Heritage of Smoke Page 12

  “How long do you think he has to live?” asked Mirko. “Seven days? Nine?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not easy to predict such things,” the doctor replied.

  “He looks weak, but somehow happy and clever.”

  The doctor bared Davor’s shins and pressed them with his thumb, and said, “The legs are a normal temperature and there’s no swelling whatsoever, so it means the heart and the kidneys are doing their job despite his not moving at all. With a good heart, there’s no telling how long he could last. It could be months, unless, of course, his brain suddenly shuts down the impulses through the life center.”

  Davor heard and understood all of this but, with the excess of morphine in his body, all he could do was grimace vaguely and good-naturedly. His wife commented, “Oh, he’s so sweet sometimes, like a baby. You can see it, there’s bliss in his face.”

  Both visitors shook his right hand and kissed him on the cheeks and on the forehead, then left. Oh yes, shake my masturbating hand, he thought. I will probably never do it again, and I’ll never have sex again. He suddenly felt abandoned; he knew that these were Judas’s kisses, absolving them of further duty to visit him ever again. This was the last time. Fuckers.

  Then came a parade of his former alcoholic friends, some with beards, others bald, some fat, some thin, some smelling of tobacco, some of hay and shit and urine and sperm. His sense of smell increased as his sight decreased. And they all felt sorry for him, some even seemed to weep, but he got a sense that all of them also looked at his wife hungrily. She was sexy, fifteen years younger than him, and most of them were such lousy friends that they would probably paw and fuck her on his deathbed. In the tone of her voice, he sometimes thought he noticed some flirtation. And anyhow, they hadn’t had sex in months, ever since Purim in Tel Aviv. In Jerusalem, they had forgotten about sex, so knocked out by heat and pilgrimage. Oh, he hadn’t even known it was the last time and, then, even as he was making love to her, he wasn’t quite there, but imagining some nearly naked girl with torn stockings and thick red lips he’d seen in the streets of Tel Aviv.

  His Czech cousins, ten years older than him, also came. One of them was a mechanical engineer who’d spent ten years in Cuba and who could never make it through a conversation without mentioning the wonders of Cuba. And sure enough, after going through the usual It’s so sad spiel, he began saying, “When we landed in Havana…” Davor didn’t want to hear the rest. He wanted to be asleep, wanted this man to be out of his life, and for himself to be gone out of his life.

  And then his sister visited from Sweden. She’d worked as a nurse there. But now because of back pains, she was semi-retired. She loved to talk about death and tragedy, and he had a sense that she kind of enjoyed it, as long as it was others and not she who was dying.

  His sister and his wife talked for a long time while he writhed in pain. He asked for morphine, but who knows what came out of his mouth. He could not count on words coming out in the right order, and he couldn’t count on his thoughts making sense. There was silence. He couldn’t hear them. Maybe he shrieked, he didn’t know. He felt chilly, and the pain that amassed in his head and bones and abdomen was sharp and fiery; he’d eaten flames that couldn’t be put out. His head hurt as though a primitive dentist was cutting off his frontal lobe and, for all he knew, maybe that was happening, maybe someone was performing surgery to remove part of his brain, the amygdala perhaps. And maybe his cancer had already eaten the amygdala, or had instead made it grow like a pear. The pain and the pressure in his brain were such that he grabbed his head with his hands and sat up.

  “Oh, he’s better,” said his sister. “Look, he has some strength. He’s risen.”

  “Praise the Lord,” said his wife. “He has risen!”

  He saw the women clearly and felt lucid, and could hear and smell everything again, but he could not get rid of or reach the pain. His half-blond, half-gray sister with thick-framed glasses, which magnified her eyes, stared at him like a horned owl he remembered from his childhood.

  “Is there any more morphine?” Davor asked with startling clarity.

  “You’ve had your dose for the evening,” said Alana.

  “Oh really? Give me more. I am in pain.”

  “We’ll have to get some more in the morning. You’re out.”

  “Out?”

  “Yeah, just sleep till the morning. We’ll get you plenty.”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” he said.

  “Look how clearly he speaks. He’s better,” said his sister.

  “You shut up, you old owl!”

  “Maybe he’s not better,” Alana said.

  “Will you stop this bullshit,” he said. “All this pity, and I don’t even have a decent painkiller. I’ll show you what pain is, you sorry assholes.”

  Davor jumped out of bed, grabbed a chair, and smashed it on the floor. It was an old chair, left over from his grandfather’s business. His grandfather had been a chairmaker in Pecs, Hungary. “Sorry, Grandpa,” he said, and smashed the leg stick still left in his hand over an earthenware flowerpot, which cracked.

  His sister shrieked.

  “Just you shriek,” he said, and punched her in the face so hard that she flew to the wall, hitting it with the back of her head. “That will teach you to feel sorry for me. What gives you the right, you smug owl?”

  “Don’t be like that. What did she do to you? She loves you,” said Alana.

  “Fuck love like this. I’m tired of all the sympathy, you hypocrites. I’m tired of all your Schadenfreude. You love it that I’m dying. You’ll inherit this whole bloody house, and it’s soulful and ennobling to watch someone die, isn’t it? Now you’re even close to Jesus, your best pal. Which one? The one from the golden pink-marble tomb or the one from the plain limestone tomb?”

  He kicked Alana and then hit her, tearing the skin on her left cheekbone.

  He chased the two women around the house and, in the middle of the chase, he attained a sense of wellbeing and near ecstasy. His pain was gone, and all his senses were as sharp as ever, he was young and strong, and he loved listening to them scream. Their screams matched the best orgasms he’d heard in the best of his lovemaking. Their screams proved that he was young and strong and in control. He wouldn’t chase them for long—just a few more minutes. It was better than lying around and dying. This was life.

  They locked themselves in the closet and called an ambulance. Two male nurses arrived and Davor shouted at them. “I know what brings you here. You want to whore around with these two sluts.”

  The nurses tried to subdued him, but he punched one of them in the face. While Davor flipped tables and kicked in the TV screen, they called the cops. He picked up the TV and tossed it through the glass window, into the street.

  The police hit him over the head with a billy club.

  “Wait a minute, that’s not cool,” Alana said. “He has brain cancer, and he’s had strokes.”

  “Sorry, how else can we calm him down? Shoot him? Or you want us to leave him alone till he kills you?”

  The cops handcuffed Davor and placed him in the ambulance, then drove him to the hospital in Slavonski Brod. There, he was heavily medicated and he passed out into fluffy dreams.

  Alana and his sister visited, and played old Gospel music for him. The two of them sang:

  Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,

  That saved a wretch like me…

  I once was lost but now am found,

  Was blind, but now I see.

  They all had tears in their eyes, and he smiled blissfully, or so he thought. He knew he was losing his brain, and the vague sounds from his past still didn’t resurrect Christ for him. Christ had many graves, two in Israel and thousands everywhere, and he would stay in the ground for more than three days—maybe three thousand years. Davor thought about Christ the man; he still didn’t believe in the God. But then he thought, what do I know? And what difference does it make whether I know something or don’t, wh
ether I believe or not? Should I be saved based on my opinions, and if my opinion is that there’s no God and no salvation, and then there is a God, should he care about my opinion one way or another? Should the opinion of a damaged brain matter? If this is all his doing, even not believing in him is a form of celebrating him. And then, who needs celebrations? I’ve kind of celebrated, and it’s embarrassing; I’m sorry I inflicted pain on the ones who love me. I didn’t think they loved me, but look, they’ve forgiven me everything, and they’re playing this lame music from my childhood, ditties about love and God. It is touching, and I wish I could talk, but I can’t open my mouth, can’t lift my hand, I am done for, I’m surprised I can think, if this is thinking. And look, their tears are falling onto me. Well, I can’t cry and weep, what would be the point, and what’s the point of asking for points. It’s all over.

  He thought he heard a doctor say, “We can’t do anything for him anymore. We have plenty of morphine for him, and you can take him home. He’s all yours. There’s nothing more we can do.”

  The two male nurses and two women in his life, his wife and his sister, took him home, where he lay for three days and three nights and then died with a mysterious half-smile on his thin blue lips, his blue eyes pale like the spring sky, irises only, with tiny and hazed-over pupils, reduced to milky black dots bleeding into the blue.

  HERITAGE OF SMOKE

  Jovan brushed his teeth, had a glass of cold water, and inhaled deeply. The water tasted a bit metallic, as though it had come through rusty pipes, but maybe it was his bleeding gums. He spat out white spittle, so it wasn’t his gums. He shaved the top half of his moustache, turning what remained into a Spanish-style pencil.

  It was wonderful to not smoke. After three years of freedom, he smelled the pine needles outside his window. He smelled all sorts of flowers—he closed his eyes and tried to sort them out. Even in Batajnica, the woeful suburbs of Belgrade, it was possible to enjoy the spring. God may have forsaken the Balkan people, but not its nature, which seemed to bloom all the more vigorously after the recent evils.

  The phone rang. He picked up the receiver and immediately recognized the voice of his second cousin, Danko. “Amazing to hear from you. It’s been, what, five years since I saw you last,” he said.

  “More. I’d say eight, since 1991.”

  “How come you remembered me just now?”

  “Well, it’s a bad news, good news kind of thing. Which do you want first?

  “I haven’t had any good news in ages. I wouldn’t understand. So, give me the bad news.”

  “Your uncle Dusan killed himself.”

  “Mother. Really? How?”

  “Hanged himself with a rope at the farmer’s market. I guess he liked the metal beams there. He’d tried once before from a crossbeam in the vineyards, but the rotten beam cracked and knocked him on the head, giving him a concussion.”

  “Do you know why he did it? Did he leave a note?”

  “No idea why. Maybe no external reason. This suicide bug runs in our families, doesn’t it? Like your brother killing himself four years ago. You must still be in pain over that memory.”

  “He drank a bottle of brandy a day, he felt nothing and could think nothing. Who could, after so much alcohol? So if he felt nothing and thought nothing, why should I feel anything for him?”

  “That’s a strange thing to say.”

  “Only strange things are worth saying. What do you want me to do, follow a script and weep? I went through that too, years ago, but this being in exile, cut off from home, you know, this has taught me some stoicism. But let’s not psychoanalyze now. Tell me more about Dusan.”

  “It’s probably a genetic destiny in our family, so I don’t really know much except that, lately, he lived with all sorts of doves and pigeons, you know, like you used to.”

  “So who’s taking care of the doves now?”

  “There’s a friend of his, Milan, who’ll take care of them. He inherited them. Dusan wrote a note, donating his doves to Milan, and here comes the good news. He listed you and me as inheritors of the house in Vinogradi. What do you suggest we do?”

  “Really, the house still exists? I thought the local Ustashas would have blown it up.”

  “You don’t have to believe your local propaganda.”

  “Well, I can’t use the house. I’m never coming back.”

  “Anyway, I already found a buyer, some Italian who came over to hunt boars. You know that’s the new tourism in Papuk and Psunj, boar hunting. He’ll give us 22,000 euros. So let’s split it, like brothers.”

  “Sounds good, if the house is not firm enough to hang yourself from its beams. Yes, sounds good, splitting, except for the brothers part. So half and half? Eleven grand for me.”

  “The house has good beams. It’s the vineyard beams that are rotten. No, ten for you, and twelve for me. A bit of commission, as I have to sell and deal with all sorts of legality. And I’ll bring you the money, in cash, next week, if that’s all right with you. So I do all this work, bring it to you, and you just get it in your hands, no tax, nothing.”

  “Yes, of course it’s all right. Here I am practically starving with my family, house needs finishing, ten grand, yes.”

  “Are you coming to the funeral? It’s going to be a cremation next Wednesday.”

  “No, I haven’t been to Croatia in all these years. And what good would it do Dusan? He won’t know who shows up.”

  “All the more reason to visit—you must be nostalgic. War shit is one thing, but your native landscape is another.”

  “I’ll come after all the wars are over.”

  “You might wait for a while, then.”

  “Or at least until after NATO bombs us again.”

  “You’re sure they will?”

  “I listen to the BBC. Maybe ten days at the most.”

  “Can you talk like that on the phone? Are you sure it’s not bugged?”

  “I don’t give a shit if it is. What can they do to me? Throw me out of Serbia? I wouldn’t mind—they can send me to Sweden. But if you’re coming here, do it as soon as you can. It might be hard once the bombing begins.”

  “You really believe it will happen?”

  “Come here and we’ll talk. And bring some Slavonian sljiva.”

  “Sure, if you bring some Sumadijska loza.”

  Two days after this conversation, Jovan walked out of his house down a narrow street in a light rain. At least it had been asphalted the year before. These used to be sunflower fields there, but Milosevic had allowed peasants to sell their fields for real estate developments, and it had been pretty cheap, so Jovan had bought a plot alongside many other refugees from Croatia and Bosnia and slowly brick-laid his house with his wife’s help. Bricks were cheap, as there was plenty of clay under the green earth, and it just had to be baked right in the kilns. He was tempted to do it alone, dig up the earth and bake it, but then he’d have to fill in the holes (or leave them for a fish pond) and it would have all taken too long, so he bought these hollowed-out bricks, the new fashion. As a child, he’d helped his father brick-lay their house, and the bricks then used to be solid, like a brick so to speak, but now air insulation in the bricks would accomplish more to keep them all warm than a solid brick would. Who knew air was that good? On the other hand, the old brick walls could take grenade hits better, and in the Balkans that mattered. Still, you could hardly find the old-style solid bricks anymore.

  As the town had expanded without a plan, and many of the exiled peasants wanted as much yard as possible to maximize their plot (they gardened and kept chickens and goats), little land remained for the streets, which were basically paths that were too narrow to bring in city buses, and so it took fifteen minutes of brisk walking to get to the first bus stop or the train station. Before being asphalted, the paths used to melt into mud during the rainy seasons, and Jovan and his children would trudge through the mud with plastic bags around their shoes. Before they started using bags, his children kept losi
ng shoes; the mud sucked them in, and sometimes it seemed the mud would even suck his children into the earth, drown and bury them. Walking through it was quite a struggle, worse than walking through deep snow, but that too could be challenging in the winter, with snowdrifts blown across from the flat fields of Vojvodina, maybe even Hungary, so that one winter their house, one of the first wind-breaks north of Belgrade, got completely buried in snow, and he’d had to shovel a tunnel out of the house to get his children to school. As he believed in education, he did this even on the worst days, having come from three generations of schoolteachers. He used to be a history teacher too, in Croatia, but in Serbia nobody needed histories anymore. If you need history, hell, we’ll make history, right here in Serbia, seemed to be the attitude. And we Serbs are so misunderstood, there’s no hope of anyone understanding us right, so why read anyone and their hateful venom? This kind of Serbian imperviousness to analyzing history annoyed Jovan so much that he concluded he wasn’t a patriot.

  Anyway, he didn’t mind walking down these paths; he could think here more than anywhere else, and it always refreshed him to see that there wasn’t a single bar in the entire town settlement. People drank at home to save money, and exiles mistrusted strangers and preferred to be home, behind double-locked doors, with a growling German Shepherd on the porch. Jovan despised alcoholism in general and Balkan sod-denness especially, and seeing no group drunkenness in the neighborhood, no matter what the miserable causes of that were, comforted him.

  Occasionally thin, lonely men, whose wives beat them if they drank too much, stood outside the few corner stores and drank their half-liter Jelen beers. It was all so wet that smoking cigarettes used to give him an illusion of being warm and dry. Today the drizzle chilled him and made him nostalgic for smoke. He looked around and sighed with satisfaction: no Serbian flags anywhere. Who says Serbs are nationalists? The fact that they did not appear to be nationalistic gave him a surge of national pride. No Cyrillic lettering in sight. These were supposed to be patriotic Serbs here, but most of them got disillusioned fast with the way the government ghettoized them, gave them the worst jobs, recruited their sons for the army, and so out of quiet protest there were no flags out here and most people kept their old customs and ways of talking instead of adapting Serbian ways.