Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (83 page)

Well, goodbye, she said.

Bitterly he rose and turned his back on her. The sun was in his eyes.

In his last year, just before he declined to undergo surgery again, Luke had said: Sometimes I want something just because I used to want it. And if I think that through, then I don't have to want it anymore.

He had doubly cheated his witch lover, firstly by not using the green liquid to call her back, and secondly by saving a few drops of it, just in case. Now that he had no use for it, he poured it idly and thoughtlessly upon the earth-eater's grave. This is what he heard:

I can't forget Mama and Papa going away. Dear Jesus, help me forget! Papa had his new top hat on.

They prayed over me and he stood up, and he was leaning on his cane as if he'd turned much older; I was always his favorite. Every time he sobbed in his throat, I thought my heart was beating. What was that
hymn they sang? It used to be my favorite.
Carry on the Calvary,
but I disremember the rest. He was holding Cornelia's hand; she was learning how to walk again, after her polio. And Mama had to keep telling Susie not to tease her. I don't know why she didn't just . . . Mama looked just like a black waterfall in her veil. And she turned her face away from me. Then they went walking together down that gravel path; I was hoping that Papa would look back at me, but he never did. He was too sad. The path's gone and so are the trees.

Not a word came from Victoria's grave. That was how it usually was when someone abandoned a lover. She had withdrawn from him absolutely. As for him, he was leaving her alone to be dead forever. When he died he would not see her. His stomach hurt. At the gate of the cemetery he wished to fall to his knees like a seventeen-year-old boy, but thought better of it—for now he felt angry with
her
for leaving him alone with the burden of life. Then he went home and unlocked his desk beneath the setting moon. All was silent. He took her letters in hand. They were very much out of order. The last one said:
So that's the bad news, but I won't die. I'm getting aggressive chemotherapy. I'll lose my hair. I just cut it really short. I'm still blonde. Something will grow back. I'll live because I want to live. I'm doing everything I can to live.

I
asked the grave why I must die, and it did not answer.

I asked who or what death was, and it kept silent.

I asked where the dead I loved had gone, and its earthern lips did not open.

I begged for just one reply, to anything, and then its grassy lips began to smile. Moistening itself with its many-wormed tongue, it opened. Too late I realized the answer.

With a heart full of hope, I look forward to the time when Jehovah God will deliver us from this painful system of things and lead us into an earthly paradise.

The Watchtower
magazine, 2012

E
very man,
asserts a German psychotherapist,
passes through a critical age in which he bids farewell to youth and love.
This age begins at death. But I, arrested in my thanatosexual development, unceasingly relive my life, to which I do not care to bid farewell, not yet. I am a young ghost. Throughout this critical age (the deceased psychotherapist resumes), unsatisfied desires haunt us. What haunts me is my longing to breathe.

Because death is eternal, people suppose that it must partake of the infinite, in which case we could hope to enter ever wider if darker voids. In fact, each threshold is meaner than the last.

Throughout my life, but especially toward the end, when my heartbeats grew as slow as the drumbeats which announce a shrine dance, what I liked best of all was to sit behind the crowd of spectators, with my back against a tree as I inhaled the shade. If you have ever drunk in the humid sunshine of Kamakura in early spring, which is flavored, as is a fresh bun by its raisins, by pigtailed girls in white blouses and vermilion kimonos, you will understand me when I say that moments and instants can remain as distinct as the studs on a verdigrised bronze bell even in that languid ocean haze, when life and death resemble the square white sleeves of two shrine dancers slowly intersecting. Soon they would summon me to the dance, striking the gong which is shaped like a crocodile's mouth. Then, perhaps, I might no longer be able to enjoy the flutter of a young woman's eyelids, but I deluded myself that what I lost in colors and forms would be recompensed me in spacious ease, as if I would find myself lolling atop Kamakura's famous cliffs, which are grown with ferns and bamboo. Once upon a time before I died I sat beside a woman I loved, on a shady cliff-ledge marked with many stupas, gazing into the
lapis lazuli fog of the sea. She took my hand, and we gazed down upon the waving tops of bamboo, which were russet green, and beyond them our vision flew over the steep low house-tops somewhere between pastel and metallic in their various shades, then lost itself in the pale bay. We slept in the darkness of her hair, and woke among Kamakura's blue hydrangeas, drinking up that summer, each humid green cliff-hill of which was so thick with growth as to resemble a single tree. Sometimes when she rolled her sticky body off of mine in order to drink green tea or make water, I even opened my eyes, faithfully hoping that somewhere within death I might pass into that blue-ceilinged room where seaside Kamakura pants with so many sharp green tongues. I have always wondered whether trees are speaking to me; and whenever they shaded me from the humid heat of Kamakura, nodding over me and glistening in ever so many coruscating greens like the foam from fresh-made powdered tea, I wished to thank them. Well, they shade me now. The huge-toed
nakai
trees bore into my bones. Whether she still lives I cannot say. Wherever she is, we cannot comfort each other.

I progress but slowly in learning how to be breathless underground, my mouth choked with earth, worms and rain-seepage passing through me, my rotting coffin collapsing on me, breaking my ribcage, showering me with earth.

It might be better could I forget our days in Kamakura, which were almost poisonously somnolent. After drinking in her love, each morning I was as a gasping, wilting leaf; a bamboo sapling exhausted by its own weight. Kites called above the treetops. Stroking my face, she wept for pleasure, and when I looked into her soul then I saw the yellow-green veins in a glossy blue-green leaf whose pigment is speckling off, leaving the yellow behind. Whether or not she loved me, she certainly lived me, and I her, I who can live no more. With her I anticipated life and death in Kamakura, both of them in the style of a japonica's roots tied down with moss so sweetly. We roamed the jungled cliffs whose names we did not learn. We lay kissing and gasping in the wet sunlight, hopeful of the time when the sea should darken and the breeze should dance in the cool evening waves.

I look back (or up); I imagine; I change flesh with the living, who through the law of compensation immediately find themselves in my
shoes—which, to be sure, are of the finest patent leather, for
it is the custom for the barber to shave the deceased, to powder him, whiten his face and rouge his cheeks and lips, and dress him in a frock coat with patent leather shoes and black trousers, as if going to a ball, may God forbid—this shall not happen to Makso.
My shoes have swelled with moisture. They bulge with dirt and bone. Meanwhile I gallop around in clothes as yet unkissed by worms. Even when alive I showed little talent for living; now I show less, and when people see me they scream.

If only I could persuade the barber to rouge my cheeks! Then I might feel more handsome down here. I want to go to the ball; I'm ready to dance my rotten heart out. There's supposed to be a theater deeper down.

I'm trying to like it here. I know that I'm obliged to. Sometimes the vermin tunnelling through me give me pleasure of a sort, but it would be better if I could give up thinking. I can't breathe; therefore, I won't; I'm going to the ball; goodbye.

T
here is a wall of ill, whose gate opens unto an archway formed of giant spiders squatting silently in a long row; and at this passage's far end there is a courtyard in whose center stands a woman barefoot, with dark red lips, who holds a bunch of flowers in her upraised hand. Tongues of white and yellow lace fall like fingers or pagoda-gables down to her ankles. Because she is alive, and I still have life in me, I pray to kiss the mud between her toes.

Since these stories are less ethnographically faithful than any of my
Seven Dreams,
I have not scrupled to operate an Anglo-Saxon charm in Bohemia, or even to alter magical names and terms to suit me. (May I be forgiven by all the demons and angels.) Notwithstanding, the basic laws of magic (sympathy, contagion, etcetera) strike me as psychologically true, so I have tried to respect them.

My Bohemia is an imagined construct. My Trieste and Veracruz both contain some deliberate anachronisms both architectural and otherwise. For instance, I wished to set “Two Kings in Ziñogava” sometime in the colonial period, when slavery was still common in Veracruz. But at this time San Juan de Ulúa was more of a fortress than a prison island.
Tant pis.

EPIGRAPH

“It is the custom for the barber to shave the deceased . . .”
— Pamphlet from the
Despica Kuca,
Muzej Sarajeva, collected in 2011.

TO THE READER

“Wherever there is a rose . . .”
— Saadi [Sheikh Musli-Uddin Sa'di Shirazi],
The Rose Garden (Gulistan),
trans. Omar Ali-Shah (Reno, NV: Tractus, 1997; orig. Arabic [?] ed.
ca.
1260), p. 186 (VII.19).

“There is no means through which those who have been born can escape dying . . .”
— Paul Carus, comp. “from ancient records,”
The Gospel of Buddha 
(London: Studio Editions/Senate, 1995; orig. pub. 1915), p. 211 (slightly “retranslated” by WTV).

ESCAPE

As many of my readers know, the events related in “Escape” derive from a real incident (19 May 1993), whose protagonists were named Bosko Brkic and Admira Ismic. As in “Escape,” he was Serb and she was Muslim. However, I have altered many other details. For instance, Bosko's family had long since departed Sarajevo; the couple were living together unmarried. They decided to leave not for the reason I have given but because Bosko had been summoned to report to the police, who of course were incensed against Serbs. I decided to alter their identities and their situation in order to respect the privacy of their surviving relatives. The family members in my account are composites of Sarajevans whom I interviewed, was told about, etcetera. Their relation to Admira and Bosko is entirely imagined.

In this story and in “Listening to the Shells,” the various confused and contradictory later accounts by strangers of the couple and their deaths (including
“No, no; he was the Muslim and she was the Serbkina,”
and
“Actually, that's just an urban legend”
) are all verbatim as I heard them in 2007 and 2011. In 2011 a young Sarajevan
woman summed up “that story on Vrbanja Most” for me: “He was Orthodox and she was Muslim. Today they are as famous as Romeo and Juliet. Just among the older generation they are popular, not the kids.”

My one visit to Sarajevo during the siege (described in a chapter of my long essay
Rising Up and Rising Down
) took place in 1992, roughly half a year before the two young people were killed. Descriptions of the city in “Escape” and “Listening to the Shells” are based in part on my notes from that time and in part on my Sarajevo trip notes from 2007 and 2011.

Given names of characters in these three ex-Yugoslavian stories— People in this region would know which names are typically Serbian, Bosnian or Croatian. Some commonly occur in more than one group, such as Marija, which can be associated with both Serbian and Croatian women. I am informed (although I take it with a grain of salt) that a few names are still more specific; thus Indira might be a Bosnian girl from a mixed marriage or an atheist family.

Meaning of the name
“Vrbanja Most”
— My friend and translator Tatiana Jovanovic writes, first noting that there is no considerable amount of information on this edifice, since “it is not beautiful or historically interesting compared to some other bridges in Sarajevo”: “A name of the bridge ‘Vrbanja' probably meant a willow grove . . . but some of researchers of the central medieval settlement (in Bosnia and Herzegovina) think that the name refers to [the] undiscovered key of ‘Vrhbosne' (literally, the top of Bosnia). It was known also as ‘ĆiriÅ¡inska cuprija' or ‘ĆiriÅ¡ana'—i.e., ‘Chirishan Bridge' [which] was a name of a small company that produced glue (“ĆiriÅ¡a” . . . sounds [like] a Turkish word) . . . Probably, long time ago, in the ancient time, a wooden bridge was in this place, about which we can know because of discovery of some Roman bricks . . . in some fields in Kovacici, Velesici, etcetera. BaÅ¡eskija (an author, probably a historian) mentioned it [in] 1793 as a wooden bridge that was erected or renovated by a Jewish merchant. The previous one was destroyed by flood [in] 1791, and because it was needed to have a bridge in the same spot (especially for the Jewish people to go to their cemetery), the Jewish merchant paid for its renovation. It was restored again in [the] 19th c., but today, on the same spot, there is a new bridge made of reinforced concrete which was built after the Second World War.”

The Serbian officers with stockings over their faces on the Vrbanja Most (just before the beginning of the siege)— Mentioned in Kerim Lucarevic Doctor,
The Battle for Sarajevo: Sentenced to Victory,
trans. Saba Risaluddin and Hasan Roncevic (Sarajevo: TCU, 2000), p. 35.

LISTENING TO THE SHELLS

Occurrence in the Orthodox graveyard overlooking Bucá-Potok— Related in Lucarevic Doctor, pp. 29–31.

Comparison to my reporting from 1992 in
Rising Up and Rising Down
will show that my protagonist had it better than I did. Although my sojourn on the frontline was terrifyingly educational, if I had it all to do over again, perhaps I would rather spend my evenings at Vesna's, flirting with her and meeting her friends. Too bad there were no such people.

THE LEADER

Epigraph:
“There is no life on the earth without the dead in the earth.”
— Branko Mikasinovich, Dragan Milivojevic and Vasa D. Mihailovich,
Introduction to Yugoslav Literature: An Anthology of Fiction and Poetry
(New York: Twayne, 1973), p. 176 (Veljko Petrovic, “The Earth,” n.d.).

THE TREASURE OF JOVO CIRTOVICH

Epigraph:
“I could have been unvanquished . . .”
— Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ivan Supicic, chief ed.,
Croatia in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance
(vol. 2 of
Croatia and Europe
) (London and Zagreb: Philip Wilson Publishers and Å kolska Knjiga, 2008), p. 122 (part of grave inscription).

Most descriptions of Trieste in this cluster of stories are based on visits in 1981, 2010 and 2012. Some descriptions of the old city are indebted to illustrations in
Trieste Dall'Emporio al Futuro/vom Emporium in die Zukunft, Dalla Collezione di Stelio e Tity Davia alle foto del nuovo millenio per la rappresentazione della città in un viaggio ideale
(Trieste: La Mongolfiera Libri, 2009).

Names of Serbian settlers in Trieste, events relating to the two Churches of San Spiridione, descriptions of those churches, the Triestine doings of Casanova (which actually occurred in 1772–74), the Triestine Serbs under the Napoleonic occupations, etcetera— After text and illustrations in Giorgio Milossevich,
Trieste: The Church of/Die Kirche des San Spiridione
(Trieste: Bruno Fachin Editore, 1999). I have altered history rather freely. The real Jovo Cirtovich (or Curtovich) did not arrive in Trieste in 1718 but was born then, in Trebinje, Herzegovina. He first visited Trieste in 1737. According to Milossevich, p. 34, he “was certainly not a refined person. He was a practical man aiming at essential things and full of new ideas and initiatives.” Apparently he began his career as a porter. This historical Curtovich would have lived in his warehouse (built in 1777), not on the hill. The Orthodox Church, or, more accurately, the first Church of San Spiridione, was built for both Greeks and Serbs in 1753 (thirty-five years after my Cirtovich's arrival), visited by the Tsar in 1772, left in 1781, by the Greeks, who wished to worship in their own language, decked out with a pair of Muscovite bell towers in 1782, demolished in 1861 to forestall a potential cave-in, and rebuilt somewhat later in the form which I describe here. My invented Cirtovich married in 1754. Tanya, whom like all his children I have invented, would have been born in about 1764, so her father's last voyage took place when she was fifteen. The names of Cirtovich's brothers are all genuine. About his father's death I know nothing. In 1806 Napoleon took ten rich traders hostage until Trieste paid him a vast tax; among them were the historical Jovo Cirtovich and Matteo Lazovich. Those two were incarcerated again in the third French occupation (1809). Cirtovich died that year, aged ninety-one, having outlived his children even though he had married three times. His brother Massimo closed down the family business in 1810.

Some details of Serbian dress and Orthodox tradition are indebted to Prince Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich, with the collaboration of Princess Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich (Eleanor Calhoun),
The Servian People: Their Past Glory and Their Destiny,
2 vols., ill. (New York: Scribner's, 1910). A few incidents of life (for nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Montenegrins) under the Turkish occupation (for instance, a man's execution by flogging in the market square) are indebted to Milovan Djilas,
Land Without Justice,
anon. trans. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958).

Serbian attitudes toward the Ottomans, and toward the Battle of Kosovo— Here is a typical (pre-1991) assessment: “During the Turkish occupation, the Serbian Orthodox Church was the only force that kept alive the national spirit and the hope for a better future.”— Mikasinovich, Milivojevic and Mihailovich, p. 2. Djilas relates some horrible stories of opportunistic murders of their Muslim neighbors by Orthodox Montenegrins, while also relating a few Turkish atrocities. A dark view (and widely subscribed to nowadays) of Serbian historiography is summarized in Branimir Anzulovic,
Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide
(New York: New York University Press, 1999).

Several Serbo-Croatian (as the language was still called in 1980) folk proverbs are taken, more or less altered for style, from Vasko Popa, comp.,
The Golden Apple: A Round of Stories, Songs, Spells, Proverbs and Riddles,
ed. and trans. Andrew Harvey and Anne Pennington (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2010 repr. of 1980 ed.; orig. Serbo-Croatian ed. 1966), pp. 26, 32, 33, 41, 48, 65, 93.

Various obscure Roman coins, cities and provinces (Cyrrhus, Panemuteichus, Bithynia)— Some of my information comes from A.H.M. Jones, Fellow of All Souls College,
The Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces
(Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1937).

“Take counsel in wine . . .”
— Benjamin Franklin,
Writings
(New York: Library of America, 1987), p. 1187 (“Poor Richard's Almanack,” 1733–58).

Captain Vasojevic— The proud clan of this name was famous for its raids against the Turks.

Decline of Ragusan trade in the early eighteenth century, together with its causes and effects— Information from Francis W. Carter,
Dubrovnik (Ragusa): A Classic City-State
(London and New York: Seminar, 1972), pp. 407–14.

Some descriptions of Dalmatian medieval religious art and architecture and of Glagolitic derive from illustrations and text in that previously cited volume by the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Other descriptions are based on my notes from visits to Dalmatia in 1980, 1992, 1994, 2011 and 2012.

Archimedes's suppositions—
Great Books of the Western World,
Robert Maynard Hutchins, ed.-in-chief, vol. 11:
Euclid, Archimedes, Appolonius of Perga, Nicomachus,
var. trans. (University of Chicago, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1975, 20th pr. of 1952 ed.), p. 525 (Archimedes, “The Sand-Reckoner,”
bef
. 212
B.C.
).

“The Sultan's rivals dragged him down from the sky” in 1730. This ruler, Ahmad III, had regained Morea from Venice in 1718, the year that Cirtovich arrived in Trieste.

Grisogono's Venetian circles for calculating the heights of tides— From 1528. Grisogono was born in Zadar.

Description of traditional Serbian marriage customs— Based on research and translation by Tatiana Jovanovic. The source was Emma Stevanovic, Faculty of Philosophy; Tatiana says “she was a student probably in a department of Ethnology.” Much to my disappointment, Tatiana “omitted the most melodramatic and patriotic parts.”

Descriptions of the squid-entity in the dark-glass, of cephalopods generally, and of
nautiluses— After photographs, diagrams and textual information in: Richard Ellis,
The Search for the Giant Squid
(New York: Lyons Press, 1998); Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Philippe Diolé,
Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence,
trans. J. F. Bernard (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1973); and Peter Douglas Ward,
In Search of Nautilus: Three Centuries of Scientific Adventures in the Deep Pacific to Capture a Prehistoric—Living—Fossil
(New York: Simon and Schuster/A New York Academy of Sciences Book, 1988).

The fumigation of a coffin, and the rite with coins— Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich and Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich, vol. 1, p. 70.

Porphyry's claim about Plotinus—
Great Books of the Western World,
Robert Maynard Hutchins, ed.-in-chief, vol. 17:
Plotinus: The Six Enneads,
trans. Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page (University of Chicago, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), p. vi (introduction).

Various (but not all) descriptions of Marija Cirtovich and her attributes (affinity for doves, different-sized eyes, etc.)— After illustrations of Mother of God icons in Alfredo Tradigo,
Icons and Saints of the Eastern Orthodox Church,
trans. Stephen Satarelli (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Publications, 2006; orig. Italian ed. 2004).