Antidote to a Curse

by James Cristina

My eyes adjusted to the light. The palm tree dripped with water. It had been raining and now the air was green, still, the static zipped clear with lightning. Yes, I imagined it must have taken an enormous lightning bolt, to produce such clarity.

  Nancy was up, conducting the whole show from her new vantage point. It was only after I looked at her a second time I realised that she was using her binoculars to get in some early birdwatching.

  As I walked into the garden Henry turned from the rooftop and greeted me. ‘Hey, Silvio.’

  ‘Looks like you put in an early start,’ I called out to him. ‘

  Almost ripped clear.’

  ‘Need help?’ I asked.

  ‘A few more nails and it will be straight as a flagpole.’ Crouching out of sight, he hammered one in lightly before giving the sheeting a good strike with the head of his axe.

  ‘It needs to be secure,’ Nancy called out, half visible above the window’s frame.

  He gestured dismissively towards her.

  ‘Strong wind?’ I asked, feeling somewhat puzzled.

  ‘See you slept through it all,’ she said, unsurprised.

  I looked up at the sky, the trees behind me, unable to detect anything unusual. I moved towards the ladder, indicating my willingness to help.

  ‘Best not, too much weight,’ Henry explained as he manoeuvred from point to point. He put his axe down and rested against the handle, just by the roof ’s edge, his six-foot-plus frame towering above me.

  ‘How’s the rabbits going?’ I asked, seeing that he was taking a break.

  ‘Booming,’ he bellowed, his voice unashamedly loud.

  I nodded, ready to move on, but he drew me in with two fingers. He pointed towards his axe. His body language caught me unaware. ‘Blunt,’ he announced, pulling up the strap of his overalls.

  I gave the axe a mock-appreciative look. He looked macabre, enthusiastically so, and I was keen to get away. ‘A bit of reconnaissance work,’ he added obscurely, before striking thunder. I kept thinking of Abrah. Through the trees, I had seen Jasna. I thought if I could sit in the gazebo I might be able to collect my thoughts. Remember bits.

  I rapped lightly on the door.

  Nancy turned her swollen face towards me. She was wearing her lime tracksuit and rose plush slippers, and leaning out of the sliding window, her binoculars in her hands.

  ‘Morning!’ I called out somewhat brightly.

  ‘Shh. It’s bad enough Henry startles the whole waking world with his hammering. How’s anyone …?’ Her question trailed off. She aimed her binoculars at the powerlines. I saw my reflection in the door behind her. In the glass the branches of the elm swayed and I heard the rustle of wind through the dry leaves. In a moment of recognition, the wind lifted and the forests beckoned.

  He composed himself before sliding his arm out of its sling. A bright light illuminated the door’s smoky glass panel. He took off his sling and folded it into his front trouser pocket.

  The door, slightly ajar, allowed a line of light to cut the classroom in front of Nancy’s office diagonally. He walked right into the room, brilliantly lit, and even though she held her head upright, Nancy’s eyes were cast to her desktop. She didn’t seem to notice him. He looked behind her at the twin stone arches of the Romanesque tower and saw a midnight rising of Orion’s constellation. Beyond that the sky was black, vacuous, or at least appeared so, but Nancy managed to catch a piercing ray of a nebula with her triangular prism. The prism shattered the light into myriad shards that sparkled a few inches over the blotter she was working at. She scattered the light further before reining it in, fanning it over the bird she was painting on a single sheet of white paper. The contingent of refracted light fell into a pattern of variegated colours illuminating the span of the sparrow’s wings. It was lifting itself off the page, though Nancy was still painting its tail.

  The stone by her bare feet was glowing: azurite.

  He stepped up to her. She didn’t seem in the least surprised to see him.

  ‘Ludovico,’ she acknowledged calmly, her voice softened by the night’s work. She placed her prism on the desk and took off the guitar that was tied to a shoelace around her neck. The chair she sat on screeched as she stood up on her dainty bird feet. Her wide, multifaceted eyes sparkled like diamonds in their deep-set feathery craters. ‘Igor hasn’t returned.’

  ‘Sure?’ he asked, obviously surprised.

  ‘Positive.’

  Together they walked over to the bulky bottle-shaped nest, and after Ludovico put his hand all the way in, he concluded, ‘Empty.’

  Those faceted eyes sparkled with clarity, a nakedness that her carefully spoken words matched. ‘Bat nets? Trapped,’ she concluded, after a brief pause. ‘At least I hope so.’ As Ludovico turned towards her, she noticed his damp shirt and soiled clothing. ‘Are you hurt?’

  He pointed to his elbow.

  She walked over to the bureau on the other side of the room and from the bottom drawer pulled out a white apron with a solid red cross on the front. She tied it and then bent to the drawer to retrieve a tissue-thin paper cap with a smaller red cross on its crown. While her back was turned, he pushed his sling deeper into his pocket. He didn’t want her to think that he had sought help elsewhere.

  ‘Please.’ She lifted her hand towards the padded bench by the bureau.

  He walked up the two steps and, using his good arm as a rest, he managed to swivel around so that he was facing her.

  She raised the light of the lamp in the corner of the room. ‘Take off your shirt.’

  He allowed her to undo the buttons, eyeing her pretzel-thin fingers before helping her draw the shirt, heavy with sweat, off his injured arm.

  She pulled an illuminated lens into place; the lens suspended before her eye created a monstrous distortion. ‘Usual grazing,’ she concluded as she pushed the lens away. She then pressed the tips of her fingers around his elbow as if feeling for a pulse, her index finger and thumb pressing between tendon and bone.

  ‘Broken,’ she concluded. ‘We will have to take an X-ray – tomorrow?’

  ‘Will you put it in a cast?’

  ‘It’s too late for that. I will just bandage it – hopefully it will heal on its own.’ She bent towards the open bureau and pulled out a syringe and some bandages. ‘I just have to go to the refrigerator.’ She let the door with the mottled panel close behind her and Ludovico saw her silhouette shrink as she walked away. He looked out of the twin arches and at the bird, which was now no more than an incomplete picture on her desk. Within moments she stepped back into the room with the blood-filled cylinder pinched between thumb and forefinger.

  ‘What’s that?’ Ludovico asked, alarmed.

  ‘A sedative.’ She injected the red mucus and in seconds he felt a little sleepy.

  ‘But it looks –’

  ‘Shh.’

  She unravelled the bandages, each a swaying pendulum, two strands, one in each hand.

  ‘Who’s Jasna?’ I asked as Zlatko withdrew the glass from his mouth.

  ‘A poet,’ he conceded, exasperated, as if the mere recollection still managed to test his nerves. ‘She turned up with a bottle of whisky in her hand –’ raising his tumbler – ‘and said, “I’m a Muslim, an extreme one.” She poured me a glass of scotch –’ his hand fell, underscoring the word – ‘neat.’

  ‘Did you meet her in Velika Kladuša?’

  He looked towards the wall, as if visualising. ‘I met her in Bihać.’

  I gave a nod, indicating I knew where this was.

  ‘I drove down for the night,’ he continued. ‘It was late.’ He seemed removed. His eyes shut momentarily.

  I attempted to visualise the terrain. ‘A club?’ I offered.

  ‘A friend of mine,’ he said. ‘I took my brother’s van.’ His voice softened, he provided some ancillary notes: the car, the road. I lowered my eyes, certain he would offer more. ‘It was licensed,’ he explained, relinquishing the stub of his cigarette. ‘There were rocks, fish …�
�� His hand swept as if traversing the edge of a cliff. ‘A cheap …’ Zlatko paused, the way he usually did when he was looking for a particular word, twisting his hand from side to side, ‘theatrical building.’

  ‘A bit like this.’

  He shrugged, adding, ‘In the centre.’

  ‘Bihać,’ I said, pronouncing the place for the first time.

  We both looked around, as if the club had been recreated, but the analogy fell flat. I broke momentarily from the conversation and noticed Darko’s eyes upon us. I met his gaze, wondering how much he had overheard. He barely raised a brow.

  ‘Did you go there often?’ I asked, almost whispering.

  ‘No. I had only been there a few times.’ The clatter of glassware drew my attention back to Darko. He was pulling bottles off the shelf and lining them up on the counter. I could tell from the dampened yellow cloth that it was time to give the glass shelves a wipe-down.

  It seemed the club was mine alone to rediscover. I peered briefly through my glass before taking a sip. ‘What did you do there? I mean, besides drinking.’

  ‘Read some poetry.’

  ‘In front of everyone?’

  ‘We were open about it,’ he said with a reminiscent smile. He tilted the decanter and refilled my glass.

  I found myself floundering. Poetry? What poetry? ‘And Jasna?’ I said, hoping to get him back on track.

  ‘I met her before the competition.’ His eyes coming into sharp focus as he looked at me. ‘I had seen her before.’

  ‘Poetry competition?’ I asked, drawing the details together.

  He blinked before releasing a sigh, a dry, cynical chuckle.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked, pushing the glass aside.

  ‘I was bored, alone.’ He plodded, as if reciting. ‘She appeared.’ He reached for the decanter, still stoppered, and tilted it towards me. ‘She offered me alcohol.’

  I eyed the amber resin.

  ‘How could I refuse?’

  I gave a conciliatory nod.

  ‘Interesting,’ he conceded. ‘I liked her.’

  I hesitated before taking another sip from my tumbler. ‘

  She was wearing soldier’s boots and this awful dress.’

  I snagged on the detail, or not so much the detail but its admission. ‘Elaborate?’

  ‘It would blow up like a parachute,’ he revealed, taking a convincing swig of his drink, ‘whenever she danced.’

  An image of thick, coarse material surfaced. ‘Cold,’ I ventured.

  ‘It was freezing, but she carried herself …’ and the words failed him. ‘She was confident.’ He retrieved the cigarette and took one last puff before stubbing it out in the ashtray.

  I drew an image in my mind, a quick pencil sketch. ‘Confident.’ But with that disclosure the story stalled and he let the reins go. I imagined something attractive about her, and tall. I had her sketched in a burgundy sleeveless top. You would need to be tall to wear a ‘parachute’, and in my mind a fine-knit woman in her twenties persisted.

  ‘Anyway, that night I crossed the line.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I asked if she wanted to go for a drive.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘She said yes.’

  I don’t know if it’s the journal writing that summoned the dreams, or whether it’s the dreams that inspired the journal writing. Yes, I took note of Zlatko’s stories. My journal was filled with newspaper cuttings of revelations about atrocities in the Balkans war. There was no shortage of articles in Melbourne’s Age. I had read the stories about the main players, Slobodan Milošević and Franjo Tuđman, and found myself particularly interested in the stories about Fikret Abdić and Alija Izetbegović. Fikret Abdić rose to become a stand-alone man who managed to take control of Velika Kladuša and some nearby villages. He contested control of the region Zlatko calls home, Cazinska Krajina, Pećigrad.

  I had bought my own copy of Bosnia: A Short History by Noel Malcolm. At the State Library and my local libraries I had scanned the indexes of reference books for the places that coincided with Zlatko’s tales. Each name lighting up an entry point into what was, at least for me, an unexplored world. At the back of my journal I had started compiling my own index: reference points to a novel that I aspired to write. I had pencil-sketched maps with cities, towns and rivers of the geopolitical entity commonly referred to as Bosnia.

  Later that night, when I was asleep, with my earplugs fastened, Zlatko appeared. The dream was convoluted; I was walking down a tunnel, a maze, unsure of my surroundings.

  ‘This way,’ Zlatko whispered, the candle flame illuminating his drawn face. We twisted and wound through what appeared to be a series of humpback caves, with no sense of a beginning or what lay ahead. I looked over my shoulder. A black haze threatened to engulf the light. I clutched a ream of paper, my one novel. Zlatko turned, holding the flame between us. I could see he was unshaved, his hair unkempt, his skin sallow. He was wearing Henry’s overalls, bare to the waist. He gave a slight nod and eyed me invitingly.

  We were in an underground canal system leading to an aviary, perhaps my own. I was stepping through a murky stream. I followed. The birds chirped excitedly, piercingly; I waded through, lighting up the words as they appeared in the inscriptions of the bones above us. I progressed, weary, intrigued, with one way to venture.

  ‘Come,’ he instructed, holding the flame above his shoulder. It glowed conspicuously, a pointed, flickering iris, surrounded by a dotted corona, gold.

  I plodded, allowing my draft to fall, page by page. I left a trail to dissolve in the slime. I looked at my feet, the muck I was walking through, and saw that I was stepping in blood. The partly lit innards rose to impressive heights, the candle flame tugging all it could reach. It danced and failed right before my eyes before reigniting inexplicably. A bird appeared from a puff of smoke, conceived from the eye of the flame.

  After the initial shock, I lurched back, Zlatko rose the flame higher, revealing a ceiling of vaulted bone; we moved rib by rib, splattered. Finches, parrots, gulls, cockatoos and birds that were not even part of Nancy’s aviary flew around us, their flapping magnified in the enclosed space. I looked towards Zlatko’s feet for guidance in an attempt to protect my eyes. The waste ran along the nape of my neck, the small of my back, I was stepping through it, Zlatko’s hair was mired. He held his hand out for support and I took it, a slimy offering that brought me a notch closer to the ruinous source. The storm had set his mouth hard and for a moment he regarded me suspiciously, but his look softened and he pulled me in.

  I shed my novel, the hard-earned first, page by page, gravitating towards something new. This is why I left England, this is why I won’t teach, I thought to myself, the truth tangible as aged bone. I slowed down and leaned against one of the ribs, curling into its hollow. Without Zlatko’s story there would be the constant sense of stepping back, of revisiting an overspeculated-on past.

  We moved towards a light source, an expansive dappled glow. He was a gracious guide; he waited for me to rest, to catch my breath. I resumed, excited by the opportunity to push further, discover more.

  The sound of flapping retreated; so did the caws and the jagged trajectory of each bird’s flight. It was hot. I pulled Zlatko towards me and with my hand cupped to his ear, I asked, ‘Where are we going?’

  The sweat was trailing along my scalp. The source was a fierce effulgence, drowning the light of our candle. There was no-one in sight. The flames stopped us from progressing any further.

  The heart of the whale was a bonfire, a burning crater. In spite of the impressive flames, Zlatko moved in one step closer. ‘Burn it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Burn it!’ His order reverberated in the hollows around us, hallowed words echoing in the surrounding chambers. I looked at the dampened sheets that trailed back into the darkness. He caught my eye as I clutched the remainder of the manuscript, my one copy.

  The flames licked the words of the ashen sheets. I
stared into the ringed lake spluttering like some exposed cyst. ‘The story?’ I asked, empty-handed.

  ‘It will come.’

  Despite the fear, the distance between us, these were the exact words I hoped for. He cupped his hand around the elongated flame. ‘Back,’ he instructed.

  Torn from the private journal of Ifran Dudakovic

  I sat waiting for what seemed like an inordinately long time, though it was barely forty minutes by the clock. I sat in my father’s truck with the windows wound down. The roads in this area were all unpaved and the stones would sing out under the rapid advance of any vehicle. It felt right to sit in the car by myself with the warm autumn wind wafting through the cabin. I was fully rested and in good health and intrigued by a sensation, an awareness, years sought but only recently acquired.

  The world had congregated at our modest doorstep. It was autumn and all these leaves would make for the driest tinder this region had yet to witness. The moment was not yet ripe, but imminent. I could detect it in the intensity of the colours, the sounds, the smells. We would all play a role; in time this drama would consume all of us. From the bread shop owner to the shoemaker down the road, none of us would prove superfluous. We all had a decision to make, an allegiance to muster. For the first time in my life Bihać was alive and I was happy to be here.

  I realigned the rear-view mirror. A hairline crack ran down the middle, and even though it did little to obscure the view I found the fracture distracting. From the chest up the cabin was all glass. I had an uninterrupted 360-degree view and yet the truck, worn enamel, was barely noticeable from the road. You could say that I occupied a privileged position.

  Each night Jasna and Zlatko would approach the intersection and park by the side of the road, just beneath the woody arches of the grand pine, where they would sometimes chat, fondle, make love. They were caught up in the early stages of their relationship and knew the randomness that such encounters evoked. They were unaware of their surroundings and yet one with them. I was beyond predicting the outcome of their romance, so I felt compelled to watch. The frivolities they engaged in, with the cabin windows fully open, altered. Sometimes they would spend no more than two minutes chatting and on other occasions these encounters would last hours. Zlatko would pick her up from work and drive here, a comfortable walking distance from her home.