Nothing in the World

  NOTHING IN THE WORLD

  A Novella

  by Roy Kesey

  Contents

  Part 1

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  Part 2

  5.

  6.

  7.

  Part 3

  8.

  9.

  Part 4

  10.

  11.

  Acknowledgments and Thanks

  About the Author

  The Dzanc Books eBook Club

  For the four:

  Svana, Bayo, Kijo, Moca

  Puno hvala

  The children were walled into the pier, for it could not be otherwise, but Rade, they say, had pity on them and left openings in the pier through which the unhappy mother could feed her sacrificed children. Those are the finely carved windows, narrow as loopholes, in which the wild doves now nest.

  - Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina

  Because it matters what kind of emptiness is left behind by things or beings.

  - Milorad Pavić, Landscape Painted With Tea

  Part 1

  1.

  The white stone walls of Joško’s house were tinged gold in the growing light, and the only sound was the sharp ring of his father’s pick glancing off rocks in the vineyard. Joško ran to join him as the sun slipped into the sky, and they worked together without speaking, his father freeing the rocks from the soil, Joško heaving them to his shoulder and staggering to the wall they were building to mark their property line to the east.

  The dust began to rise as the sun burned off the dew. By the time his mother called that breakfast was ready, the vineyard was flooded with light, and sweat slicked Joško’s neck and back. He walked to the shaded patio, turned on the faucet and took a drink from the hose.

  Water spilled from the sides of his mouth, and Joško went still as two small blue butterflies came over the wall and settled at the edge of the puddle. He stared at them, thinking of nothing, then crouched down and clapped his hands around them, felt the faint beat of wings against his palms, parted his thumbs and peered inside and saw that his hands were empty.

  * * *

  School went as usual: alone at lunch and during the breaks, invisible in the classroom. The teachers rarely called on Joško, and the few times he volunteered an answer, they looked at him as though they remembered having seen him before, but weren’t quite sure where. His classmates didn’t go out of their way to avoid him, but never sought him out or showed much interest in what he had to say. It was easier simply to be alone.

  The last bell rang and Joško hurried home, put on his swimming suit, took up his fishing spear and headed into the hot low hills west of Jezera. The hillsides were patched with wild olive and fig trees, sage and thorn. At the top of a rise he caught another trail that led to a stone lookout. From there he could see the whole island of Murter, a severed finger of earth and heat, the Croatian mainland to one side and to the other the quiet sea.

  Ten minutes later he arrived at the cliffs, and edged down through the striated rock. Boulders the size of tanks crowded the water that swirled over the tide pools and shifted away, and again he felt invisible, but here it was a source of strength. He worked back and forth along the shoreline, stopping short of every crevice, dropping down and crawling forward, careful to keep his shadow from falling across the water.

  No one else in his family was any good at spearfishing, but it had never seemed difficult to Joško. It was simply a question of knowing where to go and how to get there, and of not missing when the moment came. Though he would never have admitted it to anyone, at times he tossed dying fish back into the water, throwing his spear again and again for the pleasure of hitting what he aimed at.

  Three fat sea bass now hung from the stringer on his belt. He set his spear in a cleft in the rocks and hooked the stringer over its tip, drew a cloth from his waistband and wound it around his right hand. The periška that lived in the sand of the sea floor were by far his favorite food, but the edges of their long ochre shells left wounds that took weeks to heal.

  He watched the sun settle into a thin bank of clouds on the horizon, then stepped out onto a ledge and dove into the water. The deeper currents thrashed and curled. He kept at it, dive after dive, until his shell-bag was so heavy that he could barely make it back to the surface.

  He checked the tide pools for abalone shells for his sister, and found only one. It was almost four inches across, too big for the earrings and brooches that Klara made, and the inner surface was already weathered and dull. He tucked it into his bag all the same, climbed up the cliff, and now the wind strengthened. The Adriatic whorled into the coastline, small waves spiking and guttering below. Shade by shade the sky turned his favorite color, a ridged blue-gray as solid as stone.

  He returned to his house, and its red slate roof glowed under the streetlights, and there were grapes and cantaloupes in a basket on the patio. As he washed the salt from his body, his mother came up the sidewalk, back from the market where old women waited with their twined bunches of rosemary and dill. She took the fish and the periška, and Joško went to Klara’s bedroom. The pile of abalone shells in the corner was almost a meter high and smelled of rot. His parents complained from time to time, but he always insisted that sooner or later she would come back, would need the shells, would use every single one.

  He went to the kitchen, opened the periška and cut out the meat while his mother cleaned the fish. He watched as she fried everything in olive oil. Then they all sat down at the table, and after his mother had prayed they began to eat, wiping up the grease with slices of bread, drinking wine from rough wooden pots.

  When the dishes were cleared, Joško’s father turned on the television. The news was the usual mix of referendums and local elections, arguments about conditions in Kosovo and the Vojvodina now that they’d been swallowed again by Serbia, and discussions of Slovenia’s recent freedom after three short days of fighting. His father said that he couldn’t understand what was happening, that all Yugoslavs were supposed to be brothers. His mother said that that hadn’t been true since Tito died, and that the Serbs were not to be trusted under any circumstances.

  They both looked at Joško, and he smiled and shrugged. These were the same arguments he heard most days in history class, and they meant nothing more to him here than there. He suspected he’d have trouble trusting a Serb if he ever met one, but couldn’t say he spent much time thinking about them. While his parents had been talking he’d been wondering what Klara was doing just now.

  Two years ago she would have been in her bedroom, putting on her make-up and choosing her clothes, preparing to join her friends at one of the cafes or bars in the center of town. Then she met a man from the south. A few weeks later she married him for reasons no one could understand, and went to live with him in Dubrovnik. She hadn’t been back to Jezera in months.

  Joško had done what he could to fill the small holes that Klara’s absence carved in his chest. He spent most of his free time working the bit of vineyard that his father had given him the day he turned fifteen. Pruning, sulfur-dusting, harvest and rest, then pruning again: the future had seeped into the past like water into dry soil.

  As Joško leafed through a comic book, his father turned the television off, took an old mandolin from its case, and his mother sang the songs he had been hearing since birth, of the sea and the sand and Bura, the wind from the north. If Klara had been there it would have been perfect.

  At last his parents went to bed, and Joško took his father’s car into town. He sat down on the terrace of his favorite bar, sipped his beer and watched the girls from nearby villages who’d come to show off their sundresses and their long d
ark legs. The girls ignored him as they always had. Then he heard a radio broadcast turned up, and someone in the bar said, It’s finally begun.

  2.

  For the first time in his life, Joško had someone to hate. Serb guerrillas had attacked in the Krajina, and the federal army had helped them crush the towns of Tenja and Dalj. They’d started in Western Slavonia as well, only sixty kilometers from Zagreb. Now he stood outside the post office, waiting in line with several dozen other young men. He knew some of them from school—one was in his geometry class—but could think of nothing to add to their conversation. Their faces blurred in the heat, and there was a slight vibration in the air that he could not identify.

  His decision to enlist had not really been a decision at all. He’d returned home from the bar, and his parents were awake, and the television was on again. His parents had looked at him, and he had known: he would sign up and fight for the Motherland and probably die. His father had been silent as his mother spoke on and on. Joško hadn’t heard any of the words, and didn’t need to.

  A sergeant measured him, gave him a uniform, and waved him to a shed where he picked up a rucksack complete with the things that would apparently be necessary—a canteen, a compass, a knife, a sewing kit and a tin of waterproof matches. He was sent to stand in another line, and the vibration in the air grew stronger. Then he realized that it was the sound of his own fear, and he had no idea what to do about it, no idea how to make it stop.

  He balled up his fists, spoke to no one, kept his eyes on the ground. His fear grew louder and louder in his head, and he stumbled as he stepped to the head of the line. The soldier there said something he didn’t catch, and handed him an AK-47. It was old but well oiled and clean, felt perfectly right in his hands, and suddenly Joško could hear again. He asked the soldier to show him how to load it. The man said he’d learn that soon enough, and pointed him toward a jeep.

  There were two other new soldiers already sitting in the back seat. Joško asked where the three of them were headed, and what would be expected of them, and when they’d be allowed to visit home, but the other soldiers didn’t know anything either. They all sat there waiting. Then an older soldier came over, climbed into the driver’s seat and told them to shut the hell up, though no one had been talking.

  It was only a few minutes’ drive to Tijesno and the narrow bridge connecting Murter to the mainland. The jeep jolted across the concrete slabs edged slightly out of square, sped up when they hit the roadway, and twenty minutes later they were at Tribunj. The driver told the other two soldiers to get their gear, find the main square, and wait for the rest of their squad.

  The road curled and cut southwest along the coast. The heat seeped into Joško’s lungs, made his chest heavy and slow. He slumped in his seat. The noise of the engine was a low ache, a faraway gnashing of teeth.

  Then the older soldier was pushing him out of the jeep, yelling for him to grab his rifle and rucksack and get moving. They were stopped under a torn awning stretched out from a bus station. A hand-painted sign hanging over the door read “Šibenik” in black letters half a meter high. Joško gathered his things and asked where he was supposed to go. The driver pointed toward the beach and drove off.

  Joško stepped into the furrowed sunlight. Across the street was a vast mound of brick and charred beams. To his right was a plywood kiosk, its counter lined with wristwatches and soap, and behind the kiosk was an empty bench.

  All Joško really wanted was to sit down, but then an old man came walking up, rubbing his hands together. He stopped to look at Joško, at the ground in front of him, at the air halfway between them. His hands were still working, still cleaning. He came closer, stroked the rucksack as if it were a small deer, and asked a question that Joško couldn’t understand—the man’s words weren’t really words, just sounds. Joško shook his head, and the man leaned forward, shouted the question as if the answer might save him from something.

  Joško turned and ran to the beach. A hundred meters north was a small army camp, and waiting there were the five other men of his squad. Joško asked Dražen, the squad captain, which branch of the army they were in. Dražen said that it wasn’t yet clear, but he would let the men know as soon as he found out. The other men looked at Joško, and looked away.

  * * *

  No one in the squad had seen combat, but two of them had done hitches with the Yugoslav army years before. In the mornings Dražen taught weapons handling and marksmanship, and in the afternoons Vlade taught demolitions and recon, not because they were experts in these areas but because it was all that they remembered. Joško struggled with everything but shooting: he could hit targets so small and so distant that the other soldiers could hardly see them.

  In the evenings he became invisible again. They all cleaned their rifles—Joško’s favorite part of each day, the smell of the oil, the soft cloth, the cold metal components sliding precisely into place—and when they were done the others played poker while he listened to the news that flowed from the radio. One town after another was shattered by the Serb tanks, and when the siege of Vukovar began, arguments among the other soldiers over whether the city would fall turned into fistfights. Busload after busload of refugees arrived on the coast, and Joško watched them go by, the pale faces framed like portraits in the windows.

  Then a pair of Serb jets found their way to Šibenik, and Dražen informed the men that they had been assigned to anti-aircraft duty. Every evening the jets flew low over the city, and every morning crowds gathered for work crews and funerals. When the cemeteries were full, graves began to appear in careful lines along the edges of parks and playgrounds.

  For the first few days of this, Joško and the others could do nothing but lie on their backs and shoot up at the planes with their rifles. At last they heard that an air defense system was on its way, and they congratulated each other in advance for saving the city.

  What arrived the next week was a single 88mm, a relic from World War II, its barrel pitted with rust inside and out. Along with the gun came a German mercenary to teach them how it worked. He was tall and pale, and a thin scar split his face lengthwise, running from below his right eye down into his thick brown mustache, beginning again in his bottom lip, slipping to the point of his chin.

  According to the German, in addition to being in poor condition, the 88 would be almost useless against modern jets, particularly with no searchlights and no radar. The sound locator was broken and no parts were available to fix it. Also, the gun was designed for a crew of eight, so some of the men would have to do two jobs.

  The German assigned them their positions: Joško laying for elevation and line, Bakalar loading and firing, Mladen on the predictor and Vlade handling ammunition, Papiga setting range and Dražen setting vertical deflection. They practiced for hours with empty shells. The gun could fire twenty rounds a minute, but they’d only have ten or twelve seconds before the jets were out of range.

  That evening, as the jets leveled off to drop their bombs, Joško’s squad fired three shots as quickly as they could. High above there were puffs of greasy black encasing small flares of red. The noise made Joško’s head ring, and the jets flew away.

  * * *

  The sun lowered into the sea, and Joško watched a giant cloud become a whale, and then a musk ox, and then a bear. He fingered the abalone shell that hung on a leather thong around his neck, a gift from Klara, who had written from Dubrovnik when she heard that he’d joined the army. He was almost certain it was a shell they’d found together one morning when they were very young. It was perfectly round, and its pearled inner surface was a rare translucent swirl of violet and green.

  He remembered the day he’d left Jezera, the scene on the porch of his house—his mother crying as she told him how proud she was, his father twisting a newspaper tighter and tighter until it came apart in his hands—and his cheek began to twitch. He waited to see if the twitching would stop on its own. When it didn’t, he took the shell and rubbed his dancing
cheek until it quieted.

  The mercenary stood off to the side of camp, smoking one hand-rolled cigarette after another. Dražen was manning the binoculars, and the other soldiers were stretched out flat on their backs in the sand. They stared up at the reddening sky as they worked through the latest rumor, that a shipment of Stingers had been deployed with squads roving the coast, waiting for the chance to bring down a jet.

  Dražen handed the binoculars to Vlade, and the men’s talk shifted to stories of women they’d been with. When it became clear to Joško that he wasn’t going to learn anything helpful, he started thinking of his sister and her friends in Jezera. Klara’s long straight hair, Marijana’s deep black eyes, Andrea’s legs. Nataša’s breasts and Maja’s voice and...

  Of course, none of Klara’s friends had ever paid any attention to him. Joško watched as Papiga got up and began hopping from boulder to boulder, his arms spread like wings. The conversation turned to football, and Bakalar started in on Dinamo Zagreb and their chances once the war was—

  - How about if all of you shut the fuck up?

  It was the German. He walked from soldier to soldier, staring at each of them. Joško tried to remember the man’s name, and realized that he’d never told them.

  - I do not understand you. We all know that I am here for the money, that my paycheck comes each month no matter who is winning or losing, no matter who lives or dies, but you...

  He shook his head, and took his time rolling a cigarette.

  - How much are they paying you? Dražen asked.

  The mercenary laughed. He looked at Dražen, and finally shrugged.

  - The money’s not bad. Not as good as in Angola, but not bad.

  He turned to Papiga.

  - I’ll bet you don’t even know who I was fighting against there.

  - The government?