Island of The World

by Michael D. O'Brien

  Guilty or innocent of murder, she must have been shaken by Josip’s return nearly as much as by the death of her husband. Nevertheless, both she and the boy make an unspoken agreement that Jure will never again be mentioned. He did not exist. What happened has not happened, as so many other events have not happened. In order to continue living, they must forget the past with an absoluteness that permits no conjecture. Truth and falsehood alike must serve the necessity of survival.

  And so it is. The first three or four years are hard, cold, hungry, and full of fears, especially in the period before Tito’s break with Stalin, before the beginning of reforms. This is the time when silence is added to silence, when Josip learns never to speak about matters beyond the immediate and the physical, nor to infer them either. He is a poor student in the fields that are the most important to the new order, that is, politics and history. This might have ended any hope of advancement in education, yet so brilliant is he in the field of mathematics that the state decides his abilities may someday prove useful to the country. He is not exactly an idiot savant; rather, he is somewhat lopsided in personality and missing a component of his mind, the part that is so crucial to governments. He is simply not interested in those matters, and thus in the files of anyone to whom Josip’s life is a concern, the boy, the youth, and the young man are officially harmless.

  During those years in Sarajevo, his chief pleasure, after fishing, is soccer. The physical exhilaration pushes out despondency and can even banish certain thoughts for a time. Swimming is a deeper matter, a private one, yet it seems to hold his interest more than anything else, save mathematics. Thousands of hours are spent in midstream of the Miljacka and the Bosna, pitting his limbs against the force of the rivers with exterior calm and inner ferocity. Year after year he grows stronger, no longer skeletal but muscular and lean. It is now easier to obtain work with such strength. Mostly physical labor at construction sites. Later, he has the job at the Jablonica Dam, which he obtains through Eva’s influence. He saves every coin he earns, after subtracting what he gives to his aunt as a contribution for their food and rent. Not that she needs it, she assures him, not with her new wages, since she is rising in the secretariat and is a consultant on labor matters to the Ministry. She forces him to stop giving her his wages. Save it for the future! You have your future to think of! You are the future!

  He loves her and fears her. Or perhaps it is not she whom he fears, but the secrets she holds within herself, the events in which she played a central role and that cannot be spoken of, for they did not happen. There is a grayness that, at unexpected moments, can return to her skin and her eyes, and during those few days he is shut out. Nothing will reach her, she will not acknowledge his presence. This seldom occurs, only two or three times a year, and hardly at all during the year before he departs for Split. Occasionally, she is flushed with happiness, an animation that has its cause in places other than home. She has men but sees them elsewhere. She is like a true mother, very good to him, and she asks nothing in return. For this he is grateful, but still he fears her.

  During those years, physics and chemistry begin to interest him, too. Also astronomy. Without knowing it, he is integrating the disciplines of astronomy, mathematics, and physics into a zone of astrophysics with metaphysical innuendos. When he is able to jot down on pieces of paper his intuitions about this emerging sense of reality, they manifest themselves as phrases that, even to their author, have a certain beauty. He would not dare to call them poems. They are not poems, and he certainly no longer entertains any interest in a world beyond this one. Yet he does not dismiss these fragments out of hand. He feels that they may at some point in the future find their place in a purely physical cosmology that he hopes to develop. First, he must learn more.

  He is, without doubt, the city’s most outstanding student, a distinction that means nothing to him but does not go unnoticed by educators. He is observed and considered for various avenues into a brighter future than the one available for him in the capital of Bosnia. He gives all the right answers in the sciences, yet so many wrong ones in sociopolitical studies. Not suspiciously wrong, just off the mark, and never reactionary, but usually just plain stupid or vapid, enough to indicate to concerned officials that he is a pleasant fellow with some potential for mainstream life in the new Yugoslavia. He will neither sink to the dangerous bottom nor rise to the dangerous top.

  During Josip’s second winter at university in Split, Eva married the foreman from the factory, who had recently divorced his wife. They had thereafter become influential in the endless maze of workers’ committees and moved to Belgrade. Eva explained it all in a letter, but it seemed meaningless to Josip, who, strangely, felt some relief at the departure of his aunt to a region of the country where it would be difficult and unnecessary for him to go. He and his aunt wrote back and forth several times, always with avowals of fidelity and gratitude. She had saved his life more than once, and perhaps he had saved hers as well. In the end, the letters became fewer in number, and now he receives a card or two per year, filled with scribbled generalities, usually dated the first of May or November 29, the anniversary of Tito’s proclamation of the People’s Democracy.

  At one point during the first years of living on his own, he located the convent of nuns that he had visited as a child. All religious insignia had been removed or defaced and the building transformed into an office for functionaries of a federal ministry. The secretary at the front desk knew nothing (she assured him) of the whereabouts of the former owners. His persistent questions earned him a cold look and a hand on a telephone. He fled from the place and never returned. Every subsequent effort he made to locate Sister Katarina of the Holy Angels turned up nothing. In his second year, he chanced to overhear a muffled conversation at a stall in the market: two old women huddling with hands on their breasts, bemoaning the loss of many religious throughout the land. One told the other how much she missed visiting her dear friends, the Sisters on Stanislavska Street—the very convent where his aunt had lived. “They were all arrested or scattered”, said the other. “I watched them being taken away, and none have returned.”

  Thus he is alone in the world. During the past four years, Split has been his home. From his residence, it is a twenty-minute run to the faculty of mathematics, a fifteen-minute run to the library, a half-hour run to the top of the Marjan. In the summer there is always employment at the university. Combined with his scholarships, his wages permit him the extravagance of solitude. Few non-Communists are as privileged as he is, and few are as alone. He does not mind this aloneness. He prefers it. The life of the mind, the dreams of the sea, and the little black notebook filled with his intuitions and questions—which he has titled Fragments—are enough for him.

  He has begun work on his graduate degree. He has dropped soccer because there is not enough time to do everything. Swimming cannot be abandoned, however, because it is essential to the foundation of his consciousness. It must not be abandoned, even if he were to feel like doing so. It keeps him physically healthy and balances the mental abstractions. Besides, there are those infrequent discussions with fellow solitary swimmers that he is slowly coming to value. From time to time, he inscribes random thoughts and dialogues in his notebook:

  Fragment:

  Today, in a shop window, I saw a most beautiful thing. It was a large seashell, cut in half so that its spiral interior is exposed. It is called the “chambered nautilus”. Nature’s powers are so endlessly ingenious that one must take care not to assume one knows where its outermost (and innermost) frontiers are located.

  Fragment:

  Ivan Rados at the biology faculty recently urged me to put my eye to a microscope. There, below the strata of human vision, is a realm of astonishing complexity and order. “They’re diatoms”, says Ivan in my ear, breathing the words as if he were an Old Testament prophet delivering a revelation. Well, I must admit it is a revelation. One that prompts a question: Are there other realms within realms within these re
alms? Why, moreover, do such marvels strike human consciousness as beautiful?

  Fragment:

  Theorem: If beauty is cleaved from immortality, will not the materialist devaluation of human love extract a dreadful price?

  Corollary: If love is cleaved from immortality, will not the materialist devaluation of beauty also extract a dreadful price?

  Conclusion: Without the eternal, all things, all beings, are devalued. Yes, but is immortality real? If it is real, then our present condition in this land seems more horrible than ever. If it is not real, then there is only survival, pleasure, and betrayal.

  Fragment:

  Is there a primal injury? The injury of mankind? The injury of my own life?

  Fragment:

  I have been thinking of Telemachus today. The Greeks, as far as they were able and considering the times they lived in, seemed to understand the relationship between heroism and weakness better than we do. The young prince is suffering on two fronts, exterior and interior. His father has been missing since he sailed off to Troy. His mother is besieged by callous suitors, each of whom desires the queen only for the sake of taking the king’s property for himself. Telemachus realizes he is too young to protect his mother and his home adequately, and thus he decides to sail off in search of Odysseus, to bring him back to defend his family and his throne. For this, Telemachus needs help from the elders of Ithaca. He dresses himself in dazzling armor, arms himself with a bronze spear, holds his head high, and strides to the agora, where he intends to deliver a stirring speech that cannot fail to rouse support for his quest. The crowd is impressed by him. He begins his impassioned and eloquent pleas—then bursts into tears! His sorrows, frustration, and anger have overcome him. The crowd is no longer impressed with this sobbing boy, whom they had at first taken for a god. Such is the judgment of men. They are never to be trusted. One must never invest hope in their nobler qualities.

  Fragment:

  Three theories of the material cosmos: the solid state universe, the perpetually expanding universe, the oscillating universe. The latter model, an endlessly repeated cycle of collapse and expansion, appeals to the fatalistic mind. Well, I admit it appeals to me. At the same time, an inner note of caution: something warns me not to jump to conclusions. There may be more models to come, ones that human intellect cannot yet conceive.

  10

  Today, as Josip is drying himself after the practice swim for next week’s meet, Antun Kusić snaps his wet towel at him. Josip gives him the same in return, and makes him howl.

  “Lasta”, says Antun, “I’ll pay you back for that. Or I’ll take my dues in your valuable time.”

  Antun is his match in the hundred meters and a better diver. He is a good fellow. Josip trusts him—as much as he is able, considering the times they live in.

  “Make your offer, Kusić, but I don’t promise I’ll pay.”

  “Come with me for coffee. I need to talk with you.”

  This is new. They can talk anywhere, so why a special invitation? They go to the bistro on Partisanska where the poets and rakija addicts hang out. He has never been there before, but it seems Antun is an old familiar. He finds a table in a shadow, where no ears are close enough to make trouble. They drink tiny cups of coffee so strong that Josip knows he will not sleep for forty-eight hours afterward. But he is curious. Has Antun lost his mind over a girl again? The last one broke his heart, and now it appears to have mended completely, within days.

  “You’re in love again”, Josip says.

  “In a sense.”

  “With anyone I know?”

  He shakes his head. “No, it’s not a person.”

  “Not a person”, Josip laughs. “What then?”

  “With a way of . . .”

  Ten seconds, twenty seconds, thirty seconds . . . “Come on, tell me. You can’t leave me hanging in space like that.”

  Antun leans forward earnestly. His narrow swarthy face and bristling black hair, cut short for gliding through water, remind Josip of Petar Dučić. His eyes are jet black. Today they are not laughing as they usually are. He is in his intense mood.

  “Can I trust you?” he whispers. Josip hates it when people whisper to him and hates it when he is forced to whisper to them. If you’re whispering, he believes, you’re making a mistake about something or other.

  “No, Kusić, you cannot trust me!”

  “Good, now I know I can trust you.”

  “What’s the secret?”

  “Shhh,” he puts a finger to his lips, “for heaven’s sake, don’t shout!” Josip was of course speaking in his normal voice, not shouting at all.

  “So, tell me.”

  “Lasta,” he says looking Josip in the eye, “do you believe it is possible to speak a language other than one’s native tongue.”

  Josip bursts out laughing. “Without a doubt.”

  “I don’t mean German or Italian. I mean—”

  “Oh, you mean sign language? Just now you put your finger to your lips, Kusić. That was an item from a vocabulary.”

  “Nonsense, it’s a universal symbol. Stop distracting me. I mean is it possible to speak an undiscovered language?”

  “What do you mean? How can you speak an undiscovered language if you have not discovered it?”

  “Exactly.”

  “What do you mean by exactly? Be more specific. Define your terms.”

  “Aaargh, you scientists!”

  “Well, thank you for the coffee, I must be going now. I won’t hit you with the towel again.”

  “Sit down, sit down. I want to talk.”

  “Is our discussion not yet over?”

  “It has not yet begun.”

  Intrigued, Josip continues listening. It turns out that Antun has been watching him for three years. Not the political observation they must all endure, but something different. Maybe the assessing of personal reliability and unreliability that everyone makes about others in the privacy of their thoughts.

  Antun says that he has known for some time that Josip is not sympathetic to the regime.

  Josip replies with dead silence, completely masked. Where is Antun going with this? Is he the cleverest trap of all?

  “I hate it”, Antun declares. “I hate everything they do to us.”

  “What are they doing to us?” Josip asks with a small smile and a neutral tone that commits nothing. Still, poor Antun cannot stop himself.

  “Look, Jozo,” he says, leaning closer and moving to a new level of intimacy, “when you lose your place in the continuity of time, you become extremely dependent on the social.”

  This is quite an insight from his locker-room pal. A Literature major he may be, but Josip thought he studied Goethe and Gorky and the more anti-imperialist novels of Dostoevsky.

  “What do you mean by the social?” he asks, in no way convinced that Antun is genuine. Perhaps he has political troubles, social debts of the more dangerous sort, and is paying them off by informing. Is it a routine fishing expedition or something more serious?

  “We forget our history”, he continues. “Maybe we never learn our history, like these kids they’re teaching nowadays. You and me, at least, we learned a few things before the—”

  “Before our beloved Marshal Tito liberated us?”

  Antun sits back, his cheeks flushing. His mouth twitches, he clenches a fist and thumps it soundlessly on the table top. His eyes now blink rapidly, close to tears.

  “Beloved you call them”, he whispers. “Do you love them too, Josip?”

  Love them? While it is possible to evade, it is not possible for Josip to lie directly. He lowers his eyes and shakes his head.

  “They killed half my family, you know”, Antun goes on. “In death pits, in the north. No one has ever heard about that, but I heard about it because an uncle climbed out of one of those pits and left a trail of his blood across Slovenia and as far as Zagreb. There he told his story before he died.”

  “People say many things”, Josip murmurs, growing m
ore afraid and ashamed with each passing moment. He is choking, but he cannot let the other see this. What if the police are searching for leaks about the great slaughter. They know that Jure was one of the executioners, and they know Josip lived in his apartment before his death.

  “I was in the room when he died”, Antun declares. “Do you think a dying man would cling to a crucifix and lie through his teeth?”

  “I don’t believe in heaven”, Josip tells him.

  “But my uncle did”, Kusić breathes vehemently. “My uncle did!”

  “Look, Antun”, says Josip in a conciliatory tone, opening his hands wide on the table top. “Whatever happened back there in the past, there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  “You’re wrong, Josip, and moreover you know you’re wrong. And moreover still, you don’t have to worry about my being an informer. I’m not. I’m clean and I’m safe. And as far as they are concerned, I’m just an average guy who’s pleased about the state of the country. The uncle who died was Domobrani, but another one, who is very much alive, was Partisan. A Communist uncle in my dossier gives me some protection.”

  “I have one of those, too. A hero.”

  “A hero”, Antun bites off the word so bitterly that no one could ever mistake it for a performance. Suddenly Josip is sure—though he does not know how he is sure—that this is not a trap.

  “We should go for a walk”, he whispers. He does not mind whispering now.