The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (23 page)

Go to bed, Stjepan, his mother said when she realized he had returned home. Get some
rest. If she dies, we are leaving tomorrow.

His mother’s side of their bed remained an empty blue glow that night, her absence
a bottomless pool daring him to come close and swim away. In the morning he found
the two sisters together still, his aunt in a royal shroud of velvet curtains patterned
with silvery fleur-de-lis, his mother asleep on her suffering knees, her head cradled
atop her sister’s unused womb, her right hand cupping the dead woman’s left hand,
its cold whiteness stuck out from the folds of the shroud as if to catch at life’s
shreds, the parlor bathed in what the boy experienced as an angelic aura of radiance
from the columns of previously banished sunshine entering the apartment. He knelt
beside his mother, praying mindlessly, until she cracked open her eyes.

She was just like your father, his mother murmured. If you want a Dalmatian to shut
his trap, what can you do but kill him. She opened her reddened eyes fully, looking
at Stjepan without expression or feeling. Get dressed and pack your valise, she said.

Where are we going? he asked, and an edge of rebelliousness in his tone made her raise
her head from the corpse of her older sister and straighten her back to look down
gravely on the boy.

We are going away, she said.

Where?

God willing, we are going to the coast to find a boat.

To go where?

Be careful how you speak to me, she warned.

I won’t leave, he said, uncustomarily stubborn.

Stjepan, we cannot live with the Communists, she explained impatiently. And we cannot
live without God. You are old enough to understand these things.

His anger reared up and he told her he had decided to live with the others—the fugitives—at
the archbishop’s palace.

Soon Tito will come for the archbishop too, she said. He will die alone a martyr in
Lepoglava. Get dressed now. Not another word.

No, he said, his face bright red, shrieking. I must stay. He confessed he had made
a deal that prevented him from leaving and she thought he meant the bargain he had
struck with God to join the clergy and tried to hug him, perhaps to mitigate his piety
with the touch of her flesh, but he flapped away from her arms like a bird. Stjepan,
she said, they don’t want priests here anymore. You can study to be a priest in Italy.

No, he screamed, eyes spurting a fury of tears. I promised.

Stop this, she said. You promised what? To whom? To God?

A heart-piercing wail—Yes, God.

Quiet. Calm down. Promised what, darling?

To kill the men who killed my father, he said.

Ah, I see, she said. You and I will talk about this.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

To protest openly would reveal the sin of his thoughts—worse, expose the sin’s appeal—
and so he kept quiet and watched with sullen resentment, later that morning in the
sacristy of the national cathedral, as his mother bartered with one of the priests,
trading a bundle of currency wrapped in newspaper and tied with butcher’s string for
the promise that the church would attend to the remains of his Aunt Mara.

Why are we bothering with her? Stjepan thought bitterly. What makes her so special?
And then, unwittingly, he found himself back across the bridge in his mind to where
he had abandoned his father in the fog on the other side. Who buried Father? Was his
head soaking still in the kitchen bucket? If they buried him, did they place the head
with the body? Wasn’t that more evil than even killing, to put his head over here
and his body over there? Shouldn’t he and his mother return immediately to Dubrovnik
to make sure these unspeakably important matters were properly addressed? Why didn’t
she care? She didn’t care.

They called at the archbishop’s private residence at the massive neo-Gothic palace
behind the cathedral, his mother desperate for any assistance her husband’s cousin
might find in his heart to offer for the difficult journey ahead into exile—their
second exile together, although the boy had no knowledge of the first. She was determined
to make contact with the Americans but remained terrified of the Allied forces, foremost
the treacherous British, the venomous sting of their centuries-old contempt for the
Croats, who controlled the border crossings along the northern frontier and continued
their unconscionable wartime alliance with Moscow and the partisans. Italy, which
she had spent much of her life admonishing—in fluent Italian, no less—seemed for the
second time in her life the only reasonable destination. To her relief, the archbishop,
inviting the woman and the boy into his sitting room for the forgotten luxury of coffee
and biscuits, counseled her to go to the Italians and pray for the best. There is
a ship, he told her, that would arrive soon in Zadar to pick up refugees and take
them across the Adriatic to Ancona. On this ship, he said, he hoped to place an envoy,
who would report to the Vatican on the relentless persecution of the Church. She and
her son should consider accompanying the envoy to the coast, where passage might also
be arranged for them on the ship.

Should,
she repeated to herself.
Might.

Marija, before you say yes, the archbishop said solemnly, there is one complication
you must know about—the boat has been leased by Zionists, the refugees they will collect
are Jews. Are you guilty of anti-Semitism? the archbishop asked his mother.

No, she said, let the Jews live in peace, but they will throw us overboard and who
could blame them, Father. In Bosnia, my husband had orders to send them all to the
camps.

Yes, everyone obeyed, some more than others, said the archbishop, reciting the platitudes
that could be thrown like a golden cape over the shoulders of atrocity. Your husband
never drew a breath nor, I am certain, extinguished another’s that he did not commend
to the glory of God. To be honest, I don’t think he cared much about the Jews one
way or another. The Jews were never a genuine problem in this country—not like the
Masons, for instance. Why bother with these poor souls when the devil himself is at
the door? In any case, trust in God these Jews on the boat will not put you in the
water.

Surreptitiously, the boy ate the last biscuit; the archbishop stood to extend his
hand. Mother and son lowered themselves side by side to their knees to press their
lips to the papal ring and receive his blessings. Without warning, Stjepan became
inconsolable and the archbishop finally had to pry the sobbing child’s fingers away
from his own.

They spent the night with other refugees housed in the overcrowded fetid recesses
of the archbishop’s palace, the boy forbidden by his mother to speak to anyone of
their plans; spies were the reason she gave him but secretly she feared the jealousy
of the others should they learn of their privilege, beneficiaries of the archbishop’s
personal intervention. In the morning they walked with their belongings to the cathedral
to attend a mass for the dead, his Aunt Mara occupying one of the seven pine-board
coffins arrayed between the nave and the left side of the altar, the pews filled with
anonymous mourners, the air weighted by the humidity of their bereavement and the
gloom-heavy fumes of beeswax. The grave diggers were days behind in their labor and
to remain in the city for her burial was out of the question. After mass, his mother
led him down the aisle to the forbidding row of coffins.

Which one is Aunt Mara’s? he asked. I don’t know, she said, kiss them all.

They returned to the pews where the boy stretched out and fell asleep to the anguished
sussuration of his mother’s rosary and she did not have the heart to wake him when
the archbishop’s driver arrived but scooped him into her arms and carried him to the
car.

She folded the boy onto the front seat while the driver, a large elderly man with
white cropped hair and the piercing amber eyes of a falcon, tied their bags to the
roof and then she sat in back, sharing the seat with a pugnacious-looking man dressed
in a brown worsted suit, unsuitable for summer weather, red, meaty hands resting on
his knees, his brush-cut black hair and steel eyeglasses amplifying the severe virility
of his face. The driver too, despite his age, seemed intimidating. He had the rolling,
flat-footed gait of a brawler, one of those men who would rather fight than explain
themselves, his bulky face sculpted by pugilism, she thought, and engraved with a
vestigial sharpness she vaguely associated with criminals—perhaps the war had done
this, branded him with its harshness, or perhaps he was a redeemed thug come home
to serve the Church. Both men, she realized, made her uneasy. The driver slid behind
the wheel, bringing with him a lemony trace of hair tonic, and as they drove west
through the maze of Zagreb’s colorless streets she waited in vain for her fellow passenger
to present himself, say anything, the small courtesy of a greeting, an acknowledgment
of their common humanity, a gesture of fellowship based on the danger they now faced
together, but the man offered nothing beyond the arrogant profile of a glare directed
out the windscreen.

Where is the archbishop’s envoy? she finally found the courage to ask.

I am the envoy, he said staring ahead.

Yes? she said. I thought you would be a priest.

I am a priest, he replied with a trill of strange glee. He crossed his arms over his
chest and tilted his head in her direction, as if to share a confidence. Today, however,
he said, lowering his voice, and tomorrow, and until we are on the boat, I am your
husband—and now he looked at her with frost-blue eyes and a patronizing smile. With
your permission, he said. In name only, of course—and he shifted his body to glare
again at the streets.

What is your name? she asked dully, resigning herself to this unexpected ruse.

Our name is Bauer, he said. I am Slavko.

I see, she said. And what is our business in Zadar?

Your business, madam, is to be my wife.

At first she was concerned but then overwhelmingly gratified that her son, as if he’d
been drugged senseless, would not wake up, his surrender so deep that he slept through
two checkpoints, the first on the outskirts of the city and the second a few kilometers
beyond. The driver proved himself to be well-versed in the protocols of danger, exceedingly
calm, cautiously gregarious, his deflections a humble art she had not imagined he
possessed, exiting the car in his dark suit and yellowing dress shirt unbuttoned at
the collar and his eyes shining with camaraderie to smoke with the partisans, packs
of contraband cigarettes handed around, opening the trunk for a bottle of plum brandy,
telling barnyard jokes and mumbling lies, the passengers overlooked and soon forgotten.
Those interminable minutes at the checkpoints she thought she would faint from terror,
anticipating the boy surfacing back to reality, confused and innocent, unable to recognize
the peril they were in and not understanding that truth was a poison they would not
survive. The privilege of the archbishop’s assistance, she now realized, came at a
price she had not been clever enough to foresee.

The road was in poor condition, cratered and rutted, trafficked by oxcarts and an
occasional jeep, its soggy ditches littered with curious wreckage and the torn remains
of animals, women distant in the fields scything barley hay, chimneys rising above
the ruins of the countryside, infrequent reminders that nothing was settled—a crossroads
where she saw a gouged and severed head mounted on a stake, a turn in the road that
slowly revealed a tidy row of executed men, naked, facedown in wildflowers, their
bound hands crossed palms-up atop the pumpkinlike swelling of their buttocks. There
were no more checkpoints that afternoon until twilight, at the entrance to Karlovac,
and at the same moment she noticed the barrier across the road the boy began to rouse
and sit up. Listen to me, she screamed, diving halfway into the front seat, shaking
the boy by the shoulders while he stared at her, dumbstruck with horror by his mother’s
assault. Talk to nobody, she said frantically, if you talk they will kill us. But
she had frightened him needlessly, her heart thundering as the soldiers inexplicably
raised the wooden bar across the road and waved them onward into the city.

In an alley behind the central square, the envoy disappeared into the rectory of Holy
Trinity Church and they passed the night in the housekeeper’s apartment where, as
they prepared themselves for bed, she had tried to explain to the boy how important
it was, should they be stopped by the rebels, to keep his mouth zipped, but he seemed
increasingly withdrawn and restless, and she sensed her control over him slipping
away. I don’t know who this priest is, she said, who cannot travel as a priest under
the flag of the archbishop. Maybe he is just afraid, like the rest of us, she told
her unresponsive son, yet he wants us to pretend we are his family. So if I say he
is my husband, you say yes, if I say he is your father, you say yes, but if I don’t
say these things, you will not say these things. Do you understand? You must understand,
Stjepan. You must agree.

In the morning there was leftover ratatouille laded with paprika, reheated and served
for breakfast. Outside, the car in the alley was just as they had left it, and there
was the envoy in the backseat, unchanged in every respect except for his breath, which
carried the slightly decrepit scent of vinegar, she noticed, as she eased in beside
him, as if he’d been eating rotten apples or drinking bad wine. Good morning, she
said, and because he offered no other response than an aloof nod she did not ask him
if he had slept well or poorly or not at all, to hell with him.

She had slept fitfully, dreading what lay ahead of them, and that morning she did
not have to wait for her fear to manifest itself because it sprang, iron-jawed, upon
them instantly, the car turning a corner out of the alley into the central square,
suddenly occupied by soldiers. They jumped down from the flatbeds of two battered
trucks, an officer sprinting forward, signaling to the archbishop’s driver.
Halt!
his voice punctured the air.
Out!

To the driver—
Step away!
To the woman and boy—
Stand by him!
—the officer gesturing toward the envoy. She clasped the boy protectively to her legs
and stared into the air at pigeons taking flight until her vision spiraled with black
confetti. The soldiers formed a horseshoe and they waited, for what she didn’t know,
no one speaking, the sun too bright in her eyes and the world itself blurred to an
abstraction.

Then, in the unnatural stillness, the painful vividness of everything ebbed back into
her consciousness as the faint rhythmic purr of engines somewhere nearby in the otherwise
silent city approached the square. The mushy rip of tires on the cobblestones preceded
the dreamlike appearance of a pair of familiar black sedans, German-made and previously
favored by the gestapo. The envoy tried to grasp her elbow but she shrugged away his
hand.

Two men in ordinary street clothes with holstered pistols strapped on military belts
got out of the second sedan and spoke briefly with the officer. Then they were standing
in front of her and the boy was pulled from her arms, the man turning Stjepan around
so that she could observe his reaction, but the man could not see what she could see
on her son’s face, only how it shocked her, how his expression broke her spell and
cast her into a clearheaded state of alertness, seeing for the first time in the eyes
of the boy his intractable disregard for authority, the impudent but desolate fearlessness
he now assumed in the face of danger, some unbreakable defiance in his character that
had not been there yesterday and made her immediately afraid the boy was determined
to cause great trouble.

Who is this man? the second of the two asked in a voice so disarming it confused her
with its veneer of pleasantness.

Which man? she said, struggling to comprehend the obvious.

Him, said the man, smiling, pointing with his stubbled chin at her companion, who
stood exposed and rigid as a fencepost, sunlit face drained by the pallor of his fallibility.

I don’t know, she said, ignoring the shameless
tsk
of irritation from the tongue of the priest in the brown suit.

You don’t know? the partisan said. His smile collapsed into something flat and ominous.
Her denial seemed to cue both men to unbuckle the flaps of their holsters; the one
who held Stjepan rapped him on the head with the barrel of his gun in the checked
way someone would strike the shell of a boiled egg with the edge of a spoon. Stjepan’s
expression contorted with indignation, a small gash bloomed brightly atop his shaven
skull, out crawled worms of blood, and she marveled at his refusal to acknowledge
the pain of the blow that had stabbed her own heart.