"Mappamundi" by Angelisa Fontaine-Wood
Mappamundi
by
Angelisa Fontaine-Wood
Content warnings: graphic wartime violence and implied torture, death of friends and strangers, hateful language directed at ethnic groups, mental illness
Srđan never asked for directions, even wandering the halls of his own university. It was an open secret. Thus, Georgia slipped the 1900 Pilgrim’s Guide to Rome into his coat pocket with a wink and a congratulatory nod at his celebration dinner. He chuckled along—one jubilee year to another exactly a century later. He even feigned taking careful note of the price difference between a cab ride with one horse or two. He just as carefully avoided its foldout plans, which dizzied him already. For part of the joke lay in the fact that Georgia navigated the world by the cardinal directions indicated by sunrise and sunset, and she always got them where they needed to go, in contrast to his notorious disorientation. Still, Srđan made it through four airports and two layovers—only barely missing one flight when he could not locate his gate—across a continent and a half, and an ocean for goodmeasure.
More even than that. For in his journey, he started as an exile from the stunned, shell-shocked walls of Dubrovnik, its hotel quarter in shambles, and from his martyred Vukovar home before that—its hospital massacre and the water tower bearing witness to the dead and, worse, the disappeared. All in a onetime countrylately known as Yugoslavia.
Once safely out, leaving the unspeakable in the past, he continued on a westward trail of displaced persons’ camps across Europe, then to halfway houses in the US, until he made it back into higher learning. The final stop, or so it seemed at the time, was his presence in front of a Berkeley committee, defending a dissertation on the spatiality of medieval lands of the dead. Maybe he was a bit older than his cohort, but he had arrived in all senses, road map or no.
The postdoc grant to study the fourteenth-century drawings of Opicinus de Canistris came as the next step. An obscure official of the papal court of Avignon, the Pavian scribe had been tormented by his sense of sin, perhaps the victim of a stroke, perhaps of hallucinations. The literature often concentrated on his alleged psychosis at the expense of the marvels of imagination that he drew. More than mere supposition informed the diagnosis, which came from the scribe’s own journal, where he wrote of the turmoil that a modern reader would describe as mental illness. Certainly he suffered from something as he engaged in the bizarre geographical sketches that kept his misery in check. Srđan wished to explore how Opicino, as the scholar affectionately called him, aimed through these drawings to “tame,” per the scribe’s words, his own mind.
That is what led Srđan here, where he must now navigate his way to the Vatican through the Daedalian streets and sunken ruins, through Mussolini’s urban vandalism. At least the Via della Conciliazione had the virtue of being straight. To reduce risk, he had taken a pricier hotel nearby so that he would better know where to head. He made sure, anyway, to note the positions of landmarks along the way, what rose behind him, and before. As he studied attentively what lay to his left and his right, a staccato firing of gunshots dropped him.
It was only the belching muffler of an untuned Vespa, but in an instant he was flat on the ground. He could not shut his eyes tightly enough against the vision of Đurđica’s leg, which had but a moment before been jiggling from nerves about the exam in half an hour. Želimir had been grumbling about all the lighters Srđan had borrowed and lost, but he passed him another all the same. One instant, Želimir was cupping the flame Srđan had summoned from the striker. The following instant, Srđan still held the lighter, but his friend’s sheltering hand lay before him. Hard by, Jelena’s silver-ringed fingers still clutched her coffee. She had just begun to recite the poem that they were to analyze: “This is the graveyard of the living, this is horriblebecause it is the worst to live and already be dead.”
Srđan unclosed his eyes, which were stinging with the cold sweat seeping into them. He breathed deeply, hopefully even, into the present, only to find his nose against one of the fiberglass windows that the city had fixed in the pavement. These revealed the ruins of the Rome below, surely some back entry into Hades and its shades, going quietly about their endless tasks amid the whizz and roar of traffic. He wondered if the Tiber ran in this underworld Rome like a reflection of the Lethe. If only he could drink its waters.
After hundreds of legs passing by or even stepping over him, a grandmotherly soul asked if he needed an ambulance. The mere thought of a siren brought him back to himself. He must rise and move, push his mind onward, forward, ever forward. He stood up, smiled his thanks at the black-clad woman, and directed himself to his morning destination. He lit a cigarette and slipped the lighter back into his pocket, along with the guidebook.
Finally he would enter a real country, a country that asked for no formally sworn identity papers to cross its border: admission hinged on no passport. A simple reader’s card served as the key to the Vatican kingdom, or library anyway, which came to the same thing. It was worth the “supplication,” as the administrative request was called by peculiar custom. He took one last drag, tossed the butt to the gutter, and sallied forth, brushing off the dust of Hell, debris of Vukovar, stench of Dubrovnik. Unsteady but determined, he arrived at Saint Peter’s then turned right.
He flashed the cardboard rectangle; the Swiss guard stood aside. Srđan thrummed to study the drawings, to touch them even, instead of the rare reproductions he had pored over until now. The scholar surrendered his worldly belongings to a locker, pen first and foremost, for the library allowed no ink to enter; he was to face madness armed with nothing but a pencil.
Srđan unclosed his eyes, which were stinging with the cold sweat seeping into them. He breathed deeply, hopefully even, into the present, only to find his nose against one of the fiberglass windows that the city had fixed in the pavement. These revealed the ruins of the Rome below, surely some back entry into Hades and its shades, going quietly about their endless tasks amid the whizz and roar of traffic. He wondered if the Tiber ran in this underworld Rome like a reflection of the Lethe. If only he could drink its waters.
After hundreds of legs passing by or even stepping over him, a grandmotherly soul asked if he needed an ambulance. The mere thought of a siren brought him back to himself. He must rise and move, push his mind onward, forward, ever forward. He stood up, smiled his thanks at the black-clad woman, and directed himself to his morning destination. He lit a cigarette and slipped the lighter back into his pocket, along with the guidebook.
Finally he would enter a real country, a country that asked for no formally sworn identity papers to cross its border: admission hinged on no passport. A simple reader’s card served as the key to the Vatican kingdom, or library anyway, which came to the same thing. It was worth the “supplication,” as the administrative request was called by peculiar custom. He took one last drag, tossed the butt to the gutter, and sallied forth, brushing off the dust of Hell, debris of Vukovar, stench of Dubrovnik. Unsteady but determined, he arrived at Saint Peter’s then turned right.
He flashed the cardboard rectangle; the Swiss guard stood aside. Srđan thrummed to study the drawings, to touch them even, instead of the rare reproductions he had pored over until now. The scholar surrendered his worldly belongings to a locker, pen first and foremost, for the library allowed no ink to enter; he was to face madness armed with nothing but a pencil.
He passed through the fog of quiet in the stacks and glanced at the signage
NO SMOKING ON PAIN OF EXCOMMUNICATION.
He knew the word indicated expulsion, but he choked back a laugh and then stifled a tickling cough. He had already considered selling his soul for a cigarette.
He thought back to the last time soul-selling had occurred to him. Immediately, echoing shrieks and shelling resounded through his head and tore through the library silence. A lapse in time and space saw him sheltering with Đurđica and Želimir under a carrel, books scattered on the floor, their pages dead leaves around them. Jelena held a volume of verse to her heart like a shield.
Srđan steadied himself against a bookcase and focused on the here and now: something to see, something to touch, something to smell. Going through his grounding exercises, he noted the slim gray markers librarians slip into the shelves to signal a borrowed book. Georgia had told him the French called such things fantômes. This, with the threat of excommunication, made him wonder whether a cigarette would be worth it to join that spectral horde of unreturned tomes and impenitent smokers haunting the stacks for eternity, even after the walls themselves crumbled. He had certainly approached ghosthood; so many souls he had known lay now in hasty graves, unmarked and unquiet.
He inhaled the manuscript room’s hush in lieu of tobacco smoke, breathing out his nerves. Soon, the librarians brought out the documents. He concentrated on one parchment, a chart of concentric circles that Opicino had drawn to mark his life and its events. It recalled a scene in the Hitchcock film he’d watched with Georgia the night before he left, where Kim Novak’s phantasmal heroine indicates her points of birth and death along the tree rings of a sequoia: “Somewhere in here I was born. And there I died.”
At a distance of nearly seven hundred years, Srđan traced Opicino’s lines, trying to solve the mysteries of the obscure medieval functionary. He contemplated the diagram and wondered if, living in Avignon, the scribe had felt himself an exile from Pavia, an exile from his mind, a feeling he externalized in the weirdness of his maps. Srđan penciled notes about the color schemes and charts in wraith gray, in a jumble of English, Italian, and Latin. None, however, were in Croatian.
Next, he studied Opicino’s bizarre cartography, the papers where he sketched land masses over and over as profiles of personages. The different versions of incarnated geography turned coastlines into silhouettes whose very borders told stories. The scribe pictured Africa at the ear of Europe, with Africa now a nun, now a cleric; Europe a bearded man, or again, a delicately drawn woman. The voids of maritime and other liquid spaces carved out the devil here and pouncing monsters there. It mesmerized Srđan, this menace written into waterscapes. He spared a thought for the Tiber-Lethe he had longed to fall into when he stumbled on his way to the library that morning.
He thought back to the last time soul-selling had occurred to him. Immediately, echoing shrieks and shelling resounded through his head and tore through the library silence. A lapse in time and space saw him sheltering with Đurđica and Želimir under a carrel, books scattered on the floor, their pages dead leaves around them. Jelena held a volume of verse to her heart like a shield.
Srđan steadied himself against a bookcase and focused on the here and now: something to see, something to touch, something to smell. Going through his grounding exercises, he noted the slim gray markers librarians slip into the shelves to signal a borrowed book. Georgia had told him the French called such things fantômes. This, with the threat of excommunication, made him wonder whether a cigarette would be worth it to join that spectral horde of unreturned tomes and impenitent smokers haunting the stacks for eternity, even after the walls themselves crumbled. He had certainly approached ghosthood; so many souls he had known lay now in hasty graves, unmarked and unquiet.
He inhaled the manuscript room’s hush in lieu of tobacco smoke, breathing out his nerves. Soon, the librarians brought out the documents. He concentrated on one parchment, a chart of concentric circles that Opicino had drawn to mark his life and its events. It recalled a scene in the Hitchcock film he’d watched with Georgia the night before he left, where Kim Novak’s phantasmal heroine indicates her points of birth and death along the tree rings of a sequoia: “Somewhere in here I was born. And there I died.”
At a distance of nearly seven hundred years, Srđan traced Opicino’s lines, trying to solve the mysteries of the obscure medieval functionary. He contemplated the diagram and wondered if, living in Avignon, the scribe had felt himself an exile from Pavia, an exile from his mind, a feeling he externalized in the weirdness of his maps. Srđan penciled notes about the color schemes and charts in wraith gray, in a jumble of English, Italian, and Latin. None, however, were in Croatian.
Next, he studied Opicino’s bizarre cartography, the papers where he sketched land masses over and over as profiles of personages. The different versions of incarnated geography turned coastlines into silhouettes whose very borders told stories. The scribe pictured Africa at the ear of Europe, with Africa now a nun, now a cleric; Europe a bearded man, or again, a delicately drawn woman. The voids of maritime and other liquid spaces carved out the devil here and pouncing monsters there. It mesmerized Srđan, this menace written into waterscapes. He spared a thought for the Tiber-Lethe he had longed to fall into when he stumbled on his way to the library that morning.
Topographical fluctuations—Opicino’s or his own—overcame him a moment and he laid aside the maps for the diary. After much searching he landed on a sought-after passage, a faded annotation in which Opicino asked, “Quis sum ego?” The scribe replied to himself, “You are the Egoceros, from ego, which means goat, and ceros, which is the horn, like the mountain goat whose effigy shows a goat’s beard, which we call the Aegean Sea or Caprine Sea.” But the scholar paid special attention to the first half of the word. It resonated with an ego that had nothing to do with Freud or Pascal before him. He zeroed in on other leitmotivs. Mirrors stood out; the whole work obeyed an overarching, recursive logic of reflection. The Egoceros was but one example. He must delve into that mirror, seek out its meanings to a medieval Italian who sought solace in homing in on places and their locationsrelative to one another. In finding he could be found.
Srđan could not help but think again of Georgia and her work on Grail literature. All research fundamentally was a search, a quest, across ideas, concepts, across disciplinary divisions that were flimsy administrative constructs, just as imaginary as the borders between nations. Beyond lay monsters, and Srđan knew a thing or two about monsters.
He shook his head loose of the images, the torn flesh bleeding, the severed limbs lying in front of the café where he had laughed only a moment before. These pictures had seized him as he had stared at those from ages past, watched the teeth of a ferocious feline—embodying the coastal Atlantic—sink into Europe’s shoulder, threatening to tear open her delicate flesh. He gazed again at those open jaws. Cartographers usually drew lions at the edges of lands unknown as a grim suggestion of what one might find there; they did not incarnate the topographical forms themselves as monsters.
Although these were not uncharted waters, Opicino may yet have had a horror of their perilous depths. The hungry harbingers warned of the dangers of going too far out. The Devil’s profile emerged from other shores. Another monster haunted the delta of the Rhône. His world, populated with hallucinations and wild thoughts, bloodthirsty, savage, as the scribe himself put it, must have frightened him. Srđan remained convinced that tracing the profiles partitioned off such thoughts. Beyond the borders lay lion-haunted realms, as the jaws of the feline and the Rhône’s fanged creature attested.
The scholar sensed tidal surges, the flow of rivers beneath his gaze. He studied the voids created in the profiles of land, dirt, soil, marking a seam of ichor rising from below, meandering in the liminal and littoral in a brave attempt to make order out of chaos. He felt he might dowse those currents, gaze into their abyss, longing again for the Lethe, and there drown.
Each morning after, he followed the deceptively linear Via della Conciliazione to the piazza, the half-circle loggias enfolding him in their marble embrace. At the lockers, he left his belongings, the ritual of the refugee, the very coat off his back. The librarians sat him in the front row, wall side, in full view. He set back to work on the maps, following the labyrinths of an itinerant mind. If only there were some legend, some scale.
Srđan returned the documents once and for all, regretfully, picked up his belongings, and bid farewell to this ancient sanctuary of study and reflection. Though he was reluctant to leave, signs and arrows helped his vague sense of how to do so. Pausing, however, he stole a phantom, wondering which book he had hopelessly waylaid, then pulled out a cigarette before formally exiting. Just in case an afterlife awaited, he wanted to spend it here, be it damnation, he didn’t care.
In the weeks preceding, he had found his hotel with few enough false turns, the unbending Via della Conciliazione aiding him. Flicking his ash now as another flash of scooters beeped past, he looked up expecting to see Saint Peter’s where he’d left it, but it rose right before him. He could swear the Tiber flowed now in the opposite direction. Instinct told him left, then right, but his street did not appear.
Srđan wandered on. The hours saw the Piazza Argentina pass, then the Spanish Steps, followed by the Giordano Bruno statue, and then the Trevi Fountain. He felt it impossible to distinguish any order or plan in their locations. He had hopelessly lost his way, lost his senses even, as mad, he laughed, as a Pavian mapmaker.
***
Each morning after, he followed the deceptively linear Via della Conciliazione to the piazza, the half-circle loggias enfolding him in their marble embrace. At the lockers, he left his belongings, the ritual of the refugee, the very coat off his back. The librarians sat him in the front row, wall side, in full view. He set back to work on the maps, following the labyrinths of an itinerant mind. If only there were some legend, some scale.
***
In the weeks preceding, he had found his hotel with few enough false turns, the unbending Via della Conciliazione aiding him. Flicking his ash now as another flash of scooters beeped past, he looked up expecting to see Saint Peter’s where he’d left it, but it rose right before him. He could swear the Tiber flowed now in the opposite direction. Instinct told him left, then right, but his street did not appear.
Srđan wandered on. The hours saw the Piazza Argentina pass, then the Spanish Steps, followed by the Giordano Bruno statue, and then the Trevi Fountain. He felt it impossible to distinguish any order or plan in their locations. He had hopelessly lost his way, lost his senses even, as mad, he laughed, as a Pavian mapmaker.
Twilight fell. He found himself before one of those standing maps of the city, stamped, it was thought helpfully, with a near-existential YOU ARE HERE. He tilted his head, twisted his body in another direction, situated the out-of-sight Tiber in his mind while still studying the city plan, yet for all his contortions, he could not decipher how the map plotted him into reality.
He gave up and sat down on the nearest support. In his pocket, book and lighter met his hand, and the pencil he’d never returned. He looked around, realizing he rested upon a tombstone in the Protestant graveyard. It reminded him of the Paris conference that he and Georgia had splurged on together, their afternoon at Père Lachaise Cemetery. She had led the way, barely unfolding the paper that marked the names and where they lay. Afterward, she taught him some words and concepts she was using for her paper on Lancelot’s insanity in the wilderness: mise en abyme, fuite en avant.
The day before he left for Italy, their advisor had quoted a French medievalist who declared all historians ogres, nostrils flaring at the scent of fresh blood when a manuscript offered a morsel of lived experience. He concluded his advice by enjoining Srđan, “Be an ogre!” As they left, Georgia complained that the professor still mangled Srđan’s name.
That night, well after Vertigo was over, nightmares of wandering lost among mass graves shot through his brief passages of sleep. Georgia’s offhand metaphor of mangling converged with “ogre” to echo in the maze of his brain. He had known ogres, seen them at their grisly work. He remembered their chant to their leader to bring the greens to go with the Croat meat they intended to feast on. Slaughter, the smell of bodies voiding their bowels and bleeding out, woke him, drenched in cold sweat.
Georgia understood. She calmly explained that he was not one who devoured. He would not feast upon the dead but, like a necromancer, coax forth their secrets, cajoling and caring for them, for their memory. He would find again those lost to history and return to them some trace of the lives left behind, thus giving them the rites of proper burial.
Here, by the graves of expatriates in Italy, he looked around him. He could just make out Keats’s headstone, then further on, Shelley’s—poets Georgia loved. He wanted to take a picture for her, but the falling darkness prevented him. He could hear her now, asking, “What can ail thee, knight at arms?” Indeed there he was, alone and palely loitering. The stars now shone in their steady presence above. Had he but an astrolabe. He laughed, took out a cigarette, and lit up. He could still hear the screeching and racing vehicles, a sin against the reigning peace of those interred in good and due form.
After the lighter, he fished in his jacket pocket for his Pilgrim’s Guide. First, though, he found the stolen phantom, the call number an epitaph for a book now as lost as he was, and the holy relic of the pencil. When he put his hand on Georgia’s gift, he opened it less in hope that a pre-Fascist map of Rome would lead him where he needed to be than as a kind of breviary, a supplication yet again, for a man profoundly astray.
As he wondered what next to do, out of nowhere a ginger tabby stole around his ankles then disappeared behind a statue at the tomb where his half-smoked butt had landed. With nothing better to do than follow the lead of a random feline, he too slipped behind the weeping granite figure.
A hushed, shadowless twilight enshrouded him. Unlike the library’s silence, where scribblings and page-turnings, footsteps and breathing lent life to the quiet, here not even the breeze played at his ear. What was lost now was surely his mind, gone as far into the wilds as Opicino’s, as Lancelot’s. For his attention was absorbed not by this void of sound but by a lion, the same tawny color as the stray he had
trailed, sitting as though guarding the no-man’s-land that stretched behind it.
Something drew him further despite his fear. He approached. The beast crouched to pounce and exploded the silence with a hideous roar, threatening any who would dare defy its protection of the lands beyond. Behind the lion, Srđan spied the bodies, shredded and strewn across the landscape. Naked as newborns, they lay in this gouged and gutted “terrain vague.”
The term was yet another that Georgia had taught him, like “terre gaste.” It was a hellscape of massacre that he had thought he would never witness again in the flesh. At the margins stood Vukovar’s water tower and bombed hospital, converging with Dubrovnik’s ramparts and shelled hotels. The constructions loomed, still aflame.
They cast no shadow.
The lion stood guard and watched him, putting the librarians to shame. The scholar begged, supplicated the animal in the very words of his library card request. He pleaded in Latin, clumsy French, and even English. It remained, however, ready to lunge. Then he heard himself address the animal in a language found like a lost child finding its mother: “I am no ogre. I am a necromancer. Let me pass.” At the
Croatian words, the lion stood aside.
Before he could reach the bodies, Europe surged forth from the wasteland, enthroned, with a gash at her shoulder from the Atlantic’s predatory jaws. A counselor whispered at her ear. She bid Srđan forward, opening her arms like the Vatican loggia. Yet the path toward her turned into an ever-lengthening Via della Conciliazione changing into Dubrovnik’s Stradun. He tripped over a gaping pothole, when a river bubbled up in front of him, sprang up entire, as though some current from the world below. Vuka, Danube, Tiber, Rhône, Lethe—they were all one.
Serpents lifted their fanged maws out of the waves. Still Europe bade him come. He placed one foot on the water with no way to reach the other side, knowing he must drown, or worse. No ferryman came to his aid, two pennies or no. He only hoped the current would allow him the oblivion promised by the chthonic beyond. As he set his shoe upon it, however, it became a mirror to tread, and this without fracture, one of those impossible deeds required in dreams and old tales.
Placing his steps as carefully as possible, he glanced backward a moment to see Europe looking at him over her wounded shoulder. Her features turned int Georgia’s; Srđan tripped. Flat on his face, he found himself staring at his own reflection. But the eyes stared back differently, a devil’s gaze. A single horn sprouted from the image’s head.
He stood up, on solid ground now, suddenly on the far side of the river-mirror. The image rose at the same time, independent of the liquid looking glass but imitating every move of his every muscle. He knew now what to do. He stared at the thin inky horizon of its black glare and once more heard himself speak Croatian.
He gave up and sat down on the nearest support. In his pocket, book and lighter met his hand, and the pencil he’d never returned. He looked around, realizing he rested upon a tombstone in the Protestant graveyard. It reminded him of the Paris conference that he and Georgia had splurged on together, their afternoon at Père Lachaise Cemetery. She had led the way, barely unfolding the paper that marked the names and where they lay. Afterward, she taught him some words and concepts she was using for her paper on Lancelot’s insanity in the wilderness: mise en abyme, fuite en avant.
The day before he left for Italy, their advisor had quoted a French medievalist who declared all historians ogres, nostrils flaring at the scent of fresh blood when a manuscript offered a morsel of lived experience. He concluded his advice by enjoining Srđan, “Be an ogre!” As they left, Georgia complained that the professor still mangled Srđan’s name.
That night, well after Vertigo was over, nightmares of wandering lost among mass graves shot through his brief passages of sleep. Georgia’s offhand metaphor of mangling converged with “ogre” to echo in the maze of his brain. He had known ogres, seen them at their grisly work. He remembered their chant to their leader to bring the greens to go with the Croat meat they intended to feast on. Slaughter, the smell of bodies voiding their bowels and bleeding out, woke him, drenched in cold sweat.
Georgia understood. She calmly explained that he was not one who devoured. He would not feast upon the dead but, like a necromancer, coax forth their secrets, cajoling and caring for them, for their memory. He would find again those lost to history and return to them some trace of the lives left behind, thus giving them the rites of proper burial.
Here, by the graves of expatriates in Italy, he looked around him. He could just make out Keats’s headstone, then further on, Shelley’s—poets Georgia loved. He wanted to take a picture for her, but the falling darkness prevented him. He could hear her now, asking, “What can ail thee, knight at arms?” Indeed there he was, alone and palely loitering. The stars now shone in their steady presence above. Had he but an astrolabe. He laughed, took out a cigarette, and lit up. He could still hear the screeching and racing vehicles, a sin against the reigning peace of those interred in good and due form.
After the lighter, he fished in his jacket pocket for his Pilgrim’s Guide. First, though, he found the stolen phantom, the call number an epitaph for a book now as lost as he was, and the holy relic of the pencil. When he put his hand on Georgia’s gift, he opened it less in hope that a pre-Fascist map of Rome would lead him where he needed to be than as a kind of breviary, a supplication yet again, for a man profoundly astray.
As he wondered what next to do, out of nowhere a ginger tabby stole around his ankles then disappeared behind a statue at the tomb where his half-smoked butt had landed. With nothing better to do than follow the lead of a random feline, he too slipped behind the weeping granite figure.
A hushed, shadowless twilight enshrouded him. Unlike the library’s silence, where scribblings and page-turnings, footsteps and breathing lent life to the quiet, here not even the breeze played at his ear. What was lost now was surely his mind, gone as far into the wilds as Opicino’s, as Lancelot’s. For his attention was absorbed not by this void of sound but by a lion, the same tawny color as the stray he had
trailed, sitting as though guarding the no-man’s-land that stretched behind it.
Something drew him further despite his fear. He approached. The beast crouched to pounce and exploded the silence with a hideous roar, threatening any who would dare defy its protection of the lands beyond. Behind the lion, Srđan spied the bodies, shredded and strewn across the landscape. Naked as newborns, they lay in this gouged and gutted “terrain vague.”
The term was yet another that Georgia had taught him, like “terre gaste.” It was a hellscape of massacre that he had thought he would never witness again in the flesh. At the margins stood Vukovar’s water tower and bombed hospital, converging with Dubrovnik’s ramparts and shelled hotels. The constructions loomed, still aflame.
They cast no shadow.
The lion stood guard and watched him, putting the librarians to shame. The scholar begged, supplicated the animal in the very words of his library card request. He pleaded in Latin, clumsy French, and even English. It remained, however, ready to lunge. Then he heard himself address the animal in a language found like a lost child finding its mother: “I am no ogre. I am a necromancer. Let me pass.” At the
Croatian words, the lion stood aside.
Before he could reach the bodies, Europe surged forth from the wasteland, enthroned, with a gash at her shoulder from the Atlantic’s predatory jaws. A counselor whispered at her ear. She bid Srđan forward, opening her arms like the Vatican loggia. Yet the path toward her turned into an ever-lengthening Via della Conciliazione changing into Dubrovnik’s Stradun. He tripped over a gaping pothole, when a river bubbled up in front of him, sprang up entire, as though some current from the world below. Vuka, Danube, Tiber, Rhône, Lethe—they were all one.
Serpents lifted their fanged maws out of the waves. Still Europe bade him come. He placed one foot on the water with no way to reach the other side, knowing he must drown, or worse. No ferryman came to his aid, two pennies or no. He only hoped the current would allow him the oblivion promised by the chthonic beyond. As he set his shoe upon it, however, it became a mirror to tread, and this without fracture, one of those impossible deeds required in dreams and old tales.
Placing his steps as carefully as possible, he glanced backward a moment to see Europe looking at him over her wounded shoulder. Her features turned int Georgia’s; Srđan tripped. Flat on his face, he found himself staring at his own reflection. But the eyes stared back differently, a devil’s gaze. A single horn sprouted from the image’s head.
He stood up, on solid ground now, suddenly on the far side of the river-mirror. The image rose at the same time, independent of the liquid looking glass but imitating every move of his every muscle. He knew now what to do. He stared at the thin inky horizon of its black glare and once more heard himself speak Croatian.
“At last we meet, Egoceros.”
The creature’s eyes bored into him. After immeasurable hours, a moment, it spoke: “You ran.”
The words burned, chemical gas down his throat. “I come for my own.”
“You left your own to die while you went on to live.”
Srđan choked out his reply, the reflux tasting of swallowed petrol. “But now I have returned for them.” He felt each syllable as a lit cigarette blunted on his tongue.
“You left kith and kin behind, and what has become of you? You who have lived to learn and to love, who found a home again?”
He felt himself slipping backward into the red grasp of the river’s muddy banks. There surged into his mind, then, a verse, one that would put him to the test, Jelena’s voice prompting him: “This is the graveyard of the living, this is horrible because it is the worst to live and already be dead.”
The Egoceros was losing volume, losing depth. But though its voice rang hollow,it persisted. “Coward,” it cried. “Do you even remember their names, their faces?”
Its words reverberated like bullets through Srđan’s brain. In his pocket he grasped the stolen pencil like a sword, and lunging with it, pierced the creature’s heart. Its body flattened, creased, and folded. Srđan drew his lighter, or a lighter he knew of old—Želimir’s. Its flame shrank the Egoceros’s pupils, while the orbs grew wide with something akin to fear. He set it afire. A flash blinded him and the creature crumpled into ash.
Srđan took in the reek of rubber colliding with melted macadam, and the iron scent of blood freely flowing, blood that once had been encased in beloved flesh, and that burning too. Nothing now stood between him and the corpses scattered over the jagged ground that rose and fell under Srđan’s feet. The scarred soil—gouged here, hilly there—bore a harvest of death, with no repose for the murdered. He wended his way through the disfigured bodies heaped into tangled knots, their blank faces staring at the blank sky above.
He knelt by them, placing his ear next to their murmuring lips. He listened, though it gutted him, and learned their names, their fates: Dragana there and Milan here, further on Djordje, Slađana and Radomir, and Nediljka. One wanted to know if her child had survived, another simply if he could be buried beneath his grandfather’s elm. They told of the camps, the unmarked graves, the bulldozer’s
gruesome back and forth, and the truck returning for another batch of them. Their stories expelled from their unbreathing bodies, they fell back, finally silent, finally spent. Srđan knew exactly the task that lay before him.
He began to dig, and deeply. He broke skin and nail, streaming sweat and straining the limits of his scholar’s muscles, his damaged lungs laboring for enough air to feed him. Hoarse with the dust in his throat, eyes watering from it, he dug as deeply as his strength would allow and then beyond that, harrowing the ground with fell purpose, under the water tower’s watch and the ramparts, the hospital, the hotels. He slipped again, lost footing in the red mud.
The creature’s eyes bored into him. After immeasurable hours, a moment, it spoke: “You ran.”
The words burned, chemical gas down his throat. “I come for my own.”
“You left your own to die while you went on to live.”
Srđan choked out his reply, the reflux tasting of swallowed petrol. “But now I have returned for them.” He felt each syllable as a lit cigarette blunted on his tongue.
“You left kith and kin behind, and what has become of you? You who have lived to learn and to love, who found a home again?”
He felt himself slipping backward into the red grasp of the river’s muddy banks. There surged into his mind, then, a verse, one that would put him to the test, Jelena’s voice prompting him: “This is the graveyard of the living, this is horrible because it is the worst to live and already be dead.”
The Egoceros was losing volume, losing depth. But though its voice rang hollow,it persisted. “Coward,” it cried. “Do you even remember their names, their faces?”
Its words reverberated like bullets through Srđan’s brain. In his pocket he grasped the stolen pencil like a sword, and lunging with it, pierced the creature’s heart. Its body flattened, creased, and folded. Srđan drew his lighter, or a lighter he knew of old—Želimir’s. Its flame shrank the Egoceros’s pupils, while the orbs grew wide with something akin to fear. He set it afire. A flash blinded him and the creature crumpled into ash.
Srđan took in the reek of rubber colliding with melted macadam, and the iron scent of blood freely flowing, blood that once had been encased in beloved flesh, and that burning too. Nothing now stood between him and the corpses scattered over the jagged ground that rose and fell under Srđan’s feet. The scarred soil—gouged here, hilly there—bore a harvest of death, with no repose for the murdered. He wended his way through the disfigured bodies heaped into tangled knots, their blank faces staring at the blank sky above.
He knelt by them, placing his ear next to their murmuring lips. He listened, though it gutted him, and learned their names, their fates: Dragana there and Milan here, further on Djordje, Slađana and Radomir, and Nediljka. One wanted to know if her child had survived, another simply if he could be buried beneath his grandfather’s elm. They told of the camps, the unmarked graves, the bulldozer’s
gruesome back and forth, and the truck returning for another batch of them. Their stories expelled from their unbreathing bodies, they fell back, finally silent, finally spent. Srđan knew exactly the task that lay before him.
He began to dig, and deeply. He broke skin and nail, streaming sweat and straining the limits of his scholar’s muscles, his damaged lungs laboring for enough air to feed him. Hoarse with the dust in his throat, eyes watering from it, he dug as deeply as his strength would allow and then beyond that, harrowing the ground with fell purpose, under the water tower’s watch and the ramparts, the hospital, the hotels. He slipped again, lost footing in the red mud.
Then, nearly tripping, he chanced upon faces that had long haunted him. Still, entirely still, Srđan took in the features. Not even the traces of inflicted violence could prevent him from knowing them. When he began once more to breathe, he cradled each in turn, their bodies whole by some twisted miracle. Gently, he held them and listened to what they most wanted him to remember, to know, as they lay in his arms. To Đurđica, he hummed a lullaby, and to Jelena, whispered poem. He returned Želimir’s lighter to his hand before he leveled the dirt back over his friend’s face, closing his own eyes in thanks and farewell.
He laid each person in their grave, tracing their names in that same soil, mapping them in his memory for pilgrimage, though he knew he neither would nor could ever return. And so he gazed at the gravesites that stretched on and on, as far as his eyes could make out, learning them by heart. Filthy with burial dust, he rested his heavy body on a sarcophagus, his tears streaking rivers through the dirt on his cheeks. He wept himself dry. No shadows moved to indicate the passing of time, but when he looked up again, his surroundings were no longer terra incognita.
He made his way back over the wounded landscape, leaving only Europe staring after him with Georgia’s face, slowly transmuting into the pale lines of the mapmaker’s sure hand and scrambled mind. He found the gateway, the passage into a city eternal, daybreak. The traffic’s whir had already begun.
He laid each person in their grave, tracing their names in that same soil, mapping them in his memory for pilgrimage, though he knew he neither would nor could ever return. And so he gazed at the gravesites that stretched on and on, as far as his eyes could make out, learning them by heart. Filthy with burial dust, he rested his heavy body on a sarcophagus, his tears streaking rivers through the dirt on his cheeks. He wept himself dry. No shadows moved to indicate the passing of time, but when he looked up again, his surroundings were no longer terra incognita.
He made his way back over the wounded landscape, leaving only Europe staring after him with Georgia’s face, slowly transmuting into the pale lines of the mapmaker’s sure hand and scrambled mind. He found the gateway, the passage into a city eternal, daybreak. The traffic’s whir had already begun.
Under vanishing starlight, he took a turn eastward, hopeful it would lead him where he needed to be, his hand grasping the guidebook in his pocket.
“Mappamundi” first appeared in khōréō, June 15 2024 (ed. Kanika Agrawal)
“Mappamundi” first appeared in khōréō, June 15 2024 (ed. Kanika Agrawal)
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