After breakfast, he goes out to clean up any litter that might have fallen off the dumpster. There’s not much—a broken tricycle, a few plastic bags leaning against the metal bin. He tosses them onto the top. Then he spots a black plastic garbage bag wedged between the back of the dumpster and the alley wall. He pulls it out. It’s heavy, ripped.
A miniature human hand appears within the rip; then he can see an arm and a shoulder. An abandoned doll, he supposes. The doll is . . . blue. He carefully places the bag on the ground and chokes. Kneeling, he widens the tear. Inside is an infant with part of the umbilical cord attached. It is dead.
Josip remains immobile, staring. At last, he closes the bag and picks it up in his arms. He turns and goes down the alley and out onto the street. Without conscious decision, he makes his way along 52nd to Tenth Avenue and heads south, seeing nothing, feeling only the weight of the child in his arms. A sword is slowly revolving in his heart. He would yell, he would cry, if he could, but now there is only numbed horror. The city is utterly silent, as if nothing moves in all the frantic traffic. He crosses streets against the light and cannot hear the car horns blasting. Finally, he arrives at the church and goes up the front steps.
A few people are scattered among the pews, praying their rosaries; others are making the Stations of the Cross. He proceeds down the aisle and into the sanctuary. There he kneels in front of the tabernacle. Head bowed, lacking any words to say to God, he remains there. Silence and stillness and emptiness. There is no sense of minutes or hours. He is simply a consciousness before the court of heaven, waiting for something—he does not know what. Waiting, waiting, waiting. And it seems to him that he is presenting not only this child to its creator, but himself also. He must explain, but he has no explanations. He must speak, but he cannot speak.
When at last he can cry without sound or visible tears, he unwraps the body and lays it on the top step beneath the tabernacle. He prostrates himself face-down, and waits.
That is where one of the friars finds him. “Josip?” says a voice.
He slowly lifts himself to his knees and sees Friar Todd staring at him and the baby.
“What—what’s going on?” stammers the friar.
Later, he brings water and baptizes the child conditionally.
“We should give a name”, says Josip.
“You choose.”
“Abel.” Then, after considering: “Abel Kristijan Bogdan.”
The friar wraps the infant in a white alb and brings it and Josip into the rectory; and he phones the police. The police come—Josip cannot thereafter remember what happens next, but in the end it is decided that, according to the law, no murder has occurred. The baby was about eight months old within the womb. Abortion, in this country, is not a crime.
Three days later, the city morgue releases the body to Josip and Friar Todd. The friar has borrowed the parish car to collect it. He drives; Josip sits on the passenger side, and the body, wrapped in a red cloth, lies between them on the bench seat. They cross the George Washington Bridge into the Bronx and head up-country toward Massachusetts. There’s a cabin in the Berkshire hills that friends of the Franciscans let the friars use for hermitage days. Neither Josip nor the priest say a word throughout the entire journey. Josip keeps his hand on the little body. Sometimes words come to his mind that he would like to speak to the child, would have said if they had been able to know each other, and perhaps these words can now be heard in eternity.
He remembers Tereza and Josip’s baby, murdered by Partisans in Rajska Polja, shot through the chest even as it took its first breaths. He also remembers the swell of Ariadne’s belly, containing his own child who died at birth. There are no visual memories of this baby, because he did not see her. Yet this personal loss is the sharper, a relentless turning of the blade. And now the aborted child beneath his hand, unnamed and unknown, unloved even by its parents, embodies for him all such losses.
It is early afternoon by the time they turn off the road onto a gravel driveway that winds higher through mixed woods. At the top, they come to a cabin overlooking a small pasture and thicker forest. Friar Todd parks the car and gets out. He removes a shovel from the trunk, while Josip gathers the baby in his arms and stands by. In a clearing behind the cabin, the friar digs the grave. Josip kneels and gently places the body into the hole. Then Friar Todd puts a purple stole over his brown robes, opens a book, and prays aloud in the name of the whole Church, past, present, and to come. He blesses the tiny body and the grave. Then they fill it in, the priest with the shovel and Josip with his bare hands. A crucifix is plunged into the soil.
That done, they stand in silence for a while, looking down at the hump.
They get back into the car and return to the city.
Facet:
CHAGALL’S ABRAHAM AND THE THREE ANGELS
It is not what you expect:
The three angels are seen from behind
and you are the invisible servant who approaches the table.
Six great pigeon wings are folded politely
as the old patriarch stands before the guests with the
nervous reverence of a man
who must serve dinner to God.
Behind him, Sarah brings a bowl of stewed lamb, scowling
over the inconvenience
and the waste—it is she who must reckon the sum of
investment, gain and loss—
accustomed as she is to barrenness.
The old man is not sterile—no, the fault is hers—so she
keeps an eye on the larder
and on the issue of seed among the underlings.
Her wrinkled eyes observe the angel reach for a bottle of wine
and she laughs at his presumption while on a black hill
beyond the camp
a little sapling grows.
Caleb Franklin,
New York, 1989
32
And so the years flow into the reservoir of memory, where even the events of recent years are sometimes blended and divided by unseen currents, until Josip can no longer recall exactly those which came earlier and those which came later. Rationally, he knows that time is like a river, in its more sensory aspect—that is, it is linear. Intuitively, he senses it as a fathomless sea, continuously replenished by the streams of experience. Time’s purpose is to be found in the meaning it brings to the surface.
He is—how old? What year is now ending? Oh, yes; 1989.
On the first day of January, he glues a colored print of Zagreb’s St. Stephen’s cathedral over the Statue of Liberty on his new 1990 calendar. He tore the print from a brochure of “Sunny Yugoslavia” that he had bought in a used-book stall on the sidewalk of Central Park east. Tito is moldering in his grave, and so are the hundreds of thousands of his victims. Now the rivers of blood have become the “Riviera of the Adriatic”. How quickly people forget—enforced erasure and willful absentia.
Fifty-six years old. He feels ten years older, but no matter. He has a good job and stability, prayer, his study of literature (he is learning Greek in order to read Homer in the original), and his poetry. He has lost count of the poems he has written—“facets”, he calls them. Nothing comprehensive, no unified field theory in literary form. They are bits of a puzzle or pieces of a broken mirror or even faces of a cut diamond. Stop that, now! No more metaphors!
Fragments are prose, facets are poetry—though he will admit that sometimes his prose is more like poetry, and his poetry more like prose. No matter. He is what he is, and it is not his business what other people think about him.
He does not consider the possibility that his poems are publishable. Only in small ethnic journals, perhaps. Over the years, several dozen have appeared in the old parish newsletter. It has swollen into a national journal now and is published every month, boasting full-time employees in the downtown Manhattan office and a subscriber list that recently passed thirty thousand. Last week a Croatian-language journal in Vienna negotiated for four of hi
s poems (rather, Josip Marulić’s poems) to be republished over there. There is no fee involved, because everyone knows that the small of the earth should be grateful for a public forum. The editor chose the white horse, the white hart, the dolphin, and the swallow. Nothing political—nothing overtly political.
This is very pleasant, but he knows his limitations. He has never formally studied poetry. He often reminds himself that he is a janitor, a man who takes out the world’s garbage and scrubs its murky mental droppings off the walls. Graffiti is the fugitive poetics of those who feel they have no voice, and their fugitive politics too. He understands and would like to be lenient about it, but the rules of the building prohibit the spread of this strange new art. Its aesthetics are appalling, and his interest in it is probably disordered in some way—perhaps it is only because he remembers the graffiti scratched on the cell walls, latrines, and stones of Goli Otok. One stands out in memory, a little stick man etched into a piece of limestone left by the side of a path—a public forum of sorts. Beneath the tiny ikon anthropou was a name and a cry:
Andro I was here.
Did Andro write it, or was a nameless one calling to Andro?
What is art? Moreover, what is poetry? And why should he be permitted to write it, let alone have it published? He is a man who doesn’t know a pentameter from a tetrameter, even though he can give an intelligent discourse on the tetragrammaton and knows what a marvel the chambered nautilus is. He can describe the Hebrew name for God and the offspring of the sea in the same breath, not so much conflating as relating both as words of a secret language. And he would say this to anyone who would care to listen. He would make his listeners fall in love with that language, its countless measures discovered and undiscovered, if he could, but no one would be interested. He has at last admitted to himself that this is the case. They like a bit of verse as emotional prompts on greeting cards or as page-filler in periodicals, but they do not dive deep. Perhaps they do not know the deep is there. The pace of modern life, television, subways, fast food—these all work against the sublime illuminating moment when the distance between utterance and reception is closed in an embrace.
“What can you say to them, Josip?” he declares into the little mirror over the bathroom sink, as he shaves the gray bristles from his chin. “Should you stand on the street corner and shout, ‘Slow down, everybody!’?”
There are already a lot of shouters out there. Nobody listens to them, and why should they? He is not interested either—except on occasion, when he stops in the street and cocks an ear for the hidden springs of poetry that do sometimes leak out of the mouths of the deranged.
Into this category, he places the following characters: politicians, media personalities, drug dealers, dishonest merchants, and certain kinds of academics. He has never in his entire life met a politician or media personality—but these, he believes, are the criminally insane, for the effects of their crimes are more far-reaching than those of the street-level cheat. He knows madmen aplenty—the guilelessly insane. He knows only a few good academics—Winston and Miriam, and of course Caleb, who will always remain the boy whacking his palm with a metal bar, ever ready to strike down marauders. But there is one whom he regards with particular distaste.
She is a resident of his apartment building. On her bad days she does not see him at all when they pass in the hall. He is invisible. That’s all right; as far as he is concerned this makes it a good day for him. On her good days (his bad days) he ceases to be invisible and her eyes glint, her mouth tightens, and a little dividend of verbiage emerges when she has caught his attention. “Good morning, Mr. Lasta, the halls are looking cleaner lately, but I’d appreciate it if you would scrub the graffiti off the wall on the third floor, thank you.”
The tone is condescending. Her “thank you” is a command wrapped in the cotton-batting of an ersatz smile and delivered while she is in motion toward the entrance foyer. However, she does say “Mister”, and in this he finds hope for her redemption.
It is not that he strongly dislikes her, nor does he envy her reputation and salary. In fact, he pities her. He tries not to judge, truly he does try. In his moderately unkind moments he considers her to be a pampered baby driven by pathetic desperation to feed her false persona; in his worst moods he considers her to be a shark. She bites chunks out of human beings, therefore she is a shark. On good days he tries not to entertain negative thoughts about her and simply prays for her soul.
In her late thirties, she is handsome and overflowing with determined vitality. She has a chair at some university in the city, is a book reviewer for one of the big papers, and has authored two books of literary criticism. Last but not least, she is a devourer of men, “devourer” in the sense of putting them firmly in their place, keeping them emasculated. The Serbs would have been proud of her, though of course she is an Anglo-Saxon.
In the privacy of his room, he sometimes reads what she writes in the papers. He laughs and contradicts, shakes his head, then wraps fish heads in the page and takes it out to the dumpster. Her articles examine only to demolish what does not fit into her narrow agenda—which of course she promotes as the broadest possible worldview. She does not seek out literature that reveals the miraculousness of life, and he is sure that she would make mincemeat of his poems. Fortunately, she would not be able to understand them even if something of his did make it into print in an American periodical. She reads English perfectly but is completely illiterate in soul-speech. Doubtless, she reads no ethnic journals.
Men and women of creative genius are dissected by this lab technician only according to her strict social criteria: she is a liberal democrat with not-so-subtly disguised socialist leanings and (he suspects) a slight, though not terribly serious, infatuation with Marxist terrorists. This part of her geo-psyche never reveals itself in print, but he knows that it almost inevitably comes with the package, the new-liberal being a romantic at heart, a peculiarly repugnant kind of romantic, he adds with a shudder. It would be a mistake to presume that she is a Communist. She is not a Communist. She is simply full of contradictions, all of which are resolved in her own mind by the historical necessity of her upward mobility.
Caleb reads her articles religiously. Whenever he storms into Josip’s room, waving one of those newspaper clippings, excited by her talent and wit, Josip prepares himself for an exercise in cautious debate. He does not want to alienate Caleb, nor does he want to appear as a hidebound reactionary.
Josip will sometimes admit to himself that he is prejudiced against her. After reading her more provocative articles, he puts his head in his hands and scrutinizes his conscience. Why does he dislike her so much? Why does he examine her writing only to demolish? Is there nothing good here? Well, there is plenty of good in her words, but it is mixed with so much blind nonsense—and that is the problem. She has come to represent for him the triumph of materialism. She is a very talented, charming, and sanitized Partisan. In her reviews, she sneers with exquisite irony at what she calls “moralism” and is at her most eloquent when attacking books that might undermine the licentious socio-cultural revolution and impede the march of progress. She exalts only those authors who help propel the revolution ever onward into the glorious future.
Is he bitter about her? Yes, he supposes that he is; he cannot lie to himself about it. But why is he so bitter? Is it because she represents something he can neither fight nor run from? Yes, that must be it, because she does indeed represent the new order. What the Communists and Fascists failed to achieve through violence, materialists have accomplished without firing a shot.
He is not afraid of her. If she were to complain to the owner of the building, it would not be a great problem, even if he were to lose his job. Nor is he afraid of her on the more instinctual level—the psychic stratum that imprisons a growing number of men who collaborate with aggressive women so as not to be hurt by them—because they are unequipped to be put perpetually on the defensive.
For more than a week now, he
has not seen her comings and goings. Perhaps she is away vacationing in Cuba or Yugoslavia. Communism with a human face. He sighs, and goes down to the foyer to chat with the doorman. He knows that Gus is in a state of anxiety over his wife’s health—she has been diagnosed with cancer. When Gus is left too long without conversation, he begins to stare into the street and to overlook the people who need the door opened for them. There have been complaints. A few residents want him to be dismissed.
Sure enough, Gus is staring out into the street. But it is not the massing of his personal woes that has caught his attention at the moment. On the front step, a cat has captured a pigeon and is mauling its wings and head with its paws while trying to get its jaws around the throat.
Josip races out and picks up the cat by the scruff of its neck, and shakes it.
“Let go!” he says in his native tongue. The cat is feeling particularly bloodthirsty this day, or perhaps it has employed a complicated strategy of stalking its prey, and for either or both of these reasons it will not let go. Blood speckles the pigeon’s wing, and for once Josip is too impelled by the imperatives of justice and mercy to let himself be distracted by the beautiful juxtaposition of magenta upon a field of shimmering violet-gray.
With his free left hand, he lightly bats the cat on the back of the head. At this most inauspicious moment, the academic rushes through the doorway and stomps to a halt before him. Her chest inflates with outrage and her fists thrust down at her sides. Her feet arch upward, the silk-covered heels lifting from their suede clogs.
“Don’t you dare strike this animal!” she seethes.
“Do you mean the pigeon, Madam, which, as you see, is suffering an assault?”
“I mean the cat. Let it go, this minute!”
“If I let it go, both the victim and the aggressor will fall to the concrete”, says Josip in a reasonable tone. “Thus, both creatures may be hurt.”
Island of The World Page 61