Island of The World

by Michael D. O'Brien

  Winston has brought coffee and Darjeeling tea from his apartment. As they sip their beverages and nibble at European pastries purchased for the occasion from a shop on the Avenue of the Americas, Winston says: “These scientists in their Harvard and Princeton laboratories are alchemists. They misunderstand practically everything.”

  Josip considers this a very good sign. Winston may be abandoning his habit of confusing data for wisdom. By the same token, Josip reminds himself not to confuse wisdom for data. Even so, he senses that the elephant god is dying.

  There is a lot of craziness here in America. Well, lots where he came from too, but this is a new kind. He reads things in the papers, even Catholic papers, that astound him. Has the human race gone mad? Have Catholics gone especially mad!? Josip feels much love for this Pope who carries the burdens of the world on his shoulders. The newspapers are criticizing him these days, and his own theologians are too; they are the worst. They say he does not understand sex, that people are not baby factories, that theologians know better what is right and wrong in bed. For Josip, such thoughts are so evil that it is difficult not to slip into his old temptation to hatred. How blind they are! How proud and arrogant, to tell people it is fine to poison themselves with chemicals and mutilate their bodies at the very sources of life, just so they can escape children! As if children could ever—ever—be a burden! Death in disguise has entered the hearts of these theologians, and death will come from their teachings!

  Whenever he spots their articles in the magazine rack at the back of the church, or attends a Mass in a parish where such ideas are expressed in homilies, he stares in disbelief. Then he wrestles silently with disgust and horror. Worried by such feelings in these holiest of places or in these holiest of moments, he turns his attention to the crucifix that still hangs above some of the altars. And when the Body of Christ is raised above the altar of the world, he bows and asks Christ’s forgiveness—begs that all the anger still inside him will be washed away.

  Fragment:

  My confessor, Friar Todd, is a husky fellow from Ohio. This morning I confessed my ongoing struggle to love my enemies, even those who are beyond reach—separated as we are by innumerable years and by a wide ocean. He told me that all the sufferings in my past are a gift. He is young. He plays a guitar. But he does love St. Francis, and he has the basics in right order.

  “I know how glib it must sound to your ears”, he said through the confessional screen. (Has he guessed my identity? Perhaps he has figured out my accent.) “And it’s hard for me to say this to you because I’ve never really suffered. But our Lord has suffered, and I think he would say the same thing to you.”

  A gift that I lost Ariadne and the baby, my family, my people? A gift that I lost my learning and my vision of the cosmos? I know the truth of this, theologically. Still, how hard it is to accept in one’s heart and soul.

  Would I like to have the gift rescinded? Of course! Yet, in the strangest level of my self I know that it is a gift nonetheless. How else do we know God’s rescue unless we have been drowning? Can healing be demonstrated without injury, or love be proven without trial? Still, there is an ache within me that cries out: what of those who were not protected, who are left unhealed, who do not know love?

  The reply is articulated by—and can only be articulated by—God dying with us on our cross.

  With us? Did I just write this very simple phrase? Have I not “died” enough? Yet it makes me wonder—if there is more to come, how could I, now so privileged in this new world, die with him?

  Fragment:

  [in English]

  quirks: idiosyncrasies.

  quarks: elementary particles in pairs, such as + and - charges.

  quantum jump: an abrupt transition from one discrete energy state to another.

  quantum mechanics: a theory of matter based on the concept of the possession of wave properties by elementary particles that affords a mathematical interpretation of the structure and interactions of matter (incorporating both quantum theory and the uncertainty principle).

  quantum theory: a theory in physics based on the concept of subdivision of radiant energy into finite quanta and applied to processes involving transference or transformation of energy in the atomic or molecular scale.

  [In Croatian]

  I experience a moment of inflated pleasure as I copy these definitions from an English-language book. Then deflation follows, as I realize that I simply do not know what to do with this material. I begin to cry. I did not feel the tears coming because they were suddenly there, shaking my chest and swelling my throat without sound. I know what caused it: Loss. I have my mind still, but what I had thought to be my identity as a young man is gone, probably forever. I can tinker with little components of the “unified field theory”, but I now realize that I can never again reconstruct it. Today, if I had a rock in my hand, I would beat my chest with it, like Jerome.

  No, no, no, I would not! It is an evil thing to punish oneself for what was done to you against your will. Of course, it is feeling—dismay engendering terror or rage, initially. Then the rage tends to go outward, onto perceived enemies by transference, or inward, against oneself. In order to escape this island, one must swim away from it, draw a fresh breath of air, and see that the world has not ended. One does not need to recreate the cosmos or to fix it, but I can choose to love, despite everything. This is currency. Only God frees me to choose this because, without him, I would slide into the condition of the killers, the beast-men of Goli Otok. I am no better than they are. All men, without Christ, are capable of becoming Cain—though everyone would deny it.

  That winter he reads his way laboriously through the Summa Theologica and is startled not a few times by what St. Thomas Aquinas has to say about angels. The angels guide the course of the material heavens and strive to help man with his freedom. They sometimes appear on earth, in disguise. This prompts an old memory—the boy who came to him in the piazza of St. Peter’s in Rome. At the time, he had sensed that the encounter was mysterious—not strange, really, because mystery is a different thing from strangeness. Yet even now, over a decade later, he cannot say whether that boy was a wholly material being. Was he perhaps a supernatural being, and was the sensation of a physical hand tugging on his own a grace in the imagination? Was it like Raphael and Tobiah and the great fish? And if he was an angel, why did he not appear as a mighty warrior with a sword in hand, eagle’s wings, and a valiant face, fierce and holy? If he was an angel, why was he sent as a child? Why was his age the same as Josip’s was when his world ended?

  30

  Today he is playing chess with Caleb, a habit they began a year after the boy rescued him from an attempted robbery. Sometimes they walk together to Central Park, where it is not uncommon to see forlorn old men sitting on benches, with chessboards beside them, hoping to engage a stranger in a game. If strangers let themselves be hooked in this manner, the impersonality of the city shrinks to the dimensions of a village square. Or perhaps it is expansion. Whenever Josip and Caleb play chess in the park, passersby gather around, cosmic stragglers and wanderers, armchair military strategists, failed mathematicians, and kings—all in the vestments of the dispossessed. A few pigeons too.

  Caleb is very intelligent. Undisciplined and unformed, yet capable of lightning decisions propelled by inductive rather than deductive reasoning. It is quite a challenge to bring him into check and an extremely rare event to checkmate him. He is as good for Josip’s general mental health as Josip is for his. How old is the boy now? Sixteen, perhaps. He has shaved his head and become a beanpole—almost as tall as Josip—with the universal potential for rage in his posture, mediated somewhat by lingering African warmth. Yes, there is heart there, and while it is always guarded by the threat of violent eruptions, the taming process is under way. Formation will come later, if it is to happen, but freedom must be respected at every moment. One may invite but never force or coerce. In his back pocket, Caleb carries an ugly knife that can be unsprung
and plunged into the flesh of an attacker within a second. So far, there has been no occasion to put it to the test. Every day Josip prays that one will never arise. The taming process is helped along by food. Food is soul-currency. Especially smoked-meat sandwiches, which Josip prepares in advance whenever they are to go on a chess excursion in the park—one sandwich for himself, three for Caleb. The boy also likes chocolate and cigarettes. These are better than heroin. Josip is willing to supply chocolate but no drugs.

  “Let it melt slowly on your tongue.”

  “No way. This a whole bar y’ give me. Fast-fast-fast, that’s what ah like best!”

  “It is the worst method, Caleb. You dishonor the people who made this bar for you.”

  “I don’ know ‘em.”

  “Yes, you know them. Your mother works in a chocolate-bar factory.”

  “You crazy, man? She don’ work in no factory!”

  “I meant it figuratively.”

  “Whatinahell’s figuratively mean?”

  “Symbolically. She cleans rooms in the apartment house. What if some sixteen-year-old boy living in that house were to toss his candy wrapper onto the floor she had just swept?”

  “What you talkin’ ‘bout?”

  “Take a little square and let it melt on your tongue. See if I’m right.”

  Caleb tries it, swallows, and shrugs; says he still prefers fast-fast-fast. Regardless, after three years of dialogues and shared experience, he is decelerating a little and taking a closer look at life.

  Josip tries, as well, to expand the lad’s universe by calling their trips to the park “hunting expeditions”. They will search for surprises. Caleb thinks this is idiotic, childish, not very street-savvy. It is cosmic-savvy, Josip replies. We will collect clues to something bigger than what we see with our eyes.

  “What you see is what you get”, counters the boy.

  “No, what you cannot see is what you get”, says Josip and will explain no further. More and more he inserts such hints into their dialogues. For example, one day as they pass a woman in rags rummaging in a trash barrel, he turns to Caleb:

  “You, of course, recognize that lady.”

  “Hell no, I don’ recanize ‘er. Who she anyway?”

  “She is a queen who has fallen upon hard times. She should be living in her palace.”

  It is easy to hook the boy with the absurd—especially absurdities that contain encrypted truths.

  Or simple actions that write messages in memory. They are walking from the monkey house at the zoo, when they spot a teenage girl sitting up against one of its walls, with her head between her knees. She is wearing dirty jeans and a sweatshirt. The front of her sweatshirt is pulled over her knees, the back hiked up over the top of her head. Her forehead, eyes, and a bit of greasy hair are exposed. Her eyes are clenched shut, and her skin is gray. Though it is a summer day, she is shivering, trying to stay warm in a patch of sunshine.

  Josip and Caleb stop a few paces away.

  “Tracks”, mumbles Caleb with disgust, pointing to her exposed forearms, tattooed with lines of needle marks.

  Josip kneels beside the girl, removes something from his pocket, and gently shakes her shoulder.

  “Don’ giv her no cash, Joe!” Caleb mutters contemptuously.

  When the girl looks up with bloodshot eyes, she startles. Josip offers her a bread roll, a chocolate bar, and an orange. She takes them, staring at him uncomprehendingly. He closes his eyes and silently prays for her. And when she knocks him away with an elbow, he blesses her and walks on.

  Caleb shakes his head all the way down 52nd street.

  “You a bleedin’-heart liberal, man”, he says as they approach the apartment house.

  “Please, Caleb, explain this term to me.”

  “I meant it figuratively”, he laughs. Josip frowns. “What are you, then, Caleb?”

  “I’m a conservative”, declares the boy with a proud jerk of his chin. “Me’n’Momma, we vote Republican.”

  “Aren’t you too young to vote?”

  Caleb ignores this. “My Momma, she always vote Republican. She say th’othah people in Harlem, they’s Democrats, and she got no truck with Democrats. She says they’s bleedin’-heart liberals. She got a lotta people mad at her in my ‘partment over it.”

  “Does she think I am a bleeding-heart liberal?”

  “Nah, she say you a heretic, man. But why you give your stuff to that girl anyway?”

  “Because I know her.”

  Caleb looks surprised. “Don’ gimme that shee-it. You don’ know her.”

  “But I do. That is myself I saw sitting there.” Caleb stops in his tracks. “What you talkin’ ‘bout?”

  “When I was her age I was just like her. I sat against a wall in that posture, freezing and starving, with nowhere to go.” As they walk on, Caleb digests this. “You ain’t no Jesus Christ”, he snorts.

  “I realize this, Caleb. I cannot save her, but I am permitted to give her a little bread.” Currency.

  “Let’s go round the block again”, mumbles Caleb, still shaking his head.

  “All right. What should we see?”

  “Nothin’.”

  But the boy sets a course directly to a corner store, commands Josip to wait outside, and goes in. A few minutes later he comes out with a paper bag in his hands. He opens it and extracts a package of soda biscuits. Without a word, he hands it to Josip, and then walks away.

  “Where are you going, Caleb?” Josip calls after him. “To the monkey house.”

  The Croatian newsletter has been launched, with its first issue doing a bustling business at the back of the church. The publisher/editor/newsboy tells Josip that copies have been mailed to Croatian parishes throughout America, and also to some Croatian nationalist organizations on the West Coast and in New England. It’s a test run, he says, maybe there won’t be a second issue, but there’s no harm in trying.

  Josip’s poem is on pages 12 to 14 of the mimeographed periodical. Unable to recall his old poems from the Dolphin journal, he had written a new one. A hundred-line, thinly-disguised love poem. For a few short weeks, he fell into an illusory daydream of romance with a Croatian—American woman about as old as he is, late forties, graceful, courteous, and very devout. Friar Todd told him that she was a widow, a high-school teacher in the Bronx. Because of his various inhibitions, both natural and inflicted, he never spoke with her in any personal way. On the front steps of the church, he tipped his cap a few times, and they exchanged weather comments in Croatian, but no intimate information was divulged. However, there was something of the old current of attraction in their eyes.

  Yes, he sensed a hint of gentle flame in hers. He was certain about his own feelings because he could have poured out his lonely soul in a single flare if she had given him a signal to proceed. But she did not, though he spent several restless nights wrestling over the finest inferences of her facial expressions. Even though he misinterpreted and hoped for his own interpretation to be correct, he finally understood that he was desperately trying to inflate an illusion into a reality. If anything were to have developed, he would simply have gone down on his knees like Chicklet to his Canary and proposed marriage. But in the final days of his infatuation, Josip realized that he was merely seeking a cure for his loneliness and was not really in love with her. Then she moved away to another part of the city.

  Two blessings came as a result of this “romance”. First, it expanded his heart again, and he remembered Josipa a little and Ariadne a lot, and felt the old flow of heart-soul passion. It hurt—hurt more than he thought it could—but there was an unexpected sense of vitality that returned with the pain. It was difficult to get through this period. The horror of Josipa’s death surfaced, and he had to keep pushing the memory of that final day in Rajska Polja back into the locked cellar. His memories of Ariadne were grief rather than horror, and these he permitted to linger. The second blessing was that the poem seemed to write itself. The object of this creation, the Croat
ian—American woman, remained unnamed. He addressed it to Croatia, titled it In the Homeland of the Soul, and later understood that he was speaking to Love itself.

  Fragment:

  This passage from my one-hundred-line poem (to Croatia, to the lady, to love) keeps returning to my mind. Why this and not another?

  Language, speech, the grammar of the heart,

  expanding the vocabulary of the soul,

  signal from the heart’s lost lexicon:

  Where do we come from?

  What are we seeking?

  Why do we run ever and ever onward

  toward union and completion?

  Yet speech impedes us, slows us, weights us,

  for uncertainty lies between the speaking and the hearing,

  in turgid eddies, cold slipstreams, vortex and whirling pool.

  And fear, dark as the rotting beds of old oceans

  sucks at the limbs.

  Well, my great romance didn’t turn out the way I had hoped. Perhaps she was struggling with her own memories and could not take on any new ones. The initial look of interest in her eyes, the latent affection, and the unexpressed depths of understanding were probably no more than a form of bread offered to a stranger. Currency of the soul. In any event, she has moved on.

  The publisher/editor/newsboy informs Josip a month later that readers are enthusiastic about the inaugural issue. There will be a second. Some feel that Josip’s poem is “interesting”, though oddly inconsistent with the other material—Croatian nationalist politics, critiques of the Tito regime, and examinations of the struggles of the exiles. But since it has aroused some interest and a couple of letters of praise, he is willing to consider more poems as long as they are shorter (much shorter) and less obscure. Would Josip agree to that? Josip agrees, and so begins a working relationship that is to endure for more than twenty years and will lead to many surprises.