“You are hurting the cat.”
“I am separating the aggressor from the victim. This is a policy of the United Nations Organization, is it not?”
This brings her tirade to an abrupt halt, and she examines Josip with keen, if hostile, interest.
He now places thumb and forefinger at the base of the cat’s neck and squeezes.
“You are causing it pain!” the woman cries, with a note of wildness.
“The cat is causing the bird pain”, Josip replies in a meditative tone. The cat opens its jaws and with its hind legs rakes Josip’s forearm, shredding his sweater. Then it leaps for the pavement and bolts away. The pigeon trembles in the crook of its rescuer’s arms and buries its head.
The woman is breathing hard. Joseph recognizes a psychic weather front in her face that carries with it the threat of certain rain, possibly a hurricane. He calmly prepares himself inwardly. When you have been beaten with truncheons, a woman like this is not a serious threat.
“I don’t know what people are like in the country you came from,” she says in cold, evenly spaced words, “but in this country we do not abuse defenseless animals.”
“The abuse of birds is permitted?” he asks, without blinking an eye.
“They are wild, the cat is someone’s pet”, she says, as if explaining the obvious to a difficult child. “If you knew cats you would understand that it is a very valuable Siamese. The bird is a pest. They breed like vermin. Their droppings spoil the monuments and buildings throughout the city.”
“Ah, so you are saying they ruin the aesthetics.”
His use of the word aesthetics gives her pause; in fact, it silences her as she examines him more closely. Her gaze is unblinking, ferocious actually, as if she would cleanse the world of all superabundance, all superfluous fertility and virility. She opens her mouth to say something.
“The Siamese cat”, Josip blocks in a quiet voice, with a whimsical smile, “rather spoils the aesthetics of the neighborhood, don’t you think? It is a most unpleasant breed of cat. It has a sinister voice and a sinister appearance, though of course it is not sinister in the ontological sense. Have you not winced at its hideous screech in the alley at night, so unlike the orange tabby or the tortoiseshell, of which I am quite fond.”
“So, it’s a question of breed, is it?” she mutters coldly, drawing back and lowering her heels. She crosses her arms and stares at Josip with unconcealed contempt.
“Yes, a question of breed, though I admit it does have a right to exist.” She snorts.
“The pigeon, also, has a right to exist”, Josip goes on. “And as a fellow creature, I have the right to defend its right to exist. This is my prerogative.”
He feels a little ashamed of throwing in that word so soon after ontological and aesthetic, but she is a formidable force, and, after all, it is her native language.
Three or four seconds pass while she sizes up this new species of male, one she is destined inevitably to demolish, but whose demise might demand more complex methods. Her eyes alone are capable of splitting the shell of an Adriatic clam.
“You’re an Eastern European”, she says in an analytical little voice.
“No,” he corrects, “I am not an Eastern European. I am from Croatia which is allied in culture, intellect, and spirit with Vienna and Rome. We are distinctly Western, though we are not without affinity for Mittel Europa.”
She snorts again, then continues her probe.
“So, how many lives did you defend during the War?” she asks.
He flinches inside but does not let it show. “I was a child during the war.”
“And the death camps? What about those Nazi death camps? Croatian Nazi death camps.”
He replies gently. “Many of our people died in those camps, Madam, and most Croatian people hated and feared the Fascist Ustashe. Even more did they fear the Chetniks and the Partisans, who committed most of the crimes.”
He is feeling defensive but cannot let her see this. Her mind is shaped by media and revisionist history that has been pumped full of Serbian propaganda.
From the corner of his eye, Josip notices Caleb leaning against the banister at the bottom of the front steps, books under his arm, taking in the whole scene through wire-rimmed spectacles. He is wearing green corduroys now and a tweed blazer with Oxford shoes. He is an Afro-American intellectual listening with studied interest to the conflicts of Caucasians.
“Chetniks and Partisans committed most of the crimes”, Josip repeats.
She tosses her head and looks down her nose. “So you say. But the Partisans created the most humane socialist state in Europe. Would you have preferred Hitler or Stalin?”
Her swords strike so deep, eliciting so many memories, so much horror, that his suppressed feelings of disgust over the superficiality of the North-American mind now threaten to crack open. Not since Goli Otok has the impulse to shout like this arisen in him. He does not give vent to it, nor does he let a flicker of it show. He looks down and with his forefinger strokes the pigeon’s head and coos soothingly. He smiles reflectively. It is a mirthless smile, but it’s the best he can do at the moment.
“No, I would not have preferred Hitler, nor would I have preferred Stalin”, he says at last, in a quiet voice. “I was a prisoner in a concentration camp established and managed by the most humane socialist state in Europe. Many of my friends died in it, innocent people, teachers and students, thinkers and writers like you. They were shot or beaten or starved to death.”
He is curious to know how she has taken this. How hard an ideologue is she, really? At the same time, he administers a little mental rebuke to himself. He has never approved of the way some survivors use their victimhood to manipulate others. Tempting as it is, he does not mention the fact that hundreds of thousands of his countrymen died in slaughter pits at the hand of the most humane socialist state in Europe. He does say the following:
“Many people were killed by Tito.”
“Propaganda”, she retorts.
“History”, he says. “Search the index of your library for Bleiburg and Maribor.”
“Bleiburg? Maribor?” she snorts again. “Seek,” he says, “and you will find.”
She rolls her eyes. As they stand there facing each other across an abyss, so many thoughts cross his mind. He does not tell her that his parents were murdered in his home village by the people who helped establish the most humane socialist state in Europe. He does not mention that his mother and father were beautiful souls who hated both Fascism and Communism. Would she understand the term—beautiful souls? How could he mention Josipa? What would his sudden upwelling of grief have said if it had been permitted to erupt? I am remembering my childhood friend who was always kind to everyone, and very bright too—you value brightness, do you not, Madam—she would no doubt have gone on to study at university because she loved to read the books my father gave to her. She learned rapidly and with understanding of everything. I found her body tossed in a heap of bodies when I was a child. Do you know what this has done to me? No. Never. Never. Never.
He cannot say it, he can only permit the memory to flash before his eyes for a second before shoving it back into the cell.
“I lost many friends”, he manages to say, his voice beginning to tremble for the first time, continuing to stroke the bird.
“Haven’t we all”, the woman counters. “And for various political reasons.”
Political reasons. For various political reasons, all Josipa’s songs, her little gifts, and luminous glances are buried now in the fields of heaven.
“Rajska Polja”, he whispers.
“What!” says the woman.
He shakes himself and draws a breath.
“There is much I could tell you about those times”, he says aloud. “But perhaps you are busy. Perhaps you have an article to write.”
She snorts again. He prays it is her last, because if there is another it might be impossible not to say unforgivable things to her unspeakabl
y arrogant face.
“Why do you approve of the extermination camps here in America?” he asks instead.
“What do you mean? There are no extermination camps in this country!” she retorts.
“They are everywhere in this land”, he replies, peering straight and deep into her eyes. “The women’s clinics.”
She flinches for a moment, then counters by flushing with rage. Leaning forward until her nose is an inch from his, she says, through slightly parted teeth, “Every child a wanted child.”
“And every literary critic a wanted literary critic?” he replies evenly.
She has had enough; she turns on her heels and storms away.
Smiling to himself, Caleb climbs the steps and says in a erudite accent, “Having a little tension are we?”
“A little”, Josip answers.
“Can you spare a cup of coffee?”
“Of course. Did you find the book?”
“I found it in the Old English section at the library. And what a poem it is! Opened a lot of doors for me.”
“Excellent. Would you read it to me?”
“I’d be delighted”, Caleb says, then adds “Sho’-nuff” for effect.
Down in the basement apartment he sprawls on an armchair. Caleb is now taller than Josip, which makes the lad over six feet, five inches tall—a mega-Watusi. No chair can really contain him. He sips coffee while Josip rummages around trying to turn a cardboard box into a temporary hospital room for the pigeon.
“How come you’re such a laid-back guy, Joe?”
“What on earth is a laid-back guy?”
“Mellow. Like mell-low. Like smooth and calm. Like nothing flusters you.”
“Many things fluster me. I am a seething cauldron of displeasure and dissatisfaction.”
Caleb rolls over with laughing. “You’re too much, Joe.”
“You’re sure the biscuit, Caleb.”
The graduate student in literature holds his belly and guffaws. My goodness, was it really that funny?
“Caleb, please, get control of yourself. You are under too much tension writing this thesis. You are becoming hysterical.”
“Yup, I sho is.”
“You should take a holiday. Leave the books aside for a time. If we do not run away occasionally, we will never be at home.”
“Hey, that’s deep!”
“If we do not waste time properly, nothing will be accomplished.”
“Okay, okay, I got the point.”
The outcome of the dialogue with an American academic is that Josip is called to the manager’s office the next day and told to explain himself. Josip describes the incident accurately, without prejudice, resisting the urge to supply commentary about the woman’s character and mentality. Gus-the-doorman is called in to verify. Gus places all blame on the woman, who was “in a state” that day, he says, “and looking for trouble”. The manager is an Armenian, a longtime card partner of the Greek who owns the building, and they both understand a few things.
“She is always looking for trouble”, the manager mutters, and tells Josip and Gus to faggedaboudit and get back to work.
Faggedaboudit is an English word that means: don’t waste another thought on the matter.
During the following months, whenever Josip passes the woman in the hallway, she looks away. He is now always invisible. He delays scrubbing the graffiti from the walls of the floor where she lives. He regrets this lapse, this self-inflicted blemish on his honor, yet he cannot help himself and hopes to improve his disposition as time goes by. When her lease expires later that year, she moves to another apartment building, who knows where. It’s a big city, ten million people. She continues to publish her eloquent articles, books, and speeches and to teach a new generation of young Americans. But what can one do about such matters? Stand on a street corner and shout?
More important, the pigeon lives in Josip’s room, gathering strength, healing from its bruises and bites, and enjoying the constant food supply. When at last he puts it on the windowsill overlooking the alley and tells it to go, the bird hesitates. It shuffles back and forth on the sill, looks at Josip questioningly as if to say, you don’t really mean it. Go, go, he mutters, like a doting old uncle who must have his privacy, and pokes it gently to underline the point.
So it launches itself, flutters about in the light well, then returns to the windowsill, staring at Josip, coo-cooing. Let me in, let me in, it pleads. He sighs and scoops the little fool into his arms. Up they go in the elevator to the roof, across the flat walkway to the edge—ooh, be careful, watch the wind, not too close to the precipice! He strokes its head and then throws it into the air. How wonderful are the dynamics of its flight path, the way it opens its wings wide before the plunge—for it is at first a plunge—downward a few feet, and then, with the merest tilt of its wings, upward between the canyons toward the sky, where it belongs.
EYE OF THE PILGRIM
33
Speak, O my memory! Disclose the fragments and facets of the on-flying years. Do not hesitate, do not take a step back. Come, you can do it: blow the dust off the archives, open the grave, lift the lid of the dumpster, sever the rib cage, and reveal the heart’s palpitations and its woes!
If he had been given a choice, would he have chosen to be a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief? Never. It was given. It is gift and cost—and in time the cost may become entirely gift. It is hard to know if that will be the end of all this striving, impossible to guess when the next blessing or blow will fall.
Naomi has died, ancient and revered, though it must be that she was once a child holding a pink hibiscus in her hands. At the funeral in the Ethiopian Gospel Holiness Tabernacle (of the Ark of the Covenant), a little girl approaches Josip as he sits alone in a corner while many black people dance like David before the Lord. She puts a flower into one of his hands and takes the other, as if she is a princess and he a field slave. She then leads him out into the aisle (the aisles are wide, the pews narrow) and teaches the stiff old white man, sad and without rhythm, to dance with abandon. First she shows him how to stick his arms up into the air and to clap and wave his hands. Though he cannot say the words that she and everyone else sings or shouts—glory and hallelujah and praised be—he throws his own mute cries into the air and watches them become little clay birds into which the breath of life is blown, rising, rising through the ceiling of the church toward a distant mountain, as feathers fall from the sky, blue and white and black.
O Naomi, I did not know you very well, but I feel you close! See me dancing, message bearer, see me dancing, I am a fool. Is this what you wanted me to learn?
As the dancing souls sing out their spontaneous harmonics, rising, soaring, taking with them all those gathered into the ark—yes, even him—he is profoundly grateful. Now he can cry as he dances, cry for her passing, feel the loss and longing that prefigure the communion for which they were created. And he can weep with Caleb, who is dancing too, flinging his arms in the air, sobbing like a child for all his losses, and in gratitude for what was given, no longer concerned about trance-frenzy, for there is no hint of trance—it is all holy passion.
Naomi, I have not walked yet, I have not run, but I have taken the hand of this little child who leads me, who brings me into this great dance. Is she the one you promised would come?
He cannot turn the experience into a poem. It would be wrong to try to capture it, translate it. It must remain a mysterious parting of the veil. Is it right, is it wrong? Are they deluded? Have they drawn him into their delusion with their arts of worship, as well as by his love for them? They are not Catholic; they are, indeed, heretics.
“Can they pray the Nicene Creed and mean every word of it?” Friar Todd asks him during their post-confession discussion on the matter.
“I think so—yes, I’m sure of it”, Josip replies. “They really love Christ.”
“There are a few things missing in their relationship with him. We can’t pretend there’s a union when we real
ly aren’t united”, says the friar.
“I know, I know”, sighs Josip, rubbing his forehead in consternation. “But I do care so much for them, and I think a few of them care for me.”
“Well, that’s probably the key to the situation. We and your friends believe in the same Lord, and maybe at this stage of history the big thing is to love each other and pray for each other. We can’t share sacraments, but we can share our hearts.”
In the parish hall of Sts. Cyril and Methodius, a new thing is happening, a prayer meeting, with a kind of singing very much like the singing at the Ethiopian Gospel Holiness Tabernacle. Though there is not the same abandon as there is among the black believers, there is passion such as he has never heard before among his own. Here too they raise their arms and pray and cry and sing, these exiled Croatians, their long-oppressed ardor surfacing at last! Sometimes they dance as they pray, and the friars dance among them, the followers of Sveti Franjo, who loved to dance toward heaven.
It is also the dance of Jason, leaping high and tugging toward eternity, his arms reaching for pigeons, his inarticulate cries calling to the transcendent among the towers. It is Abel Kristijan Bogdan’s dance too, for Josip sometimes gets to his feet and walks about the room with his throat open, singing soundlessly with the baby in his arms. He lifts the invisible child high in his hands as lament and offering, as protest and as love. And sometimes he simply raises his arms empty-handed among his countrymen, not in imitation or assimilation, but as a child, because for an hour or two each week he is the child. And though most of his days are spent as an aging man of woes, he now understands that the soul of the child has not been lost, that there is no separation between this prayer-fire and the Holy Eucharist-fire, or the consolations that come from the Rosary of the Mother-Gospa. It is all one. It is all the sea of love.
Thus, he learns that there is good surrender and bad surrender: in reawakened memory he is a child in the snow-yard of Pačići, raising his arms in terror as a man points a rifle at his head. Then, in the blink of an eye, he is a man raising his arms in peace, in a warm and comfortable room in a wealthy city in a free land, far from the catastrophe.