Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (15 page)

As his father's fate proved (or did not), to see death's arrival is hardly to forestall it; for death's minions are myriad; and just because we spy an army of Turks approaching over the plains does not guarantee a victory, as again is shown by the doom of Prince Lazar. Besides, death may come when we are sleeping.

Jovo of course had foreseen nothing, lacking the pouch while his father lived. There had been no dream of bloody banners.

Since he did of course believe in heaven, Christ and angels, one might wonder whether his mistake (if he made any) consisted in refraining from turning to those beneficent helpers. His eventual point of view, a matter of convenience as well as comfort to him, was that the dark-glass thing might be an angel, howbeit of an ominous cast; in any event, it was this gift which God had set before him to make the occupation of his life, and he must face it first, just as a fisherman must get his nets in trim before he rows out anywhere. Perhaps he should have laid the matter in the Church's lap. But he declined to offer himself up any longer to other men's misunderstanding; moreover, he cherished what his father had bequeathed to him, not only because it brought him riches and power, but also quite simply because it came from his father.

Toward him the father had been strangely lenient, permitting him to read and study every now and then with the priest, so long as neither goats nor sheep got lost. Whenever he took his mother's honey into town, he returned with coins. In those days he sensed that something would be expected of him, but how can a child know himself? Had he expressed a more martial character, his father might have been prouder; certainly his brothers and uncles would have made more of him; to please them he killed his first Turk, an old woodcutter, before he was ten, and showed both quickness and courage on mountain raids, but his heart lay in his
numbers and letters, so that in time his father gazed across the fire at him with a sad bewildered pride. As for the son, to his father he had been lovingly loyal always, even through his dread.

Now that he was the family head, they feasted him from silver cups and drank his health, all the time watching him, to see what he would do. His mother, who had patiently hated the race ever since the Turks whipped her brother to death on the market square in Mostar, laid out the corpse in silence, folding its arms across its shattered breast. They toasted Saint Lazar, recourse of the persecuted and defeated.

The priest arrived. They prayed to Saint Sava. Fumigating the coffin with sulphur, tow-wisps and good black powder, they lowered the dead father into it. Afterward they threw in coins. Jovo and Maksim nailed down the lid. The sisters were screaming. The brothers passed the coffin out the window and laid it in the horse-cart. Jovo led the family to the open grave. And finally, as I have said, they toasted
the better hour.
Drinking grimly, the uncles waited for something else to be uttered, and presently Maksim said it: Brandy is good in its way, but I'd rather drink Turkish blood!

That anxiety which would weary him like a ceaseless ringing in one's ears, that was not yet perceptible. What was he to do? His sisters lowered their eyes. As for his mother, uncles, brothers, all of them kept watching him as would the double ranks of saints on the golden polyptych in the Franciscan church at Pula. Perceiving his pallor, they prepared to misconstrue him, as they had done before. He was haunted, but no longer afraid. He saw that squid-face howsoever he turned, except to the west. Especially hateful were its tonguelike radula and its beak like beetle's pincers, but when it showed him its huge round eye, that was nearly insufferable. Already he was growing accustomed to it; he would employ the thing to carry out his will.— But what did he will? First if not last, to do something great.— What that deed ought to be he would discover. Being practical, as a Serb had to be in that tyrannized land, he comprehended that he must first build up wealth, then perpetuate his family and his secret. This day he would set out.

On the riverbank he took a handful of Serbian earth and tied it up in a cloth. His youngest brother Lazar said: So, he's getting out with whatever it is that Father carried. What a treacherous bastard!— Jovo forbore to
strike him; the squid thing did not show him any need. They all perceived his determination to achieve some triumph, the more splendid since it remained undefined. Of course they could not see that staying on here would be a living death.

Turning the family over to Maksim, to whom he gave all of their father's goods and most of his ready money, he signed on to the first ship he saw, and the sea foamed into grey bubbles like the delicately woven chain-links in Hungarian armor. The dark-glass offered him a comforting opacity. He was entering a more fruitful world and therefore, as ought to have been the case, an easier one. When he first rode the rainbow sea at the base of Ragusa's walls at sunset, he smiled and thought: This was inevitable.— And he prospered, since he could see and avoid so many ills. Hardhanded in trade, and quick, as it proved, in the forecastle of any ship, confident against villains and perilous swells, familiar since childhood with both discomfort and cruelty, and (best of all) cognizant of prices and qualities, he spied out treasures of all sorts. The geometry of halyard, crosstree and shroud came so easy to his mind that the officers never beat him. Some of his shipmates were murderers, many treacherous and most drunk, but the squid-face peered in through his heart's scuttle to warn him of their designs; even in his sleep the cold wet rasp of a tentacle across his neck woke him in good time, so that already his canniness (by which I mean uncanniness) began to be talked of. To be sure, neither he nor they disobeyed the creed of most human beings who act their role instead of merely mouthing it—that since life and death are both unjust, it cannot be evil to fight against them however one can. Against, for instance, the atrocities of the Turkish occupation one is justified in murdering any lone and harmless Turk, if it can be done in secret; and justification increases in direct proportion to profitability: rob the dead, by all means!—But others were enchained by speculations, while Cirtovic was bound to knowledge. Now that death had grown visible to him, he thought to strip life to equivalent nakedness. While the others sewed, gambled, drank and carved, he read an old grimoire which promised everything, ending:
And this last point hath been proved, and is very true.
One night an Englishman stepped over the sleeping cabin boy and tried to assassinate Cirtovic with a sailmaker's needle, but the latter, galvanized by his angel's electric-blue eye, shot him from
underneath the blanket. The others held inquest, but there was the dead Englishman where he ought not to have been, with the needle still in his hand, and so they shrugged and threw him to the fishes. Withdrawing himself then, as though he meant to ease his bowels, Cirtovic peeped inside his lucky pouch, and found the thing hanging in darkness there, as if at ease, its arms dangling down and the suckers on them shining like strings of onions, which proved that nobody meant to avenge the Englishman, at least just now; so he returned to his hammock and slept the night through. Presently there came that evening when they were moored at Hvar, and Cirtovic scented an ambush by
uskoks,
in time sufficient to kill four of them. Just as certain squids are so transparent that one sees their brains and nerves beneath the skin, so the evil motives of others, if they impinged on him, were ever visible to Jovo Cirtovic. Mischances, even potential ones, announced their coming with equal clarity, as in that time off Pula when his demon rode the leech of the foresail, thanks to which he saw that the cringle had come loose, which could have hindered their getaway in a side-wind. The careless sailor got flogged; the second mate thanked Cirtovic. And just as Catholics enjoy touch-relics, so do sailors love the lucky man, for we all crave magic against danger. Ragusans, Spaniards, Triestini and renegade Turks, they all respected him, and even confided their money to him on certain doubtful ventures; whenever he agreed to take it, it came back to them with interest—unless, of course, they were fated to feed devil-fishes. To their horrors and fears he listened as would a rich man to the poor. Regarding his own life he appeared to feel nothing but pleasure, wonder and pride; for what can be as beautiful as the glory of God and the bread which people have earned? His aspirations continued to enlarge. To himself he seemed to be voyaging into an ever safer place. Perhaps if an enemy were to lock him within a prison tower he might not be able to get out again, but why couldn't he could avoid getting dragged inside it in the first place? He even dreamed that the estrangement between himself and his brothers could be remedied. Hence long before Cirtovic became Cirtovich, he had begun to wonder why his father died at all. And his very longing to solve this question might have made him so abnormally acquisitive of knowledge—although he had ever been so, since his childhood; so perhaps his learning-greed was simply the desire to understand
his father, whom he had never known as well as he would have wished. Why had the father withheld himself from the understanding of his sons?— Not from lack of love—if anything, he cared most essentially for his own blood kin—but, as might have been, from shyness of a sort, or the desire not to burden them with something, or (as Jovo believed) fidelity to a magic secret.

He remained certain that the charge which his father had laid upon him came out of love and faith, predicated in a
seeing
of his son. He had been expected to accomplish something great with the means now delivered to him. The fact that his father had done, for all he could tell, nothing great, and, moreover, had left him no explanation, much less instruction in the use of the dark-glass, unnerved him at times—for what if he should misuse it? But no, his father must have trusted him. It was left to him, without restriction, to employ the legacy as he willed. He knew that his father had been a great man—all the more so, it now seemed, that his doings must remain unknown.

He never supposed that a single deathless man could in and of himself overcome the Sultan's empire, but the more he learned of magic, the better he believed in that art, and presently his heart's wish became no less than to sail to the Sphere of Fixed Stars, in order to beseech Prince Lazar to return to earth, and free his suffering people. How could this be done? He held a conviction that his unique mental makeup, combined with the means which his father had bequeathed him, could alter most any story, given life and coin enough.

He settled in Trieste as he had left Beograd—which is to say, at the will of his cephalopodean guide. He took inspiration from the suddenness with which the Golfo's breezy weather can give way to sweltering eternities, until a purple jellyfish of cloud comes swimming over Trieste; and even though the sky over Muggia remains as blue as the lapis lazuli in the church fresco, winds are already hissing through rigging and the masts are clattering, bells ringing by themselves, and the storm comes. An hour later all is hot and breathless, and again the merchants and their shipwrights promenade up the Ponterosso, discussing the manufacture of new moneycraft. From change to change, Jovo Cirtovich proved ready. As he liked to say,
without wind, cobwebs would fill the sky.
He lived within the off-green loveliness of olive leaves. Once he had been led to
sell Friulian wines, trade-lines radiated out from his hands, and his career bore comparison to those golden stars in the blue heaven of an illuminated manuscript. And he married as you know. Some might say that his categorical mistake was to refrain from friendships with the Triestini; but Serbs have studied at a stern school; they trust in little but death; to him, the inhabitants of this port resembled an assembly of yellow-eyed octopi inside their little mounds. What would they have done to him, had they learned of his project? Remembering a certain morning when a Turkish cannonball nearly killed him, and the black-clad old women in the burning ruins had stared him over as if by missing death he had become strange or even monstrous, he declined to be gawked at, much less judged. Another fishwife offered him an old papyrus which some ignoramus had made into cartonnage for mummy-wrappings, and he bought it with a smile. Let her despise him! He read it easily, comprehending it down to the last grapheme. It was nothing but some dead merchant's inventory of olive oil, salt and sheep. From a ragpicker he obtained a letter to a praetorian Prefect, concerning the situation of the now extinct Roman city of Cyrrhus, and incidentally detailing interesting particulars of the transit of Saturn. Back to Philadelphia he sailed to vend wine, Marija raising up both hands to send her blessing after him, gauntly feminine, shadow-eyed like the Virgin whose name she carried. As usual, he cried out: Hold onto the wind with your teeth!— The sailors cheered. And before she expected him he was already shortening sail, approaching the many-windowed rectangular edifices of the Borgo Teresiano, the Teatro Romano gaping in the sunlight like a dead giant's eyesocket, Massimo and Florio embracing him tightly there before the warehouse, while Petar rode up with the carriage. Building his fleet, he sent out his ships parallel to the Longitude of Death, with facile flags dancing at their halyards. But how his father had felt upon first looking into the dark-glass, Jovo Cirtovich would have liked to know. For just that reason, perhaps he should have prayed more often to the Christ Procurator; but the many-armed angel around his neck merely gazed at him as would any animal, even a predatory or tame creature who sought something from him. The awareness in an animal's eyes is alien beyond knowledge, whereas the gaze from within the dark-glass haunted him because he nearly
comprehended it. All the same, he never feared it. Now that he was established, he could begin to achieve his wishes; and just as his multiplying capital gave birth to the many darkening rectangles of new sails against the evening sky, so his aspirations fanned out, his projects ravelling themselves practically of their own accord.