55.
It was nine o’clock in the evening, on 20 August in the year of our Lord 1633, when the guard unlocked the cell under the fortification walls of the reverend and free royal city of Zagreb and handed a torch to padre Benjamin. The guard held in his hands the red shoes the father had given him as a pay for the secret visit. He looked at them and he could not stop wondering: he smelled them to make sure that they were really lacquered. Then he let the father in and locked the door behind him. “Just be quiet, reverend”, he said. “I’ll come in a quarter of an hour. It is quite enough to… besides, she is fully immobile, you can do whatever you want”, he said, grinning obscenely with his mouse-like snout in the semi-darkness.
Padre Benjamin entered the cell.
“Papa!” she almost screamed with joy, in disbelief that she had the strength to utter his name. She lied on the floor, in the corner, on her right hip: her left leg was stretched on the side and was unrecognizable under her knee, since it was crushed by the nails of the Spanish boot. She breathed fast and she licked her lower lip: there was a hot blood-shot line along her face where they had whipped her on the day the guards had arrested her. She looked at him and her eyes suddenly got the same shine that belonged to him that summer of theirs, the summer of heated horse shoe, the summer of a single long moon day, (for what is a day, and a man’s life if not a moon phase: young moon in the morning, full moon in the noon and waning crescent in the afternoon): it was the shine of the day when they caught a fish, the shine of her sun multiplied in the scales of the carp; the ringing shine of her lisping zh-s and sh-s on the day she caressed his belly, the shine when she would tell him; “Stop sighing, I can’s sleep on your belly”. It was the same girl, the same fire that started in padre Benjamin and caught on his robe, leaving him naked to the world; it was the same pomegranate, with the same doe’s lips under the rags she was wearing now, only wounded, humiliated and immobile.
It was the same Joan, except that it was all gone now. Life has run out as small grains of wheat in the watermill though their intertwined palms on the summer that was left behind them, and padre Benjamin knew it, and he also knew that she knew it was so.
He sat in the corner and put her head in his lap. He started crying as a man, inconsolably, hard. His hot tears fell from his cheeks on her face, and it looked as if she was crying too, with his tears (for lovers also lend tears to each others, not only passionate smells). “Don’t cry”, she said. “It’s nothing, Papa, don’t cry, my Papa! I shall return to what I was made of: fire and light, sunlight and daylight, don’t cry, please, for I’ll be happy to be what I am: an untamable speed. Is there a bigger happiness than coming home, Papa, to the house of fire, to your Father?” He sobbed louder and louder, in a manly, deadly growl, he sobbed and could not stop, and she continued to comfort him as if he was a little boy:
“Don’t cry Papa, please don’t cry: I promise that I’ll call you, I’ll call you before every storm, Papa; you shall see my soul glowing in the clouds; I shall appear as a rainbow, as three rainbows, not as one; I shall appear as your childhood clouds, in an eternal changes, and I shall appear as the wind, as a butterfly, as the ashes of the wind that is long gone, I shall write you a letter that is alive and loving forever in autumn leaves, when I take them and blow: shshshshshsh!; and I shall sleep on your eyelashes without you noticing me, and don’t be angry that you won’t notice me Papa, for I will not want to wake you, while you sleep tired of your books and dream of me; I shall appear as a fish, with my insides filled with your unborn children; as a dragonfly that has hidden eternity in a moment, imprisoned life in a day; I shall appear as zh and sh in the mouths of other beautiful girls, you will surely recognize me, Papa, as the amber in the heath; you shall see me Papa, as living amber, when you’re old and gray haired, sitting by the fire in a monastery, I shall appear as your shadow, Papa, I promise that I’ll call, I shall even appear as Vevčani firefly, if you only call me and if you still love me; I shall appear as a the pupil of a turtle-dove, for it has the same color, the color of the fire; I shall baa as a black lamb, I shall appear as a red pomegranate brought from the south, you shall indulge me Papa, don’t cry Papa, we were happy, so let them burn us now, for they know of nothing else but to burn the happy ones, for they envy them, and all learned laws and all world courts and all court wigs and hammers, all the uniforms and ranks, all the marriage arrangements are invented only to forbid to people to burn each other’s fire in their bodies and hearts, to tickle their souls in sweet fires, that is why all of this foulness has been invented, to persecute the fire from our lives and bring in order, water that is commanded according to the wanted shape of the vessel, so don’t cry Papa, we loved each other, we lived everything in a moon life, in twenty-eight circles of the Earth around the Sun; we burned ourselves, we turned into fire, Papa; you were setting sweet flames on my loins, along my neck, in my thighs, inside me, you have sealed open and close my insides with a kiss and hot stamps, you melted me like old gold and cast me in a church bell, I have burnt for hundreds of times with you Papa, to hell with it, it’s nothing, don’t cry Papa, tomorrow it shall be nothing compared with all of our fires until not, Papa!” and then she caressed his beard lying in his lap.
Finally, he calmed down. He looked at each line on her face, for he wanted to remember this image: her perfect triangular mouth, smiling sadly, her ember eyes, her pointed chin, the unextinguished fire. He looked at her face upside-down in his lap: her face of glorious fresco painting, made in a breath of an ancient Slav. He read in her eyes that she was indeed not scared, she was even eager to leave, to become fire, to be with him again, to call him from everywhere, to come to him as the light, as an evening fire set by a shepherd on a distant hill, as a hot summer, as a silent sun sleeping in the sugar of the heavy autumn fruits.
“I never bought you shoes”, he said all of a sudden, in a reproaching tone.
“I know you have”, she said, caressing his beard. “Red, lacquered. I can almost see them. And I know that your heart crumbled when you had to give them away: but I no longer need them; if you left barefoot, you don’t need shoes, for you walk the light”.
Then she lifted the rags from her belly and showed him the empty butterfly spot. “See”, she said. “It flew away”. Then she smiled sadly. But she smiled anyway. “It’s better off free. They tore its wings, the two letters: they separated them. But I know they will find each other again and they will join”, she said.
Then they looked at each other long, without words, he wanted to say something, but she said: “Psst! If you want to speak, say something more perfect than the silence”. And he kissed her on the forehead. “You, tomorrow… you will watch?”, she asked suddenly. He swallowed: silent tears still ran down his cheeks and neck. He said: “Lovers die with the same breath”. And she knew that her Papa will be there. “I want to see your eyes while I leave. I want it to be the last image that will settle in my pupil, the door of love and death. I want to have a feeling that you take me your firm hot hands and that you walk with me to the rainbows”.
She smiled sadly and ran her finger along his lower lip, as he did with her the first time, in the watermill. “Death is a door”, she said. “You just pass from one room to the other. But you are in the same house, my bit of dust: in the universe. I shall wait, I shall wait for an eternity if I have to, so that you land on my palms again. I breathed too passionately, and that is why I lost you”, she said.
And then they were quiet.
”Angels have passed”, he said. “Yes”, she said. “Angels whose day grew shorter by a lightning”.
Death is a door; indeed, the door did open: the rat stood on it, with a torch in his hand.
Then she looked at him and said: “Go now, my Papa. It will be easier if you leave. Besides, you shall see that when you arrive where you have started from, my voice will be there and it will wait for you, since it will arrive there before you”.
He did not understand the last sentence. He looked at her in wonder, and she said: “Go, run, for my voice has already left”. And he thought that she was entering some pre-mortal delirium, as Dorica Vugrinec, and he shivered. He carefully laid her head on the floor, as if leaving the most precious thing, he kissed her on the lips and with tears in his eyes he felt her breath: a breath of an animal scared to death.
There was no secret salvation door.
Then the guard pulled padre Benjamin roughly to the exit, and everything that padre Benjamin heard was the heavy metal door cruelly and mercilessly bang closed behind him.
The light bearing rat walked behind him. At the first step he said: “It seems that master inquisitor still has better time with you friars”, he said. “He always leaves the cells in a good mood”.
Padre Benjamin walked in front of the light bearer fallen under ground, one step before his light; when a man rushes he even goes before the light, the same as if he walks behind it: he walks in darkness. He smiled for the first time in his life with the edge of his lips, where rage has accumulated. Rage heavy as a bag of black and barren stones.
Translated by: Elizabeta Bakovska