The Pelican

by Martin Michael Driessen

  The barred window was open, he heard gulls screeching, men talking, the rattling wheels of a cart.

  He folded his hands, put them on his balding head, and thought.

  In the end, because he was not satisfied with his thoughts and because this was not a position a person could hold for long, he let his arms drop to his sides.

  Andrej’s bloodied uniform jacket was draped over the back of the chair where he was sitting, and his hand slid, as though it were his own jacket, down over the fabric.

  Then he patted the inside breast pocket, slowly pulled out the wallet, and flipped it open. It contained, in addition to a goodly sum in dinars, a fifty-pound note with Queen Elizabeth on the front.

  “Your master is a bad man,” he said to the bitch, who raised her head and regarded him dejectedly. “He is a thief. A criminal. I hadn’t expected that of him.”

  Andrej would no longer be needing the mailbags, nor his uniform jacket or his cap with the emblem with stylized wings, he thought, so he would turn them all over in one go when the postal service van came.

  But on the other hand, it was mean to lodge a criminal complaint against a man who might at this very moment be lying in a coma.

  He decided to keep the compromising articles—the opened letters and the banknote—and when Andrej got out of the hospital, he would take it from there.

  He filled Laika’s water bowl and stroked her head.

  “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said. “Nothing you can do about it, is there?”

  She watched him leave, her eyes bulging, her narrow head resting on the edge of the basket. For Laika, life was pure stress.

  Josip took Laika out every day, for Mario had a busy job and a large family. When the tins of salmon ran out, he bought new ones. He always kept her on the leash because he had no experience with dogs and was afraid she might run away. Laika appeared to interpret this as a punishment, and whenever he looked down at her she hurried to his other side, with a gait somewhere between slinking and scampering. She was afraid of him, that much was clear, although he had no idea why.

  On his day off he took her on a somewhat longer walk, up to the concrete block on the Ulica Zrinskog. A week earlier he had put, instead of an envelope of money, a note under the rock asking for an extension. Strangely enough, the note was still there. Josip hesitated. Had the blackmailer left it there intentionally, as a sign he wasn’t buying it? In any case, he hadn’t made another move yet. Josip’s wife ranted and raved as always, but nothing indicated she had any knowledge of his liaison.

  She scoffed at his explanations when he left town for a few days. A chess tournament, a refresher course at the railways, an invented doctor’s appointment. Her theory was unshakable: whenever her husband was out of sight, he was cheating on her. There was no arguing with it.

  He always mentioned places other than Zagreb—the name of the city alone was sacred to him—but this was a moot point, as she was incapable of taking action. She was nearly illiterate, and if she left the house at all she never went farther than the corner drugstore, and the neighborhood women avoided her. Her inability to deal with reality was torture for him, but at the same time it guaranteed that he was free to come and go as he pleased.

  Laika took advantage of the stop to squat and relieve herself. As always, she looked at him with scared, bugged-out eyes, which bulged even more from the effort of emptying her bowels. She never turned her back to him, as though she feared some unforeseen assault.

  “Good girl,” he said, and looked around before taking the envelope of money from his inside pocket. He had exchanged the fifty-pound note. There was no one around; crickets chirped, the Yugoslavian flag hung slackly on the fort’s flagpole, the sea was still and blue, with only a ripple here and there brought on by a breeze that died out before reaching land.

  Josip lifted one edge of the block, removed his note, and slid the envelope with the money underneath.

  “There,” he said to the dog, “now he’ll leave us in peace for a while.”

  Laika’s drooping tail swished halfheartedly—one could hardly call it wagging.

  Josip’s pace became almost jaunty as he walked back down to the old city, and Laika trotted alongside him, a bit more blithely than usual.

  He had made a decision. He had found the solution. He did not need to borrow money from his friends.

  He impulsively decided to take Laika home with him, regardless of what his wife would say. Things there couldn’t get any worse than they already were, and maybe Katarina would be amused. After all, his inspiration was thanks to the dog.

  He tied her to the Alka-Seltzer sign that Knević placed on the sidewalk in front of his pharmacy every day and went inside to ask how the postman was faring.

  He was in stable condition, said Knević, who, more or less as the envoy of the café regulars, had visited him in the hospital. Concussion, fractured collarbone and arm, facial wounds, significant blood loss.

  “They’ve given him four transfusions. Maybe even with his own blood—did you know he was a donor?”

  No, Josip did not know that.

  “He had one of those medallions around his neck, with his blood type. That might have saved his life.”

  “A good man, then, our Andrej. I had no idea he donated blood.”

  “He did it for the money,” Knević said.

  “Of course, that’s true, isn’t it. Do you know when he’ll be discharged?”

  “They usually keep you in for two weeks. But he insists on getting out earlier, the sooner the better. When he came to, his first words were, ‘Home … the mail … the mail …’”

  “Utter dedication,” Josip said, deadpan.

  When he arrived home with the dog, his wife was sitting in the kitchen smoking, a full ashtray and a pack of cigarettes within arm’s reach.

  “Hello,” he said. He hadn’t called her by her name in years. “We’ve got a guest. I’ve brought her for Katarina.”

  Now, like whenever he spoke to her in a firm, dispassionate tone, she did not reply, but stared at him blankly. Her face, once attractive, albeit somewhat peasantish, had become round and contourless, as though she originated on the distant Asian steppes rather than a village not even fifty kilometers away; it looked like her mental degradation was accompanied by the sudden manifestation of the genes of God knows which Mongolian or Kyrgyz tribe. Josip had not only lost the young woman he once loved, but he was condemned to a life with a creature with whom, he felt at times, he did not even share a common race or even species. In spite of all this he tended to treat her with courtesy and respect, but she only took this as a sign of weakness and attacked him mercilessly. Only when, like now, he assumed a posture that would not abide dissent did she retreat into passivity. Severity and hard-nosedness were all she responded to. Unfortunately this was not in his nature, and he could not maintain it constantly. She looked at him in silence, like a kulak awaiting her master’s cudgel. Saliva glistened on her chin.

  “I want you to let her enjoy it. No scenes. Understood?”

  She gaped at him with her vacant blue eyes, hands folded on her lap, her only response being to stick her foot in the drum of the washing machine, as though expecting a pedicure.

  Josip held the leash so tightly that the dog began to make rasping sounds. His wife kept quiet, but she was as unpredictable as a proletarian on the eve of the revolution. Sometimes he was afraid she would slit his throat while he slept.

  He went to his bedroom, Katarina’s favorite place to play. He cracked open the door and used his leg to keep the dog out of sight, for it had to be a surprise. She was sitting cross-legged on the rug next to the bed, working on her pony puzzle.

  “Sweetheart? Can I come in?” This was a joke that always got a laugh; she grinned, gurgled some strange noises, and batted wildly at the air with her outstretched arms, as though to say, “Yes, yes, now the fun can start.”

  “We’ve got an important visitor. A princess.”

  Katarina pulled h
er dress over her knees and waited. He undid the leash and pushed Laika inside.

  Laika strode across the rug as only a creature on four greyhound legs could and seated herself with unassuming gracefulness. Katarina laid the puzzle pieces still in her hand carefully onto the rug. Laika cocked her narrow head and followed Katarina’s every move. Katarina reached out and touched the dog’s nose. Laika looked at her with bulging eyes, cautiously raised a foreleg, and placed it on the girl’s knee. They both drooled.

  Josip took off his jacket and unbuttoned his shirt.

  “You’ll be friends, won’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Katarina thoughtfully, “I’m fluzzie number one and she’s fluzzie number hundred.”

  “That’s nice. Now Papa’s going to lie down on the bed. Papa’s tired.”

  Josip stared at the ceiling fan, which for some thirty years had been as inert as a grave cross. It was a good plan. He would let one criminal pay the other. A win-win situation: Andrej could keep his job, the blackmailer would get his money, and he himself would get off scot-free.

  But how and where to arrange the payoffs?

  While he stared at the motionless blades of the fan and at the flies creeping over them, he came up with an absurd idea.

  Couldn’t he pick out another concrete block at the side of the ring road, so that the criminals actually paid each other, without him as intermediary? That would be a nifty trick, and one with a fine moral.

  Josip started to laugh. First noiselessly, but then with long, rasping, deep breaths that made his belly shake.

  Katarina’s eyeglassed head poked over the edge of the bed.

  “Why are you laughing?” she said. “You never laugh.”

  “Yes, I know,” Josip replied, and made himself more comfortable by undoing the top button of his trousers.

  “So why?”

  Now half a worried greyhound head also poked over the edge of the bed.

  “That’s a secret. I’ll tell you another time.”

  “Stupid Papa,” she shouted angrily. His daughter did not like it when things were not as they usually were. The last time he returned from Zagreb, she had sniffed him suspiciously and said, “You smell too sweet.” In the future he would take a shower before getting on the bus.

  “Go work on your puzzle,” he said.

  Right now he had to think practically. He could simply address the letter to Andrej and put it in the mail; the postman would deliver it to himself, once he was better. He would never ask for more money than the blackmailer demanded from him. He was a decent man, after all. A concrete block at the side of the Zrinskog as a drop-off point was by now a tried-and-true method, but it seemed to him better to pick his own spot. In his mind’s eye he traversed the city, starting on the boulevard and then up through the old town, each time via a different alley or stairway. But he mustn’t choose somewhere too close to home. The new apartment blocks up on the hill were not an option, as this was entirely unfamiliar terrain. It wasn’t at all easy to think like a criminal when you weren’t one.

  With each piece of the jigsaw puzzle, his daughter explained to Laika in great detail what she was doing. The dog in turn made the occasional squeaking noise, which he hoped did not mean she needed to be taken out.

  Little by little, his thoughts brought him higher up in the hills, and farther outside town. The lookout from the funicular’s upper station offered him myriad possibilities. Wasn’t there, a bit to the north, a narrow, steep stretch of farmland and a few vineyards? He had seldom been there but could picture it quite clearly now. There were narrow paths and dirt roads, rising and falling but always more or less following the contour lines. There were uninhabited huts and sheds where landholders or tenant farmers stored their tractors and equipment. The earth was red-brown and arid, and when it was plowed, the furrows traced patterns in the landscape resembling fingerprints. The grapes grown there were of such poor quality that they were used only for vinegar or the very cheapest supermarket wine sold in paper cartons. This was a promising place for the beginning blackmailer: it was off the beaten track, and he could walk there from the heroes’ monument unseen. Now Josip remembered the overhead power lines. Aside from the army’s broadcasting mast on a hilltop farther to the north, these were the region’s highest structures. Although he understood nothing of electrotechnology, he had always liked them, probably because they were so simply and transparently constructed, as though from a Meccano set; like three acrobats standing on each other’s shoulders, their stumpy metal arms spread wide and escorting the eighteen thick cables in elegant catenaries up the hillside until they disappeared behind the limestone peaks. Josip clearly imagined the entire setting. But what now interested him most—the base of each tower—escaped him. He would have to visit the place to take a closer look. If he remembered correctly, farmers plowed around the concrete corner blocks that supported the pylons, and in between them grew a wild patch of impenetrable thornbushes. That would be the ideal drop-off spot.

  Josip suddenly felt incredibly talented, lying there on his bed and working out the details of a game he had never played before. “Papa, can she come live with us?” asked his daughter.

  “Who?” he asked absently.

  “The doggy.”

  “I don’t think so, honey. She belongs to the postman, and one of these days he’ll get out of the hospital and he’ll be wanting her back.”

  “Maybe he won’t get out, ever,” Katarina said hopefully. “Maybe he’ll die.”

  “Don’t say things like that. It’s not nice. And besides, the postman is a good friend of mine.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I helped save his life. That makes you friends with the person, you see?”

  His daughter did not answer, but he could tell she was sulking.

  What had steered Andrej onto the road to vice? Perhaps being a bachelor. Josip had always thought it strange, his fascination with those magazines—even the foreign ones he couldn’t read, as long as they featured pictures of glamorous women. He must be so lonely. He had no Jana in his life.

  Josip’s mind wandered to his next visit to Zagreb, the following week already. There was nothing finer in life than Jana’s nylon-clad thighs. He wondered why she never became a film star. He had never experienced moments of greater bliss than on her sofa, after she had put on some soft jazz and dimmed the brass lamps with the pink lampshades. He hadn’t even known that dimmers existed until he met Jana. At home the light switches were all black Bakelite rotary knobs, which you dared not touch with damp hands. Of course, the gifts he gave her played a role, but the bottom line was true love. He considered himself fortunate that life had granted him the kind of happiness poor Andrej would never know.

  Andrej left the hospital earlier than the doctors had wanted and went straight home. The bunch of wildflowers had wilted, and the vase was dry. Laika wasn’t there. Knević had told him Schmitz, Mario, and Tudjman had taken turns caring for her. Tudjman, of all people. Andrej’s uniform jacket lay folded on the kitchen table, still in the plastic cover from the dry cleaners, the cap resting on top. At first glance it did not look like his malfeasance had been discovered. Even the empty mailbags hung over the back of a chair, like saddlebags awaiting a fresh horse so as to resume their journey. The bicycle was gone, of course; it had most likely been totaled. That day’s mail would certainly have long been delivered by a colleague. But what about those letters he had steamed open? There was no memo of dismissal from the postal service, no letter from the postal workers’ union offering legal aid, no court subpoena.

  Andrej stumbled, his head still bandaged, through the apartment looking for clues. Nothing appeared to have been touched—until he opened his wallet, which had been placed meticulously on a corner of the kitchen table, as though the finder was keen to emphasize that his privacy had been thoroughly respected.

  The amount in dinars, which he remembered precisely, was still there. But one thing was missing: the British banknote.

 
Andrej telephoned the postmaster, who expressed his surprise that he wanted to get back to work so soon. Why not take six or ten weeks’ rest after this occupational injury? Why not take advantage of the fully paid physical rehab he was entitled to? But Andrej did not want rehab. He wanted to know who had been snooping in his mailbags that day, who had taken the banknote from his wallet. That very first evening he took a walk along the ring road. Tudjman’s envelope containing the thousand-dinar notes was still under the concrete block. That proved, at least, that even though he’d been in Andrej’s apartment to care for the dog, Tudjman hadn’t connected him with the blackmail. Apparently he hadn’t looked in the cabinet where Andrej kept the photos and negatives.

  The next day he went to the pharmacy to pick up blood thinners and sleeping pills, and casually inquired who had given him first aid at the scene of the accident.

  “Oh … ,” Knević said, “everyone rushed to help. We were all sitting there when it happened.”

  “Yes, yes, that saved my life. But afterward? I mean, who took my uniform to the dry cleaners? And who turned the undelivered mail over to the postmaster? I want to thank everyone personally.”

  “Tudjman took care of the dog, mostly. He offered to right away,” Knević said, sliding a paper bag with handles across the counter as he started to instruct Andrej on the use of the injection needles for the blood thinners.

  “I know. And the mail, and my personal belongings?”

  “Gosh, I couldn’t say. Everyone was crowded around … Mario, maybe? Or no, it might have been Marković, he was going to take your mailbags on the bus. I really can’t remember, to be honest.”

  “Not Schmitz?”

  “No, not him. He did offer to finish your round, but you know how much trouble he has walking, especially on stairs.”

  “Yes … so you think it was Marković?”

  “I didn’t say that. Why don’t you just come down to Café Rubin sometime? We’re there every Saturday afternoon, at the tables out front. You could offer a thank-you round, if you want. Everyone did their bit.”