Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  I look back (or up); I imagine; I change flesh with the living, who through the law of compensation immediately find themselves in my shoes—which, to be sure, are of the finest patent leather, for it is the custom for the barber to shave the deceased, to powder him, whiten his face and rouge his cheeks and lips, and dress him in a frock coat with patent leather shoes and black trousers, as if going to a ball, may God forbid—this shall not happen to Makso. My shoes have swelled with moisture. They bulge with dirt and bone. Meanwhile I gallop around in clothes as yet unkissed by worms. Even when alive I showed little talent for living; now I show less, and when people see me they scream.

  If only I could persuade the barber to rouge my cheeks! Then I might feel more handsome down here. I want to go to the ball; I’m ready to dance my rotten heart out. There’s supposed to be a theater deeper down.

  I’m trying to like it here. I know that I’m obliged to. Sometimes the vermin tunnelling through me give me pleasure of a sort, but it would be better if I could give up thinking. I can’t breathe; therefore, I won’t; I’m going to the ball; goodbye.

  AND A POSTSCRIPT

  There is a wall of ill, whose gate opens unto an archway formed of giant spiders squatting silently in a long row; and at this passage’s far end there is a courtyard in whose center stands a woman barefoot, with dark red lips, who holds a bunch of flowers in her upraised hand. Tongues of white and yellow lace fall like fingers or pagoda-gables down to her ankles. Because she is alive, and I still have life in me, I pray to kiss the mud between her toes.

  SOURCES AND NOTES

  Since these stories are less ethnographically faithful than any of my Seven Dreams, I have not scrupled to operate an Anglo-Saxon charm in Bohemia, or even to alter magical names and terms to suit me. (May I be forgiven by all the demons and angels.) Notwithstanding, the basic laws of magic (sympathy, contagion, etcetera) strike me as psychologically true, so I have tried to respect them.

  My Bohemia is an imagined construct. My Trieste and Veracruz both contain some deliberate anachronisms both architectural and otherwise. For instance, I wished to set “Two Kings in Ziñogava” sometime in the colonial period, when slavery was still common in Veracruz. But at this time San Juan de Ulúa was more of a fortress than a prison island. Tant pis.

  EPIGRAPH

  “It is the custom for the barber to shave the deceased . . .”— Pamphlet from the Despica Kuca, Muzej Sarajeva, collected in 2011.

  TO THE READER

  “Wherever there is a rose . . .”— Saadi [Sheikh Musli-Uddin Sa’di Shirazi], The Rose Garden (Gulistan), trans. Omar Ali-Shah (Reno, NV: Tractus, 1997; orig. Arabic [?] ed. ca. 1260), p. 186 (VII.19).

  “There is no means through which those who have been born can escape dying . . .”— Paul Carus, comp. “from ancient records,” The Gospel of Buddha (London: Studio Editions/Senate, 1995; orig. pub. 1915), p. 211 (slightly “retranslated” by WTV).

  ESCAPE

  As many of my readers know, the events related in “Escape” derive from a real incident (19 May 1993), whose protagonists were named Bosko Brkic and Admira Ismic. As in “Escape,” he was Serb and she was Muslim. However, I have altered many other details. For instance, Bosko’s family had long since departed Sarajevo; the couple were living together unmarried. They decided to leave not for the reason I have given but because Bosko had been summoned to report to the police, who of course were incensed against Serbs. I decided to alter their identities and their situation in order to respect the privacy of their surviving relatives. The family members in my account are composites of Sarajevans whom I interviewed, was told about, etcetera. Their relation to Admira and Bosko is entirely imagined.

  In this story and in “Listening to the Shells,” the various confused and contradictory later accounts by strangers of the couple and their deaths (including “No, no; he was the Muslim and she was the Serbkina,” and “Actually, that’s just an urban legend”) are all verbatim as I heard them in 2007 and 2011. In 2011 a young Sarajevan woman summed up “that story on Vrbanja Most” for me: “He was Orthodox and she was Muslim. Today they are as famous as Romeo and Juliet. Just among the older generation they are popular, not the kids.”

  My one visit to Sarajevo during the siege (described in a chapter of my long essay Rising Up and Rising Down) took place in 1992, roughly half a year before the two young people were killed. Descriptions of the city in “Escape” and “Listening to the Shells” are based in part on my notes from that time and in part on my Sarajevo trip notes from 2007 and 2011.

  Given names of characters in these three ex-Yugoslavian stories— People in this region would know which names are typically Serbian, Bosnian or Croatian. Some commonly occur in more than one group, such as Marija, which can be associated with both Serbian and Croatian women. I am informed (although I take it with a grain of salt) that a few names are still more specific; thus Indira might be a Bosnian girl from a mixed marriage or an atheist family.

  Meaning of the name “Vrbanja Most”— My friend and translator Tatiana Jovanovic writes, first noting that there is no considerable amount of information on this edifice, since “it is not beautiful or historically interesting compared to some other bridges in Sarajevo”: “A name of the bridge ‘Vrbanja’ probably meant a willow grove . . . but some of researchers of the central medieval settlement (in Bosnia and Herzegovina) think that the name refers to [the] undiscovered key of ‘Vrhbosne’ (literally, the top of Bosnia). It was known also as ‘Ćirišinska cuprija’ or ‘Ćirišana’—i.e., ‘Chirishan Bridge’ [which] was a name of a small company that produced glue (“Ćiriša” . . . sounds [like] a Turkish word) . . . Probably, long time ago, in the ancient time, a wooden bridge was in this place, about which we can know because of discovery of some Roman bricks . . . in some fields in Kovacici, Velesici, etcetera. Bašeskija (an author, probably a historian) mentioned it [in] 1793 as a wooden bridge that was erected or renovated by a Jewish merchant. The previous one was destroyed by flood [in] 1791, and because it was needed to have a bridge in the same spot (especially for the Jewish people to go to their cemetery), the Jewish merchant paid for its renovation. It was restored again in [the] 19th c., but today, on the same spot, there is a new bridge made of reinforced concrete which was built after the Second World War.”

  The Serbian officers with stockings over their faces on the Vrbanja Most (just before the beginning of the siege)— Mentioned in Kerim Lucarevic Doctor, The Battle for Sarajevo: Sentenced to Victory, trans. Saba Risaluddin and Hasan Roncevic (Sarajevo: TCU, 2000), p. 35.

  LISTENING TO THE SHELLS

  Occurrence in the Orthodox graveyard overlooking Bucá-Potok— Related in Lucarevic Doctor, pp. 29–31.

  Comparison to my reporting from 1992 in Rising Up and Rising Down will show that my protagonist had it better than I did. Although my sojourn on the frontline was terrifyingly educational, if I had it all to do over again, perhaps I would rather spend my evenings at Vesna’s, flirting with her and meeting her friends. Too bad there were no such people.

  THE LEADER

  Epigraph: “There is no life on the earth without the dead in the earth.”— Branko Mikasinovich, Dragan Milivojevic and Vasa D. Mihailovich, Introduction to Yugoslav Literature: An Anthology of Fiction and Poetry (New York: Twayne, 1973), p. 176 (Veljko Petrovic, “The Earth,” n.d.).

  THE TREASURE OF JOVO CIRTOVICH

  Epigraph: “I could have been unvanquished . . .”— Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ivan Supicic, chief ed., Croatia in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (vol. 2 of Croatia and Europe) (London and Zagreb: Philip Wilson Publishers and Školska Knjiga, 2008), p. 122 (part of grave inscription).

  Most descriptions of Trieste in this cluster of stories are based on visits in 1981, 2010 and 2012. Some descriptions of the old city are indebted to illustrations in Trieste Dall’Emporio al Futuro/vom Emporium in die Zukunft, Dalla Collezione di Stelio e Tity Davia alle foto de
l nuovo millenio per la rappresentazione della città in un viaggio ideale (Trieste: La Mongolfiera Libri, 2009).

  Names of Serbian settlers in Trieste, events relating to the two Churches of San Spiridione, descriptions of those churches, the Triestine doings of Casanova (which actually occurred in 1772–74), the Triestine Serbs under the Napoleonic occupations, etcetera— After text and illustrations in Giorgio Milossevich, Trieste: The Church of/Die Kirche des San Spiridione (Trieste: Bruno Fachin Editore, 1999). I have altered history rather freely. The real Jovo Cirtovich (or Curtovich) did not arrive in Trieste in 1718 but was born then, in Trebinje, Herzegovina. He first visited Trieste in 1737. According to Milossevich, p. 34, he “was certainly not a refined person. He was a practical man aiming at essential things and full of new ideas and initiatives.” Apparently he began his career as a porter. This historical Curtovich would have lived in his warehouse (built in 1777), not on the hill. The Orthodox Church, or, more accurately, the first Church of San Spiridione, was built for both Greeks and Serbs in 1753 (thirty-five years after my Cirtovich’s arrival), visited by the Tsar in 1772, left in 1781, by the Greeks, who wished to worship in their own language, decked out with a pair of Muscovite bell towers in 1782, demolished in 1861 to forestall a potential cave-in, and rebuilt somewhat later in the form which I describe here. My invented Cirtovich married in 1754. Tanya, whom like all his children I have invented, would have been born in about 1764, so her father’s last voyage took place when she was fifteen. The names of Cirtovich’s brothers are all genuine. About his father’s death I know nothing. In 1806 Napoleon took ten rich traders hostage until Trieste paid him a vast tax; among them were the historical Jovo Cirtovich and Matteo Lazovich. Those two were incarcerated again in the third French occupation (1809). Cirtovich died that year, aged ninety-one, having outlived his children even though he had married three times. His brother Massimo closed down the family business in 1810.

  Some details of Serbian dress and Orthodox tradition are indebted to Prince Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich, with the collaboration of Princess Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich (Eleanor Calhoun), The Servian People: Their Past Glory and Their Destiny, 2 vols., ill. (New York: Scribner’s, 1910). A few incidents of life (for nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Montenegrins) under the Turkish occupation (for instance, a man’s execution by flogging in the market square) are indebted to Milovan Djilas, Land Without Justice, anon. trans. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958).

  Serbian attitudes toward the Ottomans, and toward the Battle of Kosovo— Here is a typical (pre-1991) assessment: “During the Turkish occupation, the Serbian Orthodox Church was the only force that kept alive the national spirit and the hope for a better future.”— Mikasinovich, Milivojevic and Mihailovich, p. 2. Djilas relates some horrible stories of opportunistic murders of their Muslim neighbors by Orthodox Montenegrins, while also relating a few Turkish atrocities. A dark view (and widely subscribed to nowadays) of Serbian historiography is summarized in Branimir Anzulovic, Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

  Several Serbo-Croatian (as the language was still called in 1980) folk proverbs are taken, more or less altered for style, from Vasko Popa, comp., The Golden Apple: A Round of Stories, Songs, Spells, Proverbs and Riddles, ed. and trans. Andrew Harvey and Anne Pennington (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2010 repr. of 1980 ed.; orig. Serbo-Croatian ed. 1966), pp. 26, 32, 33, 41, 48, 65, 93.

  Various obscure Roman coins, cities and provinces (Cyrrhus, Panemuteichus, Bithynia)— Some of my information comes from A.H.M. Jones, Fellow of All Souls College, The Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1937).

  “Take counsel in wine . . .”— Benjamin Franklin, Writings (New York: Library of America, 1987), p. 1187 (“Poor Richard’s Almanack,” 1733–58).

  Captain Vasojevic— The proud clan of this name was famous for its raids against the Turks.

  Decline of Ragusan trade in the early eighteenth century, together with its causes and effects— Information from Francis W. Carter, Dubrovnik (Ragusa): A Classic City-State (London and New York: Seminar, 1972), pp. 407–14.

  Some descriptions of Dalmatian medieval religious art and architecture and of Glagolitic derive from illustrations and text in that previously cited volume by the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Other descriptions are based on my notes from visits to Dalmatia in 1980, 1992, 1994, 2011 and 2012.

  Archimedes’s suppositions— Great Books of the Western World, Robert Maynard Hutchins, ed.-in-chief, vol. 11: Euclid, Archimedes, Appolonius of Perga, Nicomachus, var. trans. (University of Chicago, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1975, 20th pr. of 1952 ed.), p. 525 (Archimedes, “The Sand-Reckoner,” bef. 212 B.C.).

  “The Sultan’s rivals dragged him down from the sky” in 1730. This ruler, Ahmad III, had regained Morea from Venice in 1718, the year that Cirtovich arrived in Trieste.

  Grisogono’s Venetian circles for calculating the heights of tides— From 1528. Grisogono was born in Zadar.

  Description of traditional Serbian marriage customs— Based on research and translation by Tatiana Jovanovic. The source was Emma Stevanovic, Faculty of Philosophy; Tatiana says “she was a student probably in a department of Ethnology.” Much to my disappointment, Tatiana “omitted the most melodramatic and patriotic parts.”

  Descriptions of the squid-entity in the dark-glass, of cephalopods generally, and of nautiluses— After photographs, diagrams and textual information in: Richard Ellis, The Search for the Giant Squid (New York: Lyons Press, 1998); Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Philippe Diolé, Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence, trans. J. F. Bernard (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1973); and Peter Douglas Ward, In Search of Nautilus: Three Centuries of Scientific Adventures in the Deep Pacific to Capture a Prehistoric—Living—Fossil (New York: Simon and Schuster/A New York Academy of Sciences Book, 1988).

  The fumigation of a coffin, and the rite with coins— Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich and Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich, vol. 1, p. 70.

  Porphyry’s claim about Plotinus— Great Books of the Western World, Robert Maynard Hutchins, ed.-in-chief, vol. 17: Plotinus: The Six Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page (University of Chicago, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), p. vi (introduction).

  Various (but not all) descriptions of Marija Cirtovich and her attributes (affinity for doves, different-sized eyes, etc.)— After illustrations of Mother of God icons in Alfredo Tradigo, Icons and Saints of the Eastern Orthodox Church, trans. Stephen Satarelli (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Publications, 2006; orig. Italian ed. 2004).

  The papyrus from Heracleopolis, and other such (e.g., the wrapping of the crocodile mummy)— All these are, alas, invented, but some details relating to handwriting, sites of excavation and the like derive from information in E. G. Turner, Greek Papyri: An Introduction (London: Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1968).

  Description of the Sphere of Fixed Stars (“that great blue dome of ultramarine”)— Based on the ceiling dome of San Spirodione Taumaturgo in Trieste.

  Description of “the gloomy latitudes”— After a visit to Patagonia in December 2011.

  The magical procedures followed on the island— Abbreviated from Sayed Idries Shah, The Secret Lore of Magic: Books of the Sorcerers (New York: Citadel Press, 1958), pp. 25–27 (The Key of Solomon, Son of David).

  “The Patriarchs”: “There is no resurrection without death.”— Actually, Patriarch Gavrilo (1881–1950), as quoted in Anzulovic, p. 14.

  The silver likeness of Saint Blasius— Seen by WTV in Ragusa (Dubrovnik).

  Description of Mrs. Cirtovich— After a bust by Ruggero Rova (Trieste 1877–1965), Il Sorriso, 1910.

  The Serbian crosses of black tar— Montague Summers, The Vampire in Europe (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1968; orig. ed. 1929?), p. 159.

  The lucky man who dies at Easter— Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich and Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich,
vol. 1, p. 26.

  “Society has no way out of disappointment . . .”— Djilas, p. 257.

  THE MADONNA’S FOREHEAD

  In some versions of the tale of why she bled, a frustrated player threw a boca ball at the Madonna’s forehead. In the others, someone threw a stone, not a brick. She was the Madonna delle Grazie, or “Dei Fiori”—by one account the property of the family Fiori, since she was found in the nineteenth century when someone was digging in the Fioris’ garden.

  “we may conceive of the masochism merely as a painting . . .”— Wilhelm Stekel, M.D., Sadism and Masochism: The Psychology of Hatred and Cruelty, trans. Louise Brink, Ph.D., vol. 1 (New York: Liveright, 1953 repr. of 1929 ed.), p. 210.

  Varying opinions regarding the Madonna’s forehead— In the end our disagreements solidified into two factions, which assembled themselves in the appropriate cafés. Speaking on behalf of the old men, I want to dig my finger’s crook into your collarbone so that you’ll believe me when I insist that life was much better when we possessed as many theories as Triestini, and discussion was as many-grooved as the costumes for “Aida” . . .—when we could mumble into our grappas about the Madonna, our mumblings even extending beyond the metaphysical to erotic considerations, so that the rancor with which we contested our interpretations of her spilled blood could, just like our city’s yellow, soapy-feeling old marble, dissolve decade by decade in the acidic air. Oh, but human nature’s not like that! At my stage of life, all I want is the lovely blue sky with grey cream in it; and however bad it was, the past stays safely past; that Trieste’s always misty blue and white like a faded travel poster. Until the Romans roofed this territory with their authority, it was contested among Illyrians, Istrians, Celts and others; and after the Romans, first Venice, then Austria and finally Italy got their hands on it. Napoleon was here in 1797, just for the day. But I didn’t live through most of that, so it’s pleasant to talk about; I never oppose local color; in fact, I’m proud of that blue-and-red fragment of the old Teatro Verdi.— Nowadays it’s less complicated. There are only two factions: the light and the darkness. Of course, I forget which is which.