Magpies warbled in the gum trees as we walked up the path to Nana Alicja’s ground-floor flat in the upper-crust Melbourne suburb of Toorak. I pushed the buzzer, then heard Nana’s poodle barking and sniffing beneath the door, the donk, schlep, schlep of Nana shuffling down the hallway with her walking stick. As the door slowly opened, I sensed my mother beside me bracing herself.
‘What you have there?’ My grandmother raised her head of perfectly coiffed, auburn-dyed hair as far as her bowed shoulders would allow. She smiled at me warmly, but barely acknowledged Mum.
I levered open a box containing cakes we had selected from Nana’s favourite patisserie: a hazelnut meringue gateau for Nana, mille-feuille filled with crème patissière for Mum and me, and strawberry tarts for us all. Nana inhaled the rich vanilla scent.
‘Mmmm!’ she said, grinning. She brushed off my mother, who was trying in vain to peck her on the cheek, and made her way back down the oil-painting-lined hallway to the galley kitchen that smelled of beef fat and carrot. Nana’s part-time Polish care- giver had made a stew.
I followed Nana and arranged the cakes on a platter while watching Mum in the lounge room trying to calm the dog. As Nana reached into a cupboard for her gold-rimmed china, light streamed in from the courtyard and caught the blue-green numbers tattooed on her forearm: 2 4 5 3 3 5, though they’d softened over time, morphing into her skin folds and sunspots.
I was four or five when I first asked about the numbers.
I was sitting with my younger sister, watching Nana Alicja chop beetroot and onions for a soup. Nana’s knife hit the cutting board: rap, rap, rap. She tilted her head high to prevent the onion fumes stinging her eyes.
‘It’s our phone number,’ Nana said. ‘So I won’t forget it.’
‘Who put it there?’
Papa Mietek poked his nose over his newspaper.
‘Oh, just some man.’ Nana scraped the onions into a pot. She put down the knife and passed us a tin filled with European chocolate biscuits.
I often suspected Nana Alicja wasn’t telling the truth. On her birthday we’d stand around her Edwardian mahogany dining- room table delicately forking her freshly baked strawberry and meringue cake from her best china. I’d ask how old she was.
‘About fifty,’ she’d reply nonchalantly. Every year…
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