The sense of apocalypse ceased in the car. I clutched Vili in the back seat, and I knew that everything was all right. Grandmother sat next to me. I saw her eyes were blurry with tears, but she smiled at me, assuring me it was only sand. My mother turned around and gave Grandmother that stern look I thought she reserved exclusively for me when I did something wrong, or when she assumed I had done something wrong, which basically amounted to the same thing. I didn’t think she could give that look to anyone else, especially not her own mother. They didn’t say a word to each other, and I soon fell asleep, clutching Vili.

After that, I saw Grandmother very rarely, until one day my parents explained that she had gone to Australia on a family visit and would not return for a while. They showed me where Australia was on a world map to address my confusion, and they also showed me kangaroos and other peculiar animals in a book, which intrigued me. I hoped we would soon visit Grandmother so that maybe we could watch the kangaroos together. My mother and father agreed that if I behaved well enough all year, this wish of mine might become reality and sooner or later we could visit Grandmother.

I was a kid, that must be the reason why I was so blind to the truth, although they say that children are extremely sensitive to minor changes in their environment. Maybe I’m the exception, or maybe my mother was especially skilled at lying, even to herself. What is important to note is that I was not in possession of that information then: I didn’t know that my grandmother had passed away sometime that year. My mother asked her not to visit us, and we didn’t visit her either. My mother didn’t want me to remember my grandmother as a sick old woman, her illness consuming her body little by little, though I only know this from my father’s account. He told me when he was drunk, decades later. I know that my mother was trying to protect me when she decided to lie. I know that she wanted the best for me: what else could a parent possibly wish for her child but the very best? My father, inebriated, made wise by long years of experience, thought otherwise – he believed that my mother was scared to pronounce the words, scared to verbalize that her own mother was dead. In any case, for me my grandmother was a living person for years to come, even though she had long been buried in the ground by the time Vili started dying.