William Vollmann - Last Stories and Other Stories

I look back (or up); I imagine; I change flesh with the living, who through the law of compensation immediately find themselves in my shoes — which, to be sure, are of the finest patent leather, for it is the custom for the barber to shave the deceased, to powder him, whiten his face and rouge his cheeks and lips, and dress him in a frock coat with patent leather shoes and black trousers, as if going to a ball, may God forbid — this shall not happen to Makso. My shoes have swelled with moisture. They bulge with dirt and bone. Meanwhile I gallop around in clothes as yet unkissed by worms. Even when alive I showed little talent for living; now I show less, and when people see me they scream.

If only I could persuade the barber to rouge my cheeks! Then I might feel more handsome down here. I want to go to the ball; I’m ready to dance my rotten heart out. There’s supposed to be a theater deeper down.

I’m trying to like it here. I know that I’m obliged to. Sometimes the vermin tunnelling through me give me pleasure of a sort, but it would be better if I could give up thinking. I can’t breathe; therefore, I won’t; I’m going to the ball; goodbye.

There is a wall of ill, whose gate opens unto an archway formed of giant spiders squatting silently in a long row; and at this passage’s far end there is a courtyard in whose center stands a woman barefoot, with dark red lips, who holds a bunch of flowers in her upraised hand. Tongues of white and yellow lace fall like fingers or pagoda-gables down to her ankles. Because she is alive, and I still have life in me, I pray to kiss the mud between her toes.

Since these stories are less ethnographically faithful than any of my Seven Dreams, I have not scrupled to operate an Anglo-Saxon charm in Bohemia, or even to alter magical names and terms to suit me. (May I be forgiven by all the demons and angels.) Notwithstanding, the basic laws of magic (sympathy, contagion, etcetera) strike me as psychologically true, so I have tried to respect them.

My Bohemia is an imagined construct. My Trieste and Veracruz both contain some deliberate anachronisms both architectural and otherwise. For instance, I wished to set “Two Kings in Ziñogava” sometime in the colonial period, when slavery was still common in Veracruz. But at this time San Juan de Ulúa was more of a fortress than a prison island. Tant pis.

EPIGRAPH

“It is the custom for the barber to shave the deceased…”— Pamphlet from the Despica Kuca, Muzej Sarajeva, collected in 2011.

TO THE READER

“Wherever there is a rose…” — Saadi [Sheikh Musli-Uddin Sa’di Shirazi], The Rose Garden (Gulistan), trans. Omar Ali-Shah (Reno, NV: Tractus, 1997; orig. Arabic [?] ed. ca. 1260), p. 186 (VII.19).

“There is no means through which those who have been born can escape dying…”— Paul Carus, comp. “from ancient records,” The Gospel of Buddha (London: Studio Editions/Senate, 1995; orig. pub. 1915), p. 211 (slightly “retranslated” by WTV).

ESCAPE

As many of my readers know, the events related in “Escape” derive from a real incident (19 May 1993), whose protagonists were named Bosko Brkic and Admira Ismic. As in “Escape,” he was Serb and she was Muslim. However, I have altered many other details. For instance, Bosko’s family had long since departed Sarajevo; the couple were living together unmarried. They decided to leave not for the reason I have given but because Bosko had been summoned to report to the police, who of course were incensed against Serbs. I decided to alter their identities and their situation in order to respect the privacy of their surviving relatives. The family members in my account are composites of Sarajevans whom I interviewed, was told about, etcetera. Their relation to Admira and Bosko is entirely imagined.

In this story and in “Listening to the Shells,” the various confused and contradictory later accounts by strangers of the couple and their deaths (including “No, no; he was the Muslim and she was the Serbkina,” and “Actually, that’s just an urban legend”) are all verbatim as I heard them in 2007 and 2011. In 2011 a young Sarajevan woman summed up “that story on Vrbanja Most” for me: “He was Orthodox and she was Muslim. Today they are as famous as Romeo and Juliet. Just among the older generation they are popular, not the kids.”

My one visit to Sarajevo during the siege (described in a chapter of my long essay Rising Up and Rising Down ) took place in 1992, roughly half a year before the two young people were killed. Descriptions of the city in “Escape” and “Listening to the Shells” are based in part on my notes from that time and in part on my Sarajevo trip notes from 2007 and 2011.

Given names of characters in these three ex-Yugoslavian stories— People in this region would know which names are typically Serbian, Bosnian or Croatian. Some commonly occur in more than one group, such as Marija, which can be associated with both Serbian and Croatian women. I am informed (although I take it with a grain of salt) that a few names are still more specific; thus Indira might be a Bosnian girl from a mixed marriage or an atheist family.

Meaning of the name “Vrbanja Most”— My friend and translator Tatiana Jovanovic writes, first noting that there is no considerable amount of information on this edifice, since “it is not beautiful or historically interesting compared to some other bridges in Sarajevo”: “A name of the bridge ‘Vrbanja’ probably meant a willow grove… but some of researchers of the central medieval settlement (in Bosnia and Herzegovina) think that the name refers to [the] undiscovered key of ‘Vrhbosne’ (literally, the top of Bosnia). It was known also as ‘Ćirišinska cuprija’ or ‘Ćirišana’—i.e., ‘Chirishan Bridge’ [which] was a name of a small company that produced glue (“Ćiriša”… sounds [like] a Turkish word)… Probably, long time ago, in the ancient time, a wooden bridge was in this place, about which we can know because of discovery of some Roman bricks… in some fields in Kovacici, Velesici, etcetera. Bašeskija (an author, probably a historian) mentioned it [in] 1793 as a wooden bridge that was erected or renovated by a Jewish merchant. The previous one was destroyed by flood [in] 1791, and because it was needed to have a bridge in the same spot (especially for the Jewish people to go to their cemetery), the Jewish merchant paid for its renovation. It was restored again in [the] 19th c., but today, on the same spot, there is a new bridge made of reinforced concrete which was built after the Second World War.”

The Serbian officers with stockings over their faces on the Vrbanja Most (just before the beginning of the siege)— Mentioned in Kerim Lucarevic Doctor, The Battle for Sarajevo: Sentenced to Victory, trans. Saba Risaluddin and Hasan Roncevic (Sarajevo: TCU, 2000), p. 35.

LISTENING TO THE SHELLS

Occurrence in the Orthodox graveyard overlooking Bucá-Potok— Related in Lucarevic Doctor, pp. 29–31.

Comparison to my reporting from 1992 in Rising Up and Rising Down will show that my protagonist had it better than I did. Although my sojourn on the frontline was terrifyingly educational, if I had it all to do over again, perhaps I would rather spend my evenings at Vesna’s, flirting with her and meeting her friends. Too bad there were no such people.

THE LEADER

Epigraph: “There is no life on the earth without the dead in the earth.”— Branko Mikasinovich, Dragan Milivojevic and Vasa D. Mihailovich, Introduction to Yugoslav Literature: An Anthology of Fiction and Poetry (New York: Twayne, 1973), p. 176 (Veljko Petrovic, “The Earth,” n.d.).