Publikacija SEP 2011 - Vilenica

The Bathing
Maja Hrgović
It was not easy to ask mother to trade in the care for one sickly old
woman, the one whom she had been nursing for the past five years in
Deruta, in exchange for the care for another, even sicker old woman,
the one who, as she put it, had done with her youth what kids do with
condoms; they fill them with water and throw them from the balcony
at passers-by. I could see my mother’s thinly plucked eyebrows curving
into a dramatic arch, like the arcades of some very modern viaduct,
when she hears that, yippee!, in the end, she is the one who gets to
take care of the woman whom, in her cheerful moods, she called the
seed of Satan.
I could imagine her guffaw, like the sound of crumbled rocks rolling
down the mountainside, and her resolute voice, hoarse from
smoking, saying “no bloody way!” – the only possible answer to the
offer of becoming a babysitter to dad’s crazy mother, now that her
service as a gastarbeiter 1 was nearing its term. The old woman she was
nursing was dying of cancer. After her death, mum was planning to leave
Italy for good.
“Come on, ask her anyway. I’ll pay you,” said my father, trying to
talk me into it. He called me only days after we had brought grandma
home together and put her up in my old room. “Just try hinting, in a
by-the-by sort of way, that I’m no good at this sort of thing ...”
“Dad, you know what mum’s going to say: no one’s good at wiping
the faeces off an unpleasant, senile old woman. It’s not something you
can be good or bad at.”
“It sounds awful when you say it.”
1 From German: guest worker in another country, usually, but not necessarily in Germany
[Translator’s note].
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