Wakefield

by Andrei Codrescu

  “You can’t even go out at night anymore,” Mrs. Petrovich cries. “They push you down, take your purse, and kill you. Most of my friends move out already, their children help them.” She shoots guilt daggers at Susan, who defends herself as best she can.

  “I already said you can move in with me. Tiffany said so, too. Leave Old Slobodan here to fight it out with his pals. He doesn’t like women anyway.”

  Mommy doesn’t hear the last part. “Tiffany?” She nearly spits. “What devil come in me to name her Tiffany? She’s a whore now.”

  “Fashion model, Mommy. Tiffany is a respected fashion model. She makes good money. So what if she lives with a woman? Wouldn’t you, if you had another chance?”

  Surprisingly, Mommy laughs at this, and nods through her tears. “I would, yes I would. Have more cake, Mr. Wakefield. Forgive us, we are—what do you say?—‘passionate’?”

  There is sudden affection between mother and daughter. They laugh about something known only to themselves. Wakefield cuts a hunk from the cheese and shuts his eyes involuntarily as the essence of goat milk floods his mouth. He chases it with a slice of salted tomato and a shot of plum brandy. When he opens his eyes, he notices the stacks of National Cartographics on the bookshelves.

  Aleisha Petrovitch, Susan has told him, has difficulty walking because of her varicose veins and excessive weight, and she depends on Susan to drive her to the grocery store once a week. The rest of the time she watches the news and reads.

  “You should write a story from my life, Mr. Wakefield. What a tale I have lived.”

  “Our people are like a magical-realist novel,” says Susan,

  “When you were a girl?” suggests Wakefield.

  “Long before, Mr. Wakefield. When my grandmother was a girl. What happen is that we had a well in the village where a man who traveled—”

  Susan: “A peddler.”

  “Yes. A peddler drowned in the well. Our water tasted first like iron, then sulphur, and the mullah said that the Devil made his bath there, but the men think the Serbian men over the mountain came in the night and poisoned our well. So our men made a poison, too, and the mullah wouldn’t bless it, but the men didn’t care. Before they go to the Serbian village to curse their water, they met around the well to take one more drink of bad water to make them strong. There was moon and stars and night was light like day. My grandmother was only a girl, but all the children were awake and they let them watch. The first man drew out some water and drank, then made surprise face. Another drank, and he, too, made surprise. Everybody tasted then and nobody could believe. The water was like sweet honey, not iron, not sulphur. The mullah said that the Devil was big trick maker, that he make water taste bitter one time, sweet another. Then nobody knew what they must do, and big discussion went on, and while some people said this and some said that, there was a yellow light around the well and a very big butterfly shoot out of the water and fly up into the sky. Big like a boy with wings. Nobody believe what they see, nobody could say anything. They watched as the butterfly get higher and higher and become a star. When they talk after a long time, the mullah said that this was the Devil with wings who was chained in the well and that the men who made the poison let him out because mullah didn’t bless it. But the men didn’t think so, so they look up where the butterfly flied and beat their chest and cry. Then everybody tasted the water again, even the children, and it was still sweet like honey. Next day, one man went down on long rope to the bottom of well that was so deep they had to take all the rope in the village, and when he come back two days later, he bring with him a white bone death-head … How you say that?”

  “Skull, Mommy.”

  “Skull. He take the white skull and show it to everybody and everybody said the mullah must bless. The whole village goes to mosque, but the mullah would not bless because he said this was Devil skull. Another peddler man who was there said no, this is skull of peddler, I know him. But nobody believe him. After one week everybody said, let’s go to big mosque in Kosovo and have bigger mullah bless it, but that never happened. The Serb army came and burned our village and only ten people lived, my grandmother was only a little girl. Her mother and father were killed by the soldiers. My grandmother went to live near Mosul where she met a builder name Yssan.”

  “Mother,” Susan says impatiently, “maybe you should start more recently. Mr. Wakefield may be tired.”

  “No,” Wakefield protests, “go on, Mrs. Petrovich.” The history of the Devil interests him. He imagines for a second Mrs. Petrovich’s face if he told her that he knows Satan personally.

  “Okay, now. My grandfather Yssan was building a mosque, but the walls fall down all the time. The Mosul mullah tell him that the Devil keep pulling down at night all the walls Yssan make in daytime. Only way for mosque to stand is for one martyr to be built inside wall. He tell him to spend the night outside building and ask persons who come by after midnight if they wish to be martyr for glory of God. By this time my grandparents have five children, four girls, one boy. Two of the girls come out at night to see boys, disobeying their parents. When first girl come by, Grandfather catch her and he ask angry if she love God, and she cries and says yes, yes. So he grab her arms and put her feet in the brick mud and he build his daughter, Aleisha, in church wall. His best daughter, he love her the most, she cries, he cries, too, but what is done now is done. When wall is up to her chin, she says, ‘I love you,’ but it’s for Grandfather not God, so he cries more but is more angry and covers her all up with bricks. His daughter Fatima comes by and sees what is going on, but he does not see her. She runs away that night to big city, Belgrade, and pretend to be modern woman.

  “After that, the mosque stand beautiful, but the Turk army comes the week after, then Serb army, then armies from Europe, they kill everybody. But they don’t burn the mosque. My mother Fatima in Belgrade, she marry Serb writer of beautiful poetry, and she never tell anybody about the Devil and the wall and her sister’s death. When I’m sixteen, the German army invade Yugoslavia and kill my mother and father in bombing, but I am in school so I escape to Mosul where some family still lives. That’s where I hear this story, and I was so sad. Then I met Slobodan who came to the house with partisans from the mountain to get food and blankets. Partisans come in the house with guns and we think life is over, but they don’t kill us, they take all our food and Slobodan look at me and say, ‘After the war I come for you.’ He did, and that is why I’m in America now with him.”

  “Tell about the mosque Grandfather built, Mommy.”

  “It stand beautiful until last week. Serbians dynamite it. Nothing there now.” She starts crying. “My mother sister die there but Allah didn’t keep his word. They name me for her.”

  Casually scanning the airwaves for his name, the Devil overhears this and swells with pride. The Balklands are especially dear to him; he has shaped their essence with his flute and lyre. He is both Pan and Orpheus, master of Greek caves and king of Thrace. He has created such beauty there that the human tribes that followed defended his melodies, his stories, both those he told and those he inspired, to the death. History there, in all its bloody absurdity, was generally the result of people fighting to preserve his memory. The wars themselves were not his fault; his policy is noninterventionist. He’s often blamed for carnage, but he doesn’t revel in it. Nor does he have any particular revulsion to it: a field of corpses or a burning city have a beauty of their own. He’s attached to the Balklands because it is there, only there, that he feels at home after his original exile. Stories like the one Aleisha told, garbled as they are—he would like her to speak better English—make him proud because they are about the time when the world was young and everyone could recognize his magic. A big problem with the world now is that it is prosaic, it lacks a link to magic, it is unimaginative, without the awe it owes him. Even the wars lack grandeur, the weapons are impersonal, people use his name mostly as a curse, they rarely acknowledge his divine nature.

  The Devil a
llows himself a moment of self-pity, then swells with pride. After all, it is he, not God, who is the originator of Art. God hasn’t made a thing since he animated his clay ape. Everything else about the creature, including the music of its doubts, its flights of fancy, its love of beauty, are Lucifer’s work and his work only. People rarely sacrifice to him personally, but they willingly die for beauty, they give their lives to the awesomeness of what moves them to depths of emotion, which is for the most part the Devil’s music. Unaccountably, there are people still faithful to their remote Creator, who could care less. These dry and resentful souls scourge innocence with the whips of guilt and sin and hatred of nature. They talk of the “sin of pride,” they shrivel the blooming flesh, they freeze the scent in the bloom, they punish play and snuff out joy. Pan’s poets have long denounced these stormtroopers for God, Orpheus has nearly broken the strings of his lyre to weaken their magic, but to no avail. As beauty begins to reel under the blows of killjoys, science marches forward employing all in dreary cubicles of reason. Pan, who likes all his names, including Satan, Lucifer, Orpheus, Beelzebub, the Evil One, and whatever else people come up with, has his job cut out for him these days. God may no longer be around, but the minions acting in His name are massing at all the exit points of liberty, blocking the escapes to imaginary worlds, to fancy, to reverie, to wilderness, to play, even to one’s flesh, and even to death, can you believe it. They are freeze-drying people! Satan is sick of it and of all spiritual bureaucracies, including his own, but he won’t give up, even if that means eventually waking God Himself from His immemorial slumber. Ironically, he might need God in the end to help him fight the phonies operating in His name. That’s if He still cares about the monkey he once set spinning through the light.

  His Malignancy chews thoughtfully on a hoof: he could use a nymph right now.

  Susan tries to explain at least part of her mother’s mysterious story. “Every mosque, church, or bridge in the old country has someone buried in it, apparently. Usually it’s a virgin or a new bride. You ask my mom when something happened and she tells you that whatever it was, no matter how tragic or insane, a war followed shortly thereafter.”

  “But it’s all true, Susan. This is your family stories.”

  “They are great stories, Mommy,” Susan says agreeably. “Professor Teleskou loved your stories; he used to write them all down.”

  “Maybe he did wrong to write my stories. Poor Professor!” says Mrs. Petrovich, turning to Wakefield. “Someone break into his apartment and steal all his notebooks, his computer, everything. Then they kill him!”

  Professor Mihai Teleskou is an author with whom Wakefield is familiar. He has read a book by Teleskou about the afterlife beliefs of Balkland peasants. It is called The Gnostic Tree: The Devil in the Balklands.

  “We loved the professor,” says Susan. “After his apartment was burglarized, he moved into our spare room. He thought someone was after him, the Romanian secret police, really. He felt safer here because my father has connections and could protect him. Pop actually had guys standing watch in front of the building twenty-four hours a day, because everyone was afraid of more burglaries. The professor wrote in his room and when he went out to the college or for a walk, my father’s friend Miroslav went with him, even the day they killed him. Professor Teleskou went to the bathroom across the hall from his office. When he didn’t come back, Miroslav went to look for him. He was dead in the toilet stall. One shot to the back of the head. And nobody heard anything. It was horrible.”

  Aleisha begins to sob; Susan puts an arm around her shoulders.

  “His stuff is still in the spare room. Come look.” Susan leaves her mother in the kitchen and takes Wakefield down the hall. She flips on the light in the tiny bedroom: Books are piled up along one wall, books on Balkland folklore, mystical cults of the Middle Ages; Provençal poetry, Cathar legends; a Bogomilian treatise, Flammel’s alchemical writings, an encyclopedia of witchcraft; Gershom Scholem on the Qabbalah; biographies of Giordano Bruno and Francis Bacon; Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek grammars. A painting of the Tree of Qabbalah with its shekinahs in bright colors is framed above the desk; a tankha painting of the Tantric Tibetan wheel hangs between the narrow windows. On the desk there’s a sheaf of papers held down by a miniature replica of the Rosetta stone. Next to it is a manual typewriter. Wakefield notices a title page on top of the pile: “Magic and Memory.” Sounds pretty benign. Who’d want to kill this guy, he wonders. He is fascinated by the Tibetan wheel, half of which is festooned with grotesque demons, the other with beautiful angels. Presumably, as the wheel turns, the world becomes alternately horrible and beautiful and vice versa, but to the enlightened, horror and beauty are the same. Demons are the other side of angels; the difference is only in how we perceive them. Wakefield has long wanted to believe that, but he can never quite muster the wisdom: beauty still leaves him weak at the knees, and horror makes him want to run and hide.

  Susan touches the keys of the typewriter and blows some dust off the desk. “Mommy wouldn’t come in here after he died, so it’s just as he left it. She doesn’t understand all this, but Mihai, Professor Teleskou, told me some things about what was going on. After 1989, after the revolution, he became involved with politics in Romania. He wrote articles for an emigre newspaper about the power struggle there; according to him, some really odd business was being revived after the fall of Communism, having to do with nationalist and racist mythology, and he must have touched a nerve, because some people back in Romania got really paranoid. He got threatening mail that said he was betraying his country, that he was a Jew-lover, a pervert, stuff like that. But he kept publishing his articles, mostly about Balklands folklore and how everything going on there now can be read in fairy tales and legends. Then they stole his files and his computer. And I think they killed him.”

  “Jeez! I didn’t think shit like that happened anymore, at least not here.”

  “Mihai was very brave. He used to say the Iron Curtain didn’t fall, it was lifted. He wanted to make sure it stayed up.”

  Wakefield doesn’t know what to say. He feels very close to this woman who carries two worlds within her. She seems fragile yet strong. He puts his arm around Susan’s thin shoulders for a moment, then withdraws, feeling awkward.

  “He was a wonderful man, very gentle. He didn’t want Mommy to know about the threats.… She was a little in love with him. So was I.”

  They haven’t noticed that Mrs. Petrovich is standing in the doorway.

  “He was thin like straw, but he love my food. I never put any meat on him. Too much thinking, I tell him. So tall, such beautiful eyes, and he always dressed so neat, so clean, with a tie, a nice briefcase. A gentleman.”

  Mother and daughter wipe tears from their eyes.

  Wakefield finds it hard to believe that a scholar could be killed over some esoteric fairy tales. Unless the bad guys also used those fairy tales in some way, like a code. People sometimes collide on the same ground and nobody believes anybody could be there by mistake. Wakefield once endured two hours of questioning by the FBI about an article he’d written on military architecture, citing a totally unclassified description of certain missile silos in Wyoming. The FBI wanted to know whose eyes the article was meant for, and they had difficulty believing that he wasn’t sending signals to the Soviets.

  “I see guys in black trenchcoats and shiny shoes sometimes, lurking around this building. Definitely from Teleskou’s country. Maybe there’s something here that they still want.…” Susan trails off.

  “I have a gun now. These men come here, they better watch out,” Mrs. Petrovich says passionately. “Maybe I even use it some day on your father.” Her eyes flash.

  Susan ignores that remark, and now tries to play down the men in black. “Oh, Mommy, those guys are probably just artists, they always wear black. This neighborhood attracts artists.”

  “It’s the smell, Susan. I know the difference, I can tell, I could be parfumer. The artistickis smell like
smoke and paint. The killers smell bad like mold, like blood …”

  “My father and Mihai used to argue sometimes, but Pop never got angry, he was always polite to the professor. Pop started up on this land thing one day, talking about the blood of our people and so on, and the professor said the war wasn’t about land, it’s about genii loci, spirits of place. He said that people get possessed by these spirits, and even after years in exile, they are the playthings of these spirits, and the politicians know this and use the spirits to stir up hatred. Pop had no idea what to say to that.”

  “Yes, the professor was too smart for Slobodan!” Mrs. Petrovich seems pleased by the memory.

  “Maybe we should go now, Susan?” Wakefield feels it’s time to make an exit. He’s got a speech to write.

  “No,” says Mrs. Petrovich firmly, “you must have some Turkish coffee!”

  Resistance is futile. In the warm kitchen Wakefield stares into the delicate porcelain cup filled with sweet black coffee, a dark mirror. Nothing can be seen there. When he’s finished the coffee Aleisha takes his cup and overturns it on the saucer. She reads the trails of coffee grounds. “Many roads,” she sighs. “Mr. Wakefield, you are like us. Always going from your home. Why?”

  “I thought that maybe you could tell me.” Wakefield is sincere. He’s been running as long as he can remember.

  Mrs. Petrovich gazes into the cup.

  The Devil has a keen interest in what she sees in there, too. He watches over her shoulder, pleased with her skill. One of his disciplines, one he is very proud of, is to steadfastly forbid himself to know the future. It is a point of honor, particularly since he’s a gambler and has been one since day one. He does not cheat, despite what his mythographers say. Why would he? It would ruin the game, and he’d be bored stiff if he knew the outcome. These days he’ll do anything not to be bored, including losing. Of course, he will use what advantage he can, count cards, ride streaks, read the psychology of his opponent—all too easy after watching thousands of predictable humans doing predictable things for eons. In other words, he seeks no more advantage than a smart mortal would, and that includes employing fortune-tellers. They are his muddy mirror and his protection against the temptation to cheat. In his time, he has used diviners of every kind, from astrologers to augers who read the entrails of sacrificed animals. He has found that the world is a forest of signs and an open book for the trained eye. Some of the greatest diviners read just for the joy of it, deciphering rocks and tree branches, the wind’s play in the sand, the lines of faces. Everything in the material world speaks to those willing to read it. In fact, the world shouts prophecies and messages of every kind in wonderful, unique forms. It would be a violation of the world’s beauty to intervene directly in the all-knowing of matter. The Devil does not need to cheat; he has legions of translators.