Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (20 page)

Avoiding Italy because they had nothing to sell, and because there were more customs vessels on that side, they kept in sight of the limestone windings of the Adriatic coast, which were already bright with vineyards, grey with olive trees and green with palms; it was almost as if Cirtovich intended to trade there as usual, but they passed Spaleto, Ragusa, Zadar and Rijeka, sailing close-hauled to the wind. The sky was yellow. There was a tiny islet in the channel between Maun and Pag off which a certain chest had been sunk; their captain had once promised that its contents belonged to all of them, and now they demanded it.— Straight on, he told the helmsman, and now they were already level with Škrda. Embittered, they whispered for the first time of murdering him, but even now feared his luck, being uncertain whether it could not flare back after this waning. And the weather was so strange; the
bora
failed to blow. Two swabbies muttered when he set them to oiling the strakes, and he nearly punished them, but no blood for violence remained in him, and he could not have said why because he no longer understood himself, if indeed he ever had. They could have had their chest, for all he cared; merely for his own safety had he denied it to them, since they had asked so insolently, with their eyes like candles. They all disgusted him;
when had they ever dreamed anything worthwhile? Once he had studied such men, and quickly mastered the study; perhaps if he had repeated the course he might have learned something new to distract himself, such as, how can men live rightly and perhaps even happily without seeking but the merest perpetuation of life? Or would this study merely have ruined him further? Curiously ashamed, as if blood marked the leech of their foresail, they sailed west by northwest, then northwest until they gained Pula to the starboard. And so they drew into the Golfo di Trieste, or, as he called it when he was young, the
Tržaški zaliv.
To him it all seemed dark and dirty, as if sky, sea and land alike had been smeared with lead. In his mouth dwelled a poisonous taste.

The
Lazar
came in on one of those calm days when the harbor was blue almost like Egyptian faience, and for a moment he imagined how lonely it used to be outside the walls of Trieste—a century ago, that was; now the walls were all muddled. It was near about Easter when they shortened sail. Seaweed fouled their ground tackle, and the canvas needed cutching. The mariners' families stood silhouetted on the Ponterosso, waiting for their men. Jovo Cirtovich longed for the old marble font he had installed in his garden, and for that quiet daughter of his, so meek and obedient toward her mother, so understanding of him. But when she'd peeped into his weary eyes, how would she feel? Better, perhaps, if he never came home! Doubtless Marija would be disappointed, since he'd failed to make them any richer—

Anchoring among the ranks of high-masted ships outside the Canal Grande, he set the crew to transferring the seal-hides and certain other items, I suspect of a contraband nature, to a Venetian vessel whose captain he knew, then posted a light guard, led his sailors ashore and paid them off; as you might imagine, they were more perplexed than satisfied. In every tavern spread the news that he had grown unlucky. It was good that Vasojevic had not married; no one dependent would be impoverished by his death. But where was Petar? Why were his sons and brothers all absent? Cirtovich feared that some evil had befallen his house. Or had they somehow learned of his doings, and so forsaken him? But Tanyotchka would never do that, nor even Marija, no matter that she regarded him with the sad eyes of a silver deer; it wasn't as if he'd abjured God! By now he shrank from everybody, believing that they recoiled from him. And so,
as if fearing that misfortune might sniff him out, he passed the night alone in his countinghouse, locked in, sleepless, lighting no lamp; but a sharp-eyed busybody who spied into the upstairs windows late that night (for instance, Luca Morelli) might have seen the palest flicker behind the shutter: Cirtovich was burning a candle to Saint George, and another to Prince Lazar, with his eyes lowered over the ducats which his hands were counting: yes, still enough for Marija, Tanya and the rest if they grew more careful. All the same, he'd now return to importing Ragusan salt into Serbia and gold and silver threads from Constantinople. This had brought good money when he was young. He pulled off his sheepskin stockings; he opened his shirt. He groped at his throat, then remembered that he had no dark-glass anymore. Once upon a time he had gone adventuring into the private courtyards of Mostar and Sarajevo where the rich Turks raised roses and lovely young women. Now it was eerie enough merely to come home. Why had he avoided the Orthodox church, which was almost directly across the canal? He'd always been a wise avoider of law-courts, but never before had he declined an opportunity to whisper to his saints. Some years ago Vasojevic had ceased attending services except for high masses, because the main candelabrum hung as straight in the darkness as one of those squids who dangle their arms in a tight vertical cluster as they troll. Cirtovich had never been thus affected. But at every loud sea-swish he flinched nowadays. He sat over his ledgers and invoices, discovering that Massimo had as usual left receipts lying all in a muddle like a rotten heap of cast-off sails, that the
Beograd
was in late from Bergen and that the Cincar traders had overcharged him for wool. Nothing had altered; he could have been silently awaiting delivery of some new folio. Unlocking his secret coffers, he found untouched his separate bags of money, each ready for expected and unexpected deposits. He remembered a spring afternoon thirteen years ago now when he had stood inside the cathedral with Marija and the children, the many votive candles burning on their iron tree, and he raised baby Tanyotchka in his arms; she stretched out her hand at the rose-window, which glowed with rain-light like a chambered nautilus. Just last spring, for Saint Lazar's Day, he had endowed the church with thirty-one thousand five hundred florins; even the Vojnoviches had been impressed.

And once again his thoughts turned and turned round the bygone
enigma of his father, which had sunk so far down into the darkness of years that he could scarce glimpse something twirling, like a weighted corpse going feetfirst under the sea; he felt desolate at its going, and yet horrified at the thought that he might see it again.

At dawn he came out, half expecting to see arrayed against him the crosses of black tar which certain Serbs paint upon their doors, to keep away vampires. But the piazza was free of these. On the horizon a twin-masted Austrian warship, evidently of Venetian make, was shortening sail. He saw in the doorway of the “Heaven's Key” an unknown Triestina, fifteen or sixteen years of age, with the small firm breasts of a Maenad on a Greek vase; she stood sweeping, and behind her, drunk, his old enemy Captain Robert. Not long prior to this latest voyage, Vasojevic had proposed to open up the fellow with a bronze-winged harpoon. But Jovo Cirtovich had always hoped to interpose smoothness between himself and brutality. And so he trod the blood-red iron of the Ponterosso, with ships groaning and ropes hissing on either side, again avoiding the church; he could have hired a coach; he scarcely knew why he continued on foot; it was as if something wicked might see him and follow him home if he rode too high. Of course everyone did know this bowed old man, no matter how he hid his head or hastened away.

He had to rest; he dozed a trifle. Flies descended on his reeking sheepskin coat. They buzzed in his ears. He got back to his feet.

Now he had reached the Teatro Romano. What did he fear then? Until now he had always expected to die intrepidly like his father. He said to himself: I hope to be ever more gentle with Tanya—yes, and with Marija, too, whom I now can remember when she was young, and sailed to me. On me be all guilt and blame.— Just within the old wall, a certain marble doorway is overhung with a cartouche which once presented a lion's gape and now is merely dark empty jaws like a letter C, while the gnats thicken around the lamp; here old Cirtovich crept up the marble stairs, bending his knees and stooping, his hands in the pockets of his jacket.

The day was as hot as vampire's blood. On the rim of the old Jesuit well a cat was sunning herself. She opened her yellow-green eyes. He stopped there a moment, smiling wearily, and just as he reached out to stroke the creature, the cobblestones parted beneath him, dirt and roots split apart, and so he found his grave. Just as ivy grows up over a castle wall,
occluding every last brick, so the rats covered him, blossoming, shading his flesh from the misery of sunlight.

And no one ever knew his fate, although his sons scoured Trieste for weeks, and dragged the canal, and even searched many ships. Even Marija came out, walking in weary little steps, with that dagger at her belt. The closest they ever came to learning about him was when a certain brutal-looking sailor, stripped to the waist, with his trousers rolled up, blocked their way, laughed in their teeth and said: Cirtovich used to beat me.— To the end of her life, Tanya halfway disbelieved that her father could die. For two years, old Srdjana accompanied her each morning to the cathedral in order to pray for the vanished man, but they had to reduce her wages, and then she left their service, buckling round her hips a chain of fine brass because she was getting married at last. As for Petar, he grew demented, and drove the carriage round about by night, until old women made the sign of the cross whenever they saw him.

The Serbs praise the good fortune of the man who dies at Easter, since the angels are so merry just then that a canny soul can flit into heaven when they turn away from some gate or window in order to toast one another. Perhaps it was so for Jovo Cirtovich, who had slipped by so many customs men in his time—and, moreover, was not a bad man. Or maybe he remains imprisoned in his bones, deep under the Teatro Romano. (I myself cannot but wonder whether as he sped down into the earth he saw that dark-glass creature awaiting him, stretching out its swaying arms to him, opening its loathsome beak, with its eyes shining like cold fire. Probably it was not there.) In any case, his family held a funeral for him on the first anniversary of his disappearance, thus closing the book of his life, whose silver cover is engraved with figures. The Triestini came to gloat, and to see the inside of an Orthodox church. Suspicious of the great tapers and the canopy over the three icons of that vast chamber, they stared at the deep-worn crosses and double squares in the floor. But it was a good funeral just the same: Jovo Cirtovich had been laid low! Facing the iconostasis, the priest chanted beautifully as all the people crossed themselves.— With the exception of Cristoforo, who was tracking down a bad debt in the Orient, all the uncles appeared with their
families; Marija Cirtovich sat between Massimo and his wife. Tanya was with her nieces. Luca Morelli stood smiling outside. He had already organized a celebration at the “Heaven's Key.” Pavle Petrovic sat through the service and then paid his respects to Marija, shaking his head as he repeated: It was a visitation, dear lady, oh, yes!— Meanwhile Count Giovanni Vojnovich favored the mourners with his presence; they all got a good look at his gold medal. His epitaph for our Jovo (which fortunately Marija and Tanya did not hear):
An overcunning man overleaps his luck.
— Even Captain Robert was there. And in the highest house, Jesus gave Himself endlessly to the cross, surmounted by a circling swarm of dark triangles, his head hanging miserably, two robed figures beneath him in the immense space. It was a fine service, complete from Bishop to Archimandrite, for Jovo Cirtovich left a pretty legacy for his soul, as I can tell you. Some people said he should have been more generous to his family.

The dead man's brother Massimo carried on the business through that year of hopeless waiting, then liquidated it. It turned out that the finances were as profoundly indented as Dalmatia's coastline. Against Massimo's advice, Jovo Cirtovich's sons pooled their shares to revive the firm. They lacked their father's luck, but got on far better with the Triestini, no doubt because they were native-born. I read that they all married well. But their wives and daughters no longer wore red-topped caps embroidered with golden roses; that was out of style. Everyone was thrilled to stop studying geometry. Wrapping their daggers in the leaves of forgotten books so they wouldn't rattle, the young men sought to cut discreetly successful paths through life, as they supposed they had seen their father do.

Nicola never looked well put together. All the same, there was something beautiful in him, no matter how hopeless or even foolish. His father had struck at Turkish power in any way he could, feebly and treacherously. To Nicola now descended the longing to free the land of his birth. Unfortunately, he was not well versed in graphetics. When the rival captains, accompanied by local thieves and hangers-on, burgled the residence of the late Captain Vasojevic, to obtain whatever benefits the dead owe the living, Nicola heard about it at the last moment, and they could hardly keep him out, so he obtained a certain basket of papyri
from Oxyrhynchus, thinking to gain some magic formula for wealth or martial power. Several critical signs misled him, and he gave over seeking to comprehend these old writings. By the time he was forty he was as pathetic as old Cirtovich, striving to escape the harbor's curving pier-claws. Wondering whether it would be an act of cowardice or worse to relinquish his birthright, he clung to it for the sake of his father's name, although his sea-aptitude was leaving him. He sailed to Philadelphia with a cargo of Bohemian textiles, and thought to have done well, but the bales of Virginian tobacco he carried home turned inexplicably moldy. Tanya finally coaxed him into letting her help with the accounts, but by then it was too late; the clerks had swindled away half the capital.

Vuk wondered aloud why he turned such a poor profit at the family business. Tanya reminded him that their father hailed from a land where life was more difficult, and death colored the sky; this surely virilized any man who survived. Instead of hazarding his capital and losing it, Vuk exemplified the way that an octopus will gather coins and whatnot into its amphora of residence. Thinking to craft an alliance, he married Luca Morelli's younger sister Nella, who most definitely ruled the house. He was not unhappy counting his cash (much of which he hid from Nella) and eating potatoes and smoked meat. The Triestini liked him best of the dead man's sons. He never acted haughty or uncanny. I admit that for a time he still could name all twelve Roman cities of Bithynia, as if he held himself ready to please his father. Nella had no use for that, so he gave his children a more practical education. At her persuasion he made over the
Sava
to Captain Robert, whose helmsman soon wrecked it off the coast of Sicily. The
Beograd
needed repairs, to which Nicola stubbornly or spitefully refused to agree.— Never mind, darling, said Nella. Just find something else to sell.— To Tanya, who still listened to him, Vuk tipsily insisted that their father had
known
him, or at least seen something in him. Courtly rather than handsome, he turned out to be one of those men who look best in late middle age. Bit by bit he sold off all their father's Turkish scimitars, and his ivory-banded rifles studded with semiprecious stones. Then he started in on the books. Tanya tried to hide them, but he threatened to put her out of the house, and so in the end most of the library was sold away, although a few volumes did end up safe in the Archbishop's possession.