Arriving at the edge, he peers over and discovers that the compass of memory has not failed him. There below is the beach of white stones, a little to the right a cliff of hard sand, and before it, a flurry of activity in the air. The swallows are building their nests in the holes and feeding their young.
It takes a while to get down to the shore, for the last hundred feet of incline are rough with brush and rocks. He makes it without a tumble. When he stands at last on the beach of round white stones, blinding bright under the sun, he discovers that nothing has changed here. The sea heaves gently, more swell than wave, and the stones chatter where they meet the lip of water. He takes off his shoes and socks and wades in up to his knees. The water is cool, pleasantly so. The rounded shapes beneath the soles of his feet are familiar, stimulating. The sea is breathing, and he breathes with it.
So much space above the ocean! The sense of infinity that opens before him is a feeling that only limitless air above limitless water can give. His heart begins to beat wildly. It is that certain beat one feels only when falling in love. Though this is not first love, it is a return to the first illumination, when he had gasped with wonder over a love that would make such a world, that is present in it and speaks tender words through it.
If he were a little more foolish than he is, he would strip off his clothes down to his undershorts and plunge beneath, forgetting to breathe, trusting that some large hands would pull him up again and drag him to shore. Instead, pressing against the ocean’s power with an old man’s remnant of strength, he delights in its resistance. It would be worth drowning in it just to have a moment of such play, but it is not necessary. Long ago, he learned that it is possible to penetrate the infinite without force or folly—as spouses do in their acts of love, who, by submitting, learn to give and through their giving find submission.
Now it is time to visit his old friends the lastavice. Ho-ho, there you are, he calls to them, laughing, there you are after all this time!
Standing below the wall of their apartments, he watches the little heads pop out for an instant, take a look around, then go back in. Birds on the wing swoop down and enter this or that hole, others leave. It is still a very busy place. He imitates their calls, which draws their attention. The patterns of their flight, their arrivals and departures, change for a few moments then return to normal. He leaves the swallows, goes back to the shore, and sits down by the edge of the surf. His knees are under his chin, arms wrapped around his legs, as he gazes out at the horizon. For a time, he closes his eyes and listens to the surf. Perhaps as he rests, a swallow will make its high cheeping sound nearby, floating on a draft, and then it might land on his fingertips.
None of the swallows come near him. That’s fine, he tells himself, they must do what they do. How often in a lifetime can a person expect such a visitation? Once only. Any more than that is opulence.
He stays a few more hours and then says good-bye to the beach and the swallows. After loading his pockets with stones the size and shape of doves’ eggs, he begins the arduous climb back up the hill. Dusk is settling in as he reaches the highway. There is a lot of high-speed traffic, and the cars have their headlights on. He crosses to the other side and sticks out his thumb. He is beyond the age of threat to others. He is unarmed, he laughs to himself. Within five minutes a car stops, a vehicle crammed with a big family—a father and mother and their several children. To make room, the youngest ones must sit on laps. Josip is given a three-year-old to hold, a little girl sleeping. It’s such a warm feeling. He has missed this since Jefferson and Christiana ceased being toddlers. They drive out of their way and take him right to the corner of the promenade and Trumbićeva. They all wave good-bye to him, young and old shouting, “Safe home! Peace!” and the new expression, “Bog, Bog, Bog!!!”
He walks up the street to his apartment building, his little hole in a cliff. Inside his home, he unloads the white stones from his pockets and lines them up along the windowsill, falls into bed, and sleeps.
It is autumn again, his seventy-third year of life in this world. It is hard to believe how swiftly his life has passed. So swiftly, so swiftly, and now it is surely nearing its end, though one never knows. There very well could be more surprises. Life itself is the great surprise, and all that is within it is an unpacking of subsidiary wonders. From time to time, he feels a few sharp stabs in the heart—physical only—though nothing to see a doctor about. The tip of the sword has poked at him since his earliest years, ever since he ran from the fields of heaven, that time. Nothing new in this department.
In November, his collected works are published for the first time in Croatia—his five slender books gathered together into a single volume, under a new title: Homeland. Meaning the eternal home toward which we all journey. The office of the publishing house is right here in Split. The founders and their staff are a bright and energetic bunch, fervent young Catholics, and very literate—world-class, really. Genuine heroes, they launched their company underground before the fall of Communism and now are flourishing. It does not take long before it seems to him that they are his family. He loves them. He would not dare to tell them this because he feels so unworthy of them.
The assistant minister of culture flies down from Zagreb for the book launching, which is celebrated in a magnificent reception hall at the archbishop’s residence. It is quite an event; he did not expect all this! Other national officials are present as well, one or two of them poets in their own right. Also public figures from Dalmatian and municipal governments and numerous writers and musicians, playwrights and literary journalists, all fine men and women. He is again overwhelmed with love and unworthiness. They like to laugh. They are very witty people, and they lack the cynicism he grew so accustomed to in America. Their ironies, if they employ them at all, are purer, closer to gentle satire than to sarcasm.
Elaborate care has been taken to make the event a festival of culture: a soprano from the national opera sings arias, the cathedral choir sings Latin hymns, and another choir sings rousing folk pieces. Throughout the latter performance, Josip feels the awakening of latent dimensions in his soul, songs half-remembered from kitchen feasts in his childhood home, where family and villagers crowded together into the small rooms, cramped, yet wide open to what rises from within the heart and what is poured out from above. As it returns, some of it is joyful, some of it is sad, all of it is good.
He is embarrassed by the attention he is getting. He wishes he had some better clothes to wear, but what a waste of money that would be! Still, clothing is a language of respect, he reminds himself, a world of manners that is the basic level of human charity. He wishes he had thought about that before climbing into his only suit, the one he wears to Sunday Mass. Now it is painfully obvious to him that the jacket no longer closes across his belly. His single necktie is no lavish Croatian kravate but a droopy thing that he had purchased at a discount store in the Bronx in 1973. His shoes—well, he won’t even think about those shoes! His white shirt is washed, however, and most of its wrinkles are hiding beneath the jacket.
After the banquet, after the speeches by visiting and welcoming dignitaries, after the press conference introducing the book, and after the interviews with numerous television cameras and journalists writing in notebooks (heaven knows what he says to them!), he is ready to go home and have a good nap. He did not make it to daily Mass this morning, Our Lady’s Saturday, and whenever that happens he feels a little hunger, a certain loneliness. He really should go home now. And, oh, did he remember to water the sapling growing in a pot on his windowsill? It’s a fig tree—rather, it will be a fig tree someday if his mind doesn’t go first.
A famous man walks to the front of the room and takes the microphone. He praises Josip and lists his accomplishments. Not expecting this, Josip merely stares at his hands on his lap and sees the jagged white scars on his wrists. He closes his eyes.
Finally, he is asked to say a few words—publicly, to a rather large crowd of people. Oh, dear, oh, no
, what shall he say? He shakes himself, breathes deeply, and gets to his feet.
Well, he thinks as he approaches the microphone, it is enough to be who you are. That is the word you bring into the world. He need not try to appear rational or erudite. He is neither. Logic is the province of beginners, reflection the sphere best suited for the end of years, though both should be employed by young and old. He will open his mouth and out of it will pop anything that rises from within. Elderly people are forgiven just about everything.
Oh! Oh, look at all those faces looking back at him. So very, very beautiful those faces. The young and the old alike—all beautiful, the lovely and the plain, all beautiful. See their souls, these lastavice, so beautiful. They are his own, his countrymen, and above all they are his family.
A hush settles on the crowd. Several experienced and knowledgeable people in the front rows send him smiles of encouragement. Go ahead, Mr. Lasta, their eyes tell him, say whatever you like, you are among friends.
Everything now rising from within, the ocean of wisdom and love that he desires with his whole heart to pour out for them, cannot be formed into a single rivulet of sound. An ocean cannot become a brook; it is the other way around, always. But it seems they are asking him to try. He knows there is no need to speak of poetry or politics, nor of history’s woes and victories. That is not his task. Yet he longs to speak words that have taken a lifetime to coalesce, to become distinct and ripe, so that they may shimmer at last under the open sky and drop into outstretched hands, so that they may be eaten and transformed into youth and hope. What should these words be, then? What is most needed at this moment, at this place in time? He is not sure. He takes a breath and simply speaks.
“You are generous and good, and I thank you”, he says, in a trembling voice. “These honors that you give to me are not for me alone. They are for those who, dying young, now sleep in the earth with their unspoken poems, waiting for the Last Day.”
For a few weeks afterward, he must deal with the several avenues that now open up for him in the academies, the media, and elsewhere, the offers of friendship, dialogues, and correspondence. Though these would be stimulating and in their own way consoling, he knows they are not for him. He would too readily become attached to all that, scatter his energies, and lose the central gift, which is based in solitude. So, he declines all invitations.
The excitement of last month has been unsettling. He has written nothing since then. Well, not exactly nothing. A few lines about the fig, incorporating his mental images of fruit in the supermarket up on Frankopanska Street with the scriptural baskets of good figs and bad figs in the book of Jeremiah. It still remains undeveloped and unresolved, and in poor meter as well. He will work on it when things return to normal.
An official from the ministry of culture is in town, one of the poets he met at the book launching. He pays a surprise visit to the apartment (Josip has no telephone) and takes him out to lunch at the restaurant in the Hotel President, the very room where he confronted Zmija and Zohar. The place is crowded today, but the waiter finds them a good table in a quiet corner.
Over their meal, they discuss poetry and politics and the essayists and thinkers whose work they both know. Finally, the poet sits back and smiles. As he removes something from his briefcase, Josip irrationally wonders if the man will drop a limestone slab on the table.
In fact, it is a book.
“It seems there is more than one published Josip Lasta in this world”, he says in a playful tone. “I should have given you this the last time we met, but I will admit I was reluctant at the time to part with it.”
He slides the book across the table. It is a copy of Equations Inferential of a Meta-universe, by Dr. Josip Lasta. The dust jacket is missing, the cloth cover is stained, and the inside pages are yellow with age and smelling of mold. Josip fans the pages, letting equations flush out from between the leaves and fly away.
He says nothing, merely looks at it.
“I suppose a poet would have no interest in mathematics”, says the poet from Zagreb. “But it is a coincidence—the names—so I thought you might like to have it.”
Josip swallows hard and nods, unable to look the other in the face.
“Where did you find this?” he whispers.
“Oh, that’s a long story, too long for a sunny day. Besides, I know little or nothing about the other Josip Lasta.”
“I am interested, if you know anything about him, please.”
“I was in prison when I was younger. The UDBA arrested me in the late sixties, along with other young writers in an underground circle we had formed. A show trial was scheduled, but before it took place the guards beat me too hard and broke my spine. Three vertebrae cracked, the disks were ruined. They didn’t want to take me into People’s Court in a wheelchair, which would have been bad publicity for them. So, I was sent to a prison hospital for surgery while we were awaiting trial. The surgeon fused the vertebrae, and I spent a few months recovering in his ward. He would come by every day to check on me. We would chat a little. Not easy to talk openly, of course, because we were both prisoners.”
“The doctor was a prisoner?”
“Yes, a man named Šime. He told me his full name, but I’m sorry to say I forgot it. I was in pretty bad pain at the time, and a lot of things just didn’t stick in my memory. But I never forgot that he was Šime. He was an extraordinary fellow, not just a scientist but a real thinker. A philosopher of sorts, I would guess. In any event, whenever we could snatch a few moments without the big ears listening, we would talk. He was a fervent Catholic, and it was he who brought me to the Faith. I should say, he began the process. I converted in another prison, after my trial. There were many priests and seminarians behind bars in those days.”
“Were you on Goli Otok?”
“Goli Otok? No, thank heavens! I was in Sremska Mitrovica in Vojvodina for years. I was released after Tito’s death.” He pauses, then asks curiously. “So, you heard about the naked island even over there in America?”
Josip nods.
“That’s news. I thought the regime covered their tracks.”
“Šime gave you this book?”
“No, he told me about a friend of his, a doctor in Split to whom he had entrusted a few of his most precious belongings. When we parted, he said he would never be released, that he suffered from degenerative heart problems and he thought he probably had only a few months to live. He wanted me to have his belongings, few as they were. It seemed to me at the time that this was very strange because I was on my way to my trial and certainly to a cell for a long, long time. What made him choose me, I will never know.”
“Did you tell him about your underground literature group?”
“Yes, I must have.”
“That is why he chose you.”
The poet ponders this. “Maybe.”
“Did he tell you anything about himself?”
“Yes, though the years have erased a good deal of what we spoke about. I recall that he said he had been betrayed by his brother, a member of the Party. But, before his arrest, Šime sent his wife away to Austria. He had done so on a feeling the day before the UDBA came. He had tried to contact his daughter and her husband all that day, but they were away, he didn’t know where. In desperation he put a note under their door, begging them to contact him the moment they got home. He never learned what happened to them, but constantly prayed that somehow they had escaped.”
Josip looks down at the book, holding it tightly in his hands.
“About fifteen years later I found myself in Split and remembered Šime’s last words. I tracked down the man he told me to find. All I knew was that he had been head of the medical faculty at a university. That was quite a search, I can tell you. By then, he had retired from practice and was living on the coast south of the city. When I found him, he was very glad to hear news about Šime and in the end agreed to give me his belongings. It wasn’t much, just a few books, and this was among them. Apparently the
author was Šime’s son-in-law. I hope I haven’t bored you. Everyone has stories, and many of them are more tragic than this one.”
“May I tell you a story?” whispers Josip.
His only real excursion that autumn is a drive around the bay north of the city. He hires a driver to take him. At a spot where a path comes down through steep forested slopes beneath a rocky crag, the car stops and lets Josip out. The driver will return in six hours to pick him up by the side of the road. On winding footpaths he climbs to the base of the cliff, where there is a little stone chapel, stuccoed on the outside and painted creamy yellow. Its walls are covered with prayer requests that people have scratched or penned onto the plaster in numerous languages. The pleas are interesting, but he draws back from reading more than one or two. These are private conversations between souls and God.
He goes higher. His breathing is labored, and his heart is palpitating a bit too much perhaps, but he feels an exhilaration that is irresistible. Where the trail ends, rough stone steps climb a few more feet to a crack in the face of the cliff. A locked iron door covers it. Josip sits down on a stone, puts his forehead to the door, and then kisses it. It is said that this is the cave where St. Jerome lived before he went to the Holy Land and tamed a lion and translated the sacred Scriptures into the common tongue for all to read throughout the Roman world.
O God, have mercy on me, I am a Dalmatian, the saint had cried, beating his chest with a rock, ashamed of his short temper, for which he was as much renowned as he was for his lion.
“O Lord, have mercy upon me,” Josip murmurs, “I am a—”
For once his descriptive powers fail him. What is he, then? A poet? As the Lastavica of the Sea told him long ago, a man is what he is, not what he does. Yet a poet is what he is, poetry is never what he does. Josip sighs—this kind of self-examination can be quite confusing. Is self-identification ever trustworthy? It is better not to dwell on it overmuch. But is he an ex-Herzegovinian, an ex-Isle of Goli Otokian, an ex-American, an exile from exile? No matter, God knows what he is. Have mercy on me, a sinner. Have mercy on me, a Lasta and a lastavica.