by Greg Baxter
Manuela and Saskia walk as though they live around the corner, with assurance, a youthful at-homeness, without glancing at street names or numbers. We pass a halal butcher’s, an African clothing store, a knock-off electronics store, a pizza place, and a shoe shop with leopard- and zebra-patterned men’s dress shoes. Then we turn down a smaller road. There’s a hemp store and a store for bags and suitcases, a hairdresser’s with a gaudy purple façade, then nothing but doors and numbers on doors, and unadorned post-war buildings. The sidewalks are snowy and icy. The cars are all snowbound, and there’s trash beside the tyres, and mounds of cigarette butts. This seems pretty depressing, I say, and for the first time all day I consider the possibility that I might dislike the apartment. I am not interested in post-war utility, pressed wood, and vinyl or laminate wood flooring. I am not interested in plastic toilet seats. Saskia says, Trust me, this is not your area. These apartments go for half your rent. Much less, says Manuela. Much less, Saskia agrees. We walk a few more minutes, then we come to another big intersection. The buildings on it are old and tall, and the ground floors are flower shops, cafés, a place to buy Apple computers, and a chocolatier. There are strollers being pushed by young, beautiful women. Now the street is full of old, sincere, beautiful buildings, with big stairways leading up to the front doors. The sidewalks have been swept clean, and are dry. We see a man pick his dog’s shit out of the snow between two snowbound Mercedes, wrap it in a bag, and put that bag in another bag that is slung over his shoulder. In the basement level of a place we walk by, there’s a single lantern hanging over some steps down to a little bar. The bar’s name, says Saskia, translates as The Lantern. It’s your local bar, says Manuela, whether you like it or not. The glass on the windows is stained amber, so you can’t see inside. There’s a blackboard outside that reads 13.00 – 02.00. It looks pretty serious and dull, a place Mr and Mrs Pyz might run. I imagine it’s a nice place to have a late drink, a place you can talk to the bartender about the history of the neighbourhood. And when two a.m. rolls around the bartender is happy to let you stay a while longer.
Ahead, there’s a woman in a gleaming white wool coat and black tights and high heels standing on the corner of a T-junction, smoking a cigarette and looking at her phone. We see each other from a long way off. She lifts her head. She has a long nose and dark eyebrows. This is it, Saskia says. The woman looks at us, realizes we are probably the people she’s waiting for, smiles, then returns to her phone. I have a look around. There’s a little store on the corner opposite, where, on mornings when there isn’t anything in the place to eat, I might buy milk and eggs and ham and cheese and bread and sugar and coffee. Beside it is an awkwardly large flower shop, and this strikes me as strange until I comprehend the full view of what’s in front of me, across the T-junction. The rectangle I thought was a park when Saskia pointed to it on the map is not a park. It is a cemetery. The woman looks up again, and Saskia waves hello to her. The woman gives us a brief and businesslike smile and puts her phone in her bag. Her hair is brown and straight, shoulder-length, with a fringe. She’s probably thirty-five. Her coat is opened at the front, and she’s wearing a black dress. I feel the need to take off my hat and my gloves. It’s painfully cold, but necessary, somehow. The woman doesn’t seem cold at all. Saskia shakes her hand and introduces me, and then I shake hands with her. Hello, I say. Hello, she says. Shall we speak English? Yes, I say, I am sorry about that. Fine, she says. She does not wait to be introduced to Manuela. She says, Shall we have a look? She extends her arm toward the steps to the door, a large wooden door with an arched transom window above it. The building is tall and grey, and covered in dead ivy. Each window facing the street, on every floor, has a tiny balcony, enclosed by iron railings, not quite large enough to stand comfortably in but big enough for flowerpots. Please, I say, and extend my arm back to the woman. She goes up the steps and digs through her bag for keys. Her phone rings and she answers it while unlocking the door. Saskia says, It’s on the top floor. Manuela says, with a sympathetic grimace, You’ll have a nice view of the graveyard.
A friend once told me that the only time you ever really see a place is the first time and last time you’re there – the day you move in and the day you move out. She wrote it in a letter, and sent it to me just days before I was commissioned. She had a rare and degenerative autoimmune disease and did not expect to live through the year. Her letter, which was over thirty pages long, handwritten, in cursive, began matter-of-factly. She caught me up on how she had left for college in New York, but became sick within a few weeks, then got diagnosed with this thing, which was serious, and had to come home. She was disappointed. I thought that was odd and heartbreaking – that, even when writing me the letter, when there was very little time left, she was still disappointed she had not attended college, as though knowledge were something she could pack in a suitcase and take with her, and might do her some good. I don’t remember all of it, of course, but I remember it was a witty and positive letter, and because of that it was all the more painful to imagine a world in which she no longer existed. But that was an odd conclusion to leap to, since it had been years since I’d spoken with her, and, apart from one very strange day, I had not often thought about her since. Her name was Josephina.
When she was sixteen, the last time I saw her, she was pretty, black-eyed, and of average height. She ran cross-country and liked to read books. She had gone to Columbia University, she wrote, to study Slavic languages. She had a particular interest in the Balkans, because of her family. Her father’s family was Czech. Her great-grandmother, during the Nazi occupation, had been forced to prove, going back four generations, that there were no Jews in the family. Every family had to do this, and in itself it was not remarkable. However, during this process, Josephina’s great-grandmother had unearthed some interesting family folklore, a story about two twins found under a pile of sticks in Bosnia in the early sixteenth century, and given the surname Hinterhölz, behind wood. The twins, the story went, had been hidden to escape conscription by the Ottoman Turks. Josephina’s grandmother, who had moved to America after the war, brought this history with her. Josephina wrote that she was told the story of the twins from an early age, but the strangeness of it did not occur to her until her late teens, when her grandmother had been dead for some time. Family lore is family lore, she wrote to me in the letter, and any actual case of two twins being found in a woodpile in sixteenth-century Bosnia was probably impossible to document. Nevertheless, she became interested in her supposed Bosnian roots, and the history of the Balkans. She returned home from Columbia and, with whatever free time and energy she had, pursued her studies in local libraries, contacted professors by phone and online, and so on. She did this – all the while alternating between periods of severe illness and relative reprieve – intensely for four years. Meanwhile, she traced her family back to a man in Prague who died in July 1789, just a few days, she added as a matter of coincidence, before the storming of the Bastille. Three hundred years of mystery remained between this man in Prague and the twins that the family had accepted as their progenitors. She saw her studies of the Balkans, she wrote, as an attempt to broadly construct a picture of the lives of ancestors whose identities were otherwise unrecoverable.
The Ottoman Turks, she wrote in her letter, conquered Bosnia by the mid-fifteenth century. Land-owning Christian families were swift to convert to Islam, and in a very short space of time Bosnia had become an outpost of Ottoman civilization. Bosnian Muslims filled the ranks of the Ottoman military empire, and regularly raided surrounding Christian areas. The great Ottoman surge into central Europe, thwarted in 1529 and defeated in 1683, would go through this outpost. Every few years, the sultan in Constantinople sent warriors to kidnap the healthiest, handsomest Christian peasant children in the Balkans. In these so-called blood tributes, the raiders carried the conscripted children slung over the backs of horses, and took them in a convoy to the sultan. The mothers, grandmothers and sisters of the stolen children
would accompany the convoy for miles, weeping, exhausted, crying the names of the kidnapped, until they reached the river Drina. The Muslims carried the children across by ferry, and the families of the children could not follow. Some of the conscripted children performed military service, and the brightest of these emerged as top military commanders of the Ottoman armies. But most performed menial jobs, and life for them was over from the moment of conscription. Ironically, said Josephina in her letter, one of these conscripts would become the greatest Ottoman military leader in Europe, a grand vezir, and returned to Bosnia to build a bridge over the Drina. That bridge, wrote Josephina, is the subject of the greatest historical novel written in the twentieth century. During blood tributes, Christian peasants hid their children. And sometimes, if they could not properly hide them, they mutilated them, cutting off fingers or ears in order to make them unattractive to the sultan. If the story of the twins were based on truth – and, possibly, they had been hidden to escape conscription – the name Hinterhölz would have identified them thereafter as Christians. Josephina wrote, I like to believe this is possible, but just as vividly as I can imagine someone stripping back those sticks to find two twin babies, given up rather than given away, I know it’s possible that the story was invented, invented by a man, perhaps, trying to turn himself into Rome by giving himself Romulus and Remus – left to die as babies, found and suckled by a wolf, and raised as shepherds to create what would become the greatest civilizing force in all of history – as ancestors. She was disappointed that, as a result of her illness, she would be the last inheritor of this mystery, or at least the last person in whom the mystery was a condition in the blood.
I read the letter in a small white room in San Diego, three or four storeys up, overlooking runways, with jets descending toward us in the dusky light, over the gold and green and calm Pacific, and sensed that I had become the first inheritor of the mystery not related by blood, and though I liked the idea of carrying something so enormous around in my thoughts, I had plenty of other things to think about. I was a few days away from becoming an ensign, and it wouldn’t be long until my training began. I’d spend twelve weeks in OCS, then six months in nuclear power school, another six or seven months in prototype, then a few months in sub school. Then my first deployment. Josephina wrote that she had been following my progress in college through intermittent conversations that took place between my mother and her mother, but these could not have been very informative conversations, I knew, since I spoke with my mother just once a year, at Christmas. I have only seen her once in the last twenty years – and that was long after Josephina’s death, when my sister gave birth to twins. I spent a few days in New York, where my sister lived, and took my mother to lunches. She would say things like, I wish we’d talk every day, like this. Or, I love you with all my heart. I would tell her there was no reason to say things like that, and that just because I didn’t call or visit didn’t mean I wasn’t thinking of her, or didn’t love her. You’re like your father, she would say. My father was also in New York to see the twins. He had a good relationship with my mother still. They had simply realized she wanted a traditional life and he wanted something else. So they split, and he retired from his practice and moved to St Croix. He bought a sailboat and found a black girlfriend, and he pretty much thought he was in heaven. He sent me a postcard that was a picture of his boat, full of rich people and champagne, and his black girlfriend, and on the back he wrote: Pig in Shit. It makes me smile to think that those were the only three words he ever wrote to me. And he did finally write them, and he was happy. He was dark brown when he arrived in New York, and he wore shorts and flip-flops everywhere, even though it was not warm enough for them. I picked him up at the airport, took him to his hotel – everyone else was staying with my sister – and then we went for a drink. He’s Dutch – born in Amsterdam and moved to the US at the age of two; this is how I got a second passport. The concierge sent us to an Irish bar. We watched some weekday night college football and caught up. I kept going out to smoke but he did not. He had quit smoking as soon as he arrived in paradise and realized he wanted to grow old. He was ex-Navy as well – a flight surgeon. We had not talked about my time in Iraq, before or after I was deployed, so after the game got out of hand – one of those games where Boise State is up on Idaho by five touchdowns in the first quarter, and nobody in America cares – I explained what I did. What was Iraq like? he asked. I don’t really know, I said. I’d rarely gone outside the wire. I sat in a room and watched images of the war as though I were playing a video game by mind control, dozens of screens of the various areas of operation, some empty and some full of insurgents and, every so often, they would all be showing combat, and this was, a guy in my FDE said, like waking up in Satan’s imagination. Sailors on sand, my father said. Cutbacks, war, etcetera, I said. Etcetera, he said. Do you think we can win it? I paused and looked at him. Never before had I been asked a real question by my father, a question that required my opinion, a question that did not already have the answer attached to it. For a moment I tried to think of something thoughtful, hard-fought, and profound, because I felt this was my one and only shot, and I imagined he might go back to St Croix and say to his buddies, My son said this, and he was there; but I knew that if I did not tell the truth as I knew it, as I felt it, I’d fuck it up. I said, No, we can’t win. They might, but we can’t. He was drinking vodka on the rocks. He shook his drink. It was dry. He nodded at the bartender, then looked at me. I lifted my beer to the bartender. Thanks, I said. You bet, he said. A few seconds passed, and I said, You cannot map a coastline. He nodded. I said, They merely have to make us question our resolve, but we have to eradicate them. And I said nothing else about Iraq. He spoke briefly about the story of his own OCS training, which had lasted two hours and constituted no more than learning how to march, and I had heard it before, so I drifted toward the memories of my time there, and I asked those memories how the war would end. But they – these men sitting down in the hot sun, smoking cigarettes – had been fighting forever, and they did not understand the question. A lot of the guys I met in Iraq were insufferable nerds, idiots, bullies, or bureaucrats who could not function in the civilian world, where some degree of creativity is required. They all flourished in the military. But I also encountered the calm, stoic intelligence of the men who seemed less like human beings and more like discrete manifestations of the immortality of violence. They had fought at Thermopylae, at Gaugamela, and there they were, still, in Baghdad. It was, possibly, the fact that my role in the war was limited to watching it that fuelled my romantic notions of these men.
We all stayed another few days in New York. I had grown claustrophobic – the flags, the cops, the taxis, the increasingly self-aware symbolism of American resilience – but it was nice to see my mother and father in the same room, talking about bullshit and admiring their grandkids. One morning, my mother, my sister, her two older kids and I were in the kitchen. My sister’s husband was at work – it was a Sunday, but he always worked. It was a cloudy morning, and the leaves had changed, and the city was loud. My mother was cleaning the countertops for the tenth time that morning, and my sister asked her to sit down. My mother said, Just a minute. Sit down, said my sister. My mother was wearing an apron. She searched for something to wipe her wet hands on, then wiped them on the apron. Hold on, she said. Sit down, said my sister. You want me to go? I asked. No, said my sister. I poured myself an orange juice and leaned against the counter. Mom, said my sister, I know you’re busy at home, but I’m going back to work part-time soon, and I’d like you to move in and help with the kids. My mother pretended to address the problem of leaving, moving, responsibilities. Think about it, said my sister. The kids started screaming for her to move in. They pulled at her arms. I admired my sister. She asked no questions she did not know the answer to. She had a clear vision, not necessarily of what she wanted, but what she needed and how to get it. Her husband is a mean, greedy narcissist, with a thick New York accent an
d a sports car, and I’m sure he cheats on her, but when the marriage ends my sister will get everything, including the kids, and while he spirals into pathetic self-destruction she will find a way to be successful, proud of what she has accomplished, and remain a mother beloved by her children.
