Island of The World

by Michael D. O'Brien

  He sits back on the bank and stares at the water. A black sack slowly floats by in center-stream, pulled along by the current. Then another. Followed by a third. A fourth drifts closer to the shore and an eddy rolls it a little. There is a human face at one end, a man. The man’s body is bound by wire, and the black sack is in fact brown, darkened by the water. It is a robe. It is the same as the robe worn by someone he once knew, back there in the place he has come from, a long time ago. The face submerges and the sack is pulled onward. Three more bodies, each like the others, float by.

  He gets to his feet and climbs to the street. He turns right and walks again. Night is falling by the time he leaves the last street and continues on the road. He is going forward to another place that does not matter. He walks and walks. Now his body is complaining about hunger, and his limbs are growing weak. Nothing moves on the road for an hour, then another hour. The stars are out in force, and the whisper of the river is strong in his right ear.

  He sleeps in another abandoned shed that night, without dreams, for the exhaustion of the body will not permit even the slightest refusal of its craving for rest. In the morning, he goes down to the river and pushes his head under again, after checking to see if more sacks will float past. There are none. Then he goes back to the road and continues his journey. All day he walks. He is dimly aware that people in vehicles, on foot, or riding on animals pass him, going in both directions. No one gives him trouble. He does not concern himself with this, because he is alone in the world and they are only shadows. The river leaves the road and swings away into the eastern mountain range. The track beneath his feet begins to rise steeply. Now he is sweating heavily under the sun. Now he is chilled as it hides behind the mountains. Now he is shivering again as the stars come out. Now it is snowing again.

  Higher and higher his feet take him. He cannot find another shed in which to sleep, so he continues to follow his body long into the night. There comes a moment when his thirst commands him to stop. He tries to drink from his water flask, but it is empty. He did not fill it back there at the river. He takes a few more steps forward. He turns to the river, but it has disappeared. He turns back toward the city, but it is also too far, no glow in the sky where it should be, no glow ahead. Nothing. The snow has ceased falling, and the thick clouds part, revealing stars. Yet the road remains. It is there.

  His head is burning, his eyes are burning. He is a skull in a heap of embers, he is a pool of blood. He is silent. He is dead. A few more steps, and he pitches forward and falls unconscious onto the road.

  A foot presses into his chest. As his eyes burn and burn and flutter open at last, he sees only a shape bending over him. The presence is not a presence but an absence of light surrounded by stars. There is no foot on his chest, but rather a pressure inside his ribs pushing for release.

  He feels his body being lifted, his head and arms flopping backward. The arms that carry him are as big as the world; they are the monster of the sea that will pull him down into the deep currents of devouring. He can no longer resist anything. He wants to put on his burnished armor and stride into the agora to plead for the means to go in search of his father. But he can do nothing, for all words collapse into fire, all ships burn, all towns and cities burn—and people burn inside them—all words fail to change the minds of elders, the good and the bad. This does not matter, because good and bad have now dissolved.

  The sky throws enough pale light for the boy to see that he is riding on the back of a moving animal. It clips and clops slowly forward, and its long ears twitch at every sound in the surrounding dark. It is snorting puffs of frost into the air. He reaches out to pluck a hair from between the ears, because he must braid it into a gift. He will braid the garlic so it won’t be spoiled by frost, or else Mamica would be angry with him.

  The word Mamica has power. As it rises to the surface of his mind, he whimpers and then begins a low, low, dark moaning that does not cease. He wants to vomit, but cannot because the holy is within him. He must not waste it, no sacrilege may pass his lips, but he cannot remember what this means.

  “Ooh, ooh”, murmurs a deep voice behind him, a voice connected to the arms that are around him. A mouth clicks and a leather strap crosses the boy’s lap, pulling to the right.

  He is riding with a man on a donkey, going along a road into nowhere. The man knows where they are going, but it does not matter.

  “Sleep, sleep”, murmurs the man. “Soon we will be there.”

  He sleeps again and burns and burns; his lips are cracked and his tongue scrapes the roof of his mouth. When he opens his eyes, light is everywhere—green upon the eastern side of the valley, rose and gold upon the west. There are houses along the way, here and there, some in the hills above the road. A human voice calls from a forest. Cocks are crowing.

  His body is too sore to turn around and look at the face of the man behind him, whose body is close and warm and whose arms keep him from falling onto the road. The donkey is white. It is still puffing frost and flicking its ears.

  Now they have come to a village. No, a thousand villages pushed together into one. Along its skyline can be seen tall spires, like needles. These are familiar to him, though he has never been here before. They are pictures in a book, he is a boy in a book, the story is full of blood.

  “I—”, he croaks.

  “Ah, you are awake”, says the voice of the man. “Good. Soon you will have food.”

  How can he speak to one who has stolen him? He will not speak, he will be silent. He is dead.

  “What is your name, boy?” The man asks, as they enter a long street full of countless houses.

  I have no name, the boy thinks.

  “No answer? Tell me, boy, why were you lying on the road in the middle of the night, far from anywhere?”

  It is important to stare straight ahead, for the opportunity will present itself for escape. He will run. He will not stop running, and never again will he permit another to catch him.

  “Did you fall off a truck, a wagon? Did you run away from home? Did your Papi beat you?”

  Now the boy turns a little and sees the face of the man for the first time. He is dark-skinned, blue-eyed. The eyes are gentle, worried. His hair and moustache are black, with threads of gray in them.

  “Me, I am Alija. If you tell me who you are and where you have come from, I can return you to your family. Do you have a family?”

  No longer is it certain that children have families. Once there was a world where children had mothers and fathers, and those few who did not were taken in by relatives. That world has gone.

  “You do not answer”, says Alija. “Are you afraid to go home? Did they not treat you well?”

  Now the man’s voice falters.

  “Or are they. . . ?” He asks no more questions. He turns the donkey’s head into an alleyway that climbs the slope of a hill filled with crumbling houses. Some have bullet holes in their walls. One has been gutted by fire. From there, the donkey is guided into a smaller alley, narrow, shadowed, and stinking of urine. The sweat of the donkey. The scent of tobacco in the man’s coat. Only such smells have returned to the boy. Nothing more.

  By a door at midpoint in a series of doors, within a single long building from which plaster has fallen, the donkey comes to a halt. The man slides off its rump, lifts the boy from its back, and puts him onto the ground. The boy’s knees buckle, and he begins to fall, but the man grabs his coat and holds him upright. He shouts a name, and the door opens. A woman steps out into the alley. Small children are hanging onto her skirts, peering cautiously from behind the fortress of her body.

  “What is this!” she cries in alarm.

  “I found him lying on the road in the night”, replies the man. “And you bring him here!”

  “He is—” Alija does not finish his thought. “He has nowhere to go, I think.”

  The woman shakes her head, anxious, irritated, staring at the boy with disapproval.

  “Who is he?”

&
nbsp; “I do not know. He does not speak.”

  She shakes her head again. “You risk your life to find a handful of food to fill these little mouths, and you bring home no more than another mouth!”

  “I have brought food”, mumbles the man, pointing to two sacks dangling from the neck of the donkey. “Beans and corn meal.”

  When the man reaches for the sacks, the boy remains standing and stumbles back a step or two. Then he turns and staggers away down the alley.

  “Come here!” shouts the man, who is about to follow and bring him back. “Where are you going?!”

  But the woman seizes Alija’s arm. “Let him go!” she cries. “What can we do? There are so many. You have your own to feed!”

  So, he staggers onward. As blood pumps through his limbs, the muscles begin to work properly. Though he stumbles on cobblestones, he can walk now. Going nowhere. Back down the hill toward the maze of streets. At a corner of the main alley, his feet turn to the right. Like the donkey, they carry his body along; they know where to go, though he does not.

  Now he is in a wider street, where people are hurrying to and fro, hunched inside their coats, heads down, eyes strained with fear. He turns another corner and enters an open square. Along one side of it stand a dozen market stalls filled with vegetables for sale. Old women sit on wooden crates beside each stall. A few carry hatchets or large knives in their hands. As he passes them, their eyes observe him cautiously. One lifts her knife in an abrupt gesture, warning him away.

  He goes on and finds himself caught in a flow of people crossing the square. Where he is going he does not know. He is going with them, that’s all.

  A gunshot cracks the air and echoes against the surrounding buildings. Women scream and run toward alleys and doorways. Men grab women and children and hurry them away to cover. Another shot rings out.

  The boy is standing alone in the open square. He is silent, he is dead, so it is not necessary to run, though he senses he should do something. It is impossible to think about what it is. And for once his feet will not show him the way. So, he looks up at the sky, where it would be possible to fly if his arms had feathers. A flicker of wings that no human eye can follow, and he would soar into the high places where no man can go.

  He lifts his arms and closes his eyes. Yes, it is possible to go up, and perhaps a bullet will send him there, or something else, he doesn’t know what, but he will wait for it. It will come.

  Another shot. It whacks and pings beside him, chips the cobbles, and a splinter of stone tears the leg of his trousers. It does not hurt. He looks down at his leg and watches as a tiny droplet of blood on the cloth slowly expands.

  Children are crying, a baby wails, men and women are shouting at him.

  “Run, run!” and “Lie flat!”

  These are the voices that can be heard on the edges of storms when the breakers of the sea rush up from their prison and devour the land, when birds are ripped from the air by black wind. Sometimes these voices lurk under dangerous waters, between two monsters, the monsters on all sides, the monsters behind and ahead and below, and only above is safety to be found, though even this does not matter.

  A woman’s voice is screaming more loudly than the others. He sees her running toward him from the shelter of a shop door, her coat flapping, her eyes wild. Another whack-ping—explosion! She has him now, and she has stopped screaming. Her mouth is a tight line, her eyes are like fire, and she enfolds him in her coat as she drags him from the open space toward shelter. Reaching the alcove of the shop, she throws him onto the steps and covers him with her body.

  Soon the gunfire ceases. People wait. Then after a time, one by one, they come out of their hiding places and go on with their business.

  The woman stands and pulls the boy to his feet. She holds him by his shoulders. Her face is gaunt, gray-skinned.

  “Go home”, she says. “Go quickly to your mother. It is too dangerous to come here.”

  He says nothing, can only look back into her eyes from the pool of his emptiness. She pauses and peers more closely, her eyes flickering all over his face, his hair, his cracked lips.

  Suddenly, she begins to blink rapidly. “What is your name?” she asks.

  He has no name.

  “What is your name?” she asks again, shaking him. He opens his mouth and cannot close it. Nothing will come out of it.

  Tears springing to her eyes, she whispers, “Are you from Rajska Polja?”

  So it is that he arrives at a place where he may rest for a while. She lives on the third floor of a large old building in which there are dozens of flats. The building is a block long and much in need of repairs. She has two rooms. One is a bedroom, the other is a place for sitting, cooking, eating. In it are a single soft chair with a white lace cloth on the back, a bare wooden table and chairs, and a little cabinet filled with glasses and china cups.

  Above the table is a window, and on its sill sits a potted plant with purple flowers. The walls are covered with peeling green wallpaper. In one corner of the room, behind a screen, a tin pail serves as a toilet. After he has slept off and on for three days, lying on a mattress that the woman put in the corner of the main room for him, and has swallowed the soup and bread she continually forces upon him, and drunk gallons of water, he is able to sit up with his back to the wall and to observe.

  He knows that her name is Eva and that she is his aunt. This does not matter.

  For two or maybe three weeks, he lives with her in this manner. She goes out most mornings because she works in a factory, though some days the factory does not open. At such times, she remains at home or goes out to buy food or simply is elsewhere. From time to time, she asks him questions, though whenever she does he closes his eyes and sits motionless on the floor with his head against the wall. If she asks questions that come too close to what must never be recalled, he simply drops his head between his knees and remains in this position for hours. In the beginning, this made her angry and then frantic with pleading, because she wanted to know something desperately. At other times she would sob uncontrollably, as if she had read everything in his silence and had extracted from it far more than he himself knew, which was nothing, really. Now she has become quieter and asks infrequently.

  She dressed the cut in his leg, and it is healing. It was infected for a time, but she cured this with stinging salt. He loathes the pail behind the screen, though he is forced by necessity to use it. An indoor toilet is unthinkable, very disgusting. He has never heard of such a thing. When he is able, in the third or fourth week, he leaves the apartment for the first time and finds at the back of the building a heap of garbage and blasted bricks behind which it is possible to meet his bodily needs unseen by any eyes. At that time, also, he begins to wash his hands in a tin bowl at the kitchen table. Until then, she has done it for him, his hands and his face. Once, after she goes off to work, he undresses and washes his body, especially his feet. Then he dresses himself again, learning in the process how bad he smells, that he has become as low as a donkey or a goat—worse, for the animals are clean in their stench, while he is not. He understands this. It can take hours to see such things, even the simplest. The smell is due, in part, to old blood, someone else’s; he won’t think about that. Also the goat milk that soaked him, now gone sour, and also the sweat, his own and the donkey’s mingled.

  It is impossible to look into the little mirror on the wall beside the kitchen cupboard. He is very afraid to see what is in it.

  He can look out the single window in the rooms, but the view is of a brick wall. Sometimes the window is bright, sometimes dull, sometimes black. He sleeps and wakes and sleeps again.

  She comes home, feeds him, goes away again. No one visits his aunt. Only once, a neighbor woman living down the hall knocks on the door asking for a bit of flour to make bread; she does not want to come in. His aunt has only a sack of meal for pancakes. She lends a little, and afterward complains to the silent boy that she has been foolish to give away food now that the
re is twice as much need.

  Every few days she brings home vegetables. Once, an orange. She kneels beside his mattress, peels it for him, and feeds it to him sliver by sliver. It is sour, but when it is in his belly he feels his body’s strength return a little, and it does not take so long to see things.

  In the fifth week, she brings home some clothing for him: a shirt and trousers and underclothes, also two pairs of socks. They are all well-worn by their previous owner, but are clean.

  One day when she is away, he examines a few framed photographs on a shelf above the kitchen table. Old men and women. A young couple in wedding garments—his aunt, very pretty, and the uncle he has never met, strong and handsome. Beside it is a photo of Sister Katarina of the Holy Angels as a young nun, very beautiful. It is not possible to feel beauty, but he recognizes it, knows what it is. Beside this is a photograph of a boy.

  He recognizes this face, though he cannot remember when he saw it—long ago, back there in the world that is now gone. He takes the photo from the shelf, sits down on the mattress with his back to the wall, and holds it before him. He gazes at the image for a time, straining to recall who it is. It is a strong and solemn face, yet kind and gentle. Though the mouth is set firmly with resolve, the large eyes are dancing with humor. This is a person whom he would like as a friend, if they could know each other. But who is it? Surely they have met before.

  For the first time since he has come here, he tries hard to understand a thing with his mind. The strain is too much, and after a while he lies down with the photo in his hands and falls asleep. When he awakes, his aunt is standing by the hotplate, stirring something in a steaming pot. She looks at him and smiles. It is her first smile since they have met.

  He sits up. She nods in approval.