on the light fittings and cupboards and watched out for a chance to leap onto someone’s head and peck their skull, I recall. It was only my father to whom she attached herself with some kind of servile avian devotion. Nothing like a hawk whose devotion, were it not so magnificent, would be canine, I thought. The cockatoo, as my sister described it, had the temperament of a monkey and the manners of a possessive little madam.
The parrot imitated the way our father whistled to call us in from the street, striking terror into our hearts, because our father was strict. Later he softened, as though he knew that he had no time for anything other than fun. In summer he took us to a distant sandy beach and to play badminton and brought us copies of the latest videocassettes of films and MTV clips and pulp fiction that we watched or read in the quiet, empty seasons. He kissed our feet and eyes and under our chins, where a child is softest.
Sometimes I spent winter mornings at the Little Lagoon looking for cuttlefish shells for the cockatoo, to please my father, and that bird of his, which no one in the house liked.
‘You’ll make great soup, you’re just right for soup,’ said Daniel. He threatened the bird from a respectable distance kissing the tips of his fingers and smacking his lips.
‘It’d make a great crown of feathers,’ he told me once quite seriously.
‘Hey, you’d be a great headdress!’ he shouted to the parrot.
Daniel thought that if an animal talks, it must also understand. And if I think about it, for that matter so did I, because once I said something to it and our cat Jill looked at me and sighed.
‘Oh,’ came a muffled sound that you often hear dogs make.
And Jill’s just an exasperated dumb creature who reads our lips, but perhaps she does hear. She certainly feels our words but isn’t capable of repeating or creating them, I thought. But still my words reach Jill like flying objects, invisible artefacts – when I say food, she hears the crisp rind of bacon with red strips of meat, when I say love, she hears my hand, its moistness and warmth, my pulse.
Although it was able to repeat them, our words reached the cockatoo as noises, simple melodies.
Our pa was taken ill early, so the guys from the cement works employed him in the factory cinema. The Balkan Cinema it was called back then. It’s been closed for ages now.
He tore the tickets in half, stuck up posters, carried huge reels of film and showed the films along with Uncle Braco. Those were brilliant years for his children, the last years of that cinema, just before the war: three days a week. After the matinee I sat in the little projection room, with the projector whirring, leafing through catalogues of the films that would be coming or reading about those that would never be shown in our cinema.
After the screening, we would come out into a night full of stars pricked into the black, above the tubular, pot-bellied factory halls and chimneys painted red and white like a lollipop, and tread over the carpet of cement dust that stretched to the edge of the sea and beyond, far below the sea. Roundabout, in the dust, lay perfectly smooth metal globes, some small, some large, that were probably used for grinding marl, and steel rollers that we took to make go-karts, I recall.
We came out of the old Balkan Cinema – hearing the wooden seats clatter as they folded up behind us – as though we were passing from one film into another.
And as a finale: the spongy, muffled sound of the large cinema door closing, then my father turning the key and putting it away in the inner pocket of his jacket like the keeper of a secret.
I was proud of him then, far more proud than if he’d been a doctor, a singer or a director.
After that Uncle Braco opened a video rental shop, Braco & Co., where my father was the Co. until the end of his short life, working behind the counter.
I asked him whether we were going to have our own video shop.
‘What’ll it be called?’ I asked, pushing myself into his hands.
‘It’ll be called Almeria,’ he said, tracing the invisible name in the air with his finger and winking.
My excitement in those years sprang from a different world but continued in this one, equally exciting.
A life lasting a whole evening, a film lasting a whole life in which the best heroes lived just long enough to act an episode, for you to like them.
In my dream, my father coughs, just as he did in real life. His lungs are overgrown with little silver asbestos hairs, which you can clearly see through him. You can see through him everything it’s essential to see, only it’s hard to reproduce it when you’re awake.
‘Eh, where’ve you sprung from?’ I ask him in that dream, in which he appears in the company of the bird.
He smiles, draws from a phantom holster, winks and says: ‘Bang, bang!’
‘Bang, bang!’ repeats the parrot from his shoulder. ‘Bang, bang!’
Ma and I didn’t talk about the dope, or its mysterious disappearance from the tin under the dresser. Which wasn’t that mysterious, after all. And what was there to be said, after all. As though it was possible to drive the devil out, one has to sit down beside one’s demon and mollify it until it’s calm – that’s all, perhaps, that can be done.
From time to time Ma seemed agitated – for instance, she dropped things. But that used to happen before as well. Once it seemed to me that she reeked of alcohol.
Otherwise, she watched TV or swept the pavement in front of the house in the evening, to get some air. She would sprinkle the street with water that evaporated before it was swallowed by the manholes.
We didn’t even cook, although Ma is a cook, or used to be. Mostly we ate meals from the foodshop, ordered on the free number 0800 30 33 01. They offered heated-up frozen things that the workers bought cheaply at the nearby market and threw into hot oil in a wok. The menu included bizarre hogwash such as veal medallions in tuna sauce, wtf... But I don’t care, I’m perfectly happy with a plastic plate containing meat and rice, if possible not stuck together, and beetroot salad, and there isn’t even any washing up, it doesn’t taste of anything and it's all consumed without exaggerated emotion about food. Sometimes they add a little vacuum-packed chocolate cake.
This morning she got up very early, I recognized the sound of the vacuum cleaner. She had taken out all her shoes, new, old and those that no one wore any longer, and arranged them on the steps. I found her brushing them and rubbing polish into them.
My coffee was getting cold and there was a short, sharp hair in it. Jill had probably licked it, the wicked cat. I took the hair out with my finger and drank.
As soon as she saw me through the open front door, Ma abandoned her shoe brush and ran up, wiping her hands on a rag as she came. As though she’d hardly been able to wait for me to wake up.
‘Look, I wanted to show you this,’ she said excitedly. ‘What do you think? Is it tacky?’
On a shiny piece of paper was written:
GERBERA HEART (code: 3-70606)
Pain, sorrow and melancholy are part of life, especially at the times when we remember our dearest ones who are no longer with us. This arrangement symbolizes two hearts, which will remain forever together. It is made up of red mini gerberas, red roses and seasonal greenery arranged in the form of a heart.
Dimensions: width 42 cm, height 40 cm.
PRICE: 425.50 kunas
The arrangement in the picture looked like a strawberry cream gateau.
Her glasses had slipped to the tip of her nose, an old-fashioned frame, comical.
‘It’s not too tacky, is it?’
‘It’s lovely,’