At night I’d lie under the quince bush, listening intently to sounds from their room and imagining how it might happen. Waves of pleasure rolled through me at the very thought. Someone rings the doorbell, Mother opens up, Joza or Marija, one of the two, is there looking serious, takes a step in and sighs. Then Mother covers her mouth with her hand and cries a little. He fell off his bicycle, a car hit him, the ambulance came and took him, but there was nothing more they could do. There’d be tears and whatever, at first, and then the two of us would be free and live happily ever after. That’s not what happened. He’d been going downhill for years. First his knife-edge dulled, he shouted less, he flung his slippers less at the window, he stopped saying he was going down to the station to throw himself under a train, he lingered longer in bed, and after he retired he wouldn’t even get up sometimes for a day or two at a time. When he was awake, he was darker and more bitter than ever. He’d retreat to the shed behind the house, close himself up in the little room with the one lightbulb that hung from the low ceiling and poke around among his tools, rearrange the wrenches, pliers, screwdrivers, little tins of Nivea hand cream where he kept his screws, arranged by size. He’d sharpen the saw and clean the plane, sometimes he wouldn’t come out of there all day except to eat. Once when I stopped by, Mother sent me to fetch him to lunch; the door to the shed was ajar and when I pushed it open a little more, sunlight poured in and lit him with a broad band of light across his hands and bald head. He sat there, hunched on a three-legged stool and started as if he’d been dozing. Before he had the time to turn away, I saw he was holding something, an object he was trying to hide. He muttered, “I’m coming,” bent over toward the curtain that was drawn under his work bench and stowed whatever it was away behind it. When he fell asleep a few days later, after he staggered home from the tavern before morning and threw up all over the bathroom, and Mother shouted: “Drop dead, why don’t you!” and I’d made sure he wouldn’t be getting up until afternoon, I went out to the shed. I slipped in quietly, drew open the metal latch and groped in the dark for the pull string. Yellow light spilled over the junk-filled shed, the discarded, useless things, the coarse cloth of the little curtain. When I drew it aside, I couldn’t see anything under the table that looked special, nothing mysterious. I thought at least I’d find a bottle of rakija. Sometimes Mother would come and pour out whatever she could find. Instead, under a heap of sandpaper, I saw a pretty box made of wood, the size of a shoe box. It was smooth, planed and varnished. When I opened it and brought it out into the light in the middle of the shed under the lightbulb, in it I saw the wooden rattle, flute and bird rattle, polished, as if he’d made them only yesterday.
Water began building up in his lungs and went to his head. This is how our neighbor Marija’s daughter, who was a nurse, explained his condition. He had less and less air in his head and that was why he’d forget where he was going, what day it was, and sometimes, whom he was talking with. They’d keep him at the hospital for a week or two and then he’d be another week or two at home. He hadn’t put shoes on for a long time, his swollen feet only fit into slippers, he looked as if he were all full of air. On his way to the bathroom, he had to hold on to something with each step, and then she, when she saw he was moving, would drop whatever else she was doing and run over to help him. I had already left. I mean I’d moved out, I never actually left. Every spare moment I’d rush off to Mother’s to help her, see her, be there for my parents. While I lay at night in that house with the old folks and couldn’t fall asleep, I often thought about how I’d left her, how she was alone with him, how she had nobody to lend a hand, and he was out cold. I wept into my pillow, I cried for every year she spent with him, I pitied her more than I did myself. “Pity your mother,” was a sentence I grew up with, one that hung over the door of the kitchen full of women.
When it happened, it was a Sunday. I washed the dishes from lunch, went over to see them, I had at least a half-hour walk to their house. I saw her at the gate, purse in hand, her kerchief over her hair, in her small-heeled shoes. I began walking faster and she came toward me. “What happened, Mother? Where were you going?” She grimaced, but she was full of passion and concern: “They’ve taken him to the hospital, they told me to come. And I was waiting for you so we could take the bus, couldn’t you have come a little sooner?” By the time we reached the hospital it was all over. The water had come on so strong he couldn’t breathe any more, his color changed, and he was done for. The doctor was waiting at the front desk, he held Mother’s hand in his and conveyed his sincere condolences while she sobbed uncontrollably. “I’ll be so miserable without him!” she said, sobbing. “How could you leave me, we could have lived a little longer!”
I asked myself, as I stood to the side and grieved for her, when was it that they’d lived, and what sort of life had it been that I never saw it. After forty years of being locked-in, I said to myself, this must be what freedom looks like.