by Reif Larsen
Kermin looked skyward. “They say . . .” he shrugged. “They say weather is too cold for baby to be outside. They say he will now catch the chill.”
“What do they care about our child?”
Kermin shrugged. “In Serbia, it is very bad for baby to catch the chill. They are worrying for us. Our child is their child.”
This was no more true than his translations.
At Radar’s baptism, the congregation that huddled outside the front steps of St. Sava’s was large and unusually restless. Kermin did not know what to make of such an audience. He had barely spoken a word to many of these people. He wanted to understand their intentions as noble, but when he looked out across the crowd of faces, no one would meet his eyes.
On the church steps, Kermin protected Radar from the cold air in the same woolen horse blanket that had sheltered his sister and then him on his journey across the sea. Father Bajac, unusually sober and bright-eyed, held up a hand to silence those assembled. He turned to Kermin and said in Serbian, “On behalf of your son, Radar Radmanovic, do you renounce Satan and all of his services, all of his devices, all of his works, and all of his vengeful pride?”
They were facing west, toward the assembled congregation spilling out into the street, beyond which lay the endless dodecahedral sprawl of America, beyond which, according to the ancient belief, lay the unyielding temptations of Hades’s lair. Down one step and to his left, Charlene watched silently. She was neither a Serb nor a Christian, but she had insisted on the baptism more adamantly than he had. His was not a faith but a habit, a reminder of his weakness. Down another step stood the Volmers, grimly, dutifully.
“I do,” said Kermin.
They turned to face the east, toward the large double doors of the church. Beyond this, the ocean and the Old World, where his birthplace in the hills of Croatia beckoned. He would not recognize it if he went back now. Such was the blindness of migration.
“Do you unite yourself with Christ?” asked Father Bajac in Serbian. “Do you offer your son into the fold of the Holy Trinity?”
As Kermin felt his son squirm inside the confines of the coarse fabric, he was blessed with the sensation of being present and yet not being present at all. It was a mirrored existence that, as a radio operator, he had become all too familiar with. Every time he worked the dials of his transceiver and cast his hungry net into the invisible RF spectrum, trolling for broadcasts from Guyana or Kinshasa or Battambang, searching for the tender points of his fellow radiomen’s aerials, a part of his soul was cast out into this network of signals, even as a part of him remained seated in his workshop. Kermin closed his eyes, and for an instant, the mothballed scent of the blanket became a kind of mnemonic radio, collapsing space and time until he was back inside that Norwegian schooner; the blanket cloaking his fever, the creaking roll and tumble of seawater on the hull, the slow-dance rhythm of an ocean without end. Above, the captain speaking slipshod in his singsong tongue, his father shimmying down the hatch, parting the wool to test the throbbing heat of his contagion. The boat had barely survived the battering of a North Atlantic gale, developing a crack in its hull, before finally limping into New York Harbor on a sublime September morning. Neither father nor son spoke English; in the clerical scrum of Ellis Island, they had lost the acute diacritical mark softening the c´ at the end of their family name, thereby condemning them to a future of hard-consonant mispronunciation. The ch became a k—a sign of times to come. But they had arrived. Dobroslav had fulfilled his last promise to his wife to keep their child safe, to deliver him from their devastated homeland to a new world.
Father Bajac cleared his throat.
Kermin opened his eyes, and the wool-scented memory dissolved into the present Jersey nativity scene: the church, the steps, the priest, the crowd shifting in the frigid Meadowlands air. There is only one now now, Kermin told himself, and yet he still did not believe it.
“I do,” he said.
Father Bajac licked his thumb and made the sign of a cross above the baby’s body.
“Amen,” the congregation called, almost out of relief. The priest motioned for them all to enter the church. Inside St. Sava’s, the family circled the copper baptismal font three times as the congregation slowly filed into the knave and heralded the progress of their circumnavigations. Above, a wayward crow that had somehow found its way into God’s house squawked and crashed against a window. Everyone stared. A white-robed boy emerged from behind the altar with a broom; he beat at the bottoms of the windows but could not reach the bird. After a while he gave up, and the priest continued, ignoring the creature shuddering in the rafters.
“I’m grateful so many of you are here to witness another child becoming a Christian,” Father Bajac said in Serbian, resting his un-Bibled hand on the lip of the font. “This is a rebirth that we all should witness, that we all can learn from, again and again. Jesus teaches us it is never too late for a second chance.”
The priest produced a vial from inside his robes and then poured a sprock of oil in the shape of a cross onto the surface of the water. Kermin watched the oil swirl and curl back into itself, like a man slowly placing his arms on his hips. Father Bajac plucked Radar from him, letting the old blanket fall to the ground. He thumbed another cross above the child’s head. Radar hung there, quiet and resplendent, and then he was dunked three times. The water gurgled and splashed with each entrance. His pitch-black skin glistened in the hard fluorescent light of the church. The congregation leaned forward as one, peering at the baby, the wafts of incense swirling around him.
Before they fled at the end of the war, Kermin and his mother used to attend the services in their tiny village church outside Knin. He would lean against the folds of his mother’s dress, mouthing the words to the Gospels without making a sound, his feet tired from standing so long. They stood for the whole service to show their reverence for God, his mother had explained, and Kermin had nodded as one nods when one does not understand but knows that one should understand. Dobroslav was away, fighting Tito’s Partisans way up in the hills with Vojvoda Momcilo Dujic, the famous priest turned Chetnik warrior. Dobroslav was the vojvoda’s personal radioman, a source of pride that Kermin reminded the other boys in town of every chance he got. Dobroslav had once told Kermin how the vojvoda would sometimes summon him for his radio microphone in their mountaintop bivouac and then proceed to deliver sermons to no one but the empty valley, filling up forgotten frequencies. “My words are only for God to hear,” said the vojvoda. Retreating deeper into the recesses of his mother’s dress, Kermin found himself wondering whether his father and the vojvoda were out there now, high up in the mountains, broadcasting one of their radio sermons to a God who apparently could be everywhere and nowhere at once.
4
Charlene awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of an explosion. She shot up in bed, breathing, listening to the chorus of car alarms wailing outside. Next to her, Kermin had barely stirred. She heard Radar give a little hiccuping sob in the other room. She rose. Through the curtains she saw lights flicking on, people emerging onto their front porches.
She went to her son and gathered up his wriggling body. He folded into her, quieting. A small hand tapped at the shelf of her clavicle. She dipped and swayed, mimicking the rocking of a boat, humming a lullaby her mother had once hummed for her. She wondered if there were any words to the song. Outside, a single car alarm still blared through its cycle. She swayed. She was aware of his weight in her arms. She was aware of her arms, the muscles in her arms, holding this weight. She was aware of gravity’s pull, of the thousand invisible forces acting upon her.
All of a sudden, she was enveloped by a kind of vertigo—she had felt this sensation before, though she could not remember when. It was a feeling of being not herself, of being trapped in the wrong body, as if she had recently been miscast in a play that was her own life.
She felt herself listing; she was sud
denly worried that she would collapse onto the baby. In desperation, she uttered a single sound, something soft and round, like “Hwah.” And then, just as quickly as it had come, the feeling evaporated, leaving her with only herself again and the hazy memory of a counterfeit existence.
She clutched him. His breath against her neck. Those fierce scoops of oxygen. He was aware of none of her turmoil. He simply was. Breathing.
If only she could just breathe.
When she was sure he was asleep again, she carefully placed him next to his stuffed bear and slipped from the room. Still dressed in her nightgown, she slid into her boots and left the apartment.
As soon as she stepped outside, she smelled it. A stench like singed flesh. Several fire trucks had already arrived. At first she couldn’t see what the source of the smell was. She gagged and closed her eyes. Hand over her mouth, she looked up again and realized why she hadn’t seen anything. There was nothing there: the giant ginkgo tree across the street, such a familiar anchor to their world, was gone. Vanished. A yawning, empty space where its canopy had once resided.
“What happened?” she asked a neighbor who was standing nearby, smoking a cigarette in his bathrobe.
“Lightning,” he said. “Freak strike. Could’ve killed someone.”
And now she saw the huge chunks of wood lying all over the road, on top of people’s cars. One piece had landed forty yards away in a bed of daffodils. The heat from the electricity had burst the tree like a melon. Against a palette of blue and red emergency lights, she stood with her neighbors and watched as firemen worked at dislodging a missile-size log from Mrs. Garrison’s front window. The roar of chain saws filled the night. She tried not to breathe, since every time she got a waft of the smell, she felt as if she might vomit.
Nearby, a bleary-eyed boy stood holding his mother’s hand. His face read the twin emotions of terror and fascination as he watched the firemen unwind the destruction. Charlene saw his mother lean over and whisper into his ear. The boy nodded, without taking his eyes off the scene. In his hand he was clutching a little piece of wood. It must’ve come from the tree. The wind shifted, and Charlene was again hit by a horrific wash of burnt flesh. She heaved and fled back into her apartment building. Through the portal in the front door she looked, but the boy and his mother were gone.
She couldn’t sleep. Through the windows she watched them cut up the tree. They loaded the pieces into a truck and hauled them away. She paced. She looked in on Radar. She washed and rewashed her hands. At some point, she fetched Dr. Fitzgerald’s handwritten letter from the manila folder. When the sun finally rose, she picked up the telephone and dialed the number beneath the letterhead. It was much too early to call, she knew, and no one would answer, but it comforted her to hear the ringing on the other end. It meant there was an other end. The line rang and rang. The rings began to bleed together.
And then: “Hello?”
It was a man’s voice. She was caught completely off guard.
“Hello?” the voice said again. She could tell he was getting ready to hang up.
“Yes.” She came to life. “I’d . . . I’d like to speak to Dr. Fitzgerald, please.”
“Speaking.”
“Oh!” she said. It was him. She had not expected it to be him. A secretary, perhaps, but not him.
“Oh,” she said again. “I’m sorry to call you so early.”
A silence on the other end.
“I’m . . . I’m Charlene Radmanovic. You wrote us a letter.”
“Ah.” The voice shifted. She could hear the squeak of a chair in the background. “Mrs. Radmanovic. I’m so glad you called.”
“Please,” she said after a moment.
“Yes?”
“I don’t know what to do anymore.”
“In regards to what?”
“My son.”
“Your son?”
“I need to know what happened.”
“Well, that makes two of us.”
“I need to know what I did to him.”
There was a pause. “Why don’t you come up here and see me? We can discuss everything.”
Gratefully, she fell into the plush confines of his expertise. Twice a month, Charlene and Radar would ride the train up to Boston, all expenses paid, and visit the doctor’s laboratory, inside the twisting hospital complex next to the old city jail. From the moment she sat down in his office, she realized that he was the doctor she had always imagined before all of those useless specialists had unraveled her faith in the medical profession. He maintained a distinct air of calm that was neither contrived nor austere. Though he was already well into his sixties, he seemed both younger and older than this—perhaps it was the way in which he quoted Japanese proverbs with ease while sipping on a can of Tab soda. If he had not been a doctor, she could have seen him as a soft-spoken Sedona guru pursued by legions of followers.
Her many late nights reading textbooks and obscure dermatological articles had turned her into a bit of an expert in the field, and she had already familiarized herself with Dr. Fitzgerald’s many impressive achievements. After two years in the Army, a fellowship at Oxford, and a series of high-profile research projects on melanoma tumor growth at the Mayo Clinic, he had become, at age thirty-nine, Harvard Medical School’s youngest chaired professor. Now, twenty years later, he had just released a revolutionary schema to classify the color of skin. Designed primarily for dermatologists to diagnose skin types, Fitzgerald’s classification system was an attempt to update the largely problematic Von Luschan chromatic scale from 1897, which separated all human skin tone into thirty-six tiers. In the first half of the twentieth century, “respected” anthropometrists like George Vacher de Lapouge and Carleton S. Coon had drawn upon Von Luschan’s scale in order to categorize and sublimate racial populations within the extremely dubious discipline of “race science.” Following the Holocaust and the events of World War II, Von Luschan’s scale had largely been abandoned by the scientific community.
Fitzgerald’s system, by contrast, jettisoned such nuanced and largely subjective differentiation for a much more generalized six-point scale, focusing not on racial categorization but rather on the skin’s responsiveness to UV light, ranging from Type I (scores 0–6), “pale white; always burns, never tans,” to Type VI (scores 35+), “deeply pigmented dark brown to black; never burns, tans easily.” To his credit, Dr. Fitzgerald appeared well aware of the great potential for misuse of his schema. In a 1976 Archives of Dermatology editorial, in which he elucidated his motivation for creating such a scale, Dr. Fitzgerald also issued a warning, which Charlene had underlined in red pen: “Given the destructive history of trying to classify a person’s race based upon various phenotypical attributes, under no circumstances should the Fitzgerald scale be mistaken for any kind of comprehensive racial classification. . . . [Appearance] alone does not dictate an individual’s reaction to ultraviolet radiation nor his or her membership in any racial grouping. . . . [The] clues to our composition, more often than not, lie beneath the surface” (Fitzgerald 1976, 142).
“You,” the doctor said to Radar on their first visit to Boston as Radar sat in his lap, wondering at the pad of the doctor’s stethoscope. “You are the most special person I’ve ever met.” He twirled his hands in the air: one finger became two, and then two became one. A simple metamorphosis that made Radar giggle in amazement.
Radar was comfortable with Dr. Fitzgerald from the start, but then he was comfortable around most. Though he was only two and a half, his short life had been one of constant medical inspection, and Radar had become pliable in a doctor’s hands. He had come to expect these intrusions into his person, for he had known no other existence than that of the examined. Perhaps because of this, he remained a silent child. Even his cries were fleeting, muted affairs, as if he was reluctant to disrupt the world around him.
“This is fine,” said Dr. Fitzgerald.
“Many children take a while to find their voice. My mother always told me that I didn’t speak until I was three. And you know what? Those were the happiest days of my life. What’s the rush to join the chorus? Most of the time, we say nothing of consequence.”
During their second visit, after a day of testing basic reflexes, blood work, and UV tests, Radar fell asleep on the doctor’s examination table. He appeared at peace, forgiving of all trespasses, and as they admired him, the doctor spoke lovingly: “‘Oh, the nerves, the nerves; the mysteries of this machine called man! Oh, the little that unhinges it, poor creatures that we are!’”
Charlene stared. A button depressed.
“Dickens?” she ventured.
He nodded. “The Chimes. He’s a well I return to often.”
This led to a surprisingly impassioned back-and-forth on which was his best work (he: Bleak House; she: Great Expectations) and whether or not the serialized novel could ever be revived. It was a literary cauldron she had not stirred in years. The talk of books quickened her pulse and dampened the divot just above her lip.
She sat back, marveling.
“What is it?” said the doctor.
“I just hadn’t expected this . . . It’s not usual that you talk about these things with a doctor,” she said. “And I’ve met quite a few lately. I thought you were all . . .”
“What?”
“Boring?” she ventured.
He laughed. “Most of us are, I’m afraid. You know, it’s funny, but I find that books are essential to my profession. I’m a better surgeon if a story has its claws in me. All I need is a little dose of Melville or Dickens and his dirty alleyways, and my scalpel grows steady.”
She had a vision of him lounging in his surgeon’s gown between surgeries, his feet thrown up on the operating table as he savored the last few pages of Bleak House.
“I know I shouldn’t admit it,” she said, “but a part of me always struggled with Dickens. Sometimes it feels like he’s just trying so damn hard. His characters aren’t real, you know what I mean? They’re like these little parts of a machine. Like that man who just spontaneously combusted in the middle of the book—”