Shadow Man: A Novel (6 page)

His name was Goran, a Croatian fisherman who moonlighted as a gunrunner and a spy. He was basketball-big the way Croats are, a swoop of black hair hanging over his brow. He knew all the islands off the coast, and at night Eva and I would meet him and go trawling through the darkness, him cutting his engines while through infrared binoculars we saw guns and grenades loaded onto boats that slipped back to shore to waiting trucks that drove through Split and Mostar on their way to Sarajevo. We drank plum brandy on the boat and watched how the world worked, foreign voices, the slosh of the sea, the bang and clatter of crates, money passed, new meeting times set, the throaty sounds of engines accelerating away from the islands, silhouettes in the starlight. Goran had a daughter. She sunbathed topless when he fished. She was twenty, a student before the war. Her father sent her near the Serb lines to seduce. She was good at it, and she helped Goran put dots and lines on maps.

They lived in a whitewashed and shuttered house on the cliffs above the sea. The house had been in the family for hundreds of
years, and Goran said from the window you could feel like God, watching the tides tug and pull at the shore. Goran said the window view was best in winter when snow squalls blew over the sea and whirled up the cliffs, spinning around his house and up to heaven. I supposedly asked Goran about heaven, and he laughed, saying only Croats were admitted. It is the great trick of Croats on humanity, he said. The world thinks everyone has a chance at heaven, that heaven is a place filled with souls from every country, but this is not so; heaven flies only the Croat flag, and is very small.

We slept at Goran’s house and the next day, hours after we had left, Eva and I stopped at a gas station and found that Goran had slipped a case of Vranac into the trunk. There was a note. “Before the war, this was my favorite wine. But it is made by Serbs and I have no taste for it now.”

Eva and I traveled to Sarajevo and stayed a month. We decided to take a break from the fighting after a mortar round burst through our window but didn’t explode. When we went back over the mountains to Croatia, villagers reported that Goran and his daughter had been killed. His boat went adrift one night, struck the rocks off an island, and sank. Their bodies were found the next morning, throats slit, bullet wounds to temples, floating in a cove. They were buried in the rocky earth near Goran’s house. The story in my hands was written in the first person, supposedly by me. Did I really know a gunrunner and his spy daughter? Did I scribble their lives in a notebook? I hand the story back to the lady. She folds it into a fat envelope.

“I came to this beach once with Kurt and Vera. Then we went to another beach in Virginia. That’s the beach I know most, what happened there. It was long ago. Did you know about Kurt and Vera?”

“Yes, James. I know all about them.”

“They’re clearest in my mind. The rest is not there. I see this bottle. I read Vranac, but it may as well be a rocket ship. I know I’ve lost something; every now and then an image goes through my head, something that I’ve seen, but before I can place it, it’s gone.”

“Place me, James. Feel my face in your hand. Something in you must know, a tissue, a nerve. How can all those days, months, years vanish from you? I keep asking the doctors, how? Wonderful explanations they give. Did they tell you the one about your mind as a glacier, with fissures and light and some such drivel. They don’t know. Medicine doesn’t know, James.”

I sip wine. It’s warm and it’s not such a pain sitting in the wet with this lady.

“Eva. Say my name, James. Eva.”

“Eva.”

“I’m going to ask you later what my name is and you’re going to say Eva.”

“Okay.”

A surfer battles against the shore waves and paddles through to calmer water. Deep and cold, a swirl beneath him, the unseen power of the earth, a mystery of conspiring elements. Creation in a ball, flung into orbit. The wine is good. The lady pours me another glass. The rain falls hard but we don’t move. She holds my hand. The surfer sits in the sea, the point of his board bobbing like a flash of fin. The lady whispers to me about another time she wants me to remember, and it all sounds wonderful, exciting. I like the rain on my face. It’s cold and I have a chill. I don’t want to move. I want to sit here and finish this bottle of wine, and what’s wrong with that? This is what I know now. I see the glass. I see the wine. I taste. This is who I am. Now.

“The communists were scattered and scared. They knew …”

The surfer finds his wave.

“We thought there’d be tanks, like before, like in ’68 …”

He’s up.

“Hardly a shot was fired. We went from city to city. Champagne and barbed wire …”

The wave lifts quickly, steep, sharp.

“They were waiting for magic …”

The surfer slices down the folding water.

“Democracy and capitalism will save us …”

Faster he moves.

“A new vocabulary spread overnight across half a continent …”

He’s in the curl.

“A wall fell. New faces with new power. The unimaginable before us …”

He’s lost.

“You wrote about it, James. Every day for months …”

He’s free of the curl, racing along the wave’s last remnant.

“An era ended. The missiles in their silos. It can happen, the impossible.”

The surfer rides to shore, standing, he doesn’t fall.

“What a time, James …”

He picks up his board and jogs toward a twisted towel in the sand.

“C’mon. We’re soaked. We have a hotel room down the beach.”

He takes the towel and walks, shrinking in the distance.

“Okay, James. What’s my name?”

I cannot answer her.

Eva’s going to keep him out tonight. She does that sometimes, tries to spill herself into him, compressing all their years into hours. Maybe it’ll bring him back. Maybe the mention of Prague or Budapest at the right time in the pitch of night will glow across his synapses and become as real to him as Kurt and Vera. I pray for his tangled brain to see. It can happen. There are miracles. A miracle led me to James. He and I are forever entwined.

Before she died, and what a sad way it was, Vera told me in a letter barbed with notations and thick as a book that she was my mother and Kurt my father. It was a startling revelation; a voice echoing across time. The letter was kept from me for many years. It lay in a taped box beneath a floorboard hidden by a Persian carpet in a small house in New England. I had walked over that carpet all my life and never knew that just below my feet was the story of how I came to be. Secrets, though, like air bubbles, wriggle their way to the surface. When I finally read it, Vera had been dead a long while, but her words, ahhh her words, coiled through me and found home. “This tale, my daughter, is for you.” Is there a sweeter phrase? Page after page, Vera whispered to me. I pieced her story together and made a map of words and memories that led me to James. My half-brother doesn’t know this side of Kurt and Vera. Things changed, were altered back when he was a boy, and by the time he became a man, and his name went from Jim to James, he had no inkling. Why would he? We were orphans in different places, children of worlds that touched briefly and bounced away. The letter told me this. Yet there is still much I do not know. Imagine you have a life but then
you discover you have another that lies in the murk of an addled man’s mind. My story lives inside his darkness. James must remember more. I wait. I perch like a blackbird on a branch, patient for lost trinkets and flashes of tin.

When James is out like this with Eva, I come to his room and sit in the moonlight. The halls are quiet, the deranged sedated and tucked away for the night — it’s amazing how the muddled brain can slumber — and the only sound is the occasional shuffle of nurse shoes on polished floors or pills spilled across a counter, drumming like rain on a roof.

I read James’s newspaper stories and try to put myself in those moments of history. It will bring us closer if I can experience them the way he did:
NO SHOTS FIRED IN CZECH
“VELVET REVOLUTION.” SLEDGEHAMMERS, FREEDOM BREAK OPEN BERLIN WALL. ROMANIAN PRESIDENT EXECUTED BY FIRING SQUAD
. And my favorite, from a village in the Balkans,
A BOY’S JOURNEY THROUGH WAR TO MANHOOD AND, FINALLY, DEATH
. I try to imagine beyond the words, like when you read a book and you sense another world happening that doesn’t exist on the page but exists because of the page, and that makes it true and part of the story.

James’s story is my secret. I almost told it to the owner of the corner market, Earl, who watches me in the aisles and knows I prefer paper to plastic. He has a nasal voice and a lazy eye but he alerts me to specials on pastrami, pickles, toilet paper, and milk. The big chains, says Earl, are killing the small grocer; he may sell out one day to a dry cleaner or a tattoo parlor. Earl’s had offers. We chat about family. Earl’s quite open about such things; he’s the kind of misbegotten soul they invite on afternoon talk shows, earnest and giving of details most would prefer to keep private: Vietnam flashbacks, estranged wives, a son’s suicide, a stint in jail, a recidivist 12-Stepper. He mixes highs and lows like a brawler in a Tom Waits song and sometimes I imagine him sitting in a small apartment and
weeping through the night until dawn. But there is something about Earl. With his white smock and pocket of pens, his slow rhythm of ringing up prices on an ancient cash register, Earl has a tenderness I find rare in this world.

“What’s your brother do?” he asked the other day.

“He was a famous journalist. He’s retired now.”

“You see him much?”

“Every day.”

“I wish I was that close to my sister.”

I left it at that. It was a pretty thought.

I go to James’s window and point my face toward the moon, feeling its crystal, cool light and studying my reflection in the glass: a mirage dressed in white, the circle of my stethoscope shining, my face as faint as fog, my hair pulled back, my deep-set eyes, James’s eyes, shadowed like caves at the forest’s edge. I seem a girl at a dance, a picture in a locket, an image, frozen. I run my fingers over my name tag, tracing the letters and looking out over the city, James’s boyhood city, the city my mother, the “enchanting” Vera, escaped to on a summer night of rainstorms and lightning.

“Vera, what’s your story?”

I yelled into the dark wind of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. Kurt accelerated and the bay pressed down in its arc over us. We raced toward the square of light at the tunnel’s end, the Impala roaring back into the day. I squinted in the sun; a spit of beach in the distance, the gray hulks of navy ships sailing heavy and low toward Norfolk. Vera stood up in the car like a lady general, holding on to the windshield, her black hair blowing as if painted against the sky. She screamed something into the wind, but I couldn’t hear what it was. She sat down and held my hand. Kurt reached for the radio, but Vera slapped him away and laughed and said let the day and the wind and the bay and the birds speak for themselves. Kurt shook his head and I sat between them on the front seat as we came off the bridge and the Impala, gas dropping toward
E
and temperature leaning toward
H
, rolled onto the sandy plains of Virginia.

“My story is a long one, Jim.”

That was all she said. She opened her purse and pulled the rearview mirror toward her, shading on lipstick and eyeliner, smoothing her hair, and disappearing behind her sunglasses like someone incognito. We drove a stretch of highway and came to a road of traffic lights leading toward Virginia Beach. You could smell summer: cotton candy, popcorn, french fries, snow cones, tanning oil, all mingling, metastasizing (a good dictionary word) around us like we were in another place, a new planet. The Jersey Shore near Philly was similar in summer, but it was more exotic in the South; it seemed summer was more at home here, more relaxed and welcoming. Kurt
pulled into a 7-Eleven and bought us Slurpees, cola for me, cherry for Vera, and a lime for him. I listened to the people going in and out of the store; they held on to syllables longer, their consonants were softer, their words seemed to float, especially the words of three girls who walked into the 7-Eleven in their bikinis, sand on their brown shoulders, their long hair damp and flat against their backs. Kurt saw me watching.

“Hey, Jim, why don’t we ask those girls if they want to play miniature golf? There’s all kinds of miniature golf down here. Volcanoes, gorillas.”

I blushed and sucked on my Slurpee.

“We can wait for those girls to come out, Jim. They’re probably getting Slurpaaaays, too.”

“Listen to Kurt with his new accent,” said Vera. “Take me to your plantation, sir.”

“Let’s just go,” I said.

Kurt and Vera laughed. As we backed up, the girls stood at the counter, their brown fingers sliding coins to a clerk in a red shirt. Kurt turned on the radio again. The Jackson Five. When Michael sang about something as lowly as a rat, it calmed you, made you think of something religious. I closed my eyes, the sun warm on my face and arms, my hair windblown and feeling like straw, the Impala moving slow in the traffic. Kurt’s patience could be measured in centimeters, but this traffic, which would normally have him squirming and cursing, didn’t bother him; he sat there sweating and humming to songs as Vera uncapped silver nail polish and, leaning over me, painted a star, the kind you got for getting an A on an arithmetic exam, on his cheek. Kurt found a parking spot after he bargained with a guy. We pulled the top to the Impala shut and Vera chased me out of the car. She hung a towel in the window and changed into her bathing suit. I thought it would be a bikini, but it wasn’t, it was a sky-blue one-piece that made her legs longer. She put on an old fedora and one of
Kurt’s buttondown shirts bought years earlier when he thought he might look for a job with a desk and an air conditioner. He never found one, but I don’t think he searched too hard. I had to admit, I never could have imagined him coming home from work without scratches on his arms and ship rust in his hair. We followed Vera over a small dune through tall, itchy grass to where the sand tapered to the beach. The waves were green and white-tipped, kites snapped in the air, and Vera threw down a blanket near the edge of where the last wave rolled up the farthest.