by Reif Larsen
Finally, Danilo turned on his guide, ready to kill him with a knife that had appeared in his hand, only to realize at the last moment that it had not been this whole time, but Miša. The last image before he woke up was his son’s terrified expression as the blade came down upon him.
6
The next morning, a scissor-sharp October morning, Danilo drifted through the city toward Nikola Pašic Square and the Parliament building, as if to confront the real about Stoja’s whereabouts. With the last of his money he bought some warm nuts from a one-eyed vendor of uncertain descent, possibly a Gypsy, possibly a Turk.
“Please enjoy,” the vendor said with great kindness.
Danilo was studying the majesty of the olive-colored Parliament dome when he noticed a small group of onlookers clustered just off the square, next to a children’s playground. The crowd was focused intently on something in their midst. Danilo walked over, casually munching on his bag of nuts, letting their oily warmth settle into the foundation of his teeth.
When he got closer, he caught his breath.
The crowd was assembled around a black box. A man was hunched next to the box, his head covered by a velvet curtain.
Danilo ran up to them.
“Miroslav!” he yelled. Those assembled stared at him warily.
“Miroslav!” he called again. He grabbed the man beneath the curtain and pulled him up. It was an old man with a gold tooth.
“Did I do it wrong?” said the man.
“Where’s the puppeteer?” asked Danilo.
The man looked confused. “I’m sorry. I did not have enough,” he said.
“What?”
The man pointed to a handwritten sign propped up on the ground:
I WILL BE RIGHT BACK.
FEEL FREE TO WATCH THE SHOW.
PLEASE, BE GENTLE WITH THE BOX
AND ONLY 1 AT A TIME.
SUGGESTED DONATION:
Next to the sign was a little wooden cashbox with a slit on top.
“Is that Tesla?” said Danilo.
“It means ten billion dinars. That’s the note Tesla’s on,” someone said behind him.
“That was the old bill. Tesla’s on the five-thousand-dinar now,” said a woman.
“No, it’s the thousand-dinar bill,” said another. “But it’s worth more than before.”
“No. That was the old currency.”
“Well, it’s too much, whatever it is. Who would pay that?”
“It doesn’t mean that,” said a man with a mustache. “It’s not referring to money. It’s a metaphor. It means you must bring your imagination to the box. That’s what my friend said.”
“Can I see?” said Danilo to the old man whom he had interrupted.
“There’s a line,” said the woman.
“But my son made this.”
Their collective groan made it clear that the people did not believe him. Embarrassed, he slipped behind them, awaiting his turn, glancing around nervously, half expecting his son to materialize out of the city at any moment.
Nearly everyone put something into the cashbox, though it was clear that most were just getting rid of old worthless bank notes, whether they featured Tesla or not. They would then hunch over, duck their heads beneath the black curtain, and emerge five minutes later wearing a dazed look. One woman waited for her friend to watch, then they embraced and moved to the nearby playground, where they spoke excitedly, occasionally gesturing at the box. After watching the show, the man with the mustache circled the box six or seven times, inspecting it from all angles before finally shaking his head and walking away.
When it was finally his turn, Danilo bypassed the cashbox altogether, not caring what the others might think, and hastily threw the curtain over his head.
He was met with darkness and silence, tempered only by the faintest of rumbles from the city beyond. Danilo was suddenly struck by how vulnerable he was, crouched like this in the middle of the street. Anyone could come up behind him and punch him, rob him, kill him. There were others to protect him, to shelter him, but maybe they were pointing at him as he stood beneath the curtain: That one. He’s the crazy one. He’s the one who didn’t pay. Him. Take him.
He waited patiently, but the darkness remained. Perhaps the box was broken. Perhaps the whole point was to get strangers to crouch down in this ridiculous posture, to pay money, thinking some little entertainment was coming simply because others had done it before them, but in the end there was no entertainment, and this expectation of entertainment was what had so upset people.
And then: soft music, coming from just in front of his ear. The sound of a few violins joined by a pair of cellos and then an accordion. The music felt very close but very far away at the same time. The song being played was familiar, though Danilo could not name the tune. Maybe it did not have a name.
The darkness was softening. But this was not quite right: the darkness was no longer darkness. There was a feeling of rising from the depths. A sense of shape. An awakening into form.
A scene appeared before him. Danilo could see a river. Not an image of a river, but an actual river. He could see the water moving, turning back into itself as water does. There was a river somewhere inside that box. But how could it be? From where, and to where, did it flow? And now he could see there was a bridge over this river. Not just any bridge: the bridge. The Turkish Bridge. Tiny, resplendent, complete with its kapija, and the central pillar beneath with its grated opening, inside which a black Arab was supposedly imprisoned. It was the one detail Miroslav had remembered from the book. Had he also included a miniature Arab inside that pillar? An Arab who stared longingly at the river that flowed into the distant sea?
Danilo began to cry. How he missed his home! How he missed her! How he missed the life they had once lived!
He was again taken by the scene. How on earth had Miroslav made a river inside a box?
Something was moving slowly into the frame. At first Danilo could not tell what it was, but then he saw it, unmistakable and true: an elephant. Yes—there was the trunk, the flapping of the ears. A tiny elephant, no more than five centimeters tall, walking along the road. It was all so real, so perfect—the way the elephant leaned heavily into each step, the left front leg slightly lame, the little tail now and then fluttering away at the invisible flies. Its walk was a kind of dance, in time to the lilt of the music. And as with the box he had seen back home, there weren’t any strings. No wires or tracks or anything to betray the presence of a controller. The elephant moved on its own. Although this was not quite true: the elephant had a rider on its back. A minuscule man with a whip. The rider was directing the elephant to walk across the bridge. Danilo sensed some hesitancy in the animal, as if it knew what would happen next. Would the bridge hold? It must. It had been used for so many years. Hundreds and hundreds of years. But then Danilo remembered that this bridge was not the bridge back home, that this bridge had not been built by the hands of slaves and artisans and soldiers and thieves. This bridge could fit in his lap, and so: could this bridge, this whisper of a bridge, hold an elephant ridden by a man?
Danilo noticed then that the elephant was not right. Half of its body looked as if it had been eaten away by wolves. There was a great hole in its stomach, and you could see inside it, even as it was walking past the last building and onto the first stretch of the bridge. There were no guts or blood inside the animal, only metal, mechanics, pulleys. He noticed then that the elephant had only one ear.
Yes. He understood now. This elephant was the elephant in the barn. Incomplete, but complete. Moving. Walking.
He leaned in, staring at the rider on top, who was no taller than a thimble. He could almost see it. He cursed the age of his eyes. He squinted. Yes. It was. It had to be. It was his son. Beneath the black curtain, Danilo crossed himself twice.
The elephant had arrived at the center of the bri
dge, next to the kapija. It stopped, flapping its ears. The music, too, hung still, waiting. The tiny Miroslav seemed to gesture with his whip, and then the elephant shook its head and Miroslav gestured again and whipped the elephant’s back, and slowly the animal turned, shuffling to its left, placing one, then two of its feet onto the bridge’s parapet. The violins rising, urged on by the hook-slant caress of the accordion.
“No,” he whispered.
The elephant seemed to hear him, for it paused, its body open to the world, straining. He could see the whirring gears inside its rib cage. The music gathering force, the cello working itself into a frenzy, the violins everywhere at once, and then the creature was lifting itself, up and over the parapet, and Miroslav was urging it onward, whipping the creature with a whip the size of a thread. The music crescendoed as gravity caught the elephant and it started to fall toward the surface of the water and then—
Black. The violins sounded once more and everything went quiet.
Danilo waited for the light to return, but there was no more. A click from somewhere in the darkness, a flipping of a switch. He could hear the muffled traffic again. The show was over.
He lifted his head from beneath the curtain, blinking at the dingy city that greeted him. A woman with several shopping bags full of bottled water looked at him impatiently. He stepped aside so that she could have her turn.
• • •
DANILO WAITED by the black box all day. There was always a small line of people, and passersby would see the line and stop and talk and then begin to wait themselves. Occasionally children would swing on the swings in the little playground and then come over, curious, and they too would put the curtain over their heads and watch the show, and some would come out crying, running back to their parents.
At one point, a photographer came up and snapped photos of the box and of those waiting to see it. Shortly after, a group of soldiers, on their way to guard the Parliament building, stopped and examined the box, poking at the curtain with the muzzles of their guns, though none of them stayed to watch the show.
Some patrons put money into the little wooden box. Some did not. One man slipped in a letter. Danilo began to predict who would give money and who would not. There was a recurring conversation about what was meant by the picture of Tesla and, by extension, how much the show was worth.
“Nothing is worth anything,” a woman in dark glasses declared, and she looked as if she meant it, though she stayed to watch the show three times.
Danilo himself rewatched the elephant perhaps a dozen times. Each time, it was the same: the creature reached the point of falling and then the scene went dark, never allowing the animal to complete its fall. And there was never any evidence of previous falls. He began to look for clues, to watch the rider’s movements, to stare at the meticulously rendered houses in the background. He noticed more things: laundry drying on balconies, a crow watching from a nearby tree. After witnessing the interrupted fall for the fifth time, he knew the movements and the timing so well, it was like watching a recurring dream. After a certain point, he could not be sure it was not a recurring dream.
Miroslav never showed. Danilo marveled at how he could leave something so remarkable and precious out on the street like this, where anyone could steal it, where anyone could take the money in the wooden case, even if this money did not amount to much. And yet the box remained. Where was the creator of all this? No one could say. The sign, it turned out, was a lie: he would not be right back.
Night fell. Danilo was hungry. The vendor selling nuts had already packed up his cart, but Danilo did not dare search for food, fearing that as soon as he left, his son would come back and fetch his box.
The streetlights sputtered, popped on, one by one. Danilo sat on the sidewalk, watching the box. The number of people on the street had thinned. A policeman came up to him and nudged him with his baton, telling him to move on.
“I’m waiting for my son,” he said.
“Where is he?”
“He told me to watch his puppet box while he was gone.” He pointed across the street, though the black box had been swallowed by shadows. The policeman looked confused.
“Have you seen it?” said Danilo. “It’s really something. My son is a great artist.”
“Get out of here, old man,” said the policeman.
Danilo drifted to a park across the street. From such a distance, he could just barely make out the silhouette of the box. He was hungry and cold. He sat on a bench and felt sleep coming, though he was afraid to close his eyes. Finally, reluctantly, he walked back through the city to his storage room, which felt comparatively balmy. The little sleep he got was interrupted by an insistent vision of his son coming to take the box away in the middle of the night, leaving nothing behind but an empty sidewalk.
At first light, he jumped up and ran back to Nikola Pašic Square. To his relief, the box was still there. The same sign, the same wooden cashbox, although when he shook it, he found the cashbox was empty. Someone had taken the money! Or maybe Miroslav had visited while he was gone. The thought gave him hope. There was no line to view the box, so Danilo dipped his head under the curtain and waited for the elephant to appear.
As soon as he entered the curtain, he noticed that the smell had changed. Or maybe it was the darkness itself. He waited. This time, when the music came, there was only a lone cello, surfacing from the deep as the light gradually rose. It was the same Turkish Bridge, the same small Drina, though the water was darker, reddish this time, filled with the mud from a heavy rain.
There were people on the bridge. The sky had changed. By the pinkness of the stone, Danilo guessed it to be early evening. He had been to the bridge many times at this hour; it was one of his favorite times to visit, to feel the valley slinking toward nightfall.
Fighting the soft blur in his eyes, Danilo squinted and saw that the people on the bridge were soldiers. He recoiled. They were White Eagles. The soldiers were standing and talking, their guns slung casually across their backs. But surely they could not see him. They were inside, and he was outside. He leaned in again, marveling at their littleness, the independence of their movement. Who controlled these men? If he reached out and smashed them with his hand, would they fight back? Would they shoot him with their tiny guns?
And then he saw the blood. The bridge was stained dark crimson with blood. They were standing in the blood, talking casually, smoking.
The cello dipped and swirled with the muddy current of the river.
A woman appeared. From the near bank, where the elephant had walked the day before. She was running, looking back in the direction from which she had come. Her clothes were torn, and she was wearing no shoes. She moved quickly, up and onto the bridge, in the direction of the soilders. Danilo wanted to warn her not to run toward them.
Turn back! Don’t run over there!
She saw the soldiers standing amid the blood and stopped. She was already a quarter of the way across the bridge. She looked back in the direction of Danilo.
He saw then that the woman was his wife.
Stoja.
Good God, Stoja! Turn back! Run! Get out of there!
The men approached her.
“Turn around! Run!” he yelled, his voice damp and close beneath the cloth.
Stoja froze. The cello, waiting, held its note. She looked up at the sky.
“I’m here,” he said. “I can see you, Stoja. I’m here with you.”
She did not hear him. The cello sounded a ferocious chord, and Stoja bowed her head and ran toward the bridge’s parapet, one foot on its top, and then she leaped. Her body making an arc in the air, gravity’s rainbow catching her in slow motion—yes, Danilo was sure that she was falling more slowly than normal. She splashed into the water. The White Eagles were running to the parapet, guns drawn.
“Stoja!” he yelled.
He saw her surfa
ce and begin to swim. The sound of tiny gunshots. He winced, transfixed, but she continued to swim until she reached the central pillar of the bridge, with the small grated opening above. This was the buttress that held the Arab. She grasped the stone, pulling herself from the water. The men were looking down at her, aiming, ready to kill her. And then, at the last moment, she slipped through a narrow opening and disappeared into the bridge.
“Stoja!”
His hand thwacked against a thin pane of glass. He swore he could see the figures jostle, as if an earthquake had hit—the bridge trembling, the White Eagles confused—but then the lights and the music abruptly cut out and everything was black again.
Something had gone wrong. It was not meant to end like this.
He took off the curtain, touched the box, looking for her, for a sign, then got back inside the curtain. He waited for ten minutes, but the show would not go on. After hesitating, he shook the box with both hands. A faint rattle. He had broken it. And now Stoja was trapped. She was trapped inside the bridge with the Arab. What would he do to her? Was she safer in there than outside, with the soldiers? He contemplated ripping the whole thing open to rescue her, but instead he fell to his knees and prayed.
Eventually others arrived to see the box. Some he recognized from the day before. Some had been told about the elephant and were eager to see it for themselves. But everyone who put their head under the curtain waited and waited, and nothing happened. And even then, more people came, having heard rumors of the wonders inside the box. They too waited in vain.
“It must be broken,” one said to his companion.
“You were telling me a lie, weren’t you? You were teasing me,” said the companion.
“I was not. I swear. Yesterday there was an elephant. You wouldn’t believe. It was alive. I swear to you.”