Broke!? I can’t believe it.’
‘Yes, she moved from the States to London. She was isolated there, she was probably no longer able to earn anything. Her last words to her servant Carmen were: “I am tired,”’ I said. ‘Story has it that Frank Sinatra locked himself up in his room for two days when he heard that Ava had died. They say he sobbed uncontrollably.’
‘Well, and so he should have!’ she said. ‘Such a little man, nothing much to look at, scrawny, a shrimp. Next to her he looked like a frog!’
‘What about Mickey Rooney?’
‘Why Mickey Rooney?’
‘Well, he was her first husband.’
‘Well, that Rooney was a shrimp too! Such an exquisite woman and around her she had only dwarves.’
‘Ava was only four years older than you.’
‘Ava was the most beautiful woman in the world!’ she repeated, ignoring the comment about the difference in their ages.
‘Take, for instance, Audrey Hepburn.’
‘That little woman? The skinny one?’
‘Yes. She died at sixty-four.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘And Ingrid Bergman?’
‘What about Ingrid Bergman?’
‘She died when she was sixty-seven.’
‘She was a little clumsy, but still exquisite.’
‘What about Marilyn Monroe? Marilyn was a twomonth- old baby when you were born! And she died at thirty-six!’
‘Marilyn was my age?’
‘Your generation! You were both born in 1926!’
It seemed that the fact that she shared her year of birth with Marilyn Monroe left her cold.
‘What about Elizabeth Taylor?’ she asked.
‘She just celebrated her seventy-fifth. They wrote about it the other day in the papers.’
‘I can’t believe Liz is younger than me.’
‘A full six years!’
‘She, too, was a beautiful woman,’ she said. ‘There aren’t any more like her today.’
‘You should see her now!’
‘Why?’
‘They took a picture of her in her wheelchair for her birthday.’
‘How much older am I?’
‘Six years.’
‘Five and a half,’ she corrected me.
‘Just think how many operations she had,’ I added.
‘She had trouble with her spine.’
‘And alcohol, then those unhappy marriages.’
‘How many times was she married?’
‘Nine. When they reported her birthday celebration they said she may marry a tenth time.’
Mum grinned.
‘Hats off to her!’
At last we were talking. We chatted about Liz as if we were two good friends chatting about a third. I’m supposing that Mum was pleased to hear all that information. Liz was seventy- five and had her picture taken in a wheelchair. Mum would be turning eighty-one in another month or so, and she was not in a wheelchair. She wasn’t even fat.
‘I suppose beauty and fame don’t mean a thing,’ she said, relieved.
The expression on her face suggested that this time she was satisfied with the balance in her life.
‘Do you know what Bette Davis said?’
‘What?’
‘That old age is no place for sissies.’
‘Well, it isn’t,’ she said, heartened for a moment.
She often thought of herself as younger than she was. Once when she slid like this into a different, younger age, she addressed me as ‘Grandma’.
‘What, are you asleep, Grandma?’
She slid back and forth in time. She no longer knew exactly when different things happened. She would have been happiest to stay in her childhood, not because she thought of those years as the brightest period of her biography, but because her feelings in that period were ‘safe’, long since formulated, sealed, related many times over, chosen to be a repertoire which she was always able to offer her listeners. She retold the little events and details from her childhood in the same way, with the same vocabulary, ending with the same points or more often with the same absence of a point. It was a sealed repertoire which could no longer be corrected or changed, at least that was the way it seemed, and at the same time it was her only firm temporal coordinate. Sometimes, it’s true, harsh images would surface which I was hearing for the first time.
‘I was always afraid of snakes.’
‘Why?’
‘Once we went on an excursion to a wood and stumbled on a big old snake. Dad killed it.’
‘I hope it wasn’t poisonous!’
‘It was a price snake.’
‘You mean a dice snake?’
‘Yes, it was a big bad old snake and Dad killed it.’
She used to call my father, her husband, Dad, while she usually referred to her own father as Grandpa. Now she was using Dad to refer to her father.
Three years had passed since she’d been given the ‘ugly diagnosis’. Would there be another year? Two? Five? Bartering with death suited her (If I could just stick around for my grandson’s birth! If I could see my grandson start first grade! If I only have the chance to see my granddaughter start school!). There was one thing for certain: she had taken care of it all, wrapped everything up, everything was ‘neat and tidy’, it was ready. She sat in life as if she were in a clean, half-empty doctor’s waiting room: nothing hurt, nothing moved much, she was waiting to be summoned and it was as if she no longer cared when it would happen. All that mattered was her everyday rhythm: Kaia came over at 7:30 a. m., she ate her breakfast while watching the morning television programme Good Morning, Croatia, then she got dressed and went out to the café for her cappuccino and cheese turnover, her slow return home with little chats along the way with neighbours, then waiting for Kaia to bring her lunch at about 1:30 p. m., then an afternoon nap, then Kaia with her dinner at about 6:30 p. m., dining with
