“And since the new people took power?”
“Records disappear, memories too. I’m content with retirement. But it’s not as much fun as we used to have.”
The thin one laughs without mirth and lowers his voice: “Well, we did our part to clean up the mess.”
“Yes, it was a mess. The country was a shambles then.”
“Did you ever have trouble—afterward?”
“Never. Donkeys, as you know, don’t speak.”
Josip’s eyes remain closed. Nothing in his manner visibly changes, though he knows that the two men, seated only meters from him, must be aware of his presence. He is just an old man dozing in the sunlight, the same as a dozen others at the surrounding tables. He does not look at the two beside him, but he knows who they are. Zmija and Zohar, the snake and the cockroach.
“Let’s go get a drink”, says the cockroach. “I’m booked into the Hotel President. We can talk privately there.”
“Good idea. This is too public.”
They get up and amble away.
Exhaling loudly, Josip bends over and puts his face into his hands. He pants for breath, and then, when the beat of his heart slows enough, he gets to his feet and walks away in the other direction.
He enters his hotel room, locks the door, and sits down on the bed. He is no longer able to rest. A terrible heat flushes his body, rising from within. His head is pounding with blood, and he cannot think. At first he is merely numb, then the currents of rage and hatred—and fear—begin to flow through him. He tries to pray, wants to run as fast and as far as he can. He wants to head straight to the airport and return to New York on the next jet leaving Split.
Wave after wave hits him. He grits his teeth so hard that they are in danger of cracking, and his fists are clenched, bloodless. He tries to pray again, to cast out the dark angel that has entered the room and now strikes him again and again with its truncheon, within and without.
He would like to cry out but can only sit there trembling. He pulls his rosary from his pocket and merely grips it in his right hand. The words of the prayer are impossible to speak. He tries, but each word is a slab of stone that must be carried up a steep incline. Then it seems that all prayer dries up like a river blocked at its source. He is silent, and for a few moments he feels his life seeping away. How strange is this mixture of riotous feelings and deadness. It is as if his entire life has led him on circuitous and astonishing paths to this final moment, this end. Is this what he was spared for?
At last he is able to lie down on his back and throw his arms over his face. Wide awake, he cannot imagine what to do. What is there to do? Nothing. Be silent, you are dead. Now the only alternatives to despair are rage or terror. Terror is unsustainable because it demolishes the interior, but rage can galvanize energy, direct it outward, bring it to its conclusion. A consummation of justice, at last.
At last. In the end. In the end, in the end . . .
When he awakes, night has fallen. He drinks a little water and then lies down again in the dark. Throughout the following hours, he remains sleepless, staring at the black ceiling of a cement barracks, hearing the barks of guards and the groans of prisoners. He sees also the two boys who died at his feet. Svat’s skull crushed beneath the stones, all witnesses helpless before his cries and pleading, and in the end his silence, the brain matter and blood oozing into the dust of the quarry. Then the face of Budala shattered by a bullet, a rag puppet thrown away, crumpled in the white dust. The good have died, and the evil have prospered, grown fat on the riches of this world. They sit at cafés under the unheeding sun, laugh about their pasts, and speak of the necessity of their acts. They would grind the face of God into the dust if they could—or a young Christ with his features blasted into fragments. If God died in Goli Otok, Josip will not let it be the final word. The end of the cosmos will not go unprotested. Against the weight of the entire world, he will be the lamb’s cry for justice. He will make a gesture, futile though it may be. And as the sun crests over the Dinarics, he knows what it will be.
Later, when the city awakes, Josip leaves the hotel and wends his way through the streets of Stari Grad and beyond, toward the modern section of the city. Not far from the northern wall of the palace, he finds a little shop that specializes in antiques. Inside the dim interior, he asks the proprietor if he has any weapons for sale. Yes, quite a few, the man replies; step into this room, please. See, we have sabers and swords—old Croatian from the days of the kingdom, also Austrian cavalry, and even a Turkish scimitar. And these pistols in the case are from the Austro-Hungarian empire. Very fine this silver one with the ivory handle.
“Very fine”, murmurs Josip. “Does it still fire?”
“Yes, I fired it myself last month at the armory show in Vienna. And of course we keep every item in the best condition. I cleaned and oiled this pistol with my own hands a few days ago. It comes with a certificate of reliability. I would suggest, sir, that if you are interested in the item, you might want to make a decision soon, because a museum has expressed some interest in it.”
“I will take it.”
“Do you wish to know the price?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
So, the purchase is made, and Josip leaves the shop with a package containing the pistol and bullets.
From there, he walks over the hump separating the old city from the new and goes down into the warren of industrial enterprises. There he locates a masonry shop, and is led by its proprietor to a yard full of bricks and stone. He purchases a single block of yellow-white limestone, about twelve inches square and three inches thick, and pays for it to be delivered to his hotel. Then he goes out onto the street and catches the next bus for downtown. Back in his hotel room, he sits in the gloom with the curtains closed, and waits for the stone to arrive. He drinks more water but can eat nothing.
Shortly after one in the afternoon, the stone is delivered to the lobby desk, and the porter rings up to say that a package has arrived for him. Josip puts the pistol case into his knapsack, shoulders it, and goes down to the lobby. There he receives the stone, which is wrapped in newspaper, and loads it into the knapsack. He leaves the hotel and heads straight to the church of St. Francis. He passes Fra Anto, who is gazing at him somberly, and enters the church. He stands at the back for some minutes before going down on his knees. He kneels for a length of time, then bows to the tabernacle and goes outside again onto the promenade. Walking north on Marmontova in search of Starčevićeva Street, he proceeds with determination until he arrives at the Hotel President and enters its lobby.
He cannot ask for the thin man and the lame man because he does not know their real names. Inquiring of a porter the way to the bar, he is directed into a cocktail lounge. The snake and the cockroach are in the room, hunching over drinks at a table in the corner farthest from the door. Josip takes a seat near the entrance and orders and pays for a cup of coffee, which is brought to him shortly. After he sips it, he removes the heavy package from his knapsack and places it on the table, keeping an eye on the two in the corner. They do not notice him, deep as they are in their conversation. He removes the pistol from its case and sticks it into the inside pocket of his jacket. There comes a moment when the room is deserted, save for himself and the snake and the cockroach. After unwrapping the stone, he picks it up and carries it to the table where they are sitting.
He stands before them. They flicker their eyes at him, thinking he is the waiter. Their faces register a little surprise to see an old man standing there with a limestone slab in his hands. When he drops it onto the table between them with a boom, they jerk back in astonishment.
Josip pulls the pistol from his jacket and points it at the killer’s head—the snake.
“I am from Goli Otok”, he says in a low voice. “This is for what you did to Krunošlav Bošnjaković.” He pulls the trigger. Bang!
Swiftly he points it at the head of the cockroach. “This is for what you did to Dalibor Kovač” He pulls the trigge
r. Bang!
The snake and the cockroach stare in amazement, mouths hanging open, their eyes blazing with fear but for the moment paralyzed.
“What?” stammers one. “Who?” says the other, for the bang is not the firing of a gun but a whisper.
Now the old man takes something else from his pocket. Before the snake he places a wooden crucifix. Before the cockroach he places another.
Taking a step back, he says to both men:
“Unless you repent of your crimes, the winepress of God shall extract from you full payment. Know that judgment is soon to be upon you in the court of heaven.”
With that, he pockets the pistol and leaves the room. He walks away from the hotel without haste and goes back down the streets leading to the sea. Arriving at the shore, he stands on a wharf and throws the pistol far out into deep water, then the bullets. After that, he returns to the church of St. Francis, climbs the front steps with trembling legs, bows to Fra Anto, and enters the house of the Lord. He remains there for the day; and when he returns at nightfall to his hotel room, he falls onto the bed and sleeps.
36
The modern maps of Bosnia-Herzegovina have no trace of Rajska Polja, nor of Pačići, and as far as Josip can tell, no older maps ever revealed the presence of those two villages. Days spent in Sarajevo’s city library and also in the national archives turn up nothing. Yet he knows his home was there. He came from somewhere, even if history has erased it. No one in the city knows of a village by that name. The Communists changed the names of many places, so it probably has another now. Of course the people still living there will know its traditional name. But he must search for it by sight, dredging in the murk of his past and trusting that landmarks will aid him.
The car-rental terms are decent enough, and his pockets are full of American dollars, which open every door. Because he has never bothered to learn to drive, he hires a man to take him to the fields of heaven. The car is a white compact. The driver, it turns out, is a young fellow named Alija, the same name as a man on a donkey more than half a century ago. His full name, he informs his passenger, is Alija ibn Yosuf al-Bosnawi, but this cannot be integrated into Josip’s pilgrimage of memory. The man on the donkey had a family name, of course, but what it was, Josip had never learned.
The drive along the highway south from the city begins pleasantly enough. It is a warm autumn morning. The war is over, peace-keeping troops are everywhere, and the native people proceed about their business as they have for millennia. But the evidence of catastrophe is soon abundant—a bombed-out town, burnt, abandoned vehicles along the highway, and then a larger center with many shattered windows in apartment buildings, bullet holes sprayed across the walls, and dark-eyed children learning to play again in streets where murder reigned only a short while ago. The country is full of thousands of orphans. A quarter of a million people died here. Hundreds of thousands of others fled to Croatia and have not returned. Even so, minarets are being erected again above many a village, and, less frequently, the spires of small churches.
Alija hums to himself then breaks into a deep-throated melancholic song, a Muslim poem translated into Croatian:
Over Sarajevo flies the falcon,
Searching everywhere for shade to cool him.
He finds a black pine in Sarajevo,
by a well of sparkling water.
Near its fountains are Hyacinthe the widow
And Rose the young virgin.
He glances down, the falcon, and thinks to himself:
Shall I kiss the solemn Hyacinthe
Or the fair now-blooming Rose?
Then admonishes he, most wisely, to himself:
Gold, long tested, is far better
Than finest silver freshly poured . . .
And so forth. The falcon, clever bird that he is, kisses both women. Alija’s eyes dart to see how his customer has taken this bit of local color, so Josip smiles and nods appropriately. The song is not the way the poem is supposed to be, the young man explains. He changed it and likes his own version better. In the original, the falcon kisses old Hyacinthe, and that makes Rose lose her temper. She curses the stupidity of men, for in Sarajevo youths love older women and old men love maidens. Alija’s thoughts drift away on a trail of chuckles.
And all the while, Josip is pondering. As the mountains sweep past, his eyes linger on a lake that appears on the right, the artificial reservoir made by the dam at Jablanica.
“Jablansko Lake”, says Alija, good tour guide that he is. “The Neretva used to flow here; I guess it still does underneath.”
Yes, the Neretva. It was the river in which he saw the bodies of priests floating, the waters from which he drank.
Those waters gave him his second baptism—a death and a rebirth—the first of the many he was to experience. He had met Christ in it, a bound and trussed and murdered Christ floating by. Christ had called to him there, asking him to enter the water in a way that he had never done before, not even by the shores of the sea when, having hurled himself under the surf, he had been pulled up again, against his boyish will, by his father.
Then Christ had pulled him under. Had it been a pulling or an invitation? In a sense, it was both, the dialogue between freedom and ignorance, between providence and fate, between the call to good and the vulnerability to evil. And so, he had gone down, deeper still into the unseen currents, where he had begun to learn that knowledge itself cannot save. Christ, he had learned, always drew his followers into deep waters, even, at certain points, to the brink of literal drowning, for in this immersion was the beginning of wisdom. It pulled the soul from the merely horizontal perspective into the vertical, the cosmic one, which is so much higher than it is broad.
Is this so in every age, for every generation of men? Has it been so for him? Will it be so in the future? And will the return to his birthplace, which he has long dreaded and so yearned for, be another drowning? He is not sure; he knows only that he must return and that there can be no more delay. It is no longer necessary to avoid the apokalypsis of memory at all cost, for this practice of avoidance, which he has pursued for most of his life, can now be left behind. The only certainty is that it will contain pain. Yet this pain is life. If drowning contains the promise of rebirth, then pain contains the promise of joy. He hopes for this. Yes, the journey is not so much about knowledge as it is about hope. Here, at the latter end of his years, he may begin again.
His meditation is interrupted by the driver, who is now smoking a Turkish cigarette and has just broken into Josip’s thoughts by offering him one. He politely declines. Alija asks if he recalls any particular road coming down out of the mountains, because there are a number in the region. Josip shakes his head, straining to recall the contours of the land as he once knew it. Surely they cannot have changed, surely they will not fail to offer evidence of his past. But they do not yet do so. They are beautiful but vague.
“There was a bridge”, he murmurs. “I crossed a bridge.”
“Then you must have come from the west side of the river”, says Alija. “The highway is on the eastern shore from just south of the lake all the way to the Adriatic.”
Shortly after, Josip glances out the driver’s window and sees a great rock flash by on the side of the road, then another, followed by a third. They are natural phenomena, yet the evocation of the sacred in this trinitarian configuration cannot be dismissed. There is a sense of familiarity but no clear identification. The sense might be caused by anything from actual memory to a theological inference, or simply his visual interest in the stones. Even so, as the car rounds another curve he sees in his mind’s eye an old woman leading a pig by a rope and raising her walking stick in warning, Steal my pig, and I will break your head! Is he mixing memories—was it before or after the bridge?
Ten minutes farther along the highway they come to a bridge, and on the other side is a road that descends from the foothills of a narrow gorge. Soaring beyond are very high mountains, stark and brutally sharp.
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p; “Stop!” Josip says.
Alija pulls over to the shoulder and idles the car. “Is that where you want to go?” he nods toward the mouth of the gorge.
“Yes, there.”
The car reverses, turns off the highway, crosses the bridge, and begins to climb. Gearing down, the driver makes the engine roar. The surface under the wheels is rougher than the highway pavement, yet not difficult to navigate. It is well used, with no encroaching overgrowth. This stage of the journey is slow because the route continually twists and turns, rises and dips as it gradually ascends to higher altitudes. Now and then, they pass isolated farms, small stone houses and sheds standing among modest groves. Some of the trees are faded now, and some still have the remains of wild fruit. The older oak woods and the beeches along the way are crowned by distant stands of dark pine, and above these are the more barren heights of the range, with new snow cloaking the crests.
The day is growing warmer. Josip and the driver roll down the windows, welcoming the fresh alpine air into the car.
Because time has slowed, or simply is resting from its usual pace, it is difficult to know how long they drive through this sparsely populated countryside. They see no people on the way, though they pass a few goats crowding resentfully to the side of the road to let them by. At one point, an aggressive billy chases the car and clangs its horns on the back bumper. The driver laughs, and Josip smiles.
Coming to a fork in the gorge, the route divides into two rougher gravel tracks.
“Turn right”, says Josip. The gravel is soon replaced by narrow tire ruts winding upward at a steeper angle. Now the track is hardly navigable—only a path wide enough for a car. It climbs interminably, and Alija is worried about the engine overheating. Just as they are about to give up, they come to a dead end in a yard surrounded by five or six houses. Alija brakes, turns off his engine, and glances at Josip for confirmation. The passenger nods.
Josip opens the door and gets out. It is Pačići. The houses are much the same as they were when he last saw them. The surrounding trees are higher, their trunks thick. Between two houses, he can see a glint of water, and upon it geese are paddling. In the courtyard, more geese are strutting, with goslings frantically following on their heels. Chickens peck about, a donkey chews on hay and examines the visitors. There are automobiles parked in front of some of the houses: two black sedans, a white farm truck with open back, and a red motorbike. Perched on the roofs of two of the houses are small satellite dishes pointing to the heavens.
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