Wakefield (16 page)

Wakefield wonders how Susan has dealt with all these competing interests; curating this show must have been difficult for her, and he tells her so.

“I had to do it, but only a little for myself. Until this war, Serbs and Croats and Bosnians all went to different churches but got along fine. Well, we didn't. I told you my father wasn't a believer, but none of that mattered. There were a lot of marriages like my parents'. We had the Yugoslav ethnic festival in June, everybody came. Now they are all fighting, people have been knifed, Mommy and Pop don't speak …” She stops herself and wanders to the next room.

Wakefield follows at a discreet distance. The exhibition continues with the ubiquitous materials of life under Communism, namely iron (or steel), cement, and cigarettes. There's a tangle of barbed wire in the middle of the floor. Wakefield steps carefully around it. A panel lettered in black Constructivist script is propped against it, which reads:

The Iron Curtain was made out of barbed wire, the barbed wire of the border, the prison camp, the factory. Iron, the product of heroic workers, was Stalinist manna. We were taught that in the coming Socialist Eden all one had to do was open one's mouth and bolts and screws would pour out of it. Barbed wire was our crown of thorns
.

There are mutilated busts of revolutionary “fathers,” and a statue of Stalin that's been smashed into a cube by a car crusher. The air is intentionally dusty, to recall the industrial pollution of Communist cities. Susan reads aloud yet another statement:

The Iron Curtain was made of cement. Rivers were dammed with cement, mountains were covered with cement, the heroes of revolutionary history were cast in cement. Cement represents the qualities the regime desired to foster: hardness and intransigence, in contrast to the undesirable qualities of flexibility and sensitivity, which were bourgeois. Hardness and Intransigence, together with their little brother, Vigilance, formed a masculine trinity, and the hard, intransigent, vigilant worker was our mascot. In the sexually repressed and conservative communist ethic, this hard worker implied also a proud, erect condition. By giving it all to the ideal, he earned a permanent place in the utopia
.

Wakefield's head is aching from the cumulative fear that emanates from these twisted remains of a world still packed with evil energy. The Devil pops into his head. He's smiling ruefully as if to say, “See what I mean?” Wakefield doesn't know what he means. He can see the shimmering form. His Majesty looks very goaty in his Pan getup. There is none of the weary worldliness he'd affected when they'd first met. He looks rested and fresh. Behind him are the smoldering ruins of a recently bombed medieval town. Very painterly, thinks Wakefield, then turns back to Susan. He touches her arm in sympathy, and her dark eyes fill with gratitude. The Devil evaporates. The presence of the older woman is comforting, too. She seems in her wise way to accept the violence, the humor, the contradictions.

Wakefield had planned to deliver the same speech he gave in Typical, thinking “Money and Poetry (with a detour in Art)” was universal enough to go anywhere in America, but he knows it won't work. The relativity of value loses its context here; it doesn't apply to art that witnesses and testifies, that has challenged the temporal powers, the State, the police, the prison, the mental hospital. The purpose of this art is to scream out a reality that makes no sense in a country where all is now virtual, provisional, free-floating, happy, well fed. How can he connect this art to the disappearance of the material world?

He looks to Susan for help, realizing that she's the bridge. His dilemma is inscribed in her psyche. Her body is nouveau American, but her wetware was forged between worlds.

“Maybe I'll just talk about you tonight,” he jokes.

“If you did, it might make it easier to understand … myself?”

“Well, a shrink I'm not. About your parents? Do you really want me to talk to them?” Wakefield figures that meeting her folks might possibly help him get ideas for a completely new speech.

Susan grabs his hand, barely containing her excitement. “Let's do it right now.”

Wakefield nods, ignoring his crass instant interpretation of the phrase.

In the car Susan calls her mother and lets her know that they are on the way. To get there Susan drives through a vast Hispanic neighborhood; she points out the big neon crown on top of El Rey Burito, a place she went when she dated Tulio, a minor-league baseball player. “I was still in junior high,” she laughs. “My parents would have died if they'd found out.” Bordering the Hispanic neighborhood is an African-American community, and other landmarks of her high-school years and a relationship with a Black guy. “They would have died
twice
if they'd known about him.”

The Black ‘hood ends abruptly at a string of Polish and Ukrainian bakeries, restaurants, and barbershops, some of them with signs in Cyrillic script. The gold dome of a Byzantine church glistens at the end of the avenue.

Susan's parents, Slobodan and Aleisha Petrovich, live in a five-story red-brick apartment building. Susan parks in the slushy snow right in front, where her father is bent over the engine of his car, cursing.

He straightens up when she calls his name. By way of introduction Susan says, “I brought Mr. Wakefield over to meet you.”

Mr. Petrovich wipes his hands on a greasy rag and mumbles a greeting, sounding not at all like the great fan of his work Susan has led Wakefield to believe he is. To his daughter he says only, “Can you give me a jump? You got cables in that hippie car?”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Petrovich. What's the matter?”

“Dead battery.”

It turns out that Susan does not, in fact, have any battery cables in her hippie car.

“Is Mommy home?”

Mr. Petrovich looks at her as if she's from another planet. “Where else do you think she is? She's always up there with her friends, my enemies.” He turns his head and spits in the dirty snow. “So you're the guy come to talk about peace and harmony. You can't wipe out one thousand years of history with some art. It's all shit.” He waits with his hands on his hips for Wakefield to respond.

“Here he goes,” Susan says tightly, determined not to be baited.

“It's not my intention to change history,” Wakefield answers, “but if art helps people get along, I'm all for it.”

“Tell you what. We tried ‘getting along,' we tried to be good Americans … but guess who doesn't want us to get along now? I suppose you like the American bombs killing women and children in Belgrade?”

Mr. Petrovich slams the hood shut and lays his calloused palms on it. He looks at Wakefield through the thick lenses of his eyeglasses. “Bombs killing women and children in my homeland!”

“I don't like bombs,” Wakefield says, “but it wasn't just an American decision to bomb Belgrade—”

“It's NATO trying to save Mommy's people,” Susan interjects.

“Your mommy's people!” Mr. Petrovich spits again. “That's who started it. They were happy enough under Tito. Now they want our land, holy Serbian land!” He turns to Wakefield. “I have papers upstairs. I prove it to you!” Mr. Petrovich starts reciting a litany of dates, martyrs, and battles, only half in English.

“Well, that's enough for me,” says Susan. “All my life he's an atheist commie, now he cares about stinking relics. Let's go upstairs.”

A burly man with a black mustache even thicker than Mr. Petrovich's graying one approaches the car and says something in Serbian. He's got jumper cables. They open the hood and start hooking them up. The man opens the hood of a truck parked in front of Petrovich and winks at Susan.

“Pervert!” She blushes. “It's the mustaches,” she explains to Wakefield, “the war of the mustaches. When these guys shave them off, there will be peace.”

It's a real revelation, and Wakefield can suddenly see two enormous armies facing each other: the men with mustaches against the ones without. In the sixties when Wakefield's hair was moderately long, there was war in America over hair. The “Hair Curtain” fell between generations almost as inflexibly as the Iron Curtain between east and west. Back then, it was the longhairs versus the National Guard. Now it's the mustachioed against the clean shaven.

Upstairs, Mrs. Petrovich, who has been watching everything from the apartment window, has refreshments waiting for Susan's guest: cake, tomatoes, liqueur, cheese, and a carafe of ice-cold water. The particularly pungent goat cheese sits in the middle of a wooden board with a knife stuck in it.

“This is my mommy, Aleisha Petrovich. Mommy, Mr. Wakefield.”

Mrs. Petrovich doesn't hold out her hand for Wakefield to shake, but she makes a big welcoming gesture toward the couch. “Sit, sit. A shame that man. You tell me what I do.” She wrings her hands, on the verge of tears.

“Now, now, Mommy, you know that's how he is, a rude sonofabitch!”

“Susan! Don't talk like that. Maybe even he is sonofabitch, excuse us, Mr. Wakefield. You should have come here before the war. Men were polite and good, working hard, never a bad word, no cursing …”

“Right,” mocks Susan, “drinking and gambling every night at the club, asleep all day Sunday, screaming at me and Tiffany.… He was only nice when Professor Teleskou was home.”

“Have something sweet, Mr. Wakefield. I make.”

Wakefield takes a slice of crumbly poppy-seed cake and stuffs it in his mouth. Mrs. Petrovich pours him a glass of water. He takes a sip.

“Thank you, Mrs. Petrovich. Susan said that you might like to see the exhibit and hear me talk tonight. I would be delighted if you did.”

“How can I? You see that beast. If I leave the house, he thinks I'm going to Bosnia Club to make bombs against him.… Maybe I should.”

“Please forgive me,” says Wakefield, “I'm an ignorant American. What is it all about?”

“Land. It's about land. For eight hundred years they take our land. They kill us.”

“And you kill them,” says Susan. “It's the same land. For hundreds of years you live together, then you start killing each other. Besides, you don't live in that land anymore.”

“It was supposed to be different in America,” sighs Mrs. Petrovich. “It was, many years. This is good place, we have festivals and everybody hate the Communists. Then the Communists go, everyone happy for maybe two months. Then this big war over there starts and everybody here starts. Now, you go out and the Negroes rob you.”

“Here we go. The Yugoslavs kill each other, so let's blame Black people. Mother, please.”

Wakefield is reminded of Maggie's description of her father's prejudices. And that reminds him of Maggie. He imagines her lying naked on her back in the hotel room in Typical, talking about the Idiot Guides. He feels a pleasant tremor in his groin, even as he hears Susan bring her mother up short. In fact, Maggie might have said it the same way. It's the voice of children exasperated by their parents' prejudices but smart enough to know that it's hopeless to argue.

“They're always looking for somebody else to to blame for their problems!” Susan sighs. “That's how they think in Europe, which is why I don't eat meat.”

More twisted logic. Wakefield has his job cut out for him. What is he going to talk about tonight? Art? Art that was once a code for meat? Art that bemoaned the lack of meat, protested the absence of meat, made imaginary towers of meat? Maybe he should just do some kind of performance art, and speak from inside a pig carcass hanging from the ceiling with only his head sticking out. His head, looking as if it is being born from the belly of the sundered pig, recites dada poetry in an invented language to people who speak many languages but believe only in their own.

“You can't even go out at night anymore,” Mrs. Petrovich cries. “They push you down, take your purse, and kill you. Most of my friends move out already, their children help them.” She shoots guilt daggers at Susan, who defends herself as best she can.

“I already said you can move in with me. Tiffany said so, too. Leave Old Slobodan here to fight it out with his pals. He doesn't like women anyway.”

Mommy doesn't hear the last part. “Tiffany?” She nearly spits. “What devil come in me to name her Tiffany? She's a whore now.”

“Fashion model, Mommy. Tiffany is a respected fashion model. She makes good money. So what if she lives with a woman? Wouldn't you, if you had another chance?”

Surprisingly, Mommy laughs at this, and nods through her tears. “I would, yes I would. Have more cake, Mr. Wakefield. Forgive us, we are—what do you say?—‘passionate'?”

There is sudden affection between mother and daughter. They laugh about something known only to themselves. Wakefield cuts a hunk from the cheese and shuts his eyes involuntarily as the essence of goat milk floods his mouth. He chases it with a slice of salted tomato and a shot of plum brandy. When he opens his eyes, he notices the stacks of
National Cartographics
on the bookshelves.

Aleisha Petrovitch, Susan has told him, has difficulty walking because of her varicose veins and excessive weight, and she depends on Susan to drive her to the grocery store once a week. The rest of the time she watches the news and reads.

“You should write a story from my life, Mr. Wakefield. What a tale I have lived.”

“Our people are like a magical-realist novel,” says Susan,

“When you were a girl?” suggests Wakefield.

“Long before, Mr. Wakefield. When my grandmother was a girl. What happen is that we had a well in the village where a man who traveled—”

Susan: “A peddler.”

“Yes. A peddler drowned in the well. Our water tasted first like iron, then sulphur, and the mullah said that the Devil made his bath there, but the men think the Serbian men over the mountain came in the night and poisoned our well. So our men made a poison, too, and the mullah wouldn't bless it, but the men didn't care. Before they go to the Serbian village to curse their water, they met around the well to take one more drink of bad water to make them strong. There was moon and stars and night was light like day. My grandmother was only a girl, but all the children were awake and they let them watch. The first man drew out some water and drank, then made surprise face. Another drank, and he, too, made surprise. Everybody tasted then and nobody could believe. The water was like sweet honey, not iron, not sulphur. The mullah said that the Devil was big trick maker, that he make water taste bitter one time, sweet another. Then nobody knew what they must do, and big discussion went on, and while some people said this and some said that, there was a yellow light around the well and a very big butterfly shoot out of the water and fly up into the sky. Big like a boy with wings. Nobody believe what they see, nobody could say anything. They watched as the butterfly get higher and higher and become a star. When they talk after a long time, the mullah said that this was the Devil with wings who was chained in the well and that the men who made the poison let him out because mullah didn't bless it. But the men didn't think so, so they look up where the butterfly flied and beat their chest and cry. Then everybody tasted the water again, even the children, and it was still sweet like honey. Next day, one man went down on long rope to the bottom of well that was so deep they had to take all the rope in the village, and when he come back two days later, he bring with him a white bone death-head … How you say that?”