“This is food. With juice, life flowing through it. Powder can’t keep anyone alive. Powdered potatoes. Powdered milk! That sawdust would make anyone cough.” He traced Mama’s ankle, and she caressed his hand with her other foot as she looked far away at the haze beyond the sea.
Her wistful gaze and Tata’s crisscrossed legs on the floor reminded me of a photo I’d seen of the two of them sitting on a blanket with some friends in the early 70s. Tata’s face hidden behind long, frizzy hair that fused with his mustache, his hands rolling up some kind of a cigarette; Mama, her own cigarette hanging from her mouth, picking daisies; a cut-up cantaloupe sat between them, its succulent slices blooming in the center like petals. When I’d asked Tata where it was taken, he said “Woodstock,” snickering. “Well, our Woodstock, in Mladjo’s backyard. If you don’t have it, make it.”
“What’s Woodstock?” I’d asked.
“A time when many of us thought change was possible, was coming.” He put the photo away, slid a cassette into a player. “But as Janis says, ‘it’s all the same fucking day, man.’” He played me Janis Joplin’s “Ball and Chain.” As much as Tata tried to shield hope from cynicism, both strands were always there in his mind, in his words, tangled into a messy braid, gluttonous for his energy.
Tata went to wash up, but the water was already cut off for a scheduled reduction.
“Even better! I like being sticky with sugar,” he said, groping at my brothers and me with fingers tacky like tentacles. “Let’s wash off in the sea. Make a splash!”
“Make a splash, make a splash,” Lolek and Bolek chanted. Mama cut some pale green peppers into strips and wrapped them in aluminum foil. She threw the package in a beach tote with towels and Uno cards, yogurt and liver pâté Tata picked up in the morning.
We only passed two people on our way to the beach. An old woman with a limp and a black kerchief on her head, rosary in hand, who looked at us like crazies as her mouth moved in the shape of Hail Marys. A man carrying groceries in plastic wicker bags said we shouldn’t leave the house, that a bombing was likely “on the menu” today. “They’ve bombed Dubrovnik,” he said, the bags—one light with bread, the other heavy with beer bottles— making his stance lopsided. “You think those barbarians will have any mercy on our little neck of the woods?”
Tata said he knew nothing about any of that, and that—he outstretched his arms—the day looked pretty glorious to him. In that moment, even though Tata’s comments seemed insane, all I could hear were the lazy screeches of seagulls, the hum of the languid waves, the sly burn of the morning sun on my shoulders, reminding me of summers past, and I almost believed him. But looking around, what was missing took hold of me: the toothless lady making palačinke, the buzz of cheap plastic toys and beach balls glinting off the stalls. There was no music coming from the cafés—their chairs were turned upside down, chained to the tables.