Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (31 page)

No one returns. In the first officer’s cabin I leaf through the records, I cross out the names of those whom cerebrospinal fever, once past the Tropic of Cancer, dispatches to the deep abyss, fortunately there are just a few, a few shillings less upon arrival. I keep files on everyone, the living and the dead. You never know, maybe for the valley of Josaphat.

EVERYONE SUCKED
down the drain. The porthole is getting lighter, my friends, strange to see our faces appear; the shipwrecked survivors pull their heads out of the water, look around in the deserted expanse, the train moves off, we’re alone on the plain, a uniform, flat sea. The
Nelly
will soon depart from Bremerhaven. Now is no longer the time to talk; we are silent, strangers to one another, with our bundles and our suitcases. The words of nights in the train have vanished, moisture that evaporates in the morning.

I’m not ashamed of what I said, of what I heard. No one can read in our faces the stories we told each other, Hades is a black gurgling pit of words that remain down there; it’s as though you never said them and never heard them. The journey in the dark is merely uncomfortable, hours and hours crammed into the train compartment with the other refugees and their makeshift baggage, each with his exaggerated tale. Each with his guilt, that too exaggerated—it’s good to feel guilty, believe me, it confers a destiny, it explains and justifies the setbacks and adversities. The guilt complex is a great invention, it helps you live, to bend your head, which, in any case, they will bend for you.

None of these comrades who, like me, will board the ship to
go down there, displaced persons, people without a name—during the voyage the IRO, the International Refugee Organization, will even sequester our ID card—none of them will remember this story about Maria, just as I no longer remember theirs. When we happened to run into one another, years later, in Perth in Hobart Town or wherever, we never talked about that black pit that had landed us down here. How are things, we would ask each other, pay, work, for some the wife and children, the social clubs for refugees in Perth and Melbourne.

Down here no one remembered the stories heard that night on the train. It’s Maria who remained in that deep pit. Slipped in, left behind—maybe it was I who pushed her; when you’re drowning and someone clings to you, you shake them off, you say the hell with it and let them go down, it’s human, in that stormy nighttime sea. But no, it was I instead who clung to her, to my figurehead, when the huge wave crashed down on me. After I ended up at Goli Otok, she went to stay in Arbe, with her brother, a lieutenant in the Yugoslavian Navy who, with his launch, patrolled the coasts of the two accursed islands from which no one returns. “And no mortal enters there / neither local nor stranger, or crosses that threshold, / since it is utterly forbidden by the terrible divinity / whose breath excites the rabid fury of the dogs / with the fiery eyes.”

I knew Maria was there, beyond that inviolable expanse of sea. Thanks to her brother Absinthe—that wasn’t really his name, they called him that because he often drained a glass or a bottle—she managed to get that package to me. Bread, Pago cheese and that ticket that he unknowingly handed to me in the waxed paper. She planned the getaway well, that evening. She convinced her brother to take her with him on the launch, along with only one sailor, for the usual quick inspection tour around the islet and to take a swim,
on the way back, at Samari
, the bay of Arbe that faced Sveti Grgur. It’s only fitting, two hells facing one another—both in some way created by my own comrades. By my comrades-at-arms in Arbe, by my comrades in Sveti Grgur. We at Goli Otok were still in the water, gathering rocks. It was easy for her—when her brother and the sailor fell asleep, dulled by the Luminal that she had put in their wine—to take the launch, which she knew how to handle, approach the jagged coast of that Bald Island where I was hiding, and bring me to Kruš
ica and then, having crossed Cherso’s ridge, take me in another boat to Istria, to a beach between Brestova and Albona.

The boatman who brought us to Istria was one of Vidali’s men, a member of the network that he had organized for his failed conspiracy against Tito. Maria’s brother, when he awoke, terrified, must have feared that they would take him for one of those conspirators, for an accomplice of theirs, and so they say he lost his head ... But I was already on the other side, safe and sound, in Italy. The Mexican jaguar wasn’t successful, with that crazy scheme of wanting to overthrow Tito by having the sailors in Pola and Spalato mutiny, maybe that too was only a rumour, however those occasional odd jobs allowed someone who managed to escape from the island, like me, to cross the border, he organized them well and so, two nights later, a courier familiar with obscure routes led me to the other side, through the area around Pesek, and since that time, Doctor, I have never again set foot in a socialist country, I moved farther and farther away from the Promised Land—they’ve told me it’s no longer there, it vanished, Atlantis swallowed up by a tsunami. The roulette wheel flung the ball out of orbit; only on the moon, I think I read, does the red flag still wave, fired up there by a Soviet spaceship—wave, so to speak, up there there isn’t a breath of air, the fleece suspended from the gnarled oak hangs motionless.

We should really go and get it back, that fleece, our limp red flag. Maybe going back, in reverse, like the
Argo
driven into the sea and even into the sky by launching end on. Sailing up there, among the constellations, to recover what is ours, banished from the earth.

I TOO USE CALOMEL
, but that’s the only thing Rodmell knows to prescribe. When, once past the Tropic of Cancer, an epidemic of cerebrospinal fever breaks out among the convicts, all he knows how to do is increase the doses, ten, twenty, thirty pills. Four men die all the same and just before dying they even go crazy; one grabs a lamp, wants to light it and throw himself into the dark waters he sees crashing on all sides, shouting that he wants to see the darkness that is about to swallow him up. Rodmell, on the other hand, has the good fortune to drop dead almost without warning early one morning; he falls off the chair, lies on the ground gasping a little and dies. I remember the decoctions and packs of Dr. Rox, the physician at Newgate prison, and after a few days the epidemic ends with no further casualties. I move up from the petty officers’ table to that of the officers.

THAT KIND OLD WOMAN
in Kruš
ica, seeing me trembling and numb, gave me a yellowish blanket, an old sheepskin that we pulled over our heads, Maria and I, to sleep for a few hours. Maria had snatched me out of the jaws of the serpent, where I had been thrown by him, the Leader, Eeta radiant like the sun adorned with gleaming rays, who looked out at us from the portraits with his terrible gaze, with those cruel, imperious little eyes from which there was no escape. “Have you therefore neither regard nor fear of my sovereign power, / nor for the Colchian forces defending my sceptre?” he demanded in a terrifying voice. And we obeyed, we went down there, to construct his realm and then sacrifice ourselves on his behalf and end up, because of him and for obeying him, on the Naked, Bald, hellish island of Goli Otok. It was the other who had taken his place, the rebel and traitor, the emboldened Marshal; it was he who was now the radiant sun adorned with gleaming rays, looking out at us from his portraits hung everywhere like tavern signs, with eyes seemingly kind and jovial but which deep down were cold and ruthless, at least until he heard our choir of the damned,
Tito Partija, Tito Partija!

That evening in Kruš
ica, in Maria’s arms, under that discoloured sheepskin. I slept in the hollow between her head and shoulder, in
that cove, Down the Bay at last. Above, in the night sky, the
Argo
sailed in a sea of phosphorescent sargassos; stars bloomed, gleaming medusas of venomous purple.

The first of our new nights, I thought. The last, however, of subterfuge and deception. They had informed us that the courier, that night in the area around Pesek, would lead us to the other side one at a time; two at a time was too risky, Maria would cross over three days later, it was safer that way. Better a week, safer still, he told me later, in Trieste, someone I had never seen before and who had also arranged other escapes, more complicated than mine. Yes, of course, than your escapes, he amended quickly—when I protested that there were two of us. I should have known that when fate—or the Party, fate’s Central Committee—decided that the opening was too narrow for someone ...

You don’t always make it through the Symplegades rocks, when you come up from Hades and return from the sea of the dead.—“There’s no escape / from the fatal misfortune / driven by the swift turmoil of the winds / the Symplegades collide hurtling toward one another / and the crashing thud resounds on the open sea and in the vast heavens ... The dove wheels uneasily between the cliffs with the divine ambrosia in her beak,” but the rocks close together like sharp-edged razors and clip her wings, “the bird plunges headlong into precipitous death ...,” the ship shatters on the rocks.

The dove plummeted, its wing broken. Maria, Blasich told me speaking for Carlos—the commander was in a hurry and almost ran out, stumpy and lame as he was, there was a wine-coloured blotch on his averted face, shame or maybe I’m deluding myself—Maria was a Yugoslavian citizen and enrolled in the Yugoslavian Communist Party, which had not yet become fraternal again, that soon, perhaps, as far as, even though and however—it wouldn’t do,
now that the painful fratricide seemed to point to—no, not yet about to end, unfortunately, if only—but it wouldn’t do to exacerbate the bloody wound with unwarranted interference—and give asylum to Maria, accused by Rijeka’s prosecutor—it was the first time he didn’t say Fiume—later on, yes, without doubt, in any case the Party would follow the matter closely and take whatever steps, with all due vigour, certainly not now, and—and so Maria therefore on that side and me here, the border cutting love in two like an apple, one half falls in the mud and soon it too rots.

Did I say yes, to Blasich? No, I didn’t say anything. Consenting silence? Could be. There I was, in that room, the weariness of centuries weighing on my shoulders—“The diploid was suddenly reminded of his years, a senile ultra-centenarian ...”—I knew I had to say something, to say no to something horrible, but in a flash everything flew out of my head, I didn’t understand what Blasich was talking about, what the drowned officer had to do with it, found half-shattered on the rocks in the middle of the sea near the islet of Trstenik, the waves had carried him there from the bay of Samari
, where he had fallen or jumped onto the rocks. He was floating like a log, a small wandering island; that’s how islands are born, from blood, even the Absyrtides, my Miholaš
ica, were born from the body of Absyrtus hacked to pieces and thrown into the sea, the flower blooms from death, tsunamis and underwater volcanoes cause magnificent islands to emerge from the sea.