Island of The World

by Michael D. O'Brien

  “So, you were looking at the photo”, she says. “Yes, that is how I knew you.”

  What does she mean?

  Seeing the confusion in his eyes, she sits down beside him on the mattress and looks with him at the photograph.

  “It’s old”, she muses. “See here, written on the back, 1892. It must have cost a lot to have it done in those days.” She looks at the boy. “Do you know who he is?”

  He does not respond.

  “This is your grandfather.”

  Suddenly she jumps to her feet, goes to the kitchen area, and returns carrying the small mirror in her hands. Seating herself beside him again, she turns the glass toward him. The mirror and the photo are side by side.

  With his heart hammering, he slowly looks into the mirror. He is paralyzed by what he sees. The face is the same as the one in the photograph. Not quite the same, for the eyes of the boy in the photograph are laughing.

  His aunt touches the frame of the mirror.

  “It is you”, she whispers.

  He cannot close his eyes now, though he desires to do so. He can only look from one to the other and back again. A whimper rises in his throat, followed by the moans of a dying animal.

  “Josip”, she whispers, stroking his head with her hand, tears running down her cheeks.

  Then it is possible to see farther—not much, just a little. Yet this opening of the interior prison-gate permits a sudden inrush and outrush of feeling. His chest heaves and he begins to pant; then a sob escapes his lips.

  His aunt is sobbing openly now, and his crying blends with hers. When it is over, she says again his name.

  “Josip.”

  He does not bury his face in his knees. He merely continues to look into the mirror. The eyes are red and wet, the mouth is buckled with pain. Still, it is now a living face, and he understands that this is better than what it has been.

  “Josip”, says his aunt. “Are they gone?”

  He nods in affirmation. His first word. She holds him tightly in her arms and he buries his face in her shoulder.

  So, with time and love, words return to the world. And with them comes the resumption of action. He remembers who he is. He knows what has happened to his past, though it is unbearable most days to think about it. At night he frequently dreams of the blood and fire. He is always running through fire or swimming frantically in blood, drowning in it, for he has never learned to swim. He wakes choking in the dark. It is terrifying, but it seems better, somehow, than nothing.

  Each day he empties the toilet pail into the sewer hole at the end of the alley, washes the dishes and pots, waters the plant on the windowsill. Once a week, he goes out with Eva to shop. German soldiers patrol the streets, and sometimes shots ring out. Eva tells him that Partisans hiding in the city are sniping at Germans, that their army is drawing closer, and the Germans will soon be gone. She sells her china cups to a woman who lives in a wealthy home higher on a hill of the city, and this augments her meager supply of coins. Josip carries home the bag of potatoes, the sack of beans, and the half cabbage that they are now able to purchase.

  On a Sunday, they walk beside the river, which is now swift-flowing and jade-colored from the mountains. He is afraid to look at it, because at any moment black sacks bound with wire might float along. Once, they pass a church, and his feet turn toward it, to the right. But he winces, for it seems that in his mind he will always see a naked body on the steps of churches, with its face smashed and its flesh mutilated and holes in its hands and feet and side. So, he tells his feet that it is ridiculous to turn always to the right and makes them go left. His aunt observes this struggle, follows him without a comment. Later, she purchases a loaf of sweetbread at enormous cost, for there is still some money remaining from the sale of the china. They even find a place that sells small satchels of tea. For supper they feast on boiled cabbage and fried potatoes sprinkled with finely chopped smoked sausage. Afterward, the sweetbread and tea. Josip cries a little, wordlessly, without explanation, as he slowly eats and savors each bite of the bread. He lets the currants and buttered pieces melt slowly in his mouth. His aunt asks no questions about this, though she observes it all with a look of profound sadness. She uses his name often, more than people usually do with others. Yet he is not unpleased by this, for now that he has found himself again, his body and his mind reunited, he is Josip.

  “Josip, did you like the supper?”

  “Yes”, he nods. Then nods again and looks up into her eyes with a swift glance of gratitude.

  Later in the evening, she chatters about inconsequential things, hums songs, shows him a book that she brings out of her bedroom. It is a tattered picture book with colored photos of the Adriatic. He spends hours going through it, lingering long over each picture.

  “Do you like it?” she breaks in at one point.

  “Yes”, he murmurs.

  They have begun to speak together, now and then. She does not ask much in this regard.

  Some days it is: “Josip, take the garbage to the back and burn it.”

  “Yes, Auntie.”

  Or: “Josip, did you wash this morning?”

  “No, Auntie.”

  “Then do it now, you smell like a dog in a rainstorm.”

  “All right.”

  “And don’t forget to wash behind your ears.”

  “I won’t.”

  One, two, maybe three words at a time. Little by little, nothing that plunges him into the sea of memory, in which he is not yet ready to drown. It is there, and he knows what is in it. But he will not rush into it as he did as a child on the day a lastavica perched on his fingertips.

  Strangely, the memory of the swallow is calming. He does not think about it, merely closes his eyes and lets it perch in his mind.

  “Josip, what are you smiling about?” asks his aunt with a chuckle.

  His eyes snap open. “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, it was something. What was it?”

  “A bird.”

  “Ah, a bird”, she sighs and returns to her sewing. She is darning his old socks, the ones in which he walked from the mountains. But he cannot think of the mountains, so he returns to the sea.

  That night he crawls under his blanket and as usual curls into a ball, preparing to fall into bad dreams. Eva comes to him and kneels by his mattress. She strokes his forehead.

  “Today you smiled again”, she whispers. “You will be well.”

  She opens his clenched hand (now he realizes for the first time that his hands are always clenched). Into the palm of his hand she puts something. It is soft and round. She turns off the light and goes away into her bedroom. He hears her move about in the room and then lie down on her bed. The springs squeak while she tosses and turns, as she always does. Then he knows by the sounds of her breathing that she is asleep. He sniffs what is in his hand, pungent with the scent of fruit. It is a fig. He puts it into his mouth and chews. His entire mouth, his tongue, his lips are flooded with sweetness. He holds it in his mouth as it turns to mash, then melts, and is absorbed by his body. Then he weeps silently and, without knowing it, falls into a dreamless sleep.

  7

  Josip has lived with his aunt for more than four months. During this time most of his hair fell out in long wisps, leaving his skull half-bald, a red scabby patchwork. Thick blond bristles are growing in again, and the scabs are gone. His fingernails softened and loosened as well, separating from the base, and then peeling off toward the tip. For several weeks he was fascinated by the red corrugated skin that lay underneath, fibrous and sensitive. The nails are growing in again.

  Now he can work at his aunt’s factory. This is a cement-walled building inside a fenced compound. It is located on the edge of the city in a section called Novi Grad, a half hour’s walk from their flat. They go there at dawn most mornings. Eva works in the company office, tapping on a typewriter or filing papers or making check marks on a list that tracks shipments in and out. Josip can see her through the window that d
ivides the office from the shop floor, as he runs back and forth among machines that make nuts and bolts and other small metal items. Seven men work on the ten machines, and they are always pressed for time, except when a truckload of metal fails to appear from the coast. Josip is not strong, yet he is able to accomplish his minor chores: carry buckets of bolts here and there, fill wooden boxes with them, hammer the lids closed, replenish the long-necked oil cans that lubricate the machines, check the level in the big oil barrel. He also fetches drinking water for the men, sweeps the floor of metal tailings at day’s end, dumps them into the scrap bin for melting, carries firewood to the small smelter outside in the back lot.

  It is dirty work, but he is grateful to have it. He is helping to bring in some income, is no longer eating away so much of his aunt’s wages. The men treat him well; they don’t want to lose him. There are a lot of people without jobs right now who would eagerly fill any opening, but they would demand higher wages. Josip works ten hours a day and receives a quarter of a man’s wage. It is the first time in his life he has earned money. He is proud of this, conscientious in his labors, and he learns from his mistakes. Besides, a life of constant action has distracted him from memories of his recent past. He drops onto the mattress each night after a hasty supper and falls asleep within minutes. He does not awake until his aunt calls him in the morning, and he seldom remembers his dreams.

  Still, he is thin. His cheekbones stick out too far, and all his ribs are visible. This is meaningless to him, but not to his aunt, who pushes whatever she can into his mouth. Generally he feels continuous hunger, yet he holds back, pats his concave belly, tells her he is full. She is thinner too, paler than when he first met her, with dark pouches under her eyes. She is only thirty years of age, she tells him, but he thinks she looks like a woman of fifty. Her hair is completely gray.

  Why is she so good to him when he gives so little in return? She is as generous as Fra Anto. Most people in the world, Josip knows, have faith in God, yet his aunt, it seems, has none. She does not go to church, even though there are churches everywhere. The city rings with bells and the calls of muezzins from their minarets. There is no crucifix in the apartment, nor are there any other religious images. There is no Bible or catechism, no prayer books or rosaries. Her sisters are very religious, Mamica and Sister Katarina, but why Eva is not is a subject they never discuss. He thinks of Mamica from time to time—that she still exists cannot be questioned. He knows she has died but feels she has not. This is reinforced by the presence of his aunt, who, if no longer as beautiful as she was on her wedding day and never as beautiful as her sisters, still shares many of their mannerisms and qualities, including a kind heart, much like Mamica.

  Josip does not pray with words. He does not think about all that. Whenever he sees a church, he feels both drawn to it and afraid of it. He never enters one. He works and sleeps and when he is not doing these, he simply rests. He believes that this speeds the growth of his hair and his fingernails. He hopes, as well, that it speeds the growth of his muscles. Strength has become very important to him. If you are strong, you can work. If you can work, you will eat.

  One evening, as they eat a meal of boiled potatoes, his aunt is excited, chattering animatedly about the end of the war. Since April, Partisan flags have been flying from the roofs of government buildings. It is like the old flag of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, but it has a red star in the white center bar. Eva thinks that it will become the national flag because the Partisans are now the official government in Belgrade, ruling over all the peoples of Yugoslavia. The old puppet regime of Croatia has ended. Its army has been conquered, and its soldiers have fled to Austria. Something new and wonderful is being born. She hopes, moreover, that her husband may soon return. She has not seen him or heard from him for more than eighteen months. He is in the Partisan army. She will not consider for an instant the possibility that he has been killed. She will admit the slight possibility that he may have been wounded and is recovering, perhaps in the north, in Belgrade, because the capital has fine hospitals and good physicians, both Serb and Russian.

  “But we are Croats!” Josip says to her during one such musing. He is unsure why he says it. It just jumps off his tongue.

  “Your uncle is half-Croat”, Eva replies with a thoughtful look. “His mother was a Serb from Banja Luka.”

  “Is my uncle a Chetnik?” Josip asks.

  “No”, she shakes her head abruptly. “Never that. But the Chetniks have come into the army, and they all work together to make a new country. The Partisans have given us a democratic Yugoslavia, a free republic.”

  “What is a republic?”

  “It’s a government by the people.”

  “No king?”

  “That’s right. No more kings, no more tyrants.”

  Another day, he asks her, “Will there be more food now that we have a new government?”

  “Yes, of course. They will organize things properly, and our country’s riches will no longer be siphoned off by European capitalists.”

  This begs more questions, but he is too tired to probe further.

  “Josip”, she says. “Would you like to catch us some fish?”

  “How will I catch them?”

  “It’s not hard. I can show you.”

  “Do you have a net?”

  She laughs. “You catch fish from the sea with a net. You catch fish from the river with a line and a hook. Do you think you could try?”

  “Yes”, he declares, lifting his chin and throwing his shoulders back. She smiles fondly at him and pats his shoulder.

  From somewhere she obtains a hook and a spool of heavy black thread, more like thin cord. On their next day off work, they go down together to the Miljacka and throw it into the water. Not much happens. Nothing really, except a lot of waiting. Eva pulls it in, hand over hand. Up it comes, their fish—a bare hook with a bit of green slime dangling from it. They throw the line in again. Nothing. Again and again they try, and after a few hours they give up. There are other people along the bank tossing in their lines and a few standing on a nearby bridge dangling long strings that they jerk up and down. Now and then a wriggling sliver is pulled up.

  He would like to try again in the evenings after work, but then it is dark outside and too dangerous. He might get shot, his aunt warns. So, he waits for Sunday, when he can teach himself to fish without fear of being shot.

  On the next free day, Josip walks toward the river along a street named Ante Pavelić and sees soldiers tearing down the old street signs and putting up new ones: Marshal Tito. An army truck passes, with a big red star painted on its door. In its open-topped back, several men are standing and rocking with the motion of the truck. Josip stops in his tracks to watch them go by. The men are not soldiers. Their hands are bound in front of them, and their faces are bruised and bloodied. Their hair is disheveled and their clothing rumpled. They are burly workers, stout businessmen in shirts and ties, and even a friar in his brown robe. Four soldiers guard them with bayoneted rifles. In a glance, Josip sees that the faces of the prisoners are bleak with dismay. He feels sympathy for them, though they are probably criminals. But surely the priest is not. It is confusing. The faces of the soldiers are hard with contempt. It seems to him that he has seen such expressions before, somewhere. Then he remembers the men who came to Pačići—their eyes. In the eyes of these soldiers is the same expression.

  All of this occurs within a few seconds, yet it is sufficient to impress upon Josip a sense of the architecture of his new world. It will be months, and in some aspects years, before he deciphers it all, but now he understand the basics. The Partisans are the government, and the Partisans killed his past, and thus the new government is his enemy. He realizes at the same instant that he must never speak of this—not to anyone, not even to his aunt. And certainly not to his uncle, if his uncle ever returns.

  That day he catches his first fish. He has rubbed the hook with a bit of grease, saved from their last sausage. When the fi
sh takes the hook, he thinks he has merely snagged a rock at the bottom of the river. Then the line jerks in his hands and zigs and zags, disturbing the surface of the water. A thrill quivers upward along the line and penetrates through his fingers into his whole body. Gasping, he resists. Hand over hand he pulls it in.

  Fish, like men, are fond of sausage. This is important to know. You learn something new every day.

  It’s not all that big; not quite as long as his shoe. But it’s a healthy brown trout, spotted with colored dots. It thrashes around mightily on the pavement, gasping for breath. He tries to carry it home on the string, but the line breaks. So, he has no choice but to stick a finger into its raspy gill and to carry it this way. A strange feeling, sticking your finger inside the body of a living thing that hates what you are doing to it. It makes him sad, but not so sad that it can dispel the glow of triumph. Since he came to this city he has not until now felt this happy. There are hours each day, whole passages of days, in fact, when all energy melts from him and he is merely a sack containing a ball of sorrow that must not be closely examined. He often feels like crying, but he is learning not to give in to the feeling. It can stay inside, he tells himself. All inside, pushing farther and farther inward, into a cellar from which it cannot escape. There are harder moments, when colors fade, when sound goes too, and he can only put his head between his knees and stare at the floor. There are times when he still curls into a ball on his mattress, with a knife turning and turning in the center of his chest. These moments have become less frequent during the past month.

  The fish has completely dispelled all gloom. It is flashing in the sun, covered with jewels, silver, gold, its pale eyes reflecting the sky. He runs all the way home with it. Stamping swiftly up the stairs to the third floor, he stifles a cry that would alert his aunt to the coming good news. He flings open the door and bursts into the kitchen. She is seated at the table, cutting the top off a single rubbery carrot. Her face lights up with astonishment, the gray flees from her skin, her cheeks flush red, and her eyes sparkle!