Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (19 page)

Praying to Saint Sava, who rules over snow and ice, and offering their most heartfelt invocation to Prince Lazar, our two principals now followed the river to the gentle slope of dark scree on whose crest the white boulder waited. (Perhaps they should have also prayed to Saint Thomas.) The wind blew stronger, so they sat their fur
kalpaks
on their heads. It was the hour between the two dog watches. Their aspirations resembled the glow of golden icons in a dark room.

Do you see it now? said Cirtovich.

God help us, yes! Master, don't you? It's wriggling all its arms down in there, and it's watching us through the ground—

That's enough, Vasojevic.

They drew a magic circle in the sand, then kindled a fire and burned mastic, aloes and frankincense. Through the fragrant smoke they passed a pentacle drawn in scarlet ink upon a virgin lambskin. Then they commenced to dig; and before we describe the object of it all, before the corpse arrives, carried through the window by two stoic men, the mother need do no more than stare into the night, waiting and worrying, while the boy called Jovo gets for an instant longer to keep the precious certainty of his father's invulnerability. Then comes the sight and above all the touch of death. Their father has fallen. Death has ruined him—he who should never die. But now everything will be put right; any instant now our spade-edges will bite success.

And so their shovels struck wet sand, then ice, then gravel, and suddenly something hard and hollow—wood or metal?— The latter, of
course—a bronze casket, as ancient as the three broken basilicas at Salona.

Remember, master, what
the Patriarchs have said:
There is no resurrection without death.

I'm not afraid. Are you?

Didn't Lazar choose death?

Spoken like a Serb! And now, dear friend, let us be armed with the sword of God's Word!

Adonai,
they sang, then offered up a last prayer to Saint Sava, hoping that if they could accomplish this one magic thing their lives would be perfected, or at least mended. Although he should have kept his mind on the ritual, Cirtovich could not help but think on Tanyotchka biting her lip in half-mastered grief as he departed their home. Vasojevic was lucky never to have begun a household. His master knew that if they ever did return, the house would be smaller and sadder, the people older.

Now listen, Vasojevic. What's next may require fast work—

With all respect, I'm still young enough!

I've never doubted that. But do we agree on what to wish for?

By all the saints! We came here to—

Yes, on our own behalf. But what about Prince Lazar? We could seize this chance to bring him back. Wasn't that our old dream? Think about it. We could save our tortured country.

Or defeat death itself, as you used to say—

Knowing from the despairing hope in each other's eyes what they both longed for above all else, they fell silent. Then Vasojevic said: Lazar, God praise him, made his choice and can take care of himself. I don't say this for my own sake.

So you relinquish that dream?

Just as you say.

And death?

Endless life, and endlessly seeing that face before me—well, I'd rather not.

Raising up the chest, they tried to open it, but although green light began to bleed out as soon as they undid the clasps, the task required violence. They prayed once more, longing for their church's smell of candle wax. With shovels they attacked the lid until it was a ruin like the
multicracked shell of a boiled egg squeezed in the hand. Then they twisted with their Saracen blades, and it sprang aside.

Up rose their old companion like an emanation of the Great Godhead, closer and more corporeal than ever before, freed from the glass, neither larger nor smaller than it needed to be to fill the newly available space, its flesh breaking out in purple-brown ventral chromatophores, and all ten arms beating a tattoo against the sides of the casket before reaching out into the chilly air. The two men stepped back once it began discharging liquid from the funnel in its head, Vasojevic longing to sink a boat-hook into it and Cirtovich imagining those arms curling and tearing at his face. But fixing on them its jewel, that beautiful lidless eye, it grew calm, as if it recognized and trusted its friends. Before it had invariably appeared omniconscious, not to mention gruesomely hateful on account of the hatefulness which on their behalf it busily foresaw. And now it opened its beak like a baby bird. Which of us would not on occasion prefer to be dependent?

Almost as suave here as in Philadelphia, Cirtovich propitiated the thing with Friulian wine until its tentacles wriggled as sweetly as a baby's toes. What did he care? After all, not even it could match his childhood dread of his father.

He drew out the dark-glass, proving to himself and his companion that it was not only transparent, but void. It seemed that the monster could not exist in two places simultaneously. Then, uttering another prayer, he poured another bottle of Friulian crimson into the creature's beak. Drunkenly, wine drooling out of its beak, it draped one tentacle around his neck—the first time in all these years that it had ever touched him. Well, it felt no stranger than touching a corpse! Trusting in it not to hurt him—after all, what had it done him but good?—he knelt down, and raised it to his heart. At once it flushed red-violet, as does the giant octopus when disturbed. And Jovo Cirtovich felt moved to tenderness. But seeing Vasojevic standing quietly stubborn in his views, whatever they might have been, he set the creature gently down in the rocks.

In the box beneath where it had lain was another casket, which he withdrew. From it issued the scent of an unknown flower, but when he opened the lid, there was the head of his father, smiling at him. So grief came to him in truth.

Are you my father?

No.

Who are you?

I am the one you sought, it said, and its voice resembled the vivid strangeness of the gold on certain Byzantine icon panels, which as one alters one's angle of view appears to shift its underhue from cool reptilian green to sanguinary red. Around it shone a soft light whose rays brought sweetness and tears.

We have come for a wish, said Cirtovich.

What would you?

Hesitating, thinking perchance to dicker with this being as with some Cincar trader, he demanded: Will you advise us? Shall we rid ourselves of that nightmare?

If you choose. What would you?

Or should I ask to hear death's voice? Or preserve my favorite daughter forever, or find out where my father has flown?

Master, said Vasojevic, I pray you to improve this opportunity for the best. Never mind you or me, or even Tanya (and you know how I love her). What do I care for us, if we can make our land a graveyard for Turks?

Can you do that? Cirtovich asked his father's head.

I can. Decide now, or gain nothing.

Cirtovich, inspired by his noble friend, was about to call for the restoration to earth of Prince Lazar when the dark-glass entity returned to its senses and reached out, the suckers on the undersides of its arms scintillating with the pearlescence of certain amphorae. When it touched Vasojevic, that man, who never in any emergency, even a battle, had expressed anything but coolness, cried out like a convict being branded on the forehead; and Cirtovich, compassionating him in that moment, shouted: Free us from
that
!

The head smiled sadly, then disappeared. So did the creature, the two caskets and the hole which had been dug. The dark-glass cracked.

Vasojevic, did it injure you?

No, master, barely a sting—

Cirtovich closed his eyes. Upraising her chin, Marija stared at him gloomily. Nicola, Vuk and Veljko stretched out their arms to him like
drowning men. As for Tanya, that young woman, pulling her long hair diagonally across her forehead, prepared to go out as if she did not perceive him. Well, this was but his fancy. But what if she now began to suffer? And in truth, he felt ashamed before the shade of his father. Well, Massimo would have done far worse; he would have wished for the ointment which transforms a naked man into a wolf.

Jovo Cirtovich seemed to hear royal processions departing in faraway crownlands.

He opened his eyes. He took his father's vacant treasure and hurled it down. There alone those two men stood, on that low hummocky peat-island which was studded with striped rocks and cut by those narrow silvery streams whose multiple forks fell into the sea.

Just as after a rain the Triestine sky is of an impeccably African brightness, thus it should now have been in the soul of Jovo Cirtovich, for he had attained his heart's desire. Vasojevic stood leaning on a spade.— Well, said Cirtovich, did we act rightly?

We shall soon know, doubtless.

I could have demanded knowledge—

Foreknowledge we had.

This I've never asked you: When you saw the Sphere of Stars, was Lazar there?

Of course, master, and seated on Christ's right hand. He smiled and beckoned to me, and not with one finger, either. You did ask that, and I told you. We would have been welcomed—

Well, there's nothing to prevent us now. What do you say? Shall we refresh our crew, and then sail to heaven?

Vasojevic hung his head. Within the hour he seemed not merely to age, but to grow haggard and unclean.

Oh, yes, once they had rid themselves of the dark-glass thing, they should have felt at peace, and even righteous; but so long had they lived (Cirtovich especially) in anticipation of its ominous appearances that not seeing it refined their anxieties almost unbearably; for ambuscadoes had been
laid—all the more diligently for Cirtovich since he evaded them with such defiant success—and now he could not find them out. Students of probability theory will assert that his peril of death at any given instant remained no greater now than half a century ago; but he knew death to be a kind of person, or at least an entity with multiple writhing arms. Therefore, death hunted him actively and intelligently. This might have been an error. Then again, nothing is as hateful to nature as incorruptibility. High time for the grave to take him! Thus he believed; and his face grew ghastlier than before; he might have been a prisoner condemned to row until death in a Turkish galley—but no; that sort of wretch remains chained to others, for better and worse; while the most hideous quality of Cirtovich's existence, as ever, was
solitariness,
even though he kept longing to stroke Tanya's hair.

In his father's house in Serbia there had been a strange icon, depicting one of those cubical Biblical cities where lean brown men bore long scarlet coffins on their shoulders, ascending and descending clay stairs so that the mummies they carried could exchange one tomb for another—and everything mendaciously embellished with gold. Now he knew the meaning of it.

So he holed himself up, avoiding even Vasojevic, who likewise withdrew from inessential intercourse; and they sailed north, laboring in cross-seas, wandering through all twenty-eight Mansions of the Moon. Even Friulian wine could not cheer them. But what had they to fear? Their future resembled the weary wounded man whom one meets at the end of a trail of werewolf-blood. Vasojevic was looking still older; as for Cirtovich, he was now as fishy-bearded and bleary-eyed as that famous silver likeness of Saint Blasius. For years he had found no use for the superannuated worthies of Ragusa. Now he felt like one of them. Had he gazed in a mirror, he would have confessed that his face was no longer a bland mask; but what it expressed he could not make out. He supposed himself ready to acknowledge his losses, which so often until now had seemed to swivel into sudden gains. Behind his breastbone there seemed to dwell something hard, round and smooth. His consciousness kept fingering it as if it were a marble, turning it round and round in order to know it or, better yet, to massage it down into nothingness; but it would not go away; it was fear, when he had expected to win peace. And some
other feeling still less creditable settled into his guts like an anchor digging in with both flukes. What was it? Although they remained as lovely to him as the bloody Serbian earth, even thoughts of Marija and his loyal sons and his daughters running silently to and fro on the carpets in their stockinged feet, gathering hams, potatoes, onions and wines for the welcoming feast, could scarcely warm him. Besides, this time he brought no silver coins to string around the necks of his women, and so he felt ashamed. At last his hours had become sad and definite. He fancied he could hear jointless fingers stealthily caressing the hull. But his ears had been for so many years disturbed by fanciful things that he doubted them even more than he did his own heart. Believing him to be weakening in luck or goodness, the sailors began to doubt him likewise, although they could not yet show it. Meanwhile he said to himself: If I die now I never need touch Tanya's corpse—oh, God, that the beautiful delicacy of my daughter's skin should be burned by death's sucker-arms!— And so he went on hoping for life, at least for her.

You're holding up like a true Serb, Vasojevic.

Thanks, master. You know, an octopus shows no sign of pain when we cast him into the fire—

One morning when they had almost regained the coast of Africa a pallid wave arose, spread itself into fingers and sought to pluck him from the forecastle. Cirtovich ducked away, but it got Vasojevic, seizing him in both tentacles, then speeding him down into the clutch of those long, tapering arms which were cratered with teeth-ringed suckers, and as the monster submerged they had one murky glimpse of the brown beak opening; and so after that Cirtovich lacked anyone who could understand him, excepting Tanya, of course—but not even she could have helped him reason out the causality of this latest death. Was that submarine predator the same as the devil he'd cast away, or was it a visitation of God, meant to rebuke him for dismissing his better angel? Either way, he commenced to fear that his own doom would come from the sea. The mate, who loved Vasojevic, had proposed to lower the creeper, in order to hook and grapple that kraken into reach of their guns, but Cirtovich refused, saying merely: It would kill us all.— A certain sailor with a bearded old head resembling Saint Stephen's, whose limestone flesh keeps smoothening and blurring with time, whispered that their captain was
now an evil-eyed Jonah, which most of them immediately believed, and had another man been lost on that voyage, they might have risen up and marooned him there in the African Sea. Withdrawing from them, he knelt before Saint Lazar's icon, and prayed for his friend, but almost without feeling. He had squared off his dreams into a single thing as flat-sided and sharp-cornered as the heel of a mast, and now sat in his cabin thinking about Tanya. This year he'd present her with a real woman's dagger to wear at her hip. It pleased him to think of her at home doing the accounts. As for Marija, the love he had bestowed upon her was as the coins he had thrown into his father's coffin. Her lilies must be blooming up now. He wished he were sitting in the garden, listening to the murmurings of the dovecote; but then Marija would be out there with her back turned. And so he grew bitter against other living beings, and the more bitter he became, the less his sailors liked him. Although they were all adept at trapping the chambered nautilus in a baited basket, they caught nothing precious, as had never yet befallen men employed by Jovo Cirtovich.