We camped outside Zadar in a used tent that our father had bought from an army doctor.
On the first morning we three kids leaped into the water on an air raft. I couldn’t swim, and my sister told me she would teach me how, but not yet, because she was too busy enjoying herself. We were rowing with our hands and pushing each other for space. The sun scorched our backs, and we sprinkled cool water over our bodies; when the water dried, we had salt on us, and we licked it from each other’s skin like a family of cats.
Suddenly, in the middle of the marine delights, I slipped off the raft. The cold water cut my breath, and I sank beneath the surface. I was surprised that I was not panicking and that it was taking place all so slowly. Above, through my cold eyes, glared the enormous light blue green with a shadow in it, the raft which was just out of my reach, farther and farther above me. The shimmering surface of the water was like melted lead, which I had melted from stolen lead pipes and poured into cups. The shimmering was vanishing and reappearing. What a beautiful sight, I thought, and now in it, you will drown. Somehow I could not believe it, that I would drown and die, because I was suspended in the water, in a gravity-proof state. The glittering surface above me seemed unreal, and whatever was beyond it was bound to be even more so, distorted and vanishing in the kaleidoscope of light.
Upon hitting the sandy bottom of the sea, I sprang up, ascending slowly, surprised at the gentleness of all my motion despite putting all the force I could in it. My fingers reached the raft, caught the edge of it, and I pulled myself out of the water with the help of my brother, who grabbed me by my hair, and my sister, by one arm. Only upon getting out of the water, as if fully realizing that I could have drowned, I grew scared. My nose was sore, my sinuses were sore, my ears hurt, I had a headache, and I began to moan, and then to laugh, water leaking out of my nose and ears.
In a night and a day, I had already twice been close to death, and I bragged about it, imagining I had grown, had become brave. I bragged to everybody that I had nearly drowned, though my brother and sister begged me not to tell our parents.
In the afternoon, I accompanied my mother and sister to shop. In the harbor was a large ship with three masts and sails. The sailors on the ship seemed to me to be pirates. I begged them to let me on the ship. They laughed and said, “What the hell. Madam, we’ll entertain your son.” And they took me aboard as if I were a toy, while my mother and sister shopped. One sailor, who was weightlifting, offered me to join him. I could not move the weights, except the smallest one that he used for one-arm exercises. The engine was switched on, and the ship let water out on the sides, the way I had out of my ears after the near drowning.
The sailors carried me into the body of the ship and told me we were below the surface of the water. “The ship goes four meters beneath the surface,” a sailor told me.
My mother and sister came to pick me up, and I screamed, saying I did not want to go with them, but the sailors were traitors and handed me over. Soon we were in the tent. My mother and sister were unpacking eggs, vegetables, and meat while I talked about the wonders of the ship, and then I shut up, lost in thoughts about the engine, the masts. When my sister said something, I didn’t listen to her. All I heard was the end of it: “We had to wait for an hour; it was so long, at least five meters long.”
“Yes, very big!” I exclaimed. “It goes five meters deep into the water.”
Everybody burst into laughter, while I was astonished that such an important and impressive fact was treated so lightly. I said, “What’s funny? It did sink into the water five meters, the sailors told me.”
“We were talking about the line in front of the butcher’s, how long it was, and you say, yes, so big that it sunk into the water five meters! The whole line of people would have drowned!”
“It’s not my fault,” I cried, indignant, “that you care more about shops than ships!”
After a couple of weeks, I began to complain: “I want to go home, the sand here is no good; I can make better cities out of our sawdust!” And my brother joined me, saying he could not play Robin Hood on the rocky terrain, he needed a forest. Our sister wanted to stay; she collected pink starfish and shells. And our mother said that she should take care of the garden, which must be a mess by now. And our father said he was tired of all the salt, he felt like a smoked and salted ham and all he wanted to do for a week would be to lie in the shade of large dank oaks. And so we went home, and moved with joy into our previously scorned and now beloved woods.
FRITZ: A FABLE
Lipik, Croatia
1991
FRITZ, a gray German shepherd, who in his pointed face and thick tail resembled a wolf, howled so terribly that his owner, Igor Lovrak, went into his larder, greased his great-grandfather’s rifle, and thumbed gun powder and bullets into the barrels before he dared to walk out into the yard. And even then he trembled, expecting bears or a band of thieves to be closing in. Just when Igor stumbled out in his wooden clogs, Fritz leaped so violently that he tore from the ground the thick pipe to which he was chained, and with a terrible din jumped over a hedge. A cat leaped onto the lamppost, barely escaping the dog, and climbed to the tilted and capped light bulb, and placed its paws over the lamp hook. Once settled, the cat didn’t move.
Although usually obedient, Fritz wouldn’t listen to Igor’s shouts to stop. Igor, who was built like a weightlifter, dragged him by the chain, but almost all the ground he had gained he lost with Fritz’s leaping toward the aloof enemy.
Igor locked him in the basement—Fritz knew how to open unlocked doors—but that didn’t prevent Fritz from howling most unpoetically his ugly song all night. Igor couldn’t sleep. He marveled at Fritz’s voice box. After so many bullets of wind from the lungs into the vocal cords, you’d expect the cords to snap. Igor’s nerves did, so he took up his ancestral gun and walked to the basement. His frizzy-haired wife, Dara, who couldn’t sleep either, stopped him.
“Leave that gun alone. What good could you do with it?”
“Shoot the devil.”
“Once the cat goes, he’ll be all right.”
“Are you suggesting that I shoot the cat?”
They sat up on the edge of their bed with their feet on the cold cement floor. It was past twilight. Against the paling sky, the lamp post appeared stark black. On the post was the silhouetted cat, in the same position as the evening before.
“The damned cat hasn’t moved at all,” said Igor.
“Are you sure it’s alive?”
“Maybe it died of fright. Cats are such cowards—probably most of them die of heart attacks.”
“I wouldn’t call this cowardly. Maybe he’s got himself electrocuted in the wires.”
In the slanted, streaking sunlight, frosted branches of the hedges sparkled; in the hills, barks of beeches glistened. Loud sighing and intermittent snoring came from below, through the drains in the bathroom and the kitchen. When Igor turned on the faucet, even the water seemed to flow with the sleepy sorrow of a groaning hunter—or Igor’s ears still murmured in the aftermath of the howling. Now he couldn’t stay alert, although he had to go to work as a plumber at the spa hotels, where ladies from all over Croatia and Hungary came to improve their complexions in iodine mineral water. They languidly coiled in pink oval marble pools, and when adjusting pipes, he sometimes caught a glimpse of them—born-again embryos in halved and steaming eggs with ossified shells. Now he thought that if he wasn’t alert at work, he might cause some damage, cut his fingers off.
Igor walked out and called the cat, but the cat didn’t move. Its turquoise eyes glowed independent of the sunlight.
Igor whistled like a bird, but the cat’s ears stayed unmoved. He didn’t want to let the cat remain suspended dead above his house. If a cat crossing your path spelled bad luck, a cat crossing your wires and looming lifeless in your window spelled doom. Would crows eat the cat? Maybe pigeons? Owls? He got a ladder and climbed, shakily, up the cracked post that smelled of oil and tar.
“What happened to the cat?” Dara asked.
“That interests you more than what happened to me?” Igor poured plum brandy over the music sheet that the back of his hand had become, wincing at the wet melody of scorching pain his nerves were hearing. He pinched splinters from his palms. The splinters hadn’t provoked a flow of blood while under his skin, but once they were removed, blood flashed in the emptied lines like comets in the sky.
“Well, that’ll teach you to pick up a strange cat without gloves. Where is it now? It must be starving.”
“I’ll go get the dog and let him run after the cat.”
“Let him stay down there—I’ll feed the cat.”
She walked out. Igor, pouring plum brandy down his throat, saw a gorgeous tabby with thick black stripes—a veritable black and gray picture of a tiger—scratching its back against Dara’s thin ankles, which were in thick woolen socks. Her heels, he noticed, even now formed a dancer’s right angle; she never forgave him for living in the provinces where she couldn’t become a professional dancer. The cat lapped milk, rubbed his back against the socks, and its tail went straight up and grew fluffy, perhaps from the static that flared up from the socks. The tail tip waved joyfully above round testes. Dara picked him up, scratched his tummy, and the cat licked her palm and put his paw pads on her cheek. And so they stayed for a whole minute, gazing at each other with an interspecies sympathy.
“That cat’s so thin,” Dara said as she poured milk into a tea-cup. “We should take care of him.”
“Is that up to us to decide?”
“Fritz will just have to get used to it. When he realizes that Bobo is here to stay, he’ll accept and love him.”
But Fritz couldn’t get used to it. At night he barked mercilessly. He chased the cat up roof pipes and into the hills. Once, when the cat fled onto a thin birch, Fritz peeled the layers of bark with his teeth and then gnawed on the wood, like a beaver, until the tree fell. The flying cat barely touched the ground before it bounced over the dog and up a huge beech. Fritz dug at the beech roots and tore them, perhaps with the design to bring down that tree, too. And maybe after a month of labor he would have succeeded, if Igor hadn’t found him and chained him again. Fritz’s hatred for the cat grew legendary.
(And so, this story could have started like this: In a spa town there lived two mortal enemies, a cat and a dog. Now this was not unusual—there were many cats and dogs in the town, and they were all mortal and the hatred between them frequently entertained the inhabitants, Serbs and Croats, and the laughter of the inhabitants was loud. However, the hatred between most of the cats and dogs was amateurish compared with the hatred of a gray German shepherd and a gray tabby. The night the tabby appeared in the hedges on the edge of the town, the dog howled so terribly that his owner went into his larder and oiled his grandfather’s gunpowder rifle….Anyhow, the story didn’t start—nor will it end—this way.)
Fritz chased Bobo all over the hills and up many trees; and yet, when he dragged his feet home exhausted and disenchanted, unable to lift his hanging tongue into his mouth, he’d see Bobo strutting across the yard to his bowl of milk in the old barn’s rafters. Once, after a day of chasing, Fritz fell asleep, and Bobo came up and cuddled with him. Bobo licked his nose, purred in his ear, then left. Pretty soon Fritz awoke with a howl; he sniffed himself all over and even bit himself trying to get rid of the odious odor, sucking and chewing his fur as though he’d been infected with cat flies.
Once, in a corner, Fritz surprised Bobo, who had been absorbed in the joys of tossing a dying mouse over his head. He flew at Bobo with predatory certainty. Bobo flew even faster past his face and tore his ear. Before Fritz had time to understand what had happened, Bobo was up on the wall, ostentatiously ignoring him. Fritz would have a vee cut in his ear for the rest of his life.
The inability of the two beasts to get along complicated the Lovraks’ lives. They slept poorly. Fritz had been a passionate hunter even before Bobo showed up. He had leaped on anything that moved. But nothing matched this monomania for the cat.
“He hates life,” Dara joked.
It was a miracle that the cat did not seek another home; but, as theirs was the outermost house in town, this may have been his last chance.
Who knows how much longer this would have been going on if people hadn’t begun to behave like—and worse than—cats and dogs. Lipik was one of the first towns to be surrounded by the Serb armies. When rumors of approaching Chetniks with bared knives reached the town, and even more concretely, when a mortar shell shattered their roof tiles, the Lovraks rushed to get away. They couldn’t find Fritz and Bobo to take them along—and besides, how could you take such two enemies in one little car? Many cars, tractors, and trucks drove out of town—Croats north to Bjelovar, Serbs south to Banja Luka.
Igor and Dara stayed in a basement belonging to Igor’s brother in Bjelovar. Igor feared to walk out into the streets, lest he should be drafted and forced to run at Serb tanks armed only with a rifle. His sense of masculinity was insulted, for he saw himself as a brave man. In his youth he had been a bar fighter. That was how he had met Dara, when she worked as a tavern waitress. A giant drunk had stalked her and, when she finished her shift, attempted to rape her. Igor jumped at the giant and nearly strangled him. Dara had been grateful, and he had been proud. And now he was reduced to living with a bunch of onions and potatoes that in the winter sprouted their offspring; out of the old, shriveling fruits of the earth grew new pristine lives. And what could grow out of him?
He tried to do some good—he fixed all the plumbing and rewired the house—but once he was done, out of his bleak moods sprouted only cynicism, which Dara couldn’t take for long. She abhorred the fact that Serbs were attacking, but she also detested listening to the venom Croats, including Igor, spewed at the Serbs, as she was one. When Croatian bands began to burn out the houses of the Serbs who had left, she boarded a train to Hungary. Weeks later she sent Igor a card from Belgrade, telling him that she hadn’t felt safe in Croatia.
He was enraged. He had worried about her for weeks, and now she didn’t feel safe! And who was responsible for that, if not the Serbs in Belgrade, whom she now served, cooking bean stews in fast food dives, feeding former murderers and future murderers? He read the card while watching pictures of Lipik in the newsreel.
During the war, only a dozen elderly people remained in Lipik. Serb soldiers lobbed mortar shells into the town for weeks without a break. Croatian policemen—there was no Croatian army at first—defended the town, entrenched in the schools, churches, and hospitals.
In the old Austrian spa buildings, targeted many times, now loomed large holes, so that the ruins looked like skulls with empty eye sockets, bricks and tiles strewn around like broken teeth. Many tree trunks, cut in half from stray howitzer hits, resembled the broken legs of tubercular patients, their yellow bones sticking out of crusty skins; the rest of the patients’ bodies, which should have been above the broken femurs, was missing; the bodies may have hid in iodine vapors or slid into the ground under the moss. Shards of stained glass windows with peeing angels lay in the gardens and in pastel-blue tiled swimming pools. The shards sank in a heap of dead crows and the leaves of weeping willows.
The gloom notwithstanding, most people could take care of themselves. At least they could run; they understood what was going on. But how were animals to understand war? They trembled as though a natural calamity were taking place—
thunder, earthquake, fires. And all of these were taking place. A Lippizaner stable (from which Lipik got its name)—where for more than a century one of the original lines of the Austrian white horse was bred—had been firebombed. A white horse was seen running into the hills, its mane and tail and penis ablaze. Another stepped on a cluster of mines and flew into the sky as a geyser of blood, iron, and hooves.
When that Christmas Eve Croatian soldiers broke the siege and took over the town, several of them wanted to enter the Lovraks’ house. But on the threshold stood a wolf-like dog, and next to the dog, a tabby. The dog’s paw gently and protectively lay over the tabby’s shoulders. When the soldiers came closer, the dog growled most threateningly and the cat arched his back and hissed. The soldiers, who otherwise might not have felt any qualms at shooting an inimical dog, were touched. They didn’t insist on entering the house, even though that may have been imprudent—Serb snipers could have crouched in there, but the captain of the unit decided that was highly unlikely, for the house had a large tank hole gouged into its middle. On the way out, the Serb tanks had blasted holes in many houses, according to the dog in the manger fable: if we can’t have this, neither will you.
Much later, when Igor returned, Fritz wouldn’t let him into the house.
“Don’t you know me?” Igor shouted. “I’m your master.”
But Fritz didn’t acknowledge him. And when Igor wanted to pet Bobo, who showed no resentment but a great deal of indifference, Fritz growled jealously and nearly bit Igor’s hand. Igor backed off, and Fritz washed Bobo with his tongue.
With the help of the United Nations, Igor built a cabin in his yard. He was lonely. Not even his dog liked him. Not even the cat did.
Honey in the Carcase Page 10
