Island of The World

  As if coming to a precipitous decision, Goran suddenly turns right and enters the tunnel under the palace walls. Josip follows, keeping close to the pillars in case the man turns around. But it seems that he has no concern about being followed, and, at the end of the tunnel, he climbs the steps and enters the peristyle in front of Diocletian’s mausoleum—the cathedral. He passes on, leaving it behind without a glance, and turns left onto cobbled Krešimirova. Josip is now so close on his heels that he can hear the sound of Goran’s breath, wheezing from the exertion of climbing steps and a walk that is a long one for an overweight man. Without warning, he turns again and enters an alley, then proceeds along it several paces to a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant, and goes in. Josip waits a few minutes, then follows, passing the restaurant with his head averted. At the end of the alley, he comes to an old wooden staircase that is missing several steps. He sits down on the bottom step and waits.

  During the two hours he remains there, not a soul goes up or down the staircase. People enter and leave the restaurant from time to time, but none give a glance toward the end of the alley, which is now in deep shadow. Looking up, Josip sees that the narrow shaft of sky overhead is deep blue, slipping into black, tinged with some red cloud. Soon it is all black, with only a few lights dimly glowing behind curtained windows along the alley.

  At one point he shifts his feet, and his boot hits something that rings metallically. He picks it up—a short length of iron pipe.

  The noise of the city continues unabated, though it changes to domestic sounds—muted conversation behind walls, cooking and laughter and scolding and bursts of dissociated music. He waits.

  Rummaging in the bag, he finds the last crumbs of bread, puts these into his mouth, and swallows. Nothing can be wasted. Nothing. Does the energy expended by all the walking exceed the energy replaced by the meager food he has consumed today? He does not know. It only matters that the gap between him and his family is closing.

  Finally, the restaurant door opens, and two men come out. By the light of the open doorway Josip can see that one is Goran, the other a thinner man. They shake hands, the door is closed, and the thin man goes away down the alley. Goran lights a cigarette, takes a few puffs, then stomps it out. He comes up the alley in Josip’s direction, stops not ten paces away, and throws back his coat to unbutton his fly. He is urinating against the wall of a house when Josip presses the end of the pipe between the man’s shoulder blades.

  “Don’t move,” he says in a low growl, “or I shoot!”

  “Don’t shoot! I beg you, don’t shoot! In my right pocket, lots of money, take it!”

  “Don’t make a sound. Don’t call for help or your life is over.”

  “I won’t. Please just take what I have and go.”

  Josip does not move. The man’s hands are in the air.

  “Take it and go”, Goran pleads in a high voice.

  “I don’t want your money.”

  “Then w-w-what?”

  “Answers.”

  “Answers?” he trembles. “What answers? Who are you?”

  “Kneel on the ground. Put your hands on the wall.” Goran obeys; Josip keeps the pipe pressed hard into his spine. “Where is your brother Simon?”

  “What? My brother Simon—?”

  “Where is he?”

  “He went to prison. He is dead.”

  “And his wife?”

  “No one knows. Who are you? A friend of his? Look—I had nothing to do with all that business.”

  “Where is Ariadne?”

  “Who?”

  Josip jabs the pipe harder into the spine, and Goran squeals. “Where is she?” Goran does not answer. “Tell me or you are dead.”

  “All-all-right, give me a moment. I will tell you.”

  Without warning, Goran heaves himself sideways and with a backward swing knocks Josip’s arm away. With surprising agility for so heavy a man, he lunges and throws a punch in Josip’s direction, though in the dark it fails to connect. Josip staggers, rights himself, and grabs the man’s collar, trying to jab the pipe into his chest. But Goran knocks it aside again while he is struggling with something in the pocket of his jacket.

  “Back, back!” Goran shouts. “I have a gun. Drop your weapon.”

  Josip brings the pipe down hard on the space between himself and Goran, hoping it will deflect the aim. There is a howl, and the gun goes rattling away on the cobblestones.

  Sprawled against the wall, Goran whimpers. With his left hand, Josip grabs his shirt collar and twists. He presses the pipe into the center of his chest.

  “Where is she?”

  “I will tell you, but don’t shoot. I beg you, don’t shoot. If you kill me you will learn nothing.”

  “Where is she?”

  “I had nothing to do with it. I don’t know anything.”

  “It was you who betrayed us!”

  “No, no, not me!”

  “Yes, it was you.”

  “You’re wrong. I protected him as long as I could.”

  “Then you knew they were watching us. You knew, and you did not warn us.”

  “I heard only at the last minute. Time enough for Vera to get out. Simon didn’t—”

  “Where is my wife?”

  Goran falls silent. His chest is heaving, his throat gasping for air.

  Twice before in his life, Josip has come this close to taking a man’s life. The first in Sarajevo, when he held Petar’s axe in his hand above the sneering face of Uncle Jure. Then the rage that had burned in him had not been enough for action. Later, on Goli Otok, he had been ready, the hatred grown older and deeper, black fire in a cold wind, though another hand had doused that fire and pulled him back from murder. Would it have been murder? No—he was pulled back from justice!

  The grotesque man of power, now cringing before him, embodies all that has destroyed his life, his people, his homeland. And in that face so full of ironies and contempt, in that voice so accustomed to speaking murderous lies in the calm tones of a bureaucrat, all evil is present. He can demolish it with one stroke, without much noise. A swift blow to the cranium, then blow after blow after blow until all the evil is pulverized and pushed out of the world forever!

  He raises his hand to strike, and the black fire flows, his lips part over the cavern of his mouth.

  “Where is she?” he whispers one more time.

  “She’s alive. If you kill me, you will never find her.”

  “Tell me!” Josip growls, ramming the pipe so violently into the temple of the man’s head that he howls.

  “She’s dead!” he screams.

  “Tell me the truth—everything—or you die now!”

  “I didn’t kill her. Nobody killed her. She was in prison, then they let her go. A week later, two weeks, the baby came—came too early. It died. And the mother—Ariadne—she died too. So much blood—they told me she lost too much blood.”

  The world ceases to move, all light fades. He is alone in an empty universe, standing with an iron pipe clenched in his hand, raised above the skull of a killer, a coward, a betrayer, a liar. But he can do nothing now. He drops the pipe to the cobblestones and walks away, leaving behind forever the alley, the sobbing man, and the world that was.

  23

  So, what is left?

  Nothing. Nothing remains. A damaged organism still inhaling and exhaling, its mineral reserves consumed by its own self with nothing to replenish it. An organism that has no will left, neither to kill another nor to take its own life.

  Life itself is taking his life—it’s only a matter of time. Let it do what it will. It doesn’t matter.

  Until it completes the job, what is he to do? He will walk. He will move the organism forward so that the burning up of its cells accelerates, speeding his exit from this world.

  Where? It doesn’t matter. Just walk.

  So, he walks, and his feet take him away in the night, upward from the palace of the emperor by the sea, over a hill and around a bay, and by mornin
g he is still walking, with the sea on his left, boats far out, airplanes rising and falling over an island with red roofs.

  Now the sun is high and beating him with an iron pipe, making his eyes blur and his legs shake. It doesn’t matter. Just walk. One step after another, use it all up, that’s what he knows how to do. Use it up until it is gone.

  Now it is night, and the road rises steeply. He forgets some of what he is leaving behind. No, he remembers but cannot think about it. What purpose would that serve on this road that is just one of those he has trod before. It is the road of flight from the wolves of Pačići, the road to Mostar, the road to Sarajevo. It is all his roads and no roads, for every road is loss. He is a boy, he is an old man, it is the past, it is the future, but it is never the present.

  He pauses at a stream falling from the mountains toward the sea, lies down beside it and drinks from it, sure that bodies trussed in wire will float past. But they do not, and he walks on again.

  Night and day, followed by night and day. He sleeps sometimes, usually in jumbled rocks near the road. The road is important—he must not leave it—because it is the path that is leading out of this world, as surely as a bullet or a slab of stone dropped on his skull—though slower.

  There comes a time when his body is being lifted onto something that moves. Is Alija putting him onto the donkey’s back? Or is he Krunošlav rolled onto a truck driving down to a bay where he will be tossed into the water to sink after the boots are stripped from his feet?

  It does not matter.

  Someone traces the sign of the cross on his forehead. It must be Tata’s fingers, though a priest should not touch him because there is no need to do this to Cain. No need, no need, it does not matter.

  “Who are you?” a voice asks.

  Be silent. You are dead.

  “Who are you?”

  I am a man with no name.

  “Come on now, wake up and drink a little water.” I am the broken diatom. “Where have you come from?”

  The fields of heaven. But the fields of heaven are no more. “Where are you going?” To the land of oblivion. “Look, he’s listening, his eyes are open.” He is seated between two men, one on each side of him, an engine roaring, gears clanking, shifting up and down. “He smells bad.”

  I am the organism dissolving in the cesspool.

  “We should drop him at a hospital.”

  “What hospital? It’s hours to the nearest one, maybe Rijeka itself.”

  “He looks too weak to be dangerous.”

  “Yes, but we have to get to Trieste by tomorrow.”

  “Let’s take him with us. He’ll die if we leave him here.”

  “What’s one body more or less.”

  “Don’t say that. Here, mister, drink.”

  His mouth opens, and water pours in because his tongue is dry.

  “Whew, this guy’s been through something. You have a big fight, fellow?” Yes, a big fight.

  He does not want to drink, but his body will not let him sink; it always betrays him when he tries to hide from the rain of blood that is falling on the world.

  Joshko, you cannot swim! You and your friends only pretend to swim!

  “Poor guy. Too many like him in this country.”

  You won the city medal, Josip! Not the Olympics, but almost as good. Soon you will be a national hero.

  “Watch what you say, eh? This is a good country now.”

  “Oh, yeah, a very good country. Too bad about all the missing people.”

  “Shut up.”

  A scholarship, Josip! Now you see the result of all those years of study!

  “If we’re stopped, what do we tell them? This guy has no papers.”

  “We’ll say he’s a tramp we found on the road. Yugoslavia looks after its own, doesn’t it?”

  The inferential of the meta-universe is no more than tropism.

  “Anyway, I don’t mind if he comes along. You’re so boring, this guy seems exciting.”

  “Pass me the bottle.” Stone slab.

  Kruno sinking in the most beautiful blue waters in the world. I’m Svat. Here, take this bread.

  Ustashe killed him. No, Chetniks killed him! No, it was Partisans! No, it was the friends and strangers in my mountains, on my street, in my home, in my school, in my place of labor, and in my place of rest.

  And all my striving, all my striving, all my striving is blown away on the wind.

  It does not matter.

  But it does.

  And all my love—all the love I poured out. It is gone. It is gone. “Hey, slow down! You nearly went into the ditch!”

  “Relax, Pero!”

  “We’re not in Slavonia, Draz! These ditches are a thousand meters deep.”

  “Okay, okay. How’s our passenger?”

  “Sleeping, I think.”

  I cannot tell you what I love in you, Ariadne, because if I were to try I would not cease speaking. “How much longer?”

  “A couple of hours. Look, there’s Krk on the left. A big island. After that, we go through Rijeka and then the border a few hours after that. Istria’s not as up-and-down as this.”

  “Well, we’d better find someplace to leave him, because there’s no way he can cross the border. The permit says just you and me.”

  “Right, keep your eyes open for a hospital.”

  “Maybe a police station.”

  “Nah, he’s sick. They’d just throw him in a holding tank till they figure out who he is. That’d finish him off for sure.”

  “He’s got trouble, whoever he is.”

  “Is it policija or politika ?”

  “Maybe just crazy.”

  “Who is he?”

  I feel certain, my Josip, that together we will make a story with only joy in it.

  “Where has he come from?”

  He grieves the loss of one he wed, and a child within its mother-bed. “Cut me some of that salami, Pero.”

  Your life was given to you, Josip. And beautiful is this life to me. So much, so much has been given to you and is given to me through you.

  “My mama says, never eat salami without red peppers.”

  “Why?”

  “The peppers kill the bugs. You know, in the gut. The ones you can’t see. They’re the worst.”

  I love you, she says. And I will not leave you.

  You will be taken away, he replies. I know you will be taken away.

  “My mama never made salami. Always it was Hvar prosciutto for us! As thin as a feather and meaty and smoky, and some red wine to go with it. The prosciutto my mother used to make took about eighteen months to dry, and it’s the slow drying that gives it the best flavor, no matter how poor the pig it came from. But that’s another story. Did you ever taste Italian prosciutto, Daz? Ooh, it’s bad stuff.”

  “Maybe they think ours is bad stuff.”

  “You’re right. That’s the way people are.”

  I cannot be taken from you, because I am now, and forever, living in the sanctuary of your heart.

  “The sky is lighter over the mountains. What time is it?”

  “Don’t know. Not long now. You’ll be packing breakfast into your gut within the hour.”

  “You too! Watch out for the bugs!”

  “And the ditches. Hold on, Pero, we’re going to dive!”

  “Slow down, slow down, slow down! It’s really steep!”

  Laughter.

  It is dark, it is all darkness, as into the land of exile and ancient bondage they walk,—

  “There’s the city lights! Whew, it’s a big place!” —bearing the light in their arms.

  At a petrol station at the edge of the city, he gets out and stands in the street, leaning against the truck, his limbs trembling, his eyes blurring. The two drivers ask if he wants them to find a hospital. He shakes his head and walks unsteadily away.

  He will walk. He will move the organism forward, burn up the cells. Where? It doesn’t matter. Just walk. So, he walks, and his feet take him through
the streets, and no one stops him, no one sees him. Then the houses decrease in number, and he is walking along a dusty road with the sun striking his head again with the iron bar. He pulls the cap from his pocket and puts it on top of the bristles, wipes away the sweat from his brow, feels the scars that are there—he does not remember them, they were not there before, a long time ago in the world that is no more.

  Now the road arches slowly upward into high hills speckled with villas, little farmhouses, and orchards. For half a day, he puts one foot after another, and then, as the sun slides toward the sea on his left, he feels himself bending sideways, and he falls to the side of the road.

  Up in the branches of a nearby tree, a child is picking oranges. A little black dog sits at the base of the trunk, inspecting the man who has fallen but not approaching him. The child—a boy of seven or eight, barefoot, in dusty brown shorts and a stained undershirt—climbs down and stands beside the dog for a few moments. Then he walks over.

  His pockets are bulging. He kneels beside the man’s head, and the dog sniffs the man’s boots. The boy slowly peels a winter orange, spotted with brown bruises. The man is resting, with his eyes closed and his mouth wide open. The boy sees that teeth are missing. He feels a wave of pity. Last night his mother read to him the story of St. Francis of Assisi, about whom he is not permitted to speak at school. Now a leper has fallen into his hands. He leans over and kisses the man’s forehead. The poor leper does not stir.

  The boy holds a sliver of orange over the open mouth and squeezes it. Juice drips down and fills the mouth, slice after slice. The leper swallows and groans. The boy empties his pockets, though for a moment he does not really want to do this. He has worked hard to pick this fruit, left on the tree for the birds by a neighbor. He peels the oranges, one by one, and squeezes the pieces, one by one, into the open mouth. The man swallows, though he does not open his eyes. Because the leper does not get up, does not thank him for this kindness, does not become Jesus Christ in front of his eyes, the boy goes back to the tree and picks a few more. His father has told him that oranges are children of the sun. He wants to take the sun home in his pockets, and now his pockets are full again.