What does the extract say on why we compose literary worlds?
My grandfather’s mother had died in childbirth, and his father died before my grandfather had even formed a memory of him. My grandfather lived, instead, with his own grandmother, the town midwife, a woman who had already raised six children, half of whom were children of the village friends and neighbours. The entire town affectionately called her Mother Vera. There is an austere, middle-aged woman standing in front of what appears to be the corner of a stone house, behind which a tree-laden orchard slopes down and away. Her hands, crossed in front of her, are the hands of a labourer; her expression seems to indicate that the photographer owes her money.
In those days, the house had only three rooms. My grandfather slept on a straw mattress in a small wooden cot by the hearth. There was a clean kitchen with tin pots and pans, strings of garlic hanging from the rafters, a neat larder stocked with pickle barrels, jars of ajvar and onions and rosehip jam, bottles of homemade walnut rakija. In winter, Mother Vera lit a fire that burned all day and all night without going out, and in summer a pair of white storks nested in the charred stone top of the chimney, clattering their bills for hours at a time. The view from the garden opened out onto the green mountains above town, and the valley through which a bright, broad river still widens and then contracts around a bend with a red-steepled church. A dirt road went by the house, leading from the linden grove, to the plum orchard by the water. In the garden, Mother Vera planted potatoes, lettuces, carrots, and a small rose bush which she tended with celebrated care.
Mother Vera’s people had always been shepherds, and, being alone, she had invested so much of her own life in this profession that it seemed the natural path down which to direct my grandfather. So he was brought up with sheep, with their bleating and groaning, their thick smell and runny eyes, their stupefied spring nakedness. He was brought up, too, with their death, the spring slaughter, the way they were butchered and sold. The articulate way Mother Vera handled the knife: straightforward, precise, like everything she did, from her cooking to the way she knitted sweaters for him. The ritual rhythms of this life were built into Mother Vera’s nature, an asset she hoped would adhere to my grandfather, too: the logical and straightforward process of moving from season to season, from birth to death, without unnecessary sentiment.
Like all matriarchal disciplinarians, Mother Vera was certain of my grandfather’s eventual acceptance of order, and therefore confident in his abilities-overconfident, perhaps, because when he was six, she handed him a small, cut-to-size shepherd’s staff and sent him into the fields with a cluster of old sheep, whom she did not expect to give him very much trouble. It was an exercise, and my grandfather was delighted with his newfound responsibility. But he was so young then that later he was only able to remember fragments of what happened next: the lull of the morning fields, the springy cotton flanks of the sheep, the suddenness of the tumble down the deep hole in which he would spend the night, alone, gazing up at the puzzled sheep, and hours later, Mother Vera’s thoughtful, dawn-lit face hovering over the mouth of the hole.
This was one of the few stories my grandfather told from his childhood.