Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (16 page)

From the outset Captain Vasojevic served him faithfully; the fellow was as honest as Marija, as bravely dogged as a
hajduk,
as ready to liberate Serbia as Cirtovich himself, even if they must sail straight up into empty air! Impressed into serfdom on one of the immense Turkish farms, he had escaped only to see his youngest sister Aida hauled off to Abdul Bey's harem. Unable to kill this Turk, he waylaid a wandering scholar from Travnik and cut his throat. Then he fled to Bar, and presently to Trieste. Perhaps what he and his master shared above all was the desire to tempt fate.

Mindful of Porphyry's claim that Plotinus had achieved oneness with the Godhead four times, Vasojevic used to propose, in those days when the two of them still discussed a voyage to the Sphere of Fixed Stars, that they plumb the Enneads for the secret of celestial travel. Cirtovich knew Plotinus well enough, and believed him to be wanting in quantities and procedures: in short, no secret lay there. Besides, his destination had already begun to alter. What if Prince Lazar were not yet in heaven, but remained captive in some other realm? This would explain why he had not come back for these four centuries. The Sphere of Fixed Stars was known; one saw it every clear night. But since religion and even the best science of the
Novum Organum
failed to describe the treasure which his father had left him, thus his duty. So he studied death. Marija was in the storehouse counting bales of fiber. Massimo had brought him a case of plum brandy from the old country; once the Cincar traders were all paid off, he called Vasojevic up from the dock, locked the door, opened the first bottle, and they sat drinking toasts to Serbia, their dear home so blighted and lawless, while Cirtovich elucidated the qualities he read into Death the Huntsman, who must be as terrifying as had been his own father in anger; but Vasojevic, who in those first years remained naïve enough to eat fried squid without getting nauseated, could not yet comprehend him. Well, neither could anyone else. (A certain Captain Bijelic
from Montenegro sometimes sailed to Trieste, where a merchant who purchased bales of tea from him inquired into the doings of Captain Cirtovich.— Bijelic said: He keeps to himself.)

Cirtovich began his tertiary researches with the fact that death cannot be said to be either cold or hot, liquid or solid; therefore it, like the soul, must not be embodied; and by means of certain more detailed proofs in this vein (the lemma conceded only by force, as it were), it grew apparent to Cirtovich that death is itself a spirit or active principle. Although the corollaries to this were unpleasant, he reminded himself that if the most precious thing is truth, then realities are treasures, never mind that they often seem to be excrements and bloody cinders. Sometimes he wanted no more than did Marija—a better life. Wasn't that what she prayed for when her oval face shone gold in the cathedral torchlight? In truth, she brought gold light with her! She had wide dark eyes; the right was larger than the left. Her lips were rich red like the borders of icons. He never forgot how the whites of her eyes glowed in the dark church. When he lay down beside her, her eyes grew even larger, as if she were searching for something in him. But it was his fate to see a certain idea, his father's, silhouetted every night. The enlargement of understanding, for which he possessed so high an aptitude, requires tranquillity, if it is to be more than a fighter's ruthlessly expedient knowledge of good and evil—and Cirtovich's peace was getting eaten away. Closing his eyes, he remembered the pine trees looking down on old walled towns.

Having buried his handful of Serbian earth in the garden, he now begot his children. Their Italian was better than his, of course. They were never morose as they might have been in Serbia. Indeed, they were active and optimistic. As for his daughters, each one veiled herself, as did her mother, like any good Serbkina in a city ruled by Turks. Without his knowing it he became ever more a man of Istria or at least Dalmatia, hoarding up islands in his mind. Thank God he had declined to be renowned for creeping through the mountains and stealing cows like some middling
hajduk
!
He was going to be a savior. Before Tanya was born he had charted a plausible course. Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler had not, as the ignorant supposed, destroyed Ptolemaic cosmology. If anything, they had brought the Spheres within reach. The almost entirely uncentered earth (for only the Lunar Sphere revolved around it) conveniently
intersected the Sphere of Jupiter at certain periods. This would facilitate the voyage. Praying to Saint Paul, who protects wine and wheat, he filled, then doubled his family granary. Wasn't that the touch of proof? From this period he often recollected a certain autumn afternoon after his first wine-peddling voyage to Muscovy, Marija's doves murmuring in the garden, Srdjana off to market, his wife sitting very still in that high-backed chair holding Nicola, who must have been less than two years old; he was clinging to his mother's neck, peeking sidelong at his father. Suddenly the little boy stretched out his hand. He desired the mysterious thing which his father always wore around his neck. Marija watched huge-eyed and unsmiling. The child began to cry. Turning away, Jovo Cirtovich funded
uskoks
and befriended priests whose cassocks had secret pockets, his understanding harshening year by year, although not into what he would have termed dissatisfaction; he had not grown bitter like his brothers, whose dearest dream was to rip the Turks' beards out and skin them like lambs. Hence his secret noble thoughts prepared him for knowledge rather than for hatred. Late at night he went to the garden, mapped stars and listened. He knew what he wanted, his ambition swinging brightly like a forecastle lantern in bad seas, and and although his good angel fixed its blue eye on him and opened its dark brown beak, he succeeded.— Oh, he's as brave as a dragon! they said.— Moreover, it was known of him that unlike the Turks he never blinded or tortured anybody, even when on the trail of money. He was mostly kind to beggars. Even his competitors he treated with wary good humor, as if he were among the feathertopped masqueraders in a Venetian aquatic parade.— As for his face . . . well, such faces belong, for instance, to hardened adulterers who find themselves in difficulties—if they can only pull themselves out of this pit, in order to dive ravenously into the next, all will be well!—and so they gaze far away, clenching their lips in order not to get any more grave-dirt between their teeth; pressing their fists against their chests, they await the next pang of dread, grief or guilt.

When they wrote him that their mother had died, he pitied his brothers and invited them all to Trieste. They proudly refused, wavered, then bowed down to the power of his riches; for it turned out that they too had always wished to travel. So they came, Italianizing their names with mercenary haste: Massimo, Alessandro, Stefano, Cristoforo, Florio and
Lazzaro. They spoke about their father, who since his death had become ever more handsome and terrible, and then Jovo gave them all ships. They were jealous of him, but more so of Vasojevic, who although not of their blood had been set so high above them. All the same, he was a man they could understand, unlike their brother. When Massimo demanded to become taken on as a full partner in the warehouse, Jovo Cirtovich gave him a sinecure and told him to study Glagolitic. They tried to learn about his doings through other Serbs: Jovan Moro and even Lazar Ljubibratic. Nobody knew anything. In silence he observed them peering at his neck-pouch. They would not have dared to treat their father thus.

His father's soul swam ever farther away from him, like a lost tarnished fish of silver. Moreover, he felt desperation to see Marija getting greyer and unhappier, no matter how many turtledoves he brought her; while Tanya kept growing up without being part of the secret. What did he desire, then? He was anything but unhappy; great meditations sustained him, his aims, necessities and perils ingathered like the many-roped high masts peeping over the Ponterosso. Unlocking one of his coffers, he set to counting the black wormholes in the White Book. Then it came time to underwrite another cargo of Virginian tobacco for his sheep-dealing brothers, whose mediocrity remained as familiar and therefore pleasant to him as the stink of the Canal Grande. Scarcely cconcerned how he appeared to others, he kept dreaming that famous dream which we all dream under other guises, the one of the dead child who returns home too late, finding his parents long dead—yes, and likewise all his brothers and sisters, together with their children and grandchildren. When he laid his hand on Marija's breast, her heartbeats came as dull as the churchbells of tiny Serbian villages.

In the forenoon watch of one of those ambiguous days when the
bora
becomes gentle, and the sky an ever richer, sweeter turquoise, this man whom no one knew summoned Vasojevic, who in those days still wore a gold-braided tunic like a Montenegrin, closed the door and laid out his father's treasure. As the Americans say, misery loves company. Just as an octopus blushes while considering the capture of a certain crab, so did Vasojevic color, clenching his hand as if he might hurl the object out the window and into the Canal Grande. Cirtovich, likewise peering into the crystal, perceived a smaller, plumper incarnation than usual hanging
there within the blackly glowing glass, with its pale wide eyes watching and its beak agape, and its ten arms the greenish-brown hue of kelp. So far as he was concerned, it went perfectly, and Vasojevic, sweating and rigid like a man getting impaled by Turks, turned away, staring out the window.— You understand now, said his master.— All Tanyotchka knew (looking up from a manifest for beeswax: the Cincars were pretending that her father had not paid them) was that on his next visit, slipping into her hand a fat bag of black old amber beads disarticulated from some necklace, their family friend smiled at her, but it was not the old smile. (Her mother was weaving a woolen rug; perhaps she did not notice the change.) And now Vasojevic began to grow rich and lucky on his own account.

Tanya watched her father get ever more hollowed out. He was gazing at her with eyes which she mistook for wrathful. How had she disappointed him? Then she decided that it must have been her mother who angered him. But then again that nasty speculation about his infirmity or senescence sprang up. His hair was whiter at the temples, no doubt. Not long ago she had heard him groaning loudly in his sleep. Oh, but she knew better than to ask her mother!— Liljana was calling her. When she had finished carding the wool, her father was seeking a certain place among the golden compass-roses and blue sea-monsters of his atlases, the place-names written in blood-red script. From the way his forefinger hovered over the deep, Tanya thought it must be an island. A year or two before, she might have dared to ask him. He touched her smooth hands.

Vasojevic had benefited almost immediately from his new power when, ascending Trieste's most famous hill, in order to visit a certain Bohemian chemist on behalf of his master, he spied a dark-cloaked mendicant dozing or lurking in one of the grooves within the Arco di Riccardo, and instantly comprehended, although the beggar remained the merest clot of darkness within the soapy white stone, and although his face was buried in his chest—to any passerby he offered only a black-clad shoulder, long grey stinking hair, a limp swirl of cloth and flabby fingers twitching as if in sleep—that this man had a stiletto up his sleeve—for the decopodian incarnation of death now appeared, superimposed upon his face. Boldly
approaching, Vasojevic cocked the well-charged pistol in his pocket. The murderer leapt up; the blade blossomed from his wrist. Perhaps Vasojevic would have won out in any event, for his beard had not grown grizzled by trusting the creatures of this world. Nonetheless he was grateful to Jovo Cirtovich; not all at once did life take on for him the hateful specificity of a round unwinking eye, and the suckers on ten arms which coiled and uncoiled, and water spurting from the funnel in that nasty head which, although it could change to red, orange, yellow, black, purple, most often appeared in his nightmares fleshed in that crapulous yellow-brown which he inexplicably loathed more than anything. No ship of his could ever now spring a leak, even during the darkest moment of the middle watch, without his knowing; no Venetian or Turkish barque could surprise him in a fog; wherever a pirate's barbed grapnel hook might intend to fix itself, there his better angel would be lolling, gripping this line and that rope, waiting to alarm his second client. But why did he no longer crave to appease himself with revenge? In the rippled clarity of Grado Lagoon on a late spring evening, with their halyard puckishly flying the Wallachian flag, he asked to see the treasure again, and when his master obliged him, he stared into the crystal without expression. Cirtovich said: I often wonder what it thinks. Do you see how it opens its eye just now? I'm sure it can understand us.— By all the saints! cried Vasojevic.— And he turned away, only to perceive the simulacrum of that tubular entity floating at its ease off the bow, as it stared upward with its huge blue eyes, with a single kelplike tentacle poised as if mockingly, helpfully or warningly over the helm.

That summer Stefano Cirtovich lost a cargo of Japanese silks, and Jovo made up the loss. For this benevolence they disliked him all the more. Gratitude, of course, expressed itself in a dinner, and Stefano's wife Elisabeth, an Austrian woman, served them a nice fat fish in a fish-shaped dish, with fresh bread, olives, cheese and Friulian wine—an adequate meal, which Marija complimented, while Tanya and Liljana ate shyly, with their faces bowed; Veljko got bored and pinched Tanya under the table; Vuk and Nicola were both at sea, and the other unmarried sisters were at home, because Marija wished to save Elisabeth from too great an effort. It was sunset, the sky scarlet as a Serbian cloak at a festival, when Florio appeared, only for an instant, he said, and only to greet his
brothers. While Stefano sent the wine around again, Florio laughingly repeated what his youngest daughter Vesna had said: Oh, father, how I would love you to bring me a Turk's head to play with!—Jovo Cirtovich kept quiet. Tanya grew wide-eyed. The next time they came out of church together, Florio took his arm and invited him to join his brothers and uncles in a raid upon a Turkish convoy at Trebinje. Didn't he care to strike again for Mother Serbia?— Spare me your principles, said Jovo Cirtovich. I've seen you sell cows to Janissaries to turn an extra few ducats.— After this, his brothers accused him of putting on Turkish pantalons. He had heard it all before. That night he said to Tanya, who had asked no questions: Someone forgot that it's better to fight for the Heavenly Kingdom.— Yes, father, but when will you tell me how to do that?— Marija glided sadly into the room, so he said: That's all now, Tanyotchka. Have you calculated how many hogsheads can fit in the
Beograd
?
—
Yes, father, and I have an idea about the ballast . . .— He stroked her hair.