She clicked her fingers and gestured toward the fountain pen clipped inside Davor’s shirt pocket and he gave it to her with a glance of trepidation. When she snapped her fingers again he tore a blank page from the small diary he carried inside his jacket for note-taking and passed it to her and she stabbed out her words and pushed the page back across the table and he read its message, In this world you dreamed of, only weeds shall grow, and she snatched the page away from him and flipped it, scribbled furiously on its blank side, and pushed it back again across the table, and he nodded dispirited acceptance, reading the annotation, My happiness awaits your destruction.
Night fell and he took them to the quay and reached for her hand to say don’t give up on us but she turned her back to him. Here she was, finally, a Ustashe widow engulfed by Jews and the mortifying expanse of their silence. But the Jews were like herself, haunted emaciated women, physically ruined, with exhausted rag-doll children who owned nothing but the unspeakable pain of living. She had never lost all sense of who she was and neither had these Jews, she realized looking at them, custodians of epic shattered histories like herself. And yet not like herself because they were victims and she was not—to lose and survive is not to be a victim, just a loser with a God-given right to try again, and potentially more dangerous than ever before. Not like herself—her leaving was not surrender. Their kind weren’t coming back, her kind—God help us—were. Who knew they would remake the world—or make the ancient world new again? They were going to Palestine. In the cowed silence of their own survival the haggard women hooked their arms with hers and together with each heavy plodding step unbinding them from the barbarity of Europe they went aboard.
In the morning the ship docked at Ancona to refuel for its voyage to the Holy Land. British soldiers checked the manifest and afterward took her and Stjepan ashore, the only passengers required to disembark, where the Vatican’s ravens, a pair of laconic priests in black cassocks, thankless in manner and spirit, relieved her of the diplomatic pouches returned to her safekeeping the night before, thus ending her brief, corpse-strewn career in the service of the archbishop of Zagreb and the postwar intrigues of the Holy See.
Then, dizzying confusion. Ships arrived throughout the morning, off-loading beleaguered refugees like chattel, and they found themselves queued together with the swarm and at the end of the day trucked to a displaced persons camp on the outskirts of the city, where they remained in narcotic-like monotony throughout the autumn and winter until the advent of spring, 1946, when their own exodus began the day two jeeps carrying American soldiers drove through the gates of the camp. His mother ran to them, gobbling words he could not yet understand, waving a document he could not yet read, Marija struggling to pronounce the language that was his birthright. The jeeps stopped and one of the soldiers took the folded paper from his mother and looked at her and looked at Stjepan running to her side and looked to his buddies.
Hey, get a load of this. The kid’s an American.
G’wan, said one of the GIs, she’s pulling your leg.
Nope, said the soldier holding Stjepan’s birth certificate. Says right here, kid was born in Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh, said a GI in the second jeep, who would become Stjepan’s stepfather. Whaddya know, I’m from Pittsburgh.
That night she took the boy to the tent of the Roman Catholic priest who heard their unremarkable confessions, a brief litany of sins that in no way resonated with the evil world from which they had been expelled, and, after the recitation of their modest penance, she smothered her son with kisses and told him she had not forgotten her promises nor her duty nor forgotten his promises nor his duty and in the flurry of his mother’s blessings the boy bowed his head to accept his heritage, and she draped his father’s gold chain and crucifix around his neck.
We are leaving soon, she said, and into eternity she whispered in her husband’s ear, It’s done, my love, good-bye, what more can I do or say? The boy wondered, Will we go to Palestine as well, with the Jews, and she said no, we are going to the only place strong enough to defeat the enemies of Christ our savior and he told her, Yes, I think God wants that and he told her, as she had taught him in English and encouraged him to say again and again, I love you, and he told her he was ready.
In Zagreb she had promised, You and I will talk about this, and so they did, for many years, submerged together into a vision that was timeless, where history reigned and was immovable, one monolithic and unchanging thing with its roots sunk into the fault lines of the earth and summit far above the clouds. The mountain was never not the mountain, beckoning them forward. Memory alone, with its random chords and puny awards, could never be as alive or as full as this dream. They embraced the union of their pain; their defeat would have anniversaries to be revered. Planning the supreme duty of vengeance, calculating its inevitable unfolding, imagining its satiating honor would become her way of focusing him, creating his center of gravity. The umbilical cord of vengeance pulsed with the fidelity they would share completely, mother and child, until the end of her life, until the child himself would go forth on his quest to breed the living mountain’s legacy of grievance into another generation.
This is how peace would begin, Colonel Davor Starcevica had told her. One beating at a time.
Book Three
Tradecraft
Istanbul, 1986
If any question why we died, tell them, because our fathers lied.
—Rudyard Kipling
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Dorothy Chambers’s father flew in from Ankara to spend another weekend with her but this trip, his second visit in April, was special and tonight she would be having dinner with him but where was the question, always the question, his habit of mystery, his idea of fun, turning simple things into a challenge and a challenge into something simple. She knew only that their rendezvous involved, as always, a game, well-known and practiced between them since she was a child in Kenya, yet this late afternoon as she left her school in Uskudar and took the ferry across the choppy, breeze-swept Bosphorus, the game had become for her a source of increasing ambivalence, here on the occasion of her seventeenth birthday. She was in a hurry, or rather a state of hurriedness, her body tense with teenage urgency, already anxious to turn around and ride the ferry back to Asia, where her friends would be waiting for her in a coffeehouse on Baghdad Street. But, as always, there was no denying her father.
And now here was Europe and the busy mouth of the Golden Horn—Hello, Europe! she sang to herself, reciting the mantra she had composed to express her utter joyous wonder with the magnitude of this city and the delicious fumes of its landings, brine and diesel and grilled meat and jasmine—Asia begins, Europe ends, Asia ends, Europe begins—the ship rumbling as the captain reversed engines and the ferry nudged against the quay of Eminonu and the crew threw out the heavy ropes to men with outstretched arms, seagulls shrieking and the gangplank rattling into place. She pressed into the crowd of dour Istanbullus streaming ashore with the by now familiar exhilaration of having so easily crossed continents, ignoring the hateful stares she had grown accustomed to from some of the men, although sometimes she would stare back brazenly at the boys her age, defying their clucking tongues and vulgar gestures, and wondered what, on this most important occasion, her father’s present might be, thinking she should have come right out and told him her world would be perfectly complete if she ever were so lucky to own a Vespa. But the bus system is excellent, he’d say. Or: Take a dolmus. Her mother would just say scooters are suicidal, why not jump off a bridge, but that wasn’t what her father would ever say.
She was to approach the donar kebab vendor on the east side of the terminal but, preoccupied with her post-dinner, après-daddy plans, she forgot what she was to ask him and had to dig her father’s note from her shoulder bag and read the instruction again: His name is Mehmet. He can see the future. Give him fifty
lira and ask him for your fortune. This jug-eared Mehmet, like most Mehmets, was very happy to make her acquaintance. With the same hand that he used to slip her money into his windbreaker he withdrew a deck of cards, fanned them in his two hands, said pick three, and laid them out on the cutting block of his kebab wagon, pointing at one card and then the next. They were not the tarot cards she had expected, their faces printed instead with calligraphy, which she could not yet read although she was becoming sophomorically fluent with Arabic in its Latinate form.
Ah, he said, squeezing her right hand in both of his and raising it in the air. Happy birthday. Happy happy. Allah sends you as his bright angel to this earth.
Far out, she said in English, as if she were one of the old hippies passing through the Pudding Shop on their way to Kathmandu with the Rock and Roll Raj; as if she were her own mother at seventeen, her clueless, ex-flower-child peacenik-turned-astronomically uptight mother, a xenophobe who would insist on seeing an ID before letting her own shadow through the door.
This card, number two, said Mehmet. This card says you will leave here and go to Kumkapi, to the place called Karaca, and speak with a man who plays the violin.
Yes, okay, she said hopefully, finding her pen and scribbling in the margins of her father’s note—Kumkapi, violin, and the familiar name of the restaurant. Maybe tonight there would be no more to the game than this, dinner at the Sand Gate near the seawalls along the Sea of Marmara and then back on the ferry, but it never paid to underestimate her father’s addiction to trickery and practical jokes and object lessons meant to be eye-opening. Mehmet lifted his chin toward something behind her and she looked over her shoulder to see a silver-haired man with black horn-rimmed eyeglasses, professorial in his tweed coat and baggy trousers, yellow V-neck sweater and shiny black necktie, standing next to his shiny black Mercedes-Benz, waving a brisk hello.
And number three? she asked.
Number three, he said, studying the remaining card and turning it facedown with a frown. Number three says you will have a prosperous life.
No it doesn’t, she said. What does it really say?
You are clever, little sister. Yok. It says nothing.
Mehmet, are you really a fortune-teller? she said, cocking her hip, resting her hand there, posing, not thinking she was flirting with him but she was. I’m sure my father told you what to say for two cards but maybe not for three. He’s not that controlling. What does the third one say?
It lies, miss, Mehmet said. It says what is untrue. It says you are my enemy.
That’s crazy, she said with shocked laughter, lifting up on her toes. Why would we be enemies? I love everybody in the world. Love, love, love.
It is a mistake, miss, said Mehmet. I am very sorry.
Sometimes these people enlisted by her father into the game worked for him in a capacity she no longer bothered to imagine, and he seemed to have access to an endless supply of conscripts from all walks of life, businessmen, scholars, tradesmen, tough guys, police, bureaucrats, vagabonds. Sometimes they were simply people he had met on the street, at a newsstand or tobacco kiosk, in the library or at a barbershop or café, and charmed or perhaps bribed into service. And who could resist a man so genteel and sunnily handsome and affable, a textbook case of the charismatic diplomat circa Camelot and American goodwill, well-groomed and dressed in an Italian suit and always smiling, always a spark of sincere curiosity in his gray-blue eyes, or the twinkle of mischief that made people relax and laugh with him and agree to do him a favor. She did not look like her mother, thank God, she looked exactly like him, but as she slid into the backseat of the sedan that had been waiting for her, she thought that maybe the game was something she was now too young for or too old. The game had a life of its own, of course, full of odd surprises, but by her father’s design it evolved in unpredictable and obtuse ways and throughout the past year she had noticed the game change in a pattern that made her think he meant it to be more to his purpose than to hers or theirs, less entertaining, less of a lark, more fashioned toward a different kind of education now. It was hard to say, but then she had sensed a similar shift away from clarity with all the boys she was coming to meet and find interesting in the bistros and lycées and colleges.
The game had started in Nairobi, her favorite place on earth before Istanbul, when she was ten years old. I’m going to turn you into a flaneur, he said, making her look up the word in the dictionary. Why he chose her for this project and not her brother Christopher was obvious to anyone. The first time they played, what she privately liked most about it—that it was their game, no one else’s—never seemed diluted but instead only enhanced by the many strange and prodigious characters to whom her father led her. When she finally tracked him down they would sit at a table in a sidewalk café and she would sip her soda and eat her french fries or plantain chips or noodles and he would drink his glass of beer and they would talk with loud disbelief or hushed admiration about this one or that one, the man who, the woman who. Was he actually a chief back in his village? Did you see her scars! Do you think that old man really was a sorcerer! That guy said he killed a lion with just a spear! How do you know them, she asked, and he said, Oh, you know, friends of mine, and she said, Dad, you’re friends with everybody! As they took a taxi back to the new American compound in one of the residential areas of the changing, modernizing city about to be transformed by Big Man politics, he leaned over to whisper in her ear, This is our secret, let’s keep it to ourselves, we’ll say we went to the zoo.
Quickly, the stage expanded from its original four blocks downtown to eight blocks and then doubled again, her knowledge of the once-intimidating city and her comfort with its people growing accordingly, but then one day—by now she had turned eleven—he sent her off on the hunt into the squatter settlement known as Mathare Valley, where people were too friendly and clinging or not friendly at all, and she was intelligent enough to be amazed and angry that her father would let her wander unaccompanied through such dangerous quarters. But when she finally found him drinking beer with a throng of laborers in a bar with thrown-together walls and roofing tin, the place erupted with a cheer. The men patted her on the head to run their rough hands across the golden silk of her hair, praising her bravery, giving her small presents of beads and marbles and all the roasted groundnuts she could eat, the troubadour among them making up a song in her honor. Remember, don’t tell your mother, he said, hugging her onto his lap, letting her take a sip from his cold bottle of Tusker. She wouldn’t understand our game.
She’d disapprove, said the eleven-year-old, sounding sophisticated and wise with insight.
She’d disapprove, agreed her father with mock severity. You’ve certainly got that right.
But a little blonde-haired American girl walking by herself through those poverty-stricken neighborhoods, talking to vendors, stepping into shops to receive the next installment of her father’s instructions—Go to the open-air market three alleys south and one street west (he had given her a compass on her ninth birthday) and speak to the man who sells monkey meat (Oh, gross! she had thought, reading the note), stopping to ask directions in Swahili (which she called dog language because the dogs would obey her in Swahili but not English)—of course her mother found out in no time at all. One of the askaris—watchmen—on the way home to the room where he slept during the day with the other askaris who had immigrated to the city from the countryside had seen her. The next day when her mother heard the reports she went ballistic and Dottie escaped to her brother’s room.
Are you out of your mind, letting a child walk alone through those filthy slums! What the hell were you thinking?
She’s an American, and I want her to know that she can go anywhere and do what she wants, within reason. I don’t want her growing up to be afraid of anything.
She sat on the edge of her brother Christopher’s bed and entertained him with her tal
es of the city, which he seemed to appreciate and always kept her confidence. But she could not stop herself from pitying him his fate, not because he had been ill for two months with malaria, not because walking home from school one day he had been attacked by a pack of wild dogs that came charging over a hillside, not because he’d rather go to the movies than go on safari and take pictures of the animals or better still, learn to shoot the rifles, not because she had to personally save him from drowning in the waves the year before when their entire school went on a field trip to the embassy beach house in Mombasa, not because he absolutely hated the martial arts class they were made to attend together, and not because he was his mother’s son just as she was her father’s daughter but because she knew that her brother, two years older, had indeed grown up afraid of everything and was becoming the unmentioned disappointment to her father that she could never allow herself to be.
And this was one of the huge and irreversible reasons why she loved her father, loved him beyond tears though not beyond torment, because she had never heard him once express regret over having spawned a wimpish son, never heard a word of criticism directed at her brother’s caution or shy reluctance than what was sent her way—clean up your room, finish your dinner, homework, homework—had never seen him humiliate her brother, had only witnessed her father’s unqualified encouragement that her brother find his own path, however timidly, through the hazards of the world, her father standing guard over them all.
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