Perhaps it already had, but he refused to admit this to himself, to face it, leaving it instead, this stain, somewhere beyond his range of vision, at the perimeter of his consciousness. In any case, he said, he gave up on his planned trip to Osijek, using news about flare-ups of Serbian-Croatian hostilities in eastern Slavonia to justify not going, though the real reason for his fear was what he might find in the Osijek libraries and archives. The elation that had possessed him for several years, that had brought him overseas, ebbed, he said, and every morning, while still in the apartment near the train station, he would wake up a slightly different person, further from what he had been and closer to the man he had left behind three years ago. He hoped, he said, that we understood him, that we could see how at first he had believed that his grandfather — when he came to Canada from Croatia — had scribbled a pledge on the palm of his grandson’s hand to go back there, but then had begun to treat this as a pledge to forget, a call to embrace the fact that there would always be a place, no matter where, in which he would never set foot. Since he, the grandson, had, of course, set foot in Croatia, he said, the pledge no longer pertained; still, his actions didn’t seem irrevocable, and he thought that if he hastened his return, he might yet be able to convince himself that nothing had happened, that he hadn’t yet read the writing on his palm. But wouldn’t it have been simpler, Daniel Atijas and I asked, to seek the answer from the very person who knew — from his grandfather? Not anymore, said Ivan Matulić’s grandson, for his grandfather, as he’d said, had died some years before, at a time when he, the grandson, was not aware of any of these things.
Isn’t that always the way it turns out? he said. We recall those we need the most when we can no longer reach them. But that is why, after he left Croatia and went back to Calgary, he remembered something else: bags and boxes of his grandfather’s things that were in a cupboard in the basement of their house. When his grandfather died, most of his clothing had been given to the Salvation Army, some of his things were thrown away or, like his books, put on a living-room shelf, and everything else, of which there wasn’t much — two small bags and three or four cardboard boxes — was piled into the basement cupboard. Ivan Matulić’s grandson had no idea, he said, what they held, but when he started opening them, the first thing he found was old pajamas and slippers, then shirts and handkerchiefs, then a warm winter coat that filled a whole box, a toiletry kit including shaving things, two hats, and a plaid scarf, so for the most part he couldn’t imagine why these things hadn’t been tossed out or given away. At the bottom of a bag he found more copies of his grandfather’s books, one of which he gave to the Museum of Natural History and another of which he took to the city library in Calgary. As he was taking them out he touched the hard edge of something with the tips of his fingers, but when he peered into the bag, he couldn’t see what it was. He ran his hand along the bottom again and only then realized that something else was in there, but beneath the smooth lining. He got a knife from the kitchen, went back down into the basement, and started to cut. In retrospect, he said, as he talked of this and spoke of the knife and the cutting, he could see all the symbolism that went with the words, but as he worked a package wrapped in wax paper out through the slippery incision, he could not have imagined anything of the sort.
And was he thinking, asked Daniel Atijas, that the slippery incision was like a vagina and that when he inserted his hand into it, he was much like an obstetrician delivering a new being into the world? Ivan Matulić’s grandson answered that nothing like that had occurred to him; at that moment, he had thought of nothing and had been driven by a need to clarify something, learn about himself — that was all. He glanced over at me, but I said nothing. He unpacked the package, he said, and found in it a hardcover notebook, which later turned out to be Ivan Matulić’s diary from the first years of World War II, and with it various documents, letters and photographs, a small medal, several banknotes, and a cardboard box like the kind in which ballpoint or fountain pens are sold. Each of these things soon confirmed his fears, he said; the photographs, and letters, and immigrant documents, and parts of the diaries which he managed to read through slowly with the help of a dictionary — all of these things, each in its own way, told him that his grandfather, Ivan Matulić, had fought in Ustasha units during World War II. In and of itself, he said, that information might not be so terrible if one kept in mind the vast number of people who fought on the losing side, but when one learns of the crimes perpetrated against Serbs, Jews, and even Croats, then this was not something a person really wanted to learn about his forebears. He said this as if asking, not stating, so Daniel Atijas and I nodded. In May 1945, as the Communists neared Zagreb, Ivan Matulić’s grandson told us, many Croats, especially those who had fought with the Home Guard and the Ustasha forces, left for the Austrian border, hoping they would be able to surrender to the Anglo-American troops there and avoid the doom that awaited them if they fell into the clutches of the Communists.
They made it to the Drava River and the border and got as far as the Austrian town of Bleiburg, but there they were tricked by the British army, stripped of their weapons, and returned by train to Yugoslavia, where several tens of thousands of them were massacred and thrown into pits near Kočevje and elsewhere in Slovenia. His grandfather escaped, he said, probably by jumping off the train; after several days of wandering and hiding, he turned himself in to the British, who interned him at a camp for German soldiers. Later, by all accounts, he was transferred to a camp in Italy, and some three or four years after that, he received approval to emigrate thence to Canada, where he went with his son, who later, said Ivan Matulić’s grandson, became his father and whom his father, the grandson’s grandfather, had sent off to northern Italy, probably sensing where things were headed, to stay with his mother’s relatives. His father’s mother, the grandfather’s wife, had died before the war, he said, and she was buried at an Osijek cemetery. The only thing he hadn’t told us, said Daniel Atijas, was what was in the fountain-pen box. Ivan Matulić’s grandson looked around, then straight ahead, then he twisted sideways, and finally he leaned over the table and the cups of cold tea and said: a human finger. We suddenly found ourselves shrouded in a tent of silence. The commotion, the clatter of dishes, the squeak of rubber soles, all of it could still be heard, but it came to us from farther away, as if someone had moved the entire restaurant out onto the terrace, leaving the three of us in a closed shelter.
I remember that I shot a stealthy glance at my own index finger and tried to imagine it severed, separated from the rest, but I could not. I don’t know why I looked at my index finger in particular, for Ivan Matulić’s grandson hadn’t said which finger was in his grandfather’s box, but I probably wouldn’t have had any better luck imagining any of the others being severed from my hand, arm, body. Had his grandfather, Daniel Atijas wanted to learn from Ivan Matulić, been missing any fingers? No, he had not. If it wasn’t his grandfather’s, whose was it? He, too, would like to know, said Ivan Matulić’s grandson, but he found no hint in the box, or among his grandfather’s papers, or in the diary. The only thing he did not try to do was to get in touch with his grandfather’s friends, he said, with people who shared his grandfather’s convictions, for he couldn’t have borne hearing again the story of the thousand-year-old dream, and he doubted, he added, that they knew much more than he did. He chose a different tack. He worked, he said, to reconstruct his grandfather’s life carefully, especially the wartime and first postwar years, and in doing so he learned the details he had already mentioned: the escape from near Bleiburg, the time in camps in Austria and Italy, his arrival in Canada in 1948 or 1949, his move to Calgary after six months in Ottawa, his frequent visits to Banff, his life dedicated to the various jobs he held, including excavating dinosaur bones near Dramheller. And then, using the Access to Information Act, the grandson got hold of documents that helped him build a picture of his grandfather’s first years in Canada, and that picture, he said, was what completely undid him.