It’s not that we control the media, said the official, it’s that we will not allow the media to act against the interests of the Croatian state and the Croatian people. And besides, said Ivan Matulić’s grandson, all of that didn’t interest him much. What did interest him was a bond beyond politics and ideology, a sense of loyalty to the native soil and a sense of the transmission of purity from heart to heart. Like in Zen Buddhism, said Daniel Atijas. Maybe, said Ivan Matulić’s grandson, though he knew nothing about Buddhism, and after everything that had happened, he seemed to know nothing about the heart and even less about purity. When on a trajectory of ignorance, a person cannot stop and tends to sink ever deeper until the ignorance reaches the tip of his nose, his eyelids, the crown of the head. And he, he said, discovered that he was mired in muck; he might have been able to speak about it all as an ascendance, a conquest, which acquisition of knowledge really is, but attaining such heights would have been linked to some kind of elation, and for him, he said, there was no such feeling. He reached the heights, one could say, only to sink to the depths. It all began just when he thought he would forge the most powerful bond if he were to learn something about his forebears, and it made sense, did it not? to find out something about his grandfather, the man who predetermined his, this grandson’s, fate, having decided to venture off to another continent; one might say instead, he said, that his grandfather had inscribed on the grandson’s palm his travel line and his line of return.
He showed us his palm and looked at us as if we knew what the lines meant. He hadn’t been sure where he should begin, for he had no idea where his family came from, but one evening while out strolling around Zagreb he remembered his grandfather’s books and realized that the library was the place to start; there he would finally discover the thread which would guide him through the labyrinth and lead him out. He visited all the Zagreb libraries, and in one of them, perhaps the university library, he wasn’t sure, he found two books by Ivan Matulić in the catalogue. Both were travelogues: the first about a summer spent in Iceland, the second about a winter spent on the Norwegian fjords. On the back of the Iceland book he came across the information that the author had traveled several years before over the American continents, that he had traversed them from north to south, or rather, the blurb said, from the Yukon to Tierra del Fuego — travels about which one could read in his books Among the Mountains and Indians and The Pampas Is Burning. It would be better, he said, not to ask how he finally unearthed the books — the search itself merited a novel — but find them he did, and he learned from the biographical notes that his grandfather was born in 1904 in Osijek, where he mastered the trade of glazier, and from there, having found life’s meaning in constant movement, as he said in the foreword to the first book, he set out on his peregrinations. He never said what spurred him to travel, but with the Balkan wars, World War I, the collapse of Austria-Hungary, and the emergence of Yugoslavia in mind, one could see this as a desire for peace and quiet, a flight from the disorder of history into the order of the scheduled arrivals and departures of trains and boats — mimicry of a nostalgic dream of things that never change — or restlessness of the spirit masked by the activity of the flesh.
All this was, of course, mere guesswork, said Ivan Matulić’s grandson, since his grandfather had died years ago, though he, the grandson, was convinced of the veracity of what he sensed, considering how many times the same pattern had repeated: departure for an exotic, poorly known destination, a stay of several months, acquaintance with local circumstances and beliefs, then a return to Osijek and Croatia, as if these sometimes protracted absences were designed to so whet the returnee’s appetite for return that the condition in which he found his country, his home, no longer mattered. That should have told him something, said Ivan Matulić’s grandson, but at the time he wasn’t yet ready to hear it. Like someone who has discovered the joy of return, even though he had never left, in the literal sense, the place to which he was returning, he believed at first that this was at the heart of what his grandfather had been writing about. Then began, he said, the period of sobering — an apt word, since all love, all elation, is a form of inebriation, and when one is inebriated, as we had all experienced the night before, one’s defense mechanisms react more feebly, until finally the person becomes the victim of the drink, or rather the delusion. It is one’s own delusion, of course, but delusion is delusion, regardless of its source. In short, his initial indifference toward Croatian political events slowly eroded: ignoring the heightened nationalist rhetoric became harder and harder, as did drawing untenable historical parallels, refusing to take responsibility — all the things which, when he sat down and thought about them, should have bothered him right away.
Faced with not being able to understand historical references or allusions that were obvious to everyone he spoke with there, he began, at the same time, to fill in the gaps in his knowledge of Croatian and European history. A young woman named Klara, with whom he shared an apartment, though not a bed, near the train station, advised him not to rush into this; she urged him to give up on what she called his mad rummage backward through the time spiral, especially if he wanted to preserve his pureness of heart, his feelings. But by then it was too late. Once a person ventures into history, he said, extricating himself is not an option. This is what happened. He pulled together what he could find in English, even what he was told had been enemy propaganda; soon his head was spinning with figures, including the data for the living, slaughtered, burned, rebaptized, and disappeared people — in this hellish cosmos, simple disappearance seemed the kindest of fates. The question of where his grandfather was in all of this, he said, insinuated itself wormlike into him, and that worm now squirmed on its way, stopping at nothing and never announcing what it would become in the end. This was the first time he felt frightened, not, of course, in a way that implied terror and quaking; rather, he was filled by what is often called a chilling dread, a fear of the unknown and the amorphous, that swelled inside him and threatened to fill him to the brim. Klara, he said, had been right, but he never liked acquiescing to her, and even if he had, there wasn’t time for it: the purity might at any moment turn into a stain.