“Gimme your cash”, snarls the knife-boy.
Josip frowns. “You don’t want to do that.”
“I do wanna do it. Just gimme or I cut you bad.”
Without warning, a shriek explodes in their midst. A whirring shadow suddenly descends upon them, a bura blowing and striking in every direction. Josip’s assailants howl and run off, disappearing into the alley. And there in front of him, huffing and puffing, is Mrs. Franklin’s son. Caleb the contemptuous. Caleb the bad boy who will break his mother’s heart.
“Th-thank you”, Josip says, blinking rapidly. “You appeared at the providential moment.”
The boy is carrying an iron bar in his right hand. He smacks it on the palm of his other hand. He says nothing, just scowls, as if this white man has put him to a lot of trouble.
“What are you doing here at this time of night?” Josip asks. “Shouldn’t you be at home?”
“My Momma, she’s working tonight, cleanin’ up for a party.”
“You don’t need to be out in the streets. You could wait in the lobby.”
“I cain’t wait there. Gus he tol’ me stay outside. He don’t like me.”
“Well, from now on you can surely wait in the lobby. I’ll talk to him, Caleb.”
“How you know my name?”
“Your mother told me.”
His scowl deepens. He is one tough boy and wants everyone to know it. He is capable of demolishing a gang of older adolescents. Nevertheless, he is too young to be running around in the dark on these streets. How old is he? As old as Josip was in Sarajevo when he carried an iron bar to fend off boys who leap from alleyways to steal other people’s fish.
Josip reaches down and puts a hand on the crown of the boy’s head. It is probably permissible to treat him as such. The gesture is absolutely paternal, even patriarchal. It is a hand that reaches out of the past, out of a world of fathers and their children.
He ruffles the springy black hair a little, only to find that it cannot be ruffled. It is like steel wool, rough to the touch, not a trace of Slavic silk in it.
Caleb barks, “Don’ touch mah hair, cracker!” knocking the hand from his head.
“I apologize”, Josip says, taking a step backward.
The boy puts his fists on his waist, braces his legs, and cocks his chin high in defiance.
“I save yo life, man, but I don’t give you no rights ovah me.”
“Yes, yes, I understand”, says Josip, embarrassed. “I was not thinking. I did not respect your independence and autonomy.”
“I don’t givasheet bout no tonomy, just you watch yo hands, cracker.”
Cracker again. Hair cracker and hands cracker. What do these expressions mean? Are they similar to biscuit, but when applied to anatomical parts they take on other significance, inferences that are still indecipherable to him? He has not yet discerned any similarities between himself and a biscuit, and now the word cracker has been added to the mystery. These expressions simply make no sense whatsoever. Even so, his constant perusal of the English dictionary has taught him that a cracker and a plain, salted biscuit are the same thing—the choice between which word to use depends on whether one is living in a British Commonwealth nation or in a nation that has revolted against the British. To decrypt the history embedded in language can be confusing at times, but it does offer a rewarding sense of mental stimulation.
Josip, as it happens, has a wax-paper bundle of soda-biscuits in his coat pocket. He never fails to carry this supply whenever he goes out into the city, just in case. Hunger is still a demon that haunts, yet it can be easily dispelled if you prepare ahead for any eventuality.
He digs out the package and opens it. Offering the contents to the boy, he says, “Would you like a cracker?”
Caleb stares at the crazy janitor, and then is struck by the humor of this whiteman’s naïvete.
“Sho”, he says, and drops his arrogance. Grinning, he scoops up all the biscuits and crams them one after another into his mouth. All the while he observes the man observing him and notes the sadness that has entered those watery blue eyes.
“Do you like figs?” asks Josip.
“Ah hates feegs.”
“The children must eat”, Josip whispers. “They are our future, they are our hope.”
Mghmgh—mghmgh, mumbles the boy, with a full mouth. “I beg your pardon, Caleb, what did you say?”
“I say I ain’t no child!”
“Yes, this appears to be so. There is a maturity in you I had not anticipated.”
Caleb is again chewing and swallowing, his eyes still somewhat suspicious, trying to figure out what kind of strange bird this man really is. Josip bows, turns, and walks on toward his apartment building. Oddly, his young combatant follows, then steps up along beside him, keeping pace. Reaching the front entrance, they come to a halt, and Josip says, “Good-night, then. Thank you again.”
“Night”, says the boy, wiping crumbs from his mouth. “You ain’t no cracker, mistah.”
Josip recognizes a supreme compliment and goes in.
Fragment:
I was twelve then, that time in Sarajevo. Or maybe I was thirteen. Yes, a bit older, because I had already learned to swim in the Miljacka. I remember the day my feet sank in blood and gore on a rust-colored field above the city, though it was only soil. During those years my poor mind was still confused, still healing from the catastrophe of Rajska Polja. Has it ever been entirely well since then?
I remember, too, the time I rode a white horse in thickest fog. We galloped together in the clouds. And when he took me back to the place that was my rank in the hierarchy of existence, he told me that I would ride him again someday. He has never returned. I know that I rode him, but were the words he spoke to me merely something produced in my imagination or in a dream?
From time to time, he is rehaunted by confusions, very brief moments of disorientation when he wakes in the morning and wonders where he is. He sits up, rubs his face, and thinks about getting the coffee pot percolating. But who is he, really? And what is this place? How did he get here? Then he remembers.
Usually months pass without Josip’s recalling the final meeting with the American lady in the Rome hospital, the sphere with the dolphin in it, and the little kiss. He never saw her again after that visit, never heard a word from her. But a few days later, as he was sitting alone in his room listening to the trains screeching into Rome’s rail terminal, pummeling his brains for a solution to his hopeless situation, and praying a lot too, there came a knock at the door.
And there stood Mr. Conway. Both he and Josip regarded each other with uncertain expressions, until Josip invited him in. The visitor sat down on the single wooden chair and nervously picked at the plaster cast on his right hand.
They looked at each other for some minutes before both, simultaneously, began to say something. Every time one of them tried to speak, the words died on his lips. In the end, they both knew that everything was understood between them.
“How is your hand?” Josip asked, trying to offer at least a token conversation.
“It will be all right”, said Mr. Conway, bowing his head in embarrassment.
They nodded and nodded at each other, then smiled a little. Finally, Mr. Conway stood, put on his hat, and extended his left hand for a shake. And so they shook hands, and not long after that, a good deal of paperwork began. Then, for the first time in his life, Josip flew like a lastavica, and he found himself in a basement apartment on 52nd Street, tending a boiler and sweeping the hallways, narrowly escaping muggings, and catching fish in a river much deeper and mightier than the Miljacka, though not as beautiful.
Fragment:
The past comes with us—even when it seems to have vanished or to have merely faded. After Sunday Mass, a man came up to me on the steps of Cyril and Methodius and asked in Croatian if I had recently moved to the city and how I had come to live here. I felt no disturbance of my inner peace, and thus concluded that he is a legitimate exile, l
ike myself. So, I gave him a vague account. It was pleasant to speak my native language but a little disturbing to find out how rusty it is becoming. Most of my conversations are in a variety of English dialects. Mrs. Franklin’s, for example, and those of Gus, the Armenian manager of my building, and my confessor at the parish. I once spoke with an Australian. This was a disturbing exercise. It really should not be called English. And yet all these variations derive from the same source—my Webster’s dictionary is technically reliable, but in conversational practice not always reliable.
I am digressing.
In any event, this man who was born in Zagreb and fled with his mother into Austria and then made it to America after narrowly escaping the Bleiburg massacre is now a wealthy businessman, not much older than myself. He plans to start a monthly newsletter for the Croatian expatriates in the city. It will be in our own language. He is collecting personal accounts of injustice from individuals and would like to publish them. He explains that most people decline the offer because they have family back in Yugoslavia and are worried about reprisals. Everyone is haunted by a feeling that we are being watched. True, so am I! It is ridiculous, of course, but I cannot shake this vague sensation we all carry.
When I, too, declined to write him a little account, his discouragement about our caution (or paranoia) was evident. So, I made a concession. I offered to contribute a poem. He did not look enthusiastic. Poems! his facial expression said. What use are poems! He is a businessman and very American in appearance and style of speech. After all, he was only a lad when he arrived in New York. But in the end he gave it some consideration, and we agreed that I would resurrect some of my old attempts at poetry from the Dobri Dupin journal. I think I can remember scraps, maybe the one about the family that pulls a cart toward the Drava River with a toy sailboat and a violin on top. Even as I struggled to remember it, I felt the old pain return. After all this time, it still hurts.
I warned him that it would be obscure and certainly not professional. He pursed his lips and told me that it would be better than nothing. Such good pragmatists these Americans are, new and old.
I also insisted on a pseudonym. I will write under the name Josip Marulić. He told me that I am being paranoid, this is a free country, there is no secret police here. Nevertheless, I did not budge. Paranoid I may be, but one can never be too careful.
It is a fine Saturday in spring. Josip is standing on a grassy patch in Central Park, several blocks northeast of his apartment building. It is his day off. His paycheck is not due for another week, and he lacks the necessary funds for the bus ride that would take him to his favorite fishing spot on the Hudson. There has been another warning on the radio about mercury poisoning from some fish. He does not worry about this, just ponders it a little.
Despite the terrors of mercury poisoning, the hole in the ozone layer, and melting ice caps, the world is still beautiful—moreover, there is an island of green within this city. He goes often to the Metropolitan Museum, on the east side of the park. Its Mesopotamian collection is fascinating, as well as a few select pieces of Scythian and Illyrian art, which for him are touchstones. Nearby is the New York Public Library, a cathedral for the mind, where he spends much of his free time. And he sometimes visits the zoo, though he feels a natural empathy for the animals imprisoned there.
The park is primarily for salving his hunger for natural things, if an artificial park can be natural. He has his favorite trees. If he lies down at the base of one, the grass against his back is cool and the smell of organic things restorative, however fugitive they may be. If he squints his eyes, the ranges of high-rise towers become distant mountains, and he is in an alpine valley surrounded by the sounds of children laughing and calling and crying—as they do everywhere.
The birds are not unfriendly. They know him, he is sure of it. Well, to tell the truth, he has cultivated the relationship by feeding them. Ah, food—it never fails to connect creatures. He has developed a special affection for pigeons, which are generally disliked because of their great numbers and their droppings. What on earth do they live on? Popcorn? Sandwich crusts? A portion of his income is allotted for them. They are one of the city’s great resources, though few residents realize it. The birds humanize the place. There is an illogic here, but nevertheless he feels it is true. He has written a silly short poem about it. He has not yet spotted any European pigeons, which are thinner, subtler, and more graceful in appearance than these brash new-world pigeons. He keeps his eyes open, hoping that one will appear, perhaps blown west on the bura of providence.
Today he is standing in a hollow of grass just south of the clockwork gate into the zoo. The clock’s bells are ringing, and crowds of children are gazing at its revolving bronze characters. A few adults are among them, just as enrapt, but retaining their unnecessary aplomb. When the clockwork mechanism has completed its performance and the hour has struck with gong and bell, they disperse. Josip, too, turns away.
Where are his friends the pigeons today? Oh, here they come! How did they spot him? Thirty or forty swoop in low and land, clustering about his feet, strutting, jostling for position, bumping shoulders, and pecking at each other, vying for first place in his attention.
“Oooo, where are your manners!” he scolds. “Be patient, there is enough for everyone!” He speaks in English because that is appropriate for them, considering the land of their birth.
He scatters seeds and bread from the two bags he has brought with him, which is followed by frenzied feeding and a chorus of thanks, which they offer him in semihysterical coos. He longs to pick one up and hold it. He has succeeded in doing so a few times in the past and is ever-entranced by their startled eyes, their shimmering and chortling, and the feel of smooth wing-feathers beneath his fingertips. They do not like being held but will endure it for a minute or so before he tosses them up into the air.
He now bends into the mob, slowly, slowly, and they sidestep away from him, protesting with their alarmed little voices: You’re too close, despite your benevolence! A young white one is rather more naive than the others, and he scoops it up. Its eyes dart franticly, its head snapping this way and that, looking for paths of escape. It trembles in his hands and he can feel its heart’s vibrations. It is warm. This is one of the few moments in Josip’s life when he is able to touch, and be touched by, another living creature. He smiles, loves the little prisoner, and then lets it go.
A laugh! Has he laughed, or has someone nearby laughed? Glancing about, he sees a man sitting on a bench not ten feet away, observing him. The man is smiling. It is a fond, knowing smile, yet detached, because all human beings in this city are detached until they distill themselves into colonies and villages within the metropolis.
The man nods, and Josip nods in return. He is about fifty years of age, East Indian, dressed in a fine tweed suit with matching vest and flawless brogues. (Always pay attention to the shoes, Josip recalls. The shoes tell you everything.) Moreover, this man has been exquisitely barbered and wears a cream-colored cravat (does he know that kravates originated in Croatia?). A brown hand curls lightly around the staff of the black cane laid across his knees. The knob of the cane is an ivory elephant’s head. By the man’s side sit a leather valise and a wicker picnic basket.
“Good morning”, he says in a pleasant and cultured tone. “Good morning”, Josip replies.
“You are fond of the pigeons”, says the man. Though it is unclear if a statement or a question has been uttered, Josip nods again.
“I too am fond of pigeons”, the stranger continues, leaning forward with an earnest smile. “In my home country they were the constant companions of my childhood. Many of the birds in this great park are variations of the rock pigeon. However, you have not, I presume, heard of the Nicobar pigeon, which is black with a shawl of string-like feathers and iridescent green sub-feathers and projects a most sinister appearance, nor have you heard of the Pompadour pigeon, which is lemon-green with red wings?”
Josip shakes his he
ad, uncertain whether to approach or to depart.
“My favorite is the laughing pigeon—yes, this is its veritable and verifiable name—which is self-explanatory. While in appearance it is lovely, as are all pigeons, no, I should say most pigeons, it is among the humblest of the species, for it is only tawny-colored and does not attract the eye as do the others. As with many things in this world of ours, it is in disguise, which is to say, in cognito.”
“May I sit down?” Josip asks.
“Yes, please accompany me. You have passed a great test.”
“A test? I have said nothing.”
“You have asked to sit down. This is something. Moreover, it is a trans-cultural event of epic proportions.”
“You are gifted with language, sir.”
“Yes, and more prodigious is this accomplishment because it is my third language, in a total of seven.”
“You do not by any chance speak a Slavic language, do you?”
“I regret that I do not. I may be forgiven a presumption if I guess that you, sir, are of Slavic origins?”
“Yes. I am from Croatia.”
“Ah, a Balkan exile.”
“We do not consider ourselves to be part of the Balkans. We are an ancient nation.”
“If you will permit me a quibble,” the man goes on with an apologetic smile, in a tone of cordial exchange between equals, “may I suggest that all Balkan peoples consider themselves to be ancient nations.”
“Perhaps that is so, but in our case it is true.”
“That is quite how I feel about my native land. You are doubtless wondering if I am from Pakistan or Bangladesh, or Sri Lanka or Madagascar, or even if I am a Persian with an excess of dark pigmentation chromosomes.”
“I think you are from India.”
“This is correct.”
“Are you an ornithologist?”
“I regret to say that by education I am an economist, though I have not yet obtained employment in this capacity and do not wish to pursue it as an occupation either, despite my doctorates, of which I am inordinately proud.”
Island of The World Page 53
