Heritage of Smoke Read online

  “They stick a needle into you?” asked Lyerka. “I’m scared of needles.”

  “It won’t hurt at all,” Nenad, her father, replied.

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve had lots of those when I was sick.”

  A boy in front of them cried.

  “So why is he crying?”

  “From fear, not pain,” explained the doctor.

  “I won’t cry,” she said.

  When the doctor pushed in the needle, Lyerka’s dark brown eyes grew wet, but she didn’t let out a sound. A couple of brilliant tears welled along her long eyelashes.

  “Now, that’s my girl,” said Nenad.

  A nurse rubbed alcohol over the puncture and covered it with gauze, and said, “Hold it there for a while.”

  Lyerka did. A scarlet spot of blood appeared on the gauze.

  “You have a beautiful girl,” the nurse said to Nenad.

  “I know. I don’t know what I did to deserve such beauty.”

  “Oh, you know what you did! We all deserve beauty, but few of us get it.”

  “You have nothing to complain of.”

  Nenad noticed her deft long fingers, and he admired her blond hair, curving forward over her ears. It wasn’t real blond, but chemical, and it complemented her dark blue eyes.

  “Oh, thank you! It’s so rare in socialism to get a compliment. It’s a bourgeois manner.”

  “Life is too sad not to indulge in little pleasantries,” he retorted.

  Heading out the door, Nenad paused to check out the nurse’s form as she leaned over to put the needle into a candle flame— very thin waist and wide hips.

  “Tata, have you forgotten something?” asked Lyerka.

  “No.”

  “Why is she burning the needle? So it will hurt more?”

  “So nobody will get sick. Fire kills the germs.”

  He held Lyerka’s hand and admired how small it was in his big fist. His hand had been enlarged through too much work and appetite, which he’d inherited from his father, who had basically eaten himself to death. At least he managed to die before World War II. There was a blessing there, at least for him.

  Lyerka skipped steps over the cobbles in the town center, past a rusty hot water fountain, and they walked into an ice cream parlor. “You took it so well, my sweetie, you deserve a little strawberry ice cream.”

  She licked it, sticking out her little red tongue, like a kitten licking milk.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Good. It’s nice to be taking a walk with you.”

  “I know. I am usually too busy to do this, but I promise we’ll do it every day.”

  Lyerka smiled wide. “But no more needles,” she said.

  “You didn’t like it, of course. Does it still hurt?”

  “No. It’s fine. It just itches a little.”

  “No worse than a bee sting?”

  “Much better.”

  A stray dog, with long hanging ears, came up to Lyerka, and Lyerka petted him. The dog blinked and licked her hand.

  “See, he loves me.”

  “He loves the ice cream sticking to your fingers. But yes, he loves you; everybody does.”

  She lifted one of his hanging ears and petted it.

  “Don’t touch him. He could have all sorts of diseases.”

  “Could we take him home?”

  “No. Where would he stay?”

  “You could build him a doghouse. It’s easy for you; you can build anything.”

  Nenad laughed. “Yes, a doghouse I could, but I don’t see why. Plus, the dog is bigger than you. What if he has rabies? He could bite you.”

  “He won’t. He likes me. Look at him.” She buried her little fingers in the dog’s long orange hairs.

  Nenad pulled her by the hand, away from the dog.

  “That hurts, Daddy! That’s my sore arm.”

  “I didn’t know it was sore. Sorry, we have to get home.”

  She didn’t say anything. The dog followed a few paces behind. She turned around. “He wants to come with us. Look at those big eyes! He’s crying.”

  “Dogs can’t cry.”

  The dog furrowed his brows, and there were creases on his forehead; he looked worried and thoughtful.

  “Don’t look at him,” Nenad said. “That encourages him.”

  “But why can’t I have a dog?”

  “We have enough cats running around our yard.”

  “They’re all wild, and I can’t pet them.”

  “At least you learned that lesson when that nasty tomcat nearly scratched your eye out.”

  “Oh, he was just scared. He’s nice now that I bring out some leftovers.”

  “I didn’t know we had leftovers.”

  At home, Marta had just brought in a pile of scrap wood in a pleated basket from the workshop. “You all look ruddy and fresh,” she said.

  “The walk did us good. The sun is strong, and the wind from the mountains is chilly. And to talk with Lyerka means happiness, you know.”

  “There’s a letter for you, from the taxation office.” She pointed to a blue envelope with a stamp. Nenad checked out the stamp: the walled city of Dubrovnik. He used to collect stamps.

  “Why are you staring at the envelope? The letter is inside; won’t you read it? They want you to pay more taxes.”

  “Of course, when did they want me to pay less? Bastards, they won’t let a decent man live.”

  “I suppose they’re just doing their job. You don’t want to end up in jail, do you?”

  “I’m not afraid of their jails. I’ve been to worse places in the war. Now, of course I’ll go pay, but how am I going to feed our growing family?”

  “We’re doing fine, praise the Lord.”

  “Yes, the Lord and me.”

  “Are you all hungry?”

  Marta, a solid woman with a thin nose and small green eyes beneath a tall forehead, prepared palachinkas for supper. She put cottage cheese with a bit of sugar inside the crepes and offered them to their children.

  Pretty soon there was a measured triple knock on the thick oak door, and Nenad’s stocky brother Drago, endowed with emphatically upturned black eyebrows, came in with his sensationally pale and nearly translucent wife, Maria. There was no phone in the entire town, and if people wanted to visit, they came directly over, risking being turned away if the family was busy. But after darkness gathered hardly anybody worked, although most of them fussed, canning and pickling peppers or dancing on their bleeding grapes or on sliced cabbage or reading old yellow-papered novels. Nobody had TV sets, and guests were in demand as a source of entertainment.

  Marta brought out tablecloths to adorn the otherwise naked aged wood. The pale beechwood resembled human flesh in hue, and to her it seemed indecent; it would have to be covered for the visitors. There were a few grease stains from duck soup, a burn mark from a brimming-hot frying pan off the stove, and a few scars from children’s cutting with knives. There were lots of knives all over the house and in the workshop, where Nenad made tables and chairs for a living.

  “Would you like some rose hip tea?” Marta offered. “We also have some white wine. My husband no longer drinks anything alcoholic. His doctor tells him it’s best not to.”

  “Oh, doctors,” Drago answered. “They always tell you what not to do, but it would be better if they told you what to do. Yes, I’ll have a glass of wine.”

  “And so will I,” said his blue-eyed wife, Maria. She was half German, half Czech. After the last world war, her parents were driven out like many Germans, and that Maria could remain had to do with her being married to Drago, who had to his credit killing four ambushed German soldiers.

  Drago drew a loud gulp of greenish wine, exceedingly sour and tart. “Strange days—suddenly we can’t talk about Mother Russia anymore, and America is our new friend.”

  “Politics, they always change, it’s best not to talk about it,” Marta said.

  “Why not?” Nenad said. “You can’
t spend your life in fear that something bad will happen. A lot of bad stuff happened, and a lot more will, but we can at least talk about it.”

  “We’re getting all sorts of modern help from America,” said Drago, “better antibiotics, better radios, better beans. Can you believe it? Serbian beans, pasulj, for years came from America.”

  “I know, and today our children were inoculated against the measles,” Nenad said. “Yugoslavia is the first country in the world to get the medicine!”

  “That’s strange,” Maria said. “Why don’t they use it in America first?”

  “They don’t have a crisis like we do.”

  “It’s not a crisis,” Drago said. “You get it, and so what? A few spots, a fever.”

  “Maybe you are thinking of rubella. This is rubeola. The high fevers can damage your heart.”

  “Oh, everything can damage your heart. You don’t brush your teeth right, or you sleep on the wrong side; you spend too much time in bed or too little; you work too hard or too little, and your heart fails.”

  “Americans are nice to us,” Marta said.

  “Well, the American friendship is all self-interest,” Drago said. “It’s military propaganda to keep us away from the Soviet bloc.”

  “I don’t care about the motives as long as the deeds are good,” said Nenad. “Lyerka, apple of my eye, will you play a song for our guests?”

  Lyerka, dressed in white, glowed. She could pick a few melodies on the piano, and she improvised, in the right key, “Ave Maria.” She stood in her tiny clogs next to the piano, dancing slowly while choosing the keys.

  “Beautiful, isn’t she?” said Marta, her mother.

  Upon hearing the compliment, Lyerka smiled, and her eyes seemed to grow in size. Dimples appeared on her flushed and round cheeks. The blackness of her hair transcended itself into flickers of blue.

  “She’s smart too,” Marta said. “Ask her to multiply numbers, and see what happens.”

  “What is seven times seven?” asked Drago.

  “Almost fifty,” she answered.

  “What do you mean by almost fifty?”

  “Forty-nine.”

  “And what is nine times nine?”

  “Just a little over eighty.”

  “Bravo!” Maria said. “And she’s only five?”

  “Almost five!” answered Lyerka.

  Marta took off her scarf, shook her curly hair, which sprang up. She tied it into a tall bun. Her life was fulfilled. She had a clever and curious son who wanted to become a journalist, an older daughter who liked to read the encyclopedia, and now she had a brilliant little girl who would grow up to be a music teacher or even perhaps a doctor. In socialism, women could study like men, and since they weren’t drunks you could foretell their future.

  For the evening meal, Marta prepared žganci, a hot corn cereal with fresh cow milk. Lyerka tiptoed to the stove, where a pot of boiled milk was cooling off and forming a wrinkled cover of cream. She scooped it up in a soup spoon, which in her tiny hand looked like a ladle. While Lyerka chewed the cream, looking beatific, Marta said, “You should never walk barefoot; where are your clogs? You’ll catch a cold!”

  Nenad said grace, and at the end of the meal he kissed everybody goodnight. He was making sure they would have an orderly life, something he hadn’t experienced in his upbringing, where his father, damaged by World War I and captivity in Russia, had a bad temper. He couldn’t control his appetite because he had spent four years starving in Siberia. Every meal to him seemed to be the last one, so he devoured as much as possible, with lots of feferoni, yet he was thin, stringy, and fiery.

  The following day, after a lunch of bread, milk, and honey, Lyerka scratched her arm.

  Nenad asked, “It hurts?”

  “Tata, it still itches.”

  “But it doesn’t hurt?”

  “No. Could I have a glass of water? I’m thirsty.”

  “Can’t you get it for yourself?”

  “You’re right, I am just a little tired.”

  “Fine, I’ll get you a glass.” He poured the water from a bucket on a chair. They had no indoor plumbing; Marta had brought in a bucket drawn from their spindle well.

  Lyerka gulped the water greedily.

  “She’s kind of red in the face,” said Marta.

  “A bit flushed from the wind. She went out to look for the cats. The last gasp of winter, it’s energizing.”

  Marta felt Lyerka’s forehead. “She’s warm.”

  “They say it’s normal. After the shot, you can run a slight fever for three days.”

  “Strange idea, to take healthy children to the hospital and give them fevers in the name of health.”

  “That’s good planning, and Americans are great at that. They’ve knocked out TB, and now they’ll get rid of most diseases.”

  “What are we going to die of then?”

  “Old age.”

  “I’m sleepy. Can I go to bed?” asked Lyerka.

  “But it’s the middle of the day, and you’re too old for naptime.”

  “She’s not too old,” Nenad said. “Spaniards do it all their lives.”

  Marta said, “We should give her some aspirin.”

  “It’s not fever, only a slight temperature rise. Perfectly normal.”

  “It would be normal to keep it down.”

  “I think it’s good for the body to learn how to fight off fevers. Probably the inoculation works better with the heat—the body is producing antibodies. It’s like a little foundry. Foundries are always hot. Fire kills the germs.” He closed his eyes and saw the needle in the flame held by deft, elongated fingers.

  “I’ll give her some lemonade at least.” Marta took out a lemon, sliced it in half, and squeezed it into a glass.

  “It’s great that our country is making friends in Africa,” Nenad said, “so we can have lemons. How old were you when you had your first lemon? I had mine in 1935. We didn’t know that there was a difference between lemons and yellow pears, so we ate the skins too and wondered how such a bitter and sour fruit could be so popular.”

  “Thanks, Mama. My throat is dry and scratchy. Can I have more?”

  Marta felt Lyerka’s forehead.

  “Jesus, you’re burning up! Where’s the thermometer? Nenad, come over here, she’s all red. She’s shivering. My God, she’s in trouble. Take her to the clinic right away!”

  Nenad tried to place her on the bicycle in the child-carrying seat, but she couldn’t sit up straight.

  “She’s too weak to sit up, and I don’t think she has any sense of balance,” he said. “I better carry her.”

  As he walked up the cobbles on the hill, he sweated. Her heat was getting to him; he panted.

  At the clinic, the doctor on duty smoked a cigar and asked, “Fever and you get excited? Children have fevers all the time.” His moustache was gray and white, vertical white stripes, except under the nose, where they were yellow, black and yellow. But as he looked at Lyerka, he said, “You’re right, she looks too hot.”

  A black-haired nurse, who also had a moustache, put the thermometer under Lyerka’s tongue. Lyerka’s chin shook. The doctor felt her neck below her ears. “Her glands are a little too swollen.”

  “What is it?” asked Nenad.

  “An allergic reaction to the inoculation. Probably nothing serious, but we have to drive her to the hospital right away. We have one more child with high fever and neck swelling like that, and they’re already waiting for the car downstairs.”

  The ambulance drove over potholes in town and then over the mud and gravel to the hospital in Pakrac, twenty-two kilometers away. The ambulance thudded on the wooden bridge over the river Pakra. The hospital was painted all blue.

  A father and his son, the same age as Lyerka, went through the doors first. The son was shivering violently, and he moaned more than Lyerka did.

  Nenad and his daughter waited in a dark corridor.

  “Can’t they turn on the lights?” asked Nenad.
<
br />   “No, we have to save on electricity,” said a cleaning woman dressed in dark blue and sweeping, raising the dust, which accumulated from crumbs of caked soil slipping out from underneath people’s soles.

  Lyerka moaned and then coughed.

  “Will you stop sweeping dust and germs right into our mouths?”

  “No, I can’t. A job is a job. It has to be done.”

  “Do it when we’re gone.”

  “Most people are gone.”

  “Don’t you see the child is coughing?”

  “It’s a hospital. Everybody is coughing. What do you expect?”

  “Get out of our way, you smart fatass!”

  “Don’t become abusive, comrade. Who do you think you are?”

  But when Nenad stood up and swore colorfully (Jebo te vrag!), red in the face, she turned her back and swept at the other end of the corridor.

  The sound of children’s crying was emerging from a couple of rooms. And farther down the corridor an old man was wailing, “Mama!” He was calling through the ages, from perhaps his ninetieth year to the middle of the previous century, for a time when he was a helpless toddler with a voluptuous mother, who by now was probably dust and bones in the ground in one of the rickety cemeteries in the hills. On his deathbed, and nobody attended to him. The cries stopped and there was a long moan, which trailed off and became a wet wheeze, assuming a ghostly echo from cavernous lungs.

  Lyerka leaned her face against her father’s arm, against the scratchy herringbone-patterned wool of his jacket. He put his hand on her head and petted her hair over her ear. “Daddy, can we just go home? It’s better there.”

  “But you need help. They have good doctors here.”

  “What do good doctors do?”

  “They make you healthy.” Were they good? He wondered. They always behaved like they were; they boasted of their Zagreb Medical School education, which they said was the same thing as Viennese education, maybe even better because they adhered to the old standards of enforcing a huge repertoire of memorization.

  He stood up and knocked on the off-white door, and as he knocked some of the cracked paint crumbled and fell on the floor.

  “Comrade, not so violently! You’re making a mess,” said the cleaning woman. “I’ll have to sweep again.”