The whole day afterward he put on airs for being the smart one, until Anna trapped him below the lowest wire of a row of vines. Sitting on top of him, she opened his mouth with her hands, put a stone between his upper and lower molars so his mouth would stay open, and spat into his mouth until her throat went dry, and then she held his white tongue down with a stick and lowered a brown spider on its silky string onto his swollen tonsils. That would teach him to shout his tables!
Noah stayed on the wagon for the rest of the summer. He and Anna often sang folk songs from Zagorye, to his tambourine accompaniment. Every day he and Anna went into the vineyard, pulled out old rotten posts, put in new ones, and nailed the wires to them. If a wire broke, they mended it, using a long eight-wire twist to connect it. Her father ordered Anna to tighten the fence between the garden and the vineyard so that the sheep wouldn’t eat the grapes. But for that, Tanya attacked the garden all the more zealously.
Tanya had laid the backyard and garden to waste. Big and beautiful, she pranced around the yard like a racehorse, looking in challenge at the stray cats and dogs, who kept out of her way.
In early fall, the grape harvest took place. For a week Anna missed school to tear grape bundles off bumpy vines, toss them in a bucket, and carry them to the barrel at the top of the hill. Afterward, she, Mato, Noah, and Estera danced barefoot in the barrels, sinking through the grapes, while the grape juice flowed through holes into smaller barrels, where it would mature—or degenerate—into wine. Their feet stayed purple for days.
They boiled grape skins and distilled the steam into a pale brandy, almost as strong as pharmacy alcohol, certainly as poisonous.
After the harvest, Noah went into a tavern down the hill, and when it closed down, he brought home a dozen drunks, including the bartender. They slammed the doors and hollered and swore, so that they woke up the family. Through a slightly opened door, Estera and her children lined up their heads, one above another, and stared at the red-faced men. Several of them arm-wrestled; others sang into each other’s ears with spent voices.
The morning afterward, Estera and Anna went to pray in the Catholic church in the next village—the peculiarity of Vinograd Village was that it had no church of its own. As if to compensate, the villagers had scattered a bunch of porcelain blue-and-maroon Mothers of God and thorny bloodied Jesuses, sometimes amidst a vineyard, so that the incomplete Holy Family looked like scarecrows, but far more durable than the raggedy ones in rotten colorless dark hats with Stalinesque mustaches made of horsehair.
During the sermon, Anna detested the smell of ordinary, non-vine-growing peasants: a mixture of garlic, hay, sweat, and manure. She stared around at their venous, swollen, blistery hands, which, as if ashamed of themselves, often clasped each other. The thumbs with the blue nails of a peasant across the row from her kept circling each other. She could not follow the priest’s slow reading, though now and then she grew excited when the words sheep and lamb floated and echoed in the dank space above twisted candles.
My sheep wandered through all the mountains, and upon every high hill…my flock became a prey, and my flock became meat to every beast of the field, because there was no shepherd, neither did my shepherd search my flock but the shepherds fed themselves, and fed not my flock….I will require my flock at their hand, and cause them to cease from feeding the flock; neither shall the shepherds feed themselves anymore; for I will deliver my flock from their mouths, that they may not be meat for them.
Anna was disappointed since the words did not honestly mean what they said directly, but something beyond the sheep, about Israelites and Christians. She thought this was abusive to sheep, to use them as pictures for people’s own purposes. But she liked the verses that the priest read afterward. The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters….Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Anna sneaked out of the church. She climbed the large unsteady stones of a ruined Turkish fort, stared at glowing amber forests, and listened to the shushing and murmuring of falling beech leaves, each leaf floating like a bloodshot eye without a head to illumine. The fleeting shadows of the falling eyes gave Anna shivers because she had the impression that flocks of mice were running at her and up her legs. The flat eyes drifted into a swerving green river, and the river turned red.
On the way home, she passed her father’s favorite tavern, with the cries of drinkers rising above the clanking of silver and china. She smelled grilled meat, and inhaled deeply because the smell was pleasant. She read the sign: “Today’s Special: Lamb.”
At home she called for Tanya. No answer. She looked for Tanya everywhere. She walked back to the tavern and peeped in. The red-faced bartender, with his greasy brown beard, laughed.
“What do you want, girl? Would you like some diced lamb?”
“Where did you get it?” Anna asked, her throat parched.
“Where? Your dad sold it to me; I gave him a good price, a very good price! We neighbors have to support each other…”
“You are a shitty pig!” she shouted, and the tavern owner ran after her. She grabbed a sharp stone from a heap of gravel on the side of the dirt road and aimed at the bartender’s forehead. The blue stone hit its target. His face was bathed in blood, and like the blinded Cyclops after Odysseus, the bartender bellowed threats.
At home, Anna called her father names that he clearly could not believe she knew, though she had learned them from him. He grabbed her and knocked her head against the blue-washed wall. Anna kicked him in the stomach. He tied her to the chair and said:
“How do you think I feed you, brat? That sheep costs me a barrel of wine, with all the grapes you ripped off for her. And how do you think we’re gonna feed ourselves? Don’t you know that our grape harvest was lousy? I won’t be able to pay taxes, and the government will steal our vineyard, and we’ll starve.”
“You’re a murderer! A beast, pig…”
Father poured himself wine in an aluminum cup and drank it, tears in his eyes. He got up and pulled out a sheep’s leg from the bucket, still bloody, and said, “Dear daughter, I’m gonna cook it. This is a delicacy, grape-fed lamb!”
Anna tried to spit in his direction, but her burning mouth could produce no saliva, and when he offered her a slice of lamb, she closed her eyes and screamed.
Noah sat with her a whole day. He chewed lamb stew with onions, smacked his lips, drank wine. And he talked. “During the war, I had to boil my leather shoes and eat them. I chopped them up in a thousand pieces. In the famine after the war, we got only Red Cross rice, so I became as thin as a rake and got TB. And look at you, how lucky and thankless you are, brat!” He sighed and then sobbed. “So eat, my daughter, eat, while you can.”
Anna listened but still would not eat the lamb, not even on the second day. Her father slept by her side, and prevented her mother and Mato from bringing her plums and walnuts. He let Anna drink, but only wine. On the third day, when Noah fell asleep and snored in deep unrhythmic bursts, Mato fed her bread and milk, but Anna was so dizzy she could not keep her head up. In the evening her father woke up and tickled her nose with salted slices of grilled lamb. “Don’t you want it real bad? I bet you do. Have a bite!” And with his thick fingers he pried her mouth open and pushed in a slice of lamb. She slammed her jaw shut as hard as she could, biting his thumb and forefinger. She spat out the flesh and blood—more blood had come from her gums than from his fingers.
Noah was so taken by surprise that he did not react. Estera came in and shouted, “Enough is enough! Sure, we could not have let her carry on with her sheep anymore, but you better stop!”
“She bit my finger to the bone!” Noah howled. “Quick, alcohol!” He dipped his fingers in a cup of brandy, and Estera bandaged them.
“I’ll teach you a lesson yet, crap shooter!” he said to Anna.
“Ifyou have
n’t yet, I don’t think you ever will,” her mother said. “You’ve taught her nothing but to hate.” Her mother walked out, turning her rosary beads and muttering.
That evening Anna grew so weak and drunk that she could not resist her father pushing lamb into her mouth. Almost asleep, she chewed the meat and gulped it with wine, and it was amazingly tasty; the amazement alerted her senses, and when she realized what was going on, she spat and vomited. She wept in misery, for she had eaten of her friend.
It was nighttime, and as usual in the fall, a power shortage resulted in a blackout. A lantern on a chair cast a light, so that Anna saw a light from below pass through her father’s upper lip and nostrils, both made orange by the light that stayed in them. The shadow of his nose cast a pointed triangle across his bare forehead. He said nothing. He stood up, untied her, and marched out of the room.
Anna did not go to bed because she was afraid that when he got back he would beat her. She trembled for three hours, and as the church rang a brassy midnight, she grew calm. She could hear her father singing on his way home, hoarsely, lyrics of some forbidden regional folk song. Anna grabbed the old rusty rifle from behind the pigsty, and when he opened the yard gate, she struck him on the back of his head with the heavy handle. He fell on the brick-laid path.
Anna feared what he might do if he got up, so she hit him again, as hard as she could. Anna kept hitting and hearing crackling of bones, but she did not dare to stop.
LIES
MY BROTHER, only eighteen months older than I but old enough to have a crucial advantage, told me had an army of miniature soldiers. A whole aviation squadron was at his disposal. His soldiers were hidden deep in the Doljani Hills, which could be seen from the roof of our house. His airplanes could fly vertically, change into helicopters, change size, become invisible, fly 10,000 miles per hour. The bombs his planes carried did not exceed the size of BB gun bullets, but they were nuclear. A single one could destroy the whole school and the church. Any time, he warned, he could put an end to our sufferings in school, his present one and mine to come. This piece of news was very encouraging to me.
The squadron that he had in the mountains was not his only one. He had another one, a much bigger one, in Zagreb. This army had even more miraculous properties, the details of which I forgot in my torpor of amazement. He could tell me anything at all without any suspicion on my part. He could have told me, and probably did, that he could torpedo Hell from his base in Zagreb, the biggest city in the world, at least the biggest real city. We had heard of New York, but New York was on the level of Heaven and Hell. I suspected that Heaven, Hell, and New York did not exist, for even my grandmother, who lived in the States, never mentioned New York. Unfortunately, I think my brother had not told me that he could torpedo Jesus and Heaven.
It was necessary to see Zagreb and his military base. He refused to show me the closer and smaller base first, because he said he wished me to behold his army in full splendor. We slapped our junkyard tires with sticks and set out westward to Zagreb. The trip would be only about 140 km. If we kept a steady pace, we would be there in no time at all, for our tires could be very quick on the open road.
We rushed without speaking. It was already late in the afternoon and we had to reach Zagreb before dark. We advanced a block from home. Suddenly a terrible wind, such as I had never felt before, began blazing across the street, raising a thick screen of dust. The wind stopped me on the spot, and although I tried to leap through it, I could not move. I opened my mouth very wide as I was out of breath, but could not get any new breath because I could not exhale. My lungs were full. Gasping for air and not getting it, helpless, I enjoyed a cool sensation in my trachea and lungs.
We turned homeward. The wind carried us over the street. As soon as we crossed the doorway of our yard, big beads of white hail from the black sky covered the whole ground. The beads rebounded as if made of rubber.
I felt safe in the shelter of the doorway.
COUNTER-LIES
I THOUGHT there was something amiss in my brother’s stories. It was strange to see the general of the most formidable air force in the world beaten by our mother. Besides, he hated school so much that by now he should have destroyed it with his air force, and yet he kept going every day.
I prepared to avenge myself, but I could not think up incredible stories that would be believable. However, my lungs came to my aid. After having been ill the whole winter, I was to go to the Slovenian Alps to recover.
My father and I set out to Slovenia by train. It was still dark and cold in the morning. Then a big orange sun rose in the east. Mist covered small valleys and glens, and the grass dew twinkled sunshine at us. The train was slow as it climbed over the hills outside of our town. My father told me I could see big mountains compared to which our hills were like anthills.
In Zirovnica, a small village in the Alps, we went into a church. After the service, my father introduced me to the brethren as his sick son and people patted me on the head. I saw several variegated pieces of paper slide from my father’s hands into the hands of a man. A couple of minutes later he departed, leaving me behind. The man was my host, the father of a big family in which there were no children.
Bodgan, a young man of my host family, took me into the mountains. We visited a flock of sheep. He tossed salt over the grass and the sheep ate the grass in sped-up motions. We continued to climb. The trails were very narrow and I feared I would fall down a precipice. I had no courage to go on. Bogdan laughed and carried me over the narrow stretch. When we got high up into an open space, we could see incredibly far: mountains of blue-grey rocks and snow atop; yellow, green, and brown fields; several rivers merging into one. Houses in villages looked like flocks of sheep grazing calmly in the valleys; smoke arose from several tall chimneys: the steel factory of Jesenice. A long train like an earthworm was sliding into a tunnel.
“Look! The train is making a hole in the mountain!”
“No! It’s a tunnel, it goes all the way through the mountain into Austria. See, there are people on the train, and there is no telling where they are going.”
In lust for sight, my mouth was open and my saliva trickled down my chin. I lost all my fear and inched too near the edge of round, smooth rock. I began to slide over it. Quickly I lost curiosity about the world. Fear flamed up into panic as I saw the huge emptiness below me and the miniature world below. Bogdan leapt forward and grabbed me by my long flying hair.
One day later, Bogdan and I went into the mountains again. From a high vantage point, Bogdan showed me rocks in the valleys.
“These are safes where people keep money. Each family has its own rock. It is difficult to know which ones are safes and which only rocks.”
“Are the rocks hollow?”
“The safe-rocks are.”
“Then let’s roll rocks from up here, and all the hollow ones will crack into pieces! Then we can gather the money and go to Austria through the tunnel!” I suggested enthusiastically.
Bogdan laughed loudly. I feared that he had lied to me; I escaped one liar only to run into another. However, I still believed there was money in the rocks. With the money I could buy ice cream every day, a real bicycle, and a bazooka to shoot down a passenger airplane so it would fall into our garden and I could see the engines, and moreover, see what strangers look like. However, I could not roll any rocks down the slopes, and Bogdan kept laughing.
In the village, I saw horses and avoided them. An old man took me into the woods and wanted to put me on horseback. I screamed with terror. Puzzled, he let me go and we returned to the village.
Bogdan showed me skiing grounds and cable cars.
“They are run by electricity. Electricity is an invisible river under high pressure. The river flows through wires and pushes the cars.”
“I don’t believe you. You are a liar just like my brother.”
Several days before my father was due to take me home from my convalescent vacation, I discovered the joys of playing
with water pipes. In my town we had no tap water. I let the water flow under maximum pressure and spurted it over my palm, over horses and peasants who passed by. I could not direct all the water onto them, and a good proportion of it spurted over my face and chest. It was all right as long as I could get some of it onto the passersby. After a while I was soaked in cold water. I thought I should not let myself be seen by my hosts while wet because I would disappoint them.
I hid in the fields behind a stack of hay. It was a cold, windy day. My hosts continued shouting my name for hours all around the fields.
Upon my father’s arrival, I tried to present an image of health, because I thought that it was in the interest of general happiness that I should be healthy. But by suppressing my cough while my father climbed up the steps and entered through the door, I simply collected the ammunition for a vehement cough to greet him.
In the train on the way back, I was thinking about clouds that I had seen only about fifty feet above my head near the Three Headed Mountain. I had asked Bogdan whether I could catch a piece of the cloud and he replied I could not because the cloud was only steam.
When I faced my brother Ivo upon returning, it was time for revenge. I began to tell him stories about the miraculous land. Of course, they were all true stories.
“I caught a piece of cloud,” I announced.
“How did you do it?” he asked me skeptically.
“It was simple. I climbed toward the top of the Three Headed Mountain—just a hundred meters within reach of the top, near a glacier. We were passing through the clouds like angels. I took out a pocketknife and cut a piece of the cloud off. It did not bleed. You know, you can cut a cloud into many pieces and each of them will be a new cloud. It was a very funny cloudlet. It told me all sorts of stories about the mountains it had seen. It spoke Austrian.”
Honey in the Carcase Page 5