Heritage of Smoke Page 14

  Just today, Danko called him on the phone after the news of Milosevic’s arrest. “I can’t quit,” he said, “can you?”

  “No. I managed to quit for a day, but then when NATO bombed us, and they were hitting pretty close, as Batajnica has the largest military airport in the country, I bought a pack and smoked.”

  “How is Serbia now?”

  “I’ve lost all sense of nationalism. I don’t care for Serbia. NATO can bomb it again for all I care. So how do you make a living over there?”

  “With the inherited money, I bought the junkyard on the western hill outside of Daruvar, so now I am a scrap-metal dealer, smashed cars, old Dalit factory machine parts. Nobody needs that old machinery, so it’s all iron, steel, lead, aluminum, copper.”

  “Good for you. At least you are helping clean up a dismantled place. All our factories are gone, and we used to be a nation of proud workers.”

  “Oh, we used to be young, and when you’re young, everything is good.”

  “I miss the nature in our hometown. The trees in the park must all be bigger now. I would love to see the trees again.” “Come back, then.”

  “I am often there in my thoughts. Whenever I smoke, I think of Daruvar. Smoke is the flavor of my memories.”

  “You sound nostalgic.”

  “Yes, positively sappy. And so I smoke. This burning sensation in me just keeps going and going. I enjoy feeling that I am ashes going to ashes.”

  ECLIPSE NEAR GOLGOTHA

  After a scud missile from Iran missed habitations and hit a sandy rock near the Tomb of Joseph in Palestine, an emaciated Bedouin found old, parched paper in the sand. While herding goats, he used the scroll, not suspecting it was a Dead Sea Scroll, to roll cigarettes. Only a few triangular scraps of crumbly paper remained afterward, and we have very little to go by, but this conjectured story is the best that, after serious scholarship at Princeton and Oxford, could be pieced together. The poor Bedouin smoked away a lot of alternative wisdom about the past and the future into the desert air.

  We can never rely on a singular interpretation in our world of parallel and perpendicular and elliptical views and visions. And on the cross, we apparently had parallel visions of a believer and a skeptic, and of the man in the middle, Jesus, who was both a believer and a skeptic, but his story has been covered enough. Let’s first see what we find in Luke’s gospel.

  Chapter 23:39: One of the criminals who were hanged there was hurling abuse at Him, saying, Are You not the Christ? Save Yourself and us! 40 But the other answered, and, rebuking him, said, Do you not even fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 41 And we indeed are suffering justly, for we are receiving what we deserve for our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong. 42 And he was saying, Jesus, remember me when You come in Your kingdom! 43 And He said to him, Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise.

  The nonbeliever wanted to be saved from the cross. He didn’t mean to insult Jesus, but in the meager hope that Jesus was telling the truth, he appealed to Jesus to save him. And when it became clear that Jesus had no intention of surviving, let alone saving others, he shouted, Oh, the hell with it all! Jesus and the ingratiating thief had resigned themselves to death, and for a while the three of them kept groaning in pain. But the two believers died about the same time, and the remaining, the nonbeliever, by the name of Gestas, felt lonely and forsaken. It had been easier to suffer in the community of groaning which the three of them had made. Groaning alone and grinding his teeth, for he still had hale teeth, exasperated him so much that he shouted, Oh God, why have You forsaken me? Aren’t we all Your children?

  Two Roman foot soldiers, who had buried the other two convicts, came back and said, Look, this one is still shouting. What endurance!

  Yes, some thieves are really tough, said the other. Nearly indestructible. This one was caught once after hiding in the desert for forty days without any food and water, and he escaped, but now we got him. There’s no way he’ll escape. Yes, he looks tough and indestructible.

  We’ll see about that, said a soldier, and threw his heavy lance into Gestas’s side, nailing his body to the wood. Gestas shrieked and gasped and blood poured out of his wound, and soon also out of his nostrils, foamy and light red, translucent in the light of dawn. As soon as he was taken down, the sunshine dimmed, for there was an eclipse in progress, and in the strange, metallic gloom, the soldiers buried this bleeding man in a cave in the tomb garden outside the city walls near the Skull hill.

  He was alone indeed, and moreover, clinically dead. There were no clinics around, and perhaps thus there were no clinical deaths in that era, but let’s say he was clinically dead. Jesus and Dismas had already ascended to heaven, fulfilling Jesus’s words, For you shall be with me in paradise today already.

  Gestas suddenly believed all this, and he felt jealous, and prayed to God. Why has thou forsaken me? Dismas was a better thief than I; he stole gold, while I stole only sheep and goats, and I don’t know anything about Jesus, except I heard he was a wine thief and he wanted to lead a revolution against the Romans and be the King of Israel, but let’s say I am the worst. But is salvation the matter of being good? And of believing? So what if I don’t believe in You, God. Why should I? You have been better to everyone than to me. Did I have to die so the other two could live? Did I die for them? Someone has to be dead and in the ground after the crucifixion, and so it’s me. Oh, God, can I get some credit for this? I haven’t lived enough. I haven’t had any wine from the Golan yet. I haven’t made any children. I haven’t made love yet. Could I at least get to live three more days? And praying thusly, Gestas sank further into death.

  In the meanwhile, outside, the eclipse passed and the sun warmed the rocks. It became extremely hot. At night, a hailstorm chilled the rocks, and thunder and lightning and an earthquake shook Heaven and Earth.

  The rumbling of the earth cracked the rocks, and the stone blocking the entrance to Gestas’s tomb rolled off. Moreover, all this rumbling and fresh cold air stirred Gestas. The cold air was God’s breath blowing life into the pierced corpse. Gestas crawled out, and the sun blinded him and he didn’t see anything for a while. He breathed deep, and crawled toward a murmuring sound nearby, where he washed his face and drank the tears of God, which flowed in a stream for the ways of our world had saddened the Lord God so.

  And after drinking from this stream of sorrow, Gestas shook himself alive with the bitter and salty taste of universal sadness. And he awoke from his horrifying dreams and nightmares of being in Hell and consorting with Satan and smoking a variety of leaves with his hair on fire. Gestas now didn’t know where to go, and sat in the cave, where the cool darkness cured his vision from too much light. He sat on a rock, which cut into his buttocks, looked back at the two little graves and an antechamber. He wondered whether the other two had been there before being whiffed up in a holy cloud straight into Heaven.

  In the meanwhile, a young man saw him, and said, Jesus? Is that You?

  Gestas didn’t know how to reply. He was dazed, and didn’t know whether he indeed was alive, whether he was himself. And he said, Yes, maybe it’s Me.

  Soon, the disciples came, and Peter kissed the son of man, and said, You are the son of God indeed!

  And Thomas said, He looks a little different. His beard is much longer than Jesus’s and he’s taller.

  You can feel the hole where the lance went in, said Gestas, and you can also feel the hole in My back, where the lance tip exited Me.

  And Thomas did so, and said, Yes, this is Jesus.

  And Simon said, Beards grow faster in death, and when you are thinner you look longer. This indeed is Jesus.

  And Gestas found all this amusing, and smiled and asked, Where are My sisters? And where is wine? For we shall celebrate life and thank the Lord for His kindness.

  And there ensued a big festivity, in which Gestas experienced the things he had missed in his busy life of stealing and grilling sheep and hiding in the de
sert and eating grasshoppers when there were no sheep. And Mary Magdalene washed him in aromatic oils, and Gestas was happy, and said, It’s good to be Jesus.

  One could say that this was identity theft, and if so, who should be better at it than a stealer of sheep? And it would not be the first identity theft—for hadn’t Jacob stolen Esau’s hairy identity by putting goatskin over his arm to obtain the blessing of blind Isaac? So if Gestas had pulled wool over the disciples’ eyes, and passed himself for Jesus, he carried on the tradition to obtain the blessings of his followers. Three women armed with aromatic oils oiled him and anointed him the way David had been anointed.

  Unfortunately, the Bedouin, who died during an Israeli raid of the Gaza strip while he was in a hospital, had smoked too much of the Dead Sea Scroll for us to know more about how the frolic with disciples and a variety of Marys and Marthas and Leahs went, whether Gestas indeed had the wish fulfilled to create a son of his own, or whether he died childless, and whether he evaporated from Mt. Moriah like Mohammed 599 years later, or whether he whiffed into stardust from the Ascension hill or the future Ammunition hill, and whether the grateful and ingratiating thief had done the same with Jesus. We know very little thanks to the infernal fires of tobacco, but with a few sips of red wine from the Golan Heights, we might yet be able to piece the story together, with a great deal of imagination and faith.

  WANDERER

  Neda, a blue-eyed fourteen-year-old with a swinging black ponytail, was walking down Brothers Wolf Street in Vinkovci and posting black-and-white photocopies of a longhaired Persian cat. There was no need for many colors, as the cat was white and would be so in a color photo as well. The cat evinced a pensive, perhaps angry or mistrustful expression, so that if a passerby read the text—A three-year-old female cat, lost. If you find Mimi, call…—he might think she had deliberately run away. And that is what a middle-aged man said, startling Neda, in English. “Are you sure Mimi hasn’t simply run away?”

  She stared at the man’s thick, curly beard, his long salt-and-pepper hair, and the crow’s feet around his hazel eyes.

  “Pretty cat,” he said.

  “I ran out of tacks.”

  “No problem!” The stranger stuck the paper to the red bark of the fir tree by its resin. The tree could have been a good Christmas tree in its youth but was now shaggy, its branches drying out, and it bore scars of shrapnel from the war a quarter century ago. The scars kept bleeding resin and failed to heal.

  “Are you a refugee?” she asked him. “I’ve read a lot about refugees, but I haven’t seen one yet. You look Syrian.”

  “You could say that.”

  “Why aren’t you in a group?”

  “Maybe, like your cat, I left a group.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “Across the Danube and through the cornfields.”

  “But there were warnings that the fields could be mined.”

  “Of course, just to scare people away. How would you grow corn in a minefield?”

  “Where are you from?”

  The man rolled his eyes. They were large and clear. “Wait a minute,” he said, “I see her!” Just then, the white cat meowed from the top of the weeping fir tree. “See, she’s not lost, she’s treed! She doesn’t know how to get down, and maybe she doesn’t want to.”

  The stranger climbed the tree swiftly. Some of the thinner branches cracked as he stepped on them, but he didn’t lose his grip. Neda feared that the tree would split. The stranger gripped the cat by the scruff of her neck and climbed down. He didn’t look where his feet went, but they seemed to have an intelligence of their own. Even the little stubs of branches supported him, despite his weight.

  When the man landed on the grass, Mimi hissed, as though not recognizing Neda. She grasped the cat and cried for joy, kissing its ears.

  “Thank you so much,” she said to the stranger.

  “Oh, nothing to thank me for.”

  “Are you thirsty?” she asked, noticing his chapped lips.

  “I can’t deny that.”

  “Well, come home with me and I will give you a glass of water.”

  When they came home, she shouted, “Mom, we found Mimi!”

  Mom, a lean redhead dressed in a plaid miniskirt, came out and saw the stranger. “And who is this? What are you doing here, sir?” she asked in Croatian.

  “I don’t think he understands Croatian, but you can talk to him in English.”

  “I am insecure in English. German, perhaps.”

  “He found the cat just as I was putting up the picture on a tree. And I invited him home because he’s thirsty.”

  “How can you just pick up a stranger in the street like that? It’s not safe to talk to older men. Most of them are perverts.”

  “I know that, but he’s no stranger anymore. He’s part of the family. He saved my cat.”

  “We are not supposed to just let them in. I should call the police to see whether he’s properly registered. It’s illegal to just take them in randomly.”

  The stranger drank water and said, “Thank you. Your kindness means a lot to me. And now, I am off.”

  “Where to?” asked Neda. “Not to Germany, I hope. What’s so good in Germany? Why do you all want to go there?”

  “No, not to Germany,” he said. “I can’t speak for all of them, but it’s not for me. I am Jewish, and the history of that country and the lack of sunshine put me off.”

  “I thought you were Arabic.”

  “Arabic too.”

  “Mom, why don’t we invite him to stay overnight? It’s getting

  late.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about me,” the stranger said. He walked to the door and opened it. A strong wind blew and rattled the world, and it thundered, and a shower of hail beat down.

  “Do wait at least till the rain is over,” Neda said. “And you must be hungry by now.”

  “I cannot deny that.”

  “Here, we have some bratwurst,” Mom said.

  “I don’t eat pork.”

  “Oh, look at him,” Mom said. “He’s starving but so finicky he won’t eat pork. What next, he’ll want gluten-free?”

  “Well, Mom, they have religions like that, not to eat pigs. I’m glad we don’t eat cats.”

  Mom brought out a jar of honey, some warm white bread, and milk. The stranger said, “Danke schön,” and smiled, revealing his misaligned white teeth.

  “How about some red wine,” offered Mom. “Is that against your religion?”

  “May I have a glass?”

  The stranger poured water into his tall glass of ruby-red wine, Plavac Mali.

  “You are diluting it,” Mom said.

  “No, this way there will be more.” He drank, and kept pouring water into the glass, and the wine stayed ruby, refracting the light into swift arrows. The stranger sighed with relief and satisfaction, and while sitting in the red living room armchair he fell asleep.

  They arranged the sofa with a pillow and a down cover and guided the stranger to it. He snored.

  Marko, Neda’s bald father, showed up around ten in the evening, smelling of cigarettes and brandy. “Who is this alcoholic bum sleeping on our sofa?”

  Neda was still up, posting pictures of Mimi on Facebook. “Dad, he’s not a bum. He found my cat! I love my cat, and I love the stranger because he saved Mimi.”

  “But he reeks of wine and sweat. I thought Muslims didn’t drink wine. What kind of refugee is he?”

  “Well, don’t you think you’d want a glass of wine after a hard journey like that? I wonder whether he took a boat from Turkey to Greece. Haven’t you heard that so far six hundred people have drowned crossing from Turkey to Greece?”

  “Yeah, what’s up with these boats. Can’t these bums walk on the water? Maybe they don’t have enough faith, fuck them. And there’s land connecting Turkey and Greece. There are bridges, aren’t there? If they want to go to Germany, and the Germans want them, why don’t Germans just send a bunch of airplanes d
own there and take them? Who needs them here? Anyway, he’s just a bum, you can see that, he’s unwashed and he drinks. I hate drunks.”

  “He’s not Muslim but Jewish. And I am sure he’d love a bath. Turn the boiler on?”

  “That’s ridiculous, there are no Jewish refugees.”

  “I don’t think he’s a refugee, but a wandering Jew,” Neda said. “But really, isn’t being a refugee like the main thing in Judaism? They left Egypt and wandered for forty years.”

  “Yeah, a great sense of direction, just look at the map, it’s not such a great distance.”

  “Maybe that’s why the Israelis developed GPS,” Neda said.

  “For a young brat, you have lots of information. Where do you get shit like that?”

  “I read Jutarnji online.”

  Meanwhile, the stranger woke up, rubbed his eyes, and began to recite the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic.

  Marko walked out to smoke and came back. “The damned hail wrecked the new cement on the balcony. I’ll have to do it again. And moreover, I didn’t get paid this month. The construction company is broke. Nobody builds anything here anymore. We only know how to destroy. And we aren’t all that good at it, either.” He sat down, sighed, and smoked more, coughed.

  He ate three pale penises of bratwurst and drank Sljivovica, plum brandy, and smoked more. He stood up and walked to the larder and took out a slab of bacon, and with a sharp knife sliced away the thick bottom skin and tossed it out the window for the dog, who growled with gratitude. Then he gave a thin slice to Mimi, who sniffed at it, walked around the slice, and tried to bury it with dust from the floor.

  “Oh, you little bitch,” shouted Marko. “You are too fine for this? You think it’s shit? It may be shit, but it’s good shit.”

  Marko kicked the cat, and Neda shouted, “You asshole, how dare you!”

  “Don’t talk to your father like that!”

  “Or what, you’ll kick me and beat me, to teach me not to trust men?”