Island of The World

by Michael D. O'Brien

  “Finish him off! A big lunch!”

  “No, no, look at him. He can keep going!”

  “One more time, rabbit!”

  Slowly, slowly—rising on hands and knees—then wobbling upright. Again the blows rain down. “Last lap!”

  Shuffling forward, centimeter by centimeter, bending under the down-striking blows and the up-striking blows. A rib cracks. His mouth is gore—teeth are broken, and he spits them out.

  Finally, he is down on his belly and cannot move—he wants the guards to complete their work, send him out of this life—please, please kill me! But something inside him will not permit it. He can no longer rise on hands and knees. He slithers forward through the pools of blood.

  Now the laughing becomes guffaws.

  “Salamander! Reptile!”

  He is a steel thread of will, dragging a sack of agony. “Enough!”

  All kicks and blows cease. He can no longer move. “What a horse.”

  “Bath time for baby!” a guard shouts.

  Two forms with shaved heads come forward, barefoot and dressed only in canvas shorts. They pick up the first prisoner and drag him toward an iron oil barrel. There they lay him on the ground, change their grip on his body, lift him upside down, and plunge him head-first into the drum. Only the feet and shins are visible. The legs thrash weakly. Thirty seconds pass; they pull him out and drop him to the ground. He is unconscious, yet still breathing.

  “Next!”

  Josip sees them coming for him. He cannot move his limbs, which are now in spasm. The two men grab him and drag him toward the barrel.

  Bending to take him by the limbs, one whispers, “Courage.” They turn him upside down and plunge him into the drum. It contains seawater stained with blood. From the moment his flesh enters it, he begins to scream, a scream that grows in volume until every cell of his being is screaming eternally.

  18

  Consciousness returns.

  Buried in the folios is an abundance of material, much of it dramatic, some of it incredible, most of it banal. Why does the passage of time retain certain images in the forefront of the mind and relegate others (even the most astounding) to the background? Does the soul sift experience according to pain and pleasure, or according to its true destiny? Or does the mind do the sorting, archiving images according to a sense of destiny, however distorted this may be? There is much to ponder about this, and much that will remain imponderable.

  He remembers waking up in a cement box. Always, it seems, whenever he awakes from merciless blows, it is only to find himself within cold, hard enclosures. A coffin—if he should be granted so luxurious an item—will be his final box.

  Now, his eyes open upon a new world that is strangely familiar. A man is kneeling beside him, bending over him, swabbing his body with rags, which he dips into a metal bucket. Josip hopes his nurse is the Lastavica of the Sea, and for a time—as his mind blurs, then focuses, then blurs again—it is his old friend who ministers to the demolished flesh, though his wings are folded and his arms and hands have regrown. The face is the same.

  Josip closes his eyes, for he has become the blind man.

  “Is it you?” he cries.

  “I am Sova. Don’t try to talk.”

  Josip’s mouth is swollen and aching. But he needs reassurance more than the cessation of pain.

  “I know you have come to me,” he raves and weeps, “as on the day when you came to my fingers.”

  Because teeth are missing and everything is swollen, his tongue does not make the words properly.

  “Be quiet now. I must wash you. There is risk of infection.”

  “Though you say you are a sova, will you not speak to me as the lastavica ?”

  The man pauses and glances at Josip curiously.

  “Is it you, is it you?” says the mouth like a cavern of gore, the body shaking uncontrollably.

  “Yes, it is me”, Sova replies, stroking Josip’s forehead as Mamica used to do whenever he was ill.

  The blind man sighs, and his body becomes completely still. He is not dead, he is listening.

  “I knew you would come.”

  “I am here”, says Sova, “I am here.”

  When sanity returns, as it almost always does, two other prisoners roll Josip onto his belly. His bed is a heap of dirty canvas. Because he is a mass of open wounds, he is left unclothed. Flies are buzzing around him. Birds frequently fly in through an open doorway, materialize as walking shadows then become men who turn him over. They ignore his screams, wash the wounds on his back, turn him again, lift his head, pour soup down his throat, followed by more water. More and more water. Then a mash of wet bread. (Some birds will masticate the food for their chicks before stuffing it down their throats.)

  “Drink, you must drink!” the birds tell him.

  Whenever they are disguised as humans, the birds are distinct individuals. One day, they make him sit up. Another day, two of them pull him to his feet and walk him from one end of the cement box to the other. His legs vibrate underneath him, and, when they collapse, the birds carefully lay him down again.

  Sova is washing his body. Josip examines his face, which the owl has carefully changed into a man’s so as not to frighten him.

  “I know it is you”, he whispers. “Don’t try to talk. You’re not ready.”

  “Speak to me. Am I dead?”

  “No, you are not dead.”

  “I cannot die.”

  “You cannot die?” says the owl, raising an eyebrow.

  “I must live”, chokes the mouth, now less swollen, its bleeding gums healing within the cavern, the tongue no longer a leather rasp.

  “So do we all feel”, says Sova. “All of us believe that we must live.”

  “Where is Ariadne?” Josip whispers, and then he bursts into wails.

  “Shh-shhh, enough. Here, drink this.”

  When Josip is calm again, he says to the owl, “I have lost the sword. I cannot find the thread.”

  Sova frowns and shakes his head. “Rest”, he says, and goes away.

  During the daylight hours, the birds all fly off, leaving him alone. He sleeps, mostly. A man comes in to check on him. Like all prisoners, this man is dressed only in canvas shorts. About thirty years old, he is wiry, his dark-brown skin covered with scars.

  “I went through this”, he says. “You will recover.”

  “Who are you?” Josip asks, as the man helps him to raise his upper body in order to drink from a dipper of water.

  “I am called Propo.”

  The others return to the cell at dusk, materialize as men, lie down, and sleep. Only Propo and Sova tend Josip’s needs. They say little to him, for both are exhausted. Then they too go to sleep. Josip has dozed throughout the day and is now fully awake. Bright lights come through a window above his head; they are always on. He hears a shout, a barked command, a scream. These sounds do not waken the others.

  Looking about the room, he sees that it is a rectangular cement hut with a door at one end and narrow glassless windows along the wall above his head. Within the room there are thirty or forty sleeping prisoners, each lying on a pallet of canvas. The room is unnaturally still and silent, relieved from time to time by a snore or by a cry in a dream.

  Morning. Sunlight comes in through the open windows. The men (they are now always men) are sitting with their backs against the walls or are walking slowly about the room. They say little to each other, and always in low murmurs. When a guard enters with a clipboard in hand, they hastily stand to attention beside their pallets. Only Josip is unable to rise. The guard struts up and down between the rows of prisoners, making check marks on the list. He stops at the foot of Josip’s pallet and stares down at him with a scowl. He makes a check mark, then moves on.

  Josip is seated with his back to the wall, watching sunlight move across the floor toward his bare feet, at the end of the legs stretched out before him—legs splotched with purple and brown.

  Sova brings him a tin dish with
soup and boiled wheat in it. “Can you chew it?” he asks.

  Josip lifts the dish to his mouth and swallows its contents down in a few gulps.

  “It is better to chew”, says Sova. “It is never boiled properly.”

  Josip does not answer at first. He cannot yet chew food. He gives the other the empty dish.

  “Thank you”, he breathes.

  Sova nods. “You will survive.”

  “I want to die.”

  “You cannot die. You told me so yourself.”

  “Yes”, says Josip, and then begins to cry, for Ariadne has come to his mind. He is consumed with both longing for her and shame that he had temporarily forgotten her. Sova goes away. Propo comes.

  “I think they will give you another week of rest”, he says. “But try to get moving as much as you can. You must walk. Can you get up now and walk?”

  Propo helps him struggle to his feet. He stands shakily, supporting himself with a hand to the wall. Propo takes his other arm, and they walk together, very slowly, from one end of the room to the other. That done, Josip lies down again and sleeps. Three times that day, Sova and Propo return and make him walk.

  Toward nightfall, another prisoner joins them. He is a man in his sixties. Carrying a slice of hard black bread and a tin cup full of water, he breaks the bread into two equal pieces and dips one into the water. Without a word, he tears it into sodden bits and pushes them into Josip’s mouth, then the other half.

  “Who are you?” says Josip after he has swallowed.

  “I am Tomislav. Here they call me Tata.”

  Now a fourth man arrives, very young. He too brings a piece of bread. The feeding of Josip is repeated.

  “They call me Budala, a blockhead”, he grins. “And it’s true.”

  Another man kneels beside Josip, and he too gives his bread. He is in his mid-thirties, with scars on his forehead and a broken nose badly healed.

  “I am Prof”, he says with a keen analytical glance into Josip’s eyes. “They let you live because they can see that you will be a useful pack animal. Few survive what you went through. It is because you are strong. Now you must get stronger.”

  Josip looks at their bodies, skin and bones. Though these men are muscled, the muscles are without any fat, and the skin is stretched tightly over every line and fold of the interior anatomy.

  Another man arrives, feeds Josip his crust of bread. He is young, physically unmarked, slightly cross-eyed, and rather cheery in disposition.

  “I’m Svat”, he says. “This is a nice hotel, isn’t it? The food is great, the swimming’s great, the staff are so polite. But we’re really here for the good company.”

  The others raise eyebrows or frown.

  A whistle blows outside the window, followed by the voices of barking guards. Josip’s visitors scatter to their own pallets and lie down. Josip too lies down, and for the first time falls into sleep without a knot of hunger in his belly.

  He walks unaided now, if one could call it walking, this halting shuffle. Throughout that week he forces himself to go up and down the room several times each day. Whenever he whimpers with pain, he is grateful that the others are out at work and cannot hear it. As his self-consciousness grows, he is increasingly embarrassed by the whines that bleat from him unexpectedly. He knows he cannot afford any emotional or mental complexity. The simple contours of survival are the only factor. He will survive. He must survive. Though all odds are against him, it is not impossible that he will one day escape. Then he will find Ariadne and their child, and they will all flee into the north.

  He knows this is a hopeless dream, the kind of thread that men cling to in labyrinths. But he will not let go of it. As he follows its invisible unraveling, the thread may tighten and thicken into a cord along which, eventually, he might be able to pull himself to safety.

  The cracked rib gives him constant trouble; it is slowly healing but seems more painful than ever. Prof tells him it’s because his other bodily pains are subsiding and the rib’s protest now seems louder.

  Most of the prisoners do not talk to him. As Josip observes and listens, he learns that with few exceptions they all have one or two confidants, but no one knows or speaks with all the others. Some exist as if the universe were devoid of anything except themselves. They either burn with suppressed rage, their eyes dark with animosity, or they fold their bodies and bury their heads, going inward, speaking to no one. These types are a small minority, and Sova comments that they are the ones who go first.

  “Go?” asks Josip.

  “One morning, sooner or later, they do not respond to the guard’s command. They will not get up, though they are alive and could if they wanted to. Then they are dragged away. They make no protest, and a minute later you always hear a gunshot. Or else it happens at work. They run from the quarries toward the sea and are brought down by a bullet before they have got ten meters. Perhaps those few seconds of freedom are worth more to them than an entire lifetime of survival. Or it may be they are simply insane.”

  Personal loyalties are furtive. Suspicion is always in the air. An informer can obtain a bit of extra food, if he reports subversive conversation or activity. Are there any informers in the cell? How can one tell? This uncertainty is an essential component of subjugation. The atmosphere is one of constant fear and subservience, obedience and exhaustion. Humiliations are part of the day’s routine. For example, the prisoners must wash their own excrement out in the yard and sort from it bits of undigested grain, which is then reboiled and eaten. All are disgusted by this practice, yet few refrain from eating the results.

  “It’s a degradation”, explains Prof one evening. They are standing by a window gazing out at the yard as the sorting and re-cooking is in process. “They do not let us forget that we are animals owned by the State.”

  “Lower than animals”, says Sova with a scowl.

  “We are not animals”, says Tata.

  Gazing beyond the bucket of water where the sifting takes place, and the steaming cauldron beside it, Josip examines the immediate environs. The compound contains several barracks grouped around larger administrative buildings in the bottom of a wide ravine, all enclosed within chain-link fences. It is surrounded by rocky white hills, not very high, but sufficient to hide it from outside view. A few stunted bushes cling to whatever traces of barren soil hide within crevasses on the slopes. Otherwise, it is a lunar landscape.

  “Nothing grows here”, Josip says in a puzzled tone.

  “This is Goli Otok”, says Propo, “the naked island.”

  “Nothing of what goes on here can be seen from the water”, adds Sova. “Boats pass nearby; you can sometimes hear them. The islands Prvić and Rab are close.”

  “How far?”

  “Three or four kilometers.”

  “And the mainland?”

  “Maybe five, six.”

  “It could be swum”, says Josip.

  “It could be, if a man were unusually strong, in good health, and the sharks had not developed their habit of expecting free lunches.”

  “Has anyone escaped?”

  “None that I heard of”, murmurs Sova. “As you see, we are too exhausted. You might swim a few hundred meters, perhaps, before the guards spotted you—or the sharks. But I think it would be weakness that would finish you off in the end. No, it is impossible.”

  “Nothing is impossible”, says Tata. “Nothing is impossible with God.”

  Josip lowers his eyes, stares at the floor. Everyone else turns away, abruptly ending the conversation.

  While none of the thirty or forty others appear to bear him ill will, they do not try to initiate contact. Perhaps in their minds he is a potential informer! It is unusual, therefore, that he has been adopted by a rather large circle of six fellow prisoners. At night he ponders this, along with other questions.

  Why do these particular men give him a share of their own meager rations? A piece of bread can mean the difference between life and death, yet they continue to ris
k doing it for him. Now, as he recovers, they take turns giving him portions of their food, one extra piece of bread a day, one extra dish of wheat soup; and sometimes they supplement this with other material: a handful of dusty herbs scavenged from the rocks, a lizard, a seabird’s egg, blades of grass.

  Why do they do it? They do not do this for others in the barracks, some of whom have been beaten almost as badly as Josip. Who are these six, really? In the beginning, all that he can discern about them is obtained by fragments of their behavior and minimalist conversation. As his mind continues to clear, Josip fixes in his memory an impression of each. If he survives, he will remember them. If they do not survive, they will not be forgotten. If no one survives at least they tried to think of each other as human beings.

  The six are of differing temperaments, character, and background, yet all have sacrificed themselves for him.

  Sova, the “owl”, is a dour pessimist. He is about thirty-five, swarthy, and when he speaks it is usually in tones of bitter irony. His crime is unknown.

  Svat, or “wedding guest”, is a cheery optimist, even energetic, and impulsive. He is a handsome youth in his late teens, and not as gaunt as the others. His comments never contain insights, only factual observations. He is like everyone’s little brother, the favorite, though he is probably unaware of this. Perhaps they see their own lost youth embodied in this good-hearted fellow. Crime unknown.

  Budala, “blockhead”, is a pleasant youth about the same age as Svat. He is as physically robust as the other, yet despite his age he displays little vitality. He is a quintessential survivor, a docile pleaser. The most verbal of the six, when he speaks it is usually to make an inane comment. He is so stupid they fear for him, knowing that he will one day say an innocent idiotic thing and bring destruction upon himself. Moreover, he likes to make silly jokes as if he were still playing in a carefree village square. Jokes in hell rarely amuse the other residents. Svat speaks humorously as well, but there is a difference. Where Svat evokes a general low-key affection, Budala usually provokes irritation, but he is probably unaware of his effect on others. Perhaps he is the troublesome little brother who cannot be rejected. Mysteriously, he is one of them. Crime unknown.