Different speakers focussed on different manifestations of the enemy: New Age, abortion, magic, clairvoyance, cloning, the combination of drug addiction and heavy metal, and in all that they saw one and the same source of Evil, that other pole of supernatural power. Everyone agreed that there existed only two possibilities, with a clear line in between: either you were on God’s path, with a cross on your shoulder but truth in your eyes; or, in all other cases, you were a minion of Evil.
God loves us, we sang for three days, God heals our wounds. God is calling us, God needs us, and we don’t need anything except God’s love.
His love was a gift to us, but we still paid for it: the leading priest in charge of the seminar underscored this aspect in a Mass which formed the culmination of the seminar. God was watching us, he explained, and he required that we please him; not just with good behaviour–He also demanded sacrifices of us. To sacrifice didn’t mean to give what was in surplus but to deprive oneself of what was most precious, to renounce precisely that. At this point I became concerned. What an enormous demand! Is that how God shows how much he loves us? What can I relinquish on his behalf? What do I have which is precious? What do I care about other than painting? Would it please him if I gave it up? Would he then take me to his bosom?
The leading priest illustrated the thesis with Jesus’ praise for the woman who put a few paltry copper coins in the collection box at church after the others had poured in golden ones. Because the poor woman sacrificed far more for the Church than the rich did: her last coins. So there do exist protocols and scales of sacrifice? It’s quantifiable, and the Church is here to keep accounts?
That was just the beginning of his argumentation. Next came the story of Abraham, which he personally considered one of the most beautiful in the Bible, he had to admit. He paused and showed us his angelic teeth. Joy blinked in his eyes behind his metal-rimmed glasses, and he suddenly looked like a rag doll or an amiable cartoon character in his brown hooded habit with the cord dangling at his side.
Because what could be greater than the sacrifice Abraham was prepared to make without a second’s hesitation? To return to the Creator his only child, for whom he’d prayed for so long. His son! That devotion was an eternal model and source of inspiration for us all. We had good reason to consider Abraham the forefather of faith.
God, in his goodness, therefore demands that we be prepared to kill our own children for Him if he so requires. No one asks them what they think about it: their sacrifice is of no interest, only their father’s. But the Pater, knitting his brows again, was quick to attack those who doubted God’s intention and asked how he could demand such a terrible act, even if they knew God would stay Abraham’s hand at the last. That doubt was the Serpent, he said, which had been among people ever since Adam’s day. It incited them to pass judgement on God and reach out for powers which would put them on par with Him. Our serpentine tongue always said there was a knowledge higher than His. We had to resist the temptation of knowledge with all the strength we possessed.
I still couldn’t withstand the temptation to think about the millions of poisonous snakes which crawl the earth, or all of God’s other creations whose life depends on killing and devouring. Just what ecumenical mission did He entrust to His crocodiles and scorpions, or to the leeches, ticks and hookworms? And what of the bipeds, who started out as their epigones, only to rapidly surpass them and become the only species which kills not only for food but will also do it for the love of the editors at CNN?
Their advocate wasn’t to be rattled. Leaning forward over the pulpit, his gaze fixed and transfixed every pair of eyes. He called on us to look deep inside and ask ourselves if we’d allowed ourselves to be led astray. Where were we heading? Who were we following?
I found no answer in the ensuing silence, nor would I today. If I really am heading anywhere, I can’t imagine where or why. My thoughts slipped to the Abraham waiting for me at home, who, I could rest assured, wouldn’t take me away anywhere on an ass. Nor show in any way that he cared I was alive, nor make an effort, at least during lunch, not to groan with every mouthful as if he’d been stabbed, and try not to chew whatever I cooked for him as if it were glass, leaning silently on his elbows and hypnotised by his suffering. It’s all he has left, and he’ll share it with me whole-heartedly until his dying day.
But, at the conclusion of Mass, the child burst through to the fore. After God’s wrath had scorched Sodom and annihilated all those who had spoiled the earth, a sign was seen in the heavens, a woman clothed in the sun, with the moon beneath her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. Being pregnant, she cried in the pains of birth; but another sign appeared, a fiery Dragon with seven heads and ten horns, the heavenly master of the Serpent, the seducer: Satan himself. Although his tail swept away the stars, he was unable to devour the son the woman bore because God had embraced the child, assigning him to bring life back to earth and to rule all peoples. The forces of Good cast out the Dragon because life always prevails. The woman also saved herself by fleeing into the wilderness.
All that wheeled around in my head while the little lamb Sara gambolled around on my lap, and a wilderness gaped on the other side of the table on the face of her mother.
Not even the Bible could elucidate for me exactly how the Dragon was vanquished. The angels overcame him by the blood of the sacrificed Lamb and the word of their testimony, and they scorned their own lives. I tried in vain to visualise the Dragon fleeing this in mortal fear.
After Mass, each of us received and swallowed a small piece of the Lamb’s body from the hand of the Shepherd. I only wish I hadn’t passed him just beforehand at the entrance to the toilets and noticed that he’d come out without washing his hands.
What made the seminar such a crowd-puller was saved up for the end. (Its popularity endures today, especially since its attracted pop singers and TV compères and the papers declared the Pater the best preacher in this part of the world. No stigmata appear on his forehead and it’s hard to charge people for taking photos, but believers still come from far and wide to hear him.)
Everyone had to write a wish to Jesus on a little piece of paper and give it to one of the priests, who would include it in his prayer. Ines wrote: Dear Jesus, please spare me all the blah about love. Just give me sex. I sighed and gave her another piece of paper; then I read what she’d written: Jesus, give me the strength to march on towards the Kingdom of Heaven like you’ve helped me get up out of the mud. Only You could have done that. Bravo, maestro! I tore off the ending and gave it back to her, then I wrote something similar, though less ambitious, on my own piece of paper. The priests stood in line, the supplicants stepped up to them, and a body-builder in a T-shirt with the seminar’s logo and the words Teacher, let me see the light stood behind each of them with arms outstretched. We immediately found out why: the priests placed their palms on the top of people’s heads, prayed for them, and every single one of them fell unconscious; the colossi caught them and laid them on the floor like bundled sheaves of wheat. All this was done with speed and skill, with mechanical precision: as each new person knelt down, about to be laid tenderly on the ground, the person before them was already picking themselves up and moving aside, blissfully smiling.
Ines insisted I go first. The priest stood long immersed in my wish, although it was stunningly simple. Then he prayed, staring intently into my eyes, and scowling ever more because I didn’t swoon like I was supposed to. He was the youngest of them and probably hadn’t yet fully mastered the technique, but still I didn’t feel like falling flat just to please him. In the end, he drew a cross in the air, released me and moved on to Ines. No sooner than he’d raised his hand and begun to murmur the prayer, she sagged. That wasn’t just another performance. From the moment she got to her feet, and then unceasingly all the way home, she spoke of a burning heat which she still felt on the top of her head, together with an indescribable bliss.
She devoted the next few months to her transformation. S
he enrolled in catechism classes and was thoroughly infused with the Holy Ghost. It was picture perfect. For a while she even flirted with the idea of becoming a nun. At the same time she returned to uni, finished her degree, and in the end even got a job in a public-relations agency. She never touched synthetic opiates again.
She met Marko during one of the visits to the Pope, organised by the parish. What flared up between them in those few days was enough for him to leave the seminary and his vocation as priest. The marriage was a hurried affair, as was the embryo of family expansion, although not without resistance, especially from his large, poor and barely literate family. Marko was their pride and hope, and she’d ruined him; they never failed to remind her of that, and there was many an occasion because Marko stayed true to them and was always there to help, both emotionally and financially. On her side, things were not dissimilar: although it would be an exaggeration to say that her parents preferred her in her previous phase, they didn’t conceal their contempt for her holy roller of a husband. But they didn’t try to influence her choice and the lack of independence it revealed. They made it clear that she shouldn’t reckon with their financial reserves, which they put into travelling and a comfortable retirement.
Ines counted on her grandfather’s flat when he died, and for the time being they moved into a rented one. Deep down, and then ever more outwardly, she hoped that her parents might have pity on her after all, given her increasingly cramped circumstances. Each new child was meant to add to the pressure. Meanwhile, they enthusiastically consulted architects, bought interior-design magazines and accumulated furniture and designer objects. But her parents proved completely resistant and her grandfather exceptionally longevous. Even today, at over ninety, he’ll hear nothing of an old people’s home.
At the same time, her depression grew. That doesn’t mean she broke with the Holy Ghost. On the contrary, crucifixes still cling to the walls and around her neck. But they don’t work like before.
An attentive eye would have picked up the worrying signals she sent out even at the peak of religious exaltation. Maybe Marko needed precisely that–a soul he could lift up and drag out of despair day after day. He says he’s never regretted giving up the vocation of priesthood. That sounds convincing, because in addition to his job at primary school he does most of the work at home. Ines worked until the intervals between her bouts of depression became ever shorter. It began after the birth of their first daughter: she developed a delicateness and hysterical attentiveness such as a daughter can only wish for. But whenever there was a lull in the demands on her, as soon the eyes of others were gone, she fell into a black hole. Food provided partial consolation, and gaining weight was an excuse for depression. But psychotherapy aided by medication achieved a realistic goal: it made her self-hatred easier to bear.
The whole family waved goodbye to me from the window, including Josip’s little hand, held up in Marko’s. So much humanity condensed in that illuminated rectangle. A fine drizzle wept down on my head through the mist, and puddles sloshed underfoot. The cold immediately crept under my coat, which I pressed in vain against my body.
At home, I sat down in front of the blank paper on the easel with the sole intention of smoking three or four cigarettes. But I was still sitting there when the first sounds of morning roused me, and all at once a mighty weariness descended on my shoulders. Without undressing, I just wrapped myself in my quilt. I was woken around midday by a presence in the room. A painting was watching me, intrusively and akimbo, in the middle of the space which it absolutely dominated; it was doubtlessly finished and complete, although I can’t remember a single stroke. A winged dragon in black Indian ink inhabited the upper left-hand corner on a blank background. It had come from afar, and in its gruesome fangs it bore a baby, naked and freshly born but obviously already dead, its limbs pitifully limp. The whole right side of the painting was taken up by the figure of a woman. She too was naked, with sturdy legs, broad hips and bulging breasts, her elbows upraised as if in defence, but with absent, vacant eyes. Through the top of her head and her nest-shaped hair there showed another head with gaping jaws quite like a dragon’s, but only smaller: the head of its hungry young which dwelt inside the woman’s head.
* * *
I found work straight after uni. I would have contributed to the household budget earlier by getting a casual job on the side, but Mother wouldn’t hear of it: nothing was allowed to distract me or slow me down on the path towards my degree, that crucial threshold in her life and mine, that achievement which would enable us to face Saint Peter without fear. My study years coincided with the war and Mother was unemployed; the piano lessons she gave in a few houses turned into cleaning jobs in others. We lacked money at that time even for the indispensible minimum of dignity, but dignity is one of those things you learn to do without when it’s unattainable. After the war, when house owners began to compete with showy roof tiles, aluminium-framed windows and garages for more and more cars, our house ignored the upbeat trend of nouveaux-riches society, as if spiting it with the haughtiness of a bankrupt aristocrat. If our needs had moved beyond the most basic we would have been in a nasty dilemma, not knowing which repairs, replacements or emergency work to prioritise. But since everything was equally impossible to improve, we dug into the comfort of resignation, which deflated every problem and made it unreal. How we survived from day to day was incomprehensible, and that led us to think about the future flippantly, almost humoristically. That was incredibly liberating and took us a telescopic distance away from worldly things.
I escaped having anything much to do with the war thanks to Mother. The idea of avoiding compulsory service in the Yugoslav People’s Army evolved in my head half way through high school. I wasn’t aware back then that military service was considered a patriotic act, nor did the Army know (or at least publicly state) that it would become Croatia’s enemy within a year. I wasn’t overly preoccupied with the plan and assumed that a bit of dramatic play-acting would suffice for the truth about me to shine through: that I was a faulty human product unfit to be stored in a confined space with the healthy ones. But the recruitment commission–one guy in uniform, one in a white coat, and a lady with hair permed like a fur hat–weren’t convinced of the dangerousness of my symptoms and sent me for ‘observation’. Instead of being able to go home with some certificate or other, this meant that I was immediately imprisoned in a room with six beds in the company of five characters whose state of mind was…well, I won’t go into that. What distinguished them from me was that they belonged voluntarily to a military machine which had put them in hospital for therapy because of various acts of violence in barracks and public houses. They were united in the delight with which they awaited me–a new toy to help them while away the day, and particularly the night. My arrival put a new lease of life into this clique of junior officers and excited a waggish sadism in them which most people grow out of in puberty. Men like this were undoubtedly in their element several months later, howitzering besieged towns and cities.
I don’t know how long they planned to ‘observe’ me for, but Mother found me the next day. They only condescended to hear her out after much shouting in the corridors. Whatever she told them about me behind closed doors, or they concluded about her, the result was that the guy in the white coat came in with a look of concern and announced that I could go. That had a twofold advantage: not only did I elude the army of occupation when it was stocking up on young cannon fodder for its criminal assault, but the army of liberation didn’t take an interest in me either.
The war lasted for some time, the front pages of the papers left no doubt about that. It was constantly vigilant on the radio; as soon as Mother turned it on, it would start to count shells, maimed children and knocked-out enemy tanks, and she would nod with a smile of pity like an anthropologist whose dark hypotheses were coming true before her eyes. Now and then it also left its marks on the lamp-posts in our neighbourhood in the form of black-framed obituary notices,
and with some of them I had to go to the grave, throw in a handful of earth and drink a glass of rakija while squeezed between family and relatives at a table with a candle burning. I had to listen to stories about me and the now-dead Tomo coming back all muddy from gathering chestnuts when we were boys, ho-ho-ho, and keep quiet about the fact that I’d never gathered chestnuts, and endure the looks that said Why are you not at the front too? and Why is he dead and you alive?
But such things could only ever touch me superficially, devoted student that I was, immersed in deep structure, allophones, enclitics and catalysts, with a diligence just waiting to be rewarded. And my lucky number came up: I was invited to a job interview, with a reference from a lecturer under my belt.
The lecturer was a relative of the employer, who had returned from the diaspora several years before to support the progress of his native country with his capital and business acumen. He’d acquired both abroad, trying his hand in a whole range of fields, from catering to purchasing tamburitzas for his emigrant clientele. Then he became a sales representative of a Korean car-parts producer for all of Eastern Europe. Once he’d built up a commercial empire for himself with a glitzy headquarters in Stuttgart, he was able to devote himself to noble deeds for the good of Croatia. But what exactly? It wasn’t yet modern at that time to do what is seemly for a man of his calibre: to run for president. Besides, he revered and loved the president too much to want to threaten his rule–you revere and love the hand which has fed you since it found you lost and alone in the wilds. The first thing I saw, which was the first thing everyone had to see when they entered his office, was the portrait on the wall right above his armchair (with jacaranda armrests and the leather of some sophisticated animal) and his desk: the president expressing his famous, cheesy charm through the gap formed by his drooping lip. And whenever and for whatever reason you entered the Boss’s office–we only ever called him Boss, although he never explicitly requested it–you had to think twice what to say because you were actually addressing the two of them; the top boss refrained from commenting but proctored every conversation with his strict eyebrows, and when our Boss signalled for you to go he would gently and proudly lower his hand for you to kiss.
A Handful of Sand Page 10