Island of The World

by Michael D. O'Brien

  Year two, more of the same, but somewhere in the middle of the year she dropped the “What!”, though all the other symptoms of loathing continued.

  Year three, she nodded at me one day when I said thank you and put the change into my hand. She still wouldn’t meet my eyes, however, and kept her scowl firmly in place. Each Christmas I give a box of cream-biscuits and recite my thanks for her excellent services. Each year she pretends she hasn’t heard. I never discover what happens to the biscuits. Does she trash them for fear of poison or moral contamination? Or does she open them secretly wherever she lives and wonder about the mad Croat who will not collapse before her arsenal? Alternatively, does she pass the box around to her fellow employees and make jokes about the idiot who brings them? If so, that is not my concern. It is not my business what other people think about me. The Serb-lady is around seventy years old and physically unwholesome, so of course no one would attribute my attentions to romance. If they laugh at me behind my back, it is only because I appear to be very stupid. Well, I will say it again: no matter! And stop being so sensitive, Josip!

  Year four: No difference from year three.

  Year five begins. Have I ever been able to predict anything? No. The surprises of the Lord have not come to an end.

  That year he learns that the owners and employees of the fish market are indeed Serbs, an extended family of refugees. Freshly taped to the wall behind the cash register is a big tourist poster of Belgrade with English words beneath it: Sunny Yugoslavia, followed by the name and address of a travel agency. There are no Orthodox icons or religious symbols anywhere in the shop, so Josip concludes that these are not religious Serbs. However, as immigrants, even as citizens of America, they are perhaps anti-Communists or simply apolitical.

  Croats are fairly certain about who Serbs are—you can tell by their faces, their expressions. Serbs, doubtless, can spot a Croat a New York City block away. Josip has been proven wrong before. Now he is certain.

  The Serb-lady never speaks to him, nor does he speak with her other than relentlessly to maintain his courtesies and his annual Christmas gift. Still, she continues to put his change into his hand and no longer barks at him. She hears his requests for certain kinds of fish without asking him to repeat himself. Her eyes remain cold and her mouth is ever the dangerous inverted slit, but he has come to feel a strange affection for her. Who is she? What has she suffered? Where has she come from?

  One summer day, he is in the shop buying a slab of white cod. Caleb is with him, and he wants to show the boy the best cuts of cod and how to cook it properly, which is to simmer it in water to remove the heavy dose of salt, then to marinate it in lemon juice, and finally to cook it in butter and olive oil with generous peppering. A Portuguese man on the third floor introduced him to sliced potatoes cooked in oil and pimiento sauce (minced, slightly fermented, sweet red peppers). Combined, they make an excellent meal. Josip likes to put pimiento on his cod also. Few North Americans know about this rare treat. It’s time for Caleb to leave behind the disgusting habit of eating fast-food hamburgers.

  The Serb-lady is not at the cash register today. She is standing (scowling as always) at a wooden chopping table behind the counter, dressed in a blood-spattered apron. She raises a stainless-steel cleaver above a fish and brings it down on the body like an executioner. Chop! Josip shudders. Caleb chuckles.

  Josip places his order, smiles at the woman, and bows his head to her in deference, prepared as always to receive no good return for his efforts. Instead, she places the cleaver on the block and covers her face with her hands. Her poor old body trembles, then her shoulders heave with suppressed sobs. Fish gore is dribbling down her fingers. She begins to cry audibly. The man at the cash register glances at her, shrugs at Josip, then is distracted by another customer.

  At first astounded, then impelled by a wave of compassion, Josip leans over the counter.

  “Oh-oh-oh, Madame”, he murmurs sympathetically. “Are you all right?”

  Looking up, she stares at him with red eyes and snarls in Serbo-Croatian, “Get away from me, you UDBA bastard!” Following these words issues a string of foul invective that leaves Josip stunned to silence and Caleb grinning.

  “B-but I am not UDBA”, Josip stammers.

  She steps up to the counter and leans over it, her face close to his, seething with hatred.

  “You almost fooled me with those biscuits, but I saw through it. I know you came from them!”

  “Wh-who is them”, Josip whispers, shaking his head.

  “I know who you are. I know! You killed my son!”

  “I have killed no one, Madame!”

  Then she begins her tirade: “He was a good comrade, he built bridges and dams for you, and then just because Tito betrayed the Cominform, you throw the loyal men into prison. My boy was all for Stalin, and then when Tito went to bed with the British, you destroyed him.”

  “Where was he in prison?”

  “You know where! You know!” She picks up the cleaver, and an animal rage flares in her eyes.

  “Was it Goli Otok?”

  “See—you know!” she screams, preparing to throw the cleaver. The other employee leaps for her and grabs her arm, wrestling the cleaver from her. Now she is raging uncontrollably. Shocked and embarrassed, customers are scurrying out the door.

  “I-I-I was a prisoner on the white island too”, Josip says in a raised voice, trying to bring this torrent to an end.

  When she finally absorbs this, she stops struggling, but her furor is unabated.

  “You’re a liar! You followed us here. You’re always watching! I don’t care if you kill me. If you come close, I will kill you first.”

  “No, no, no, Madame, I am not with the watchers.”

  Neither his English words nor his Croatian words make any difference to her. He unbuttons his shirt and pulls it open. The crucifix is exposed. The scars most of all.

  “The UDBA put me in Goli Otok”, he says. “The UDBA made these marks on my body. You see this. And this. And this—”

  His shoulder is now bared, revealing the jagged scar and stitch-marks standing up like ridges. Trembling, breathing heavily, she falls silent, staring at the old wounds. The other employee lets her go and gapes. Caleb, too, is staring.

  “An engineer from Belgrade sewed up this wound”, whispers Josip. “He bathed all my wounds and kept me alive, gave me his bread. His name was Ante.”

  She covers her face with her hands and breaks into fresh sobs.

  “Oh, my Ante”, she wails. “My Ante, my Ante!”

  So the three other human beings stand there helplessly, listening to the old woman cry. No customers enter the shop. Outside, the city’s pavement is hot, and traffic noises are roaring. Inside, there is only stillness and the agony of memory.

  When it seems that the woman is becoming a little calmer, Josip continues.

  “I do not know if the Ante I knew on Goli Otok was your son, but he would be the right age, and he built bridges and dams for Tito, and he was a Communist. That is all I know. Perhaps it was another.”

  Wiping her eyes with the bloody apron, her lips trembling in the struggle to shape words, she asks in the voice of a child, “Is he still alive?”

  “I do not know. I escaped in 1960, or it may have been 1961. He helped me to escape.”

  “Where is Goli Otok?” she asks.

  “It’s a small island not far from Rijeka.”

  Taking a deep breath, she comes to a decision, strides to the poster of Belgrade, and rips it from the wall. Her teeth are bared and gritted as she tears it into small pieces, crumples them, and throws them onto the floor. Then she stomps on them.

  Josip buttons up his shirt. Caleb grunts, “C’mon, let’s get outta here; this is a mega screw-up!”

  “Be silent”, says Josip, with a firmness he has never before used on the boy.

  The woman returns to the counter, staring at the floor. Finally, she raises her eyes and says, “Did he tell you about his fam
ily?”

  Josip shakes his head. “I’m sorry, nothing.”

  “What did he look like?”

  Josip describes the Ante he knew. “That must be him”, she whimpers. “Was he brave?”

  “Yes, very brave. He was one of the few who did not lose his honor—on an island where there was little honor.”

  “He did not betray the Party?”

  “I know only that he did not betray his fellow prisoners.” She nods solemnly, then murmurs, “On this day in 1957, they took him away.” She can say no more.

  Heading back to the apartment with a package of cod under his arm, Caleb is quiet for most of the way.

  “What all dat shriekin’ about?” he ventures at last.

  “The woman lost her son. I think I knew him.”

  “She sho’ was pissed at you.”

  “She mistook me for someone else. We corrected our misunderstanding.”

  “So, you knew her son in the ol’ country.”

  “Yes, we were prisoners together.”

  “Prisoners? Dat where y’ get dem scars?” Josip nods. “Sheee-it.”

  “Caleb?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You are an intelligent young man. I like you very much. But I am exhausted by your act.”

  “What act?”

  “I ask a favor of you. I entreat you to speak like the man you really are.”

  “What you talkin’ ‘bout?”

  “You are not a rat. From now on, you will speak to me like a man.”

  31

  Fragment:

  Individual destiny is not produced machine-like from the “mills of the gods”. Nor are we characters in a morality play. We are works of art, each work distinct, each a phenomenon, the art laboring hand in hand with the Artist to create the story. We are inside a poem. No, we are the poem. Oh, my mixed metaphors! Help me, imagination, to revolve the lens of microscope and telescope so that what I see is in clear focus.

  The lens revolves:

  On the seventh floor a family of six lives in a three-bedroom apartment, Sally and Steve McIsaac. Josip has frequently replaced electric fuses in the panel above their refrigerator, but somehow the McIsaacs continue to overload the circuits. Their life is a little out of the ordinary. Though husband and wife seem to love each other and their children, they are perpetually exhausted, and the reason is that they have an eight-year-old son who suffers from a severe mental disability. He is a grinning lad who lunges in and out of the building with a parent always gripping his hand firmly. He cannot speak, can only make grunting noises, and is hyperactive.

  Today, the mother of the family phones down to the basement to explain that once again a fuse has blown, and there is no electric power in the living room. She cannot run out to buy more fuses because Steve is at work and the baby is sleeping, Jason (the handicapped boy) is in his crib, and all the other children are at school.

  When Josip arrives at the apartment, he learns from the exasperated mother that the boy has stuck a bobby pin into a wall socket, burned his fingers, and fried the socket. He is now whimpering in one of the bedrooms. She apologizes for putting Josip to this trouble once again, is terribly sorry for her son’s misdemeanors and explains his condition, as she has done several times before. Josip tells her not to worry and replaces the fuse.

  “Jason doesn’t sleep much”, she sighs. “How he keeps going, I just don’t know, because he never stops moving, burns up energy all day long, and most of the night too. That’s why he has to be kept in the crib at night. He bounces in his crib night and day, making noises. The other kids have learned to sleep with it, but Steve and I are always on the alert. If he breaks out, he can get into the kitchen, turn on a heating element, and burn himself. He has done it a few times, but he never learns from his mistakes. You just never know when he’ll do something crazy and hurt himself.”

  Jason is also epileptic and suffers grand mal seizures when he gets sick and develops a fever. The high temperatures are a real danger. Now Jason stops wailing. Though it is late January, a Christmas tree is still sitting in the corner of the living room. Josip plugs in the lights, and the tree blooms with its cascade of colors, the glass angels dangling from every branch, magnifying the lights, casting sparkles about the room. He notices a Bible open on a table beside the tree.

  As the woman continues her apologies, Josip tries to reassure her, but the explanations are something she needs to say. She has said it so many times to him that he knows it all. There are dark bags under her eyes, and she is close to tears.

  “We couldn’t bear to put him in an institution, we just couldn’t. We love him so much, Josip. I know he looks kind of hard to love, and our life’s pretty stressful at times, but you can’t imagine what he’s brought to our family.”

  Josip can imagine. This family is full of generous, patient children with bright faces and a depth in their eyes that is far beyond their years. There appears to be no self-centered behavior, just an uncanny amount of happiness whenever they are not involved in a Jason crisis.

  “I understand very well”, he says. “It is a great cost—and a great gift.”

  Blinking rapidly, she pauses.

  “You’re the first person in eight years who’s said that.”

  “It is so obvious; he is a pure soul.”

  She begins to weep and sits down on the ripped couch.

  “You can’t imagine the things people say to us”, she chokes. “All those well-meaning sympathetic friends and neighbors, doctors and teachers and counselors, and even the check-out lady at the grocery store. Family members are the worst. Their bottom line is he really shouldn’t exist, better for him to die, better for him never to have been born, and better for us too, that’s what they really mean.”

  “Their thoughts are evil.”

  “Yes, evil”, she whispers. “I just don’t know what to say to people like that, because if you try to explain it to them, they go all vague and mushy, and then you can’t see the killer beneath the kindness.”

  “Do they ever help you?”

  “Of course not. They’re very helpful with their advice but never with practical—”

  Then a scream from the bedroom.

  She jumps up and races down the hallway. Wondering if he can help, Josip follows her into a bedroom crowded with bunk beds and dressers and a unique kind of crib. It is made of wooden slats and a lid that latches. In fact, it is a comfortable cage. Inside are cloth animals and a jumble of plastic toys suitable for a two year old. Inside, as well, is the boy, an eight year old in diapers. Eyes in a panic, he is lifting his arms to his mother, who is scrambling to unlatch the lid, while his mouth chews on something, and blood dribbles down his chin.

  “Oh, Jason!” she cries, pulling him out. “Oh, no, not again!” She pushes the boy into Josip’s arms. “Hold him tight, please.”

  Jason begins to thrash, and it takes every bit of Josip’s strength to keep him from catapulting onto the floor. While he holds the boy’s head, the mother pokes her fingers into the yelling mouth and pulls bits of glass from it.

  Later, as she sits on a rocking chair with Jason in her arms, dabbing his tongue and lips with an ice-cube wrapped in a washcloth, the lad calms down. Somewhat subdued, he is soon grinning and making his grunting noises.

  “He thinks Christmas-tree bulbs are fruit. The red ones are his strawberries, and he likes real strawberries a lot”, she laughs, wiping her eyes.

  “Would it be good to take him to the doctor to check his mouth?” asks Josip.

  “We’ve worn a path in his carpet with stuff like this”, she says, shaking her head. “He’ll just looks inside the mouth and tell us to keep an eye on him, and always—I mean always—suggests that he needs to be put in an institution.”

  “I think he needs to run”, murmurs Josip.

  “I try to get him out to the park at least once a week, but he’s a total-care child, and I can’t really do it with the baby. On weekends, when Steve’s home all day, we go out as
a family. Every Saturday we go to the zoo or have a picnic by the pond, but we can’t go out at night. There are some rough characters roaming around, and strangers say things too.”

  “Mrs. McIsaac, would you let me help you?”

  She furrows her brow and cocks an ear as if she has not rightly heard.

  “I could go with you each day during my lunch hour, if you think this would help. I can give more time during my day off, if you wish.”

  Gazing at Josip with something like wonder, she whispers, “I’ll talk to Steve.”

  So begins two and a half years of almost daily excursions to Central Park. As a result, both Josip and the boy are looking healthier. The pigeons in the park will distract Jason for a few minutes, making him laugh and laugh and laugh like a very small child. They pull him into the flock, where he clearly longs to be, and he would rise with them into the air if he could, because he always raises his arms and sobs as they fly away. Josip understands. He was like this once, a long time ago.

  Though Josip sometimes feels regret that his Saturday is not as free for fishing trips up the Hudson, he realizes that in the unfolding of the providential universe, he is now purchasing almost all of his fish from the Serb-lady. As a result of this, Ante’s mother continues to thaw. They speak together sometimes. It is nothing extravagant, just basic human courtesies. The following Christmas, he gives his usual gift, and she gives him an extra little packet of smoked fish, now bestowed with a grudging smile and a flick of the eyes—an unspoken qualification that he shouldn’t count on this every year.

  Sometimes on a Sunday, Josip will accompany the McIsaacs to Mass at St. Patrick’s cathedral, and they have in turn come with him once to the Croatian Mass at Sts. Cyril and Methodius. Jason is hospitalized a couple of times with high fever and convulsions, and Josip stays overnight in the ward with the boy, praying the Rosary, while Steve and Sally go home to sleep. Coriander babysits during crises.