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.
28“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.”
29We 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.
30This 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.”
31When 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.
32The 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.
33It 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.
THE LIFE AND WORK OF ALPHONSE KAUDERS
Alphonse Kauders is the creator of The Forestry Bibliography, 1900–1948, published by the Engineers and Technicians Association, in Zagreb, 1949. This is a special bibliography related to forestry. The material is classified into seventy-three groups and encompasses 8,800 articles and theses. Bibliographical units are not numbered. The creator of The Forestry Bibliography was the first to catalog the entire forest matter in a single piece of work. The work has been viewed as influential.
Alphonse Kauders had a dog by the name of Rex, whose whelp, in the course of time, he gave to Josip B. Tito.
Alphonse Kauders had a mysterious prostate illness and, in the course of time, he said: “Strange are the ways of urine.”
Alphonse Kauders said to Rosa Luxemburg: “Let me penetrate a little bit, just a bit, I’ll be careful.”
Alphonse Kauders said: “And what if I am still here.”
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