The Small Boat of Great Sorrows

by Dan Fesperman

  “Nothing, really. But I’ve learned a few things in the past week. About what he did. Where he was. That he went to Italy afterward, things like that.”

  “Then maybe you can understand why he and your Uncle Tomislav never really got along later.”

  “Because of the war?”

  “Mostly because of what happened afterward. Your father had been traveling with another boy from here. Pero Rudec.”

  Pine heard the name, and Vlado flinched as he noticed the American straining to figure out what was being said. It wasn’t a good time to interrupt for interpretation. He hoped Pine would have the good sense to be patient.

  “Yes. I’ve heard of him, this Rudec.”

  She shook her head, sipping her coffee, then spoke very slowly, gravely. “Then maybe you also know about a man named Josip Iskric?”

  “Yes. He’s my father.”

  She nodded, saying nothing for a few moments. “Iskric was my name, too, of course. Until I married your Uncle Tomislav. Our family was all through this valley. Only a few of us now. A lot of them were killed in the war.”

  “Tell me about the war. And what happened around here.”

  “Afterward was the worst. That’s when your father and Pero left the country. But your uncle stayed, and the new authorities, Tito’s people, put him in jail for a while. Him and some others from the local militia. He had never gone in for the politics. He’d just fought in the Home Defense Army because all his friends were doing it. But he had never sewed a big U on his shoulders like some of them. Like your father, for one, at least for a while. And like that Rudec for another, as if he ever cared about any cause but his own.

  “But your uncle wasn’t interested in causes, and I think that is what saved him. Some of our friends in the village, the Seratlic family, they were Serbs. They had survived. Someone must have hidden them during the war, because by the end of the fighting the other Serbs in the valley were all either dead or gone. Taken north. But Seratlic vouched for Tomislav. Why, I don’t know, because Tomislav wouldn’t have spoken up for them, and he certainly wouldn’t have hidden them. He always did as he was told. But we’d once sold them milk at fair prices, when their father had a dairy. So your uncle got out. Some of the others stayed in jail. A few were shot. Quick trials that no one ever saw. You’d read a paragraph in the newspaper, and that was it. It was a bad time.

  “We thought your father was dead. Rudec, too. And when we didn’t hear from them for a few years, we were sure of it. My only brother, gone. Then in 1961 we got a letter from him. He told us to burn it after we’d read it. It didn’t even come by the regular mail. Some old man on a mule who’d gotten it from someone else on a train. It didn’t have his name in it, but we knew who it was from what he said.”

  “Do you still have it?” Vlado asked, more as a son than an investigator.

  “We burned it, as he’d asked. He told us that someday he would visit, but that for the moment it was too dangerous. He said he was near Sarajevo, that he’d learned a trade and met a woman. But he didn’t tell us his new name, or his village. When you were a boy, I knew you only as Vlado. Maybe now you can tell me your last name. I have always wondered. Can you tell me?”

  “Petric,” said Vlado, feeling fraudulent as he stated it, a creation of forgery and deception. “Vlado Petric. It has always been my name.”

  She nodded curtly, accepting it.

  “Excuse me again,” he said. “I have to tell my friend a little of what we’ve been saying.” He brought Pine up to speed, leaving out the part about his name.

  “Ask her if your father’s letter mentioned Rudec,” Pine said.

  It hadn’t.

  “But Rudec is alive, isn’t he?” she asked. “This visit is about him.”

  “Yes. Only now he goes by the name Matek. We’re looking for him. Partly because of the past. Partly because he killed one of our colleagues.”

  She shook her head slowly, regretfully. “Then I will help if I can. But I’m afraid I don’t know much. He never returned. Never wrote or sent word to anyone. Only your father came back, and even he had to sneak into the valley. He said that if anyone ever found out his real name, they would put him in prison, or shoot him. But of course Tomislav, being a man, had to talk about the war. So after dinner, and after the third glass of brandy, Tomislav began asking questions. About the war, and the year your father went north.”

  Vlado knew where north led—straight to the Sava River, and Jasenovac.

  “He wanted to know what had become of Rudec, and where they’d gone, what they’d done all those years. Maybe your father had been led astray by all of the bad politics, Tomislav said. By all those men who went goose-stepping with the Germans, wearing their big U’s. Bowing down to priests and politicians, like it was some kind of crusade. Because by then, of course, your uncle was only listening to what Tito had to say. So he and your father argued, then they fought. Fortunately by then they were so drunk they couldn’t do much harm. They broke a few glasses, knocked over some chairs.”

  “I saw them out the window. Like two bulls in a ring. Snorting and pawing.”

  “Two drunken bulls.”

  She smiled, showing her missing teeth. “But your mother and I got them to bed. You only had to lay them down and they passed out.”

  She paused, as if that was all she had to say on the matter. Vlado sipped at the strong, bitter coffee, feeling the pleasing familiar grittiness on his tongue. Somehow it tasted better here, in this quiet valley hidden in the hills.

  “Tell me more about Pero Rudec,” he said. “You knew him?”

  “Oh, yes. A handsome boy, especially when he wore his uniform from the officers’ academy. But he was always a little unsettling, too.”

  “How so?”

  “Oh, you know. Always the first to do everything, especially when it came to girls. Always looking for the easiest way to do something. The shortcuts. But he also knew how to make the parents like him. Being sweet to your mother while trying everything under the sun with her daughter. Some of the fathers saw through it and chased him off, but he was pretty sly.”

  “You went out with him?”

  “Oh no. He was forbidden fruit. And I was already promised to Tomislav. A good thing, too. Soon everyone knew that a girl down the valley, Mirta, was pregnant. But it was just after the war had started, and that gave Pero a chance to get away. Tomislav and your father signed up for the local militia. But Pero volunteered for a special unit heading north. Sort of an Ustasha SS, only they didn’t call it that, but I think he liked the idea because it took him away from Mirta and her father. Of course he had to put a different face on it, talking about his valor and his duty. But no one believed him. I think he also liked the idea that he might collect some booty. Like a pirate.”

  “People knew there would be booty?”

  “People had already heard what these units were doing. Burning villages and taking everything. Trying to wipe out the Chetniks. Some volunteers had already come back because they couldn’t stand it.” She shook her head. “I don’t think Pero felt one way or the other about the Chetniks, but he never came back.”

  “What was it like here?”

  “There were raids by all sides, back and forth across the hills. In the last year of the war a group of Partisans or Chetniks, no one was sure which, attacked and burned a village near here. Tomislav and your father were with the first men to get there afterward. Every family had been murdered in their beds. Everyone wanted revenge. And that was when your father went north.”

  “In the last year of the war?”

  “Yes.”

  Vlado was puzzled. The file had clearly said his father went north two years earlier, at the same time as Matek. He attributed the discrepancy to the haze of his old aunt’s memory, knowing how these things could get jumbled over time.

  “But Tomislav stayed?”

  “His father wouldn’t let him go. Our father felt the same way. But Josip went anyway. He was determined.”<
br />
  Thus was a war criminal born, Vlado thought. Seeking vengeance and finding it, but a vengeance of the most terrible sort.

  “And he ended up at Jasenovac.”

  “Is that what you’ve heard?”

  “Yes. Right there along with Rudec.”

  She was silent a moment, playing with her napkin. “I’d always heard that about Rudec,” she said. “But I was never sure about your father.”

  “Is that what he and Uncle Tomislav were arguing about that night?”

  “Who can say? Your mother and I couldn’t stand the noise, so we left them alone out there in the back. Then we heard things getting worse, but by the time I got downstairs they were on top of each other.”

  “So you never really found out what set them off?”

  She paused, as if reluctant to continue. “Something about Rudec, if you really want to know.” She stared at the floor. Pine must have sensed the change in her tone, because he was suddenly more attentive, leaning forward in his chair.

  “What was it?”

  “Oh, Vlado, you really don’t want to know all this. The past is the past. Let it stay in the ground.”

  “Someone else has already dug it up, I’m afraid.”

  She sighed, then placed her coffee cup on the table and straightened in her chair. “Tomislav told me about it the next day, after you had all gone. Even then he couldn’t quite remember why things had gotten so out of hand, once he started explaining it. But Rudec’s name had come up. Tomislav had heard some things after the war. About that place you mentioned.”

  “Jasenovac.”

  “Yes. Rudec and a few others had apparently been some of the worst. All the wild stories about the killings, the torture. I’d always wondered if maybe it was just Tito’s people making it up. But the Seratlic family, the ones who’d helped Tomislav, they’d heard it from cousins who’d survived the place. They said all of it was true.

  “But your father told Tomislav to stop repeating those things, especially the ones about Rudec. He said it was too dangerous. And Tomislav thought your father was being a coward. But your father insisted, and said Tomislav should never repeat those names to anyone. Not his, and not Rudec’s. So Tomislav lost his patience. And, well, you saw the rest out your window.” She paused again. “But the oddest part was what your father did the next morning.”

  “Leaving early the way we did?”

  “Before that. Before you were even up. Tomislav was still asleep, snoring. Your mother was packing. I was already in the kitchen, still restless from seeing them the night before, my husband and my brother rolling on the ground like a couple of animals. So I was making bread when your father came down. He told me he was sorry things had gone so badly. But that he really was worried about what would happen if we talked about Rudec, or whatever he was called now, because he had some sort of new name, too. Your father said it would hurt him more than Rudec, because of things that had happened after the war.”

  “After the war?”

  “Yes. In Italy.”

  “But not during the war.”

  “No. Your father wouldn’t talk about those years. Not a word. Especially about the time after he went north.”

  “To that place.”

  “Yes. To that place.” She lowered her head.

  “They were in Rome fifteen years,” Vlado said. “I guess a lot could have happened. He could have been talking about anything. Work that they did against Tito, maybe.”

  She shook her head. “Not in Rome. Later. When they were on the coast. In some other town. It’s where he and Rudec were for years, your father said.”

  There had been nothing in either file about that.

  “I didn’t know they lived anywhere but Rome,” Vlado said.

  “They only stayed in the city a year or two, he said. Then they went south. Looking for work, I guess, or maybe because it was cheaper. He didn’t say much beyond that. But he did say he hadn’t wanted to leave. He said he was happy with his new life, with you and your mother. But—and I’m trying to remember exactly how he said it, because it was so strange . . . it was something like ‘I love my new life, but I never really finished my old one.’ Then he gave me something, and I understood at least part of what he meant. But not for sure, because he never said anything more. He just gave it to me and told me to never throw it away, but to never let you or your mother see it. I think he couldn’t bear to destroy it but was afraid to keep it anywhere that one of you might find it.”

  “What is it? Do you still have it?”

  “Yes. And maybe I should have kept his wish and not told you about it. But if it will help you find Rudec . . .” She shrugged. “Because he is part of it, too.”

  “Show me, then. Please.”

  She nodded, placing her palms on the table and slowly pushing herself to her feet. In passing she laid a hand lightly on Vlado’s head, in the manner of a priest offering a blessing. “It’s in my dresser drawer, where it has been since that night. I never even showed it to Tomislav.” Then she hobbled off, stiff after their hour at the table, seeming years older than when they’d arrived.

  “What’s happening?” Pine whispered. “Where’s she going?”

  “She’s getting something my father left here, years ago. When I was a boy.”

  Pine said nothing. There was only the sound of chickens outside the window, clucking and scratching, heads bobbing in the sunlight. Aunt Melania returned with a small square of paper. When she turned it over, Vlado saw it was an old photograph. She handed it to him. The tones had browned but the focus was sharp.

  It was his father, smiling broadly, a young healthy man standing with his arm around the shoulder of a smiling woman whom Vlado had never seen. They stood by a ladder, which was propped against a lemon tree. Gauzy netting was stretched across the tree-tops, filtering the sunlight. Next to them was another couple, and it took only a few seconds for Vlado to recognize the features of Pero Rudec, or Matek, as they knew him now. His aunt was right. Matek had been handsome, with just enough of the rogue in his expression to seem mysterious. The foursome was in a small grassy clearing, surrounded by citrus trees. On one side of the grass was a ring of white stones, darkened in the middle, as if someone had made a campfire.

  The woman with his father was thin and dark-haired. They seemed quite comfortable with each other, whereas Rudec’s companion seemed stiff, ill at ease, or perhaps that was Vlado’s imagination.

  “Do you know her name?” Vlado asked.

  “No. He never said a word of explanation. He only asked me to keep it.”

  “May I have it?”

  “Please,” she said. “And take this one, too. He sent it later.”

  It was a picture of his father and him standing by a wooded mountain overlook. Vlado recognized the view, a few miles outside Sarajevo with Mount Jahorina in the background. Vlado looked about six, in shorts with knobby knees and blocky shoes. His father stood behind him. Both were smiling broadly, the same look of ease that his father wore in the picture from Italy, only in this one you couldn’t help but notice the man’s large, strong hands placed protectively on the boy’s shoulders. Were they the hands of a killer? Vlado felt his eyes brimming, so he took a deep breath and looked again at the other photo, turning it over to search for an inscription. There was only a stamp from a studio where it must have been printed: FOTOGRAFIA MARTELLI. CASTELLAMMARE DI STABIA. 1958. He’d never heard of the place. Perhaps it was the town on the coast his aunt had mentioned.

  “Just pictures?” Pine asked from behind. He sounded disappointed.

  “Maybe we’ll learn more in Rome,” Vlado said. “And this other place.” He turned the photo over again, saying the name slowly. “Castellammare di Stabia. Maybe we should go there, too.”

  “Maybe,” Pine said, sounding skeptical.

  Aunt Melania, who hadn’t understood a word of their English, then spoke up. “Would you like a piece of advice from an old woman, Vlado? Something that will last longer than just
a cup of coffee and a warm slice of bread?”

  “Sure,” he said, smiling back. But he saw she was serious.

  “Don’t go there.” She pointed to the photo. “Leave those things where they belong.”

  “I’m afraid it’s too late for that now.”

  She nodded, as if resigned to his answer. “If you have to, then. Maybe it will even be for the best.”

  The look on her face said she didn’t believe a word of it.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Robert Fordham gazed down at the streets of Rome from his balcony on the fourth floor, wondering what he’d gotten himself into. On a warm November Saturday like this it was easy to forget the weary dishevelment that had reigned a half century earlier. Today the view was of nothing but prosperity—stylish hordes out for fresh air in sleeveless majesty. Older women squeezed vegetables in the market; the younger ones window-shopped. Close your eyes and the exotic orchestra of the streets kicked in—buzzing Vespas and honking cabs, a tinny choir of cell phones.

  Yet, within the hour, and by his own free will, he would be conjuring up the grim postwar mood of 1946. For a pair of strangers, no less—an American and a Bosnian, the same sort of tandem that had once done him so much harm.

  He sighed at his foolishness. Ever since he’d given his consent the previous morning his cautious nature had been on overdrive. Already wary of phones, of repairmen, of any visitor other than his housekeeper, Maria, he was now seeing threats in every strange face. Before taking his regular walk that morning he’d found himself reverting to the small tricks of a very old trade, leaving behind markers and telltales to determine if anyone had entered his apartment—or tried to—while he was out. He’d stopped at every corner to look over his shoulder, guarding his flanks. He’d scanned every parked or passing car, looking for an excessive number of antennae, and he’d been more relieved than he cared to admit to find his front door undisturbed on returning.

  Stir up enough memories from a brief and intense time in your past, he supposed, and the old habits and fears returned with them. But part of him believed that it was only prudent to feel this way. There were still too many unforgiving people out there, with memories as long and clear as his, and Rome was his last refuge. He had long since given up the stern clapboard villages of New England for the eternal mess and glory of this ancient sprawl along the Tiber, having made it his solemn duty to live and eat well, while worrying as little as possible about the past.