Fiction: Behind God's Back by Tomislav Longinovic

Behind od's Back

y grandfather Miya lives in a place near the Bulgarian border. The name of the place is Nish, and it is real. He spends days on his back, looking through the window. Through the curtains of once white lace, handmade by my dead grandmother, he sees the world of infinite, dreadful present. Before retirement, Miya worked for the railway as a clerk, measuring distances between stations.

He once told me the story about a tunnel which never ends. I remember him waving his wrinkled hands as he imitated the sound of a steam engine which never reaches the end of the tunnel. One of his eyes was looking at me, while the other, injured one always looked away. I remember closing my eyes and trying to imagine the world of infinite darkness. But, the horror had been so intense that I immediately opened my eyes and giggled while he puffed and sweated.

My grandfather is only one of three persons who could have once been able to tell the story about the unending tunnel with an abundance of detail, rage, and horror. I am sure he remembered every twist in the plot and the fate of all the passengers until the day he was taken in an olive gray van with a red cross to the hospitaL Miya was treated for depression with a steady current of electricity applied to his temples. This calmed him down considerably, causing a pleasant side effect of forgetfulness. His memory was erased on the cellular level, leaving me with a firm conviction that words are fragile and old~ that stories are a futile attempt of reaching their invisible origin concealed under the layers of blood and mud of the Serbian soil, silent and fearful like a child without a father. Words don't mean much to my grandfather anymore. It angers him to see his only grandson spending his time playing with words, inventing stories, stirring up feelings. He does not want to talk. He stares through the window opposite his bed and keeps silent.

But the story is restless. It is a story of horror which can be told only if the temptation of easy flowing language is resisted, if the core of suffering is preserved as an unspoken vow. The force behind God's back moves the word and tears through the chains of lies which ~over the surface of the white page,}~ speaks in tongues, and through the voices of those who suffered, it finds other faces and bodies.

Two other persons are dead.

Gypsy Dragi died many years ago. I knew him while I was a boy who'd spend his summer holidays playing with the dog he brought from the ghetto. Dragi was a man who slaughtered lambs and piglets for a price. He found a puppy inside a pile of animal guts outside his mud shack. Gypsy saw it inside the stinking mess covered with a buzzing crust of fat flies, read it as a sign from Kali, and

FICTION

spared the animal that did not seem worth living. Since he was coming to our house to kill a lamb for Easter, he brought the puppy along and gave it to me as a present. '~.~'

My grandmother Lela is~he person who could tell this story better than anyone else. She fed my puppy and even gave him a name. We called him Johnnie because that was the name of the American president who was shot that year in a distant desert city, a man whose television image grandmother adored with the same silent devotion as she did the icon of the Mother of God which looked at us from the wall ~y her bed covered with Turkish rugs. The destiny of the little mongrel with sad brown eyes could sum up the story of our family: Johnnie lived inside the yard paved with cobblestones, ate leftovers from his cracked plate, enjoyed the fondling of my boyish hands, and died in the street, torn apart by the German shepherd. Soldiers who took my grandfather to the concentration camp thirty years before Johnnie's death were Germans. They did not arrest him for some heroic deed since Miya was neither a hero nor a brave man. He was just trying to keep his family alive. Germans took him to the camp as part of a general racial cleanup, as an exercise of their will to power, as a show of decisiveness and strength of their armies: jaw of the huge shepherd opens, ivory teeth plunge into the neck of the squealing mongrel, blood spurts all around~ life evaporates quickly. Cold northern wind blows across the grey, barren plains of Serbia, slowly building up the sediments of dust over the barbed wire closest to the ground, covering it with dirt in no time, muffling screams, making space for new beginnings.

I see: my grandfather as a young man, standing in a line with other men who do not understand, who do not even ask anymore. Orders are given in sharp sounds of a foreign language as men aimlessly move around the camp. Miya stands between Gypsy Dragi and Leopold Alkalai, looking as the procession of young communist girls is being led into the gas chambers. They do not cry-they are naked. Many of them have never known love. Girls sing the International and then a drawn out and sad Slavic song about the life that is never long enough. One of them drops a piece of paper before she is hauled into the building. The wind carries the message in front of the line of men. None of them dares pick it up. The wind blows the letter further off, beyond the barbed wire.

What goes on inside the dog's brain before it dies? Is it able to comprehend the horror of murder and violence? Or does it succumb to the law of nature which favors the stronger? A dog is not able to bear witness to the present and leave a testimony for the future. It dies fal. ling slowly onto the ground, its limbs shaking as the strength is drained from the body, its eyes losing the last sparks of life. There are no last words, no promises or prophecies. But, my grandmother said that when Johnnie was killed by the German shepherd she heard a loud crack inside her old walnut wardrobe and knew that somebody had just died. Only later she discovered that the dog's body was lying in the street in a puddle of blood.

Long winter nights: I cannot fall asleep, listening to my grandmother's heavy breathing and the ticking of the giant alarm clock. The story haunts me as I fear that grandmother's breath may soon become frantic or even cease completely: The prisoners stand in front of the latrine, while the guard beats them with an iron bar. He is enraged because the process is so slow. If you can't get the shit to move, you deserve to die. He yells at them and beats the tired flesh until his helmet falls off his head and lands in the puddle.

The man inside the sanitary shack is Leopold Alkalai. He can hardly stand up and walk on his own. Grandpa tries to help him to his feet, but collapses and falls by his side. They are all waiting for the last blow, for the iron bar that breaks the skull and starts the period of prolonged silence. The guard picks up his helmet from the mud and stares at them with a twisted expression on his face. Gypsy Dragi jumps at Alkalai, grabs his head and cuts the neck artery with a piece of sharpened glass. The crowd watches the weak trickle of blood, dimming eyes and a grateful smile of the martyr who eases himself onto the stinking floor and expires. Miya gets up on his feet, stares at the lifeless mass of skin and bones, and tries to say something to Dragi. The guard is perplexed but orders Dragi to step over and hand him the glass. He slaps him hard on the face, takes the glass from his hand and throws it into the stinking pit. Then he orders the murderer to follow him.

Dragi gave me the dog on Good Friday. The puppy was full of scabs, ticks, and fleas. While I was helping grandmother to clean its brown fur, Dragi tied the lamb to the apricot tree in the middle of the yard and said he would be back on Sunday to do the job. Grandfather sat under the tree with a shotglass of plum brandy in his hand, watching the lamb as he sipped the golden liquid. He did not say good-bye to Dragi. Grandmother later told me that he did not speak to Dragi ever since the war had ended. They would sometimes sit in silence and drink a glass of brandy without looking at each other. They stared at the soil paved with Turkish cobblestones, inhaled the attar of roses from the garden and sighed. I could not understand the burden that had oppressed my grandfather.

Right after the liberation from the Germans, the conquering partisan army took my grandfather from the concentration camp and put him in prison. He was suspected of knowing something~ something that he did Continued

Fiction (Continued from page 47) not know. He did not even know what they thought he was supposed to know. They had kept him in the basement of the prison, immersed in the icy spring torrents of the Nishava River. They wanted him to tell them the story, everything, -from the beginning to the end-all that he knew about certain persons in the camp, including the Gypsy Dragi. Investigators would wake him up every time his head would slide down under the water and ask him more questions. Who had collaborated with the Nazis? Who was against the Communists? How is it that he stayed alive and thousands of other were dead? What did he promise to the Germans?

They released him after a few months. My grandmother, my mother, and my aunt were waiting for him in front of the prison. He did not say a word, he did not even kiss the children. Then his brother, a famous partisan cavalry colonel, showed up with a jeep and offered him a ride. Miya just looked at the red star painted on the hood, spat in the dust and turned towards the railroad tracks. He came home and knelt in front of the icon of Saint Nicholas, moving his lips and

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American Heart • Association V

crying. The women stood behind him and cried in silence. Suddenly he jumped up, ran into the kitchen and grabbed scissors from the table. He started stabbing his own chest, but grandmother managed to overpower him before he succeeded in finding the heart. Then the olive gray van with a red cross came to take him to the mental hospital. His depression was real.

I call my grandfather from America once a year, for the celebration of Saint Nicholas, his patron saint. I put the receiver to my ear and listen as the electronic impulse travels thousands of miles and reaches the bell of his telephone seated on the wooden stool by his bed. His voice is weak and I can hardly understand what he is saying. I am always tempted to ask him about the war, about his years in the camp, the whole story, from the beginning to the end, but something holds me back. We exchange congratulations, wish each other well and then I hang up. Sadness comes over me and an image haunts me.

The image is about my life, the life of my grandfather and the destiny of our people. It is connected to Nish, to that real place. Serbians visit the graves of their dead on the anniversary of their passage to the realm of light. It so happened that I had to serve my year of military duty there, in the middle of things. Grandfather and I went to grandmother's grave together. I was in uniform, in the same olive gray uniform that the conquering Army was wearing as it liberated the town from the Nazis. I stood by the grave monument while he sat on a pile of old newspapers. I had a cap on my head with the red star on the forehead. Beside grandmother's name and picture was grandfather's name and picture, with a year of his birth carved into the marble and only the year of his death missing. He looked at his own picture on the grave and at that moment I thought I understood human longing for eternity. Dragi's hand took the knife many times and spilled the blood of many lambs and men, many dogs and men changed their forms and experienced death, but all those were just illusions, transitions of various forms of life which were never lived, but were always there, in an uninterrupted procession that went from light to darkness and back from the darkness to light.

Grandfather said: "I hope there is light at the end of the tunnel."

It was a nice May morning, there were tiny rainbows in the drops of water hanging from the blades of grass. I took the cap from my head and let it slide onto the damp earth. -By Tomislav Longinovic

Lithuanians (Continued from page 37)

visitors, many of them among the 1.5 million Lithuanians now living in the U.S. Cultural offerings include religious ceremonies, concerts, readings, and a popular Lithuanian festival held each summer in early July. The hotel serves old-world Lithuanian fare such as "dark and raisin breads, 'borscht, kapusta (cabbage soup), sour cream salad, potato salad, fish in tomato sauce, pyrogis su mesa (meat pies), and cheese."

Father Bernardino, 70, is director of the novices and spokesman for the Monastery. Lithuanian born, he studied in Rome before coming to Maine with the original priests of 1947. He carries a warm, scholarly sense of humor. Admonishing our photographer for showing up late, he winked, "You missed an important ceremony. Contemplation of the Ceiling!" A beat later he explained, "That's our nap time."

With Lithuania in the world spotlight and Father Bernardino's shared drearHr.on the brink of reality, he and his coU~agues are being barraged by media across the country for reactions. In a typically dramatic move to aid in Lithuania's exciting strides toward religious and political independence, the friars, he announced to us, have sold a parcel of the Monastery, with proceeds being sent to Lithuania as a catalyst to spur on the native country: "It is a sensation," he has told the newspapers. "This movement is toward a freedom of religion. It is unsuspected, out of controL"

BUSINESS

In 1972, the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy tribes filed suit to reclaim land they said the state of Maine had stolen from them-virt~ally twothirds of the state. Tn~ suit was settled out of court in 19B0 in the Land Claims agreement. It was the largest Indian claims settlement in U.S. history. In it, the tribes were each given $27.25 million to buy a total of 300,000 acres of land. In addition each tribe received $13.5 million that was set up in a trust managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The Indian Land Claims settlement infused millions of dollars into the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy tribes. Ralph Dana, a Passamaquoddy and former governor of the tribe, started a trucking business in Perry in 1974with one truck; he now owns six and rents up to sixty more.

Engineer Watie Akins has been a professional for twenty-seven years. His Old Town firm specializes in structural engineering and occasionally teams up with other consultants to d~sign large residential and industrial projects.

With a truck, some tools and a small loan, Miles Francis sta'rted a roofing and siding company in 1973. Now, with twenty-eight employees, two offices, and more than $2 million a year in business, Francis says he's "doing pretty well." He recently bid on a $300,000 school project. His firm has also been busy with naval contracts of up to $1.5 million, finishing most of them ahead of schedule.

In 1968, Joseph Socobasin secured the first Small Business Administration loan granted to an Indian. This Penobscot went on to run a general contracting firm for twenty years. "To me, these people would have been in business without the Land Claims settlement because they are that type of people," said Terry Polchies, director of the Central Maine Indian Association, as he read from a list of Indian-run businesses that includes T.C. Heating Services of Howland, Poolaw's Trading Post of Old Town, Indian Tent of Lincolnville, and the Three Feathers of Houlton. These businesses are all run privately, with no tribal affiliation.

And over in Perry and Princeton, the Passamaquoddy tribe has been . credited with making a series of wise investments with the money it received from the Land Claims settlement. Not too long ago the tribe turned one investment into a $55 million profit.

Many say that time spent away from the reservation, out in the working world of "mainstream America," sharpened their business sense. Dana worked as a tool-and-die maker in Massachusetts before returning to the Passamaquoddy reservation to start his business. That work experience, he says, enabled him to see opportunities to which his fellow Indians, because of their isolated reservation existence, could not see. Oil delivery, road plowing, home building-this was work Indians, burdened with a chronic high rate of unemployment, could take on themselves rather than hire outside contractors to do. "I realized there were opportunities on the reservation before Land Claims," Dana said. "until you get into the main stream of construction, you don't really see the opportunities," said Francis. "If you're just coming off the

Photo at left shows Olamon Industries-the audio cassette manufacturing plant at Indian Island.

reservation you really don't know what avenue to take." "If it hadn't been for help from outside the tribe, I wouldn't have any business going," Akins acknowledges, while Dana says his business has been aided immensely by "set-aside" laws that require companies to sub-contract work on jobs receiving federal highway funds to minority-owned firms.

Maine's Native Americans waited a long time to re-inherit a portion of what was rightfully theirs to begin with. And much needed opportunities beyond the reservation have only begun to surface. It can be argued that the Land Claims settlement amounts to a certain amount of leverage, even if only indirectly. "We really started so late," Akins said. "Vp until now, even into my generation, there weren't many people at all who went on to a postsecondary education. And education is a strong requirement for going into business. " "We are in the development stage," said Dana. "The opportunities are there. And because we increased our land base, there are tremendous opportunites for development. We are improving. We just have a lot of growing pains.". -Bryant Carpenter