyond the zoo—he had been at the zoo, all alone, and something about that devastated me.
An hour into the drive, Zora leaned forward and took our remaining, hidden skull out of the First Aid compartment and put it on the seat between us with a smile that was intended to comfort me. My grandfather was looking in the rearview mirror.
“Who the hell is that?” he said.
“The Magnificent Fedrizzi,” Zora said flatly, and afterward we shared the skull and the story and, eventually, the smile from Mica.
The war had altered everything. Once separate, the pieces that made up our old country no longer carried the same characteristics that had formerly represented their respective parts of the whole. previously shared things—landmarks, writers, scientists, histories—had to be doled out according to their new owners. That Nobel Prize–winner was no longer ours, but theirs; we named our airport after our crazy inventor, who was no longer a communal figure. And all the while we told ourselves that everything would eventually return to normal.
In my grandfather’s life, the rituals that followed the war were rituals of renegotiation. All his life, he had been part of the whole—not just part of it, but made up of it. He had been born here, educated there. His name spoke of one place, his accent of another. None of this had mattered before the war; but as time went on, and the Military Academy did not officially invite him back to practice medicine, it became clear that a return to professional normalcy would not be possible, and he would be tending to his under-the-table patients until the day he chose to retire. With this knowledge came an overwhelming desire to revisit lost places, to reestablish unmaintained rituals. The zoo was one of these.
Another was the lake house at Verimovo, across the border now, where we had spent every summer until I turned eleven. It was a beautiful old stone house at the edge of one of the big valley lakes, just off the main highway that connected Sarobor and Kormilo. A few steps down the cobbled path and you would be in the water, the clear, blue-green waters of Lake Verimovo, fed by the Amovarka. None of us had been to the house in almost seven years, and there was silent acknowledgment in the family that the house was probably no longer standing, or that it had been looted, or that the second you came through the door you would be hoisted by a mine that some careless soldier, probably from your own side, had left behind. There was also acknowledgment, however, that the house had to be seen, the damage assessed, a decision made. My mother and grandma wanted to see if our neighbor Slavko had turned on us, if he’d given up on the house, reneged on his promise to keep it safe until after the war. For my grandfather, however, the urgency sprang from a need to resurrect a past pleasure into the sphere of the everyday, as if nothing had happened.
“Wouldn’t it be something if the vine was still up on the garage balcony?” he said in the fourteenth month of the cease-fire, three days after the grand reopening of the southbound railroad. He was packing for the train ride to Verimovo: his small blue suitcase with the built-in combination lock was open on the bed, and he was folding several pairs of gray cotton shorts and white undershirts into it. I was sitting at the foot of the bed, and had come in to tell him not to be ridiculous, to just sell the house. But he was smiling the way he smiled when we used to go to see the tigers, and I suddenly felt overwhelmed by my own lack of optimism—who was I to tell him what was appropriate and inappropriate? Who was I to hold him back when he wanted so much for things to go his way? So instead, I offered to go with him. To my surprise, he accepted. When I think about it now, I realize how willful he was, as though, by bringing me along, he was ensuring it was safe enough to bring me along.
As with everything we did together, there was a plan. We were going to evaluate the damage. Assuming it was still standing, we were going to open up the house, air out the rooms, see what furniture had been stolen or broken, restock the pantry. We were going to bring down summers and summers of swallows’ nests that had caked up the balcony walls, trim the bright green vines that slithered along the awning above the garage, pick whatever figs and oranges were ripe, all in preparation for my grandma, who had agreed to join us the following week. Depending on what we found, we were also going to get the new dog accustomed to lakeside life.
He was a very small, but very fat, white dog my grandma had been tricked into buying at the Sunday market in the City. She had fallen victim to circumstance because he had been the last one left in the puppy box, and the farmer, squatting in the summer heat since dawn with a box of wormy, smelly farm puppies, all throwing up and peeing on one another, had finally held the dog up in desperation and said, “I expect I am going to have to eat you,” just as my grandmother walked by. My grandma paid the man far too much money and came home with the dog cupped in her hat, and the farmer presumably went to buy some crispy pig and never thought about it again.
The dog went unnamed for a long time. He liked to be held, and he sat on my knees wrapped in a pink towel while our train sped through the parched mid-country, following the river past wheat fields and clapboard towns perched at the water’s edge, and then, as we got closer to the lakes, through soaring blue mountains tangled with scrubs and sprouting clumps of lavender. We had the compartment, meant for six, all to ourselves, because my grandfather wanted to avoid any other passengers catching sight of our passports at border control. The windows were down, and the smell of that pine scrubland came in sharp and strong.
My grandfather sat beside me, drifting in and out of consciousness. Every so often, he would wake up with a start, and then take his right hand off his belly and pet the dog, who couldn’t sleep, and was peering anxiously through the window. My grandfather would pet the dog, and, in a voice that made him sound like some kind of children’s program puppet, he would say: “You’re a dog! You’re a dog! Where are you? You’re a dog!” and the dog’s tongue would drop out of its mouth and it would start keening.
After a few hours of this, I said, “Jesus, Grandpa, I get it, he’s a dog,” not knowing that, just a few years later, I would be reminding every dog I met on the street that it was a dog, and asking it where it was.
The house was a five-minute walk from the train station, and we took this walk slowly, both of us stiff-limbed and silent. The afternoon was dry, and my shirt was sinking into my skin before we even reached the drive. And then it was there—the drive, the house, the garage drowning in vines. There was rust on the fence, and I suddenly remembered how easily things rusted at the lake house, and how, long ago, my grandfather would repaint the fence every year, patient, meticulous, standing with a sort of pleasurable grace in his clogs, with his socks on, his bony knees very white with sun protection.
Our neighbor Slavko was standing on the porch, and when he saw us he stood up and began rubbing his hands on his pants. I couldn’t really remember him from my childhood at the lake, but my mother had often talked about him: they had grown up more or less together. Somewhere along the line, my mother had started wearing jeans and listening to Johnny Cash; this, according to Slavko and some of the other local boys, distinguished her as part of the “wild crowd,” and made her a target of prepubescent window peering. I could see that boy in the guilty look he was giving us now. His face was clean-shaven, scrubbed raw, and he had a mop of gray curls that lay flat against his forehead. This, combined with big feet and shoulders that dropped suddenly into a concave chest and potbelly, made him look unnervingly like an oversized penguin.
Slavko had brought us a few pies for dinner, and was rubbing his hands on his pants nervously, nonstop. I thought for a minute that my grandfather would overdo it and embrace him, but they shook hands, and then Slavko called me “Little Nadia” and rubbed my shoulder cautiously and I shot him a dry smile. He showed us the house. Soldiers had come through almost immediately when the war began, and taken some valuables: my great- grandmother’s china, a portrait of a distant aunt, some brass Turkish coffee cups and pots, the washing machine.
