The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (28 page)

The morning had turned muggy, windless. Exposed to the Adriatic sun she lapsed into
a trance of anxiety, startled to feel her knee poked and hear the word
Madame
wrapped in an alien accent and her first thought, looking down at the British soldier
inviting her attention, was,
How ridiculous, how absurd, this pink-faced man wearing shorts like a schoolboy,
her contempt for the great liberator immediate and unconcealed. In stilted Italian,
he requested her documents and, with regal exasperation, she rummaged through her
handbag as if searching for a coin to dismiss a beggar and handed him an expired passport,
issued by a government that had ceased to exist even before the war. He stepped away
to consult with a partisan officer who became animated with nervous excitement and
she understood what would happen next and then it happened. She and the boy were ordered
off the wagon, their luggage tossed into the street by Carabinieri, the drover told
to go on, an escort assigned to take them a block into the city to a small cobblestoned
square where she found herself penned with veritable scarecrows, scores of sagging
button-eyed dispossessed made to stand in the sun’s wilting rays throughout the paralyzing
hours of the morning, Marija holding her son’s hand in hers knowing only the archipelago
of pain rising from her flesh multiplied by unbearable thirst and thinking one thought,
ceaselessly, that we are all bobbing on an ocean of death, clutching and unclutching
our fears, and who might save us, and why, and then what, and where was the haven
that would allow her mortal self to rest. Gradually they mobbed the bar of shade cast
by a roofless building and then, sometime after that, a partisan appeared behind the
cordon, calling her name, and she staggered forward, squeezing the boy’s hand to reassure
him of her pride in his forbearance.

They were taken a short way down a narrow alley through a portal leading to a rubbish-strewn
interior courtyard and through an iron-strapped wooden door that opened into a vaulted
chamber, a dank cave illuminated by an electric bulb dangling from the ceiling. She
saw a chamber pot and smelled moldy excrement and stale beer and saw a bare tick mattress
that seemed to be a repository for every possible human leakage. At the back of the
room were four mismatched chairs, an empty desk, a mound of ashes from a fire that
had scorched the blue plaster above it, and graffiti gouged into the walls. Italian,
Serbo-Croatian, German, English. Names, dates, obscenities.
I fucked your little sister,
and she stopped reading.

What now? she turned to ask the soldier.

Sit, if you like, he said, scratching his unshaven cheek. Stjepan asked to pee and
the soldier said he would take him but she refused to let the child out of her sight—Use
the pot, she said—and when she asked for water the partisan said I’ll see and left
and never came back.

Then they sat, rosaries in hand, counting Hail Marys like divine seeds to temper her
misgivings until the boy dozed off, and she could smell how death surrounded them
and imagined she smelled much the same. Minutes or hours later, she heard the yawning
cry of the door and hammering boot
steps and asked God for a miracle. Two men entered the chamber, one of the partisans
deposited their ransacked luggage next to the desk and went away and the other, an
officer with a pitted face and freshly ironed uniform and a ridiculous visored cap
that dwarfed his head walked behind the desk and stood looking at her with a perplexed
but not unfriendly expression and did not speak for a very long time.

She saw the red star on his cap, a revolutionary ornament that would soon infuriate
Stalin as a needless provocation of the Western Allies, and she supposed he was OZNa,
one of Davor’s OZNa agents—the Department for the Protection of the People. OZNa’s
growing efficiency had given birth to the rhyme she had heard on the streets of Zagreb,
Ozna sve dozna,
Ozna finds out everything. OZNa itself was to be transformed by Colonel Starcevica
into Tito’s UDBa, the Office of State Security, with its own spine-chilling motto:
UDBa,
your fate.
Prepared for his questions, she looked with challenging directness into the officer’s
close-set, intelligent eyes, and he exchanged his querulous expression for a courteous
smile as he came around the desk to pull up one of the empty chairs and, facing her,
knee to knee, took a seat.

Are you well, Madam Kovacevic?

Yes, thank you, she said, relieved to hear his accent—not Bosnian, not Serbian. He’s
a Croat, she thought, he understands that one day we must all stand together again.

And the boy? he asked, with an avuncular wink at Stjepan.

Yes.

And your journey?

Has not ended.

Of course, he agreed, and continued amiably. Colonel Starsevica had written her a
pass and entrusted to her a correspondence, and he had attached an escort for her
safe deliverance. Strangely, she and her son had arrived alone in a peddler’s wagon.
I find this very troubling, he said. May I see the pass?

Without hesitation she told him she didn’t have it, not the pass, not the correspondence,
none of it.

I see, said the officer, his mouth pursed with commiseration. And where is Zarko Bogdanov?

I don’t know, she answered. He abandoned us.

And the escort? he wondered aloud, folding his arms across his chest. The soldiers?
Where might they be? She told him they had fought with Gypsies, one was dead, one
was
. . .
she didn’t know.

And Bogdanov, said the officer, his eyes contemplating her, focused intently. When
he put you out. He took the road north or south?

She felt an irrational craving here to speak and be spoken to truly, to have honesty
restored to her affairs with her countrymen, imagining in her interlocutor a similar
hunger for a world stripped clean of its compulsory lies.
If only we are honest with one another, all will end well,
she thought, but could not convince herself that such a thought amounted to anything
but self-delusion.

South, she said.

No sooner had the lie left her mouth than the officer, having earlier interrogated
the drover, catapulted to his feet, his fist landing square under her chin, the very
tip of her tongue bitten off and several teeth chipped from the blow. She fell backward
in her chair to the concrete floor, unconscious, unable to prevent or even know or
ever know what happened as she lay thrown into the blackest depths of darkness. She
awakened dazed to the nightmare of herself and the boy alone within the vile skirt
of piss-colored light, swallowing her own blood, the boy next to the desk shuddering
and speechless and once again lost in place, his face pummeled, nose broken, one eye
puffed into a slit and the other open but lifeless, pants dropped to his ankles, shit
on the floor, shit caking down the spindlebacks of his legs. Ears ringing, she crawled
to her suitcase, spitting blood, and began as best she could the desperate act of
cleaning him without water, wiping him with the last of their clothes, trying to speak
clearly through the pain, to offer the lisping comfort of her blood-thick words, begging
the mother of God to repair this irreparable damage to her only child, terrified to
look upon her son’s profound absence, terrified to ask, to know.

When Stjepan finally spoke again that night as she cradled him in her arms and rocked
him on the mattress he confessed he didn’t remember what happened, there was nothing
he could tell her to ease her conscience or cool the fever of her hatred, and for
the rest of his life the only memory he carried with him of his ordeal in Zadar, on
the eve of his leavetaking from wartime and Yugoslavia, was of being strangled by
a soldier, the clarity and consequence of the overpowering grip of death on his throat,
his boyhood emptied of life and destroyed and then, because he would not surrender,
refilled and resurrected.

All she asked from Davor was water when he came the following day, the last word he
would hear from her coveted lips for many years, Marija determined to teach him a
lesson about the intractable lack of submission, the unforgiving obstinacy of Croatian
women, to deny him the guilty sympathy of her mangled speech, consonants skating over
the jagged precipice of her tongue. At first he tried to flash a smile but she would
have none of it. He selected his words to placate and soothe her, to draw her away
from her resistance to his solicitude, but gave up soon enough, his only accomplishment
the reinvigoration of her God-invested hatred. She refused to listen to the glib evasion
of his apology—
Marija, please understand, this is how peace begins—
to justify the psychopathic behavior of his minion, a blind extension of Davor’s own
homespun cruelty, as unprincipled as it was useful, here at the end of her war but
not his. Finally, without further sentiment or insipid nostalgia, the colonel transferred
them personally to a room in a hotel by the port with shattered windows and a staff
of cheerless old women in smocks, sent for a medic to tend their injuries, and instructed
his aide de camp to find clean clothes for the boy and his mother.

At the end of the hall was a bathing room with a rust-stained claw-foot tub where
she washed her son with feeble strokes of tenderness and let him remain posted like
a sentry, his remote eyes floating the length of her body, lingering only briefly
with equal fascination on both her wine-and mustard-colored bruises and soapy breasts
as she soaked in tepid water and thought of Davor’s duplicitous attempt at kindness—even
the memory of kindness a boneyard where she felt tempted to lie down and rot—and she
could not remember if she had once loved him because she could not remember love and
saw how she was bereft of earthly prospects, destined for a loveless life in which
she would love God and only God and, of course, her son, the last remnant of an answer
to the question, Where is my joy?

She dressed in the black dress of crones and widows that had been brought to her room
and fixed her hair in a severe bun that bared the lividity of her abuse for all to
see. Davor returned in the evening to take them to a café for dinner, an offer it
was not within her heart to decline, knowing the boy must get some food in his stomach
if he was to stay strong. On the street-side patio she sat at their table and sipped
cold tea absentmindedly and said nothing and could barely look at him because there
was nothing he could make right and she would not give him the chance. Men’s brains
grow big with war and their hearts small, he told her, a needless prelude to his resolution
of mysteries for which she summoned not the slightest curiosity.

The price of Bogdanov’s freedom had been the betrayal of the passenger he had collected
in the forest of Plitvice for Starcevica, executed on the road to Senj by the colonel
himself. The man’s name surfaced like a crocodile with a corpse in its mouth—a murderous
criminal, the Ustashe police commander in Slavonska Pozega. The recovery of the church’s
stolen wealth, intended to fund an insurgency against the state, now the property
of the patriots devoted to protecting the people. She sat facing east, not quite listening
to him, lost inside the waning light, watching the night bury itself in the death
throes of her nation’s independence, the slaughterhouse that would always be Croatia,
its endless bloody-minded pageantry of violence, thinking, the devil can be found
anywhere, in anybody. She thought,
I am sitting with a repugnant man who represents a curse upon the world.
She thought, achingly,
I will never have sex with my husband again, or any man who imagines I might love
him.
She thought,
our hatreds are not invented,
and she thought Davor, once a simple truant, had finally succumbed to the unenlightened
worship of power.

She clicked her fingers and gestured toward the fountain pen clipped inside Davor’s
shirt pocket and he gave it to her with a glance of trepidation.
When she snapped her fingers again he tore a blank page from the small diary he carried
inside his jacket for note-taking and passed it to her and she stabbed out her words
and pushed the page back across the table and he read its message,
In this world you dreamed of, only weeds shall grow,
and
she snatched the page away from him and flipped it, scribbled furiously on its blank
side, and pushed it back again across the table, and he nodded dispirited acceptance,
reading the annotation,
My happiness awaits your destruction.

Night fell and he took them to the quay and reached for her hand to say don’t give
up on us but she turned her back to him. Here she was, finally, a Ustashe widow engulfed
by Jews and the mortifying expanse of their silence. But the Jews were like herself,
haunted emaciated women, physically ruined, with exhausted rag-doll children who owned
nothing but the unspeakable pain of living. She had never lost all sense of who she
was and neither had these Jews, she realized looking at them, custodians of epic shattered
histories like herself. And yet not like herself because they were victims and she
was not—to lose and survive is not to be a victim, just a loser with a God-given right
to try again, and potentially more dangerous than ever before. Not like herself—her
leaving was not surrender. Their kind weren’t coming back, her kind—God help us—were.
Who knew they would remake the world—or make the ancient world new again? They were
going to Palestine. In the cowed silence of their own survival the haggard women hooked
their arms with hers and together with each heavy plodding step unbinding them from
the barbarity of Europe they went aboard.

In the morning the ship docked at Ancona to refuel for its voyage to the Holy Land.
British soldiers checked the manifest and afterward took her and Stjepan ashore, the
only passengers required to disembark, where the Vatican’s ravens, a pair of laconic
priests in black cassocks, thankless in manner and spirit, relieved her of the diplomatic
pouches returned to her safekeeping the night before, thus ending her brief, corpse-strewn
career in the service of the archbishop of Zagreb and the postwar intrigues of the
Holy See.