The Pelican

by Martin Michael Driessen

  On the white plastic tub sat an Apollo butterfly, a Parnassius apollo, the most beautiful and rare butterfly in all of Croatia, one which was normally only spotted in the national nature reserve.

  Andrej gingerly lifted his camera. This was a magnificent specimen. Its wings, with their six red eyespots, quivered in the breeze.

  The cheap plastic tub would spoil a calendarworthy photograph, but he snapped a few shots anyway, just to be on the safe side. Once the butterfly flew off there was no telling where it would land.

  He did not get another chance: the butterfly flew away when he approached and showed no intention of landing on a photogenic blossom, and Andrej soon lost sight of it.

  “Pity about that plastic tub,” Schmitz said when they inspected the prints together, “otherwise it would have been perfect for a postcard.”

  “True,” Andrej replied and slid the photos back into the envelope. You couldn’t very well sell a postcard of a white plastic lid with the clearly visible sell-by date 02-03-1988.

  “You should get yourself a camera with a telephoto lens, so you don’t scare them off. And what’s more, the butterfly comes out perfectly sharp while the background is blurry. Here, look, I’ve got one, a Leica. Almost the same name as that cute dog of yours! It’s got a focal length of —”

  Andrej cut him off with a shake of the head. “Another time, Papa Schmitz. I’m a little short on cash at the moment.”

  “I can give you a twenty percent discount. Dear boy, I’m so happy you are taking pictures again!”

  “No, really, not right now.”

  “You know what, I’ll give you thirty percent off.” Schmitz rested his soft, spotted hand on Andrej’s. “I look at it as an investment. If you were to make a really good series of that Apollo butterfly …”

  Irritated with Schmitz’s pushiness, Andrej snapped, “You won’t be able to sell those cards of yours anywhere except here. Mario won’t stock them at the Avis office, and he’ll stop the hotel from ordering them. And you can forget Tudjman’s kiosk altogether, after that stunt you pulled back at the café.”

  Old Schmitz gave him a hurt look and sank back down on his stool.

  “Ah, so there we are, I’m a pariah in my own city. And why? Because I dare to speak the truth.”

  “Nonsense. That anti-Semitism of yours is complete drivel.”

  “What would you know about it? You didn’t live through the war. You don’t know the repression we Croats had to endure. And by who? By the Jews, the Freemasons, the Serbs. Now Serbia’s about to annex Kosovo and Montenegro. We haven’t learned anything from history, that’s our problem. That is the tragedy of our fatherland. Do you still go to Café Rubin?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “What do they say about me? What does Knević say?”

  “Nothing. No one mentions you anymore.”

  Old Schmitz let his head droop and mumbled, “The silent treatment. Shunned because of my ideals.”

  Andrej patted him on the shoulder. “Come now, Papa Schmitz, don’t make such a drama of it. Plenty of others here ran the Jews out of town, but that’s all been forgiven and forgotten. You’re the only one foolish enough to keep bringing it up.”

  When Schmitz looked up, there were tears in his eyes.

  “You’re the only one I have left, Andrej.”

  He took a tissue and blew his nose.

  “I’ve often thought: if only you had been there. With the Ustaša, when we had our own Independent State of Croatia. That’s where you belonged.”

  “Me? Why?” It was not often that a conversation revolved around him.

  “My dear boy … You are the personification of the ideal Croatian man. When I picture you in that uniform, with saber belt and boots … and your height … Even the SS didn’t have men like that. I swear to you, you would have had a magnificent career.”

  “Career?”

  “Of course. You’re a pure example of the Dinaric race. Those Serbs belong to the Slavic race, but we’re Aryans, just like the Germans.”

  “And you, then?” Andrej asked, a bit maliciously.

  “I realize I’m different from you,” Schmitz conceded, as though he were prepared to make allowances as long as his young friend went along with him in the big picture. “I’m Mediterranean-Alpine. But there’s a good reason I’ve got a German name. My family is from Graz.”

  “So you think I could have made a name for myself during the war?”

  “Absolutely,” Schmitz said. “But your day will come. Mark my words, it won’t be long now.”

  “Za dom—spremni!” Andrej said as a joke, springing to attention.

  “For the homeland—ready!” Schmitz repeated, raising his right hand.

  “I have to be getting home, Papa Schmitz,” Andrej said, tucking the envelope of unusable butterfly photos into his inside pocket. “I’ll have a think about that Leica.”

  Josip’s recent visit to Zagreb had not gone as he had hoped. Jana was out of sorts. Her bed was not decked, as usual, in red satin linens; in fact, it looked as if it hadn’t been made up in weeks. Jana was also without makeup, her face swollen and pale. He sat on the sofa next to an old woman, or at least with one who suddenly did not look twenty years younger than him. But Josip was a decent fellow and did not want to give her the impression that he was only there for the sex. They were soul mates, after all, but even then, a man did not gladly sit for two hundred kilometers on a bus only to find something no better than what he already had at home.

  Forgive me, Josip, she had said, I’m just not in the mood.

  Of course Josip forgave her, and he got up to mix a drink. It came out soon enough: she had money problems. They threatened to evict her, she said, because she was in arrears with the rent. And this was because her best friend Yelena had borrowed money from her and then skipped town with a Bosnian ne’er-do-well; she should have known better, because Yelena was a Taurus with a dreadfully discordant Jupiter … but it was too late now. And on top of it, she had lost her job at the nail salon. To cut to the chase: she was in dire straits. Josip sympathized and comforted her. In bed she made a halfhearted attempt to please him, but Josip’s mind was elsewhere, as he was trying to come up with a solution.

  Sometimes a man needs a certain distance in order to figure things out. Josip got this chance when the bus got stuck underneath the roof of a gas station halfway home. The delay set them back more than an hour, giving him plenty of time to think.

  To start with, he could temporarily demand more money from Andrej. As a full-time employee, he had more to lose if his secret ever became public. The extra cash could go to help Jana.

  They let the air out of the tires to lower the bus, and when it had been freed and they were able to continue their journey toward the coast, it suddenly hit him.

  Schmitz. Of course. It was Schmitz.

  Only Schmitz was cultivated and cunning enough to think it all up—and he was a photographer to boot. And what about that dirty taunting of his, with that cooked-up story about the Jews and the funicular? Everything pointed to Schmitz believing he had some sort of power over Josip, and enjoying it, too. The man was a racist; he was a bad egg through and through. Everyone knew that his photo shop hardly broke even, and that he had practically no pension. His gimpy leg did not offer the least alibi, because he had one of those little cars in which he could very well have driven to the Zrinskog and even to Rijeka.

  It was Schmitz, Josip was now convinced of it.

  But how to unmask him? Josip was not a quick thinker, and it was only a few weeks later that he came up with a solution.

  The political situation had become so complicated that every Saturday it took Knević longer to explain it to the others. At present, a Bosnian was chairman of the presidium and therefore also head of state, a position that rotated annually among the member states Slovenia, Macedonia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Vojvodina. The last Croatian had been Mika Špiljak. But the parliament, Knević said,
was a sham anyway. The Republic, which had for so long been held together by Tito’s iron fist, would soon crumble, this much was certain. The Serbs claimed that their minorities in Kosovo and even here in Croatia were discriminated against, and they demanded a border revision, which Knević saw as a prelude to the expansion of Greater Serbia. “And what did Špiljak do for our country, anyway?” he said. “He was toothless. Where did he let the Olympic Games take place? In Sarajevo!”

  “He should have seen to it that the games were held here, in our mountains,” Josip agreed.

  “Be realistic, man,” Mario said. “There’s never enough snow.”

  “Oh no? Don’t you remember that time we couldn’t even find our tents?”

  “Camping trip?” Marković asked.

  “No, World War II,” Josip said.

  “Nevertheless,” Mario said, with that man-of-the-world air that sometimes irked Josip, “the Olympic Committee had chosen Bosnia years earlier, when Tito was still president. That’s just the way these things go.”

  “I personally didn’t have any problem with Sarajevo,” Marković remarked. “Jure Franko won a medal on the giant slalom.”

  “He was Slovenian.”

  “So what? Slovenians are good Yugoslavians. There are hardly any Serbs there. I still consider myself Yugoslavian.”

  “The giant slalom and politics are two different things, gentlemen,” Knević reminded them.

  The conversation then turned to the Hungarian minority in Vojvodina, which Josip did not even know existed. His fatherland basically resembled the bizarre jigsaw puzzle that Andrej and Katarina had put together, where although the pieces did actually fit together, they did not form a logical whole.

  Some of them saw an armed conflict as inevitable. Croatia would be attacked, especially if a man like Milošević were to rise to power.

  But aside from the debates at Café Rubin, not much happened in the town. The Serbian residents, a couple hundred of them, kept out of trouble, and in turn no one bothered them. Everyone was on greeting terms with the priest of their Orthodox church, and people still bought their vegetables from Goran Kostić, whose standard saying was that pumpkins were pumpkins and needed no passport.

  People led their lives as always; their fate was decided in far-off places like Belgrade, just as in the days of Venice, Istanbul, Vienna, and Berlin. At times a shadow seemed to fall over the bay and the town; usually it passed as quickly as the shadows the clouds cast on the gray slopes of the Velebit, but sometimes it seemed to the townspeople that the sunshine and sparkling blue sea might be camouflaging some approaching misfortune and inevitable death, and that life would never be the same.

  But most people chose not to think about it. Not think about it, and carry on with one’s everyday activities, seemed the most sensible thing to do. It was as if they said, “What does it have to do with us? Maybe nothing. And what if it did? There is nothing to be done. Why fret about the rest of the world? They’ll let us know if they want something from us, and we’ll see how it all turns out.” This was the mentality that had allowed them to survive for thousands of years, while the empires of the doges and the sultans and the emperors and the dictators had all bitten the dust. Pumpkins were still pumpkins.

  Katarina had fallen down the stairs and had a strange-looking bulge on the outside of her left leg.

  “Why didn’t you call for the doctor?” Josip asked when he returned home.

  His wife shrugged. “She’s fine there on the sofa, isn’t she? And that dog of yours is keeping her company.”

  He bent over his daughter and cautiously felt her knee. “Is it bad, sweetie?”

  Katarina, engrossed in a Donald Duck comic book, nodded absently. As usual, she seemed insensitive to pain, and barely flinched when he lifted her leg onto his lap and pressed the kneecap back into place. Mario had screamed bloody murder when Josip did the same to him back in 1945. He wondered if being impervious to pain was a blessing or a curse. Perhaps the former, if one’s awareness of the world was as limited as Katarina’s. But he would give her some aspirin anyway and wrap a cold compress around her knee, and he went into the bathroom.

  His wife’s reflection appeared in the bathroom mirror.

  “What are you doing there?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Taking care of our daughter.”

  “Our daughter? Who says she’s mine? You’ve been an adulterer as long as I’ve known you.”

  Josip wrung out the washcloth, turned, and leaned against the washbasin.

  “Have you lost your mind, Ljubica? What’s become of you?”

  She glowered at him and said, slowly and clearly, “You have ruined everything.”

  He shook his head, as though trying to fend off a swarm of hornets.

  “Listen. She is our child. We have to help her.”

  “And who will help me?”

  “I would, if you’d let me. But you won’t.”

  She laughed derisively, playing the role of the betrayed queen. “You help me? Admit it, Tudjman. You’d rather see me dead than alive. But mark my words: I’ll outlive you.”

  Josip considered that this might be his very last chance to speak rationally with her.

  “Ljubica …”

  “What?”

  “I once loved you so much.”

  This seemed to please her somewhat. Not that she believed him, but the fact that he said it.

  “Oh, yes. Almost as much as my sister.”

  Josip looked her straight in the eye for the first time in years. He was even prepared to take her in his arms, if that would help normalize the situation somewhat.

  “Listen. She’s our child.”

  “But I’m not simple, like she is.”

  “Of course you’re not. But her knee was dislocated.”

  His wife nodded and said, “All right, give me those pills.”

  Josip opened his hand. She took the aspirin from him and popped them in her mouth.

  He grabbed her angrily by her shoulders, but this was ill-advised, because as soon as she swallowed them, she grabbed his suspenders and, hanging on them, she whispered, “I am, too, Josip Tudjman. I am completely dislocated.”

  Andrej and Josip sat side by side on the steps of the heroes’ monument and shared bread and salami. Josip told him, for the first time, about his wife and their terrible marriage. Andrej listened in silence, flattered that Josip would confide in him and afraid that any comment he made might interrupt Josip’s unbosoming.

  Mario and he, Josip said, had fought together in the war and in 1945 they returned home to a hero’s welcome. They started dating the sisters Marija and Ljubica.

  “Things were different back then,” Josip told him. “Young people nowadays can wait until they meet the love of their life. Just like you’re doing. But in those days …”

  Everyone was in a hurry to marry and start a family to make up for the lost years. He could just as well have ended up marrying Marija, and Mario marrying Ljubica.

  “How different things could have been. They were lively young women … and of course, we were heroes.”

  Josip spat out the casing from a slice of salami; it was made of plastic nowadays. “You know Marija, right? Mario’s wife?”

  Not really, said Andrej, but he knew she was a beautiful woman. He thought her bleached-blonde hair was sexy. He considered bleached blondes, like Princess Grace, even more attractive than natural blondes.

  That was a matter of taste, Josip said, then continued. “Marija could have been my wife. She danced with me as often as Ljubica danced with Mario. But you know how it goes: women have a way of making their own plans, and before I knew it, she and Mario were standing at the altar together, and Ljubica and me.” It had been a double ceremony, two sisters getting married on the same day to two men who had been born on the same day. An occasion that heralded a new, hopeful future, according to the town’s then-mayor.

  “But you know how it turned out. Mario and his wife had a healthy son. We ha
d Mirko.”

  “What was the matter with him?” Andrej asked.

  Josip explained, and also told him about Katarina and about the steady debilitation, both mentally and physically, of his wife.

  “You’ve got it rough,” Andrej said.

  “Oh, what the hell,” Josip sighed. “Everyone does. So do you.”

  “True,” Andrej said.

  They were silent for a while and looked out over the rooftops.

  Then Josip asked, slightly awkwardly, “Has my wife … how shall I put it … ever made advances? Approached you in an improper manner?”

  “No,” Andrej said, “but I do think she’s got some strange ideas in her head.”

  Josip nodded. “That’s for sure. Especially when it concerns me. She’s obsessively jealous. She has made my life a living hell.”

  Andrej said nothing, and opened two beer bottles with a lighter, a trick he had learned from Marković.

  “She is convinced I’m a skirt-chaser. And it’s been a while since things between us have gone as they should go in a marriage, if you get my drift.”

  Andrej nodded and set the two bottles between them.

  “I might not be so young anymore, but of course a man still has his needs. And I’m not just talking about the physical ones. You need a woman you can share things with, the good as well as the bad.”

  They reached for their bottles and raised them in agreement. They understood one another completely, without even making eye contact.

  Andrej drank and watched as the rabbits below them foraged and, every now and then, hopped over the rails. Maybe they could bring Laika along sometime so she could chase them.

  “I know how it is,” he said. “I’m alone, too.”

  “You’re still young. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”

  Andrej hadn’t had that feeling in quite some time, but on the other hand, he wasn’t in as much trouble as Tudjman.

  After a long silence, Josip said, “I’m going to tell you something. In confidence.”