Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (10 page)

You swear that you were in the same car?

I swear, he listlessly replied; his trousers were still clotted with Ivan's blood.

All right. If you had been ahead in another car, leading Ivan to his death, I would have killed you.

Zrinko drove him to the bus station. When he thanked him, Zrinko said: I'm not doing it for you. I'm doing it for Ivan.

He never saw Zrinko again.

His wife signed the bill. He longed for her to say something loving, take him by the hand, “help” him; he knew quite well that there was no help in such matters. Just then he could hardly endure his grief and bitterness. Had he voiced it, perhaps she might have embraced him, as he clearly comprehended, but he lacked the power to take charge of himself. Anyway, if he waited, the feeling would depart. He blamed her for nothing. Wasn't he a grown man? They rose and crossed the Stari Most, which had been beautifully reconstructed, evidently with United Nations funds. How had the joke run? When that Serbian commander
destroyed this bridge, he consoled his staff that in due course, Serbs would remake it: wider, more beautiful and even older than before! It rose in an inverted V over the green river. Tenderly he helped his wife up the slanting stairs; her joints were weak. There came thunder, rain, the lovely green smell. To him the grass upreaching, the swallows and the rain on the roses all seemed new, but not the narrow evergreens rising up the steep arid mountain; that horizon was hideously familiar.

A Spanish woman with a seashell belt and a leather purse like a uterus touched the bright brass writing-pens made out of shell casings. The vendor offered her another and another. She gazed at each one with doe eyes.

On a streetwall it still said
USTAÅ E DUBROVNIK
,
*
and on another,
ULTRAS 1994
. He could not remember which brand of cigarettes Ivan had most frequently smoked. Middle-aged women in checkered hijabs were photographing one another on the Stari Most.

These white butterflies flickering everywhere like ashes in an updraft, he lacked all recollection of them although it had been this time of year, that same sweaty light, with those arid yet forested mountains across the river. There were more roadside fruit stands than before, new shopping centers and gas stations, but plenty of the same old smashed houses. On the trees the figs hung green over the river. It seemed peculiar how much he had forgotten, especially after Ivan's brother had hounded him so closely over what might as well have been every turn in the road, from the very starting-point where that United Nations pilot, smiling faintly, reached into his camouflage-flavored breast pocket, pulled out a manual the size of a combat Bible, and edified them with a diagram of some creepy wilderness of fortifications, remarking: That's what those Serbian checkpoints look like. I prefer to fly myself.— He
could
fly, while they were only journalists. After waiting two days, the three of them made the decision
together.— So you admit that you convinced my brother to take that road, said Ivan's brother, smiling with triumphant hate.

Supposing that his duty must lie in submission to the brother's cold hatred, ready to answer any questions if it would bring the man peace—in fact it appeared to inflame him—he complied, told and clarified. When the brother first began to interrogate him (he had awaited his coming for many days), he endured it calmly, even after it became apparent that rather than being, as he had foolishly imagined, “helpful,” he was simply
accused;
but when the brother demanded that he tell and retell each detail of Ivan's death, which on his own account he absolutely could not bear to think about, he shivered for an instant. No doubt this bore out the brother's already completed judgment.

As for the sister, whose questioning took place over the telephone, and was therefore indefinitely protracted, she instructed him to call her again tomorrow at one-o'-clock. Every time he called her, it cost him a hundred dollars. He was trying to do right by that family; that was what he would have wished for in their situation, to have his questions answered.

Explain to me again just why you took that turn, she said.

So he did. He had explained it to her four times.

And you were sitting in the back seat? Why weren't you up front with my brother?

Ted was the driver.

You say my brother was your interpreter. So why didn't you take the rest off his shoulders?

Ivan asked the Spanish battalion for directions. He asked again at the Croatian checkpoint. In each case, he was satisfied as far as I could tell—

But you didn't help him verify these directions?

As you know, I don't speak the language. He didn't ask for help. He just said, okay, we turn right just after the final checkpoint—

Then how do you account for what happened?

Ivan directed us to take a wrong turn.

A wrong turn.
And all this time you were sitting in the back seat, doing nothing.

That's right.

My brother was working for you. He trusted you. I don't know anything about the man who was driving, but I do find it significant that you had them doing all the work while you sat in the back seat.

Put it any way you care to.

And now you'll cash in. You'll have your dramatic story.

Sure. I'm cashing in every time I call you.

Just what do you mean? Tell me exactly what you mean by that remark.

I mean that I'm trying to answer your questions as patiently as I can. By the way, Ivan was working
with
me, not
for
me.

You hired him as your interpreter.

I got the magazine to agree to pay him a fee, yes.

You persuaded him to go.

I invited him to go. He liked it over here.

You lured him to his death.

You know what, Jeanette?

You killed my brother.
You're just as responsible as the men who shot him. I want you to admit it.

I don't see it that way.

So you're a coward as well as a—

Jeanette, go to hell.

He hung up the phone.

Sweet trees were growing up through roofless stone ruins. His wife smiled at him wearily.

Now that he had come back to where it happened, he could not stop remembering Ivan's sister, to whom he must have been a leader of unearthly power, since he could lure a man to his death for unstated reasons, conveying him, and Ted also, right into a sniper's nest, like a prostitute who inveigles drunks into some lonely ambush of robbers, then flits away unharmed. The sister had definitely been the most plainspoken of all his judges. But the rest unanimously implied what she had asserted: he was more than he supposed himself to be. In the market, the old man selling cherries kissed a tomato and gave it to his wife. A man was selling pens made of shell casings; was he familiar? A man sat playing the accordion. And the American or survivor or whatever he was
said to himself: If only I'd truly had such power! Well, I did, to my accusers at least. For once in my life I got to be a leader.

His ex-girlfriend Victoria, who had gone to school with him and Ivan, was the only one who ever wrote to say that she was sorry. She was dead now. Remembering this, he felt his love for her return, as a dull lost yearning.

His anger at Ivan's brother and sister fluttered like those white butterflies over the elderberries. He forgave Sam again, then hated him. If he ever happened upon Sam again it would be perfectly all right between them. As for Zrinko, he had become one more denizen of a bygone foreign land, so that his hateful and threatening behavior need not be taken personally.

He could not remember the first time he had seen Ivan or even what they had meant to each other when they were boys.

Perhaps if he had made up his mind to take some attitude, not about Ivan's family, or the consequences to himself, but about that double death itself, which belonged not to him but only to Ivan and the other man, he might have been better to himself and others, but precisely which thought or feeling would have accomplished this? Or what if he had simply set out to remember Ivan from time to time? Well, he would not. He disbelieved that he had meant that much to Ivan, or even that Ivan had respected him; Ivan had been too far above him. And so it could have been said that he rejected peace, which is scarcely more or less than sleep.

Without his glasses Ivan had looked much younger; this was surprising. But perhaps the leader had never seen him in life, in which case it would have only been the dead Ivan that he knew. Ivan was smiling in all his press cards. When he smiled, the corners of his mouth did not turn up. In this respect his signature was the same, for it hurried across the empty space, narrow and flat. He was not handsome but his face was kind. There had never been wariness in him. The official stamps on the press cards remained unfaded. In these photographs Ivan had stopped being a man and become a boy, gentle and careless, much younger than the one who had survived him.

In the morning he woke up happy that they were leaving the place. The day was still cool. His wife's knees hurt; he kissed her. At breakfast he
ordered a coffee, and the woman smiled at him. He smiled back. His wife returned to the room to organize her suitcase. She was looking very tired. It seemed to him that he could not bear to outlive her. The woman brought his coffee. She was very pretty, and had sweet friendly eyes. He tried to speak a little of her language as he once used to do, and she laughingly encouraged him. Traces of words rose up on his tongue.

The coffee was Turkish, of course: bittersweet, blacker than dirt, thicker than paste. He felt joyful to taste it. Hoping to take his wife back to the market if there were time, and perhaps to buy her some plums, he drank it quickly. Again the woman was smiling at him. He wondered whom she loved. Now she was in the kitchen; he heard her singing. A little sorry to go away, he left a fine tip and went out quietly, not wishing to trouble her with anything. At once he forgot her face. He was worrying about his wife, so at first he did not hear the rapid footsteps behind him on the street. How could those have anything to do with him? But the young woman, out of breath now, had come running after him, just to say goodbye.

I could have been unvanquished, if death had not been victorious.

Epitaph for Lord Šimon Keglevic of Bužin, died 17 December 1579

When Jovo Cirtovic sailed to Trieste in 1718, the place must have whispered to him, for he stayed on to become a merchant of Friulian wines, which his ships carried with magical success. Before the native-born citizenry could open both eyes, he owned a veritable fleet, supplying ports as far away as Philadelphia. Why the grapes of Friuli bleed so delicious a juice remains nearly as mysterious to my mind as Cirtovic's triumphal accession to the trade, although just yesterday, in that breezy hour when bronzes begin to surpass the darkness of pigeons, three of my fellow drinkers persuaded me that what accomplishes vinocultural excellence is
soil,
while two others led me to comprehend that the most ineffable qualities of the Bacchic Tetragrammaton derive from
atmosphere,
as has been proved down at Cinque Terra, where one famous salt-fogged vineyard, unremittingly guarded against the sea, produces a crop of great price. The waiter proposed to bring us a bottle of that stuff, but we disregarded him, for he was no Triestino; had we indulged his advice, he might even have poured something foreign down our throats. Meanwhile my helpful friends had educated me concerning the absolute excellence of Friulian vintages, which indeed occupy so commanding a position that should the Devil in his malice uproot every other grapevine on earth, nobody would be worse off, excepting only a few charlatans in Bordeaux or Tuscany. Here they paused to ascertain that my intellect had in truth kept pace with their instruction, for they were warmheartedly solicitous academicians, whose very breaths were purple. Yes, I said. Accordingly, all that remained was my indoctrination in the seventh syllogism of the thirty-first demonstration. This required their coming to blows, so I thanked them one and all, uplifting my glass, forsaking them
for a breeze, the sea, a stone wall, potted palms. Then I poured a libation over Cirtovic's cenotaph. He was a good father.

Now, what about soil versus atmosphere? I know I am getting out of my depth here, since wine disagrees with me (I'm drinking smoky Dubrovnik
loža
as I write this), but I do seek your tolerance of my efforts, being myself a merchant of sorts, retailing paragraphs by the sailmaker's yard. How shall I say why Cirtovic could sell every last barrel that creaked and sloshed on his shipbelly voyages? In the Caffè San Marco my friends are still arguing about it; their tongues have gotten winestained and their eyelids resemble those reflections of blinds which droop in the arched windows of lingerie shops. Not even they can explain wine. In the Piedmont, waiters dispraise Friulian reds; in Spaleto and Zara (which our hero preferred to call Split and Zadar), fat old nobles swear upon Mary Magdalene's reliquary that Friulian whites are absolutely no good. Cirtovic never committed himself to any theory about grapes; nor could I imagine how such abstrusities would have impressed the hardheaded merchants of Philadelphia. Was his secret simply
price,
which must have been low enough to satisfy frugality and high enough to massage pretension? Or did the Tories of that epoch feel a yearning for far-off salty places, which they indulged only by the glass? Up until then, many an innkeeper in those Colonies had been wont to regale his guests on fly-infused vinegar, reminding them that such had done well enough for Christ on the cross. Then came sea-barrels of wine from Friuli. For a quarter-hour the thirsty Yankees knew how to be happy. In vain the skinflints who sold foul stuff invoked cabals and vigilance committees against Cirtovic—wasn't he a tool of the Papists? Examining the barque
Kosovo
as a precaution against contraband, a certain customs officer, invited for a glass of wine in the captain's cabin, spied above the bed an icon of the Madre della Passione, or
Strastnja
: mostly silver, it was, but the metal drew sharp-edgedly away from around those two golden faces; Marija fitted the young mother's part, while Jesus could have been a watchful little Roman Emperor. Ah, that draught, how magically purple it was! Cirtovic began smiling; he seemed an excellent fellow. Rising, the customs man demanded to know whether his mariners obeyed the Pope.— Not us! laughed the captain. If you like, I'll attest an oath to that effect.— Then what are you?— Orthodox, sir. And I am quite sure our
Patriarch has no designs on these Colonies.— The cautious customs man held fast to the proverb
Take counsel in wine, but resolve afterwards in water;
after another glass of the Friulian vintage he forgot the second half. And so the cargo got landed; heaven came to earth. Safely alone, Cirtovic raised a glass to his true hero, Prince Lazar.

In Genoa, agents of the Vatican received delivery of another twelve hundred barrels of Cirtovic's wine. Now the Austrians and the Swedes got a taste for it; and I have even read that odd lots of it ended up at the Russian Court. Catherine the Great bathed in the stuff, after which her various lovers drank it. In Tartaria it corrupted a certain Khan who finally sold Cirtovic what was supposed never to leave the family: an Arabic manuscript on the subjugation of monsters. A Coptic priest in Ethiopia accepted a cask of red in exchange for an illuminated treatise on the geography of heaven. For Cirtovic was, you see, a collector.

In his younger days he was frequently to be seen upon the docks and quays, opening wooden chests, drawing men into taverns, pressing coins into callused hands, while the Triestini wondered what was happening. He was built like a porter; his beard was salt-stained; he smiled easily, and all his doings seemed to be accomplished slowly, in the light. Around his neck hung some medallion or amulet concealed in a leathern bag, so that he resembled all the more some credulous peasant. Stolid even in the
bora
wind, gentle of speech, almost humble, unremarkable, such was Jovo Cirtovic. Yet again and again he sewed up the market, with greater celerity than a young bride preparing her rich old husband's shroud. And it wasn't merely wines he dealt in; it got said that even rotten onions he could unload at a profit! He leased a warehouse right on the Canal Grande, just in time for the Canal Grande to become the harbor's liveliest tentacle. Against him it was also remembered that he had established himself in the city only one year before the Emperor elevated it to a free port. Laughing, Cirtovic offered wine at the communal celebration, but they noticed that he laughed only with his mouth. He could write Cyrillic and Glagolitic with equal facility—a nearly unmatched ability hereabouts. His fellow Serbs called him as wise as Saint Sava, not that they knew his mind. He was a man of his word, as everyone admitted, and generous on the rare occasions that he entertained. Moreover, he seemed adept with nearly any make of dromoscope. In taverns they computed
his worth at half a million florins (an exaggeration); but most definitely he now dominated the Hungarian trade, which had enriched many daring men; and he vended the best Bohemian glass; in consideration of how much Count Giovanni Vojnovich had paid for a carafe and two dozen wineglasses, his rivals saw fit to multiply and magnify the treasure of Jovo Cirtovic, with as much gusto as if it belonged to them. For six years the Ragusan consulate knew him well. Then he also began dealing with Saracens. You must remember that ever since the Sultan had reconquered Morea from the Venetians, the latter operated more assertively in Ragusan waters, hoping to make up the loss; and when they appealed for amelioration of their taxes and duties, so that they could at least make a living as their fathers had—surely the Sultan could understand; even Turks had fathers!—he equivocated, all the while impelling his Sarajevans to invest new ports at Bar, Ulcinij, Novi and Budva. It can be perilous to trade with people who hate one another. But the prudent skipper who alters his flag from port to port reduces his risk, oh, yes, and increases his profit. What bribes or taxes Cirtovic had to pay is unrecorded; the main thing is that he never returned home without his head. That man had luck! Neither earthquakes nor French troops harmed his stock; English pirates lost him in a fog; his helmsmen never went off course; his glassware declined to break before he sold it; even pestilence, which visited Trieste nearly as often as sin, robbed away only his most inessential employees. While others had to wait on a fair breeze, somehow Jovo Cirtovic always knew when to raise sail. It might be dead calm in the harbor; no matter. Cirtovic embarked his men. When the ship was laden, he'd cry out: Hold onto the wind with your teeth!— Just about then, the wind would come. Did God truly love him so much? After his third voyage to Africa, every sailor on the
Beograd,
right down to the cabin boy, received as a bonus one of those jewels that glow red like a sea monster's eye when it surfaces at dusk. The wise ones used them to get wives and sloops; some left Cirtovic's employ, with good feelings all around; the rest squandered them on whores, and once they had flooded the jewelry-shops of Trieste, a certain haughty ruby-dealer hanged himself, following which the Cincars swooped in to buy cheap and sell far away. After that, most ambitious young mariners hoped to sail for Jovo Cirtovic.

Around that time certain rich men of the city began to build houses up
on the hill, where they could guard their families from future epidemics; Cirtovic listened, saying nothing; soon two drunken notaries sang about a lot he had purchased in that district. Even the other Serbs were shocked, for they all lived quite satisfactorily in their warehouses. This Cirtovic, lacked he any regard for rules? They had already agreed that he was no son of his late father, who had made it his business to be a dread to Turks at night.— In order to raise up an appropriate edifice for himself, Jovo Cirtovic now commenced to trade still more widely. It was all he could do not to smile at the naïve customs men of Philadelphia, who worried that he might know his way around the Vatican when he had long been at home in uncannier realms—not least the Bosphorus itself, which in those days was unfailingly studded with sailing ships most of which flew the Sultan's colors, and some of which flew no flag at all. Wending his trade betwixt the curving deltas and the peninsulas crowned with mosques walled like forts and bristling with crescent-topped steeples, he cast before him the lure of a courtesy which pretended not to be wary, and treasured within his vest a safe-conduct bearing the Sultan's seal and illuminated in gold by seven calligraphers. Had the Philadelphians chanced upon
that,
they would have had no idea what it was.

He was married by then, but nobody could say who had been invited to his wedding, for it took place back in Serbia, during his seventh absence from Trieste; he had chosen his bride by correspondence with his brothers, making use of a certain Cincar wax trader who would later become his undeclared supercargo on an African voyage. According to dockside idlers, Count Vojnovich was offended by some aspect of these proceedings, perhaps because he wanted the lady for himself. She arrived well veiled, accompanied by a mound of crates and trunks; it was dusk when Cirtovic, having briefly confabulated with his factor, Captain Vasojevic, led her down the gangplank and into a closed carriage. She was slender and she walked with rapid little steps. Another veiled woman who must have been her maidservant came just behind. In good Serbian fashion, both wore daggers at their sides. I'd guess they were thinking on the pear trees, kinsfolk and rapid streams they would never see again. Perhaps they'd been seasick. Spitting, Petar whipped up the horses. The next morning Cirtovic gave six hundred florins to the church, which at that time had stood for barely a year; it still served both Greeks and Serbs.
Then he went straight to the dock and put his topmen to cutching some sails for the
Kosovo.
The Triestini, who certainly kept secrets of their own, watched all this with narrowed eyes, jutting out their beards as they asked one another what seraglio those females hailed from, and which other ports the
Lazar
might have touched on in the course of her wedding voyage; for the Adriatic coast, particularly on the Dalmatian side, is so addicted to doublings that a stranger can hardly tell whether the blue-green land-wave he spies below the sky's belly is an island or the continuation of the continent. In short, this part of the world is a smuggler's paradise. Whether or not our good Cirtovic ever accepted the discreeter commissions of contraband trade remains, in token of his success, unrecorded, but year after year his fleet plied up and down the labyrinthine coast, counting off stone beacons, hill-castles and their ruins, making quiet landfalls behind walls of birch-beech leaves. Returning quietly into the great blue bay with the whiteness of Trieste before him, he stood beside the steersman, gazing ahead in that guarded way he had, as if there were clouds between all others and himself—he who could see through all clouds. Yes, he who derives from the shadow passes more freely in and out of sunlight than he who was born in brightness. So the Triestini, tanned by the shimmer of their near-African sea, asserted, in order to excuse themselves for not venturing to Serbia, whose roads are paved with bleeding gravestones. For that matter, they did not even peer into the Orthodox church. In the market, housewives bowed their heads together to gossip about the new couple, in between the more interesting task of considering eggplants, while their husbands disputed as to whether or not Jovo Cirtovic possessed the evil eye. The way some described him, he wore the masklike face of a vampire squid, when in fact even the wariest customs guards saw nothing in him but well-heeled blandness, and his sailors loved him as they would have anyone who brought them home alive and paid good money. To be sure, he seemed care-ridden now; certain Triestini (who of course loved their native city so much as to frown upon even the neighboring port of Muggia) proposed that if he merely renounced Serbia entirely, forgetting those half-real denizens of an unlucky place, he'd grow as happy as the rest of us—although it could have been (as a certain unsuccessful butcher proposed) that debt had snared him. After all, how much capital must it take to
send out so many ships? The Triestini would have loved to know. Unfortunately, the interloper's brothers, recently arrived, proved almost equally closemouthed, although Cristoforo Cirtovic did say: Jovo's always been a mystery to us. He takes after our late father, may he sit in the presence of the saints.— Bribing the watchman, a certain Captain Morelli snooped through the logbook of the
Sava
and was astonished to discover some proof or demonstration relating to the section of a right-angled cone; what it meant was conjectural, since the writing was Glagolitic. Copying it out, he sprang it on Cristoforo Cirtovic, who said: What's this gibberish?— This Morelli next waylaid Stefano Cirtovic on the docks when that latter was unloading a cargo from Korea; Stefano said: Don't ask me my brother's business.