The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (27 page)

Bogdanov, she said, tell me about killing people. You know about this, yes? Are we
all going to hell?

The sin, he told her, was to not protect those you love.

War is a sin, and I chose it, she replied. Who did I protect by killing that man?

I would have killed him myself, and been happy for it, said Bogdanov. He was a Turk,
an animal.

Happy, she said. Yes, I understand now. That’s the sin. I won’t lie, Bogdanov. That’s
what I felt. A war has come and gone and today was the first I felt it.

Happy, or sinful?

I’m talking about the blood on my hands, she said, the brandy gone, her voice beginning
to slur. I’m talking about the satisfaction.

In God’s eyes, you are without sin, he said. How is it possible to sin by resisting
the devil?

You know what we need, Bogdanov, she said, suddenly drunk. The campfire was blazing
again and there was her boy, illuminated by the towering flames, a cigarette in his
mouth, brandishing one of the partisans’ rifles and the older boys showing him how
to hold it but Davor had made sure their two escorts were Croats and so she was not
alarmed and did not disapprove when they let Stjepan have some fun and fire into the
trees, the blasts swallowed by the forest as it began to rain.

What we need, Bogdanov, she said, is another war.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The roar of the rain woke her at dawn and she opened her eyes to fibrous woolen light
inside the car, afraid to move, anticipating the swell of pain throughout her body.
Bogdanov and his foundling Jew were crumpled in the front seat, snoring, and the boy
was huddled back against her womb, encircled by her arms, her left arm underneath
him and tingling and she slowly realized her hand was tucked under the waistband of
her son’s pants, cupping his scrotum like a warm toad. She concentrated on moving
her fingers until the sensation of feeling returned and she withdrew her hand and
the child moaned and shifted and the rain came in angry spasms that made her feel
trapped and hopeless and finally stunned by the desolation she felt within her. God
give me strength for one more day, she prayed, as she prayed every morning since they
had fled Dubrovnik. Then the pain awakened from its bed of brandy and she could think
of nothing else until the engine started and she heard the
ticktock
of the wipers across the windscreen and Bogdanov, hacking as he lit a cigarette,
was driving them out of the deluge.

Down through the mountains the rain slowed and changed to rolling mists and Bogdanov
stopped on the side of the road to allow everyone to empty their bladders. She sucked
in her breath and sat up with tears in her eyes and took the boy behind a chestnut
tree and made him squat with her, despite his resistance to this embarrassing intimacy,
and insisted he move his bowels but for the third day in a row he couldn’t. Back at
the car the Jew was in the front seat, waiting, frozen with gloomy patience, and Bogdanov
had opened the trunk, where he had stored her luggage sometime during the night to
keep it dry.

Bogdanov, she said, looking up and down the road, the mists above and below. Where
are the soldiers?

I don’t know, said Bogdanov, shrugging. They left in the night.

We heard music, said Stjepan. In the forest.

I told them not to go, said Bogdanov, offering around a cone of olives.

She prepared toothbrushes for herself and Stjepan and afterward wet a washcloth and
wiped his face and rubbed salve into the cut on the top of his head, which had become
infected, then took her hairbrush and lipstick with her to the front seat to use the
mirror, saying as she sat down, Good morning, to their passenger, getting a good look
at him for the first time, his haughty topaz eyes, the narcissism of his bloodless
lips, and thought, since when do Jews have eyes like this? He snickered with cold
amusement and she said, Tell me, what’s so funny.

It’s possible they will accept you as one of their own.

Who?

The Jews on the boat. You and the boy, eh, you look like you’ve come crawling out
from the camps.

What camps are those? she said, not trying to be disingenuous, knowing instinctively
without knowing literally. You could listen to British propaganda forever on the BBC
and still not know the truth or harvest its attendant verities. The first time she
ever heard the word at her dinner table she had naively accepted the image it conjured,
rustic holidays, family outings in the mountains, happy children, uncomfortable bedding.
She turned the mirror and saw herself, her skin sallowed by malnourishment, her face
waxen and hollow-cheeked, the ghastly bruising, her limp hair and the ringed flatness
of her eyes and, resigned to the irony of her position, looked back at the man. And
what about you? she asked.

Me? he laughed darkly. Oh, yes, the Jews will welcome me with open arms. We will share
fond memories, the Jews and I.

However they receive me, I don’t care, she said. If they let us on the boat, God bless
the Jews.

Your husband was a Jew lover as well.

You don’t know what you’re saying. Who are you?

Oh, yes, said the man. You didn’t know? So I will tell you. Many times the SS complained
to the Ustashe leadership about your husband’s lack of appetite for exterminating
Jews.

Where might you have heard such things?

The Germans claimed he was insincere.

Insincere?

Racially and spiritually.

Who are the Germans to lecture Croatians on race or spirit?

Oh, yes, said the man, slapping both knees for emphasis. Here’s how it was with your
husband. If a Jew joined the Communists or the Chetniks and fought against us, then
your husband obeyed his orders. Otherwise, he allowed the kikes to escape to the Italian
zone, where he looked the other way.

I see, she said. It’s your opinion that my husband is to blame for losing the war.

Perhaps he was too busy converting Serbs.

Who are you? she asked again, warily, not knowing what to expect anymore from anyone,
when all the loss her world had suffered merited not consolation but seething resentment
and recriminations. Another priest with bloody hands?

She heard Bogdanov’s footsteps approach and he held the door open and with his free
hand he reached and lightly took her elbow and helped ease her out of the car. It
is our duty, Bogdanov said, to survive, and the sad reprimand of his voice disheartened
her. The rueful cast of his eyes moved beyond her, over her shoulder and back up the
road they had followed out of the clouds. What is it? she said, alarmed by the sharpening
concentration of his face, and, turning, she saw the black outline of the motorcycle
and its sidecar emerging soundlessly from the fog. Oh, Davor’s boys have come, she
said uncertainly; whether their belated reappearance was good or bad she could not
discern from Bogdanov’s stony lack of reaction.

Like an apparition from a twilight world, the shape of the machine and its riders
floated toward them, announced by a dull tapping that grew in pitch and volume until
it pulsed in concert with her body. A sudden brightness of color, a vermilion flag,
began to snap in her vision and then came the freezing dread of impotence, a new danger
hurtling their way and nothing to prevent it. The boy in the sidecar slumped awkwardly,
head lolling at an angle like a village idiot. Then she could see he was near death,
his throat slashed, the front of his blouse glazed with blood, and the other boy,
the handsome moon-faced driver, wept red tears, blood striping his tortured countenance
from a wound plowed across his forehead.

Where are they? the young partisan demanded wildly, steering the motorcycle to a stop
behind the car. Have you seen them?

Seen who? said Bogdanov.

Goddamn you, he sobbed breathlessly.

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.