Island of The World

by Michael D. O'Brien

  “You’re supposed to be at the reception, honey. You shouldn’t have come back.”

  “I came to bring you a gift, Mrs. Conway. May I stay a moment?”

  Her eyes blink open, and she sees him. She inhales sharply, her eyes full of fear.

  “I do not want to trouble you”, he goes on. “And I will leave if you tell me to go.”

  “I know what you’ll say”, she moans. “Go ahead and flatten me if you want to. I deserve it.”

  “No person deserves it”, he whispers.

  She begins to cry and covers her face with her hand.

  “I will go if you wish.”

  “Stay, please stay. I’m sorry for what I said. And for what I did.”

  He sees what it costs this proud and lonely woman to say this. She cannot meet his eyes, and her face is turned away. There is no dignity left but what remains after purgation by shame.

  “Once, when I was in despair, not many years ago,” he says to her in a quiet voice, “I tried to take my life. I was in great fear. All love had been taken from me. My wife and child had been destroyed, my life also. It seemed to me that only evil remained in the world, and that I too had become evil.”

  She turns her face to look at him.

  “You? Evil? You’re good. That’s the difference between you and me.”

  “You are wrong, Mrs. Conway. In each person there is good and evil, and we cannot choose the good unless we see that there is also evil. If we resist it, the good grows.”

  “So, you’ve come to help me see my evil?”

  Josip shakes his head.

  “I come to ask your forgiveness.”

  “Don’t—” she cries. “I couldn’t bear it.”

  “You do not understand what I wish to say. I have resigned from my employment at the embassy; perhaps I have already been dismissed. And even if it were not so, I would leave. I do not come to you to seek anything. I do not want this job, and I do not need you to help me from being sent back to Yugoslavia. I will not go there under any circumstances. I do not even come to you to prevent any trouble from police or authorities or from your husband. I do not look for anything from you. I come simply as one person to another. Can you understand this?”

  “I think so”, she whispers. “A little.”

  “When I shouted at you, I was afraid. I was afraid that I was falling back into the island of death.”

  “What do you mean?” she asks. “What is an island of death?”

  “May I explain to you about it?” She nods, no longer averting her eyes.

  He tells her about his wife and child, about their deaths, his arrest, and his imprisonment. He speaks of his despair and rage, his fears and his terrors.

  “So, you came to Rome,” she says with eyes brimming and lips quivering, “and from all that hell you walked straight into a woman like me. A woman who—”

  She begins to cry again.

  “When I was praying for you this morning at the tomb of a great saint, she showed me that I was not understanding properly. She helped me to see that I must come and speak with you. I know it is hard for us to speak together. But I think it is good.”

  “Maybe it is”, she whispers.

  “I want to tell you that when I leave this room tonight, all that has happened at the embassy is forgotten and will not be spoken of in my life. We remember things, I know. I remember the wrong I have done in my life, and I am sad for it, but it has no more power over me. And this, I think, should be the way for you too. I ask it of you.”

  “You ask it of me?” she says, puzzled. “You ask me to forget that I hurt you, and could have really hurt you badly, maybe ended your life?”

  “I ask you to understand and to forgive. Understand yourself and understand me.”

  “I will try.”

  “You can choose. May I give you a gift I bring for you?”

  “A gift?” she says and breaks into fresh sobs. “You bring me a gift?”

  “Yes. Here it is.” He smiles. “Please open it. A little thing, but it is for you.”

  She takes it in her hands and holds it. “It’s heavy”, she says.

  “It is light,” he replies, “like a lastavica sitting on your fingertips, or a dobri dupin leaping above the waves.”

  She carefully pulls away the wrapping paper, and finds a glass sphere. In its center is a tiny blue dolphin.

  He steps forward and bows his head, then stands to attention.

  “Mrs. Conway, may I give you a little kiss?”

  She stares at him in disbelief. She does not say no, so he bends and plants a brief kiss on her forehead.

  He straightens and says, “Good-night, Mrs. Conway.”

  “Good-night, Mr. Lasta”, she whispers.

  Her eyes follow him as he leaves. Then, when he is gone, she sits for a long, long time, gazing at the dolphin within the sphere.

  NOTES FOR A

  RECONSTRUCTED

  COSMOLOGY

  (FRAGMENTS INFERENTIAL OF A META-UNIVERSE)

  29

  So! What is he going to do with this big catfish? It’s as black as soot, weighs fifteen kilos, and it keeps sloshing around in his bathtub all night, keeping him awake. He caught it as food for himself, and now he is feeding it! Something is wrong in this arrangement. It doesn’t want to die; it wants very badly to be taken back to the Hudson River and released. Can catfish hypnotize people the way snakes can? Probably not, but he must admit he has grown quite fond of the thing, against his will.

  It’s too big a fish for the freezer compartment in his fridge, even if he could bring himself to kill it. Maybe he could give it to the Franciscan Fathers over at the parish. Not a bad idea, but do Franciscans kill fish? It might be as hard on them as it is on him. It would be difficult to preach to the fish and the birds and then knock them on the head.

  Maybe he should offer it to Mrs. Franklin. She works so hard cleaning the penthouses and looks tired all the time. She has some heavy crosses (and her skulker-scowler son is going to be one of the heavier ones, if he isn’t already). Yes, he will give the fish to this fine lady, who has a family to feed. They are friends, in an oblique way, though she is reticent to share details about her life. Since he moved into the building seven years ago, they have struck up a habit of short conversations whenever they pass in the hallway. Not unlike the dialogues on Goli Otok. He and the woman share no confraternity of the unjustly imprisoned, but there is a rapport of sorts, for they both serve at the very bottom of the world: he cleans the building—keeps the hallways shining, the garbage carried out, and the boiler in the basement running—and she cleans the more expensive apartments on the upper floors. They are the feeders at the bottom of the river, like the catfish. Yes—it will go to her.

  Wait! The fish is black. Will she infer a veiled reference to her color in this? Maybe not. She’s a sensible person, in no way neurotic. But it must be hard for someone to have come from slavery—even if it was a hundred years ago. Well, he knows what slavery is, too.

  Later in the morning, they happen to meet in the corridor on the sixth floor, where he has been fixing a leaky tap. She has a bottle of cleaning fluid and rags in one hand.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Franklin.”

  “Mornin’, Mistah Lastah. You look chirpy today.”

  “As do you, Madame.”

  Madame always makes her laugh, and she laughs with her whole body, her eyes dancing, too. She is very overweight.

  Her full name is Coriander Franklin, and she knows that his name is Josip, but they stay with the Mr. and Mrs. , mostly for the fun of it, but also because they both enjoy the dignity it bestows.

  “I am wondering if I may give you something, Mrs. Franklin, a little gift for your family”, he begins tentatively.

  “What kinda gif’?”

  “Fish.”

  “My daughter’s got more than enough goldfish, so I better not.”

  “It is a fish for eating.”

  “Well, we like t’ eat fish, so I ain’t
got no objections.”

  “It is a large fish—very large.”

  “How big?”

  “Fifteen kilograms, perhaps sixteen.”

  “Say again?”

  “About thirty or forty pounds.”

  “What! Where you get a fish like that!”

  “I caught it in the Hudson a week ago.”

  “That’s a lotta fish to pack into a freezer.”

  “It is alive still, and I think quite fresh which will improve the taste when it is cooked and eaten.”

  “Makes sense. But where you keep that fish—alive?” “In my bathtub.”

  She looks at him for a moment, then bursts into giggles. “You da biscuit, Mistah Lastah, you sho’ da biscuit.”

  Biscuit? An odd expression, but then most English idioms are inexplicable. In what way is he like a biscuit?

  “I do not have the heart to dispatch it, that is my problem. How do you feel about killing fish?”

  “I feel jus’ fine about it. No problems there. Say, that is real good of you, sir.”

  She pronounces certain words like “fine” and “sir” as fahn and suh. Her use of language has sunshine in it—warmer than the Manhattan environment. He likes it a lot, this mysterious poetry in her speech, redolent of generations of southern cotton fields and a more elusive Africa. He feels sorry about the slavery but enjoys the soul-speech that evolved from it.

  So, they go down to his basement apartment to have a look at the fish. She shakes her head when she sees it.

  “My, that is some fish. How did you get that monster back here all the way from the river?” Pronounced: Mah, thass sum feesh. Ha y’get thet mounstah hee-ah allaway from d’ rivah?

  Well, his Slavic dialect must sound equally quaint to her ears:

  “I have an excellent method. Not all my catches survive the trip home, I must admit, but catfish are capable of enduring much oxygen-deprivation.” Pronounced: I haf ecksillint met ode. Not ole my cat chess survife treep home, I mussed mitt, but catfeesh are capabile uf entoorink mutch oxychen-deprivat-yun.

  There are always pauses while the two brains translate.

  He shows her the carrying case—a flexible plastic water-bag with a zipper on top, red handle, and a spigot at one end. The plastic is see-through.

  “That’s a mighty clever invention, Mistah Lastah, mighty clever. You have troubles getting it on the bus?”

  “The bus driver looks at it, this is true, but he does not ask questions.”

  She belly-laughs. “And the people on the bus, they look, too?”

  “They all look. None of them ask questions. I find this aspect of our life in the free world very strange, Mrs. Franklin. Here, people look at the most surprising things but are afraid to ask about them.”

  “I know, I know”, she grins, still shaking her head. “That’s city life for you. It wasn’t that way in the South where I was born.”

  “In my homeland we had reason to fear. But what are these people afraid of? I ask myself all the time.”

  “Well, I can’t say for sure.” Willa cain’t say fo’ shoah. “I’ll never understand these people myself. But I thinks they’s afraid of themselves, mostly.”

  “Perhaps you are right. Will you take the fish?” Veel yoo tek se feesh?

  “I’d be happy to take it off your hands. I can knock the dang thing on the head right here and cut it up, take it home in a shopping bag. That okay by you?”

  He sighs. He does not like slaughter, especially not in his own home. He knocks fishheads sometimes, but always smaller ones. Slaughter follows by necessity. Still, he prefers to do it by a river bank. In summer, this is a risk because heat can spoil the fish.

  “That is okay by me.”

  “Well, thank you very much, Mistah Lastah. I’ll talk to Caleb tonight and get him to come by after school tomorrow. Him and me can carry the thing home.”

  “That is an excellent plan. Thank you for taking it.”

  “I’ll leave you a few chunks for your dinner.”

  “That is thoughtful of you.”

  “And just as a bonus, I ain’t gonna call you a heretic no more.”

  He laughs. “Thank you again and again.”

  This is a joke they like to spin along over the months and years. She belongs to a Pentecostal church up in Harlem and always wears a large cross on a chain about her neck, full of jewels and flashing lights, but no corpus. Their religious dialogue began about two years ago, when she noticed one day that his crucifix had fallen out of his shirt as he bent over the squeeze-bucket, pressing dirty water from the floor-mop. Until then they had enjoyed a relationship of courtesies, friendly but impersonal.

  “Oh, my”, she exclaimed, “You love the Lord Jesus?”

  “I do”, he answered solemnly.

  “I love him too”, she smiled. “He’s my main man!”

  So began their theological debates. She invited him to attend a Sunday service at her church, The Ethiopian Gospel Holiness Tabernacle (of the Ark of the Covenant) in Harlem, not far from her place. He declined, though he was touched by her invitation. In return, he suggested that she might enjoy attending Mass with him someday at Saints Cyril and Methodius parish, down by the Lincoln Tunnel. Its pastors were Franciscans, and a lot of Croatian exiles were attending it now. She declined, though she seemed touched by the invitation.

  “That’s real nice of you, Mister Lastah, but I gotta be honest. I just don’t truck with no heretics. And I’m sorry to say, you’s heretics.”

  Astounded, he said, “But Madame, I think, perhaps, it is you who are the heretic!”

  She slapped his arm with a cleaning cloth, a gesture that sealed their friendship.

  “Well, honey,” she concluded, “I don’t know what’s gonna happen to either of us on the Great Day of the Lord. Maybe you gonna fry and I’m gonna go on up to glory, or maybe the other way around. But I knows one thing for sure.”

  “What is it, Mrs. Franklin?”

  “We both loves the main man, and that’s good enough for me.”

  So, back to the fish.

  They are standing there in the bathroom, looking down into the tub, where the sinister creature swishes its tail and broods about existence. Its nose is an inch from the drainpipe; its tail scrapes the other end.

  “He is very black”, Josip muses.

  “Still good eatin’.”

  “Black is beautiful.”

  She laughs. “Where you hear that?”

  “Quite often in the newspapers, and on the radio.”

  “Well, it’s true, but it sure soun’ funny comin’ from the mouth of a white man.”

  “Am I a white man?” he asks with some puzzlement. “Ah, yes, of course, my skin has very little pigment.” He smiles and shakes his head. “The psychology of perception is always a problem in human affairs, is it not?”

  “Say again?”

  “We see the outside and think we know what is inside.”

  “Uh-huh, that’s a very bad habit in human bein’s.”

  “Very bad.”

  “So, you think you ain’t white. That’s got me mighty curious. Where you from, anyway?”

  He tells her. She has heard of Yugoslavia but not Bosnia-Herzegovina or Croatia.

  “So, you’s from eastern Europe, then.”

  He corrects her, but she waves it away.

  “All that’s too much for me, Mister Lastah, but tell y’ what, I’m gonna get you some sauerkraut to go with the fish.”

  “Please do not waste your money, Mrs. Franklin. I am not fond of sauerkraut—kiseli kupis, we call it.”

  She nods, thanks him for the fish, and says good-bye, because she has to get back to work. She will return tomorrow with the boy and two shopping bags.

  The next day, Mrs. Franklin arrives with her son in tow. He is about eleven years old, scowling like a New York City policeman, and clearly unhappy about being put to work. Josip drains the bathtub, and she hits the creature on the head. A horrible amount of thrashing en
sues, but in the end a large number of fish chunks get wrapped up in newspaper.

  The boy doesn’t say a word. From start to finish, he eyes the janitor with disapproval—even contempt. Josip does not know what to make of it. What goes on inside that young mind? Is he getting involved in drugs? Is he stealing? Is he breaking his mother’s heart again (the father had left them some years back). The boy is not sad. He is angry—as Emilio Mazzuolo once put it, angry at the unfairness of existence. And it looks like this lad is going to make somebody pay for it, starting with his mother.

  About two months later, a November evening. Puddles freeze at night, though no snow has fallen yet. The days are occasionally autumnal, full of fine light and spinning yellow leaves; but one can feel the approach of winter. Josip is talking with Gus-the-doorman in the entrance lobby and watching children playing stoop-ball on the steps of the apartment building across the way. Gus is restless, keeps patting every pocket in his uniform because he has run out of cigarettes, but he cannot leave work to buy a pack. Josip offers to go get him the cigarettes; there’s a convenience store over on 9th. It’s a rough neighborhood—not called Hell’s Kitchen for nothing—but he has strolled through it many a night without a qualm.

  It is a short walk from his own street, 52nd, to 9th Avenue, then a fair hike south to the store. Arriving there, he buys the brand Gus prefers, then goes back out into the street. He decides to lengthen the journey home by walking west to the river, then north on 11th Avenue, and back east on 52nd. He has been growing a bit of a belly lately, something that has never happened to him before. He can’t explain it. Maybe puttering about a twelve-story apartment house is not what human beings were designed for. He has been neglecting his walking—just too much to do around the building. He stretches his legs and strides along at a good clip. Nostos, he thinks, and then wonders where the thought came from. He does the circuit and is just heading along a murkier section of 52nd, a few blocks from home, when three teenage boys bound out of an alleyway and block his passage. One pulls a knife and presses its point into the chest of Josip’s coat.

  He is not frightened, merely surprised. He has heard a lot about such incidents but has never worried about them happening to him.