The Pelican

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The Pelican Page 2

by Martin Michael Driessen


  Not that he had any personal grudge against Tudjman. He hardly knew him; they didn’t even go to the same café. Of course, he knew that Tudjman was a decorated veteran, and for that reason he almost regretted him being the victim. But fate, Andrej knew, was impartial; even Marshal Tito himself had sacrificed former comrades and friends in the name of the cause.

  Josip’s wife was a horror. The signs of instability she had already exhibited early on should have been a warning sign; however, she was a young lass with an ample bosom and a friendly, round baby face, so there was no reason a certain lack of intelligence should have put him off. Besides, having experienced the horrors of war, he yearned only for a straightforward, safe existence. The fact that their first child, Mirko, lived only six months did not discourage him. But then Katarina was born with a cleft lip and only started to learn to speak at the age of six; she was a crazed and slow-witted child, although at times she and Josip managed to achieve something like closeness, as when she had taken her medicine and they set to work on a large jigsaw puzzle—always the same one—picturing a white mare and a white foal in a field of dandelions. This child, he could have lived with. But his wife had been transformed into something unforeseen, something unfathomable. She cursed, she ranted, she groused incessantly, and was consumed by compulsive jealousy. They could no longer walk down the street together without her attacking him for greeting a female neighbor; on the other hand, if he did not greet her and shuffled past with downcast eyes, his wife hissed at him that it was as plain as day that he had to force himself not to ogle her. The funicular, she claimed, was a playground for shameless foreign sluts who would spread their legs for a free ride. The fatter and more formless she became, the more she seemed to revel in her own ugliness. Her face had become rounder, and as dark and wrinkled as a walnut, and the fact that her light-blue eyes, amid all this repulsiveness, remained the same as those of the young girl he once courted only made things worse. For a long time, the neighbors did their best, but in the end were forced to concede that Josip was doomed to a life of misery.

  The first letter he wrote since the death of his mother was to a lady in Zagreb in response to a personal advertisement.

  She was a still-young woman who, according to her ad, sought a “kindly, charming gentleman,” age not important, as long as he was cultivated.

  Josip then had sex for the first time in years, and after that he took the bus to Zagreb once every six weeks.

  What especially excited him was that she always wore spike heels and showed a lively interest in the history of funicular techniques.

  The day had arrived. Andrej observed how Tudjman—clearly recognizable, for he was the only passenger in the car—rode up the hill to enjoy his midday break in the shade of the monument. When the funicular came to a stop and the cars had reached their starting and ending positions, he mounted his bicycle and rode slowly down the Ulica Nikole Tesle, a broad paved road lined with plane trees, on which the funicular’s lower station was located.

  He had snipped out letters and words for his blackmail note, like he had seen on that TV show Columbo. This turned out to be a time-consuming task, all the more because he had to carefully cut around the photos of Princess Diana. And now he had extremely persuasive evidence in his possession, far better than Tudjman’s correspondence.

  Three weeks earlier, while making his deliveries at the plaza where the bus stops were located, he saw Josip Tudjman, in his green uniform, as always, waiting with a bunch of flowers in his hand. This was suspicious. Andrej feigned not to have seen him and cycled hastily on.

  He did not bother to eat, leaving the plate of anchovies untouched on the kitchen table; he changed out of his postman’s uniform into short pants, a polo shirt, sandals, and a straw hat, and grabbed his camera bag. He filled an empty Sinalco bottle with tap water, for it was a hot day and the ride was a long one.

  Aside from the funicular and the steep, zigzagging footpath alongside it, the only way to reach the heroes’ monument was by road, first heading southward along the coast, and then taking the first side road up into the mountains, until a white arrow-shaped sign pointed to the turnoff leading to the reservoir. It was an uninviting route, and few people saw any reason to visit a fishless and sterile dammed lake high in the limestone hills.

  It had thus been a good ten years since Andrej was last there. He chained his bicycle to a concrete picnic bench, hung his camera bag around his neck, and set out parallel to the shore path to his right, the shortest route to the monument and the upper station of the funicular railway. If his suspicions were correct, then Tudjman and the lady from Zagreb would now be making out on the pedestal of the monument.

  In the event that they were cautious enough to have chosen the back side of the monument, then he would pretend to be photographing insects in the reeds. But he considered this unlikely. Anyone in a romantic state of mind would certainly prefer a view of the bay and the sea rather than the barren hinterland. And Tudjman, the pathetic braggart, would want to impress her, and would therefore use the funicular, which, Andrej mused, should still have been government property. Tudjman would want to spread the magnificent panorama of the town and coastline at her feet, as though he had personally conquered the place himself, while in fact he should thank his lucky stars the new owners hadn’t fired him.

  Andrej crept up the steps to the monument on all fours until he reached the platform, his camera at the ready. If they caught him, he would say he was taking artistic photographs of the vista, with the bronze boots and the trampled fascist insignias in the foreground. The Kodak was both his weapon and his alibi.

  His precautions were unnecessary. Tudjman and his lady friend, who wore a flowered dress and a white hat, were entirely engrossed in one another, entwined in a compromising embrace on the bottom step. Next to them were two glasses and a bottle of spumante.

  Andrej began snapping pictures. His heart stood still with every click of the shutter, but they apparently did not hear or see him, even though the woman’s face—or what he could see of it above Tudjman’s shoulder—was turned toward him for quite some time.

  He dared not load a new roll of film, but the sixteen shots he took would suffice. Tudjman and the lady kissing, toasting, embracing. The lady rolling up her stockings. Tudjman’s hand on her knee. The lady on his lap.

  This was the moment. Andrej rested his bicycle on its kickstand and glanced around. No one in sight. And in any case, he was a uniformed postman, he could put an envelope in the kiosk’s mailbox without raising any suspicions.

  The cable car tracks and the monument were obscured by the foliage of the plane trees. There wasn’t a soul to be seen, and he recognized all the parked cars.

  He did not see anything particularly wrong with what he was doing. After all, Tudjman was a married man and a father, and had no business dallying with another woman. Perhaps the three-thousand-dinar payoff would serve as a kind of moral warning shot. He had originally planned to demand two thousand, but on second thought he felt that all the costs he had incurred justified an extra thousand. And besides, Tudjman could spare the money; in addition to his pension he had an income from the funicular.

  Not that it was about the money. It was about the need for something to happen in Andrej’s life; this total denial of his existence simply had to stop. The world owed him something. Once he thrust the letter through the chute of the green cast-iron mailbox, there would be no turning back. It would be the first time in his life that he took a step that was courageous and irreversible.

  Never before had he sped down the Nikole Zrinskog at such a clip; he whipped along the ring road that led him around the alleys and nooks and crannies of the old town center to the harbor. The Agip gas station flew past, the ruins of the Turkish fort, the dusty palm trees, the long row of deserted terraced workmen’s houses that followed the stepped contour of the hillside, like the spine of a dead animal. He coasted all the way, sitting upright on the seat, his legs stretched forward as though goi
ng down a playground slide, pant legs flapping, until he had to brake in the last curve before the boulevard. He set his bicycle against the bars and, as always, chained it securely. After all, the bicycle was state property, and with it came certain responsibilities.

  Andrej wanted to watch Tudjman return to the kiosk after his lunch break, oblivious to what awaited him. Only he, Andrej, knew.

  He bought an ice cream and headed for the jetty on the waterfront. It was a warm day for this time of year, sunny and practically windless. Only far off to the south, where it was cloudy, did the coastline become hazier.

  He walked out to the end of the jetty and sat down on a low wall. One thirty. There was hardly a ripple on the water underneath him, where small fish darted back and forth, apparently taking no notice of the up-and-down swells that carried their entire school.

  He tossed the last bite of his cone into the water and smiled at the pattern that emerged: lightning-quick attacks followed by brief retreats, as if every sinking crumb was a depth charge that first had to be deactivated. And then the school continued to swell back and forth like foolish children in an oversized cradle who had no inkling of the big wide world around them.

  He looked at his watch, and then over his shoulder. The cable car was still stationary. A large pelican had approached, stopping about four meters away.

  All his life, Andrej had seen the pelicans descend on the town each year. He had never liked them. They were odd creatures and did not belong here. Moreover, they were an unpleasant reminder of the time he was unemployed, before he had gotten his current job: he had earned extra cash by donating blood, and the blood bank’s emblem was a pelican. It had something to do with the Christian faith.

  “Go away,” he shouted, waving his arms.

  The pelican stood there and looked straight at him with its beady eyes. It had the kind of dignity one sometimes sees in very ugly and stupid creatures.

  “Piss off to Africa,” Andrej said, and got up. He gave the pelican a wide berth, for they were pretty big animals, and returned to the harbor.

  The first envelope was postmarked Rijeka and contained photographs of Jana and him. Jana was the woman of his dreams, the woman who made him happier than he had been in years. Without the accompanying note, he would have treasured the pictures and even proudly shared them with her: they had been taken during that first, memorable rendezvous at his funicular. It was the first time Jana had visited him, after months of his traveling to Zagreb on the bus to be with her.

  They were small-format prints with a jagged white border. On the back, the stamp of the photo studio where the film had been developed had been blacked out with thick ink strokes.

  Together with the photos was a note demanding three thousand dinars. The note was a chaotic collage of glued-on letters and words that, Josip could tell at once, had been largely snipped out of the celebrity magazines Paris Match and Bunte and the local newspaper.

  His first reaction was: What’s three thousand dinars, after all? He could afford it. But then he thought: Why am I acting like this is a household bill or the monthly rent? This is about Jana, the love of my life, and no one has any business interfering with us. This is gross, unlawful blackmail. And what’s more, he had watched enough television to know you should never give in to the demands of a blackmailer, because that’s the beginning of the end.

  OR ELSE YOUR FRAU WILL FIND OUT EVERYTHING read the last sentence, haphazardly pieced together out of letters of irregular fonts and sizes.

  The word Frau had been snipped out of the Bunte.

  An envelope containing the money, said the instructions, was to be placed under a certain concrete block along the Ulica Zrinskog by one thirty the following Tuesday afternoon. That was when, as everyone in the town knew, he took the cable car up the hill for his lunch break.

  And the concrete block was on a barren, vacant stretch of the ring road, and could not be observed from the monument. There was only a small bus shelter, where no one could conceal themselves from a watchful eye. It seemed impossible, then, to catch whoever came to collect the money.

  There’s no getting out of this, he realized. But he did decide to write a letter back, making it perfectly clear that this one payoff was also, definitively, the last.

  Andrej was elated. The three thousand dinars in the envelope meant more to him than his postman’s salary. This was money he had earned through personal enterprise, money he would never have had without having shown such nerve and gumption. A socialist utopia was all well and good, and while he was in favor of equal opportunity and against international capitalism, over time it was a bit suffocating to realize that being better than the others, that being someone special, made no difference whatsoever. And he was not planning to spend the rest of his life as a nobody. A man like him deserved more. The waiting list for a modern apartment on the outskirts of town was so long that it would take a bachelor like him years to get one; that he, of all people, who literally towered head and shoulders above the others, had to squeeze himself into a semi-basement apartment was a grave injustice.

  After all, on the soccer field, too, it was always the top players who walked off with the honors. And the Russian cosmonauts were heroes because, like Andrej, they were the first to venture into the unknown.

  For a moment he considered stowing the banknotes in the drawer of his nightstand forever; this money was too meaningful to spend.

  The accompanying letter likewise gave him immense satisfaction, and he reread it several times. Josip Tudjman gave notice that this would be the first and last payoff. But of course, the decision in this matter lay entirely with Andrej. Actually, Tudjman was begging him not to make further demands. The fact that he’d paid proved he was powerless.

  In the end, Andrej decided to spend the money on something special. He cycled out to the dog racetrack on the edge of town.

  When he arrived and, as always, chained his bicycle, this time to the rusty railing, a dust cloud rose at the far end of the oval track. He had missed half of the first race, but there would be more. Farther up, a cluster of cars parked haphazardly on the gray-green field surrounded the focal point of the event: a small group of men at a white party tent and a dilapidated shed. Folk music blared from loudspeakers. Andrej could see at once that he did not know these men. He had suspected as much when he saw their cars: rickety Zastavas, cast-offs from Italy, a few small trucks. The spectators doubtless came mainly from the concrete apartment blocks where he did not deliver the mail, and perhaps also from the countryside.

  He was out of place here, but did not mind. He came as a man who could blow three thousand dinars if he felt like it. The dogs, with their muzzles and colorful vests, each emblazoned with a number on the back, tore around the racetrack at breakneck speed, passing him as he walked along the railing.

  The metallic riff of a Slovenian pop group was broken off for the announcement that Darling Boy had won.

  Money was paid out, betting tickets discarded, the heavily distorted voice from the loudspeaker announced that the next race would commence in fifteen minutes, and the music resumed.

  Andrej bought an ice-cold can of cola and studied the racing form. Greyhounds at 240 meters. He didn’t understand a jot of it, but no matter. He would bet high, that’s what he was here for.

  “You fellows have a tip for me?” he asked jovially of the bystanders, his wallet in his hand.

  The men did not answer; he could see they were sizing him up, perhaps estimating how they might profit from this visit from an outsider. But Andrej felt self-assured.

  “Win, forecast, or trio?” someone asked.

  “Win,” Andrej replied confidently, so as not to let on that he had no idea what they were talking about.

  “Bet on Laika, then.” The tipster was a small, unshaven man in a tweed jacket and jogging pants, with a chewed-off cigarillo in the corner of his mouth.

  Laika, that was the name of the first living being in outer space.

  “Why Laika?” A
ndrej asked, a bundle of banknotes in his hand.

  “Fastest bitch last year,” the man replied, with a knowing nod.

  Andrej bet three hundred dinars on Laika.

  By the time he cycled home he had lost more than a thousand dinars. But he had no regrets: he saw it as a useful lesson, and on top of it, one he had not had to pay for out of his own pocket. Laika, it turned out, was old and slow and finished last, and in the next race, Drago, the favorite, was beaten by Golden Dream. He resolved to return the following week and approach things more wisely: he would spread his bets, and would wager “reverse forecast,” meaning he only had to choose the first- and second-place dogs, regardless of their order. This was less risky. And most of all, he would no longer listen to the small man with the tweed jacket who, he noticed after the fact, did not bet on Laika or Drago but, in both cases, on the winning dog.

  On his next visit to the dog races he lost most of the blackmail money. A few times, though, he came close: his dogs finished first and third, then second and fourth; but he did not win. Not even once. Laika was in the starting box for the last race, although probably no one bet on her. As it happened, things went even worse for her than last time, because when the gates swung open, she did not leave her box at all. As the other greyhounds tore into the first curve, leaving a red dust cloud behind them like a quick-burning fuse, her owner, a stout Gypsyish man in a leather jacket, approached the starting gate and started hitting the bars and prodding her with a stick. Laika crept out of the box, to the great amusement of the spectators, her tail between her legs and her scrawny back hunched. She watched her rivals, now on the far side of the track, as they reached their top speed, let her narrow head droop, and lifted a front paw, as though to show an injury. The announcer provided witty commentary throughout, and as the tractor towed away the starting boxes to clear the track for the finish, her owner clipped on her leash and led her to the small shed that served as a kennel.

 

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