The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  She inhaled the willow and stone scents of the river wafting through the open windows and said to the water, Carry us far away, and in the long but always broken conversation she kept with her dead husband she experienced a surge of insolence and told him they were leaving now, she was taking their son to the place of his birth, and get used to it, if he comes back he comes back, and she would not guarantee her own return, nor venture any promise to the dead except memory.

  The teenage boy-soldiers returned from their forage, the moon-faced driver with a carrot stuck cigarlike between his grinning lips and the one in the sidecar with a goat kid squirming in his arms. Stjepan came shivering out of the water to admire their riches and the partisans shared their lunch with Bogdanov and the child, cheese and bread with slices of salty prsut and a paper cone of greasy burek, his mother unresponsive to their offers and everyone seemed to know to leave her be. Clouds gathered and the light collected into burnished lumps and the afternoon became more humid and when Stjepan jumped into the river again the young soldiers followed along, their undressed bodies like the boy’s, colorless and bony and malnourished, and all three played a game of tag, which became a game of tossing the boy into the air between them, and his mother listened to the yips of their exuberance and could not stand it. For the first time since leaving the outskirts of Karlovac she sat up, wincing in pain, and leaned over the seat to tap the horn.

  They drove on to the wilderness of Plitvice, the rugged high country before the land descended to the coast. Bogdanov seemed to have a particular destination in mind, rejecting the escorts’ desire to stop at an abandoned cottage and, farther on, a bivouac of local partisans. At the driver’s insistence, they spent the night in the open, camped a short distance off the road in the hilly forests near a waterfall rumbling over the brim of a turquoise lake, arriving an hour before sundown, the sky overcast and threatening. While her son and the young soldiers collected firewood and Bogdanov wandered away into the forest with a tin pail to gather mushrooms, Marija walked along the lake until she was out of sight and removed her dress and waded into the frigid water to wash herself with a brown bar of soap, her teeth chattering and the sting in her breast and shoulder easing with the cold. When she looked back at the darkening shoreline she noticed smoke curling out of the trees not only from the direction of their own camp but throughout the wooded headlands and thought, of course, the forest is filled with runaways like us.

  Back in the clearing, the soldiers had slit the throat of the little goat and were yanking back its hide and Stjepan heaped branches on the fire as if it were All Hallow’s Eve. She sat on the running board of the car and called him over to dry her hair, telling him, Careful, not so hard, pain streaking through her right shoulder, and then Bogdanov emerged from the shadows between the trees with a companion. I found this Jew hiding in the forest, Bogdanov announced. He says he’s trying to get to the boat to go to Palestine and he says he’s hungry. Is it a problem? he asked the two soldiers, intent on butchering the goat, who looked up at the haggard man with more indifference than suspicion and said they didn’t mind. The man nodded his appreciation and dropped his duffel bag at the rear of the car and sat down on a log, head bent, staring at his cracked shoes. Where’s Palestine? Stjepan asked his mother. Is that where we’re going too? Look, said Bogdanov proudly, dumping chanterelles and wild onions on the hood of the car. That’s the stuff, eh? and he sent the boy down to the lake with the emptied pail. Marija, he said, stepping over to her, are you feeling better? With paternal tenderness, his large hand alighted on her right cheek, below the swelling where the captain had struck her.

  What happened? The bastard hit you.

  Yes, she said, pressing into the warmth of his palm, this small reprieve from the poverty of touch.

  What can I do for you? Perhaps brandy?

  Yes, she said. Thank you, Bogdanov. Brandy.

  Grandpa, don’t forget us, said the soldiers.

  He went around to the trunk and came back with two bottles and a metal cup, which he filled and gave to her and gave the partisans the unopened bottle for themselves and a pack of cigarettes and took the first bottle to the man on the log. Rabbi, a taste? he said with strange joviality, and the fellow took a long swallow and then Bogdanov took a long swallow and the bottle was soon finished. Stjepan returned with the pail of water and Bogdanov helped the soldiers wash the carcass of the goat and took a jackknife from his pocket and trimmed what little fat he could find and put it in the cook pot the soldiers carried in their kit, along with the mushrooms and onions. Son, he said to Stjepan, stop putting wood on the fire, let it burn down, and the partisans cut forked branches for the frame of a spit and Bogdanov skewered the goat through the gullet and anus and Marija drank the cup dry and asked if there was more and out came another bottle. The last of it, said the driver. The last of everything, she whispered bleakly.

  Nightfall was upon them and blackness hugged the campfire where the men prepared their rustic dinner. From her perch on the running board she watched her son enjoying this adventure, poking at the coals with a stick, seemingly oblivious. She sipped her brandy, welcoming its burn, the relaxation of the hard knots that held her perseverance together, which could be loosened but never untied, and thought about her husband Andre and about Davor and Andre, what firebrands they had been, what spirited boys, ardent and enlivening, unlikely but devoted brothers, living poems of courage and passion.

  She and Andre were university students and Davor a street-corner recruiter for the Organization, the cafés of Zagreb the mixing bowl between the intellectual activists and the uneducated paramilitaries. They were young together in a world they agreed was no good and could not be allowed to persist. Was that it? she wondered, to which all the energy and glorious intensity of their youth had been dedicated, was their common cause that banal?—and not their idolization of the hard-line nationalists who, within a few short years, would become the government of Croatia. Why had they become such good friends when so little in their backgrounds recommended it?

  So Davor, she concluded, I see. Your joke was not a joke, when you hectored us for being bourgeoisie. How do you spell that word? she had once teased back, everyone laughing at the hick’s expense, but she had wounded him and never teased again.

  Davor, she said into her cup of brandy, saving my life won’t prevent me from hating you. I don’t have the luxury of choosing my protectors.

  It was Davor who inspired Andre to cross the ideological threshold from talk to action, to put aside his books and join the uprising, and then they were running from the police and when Mussolini allowed the Ustashe to set up training camps they fled to Italy, an effortless transition for the two of them, newly married, both Dalmatian-born and schooled in Italian, foreigners yet not absolute outsiders. Davor, however, felt shunned as a philistine and mistrusted the Italians, a mistrust that would spare the three of them twenty months of internment on the island of Lipari with the hundreds of Ustashe exiles imprisoned by Mussolini after the assassination of Aleksandar, the king of Yugoslavia, during a state visit to France. As the training camps closed and the roundups began, the three of them had already embarked on a ship bound for Buenos Aires, Davor having persuaded Andre to answer the Organization’s call for volunteers to establish Ustashe cells abroad. Embraced by the Peronistas, Andre lectured and administrated while Davor drilled recruits; the children of German businessmen and the Argentinian military became her students at the piano. Before the year was out the leadership issued a decision that Andre’s talents could be applied to greater benefit in the United States, and so she began English lessons and two months later there they sat, the three of them, for the last time together, in a steak house behind the wharves in Buenos Aires, their farewell dinner, making plans to reunite in Zagreb but they never did, never the three of them together again, although the two men saw each other frequently that year, back home before the war. She never underst
ood Davor’s aloofness, never fathomed why he would not make an effort to see her and the baby, his godson, or participate in a second christening in the national cathedral, but now, sickened by her first smell of roasting meat since that day her husband’s head was booted into the fire, she understood.

  Twice the traitor, she told the brandy before taking a gulp. Even in friendship and love, a turncoat and double agent. She should have known then, in Buenos Aires, when he kissed her good-bye—the way he kissed her good-bye—and she let him, turning, gasping and confused, from the flare of the embrace toward her smirking husband, the only man who had ever measured her passion.

  She shifted her gaze toward Stjepan and the boyish partisans, the three of them squatting like Indians around the red coals, the glint of a knife passing from hand to hand, taking turns carving fistfuls of meat from the goat and stuffing their mouths. The Jew sat hunched on the log, slowly chewing, the fire’s glow sliding along the muscles of his jaw, and she watched him for a moment and then looked away, not wanting to think about Jews or imagine their troubles or anticipate tomorrow, when her fate would pass into their hands. Then the archbishop’s driver came toward her with a full plate of meat and steaming mushrooms but she shook her head no, groaning from the noxious fumes, and he opened the driver’s door and sat sideways, his feet on the running board next to her, and began eating the meal himself.

  Bogdanov, she said after a while, did you know Davor Starcevica? The colonel. I mean, before today.

  Not well. I saw him around with the others. The Home Guard. The police.

  He called you bagman, she said. I don’t know this word. This is a gangster word. What does it mean? She waited for him to reply but he didn’t and she continued. What did he want from you? Money? Information? What did you give him?

  Marija, said Bogdanov, life is complicated now. What he gave us is what’s important.

  She felt the urge to reprimand him but could not make sense of her feelings—he had risked his life to undo his mistake, taking her to the captain—and she had no desire to examine her continued value in the bartering that took place among enemies, which, she was learning, was how the temperature of war cooled down to a state of tepidness.

  Bogdanov, she said, tell me about killing people. You know about this, yes? Are we all going to hell?

  The sin, he told her, was to not protect those you love.

  War is a sin, and I chose it, she replied. Who did I protect by killing that man?

  I would have killed him myself, and been happy for it, said Bogdanov. He was a Turk, an animal.

  Happy, she said. Yes, I understand now. That’s the sin. I won’t lie, Bogdanov. That’s what I felt. A war has come and gone and today was the first I felt it.

  Happy, or sinful?

  I’m talking about the blood on my hands, she said, the brandy gone, her voice beginning to slur. I’m talking about the satisfaction.

  In God’s eyes, you are without sin, he said. How is it possible to sin by resisting the devil?

  You know what we need, Bogdanov, she said, suddenly drunk. The campfire was blazing again and there was her boy, illuminated by the towering flames, a cigarette in his mouth, brandishing one of the partisans’ rifles and the older boys showing him how to hold it but Davor had made sure their two escorts were Croats and so she was not alarmed and did not disapprove when they let Stjepan have some fun and fire into the trees, the blasts swallowed by the forest as it began to rain.

  What we need, Bogdanov, she said, is another war.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The roar of the rain woke her at dawn and she opened her eyes to fibrous woolen light inside the car, afraid to move, anticipating the swell of pain throughout her body. Bogdanov and his foundling Jew were crumpled in the front seat, snoring, and the boy was huddled back against her womb, encircled by her arms, her left arm underneath him and tingling and she slowly realized her hand was tucked under the waistband of her son’s pants, cupping his scrotum like a warm toad. She concentrated on moving her fingers until the sensation of feeling returned and she withdrew her hand and the child moaned and shifted and the rain came in angry spasms that made her feel trapped and hopeless and finally stunned by the desolation she felt within her. God give me strength for one more day, she prayed, as she prayed every morning since they had fled Dubrovnik. Then the pain awakened from its bed of brandy and she could think of nothing else until the engine started and she heard the ticktock of the wipers across the windscreen and Bogdanov, hacking as he lit a cigarette, was driving them out of the deluge.

  Down through the mountains the rain slowed and changed to rolling mists and Bogdanov stopped on the side of the road to allow everyone to empty their bladders. She sucked in her breath and sat up with tears in her eyes and took the boy behind a chestnut tree and made him squat with her, despite his resistance to this embarrassing intimacy, and insisted he move his bowels but for the third day in a row he couldn’t. Back at the car the Jew was in the front seat, waiting, frozen with gloomy patience, and Bogdanov had opened the trunk, where he had stored her luggage sometime during the night to keep it dry.

  Bogdanov, she said, looking up and down the road, the mists above and below. Where are the soldiers?

  I don’t know, said Bogdanov, shrugging. They left in the night.

  We heard music, said Stjepan. In the forest.

  I told them not to go, said Bogdanov, offering around a cone of olives.

  She prepared toothbrushes for herself and Stjepan and afterward wet a washcloth and wiped his face and rubbed salve into the cut on the top of his head, which had become infected, then took her hairbrush and lipstick with her to the front seat to use the mirror, saying as she sat down, Good morning, to their passenger, getting a good look at him for the first time, his haughty topaz eyes, the narcissism of his bloodless lips, and thought, since when do Jews have eyes like this? He snickered with cold amusement and she said, Tell me, what’s so funny.

  It’s possible they will accept you as one of their own.

  Who?

  The Jews on the boat. You and the boy, eh, you look like you’ve come crawling out from the camps.

  What camps are those? she said, not trying to be disingenuous, knowing instinctively without knowing literally. You could listen to British propaganda forever on the BBC and still not know the truth or harvest its attendant verities. The first time she ever heard the word at her dinner table she had naively accepted the image it conjured, rustic holidays, family outings in the mountains, happy children, uncomfortable bedding. She turned the mirror and saw herself, her skin sallowed by malnourishment, her face waxen and hollow-cheeked, the ghastly bruising, her limp hair and the ringed flatness of her eyes and, resigned to the irony of her position, looked back at the man. And what about you? she asked.

  Me? he laughed darkly. Oh, yes, the Jews will welcome me with open arms. We will share fond memories, the Jews and I.

  However they receive me, I don’t care, she said. If they let us on the boat, God bless the Jews.

  Your husband was a Jew lover as well.

  You don’t know what you’re saying. Who are you?

  Oh, yes, said the man. You didn’t know? So I will tell you. Many times the SS complained to the Ustashe leadership about your husband’s lack of appetite for exterminating Jews.

  Where might you have heard such things?

  The Germans claimed he was insincere.

  Insincere?

  Racially and spiritually.

  Who are the Germans to lecture Croatians on race or spirit?

  Oh, yes, said the man, slapping both knees for emphasis. Here’s how it was with your husband. If a Jew joined the Communists or the Chetniks and fought against us, then your husband obeyed his orders. Otherwise, he allowed the kikes to escape to the Italian zone, where he
looked the other way.

  I see, she said. It’s your opinion that my husband is to blame for losing the war.

  Perhaps he was too busy converting Serbs.

  Who are you? she asked again, warily, not knowing what to expect anymore from anyone, when all the loss her world had suffered merited not consolation but seething resentment and recriminations. Another priest with bloody hands?

  She heard Bogdanov’s footsteps approach and he held the door open and with his free hand he reached and lightly took her elbow and helped ease her out of the car. It is our duty, Bogdanov said, to survive, and the sad reprimand of his voice disheartened her. The rueful cast of his eyes moved beyond her, over her shoulder and back up the road they had followed out of the clouds. What is it? she said, alarmed by the sharpening concentration of his face, and, turning, she saw the black outline of the motorcycle and its sidecar emerging soundlessly from the fog. Oh, Davor’s boys have come, she said uncertainly; whether their belated reappearance was good or bad she could not discern from Bogdanov’s stony lack of reaction.

  Like an apparition from a twilight world, the shape of the machine and its riders floated toward them, announced by a dull tapping that grew in pitch and volume until it pulsed in concert with her body. A sudden brightness of color, a vermilion flag, began to snap in her vision and then came the freezing dread of impotence, a new danger hurtling their way and nothing to prevent it. The boy in the sidecar slumped awkwardly, head lolling at an angle like a village idiot. Then she could see he was near death, his throat slashed, the front of his blouse glazed with blood, and the other boy, the handsome moon-faced driver, wept red tears, blood striping his tortured countenance from a wound plowed across his forehead.

  Where are they? the young partisan demanded wildly, steering the motorcycle to a stop behind the car. Have you seen them?

  Seen who? said Bogdanov.

  Goddamn you, he sobbed breathlessly.