The face of Jelena smiles at him again, simultaneously as the child and as the middle-aged woman. How swiftly life passes, full of partings and reunions, some accidental and some intended. She had not remembered the words of her dolphin poem, while he has remembered it ever since, each word distinct within its whole. What is this mysterious overflow of the soul’s secret languages, so close to the surface in the heart of a child but buried deep under the weight of experience or crowded aside by practical matters as the years unfold? The voice of mankind speaking its thoughts and singing its songs and breathing its poems. Little dreams that evaporate almost upon leaving the lips. Where do they come from, and where are they going? And who are we, if such mysteries pour from our mouths?
Later, he recalls Zadar as a mixture of beauty and devastation—a lot of bomb damage, rubble, and burnt-out buildings, but St. Donat’s cathedral on the island is intact, and the surrounding streets show signs of recovery. A little boy eats a ripe fig with a smile of gratitude to his father, a mother sings a hymn in the old Roman forum, pouring music into the sky while her adolescent children prance about reading historical plaques and trying to imagine a lost empire. There is a very old woman pushing a baby carriage with a crying infant in it, and two young lovers stroll aimlessly as they dissolve into each other.
Above all he will remember the cathedral. A long line of people trails into the church and Josip follows it. He does not know what the line is for. Perhaps it is for Mass, and if so he would like to attend. People nearby are talking about a relic, and thus he learns that today is the feast of St. Simeon and that the prophet’s relic is inside. This is the one day of the year when the public may see it. It had been brought to the city during the Middle Ages by a Venetian ship returning from the Holy Land.
Blown hard by a bura, the vessel had sought shelter in this harbor. When the storm passed and the Venetians were ready to leave, the people of Zadar insisted that the relic remain in their keeping. The Venetians departed after much debate, and there ensued centuries of dispute over it. But here it remains.
As the line inches forward he supposes he will kiss a gold container containing a finger bone or a lock of hair. As he enters the cathedral along with hundreds of other people, a hush falls on them all, and now, slowly, slowly, he approaches a great silver casket on a dais above the high altar. Its front panel is dropped, and a form can be seen inside behind glass. He climbs narrow marble steps toward it. Now he is here, and suddenly he is frozen in a state of attention, because the case contains the body of a man who lived two thousand years ago, lying as if asleep. Though the skin is dark brown and dry, he is neither a waxed effigy nor a mummified corpse. Very short and thin he is, just an old man. The head is centimeters away from Josip’s face, and he can closely inspect the shape of the skull, the wisps of hair at the temples, the eyelashes, the pores of the skin—all visible and incorrupt.
Josip drops to his knees and plunges into the timeless stillness that has been given. It would be easy to question, to demand documents and proof, but he simply knows. He is only perplexed that the entire world does not line up to enter this church and see the lips that spoke the incandescent words.
This child is destined for the rising and the falling of many in Israel. He will be a sign of contradiction—
Who is this little man from whom such words poured forth? Where did he come from, and what formed him? What impelled his spirit to cry out at the sight of an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and an ordinary child entering the temple, bearing the light of the world in their arms?
—a sign that will be rejected, that the thoughts of many will be laid bare, and a sword shall pierce your own heart.
Now the sea rides at his right hand, and it seems to him that the ships of ancient heroes no longer sail upon it as they once did. There, so bright that he cannot stare at them for more than a second or two, are angels walking upon the sea of glass, even though the turquoise of the water is stronger than he thought it would be.
Split is near, and the bus is descending on the coastal highway; the Dinarics are white-crested above it, and the Adriatic is shimmering to the West. There are the hill of the Marjan rising between the bays and the ivory city capped by red roofs and bell towers. Here, at last, after thirty-five or more years, the intervening time is dissolving as the past becomes present.
The bus takes him to Stari Grad, the old downtown core near the imperial palace. He carries his luggage from the dropoff point on the waterfront promenade to Marmontova Street and to a hotel, a minute’s walk from the shore. It is also a minute’s walk from the church of St. Francis. After he has checked into his room, he goes back down to the street and makes his way directly to the church. So much returns as he approaches its entrance. The crucified body of Fra Anto, holy and beautiful, is on the steps as always, yet he is now standing, robed in white, with open arms and light pouring through the wounds. His smile welcomes Josip home. Though the original catastrophe took place on other steps, all churches are forever that place.
Here too, in this very spot, Josip had his last conversation with the Lastavica of the Sea, forty years ago.
Let us go in, said the man with no arms.
I cannot, said the youth, shaking with nameless terror.
Josip now enters the church, blesses himself with holy water, and kneels on the marble floor. There are no other visitors. He may speak without disturbing anyone. He wants to say thank you, aloud—many words of gratitude, aloud. Yet, as always whenever he is upon those bridges that span oceans, especially those bridges uniting time and eternity, all spoken words repose in the source of words, which is silence.
Christ is alive here. The flickering red candle signals it, yet the clearer affirmation is within Josip’s soul. He bends and kisses the floor, once, twice—then five more times in honor of the wounds. He is kissing the wounds of Christ, he is kissing the wounds of Fra Anto; so, too, he is kissing this land and this people who have been forged in the furnace of affliction. Their tortures and humiliations have given birth to a new country. And within this country, though it is still young and unstable, there prevail wisdom and valor that have long been declining elsewhere in the world.
He wonders: Is there any virtue antecedent to the wills they define; is there any good without sacrifice; is there a true home without abandonment as its herald? Yes, there can be, he reminds himself, for we are not mechanisms. Much good begins in us before we learn to know its name. Our Father is patient with us, for he loves.
Josip eases from his musings into prayer and remains there until the pews begin to fill with people. The great prayer begins, Holy Mass. Then follows his first Communion in the new world. And peace.
Josip passes through the Gate of Gold into the imperial compound and walks at an unhurried pace toward the northeast corner. He must not rush things, especially the important reunions—most of all the ones that might reopen old sword-wounds that were once, long ago, pushed so deeply into the heart. He will walk slowly through the labyrinth, for all Minotaurs are dead, and he, the king, is returning to the palace. This way and that, through the streets he moves, until he comes to a halt and looks up at the balconata, to the doorway leading into the apartment where he and Ariadne lived and conceived their child. It has not changed. Children are boisterously running up and down the zig-zag steps. He remains for a time in silence, gazing at every detail, and looking within himself as well. There is peace in this reunion, peace and sadness and gratitude. A year of joys was given to him, a year of hopes, and though it was taken away, he now thanks God that it was given, for not everything was destroyed. He prays for Ariadne, casts his mind across the ocean to the city of New York, where she is living, unaware of his existence, and he is grateful for her new life as well. If he would truly live, he must live with an exposed heart, with both blessing and loss.
Turning away, he returns by the way he came and goes out onto the waterfront promenade, and the peace comes with him. He intends to return to their first home many times in the days to come,
but for now he is hungry and needs to rest his old legs for a while. He will eat a little and afterward bask in the ethos of his homeland. The palm trees are sighing in a stiff breeze from offshore. In the harbor, a large white pleasure-ship is nosing toward the docks, full of tourists from Italy and elsewhere, he supposes.
He finds a table at an outdoor café and sits down to watch the people strolling in all directions. It is good to be here after all this time. He can turn in any direction and find a memory associated with it:
There to the right is the wharf where the two brothers dropped him after his escape. There too, he was reunited with the Lastavica of the Sea. Above is the green mountain of the Marjan where he used to run. He will go there tomorrow and remember his youth, remember especially the times he lay down on the rock during his courtship of Ariadne, and how she slept with her head on his chest while he stroked her hair, with his eyes fixed on the pale fracture line of sea and sky, the metaphors of infinity.
Look to the left, and there is the tunnel under the palace walls where he followed Goran Horvatinec. Beyond is the cathedral, where he prayed beside his father. He will go there to pray after he has enjoyed his two or three cups of coffee and a dose of bright October sunshine, as well as a stronger dose of turquoise hungrily absorbed through the eyes. Coffee and a basket of bread are brought to his table. What a pleasure it is to pay the young fellow with Croatian currency untainted by servitude or tyranny. To sip the coffee slowly, to tinkle the tiny silver spoon in its depths, to breathe salt air, to squint at the young lovers and feel again the joy he once felt while walking here with his betrothed, their hands molten gold, their eyes full of stars and their hearts brimming with the eternal—which is love.
So, this is the way it happens, he muses, this is what it is to be old. You return to the past only to find that it returns to you. Nothing is lost, even when everything has been lost. Or is it the other way around? For the moment he is unsure, but he brushes aside the question. Is it really always necessary to ruminate on imponderables, on symmetries and structural chiasms and fanciful syllogisms? No. He is merely happy to be here. Though he is alone and should have been sitting here with an aged woman who was the great love of his life, he need not banish the sadness of her absence, for sadness is part of love in this world, and it is even part of the joy he feels this day. She is alive and has had a long and happy marriage, a life he did not share with her. Perhaps she sits alone sometimes and remembers him. Or it may be that he has faded into her past and blended into the tragedies she left behind when she departed for the new world. Her loss is unlike his loss, for she is married with a family that loves her.
Is he alone? Yes, he is alone, and yet, not alone. Beyond all sorrows, he has the fire of Holy Communion with Christ, as well as friends and fishing and the central grace of his life—his mission to forgive. Returning good for evil wherever he stumbles across it, within the streets of the great city where he lives and also within himself. In all of this, he has been blessed with a life of interior riches, with the added gift of poetry. Though this creative power is falling into disuse in the present age, it abides. It will not be lost, and perhaps he has added his little fragment of bread to the feast.
He will leave in a moment, after just one more cuplet of coffee. Europeans know how to make it right! This is the best in the world, better than the specialty brands he experimented with in the delicatessens on Fifth Avenue. Europeans understand that flavor is not about sensory stimulation, it is about evocation. It is art and memory. It is reunion with exalted moments, and such moments are never solitary ones. In short, life without coffee is not really life. The waiter brings it to him and tells him it’s on the house! A smile from the lad and a bow of his head. What elicited this gift? Perhaps it is house policy: three paid, get one free! Maybe it is simple human kindness. Yes, kindness prevails in the world, gratuitous and unsolicited. This bodes well for the future of mankind.
He senses again Fra Anto’s presence with him. The friar seems to be lingering for an unusual length of time today. Maybe it is the proximity of the church, added to the promptings of memory and grace. Yes, hallucination has been transformed into a vehicle of grace. O life! O very mysterious life! What can we say about you—only that you will never cease to astonish us.
There are a lot of old fellows sitting at tables along the promenade, most of them in groups of three or more, chatting, smoking, and drinking coffee or herbal loza. Scattered among them are tourists drinking from large glasses of red wine. He can tell which ones are tourists. They do not wear certain kinds of discretionary masks, hiding their thoughts. Their thoughts, shallow or deep, happy or sad, are visible to Josip. Their shoes are a giveaway too. Always check the shoes.
Take the man sitting under the awning at the next table. His shoes are Balkan design and down at the heel and scuffed. He is a portly fellow about five years older than Josip, overweight, with high-blood-pressure symptoms in his face. But he has a neat silver moustache, and silver hair, recently cut. His right leg is stretched out straight, and a cane is leaning against the table. A war veteran, no doubt. Which war? There’s a heavy overcoat to guard his chest against the autumn chill. What memories does he hold dear, what treasured lore, what losses? He is drinking travarica from a small glass and sits alone.
A returned expatriate cannot help imagining the personal histories of strangers. Just like legs, poetic imagination needs daily exercise. So, what harm is there in asking himself who these old fellows are, what their lives were like in Yugoslavia while he was safely tucked away across the Atlantic? He has made a guess as to what their stories must have been, but he also knows that it is his own mental construct. Look at that face. Not a bad face, though a history of troubles is written in it. Was the man formerly a Communist or a freedom fighter? A betrayer or a victim? Now that everyone is being let out of prisons and offices of power, and is walking about in the sunshine, it is hard to know. Perhaps he is a retired factory worker with a pension, or a banker from Zagreb, or a Dalmatian fisherman. He can’t be a banker with shoes like that, nor a fisherman with a belly like that. And (Josep thinks) what about his own rather rotund middle, which, despite all his janitorial sweating, grows larger with each passing year? Maybe the man’s bad leg has prevented him from exercising. Maybe he has some heavy crosses to bear. Look at that face, so strained, so full of memories, whatever they are. There are traces of bad mistakes in the eyes—nothing you could put your finger on, but they’re there. Plenty of faces like it pass by on the promenade or sit together at nearby tables. Such faces are everywhere in the world, and more of them in New York than in Split, he would wager.
Ah, well, he will never know the truth about their lives. In this environment, a stranger who asks personal questions would be perceived as a threat. Excuse me, sir, I have been exercising my creative intuition on your life and would like to have my suppositions confirmed. Do you mind answering these four hundred simple questions, please?
This is not America, Josip reminds himself. Enough ruminations for one day. It’s time to go.
Though he is tired and needs his nap, he pauses a few minutes longer, gazing up at the palm branches and letting the breeze stroke his cheek. He closes his eyes for a moment, just to take a rest before leaving. And then he overhears a word or two from the next table.
“So, here you are at last”, says a man’s voice.
“The ship was delayed leaving Bari”, replies another. “It just docked, and I came as fast as I could. It’s good to see you after all this time.”
“Thirty years and more, it must be. You have changed.”
“You too have changed.”
“Life has treated you well. Nice clothes.”
“Thank you.”
Josip opens his eyes to see two old men shaking hands and sitting down side by side. One is the fellow with the cane, and the other is a thin gentleman dressed casually in tan slacks, olive polo shirt, and a jacket imprinted with the insignia of crossed golf clubs. His shoes are very
fine—green alligator with tassels—it cannot be doubted that he is a man of means.
“You’re not as I thought you would be”, says the portly one. “When you wrote to me, I wasn’t sure if this was for the best—our meeting. Things are different now.”
“I understand the situation. I read the newspapers.”
“And how do you like it over there in Los Angeles? Are you very rich?”
The other laughs. “I’m not doing badly. I don’t have to work anymore, if that’s what you mean. I own three apartment buildings in Pasadena, but they’re small ones.”
“I’m glad for you. You can play a lot of golf, then. Am I correct, that’s what they play over there?”
“They play everything over there.”
The conversation continues in this line, and is so banal that Josip’s mind begins to wander. He is just nodding off into another doze when he overhears the words “white island”.
Curious, he opens his eyes a slit. Can it be? Did one of them just make a veiled reference to Goli Otok? Closing his eyes again, he listens with great attentiveness, though he appears to be asleep.
The conversation continues, opaque to anyone who might be listening. There is more about golf and pensions and general politics, and then another reference to how things are different now—so different from the way it was on the island.
What island? Josip asks himself. There are a thousand islands in the Adriatic.
“It’s better to forget all that”, says the portly one with the cane.
“I forgot it long ago—everything.”
“Still, it’s good to meet up with old comrades.”
“It was a surprise when your letter came. How did you find me?”
“It wasn’t so difficult to track you down. The old lines of information are crumbling, but a few remain.”
“I always wondered what happened to you, after you left”, says the thin one.
“They put me to work at a desk. Thirty years at a desk in Belgrade and Zagreb.”