Chapter Five
Measured Portions
There were lindens in Mira’s garden, too. It was the first thing Vesna noticed when the taxi turned in off the main road — the same tree, the same thick sweetness pushing in through the open window, as if the thing she had crossed an ocean to leave behind had simply been waiting for her here, in her sister’s yard, in flower. She had forgotten they bloomed at the same time on both sides of the water. She had spent years forgetting it.
The visit was seven days. She had counted them on the plane the way she counted everything now — carefully, privately, keeping the sum to herself. Seven days in her sister’s city, her sister’s house, her sister’s life, which ran on rails Vesna had long ago stopped being able to read. Their mother had turned seventy in the spring, and the party had been in May, and Vesna had not come for the party because four plane tickets were the price of a month of her life, and so she had come now, in July, alone with the children, to make up for the absence in person. That was the official version. She was no longer sure there was an unofficial one. She had stopped being sure of her own motives somewhere over the Atlantic.
Her children spilled out of the taxi ahead of her — Nina, fifteen, already taller than her aunt would be expecting; Marko, twelve, headphones slung around his neck — and they greeted Mira in the language of the country they had grown up in, then caught themselves, laughing, and switched into the slower, more careful version of the family’s language, the one they spoke with an accent now, the one that made their grandmother’s face do something complicated every time they opened their mouths. Pride and grief in a single expression. Vesna knew that expression. She had been making it herself for ten years.
Mira’s children were waiting on the steps, scrubbed and polite in the specific way that meant they had been told to be — Ivana, fourteen, and Bojan, ten, who knew exactly who Vesna was because they had grown up on stories of her: the aunt across the ocean, the one who left. They kissed her on both cheeks and asked after the flight in flawless, unaccented sentences, and the difference landed before she had even set down her bag. Her own children spoke this language badly and another one well, and the one they spoke well was not this one. Mira’s children spoke a single language and spoke it as though it belonged to them, because it did.
Their mother sat in the shade of the linden with her hands folded in her lap. She had aged in the photographs and then aged again in person, the second always a small shock after the first. “You came,” she said, as if there had been some doubt, which there had, and she held out her arms, and Vesna went into them and was a child again for exactly as long as the embrace lasted, which was not long, because their mother had never been a woman who held on.
Lunch was in the garden, under the tree. Mira had been cooking since morning — Vesna could read it in the number of dishes, the deliberate abundance of them, the way the table had been set to say something.