I Am Radar

by Reif Larsen

  “He saved me,” said Miša. “It was coming back to get me and he scared it away.”

  “You’ve got to be more careful, Miša,” she said, slapping her thigh. “I swear to God, if something had happened . . .”

  “Yes, Mama,” he said, and kissed her cheek. “I’m sorry, Mama.”

  Danilo pulled Miroslav aside. “Who was it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You and I both know there was no bull.”

  “Tata—”

  “I will say this only once, Miroslav. You have only one brother in this world. You have only one family. God gave you only one life. Take care of this. Take care. Someday it’ll all be gone, and if you wait until that day to know what you’ve lost . . . by then it’ll already be too late.”

  That night, Miroslav sat by his brother’s bedside. Miša had taken six of the doctor’s pills and a shot of šljivovica, and now his head was lolling against his pillow. He reached out and tried to hold his brother’s hand.

  “Thank you, Miro,” he slurred. “You really saved me. I owe you so much.”

  “You don’t owe me anything,” said Miroslav. “You’d do the same.”

  “Will you make a show about this one day?”

  “About what?”

  Silence.

  “Oh, okay. I get it. About nothing.”

  Miroslav patted the soft maw of his brother’s palm. “Get some rest.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too, burazeru.”

  Fig. 2.4. “Miroslav’s Robotic Swan v2.1”

  From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 962

  3

  1. THE TOTAL AMOUNT OF ENERGY IN A CLOSED SYSTEM REMAINS CONSTANT OVER TIME.

  Miroslav’s Swan Lake: Von Rothbart’s Revenge, while praised by the professional theater critic who had driven in from Sarajevo, was not well attended, and the preponderance of empty seats during the final performance of the three-night run sent Miroslav into a post–curtain-call rage. Before anyone could talk him out of it, he took a hammer to all of his actor-puppets, including the two giant black-and-white swan robots with their triple-reticulated, reverse-subluxated necks. This would not be the last time he destroyed his work after a show.

  Two weeks later, Miroslav graduated top of his class at the secondary school in Višegrad, though this came as no great surprise to anyone. Nor was there much celebration among his peers for this achievement. Despite his relative fame, Miroslav was not admired by his schoolmates. There were more than a few rumors about his sexuality.

  At graduation, there was an old tradition called krštenje svinje, in which students would papier-mâché a live pig with pages from their final exams and then heave the poor creature off the Turkish Bridge into the Drina. Though the origins of such a practice were unclear, it was beloved by local students, many of whom had stuck it out through school solely to take part in the ceremony. Miroslav called the whole endeavor “barbaric” and made a great show of boycotting the festivities, constructing a puppet pig in a field by the church that he slathered in writings by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and then set on fire. Despite the allure of fire and the melodramatic posters that he had pasted around town, no one attended this alternate krštenje svinje except Miša, Danilo, Uncle Dragan, and his bewildered twins. Miroslav, again humiliated, vowed never to perform again.

  “This town’s the worst place in the history of the universe,” he said.

  “That’s a bit extreme,” said Danilo. “I liked the pig.”

  Miroslav’s indignation was tempered somewhat by his acceptance shortly thereafter into the University of Belgrade’s philosophy department. It was a great honor, for this was the first time in more than a decade that a boy from their village had been accepted into the university. Miša was so proud of his brother that he punched Ratko Obradovic in the face and knocked out three of his teeth. Miša claimed Ratko had called his brother a faggot; Ratko claimed the attack was unprovoked.

  2. A SYSTEM WILL FOLLOW THE PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE.

  It was the summer of the great drought. More would have been written about this in the history books had it not also been the last summer before the worst war in Europe since World War II. Soon there was barely any water in the mountain streams that fed the Drina; the once great river dropped to the lowest level anyone could remember. If a pig were thrown into the river again, it would likely be killed by the fall. Dead fish rotted on the muddy river shores, and a stench rose up into the narrow alleyways of the old town and hung there for weeks, until the people became accustomed to it. A man can grow accustomed to anything if he lives with it long enough.

  Danilo worked long hours in the fields, trying to save the crops. He drilled several wells around the property, attempting to locate an underground spring that never materialized. While Miša recovered from his wounds, Miroslav surprised his father by offering his services, even going so far as to design a “root stimulation machine” that he had read about in an obscure nineteenth-century journal on electricity and mesmerism. He buried a long copper wire in the ground, encircling the rows of wheat with a low-grade current of 19.55 volts, which was supposed to trigger growth and replace the need for water. You could run your hand against the dying husks and feel a tingle migrating up your wrists.

  “I’m thankful for your efforts,” Danilo said to his eldest son. “I really am. But I must ask you to remove those wires. You’re killing my crops.”

  After this, Miroslav swore off farming for good. He retreated to the back of the barn, where he began building a life-size elephant puppet that could be operated by its rider. He planned to walk it across the Turkish Bridge and then push it into the river, in an homage to Tuffi the elephant’s famous fall from the Schwebebahn in Wuppertal. It would be his swan song to Višegrad.

  “Why an elephant?” Stoja asked, surveying the huge metal skeleton taking shape in the barn.

  “Elephants never forget,” said Miroslav. “They’ve witnessed all of history. Only they can read the river.”

  Fig. 2.5. Tuffi plunging from the Schwebebahn into the River Wupper (1950)

  From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 962

  “I see,” said Stoja, though she did not. At St. Stephen’s, which had become her regular place of refuge, she began lighting a third candle alongside those for her two sons, though even she was not entirely sure if this was for the elephant, the river, or the country.

  When Miša had finally recovered, he joined Danilo in the fields again, digging out the ditches, coaxing what was left of the water to run across their land. In the end, it was all for naught: one day the stream finally dried up for good. The grass shriveled and died. Three of their cattle collapsed from dehydration. They found one of them dead in the morning, its hindquarters devoured by a wolf.

  3. FOR EVERY ACTION THERE IS AN EQUAL AND OPPOSITE REACTION.

  FK Drina HE’s ultrafans were known as the Mosta, the “Guardians of the Bridge.” They had recently aligned themselves with Red Star’s Delije ultras, run by Arkan, the notorious criminal turned paramilitary leader. During the last game of the season, a crowd of Mosta beat a Muslim man unconscious during a match against Sloboda Tuzla. The man did not die, but he would suffer from chronic cluster migraines and never see out of his left eye again. There was no police investigation. Miša was present for the match, but he claimed he was too busy watching the game and did not even know about the beating until much later. He was much more concerned with rumors that Stojanovic had already signed a contract that would send him to Italy.

  “He’s a traitor!” he wailed. “Doesn’t he know he’s one of us?”

  4. A BODY’S MASS MULTIPLIED BY THE SQUARE OF THE SPEED OF LIGHT EQUALS THE POTENTIAL ENERGY OF THAT MASS.

  In the back of the barn, the elephant continued to grow.

  5. IF TWO SYSTEMS ARE IN THERMAL EQUILIBRIUM WITH
A THIRD SYSTEM, THEY MUST BE IN THERMAL EQUILIBRIUM WITH EACH OTHER.

  Most people heard the announcement that Slovenia and Croatia had declared independence from Yugoslavia on the radio. The newsman’s disembodied broadcast, quivering the little porous speaker on the mantel, informed them that Tito’s kingdom was finally unraveling. The radio gave the news a certain air of inevitability: it felt at once like a tale of fiction and an eternal truth. People could not believe what they were hearing, and yet they also could not remember a time when it had not been so.

  In the days that followed, as Slovenia successfully defended itself against the JNA during the Ten-Day War, as tensions rose all across Croatia and tanks were moved into position throughout Dalmatia, people milled around nervously, lingering in bakeries, staring at the bends of the Drina, holding their lovers a second too long. Everyone wondered if Bosnia would get caught in the trouble brewing to the west.

  Despite a three-month moratorium on independence, in August war broke out in Krajina between Croats and ethnic Serbs. Each claimed an ancient right to their homeland; each claimed the other had taken what did not belong to him. After the first weeks of fighting—in which almost the entire population of Višegrad did not move from in front of their radios, in which everyone was hungry for any new scrap of detail concerning the distant violence, in which the term “ethnic cleansing” was first used in all seriousness—people began to slowly accept that this would now be a part of their reality. Through the daily rhythm of their lives, they separated themselves from the fighting, hoping it would never come their way. Violence could happen only far away and over the mountains, in the valleys where evil like this had always lurked.

  “It’s a Croatian problem,” one person would say, and wave his hand like a conductor. And his partner would clap, once, twice, as if to wake someone up from a light slumber, and respond: “Yes. Life never changes.” But even as they said this, they knew that life always changes, that life had already changed and would never be the same again.

  It was also true that certain Muslim residents of Višegrad had already received veiled threats. A crude skull was spray-painted on the Selimovic house in Drinsko. And Alija Kujovic found a decapitated bat on his doorstep. Perhaps the bat had decapitated itself through a failure of echolocation. But it must also be said that these events were few and far between. The people of Višegrad had lived with their neighbors for a long time, and despite the vague rumblings of nationalism, there was still a pervasive belief—based on the slow thrum of proximity, based on the cushion of a handshake repeated ten thousand times—that everyone in their heart was decent and that a man could not turn on another man he had known his entire life.

  6. THE FORCE OF FRICTION IS INDEPENDENT OF THE APPARENT AREA OF CONTACT.

  That whole summer, the brothers did not speak of what had happened on the riverbank.

  For Miša, such silence was an attempt to erase the event from his memory. If it remained unspoken, then maybe it had never happened at all. He played football and worked in the fields and fell in love with a girl from town who kissed him on a rock by the riverside and then broke his heart when a week later she was seen with an older boy on the same rock. But when the darkness came, he could not forget: he would dream of the gypsy’s body drifting in the current, the slight, tetrahedral mounds of the shoulder blades peeking above the water, the man’s long hair floating on the surface of the river like a black jellyfish. In the dream, he would run out into the river and lift the man’s head from the water and find that he was not a gypsy at all—he was Miroslav. He would cradle his brother’s head and then look back to the shore and the gypsy would be standing there naked, laughing at him.

  For Miroslav, the memory of the killing was more complicated. He knew that he would never be able to forgive the world for directing such violence at his kin, that there was no way to return to the neutral ignorance that had enshrouded his life thus far. On the one hand, the echoes of the attack brought with them a great sense of shame and guilt; he could not rid himself of the feeling that his actions were somehow to blame for the natural and political disasters that were slowly enveloping their world. He was not superstitious like his poor baka back in Trebinje, who crossed and recrossed every threshold twice so as to confuse the trailing spirits—he did not actually believe in curses, and yet he was fairly certain that it was he who was directly responsible for the evil that everyone felt blowing in from across the river. He could not explain this knowledge in any rational terms, though he felt it in his heart, and this angered him. Why must he be the one who was held karmically accountable? Weren’t there much worse people in the world than him?

  In his darker moments, as he lay awake on his back at night, the guilt was not what lingered. Tucked beneath the guilt was a longing—a longing to feel it all again, to be enfolded in that giddy sensation of mind and body bifurcating, of himself other than himself, of watching his person strike the gypsy down with such ease it made his bones ache. This division was what he had been searching for in each one of his plays—he relied on the services of puppets and robots to perform this cheap trick of displacement—but in that moment by the river, he had needed nothing but himself. He had been the other. Puppets—glorious and profane—were no substitute for the real thing.

  7. THE FORCE WITH WHICH TWO OBJECTS ATTRACT EACH OTHER IS DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL TO THEIR MASS AND INVERSELY PROPORTIONAL TO THE SQUARE OF THE DISTANCE BY WHICH THEY ARE SEPARATED.

  Work on the elephant stalled. Lacking one of its ears and a proper sheath of skin, it languished in the nave of the barn, silent and immovable. This picture of incompletion, of an animal half-realized, slipped Miroslav into despair. He feared he would never create anything again. The carcass presided over a tribunal of failure.

  One day, when he felt himself on the edge of madness, he wrote a letter to Professor Darko Zunjic, in the philosophy department at the University of Belgrade, asking him if he wouldn’t mind providing a reading list of essential titles in hermeneutics and continental philosophy.

  “It’s bleak out here,” wrote Miroslav. “I hope you understand. I’m primarily a puppeteer, but the puppets have stopped speaking to me. So now I’m at a loss. I’m interested in anything that deals with consciousness, reason, and/or death. Thank you very much in advance. Regards, Miroslav Danilovic.”

  To his great surprise, Professor Zunjic sent him a battered box full of his personal books.

  “May they change you as they have changed me,” read the note. “See you in the fall.” Professor Zunjic asked only that he return his books when he arrived in Belgrade.

  Miroslav was so moved by this gesture, by the cracked binding of the books, by the wild, illegible notes in the margins, by the infectious evidence of a mind at work, that he spent his whole summer working his way through the box as his father and brother slaved away in the fields, trying to save what could not be saved. Aristotle, Kant, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Derrida, an American named Richard Rorty—he did not understand all of what was in the box, but what he did understand made him hungry, and what he did not understand made him hungrier still.

  “What are those books about?” Miša once asked him after coming in from a day of digging ditches. There was a palm print of mud on the left side of his neck, as if the earth itself had tried to strangle him.

  “Nothing much,” said Miroslav. “You could go through life and never read Heidegger and you would still be fine. You would probably even be better off. You could just go about the act of being without worrying what that meant.”

  “So then why do you read them?” Miša asked.

  Miroslav thought about this. “Well,” he said, “I guess I’m afraid.”

  “Afraid of what?”

  “What is anyone afraid of, Miša?”

  “I’m not afraid of anything. Spiders, maybe.”

  “I’m afraid of a world without meaning.”

  “Okay.”

 
“I’m afraid of our capacity for self-deception. I’m afraid of being without being. I’m afraid of dying alone.”

  “I would never let you die alone,” said Miša.

  “I love you, Miša, but we all die alone. They never tell you this in school, but this is the only truth you can depend upon. Solitary demise.”

  “But then you still go to heaven. And heaven is full of people.”

  Miroslav smiled. “And then you go to heaven, Miša. Full of people. It’s true. There’s always that. Although you could go to hell.”

  “Lots of people there, too,” said Miša. “You’ll never be alone.”

  8. AN OBJECT IN MOTION WILL STAY IN MOTION UNLESS AN UNBALANCED FORCE ACTS UPON IT.

  One evening in early August, Danilo knocked three times on Miroslav’s door.

  The sequence was like this: - - - such that the last knock seemed like it would never come, and then it came.

  There was no answer. Danilo cautiously opened the door and found Miroslav reading on his bed.

  “Why didn’t you answer?” he asked.

  “Why did you come in?”

  Danilo had noticed a shift in his eldest son. Long ago he had given up on his being a productive participant on the farm, and he had accepted this loss because Miroslav was destined for great things—opportunities were open to him that Danilo had never had for himself. And yet he sensed something impure in his son’s heart—he no longer looked at you when he spoke, and when he did, his eyes appeared heavy and resigned, the kind of look Danilo recognized in an ailing animal.

  Danilo came over and sat on the bed. He put a hand on his son’s foot.

  “Tata, what is it?” said Miroslav. “I’m busy.”

  “Tell me what is on your mind.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Danilo remained quiet. He left his hand resting on his son’s foot.