Island of The World

by Michael D. O'Brien

  There is a funeral. Dozens of men and women take part in it, some in uniforms, some in rough clothing, all with guns firing a salute into the sky as the body is lowered into a hole dug from the frozen soil by pick and axe. There are orations. Then the soil is shoveled into the pit. Josip will always remember the sound, the thumping of hard chunks of dirt on a hollow body wrapped in a sheet, but later he can recall little of what is said that day.

  He stands beside his aunt throughout. Her skin is gray and her eyes are without tears, staring straight ahead. He cannot read her face. Perhaps beneath her lack of expression lies a sorrow so profound that it is beyond emotion, perhaps it is something else. To all eyes she is the epitome of courage. Jure is a war hero; she is his widow. She listens without visible feeling as veterans give accounts of her husband’s bravery under fire. No mention is made of certain events in the north, which, of course, have not occurred. There may be wolves of Pačići present, but the boy does not recognize any faces.

  On a pole by the grave, the new flag of Yugoslavia snaps and ripples in the wind. More than he observes the soldiers and their rites, Josip watches the flag, ponders its bars of color and its star. The order of colors is reversed. He recalls the flag of Croatia that his father kept in the parlor drawer beneath the altar of the crucifix, rolled up and waiting for a better day. It bore a red bar on top, white in the middle, and blue at the bottom. Rolled beside it was an older flag, which had a checkered white and red crest on it.

  The new flag bears the blue on the top, red on the bottom. Josip wonders at this—the first stirring of thought since the death of his uncle. Why have they not put the red on the top?

  After all, red is the color they love, is it not? Do they not think that this red reigns supreme over all the country?

  Then he understands that the red star is central, floating on an ocean of blood, swelling and swelling as it sucks from the blood of the peoples of Yugoslavia.

  Blood dries in the soul, yet leaves its stains. There is no trace of it in the apartment. Everything has been washed down, scoured. The bullet hole and the lesser holes blasted into the wall by fragments of skull have been filled, the wall above the bed repainted. It’s all fresh now, as if nothing unpleasant happened here. Even so, Eva has moved the bed to another wall. She is restless at night. Her light is always burning when Josip falls asleep on his mattress. It is still on when he awakes in the dawn. She is a ghost of herself; she never smiles, never cries, speaks only of inconsequential matters, goes to work with resolve every morning, and in the evening stares out the window at the brick wall. On her days off, she darns his socks, ferrets through the city in search of clothes for him: a new pair of trousers, a new shirt, new shoes that are not falling apart. New is any article of clothing he has not seen before, however much it may have been worn by others, discarded, or sold for a pittance. She forgets to make meals sometimes, and she lives with him on such days as if he were not there. These are the days when he wonders if his aunt is losing her mind, even as he is regaining his.

  He fishes frequently from the Miljacka and catches enough to supplement their diet. He has not yet found work. The factory will not have him back. He earns a few coins by running errands for people in the nearby buildings or by performing odious tasks, such as carrying the toilet pots of the elderly down to the sewer hole on the street, then emptying and washing them. He no longer gags when he does it. Sometimes the old people give him an extra bite of bread too.

  He has returned to the evening classes. He tries to ignore the political indoctrination. He has learned how to present himself as an exceptionally slow learner, deficient in wits. His first moment of pleasure since the death of his uncle occurs toward the end of winter, when he is called upon in class to define the word cadre. He makes his eyes glaze a little, lets his mouth fall open, says, uhhh, ahhh, and even produces a bit of drool. The drool is particularly effective.

  It is more difficult to maneuver in history class. His mind leaps into the subject like a starving dog lunging at poisoned meat. He cannot be held back, even though he knows what they are feeding him. This new version of history is so different from what his father taught. He hates it, but he thinks about it a lot. He worries, too, that it will imprison his mind by repetition, combined with the gradual disappearance of truth.

  There are times when it is hard to resist the world that is so rapidly changing all around him. It takes energy to resist, even if only within the privacy of his thoughts. When he is alone, exhaustion can hit him without warning, and the lack of substance on his spindly frame takes its toll. Then he cannot stop himself from weeping for his mother and father and for the others he has lost. He is unable to think about them much, and certainly will not allow himself to dwell on his last memory of Rajska Polja. Yet he can grieve over the void in his life, and these moments are followed sometimes by a peace.

  From time to time, his aunt cuts his hair with rusty scissors, or tells him distractedly to wash behind his ears, or to change his socks. A twitch of a smile crosses her face whenever he enters the apartment triumphantly with fish in hand, though it never lights up her eyes. She receives no personal visitors, and few people come to the door. Once, the factory foreman knocks and invites her to have a meal with him, but she declines. Perhaps it is because Josip is not mentioned in the invitation. Later, he asks his aunt if the foreman blames him for uncle’s death. She replies with no more than this: “People are strange; they always have excellent reasons for their resentments.”

  An official knocks at the apartment door once a month and hands her an envelope with a bit of money inside, her pension as the widow of a hero. She buys extra food with it, things a boy needs, a sausage, a cube of cheese, a wizened last-year’s apple. Through these gestures, he learns that she does not in any way hold him responsible for the death. He feels immense relief when he is finally convinced of this. He does not mind when she scolds, because it is better than her silence, which sometimes returns and blocks him temporarily out of her world.

  Each night he dreams of blood. He is either running from it, wading in it, choking on it, or drowning in it. And when he is not, he is licking it from his hands—is it his blood or other people’s blood? He does not know. Blood strengthens him and makes him want more. He wakes from such dreams gagging and horrified by himself.

  He washes his hands so often that his aunt begins to notice. She tells him to stop all that nonsense, says it’s wasting the precious bit of soap they own, the little brown chunk that shrinks and shrinks so swiftly. Where will they find another to replace it! He tries to stop, but can’t. Ten, twenty times a day, for no reason, he will bolt toward the sink on an impulse and scrub his hands, his nails, his forearms. His nails have grown back in, but he can see the blood pulsing beneath the translucent shells.

  He will at times, though not often, drift off to sleep at night lying on his back, arms by his sides, mouth wide open. If he is especially tired, he pokes the forefinger of his right hand into his mouth and with his left pulls a trigger.

  “Bang”, he whispers.

  He dreams of fire and blood only in connection with Rajska Polja, which is always burning. He dreams of drowning in blood only in connection with Sarajevo, which is always a cement box in which people’s arms are severed, their eyes gouged out, the tops of their heads blown off—and always there is blood running from the wounds, filling up the box from floor to ceiling. Memories and hallucinations blend, mutate, cavort: an ever-changing panorama of descent into darkness, above which a red star sucks and swells ever larger.

  He learns to steal. His first crime occurs in the market square one morning, when he passes a table guarded by an old man of the countryside who is sitting with closed eyes on a crate beside the table. He wears a long knife at his belt, the kind used for slashing brush in the forest. No gun or other weapons. Josip stops by the table and spots a row of brown bars on it, bends over them, and sniffs. It is a fine smell, a mix of pig tallow and the acid made from wood ash. He knows this smel
l as he knows the pungencies of his goose-down bed in the loft at home, or the scent of fresh-cut hay in Svez’s shed; this is the smell of autumn when Mamica makes soap for the year. He seizes one and breaks into a gallop, running away as fast as he can. The old man wakes and shouts after him, but he does not give chase. Thus Josip learns from whom to steal. If they are old and alone and have no serious weapons, they are the right ones.

  Bloated with glee and shame, he heads toward the river through a maze of alleys. Arriving there, he drops to his knees and washes and washes and washes, though there is no need for this, his hands are always clean. By the time he lies down in the dark that night, the glee has evaporated, the pleasure declined to almost nothing, and the shame is now so great that he cannot sleep. A new horror has arisen within him—horror at himself—he is not only a person who drinks blood, he steals from the helpless.

  He continues to steal. However, in order not to be devoured by shame, he catches fish in the river, runs to the market, throws them on various tables from which he has lifted items in the past, and runs again. He does not think to offer a trade. Perhaps he believes that no one would part with so precious a thing as a bar of soap, not even for a large and healthy fish. Before long his face becomes familiar to the merchants. They eye him warily: there is a mad boy about town, and this tall skeleton with furtive eyes fits the description perfectly. Of course, there are many such children on the streets, scrabbling for objects of peculiar need, food mostly, and sometimes inexplicable items.

  One evening Eva does not return from work. Josip remains awake all night, listening for steps outside in the hallway. Two days, three days, four days pass. She does not return. He does not leave the apartment. His fear grows and grows. She has been taken away in a truck with a red star on its door. No, she has taken herself away into the state of mind that blocks all things out. She has pulled a trigger. She has gone, he is sure, because she can no longer bear to live with a boy who drinks blood.

  Now the blood is constantly in his thoughts. He does not want to drink it when he is awake, but it cannot be washed from his mind. Once, he makes the mistake of looking into the bedroom in the hope that he will find her there. The bed has not been used. A splatter of blood appears on the wall and spreads across the plaster, as if the building were bleeding internally. He blinks and it disappears. Blinks again and it returns. He slams the door shut and does not go in there again. With the last of the stolen soap, he washes and washes his hands, over and over and over.

  To escape from himself, he returns to the night classes. He is reprimanded for his absence during recent weeks. In order to explain it, he lies: He has been very ill. He was hit by a truck. He fell down a hole and hurt his leg. He was away on a journey.

  In his absence, a new subject has been introduced. The teacher gives him a book about it—mathematics. There is nothing in mathematics that bends the past or the future. He flips through the pages, recognizing old friends in these squig-gling numbers and symbols. Yes, he knows all this, it is awakening again, though at a level below what he once learned. Even so, this is good. You take one step back in order to take two steps forward. You learn something new every day.

  Eva returns the next afternoon. She blows into the apartment with color in her cheeks, a big smile, a pink scarf at her neck, and packages in her arms. Josip is seated on his mattress, back to the wall. He stares at her and does not return her cheerful greeting. She kisses him and exultantly unwraps what she has brought. Loaves of bread, butter, rakija, a package of tea, a turnip, a radish, a green onion, new socks for him, a dress for herself. She chatters without ceasing, explaining that when she was at work last week an unannounced visitor from the Workers’ Commissariat arrived at the factory, and all senior employees went away with him to a meeting. She had to go too, for she is the boss’s secretary now. Labor is being reorganized, the new policies will be enforced everywhere, and it will make everything so much more efficient, so much more productive. This is what they fought for, sacrificed for. She is sorry she didn’t have time to let him know—she had no idea how long she would be away, and after all, he is capable of looking after himself. How was his week? How were his classes? And what is that book he is reading? Ah, excellent. It’s nice to see you studying, Josip. Good boy. Then she flies into the bedroom, closes the door, and begins singing to herself.

  Josip drops the book onto the mattress. For a time he stands in the middle of the room looking at the closed door. A curtain of blood descends between himself and the door. Blood sprinkles across the floor and creeps toward him, drop by drop.

  He wheels and goes out into the hallway. By the time he reaches the street, he is running. The afternoon sun is warm, and flowers are appearing in the vacant lots, poking up from the rubble. Down by the river there is more grass, more flowers. The trees along the banks are flowering too. He is sweating from the run, his body prickling with heat, his breath tearing in and out. He turns to the right and races along the shore toward something that he does not define to himself. He can sense it only as a place he must go in order to leave everything behind, everything, for the blood is back there behind him. But it cannot be left behind, it always follows, and it is following still. He feels it catching up. It is on his heels, the ocean of roaring blood reaching for the well of stolen blood within him, trying to swallow him so that everything will swirl down into the sewer hole.

  With a burst of speed, he passes the last houses of the city. Then the solitary farmhouses begin. He is pulling ahead now, farther and farther from the ocean, going deeper into the mountains, always beside the river. Finally, he is spent; there is no more fuel to drive his legs. He stumbles to the side of the road and collapses onto the grass. Quickly the ocean tide sweeps up to him and pushes him down the bank to the river’s edge. At this spot there is a shallow full of water weeds and brown stones. He wades in up to his knees, gasping. The water is so cold that he shouts when the shock hits him.

  He will wash everything off, all the splatters of blood and bone on his shirt and trousers and shoes. He tears all clothing from himself, and the current tugs it under and toward the shore. His teeth chatter, the flesh of his hands and arms and legs turns red, the skin rises in bumps like a plucked duck, and soon, unless he hides beneath the water, his head will be severed with an axe.

  He plunges under. It is all yellow and brown down there, with swirls of green murk stirred up by his feet. His legs push him out farther, and the mud slopes into the depths. He will wash it all away, the blood on his hands, the blood in his mouth, the blood that is falling and falling like ceaseless rain upon the mountains all around. He will wash it all away in the river, for the river has not yet turned to blood.

  Knowing that no large hands will pull him up and carry him to shore, he understands that he has come to the end. He will sink into the pit as so many others have sunk into it. Yet he will go down naked and free and cleansed at last. All murder and theft and falsehood will be washed out of him, all fear and shame.

  Now it is up to his neck, now it covers his face and his hair. Now he is sinking. He is screaming, his mouth open wide, blood spewing out from within.

  Now he is choking, his arms lashing, his legs kicking. Up he rises into the rain of blood, then down again. Lashing and kicking, his arms and legs and lungs refuse to obey him, and they will not let him go down. He hates them, forces them to stop, and sinks again. But their power is greater than his will. They do as they wish and force him up again. Now the current has taken him into center stream, where it is deeper. Sinking and rising and bobbing along, sinking and thrashing, and rising again. Slowly, slowly he is cleansed. Slowly, slowly, he realizes that he has learned to swim.

  THE PALACE BY THE SEA

  9

  He is standing on a rock, smiling to himself, soaking up the light. The Adriatic has never been so blue. Of course he feels this whenever he jogs through the park and the woods to the topmost height of the Marjan. Bluer and bluer the sea becomes—always. Among the many fine places t
o be found in and around Split, this is the best because from here it is possible to survey the entire world. To the south lies the old part of the city, its white buildings capped with red tiles and the bell tower of the emperor’s palace. To the west the bay, and to the northwest the island city of Trogir, built by the Romans and Venetians.

  The crest on which he stands evokes the latent sense of proportion. The flatness of the world shifts in the mind’s eye and becomes an orb revolving slowly on the sea of infinity. The islands beyond the bay become amethyst clouds floating above the hiatus where water and sky merge. Here, everything about life that he finds burdensome or disgusting or boring falls away. He admits a single exception to this illusion of supreme vantage—the wall of the Dinaric Alps looming behind him, blocking out his past.

  Saturdays are his day for making love. This is how he thinks of his affair with sea and sky, his only passions. The act of running from his residence near the university down through the streets toward the hill of the great park is a headlong race to his trysting place. Prancing like a race horse up the slopes, charged and exalted by altitude, sole master of his sweating, oxygenated body, he is fully himself. And upon his arrival at the top, he becomes, for a time, accountable to no one. A week without this rejuvenating event is a dull one, and sometimes a dispiriting one.