pokojna moja baka, Milica

Grandmothers on television were white haired, and kindly; mine survived an apocalypse which detonated in her for the next 70 years, less an explosion than an unfurling of damage. Imagine a flower opening endlessly, the petals razor sharp. Which of us were not cut? But we did not talk of it, ever, and instead it hung in the very air of her house the way cigarette smoke will, a dirty blue where the light hits it.

Her photograph, like all those others, is on my coffee table; it isn’t a photograph but rather a copy of a copy of one. In this family we are always in translation, in every sense of that word, and there is always something lost. She faces the camera directly, and for once her look is soft, and she is smiling as though she is really seeing me. I will sometimes walk past it, consciously trying not to look, or to be seen.

This morning I was wondering here in the heart of our apocalypse how she did it, how anyone does it, how do you bear the world ending and somehow carrying on simultaneously, the juxtaposition. I can’t have been fully awake then, because it seems so obvious to me now: you focus on the catastrophe that is already lapping at your ankles. The cow needs milking. The children want for shoes. Something must be cooked for dinner. Get to the end of this day, and then do the same tomorrow.

This story had three endings and you may choose your favourite:

a) Despite that early harrowing, and all the waves of loss and damage that followed, she was never without a tube of coral pink lipstick in her handbag.

b) She kept my daughter’s photograph in her china cabinet, and would take it out and talk to her sweet baby-image in a language my child not only does not understand, but does not recognise when she hears it. The child knows nothing of our history, or the things we don’t talk about. This was a choice I made on purpose.

c) When she died, we found an envelope filled to bursting in that same handbag of photographs, many of them were of my mother who, although she had never heard any words other than spiteful ones from my grandmother, gave me her name anyway as a peace offering.

Survive an apocalypse? Maybe you don’t.