Island of The World

by Michael D. O'Brien

  Did the bad men come here? Has everyone run away into the forest? But what about the mother giving birth? She could not have run away. He must find her and her husband and ask if they know where everyone has gone.

  Step by step he goes along the lane. Another sleeping form in the snow, an old woman. He shakes her, but she will not wake up. Farther on there are three more shadows, a man, two women. They will not wake up, no matter how hard he shakes them. Whimpering, gazing in fright at the passing houses, he sees that each has been gutted by fire. Because most are made of stone and earth, with slate shingles, there is no longer any fire in them. A few sparks burst from within their doorless entries, mouths waiting to swallow him.

  Next comes the house belonging to Tereza and her husband. Unlike the others, it is not burnt, though its door hangs open. He steps hesitantly onto its porch and goes inside. He has visited this house many times in the past. He remembers that there is always a candle and a box of matches on the window sill next to the door. He feels about in the dark and finds them. The candle has been knocked over. He sets it upright, strikes a match, and puts it to the wick. The flame of the candle rises, illuminating everything within the room. It is the kitchen. Furniture has been smashed and tumbled into a corner. Some of it has burned but is now cold. There is a puddle of water on the floor. Someone has put out the fire.

  He jumps at the sound of a sudden noise that comes from within the next room. Squeak-squeak. Squeak-squeak.

  Carrying the candle with him, he peers carefully around the doorframe and sees the old midwife, sitting in her rocking chair in a corner. She is staring ahead, the white moons in her eyes. She is wrapped in a blanket. She sighs like a whistle, and moves the chair a little. Squeak-squeak. Squeak-squeak.

  Josip goes to her.

  “Who is there?” she whistles.

  He swallows and whispers, “Josip.”

  She turns her head toward his voice.

  “Are you alive, after all, Josip?”

  “Please, where are my mother and father?” he asks.

  “Ah,” she breathes, “ah.”

  “Do you know?”

  “Come here, child, come closer.” She reaches out a spotted claw to him, which is gnarled and blue with the cold. He touches her fingers with his own. “Sit with me”, she says.

  “I cannot. My house is burning and I must find my parents.”

  “Sit with me”, she says again, tears rolling down her old face.

  He does not know how he can comply with her request, but he moves closer.

  He begins to cry. He is ashamed even as he feels the release of tears. She reaches up and gently pulls him to herself. He kneels on the floor and lays his head on her lap. She strokes and strokes his forehead, his hair, his cheeks. At first he is repulsed by this, then succumbs, and lets her go on. He cries and cries, not like the weeping when the man slapped him, nor the sobbing of his long walk home; it is something else, a kind of crying he has not done since he was very young.

  She puts her other arm around his shoulder and rocks the chair.

  “You are tired”, she says at last. “You have come from afar.” He nods without speaking.

  “Rest”, she says. “Rest a little, for you still have far to travel.”

  “I want to go home.”

  She does not reply, and in her silence he remembers that he no longer has a home.

  She lets him cry a long time, stroking and rocking and holding him to herself.

  Pale gray light grows in the bedroom window. His feet have woken him, they are very cold. He still wears his coat and boots, and a blanket is around his shoulders. His cheek is resting on a shoulder. Where am I?

  Then he sees the old woman’s face next to his. He is surprised to find that he is sitting on her lap, her arms around him. Coming fully awake, he straightens up, feeling very embarrassed. He is too old for this! Uneasily he slips from her lap and stands looking down at her. Her eyes are open but no whistle breath comes from her mouth. On the floor, spreading from beneath the chair, is a pool of purple blood that has frozen in the night.

  Startled, he steps back and bumps into the bed. Turning, he sees that Tereza is lying on it beneath blankets and sheet. There is a newborn baby in her arms. Beside her on the bed, her husband, Josip, sleeps with his arm around her waist, covering the newborn as well. Everyone is sleeping.

  They are asleep as the entire village is asleep. The husband sleeps with a large hole in his back, from which blood has ceased to pour. His wife sleeps with a small round hole in her forehead. The child sleeps with a hole in its chest.

  Josip steps backward out of the room. In the kitchen, he turns and then hurries through the doorway and out into the lane. A light snow is falling from the overcast sky. A few steps beyond, toward the church, two figures lie on the ground, white with a dusting of snow. Josip goes to them. One is Petar’s father, lying on his back, asleep. Beside him is an old hunting rifle, its barrel bent at an angle, the butt of its stock smashed to splinters. Lying face down is Petar, also sleeping. His face is turned to the side, as if he is dreaming deeply with open mouth. The back of his skull is split and is locked in a pool of frozen blood. His outstretched right arm has no hand, only a severed stump. When Josip sees this he screams and runs toward the church. Smoke is rising in wisps from its broken windows.

  On the steps he finds another body—a man. It is lying on its back, without clothing. It floats in a sea of frozen blood. It is difficult to know who it is, because the face is a mass of pulp. The arms and legs are outstretched. There is a great wound in the side. Another part of him has been cut out, for in the most private place there is a gaping hole. Bullets have been fired into the hands and feet. Josip then sees the feet, which are huge, bruised, with a bandage or two.

  He vomits, screams, vomits, gags, vomits again, and then when his stomach can turn out nothing more, he runs into the church through its open doors. At the entrance he stumbles over a heap of brown cloth. It is Fra Anto’s habit.

  “O-O-O-O”, he moans, stumbling toward the sanctuary,

  “O-O-O-O, Jesus—”

  A terrible emptiness reigns in the church, for the tabernacle door is open and there is nothing within it. Entering the sanctuary where he has so often served Mass, he finds the sacred hosts strewn about on the floor. Some are muddy, some bloody, and the large host from the monstrance bears the imprint of a boot. He drops to his knees and scrambles around, cramming the hosts into his mouth. He does not think about this, does not question it, but merely does it. He tries not to vomit, and succeeds in keeping the hosts down. When everything has been consumed, he runs out the front door, past the body of the priest, and back along the lane toward the schoolhouse.

  By the light of day it is possible to see more bodies scattered here and there, in the side lanes and yards. Petar’s mother lying beside the creek, Marko and Sasa lying across their doorstep, Marko’s arms around his brother.

  Clomping up the front steps of the school, Josip sees the little gray cat, dead on the porch. The door has been blown open, disintegrated—blast marks all around it. Stepping inside warily, he hopes he will find his father alive, his mother as well. Instead there are only lifeless bodies. Josipa is among them.

  He stares at this for a moment, unable to move, all thought seared from his mind by what he beholds—so vast and dark that to gaze at it any longer would be to fall headlong into hell forever.

  He runs outside and down the lane toward his home. He comes to a brief halt before its ruined stone walls, only long enough to see that all the embers have settled down to ashes, and that two human skulls are within the ashes.

  Then he runs again and does not stop running.

  6

  Be silent! You are dead!

  The sun rises beyond the eastern range of the mountains, breaking though the thin overcast. Josip stops once at the head of the pass to look back at Rajska Polja. The snowfields of its western pastures are bathed in rose and gold, its houses appear to be normal, as
if life goes on within them. He turns away and resumes running along the path. He is without thought, without feeling.

  Be silent! You are dead!

  He is unaware of how long he runs and of what he sees along the way. There is stumbling at times, slowing of pace, resuming of pace, hastening, faltering, but always the headlong pitch of the disconnected body. The pain in his lungs and limbs is not pain, because the body is not his. He passes through Pačići, pausing only to drink from the water-skin that is still hanging about his neck. Bodies lie in the barnyard, but he does not look at them. All doors are open in the houses, no smoke rises from the chimneys. There are no animals, only a few chickens, ducks, and a single gander, which hisses at him and strikes at his shins with its beak. He does not feel it, and walks without haste across the bloodstained snow of the barnyard.

  Entering the footpath at the south side of the dwellings, he continues on as he has done until now. Little by little the path slopes downward, turns and twists around hillocks, around mountains, enters other valleys and goes ever on into nothing, into the nothing beyond nothing. Yet he senses that the nothing ahead is where he must go, because the nothing behind is the annihilation of everything. There are no tears, no cries, only a dull consciousness carried forward by this body, which is connected to it, yet does not belong to it.

  Though the sky is now deep blue without a cloud, there are no colors in the world. Birds have begun to call and swoop from pine to beech, yet there is no music in the world. There is no sound or motion other than his trajectory. Terror has dissolved, leaving only the gray consciousness into which there stabs from time to time the words Be silent, you are dead. He senses a little eruption of fear whenever these words enter, but the feeling evaporates almost immediately, because when you are dead there is no fear.

  He is walking now, for he can run no longer; the body will not let him. The sun crosses the sky as he goes ever downward. It lowers in the west toward the crest of a range he does not recognize, could no longer recognize even if he had seen it countless times and knew its name, for names no longer exist.

  As dusk begins to settle in, he arrives at the end of the trail, which meets with a wider path through the snow. It is like a road, for the marks of sleigh runners are upon it, as well as the prints of donkeys and men. The heels of the boot prints are on the left, the toes are on the right. These may have been made by bad men or by good men chasing the bad men, but none of this really matters. He turns to the right because that is where people are going, leaving the world emptier and emptier behind them with each step.

  He follows the road until night has fallen completely. He can no longer force the legs of the body to obey him. He is about ready to fall into the snow and sleep as Petar and the baby sleep, as Fra Anto and Tata and Mamica and Josipa sleep, when he hears a goat bleating nearby. It is standing on the road just ahead. As he approaches, it naaahs at him again and jumps into the snow beside the road. The goat sinks into it and tries to get out, but the snow is too deep. Josip stops and watches its struggles, then notices that beyond it stands a stone shed cutting into the side of the hill. Beyond that is an empty house, a black square against the charcoal snow, with a black chimney from which no smoke rises.

  He jumps into the snow and catches the collar of the goat. Together they lunge toward the shed. The goat escapes him and trots inside its wide-open doorway. He stumbles in after it and falls onto a pile of straw. Though it is cold inside, he can smell hay and the animal’s droppings. For a moment, this invigorates him, but then it quickly fades, as his mind registers no more smells. His eyes close, yet he cannot sleep immediately. Fire and blood fill his thoughts, while a gnawing pain grows in his belly. The goat trots all over him, naahing and naahing, hurting him with its sharp hoofs. Its distended bags slap him on the face. He reaches up and grabs the udders and squeezes. A jet of warm milk splashes his cheek. He opens his mouth and a stream of milk fills it. He squeezes and squeezes. The bags are very full, the milking is long overdue, and the goat is desperate. He empties its udders squirt by squirt into his mouth, choking and sputtering, losing a lot of it down the sides of his face, into his eyes, his collar, his jacket, his cap, until he is soaked from the chest upward and his belly bloated. Then the goat goes away. He pulls straw over himself, and the gray consciousness fades.

  The goat wakes him just before dawn. It trots on him again, forcing him to scramble around on hands and knees, bunting and butting him until he falls flat on the ground. It steps over his body, braces its legs, and demands another milking. Lying on his back, eyes tight shut, mouth wide open, he empties its life into his own. That done, he gets up and returns to the road.

  Within an hour or so, the snow underfoot becomes slush, and patches of wet gravel increase in number. The sun rises in an empty sky. By the time it is overhead, the entire road has become mud and gravel, deeply rutted and revealing the prints of animals and humans, all of them bearing onward in the direction he is going. The road is falling more steeply. Gradually it becomes drier, and now there are only patches of mud, though the woods on either side are still buried in snow. The air is growing warmer.

  In time the road comes to a bridge over a river. He crosses it and arrives at the intersection of another route. Because at all moments of choosing his feet have carried him to the right, he turns right once again. Now he is walking down the center of a gravel road that is flatter than the one he has left; it twists and turns as it follows beside the river.

  During the first hour, he meets no one. He passes three large rocks beside the road, and shortly after spies a dark form walking toward him. As it approaches, he sees that it is an old woman, leading a pig by a rope. It is a small pig, spotted brown and pink. She moves along slowly, bundled in a heavy felt coat, her head bound by a shawl of blanket cloth. When she notices him, she slows a little and stares at him, hisses and raises her walking stick.

  “Don’t!” she cackles. “Try to steal my pig, and I will break your head.”

  She walks on. He remains motionless, gazing after her. Then a rumble increases in volume from that direction. An open-backed army truck, carrying soldiers, appears around a bend in the road. One of the soldiers stands as they go by and points his rifle at the boy by the side of the road. He is a strange looking boy, his wet clothing filthy with mud, staring at them with an open mouth, hands dropped to his sides, arms spread a little. The other soldiers laugh and pull the man with the gun down to his seat. After they have gone, the smoke of their cigarettes and a cloud of exhaust hang in the air.

  He continues to walk, going nowhere. Now and then, distant rifle fire echoes against the walls of the valley through which the river passes. These sounds are far away, far, far away.

  It does not matter, near or far does not matter. When you are dead, it does not matter.

  Even so, as the sun crosses the sky again and falls silently toward the west, houses appear at random beside the road. Sometimes a person or two, farm people or mountain people, look down from their stone cottages or their animal sheds to the figure passing beneath them—a boy without weapons. They always return to what they were doing and do not trouble him.

  Another truck passes with soldiers in it. None aims a rifle at him.

  He sleeps that night in an abandoned shed, under a heap of straw. His hands shake continuously. He is so thirsty that he wakes in the dark and crawls on hands and knees toward the sound of water. It is a dribble running off the hillside beside the shed. He sucks at it until he is full, and then crawls back to the shed and sleeps.

  In the morning, he stumbles down to the road and walks on. All day long, his body drags him forward. He sees nothing of the passing scenery, only his feet. In-out, in-out, in-out. A blur of feet belonging to someone. His boots are soaked, cold in the morning, hot by afternoon, and whatever is inside these boots makes squishing noises to accompany the clip and clop and clip and clop that is without end.

  A horse and cart come trotting along the road behind him. On the driver’s board s
it two white-haired men with a black-haired boy between them. All three of their faces are anxious. They are moving quickly, and the boy on the road steps into the ditch to avoid being hit. As they pass, he notices the cart is carrying a scanty load of hay. Tethered to its staves are three brown goats and a white one.

  There are more and more houses now along the road. Soon the road becomes a cobbled street leading into a village. No, it is a hundred villages pushed close together. He senses that he has seen this before. Down in the middle of this place, he arrives at a bridge. It is an ancient bridge, flanked by two high towers. This too is familiar, though it does not matter.

  For no reason whatsoever, he climbs the steep arch of the bridge and stops at its crest. He gazes down into the water of the river. This is familiar also, the feeling that narrowness and wideness were once somehow important to him, but not any longer. A flag flaps on a pole on top of the tower, a flag he does not recognize. For a brief moment, he sees a boy beneath the flag, waving a sword that flashes in the sun.

  He wheels around and quickly returns to the street from which he has come. He turns right because his feet know he must always turn to the right. On he walks for a time, seeing none of the people who look at him from windows or who stare at him from the corners of their eyes as they pass him by. His water flask is empty, and he must drink. Hunger has returned as well, but it is thirst that drags him off the street and through an alley to the edge of the river. It is a chilly day, but the skiffs of snow are thin. After slipping and sliding down to the muddy bank, he kneels and plunges his face in. The water is very cold. He shudders, and opens his lips, sucks it in, chokes, sputters, and lifts his head. His body makes him do this. It wants to breathe, though it does not matter to him if it does or does not breathe. Yet because the thirst is strong, he pushes his face underwater again and sucks and sucks, until his teeth ache and his lungs demand that he breathe again.