Even so, when Eva returns with a triumphant look, carrying a bottle of slivovica in one of her coat pockets and a bottle of herbal loza in the other, Josip greets her with a forced nod, and pretends that he is absorbed in the book. Women, of course, can read atmospheres, faces, thoughts, anything.
“Did you get along together?” she asks in a low voice, offering a hopeful smile.
Josip returns the smile—entirely artificial—and returns to the book.
“Good”, she says with a note of relief. “Good.”
It is impossible to sleep. After the lights are turned out, and the door to the bedroom is shut, Josip curls into a ball, begins to whimper, and then to moan. The squeaking bedsprings are so loud he is forced to put his fingers into his ears until it is all over. Then the mumbled conversation of his aunt and uncle resumes.
They are talking about him, this is certain.
Eva is describing Josip’s excellent qualities, his hard work at the factory, his habit of fishing, the quietness of his demeanor—the boy will be no trouble, she assures her husband. He mumbles a reply, in the tone of a mildly disgruntled man who is, after all, kindly of heart and willing to sacrifice.
The squeaking resumes. Fingers in ears, his mouth opens wide in screams that cannot be allowed to vibrate the air and penetrate the walls of this prison. Perhaps he sleeps, perhaps not. In the morning, he cannot remember falling into dreams, though he must have at some point because there was blood and fire in the night, and an old woman’s chair rocking and squeaking, rocking and squeaking.
Eva rouses him before dawn. Uncle is sleeping, she says, he emptied both bottles last night—well, they both emptied the bottles, she laughs. But they must be off to the factory now.
As usual, they walk to work. He is completely silent. Even when she asks him the usual questions of no import, he cannot speak. He nods or shakes his head. She stops in the street, and feels his forehead.
“You’re burning up”, she scowls. “You can’t work in this condition.”
At the factory office she obtains permission for time off, in order to search for a doctor who can tell her what is wrong with the boy. They find the clinic of a doctor down near the market where Josip was almost shot, that day she saved him from the sniper. There are no Christian images in the outer office, no Islamic symbols either, nor is there any indication of political interest. Eva and Josip sit on the floor among a crowd of other people, most of whom are Muslims. Hours later, when they are admitted to the surgery, they see that it is a bare room, containing only trays of instruments, medical books, and an examination table covered with a green sheet, its old bloodstains washed and rewashed. The doctor is a thoughtful man in his sixties, a secular Muslim, very thorough in his approach. When he has finished his examination and Eva has told him what she knows, he informs her that the boy may have typhoid. More tests are needed. Typhoid is highly infectious, and thus he must be admitted to hospital for observation.
By now, Josip’s body is throwing off a lot of heat. He has become the embers of civilization in the house of annihilation. He is incapable of thought or word or action, yet even in his semidelirium he feels a faint return of hope: the promise that he will soon die far away from his uncle. He will at last go upward on his wings.
Unfortunately, his escape is not so easy. Everything that happens after that is erased from his memory because it has not really been imprinted on it. Three days later he becomes aware that he is lying inside a box—or as it slowly reveals itself to be, a cement-walled chamber. He is lying on a mattress on a damp floor. He is naked under a dirty sheet. His head hurts badly, and every part of his body is aching.
A single light bulb burns in the ceiling; it hurts his eyes. He thinks, at first, that he is in the factory, but no machines are present, no sounds of whirring motors and screaming metal. The walls are painted dark green and sweating moisture. At the far end of the room are metal tables like trays, drained by hoses into buckets. Though the door of the room opens onto a hallway in which there is a faint yellow glow, no other people are present, and no sounds can be heard. He has never seen the inside of a hospital, yet he is sure from his reading of books that such places are always clean, full of light, and bustling with good people who minister to the sick.
Perhaps this is his new home, the house of orphans. He will live here and never again will he meet his uncle, the wolf of Pačići. He will get better and will return to work. He will purchase his own food, and he will fish in the river. And if this house is too lonely, damp, and dirty, he can find a place to sleep at the factory, be a night-watch maybe. There is a cubbyhole behind the smelter, a few blankets and a sheet of tin over it would turn it into a good apartment for a boy.
He sleeps.
When he awakes again, the doctor is hovering over him; Eva is there, too.
“—not typhoid, just influenza, though a bad one. He cannot be moved until the worst is over—”
He sleeps again. When he wakes up, he sees the book of the sea on the floor beside his head. His skull pounding, he rolls onto his side and grabs it, opens it, finds the swallow, talks to it, listens to it, lets it perch on his fingertips.
Who are you? Where have you come from?
They ask this of each other, again and again, until the flames consume his body and his mind falls away like the curve of a wing’s tangent, back to the earth.
“Where are you going?” he cries.
Back to the place of our labor, sing the eyes of the lastavica, down to the heaving seas, the swaying forests, the dark sleeping fields, the cold mountains, the blossoming trees, and the consuming fires.
“I can’t see you!”
I am here,
I am here,
I am here.
Now he sits up. A beam of sunlight pours through a small window at the top of the wall. An old woman is spooning soup into his mouth. When she has finished, she moves on to three other bodies lying on mattresses along the wall and tries to feed them, one by one. A man is lying on the mattress closest to Josip’s. He is tossing and turning, sobbing loudly, groaning, sobbing again. His body is bandaged in several places. The old woman goes to the door and calls for help. Two men come in and kneel by the bandaged man.
“He’s going to burst his stitches, the idiot!” says one.
“Let’s tie him down. Better than bleeding to death”, says the other.
“He won’t make it anyway—those wounds, and the sickness on top of it.”
They force the man down flat on the mattress, and secure his body with strips of canvas so that he will not thrash and open his wounds.
Josip watches this for a time, until the two men and the old woman go away. Then he returns to his book.
Now the swallow tells him to get up and go to the bandaged man and speak with him. For the first time in many days, Josip stands upright, his legs wobbling underneath him, his head spinning with dizziness. He wraps the sheet around himself and shuffles toward the figure on the mattress. He kneels and puts his hand to the other’s forehead. It is very hot. The eyes are bandaged, blood has crusted there. Have his eyes been taken out, or are they only hurt?
Josip is not afraid. The man is, after all, bound by webs. Bound more by his weakness.
“Who is there?” cries the blind man.
“Josip”, he croaks.
“Who?”
“The lastavica.” “Who are you?”
“The lastavica is coming to you. He would speak with you.”
Now the man has stopped thrashing and sobbing. He is not dead, he is listening. “Is it you, is it you?”
It is difficult to know what this question means.
“Yes, it is me”, Josip replies, stroking the forehead as Mamica used to do whenever he was ill.
The blind man sighs, and his body becomes completely still.
“I knew you would come.”
“I am here, I am here, I am here.”
The blind man dies in the night. His body remains motionless throughout the
morning, until it is taken away. There are now five sick people in the room. More people come and go—visitors, doctors, nurses, patients. Another man dies, and he is taken away. A family comes in, kneels on the wet floor: father, mother, brothers, sisters, grandparents. They talk with a youth whose chest is crossed by bleeding bandages, half of his face is gnarled by burns. He is sitting up with his head on his knees, crying. The women are wailing. The father tells them to leave him alone with his son for a minute. He is not weeping, but his face is contorted with anguish. After the others go out, he leans forward and embraces his son, says nothing, merely holds him. The son lifts his arms to return the embrace. He does not die, but the following day he is taken from the room to another place.
Eva brings food. The hospital cannot supply all the needs of the patients.
“Your uncle asks after you”, she says with a smile. There is color in her cheeks again, and she is not so thin. “He hopes you will recover soon.”
Is she lying? Is she trying to make things work properly between her husband and nephew by pretending the situation is normal? Or has the uncle actually sent this message, in order to hide his life as a wolf? If so, the lie is his, not hers.
“Will I soon go to the house for children without parents?” he asks.
The question makes her uncomfortable.
“I do not think you will go to live with the orphans. You and Jure will get used to each other. In time he will understand that it is better for family to remain together.”
“He wants me to go.”
“No, no, he doesn’t want you to go. He is a good man. He has—well, he has been through so much suffering, so much fighting for our country, and now he needs rest. When he has rested, and you are well again, then you will see. He will be a father to you, as once Miro . . .”
The name breaks open something, crashes through the walls of Josip’s terror of his uncle. Tears spurt from his eyes, and he begins to sob uncontrollably.
“I know, I know”, his aunt croons, soothing and soothing, stroking the wisps of hair from his forehead. “It is hard. It is so hard for you. But they are in heaven.”
He wants to believe this. He needs her to believe it too—to believe for him.
“Do you believe in heaven, then, Auntie?”
She frowns. “No, Josip. But you do.”
And with this he learns that even the best of people, in their good intentions, can damage you. He understands that she has told him only what he needs to hear, yet at the same time she has denied what he needs to hear. Thus, everything is unreliable, in contradiction. You may comfort the blind, but in the end they die. Human life is a man bleeding to death, with no eyes in his sockets, leaving only the mind ticking away with whatever has filled it before the removal of the eyes. The eyes that he thought were his own are, in fact, blind. And now she is saying that she sees farther than his blindness, broader and higher than his childish beliefs; she will try to comfort him with them, though she thinks they are untrue. Thus, there is no solid true and untrue, only what the blind need at this moment or that moment; it does not matter, it makes no difference.
So, in the end, all words must dissolve into the realm of silence.
He dries his eyes. He says no more. Soon she kisses him and leaves.
Because she has destroyed paradise, he is unable to move that day. He curls into a ball and stares into blackness.
The next morning, the blackness has receded a little. No light has replaced it, yet this darkness, he feels, cannot be everything. He senses it, hopes it is true, but frequently wonders if anything is true.
More days pass, during which the desolation slowly declines. His appetite begins to return. The old woman gives him more soup and crusts of bread. She does not speak with him. There are so many she must feed with her scraps. He is restless now. Though he sleeps off and on throughout each day, he is up and about too. This is not as embarrassing as it was in the beginning. A nurse has given him a set of hospital pajamas, too large for him. He must keep the cuffs rolled up and the waist tied tightly with a string. There are a lot of stains on the cloth, though it has been washed. He likes to amble from mattress to mattress, looking people in the eye, those who have eyes, those whose eyes are open. None of the eighteen people in the cellar are talkative; most are in pain. But he has learned that many of them appreciate a delicate perching on the fingertips of their minds. You cannot touch them in any other way, cannot sit on the end of the mattresses because of the risk of infection. But you can look, and this is a form of touching.
Once, he tries speaking with his voice to a man lying on a canvas sheet, for there are no more mattresses available. Josip asks the man where he has come from. The eyes answer without words: I have come from a place of pain, and am now in a place of pain, and soon I will depart for another. From then on, Josip no longer asks questions with his voice. He speaks only with his eyes, and it is a wonder to him that so many—though not all—understand a little of his new language. His task is to remind people that, as they take flight, they are going upward to an open and light-filled place without sorrows. As high as the sea, as deep as the sky—yes it is like that, not the other way around. Whenever it is right to do so, he speaks in this way to people prostrate on their bloodied and fouled beds; he also senses when it is not right to do so. The swallow is sometimes with him, sometimes absent, for he cannot make it come or go at will. But when it is present, he may speak. He speaks to all the sufferers in this way.
He forgets about infection, forgets the rule of the hospital, because it does not matter. Now he dares to touch some people with his hands, taking their hands tentatively, without force, as a bird might alight for a moment before the flicker of its eye, flicker of its wing, carries it away on the wind. Those whose hands he touches invariably grow still, look at him curiously, and then gratefully begin to weep. This is true for the old and the young, the weak and the strong.
He does not ask himself why he is doing these strange things, why it is so important to explore this new way of speaking. He simply does it. It is a state in which fear evaporates, and the distance between himself and other souls diminishes almost to nothing. Yet there always remains a gap, for complete communion has occurred only with Josipa, who is gone, and cannot be replaced by any other. Perhaps he is seeking comfort for himself, trying to feel a hint of what he felt long ago when the communion flowed. He can recall those times as an undefined light, though always surrounded by the walls of memories that came later, the blood and the fire. Whenever he approaches the walls, his mind and body flinch and quickly turn away. Yet a swallow may fly over a wall, and thus the core of love remains open to him.
He does not think much about this. It is just a way of knowing—knowing where one can go, where one cannot go, what one may see, what one must never see.
Then there is a meeting unlike any of the others. One morning, Josip awakes and discovers that a new patient has been brought to the cellar. Three have died while he slept, and now there are enough mattresses for everyone. The new patient has eyes, but no arms below his elbows. The stumps are bound by bandages. One of his legs is broken and is bound by splints. He is sitting with his back to the wall, staring at the bar of sunlight that enters through the small window at the ceiling, hits the opposite wall, and moves slowly at an angle across it. He observes its progress without shifting his body or altering the direction of his gaze.
The day is hot, the walls are sweating, the cellar is dank with thick humidity. The stench of decaying blood and other matter is growing stronger. Two hospital workers pour buckets of water onto the cement floor, none too careful about splashing the mattresses, and then with their straw brooms they scrape the resulting soup toward a drain hole.
Josip wobbles unsteadily to the new patient and kneels at the end of the man’s mattress, taking care not to block his view of the beam of light. Because of the heat, the new patient is wearing only canvas shorts. He is about forty years old. His body is one that has known a life of labor, very
strong but now defeated. Perhaps he is a farmer. His brown face indicates constant exposure to the sun. He is clean shaven, and the hair on his head is black, cropped short. His eyes are brown, and thus it may be that he is a Muslim, though this is uncertain, since the eyes of some Croats are brown, though most are blue. Some Muslims also have blue eyes. The man seems to rest in solitude. A terrible loneliness hangs about all patients, but it does not seem to be around this man. His solitude is composed and peaceful, despite what has happened to him.
His eyes flicker, acknowledging Josip’s presence.
Josip senses the swallow within himself. He speaks with his eyes to the man without arms. It is the message he usually delivers. He senses also that with this man it would be permissible to touch hands, though the man has no hands. So, he rests his fingertips on the toes, at the end of his good leg. With this contact he becomes fully the lastavica; all motion dissolves, all noise fades, and there is only presence. The man’s eyes slowly register the fingers on his foot, then they rise to meet the gaze of the strange boy who has arrived, out of nowhere it seems, at the end of his mattress. For a time, he looks at Josip in the same way he has regarded the progress of the light.
There is, of course, no speaking with the mouth. Even so, the gap is very small, the distance between them narrower than any Josip has experienced with other patients. He does not analyze this, nor does he question its purpose. It begins as the silence of the lastavica and swiftly becomes the shared silence of two lastavice twining the path of their flight as they rise on a current of air and light that has no beginning and no end.