In February the Bolsheviks captured Mostar, the same month his mother fell ill drinking an herbal remedy, a traditional midwife’s abortifacient meant to trigger miscarriage, and afterward lay curled into herself like a sick cat, mewling in bed throughout Lent. In April, Srijem, Vukovar, and Valpovo followed Mostar into Stalinist hell. As May approached and the partisans moved inexorably westward toward Zagreb, Stjepan and the two specterlike widows joined the city’s exodus—hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians—on a Boschian trek toward the Austrian frontier, the army and home guard choosing to surrender to the Allies and not the Reds.
But at the River Drava the national troops of the Independent State of Croatia were disarmed by the unsympathetic and ideologically ambivalent British, shuttled aboard overcrowded trains, and transported straight back to Yugoslavia, into the hands of the Communists, massacred as they filed out from the boxcars like the eighty thousand Jews they had dutifully shipped to Poland throughout the war. Stjepan and his exhausted mother and increasingly demented aunt had already turned back from the border, deterred by partisan raids on the tail of the column where they trudged like stock animals in a desperate herd of hollow-eyed disheveled women and bawling children, reaching the deserted streets of the city only hours before Zagreb fell to Tito on the eighth of May, the same day Germany surrendered.
They stayed indoors, the heavy brocade curtains drawn across the apartment’s bay windows, fearing every sound as they dreaded every silence, phantom shapes in flickering candlelight, saying the Rosary together in hushed voices or lying like invalids numb in their beds. Occasionally the boy took a book from the shelves of his uncle’s library to stare with zero reaction at pictures of farm machinery or let his mind fall into a sentence and wander aimlessly through the shadowy canyon of its words. On Sunday mornings they ventured out for mass, scurrying like frightened mice along the damp pavement uphill toward the beckoning spires of the cathedral. It had been in this same cathedral, two years earlier on the feast day of Christ the King, that the boy and his parents had heard the archbishop’s sermon condemning religious and racial intolerance—All men and all races are the children of God . . . one cannot exterminate Gypsies or Jews because one considers them of an inferior race—although the boy had forgotten everything about the service but the heroic and rare presence of his father sitting next to him. His harried, preoccupied father, his beautiful uniform smelling of saddle soap and rain and peppery gunpowder, had been ordered back to the capital from the Bosnian front for consultations, his wife and son joining him from Dubrovnik for a holiday in the Esplanade, the grand hotel across from the train station. What’s a Jew? he remembered asking, too loudly, and he remembered his father lightly pinching the side of his bony thigh and whispering, Someone preferable to a Turk, now shh, the expression in his father’s friendly gray eyes fixed on something far away, and not friendly, not forgiving.
After church they walked hand in hand in hand to a café, the parents sometimes swinging the child between them like a bell of joy; Stjepan ate ice cream with berry preserves, his parents laughed and drank beer with the Waffen-SS, and even the obliging waiters seemed like emissaries of happiness, that lost Sunday afternoon in the middle of war.
The archbishop, released from partisan custody the first week in June, distributed flour and the comfort of absolution to his burgeoning congregation of refugees. Stjepan, who had only known compassion from women, fell in love with the priest, the dark crescents of mercy like bruises beneath the archbishop’s eyes, the pure hand of tenderness resting on the boy’s shoulder, kneading the back of his rigid neck or warming the top of his shaven head, the compressed grace of his beatific smile in a city where smiles were as unlikely as roasted chickens and laughter had been consigned for safekeeping to the insane. The Sunday when Stjepan announced to the archbishop that at the moment he received the Eucharist and felt the buttery melt of the consecrated host on his tongue, he had heard God’s voice instructing him to join the priesthood, the archbishop, deeply touched by the child’s faith, studied Stjepan with sad resignation.
My son, he told the boy, I am reluctant to encourage you, it is a difficult time to want to be a priest in Croatia. Partisans were hunting down and executing Catholic clergy throughout the parishes, intent on decapitating the Church with as forceful a blow as they had lopped off the heads of the Ustashe puppets; the archbishop himself accused of inspiring, if not advocating, war crimes. Nevertheless he admitted Stjepan to the ranks of altar boys serving the cathedral. In this role, and the starched, incense-fragrant security of its ritual, Stjepan began to reawaken from his family’s coma of defeat. His excitement was uncontainable when, in July, the new regime, for the first and last time, granted permission to the archbishop to hold the city’s annual procession to the shrine of Marija Bistrica, north of Zagreb, and he was selected to lead the file of priests in scarlet cassocks and white lace mantles, swinging a brass censer, intoxicated by the puffs of frankincense he created. Behind, in the flock of forty thousand pilgrims, walked the two sisters—his mother and aunt. Tito’s soldiers, many still dressed like forest partisans but others wearing the new uniforms of the Yugoslav army, lined the route, inflamed by the audacity of so large a crowd, the impertinent bereavement of the families of the Ustashe collaborators, the husbands and sons and fathers who had been annihilated while trying to surrender at the frontier. No shots were fired but the verbal abuse escalated, sporadic, convulsive, to sudden and unpredictable acts of violence. Somewhere along the route of the procession, a bull-faced partisan thrust himself into the flow of pilgrims to block the path of the widows.
Do you recognize me? he demanded of the boy’s Aunt Mara. I am from Siroki Brijeg—her husband’s village.
Yes, she said, get out of my way.
I am from Siroki Brijeg, he repeated like an imbecile, bellowing.
Yes, his Aunt Mara said, I often saw the drunken slut they called your motherfucking Turks in the alley.
For her insolence she received a rifle butt to the head, the stock turned sideways, striking cheekbone to cheekbone, her aquiline nose crushed backward into her sinus cavities. After the benediction at the shrine, the boy, yearning for praise, looked for the women and was disappointed but not overly surprised when he failed to locate them among the vast expanse of the devout, who had pressed onward in their pilgrimage despite the harassment. Meanwhile, his aunt and mother had been taken back to the city by a white-haired peasant with his horse-drawn wagon, first to a clinic where his once glamorous aunt was hastily diagnosed as unfixable, the weary doctor injecting her with a syringe of precious morphine after settling on the amount of his bribe, then back to the apartment, where his mother stood on the street pleading with passersby to help carry the half-conscious woman up the steps, her pale blonde hair gelled with black blood, eyes like tomatoes, swollen closed, purple face bloated beyond recognition. When the boy returned at sundown, he found the women in the musty parlor, his tall scarecrow aunt laid out on the sofa, his mother kneeling by her head with a washbasin of cold water and a mound of bloody tea towels, the sound of his mother’s prayers entwined with the gurgle of agony coming from his slowly suffocating aunt.
Go to bed, Stjepan, his mother said when she realized he had returned home. Get some rest. If she dies, we are leaving tomorrow.
His mother’s side of their bed remained an empty blue glow that night, her absence a bottomless pool daring him to come close and swim away. In the morning he found the two sisters together still, his aunt in a royal shroud of velvet curtains patterned with silvery fleur-de-lis, his mother asleep on her suffering knees, her head cradled atop her sister’s unused womb, her right hand cupping the dead woman’s left hand, its cold whiteness stuck out from the folds of the shroud as if to catch at life’s shreds, the parlor bathed in what the boy experienced as an angelic aura of radiance from the columns of previously banished sunshine entering the apartment. He knelt beside his moth
er, praying mindlessly, until she cracked open her eyes.
She was just like your father, his mother murmured. If you want a Dalmatian to shut his trap, what can you do but kill him. She opened her reddened eyes fully, looking at Stjepan without expression or feeling. Get dressed and pack your valise, she said.
Where are we going? he asked, and an edge of rebelliousness in his tone made her raise her head from the corpse of her older sister and straighten her back to look down gravely on the boy.
We are going away, she said.
Where?
God willing, we are going to the coast to find a boat.
To go where?
Be careful how you speak to me, she warned.
I won’t leave, he said, uncustomarily stubborn.
Stjepan, we cannot live with the Communists, she explained impatiently. And we cannot live without God. You are old enough to understand these things.
His anger reared up and he told her he had decided to live with the others—the fugitives—at the archbishop’s palace.
Soon Tito will come for the archbishop too, she said. He will die alone a martyr in Lepoglava. Get dressed now. Not another word.
No, he said, his face bright red, shrieking. I must stay. He confessed he had made a deal that prevented him from leaving and she thought he meant the bargain he had struck with God to join the clergy and tried to hug him, perhaps to mitigate his piety with the touch of her flesh, but he flapped away from her arms like a bird. Stjepan, she said, they don’t want priests here anymore. You can study to be a priest in Italy.
No, he screamed, eyes spurting a fury of tears. I promised.
Stop this, she said. You promised what? To whom? To God?
A heart-piercing wail—Yes, God.
Quiet. Calm down. Promised what, darling?
To kill the men who killed my father, he said.
Ah, I see, she said. You and I will talk about this.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
To protest openly would reveal the sin of his thoughts—worse, expose the sin’s appeal— and so he kept quiet and watched with sullen resentment, later that morning in the sacristy of the national cathedral, as his mother bartered with one of the priests, trading a bundle of currency wrapped in newspaper and tied with butcher’s string for the promise that the church would attend to the remains of his Aunt Mara.
Why are we bothering with her? Stjepan thought bitterly. What makes her so special? And then, unwittingly, he found himself back across the bridge in his mind to where he had abandoned his father in the fog on the other side. Who buried Father? Was his head soaking still in the kitchen bucket? If they buried him, did they place the head with the body? Wasn’t that more evil than even killing, to put his head over here and his body over there? Shouldn’t he and his mother return immediately to Dubrovnik to make sure these unspeakably important matters were properly addressed? Why didn’t she care? She didn’t care.
They called at the archbishop’s private residence at the massive neo-Gothic palace behind the cathedral, his mother desperate for any assistance her husband’s cousin might find in his heart to offer for the difficult journey ahead into exile—their second exile together, although the boy had no knowledge of the first. She was determined to make contact with the Americans but remained terrified of the Allied forces, foremost the treacherous British, the venomous sting of their centuries-old contempt for the Croats, who controlled the border crossings along the northern frontier and continued their unconscionable wartime alliance with Moscow and the partisans. Italy, which she had spent much of her life admonishing—in fluent Italian, no less—seemed for the second time in her life the only reasonable destination. To her relief, the archbishop, inviting the woman and the boy into his sitting room for the forgotten luxury of coffee and biscuits, counseled her to go to the Italians and pray for the best. There is a ship, he told her, that would arrive soon in Zadar to pick up refugees and take them across the Adriatic to Ancona. On this ship, he said, he hoped to place an envoy, who would report to the Vatican on the relentless persecution of the Church. She and her son should consider accompanying the envoy to the coast, where passage might also be arranged for them on the ship.
Should, she repeated to herself. Might.
Marija, before you say yes, the archbishop said solemnly, there is one complication you must know about—the boat has been leased by Zionists, the refugees they will collect are Jews. Are you guilty of anti-Semitism? the archbishop asked his mother.
No, she said, let the Jews live in peace, but they will throw us overboard and who could blame them, Father. In Bosnia, my husband had orders to send them all to the camps.
Yes, everyone obeyed, some more than others, said the archbishop, reciting the platitudes that could be thrown like a golden cape over the shoulders of atrocity. Your husband never drew a breath nor, I am certain, extinguished another’s that he did not commend to the glory of God. To be honest, I don’t think he cared much about the Jews one way or another. The Jews were never a genuine problem in this country—not like the Masons, for instance. Why bother with these poor souls when the devil himself is at the door? In any case, trust in God these Jews on the boat will not put you in the water.
Surreptitiously, the boy ate the last biscuit; the archbishop stood to extend his hand. Mother and son lowered themselves side by side to their knees to press their lips to the papal ring and receive his blessings. Without warning, Stjepan became inconsolable and the archbishop finally had to pry the sobbing child’s fingers away from his own.
They spent the night with other refugees housed in the overcrowded fetid recesses of the archbishop’s palace, the boy forbidden by his mother to speak to anyone of their plans; spies were the reason she gave him but secretly she feared the jealousy of the others should they learn of their privilege, beneficiaries of the archbishop’s personal intervention. In the morning they walked with their belongings to the cathedral to attend a mass for the dead, his Aunt Mara occupying one of the seven pine-board coffins arrayed between the nave and the left side of the altar, the pews filled with anonymous mourners, the air weighted by the humidity of their bereavement and the gloom-heavy fumes of beeswax. The grave diggers were days behind in their labor and to remain in the city for her burial was out of the question. After mass, his mother led him down the aisle to the forbidding row of coffins.
Which one is Aunt Mara’s? he asked. I don’t know, she said, kiss them all.
They returned to the pews where the boy stretched out and fell asleep to the anguished sussuration of his mother’s rosary and she did not have the heart to wake him when the archbishop’s driver arrived but scooped him into her arms and carried him to the car.
She folded the boy onto the front seat while the driver, a large elderly man with white cropped hair and the piercing amber eyes of a falcon, tied their bags to the roof and then she sat in back, sharing the seat with a pugnacious-looking man dressed in a brown worsted suit, unsuitable for summer weather, red, meaty hands resting on his knees, his brush-cut black hair and steel eyeglasses amplifying the severe virility of his face. The driver too, despite his age, seemed intimidating. He had the rolling, flat-footed gait of a brawler, one of those men who would rather fight than explain themselves, his bulky face sculpted by pugilism, she thought, and engraved with a vestigial sharpness she vaguely associated with criminals—perhaps the war had done this, branded him with its harshness, or perhaps he was a redeemed thug come home to serve the Church. Both men, she realized, made her uneasy. The driver slid behind the wheel, bringing with him a lemony trace of hair tonic, and as they drove west through the maze of Zagreb’s colorless streets she waited in vain for her fellow passenger to present himself, say anything, the small courtesy of a greeting, an acknowledgment of their common humanity, a gesture of fellowship based on the danger they now faced together, but the m
an offered nothing beyond the arrogant profile of a glare directed out the windscreen.
Where is the archbishop’s envoy? she finally found the courage to ask.
I am the envoy, he said staring ahead.
Yes? she said. I thought you would be a priest.
I am a priest, he replied with a trill of strange glee. He crossed his arms over his chest and tilted his head in her direction, as if to share a confidence. Today, however, he said, lowering his voice, and tomorrow, and until we are on the boat, I am your husband—and now he looked at her with frost-blue eyes and a patronizing smile. With your permission, he said. In name only, of course—and he shifted his body to glare again at the streets.
What is your name? she asked dully, resigning herself to this unexpected ruse.
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