Islands – Original Text

Islands – Aleksander Hemon

We got up at dawn, ignored the yolky sun, loaded our navy-blue Austin with suitcases and then drove straight to the coast, stopping only on the verge of Sarajevo, so I could pee. I sang communist songs the entire journey: songs about mournful mothers looking through graves for their dead sons; songs about the revolution, steaming and steely, like a locomotive; songs about striking miners burying their dead comrades. By the time we got to the coast, I had almost lost my voice.

We waited for the ship on a long stone pier, which burnt the soles of my feet, as soon as I took off my sandals. The air was sweltering, saturated with sea-ozone, exhaustion, and the smell of coconut sunscreen, coming from the German tourists, already red and shellacked, lined up for a photo at the end of the pier. We saw the thin stocking of smoke on the horizon-thread, then the ship itself, getting bigger, slightly slanted sideways, like a child’s drawing. I had on a round straw hat with all the seven dwarves painted on it. It threw a short, dappled shadow over my face. I had to raise my head to look at the grown-ups. Otherwise, I would look at their gnarled knees, the spreading sweat stains on their shirts and sagging wrinkles of fat on their thighs. One of the Germans, an old, bony man, got down on his knees and puked over the pier edge. The vomit hit the surface and then dispersed in different directions, like children running away to hide from the seeker. Under the wave-throbbing, ochre and maroon, island of vomit, a school of aluminum fish gathered and nibbled it peevishly.

The ship was decrepit, with pealing steel stairs and thin leaves of rust that could cut your fingers on the handrails. The staircase wound upward like a twisted towel. “Welcome,” said an unshaven man in a T-shirt picturing a boat with a smoke-snake, wobbling on the waves, and, above it, the sun with a U-smile and an umlaut of eyes. We sat on the upper deck and the ship leapt over humble waves, panting and belching. We passed a line of little islands, resembling car wrecks by the road, and I would ask my parents: “Is this Mljet?” and they would say: “No.” From behind one of the petrified islands, shaven by a wildfire, a gust of waylaying wind attacked us, snatched the straw hat off my head and tossed it into the sea. I watched the hat teetering away, my hair pressed against my skull, like a helmet, and I understood that I would never, ever see it again. I wished to go back in time and hold on to my hat before the surreptitious whirlwind hit me in the face. The ship sped away from the hat and the hat was transformed into a beige stain on the snot-green sea. I began crying and sobbed myself to sleep. When I woke up the ship was docked and the island was Mljet.

Uncle Julius impressed a stern, moist kiss on my cheek—the corner of his mouth touched the corner of my mouth, leaving a dot of spit above my lip. But his lips were soft, like slugs, as if there was nothing behind to support them. As we walked away from the pier, he told us that he forgot his teeth at home, and then, so as to prove that he was telling us the truth, he grinned at me, showing me his pink gums with cinnabar scars. He reeked of pine cologne, but a whiff redolent of rot and decay escaped his insides and penetrated the fragrant cloud. I hid my face in my mother’s skirt. I heard his snorting chuckle. “Can we please go back home!” I cried.

We walked up a dilapidated, sinuous road exuding heat. Uncle Julius’s sandals clattered in a tranquilizing rhythm and I felt sleepy. There was a dense verdureless thicket alongside the road. Uncle Julius told us that there used to be so many poisonous snakes on Mljet that people used to walk in tall rubber boots all the time, even at home, and snakebites were as common as mosquito bites. Everybody used to know how to slice off the bitten piece of flesh in a split second, before the venom could spread. Snakes killed chickens and dogs. Once, he said, a snake was attracted by the scent of milk, so it curled up on a sleeping baby. And then someone heard of the mongoose, how it kills snakes with joy, and they sent a man to Africa and he brought a brood of mongooses and they let them loose on the island. There were so many snakes that it was like a paradise for them. You could walk for miles and hear nothing but the hissing of snakes and the shrieks of mongooses and the bustle and rustle in the thicket. But then the mongooses killed all the snakes and bred so much that the island became too small for them. Chickens started disappearing, cats also. There were rumors of rabid mongooses and some even talked about monster mongooses that were the result of paradisiacal inbreeding. Now they were trying to figure out how to get rid of mongooses. So that’s how it is, he said, it’s all one pest after another, like revolutions. Life is nothing if not a succession of evils, he said, and then stopped and took a pebble out of his left sandal. He showed the puny, gray pebble to us, as if holding irrefutable evidence that he was right.

He opened the gate and we walked through a small, orderly garden with stout tomato stalks like sentries alongside the path. His wife (he pointed her out to us) stood in the courtyard, her face like a loaf of bread with a small tubby potato in the middle, arms akimbo, her calves full of bruises and blood vessels on the verge of bursting, ankles swollen. She was barefoot, her big toes were crooked, taking a sudden turn, as if backing away in disgust from each other. She enveloped my head with her palms, twisted my head upward and then put her mouth over my mouth, leaving a thick layer of warm saliva, which I hastily wiped off with my shoulder. Aunt Lyudmila was her name.

I clambered, dragging a bag full of plastic beach toys, after my sprightly parents, up a concrete staircase on the side of the house, with sharp stair edges and pots of unconcerned flowers, like servants with candles, on the banister side.

The room was fragrant with lavender, mosquito-spray poison, and clean, freshly ironed bed sheets. There was an aerial picture of a winding island (Mljet, it said in the lower right corner) and a picture of Comrade Tito, smiling, black-and-white, on the opposite wall. Below the window, the floor was dotted with mosquitoes—with a large green-glittering fly or a bee, here and there—still stricken by the surprise. When I moved toward them, the whisp caused by my motion made them ripple away from me, as if retreating, wary of another surprise.

I lay on the bed, listening to the billowing-curtain flaps, looking at the picture of Mljet. There were two oblong lakes, touching each other, at the top end of the picture-island, and on one of those lakes there was another island.

I woke up and the night was rife with the cicada hum, perpetual as if it were the hum of the island engine. They were all sitting outside, around the table underneath the shroud of vine twisting up the lattice. There was a long-necked carafe, full of black wine, in the center of the table, like an axis. Uncle Julius was talking and they all laughed. He would bulge his eyes, lean forward; he would thrust his fist forward, then open it and the hand would have the index-finger pointed at the space between my mother and his wife; and then the hand would retract back into the fist, but the finger would reappear, tapping its tip against the table, as if telegraphing a message. He would, then, stop talking and withdraw back into the starting position, and he would just watch them as they laughed.

Uncle Julius spoke: “We brought beekeeping to Bosnia. Before the Ukrainians came, the natives kept their bees in mud-and-straw hives and when they wanted the honey they would just kill them all with sulfur. My grandfather had fifty beehives three years after coming to Bosnia. Before he died, he was sick for a long time. And the day he died, he asked to be taken to the bees and they took him there. He sat by the hives for hours, and wept and wept, and wept out a sea of tears, and then they put him back into his bed and an hour later he died.”

“What did he die of?” Aunt Lyudmila asked.

“Dysentery. People used to die of that all the time. They’d just shit themselves to death.”

I went down the stairs and announced my thirst. Aunt Lyudmila walked over to the dark corner on my right-hand side—suddenly the light was ablaze—and there was a concrete box with a large wooden lid. She took off the lid and grabbed a tin cup and shoved her arm into the square. I went to the water tank (for that’s what it really was) and peeked over. I saw a white slug on the opposite wall. I could not tell whether it was moving upward or it was just frozen by our sudden presence. The dew on its back twinkled, and it looked like a severed tongue. I glanced at Aunt Lyudmila, but she didn’t seem to have noticed anything. She offered me the cup, but I shook my head and refused to drink the water which, besides, seemed turbid.

So they brought me a slice of cold watermelon and I drowsily masticated it. “Look at yourself,” Uncle Julius said. “You don’t want to drink the water! What would you do if you were so thirsty that you were nearly crazy and having one thought only: water, water! and there’s no water. How old are you?”

“Nine,” my mother said.

Uncle Julius told us that when he was in the Arkhangelsk camp, Stalin and his parliament devised a law that said if you were repeatedly late for school or missed several days with no excuse, you would get six months to three years in a camp. So, suddenly, in 1943, the camp was full of children, only a little bit older than I was—twelve, fifteen years old. They didn’t know what to do in the camp, so the criminals took the nicest-looking to their quarters and fed them and, you know (no, I didn’t), abused them. So they were there. They died like flies, because it was cold, and they lost their warm clothing, they didn’t know how to preserve or protect the scarce food and water they were allotted. Only the ones that had protectors were able to survive. And there was a boy named Vanyka: gaunt, about twelve, blond, blue eyes. He survived by filching food from the weaker ones, by lending himself to different protectors and bribing guards. Once—I think he drank some vodka with the criminals—he started shouting: “Thank you, Vozhd, for my happy childhood!” At the top of his lungs: “Thank you, Stalin, for my happy childhood!” And they beat him with gun butts and took him away.

“Don’t torture the boy with these stories. He won’t be able to sleep ever again.”

“No, let him hear, he should know.”

Then they sent Uncle Julius to a different camp, and then to another one, and he didn’t even know how much time or how many camps he passed through, and he found himself in Siberia. One spring, his job was to dig big graves in the thawing ground, take the dead to the grave on a large cart, and then stuff them into the grave. Fifty per grave was the prescribed amount. Sometimes he had to stamp on the top of the grave-load to get more space and meet the plan. He had big, big boots. One day they told him that there was a dead man in solitary confinement, so he pushed his cart there and put the corpse on the cart, and as he was pushing, the corpse moaned: “Let me die! Let me die!” I was so scared I almost died, I fell down and he kept moaning: “Let me die! I don’t want to live!” So I pushed the cart behind the barrack and I leaned over him. He was emaciated and had no teeth and one of his ears was missing, but he had blue, blue eyes. It was Vanyka! He looked much older, oh my God! So I gave him a piece of bread that I had saved and told him that I remembered him and this is what he told me.

They took him away and mauled him for days and did all sorts of things to him. Then they moved him to another camp and he had problems there all the time, because he would speak out again, despite his better judgment. He knew how to steal from the weaker and there were still men who liked him. He won acclaim when he killed a marked person, some Jew, after losing a card game. He killed more. He did bad, bad things and learned how to survive, but he could never keep his snout shut. So they sent him to the island where they kept the worst of the worst. The nearest guard was on the shore fifty kilometers away. They let the inmates rob and kill each other like mad dogs. Once a month the guards would come in, leave the food and count the corpses and graves and go back to their barracks by the sea. So one day Vanyka and two others killed some other inmates, took their food and clothes and set out on foot toward the shore. It was a very, very cold winter—pines would crack like matches every day—so they thought they could walk over the frozen strait, if they avoided the guards. But they got lost and ran out of food and Vanyka and one of the other two agreed by exchanging glances to kill the third one. And they did and they ate his flesh, and they walked and walked and walked. Then Vanyka killed the other one and ate him. But the guards with dogs tracked him down and caught him and he ended up in solitary confinement here and he didn’t know how long he had been there. All he wanted was to die and he’d smash his head against the walls and he’d try to choke himself with his tongue. He refused to eat, but they’d force him, if only to make him live longer and suffer more. “Let me die!” he cried and cried.

Uncle Julius fell reticent and no one dared to say anything. But I asked: “So what happened to him?”

“He was killed,” he said, making a motion with his hand, as if thrusting me aside, out of his sight.

I woke up and didn’t know where I was or who I was, but then I saw the photo of Mljet and I recognized it. I got up, out of my nonbeing, and stepped into the inchoate day. It was pre-blindingly bright, but I could hear the din of the distant beach: bashful whisper of waves, echoes of sourceless music, warbling of boat motors, shrieks of children, syncopated splashing of oars. Bees levitated over the staircase flowers and I passed them cautiously. There was breakfast on the table in the netlike shadow of the vines: a plate with smoldering soggy eggs, a cup with a stream of steam rushing upward, and seven slices of bread, on a mirroring steel tray, leaning on each other like fallen dominoes. There was no one around, apart from shadows stretching on the courtyard stone pavement. I sat down and stirred my white coffee. There was a dead bee in the whirl and it kept revolving on its back, slower and slower, until it came to a reluctant stop.

After breakfast, we would go down a dirt path resembling a long burrow in the shrub. I’d carry my blue-and-white Nivea inflatable ball and sometimes I would inadvertently drop it and it would bounce ahead of us, in slow motion. I’d hear a bustle in the thicket—a snake, perhaps. But then there would be more bustling and I’d imagine a mongoose killing the snake, the whole bloody battle, the writhing snake entangled with the mongoose trying to bite off its head, just the way I saw it on TV, on Survival. I’d wait for my parents, for I didn’t know what sort of feeling a fierce mongoose would have toward a curious boy—would it, perhaps, want to bite his head off?

We’d get to the gravel beach, near the dam dividing the two lakes. I’d have to sit on the prostrate towel for a while before I would be allowed to swim. On the left, there would usually be an old man, his skin puckered here and there, a spy novel over his face, white hair bristling meekly on his chest, his belly ascending and descending nearly imperceptibly, with a large metallic-green fly on the brim of his navel. On our right, two symmetrical old men, with straw hats and baggy trunks, would play chess in serene silence, with their doughy breasts overlooking the board. There would be three children a little farther away. They would sit on their towel, gathered around a woman, probably their mother, who would distribute tomatoes and slices of bread with a layer of sallow spread on them. The children would all simultaneously bite into their slices and their tomatoes, and then chew vigorously. The tomato slime would drip down their chins, they would be seemingly unperturbed, but when they were done eating, the mother would wipe their recalcitrant faces with a stained white rag.

Finally, my parents would tell me I could swim and I’d totter over the painful gravel and enter the shallows. I would see throbbing jellyfish floating by. The rocks at the bottom were covered with slimy lichen. I’d hesitantly dive and the shock of coldness would make me feel present in my own body—I’d be aware that my skin was the border between the world and me. Then I’d stand up, the quivering lake up to my nipples, and I’d wave to my parents and they’d shout: “Five more minutes!”

Sometimes I’d see fish in pellucid water, gliding along the bottom. Once I saw a school of fish that looked like miniature swordfish, with silver bellies and pointed needle-noses. They were all moving as one and then they stopped before me, and hundreds of little wide-open eyes stared at me in dreadful surprise. Then I blinked and they flitted away.

We walked up the path as the sun was setting. Everything attained a brazen shade and, now and then, there would be a thin gilded beam, like a spear, sticking out of the ground. Cicadas were revving and the warmth of the ground enhanced the fragrance of dry pine needles on the path. I entered the stretch of the path that had been in the shadow of the tall pines for a while, and the sudden coolness made me conscious of how hot my shoulders felt. I pressed my thumb firmly against my shoulder and, when I lifted it, a pallid blot appeared, then it slowly shrank, back into the ruddiness.

There was a man holding a German shepherd on a leash, much of which was coiled around his hand. The shepherd was attempting to jump at a mongoose backed against a short ruin of a stone wall. As the dog’s jaw snapped a breath away from the mongoose’s snout, the man pulled the dog back. The mongoose’s hair bristled up, and it grinned to show its teeth, appearing dangerous, but I knew it was just madly scared. The eyes had a red glow, akin to the glow that people who glanced at the flashbulb have on bad color photos. The dog was growling and barking and I saw the pink-and-brown gums and the bloodthirsty saliva running down the sides of the jaw. Then the man let the dog go and there was, for just a moment, hissing and wheezing, growling and shrieking. The man yanked the dog back and the mongoose lay on its back, showing its teeth in a useless scowl, the paws spread, as if showing it was harmless now, and the eyes were wide open, the irises stretched to the edge of the pupils, flabbergasted. There was a hole in its chest—the dog seemed to have bitten off a part of it—and I saw the heart, like a tiny tomato, pulsating, as if hiccuping, slower and slower, with slightly longer moments between the throbs, and it simply stopped.

As we walked through the dusk, my sandals would fill with pine needles and I would have to stop to take them out. Thousands of fireflies floated in the shrubs, lighting and vanishing, as if they were hidden fairy-photographers with flashbulbs, taking our snapshots. “Are you hungry?” my mother asked.

We would sit under the cloak of vines, with a rotund jar of limpid honey and a plate of pickles. Uncle Julius would dip a pickle into the honey and several bees would peel themselves off the jar and hover above the table. I would dip my finger and try to get it to my lips before the thinning thread of honey dripped on my naked thighs, but I would never make it.

Sometimes, around lunch time, Uncle Julius would take me to his apiary. He would put on a white overall and a white hat with a veil falling down on his chest, so he looked like a bride. He would light a torn rag and order me to hold it, so as to repel the bees. He would tell me to be absolutely silent and not to move and not to blink. I’d peek from behind his back, my hand with the smoldering rag stretching out. He would take the lid off a beehive, carefully, as if he were afraid of awakening the island, and the buzz would rise like a cloud of dust and linger around us. He would scrape off the wax between the frames and then take them out, one by one, and show them to me. I’d see the molasses of bees fidgeting. “They work all the time,” he’d whisper. “They never stop.” I’d be frightened by the possibility of being stung, even though he told me that the bees would not attack me if I pretended not to exist. The fear would swell, and the more I’d think about it, the more unbearable the unease would be. Eventually, I’d break down and run back to the house, get on the stairs, from where I’d see him, remote, immobile—apart from the slow, wise motions of his apt hands. I’d watch him, as if he were projected on a screen of olive trees and aisles of beehives, then he’d turn to me and I could discern a peculiar, tranquil smile behind the veil.

Mother and Father were sitting at the stern, with their feet in tepid bilge water, Uncle Julius was rowing, and I was sitting at the prow, my feet dangling overboard. The surface of the lake would ascend with an inconspicuous wave and my feet would delve into the coolness of menthol-green water. With the adaggio of oars, creaking and splashing, we glissaded toward the lake island. There was a dun stone building, with small drawn-in windows, and an array of crooked olive trees in front of it. Uncle Julius steered the scow toward a short desolate pier. I slipped stepping out, but Uncle Julius grabbed my hand and I hung for a moment over the throbbing lake with a sodden loaf of bread and an ardently smiling woman on a magazine page, stuck to the surface like an ice floe.

“These lakes,” Uncle Julius said, “used to be a pirate haven in the sixteenth century. They’d hoard the loot and bring hostages here and kill them and torture them—in this very building—if they didn’t get the ransom. They say that this place is still haunted by the ghosts of three children they hung on meat hooks because their parents didn’t pay the ransom. Then this was a nunnery and some people used to believe that even the nuns were not nuns but witches. Then it was a German prison. And now, mind you, it’s a hotel, but there are hardly any tourists ever.”

We walked into the sonorous chill of a large stone-walled hall. There was a reception desk, but nobody behind it, and a smiling Tito-picture over the numbered cubbyhole shelf. Then we walked through a long tunnel and then through a low door, so everyone but me had to bow their heads, then we were in a cubicle-like windowless room (“This used to be a nun cell,” Uncle Julius whispered), then we entered the eatery (they had to bend their knees and bow their heads, as if genuflecting, again) with long wooden tables and, on them, two parallel rows of plates and utensils. We sat there waiting for the waiter. There was a Popsicle-yellow lizard, as big as a new pencil, on the stone wall behind Uncle Julius’s back. It looked at us with an unblinking marble eye, apparently perplexed, and then it scurried upward, toward an obscure window.

This was what Uncle Julius told us:

“When I was a young student in Moscow, in the thirties, I saw the oldest man in the world. I was in a biology class, it was in a gigantic amphitheater, hundreds of rows, thousands of students. They brought in an old man who couldn’t walk, so two comrades carried him and he had his arms over their shoulders. His feet were dangling between them, but he was all curled up like a baby. They said he was a hundred and fifty-eight years old and from somewhere in the Caucasus. They put him sideways on the desk and he started crying like a baby, so they gave him a stuffed toy—a cat, I think, but I can’t be certain, because I was sitting all the way up in one of the last aisles. I was looking at him as if through the wrong side of a telescope. And the teacher told us that the old man cried all the time, ate only liquid foods, and couldn’t bear being separated from his favorite toy. The teacher said that he slept a lot, didn’t know his name and had no memories. He could say only a couple of words, like water, poo-poo and such. I figured out then that life is a circle, you get back right where you started if you get to be a hundred and fifty-eight years old. It’s like a dog chasing its own tail, all is for naught. We live and live, and in the end we’re just like this boy [he pointed at me], knowing nothing, remembering nothing. You might as well stop living now, my son. You might just as well stop, for nothing will change.”

When I woke up, after a night of unsettling dreams, the suitcases were agape and my parents were packing them with wrinkled underwear and shirts. Uncle Julius came up with a jar of honey as big as my head and gave it to my father. He looked at the photo of Mljet and then put the tip of his finger at the point in the upper-right corner, near the twin lakes, which looked like gazing eyes. “We are here,” he said.

The sun had not risen yet from behind the hill, so there were no shadows and everything looked muffled, as if under a sheet of fine gauze. We walked down the narrow road and the asphalt was cold and moist. We passed a man carrying a cluster of dead fish, with the hooks in their carmine gills. He said: “Good morning!” and smiled.

We waited at the pier. A shabby boat, with paint falling off and Pirate written in pale letters on the prow, was heading, coughing, toward the open sea. A man with an anchor tattooed on his right arm was standing at the rudder. He had a torn red-and-black flannel shirt, black soccer shorts, and no shoes—his feet were bloated and filthy. He was looking straight ahead toward the ferry that was coming into the harbor. The ferry slowed down to the point of hesitant floating, and then it dropped down its entrance door, like a castle bridge, with a harsh peal. It was a different ship than the ship we had come on, but the same man with the hobbling-boat shirt said: “Welcome!” again, and smiled, as if recognizing us.

We passed the same islands. They were like heavy, moulded loaves of bread, dropped behind a gigantic ship. On one of the islands, and we passed it close by, there was a herd of goats. They looked at us mildly confounded, and then, one by one, lost interest and returned to grazing. A man with a camera, probably a German tourist, took a picture of the goats, and then gave the camera to his speckle-faced, blue-eyed son. The boy pointed the camera toward the sun, but the man jokingly admonished him, turning him, and the camera, toward us, while we grinned at him, helpless.

It took us only four hours to get home from the coast and I slept the whole time, oblivious to the heat, until we reached Sarajevo. When we got home, the shriveled plants and flowers were in the midst of the setting-sun orange spill. All the plants had withered, because the neighbor who was supposed to water them died of a sudden heart attack. The cat, having not been fed for more than a week, was emaciated and nearly mad with hunger. I would call her, but she wouldn’t come to me; she would just look at me with irreversible hatred.