Out on the street, he whacks Antun on the back. But his friend is in no mood for play fights, and he says nothing for a block or two as they idle their way over the city hump toward the old town core. No one is following them.
“The continuity of time”, Josip says, trying to get things moving along. “What did you mean by that?”
“I mean they’ve erased our history and are rewriting what remains. I mean, as well, that whole zones of literature are now forbidden and are disappearing from libraries. And who knows what else is missing. The entire field of newspaper and radio is their toy. Toy? No, it’s their weapon! They fill our minds with whatever they want us to think.”
“The older people remember.”
“Yes, but most are frightened. Hundreds of thousands of people have disappeared. And before he disappeared, a man whom I trust, a professor in Zagreb, told me that a quarter of a million Croats are either in prison or facing trials. The cardinal of Zagreb is in prison, too.”
“They can’t really do that, can they? A cardinal in prison?”
“They’ve done it. A big political trial—he was archbishop then—lots of false evidence against him. He spent five years in a jail cell, and then they commuted his sentence to permanent house arrest. They will probably kill him. He is a brave man. Don’t believe the papers when you read that he’s a Fascist criminal.”
“But how can we know what is true and untrue?”
“Exactly—how can we know? And we are knowing less and less with every passing day. But of this man you can be sure, he is the best, and what they say about him is untrue. He is the real Croatia. He is one of the true heroes.”
“His name?”
“Stepinac.”
The name is new to Josip. But then he does not read the regime’s vile newspapers or listen to their vile radio programs. “I don’t recall having heard of him.”
“You see—erasure. Erasure! You, a mathematician, will understand the concept of a negative as positive function, right? You will understand, at least, the power of subtraction.”
Josip is beginning to realize there is a lot more to Antun than he had supposed.
“I too lost family”, he whispers as they round a corner onto the waterfront.
“Who killed them?”
The question that is always asked: Who killed whom? The answer identifies you fairly accurately, and it locates your place in the political continuum.
“Partisans did it”, says Josip. “They killed everyone I loved—everyone.”
“But—”
“By an accident of fate, my Communist uncle—no, I cannot describe all that. It’s too complex and too insane. You wouldn’t believe me anyway.”
“Josip, there is no need to explain. I know how things go. It is all too complex and insane, those times—”
“And now we have a new insanity.”
“Yes, and that is why we need a new language.”
“What exactly do you mean by a new language?”
“I mean new ways of communicating the truth. Not just data, not just information—Truth!”
“Yes, but what do you mean by truth?”
“That has been asked before, you know.”
“Let’s stay on the topic. Are you suggesting we need a black-market history to hand out to every student in Yugoslavia?”
“That’s not a bad idea, but it’s not what I’m thinking of. I believe that in our times the control of all public communications, all education, and all public culture is creating a new consciousness in our people, and as a result they will become less and less able to comprehend the truth, let alone remember it. Our strength in the future will depend on those with faith, especially the ones who remain in their churches, as they always have. But not everyone is a believer. In fact, the state is making it harder and harder.”
“Are you a believer in Christ?” asks Josip, eyeing him carefully.
“Yes,” he nods, “but I must remain quiet about it. Not everyone is quiet about it, and they are heroes too. I am not a hero, Josip. I hope someday to be a writer, but I am damned if it’s going to be poems about tractor production and novels about life on the collectives!”
“Lower your voice, Antun.”
“Sorry.”
“So, you’re saying that—”
“I’m saying that through genuine culture man can know himself, even in nations where his identity is denied.”
“But what do you mean by genuine culture?”
“The beautiful and true! In music, in poetry, in literature, even in novels without political or historical references, we can apprehend what is not immediately known through rational thought or the accumulation of objective facts.”
“Antun, you’re investing too much faith in culture. Does culture have the power to liberate man from overwhelming historical forces?”
“Culture is the last refuge, the sanctuary, the human place in the midst of the surrounding dehumanization. Through the arts man is able to know himself, even if only on the intuitive level. He senses his own worth, even when he cannot articulate it.”
“Can a poem or a song defeat a tyrant?”
Defeat a killer, defeat atrocities, defeat the bottom falling out of the universe when you least expect it?
“Yes. Yes, it can, given enough time. When a work of art is both beautiful and true, man’s freedom is strengthened by it—both his interior need for freedom and his capacity to seek a rational understanding of it.”
“You hope for a lot.”
“Yes, I hope for it. And if I didn’t, I would die of despair.”
“You are a person of extremes”, Josip says, not unkindly.
“Am I? I suppose so. But which is more extreme, a man who desires to speak the truth in a season of lies or a tyrant who creates the lies that engulf an entire people?”
Josip nods in agreement.
“Why are you telling me all this, Antun? I respect you, and to tell the truth, I like you a lot, I always have, even though you’re pretty fast with the wet towel, but I do not see what I can do about it.”
“You are a poet, Josip.”
Josip stops in his tracks and laughs outright. A poet? That is ridiculous! “A poet?”
“Yes, you are a poet. Regardless of what you think.” Antun pauses, and looks at Josip somberly, a world of grief and hope within his eyes. “You are.”
Later, Josip forgets much of what they talk about after this stunningly erroneous statement. Suffice it to say that at various times during the past few years Antun has overheard him discussing with others any number of subjects, ranging from stellar constellations to oceanography to theories of wave motion. He has mistaken Josip’s cryptic minimalism for poetic inspiration. They argue this for an hour while sitting side by side on a cement wall at the harbor front, their legs dangling over the water. Josip defends himself vehemently. Antun asserts ferociously, defining Josip to himself, of all things!
Demanding proof of Antun’s theory, Josip makes him regurgitate some of his memorable sayings.
“Two years ago, you were talking with a professor in the hallway outside the science lab”, says Antun like a trial lawyer. “Remember?”
Josip shakes his head, frowns.
“Sure you remember. I’d come to pick you up for the practice swim, and you made us late. You told the prof that the sea is a cosmos and the cosmos is a sea.”
“So? Einstein suggests something similar in his theory of—”
“Yes, but Einstein didn’t say it the way you said it.”
“A fluke, an accident of speech.”
“A stroke of poetic intuition.”
“Please, enough!”
“Then at the party Suzana brought you to last year, you went head-to-head with that idiot from the history department. I thought you were being quite rash that night, taking him on, but then I remembered that you have the mantle of science to protect you and are widely known as a nonpolitical cretin of the first order.”
“Thank you so
much, Antun.”
“You didn’t say anything you could be arrested for. But I knew what you were saying, and a few others knew too, and it electrified us. We were frightened for you, and at the same time we were in awe of the beauty of your words. No mole with his head buried in Pythagorean theorems could come up with phrases like that.”
“What on earth did I say, if it was so earth-shattering?”
“Don’t you remember? The idiot was babbling about monetary policy, and a professor from the faculty of economics was sitting right beside him, and they were both knocking back the slivovica. It was pretty loud in there, with everyone singing, dancing, and the radio blasting. The economics parrot was agreeing with the history parrot, both of them looking after their own hides, you can be sure. And you just kept listening to them, staring into space, your eyes glazed, and when they’d finished their song and dance in praise of Tito’s reforms, you said, ‘Words are gold, split and shared as coinage, small pebbles, emblems offered back and forth—given, received; given, received—expanding the vocabulary of the soul.’ ”
“I said that? I don’t recall saying that.”
“You said it. It came from your very own mouth.”
“I was probably quoting something I’d read.”
“No, you weren’t.”
So the discussion rages on, with Antun supplying more of the golden ambrosia that apparently drips like warm honey from Josip’s lips.
He begins to recall the night of the party more clearly. The words did just spring to his lips. Who knows where they came from, from what dusty corner of his mind? It does not matter. He is not a poet!
At the end of their Marathon conversation—or is it Thermopylae?—Antun invites Josip to become part of a small, “intimate and private” group of people who hope to produce an “alternative culture”, as he phrases it.
Josip declines. He says he admires them for it, but it’s not for him.
Fragment:
He pushed hard to get me to join them. But what is all this pushing, all this desperate intensity! Should poetry push itself into the agoras of the world? No, poetry does not push. It simply is present, radiating its virtues. By the same token, is a word more than itself? Is a symbol both itself and what it signifies? A chambered nautilus and a diatom are integrated and compact in themselves. They are what they are, yet they remain as presences in the world and may point to some larger cosmology, despite their small stature. Subtract them from existence, and the world is poorer. Perhaps this applies to individual people as well. Antun is who he is, yet he may point, without knowing it, to something greater. Not so much by what he believes or says, but rather by what he is. I must think more about this.
* * *
Memories continue to afflict him from time to time. Often the worst, and not so often the best. Between these two poles there are others, the inexplicable:
It is nine or ten years ago. In Sarajevo the winter has come and gone. He and Eva are hungry all the time because, even though her wages have increased, money is numbers on paper. Then and now, food is real currency. It always has been and always will be.
He has come up out of the river on a spring day. The valley bottom is warm, though the heights of the surrounding mountains are still white with snow. He dries himself off, gets dressed, and then walks from the river into the lower hills, hoping he will find a field where a farmer might have forgotten to dig up every potato plant. The pastures are dotted with isolated hay cones; black from the spring rains, they stand like ominous sentinels above the city. Then he comes upon a plowed field, the soil wet, rust-colored. He takes off his shoes and slowly crosses the field, searching for dead stems of potato plants, beneath which a few tubers might still be sleeping. There are none.
He stops in the middle of the field, enjoying the feel of earth beneath his bare feet, the mud oozing up between his toes. As he watches it slip and curl and rise toward his ankles, the sun comes out, and the rust turns to red. Suddenly, he sees that his feet are sinking in bloody gore. He knows it is only soil, but he shouts in terror and tries to pull his feet out at once. This trips him and he falls backward. Then the weight of his body pushes him into the blood, and it begins to suck him down. He flips over onto his belly and scrambles on hands and knees to the edge of the field. There he lies on the grass and sobs uncontrollably.
Why can he not forget? Why do these memories return? Are they pushing for resolution, explanation? Or does a consciousness higher than his own try to show him important things—even those he would rather not see?
Sarajevo again. He is sixteen or seventeen years old. That year, the gymnasium is given a single telescope. One small instrument for two or three hundred students. The time allotted for each is not much, but those few moments at the lens are worth years of waiting. He spends days preparing for his brief glimpse into the universe, reading star maps, devouring books on astrophysics, lying on the apartment roof for hours in the dark, staring upward. Finally, the night arrives for his class. Each student is given two minutes at the telescope. They can point it anywhere in the sky they want to look.
When his turn comes, he knows what to do. He turns the barrel to Andromeda, a spiral galaxy countless light-years away, the closest major galaxy to our own. For the first time, he sees infinity with his eyes, almost feels it in his flesh. The light from that spinning wheel of fire pours through the glass lens, inverts through the organic lens of his eye, burns an image into his brain. Then, with only half a minute remaining, he turns the telescope to the constellation Pegasus. During those final seconds of seeing, he hears galloping hooves and feels himself rising on the back of a white horse. Then a hand grabs the instrument and barks, “Next!”
The following morning, he is wandering in a woods north of the city. There is no school that day. It has rained heavily before dawn, and now it has stopped. Fog covers the valley bottom and stretches partway up the slopes. He meanders without purpose through the mist, picking his way slowly among bushes and rocks dripping with moisture, knowing that he is probably getting lost, but not worrying about it. Eva was in a mood at breakfast, and he knows that during the night she had been thinking about her husband. In those years, he still experiences, from time to time, small hallucinations in which the walls of her bedroom seep blood. Thus, he is glad to escape the apartment for the day, desiring to be alone and to retain the sense of wonder he had felt the night before.
The fog thickens, as if the layer over Sarajevo is rising into a new cloud, engorged with rain. Yes, he is inside a cloud, and it is carrying him upward to the heights, rising above all the unhappiness of mankind.
Suddenly, the bushes seem to part and he finds himself walking unimpeded across a sloping grassy meadow. Without warning, he hears the pounding of feet—like the boots of mountain terrorists descending into an unguarded village. He freezes, motionless, hoping that the fog will hide him. His throat swells with fear, his heart skips beats, and his hands clench into fists. When a shadow appears in front of him, he stumbles backward away from it. And there before him stands a great horse. It is white. He is certain it is Pegasus descended, though its wings are invisible. Breathing in silence, they regard each other solemnly.
Never in his life has he ridden a horse. He knows how to bounce along on a donkey, but on Svez his feet were never far from the ground. A fall from his back would bruise you, but not break you. Now this immense marvel of beauty and power commands him to ride upon him as his guest. He could toss a rider into the air to shatter on the rocks. He could annihilate with one kick. His hoofs thump the sod like the booms of a drum. He steps sideways, turning a little as if to say, get on!
Josip grips the mane and jumps, his belly across the horse’s back, then swings a leg over. Now he is sitting. Now he is trembling upright, straightening his spine. The fog is so thick he can barely see his hands on the mane. Pegasus moves forward, high-stepping and sure, slowly, slowly, slowly increasing his gait until they are clopping in circles around the wide pasture. Little by little
, fear is replaced by exhilaration.
The horse breaks into a full gallop, and Josip’s fear returns. The fog whips his face, yet he is laughing and laughing in his fear, cries of happiness leaping from his throat. He does not ask where they are going, does not think of it. He is being carried higher into the cloud, and the cloud rises with them as they ascend. Now they are entering the sphere of the constellations; the stars are invisible, but they are singing all around: We are here, they chant, we are here!
Then the horse and boy plunge downward, headlong into the unknown. Is it to earth they return or to the depths of the sea? They are galloping beneath the waves now, the cloud raining within itself, soaking them, the horse swimming even as he runs. Now they rise again, and Josip bends his neck to see what the hoofs are striking upon; it is a path beaten by many feet, but of man or beast he cannot say. Is it seafloor or mountaintop, he does not know. Onward they run into a field higher than the other. The boy yearns for the ride to go on forever—never, never, never to stop! He wants to go upward always, far from the cities of mankind and the enclosures of the self with their bleeding walls. Then he weeps with the memory of what he is fleeing, and the horse sobs with him, for their tears are streaming out behind them as one.
The horse slows to a canter and comes to a stop, his great sides heaving. He wheels and breaks into a gallop again, taking the boy back to the place where he found him. The horse tells him this without making any sound, in his own language, and thus Josip learns that there are other unknown tongues besides the lastavice speech and the heart-soul speech of humans.
Why now? Josip cries in that language. Why, when the ascent has just begun, are you taking me back?
Then Pegasus answers:
You must live in the place that is the station of your labor and your love. Down there in the swaying forests, the dark sleeping fields, the cold barren lands, and the cities of man, where the indestructible, the faithful, the true are needed.
“No!” the boy wails. “Do not take me back there!”
The ride abruptly ends. Pegasus halts in the center of the pasture and tells him he must get off, must put his feet onto the earth and live in the rank of being that is his own.
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