Heritage of Smoke Read online

  “Yes, of course, I always carry them. We run into so many rape victims.”

  The result was positive, a thin purple line.

  What she had once hoped for, and later feared she could not have, was now growing inside her. Her mood alternated from absolute dejection to elation, and she didn’t know what should be a reasonable response.

  Ana told John she was pregnant.

  “When did we have sex last? Four months ago? And you found out only now?”

  “Well, yes, I don’t think you’re the father.”

  “Here I thought you were saving the world, and you go screwing around!”

  “What do you think? I was raped by two guards in the camp.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I am telling you. I’ve seen so much suffering that I didn’t want the pity for myself. Or shame. In a way, I felt proud that I had taken up the suffering so directly upon myself. Forget sympathy. Suffering the same pain the women I talked with had suffered, and writing about the horrors firsthand, well, that seemed the right way to me. Except I still didn’t want anybody near me to know. Not that I had planned it that way. Still, I didn’t want unpleasant conversations after. But now, go ahead.”

  “Get an abortion. No reason to have a reminder for the rest of your life of what happened!”

  “At least the child had no decision in that.”

  “I don’t think you have any choice, really.”

  “You want me to abort here? You want me to risk my life?”

  At night, however, Ana couldn’t sleep, and the nausea grew worse, but she couldn’t tell whether it was from angst or only from pregnancy. Flashes of the rape, the faces of the potential fathers woke her up, and she thought, I should get an abortion.

  After the onslaught of Russian volunteers, the Muslims shifted their position, attempting to circle behind the mountain held by Serbs. They left only twenty soldiers behind to keep shooting, so their manoeuvring wouldn’t be obvious.

  On the way through a village, Ana saw little children playing basketball with a teddy bear. Clearly, they didn’t have a ball, but the teddy bear flew around amidst children’s happy hollering. Ana was elated at the sight of children, their little hands and fingers, tiny mouths, big eyes; was it their lack of self-consciousness or innocence or freshness that was attractive? And she knew there were children playing like that on all sides, Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Albanians, from all sorts of parents, and this knowledge helped her decide right then that she would not abort, because a child, no matter out of what circumstances, is always innocent. Adults, that was a different matter. Hadn’t even she become a murderer, hadn’t even she experienced a glimmer of twisted joy in murder? Twisted by desire for revenge or survival, but twisted nevertheless. Yes, adults could be corrupted, and often were, adrift in a chaos of revenge and hate. But children? After all this, she had no more doubts.

  Ana and John stayed in the army for one more month. He could not forgive her deciding against an abortion. The more time passed and the less time there was for an abortion, the harder his features grew and the easier she found it to keep drifting away from him. He still tried to persuade her. “Get an abortion. You’ll always have to think, my child was born as an act of violence. Not love. A child of hate. Horrible.”

  “Yes. Horrible. But it would be wrong to think about it that way. The men doing it—it’s nothing genetic. It’s the culture, the strategy, the mass rapes, and it’s possible that they were forced to do it. The same men could have under different circumstances become wonderful citizens, kind, generous….true, they became monsters, but they could have become saints.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “And you really don’t?”

  “I…I believe in the bad egg theory. Anyway, this means you can have a kid. We’ll keep trying, and it’s going to work. But now…”

  During the march around the mountain, she watched the foliage of red oaks glistening in the sunshine. Everywhere, the rusty color was seemingly bursting into dark blue-tinged flames from the distant mountains. While gazing out, she slipped from the muddy path and fell at least ten feet before hitting the ground and cutting herself on a rock. Her shirt and skin over the abdomen had torn, and she bled.

  John got a bottle of plum brandy to celebrate. “High time! The rock did the job, I’m sure, but do speed it along, darling. Drink half of this!”

  “I don’t see what you’re rejoicing for,” she said, and looked at him with momentary hatred.

  “It’s either me or the rape child,” he said.

  “In that case, we’ve decided.”

  “The rock has decided. And don’t worry. We could have another child.”

  “I don’t want another child. I want this one. It’s not even a matter of just having a child for the sake of having a child. I want this one.”

  The nurse didn’t know what her chances for keeping the child were. To get medical attention, Ana walked with several locals who knew a way around Bihac into a sliver of Croatian territory. Although exhausted, Ana stopped bleeding during the long march, and the pregnancy held. The following day, she felt strong, her body in equilibrium such as she had never experienced before. John, who could no longer communicate with her, left. Ana didn’t ask him where he would go, as that was now irrelevant to her.

  In Zagreb, on a tram, people read reports about mass rapes in Bosnia in Vecernji list and other dailies. Ana fleetingly wondered whether her report had contributed to the stories coming out into the open worldwide, but she was preoccupied more with observing the women right there. Many women stared at the floor, and among them was Selma, the blonde from Omarska. Her eyes were vacant; she seemed to be out of her mind. She was singing Serb folk songs loudly, out of key. Ana recognized her, called to her, but Selma did not respond. Some people shouted at Selma and beat her with folded newspapers—the very news papers that reported on the rapes of which she was an extreme example—but she paid them no mind and continued singing the songs she had grown up with. Ana wondered whether she herself appeared like that to John, out of mind, out of key. But she could not think of a song to sing. When she stepped off the tram, she breathed in the cold air, glad that she felt no pain in her abdomen.

  In front of a woman’s clinic, dozens of scarfed and pregnant women timidly came to a large gate that had gray lead paint peeling like snakeskin. As Ana walked past them, she marveled that there was a life in her life. How could she want to harm it? She walked to the corner grocery store to feed the life within her with dark bread and walnuts.

  WHEN THE SAINTS COME

  Davor had been wheezing for days, and he gasped in his sleep and talked about Armageddon, global warming, and the vanished Boeing 777. Even awake, he talked about the 777 as the ascension airplane—all the people onboard went straight to heaven, and the rest remained on the ground, awaiting the wrath of God.

  “You’re not right in your head,” his wife Alana said. “Since when have you been religious?”

  “I used to be very pious as a kid, until I discovered girls. The way I understood it from my minister, it was either girls or God. I chose girls.”

  “Seriously, your breathing is terrible. You should give up smoking and go see a doctor.”

  “I’ve given up booze. That’s good enough. You can’t expect me to give up everything fun.”

  “This doesn’t look like fun. Just look at you—you inhale and spit, and make faces like your tongue is burning.”

  “It is burning and it’s not fun. I don’t even get a kick from it, but I must do it. Some kind of devil has possessed me, and he’s stronger than me.”

  “I think you’ve developed asthma and chronic bronchitis. Do your lungs hurt?”

  “Can they hurt? Major organs don’t.” “You have to take care of yourself!”

  “But why? I’ve lived longer than my father, who died at the age of fifty. I thought that was my deadline. I’ve had ten extra years. Actually I used to think I would die even earlier than t
hat, because I believed in the biblical verse, Obey your father and mother lest your days on earth be shortened!”

  “Is there such a verse?”

  “I was an evil kid. I fought a lot in a street gang, stole, drank. I have no explanation why I was drawn to bad things, other than that it was some kind of freedom or that I was possessed. No matter what, I thought I would die young, maybe ten years younger than my father. That I’ve outlived him is obscene.” Davor blew out smoke and felt like passing out. “Can you fix me some Turkish coffee?”

  “I will, and then we’ll drive to Rebro Hospital in Zagreb.”

  The following day, after X-rays and blood tests, Davor faced a bald pulmonologist.

  “Gospodine,” the doctor said. “This is the worst part of my job.” He cleared his bumpy throat.

  “Obviously you have bad news. Go on.”

  “You have lung cancer.”

  “Oh. Is it a death sentence?”

  The doctor remained silent for a few seconds, scratching his bald head, which had a wine splash of a birthmark that looked like Sicily. He leaned forward and peered into Davor’s eyes. “No, medicine has advanced. We have many ways of treating lung cancers, and almost half the people survive it. It also depends on how advanced it is and what kind of cancer it is.”

  “Well, you said it was lung cancer. I thought there was only one kind.”

  “That’s what we used to think, but there are many kinds, as many as there are varieties of snow in Alaska.”

  “How advanced is it?”

  “You’ll find out when we transfer you to the cancer ward for further tests.”

  And he found out that it was stage three, pretty late. He was content, nearly happy—he owed it to his father to die young. He’d lived too long already. And what more could he expect of life? Yugoslavia was gone. His older son lived in Belgrade and never returned his calls, and the younger one had died of a drug overdose in Stockholm, where he went as a guest worker. True, he had a fine wife in Alana, but even that had become a drag. She expected too much lovemaking and he found it too much work. He ran out of breath quickly and his body lost interest. Now he knew why—he didn’t have the lungs for it.

  His doctor and wife told him he had a chance of recovery only if he quit smoking and did his best to be healthy, and he listened, although living might be more work than not living. He daydreamed about how relaxing it would be to be stone dead.

  He saw his old friends and forgave everybody all the debts they owed him, demonstratively. He went to Baptist church services on Sundays and Thursdays. He would go in peace.

  He enjoyed each breath he drew, each sighting of red squirrels flying from branch to branch, and he relished drinking warm spring water in the center of the park, because he knew each of these little events could be unique, and the last of their kind.

  Stage three small-cell cancer, survival rate fifteen percent, based on old statistics. I am done for, he thought, and strolled to his father’s grave, and said, “Dad, I will see you soon. Are you glad?” Sunshine sifted through evergreen needles and flickered off the black marble stone, winking, and he wondered how it was possible that such a bright light came off a black stone.

  At night he used an inhaler with cortisone. When he didn’t use it, he gasped. And when he was falling asleep he was not sure whether he was passing out, falling asleep, or dying. He dreamt of French airplanes crashing in his backyard, snakes in his basement and in the living room, and floods coming up to the window on the second floor, carrying the empty coffins of his mother, father, and younger sister. A fourth coffin filled up with water, about to go under, and it contained his own yellow figure.

  In the morning, it took him a while to come to his senses. His wife brought him Turkish coffee in bed, and he drank it plain, bitter, without sugar, as Alana had read that sugar was carcinogenic. Alana studied the writings of David Servan-Schreiber online, curious how to vanquish cancer with healthy foods and spirituality. The French scientist had just recently died of brain cancer after a fifteen-year struggle with it. Davor ate mostly vegetables and fruits and drank green tea. On the sly he put some sugar into green tea, which otherwise tasted like rotten hay. Hibiscus or red zinger he enjoyed plain.

  “At least you are not tempted to drink slivovitz,” Alana said.

  “I’m amazed that you managed to quit smoking with me,” he said.

  “After you were diagnosed, how could I smoke? I don’t miss it at all.”

  “It might be good to get some marijuana.”

  “You aren’t allowed to smoke anything.”

  “There’s no proof that smoking caused my lung cancer. Maybe years of burning wood in this Dutch stove did it, maybe the war, all those bombs, who knows, maybe they had depleted uranium. Smoking cigarettes—that could be American propaganda. Maybe I am dying from American propaganda.”

  Birds chirped outside the windows, swallows and finches. It was early spring in Lipik. Davor hadn’t been into flowers before, yet now he saw the world differently and loved the forest flowers whose names he didn’t know, some white, like little bells, others blue, yellow, purple. After a dreary, colorless winter, the ground had burst in the full spectrum of a rainbow, as though it had become the heavens, and who’s to say it hadn’t, as our earth is part of the celestial harmony, God’s design. Now that he was sure he was dying, parting from a dreary life, Davor began to feel not only tranquil, but also happy—so happy that he began to fear that he would lose these moments of beauty, that he could not hold on to them, and thus the fear of losing the glimpses of beauty transformed into a fear of death just when he thought he was completely beyond it. The certainty of death enhanced the colors of life, and the colors made Davor feel more alive than ever, and swelled within him a desire to live.

  And he thought, fifteen percent survival rate. Why, I will be in the fifteen percent. I will walk, pray, love. Maybe I will live to be ninety, who’s to say I won’t? And fifteen percent is an old statistic; maybe new treatments increase the chances. Maybe I’ll live on carrots and walnuts, like a rodent.

  But then chemo and radiation therapy came along, a dark phase of hair loss, feebleness, pain, and incessant nausea. His wife was always there, at his side, steady, patient. Alana was his second wife. The first one left him when he was still an alcoholic as a Gastarbeiter in Stuttgart. Although Alana was twenty years younger than him, she stuck by him. He’d heard rumors that she’d had lovers before him, perhaps even during their marriage, and he was jealous, but he repressed his jealousy. She certainly met a lot of people as a newsstand saleswoman. In this town and country, where half of the people were unemployed, it was a great thing to have a job. He couldn’t mind that. On his own, as a car mechanic, he probably couldn’t make enough for the basic bills. Twenty years ago, when the war had ended in Croatia, it was a good trade—there were many old cars in need of fixing that worked on pure mechanical principles. But now, even though people couldn’t afford new cars, everybody had them somehow, and since cars were completely computerized, and Davor thought he was too old to learn new tricks, he was getting less and less work from more and more marginal people to work on progressively less and less worthwhile cars, for less and less. Cars that used to cost 20,000 Deutsche marks were now worth 1,000 euros. Changing a clutch in a car worth 10,000 euros, he could charge 400 euros. But now that the whole car was worth only 1,000, nobody wanted to pay forty percent of the car value for a peripheral part—they’d rather ditch the car up the hill outside of town for raw iron. The going rate was 100 euros for a plateless piece of junk. In other words, half the car value would be poured into a part, and if you added new tires, brakes, you’d spend the whole amount.

  Even before his diagnosis of lung cancer, Davor had become completely dependent on his wife’s income. His was good enough for cigarettes, coffee, and electricity. On the other hand, he lived in the solid walls of his patrimony, a three-story redbrick house his father had built with his own hands. It was a redbrick because he’d died befor
e he could stucco it, and Davor had other priorities when he took over. It looked good in red, he claimed. So, no, he was not exploiting his wife, as she had free rent in his palace, his father’s palace. It was all fair. But her working in public, to return to the first point, made him jealous. Sometimes she exposed her cleavage a little too much. She did it for him, and then when it wasn’t him, it was all still there for the whole town; whoever wanted to buy Jutarnji list (Morgenblatt) could take a peek at Alana’s sloping breasts and shaded thighs. If he’d been drinking, the way he used to in Stuttgart (oh, die Biergaerten!), he would have probably come out and complained and perhaps used a heavy hand in the Balkan tradition. Sometimes he listened to the Meho Puzic folk song, “Majko, il me zeni il mi gitaru kupi.” Oh Mother, either find me a wife or a guitar, because a man must hit on something. His father had, in moments of inspiration or desperation, beat his mother. Not often, maybe once a year, maybe less, maybe it had happened three times in his childhood, but it left him and his siblings terrified for good, and strangely it imprinted that pattern of marriage in his mind. He was a cordial and soulful man who, now and then, when drunk, was a heartless and soulless man who beat the hell out of his first wife, thrice, and so she left him to marry someone in Belgrade who would continue this horrifying Balkan tradition until she divorced him too. The younger generations supposedly didn’t do it anymore, but then, they indulged in soccer hooliganism and war.

  He took the chemo better than expected and suddenly he had more energy than he’d had in years. He had no desire for cigarettes and wondered why he had ever bothered. But that meant he couldn’t go out to cafés and bars. In most of Croatia, the smoking ban in eating and drinking establishments had been lifted. The country had reverted to the Yugoslav days, becoming one huge stinging tobacco cloud. He bumped into people in the streets and was more sociable than he’d been in decades. Memento mori had improved his life tremendously and kept him out of bars. He feared the oil and gasoline exhausts in his shop and in the streets.