Island of The World

by Michael D. O'Brien

  “Nor can I, Josip, but here we are.”

  “Here we are.”

  “I do not know what to say.”

  “Nor do I.”

  “But we are speaking.”

  “We are—without words.”

  “Without words.”

  14

  The time is three months later. They have taken many walks together throughout the city, seeing things long familiar, but entirely new because they are seeing together. The meals Josip has taken with the Horvatinec family have put a little weight on his frame, which until now has been bone and muscle in its minimalist form. More meat and fish have helped. His cheeks have filled out; his color is better. The only interests he and Ariadne do not share are running and swimming. He has dropped out of the university swim team, but he continues to do a hundred laps each day. She approves of his perseverance, but she says she prefers to walk. Besides, it is impossible to hold hands properly when you run or swim, nor can you really speak with each other. When you are running, running is your primary focus. When you swim, swimming is your focus. When they walk together, they are the focus and need not pay attention to where they are going.

  Vera scolds Ariadne for neglecting her studies. This is not so, but it is true that she no longer practices violin four or five hours a day. Now it is three hours a day, and the rest of the time is spent either walking with Josip or staring out her bedroom window, anticipating his arrival.

  It is much the same for Josip. He is writing his master’s thesis, but he can concentrate on it only with an extra effort of the will. Even so, in the privacy of his little cement cell, whenever he looks up from his books, he sees her face floating above the mountains. Near him or far from him, she is always here.

  He looks back down to his papers, sighs, and continues to write:

  The Newtonian universe, which conceives reality as a mechanism, is concerned exclusively with material phenomena: weight and mass, volume and velocities, and thus its refusal to consider beauty and faith as realities. With the advent of twentieth-century physics, the realm of philosophical speculation returns. Einstein’s differential equation of gravity or Schroedinger’s wave equation do not prove the existence of the metaphysical, but they no longer banish the questions that arise in human nature regarding the nature of ultimate reality (which once more may be considered), that is, dimensions beyond the empirically evident. The “intelligence” evident in mathematics, for example, cannot “prove” anything about the ultimate nature of reality, yet it can now function in an inferential manner as a signpost into the unknown. Thus—

  He throws down his pen, closes his eyes. I love her, I love her, I love her!

  They have not yet kissed. They have not even discussed it. They merely know that the time is not ripe for it. Their love is so great that a single prolonged kiss might burn up the land, ignite the sea. He kisses her forehead, cheeks, her hands. She responds in kind. They are always pressing close, side by side, arm to arm. In winter it is possible to embrace through thick coats. When spring comes, they will desist. Their hands are ever in danger of melting into a single unit. They send love to each other through their eyes, reinforced by the subtlest touches of hand to face. Once a month, they attend a symphony concert together. Once a week, they walk to the top of the Marjan and spend a few hours there, resting, talking, laughing. She too has always loved the sea. Now they love it together. Sometimes she lies down on her back with her head resting on his chest, and he strokes her forehead with his fingertips until she falls asleep. At other times she merely looks into his eyes for a long time; then, on an impulse, she reaches up and puts a finger to his lips, or the palm of her hand against his cheek. He feels pain (fear and loss) whenever he returns her to her home and they must part until tomorrow. Yet there is joy in the pain because the reunion the next day is always better than the one before.

  So it grows and grows, and none can stop it, none deflect it from its course.

  They have discussed many subjects together: music and mathematics, poetry and politics, love and suffering, desire and self-denial, and also their pasts.

  Though love has dissolved many of the ramparts that have guarded his most devastating memories, Josip cannot tell her everything that has happened to him. Indeed he has told her only, with a choked voice, that his parents died in the war, were murdered by Partisans, and that he is alone in the world. Seeing that he is unable to tell her more, she does not probe. Instead, she kisses him on the lips, swiftly and tenderly. This happens on the topmost rock of the Marjan. He returns the kiss as gently as it is given.

  Arms around each other now, they realize that this long-anticipated kiss, which has come at last, contains for the moment no carnal desire. They know as well that the longer they keep their passions in check, the deeper their soul-love will grow.

  “I did not know I was so alone”, he says at last, “until you came. Suddenly I discovered two things at once. I understood that I had been alone within myself—since childhood—and that I am now no longer alone.”

  “This is what we were made for, Josip, to find each other and no longer to wander through this world in isolation.”

  “I mistook isolation for solitude. I loved my solitude, and now I no longer love it.”

  “It was the same for me. Music was my companion and my spouse. I still love it, but it can never again be enough for me.”

  “Do you not fear that it will be taken away from us?”

  “Yes, I fear it. But I believe we must cast out the fear. Then our love will be indestructible.”

  “So many people have lost love or never found it. So many are alone. So many.”

  “If we live our love fully, then we can love them too.”

  “We will love, fully.” He nods solemnly.

  She takes his hand just as he is reaching for hers. How is it that they seem to move as one, when they have barely begun to live as one?

  “I cannot tell you what I love in you, Ariadne, because if I were to try I would not cease speaking, and then there would be no time left to live it.”

  “I am the same, Josip. The same”, her voice trails into a whisper. “The gift we have been given is so great, a lifetime of gratitude would not be enough to repay it.”

  “One does not repay a gift.”

  She smiles, “Yes, you are right.”

  Her hand is a small sun resting in his. He will never let it go. This holding is life to him; to let go of it is to sink into darkness.

  “Still I would speak to you”, he says. “I must speak. The signs and gestures and our self-denial—all of these speak. But there are other languages that can take us higher.”

  “Like certain kinds of music.”

  “Yes, they help us rise even as we create them.”

  “Love is higher than mankind, Josip, but within us too. It is love who creates in us.”

  “You say who”

  “Yes, I say who. It is very mysterious. It moves silently and without intrusion. It is a force, yet it does not force. It is a power, yet it is the gentlest thing on earth. It is a fire, its flames even brighter than the flame within your heart and mine. In fact, I believe we are within something greater that flows through us. But this is not just energy or biology. It’s as if—no, I can’t find the right words for it.” She pauses, then continues. “It’s as if you and I are alone together, yet not alone. It’s as if another is with us who is the source of our union.”

  “Do you mean God?”

  “I’m not sure. But I feel that there is more in us than ourselves. Our love is not only our love. I know this does not make sense, but it does to me, at this moment anyway.”

  “Love is a language without words”, he whispers and can say no more.

  “Without words”, she says, then she smiles suddenly at the necessity of using words.

  They lean into each other for a while, supporting themselves shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand.

  “When I was a boy,” Josip says at last, “I used to spea
k a kind of language that did not make sense. It gave me pleasure, though my mother scolded me for it. She warned me that I must not talk nonsense.”

  “And your father?”

  “I think he understood. He never scolded me when I was being foolish, as my mother called it.”

  Sitting on the big rock beside the oak tree in their backyard, he is gazing out over the roofs of Rajska Polja and beyond, surveying the valley as a whole. His mother is seated on the grass beside the rock, cracking walnut shells that she will boil to make a dye that is useful for staining raw wool. She is humming to herself. They are both feeling whimsical and light-hearted that day.

  As he gazes at the valley, Josip is learning that parts compose a whole but are not the summation of it. He is perhaps only nine or ten years old at the time, and he has discovered that parts have a kind of being in themselves, yet they can also belong to something greater. At the moment, the valley is, in turn, part of a whole called Herzegovina. It is part of the world. The world is part of the solar system, and the solar system is part of the universe. The universe is a sea.

  It all fits together, and it moves in a marvelous order. This is the first time he has seen it with his eyes. Though, of course, his textbooks and Tata’s lessons have already inscribed it in his mind. Now it lives. It is immense, complex, and so moving that tears spring unbidden to his eyes. “O cosmos!” he gasps.

  His mother turns to him curiously and smiles. “What did you say, Joshko?”

  In reply, he takes one of the white stones from the sea out of his pocket and rolls it around in the palm of his hand.

  “It’s so beautiful, Mamica,” he breathes, “so beautiful . . .”

  “Yes, it’s a nice stone. Don’t lose it.”

  He had not meant that the stone was beautiful, only that everything is wondrous and the particular harmony in the stone’s form reflects the vast harmony in which they live and move and have their being. His eyes are misted with the wonder of it all, his immersion in a world that he has not really understood before.

  He turns to her and says, “The sea is a cosmos, and the cosmos is a sea.”

  She chuckles. “Well, it’s not quite like that.”

  “But it is”, he says emphatically, yearning for her to understand.

  She is exasperated by his speaking cryptically. He has been doing a lot of it lately. Something he said about a feather the other day, and then there was all that nonsense about the swallows—as if they could talk to a boy!

  “We swim in it!” he declares.

  “What do you mean, we swim in it? Swim in what?”

  “The cosmos.”

  “Josip, stop that now. People will think you’ve lost your wits.”

  “But it makes me happy.”

  “How happy will you be when you’re sent to a hospital for crazy boys?”

  She kisses him, and tells him to go find more walnuts.

  Now, all these years later, he remembers that incident as freshly as the day it happened. Perhaps it was fourteen or fifteen years ago, in a time before the world ended.

  “My father was a literate man”, Josip says to Ariadne. “Not in the sense of one who merely filled his mind with the contents of what he read. He understood that words of beauty and truth raise man higher than himself. No, that is not exactly what I mean. To be honest, he and I never talked about it. But I remember the stories he read to me, and I remember him smiling at me whenever I spoke in my strange tongue.”

  “What did you say in that tongue, Josip?”

  “Little things.”

  The blue feather falling from the sky is sent. “About nature?”

  “Yes.”

  The sea is breathing. Then, later:

  The dove, soaring, sees the distant curve of the earth, and trembles at its shape— The sea surrounding it is deeper than fathoming. Later still:

  Rising higher, he looks down to the small orderings of man—

  “I once wrote a line of poetry”, she says. “It came from somewhere inside of me, but I don’t know where. They were terribly important to me, those few words. They seemed to have no beginning and no end.”

  “What were the words?”

  “The wing’s curve, the wind’s curve, the earth’s curve”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes, that’s all.” She squeezes his hand. “So you see, I too was capable of foolishness” “How old were you?”

  “Twelve. I remember because it was my birthday, the day we heard that my uncle had been arrested.”

  “The curve of a wing and the arc of the planet. To connect them is a way of seeing, Ariadne.”

  “Yes, but what did I see? And what did it have to do with my uncle? I was crying for him, alone in my bedroom. Then the words came. They just came, and now all these years later I still do not know why. Yet I remember them, and I know I must not forget them.”

  “It’s strange isn’t it? I have so many passages like that in my memory, and also the feeling that they must be remembered. Why are we like this?”

  “I don’t know,” she smiles, “but I am certain of one thing: we are now like this together.”

  “How will these small wings carry me?” he whispers.

  “You are speaking your language, Josip.”

  “Yes. How will these small wings carry me, for the earth is so great and I am so small.”

  “The bird rises and takes us with it. Yet, as we rise, we tremble at what we begin to see.”

  “The curve of a wing, the curve of a horizon. Then we begin to understand, Ariadne, that we are very small.”

  “It seems to me that the higher we rise, the greater is the mystery of the unknown. The more we see, the more we realize how little we understand; but love shows us our greatness too.”

  “The world is growing cold. So much hatred, so much death, so much spilled blood.”

  “That is why love is needed, Josip. The indestructible love.”

  “And at last this love has come. You are here.”

  “I am here”, she whispers, looking up into his eyes. “I am here.”

  Her arrested uncle has been missing since 1945. A Jesuit priest, he taught theology in Zagreb. Refusing to flee before the approaching Partisan army, he remained in the city to minister to the wounded. He was caught in the net. He was Simon’s older brother.

  “Are your parents Christians?” Josip asks.

  “When I was a child, we went to church. As you can see, my mother is not exactly a typical Croat. She spent much of her life in Vienna. Tata studied surgery there before returning to Split. It’s where they met. Their circle of friends in Austria was the intellectual and cultural elite of the time. I think there were many atheists among them, but no Communists as far as I can tell. As you know, they have no love for either Communists or Fascists, so I suppose you could call them liberal democrats. They do not discuss it with me.”

  “One may be a devout Christian and a democrat. Antun and Tatjana, Ana and Zoran.”

  “Yes, but that’s not the case with my parents. You must understand, they are the best of people, Josip. They love each other and have been through so much since the Communists came to power. They shelter me from everything.”

  “Ariadne, this is one aspect of your family that puzzles me. Your father is a highly visible man, yet he is not connected to the regime, nor is he sympathetic in any way to it. And now our Dolphins put him in more danger. Why does he risk it? What does he hope to gain by it?”

  “He loves our people, and he knows that what we are has been purchased by untold centuries of sacrifice. He sees what has happened in Russia and is happening now in China. He hopes for the coming of true democracy, so that we will be free to know ourselves as we really are.”

  “But we are Catholics”, Josip murmurs, staring at the ground beneath his feet.

  “Yes, this is our socio-cultural consciousness. My uncle talked to me once about this. He was an extraordinary man. The summer before he was taken from us, he and I went for a
walk to the church down by the imperial palace, the little place the Franciscans have on the promenade. We went inside and prayed together. You must understand, Josip, that he was the most brilliant man, yet he could pray as a child. I loved him. I still love him.”

  “Yet you are not a believer.”

  “I’m not sure what I believe now. I love my family, and I believe in God. But I don’t know about religion. Josip, you said that we are Catholics. Yet you do not pray or go to church either.”

  “Catholicism is our culture and our history, and for that reason it is an indelible part of our Croat identity.”

  “Still, I wonder,” she says uneasily, “can there be a living culture without a living religion? That is what my uncle said to me the last time we saw each other. He told me that great evils were approaching and perhaps the crucifixion of the Church. Everyone would be put to the test. I thought he meant the Nazis, and so I argued that they were being pushed out. He said that after the Nazis there would come a worse evil. I would live to see it, he told me. His face was so worried, so anxious for me. He took me up to the tabernacle, and we knelt before it, side by side. He begged God not to let me fall into the evil. Later, as we walked together back to my home, he told me that the Communists would come and stay for a long time, but eventually they would lose power. After that would be the time of greatest danger, he said. A false peace, he called it, a moral void. And into that void the worst evil of all would come, if we do not recognize it and resist it.”

  “Did he say what kind of evil?”

  “No.”

  “Well, we have evil enough right now. It looks as if they will never lose power.”

  “Yes,” she nods, musing, “it looks that way. But we can still live as if their days are numbered.”

  “I suppose that’s what the Dolphins are about. Ariadne, I am still puzzled by your father’s confidence that we will not be troubled by the police.”

  “There are three reasons for his confidence. The first is that there is another brother. My father’s younger brother is an influential member of the Party. A high official in Dalmatia. The second reason is that my father is one of the most skilled spinal surgeons in Yugoslavia, perhaps in all of Europe. He has operated on people in the resistance and on big officials from Belgrade. No one would want to see him in prison.”