The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  We’ve seen no one, she said. My God, what happened?

  Roma, the teenager panted, swiping the blood from his eyes with the back of his sleeve. Roma! Let’s go. Get in the car. Let’s go.

  The motorcycle leaped ahead, absorbed into the oblivion of mist, and Bogdanov followed but without urgency, as though nothing unusual had happened or might happen. Only Stjepan talked, no one taking the trouble to imagine answers for his questions, the road descending through swirling obscurity until the mists cracked open like an egg and there was the blinding barbaric sun and there too was the motorcycle, abandoned by its driver who stood in the center of the road firing his rifle into a plodding oxcart filled with Gypsies, several of the men among them with rifles of their own, shooting back.

  There was a bang inside the car and a glittering hole flowered in the windscreen. Bogdanov reversed violently, skidding out of the line of fire, and they watched as the young partisan advanced, aiming well, and methodically dropped his foes, the men with guns first and even the heedless ox, then the women as they shielded children, and then the children too until a single survivor remained, a screaming teenage girl with parted waves of black hair that fell almost to her waist, perhaps a few years younger than the partisan himself, whom he dragged out from the cart and lost no time tearing off her embroidered peasant’s dress until she stood in tattered underclothes in the road, trembling, and he tore these last rags of modesty from her as well.

  That’s how it’s done, said the Jew who was not a Jew, nodding with appreciation.

  Bogdanov, she said, as they all saw the young partisan lay down his rifle to unbuckle his belt and his pants sink to his boots. Make him stop, dear God. But she felt nothing, her shame hidden, her compassion voiceless. Why bother to believe in her own goodness or anyone else’s when the very idea of goodness had come to seem nothing so much as a useless thought? Bogdanov quietly slipped the car into gear and drove forward, neither the soldier nor the Gypsy, on hands and knees like two dogs in the road, aware of their passing, the girl’s hair like an executioner’s hood hiding her face, the men in the car—yes, her son too; even the boy’s dead comrade in the sidecar—craning for a look, and Marija examined the moral curiosity of the nothingness she had come to contain. My God, look, they cut that boy’s throat and almost killed us, she reasoned, fixated on the bullet hole in the windscreen, and what did we do to them, and what finally was left to believe in except the horror of existence?

  Stjepan, she commanded. He knelt on the seat cushion, facing backward to look out the rear window, the canine image of the teenagers receding but never the mystery of what he had witnessed, nor the mystery’s implicit temptations, which he had no language to describe yet somehow understood must be guarded from adults and preserved, unspoken, feelings you gazed at wordlessly like strange animals in the zoo.

  Stjepan, she repeated in a voice he could not ignore. Turn around, sit right. Take out your rosary. Say it with me.

  Nearing the coast their progress slowed, the sedan required to halt at partisan checkpoints in each maimed and ravaged village, the route clogged by a grim exodus of refugees fleeing the boundless treachery of the kamenjar, the stone fields of Dalmatia’s interior, its ethnic Italians to be slaughtered by the thousands in the coming year and thrown into foibe—sinkholes—until Tito secured the zone for Yugoslavia.

  At a crossroads above the entrance to Zadar, in a landscape of olive groves and vineyards and a rosemary-scented sea that for much of her life had been home, Bogdanov swerved around a horse-drawn wagon piled high with household furniture and parked, blocking its path. Please, one moment, he announced and walked back to speak with the drover, a conversation she could not hear. Nor could she discern the consequence of its outcome when Bogdanov opened the trunk to pay the drover with a hundred dollar bill and transfered her luggage to the bed of the wagon. Behind her the trunk clicked shut and still she had no sense of what was happening.

  Marija, please, he said, may I speak with you a moment.

  She began to lower the glass of her window but Bogdanov went to stand in front of the car and when she approached him she could not catch his eye and followed his distracted gaze down the limestone slopes to Zadar, which appeared half-eaten by some leviathan, the red-tiled roofs and Venetian bell towers, the ancient stone facades and whitewashed walls bombed seventy-two times by the Allies. He told her the next checkpoint at the city’s gates was operated by the British and he dare not risk it but she and the boy would pass through safely with the drover, who would carry them the remaining distance to the wharves. She was too dumbstruck by the abrupt finality of their parting to do what she wanted, which was to embrace the fearless old man to whom she owed what could not be repaid, to grasp and kiss his hand like a daughter, to press for a few seconds against the warmth and shelter of the flesh of the last person on earth except her child who knew her name and might say it with the smallest light of affection. Instead she bowed her head and whispered a promise to keep him in her prayers.

  Take this, he said, making her conceal the five hundred-dollar notes in her shoe.

  Bogdanov, she asked, what will happen to you now? Where will you go? And he told her it was better not to know.

  She retrieved her handbag from the seat and Stjepan became obstinate when she called him out of the car to say his good-byes, demanding to know why, burning an accusatory look into the archbishop’s driver, seeing what she herself refused to see. Son, take care of your mother, said Bogdanov, but the boy, showing only rancor, told him go to hell and stomped away, clambering up the footholds to sit on the wooden bench next to the drover, who chastised the child in Italian to climb in back and give the seat to his mother.

  Bogdanov, she began, but the old man interrupted her to ask her forgiveness. But Bogdanov, she protested, and he interrupted her again to ask that she open her handbag and give him the envelope.

  Envelope? she said, although she knew perfectly well what he wanted. Her eyes begged him for a different end to their story but he had become distant and aloof.

  Please, he insisted, taking it from her.

  What are you up to, Bogdanov, you and this man in the car? Was I ever the archbishop’s envoy?

  Yes, Marija. God and the saints watch over you, he said, and with that he was on his way.

  The drover, not a farmer but a scavenger picking clean the ruins, was good to his word and brought them down the last few miles to the medieval walls of Zadar, rolling to a stop behind the crowds assembled at the Land Gate thronged with British soldiers, whom she despised but feared less than the partisans, who were there too among the hapless Italian police. Behind her she heard Stjepan say in awe, Look, Momma, and she thought Dear Christ, how could the planes have missed this mockery of Croatia’s soul, the triumphal arch crowned by death to ward off death, a harrowing row of broken-beaked skulls meant to be cattle but more recognizable as satanic predators in perverse collusion with the monumental winged lion of Saint Mark reigning above them.

  As they took their place in the queue to enter the city her heart raced remembering the laissez-passer Davor had written, still in the pocket of Bogdanov’s coat. She had forgotten to ask for it and likely he would not have given it up anyway. But look at all these wretched people, she told herself, and why should anyone care about two more castaways, a harmless boy and his battered mother. It was the boat she could not stop worrying about, the Zionists would surely care about who they were, ready with the questions for which there would never be an adequate and acceptable response.

  The morning had turned muggy, windless. Exposed to the Adriatic sun she lapsed into a trance of anxiety, startled to feel her knee poked and hear the word Madame wrapped in an alien accent and her first thought, looking down at the British soldier inviting her attention, was, How ridiculous, how absurd, this pink-faced man wearing shorts like a schoolboy, her contempt for the great liberator im
mediate and unconcealed. In stilted Italian, he requested her documents and, with regal exasperation, she rummaged through her handbag as if searching for a coin to dismiss a beggar and handed him an expired passport, issued by a government that had ceased to exist even before the war. He stepped away to consult with a partisan officer who became animated with nervous excitement and she understood what would happen next and then it happened. She and the boy were ordered off the wagon, their luggage tossed into the street by Carabinieri, the drover told to go on, an escort assigned to take them a block into the city to a small cobblestoned square where she found herself penned with veritable scarecrows, scores of sagging button-eyed dispossessed made to stand in the sun’s wilting rays throughout the paralyzing hours of the morning, Marija holding her son’s hand in hers knowing only the archipelago of pain rising from her flesh multiplied by unbearable thirst and thinking one thought, ceaselessly, that we are all bobbing on an ocean of death, clutching and unclutching our fears, and who might save us, and why, and then what, and where was the haven that would allow her mortal self to rest. Gradually they mobbed the bar of shade cast by a roofless building and then, sometime after that, a partisan appeared behind the cordon, calling her name, and she staggered forward, squeezing the boy’s hand to reassure him of her pride in his forbearance.

  They were taken a short way down a narrow alley through a portal leading to a rubbish-strewn interior courtyard and through an iron-strapped wooden door that opened into a vaulted chamber, a dank cave illuminated by an electric bulb dangling from the ceiling. She saw a chamber pot and smelled moldy excrement and stale beer and saw a bare tick mattress that seemed to be a repository for every possible human leakage. At the back of the room were four mismatched chairs, an empty desk, a mound of ashes from a fire that had scorched the blue plaster above it, and graffiti gouged into the walls. Italian, Serbo-Croatian, German, English. Names, dates, obscenities. I fucked your little sister, and she stopped reading.

  What now? she turned to ask the soldier.

  Sit, if you like, he said, scratching his unshaven cheek. Stjepan asked to pee and the soldier said he would take him but she refused to let the child out of her sight—Use the pot, she said—and when she asked for water the partisan said I’ll see and left and never came back.

  Then they sat, rosaries in hand, counting Hail Marys like divine seeds to temper her misgivings until the boy dozed off, and she could smell how death surrounded them and imagined she smelled much the same. Minutes or hours later, she heard the yawning cry of the door and hammering boot steps and asked God for a miracle. Two men entered the chamber, one of the partisans deposited their ransacked luggage next to the desk and went away and the other, an officer with a pitted face and freshly ironed uniform and a ridiculous visored cap that dwarfed his head walked behind the desk and stood looking at her with a perplexed but not unfriendly expression and did not speak for a very long time.

  She saw the red star on his cap, a revolutionary ornament that would soon infuriate Stalin as a needless provocation of the Western Allies, and she supposed he was OZNa, one of Davor’s OZNa agents—the Department for the Protection of the People. OZNa’s growing efficiency had given birth to the rhyme she had heard on the streets of Zagreb, Ozna sve dozna, Ozna finds out everything. OZNa itself was to be transformed by Colonel Starcevica into Tito’s UDBa, the Office of State Security, with its own spine-chilling motto: UDBa, your fate. Prepared for his questions, she looked with challenging directness into the officer’s close-set, intelligent eyes, and he exchanged his querulous expression for a courteous smile as he came around the desk to pull up one of the empty chairs and, facing her, knee to knee, took a seat.

  Are you well, Madam Kovacevic?

  Yes, thank you, she said, relieved to hear his accent—not Bosnian, not Serbian. He’s a Croat, she thought, he understands that one day we must all stand together again.

  And the boy? he asked, with an avuncular wink at Stjepan.

  Yes.

  And your journey?

  Has not ended.

  Of course, he agreed, and continued amiably. Colonel Starsevica had written her a pass and entrusted to her a correspondence, and he had attached an escort for her safe deliverance. Strangely, she and her son had arrived alone in a peddler’s wagon. I find this very troubling, he said. May I see the pass?

  Without hesitation she told him she didn’t have it, not the pass, not the correspondence, none of it.

  I see, said the officer, his mouth pursed with commiseration. And where is Zarko Bogdanov?

  I don’t know, she answered. He abandoned us.

  And the escort? he wondered aloud, folding his arms across his chest. The soldiers? Where might they be? She told him they had fought with Gypsies, one was dead, one was . . . she didn’t know.

  And Bogdanov, said the officer, his eyes contemplating her, focused intently. When he put you out. He took the road north or south?

  She felt an irrational craving here to speak and be spoken to truly, to have honesty restored to her affairs with her countrymen, imagining in her interlocutor a similar hunger for a world stripped clean of its compulsory lies. If only we are honest with one another, all will end well, she thought, but could not convince herself that such a thought amounted to anything but self-delusion.

  South, she said.

  No sooner had the lie left her mouth than the officer, having earlier interrogated the drover, catapulted to his feet, his fist landing square under her chin, the very tip of her tongue bitten off and several teeth chipped from the blow. She fell backward in her chair to the concrete floor, unconscious, unable to prevent or even know or ever know what happened as she lay thrown into the blackest depths of darkness. She awakened dazed to the nightmare of herself and the boy alone within the vile skirt of piss-colored light, swallowing her own blood, the boy next to the desk shuddering and speechless and once again lost in place, his face pummeled, nose broken, one eye puffed into a slit and the other open but lifeless, pants dropped to his ankles, shit on the floor, shit caking down the spindlebacks of his legs. Ears ringing, she crawled to her suitcase, spitting blood, and began as best she could the desperate act of cleaning him without water, wiping him with the last of their clothes, trying to speak clearly through the pain, to offer the lisping comfort of her blood-thick words, begging the mother of God to repair this irreparable damage to her only child, terrified to look upon her son’s profound absence, terrified to ask, to know.

  When Stjepan finally spoke again that night as she cradled him in her arms and rocked him on the mattress he confessed he didn’t remember what happened, there was nothing he could tell her to ease her conscience or cool the fever of her hatred, and for the rest of his life the only memory he carried with him of his ordeal in Zadar, on the eve of his leavetaking from wartime and Yugoslavia, was of being strangled by a soldier, the clarity and consequence of the overpowering grip of death on his throat, his boyhood emptied of life and destroyed and then, because he would not surrender, refilled and resurrected.

  All she asked from Davor was water when he came the following day, the last word he would hear from her coveted lips for many years, Marija determined to teach him a lesson about the intractable lack of submission, the unforgiving obstinacy of Croatian women, to deny him the guilty sympathy of her mangled speech, consonants skating over the jagged precipice of her tongue. At first he tried to flash a smile but she would have none of it. He selected his words to placate and soothe her, to draw her away from her resistance to his solicitude, but gave up soon enough, his only accomplishment the reinvigoration of her God-invested hatred. She refused to listen to the glib evasion of his apology—Marija, please understand, this is how peace begins—to justify the psychopathic behavior of his minion, a blind extension of Davor’s own homespun cruelty, as unprincipled as it was useful, here at the end of her war but not his. Finally, without further sentimen
t or insipid nostalgia, the colonel transferred them personally to a room in a hotel by the port with shattered windows and a staff of cheerless old women in smocks, sent for a medic to tend their injuries, and instructed his aide de camp to find clean clothes for the boy and his mother.

  At the end of the hall was a bathing room with a rust-stained claw-foot tub where she washed her son with feeble strokes of tenderness and let him remain posted like a sentry, his remote eyes floating the length of her body, lingering only briefly with equal fascination on both her wine-and mustard-colored bruises and soapy breasts as she soaked in tepid water and thought of Davor’s duplicitous attempt at kindness—even the memory of kindness a boneyard where she felt tempted to lie down and rot—and she could not remember if she had once loved him because she could not remember love and saw how she was bereft of earthly prospects, destined for a loveless life in which she would love God and only God and, of course, her son, the last remnant of an answer to the question, Where is my joy?

  She dressed in the black dress of crones and widows that had been brought to her room and fixed her hair in a severe bun that bared the lividity of her abuse for all to see. Davor returned in the evening to take them to a café for dinner, an offer it was not within her heart to decline, knowing the boy must get some food in his stomach if he was to stay strong. On the street-side patio she sat at their table and sipped cold tea absentmindedly and said nothing and could barely look at him because there was nothing he could make right and she would not give him the chance. Men’s brains grow big with war and their hearts small, he told her, a needless prelude to his resolution of mysteries for which she summoned not the slightest curiosity.

  The price of Bogdanov’s freedom had been the betrayal of the passenger he had collected in the forest of Plitvice for Starcevica, executed on the road to Senj by the colonel himself. The man’s name surfaced like a crocodile with a corpse in its mouth—a murderous criminal, the Ustashe police commander in Slavonska Pozega. The recovery of the church’s stolen wealth, intended to fund an insurgency against the state, now the property of the patriots devoted to protecting the people. She sat facing east, not quite listening to him, lost inside the waning light, watching the night bury itself in the death throes of her nation’s independence, the slaughterhouse that would always be Croatia, its endless bloody-minded pageantry of violence, thinking, the devil can be found anywhere, in anybody. She thought, I am sitting with a repugnant man who represents a curse upon the world. She thought, achingly, I will never have sex with my husband again, or any man who imagines I might love him. She thought, our hatreds are not invented, and she thought Davor, once a simple truant, had finally succumbed to the unenlightened worship of power.