Island of The World

by Michael D. O'Brien

  She pats his hand, then withdraws her own. She falls asleep with Josip staring at her.

  Later, the man in military uniform crosses the room with two bowls in his hands and stands in front of Josip.

  “’Lo, there”, he says. “Can’t shake your hand as you see. Brought you a bowl of prawns in Cori’s special sauce. She’s my sister, Caleb’s my nephew, I’m Carl Johnson.”

  “How do you do”, says Josip, rising to his feet and taking one of the bowls. They clumsily shake hands.

  “Balcony’s deserted for the moment”, says Carl. “Why don’t we go on out there and get as much fresh air as is allowed in New York City?”

  So, they step through a doorway in the living room wall out onto a narrow balcony and are hit by the roar of traffic.

  Carl spoons down the prawns, and Josip follows suit. When they’re done, Carl lights up a cigarette.

  “Nice of you to talk to Grandma Naomi like that”, he says. “Thanks for taking the time.”

  “It is I who am grateful. She is a great soul.”

  “Great soul? Well, yes, you could say that and wouldn’t go far wrong. We all love her, but sometimes I wonder if she’s getting senile.”

  “She sees better than most people, I think.” Carl regards Josip thoughtfully, then turns away, looking out over the city.

  “That boy of Cori’s is something else”, muses the uncle. “I been trying to get him to join the army. I’m a sergeant now, and it’s a good life, lots of benefits and discipline. And that’s one boy who needs discipline, I can tell you.”

  Josip says nothing, hesitating to render assessments of a family member.

  “I worried myself thin over him when he was growing up, and Cori, she wore out her knees praying. I don’t know what would’ve become of him if—”

  He doesn’t finish the thought.

  “He is an outstanding person”, says Josip at last. “He does not quite realize it yet.”

  “Oh, he’s smart,” agrees Carl, “he’s real smart. And he’s going to go up in the world, but it ain’t over till the fat lady sings.”

  Another idiom! Who, exactly, is the fat lady? “Have you experienced any combat?” Josip asks. “I was in Vietnam.”

  “Was it bad?”

  “Very bad. I lost some buddies. Saw terrible things. That’s the way war is—always.”

  “Yes, always.”

  “I pray to God to keep my hands clean. Every day I ask the Lord for this. But a country has to pray too, doesn’t it.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “That war, I don’t think about it the way I used to. And I believe there’s another one coming.”

  “Where do you think it will be?”

  “Could be Europe, could be any number of places. Communism is rotting from the inside—collapsing internally. Ten years ago, who’d have guessed. Now it’s close—real close.”

  “The end of Communism? It does not seem possible.”

  “Not if you read the papers, but I think we’ll see it. Five years, ten, maybe twenty at the most, and there’s going to be a whole new world over there. You’re from Europe aren’t you?”

  “Yes. Croatia, a republic in Yugoslavia.”

  “Yugoslavia—now there’s another potential hot spot. I think it’s going to be a right big mess there when the Communists fall.”

  “Will they fall? It seems a dream to me that such a thing could happen in my native land. Only God could accomplish such a miracle.”

  “It’ll take more than one miracle.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Carl lights another cigarette and blows the smoke out over glittering Manhattan. “I mean there’s a lot of people who won’t be happy about it.”

  “My people long for freedom.”

  “Of course they do. Everyone does. But Belgrade has a pretty big army, I hear, and your people over in Zagreb don’t have an army or much of a police force or anything really, do they?”

  “They have their faith.”

  “That may be so,” nods the American sergeant, “but they’re also standing on the border of three worlds. Right in the path of everything that’s going to happen.”

  “What do you think will happen?”

  “It’s not about freedom, Mr. Lasta. It’s about power and wealth. And in our times power and wealth are all about oil.” Josip says nothing.

  “I know, I know, it sounds like conspiracy theory and all that. Cartoon politics, bad guys and good guys trading hats. But it all comes down to some basic factors in the end. During the past ten years, I been tinkering away getting a political-science degree, took some history courses too. You ever hear of a writer named Aristotle?”

  “Yes”, Josip nods.

  “It’s not as simple as I used to think it was, and it’s not going to get any simpler. If I had to make a bet, I’d wager that a lot of things are going to be battled out on your home ground. After that, Iraq, then Iran. Maybe Nigeria, maybe Mexico—who knows.” He stomps out his cigarette and shrugs. “Give or take ten or twenty years, I think we’re going to see Islam on the rise in our lifetimes, keeping us busy with more riots and killin’ and oil politics. Then when we’re real distracted and real worn out, China will swoop in and take the whole crap game. Oil, again. Oil and population and space to live the good life. Soviet Communism’s finished, just a few last gasps to go and then it’s over. Something new is coming, and it’s going to be real bad.”

  “Can anything be worse than Communism?”

  “Maybe we’ll find out. Maybe not. Round and round it goes and where it stops nobody knows. Life’s cheap, you see. Shouldn’t be that way, specially shouldn’t be that way in a country like ours. Inside and outside should be the same, don’t you think?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Domestic policy and foreign policy—there shouldn’t be two sets of morals, a different code for each. If we try to live that way the center gets hollower and hollower till everything collapses. After that, it doesn’t matter what happens outside because there’s nothing left to protect.”

  “Is it really as bad as you think?”

  “Probably not. There’s a whole lot of good people in this country—the best. People like my sister and grandmother. And I’m willing to die to protect this country—I probably will die doing just that. But I’m not going to lie to myself about the way it’s going inside our borders. We’re rotting too—rotting fast. And life’s getting cheaper every day.”

  Fragment:

  Well, the Afro-American prince-in-exile has changed costumes and dialect and has become truly impressive. He no longer wears rings on his body. His vocabulary is about three times larger than mine (in English, I should say). He is quieter these days, when he is not emoting about literature. He is humbler too. Perhaps he was always humble and the blatancy of his arrogant mask was an admission of his powerlessness. We will soon see what he does with power. Yes, he will have power, and I pray that it will not be the worldly kind. He despises NYC politics, loathes federal politics, and hates militarism in any form. (I gave him Aristotle’s Politics as a mild corrective, but he has not yet read it.) A newly forged idealist and humanitarian, Caleb does not really see the beast-man in human nature, despite the streets he has lived on all his life. He is reading American poets, focusing on black writers especially, though he likes some white poets from the previous century, for example a man named Whitman. I found some of the poems intriguing, notably one about lilacs in a yard on the day a president died. But there is a disturbing sense of the pantheistic spirit in the book. Perhaps I am misunderstanding him—the language barrier. Caleb is presently obsessed with Thoreau and recently took me on a weekend excursion to a place called Walden Pond. It is a little body of water, quite charming, but I could not get excited about it, even as I observed the religious fervor in the prince’s face as we walked around it through the woods.

  “It’s very small”, I commented.

  “It’s enormous”, Caleb replied, br
inging me to a stop as I strained to recall a lost memory.

  He gave me Thoreau’s Journals for Christmas, and it is wonderful, wonderful, wonderful (full of wonder). As Zoran once declared at a meeting of the Dolphins, philosophy is born of wonder. So is poetry. Where is Zoran? Where is everyone I once knew?

  Caleb’s infatuation with the poetics he once hated (“crap”) gives me hope for his restoration to the transcendent universe. He long ago rejected his mother’s faith, tells me that it is no more than “residual subservient assimilation” into white Anglo-Saxon religion. I reminded him that Jesus was a Semite with skin probably about as dark as his. “So?” he snapped back irritably. “What you cannot see is what you get!” We both laughed. He is fast and very, very clever.

  “My Momma is the best,” he summarized, “but she seeks her pleasure and consolation in borrowed tribal rituals every bit as primitive as the trance-frenzy of the animists of my native land.”

  “American trance-frenzy?”

  “I meant Africa.”

  “Oh. Which country in Africa are you from?”

  “I’m not sure. Somewhere between Pygmies and Watusis. If you were black, Josip, you’d be a Watusi.”

  “Your great-grandmother does not strike me as a trance-frenzy person.”

  “She’s a Pygmy”, he laughed.

  I could not restrain a look of censure, and I’m afraid I said very gruffly: “Naomi is a giant. You should spend more time with her.”

  He shrugged and changed the subject. On the bus ride back to Manhattan, he informed me that he is the editor of a new poetry journal at the university. Somewhat timidly (he was still a little shocked that I had been angry with him), he asked if I would be willing to read what he has written lately. This was absolutely the first time he ever made such a request of me—in his entire life! An excellent development. I agreed, of course. He has been reading my poems, too. I translated a few for him, awkwardly, into English—a frustrating exercise. Ideas cross the ocean intact, the poetry drowns somewhere in mid-Atlantic. If only I had been created a musician!

  Facet:

  THE HART OF MANHATTAN

  I am walking by night from the mountains of my home

  lordly beneath this crown, though no man knows its weight,

  white-antlered as if I am a mountain crested with two oaks,

  the foothills green and gold by the sea of blood

  part to let me pass, and when I ask if I am ever to return

  they bow in silence

  —no eyes see my approach.

  Pausing upon a bridge made by human hand,

  spanning land and sea and river and sky, I ponder

  what they have made,

  then knowing my task I leap forward onto the island

  —none see my arrival.

  I have brought the mountains into the city;

  it is my gift to you; and the sky which is my breath,

  and the sea as well, for all oceans are in my eyes,

  and all this I bring to you,

  for all has come from me

  —none see me pass between the towers.

  I lift my head and sound the bugle call

  to rouse the city from its sleep, but the city awakens into deeper sleep

  and dreams itself awake when I am among them.

  Why is it so, this reversal of intent?

  Why, though I do them no harm, do they fear me?

  —none know who I am.

  Who shot me, who made me fly on panicked feet?

  Leaping, leaping, tossing my head before I fall to the pavement

  and my crown rolls along the streets

  as you gather round to see a marvel brought down.

  Who has done this? Who?

  Speak! The arrow quivering in my chest with the last pulse-beats

  does not condemn you, nor do I condemn you, my slayer,

  but you should know me, for I was born for this.

  If my blood is needed to show you to yourself,

  to refresh you or awake you now, I will give it.

  Here it is, take it.

  But understand as you drink that even the mighty

  strain their eyes for a final glimpse of stars,

  longing to rest like children in their mother’s embrace.

  This dialogue between Josip and Caleb, after the latter soliloquizes about T. S. Eliot and Pablo Neruda, takes place over Josip’s bathtub while cutting up a grass carp, which the old man caught at Peekskill on the Hudson three days ago—2.5 kilos.

  “So, how did you like Giraffe Wars ?”

  “I regret that I did not like it, Caleb.”

  “Oh, thank you very much.”

  “However, I did notice your technical competence, and your growing sense of creative intuition.”

  “Oh, then it’s my hypothesis you reject.”

  “Poetry must never be a vehicle for ideology.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Poetry is always a vehicle for somebody’s ideology! Look at Ezra Pound.”

  “I cannot read him. His Fascism disturbs me, just as Picasso’s paintings disturb because they derive, consciously or subconsciously, from his Communism.”

  “I like Picasso—a lot!” the boy says in a challenging tone.

  “You should go to the Metropolitan and spend time with Chagall.”

  “Who is Chagall?”

  “I will take you to meet him on Saturday. He is in his painting what a poet should be in poetry. These heroes you are fond of, Picasso and Pound, they disturb not in the way a painting or poem should disturb. Instead they create a malfeasance in the subconscious—and in the soul.”

  “And you’re saying that’s what I did?”

  “I am offering you a little caution. Your concept is clever. The giraffes have lost patience with the rhinocerasauruses, yes?”

  “Rhinoceri.”

  “And so they have a war. The metaphor of tribal hatreds is immediately obvious.”

  “Right. And territorialism and class-conflict.”

  “Your Marxist-Leninist presumptions are my real concern.”

  “What! I’m not a Communist!”

  “No, you don’t want to be, but you are presently a materialist, and it is my hope that you will recognize the dangers inherent in its mythological impressionism.”

  “I’m for freedom.”

  “So am I. But what do you mean by freedom, Caleb? Can there be freedom without responsibility?”

  “The giraffes are very responsible.”

  “Yes, but only to themselves. And that is perhaps what I am getting at. The poet who sees himself as a hero or a prophet, or a priest of the socio-political forces to which he is loyal, which he believes are the historical necessities of his times, too easily becomes a puppet. He has no external measure with which to assess reality. Whether he submits to the forces or rejects them, he becomes a parody of himself, and then without knowing it submits his gifts to the demons of his era. He loses his place in the continuity of time. He becomes dependent on social affirmation and the drug of exalted feelings common to all revolutionaries. He destroys, even as he thinks he creates.”

  “Whew! I shoulda got into basketball.”

  Josip laughs. Caleb’s humor is sometimes irresistible.

  “So, you think I’m a bad apple, Joe?”

  “No, you are merely young. And your desire for exultation is really a damaged longing for the transcendent.”

  Now Caleb is frowning hard, thinking hard. Silently he wraps the fish pieces in waxed paper and leaves the room. The fridge door opens and closes. Josip is washing the bathtub when Caleb kneels beside him and sprinkles cleaning powder on the stains.

  “I don’t get what you’re saying. Could you write it down for me?”

  “Of course, if I can remember it. I have already forgotten what I said.”

  “Something about fake prophets, I think you said.”

  “Did I say that? But that is not it exactly. I think the real challenge for the poet is to distingu
ish between his tendencies to genuine creative intuition and the impulses of the self-centered ego.”

  “How does he do that?”

  “By seeking to understand himself without falling into the trap of self-obsession. By suffering. And most of all, by loving.”

  “Love?” Caleb rolls his eyes.

  “Yes, Caleb, love. Love costs. It always costs. Sometimes it costs everything.”

  Josip’s article on Goli Otok sparks a reaction from Yugoslavia. He has been pressing for years to have it published (his promise to Ante to “babble” about what is happening), but the publisher/editor/newsboy has resisted until now, feeling that Josip exaggerates the severity of Tito’s camps. In the end, he decides that Josip should be trusted and publishes the article, despite the lack of confirming evidence from other sources. A week after the issue is mailed, someone tries to break into the publisher’s apartment, but he scares him off without catching a clear sight of him. Now Josip is grateful that he has maintained his pen name. No one tries to break into the basement cell of Josip Marulić—simply because it cannot be found.

  The next night, a freak fire breaks out in the newsletter office, burns up the files, the subscriber list, the back issues, and the galleys for the issue being prepared for the printer. Fortunately, someone walking past the parish hall smells smoke and calls the fire department. The building is saved, but it seems the magazine has gone up in smoke.

  It is a terrible blow, but, strangely, the publisher appears to be quite pleased when he tells Josip about it on the steps of Cyril and Methodius.

  “It’s a good sign”, he smiles. “Yup, a very good sign.”

  He explains that he is scheduled to give an interview about the incident to The New York Times. Also, as a precaution, he had made a duplicate copy of the subscriber list and kept it in the safe at his commercial office downtown. Twenty-eight hundred names is nothing to scoff at.

  Revolve the lens:

  Josip is yawning, sitting on his cot in his underwear, sipping his first cup of coffee. He glances out the window, which opens onto the light-well. A blue-yellow hue—so there is sunshine out there. It will be a long day—“garbage day” for his building. As usual, the dumpster in the back alley will be heaped high, and the lid won’t close.