health, and altruism is good, and that is why she lived so long, and she would have perhaps lived longer if the last war hadn't shaken her so much.

          Ivo and I talked later still, and I said, You know, we were not good sons. After Dad's death, things were difficult for Mom, and we made them more difficult still by being nasty boys.

          I agree, he said. We didn't listen to her at all, we were rude, we stayed in the streets past midnight nearly every night while she worried about what we were doing. We were doing nothing bad, really, we didn't drink or have sex, but she had no way of knowing that.

          We thought we were exploring the world, ideas, hanging out with friends, and she didn't understand that. She didn't approve of our friends, she wanted us to have the square and studious ones, not the delinquents we tended to.

          I know. She wanted me to study, but she could hardly ever see me study. I did read books late at night, and she kept coming to my room and turning off the light, saying, you will ruin your sight. What kind of life will it be if you are blind as a mole?

          And what kind of life will it be if I am an idiot who has read nothing?

          But what are you reading? Karl May? What good will it do to you, stupid adventure novels.

          It was Einstein's favorite reading in his adolescence.

          As was math. I don't see you reading math books.

          Get lost! I'll read what I want, and if you want to know, my eyes are my strongest feature - my teeth will fall out, I'll grow deaf, by I will still see very well, I just know.

          Don't boast lest God should. . .

          And we'd quarrel at 3 in the morning like that. I thought I was in the right, but of course she was. I could have got up earlier and read during the day.

          And Ivo was like that too, shouting at her. She was a poor widow with sons who shouted at her and didn't listen to her. She carried flowers to the grave of her husband, and perhaps she wished he were alive because we had feared him. He didn't tolerate insouciance. He beat us to subdue our selfish wills. He beat Ivo more than me and I learned on the example of how to avoid his educational wrath. There was something biblical in his rage - he'd quote from the Bible and beat you. She probably thought we deserved that but couldn't do it, other than, when we were smaller, to pull us by our ears.

          Ivo had an anecdote about Mom in exile, in Switzerland, during the bombing of Daruvar. There was an immigrant child, a couple of years older than Ivo's son Matija. The boy, from Serbia, used to beat Matija, the way we grew up, older boys beating younger boys, animal style, older cats chewing on younger cats, something that looks ugly from the outside but is probably an all right way of growing up. You learn to mistrust people and you also learn authority. Actually, I detest that kind of childhood although it was mine. Anyhow, Ruth came up to this boy, and said, Why do you have ears? Why, asked the boy. To listen. I told you not to torture that poor boy, and you keep doing it. That means, you aren't using your ear. While talking to him, she grabbed one of his ears and twisted it. The boy grew red from pain and cried, and she let him go.

          Can you imagine if they had reported that to the Swiss authorities, Ivo said. Child abuse. I don't think the boy complained. He stopped beating Matija.

          She always took care of her brood, I said. There's something instinctive and animalistic about that, isn't there?

          She pulled us by the ear all the time.

          Yes, she had a fetish about it. her favorite saying was an old jewish proverb. Why do we have two ears and one mouth? In order to talk half as much as we listen.

          She believed we should never talk much, eat much, drink much, say much - basically, she asked for a life of restraint and obedience.

          True, Vlado said, but she had courage when it came to survival. She saved her father who was in prison for anti-communist statements after the war, when Tito had people shot left and right simply because he didn't want to be weaker than Stalin. He was as ruthless. (ruth, less?) She went to the regional communist party headquarters and asked for his release, saying he was unjustly accused. Her argument was that he was a worker damaged by America. He lived in America, worked in a steel factory, joined a union, basically a communist workers' organization, and as an American communist, he was not rational, and his statements therefore should be ignored. He came back to his village, alive, after that. She probably saved him. And then she remained the shy woman and mother. I believe that she was actually quite heroic. Nothing physical scared her. Only people and their politics did, and even worse, diseases.

          If I am writing an homage to my mother, and I am some kind of writer, I feel guilty at my lack of artlessness and skill. This should be a beautiful story. I stepped out into the woods; it's Fall, and after the powerful windstorm last night, the sky is clear, the visibility is fantastic, and the sun is shining through maple and oak balding splendor of yellow and rusty red, while the wind shushes and whispers. He who has ears to hear, let him hear. I should write more in that vein of beautiful images and sounds but what can I say, I listen twice as little as I talk. I have two lips and only one good unplugged ear. The other is still plugged from the combo: airplane and cold.

          While standing among the trees and looking up at them swaying and shushing, I wondered, It's one week since my coming back from Croatia, eleven days after her burial, and I am doing this, writing about her and her life and death. Can't I write something else? Is this grief? The hell with it, it probably is. I remember how I feared, as a child, her death. My second nightmare: my father and I are standing next to Mom's casket. He has blue stubble on his chin. I ask, what next? And he says, How would I know? I wake up shrieking, and it turns out I have high fever. That was my TB year, with lots of fevers.

          My first nightmare that I remember, the same year. Ambulance at the gate and mother carried out on stretchers. I shrieked out, Bonica. I skipped an l, in Bolnica, Hospital, or literally, the house of Pain, as Bol is pain. But Bon is good, so, in a way, in my childhood dyslexia, I said the house of good, but it certainly didn't feel like it as I shrieked. My sister, four years older than I, woke up first, and comforted me, and for years, she thought it was cute that I had shouted Bonica. (It was my father actually who was carried out the same year for kidney failure.) Now she is a nurse in a cardiac surgery unit in Stuttgart. She was sent to Germany for a training at the age of 15, to become a nurse. Why not a doctor, I don't know. She was the best student in her class, but so shy that she often covered her eyes with her palm so she wouldn't have to make eye contact. On the other hand, this is a very ostentatious way of not making eye contact - you can always avoid it, you don't have to use your hands, just look at them. I think looking at your hands at the time of challenge and temptation is the best way to stay put and to tell others to stay put. By the way, my mother's hands were almost as large as her head in the casket. When I looked at her, I wondered why not have Totenhaende, death hands imprint, to last forever? I had seen only two death masks, as a pretentious tourist, Beethoven's and Liszt's.

.         Nela's main complaint about the funeral was that the morticians didn't use Mom's dentures to prop up her mouth. In the West, you won't let the mouth sink like that, she said.

          Vlado looked at her blankly. He took care of Mom for 10 years, and she was never there, and she only preached about how it should be done. He didn't say a word. So, is that it, your Mom in natural state, is not properly pretty for you? I exchanged glances with him. I trusted him. When Father died, this was the man who came from Novi Sad, as a doctor, with an olive-colored partisan cap, and dark crimson five-limbed star, after nearly bleeding to death himself from a tonsillectomy gone wrong. This was my father's boy, beaten many times by the man. He was the man now. We were lost without him, and it stayed that way.

          I remember how when Dad died, I looked up at her, and didn't say, What's next? It was the end, no father. Even in my nightmare, my father remained as the pillar of safety. But he was no safety. He had no measure in him. She did. I wish she had written as she had wisdom. I don't have it, I never will, my father didn't have it, although was a luminous and prophetic kind of musician and enthusiast. He earned her love somehow, so that she remained faithful to him for 39 years after his death, every day looking at their wedding picture. It's amazing. I am not capable of such endurance, and he probably wasn't, but then, did I know him? Did he know himself? Did he have enough time to know himself? As a biblical pacifist, he spent eight years in the army, two before the war, four during it, two after it, totally ruined by the killing fields. I wonder whether he ever killed. I know he was tormented and tortured. His brother boasted that he, as a partisan with a machine gun, had killed lots of people, but was even that true? Dad claimed he shot in the air, that only God could determine who should live and who should die, and he prayed during fire exchange, and he wasn't shot although most of the people around him eventually were shot. Anyway, this is not a tribute to him, but to my mother.

          The burial is over, and I don't have to travel to my hometown, for a while. I always struggled to get away from home, but there was a home, and now there isn't. Naturally, eventually, I will have to buy a plot of land near the graves of my parents. That grave looks a little too tight for me. There are way too many people there, in six square meters. Our bones don't need to cling and clang and scrape together. Another plot of land, with some elbow room, although I am not going to be doing anything with my elbows, is slightly less appalling than this underground bedroom of my parents.

Josip Novakovich