Heritage of Smoke Read online

  Branko stood up to make another cup of coffee. He beat the coffee beans into Turkish dust in an iron cup with a round-headed piece of iron, which looked like a bone, the head of a child’s femur. The metal rang dull under the crunch of beans. Branko sprinkled the coffee powder into boiling water as though scattering ashes and the intoxicating smell of black dust wafted through the room. I declined a cup he offered because, from my experience, coffee smelled good but tasted horrid.

  “Branko, what’s come over you? He’s too young to like coffee.”

  My aunt brought me a cup of milk with a slice of bread and a spoonful of honey. I let the honey trickle onto the buttered slice in concentric circles.

  “He’s too young to like anything,” Branko said, before continuing his story.

  What happened with my other brother, Nikola, was even worse.

  When he arrived at the partisan camp, he got old shoes that were too big for him. As he walked through the cold November mud, his feet froze. He asked for another pair of shoes.

  “You have a fine pair of shoes,” said his sergeant.

  “They’re too big.”

  “Wrap up an old towel around your feet, and they’ll be warm.”

  “I tried, that didn’t work. Could I go home and get my own pair?”

  “You could have thought of that when you were drafted.”

  “I wasn’t allowed to think. I had to go right away.”

  “What did you expect, that we would supply everything for you? That this is a paid-for picnic? You got to contribute.”

  “I’m eager to contribute, Kapetane.”

  “I’m not a captain but a sergeant. We can’t afford to let you go. We need you in action here.”

  “But there’s been no action, just walking.”

  “You don’t need to explain to me what action is.”

  At night, Nikola walked out of the camp. He got exhausted a village before home, and as he knew an old man there, he knocked on his door late in the afternoon the following day.

  The man opened the door, and said, “I thought you were in the partisans.”

  “I am, but I have to get my shoes.”

  “Have a seat, and I will make you a kajgana, with the best corn eggs and sour cream. First I need to go out to the stall to get the eggs, fresh out of the hen.”

  “You didn’t pick them up in the morning?”

  “You wouldn’t believe my hens. They lay them even in the evening.”

  The man didn’t come back for a long time and so Nikola went out, looking for him. Several partisans were in the yard, and one of them was beheading a chicken on a stump with a short-handled axe. The soldiers took bets as to whether the headless chicken would run and how far. It didn’t run. That infuriated most of them.

  “Pero, what do you feed your chickens? They should have more energy than this. How can you eat this? I bet the meat is all flabby.”

  My brother was about to slip out of the yard when the chicken beheader said, “Where the hell do you think you are going? You stay here. We were worried about you and we came here looking for you.”

  “Why did you leave?” another one asked Nikola.

  “I didn’t leave. I’m going home to get boots.”

  “What’s wrong with the ones you have? They look fine.”

  “The sole is coming off.” Nik lifted the boot and pulled the sole off in the front, and through it, his naked big toe peeked out. Small bent nails stuck out of the sole from all the sides, so it looked like the jaws of a sharp-toothed pike in the river about to swallow a chubby pink fish.

  “You just pulled the sole off yourself. You can nail it all back together, it’s simple.”

  “The boot is rotten, just look at the leather.”

  “Seems fine to me.”

  “I have a good solid pair of boots that will last me through the winter, so I was on the way home to get them.”

  “You could have told us you were going.”

  “I tried, but the sergeant wouldn’t let me go.”

  “He couldn’t—it’s not in his authority. Anyway, you shouldn’t waste anybody’s time like that, with your tales. You were deserting, that’s the simple fact.”

  “I’d come back tomorrow morning.”

  “Once you’re home, you’ll like it better there, or you might join another army.”

  Then they shot him, with one bullet to the head.

  Branko paused, his eyes glazed with tears, and he stood up from the table and walked unsteadily to the bathroom, touching the walls for support. As he wore shorts, I saw that his legs were thin; he seemed to have no calves. Yet these thin legs had to support his big torso and huge head. He blew his nose and cleared his throat. He probably spat out green phlegm. I heard him brushing his teeth. His mouth must have grown weary and sticky from so much talking, so he refreshed it. My aunt offered me a walnut cake. She tried to smile but she was sniffling too.

  “His memory is too good, and he remembers all the worst things, all the details,” she said.

  “But he wasn’t there. He must be making it up,” I said.

  “Oh no, he heard lots of things and he saw too much. He was everywhere, trust me.”

  Branko limped back through the door, smelling of mint.

  “That’s a great cake,” I said to my aunt, and hoped that Branko could be distracted from his histories. He put white cotton fluff into his ears as though he wouldn’t need to listen to anything—for talking he didn’t need to listen.

  All these drafts give me earaches, he said. Anyway, now that I started to tell you what a doomed land this land of ours is, I must finish. So, they shot my brother with one bullet. They were saving bullets; that’s all they gave him, one bullet, and so he died slowly while the soldiers took bets whether a man with a shot brain would crawl and how far he would manage to go before quitting. They were disappointed that he crawled only one yard, and they kicked him with their boots. He was buried in a field, in the soft clay, near the stream.

  For ten years, we knew nothing about what happened to him. All we knew was that he’d been a partisan and that he’d vanished. We even boasted that he died as a freedom fighter for the new country. But there was no new country. Things here always remain the same.

  After the war, I inquired about where Nik disappeared but was told repeatedly that there were too many missing people, that there was no way to recover all the bodies from the war.

  One day in a tavern, however, a toothless man told me, lisping, “For a shot of slivovitz, I will let you know where your brother is buried.” I bought him a bottle, and the man with sunken lips gave me his account of Nikola’s execution.

  “I was there,” he said, “but could do nothing about it. I was sorry for your brother, but war is like that, full of sorrow you can do nothing about but drink for the rest of your life. Even then we were all drunk, and to tell you the truth, we were only pretending to be looking for your brother. We were sent there to find him but all we wanted to find was slivovitz, and if he hadn’t come out, probably we would have gone back with the few bottles the old peasant gave us. The slivovitz made every bone crazy.”

  He pronounced his words badly, so everyone sounded like every bone and all the people, svi ljudi, like svi ludi. All humans, all hummus. Some of it may have been intentional. It was hard to follow his slurred speech, but I managed to reconstruct the story from it. I didn’t believe the drunk. People often said in vino veritas, but I find in vino exaggeration to be true more often. I believe in coffee.

  The drunk led me out into the field in Badljevina, near the train station and a lively stream. Weeping willows and pussy willows lined the stream and, in the setting sun, their yellow barks blazed like a golden fire, without a trace of red. The water gurgled like someone was clearing his throat, and I thought I saw silvery bodies of trout glistening as they leaped over rocks, but it was probably an illusion, with the waves occasionally flashing the light of the sun back at me from under the dark canopy of willows. Maybe I saw no re
al trout, but glimpses of trout spirits.

  “We buried him here, by this willow,” said the drunk.

  “How do you know it’s here?”

  “I know it was near that tilting old willow, that’s all.”

  And so I set out with a shovel to unearth my brother’s bones. I was glad it had been several years since his death because bones I could deal with. Rotten flesh I couldn’t.

  I dug in some five feet and found nothing.

  “You lied,” I told the man.

  “I didn’t. Dig again. Maybe you’re too far from the river.” He was sitting on the tree roots and licking the bottleneck.

  That time I didn’t find anything, and I went back alone the following morning. First I fished and caught a trout. I released the trout back in the water so I could have my wish. I know that sounds superstitious, it’s not a golden fish, but the trout was a rainbow trout, with beautiful sparkling colors, blues and purples.

  After that, I dug again. The soil went smoothly from shovelful to shovelful. I cut through earthworms, struggled with a few tree roots, and I hit a bone. I dug out three skeletons. Was one of them my brother? I wondered. In our parts, nobody has good teeth, unlike the people from the coast, who get more sun and eat small fish bones. Here, with all the rains, everything rots, including our teeth. My brother, however, had a perfect set of teeth, large, white, in a good jaw. So when I saw a skull with all the teeth in it, not even now in any way marred, I knew it must be my brother.

  I gathered his bones. I didn’t have a car, so I packed them in a suitcase, and I carried them to the train station and waited for the steam-engine train. The train was late, but it didn’t matter. I was struck with grief. That evening, the whole train was empty, but it stopped, and I dragged the bones. Well, not to make a short story long, let me tell you. I buried the bones right next to his brother’s, with my own hands. We could have afforded a gravedigger—now there were many of them in town because after the war people kept dying very quickly, of all sorts of disease but mostly grief.

  Before then, my hair was white, but my moustache was black. But after I buried my brother, even my moustache turned white.

  Several years after Branko told me the causes of his grief, he died of a massive stroke; his brain burned out. And when I visited my aunt, she looked startled. Her large black eyes flashed, reflecting the sunlight of the day.

  “You know,” she said, “you look just like your father did, so at first I thought it was his ghost walking through the door. But then I decided there was too much detail in the vision, you walked too firmly, so you weren’t a ghost after all.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Now that Branko can’t, you’ll torment me with ghosts?”

  “Oh yes I will,” she replied cheerfully. “Your father was lucky to have all these children, and you all carry bits of your father with you wherever you go, and he travels like that in this life with you. He doesn’t need to be a ghost. But us poor people who have no children, all we have are ghosts, real ghosts, you know, and that is all we’ll be.”

  “Well, well,” I said.

  “Will you have some coffee with me?”

  “Sure, I love Turkish mud.”

  She boiled water in a copper pot and sprinkled the black ash of coffee beans into it, and the liquid foamed up brown, smelling like resurrection. We sat down and she slurped and looked out the window to the green Sljeme Mountain and beyond.

  “Look at all these clouds,” she exclaimed. “Woe to me!”

  “What harm can they do? They are beautiful white clouds.”

  “I used to laugh when Borovnik—remember, Branko talked about him—complained about clouds. He was terrified of them. I found that funny.”

  “Well, it is. And to be afraid of white clouds is silly.”

  “They’re the worst. All my bones ache, and my hip squeaks. You don’t have any broken bones, do you? Just you wait, you’ll understand me one day!”

  In all the decades before, I must have heard only a dozen sentences from her, but now she seemed to carry the torch of the words of sorrow, and she talked just like Branko did, in his diction, with his relentless zeal. I wanted to close my ears, to fill them with white cotton fluff, when she began to tell me how her husband showed up as a ghost several times, to reassure her that there was life after death, that she should believe. He tends to open the door, pressing down the apartment’s door handle and opening it slowly and gently. Usually the door squeaks because my aunt forgets to oil it, but when he opens it, it doesn’t squeak at all but glides and opens like the wing of an angel, letting in gentle breezes from the rose garden. Sometimes he touches her shoulder and when she turns around there’s only a vanishing blue light in the dark, close to the ceiling.

  Her talking like that drove me mad, but I contained my frustrations to rolling my eyes. How could I blame her for believing in ghosts?

  Last time I visited her, she dressed in black, combed her thick silver hair, sprinkled perfume on it, and said, “You have a car. Will you drive me to the cemetery? I can’t walk very well, I can’t take trains. My walking sticks don’t support me, I am so unsteady. But I’d love to go to Mirogoj to visit Branko’s grave. And it’s so beautiful out there, just look at how blue the sky is.”

  “But why go,” I said, “if he visits you?”

  “You know, you have a point.” She looked at me askance and smiled cleverly. Her eyebrows were black and somehow she looked decades younger. “But I would still like to go to lay the flowers. He loved white roses. I do believe he spends quite a bit of time in his grave, you know.”

  WINO

  The town in which I grew up, Daruvar, was divided along many lines: believers and nonbelievers, communists and anti-communists, Serbs and Croats (and Czechs), but these were all superficial divisions. The really deep and substantial one was between alcoholics and non-alcoholics. I was informed early on that I belonged to the non-alcoholic camp. My father, mother, and siblings—none of them drank. It was a little different with my uncles, one of whom fell off a barn after drinking plum brandy and broke his neck; another kept a vineyard and was always flushed and quiet. In late adolescence, I didn’t drink at all, and I abhorred some of my friends who did. I heard they got together, drank beer and brandy, and passed out. Others went to village fairs, had fistfights, got drunk, and had sex with village maidens in haystacks.

  Most of these were amateur drunks. A friend of mine, a few years older than me, informed me that alcoholism was a disease, first defined as such, coincidentally, in 1956, my birth year, in the United States. Previously, alcoholism was just a phenomenon. Pop (my friend) explained that there were all sorts of alcoholics, such as rakijasi (brandy drinkers), pivasi (beer drunks), and the worst of all, winos (vinasi). Something in wine made these people hooked and incurable. I didn’t know any winos. Oh, you can recognize them easily, said Pop. They dehydrate, so when you see a man drink several glasses of water in the morning, you might look for the correlation of wine in the evening. Nobody needs to drink water in the morning except alcoholics, he claimed.

  It turned out winos were not all that bad. Namely, when I needed to visit Belgrade to take TOEFL (the test of English as a foreign language) so I could apply to American colleges, I asked Pop if he knew where I could crash for the night preceding my test. No problem, answered Pop. I know a wino who has a little house in Zemun, just outside of Belgrade. Misho is his name.

  How do I get in touch with him? I go to the post office and dial him?

  Oh no, he’s always home. I’ll give you the address. Just go there, bang on the door, as he’s hard of hearing, and say you are Pop’s friend. Give him a one-liter bottle of red wine and you’ll be his best friend right away. Maybe he’ll be in a good phase, maybe not. His father is an officer, but now and then the police, who hate winos, come over and slap him. For a while they came every morning and woke him up by slapping his face and kicking him. His father probably sent them.

  I followed Pop’s instructions. It was a snowy,
windy February day. I came to a triangular square, found the little house with two shattered windows, and banged on the door. Misho opened the door, tall, disheveled, with somewhat purple undersides to his eyes.

  I presented myself, and he laughed, Josip, like Tito. You must be Croatian, as, though everybody loves Tito in Serbia, nobody names children after him. Oh, and what do I see, a bottle of red.

  Yes, I replied, Plavac from Peljesac, Zinfandel from the Peljesac peninsula. Pop says I can spend the night here—I have to take tests at the American Embassy tomorrow.

  At the American Embassy! Misho replied. By all means.

  We sat down and lit a petroleum lamp. I haven’t paid the electric in a year, so the city has cut me off. The petrol fumes and smoke drifted while Misho popped the bottle open and drank straight from it for a long while, finishing half. Good, now we can talk, he said. If you are tired, you can go right to bed. That down cover is yours for the night.

  I shivered as the snow blew through the windows and the wind whistled cheap melodies over the shards of glass. Misho walked to the cupboard, yanked a glass door open, and took out a handgun.

  Do you want to check it out? he asked.

  No, I am fine here, I said. It’s really cold; I don’t want to leave the bed.

  It’s an interesting gadget, he said. My grandfather had a quarrel one day with my grandma. She was in bed just where you are, in the same bed, at midnight, like now—it’s midnight, isn’t it?—and he shot her. Yes, my friend, he killed my sweet grandma right there, with three bullets.