The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (24 page)

I don’t know, his mother whimpered. She heard the pistol’s hammer being cocked and
watched its barrel nuzzled obscenely in her child’s ear and saw the boy breathing
fire.

The archbishop’s envoy, she screamed out. As God is my witness, I don’t know his name.

But you are the archbishop’s envoy, the partisan said to her. Step over here with
me.

What? she answered weakly. I don’t understand.

Step away from that miserable bastard.

Flinging the boy aside, the man pounced forward and she closed her eyes. The blast
was so forceful it seemed to lift her off her feet and beyond the deafness ringing
in her head the shot repeated itself, echoing in the stony chamber of the square.
When she opened her eyes the priest in the brown worsted suit had crumpled to the
paving bricks, life bubbling from his forehead and nose, his executioner sweeping
the air with the pistol. Go, he said to her with a crazed look of happiness. He brandished
the pistol carelessly at the driver. Go, old man.

Wait, said his partner, and she instinctively shielded the boy with her body. Wait,
said the man, there is someone in the first car who asks for your courtesy.

My courtesy?
she said to herself, stunned, and the word itself seemed to rob her, as nothing else
had, of her strength. Whatever had held her nerves together for so long she felt disintegrating;
her legs would not move, crippled by the black weight of violence in her stomach,
nor could she find her breath. The boy and the old man supported her arms and she
shuffled between them through the cordon of statue-faced soldiers to the black sedan
and its hallucinatory summoning.

My God, I don’t believe it, she said, bending to the open window, straining cronelike
to squint in dismay at the broad forehead and narrow chin of a ghost.

Marija, the passenger in the front seat answered in a quiet voice. My apologies.

The boy would always remember his mother’s transformation at the moment she recognized
the man, her backbone snapping erect and hands flying upward, brazenly reanimated
and self-assured, contempt flowing through her like a return to health.

Your apologies, she scoffed, unwilling to use his name, to allow the intimacy of old
friends. Quisling. Murderer. God forgive you.

Marija, he said, untouched by her insults, think strategically. I fight the same battle,
now from the inside, at the next stage. You can see the necessity. You can understand.

How could you ever become a Red? she asked, incredulous and then cold, then vicious.
Ethnic trash is what Karl Marx called us, unfit to drink from the piss pot of his
lofty schemes. Tell me, how could you forget this? Ah, wait, it’s a question of brains,
she sneered, happy to see the crimson stain that flowered on his neck when his literacy
was challenged. You can’t remember what you can’t read, is that it?

Marija, we survived. Now we must win.

God take you straight to hell, she said, rediscovering her son as she turned away,
then whipping back around. Why must you hurt the boy, you pig? she raged, dabbing
tendrils of blood from Stjepan’s face with the hem of her skirt. Damn you, give me
your handkerchief, she demanded, but he had no handkerchief to give.

Marija, I regret this very much, he said, and she noticed he had difficulty turning
his head to look at her directly. It happened because it happened. Are you all right,
boy? he asked. You stood bold, like your father. You have guts.

You knew my father? asked the boy.

I knew your father, Stjepan.

Fuck yourself, his mother said.

His face blanched. Don’t speak like a whore, he admonished her, and the boy came through
the window, his fist striking snakelike, breaking the skin on the right side of the
man’s upper lip. He swung again without effect, his mother yanking him back by the
collar of his shirt, and the man laughed with stiff appreciation, waving away the
two pistol men who came sprinting toward the car.

He’s a little wolf. This pleases me, Marija, he said, wiping his bloody mouth with
the back of his hand. When he rotated his entire body to look the boy in the eye,
she put her own hand to her mouth, gasping, able to see his injuries for the first
time, the gruesome scarring, the curled hand flopping from the lifeless left sleeve
of his summer jacket, the partially missing ear and its ugly hole. It’s okay, boy,
he grinned. You are a Croat. Against all enemies, defend your mother, defend your
motherland.

Defend the Lord Our Savior, Jesus Christ, Marija said but wavered in her bitterness,
moved by his act of forgiveness, the mutilation of his youthful, athletic body. Who
was he anyway, this priest who asked that I be his wife? she asked.

A transgressor, a criminal, said the man in the car, whose name was Davor Starcevica,
her husband’s erstwhile comrade, a peasant from Slavonia who had wandered from the
land to the slums to find his purpose in life, which was, as with so many others at
the time, insurrection. Some priests, he said, will do all the things that other men
must hang for.

This priest was the archbishop’s envoy, she said, knowing the distinction now made
little difference.

This priest was a Franciscan who baptized Serb infants and Turk children and afterward
wrapped their heads in towels, Marija. Why the towels? To dry the holy water? No.
To prevent his robes from being sprayed with gore when he took a mallet and smashed
their skulls.

What do you want me to say? Heaven welcome their souls, she said. Was my husband part
of this?

Six years of war, Marija. Everybody was part of everything. We created a democracy
of madness.

And the archbishop?

It’s complicated, he sighed. The archbishop understood we would eliminate this butcher
if we caught him.

And you caught him, she said. Too easily, I think.

Perhaps, Marija. Everyone played the game well.

What game is this, when an archbishop sends his envoy to his death?

The archbishop’s envoy has a laissez-passer. Immunity to the coast.

The envoy has a bullet in his head.

You are mistaken, Marija, he said. Despite her distress at the moment, the archbishop’s
envoy seems in fair health.

What nonsense are you saying? Stop hurting my head with this nonsense.

He reached across the seat to pick up a small packet, sealed with red wax impressed
with a star and addressed to His Holiness. Please, take it, he said but when she reached
for the envelope he did not give it up. Stay with me, he said. Don’t abandon your
country. It’s coming now, it will bring us a good life, the future we dreamed together.

Do you know Kresimir? Stjepan interrupted.

I know many Kresimirs, said the man in the car.

You know which one the boy means, said his mother, recomposed by anger, tugging at
the packet until he released it, the invitation of his fingers emptied into the air.

Yes, I know him, the man admitted. He escaped from Jesenovac by being dead.

Tell me, Davor, she said, finally using the power of his name to condemn him. If you
destroy the churches, what church will we be married in? What priest will marry us,
if you kill them all? Who will baptize our children? Tito? Stalin? Taking her son’s
hand, she began to step backward away from the sedan, trembling with fury. Stay with
you! she mocked. The future we dreamed together! I must be confused, Davor. Did we
dream of a future of Croats betraying Croats? Did we dream of a future of fratricide?
Did we dream of licking the boots of the Serbs, of our children becoming communist
slaves? Did we dream of a future where we tear down Christ from the cross to bury
him in an unmarked grave beneath a mosque? Did we dream of a future where the Turk
who beheads my husband becomes the Turk who is now your brother? Was this our dream,
Davor, when they exiled all of us to Italy? I don’t remember. How could I forget our
dream!

If you don’t release the hate, Marija, he said ruefully, I fear for your soul.

This hate is my blessing! she spit and heard her voice become hysterical but wouldn’t
stop. This hate is my gift to Christ Our Lord, she shouted like a madwoman. This hate
is sacred. May God take this hate and use it to vanquish His enemies. She grabbed
the boy by the shoulders, bent her knees until they were face-to-face, her chest heaving,
mother and child each searching the fierce activity in the other’s eyes. When you
come back as a man to liberate Croatia from these devils, Stjepan, she said, promise
me you will kill this one as well.

Who is he? asked the boy, nodding his loyalty to her, stern-faced in agreement to
the pact that would consume the last faint shades of his innocence.

Tell him, screamed his mother.

I am your godfather, Stjepan, said the man in the car.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Leaving the square, the boy thrust his head out the open window, looking back to see
where the soldiers had hung the priest from a lamppost, his corpse stripped and inverted,
a crucifix carved into his fish-white flesh now upside down as well, pointed hellward,
its crossbar dripping scarlet flames. Stjepan, don’t look at these beasts, said his
mother from her seat behind, blessing herself, but then she changed her mind and told
her son, Forget what I said—
Look. Remember
. When he sat back, she pressed a washcloth to the top of his head, heedless of his
protest.

Minutes later, a short distance beyond the edge of the city, the driver slowed at
the sight of a checkpoint ahead, if that’s what it was, though its strangeness in
this season of anarchy seemed less strange than worrisome. An object of manor house
stateliness, an antique banquet table with sinuous legs made of dark wood had been
placed lengthwise across the road, barricading the single lane south across the plain
to the upland pastures of Kordun and Lika, a seating and service for ten occupied
by as many stubble-bearded partisans who seemed, even from this distance, out of sorts.

As the car approached they leaped up in their grimy underclothes, nervous as startled
crows, reaching for their weapons but then sinking back unconcerned. An eleventh soldier,
obviously fatigued, paced mechanically around a nearby cook fire, feeding its black
clouds with the aftermath of war—busted furniture and rain-swollen books—the thick
smoke belched into the leafy branches of an oak tree, an upright piano hauled under
the dismal shade of its canopy, a dead or drunk or sleeping man in the scatter of
rubbish in the dirt next to the piano’s vacant bench. Farther down the road was a
burning farmhouse, its bouquet of orange flames shimmering above the fields.

For fuck’s sake, said the driver under his breath. What now?

He braked and stopped a prudent distance from the barricade and went to greet the
rebels with the false air of a man who never met an enemy, his confidence buoyed by
the envelope in the pocket of his suit coat and the black art of survival he had mastered
long ago. In the dark symmetry of his own life he knew these fellows, a motley group
of schoolboys and farmhands, juvenile delinquents and tenured cutthroats, and he recognized
where he was, where he had spent much of his life, the warp of time and sensibility
that twisted into the small raw spaces created by the ending of wars that resolved
nothing—the First Balkan War, the Second Balkan War, the Great War, this war—lawless
dead zones where armies factionalized and territorial obsessions defied ideologies
and generals begat warlords and warriors begat gangsters. He knew what it was like
to stand in the yard of a farmhouse, the family huddled somewhere inside, and give
the order, not only absent of regret but with the extreme satisfaction of nihilistic
acquiescence—
Burn it down!
How do you explain this? If you believed in the clarity of violence, explanations
were redundant.

The expanse of the table’s surface held a clutter of inharmonious worlds—grenades
and soup pots, rifles and lovely blue bowls, bayonets and butter knives, bottles of
wine and brandy and tubes of medicines, crystal goblets and brass handfuls of ammunition.
He saw immediately that the men around it were possessed by unwholesome decaying energy,
ruddy-faced but sickly with apprehension, their countenances governed by the permanent
jolt of paranoia in their bloodshot eyes. By all appearances they were an ill-disciplined
and unpredictable band who seemed exasperated by peace and indifferent to the nature
of their victory or their role as victors. Like wary dogs, their eyes tracked his
movement while they continued shoveling gray porridge into sour-looking mouths, munching
links of burned sausage, their weathered skin boasting an array of new scars and old
scabs and dusted with grit and soot.

Ah, Bogdanov, you’re too old for this,
he groused to himself, bowing toward the rebels. Gentlemen, he said out loud, comrades.
Good morning.

Stjepan’s mother lifted the washcloth to examine the boy’s wound and overcame her
reluctance to add to her son’s pain. I’m going to sew you up, she said.

But I’m fine, Mother, Stjepan insisted, slouched under her attention. It doesn’t hurt.

It’s deep, this cut. It won’t stop bleeding, she insisted. I can see the bone. Flies
will lay eggs in your brain.

She got out of the car and stood on its running board to grope through the luggage
strapped to the roof, locating her sewing kit and a perfume bottle she’d had the forethought
to refill with antiseptic. Cross your arms and lean on the door and put your head
down, she instructed, standing outside his window to do her work. Doesn’t it hurt?

No.

It must hurt a lot, she said, gently sponging at the ooze.

I don’t care.

That’s good, she said, then you won’t care when I do this, and swabbed the wound with
alcohol. He flinched and exhaled, hissing between clenched teeth, but was as silent
as a mystic, squeezing his face smaller with each prick of the needle.
That bastard Davor was right,
she thought, her deft fingers tugging the heavy black thread through his scalp, closing
the pucker with four tight stitches.
You are a little wolf, my little wolf.
God and the war had made her son strong or else made him crazy, but strong and crazy
meant you were born normal, more or less, for a southern Slav. Now he had suffered
far too much, seeing and knowing what he shouldn’t, to ever be anything but a Croat—first
to throw off the Byzantines, first to stop the Turks, and now, God willing, the first
to slay the pagan onslaught that was Communism.

A streak of high-pitched noise made her lift her head in time to see the flash of
a motorcycle and its empty sidecar as it passed, a young soldier racing back into
the city, and she was given a memory to brush away, of her husband’s passion for these
machines. Finished, she announced, compelled to skip aside as the door flew open and
Stjepan vomited eggplant at her feet and she brought him what she could—pity, water,
and the solace of her pride.

T
he archbishop’s driver returned, looking like a man who could not sell an egg to an
infertile goose. She had never asked him his name—beyond the formalities of class
and stature, if you lost a war it was a bad time to know people’s names or stories—but
last night she had heard the housekeeper address him playfully—
Bogdanov, you’re not getting younger; Bogdanov, where are you running off to with
this frisky mare
—and it cheered her secretly to hear the old man incriminate himself with foul language,
disobeying the archbishop’s strict draconian ban on cursing, a ban that she herself
had adhered to effortlessly, unthinkingly, a natural extension of her upbringing and
education, the once-clear division between good behavior and the indecency of what
was unacceptable in thought or action. But this morning
. . .
! The nasty words had erupted from her tongue, ready-made for her collision with the
man she would have loved if she had not first loved another. My God, the deplorable
hypocrisy: clean mouths, dirty hands.
Don’t talk like a prostitute, Marija—Pardon me, who is the prostitute!?
The driver’s beer-hall vulgarities, which she knew were not meant for her ears, had
begun to appeal to her remaining sense of humanity, making him seem oddly but authentically
trustworthy and natural in a world that was itself inauthentic and profane, and, criminal
or not, she had decided,
Sir
was insufficient for a person so entangled with her fate.

Bogdanov, she said, coming around to the front of the car to meet him, her hands fidgeting
with the cloth belt of the dress she had worn since leaving the apartment in the capital.

Madam?

Oh, God, she said, blinking back a surge of tears, the facade of her emotions shattered
unexpectedly by his deference and grandfatherly disposition—the tendered bow, a grateful
smile, a sudden kindness in hawkish eyes—the small things that exposed large hearts
or offered, at least, their illusion. Bogdanov, she said again, unable to continue,
leaning her weight against the grille of the car.

Marija? If I may.

Bogdanov, she tried again, sniffling. I can’t cry. Now is not the time.

No, you’re right, he said, patting her hand, apologetic and consoling. Perhaps now
is not the best time. Excuse me, I must ask. Can you play a piano?

But what was the old fool talking about! A stampede of feelings overwhelmed her and
her voice sank plaintively to a wretched sob—Yes! I can—then trampolined upward into
a strangled squeak—No, I can’t—her fists hammering the grille while she wrestled herself
under control. I’m sorry, she said between shuddering deep breaths, it’s possible
I’m losing my mind.

No, missus, Bogdanov reassured her, but I’m afraid I must introduce you to a man who
has.

She instructed the boy to stay in the car and went with the archbishop’s driver down
the road to the men, her steps slowing when the soldiers sprang to attention, their
eyes settling on her, instinctively homicidal, then reassembled with lust. Her feet
stopped and her own eyes skipped quizzically from Bogdanov to the men and back again
to see the uncertainty molding the driver’s face as he began, too late, to register
his mistake and she thought,
Mother of God, have mercy, I am the black lamb taken to the altar
.

Bogdanov, she said, light-headed. A whisper of despair—What have you done to me?

Turn, he said. Walk. We’re going back.

But the officer in charge had come forward, bare-chested, clumping toward the pair
in his unlaced boots, his head tilted like a mockingbird and displeasure reflected
in his sun-creased eyes. One moment, he said. A moment, please.

Bogdanov, she said, how could you have been so blind! You see what they want.

Chauffeur, what’s the problem? asked the captain. Can she play?

No, said the driver, but the captain shoved him backward and ordered him to leave.

Bogdanov, dear Jesus, no, don’t leave, she pleaded. Help me, you must, she said, but
the captain shoved him again and slapped his head—Get out of here, old fuck—and she
panicked seeing the quick cold glint of malevolence in the driver’s eyes and told
him yes, go, it’s better, and he left without another word.
Even big as he is, what could the old man do anyway,
she told herself, except witness her humiliation.

He had, he would report to Marija at their camp that night in the forest, respectfully
produced the laissez-passer, dated and signed by the hand of Colonel Davor Starcevica,
regional commander of intelligence for the new regime. Let me see, the corporal had
said, a middle-aged man with receding hair, whose eyes resembled boiled plums. He
grabbed the document away, glancing at its content, handing it down the table, each
man examining the page with the darting intensity of a monkey, until it reached the
shirtless captain of the platoon. A man of Napoleonic height with unruly hair and
a flattened nose, his shoulders and chest sculpted with furls of muscle, he wore only
boots without laces and army pants with an unbuttoned fly and spoke with a Bosnian
accent in a loud incoherent croak, his liver-colored eyes dilated and twitching beneath
the jet-black hedge of his brow.

There is a crisis, said the captain, his violent expression fluid with whimsy. He
brushed away an insect the driver could not see. Do you think I’m joking?

No, sir, said Bogdanov, I would not think that. May I ask the captain, is the pass
not acceptable?

One of the pimple-faced teenage soldiers had stood up sneering, making accusing jabs
with the spoon gripped loosely in his bandaged hand. I know you, he threatened. What
village are you from, Ustashe? Globs of porridge rained down on the soldier sitting
to his left.
Ass breath!
his comrade shouted and popped up with a backhand swing of his forearm, catching
the scrawny youth in the jaw and knocking him off his feet.

He doesn’t know me, the old man said to the table, although no one seemed to care.
My family is from Zagreb.

I know him, said the kid on the ground, dusting himself off and returning to his breakfast,
grinning and unaffected. He used to suck the cocks of every priest in Mostar.

That was your sister, said another soldier to barks of laughter, and food sailed across
the table until the captain promised to shoot the next man who interrupted the train
of his disturbed thoughts.

The captain, it soon became apparent to Bogdanov, was a drunken, overstimulated lunatic
in charge of men liberated by his delusions, and doubtless they would never be more
free in their lifetimes than here under the captain’s command. The pass was confirmed
valid, the checkpoint had received previous instructions to provide an escort for
the driver and his passengers, but the order, the captain said cryptically, was under
review. He would be looking into it shortly, he would make a decision and devise a
plan—but first, the crisis.

In their rampage through Karlovac, the soldiers had plundered the apothecary, carrying
off a trove of medications, some, asserted the captain, with unusual magical powers.
It’s very dangerous here, said the captain. My wife and four children are fucking
dead, he announced. Our village was torched to the fucking ground. We were attacked.
It never stops. But you can see for yourself we are vigilant, we are tireless. You
can’t go south, not yet, and never after sunset, so don’t be impatient. The road is
filled with bandits, terrorists, blood drinkers, evil the likes of which few men have
the strength to overcome. I can tell you, there are land mines, crazy people, farmers
with axes and swords, Gypsies stealing children, priests with bombs. We need petrol
and then we go. In a few minutes, you’ll see. Ah, but the jeep. These imbeciles wrecked
the jeep.