“And remember, smoking kills,” the soldier said, gesturing to Tata to get going. I knew what he meant from the TV reports: the cigarette embers were visible in the black of night like fireflies, making smokers an easy target. But the soldier’s remark also caused something to finally register with me: Mama and Tata had both smoked until recently. They must’ve stopped, perhaps to save money. The gusto with which they had drawn smoke in and out of their bodies seemed too fervent to warrant any other reason, least of all some token cigarette pack health disclaimer everyone ignored. Still, there may have been something to it, because Tata’s morning coughing had ceased. Mama’s, curiously, persisted.
Tata leaned on the window frame, his body a hypotenuse— right hand controlling the wheel, the rest of him pushing the car forward. Mama turned around and lowered to the floor, kneeling in front of the passenger seat. Turned toward me she laced her fingers with mine. With her other hand she caressed my brothers’ arms, whispering shhhh. Her palm was sweaty, fingers wiry, alert. I could see her white teeth in the darkness and hear her breathing, coarse but steady. The pontoon bridge bopped underneath us like a cradle, its movements soothingly uneven. The stars were all around us, the canyon’s bare mountains so rocky it was like we’d landed on the moon, in the middle of space, weightless and perfect.
*
The next morning was disorienting, waking up at Mladjo’s house. It reminded me of times when I was little and Tata would carry me up the steps half-asleep from a hangout with his friends, after which I would smell tobacco smoke on my skin for days.
I blundered to the fridge. Already, Tata had paid a sunrise visit to the fisherman at the dock, and little sardine bodies lay scaled and gutted, lined like twigs on an oval plate. The thick smell of salt and fish overwhelmed me. In the fridge door shelf stood a tall aluminum bucket with a wooden handle: milk from the old woman with the goat. I’d have to wrestle with the wrinkled yellow skin that would form on the top of my cup as the milk cooled.
Rustling came from the terrace, where Lolek and Bolek rammed their little metal cars into each other. I walked outside onto the cool concrete floor. Mladjo’s rusty, puny table screeched as Mama unfolded it for breakfast: some dry toast we brought from home, the cheese and honey we bought on the way, and two big tomatoes she fished out of her dress pockets.
“I rescued them from the kingdom of weeds,” she said, smiling wide and pointing to the tall grasses ruling Mladjo’s garden.
To be honest, I preferred the powdered food from boxes, though saying so out loud in the middle of Mama’s tomato excitement and Tata’s freshness obsession would’ve been treasonous. The cheese looked interesting. It crumbled under the knife as Mama cut it, and each sliver shone as if covered in glitter, which Mama said were salt crystals. They made little cracking sounds as my teeth ground the minerals. The timid cracks felt too loud in the quiet of the morning and recalled the crumbling sounds of distant explosions for me. I dipped some toast in the jar of honey, licked it like a lollipop without biting into it—to stave off the raucous crunch—and looked at the small patch of sea through the passage between the rows of stone houses in front of us. There were no people about, only a few wasps buzzing. And Tata. He stood in the front yard fig tree, leaves covering his swim briefs, swatting the flies and bees that protested the intrusion.
“Food for the gods.” He held the figs high up, his hefty body almost overtaking the tree’s wider-than-tall frame. He almost lost his balance, but caught himself at the last moment, a rickety branch beneath him barely steadying his thick legs. The jesters laughed and laughed.
“Tarzan Tata,” Bolek shouted.
Emboldened, Tata reenacted his stunt to keep the fun going. But his childishness wasn’t all that funny to me. It seemed irresponsible. I looked at Mama hoping she’d share my outrage, but she just bit into her tomato like an apple, the juice trickling between her fingers and down her forearm, dripping off her elbow, splotching the concrete. It struck me that all the foods Tata had listed—the reasons we were here—were Mama’s favorites, not his.
Tata climbed down the tree and joined my little brothers on the terrace floor. He gorged himself on figs while simultaneously trying to force-feed them to the little ones.