II

1.

I took a book from the footstool, the one my grandad used as a bedside table, and opened it at the page marked by a shred of newspaper. He had never been one for leather, cotton or paper bookmarks, and so rather than between pages they rotted away in untidy drawers and other ransacked corners of his house, while other flat or pointed objects at hand – pencils, toothpicks, coins – would perform the task instead. His later life amounted to the sum of insignificant details: stains encrusted on shirts, clumps of food on plates, different coloured shoelaces, burnt-out lightbulbs, chipped glasses, old biros, out-of-date I.D cards, faded horoscopes, keys without keyrings and keyrings without keys. All of these were tiny trivialities of no consequence – things he was not inclined to waste his limited time on.

Because time was always against him, Grandad never searched the house for things that were designed with a specific purpose in mind, like keeping a page in a book, because he, consistently stubborn, considered there to be plenty of other objects that could do the job – or any other job – just as well. Coffee was stored in a mayonnaise jar, tipped into the coffee pot, stirred with a gas lighter and poured into a yoghurt pot, while Grandma’s beautiful ceramic sugar, salt and coffee jars, gilded coffee spoons and porcelain cups sat gathering dust in the cabinet.

Mum flew into a rage when once he used her driving licence as a bookmark, which along with the book was then returned to the library, only to reappear when the book was taken out again. It was at this point that she furiously went on a hunt for bookmarks – raiding drawers, moving armchairs, wardrobes, and even the fridge; she got under tables and beds, and eventually placed seven bookmarks on Grandad’s footstool with a loud huff, and insisted that he use them. Against all her expectations, he promised that he would.

But Grandad would only read within reach of the footstool in the evening before he went to sleep, and it housed very few of the books he actually read, so it was not long before random things reappeared between the pages, from electrician’s business cards to Jehovah’s Witness leaflets. Usually he would just tear off a piece of newspaper, and once, when he was reading some particularly heavy tome, an obituary and photograph of Julia Morosin could be seen protruding from it for several months.

From the table in the living room, from the arm of Grandad’s chair, from the oven, from the dresser in the hallway, even from the bathroom floor, my eyes were met with Julia’s look of resignation. Many a time I pored over her eighty-seven years, her three daughters and their families, and the days leading up to her funeral, before I’d have to avert my gaze just to be on the safe side, before I rescued poor Julia from her posthumous duties and replaced her – Grandad style – with an article about a regatta.

Yet in spite of the boundless freedom granted to objects in his house, where beach towels would bask on the bedroom floor and dictionaries would relax on the toilet cistern, my scatterbrained Grandad was an incredibly disciplined reader. Never would he stop reading in the middle of a page, least of all mid-sentence. Neither the doorbell nor a stew boiling over on the stove would interrupt his reading. He always read a chapter from start to finish, but if the chapters were too long, he would stop reading at the end of the first sentence on the left-hand side. It was therefore easy to establish which had been the last sentence he ever read in his life.

I opened the book that I’d found on the footstool at the place marked by a piece of newspaper. At the top of the left-hand page was only the last part of the sentence, so I turned back and read the paragraph from beginning to end:

An eventful century or so ago, my paternal ancestors left behind what was then Galicia, the easternmost province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Western Ukraine), and resettled in Bosnia, which had recently been annexed to the Hapsburg domain. My peasant forebears brought with them a few beehives, an iron plough, many songs about leaving home, and a recipe for perfect bors