The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (22 page)

Is that so? said Tom, also in English. And why would you be sorry for me?

I am sorry for you,
Toussaint repeated, and appeared to lapse into a trance.

What the hell, said Dolan. He speaks English.

He’s faking it, said Tom. I think it’s time we left.

Did you ask him about the red motorcycle? Wake him up, said Dolan, and ask him about
the red motorcycle.

In a burst of sinister laughter, Toussaint’s eyes flew open and he reached into the
shadows toward the altar, shuffling bottles, looking for a particular one, finding
it, raising it to his lips and guzzling, the alcove stinking with the fumes of the
clairin
he then poured on the floor for the
lwas,
and Tom’s eyes remained fixed on the rearrangement of bottles. Connie, he finally
said, Jackie had a bracelet that a friend gave her. It’s there on the neck of one
of the bottles.

Dolan asked if he was sure it was hers and Tom said, no question about it. What do
you want to do?

Ask the kid how he got it, said Dolan. Maybe she gave it to this guy or his uncle.

I don’t think so.

When she was taking pictures. She took a lot of pictures here, right? Maybe it was
a gift.

No, said Tom, standing up. It was a birthday present from her old boyfriend who she
told me died. You don’t give something like that away.

Tom stepped over to the shrine and took the blue-glass bracelet off its dusty bottle
and turned toward Toussaint, the strands of blue and white eyes dangling from his
fingers, but with a cowed look Toussaint had no answer for Tom’s questions other than
Se pa fot mwen,
which he repeated several times in an injured voice.

He’s saying it’s not his fault, Tom explained to Dolan, but he won’t say what it is
that’s not his fault. He asked Dolan what he thought they should do and Dolan said
Let’s take him with us down to the police in Saint-Marc. The boy would not move, and
when Tom took Toussaint’s arm to make him stand up he bolted from the stool and tried
to run but Conrad Dolan, defying his age and weight, moved into his path with an agile
ferocity, wrapping Toussaint in a bear hug, chest to chest, Dolan’s back toward the
door and Toussaint wailing for Marville and Marville came.

The first explosion stunned Tom, filling the
hounfour
with white light and a painful bolt of sound that deafened him. Where the shot had
been directed he couldn’t say. Without letting go of the boy, Dolan spun around so
that Toussaint’s body shielded him from the second blast, tearing into the youth’s
upper thighs and buttocks, a few of the pellets striking Dolan’s legs as well. Together
still, they tumbled to the ground and Marville, in a panic, threw down his rifle and
fled. They sent Gerard to Saint-Marc for help and the police arrived and soon an ambulance.
Toussaint was taken to the clinic in Saint-Marc and the next day transferred to the
hospital in Port-au-Prince. When he had recovered from his wounds, Tom eventually
learned, Toussaint was delivered to court and sentenced to prison, the verdict not
the result of any confession but based on the evidence provided by the police of Saint-Marc,
who, upon further investigation, had discovered what had always been there, parked
out of sight along the network of paths behind the
hounfour,
a small and inexpensive Japanese motorcycle, its original color only partially concealed
beneath a fresh but badly applied coat of white house paint.

He would remember himself and a bandaged Dolan escorted by the police to the airport
in the ripening twilight, an apologetic Woodrow Singer the only one there to see them
off, telling them this wasn’t his idea, the order for their deportation came from
Washington and not Port-au-Prince and I swear to you, Connie, I don’t know any of
the particulars. He would remember his astonishment to find that there, in the sweltering
police station of Saint-Marc’s, amid the crush of personnel brandishing their new
M16s and the grinning fat-boy chief who conducted their interrogation, the composed
and calming presence of a white American standing off to the side with an amused air
of authority, his military bearing not particularly well disguised by civilian clothes.
When the chance came for them to speak Tom said,
Who are you?

The American said,
The trainer,
and Tom said,
Army?
And the guy said
maybe,
and Tom said,
Special Forces?
and the fellow said,
You never know
and Tom felt a light turn on and asked,
Where’s Eville?
And the trainer said,
Busy,
and winked and then they were told it was time to go.

Back in the States, Eville Burnette stayed on his mind and, a few days after his return,
when he read an archived
Herald
story reporting the uprooting of the renegade police chief of Cap-Haïtien by a special
unit of the palace guard, Tom contacted Daniel, the AP photographer who had been on
the scene, and asked to see his shots from that day and downloaded them onto his computer.
In the scroll of images there was Eville, at the side of the black uniformed squad
of paramilitaries from Port-au-Prince and Tom could make no sense of it, believing
all along that Burnette had been orchestrating a coup, not preventing one. For several
months he made an effort to contact Eville through channels in Fayetteville but nothing
ever came of it and when, on a hunch, he petitioned the Air Force for the flight manifest
of the C-130 that flew Renee Gardner’s body out of Haiti he was told the manifest
was classified and even when he filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the
manifest nothing ever came of that, either.

He remembered on the flight back to Miami Dolan’s supreme relief, despite the pain
of the superficial wounds to his legs, that Parmentier was not responsible for the
girl’s death and then the next day Connie had phoned him from Tampa to say Parmentier
had been released from the federal penitentiary and he didn’t know where he was and
good riddance and that was the last that Tom Harrington ever expected to hear from
Conrad Dolan.

Several months later, Harrington, recently back from a month in The Hague, walked
out of his office in downtown Miami and hailed a cab to Little Haiti, where he often
liked to have his lunch and catch up on the latest news and rumors from the island,
and as he sat down that day at a tiny wooden table and studied the menu scrawled in
Kreyol on a blackboard behind the restaurant’s counter, a man looking very much like
a storefront minister stepped up to the cashier to pay his bill and Tom jumped out
of his chair, certain that he was seeing Bòkò St. Jean risen from the dead, even more
certain when he approached him and looked into his eyes, but the man said No, monsieur,
you are mistaken, and then in English, Have a nice day.

Tom Harrington managed, as well as anybody, the half-formed truths of love with an
acceptable amount of grace and honor. He did not neglect his daughter, and sometimes
he was happiest with the dog, walking the shoreline of Virginia Key, and sometimes
he was most gratified helping Allison with her homework or reading to her at bedtime.
Aware of her looming sexuality, Allison in her skimpy bikini at the beach, Allison
in the kitchen at night wearing only a T-shirt and panties, the presence forming in
her that a father had no choice but to resist, and from this struggle he felt for
the first time an erotic apathy that puzzled both his wife and his lover in South
Beach. Sometimes he felt that, except for his daughter, he could not name one thing
about love that was unconditional, and though he loved his wife he was aware with
an indifference he did not understand that he did not love her enough, that they were
not the match he had hoped they would be, and when they fought their predictable and
futile battles over money or the time he spent away from them, a moral crusader without
the benefit in his private life of a moral center, an unimpeachable core, if there
was such a thing in a human being, an attainable infallibility of virtue, he sometimes
thought about leaving her and perhaps he would when their daughter had grown and was
away, as she must be, on her own.

Occasionally in the lonely hotel rooms he spent much of his life in around the globe
he thought as he fell asleep about ape souls, something that bothered him, the six-million-year
split from a common ancestry. What was in an ape’s soul? Was it very much different
than what was in his? In our own ability to see and confirm ourselves, had our rise
as a species been propelled by one simple skill, the slick repackaging of our brutish
heritage into an alliance with the divine? Thus, men have souls. Thus, apes are without.
Thus the ordination of violence. And this—When a nation lost its soul, where did that
soul even come from to begin with? What was the genesis of a nation’s soul? The answer
seemed only to be war.

He had told her the story now and she wanted to hear it once more. I need to understand
this, his wife had said, but he couldn’t remember precisely what he had said, where
the lies mixed with the truth, where the truth diverged from his imagination, the
correct order of fact and fabrication, and he knew he could not tell it in the same
way again.

Book Two

How Peace Begins
Croatia 1944, 1945

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it
were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the
line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is
willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

—Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

During the final days of the German occupation of Croatia, there was an eight-year-old
boy in Dubrovnik, Stjepan Kovacevic, who would be introduced in the most indelible
fashion to his destiny, the spiritual map that guides each person finally to the door
of the cage that contains his soul, and in his hand a key that will turn the lock,
or the wrong key, or no key at all.

In Stjepan’s case, the map was drawn by an act of retribution: the brutal death of
his father, beheaded before his eyes. One apostate held the boy with a forearm clamped
across his throat, the canvas sleeve of his uniform reeking of paraffin; two men escorted
his mother upstairs for interrogation, three more forced his father to prostrate himself
before the hearth in the kitchen, then side-kicked his severed head into the fire
like a soccer ball, the boy crying as much from shame as terror because for months
now, as the war turned against his people, he had been ravaged by hunger, and the
smell of his father’s sizzling flesh made his mouth water pitilessly and his stomach
foam.

The Serb who held him said, And this one?

The Bosnian partisan who had wielded the crude saber stepped away from the headless
corpse, muttering introspectively. Who is the beast? Is it me? I am a slayer of beasts.
Who kills children? I do not kill children, even fascist brats with fathers who kill
children, he said and came and stooped before the boy, taking his measure, a child
of Europe in the hands of the barbarians.

Stjepan, who would not look at him, remembered little more than the stink of black
tobacco steaming from his mustache, the splatter of paternal blood on his greasy trousers,
the winter mud streaked on his boots.

My name is Kresimir
mrtvac,
he told the son of the former Ustashe vice commander who had orchestrated the pogroms
in central Bosnia. Kresimir
mrtvac,
Kresimir the corpse. He was one of Tito’s Partisans, Serbs and Bosnians, Communists
and Muslims, men who shit on God and men Stjepan would spend the rest of his life
calling, as all Slavic Christians, Roman and Orthodox, called such men who bowed to
Mecca, the Turks. Their actual origin hardly mattered.

When you are a man, Kresimir said, come find me, okay, and I will kill you then. He
lifted the boy’s quivering chin with blood-slick fingers. Yes? Promise? But Stjepan
kept his eyes downcast and finally the Bosnian chuckled drily and patted him on the
cheek as if he were his own.

Good, he said. Don’t forget.

The partisans left to continue their orgiastic purge of Dubrovnik and Stjepan stood
in place, exactly where he had been released from the grip of the man who had held
him, the satin pool of his father’s blood inching toward his shoes. Over the crack
and stutter of gunfire in the nearby rialto he strained to hear any sound from the
floor above to tell him his mother was alive, not knowing then that she listened,
too, lying in catatonic stillness where the men had left her in her child’s urine-smelling
bed, commending to the Almighty the souls of her husband and the boy, convinced they
were both lost to her on this earth but absorbed by eternity as martyrs of God and
saints of the fatherland, their names already on the lips of unborn avengers. To have
such a prayer to pray was a sacred honor, and lifelong.

Outside the house the old city shrieked and whistled and banged but inside endless
minutes passed in catastrophic silence until she heard the boy retching and bolted
down the stairs into the kitchen in time to see him drop his father’s charred skull,
which he had managed to recover from the flames with cast-iron tongs, into a pail
of dishwater. She wiped the vomit from his slack mouth with a rag, the bloody smudge
of handprint from his cheek, pulled his soiled sweater over his head and replaced
it with two clean ones, made him put on his overcoat and gloves, scarf, and felt hat
as she ran back upstairs for their documents and cache of banknotes—what was there
to buy anymore with all this money? Then she packed toothbrushes and her hairbrush,
a bar of homemade soap and hand towels, extra underwear and a sewing kit, jewelry
with sentimental value, saints’ reliquaries and an ivory-beaded rosary blessed by
the Pope, a Confirmation gift from her parents, and the few family photographs she
cherished, rushed belatedly to the toilet to cleanse herself and clear her thoughts
of the rape, no time for that now, buttoned a cashmere sweater on over her housedress
and a stylish fuchsia wool jacket over the sweater and hurried back downstairs to
where the boy stood in the ruins of his world, his face ashen and immobile, a tiny
mannequin fattened by winter clothes staring eyeless into space. She made the sign
of the cross over her dead husband and fished his billfold from his pocket and his
gold crucifix and its chain from a pudding of blood.

We’re leaving now, she said, looking back at her headless husband as she pushed her
son out the door, away once again from the city of her birth into the peril of a future
known only by its past.

They fled the walled city to its outermost quays and were packed aboard the fishing
boats filled with other panicked refugees that would take them that night and the
next day north to Split, Ustashe-controlled and two weeks in front of the partisans’
advance, where Dido Kvaternik’s men secured passage for them on a convoy to Zagreb,
the city rising from the plain in a dome of sulphurous fog, arriving two days before
Christmas, 1944. In Zagreb, they shared a bedroom in his Aunt Mara’s lugubrious apartment,
like a private chapel infused with grief, on the northwestern corner of Jelacic Square—Mara,
his mother’s sister, widowed herself by Chetniks earlier in the war. For months it
seemed they did little more than huddle together in its sunless freezing rooms, insensate,
bewitched by the fizzing radio and its diabolic spew of contradictory reports, waiting
for the end, leaving the apartment’s sanctuary only to plod uphill to Dolac and its
barren stalls, scavenging for bread and turnips and coal, or to attend mass at the
cathedral, over which his father’s cousin reigned as archbishop, spiritual leader
of the land described in 1519 by Pope Leo X as
Antemurale Christianitatis,
the outermost ramparts of Christendom, a belated and feeble acknowledgment of a reality
superior to geography—Asia meets Europe not where the seas divide the continents but
here, deep in the savage wilderness of the Balkans, where empires and religions grate
against each other to produce a limitless supply of bloody slush flowing east and
west into the gutters of civilization.

In February the Bolsheviks captured Mostar, the same month his mother fell ill drinking
an herbal remedy, a traditional midwife’s abortifacient meant to trigger miscarriage,
and afterward lay curled into herself like a sick cat, mewling in bed throughout Lent.
In April, Srijem, Vukovar, and Valpovo followed Mostar into Stalinist hell. As May
approached and the partisans moved inexorably westward toward Zagreb, Stjepan and
the two specterlike widows joined the city’s exodus—hundreds of thousands of soldiers
and civilians—on a Boschian trek toward the Austrian frontier, the army and home guard
choosing to surrender to the Allies and not the Reds.

But at the River Drava the national troops of the Independent State of Croatia were
disarmed by the unsympathetic and ideologically ambivalent British, shuttled aboard
overcrowded trains, and transported straight back to Yugoslavia, into the hands of
the Communists, massacred as they filed out from the boxcars like the eighty thousand
Jews they had dutifully shipped to Poland throughout the war. Stjepan and his exhausted
mother and increasingly demented aunt had already turned back from the border, deterred
by partisan raids on the tail of the column where they trudged like stock animals
in a desperate herd of hollow-eyed disheveled women and bawling children, reaching
the deserted streets of the city only hours before Zagreb fell to Tito on the eighth
of May, the same day Germany surrendered.

They stayed indoors, the heavy brocade curtains drawn across the apartment’s bay windows,
fearing every sound as they dreaded every silence, phantom shapes in flickering candlelight,
saying the Rosary together in hushed voices or lying like invalids numb in their beds.
Occasionally the boy took a book from the shelves of his uncle’s library to stare
with zero reaction at pictures of farm machinery or let his mind fall into a sentence
and wander aimlessly through the shadowy canyon of its words. On Sunday mornings they
ventured out for mass, scurrying like frightened mice along the damp pavement uphill
toward the beckoning spires of the cathedral. It had been in this same cathedral,
two years earlier on the feast day of Christ the King, that the boy and his parents
had heard the archbishop’s sermon condemning religious and racial intolerance—
All men and all races are the children of God . . . one cannot exterminate Gypsies
or Jews because one considers them of an inferior race
—although the boy had forgotten everything about the service but the heroic and rare
presence of his father sitting next to him. His harried, preoccupied father, his beautiful
uniform smelling of saddle soap and rain and peppery gunpowder, had been ordered back
to the capital from the Bosnian front for consultations, his wife and son joining
him from Dubrovnik for a holiday in the Esplanade, the grand hotel across from the
train station.
What’s a Jew?
he remembered asking, too loudly, and he remembered his father lightly pinching the
side of his bony thigh and whispering,
Someone preferable to a Turk, now shh,
the expression in his father’s friendly gray eyes fixed on something far away, and
not friendly, not forgiving
.

After church they walked hand in hand in hand to a café, the parents sometimes swinging
the child between them like a bell of joy; Stjepan ate ice cream with berry preserves,
his parents laughed and drank beer with the Waffen-SS, and even the obliging waiters
seemed like emissaries of happiness, that lost Sunday afternoon in the middle of war.

The archbishop, released from partisan custody the first week in June, distributed
flour and the comfort of absolution to his burgeoning congregation of refugees. Stjepan,
who had only known compassion from women, fell in love with the priest, the dark crescents
of mercy like bruises beneath the archbishop’s eyes, the pure hand of tenderness resting
on the boy’s shoulder, kneading the back of his rigid neck or warming the top of his
shaven head, the compressed grace of his beatific smile in a city where smiles were
as unlikely as roasted chickens and laughter had been consigned for safekeeping to
the insane. The Sunday when Stjepan announced to the archbishop that at the moment
he received the Eucharist and felt the buttery melt of the consecrated host on his
tongue, he had heard God’s voice instructing him to join the priesthood, the archbishop,
deeply touched by the child’s faith, studied Stjepan with sad resignation.

My son, he told the boy, I am reluctant to encourage you, it is a difficult time to
want to be a priest in Croatia. Partisans were hunting down and executing Catholic
clergy throughout the parishes, intent on decapitating the Church with as forceful
a blow as they had lopped off the heads of the Ustashe puppets; the archbishop himself
accused of inspiring, if not advocating, war crimes. Nevertheless he admitted Stjepan
to the ranks of altar boys serving the cathedral. In this role, and the starched,
incense-fragrant security of its ritual, Stjepan began to reawaken from his family’s
coma of defeat. His excitement was uncontainable when, in July, the new regime, for
the first and last time, granted permission to the archbishop to hold the city’s annual
procession to the shrine of Marija Bistrica, north of Zagreb, and he was selected
to lead the file of priests in scarlet cassocks and white lace mantles, swinging a
brass censer, intoxicated by the puffs of frankincense he created. Behind, in the
flock of forty thousand pilgrims, walked the two sisters—his mother and aunt. Tito’s
soldiers, many still dressed like forest partisans but others wearing the new uniforms
of the Yugoslav army, lined the route, inflamed by the audacity of so large a crowd,
the impertinent bereavement of the families of the Ustashe collaborators, the husbands
and sons and fathers who had been annihilated while trying to surrender at the frontier.
No shots were fired but the verbal abuse escalated, sporadic, convulsive, to sudden
and unpredictable acts of violence. Somewhere along the route of the procession, a
bull-faced partisan thrust himself into the flow of pilgrims to block the path of
the widows.

Do you recognize me? he demanded of the boy’s Aunt Mara. I am from Siroki Brijeg—her
husband’s village.

Yes, she said, get out of my way.

I am from Siroki Brijeg, he repeated like an imbecile, bellowing.

Yes, his Aunt Mara said, I often saw the drunken slut they called your motherfucking
Turks in the alley.

For her insolence she received a rifle butt to the head, the stock turned sideways,
striking cheekbone to cheekbone, her aquiline nose crushed backward into her sinus
cavities. After the benediction at the shrine, the boy, yearning for praise, looked
for the women and was disappointed but not overly surprised when he failed to locate
them among the vast expanse of the devout, who had pressed onward in their pilgrimage
despite the harassment. Meanwhile, his aunt and mother had been taken back to the
city by a white-haired peasant with his horse-drawn wagon, first to a clinic where
his once glamorous aunt was hastily diagnosed as unfixable, the weary doctor injecting
her with a syringe of precious morphine after settling on the amount of his bribe,
then back to the apartment, where his mother stood on the street pleading with passersby
to help carry the half-conscious woman up the steps, her pale blonde hair gelled with
black blood, eyes like tomatoes, swollen closed, purple face bloated beyond recognition.
When the boy returned at sundown, he found the women in the musty parlor, his tall
scarecrow aunt laid out on the sofa, his mother kneeling by her head with a washbasin
of cold water and a mound of bloody tea towels, the sound of his mother’s prayers
entwined with the gurgle of agony coming from his slowly suffocating aunt.