I barely understood what she meant, but bile welled in my throat all the same.
“Mama saw me cowering in the doorway, and screamed at me to run. And I did—but not until I saw him drag them to the precipice, the cliff’s edge Ana and I had always been forbidden to go near. And he threw them over”—Lina and I both flinched hard—“like they were nothing. I stayed, frozen, until I couldn’t hear them screaming anymore. I’ve never taken you up to the mountains, but they’re terribly tall. It was a very long way down before the sound stopped carrying. Once I finally moved, I ran far and hard until I reached this little city. And here our ?i?a Jovan found me, and took me in.”
Malina pressed against my side, both of us trembling. The questions had blackened and curled up inside me, and all I wanted was for Mama to stop.
She fixed us in her feather-lashed gaze and put a light hand on each of our cheeks. Her fingers were so cold I could feel their chill leach beneath my skin. “Do you understand me? Ana fell in love, and then she was seen. If a father could kill his own child because she gleamed, what do you think a stranger would do to you? That’s why you never let anyone see you. And that’s why we take care to never, ever fall in love.”
I found my voice again, a rusted wire in my throat. “But Mama, I don’t want to stop,” I said, digging my nails into my palms. Even then, the power to bloom was the one thing, the best thing I had. Where Lina was sweet-tempered and tender, I was stark and sharp, fashioned of edges. I wasn’t already deft in Mama’s kitchen like Lina was, school bored me to misery except when it came to poems and stories, and I didn’t have a whisper of our mother’s easy charm.
On top of it all I looked like a thing apart, some prickly offshoot of my mother’s and sister’s languid beauty. What would I be without the gift? Would I even belong with them? “I could learn to be so careful, I promise I could, if you just teach me. Only ever in the dark, like you said. But please, Mama, don’t make us stop.”
“It’s not just about you,” she said, soft. “You’re so bright, you’ll make all of us too easy to see. Beauty is our birthright, but only as long as we do it safely. I’ll find you some other way to bloom, something that won’t show you for what you are.”
She lifted a hand as if to touch my cheek again, and I flinched away from her fingers. Her hand stilled in midair; maybe that was the moment she first turned herself to winter.
IN THE TEN years since, I’d lost everything but the flowers, and I wasn’t even sure why those hadn’t faded. It had been like going color-blind, or growing scars inside my eyes. My world had gone so flat that sometimes, nothing but the magma roil of the glass furnace in ?i?a Jovan’s workshop felt even remotely real.
And yet here I still was, same as ever, stuck with Mama and the café. Because what else was there to do, for me? Where else was there to be?
I unlocked my bike from the fence and swung my leg over the rickety two-speed Schwinn, and the bougainvillea fractal faded away. Pressing my feet into the groaning pedals, I set off along the ?kurda, the stagnant little river that trickled by our ramshackle, whitewashed old house. As I cut a left along the Adriatic Highway toward Cattaro’s Old Town, I could already catch the brine of the bay, glimmering beneath the limestone cliffs across the water. Our city nestled in the deepest recess of the Gulf of Cattaro, a pool of the Adriatic two inlets removed from the open sea. The mountains circled the bay like hands cupping a palmful of water much deeper and more dazzling than the sky—a solid ring of verdant rock broken only by the narrow thread of the Verige Strait.
Past the bridge over the second leg of the ?kurda River, the Venetian ramparts surrounding the Old Town came into view. Old Cattaro had been settled by the Romans around 160 BC, and a thousand years later the stone city still clustered behind the ancient walls, a mosaic of gray blocks and red roofs against the cliffs that soared above.
Outside the blackened walls, I slid off the bike to walk it beside me through the Sea Gate. Tu?e ne?emo, svoje ne damo, proclaimed the inscription carved into the stone above: “What belongs to others, we do not want; what is ours, we will never surrender.” The entrance opened into the Arms Square plaza, with its medieval clock tower and stone shops, cafés, and hotels with wrought-iron balconies and green shutters. Bike tucked tightly against my side, I navigated through the warrens of the streets, passing boutiques and bakeries and jewelry shops until I emerged into the sunlit square of the Cathedral of Saint Tryphon.
A vague pall of incense always hung over the square, even with the sweeter smells emanating from Café Tadi? across the way. I secured my bike to the little post ?i?a Jovan had nailed for me by the café door and found him already inside at the glass dessert display, in his neatly pressed slacks, matching waistcoat, and blinding white shirt. Not quite one of the vintage three-piece suits he still wore from his time as a man about town in Belgrade, but close; he was the only person I’d ever known who dressed formally for comfort. Even at seventy, he was still striking in a weathered, leonine way, his snowy hair thick and swept back like a wave crest from a bold forehead, blue eyes piercing beneath craggy, bushy white brows.
He was leaning heavily on his “battle cane,” the dragon-headed, warrior-king’s cane he’d carved for himself when his left hip gave out and he’d had to have it replaced four years ago. In his other hand he held one of my mother’s specialty burek, a savory goat-cheese pastry studded with pine nuts and drizzled with honey. He bought one almost every morning, as much to see his honorary granddaughters as to sample Mama’s flavors. “I only have so many days left,” he always said. “And I’ll be damned if I miss any opportunities to start them with my girls and the best burek in God’s great world.”
“But we’re a European country,” he was saying now to Mama, stoutly. “Still part of the European Union, part of the world, my girl. What the giants do affects us as much as anyone else. We have to care.”
“Why?” my mother replied, leaning on the counter. Her dark hair was braided into a gleaming crown, and she wore one of her slim sheaths, dove gray beneath her stained apron. She propped her chin on her clenched fist, and I was surprised to see how white her knuckles were. “The rest of us should be so lucky to have that much strength, to do anything we wanted without being afraid. And look, instead, how small we are. What does it even matter what we think?”