Little Mima always loved to read, to watch cartoons and films, and to daydream. She dreamed of the strange worlds she read about, and she also created some of her very own. She connected reality with fiction, joined the past and the present, and daydreamed about the future. In those daydreams, the most frequent magical object was a music box.
She had read about them more than once, as relics of the past. About boxes that, when opened, would with their very first notes awaken an indescribable nostalgia in the characters, all those feelings, memories and untold stories.
Perhaps the best example of such a box is the little music box from the animated film “Anastasia”. The story of the lost princess of the royal Romanov family, and of how a grandmother and her granddaughter finally recognise each other and are reunited through the melody of a little music box, which evidently held a whole world, the whole story of a family, and even of a country.
That’s why I decided back then that, since I didn’t have a box like that, one whose music awakens existing memories, known and unknown, I had to get at least a new one, with which I would start a tradition myself and set the magic in motion.
At our request, my grandma and grandpa bought one for Ana and one for me one Christmas, so that we could keep our jewellery in them. As similar as these two boxes were, they were just as different, just like my sister and me. Each had its own charm. Mine, when wound up, played Beethoven’s enchanting “Für Elise”, while I never managed to recognise the melody of Ana’s among the well-known pieces of classical music (which doesn’t mean it isn’t one of them). What made Ana’s box special was a couple that danced while the music played. It is exactly those small differences that set the two of us apart to this day. Her life is dance and she adores it, it is part of her. And me… For me, music as such has always been more important.
I could sit for hours next to my box, winding it again and again and, with my eyes closed, making up stories about it. How old could it be? Who had it belonged to? What had been kept in it? Who had the previous owner received it from? And so on, endlessly. Always a new story, always new characters, never quite real, because the box was brand new, but close enough, because they surely had to be part of the family. That was what mattered.
Those boxes stayed behind in my childhood home, in the country where I was born and grew up.
I moved away, got married and had Sofia. My grandmother left Serbia for the first time when she heard I was pregnant. Although she was nearly 80, she got a passport for the first time in her life and set off on a long journey without batting an eyelid or doubting her decision.
The second time she came was a few months after Sofia was born. And she came several more times after that. But the time she first saw Sofia was special in many ways.
On one of our walks back then, at Grandma’s request, the three of us went into a nearby shop that sold all sorts of odds and ends, from household goods to the silliest things that nobody will realistically ever need, and yet someone will always buy them. On one of the shelves in that shop stood snow globes. I had never had one, and I had always wanted one. I had never told Grandma, but she always somehow knew how to make my wishes come true before I even said them out loud.
She chose one of the globes, with a beautiful angel inside, and said: “I’d like to buy this for Sofia, so that she always remembers her Grandma Bia.” I didn’t object.
Although too little to hold it herself, Sofia was enchanted from the very first day, first by the music the globe plays when it is wound up, and then by the magic of the trapped snow that never stops falling on the little angel with folded hands.
That globe stands in our living room. Sofia is big now, so she can pick it up and wind it herself, which she does quite often.
For the past week, whenever she talks to her grandpa, my dad, she asks him near the very end of the call to switch on his music boxes, while at the same time she winds up her snow globe, sits by the phone and listens to that cacophony of different yet so similar sounds without blinking.
In her eyes I then recognise little Mima from many years ago, who dreamed so vividly of perhaps exactly something like this. And big Mima always gets a few tears in her eyes that she tries to hide.
Magical boxes and music that tell a family story. Feelings, distance, losses.
If I didn’t have an inherited music box with a story behind it, my daughter now has two. One her great-grandmother bought for her mum, and it is waiting for her in a house far away, and the other she bought just for her, and it is right here, always before her eyes.
Great-grandma Bia is gone.
But the music is here, and with every note it brings her back to mind, right here where she was until not so long ago.
And as long as there is this music and these boxes, Sofia will have her own little nostalgic story about a wonderful person who loved her beyond words, even before she came into this world. She will have an angel watching over her and memories that will surely not fade, at least not while we are here.
And so, at 30, I too got my own story about family and heritage, which, in small ways, is passed down from generation to generation. Now my box is worth more than ever before; now its sounds set off an avalanche of mixed emotions and streams of tears down my cheeks, out of sadness that she is gone, but also out of happiness that she was here.
Thank you, Grandma.
Your Mimče
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