Grandpa often talks about a ruler called Tutankhamun, whose wealth, as he says, "was discovered completely by accident in the middle of the Egyptian desert." Grandma calls the ruler "Tutkun" for short, and this horrifies grandfather, who protests and corrects her: "No: Tutkun, Tu - tan - kamon, I told you so many times!" Sometimes he gives me a book in which they have pictures of caravans with camels and some colorful chests in which riches have been found. "Here," says the grandfather, pointing to a picture of a man with large solufs and a tropical helmet on his head, "that's Lord Carnarvon, the one who entered the tomb first!"
"Both he and all those who crowded around the tombs with him contracted some bad diseases and died," adds his grandmother. "What were they looking for there, for a man to ask them." "Well, they were archaeologists, that was their job," the grandfather justifies the actions of those who found wealth. "And diseases are diseases, you can get them here too", he adds.
I take the book, secretly, into the garden and leaf through it there. An orange - yellow caterpillar falls from the apricot tree onto the open page . I look at her with horror: she has countless tiny legs and bright hairs sticking out in all directions. It is a meaningless story that a caterpillar becomes a butterfly - it can only be born, by transformation, into a soft, pink dragonfly or something else like that, unfinished and nasty. The caterpillar shrinks and elongates, shrinks and elongates, in fact - it walks with its twenty pairs of legs, sometimes becoming humped and sometimes flattened. She crawls over pictures from the book that represent some area with a desert and a caravan of camels. The caterpillar is a huge monster that swallows camels along with the camels, crawling over them. I shake the monster off the book. It falls to the ground and bends in a circle. I take the stone and crush it. It twists. It has green blood. I sprinkle it with dust. Then I place a pile of stones over his corpse, something like a pyramid, which my grandfather tells me is a tomb made for dead pharaohs. On top I put one blue flower in the shape of a tube. The caterpillar is actually a pharaoh.
***
I live with my grandparents, together with other family members - uncles and aunts. My mother and father are not here. When I ask, they tell me that the mother is sick and is in the spa.
When the aunts talk among themselves and at the same time mention their mother, they quietly say the word "sanatoria": "The doctors at the sanatorium say that the situation is not getting better," they say worriedly, and then, noticing that I am listening, they change the subject and begin, with a certain forced cheerfulness, to talk about some of their friends who are "very classy" and about things they saw in the shop windows in the city center that are also "very posh”. No matter how ugly and terrible the word "sanatorium" is, I am much more afraid of the word "situation", considering that the aunts pronounce it somehow drawn out and forwarded by the exchange of meaningful glances. The father appears from time to time, always in a hurry, he comes suddenly and leaves again, as he says, "to the field". From those absences, he brings me bags with colorful candies that have lines on the cross section that represent the inside of some fruit; the aunts say disgruntled that eating too many candies causes tooth decay. "Poor child," they say, thinking that I don't listen to them, "will grow up without parents." I get the impression that grandfather disapproves of father's travels; "It's not the time to travel," he says, "it's not the time at all." He thinks there will be a war and the family should be gathered at home. From one trip, my father brought me an airplane - a silvery model of a German "pike", but then it disappeared, whether I lost it or someone hid it, it was not clear. Adults sometimes have a desire to adapt the world of children to their ideas and commit violent acts. Basically - the plane, despite all my investigations, could not be found. Even at the beginning, when I showed him to the family, grandfather didn't like him. Inside, in the plane, sat the pilots who had leather caps on their heads and large glasses. There was also a machine gun that could turn around. The propeller was also spinning. Everything was made with amazing precision, as if it were real. Now he's gone. I need to come up with a story to tell my father if he ever asks me where the plane is. He'll probably be mad that I lost him.
Translated from Macedonian by Seida Beganović