‘Maybe she went down to the water?’
Maybe she did. They come to an agreement: Branko and Kunicki will return to that spot on the road while the other two go to the police station to call down to the town of Vis; Branko explains that Komiža itself has only one policeman. Glasses holding melting ice still stand on the table.
Kunicki has no trouble recognizing the place where they’d pulled off, where he had been parked before. It feels like ages ago. Time is passing differently, thick and acrid, sequenced. The sun appears from behind the white clouds, and suddenly it is hot.
‘Horn,’ says Branko, and Kunicki applies pressure to the horn.
The sound is long, mournful, like the voice of an animal. Then it stops, shattered into cicadas’ small echoes.
They move through the olive brush, bellowing out from time to time. They don’t run into one another again until the vineyard, and then after a brief talk they decide to inspect that entire area. They scour rows half in shadow, calling out for the missing woman: ‘Jagoda, Jagoda!’ It occurs to Kunicki that his wife’s name means ‘berry’ in their native Polish. It is such a common name that he had forgotten about that until now. Suddenly it seems to him that he is taking part in some sort of ancient ritual, blurry, grotesque. From the bushes there hang grapes in swollen, deep violet bunches, perverse, multiplied nipples, and he wanders the leafy labyrinths, shouting, ‘Jagoda! Jagoda!’ Who is he saying that to? Who is he looking for?
He has to stop for a second. He has a stitch in his side. He doubles over between the rows of plants. He buries his head in the shadowy cool, Branko’s voice muffled by the foliage till it finally falls silent, and now Kunicki can hear the flies buzzing – quiet’s familiar warp.
Past the vineyard there’s another, separated from this one by just a narrow path. They stop, and Branko calls someone on his mobile. He repeats the words ‘wife’ and ‘child’ in Croatian – those are the only words that sound enough like Polish for Kunicki to be able to understand. The sun grows orange; great, swollen, it weakens before their eyes. Soon they’ll be able to look at it directly. The vineyards, meanwhile, take on an intensely dark green colour. Two small human figures stand helplessly in that green-striped sea.
By dusk, there are already some cars and a small cluster of men on the road. Kunicki is sitting in a car that has ‘Police’ written on it, and with Branko’s help, he responds to the haphazard – it seems to him – questions he is being asked by a big sweaty cop. He tries to speak simple English: ‘We stopped. She went out with child. They went right, here’ – he points – ‘and then I waited, we can say, fifteen minutes. Then I decide go and look for them. I can’t find them. I don’t know what have happen.’ He is given lukewarm mineral water, which he drinks in desperate gulps. ‘They are lost.’ And then he adds again: ‘Lost.’ The officer dials somebody on his phone. ‘It is impossible to be lost here, my friend,’ he tells him, while he waits for them to pick up. Kunicki is struck by that ‘my friend’. The officer’s walkie-talkie says something. It is another hour before they set out, in loose line formation, for the island’s heart.
In that time, the puffy sun sinks down around the vineyards, and by the time they’ve got all the way to the top, it’s already reached the sea. Like it or not, they view the operatic drawing out of its setting. Finally they switch on flashlights. In the dark now, they climb down the island’s steep shore, which is full of little inlets, two of which they check; each has little stone houses inhabited by the more eccentric tourists who don’t like hotels and prefer to pay more to not have running water or electricity. People use stone stoves to cook or bring gas tanks with them. They catch fish, which travel straight from the sea to the grill. No, no one has seen a woman with a child. They’re about to eat dinner – on the table are bread, cheeses, olives, and the poor fish who only this afternoon had been fully absorbed in their mindless exercises in the sea. Every so often Branko calls the hotel in Komiža – at Kunicki’s request, since he figures perhaps she got lost but ended up getting back by a different route. But Branko just pats him on the back after each call.
Around midnight the pack of men disbands. Among them are the two Kunicki had seen at Branko’s table in Komiža. Now, as they take their leave, they introduce themselves: Drago and Roman. They walk together to the car. Kunicki is grateful to them for the help, he doesn’t know how to show it, he’s forgotten how to say ‘thank you’ in Croatian; it must be similar to the Polish dziękuję, something like dyakuyu or dyakuye, but he doesn’t know. With a bit of goodwill they really ought to be able to work up some sort of Slavic koiné, a set of similar, handy Slavic words, to be used without grammar, rather than falling into a stiff and simplified version of English.
That night a boat comes up by his house. They have to evacuate – there’s a flood. The water has already reached the second floors of some buildings. In the kitchen it forces its way in through the joints between the tiles on the floor, flowing out in warm streams from the electrical outlets. Books bulge with moisture. He opens one up and sees that the letters run off like make-up, leaving empty, blurry pages. Then he realizes that everyone else has gone already, taken by an earlier boat, and that he is the only one left.
In his sleep he hears drops of water trickling lazily down from the sky, about to become a violent, short-lived downpour.
BENEDICTUS, QUI VENIT
April on the motorway, the sun’s red streaks across the asphalt, the world all delicately decorated with a glaze from the recent rain – an Easter cake. I’m driving on Good Friday, at dusk, from the Netherlands to Belgium – I don’t know which country I’m in now, since the border has vanished; unused, it’s been expunged. They’re playing a requiem on the radio. At the Benedictus, the lights come on along the motorway, as though reinforcing the blessing I’m getting involuntarily from the radio.
But in reality it could not have meant anything other than that I’d made it to Belgium, where, happily for travellers, all the motorways are well-lit.
PANOPTICON
The panopticon and the Wunderkammer, as I learned from a museum guide, are a rather venerable duo whose existence precedes that of museums. They exhibited collections of all types of curiosities that their owners had brought back from journeys to places near and far.
Nor should it be forgotten that Bentham chose ‘panopticon’ as the name for his brilliant system of prison surveillance; his goal was to construct a space that would ensure that every prisoner could be ceaselessly seen.
KUNICKI: WATER (II)
‘The island’s not that big,’ says Branko’s wife Djurdjica as she fills his cup with thick, strong coffee.
Everyone says this over and over like a kind of mantra. Kunicki gets the message – he wouldn’t have needed to be told, anyway, that the island is too small for anyone to disappear on it. It’s just over ten kilometres across, with only two real towns, Vis and Komiža. Every inch of it is searchable. It’s like rifling through a drawer. Plus everyone knows each other, in both towns. And then the nights are warm, the grapes in full flourish on the vines, the figs nearly ripe. Even if they had got lost somehow, they would have been fine – they wouldn’t have frozen or starved to death, and they could hardly have been devoured by wild beasts, either. They would simply have spent a warm night on sunburned grass, beneath an olive tree, with the sea’s sleepy rumble in the backdrop. It can’t be more than three or four kilometres to the road from any place. Little stone buildings housing wine barrels and presses stand at intervals in the fields, some equipped with provisions, candles. For breakfast they’d have juicy grapes, or a normal meal with the tourists in the inlets.