Condolences

Rain close beneath the tin under the wing of the Studio before dawn was a trifle unsettling; it was something like the concern at howling wind and storm against the window in childhood. The evacuated possums would be having a torrid time of it without shelter. After having dispatched the large bushy-tailed felon a second much smaller was squeezing through a tiny gap on the other side of the front window. More trouble and expense. In the end handyman Goran had flipped the hinges on the box he had crafted that had fixed the first old fellow and filled that hole with expandable foam from an aerosol can. Three days later the operation appeared to have been a success—no sound of the creatures in the ceiling. After the funeral on Sunday over in Montenegro the matter of rain over a grave had played in the over-het brain. Finally the bereaved brother and the widow were reached on the phone and condolences offered. Words had been very difficult to find either side. As a sailor the brother Vajo had missed both his father and mother’s funerals. On this occasion he had been found at home. A flinty old mariner, thought had been that Vajo might have gathered himself and a calm, settled voice would be heard on the phone. In the event it proved to be not the case. Bad choking. Velika ti hvala, Many thanks to you, Vajo had responded. There was little else intelligible. Often Vajo could be quiet and circumspect. As in the villages, in Vajo’s place there at Kumbor where Aunt Radoslava had married he would live the remainder of his life one hundred metres below the church graveyard where all his family lay in the ground. Shaving the last days the thought had come of the preparation of the corpse. The younger brother Leka—Aleksandar—had a kind of large mole high on his cheek. In the summer it grew larger, he had said once. Some kind of skin condition ran through the male line in that branch of the family. Leka’s nephew Vladimir had a large dark patch of skin on his forearm that had raised consternation among the grandmas in his early years. The women shaving would need to take care with Leka. Surprisingly, late last year up in Johor Bahru, Southern Peninsular Malaysia, it had been revealed that among the Muslims in the Tropics at least it was the male kin who prepared the dead for burial. Not the case in another patriarchal form in Montenegro, where the duty fell to the widow, the daughters and other female kin.

                                                                                                       Melbourne, June 2017