Summary
Milica Lukšić: Alice without a mirror
Grandma lived in one of those apartments: ceilings up to the sky, suggestive of bat nests near the top, lost in gray fog and vapors. A kilometer of corridors and some rooms. Barica Iz Priče was with her before; Alisa remembers a pirate woman with an eternal scarf around her head who slavishly served her grandmother and guarded her like a kerber. Barica had its own dog corner, a girl's room, next to the kitchen and a toilet-bathroom where it was always cold; her name was actually Regina, but even that wasn't certain. Alisa remembers that she once heard how Regina, when her name was something like that, beat her husband for the third time, with an axe. And her grandmother, in spite of the non-national militia, accepted her in an apartment and service in an act of charity, and through many years of successful coexistence with her proved that a nice and gentlemanly approach is always a more effective way of re-education than punishment and repression. Alisa imagined Barica-Regina suffering in a Soviet-style labor camp, in a black-and-white film, and grandmother in the guise of a Russian countess mercifully coming to save her. In addition, the film was silent, so the grandmother's eyes expressively sparkled with anger at the simpletons in the role of guards, and below were captions with dialogue......
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