"I'm not going to Granny's anymore, Mum dear, send Ion this time too!"
"Now, Little Red," says Mum, "come on, Mum's begging you, because afterwards I'll make you pancakes! Come on, or I'll tell your dad, if you don't..."
Hmmm, I think to myself, let me work out a little arrangement now, so that I don't go to Granny's, I still get the pancakes with Nutella, and I don't get a hiding from Daddy either.
He was a good man, a little afraid of Mum, like any man, but she only had to give him a slightly harder look and, bang, he would articulate exactly what a man has to articulate to keep the woman content. I don't know how it is in other families, but in ours the woman was the neck of the family, and nobody ever made any mention of a head.
"Come on, Mum, put it in a bag, stop giving me a basket, it's hard to carry."
Proud that she had talked me into visiting the old woman, Mum arranges everything in there nicely; I don't even really know what she packed for me, all I remember is that the carrier bag was one of those from Kaufland, the kind that holds plenty of kilos. Anyway, she went on telling me there, be careful, don't stray off the path, blah blah, and what with chewing my gum, I barely heard her.
What can I say, I didn't walk all that far, to be honest, I hid behind a block of flats, I was just in the Țiglina area, between stairwell 3 and 4 in the A blocks, and I stood there and thought it all through, like: "Now I'm there, now I'm there, now I'm crossing that road, now I'm at the Profi shop, now I'm walking through the old woman's gate, now I've opened the door, now the conversation with the wolf who ate Granny, now he's snatching me too...", and so on, until I managed to get back to the A blocks in Țiglina.
Maybe you're wondering what I did with the Kaufland bag. Well, whatever was in there smelled so good that, at one point, as I was standing there so no neighbour would spot me, a poooor old maaaan walked past me... and he was lugging along a wolfdog too, black, a lovely dog, but rather dirty, and I couldn't very well go back home with the bag, so I gave it to them, but the poooor maaaan, poor thing. He was thrilled, he said God bless you, and I said: "Let it be for the soul of Granddad, what a good man he was, gone now, poor soul, died of stress, the stress from the old woman, but, oh well."
I get home about when I was supposed to, I was a bit late anyway so it wouldn't look suspicious.
"Have you come back, Mummy's girl?"
"Yes," I say, putting on the face of a good, obedient little girl, and a touch tired after such a long walk. My legs even seemed to ache a little in the muscles, well, of course they were going to ache.
"How is Granny?" she asks me.
"Fine, fine... she was in bed, a little under the weather, but I took her... I waited for her to eat... I sat and chatted with her a while."
"Goooood, gooood..."
Briiiing, suddenly the phone rings; well, in reality it was the ringtone from Jerusalema.
"Hello? What? When? I'm coming now! Children, Ion, Little Red, get dressed quickly, we're going, the old woman has died!"
I was feeling a bit awkward now...
"Come on, Little Red, quickly, that's it, she's gone, at last, the poor thing has gone..."
So you understand exactly: it was the grandmother on my father's side, because the grandmother on my mother's side lived with us in the house...
