Island of The World

  When he returns he makes tea over the fire, then fries sausages and potatoes, enough for himself and his guest. Josip contributes the food Branko gave him. As the stars come out, they eat their meal and drink their tea. The boy grows talkative. He tells about his youth, his interests, and his desire to travel. He would like to go through Europe and see the world, maybe even farther to America. There’s a special girl in a town halfway between Mostar and Sarajevo. Every two weeks, his father hikes here and stays for a day or so, to bring food and to check on him. He has begun to read history. He finds it very interesting, realizes that a lot of the things he learned at school before the Communists were booted out are not true. An uncle in Split sent him some books last winter.

  Ivo lifts a volume and waves it in the air.

  “This one is so interesting. It’s my favorite.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s about a man who goes on a long journey, on a ship. He has a lot of trouble, but he gets home in the end.” Josip peers at the title. The Odyssey. “Do you like poetry?” he asks. “No. But I like this book.”

  It is early evening, and the mountain chill is settling in. Ivo tells him that he’s welcome to sleep in the tent, but Josip wants to fall asleep watching the stars. He lies down on the grass, rolls himself in the blankets, and looks up. Ivo lights the lantern and reads for a time. The old man blinks, and it is dawn.

  The boy is gone; he is somewhere in the valley with his sheep. Throughout the morning, Josip retraces his steps through the village, moving ponderously from house to house. He remains motionless for a long time before the largest hump, where the church of St. Francis once stood. There are no artifacts to be found. Whatever remains is buried: the broken glass portraying the poverello’s life, the dented chalice and burnt prayer books, and the body of a martyr. Here he fell in love with a girl before the altar of God. Here he ran toward the sanctuary of the tabernacle moaning, O-o-o-o, Jesus! Here, too, he consumed the sacred hosts, muddied and bloodied by killers. The very place where the crucifixion of a child’s heart cast his life into a pit, into the end of everything. Though it was not the end.

  Josip kneels. He experiences again the sense of suspension, where the frontier of time dissolves into eternity. As on the day before, it is not prayer with words, but absorption into the presence.

  Later, he goes to the house where the blind woman rocked him, from there to Petar’s house, and from there to the most terrible place of all.

  This heap of grass was the schoolhouse. Though he jerks his head away, he sees again the heap of naked bodies, the women and girls. His mother is not among them, for she is already burning in her home. He forces himself to look at the bloody mattress and finally at the body of Josipa. He sees everything as if it occurred seconds ago. Though he did not witness the killings with his own eyes, it now seems that he hears screams and sobbing and the pleading of the women and the laughter and curses of the strong men. The horror has remained within him all these years, known but unexamined, because to stare at it for more than an instant is to be pulled headlong into absolute darkness. The negation of everything is hell, and he must not go there. Now, it is possible to look. Now, the powers of negation can only wound, not destroy him. He examines everything that he saw in a single flash more than fifty years ago. It takes no more than a minute, yet it cracks him open. So wide is the fissure that it gapes before his soul as an abyss of despair, and it drags him forward onto his hands and knees. He chokes, chokes, chokes, and then vomits.

  It is as if he is vomiting all that darkness out and must see its every detail as it leaves. Now he faces it—knows that his beloved lastavica was raped by the soldiers before they cut her throat when they had enough of her. Before his eyes he sees her, as if he were a boy again and it happened only a minute ago, the two pools of blood crying out to him, the little pool in the hollow cavity between her collar bone and her neck, and the larger pool at the exact center of her body, halfway between the head, which is the crown of all sublime thought, and the feet, which are the humble bearers of burdens.

  Then a low, dull, retching scream from an old man’s ravaged throat. So horrible and ugly is this sound that it would be unbearable for another human being to hear it. He can hardly bear the sound of it. Gradually it subsides, and he is empty. Then he weeps—hours of weeping—and with the tears there slowly grows an inner calm. In this calm, he is able to acknowledge the loss that is at the very core of his being. He has lost the most beautiful gift in the world. There were other gifts, before and after, yet this was the purest of all, the one that first drew him into the holy fire. It is gone, it will never return. And he has lost the children who might have come from their love and the many who would have come from those children, the generations upon generations who will never be.

  Ivo finds him lying on the hump of grass in mid-afternoon. Worried that the old man has fallen again, he runs to him and shakes his shoulder, like the shadows of the dead who cannot be roused from their sleep. Josip sits up. The boy helps him to his feet.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I am all right.”

  “Come, I have made a lunch”, he says, brushing grass and dirt from Josip’s clothing. “Well, not quite a lunch because it’s getting late. But you can think of it as an early supper.”

  Seated on stumps beside the campfire, they drink tea. The boy hungrily downs a pan of food, while Josip eats nothing.

  “I have to go”, he says. “A car is coming to pick me up this evening at the house of the people who raise geese.”

  “It’s a long walk”, says Ivo. “I’d like to go with you, but I can’t leave the flock.”

  “That’s all right. It has been so good to meet you. You are a fine boy.”

  Clearly, this is somewhat embarrassing for Ivo. He pretends he did not hear it and keeps eating.

  “Do you have a pen and paper?” Josip asks. “Hmmm, I think I have a pencil.”

  He jumps up and rummages around in the tent, returning with a stub of pencil.

  “Sorry, no paper. What do you want it for?”

  “I want to leave you something.”

  “Oh.”

  “May I write on a blank page of your book—your favorite book?”

  “Sure. Let me get it for you.”

  Josip, with the book in his hand, turns the pages slowly. There are four blank end-pieces. He sits down on the stump and writes. From time to time, he looks up at Zamak or toward the end of the valley or the ruins of the village, then goes back to writing. When he is finished, he hands the book to the boy.

  “What did you write there?” he asks.

  “My address in New York. If you ever come to America, you can find me.”

  “Ah, this is good!” declares Ivo with pleasure.

  “There is more”, Josip goes on in a quiet voice. “I have written some lines that you will not understand. As you grow older, you will understand them. Will you keep them?”

  “If you wish”, he nods.

  “I ask you to keep them”, Josip says. “They will be of little value to you at this time, but later you will see.”

  “I will keep them and read them again.”

  “Good. Now I must go”, says Josip, rising. He and Ivo shake hands.

  “Good-bye, Mr. Lasta. It was nice to have company.”

  “Good-bye, Ivo. Thank you for your welcome.”

  With no more to be said, Josip turns and walks through the village toward the pass that will lead him to the south. He is leaving his home now, and he knows he will never return. Yet he is going toward home as well, there in a distant land.

  Ivo watches the old man until he has disappeared into the trees. Then he sits down on the stump and opens the book. He reads:

  LOSS

  Of those times which we the living and the unremembered dead

  live again as if we have not ceased

  in tides of memory to swim,

  we know:

  The past is present and will be all that i
s to come.

  With final breaths we tell what we have learned

  in words you do not know:

  There was fire and there was snow,

  there were hands held tenderly and striking fists,

  there was each year’s returning sun

  and the first fruits on the laden trees,

  the milk swinging in buckets, sweet waste

  and nourishment, warm breasts, a father’s toil-worn face;

  there were birds that landed fearless on our wondering fingertips,

  filling our minds with images of flight

  and our mouths with laughter.

  I see the eyes of children I once knew

  who through those dark pools beheld the killing

  of mothers and fathers, the ones who gave them their names,

  for no child lacks a name, the great and the small.

  And thus, sinking, they reached for what was gone,

  for what was beyond all hope, clutching their names as survivors cling

  fiercely to the unsustaining debris of shipwreck.

  What would such a child say to me as he drowned,

  if he were to speak at all?

  What sole legacy hurled above the abyss, what sound

  as his final contribution to mankind?

  For what far sanctuary would he strain in his last gesture

  as he went down?

  Were I to reach for him as a bird without hands,

  capable of rising above his soon-forgotten fate,

  yet unable to assist,

  my only strength would be to carry his words,

  and sing them out across the void.

  What would these words be? Surely it is these:

  “I do not ask why;

  I do not seek to be as you,

  though I am you.

  I seek the ocean that is above me

  and within me, for it is one sea;

  and I leave behind

  the island of the world.”

  THE FLIGHT

  OF THE LASTAVICA

  37

  Caleb hands Josip a bundle of paper crawling with typewritten text. He is bursting with anticipation, affection for the old man brimming in his dark eyes. So much intelligence in them, a wily street survivor, this well-published literary man, yet curiously childlike too. Or perhaps this is a rare moment of complete guilelessness.

  “What have you got for me, Caleb?” asks Josip, taking the papers gingerly. “Is this a new collection of your poems? Do you trust me to critique?”

  “I trust you, Josip, but they aren’t new poems. These are the galley sheets for my intro to your selected poems.”

  “Your intro? What do you mean, your intro?”

  “The publisher asked me to write it. Of course, I knew what you’d have to say about that, so I made an executive decision. You ain’t gonna escape fame, brother Joe, no matter how far y’ runs or how hard y’ tries t’ hide.”

  “I am not running, I am not hiding, but, shh-shh, let me read it.”

  The document takes quite a while to go through, and by the end Josip is thoroughly appalled. It is fairly accurate, but he wonders how Caleb has obtained all this biographical data. Doubtless he has gleaned it from their years of conversations, and by his uncanny skill in observing the nature of white people. Has he really revealed so much personal information to the boy? Boy? No, the lad he met more than twenty years ago is now a doctor of literature, married to a sociologist, and father of a prodigious little child of the metropolis; moreover, he possesses the subtleties and complex manifestations of character and historical damage that are the particular patrimony of the despised and rejected. A former slave sees things from the ground up, from the inside out. Of course, Caleb has never known slavery, but he has experienced the residue of slavery’s mark upon his society. He has from childhood onward (especially during the years when he wore his sinister camouflage) been avoided or regarded with suspicion by strangers. Throughout his life it has been of utmost importance for him to read properly the character of the race most dominant on this continent. Josip smiles ironically—he can relate.

  He loves Caleb and his family, though his cosmological sympathies lean toward the wife, who remains always, despite her alien temperament and exotic Eritrean culture, a sacramental Christian. He sighs. How complex the universe is—a mine field of difficulties. Nevertheless, he must not be bamboozled (a curious English term) by this upwardly-mobile shiny copper penny just because of love. There is no love without truth, Josip reminds himself.

  So, what is true here? Is this glowing mini-biography the truth? The details are flawless, but the meaning is as far off the target as an arrow shot in a windstorm.

  Stop the metaphors, Josip! he admonishes himself.

  “Well, do you like it?” Caleb asks leaning forward.

  “I am honored, Caleb, that you have applied such an effort of concentration and energy, not to mention mnemonics, to an insignificant life.”

  “You don’t like it”, Caleb mumbles, his face falling morosely.

  “It is not me.”

  “What do you mean, not you!”

  “In the poetic sense.”

  “It’s prose.”

  “Yes, it’s prose. But I don’t believe one can express the truth of a life with prose.”

  “I think we disagree on that.”

  “I know we disagree on that, of this I am very certain. Please, you will not publish this.”

  Caleb clears his throat, he has worked hard getting the biography just right. There’s the old hurt look in his eyes, the look that fatherless men sometimes revert to without realizing it.

  Josip reaches out and pats Caleb’s shoulder.

  “No man could have done a better job writing my life, Caleb. However, it must be honestly admitted between us that my life is in my poems, not in such words—fine as these words are. And they are very, very fine.”

  “Don’t guff me, ol’ man.”

  “Okay. I will speak frankly. I am embarrassed by them. I am afraid of the naked facts. It is better to be silent about facts.”

  “Why?”

  How to explain to this energetic North American the consciousness of a boy drowning in a river of blood—drinking from it as bodies float by—a dead boy found on a road in the middle of the night. Or a skinned rabbit.

  “It’s just better, that’s all.”

  “You’re not being coherent today, Josip.”

  “True. But what can I do?” he shrugs.

  “And another thing—it’s ridiculous for you to keep using the pen name. Why not use your own? What are you scared of? The Communists aren’t going to track you down and mess up your life. Those days are over!”

  The battle continues for two or three hours. Josip interrupts from time to time to make Caleb a cup of coffee, and once to show him the seven-kilo catfish brooding in the bathtub. Caleb just stands there, looking down into the water with hands on hips, shaking his head.

  Perhaps it is the absurdity that breaks up the categories of his thought—his assumptions about how literary biographies should be written.

  “So, you refuse”, he says at last with a groan of resignation.

  “You can do as you wish.”

  “Don’t give me that! You know I can’t do it if you aren’t going to be happy about it.”

  “You’re a free man. This is a free country.”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Thus—?”

  “Thus—what do you suggest?”

  “If you are desperate to have an introduction, and if the publisher insists upon it, I can think of no better person to write it than yourself. However, I request that you delete all informational data from it.”

  Caleb shakes his head again. The old poet is proving to be a barbed catfish—and after all these years!

  “Okay, Josip”, he says glumly. “I’ll rewrite the damn thing.”

  That autumn the book is released under the title The Seraph of Sarajevo: Selected Poems of
Josip Marulić. When Caleb drops by one blustery November evening to deliver a packet of six complementary copies from the publisher, his facial expression is cheerily enthusiastic, his bass voice announces the happy birth as boisterously as a presiding uncle, yet his eyes are qualified. Though he is the midwife, doctor, and family member all in one, the baby is not quite as he had hoped it would be. Josip interprets this mild tempering of the original enthusiasm as a double compliment. Caleb, it seems, is not unattached, and that is nothing less than a sign of how much he cares. After a cup of coffee and a quick check into the bathroom to see if there are any fish in residence, Caleb opens the package and presents the first published copy of Josip’s poetry in the English language to the poet himself.

  It is one of those moments when silence is as it should be—good and full.

  Josip flips pages, reads a poem or two, his own words translated into a foreign tongue. He notes the Calebite changes, not bad at all—very well done, in fact, and a few are actually improvements.

  “Excellent,” he says, “excellent.”

  He likes the weight of this hardbound edition, its purple cloth and its shiny jacket too, which displays a hieratic skyline of Sarajevo with a burst of flame above it—presumably a fire of angelic holiness.

  Then, with some trepidation, he turns to the introduction and reads it from start to finish, while its author looks on with a neutral expression combined with body language that signifies intense anxiety.

  Thus, Josip reads the revised summation of his life:

  Introduction

  At long last the poems of Josip Marulić appear in English translation. Though his individual poems have been acknowledged by the expatriate Croatian community in Europe and America for several years now, they have been published by small journals and circulated only among the Croatians in exile. As the editor of this, the first English-language edition of his work, I was honored with a responsibility due entirely to the operations of fate and friendship. Mr. Marulić is my neighbor and the janitor of the building in which I live.