TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

Olja Knežević

messengers fromthe kingdomof heaven. Everyone’s guessing. How could we possibly know if a person is conscious or not as they’re dying?” Then, as if to herself, “I sure hope I’ll be conscious. But it looks like everyone else would rather be permanently unconscious, which they are.” “Eat something,” one of Dad’s Titograd aunts tells me, while another aunt turns her attention to Granny: “I brought you breaded eggplant.” The dining room table is groaning under all the food. “These people think only of gorging themselves,” mutters Granny. “A hungry stomach has no ears.”

“Is she really dead?” I ask.

They tell me she is.

“For good?”

For good.

“She’s gone to her rest,” Granny tells me. “She was in a lot of pain. You are in shock now, but thank goodness at least someone here has their wits about them.” I know Granny means herself. She goes on to say that her neighbor, Čeda, had warned her in time. Čeda ran over earlier to tell Granny that when she poured her morning coffee, the grounds overflowed the demitasse right on the female side, leaving a sickly brown trail, from the cup to the saucer, headlong, no stopping, not even when she moved the cup to a newspaper to soak it up. 64