Free While the Shark is Sleeping by Milena Agus Page A

beautiful. The happiest period of my life.’
    That’s how it happened, Zia didn’t want to get up off the floor and days had gone by and we knew very well that if something didn’t happen she’d never get up again. In desperation I went to Mauro who said he reckoned Zia couldn’t go on as before, she had to get a hold of herself and show some balls, and he was certain she would. He told me to relax, Zia would not die and she would no doubt manage to fall in love again and to imitate the Normandy landing if the kitchen flooded, or General Kutuzov’s tactics walking backwards down the hallway. He didn’t believe in God, but the force of nature was a definite reality and Zia was an equally definite part of that.
    I even swallowed my pride and phoned all her ex-boyfriends whose numbers I could find.
    ‘What’s wrong with my Zia?’
    Some got worried and thought I was some kind of vengeful niece. They hung up in fright. Others replied, ‘She’s perfect, but not for me.’
    It was my brother who came up with the idea.
    ‘I need you,’ he told her. ‘Don’t die. Don’t be selfish. I’ve always thought I’d have preferred you as a mother, and as a father, and as a grandmother. And I don’t know what I’d give for a girlfriend as hot as you. Everything, apart from my piano.’
    So Zia got up and went to have a cold shower, as she always had before the judge, and then she threw herself on the pot of meatballs Nonna had left for us all.
    I got angry with my brother. ‘You shouldn’t have done that to our parents.’
    ‘It’s not true that I prefer Zia. But nor is it true that the dead can hear us or that people far away can have a sense of what we’re thinking, or other bullshit like that. The dead are empty sacks and Mamma is ashes in an urn and if Papà could hear our thoughts he’d come back. Wouldn’t he?’
    The fact is Zia got up off the damn floor.
    So Zia said goodbye to Nonna, brought her history books and her low-cut dresses over to our place and started her new life with no boyfriends and no money, because she wanted to maintain the two of us without having to ask Nonna for help and she wanted to buy our house, which we were renting, and give it to us, with the money she’d been saving for her marital home, plus a mortgage.
    If we hadn’t been so sad, we’d even have enjoyed ourselves with Zia, because when we were all together, feeling abandoned and defeated, she’d always pull out some tragic historical event and compare it to our situation.
    Leaving behind the era of the Bible, my brother said, now was the time for history. We were the Carthaginians at Zama, the Persians at Marathon, Napoleon at Waterloo. We faced the battles of the Somme and Verdun, and capitulated at Caporetto. We suffered the cold of Stalingrad. We were the Jews in Nazi Germany and the Palestinian refugees driven out by the Jews. But Zia said we would pick ourselves up again, just like the Japanese.
    She’d often cook something special and invite Mauro De Cortes to come and eat with us. Not wanting to be impolite, he would say, ‘Thank you, but I’ve got something else on, maybe another day.’
    Zia would wait for another day and send him funny text messages pretending to be the owner of a restaurant advising him of the menu. Mauro would reply just as nicely, but he’d still never come. When she finally decided to release her specialities, because the only real client was never going to turn up, they were no longer all that special: soft vegetables, watery sauces, dry sweets and stale bread.
    And if we screwed up our noses, Zia would say, ‘If they had it in Afghanistan, or Palestine, or Nicaragua, where your father’s no doubt gone! If your Nonno had had it in the concentration camp, or Londoners during the bombings of September 1944!’
    ‘Zia,’ my brother finally burst out, pushing away his plate, ‘we’re not at war. We’re just waiting for Mauro De Cortes to do us the honour of eating with us.’
    We