Honey in the Carcase

by Josip Novakovich

  “Come on! I keep track of your miles? More like you keep track of mine. After all, you like numbers.”

  A couple next to them made love in the water, the bearded dude leaning backward and an enthusiastic lean young woman astride him, leaned forward. Rose looked the other way, and David touched her. “No, you won’t get me to do that,” she said. “It’s probably illegal.”

  She closed her eyes. She was excited by the unrestrained couple, but to behave like them would be too much.

  Later, the couple chatted with David and invited him and Rose to visit at their hotel room. “We got some coke, the best coke in the world. Come, try it with us.”

  “Thank you, how nice. Rose, what do you think, it sounds like fun!”

  “It’s totally pure. The best high ever,” the beard said.

  “I don’t think so,” Rose said to David, ignoring the stranger. “If you want to end up in jail, just go ahead. I am not going.”

  “Oh, come on, don’t be a party pooper!”

  “Suit yourself. I am not going. You can go if you like, but if you do, I am going right back to Lima and then home.”

  That night, they didn’t make love, and Rose couldn’t sleep. David said, “I am going out for a stroll.”

  “For the Dutch treat?”

  “No, just to clear my head.”

  “It would take much more than a little stroll to accomplish that!”

  The next morning, they zigzagged through a crowded market place in Huaraz before their bus trip to Yungay, the starting point of their hike around the mountain.

  As David dispatched his last bite of a fried fish and threw its fragile skeleton away, Rose said, “Let’s buy a chunk of cheese.” Her voice often seemed to come from somewhere deep, not only from her lungs, but from her soul. But now her slow voice seemed to irk him, and he said:

  “No, I’ve had enough omelets and cheese sandwiches to last me till Doomsday. Anyway, there is no time for that. The bus will be leaving any second.”

  “No, it won’t, you don’t know these people.”

  “I know enough.”

  “We need some solid food, otherwise we’ll starve.”

  “I am sure we’ll run into some village where we could buy quails, rabbits…let’s go!”

  She fondled a large yellow disk of cheese. “Cuánto es?” she asked a creased mestizo woman. The woman had a condor-esque nose and the disinterested eyes of an arbitrator in a black gown, awaiting the prosecution and defense to state their arguments; and, upon hearing the question, the arbitrator livened up, her small eyes becoming large. Now Rose began to bargain.

  “Come on,” David said. “We don’t have time for that.”

  “Relax! Take it easy! Isn’t that your motto?”

  Rose handed some money from her smooth hands into the old woman’s hands, which looked like cracked soil in drought, despite the indigo veins—streams and rivers—swerving through the dry skin. The woman put the money into her bosom behind her black robe, took out some change, slowly, and handed it into the pink hands. Rose put it into her leather purse, which hung from her neck, and packed the cheese into her backpack. David helped her pass her arm through the back strap. Rose then took a picture of the old cheesemaker.

  As they waited for the bus for a good five minutes, Rose smiled, and wondered, did David join the Dutch for a snort? For a little threesome? She decided not to ask him. Maybe it didn’t matter. And after all, she probably would have smelled something on him, some feminine smell. The hippies used all sorts of ointments and smoked hashish in addition to snorting. He had probably wanted to visit them but didn’t dare. David paced up and down, and said, “Where is the damned bus?”

  A truck came, and the waiting crowd soon filled up the bed. Rose and David joined them.

  A day later, before sunset, they were reposing on the side of a pure glacier lake, locked between Huascarán’s blue rocks and on the other side a steep rocky mountain. Rose stared at the turquoise of the water with a thirst for beauty. The tint was the same as the woman’s eyes on the Titicaca. No matter how much she gazed at that shade between blue and green, she’d never possess it. Her muscles ached from hiking in the thin air, and her stomach growled. Rose took out the cheese and ate, smacking her lips.

  “That smells good,” David said.

  She did not say anything.

  He took out a dry piece of bread and chewed it with an onion. “Could I have a slice?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You said you wouldn’t want it. I thought you were a man of your word.”

  “Well, yes, then we were in a rush.”

  “You didn’t need to rush.”

  “You have more than enough for the whole hike.”

  “I know, but we might run into some hungry children.”

  “I am hungry.”

  “So what?” she said. She had finished her meal while David still chewed the rocky bread crusts. She filled her cup from a mountain brook which loudly rolled stones. She put a pill into the cup.

  “What are you scared of? There’s no bacteria in the glaciers!” David said.

  Rose stared at him. She put one of her contact lenses into her mouth, and then back into her eye. David chewed his hard bread, his left jaw popping; on the right, she knew, he was avoiding a new molar crown.

  “Well, it wouldn’t hurt you to give me a slice,” David said.

  “No is no. You didn’t want it then, and you can’t have it now.”

  David went down to the lake and bounced flat stones against the surface, came back and chewed a wild onion.

  The rocks of Huascarán were radiant with the setting sun, and the glaciers glared like a magnified diamond crown. The lake lost its turquoise, turning a blueberry hue.

  Rose began to unpack a red tent and looked at him askance for not helping her.

  “Are you sure you want to sleep beneath that colossal piece of detachable ice, that iceberg in the sky?” David asked.

  “Why not?”

  “If the glacier comes tumbling down once every ten years, well…”

  “Nonsense. Once every ten years is one in 3652.5; and one night here, eight hours, would decrease it to one in 10,957.5.” Whenever she was angry, she could astonish herself by how sharp she could be.

  “That’s still pretty high for me…and it hasn’t happened in ten years, so…and if it does happen every ten years, and it hasn’t, isn’t it more likely that well, hum.” He swallowed and ate his words.

  “Have a slice of cheese,” said Rose softly.

  “No, I don’t want any.”

  “You don’t want any? How come? First you beg me for it, and now you don’t want any. Take it!”

  “No, I don’t want it anymore. I’ve just had a juicy dinner.”

  She stood up to cut a slice. “Here, have some.”

  “Fuck your cheese!” David shouted, and his shout echoed from the mountains, “ease, cease, ease.”

  She dropped the knife and whirling around her axis like an Olympic disk thrower, she unleashed the whole sunny cheese at David’s balls.

  David lifted his foot with the reflexes of a goalie defending his net. The cheese hit the sole of his sneaker, protecting the possible origin of a long genealogy of future generations.

  Rose danced like a medicine man in a trance, holding a stone in her hand, ready to fling it at him. David jumped at her. He grabbed her and squeezed her. Her ears and her neck turned red, and she growled, kicking his shins with her heavy hiking boots. David flung her on the ground and sat on her to keep her body immobile.

  Her booted feet, free, banged against his back. David lay on top of her, intertwining his legs with hers. He gripped her around her neck with his elbow. She sank her red nails into his hand and ripped. The well-rasped nails cut to his tendons. David clasped his left arm around her neck, pushing her head with his right arm into the hook. She felt she was about to swoon, and her kicks weakened. Then David let her go and stood up. Blood dripped
from his hand. Rose had a hard time rising. David staggered away, and he dropped to his knees, tying the strings on his backpack into tight knots.

  As she stood up, she could see nothing on the ground level, but there was light at the tip of the glacier on Huascarán, which was echoed, diminished on the blue rocks. Tears flowed down her cheeks. “I’ll never forgive you,” she said.

  “You won’t have to.”

  He walked away steadily in the direction of Yungay. As he grew smaller in the distance, the world astonished her with its glacial beauty.

  WOOL

  IN VINOGRAD VILLAGE one morning, a girl named Anna rushed out of her backyard when she heard a high-pitched murmur, her hazel eyes turning green as she looked through the slanting rays of the sun. A lake of sheep was flowing down the hill toward her in waves, each wave with many voices, all voices together becoming a huge sorrow. (After spending the winter in the Pannonian plains near the Hungarian border, the flocks were returning to the Bosnian mountains—this was in 1969, a long time before bridges over the River Sava between Croatia and Bosnia would sink.) Shepherds with long sticks, dressed in rags, walked along their flocks. Black dogs bullied the sheep. Rams with mud in their hair often bucked thick back-twisted horns. Ears hung on the sides of mothers’ faces as if the mothers had grown tired of listening to bleating, though it was they who bleated the most. Little lambs struggled to keep up with them, bleating several octaves higher.

  Anna’s neighbors stood on the roadside, at the edge of grassy ditches, and chewed pipes with their yellow dentures. Her father Noah stood behind her, leaning on a hunting rifle, his small blue eyes vanishing into the redness of his chubby face. “If any of these damned sheep run off the road into my vineyard, I’ll blast the hell out of them.” He probably forgot that the rifle did not work—it was rusty and jammed with mud. His free hand lifted a bottle of crimson wine to his wet lips.

  Anna asked a shepherd if she could hold a little lamb, as small as a cat—its legs were long so that it looked like a cat on stilts. It had black nostrils and black circles around its eyes.

  “Could I have it?”

  “Give me three hundred dinars, and it’s yours,” the shepherd said.

  “Dad, could you…?”

  “Hungry monster, aren’t you?” Noah said.

  “I’d like to have a pet.”

  “What good can a pet do?”

  “The flock’s not gonna wait,” the shepherd cut in. “Take it or leave it!”

  “Three bottles of wine?” Noah said.

  “Four.”

  Anna ran into the house, brought five bottles from the moldy cellar, and was about to hand them all to the shepherd, but Noah snatched two and said to her, “Can’t you count, ass?” and to the shepherd, “Take it or leave it.”

  The shepherd looked down the road at the flock, which had passed, brown dust rising above it, and said, “Blood is worth less to you than wine?”

  “What can you do with blood?”

  The shepherd wiped his dusty lip, and his Adam’s apple rose and fell with a click. “Fuck your planets, my friend. You got me!” He snatched the three bottles, and Anna took the lamb from his forearm, where it had perched chewing imaginary future grass. The shepherd walked in quick strides after the bleating brown cloud.

  “Kid, we got us a steal. Have a sip!” Noah offered wine to his child. Anna rushed inside the house to play with her little lamb.

  For days Anna groomed the lamb, gave it milk, walked it in the vineyard down to the creek, and rolled with it in the cricketing grass. She buried her thin aquiline nose in the wool. Surrounding the lamb with her long coppery hair, she created the illusion that her face and the lamb’s were in a luminous tent.

  The lamb was clean and averse to mud and could have slept with Anna if it had not rolled little steamy bronze-black droppings all around the living room. Her mother, Estera, wanted the lamb to sleep outdoors on a chain, like a dog.

  Anna set up the lamb in the empty pigsty, in a nest of hay and old sweaters. The lamb often broke into the garden and ate lettuce, cabbage, tulips, and white roses. Estera was dismayed. Anna dragged green branches of various trees to the lamb; cherry leaves were the lamb’s favorite, so Anna climbed two large cherry trees in the garden and sawed off branches and tossed them to the lamb, who wagged its tail and hopped like an antelope.

  Anna often crawled around the animal on all fours, as if she were a lamb too. She scratched her head against the lamb’s, pushing a little. At first the lamb dodged her head and ran away into a bush of budding flowers, but soon it began to press its head against Anna’s. For weeks they gently pushed each other around the yard, but the lamb was growing stronger and stronger, and for all Anna knew it could have been a ram. She decided, however, that it was a female, and named it Tanya.

  As soon as Anna came back from school, Tanya would lower her head, dig her hind hooves in the sandy soil, and grind her teeth, as if she’d chew Anna. Anna laughed at the challenge and went down on all fours, imitating her teacher, who catapulted and flew to collide with Anna’s forehead. The impact of the collision threw Anna off balance, so that she rolled on the ground. Anna had a splitting headache and tears went down her cheeks. She invited neighborhood children to play the same game with Tanya. They were astounded at the violence of the sheep, and none of them wanted to have their head butted more than once.

  Soon it was summer, and Anna thought the best part of her life was over. Every Saturday night, her father got drunk. The first Saturday night in June, he came home at midnight. He shouted at Estera, accusing her of sleeping with the chimney sweep, and hit her with his fist over her mouth so that she bled.

  Anna’s younger brother Mato—he was eight, she was almost eleven—and Anna stood in the corner of the room, their teeth chattering, while their father smashed a chair over an old cradle, where instead of a new child Estera kept jars of plum jam. The cradle cracked, the jars burst, and the dark sugary tissue of plums oozed onto the splintery floor. “Coward!” Estera said.

  Noah charged after her and slipped on the jam, while Estera jumped out the window. He ran after her down the gravel road into the woods. In nightgowns Mato and Anna ran after them, screaming to their father, “Don’t, don’t!”

  They caught up with him. His tobacco breath rasped, wheezed, and he doubled over and panted, “My liver, my liver!” Mato and Anna did not respond.

  “Don’t you worry about your dad?” he said.

  “You bet!” Anna said.

  “How dare you worry about me? I don’t need your sympathy! Chimney-sweep bastards!”

  He grabbed Mato and Anna by their hair and knocked their heads together and kicked them, and his knuckles struck Anna’s cheek so that her face blazed with heat. Anna ran to the pigsty and moaned, while her knocked-out salty molar swam in blood around her tongue. She cuddled up with Tanya and fell asleep.

  The next morning, when Anna woke, Tanya was sniffing her hair and wetting her eyebrows and eyelashes with her cool nostrils. That refreshed Anna. When she walked out, she saw her mother sweeping the entrance to their red brick house; the polished stone steps glistened. No evidence of the previous night remained, and Anna thought that perhaps she was crazy to think all that helter-skelter had gone on. But it was odd that her mother wore cherry lipstick; though her lips were full, her lower one looked too full now, so she must have hidden the bruise. Noah was repairing old wine barrels, taking off rusty rings and putting on new ones, then hammering them down. His hands were unsteady, and the short nails kept falling from between his fingers into the dust, where he could not find them. In his hangover imprecision he missed most of those that didn’t fall and he hit his thumb; he groaned and jumped around the yard as though he’d hit his toe. He stood at the side of the spindle, sticking his hand into a pail of cool water.

  Anna helped her father mix chemicals, for spraying the vineyard, in a cemented hole in the ground with walls as high as her waist. The chemicals turned pale green. Noah saddled the copper ca
rry-on pump on her back. In wooden shoes, she walked down the slope between the rows of vines, sliding here and there over snails. She kept pushing its handle with one hand and with another waved a metal-capped hose with small holes, smaller than needle eyes, so that the spray came out as a haze that bit her eyes. This went on for two days. Sunday Anna hated it, but Monday she did not mind because she could skip school, and her father would write a note saying that she was sick, which, as it turned out, she was, with a cold—headaches and a nose drip—so she skipped Tuesday too, free to play with her friend the sheep.

  When her father wasn’t watching, Anna took Tanya to the vineyard and spread the leaves of the vines so she could chew young bundles of green grapes, which, out of their sheaths, looked like homeless peas. Tanya loved the baby grapes, chewing quickly, rubbing her ears against Anna’s knee, looking at her sideways, flirtatiously, with big moist eyes. Anna petted her, and each swallow the sheep made was to Anna as though she herself had swallowed ripe apricots.

  Who knows how long their idyll would have gone on if Noah hadn’t sneaked up on them, grabbed Anna by the hair, and dragged her into the yard. Tanya fled into the pigsty, but Anna couldn’t, though she kicked her father in his hairless white shin. He pulled his belt off his pants, tied her to the youngest cherry tree with a rope, and whipped her, mostly over the back. The metal buckle cut through her cotton shirt. It was as though fire licked her. For a while he did not seem to know how to stop, though he took several momentary breaks to pull up his unfastened pants.

  Anna became feverish and her sores became infected. She lay on her stomach, and her mother rubbed plum brandy into her skin to disinfect her. Anna gasped with the pain and then fell asleep, brandy sinking into her blood from everywhere, so that she woke up drunk. Anna missed a whole week of school, and then got an F in math upon returning—she had forgotten the multiplication tables. While Estera cooked vegetable stew, Anna had to sit at the bread cabinet and recite the multiplication tables not only up to ten, but to twelve. Anna hesitated at eight times nine, and Mato, who’d been cutting his initials in the table leg with a Swiss knife, shouted, “Seventy-two.” Anna could not think what eleven times eleven made, and while she was coming up with the answer with help from pencil and paper, Mato shouted, “One hundred and twenty-one,” and added that thirteen times thirteen made a hundred and sixty-nine.