by Lana Popovic
The entire inside of the church was rife with repeating patterns, and again I could feel the beginnings of the gleam swelling in my sight. I wanted to wallow in it, to be delighted in this sudden resurgence—I’d missed it so badly, for so many years—but this felt almost hostile in a way I didn’t remember from before. As if it wanted to multiply this church’s insides into endless fractals and then shatter them, like a mallet brought down on a block of ice.
“Missy?” Luka said, hand on the small of my back. “You okay?”
I took a deep breath. “I’m fine. I just need a minute.”
Trying to narrow my focus, I drew closer to one of the silver plates, an exquisite rendering of a storm-wracked ship with one splintered mast, a cloud-borne Madonna hovering above it in blessing. The metalwork was so finely done that the waves beneath the ship’s prow churned in a fine, almost lacy froth.
“They’re votive plates,” a tentative voice said over my shoulder. “Perast has always been home to sailors. Whenever they survived some tragedy at sea, they would make a solemn oath.”
I turned from the plate. A gangly, green-eyed boy about my age stood behind me, his freckled cheeks flushing adorably when I met his gaze. I smiled at him. “What kind of oath?”
“The sailor would pledge that, if he survived and returned to port, he’d leave some mark on something lasting like silver—usually a picture of whatever kind of ship he’d sailed on, and an inscription naming the vessel and its captain. Local goldsmiths made these plates, here in Perast and in Cattaro.”
“What about these?” I asked, pointing to a silver heart, nestled into the crook of a miniature arm. “What are they for?”
“Same thing. Sometimes the sailors thought they were sure to lose an arm or a leg, falling overboard or getting tangled in the rigging, and that it would have happened if Our Lady’s love hadn’t protected them. This isn’t nearly as many as we once had. Our Lady was looted twice.” His eyes dimmed. “People always want to take what isn’t theirs. Even today.”
He tried a fretful smile. “I’m Ivan—I’m sorry, I should have said. I’m the curator’s son. Let me show you and your friends the altar. The museum is closed today, so that’s all you’ll be able to see.”
I followed him between two smaller marble altars on either side of the nave, censers dangling above us, to the enclosure of the main altar. Its walls were painted a deep maroon, like the inside of a heart; Malina, Niko, and Luka were already there, on the narrow benches on either side. Three curved tiers rose up from the altar, each wider than the previous one, the last holding a tabernacle supported by mottled green marble pillars. Above them stood the painting of the Madonna and child, surrounded by cherubs and seraphim, a chiseled marble curtain shielding it from above.
“This is a replica of the painting found by the Mortesić brothers, painted over plaster,” he said. “The original icon is in a museum. Safer than it would be here,” he added, again with that trace of outrage.
Looking up, I saw a delicate confection of glass, its loops so finely wrought it made me long for the blowpipe at my lips, the molten give of the bubble, or the gather, at the end of the pipe. From below, some of the shapes even looked like the bulbs and buds of flowers. They practically quivered in my sight, wanting to burst into fractals like some hostile hybrid of glass and weedy plant, and my breathing went shallow. I screwed my eyes shut and snapped the band around my wrist, trying to rein myself in.
“And see all these dried wreaths and bouquets hanging from the lintels?” I heard Ivan saying, but I didn’t dare look at actual flowers, even dead ones. “Those are votive gifts from brides who get married here. They give their bouquets and ribbons and jewels as offerings to Our Lady, to safeguard their marriages and their husbands when they go off to sea.”
Why would Dunja have wanted to come here? I wondered. Despite my reaction, my still-buzzing scalp and the milling unease like centipedes down my spine, I could feel that this place was meant to be a sanctuary, if not one for me. What could she have been looking for in this homespun little church?
I turned my attention back to our reluctant guide, who was biting his chapped lower lip. “There’s one more thing,” he said. “We don’t usually show this to the larger groups in case of damage or accidents, but since it’s just the four of you . . . do you want to touch the first stone, behind the altar? The one that held the painting when the brothers found it on the sea?”
Luka’s face brightened like a little boy’s, despite all the skepticism. “We’d love to,” he said. “Thank you.”
Ivan squeezed behind the altar, his voice growing muffled. “It’s tight back here, but you’ll come through just fine.”
I startled as his hand wrapped around mine, and he gently tugged me forward, placing my palm against the altar’s cool, dusty back. I edged in sideways, trying not to breathe too shallowly. The dark, tight space smelled as clean as the rest of the chapel, nothing but the fresh saltwater breeze from outside and the ghostly undertone of faded incense. Still, my flesh crawled as Ivan guided my hand around the dry rim of an opening carved into the altar’s back, as if there might be creatures in there, a snake or swarming beetles, a scorpion with its barbed tail held poised to strike.
But when I finally slipped my hand into the smooth, rounded opening and ran my fingers over stone polished by countless palms, I felt a deep wash of disappointment, as if I had thought there might be something here. A clue, maybe, something we could use to begin picking at this thorny tangle with Mama—and the two of us—at its center.
But nothing was ever so easy.
After all four of us wriggled out the other side, Ivan gestured toward the doorway to the left of the altar. “The museum is through there. It’s a shame that I can’t show it to you, but after yesterday, my father thought it’d be best to be a little careful, even if we can’t close down the church itself.”
Malina stiffened beside me. “What . . .” My voice came out raspy. I could practically taste my heart in my throat. “What happened yesterday?”
“Someone stole our most precious votive offering. It was a tapestry of the Madonna and child, embroidered by Jacinta Kunić-Mijović, from Perast. She worked on it for twenty-five years while her husband was away at sea, until she lost her eyesight. She used gold and silver fibers, and seed pearls, but by the end, when she ran out of money and could barely see, she used her own hair. You can see how it pales from dark to white where she wove it in.”
He turned away from us, as if to straighten a little display of candles, but I could hear the fury in his voice. “Can you imagine how much love went into something like that? Her wealth, her sight, her own hair—just in the hope that her husband would come home. And now it’s gone forever. It was given to Our Lady, and someone stole it. Our Lady wouldn’t ever be vengeful, but I don’t think it’s blasphemy to say that I hope that woman pays for it.”
“Were you here when it happened?”
“I was,” he said bitterly. “I showed her everything, even the first stone. And I let her stay upstairs alone so I could tour a French group that had come in. She seemed so . . . She didn’t seem like the kind of person who’d do something like that. But what do I know. I can’t even be remembering her right.”
“Why not?”
“I thought she was old, to begin with. Her hair was white. But when she took her sunglasses off inside, I could have sworn she wasn’t any older than me.”
FOURTEEN
“WHAT IS SHE DOING?” I DEMANDED. WE SAT AT THE outermost table of the trellis-shrouded restaurant’s terrace, overlooking the water as the sun dipped behind the mountains across from us. I’d wanted to head straight back to Cattaro, as if simple movement could make up for how stagnant and lost I felt, but apparently I’d still looked pale when we got off the ferry. Luka had insisted we get something to eat. “What could she possibly want with a tapestry? And if she burgled a church, it seems likely that she’s the one who took our things, too.”
Malina d
ipped her chin, her cascade of curls rushing over her cheeks. “But what for? It’s not just why a tapestry—it’s why that one.”
“Maybe if we understood the context better,” Luka mused. He was sitting next to me, across from Malina and Niko, one arm slung across the back of my chair. “This gleam, these things you both can do, and Jasmina too.” He leveled a gaze at his sister. “That you knew about, apparently.”
“Yes,” I said flatly, looking at Malina, who met my eyes with a guilty dart of a gaze. “About that.”
Niko shrugged, one brown shoulder slipping free of her black-and-gold top, slim as a sparrow wing. “Well, I obviously wasn’t going to tell you, Luka. I didn’t think it was such a terribly big deal anyway. Mama did things for us sometimes, cantrips and blessings, little songs for health and wealth. No need to look so shocked about it—you were the one who never wanted to hear about her old family, her compania in Bosnia, before she married Tata. Anyway, this seemed like that, just scaled up. And it was Lina’s secret, which she didn’t exactly mean to tell me in the first place. We were singing together, and then—”
“Yeah,” Lina broke in. “Niko was teaching me one of Koštana’s songs, the Romany rounds. We were singing on top of each other, and it just happened. I showed too much. It was three or four years ago. I was still doing it by accident a lot more than I do now.”
I looked between the two of them. They were staring away from each other, Lina’s eyes near silver in the dimming light, as if her irises were limned with mercury, Niko’s dark and gleaming like a doe’s, blackened with liner. There was something glinting right beneath the surface there, a goldfish flicker in a pond, but I lost it just as quickly. Niko’s eyeliner reminded me of Fjolar, and I wondered if he might be free when we got back tonight. If he might want to see me.
Thinking of him put me in mind of my flaring gleam, like a candle flame caught in a cross breeze. “Lina, do you feel like you’ve been getting stronger at all? Or more unpredictable, anyway? It kept happening to me at Our Lady, like in the café. Also, I’m not sure if that’s all it was, but I almost hated being in there.”
“Yes!” Lina burst out. “Not about the strength—I’m not feeling much different, though maybe it’s been a little easier to sing things out—but there was something about that place. This feeling, you know, like when you’re visiting with someone and you can tell they’re just itching for you to leave?”
“Hmm, a bit like that,” I said. “Though it was more . . . visceral for me. More mutual, maybe. It wanted me out. And I wanted to hurt it.”
“So, what else?” Luka said, drumming his fingers on the table. “This is an equation, like everything else. A really damned weird one, but still. The more variables we can fill in, the better we’ll understand it.”
“Mathematics to the rescue!” Niko cheered under her breath, giving a sarcastic fist pump. “Calculus will find a way!”
“Oh, shush, brat. It’s just a way to consider it. Think of it as a criminal case, if that works better for your gnatty brain. The more clues we have, the closer we are to understanding how the whole is supposed to look. Right now we have Jasmina, our Schrödinger’s cat. Alive and not alive.”
“Luka!” Niko hissed. “She’s their mother. You can’t just turn her into a physics paradox.”
“I’m just trying to help, and this is the only place I know to start,” Luka said equably, squeezing the back of my neck. “Why don’t you two walk us through what else you know?”
Lina and I took turns respooling the past few days. Niko’s brow had wrinkled while Lina and I described the nightmare of Mara, and she broke in before I could even finish telling them about Sorai and Naisha.
“The woman that you saw, in the winter valley. You said one of her names was Marzanna?”
“Yes.” I closed my eyes and tilted my head back, a chill running down my spine like a trickle of water as I recited the rest. “Also Mara, Maržena, Marmora. There were others, too, I think. Why?”
“It sounds familiar, is all. I can’t quite remember it—it might have been a song Mama sang us, or maybe one of her stories, Luka, remember the ones?”
He pulled a face. “How could I forget? We probably had a few nightmares of our own about them, not that that ever stopped Mama.”
“She just wanted us to remember, is all,” Niko countered. “That’s what we come from; it’s not something to be scared of, or ashamed. I wrote a lot of them down in the last months, along with her tinctures and recipes, when she”—her slim throat worked—“when it got worse than bad. I’ll look through them for you when we get home.”
We all fell silent, watching the sun set. Layers of mountains reared above the bay, each receding tier like a paler charcoal rendering of the first. The pinks of the sky turned the rippling water a silvered mauve, with the early moon rising fat above the mountain peaks. Despite everything, I could feel my heart swell with the majesty. Sitting here, you understood why so many monasteries and churches clustered in Montenegro, perched on every other cliff top and wedged into folds of mountain stone. It was beautiful on top of beautiful with beautiful tucked inside, like one of my fractals, and watching it you could almost sense the slipstream of eternity, the holy, breathing soul of the universe.
The waiter returned then, carrying a tray loaded with the gleaming catch of the day. A massive two-pound bass served as a centerpiece, with fleshy sea bream fanned out around it, along with an ugly, gawping monkfish. As we waited for the fish to grill, we tore into dense, chewy rolls spread with kajmak—the buttery cream cheese made from ripened curd—washing our bites down with tart, tannin-laced sips of the dark Vranac merlot Luka had ordered.
I was wondering if I’d even have room for the fish when Malina let her fork clatter to her plate, her eyes brimming. “The kajmak is perfect. The balance is exactly right. Mama would have loved it.”
The roll turned to ash in my mouth, and I struggled to swallow. Luka draped his arm over my shoulder and pulled me against his side, sliding my chair along with me. “Hey, now. It’s not a sad thing. Flavor was everything to Jasmina, even I knew that. Even before I knew it meant anything more.” He gestured toward the dusky water. “And she would have liked that, wouldn’t she? Maybe . . . maybe she’d have made it into one of those little cake squares. What are those things called?”
“Petits fours,” Malina whispered. “It would be really pale pink ones, with mille-feuille and strawberry filling, and a sprinkle of sea salt for the surprise. And silver foil for the decoration.”
I took another swig of the wine, feeling the kick of warmth in my stomach displace the hurt. Maybe that’s why they had named it after a vranac, a rearing black horse, I thought muzzily. Because it bucked so nicely in your belly. If I had another glass, I would be fully tipsy.
Our fish arrived, and the waiter prepared it for us, separating the steaming, flaky white meat from the tiny needles of the skeleton in one smooth slice with the fish knife. He slid portions of the bass and the sea bream onto our plates, complete with the salty crisp of skin beneath, along with potatoes boiled with spinach. I ladled dollops of the slick marinade onto the meat—olive oil, parsley, and minced garlic—letting each tender bite saturate my mouth.
After we finished, we sat with our feet propped up against the restaurant’s ivy-twined railing, sipping the last of the wine and watching the night sky. The day’s heat had broken into a rainless thunderstorm, and the dense bank of clouds had gathered low above the inlet, flickering and bursting with bright bolts of jagged lightning, like a Polaroid negative of a daytime sky. I thought of Peter Pan, of celestial pirate ships dueling between clouds. The salty, ozone-laden wind blew into our faces, carrying with it that soapy scent of pine sap that was always strongest in summer.
Despite the storm, the restaurant was doing a lively business. A live band had struck up, covering classic, older hits from bands like Bijelo Dugme, Merlin, Hari Mata Hari. Luka eventually stood and held out a hand to Malina, bowing extravagantly in front o
f her. Giggling, she stood a little shakily and stepped into his arms. He led her through a loose, improvised waltz, his steps sure and hips swaying just slightly.
“Where did he learn how to dance like that?” I asked Niko, who was smiling a bit as she watched them, one corner of her mouth turned up.
“Mama and Tata used to take dance classes together. They were amazing—they could do anything from this silly tango to a ballroom waltz. They’d dance sometimes when the bands played at the cafés on the riva. Luka and I loved watching them. Tata so fair and tall, Mama gorgeous and dark and little.”
“Like you,” I said.
She smiled again, faintly, acknowledging the compliment. “She taught me all of them, and her Romany dances too. Sometimes—near the end—I used to dance with her, just a little, very slowly. It reminded her of her compania. They wouldn’t acknowledge her anymore, after she married a gadje. But she was happy with us. She was.”
“You must miss her so much,” I said. “She was so wonderful, so warm. We used to talk about it, Lina and I, sometimes. What it would have been like to have her as a mother, instead of ours.”
“And me as a sister?” she teased. “Not ideal.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, you know.” She waved her hand vaguely. “You’ve seen me and Luka tear into each other, and you and I butt heads plenty even without being blood. There you are,” she said to Lina as Luka led her back to our table, her cheeks still flushed. I felt a surprising needle-stab of jealousy slide between my ribs. “I was just telling Iris how Mama and I used to dance, while you played us a sevdalinka on the guitar and sang for her.”
“I didn’t know you sang, Luka,” I said. I loved sevdalinke, too. They were my favorite kind of folk music, love songs that tasted like Turkish delights, slowly and sweetly strummed in a minor key that seemed to resonate in your own heart’s valves. “I thought you only played.”
