Leontis entered her sitting room, which had a Mr and Mrs Duck in it, he in blue dungarees, chocolate polka-dot scarf, she in blue bib dress not unlike her husband’s outfit.
Old hogs going blind run at everything.
She threw a grenade which killed Leontis beyond recognition.
‘We put her on the stick,’ said Dimitris, sipping liquorice liqueur – licor à la sambuca – as his budgie Hannibal and his canary Lecter, called after Dr Hannibal ‘the Cannibal’ Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, chirruped in their cage.
Impaled her.
This was a partisan method of revenge immediately after the war.
Pointed wooden pole greased with oil, forced into the anus, pushed through until it emerged around collarbone, wide end of the stick placed in a hole in the ground, and the victim hoisted for all to see.
‘Toblerone, Turkish Delight, weed helps me with post-traumatic stress syndrome. And she does.’
Zyna, Dimitris’ girlfriend, went to her job in a Dublin bakery with her honey-blonde hair like a cluster-bomb explosion, black boa, shoulder bag like a laminated magpie’s or wren’s nest, face the colour of a Steve Reeves movie – Romolo e Remo maybe – jackboots that Kaiser Wilhelm’s favourite Count Philipp zu Eulenburg, banished for his proclivities, might have worn.
*
Beech, lime, birch, maple leaves, the ground outside Alojzije Stepinac’s Cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the verdure by the cathedral, covered with the leaves of a Japanese pagoda tree, like gold coins, riches you have saved up.
Smell of chrysanthemums, candytuft, mistletoe, dried figs from Dolac market.
A nun in black and white veil comes down Skalinska – a wynd near the cathedral.
The fragile Alojzije Stepinac welcomed and had close links with Ante Pavelić’s Nazi satellite Independent State of Croatia, many against him, many for him, his strongest supporters the Jews who know of the assistance he gave to Croatia’s Jews. It is widely believed that the body which lies in the cathedral was poisoned by Communist agents.
‘My grandparents were Ustaše. The People who Rise,’ Dimitris had told me. ‘They said times were good then. The old people said times were good then.’
From childhood Croatians hear how Saint Nikola Tavelić was cut to pieces by the Muslims in Palestine in 1391.
As we drank Turkish mocca coffee from Croatia I had it recounted: Poles thrown over cliffs; knives, saws, hammers, wheatsheaf cutters, machetes, piano wire, wooden mallets, clubs, rifle butts, bayonets as a method of death; the crane gallows by the river Sava at Jasenovac Concentration Camp the winter before final defeat, bodies slashed and throats slit before being flung in the current; throat-slitting competitions; heads sawn off; children’s heads severed and thrown on mothers’ laps; children’s heads dashed against schools’ walls; arms and legs cut off, eyes, tongues, hearts cut out, breasts severed; not to mention death by gas, by fire as happened to those locked inside Glina Orthodox Church (this the reason for a letter from Stepinac to Pavelić); eyes and human organs gloatingly displayed in the cafés of Tkalčićeva in Zagreb.
‘Pavelić escaped to Argentina, was shot in Buenos Aires, died in Madrid, and there’s a gold tomb for him there.’
Dimitris’ mother’s grandfather had been a lieutenant in Treblinka, executed after the war.
His grandfather received toxic barrels of waste from the Soviet Union. Most people had car licences for certain days. He had a car licence for all days. He opened one of the barrels and his organs became disarrayed. He died in one week. Dimitris’ father, who was imprisoned for going to Mass, was near one of the barrels and got an ulcer.
Zyna’s grandmother, her mother’s mother, a Russian, was put in Dachau.
*
‘You’ll be sent to the cells,’ I was warned.
Packing your belongings into boxes, sacks, possible imprisonment. Who will collect the boxes and sacks? Who will collect the life, the existence?
A Jewish woman has recently managed to reclaim her family heirloom of Gustav Klimt paintings stolen by the Nazis and you remember in gold Jewish women taken to concentration camps in fur coats, wearing excess jewellery, wearing their jewellery so it could be saved. Jewish people rounded up at a theatre in Amsterdam, Hollandse Schouwburg, a stop for a day before the train to Westerbork, then further east.
*
After a front-page Sunday tabloid article my mountain bicycle is grabbed outside my basement bedsit. I find it wrecked on the other side of the eighteenth-century building, white splashes from the carrion crows nesting above all over the place, as if they were engaging in amateur painting.
Frame kicked in. Two wheels mercilessly buckled. Brake wires pulled out. More damage done by stomping on it, by a man whose face looks like a plate of rashers. I am thrown on the ground and kicked like a Kerry football. A Stella Artois bottle is thrown at me.
‘The newspapers never lie,’ declares his girlfriend in a diamanté halter top, matching hot pants, her body like a pudding stuffed into this attire and supported by stars-and-stripes block-high heels.
A Japanese Spitz dog is watching this from afar. ‘Get back on your lead at once,’ a lady in a summer dress with lotus flowers and South Sea sunsets on it says to him and walks off with him.
*
A crowd comes and bangs on my door some nights later. ‘Where’s the paedophile?’ Like a lynch mob in Alabama. Do they intend to hang me from a lime tree in the Belfry?
A mug with vintage cars and car horns is thrown through my window. I keep very silent and they leave.
Romanians greet me cordially. Offering sweet anadems – a watch with enamelled dial, crystal surround, gold-plated, for sale outside Lidl.
*
A man who used drink with Pecker Dunne, author of ‘Sullivan’s John’, in Jet Carroll’s in Listowel, drives me across the Curragh – a heroic landscape – playing Margo, ‘West of the Old River Shannon’, and Mike Denver, ‘I Want to Be in Ireland for the Summer’.
Pecker Dunne, whose grandfather Bernie used to busk at the Country Shop Café in Dublin, claimed he wrote ‘Sullivan’s John’ when he was eleven.
A farmer’s son, Johnny Sullivan, fell in love with a Traveller girl at Pecker Dunne’s site in Kilrush, County Clare, and ran away with her. Off to England where he started a tarmac and trucking business. The song has him carrying a Traveller’s box of tools.
*
In a glory hole by the Royal Canal with a view of Mountjoy jail I find a traumatised brimstone butterfly – yellow with orange spots – who has stowed away among images wrapped in cotton teacloths my mother sent me when I lived in Limerick – images numerously scrutinised, even my Madonnas, as possible pornography, Antoine-Denis Chaudet’s Cupid and the Butterfly from the Louvre, posthumously finished by Pierre Cartellier, naked crouching teenage boy with pigeon wings feeding a butterfly on a plinth, eliciting even leers because of his committed buttocks.
In 1702 there’d been the Brimstone Butterfly Fraud when brimstone butterflies had been painted with eyespots and declared a new species.
I release the butterfly in the direction of Mountjoy jail.
*
‘It’s a terrible thing, Mountjoy,’ a youth by the Grand Canal, with a turf cut that looks as if it’s been done by a lawnmower, face the red of someone who’s just been up and down the Sugarloaf, eyes like Badlands fires, yellow and emerald Manchester United protest scarf around his neck, tells me.
‘Grown men using a bucket for urinating as a toilet. Mountjoy is terrible. You light a cigarette on a bunk in the middle of the night and you see cockroaches. The cockroaches have been there since it was built. When I was first put in Mountjoy in the middle of the night it was the caravan cell. Four bunk beds. Eight people, four sleep on the floor. Travellers thrown in there a lot. Young Travellers go on suicide watch. Twenty-three hour lockdown, padded cells.’
*
‘I was in jail. Zagreb. Ljubljana. Italy.’ Dimitris wears a chocolate-coloure
d T-shirt with a deranged Mr T from The A-Team on it.
When they first moved into this flat they were robbed – socks, toilet paper, even things in the fridge were stolen.
Their fridge magnet shows four completely covered Muslim women and a small boy with the word ‘Mom’ in a dialogue bubble.
Dimitris was shot in left foot in Milan, stabbed on right side on Via Roma, Rijeka, which Gabriele D’Annunzio and three hundred supporters occupied in 1919 and which he ruled as dictator until December 1920.
Their fathers killed in the war, children start sniffing glue by the canal there.
One of them, a boxer, beat people up and threw them in the canal.
Ships travelling to Rijeka from the south throw food into the sea, and sharks follow – modruy, Zyna calls them – when they come into the archipelago. Then they get trapped because of shallow water.
*
Helicopters – choppers for Dimitris – shoot when they see a shark’s tail in summer.
Post-traumatic stress syndrome.
After the war – the clean-ups in Muslim Bosnia – life is a collage. Berlin, Munich, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Rome, Palermo, Dublin.
Armed robbery – jail.
He stole Marshal Tito’s watch from a museum in Zagreb and sold it to a Jewish man in Piazza Goldoni, Trieste.
Hid on Cres island for a while before being sent to jail.
Then armed robbery again. International journeys ending in Palermo.
Return. Jail.
Organised crime. He and Zyna manage to get to Dublin the year a design of a woman with plentiful hair playing a harp, which Ivan Meštrović submitted for the coins of the Irish Free State in 1927 but too late for consideration, is finally used on a commemorative coin.
Before he left he started kicking a Jewish youth with whom he’d had an argument on the ground, and the youth clung to Zyna’s boots.
He didn’t know why he did it.
Ustaše?
Black Legion? The Nazis got the uniforms for them.
Didn’t I know of Ivica Čuljak? Panonski after the Roman Pannonia Inferior. Painter. Poet. Actor. Punk singer. From Vinkovci near Vukovar – Chicago of Yugoslavia.
Mental Casualty. How the Punk Defended Croatia.
Five seconds after the concert begins in Maksimir Stadium in Zagreb, riot squad called in. Used cut himself during performances so he looked like a mutilated ant. Twelve years for killing a man in self-defence. Spent time in a mental institution near Zagreb. Wore the uniform of the Croatian National Guard when war started. Joined the army to defend his mother. Turned up in a Belgrade nightclub during the war. Dimitris says that because of his enthusiasm with hatchet and chainsaw in combat he was shot in his bunker by the Croatian army.
And even just now Marko Perković and his group Thompson who sing songs in praise of Ustaše Croatia get 60,000 people in Zagreb, many wearing Ustaše insignia.
What does she think of Alojzije Stepinac, I ask Zyna? She’s wearing a T-shirt with a mannequin cat’s face on it.
‘He was a good man.’
*
The world’s borders changed. Old acquaintances faded into the night like the ghosts of yesteryear. Your only friends a Croatian couple. He involved in clean-up operations in Bosnian villages at fifteen. From Bosnian villages to Plunkett Tower in Ballymun.
Wars have brought us together.
*
Arriving in Dublin Dimitris and Zyna initially lived in the only occupied tower in Ballymun, Plunkett Tower.
Towers at Silloge and Shangan were waiting to be destroyed. They burnt rubbish under them.
At the reception youths, scamgany, skaggy boys, some on drugs, would ask for money, would ask for sweets.
‘Arriving in a new place you must always get to know the social bottom first.’
Daso, aged eighteen, Sonic the Hedgehog hairstyle, injected himself. Water bubble in syringe went through his body as blood clot to his heart and killed him.
Rozzer, aged fifteen, hoodlum in hoodie look, took too much methadone, went home, got sick in his sleep, choked on his own vomit.
While they were there some boys stole six rabbits, set a deaf pit bull terrier on them in Coultry Park, mutilated the rabbits with their own hands.
Dimitris and Zyna threw their passports into a fire under a tower at Silloge.
As a fugitive the only job Dimitris could get was as gravedigger in nearby Glasnevin Cemetery.
There he worked with Robo, a gravedigger from County Antrim.
Inebriated pike expression, long face, flinted features.
Robo’s grandmother – his father’s mother – had ninety-three grandchildren. Mother Shiggins.
Robo’s uncle used drive Robo around Antrim on a Bill Wright pot cart. Mending pots and pans on the way. They’d go to small fairs. Sleep under the cart.
Robo’s uncle’s house was a shed. Donkey in shed too.
He raised chunky chickens for Christmas. Stole wood from building sites. Gathered fallen trees with Robo’s help. Sold them as logs for Christmas. He used a bow saw.
Some of the Shiggins beat the Lambeg drum at two Orange gatherings each year in Tennessee.
Robo came south to see the site of the battle of the Boyne and became a gravedigger, often exposing the Eve with very nude breasts on his back from Sailor Bill in Portrush.
‘He was a sailor. Did tattoos in Portrush and Colraine. His son Bruce carried on the business.’
Nuns had babies, threw the babies into lime he informed Dimitris.
Digging seven feet deep one day Dimitris broke a coffin and stepped in yellow jelly.
A mother asked him to put a cross on a three-month-old baby’s neck. He opened the coffin and the head fell off and he had to pick up the head.
Memories of Second World War Ustaše massacres of Serb children.
The mother started spitting at him. The priest was alien to him, Dimitris said.
‘On my twenty-eighth birthday I buried five babies.’
*
‘Arriving in a new place you must get to know the social bottom first.’
Arriving at the house by the Royal Canal Dimitris and Zyna immediately got to know Mosher and Peggy’s Leg who drank Brasserie beer by Tesco.
Eyes swallowed in Mosher’s face the way insects are swallowed in the pitcher plant that grows in Roscommon and Westmeath, leaving an echo of deep sea blue, youngish face that has Patriarch’s scrolls.
Peggy’s Leg wears a rainbow-striped woollen hat and her hair is the colour of Marie Antoinette’s wig.
‘You meet the nicest people in the Joy,’ Mosher tells me. ‘The ones outside should be inside and the ones inside should be outside.
‘Some get out and are in again on a running charge after a week. They’re used to it. It’s a way of life. The way it is, you get fed. It’s cheaper to be inside.
‘I’ve lived on the streets for years and I know everyone. If you’re with me you’re all right.’
*
‘I’ve been a landlord for twenty-five years and every nutcase in Ireland has passed through my hands,’ the landlord, a man from Carlow with a face the colour of marmalade, says.
The house we live in is peaceful now but Dimitris and Zyna tell me about some of its recent occupants.
A man from Kazakhstan who thought Muslims were after him and going to bomb him and who set the curtains and mattress on fire and threw the mattress on fire outside on the landing.
A man who thought Dimitris and Zyna were spies and that Tesco was a spy ring.
A Bosnian Muslim who was always banging drawers, shelves, doors.
A woman from Moldova with three children, including an ice-blonde, almost narcissus-haired boy. ‘I am divorce-ed.’
Kookie arrived with a bottle of Scottish sparkling water and nothing else.
Three times she’d run away from a mental hospital.
She used wrap her body in tinfoil, put clothes over tinfoil, then don a tinfoil headdress, sleep in the hall in this apparel. Though
t there were a million people in her room.
Once went naked to Tesco except for bits of tinfoil wrapped around her, many of which fell off.
‘She was a ‘phrenic,’ Dimitris whispers.
*
‘I have a friend. Painter.’
Age of consent is fourteen in Croatia but Slavko was accused of spiking a seventeen-year-old boy with drugs and drink and then having sex with him.
Due at prison hospital with his solicitor – his ‘brief’ (Dimitris uses a word he learnt from Mosher), Dimitris picked him up.
The escape route was florid. Naum in Bosnia. Montenegro. Serbia. Kosovo.
Going south to Albania, to keep the map, the atlas of desire alive.
Dimitris got Slavko to safety in Tirana, Albania.
Dimitris picks up a photograph from over the fireplace of Slavko swimming with a fifteen-year-old Albanian boy in Lake Ohrid, Macedonia, Slavko in briefs with a jabberwocky pattern, blue, yellow, red; the boy, who has a pencil-line moustache, in sailor-stripe jersey briefs with a red rim.
‘There are twenty Croatian mercenaries in Dublin,’ Dimitris tells me. If ever I need help.
Croatian mercenaries in Burma communicate video footage to Dimitris’ computer of people being executed in Burma.
*
A Pakistani couple with a child move into one of the unoccupied flats, and soon there are broken Chivas Regal bottles all over the back. The council won’t take the rubbish because of bottles in it, and rubbish bags accumulate, and one evening I come home and find that they’re on fire near the central heating exhaust.
It takes four buckets to quench the fire.
Two Chinese youths move into another flat. They grow hash with hydroponics. Bio-fed hash. A ventilator goes off regularly at three in the morning – at first Dimitris and Zyna think it’s a sausage maker – for the benefit of the hash.