The Pelican

by Martin Michael Driessen

  Only then did Josip remove the banknotes from the envelope. Erich did indeed have a generous pension: it was more than ten thousand dinars.

  Andrej flaunted his greyhound. He had bought a small red leather collar that contrasted nicely with her white coat. Laika slept in a laundry basket lined with a blanket. She slept more or less constantly, but as soon as Andrej moved or spoke, she would open her eyes. They were round, sad eyes; she looked at him with the expression of a terminally ill patient, surprised that anyone still cared about her. When she wasn’t sleeping, she trembled. She often even trembled in her sleep. But soon enough it became clear that there was nothing at all wrong with her. The first time he let her free on the small beach beyond the boulevard wall, she stood quaking next to him. Andrej gestured and coaxed her encouragingly, but she stuck close to his heels, her back arched. They were a curious-looking pair: a man more than two meters tall and a slight, skinny greyhound. He bent over and picked up something to throw, the first thing he could find, a clump of dried seaweed. Laika took off like a shot and raced under the airborne seaweed before it landed. A small group of children up on the boulevard started clapping and shouting.

  “Any of you have a ball?” Andrej shouted.

  A little girl held up an orange ball.

  Andrej hooked a finger under Laika’s collar and instructed them what to do; the children ran past the palm trees, a good hundred meters along the boulevard.

  “Now!” Andrej roared, gesturing broadly with his free arm. They threw the ball onto the beach, and at the same time he released Laika. She tore after the ball like a white bolt of lightning. Andrej trotted after her.

  “Wow,” shouted one boy. “She sure is fast! Is that a real racing dog, mister?”

  “Yes,” Andrej said, petting Laika’s narrow head. “A real English racing dog. I bought her in London.”

  “Can she run faster than a horse?” the girl asked.

  “Of course. Much faster.”

  “Faster than a car?”

  “Count on it. She’s the fastest dog in the world.”

  “Faster than a train, too?”

  Andrej did not answer. He grasped his dog’s ears and turned her head toward a small group of pelicans that had assembled at the water’s edge in the distance.

  “See those animals there, girl? D’you see those ugly pink creatures?” He moved her silky ears up and down as though they were wings. “Chase them away. Go!”

  She shot down the beach, reaching her top speed before the pelicans saw her coming and set off in unison in a gait not much clumsier than that of Andrej himself, who had run down the beach after her. Then they spread their wings and lifted off, while Laika stood barking, her legs spread and her back arched. It looked like a huge effort; with each high-pitched yelp her body contracted so fiercely that she nearly toppled over.

  “Well done, girl,” Andrej panted. Laika looked at him with her round eyes as though to say: “Why didn’t you just say so in the first place.”

  The pelicans circled, landed together like heavy seaplanes a safe distance from the beach, and from there kept a close eye on the peculiar beach walker and his dog.

  On their way home, Laika ran in big ovals and figure-eights around her master. He bought her a can of salmon.

  Josip had put the three thousand dinars under the concrete block, with a note saying that this was absolutely the last time, and that he wanted the negatives. He had spent the rest of Erich’s money entirely on pleasurable things. He took Jana out and gave her a gold bracelet. He bought a new jigsaw puzzle for his daughter, of Saint Peter’s in Rome. He had wanted to buy a digital watch for himself, but in the end decided he should buy a present for his wife.

  It had been years since they gave each other gifts, so Katarina believed she was the only one in the family who ever had a birthday.

  When he presented his wife with a color television, she grabbed it, box and all, and carried it to her bedroom.

  “Shall I hook it up for you?” he asked. “It’s got a room antenna.”

  She gaped at him like a Mongolian empress who had just learned of a plot against her life and slammed the door in his face.

  His daughter, drooling, dumped the thousand puzzle pieces of Saint Peter’s onto the rug and exclaimed, “Come on, Papa!”

  Andrej blew his money within a matter of hours, thanks to just one ill-conceived wager; at one point he had chips worth ten thousand dinars piled up before him. He felt he was on his way to becoming a first-class player and deserved a second chance. So he would wait a month or so and then cash in on Tudjman one last time. After that he would let him be. Andrej even considered sharing the winnings with him, if he were to hit the jackpot at the casino. He would give him, together with the negatives and the remaining prints, a sum of money as a sort of compensation. Signed, Your Unknown Friend. But first he needed another few thousand dinars.

  Things were going his way, and he felt heartened. The postal workers’ union had offered him a position—unpaid, admittedly, but an honor nonetheless. The steaming open of envelopes, too, became increasingly profitable. Prudently, of course—letters from fellow townsmen employed as migrant workers in Germany, he left alone; registered letters were likewise sacred. But if a granny abroad was so stupid and stingy as to enclose money with a birthday card to her granddaughter, and not send it registered—well, that was fair game. No one could prove that he had ever laid eyes on that missing letter.

  With Laika curled up in her basket and him seated at the kitchen table sorting the mail, he felt like a monarch who decided which tributes from subjugated nations he would let pass. It was up to him, Andrej, to decide who received mail, and who did not. He was particularly merciless regarding mail addressed to guests at the Hotel Esplanade. These he often threw away, especially if they were written in a language he did not understand. He saw it, in a sense, as an act of patriotism.

  PART 2

  It was March and the pelicans had not yet returned. They must be very picky creatures, for while there were perhaps warmer regions elsewhere, nowhere was more pleasant and beautiful than here. The days were not as hot as in summer, the nights cool but no longer chilly. The town lay charmingly on the bay, basking in an almost timeless beauty and watching over the to-and-fro of fishing boats and motorized yachts on the blue sea, the way an older lady who once waltzed with the young emperor Franz Josef might now observe the young people sashaying about the dance floor. There were hardly any tourists at this time of year, and in a way, it was nice not to have to share one’s familiar haunts with strangers. Now it was mostly the youths from the concrete apartment blocks up the hill who came to the old town center, often on sputtering motor scooters, in search of diversion not available in their parts, for only here did you have cafés and grillrooms, and even an arcade with slot machines. Belgrade had recently gotten the first-ever McDonald’s in a Communist country, but the capital was too far away.

  Josip sat, as he did every Saturday, at an outdoor table at Café Rubin with a glass of beer. Around him, as usual, were friends, neighbors, and former comrades. Men whom he could turn to for help if he saw no other way out. The blackmailer was still demanding money, now even twice as much as at first. The last note included a snapshot he had apparently been saving up: Josip between Jana’s legs.

  Even if he were prepared to pay, his funds had dried up. He would have to borrow money. Or consult someone more strong minded than himself, with other methods of settling the matter. Sitting next to him was Marković, the bus driver. He drank cola, as it was nearly time for his shift. A heavyset man who always wore a nappa vest and smelled of garlic. Josip and he were not good friends, and besides, he was a simpleton and didn’t earn enough to be able to give Josip a loan. The pharmacist Knević, on the other hand, was well off, but he was a know-it-all who believed it was his right to pontificate on world events on behalf of the entire café. Not someone Josip wanted to be indebted to. Schmitz, the owner of the photography studio, might be a possibility: he was
good natured and cooperative. The problem with Schmitz was that he had collaborated with the Germans during the war and was incorrigibly anti-Semitic. Each of the men at the café had his own wartime past. All these things had been put to rest—in such a small town there was no other choice—and Schmitz had made the photo albums of his wedding, but still, Josip could not imagine taking a man like him into his confidence.

  The sun set, searching for ever larger gaps in the foliage of the plane trees on the square, while Knević held forth on the American presidential elections and predicted a victory for Dukakis.

  The only one left was Mario. A fellow partisan and comrade, back in the day. They even shared the exact same birth date. Mario was his brother-in-law and best friend; Josip had helped him build his house up on the hillside, just to the north of the funicular. For weeks, Josip laid bricks, dug trenches for the plumbing, and together they had laid the granite bathroom floor. Regrettably, they had drifted apart of late. Perhaps the disparity between their lives had become too great: the one was successful in business and happily married, the other struggled to make ends meet and had a miserable homelife. It shouldn’t be so, but developments like these inevitably undermine the sense of equality on which all friendships are based.

  Josip kept his sunglasses on, although the sun had now gone down, and listened to Mario tell a long and doubtless completely fabricated story about Swiss boarding-school girls. Mario fancied himself God’s gift to women, even though he had long been happily married to the sister of Josip’s wife. No one believed that he had had more than a thousand women, as he was wont to claim; in any case, he was physically an improbable Don Juan, with his potbelly and balding head. Mario was a childish fantasist. Josip would always be fond of him, perhaps even more than of himself. This was exactly why he did not want to ask Mario for money, even though he knew his brother-in-law would lend him whatever he asked for; they had shared only good times, and he simply couldn’t embroil him in this dirty business.

  The bus that Marković would soon be taking over pulled in across the square.

  When it comes down to it, Josip mused as he drank the rest of his tepid beer, you’re on your own. He was disappointed in his friends, in Mario, too, now that it was clear he couldn’t ask any of them for help.

  Andrej the postman cycled past, as always erect on the saddle and in full uniform, cap and all.

  “Strange fellow,” Knević pronounced. “I hear he’s in the union. A Serbian snake pit—what business does a Croatian have there? Nothing but vain ambition, if you ask me.”

  “Wasn’t much of a soccer player, either,” Marković added.

  Andrej rested his bicycle on its kickstand, opened the flap of his saddlebag, took out a packet, and walked over to the entrance of the clock museum, balancing the packet at shoulder height on the fingertips of his right hand.

  “Look at that, will you,” Marković said. “Thinks he’s a pastry chef carrying a tart.”

  “A strange bird, that’s for sure,” Knević said. “Maybe he’s a homosexual.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Josip, who knew how keen on movie stars and princesses Andrej was.

  “So why isn’t he married?” the pharmacist asked.

  “Just too timid, poor guy,” Mario said, and got up to go to the restroom.

  “He does have some artistic talent,” said Schmitz in his defense. “Those postcards of the butterflies still sell well.”

  The postman came out of the museum and remounted his bicycle. Josip’s sunglasses blotted out much of the usual tableau the town square offered, with its view of the museum’s clock tower, built in some Italian style or other. He sat slouched in a plastic chair and pondered ordering another glass of beer, as he had no desire whatsoever to return home. Anywhere was better than home.

  Through the tinted lenses, the world was simplified into a violet sky, and the dark rest. Josip was satisfied with that. Especially now that the dark rest became even larger because of the bus that had stopped just in front of the café.

  The ambient sounds also receded; he had all but stopped listening.

  Until he heard the sudden thud. He looked up and saw, between the streaks of light caused by the scratches on his sunglasses, a dark figure sail through the air, a completely improbable postman arched like a pole vaulter above an invisible crossbar. Josip yanked off his sunglasses, there was a second thud, and Andrej slid sideways off the hood of a car.

  The others leapt up, but Josip needed a few moments to put the world back into focus. The car that had hit Andrej was just passing the parked bus. The Volkswagen he landed on, smashing its windshield, was parked in front of an ATM and facing against the traffic. Andrej lay on his belly, arms and legs spread as though he were trying to hold back the large pool of blood that was spreading out from under him. Car doors opened, people shouted. The bus let out a pneumatic hiss, like a prehistoric monster that regarded the mangled bicycle on the ground as a kind of alien insect.

  Marković rushed over, a woman turned her child’s stroller on its back wheels and hurried off in the opposite direction. Despite all the commotion, Josip had the sensation of everything happening in slow motion. Chair legs scraped the pavement, Schmitz and the pharmacist got up, a startled Mario appeared in the doorway.

  “Call an ambulance!” Josip called to him.

  The blood had two colors, dark and light red, which mixed like when a river empties into the sea. Andrej was covered in shards of safety glass. The man at the ATM looked over his shoulder but waited until he could retrieve his bank card. Josip knelt alongside Andrej.

  “The ambulance is on its way,” Mario said.

  “Arterial bleeding,” Josip said. “We have to turn him over.”

  They did what they had done half a lifetime ago, before the postman was even born, whenever a comrade was hit by shrapnel: Mario lifted the victim’s torso, they carefully removed his jacket, and Josip tied a tourniquet—his necktie with the funicular’s emblem—just under the armpit and pulled it as tightly as he could. The bleeding stopped, but Andrej was still unconscious.

  The ambulance, its siren wailing and lights revolving, arrived surprisingly quickly, but was blocked some thirty meters back by the bus, cars, and the mangled bicycle. The paramedics came to assess the situation and returned to get a stretcher.

  “Move that damn bus!” Josip snarled at Marković, who just stood there gawking.

  “Can’t,” said the pharmacist. “The police haven’t arrived yet.”

  Andrej lay there peacefully, as though he were soaking up all the attention. The trickle of blood running down his long chin gave him the look of a bon vivant who couldn’t be bothered to use his napkin.

  Sixteen arms lifted him onto the stretcher, and the ambulance backed down the street, lights and siren still going, until it was able to turn.

  “There was nothing I could do,” said the driver of the car that had hit him.

  “Shut your trap, man!” Marković barked and grabbed him. “Tell that to the cops. You should’ve waited behind the bus! Behind the bus, you get it? In America they’d give you the electric chair! There could’ve been children crossing. Children, you get it?”

  “Let’s be reasonable, this isn’t a no-passing zone,” said Knević, the pharmacist.

  “But it is a no-parking zone,” Marković said, now taking the owner of the Volkswagen by the arm, as if to hinder an escape attempt. “And facing the traffic flow, at that. What business did you have stopping your car there, eh? And besides, I’ve never seen you before. You’re not from here, are you?”

  “My wife’s birthday is tomorrow … I only wanted to …”

  “Tell that to the cops,” Marković said, still tightly holding the man’s arm.

  The sun had set, and Josip had a good excuse for not returning home yet.

  They eventually gave their statements to the police, and then he, Mario, Schmitz, Marković, and the pharmacist discussed what should be done with Andrej’s mangled bicycle, his cap and jack
et, and the still-full mailbags.

  Mario offered to take Andrej’s belongings to his apartment on the harbor—his keys were still in the uniform pocket—and to look after his dog. In the days thereafter, Josip would take over, and if he did not have the time, Schmitz would fill in.

  When it was Josip’s turn, he found the semi-basement apartment to be a typical bachelor pad, although in a way it was homier than his own house. There was even a vase of lilacs on the Formica-topped kitchen table. The dog cocked its head warily as Josip fastened the leash. When they got back, he looked through the kitchen cabinets for dog food and found seven oval tins of salmon and a box of dry food. Apparently this was her menu.

  He unconsciously took in the apartment. Long woolen socks hung on a clothes-drying rack, and Andrej had quite an expensive-looking Kodak. That must be what he used to take those butterfly shots on the postcards.

  Josip emptied the undelivered mail from the saddlebags into a plastic bag. He would inform the postal service so that they could pick it up at his kiosk tomorrow.

  He noticed that one side pocket contained opened envelopes. That was strange. He took one out and gave it a closer look. British postage stamp, addressed to Joyce Kimberley, c/o Hotel Esplanade. There was a letter in it, which, despite his poor English, Josip could follow: … sorry to hear about your troubles … hope you notified your bank about those Eurocheques … take care … hope this ₤50 will help … Love, Daddy.

  Fifty pounds was a huge sum of money. Josip searched the other open envelopes and determined that there were probably others that had contained money. From an aunt to her niece on her birthday, from a man who apologized for returning a borrowed car with an almost-empty tank. These were in Serbo-Croatian, so the amounts would probably have been in dinars, and not very much.

  Josip leaned back.

  The dog now lay flat in its laundry basket; only a single bent ear stuck out above the rim.