That summer Stefano Cirtovich lost a cargo of Japanese silks, and Jovo made up the loss. For this benevolence they disliked him all the more. Gratitude, of course, expressed itself in a dinner, and Stefano’s wife Elisabeth, an Austrian woman, served them a nice fat fish in a fish-shaped dish, with fresh bread, olives, cheese and Friulian wine — an adequate meal, which Marija complimented, while Tanya and Liljana ate shyly, with their faces bowed; Veljko got bored and pinched Tanya under the table; Vuk and Nicola were both at sea, and the other unmarried sisters were at home, because Marija wished to save Elisabeth from too great an effort. It was sunset, the sky scarlet as a Serbian cloak at a festival, when Florio appeared, only for an instant, he said, and only to greet his brothers. While Stefano sent the wine around again, Florio laughingly repeated what his youngest daughter Vesna had said: Oh, father, how I would love you to bring me a Turk’s head to play with! — Jovo Cirtovich kept quiet. Tanya grew wide-eyed. The next time they came out of church together, Florio took his arm and invited him to join his brothers and uncles in a raid upon a Turkish convoy at Trebinje. Didn’t he care to strike again for Mother Serbia? — Spare me your principles, said Jovo Cirtovich. I’ve seen you sell cows to Janissaries to turn an extra few ducats. — After this, his brothers accused him of putting on Turkish pantalons. He had heard it all before. That night he said to Tanya, who had asked no questions: Someone forgot that it’s better to fight for the Heavenly Kingdom. — Yes, father, but when will you tell me how to do that? — Marija glided sadly into the room, so he said: That’s all now, Tanyotchka. Have you calculated how many hogsheads can fit in the Beograd? — Yes, father, and I have an idea about the ballast… — He stroked her hair.
Florio and Massimo cornered him in the warehouse. They said: You’ve got luck, brother; there’s no denying that.
Jovo Cirtovich replied nothing.
Brother, they said, we’ve been talking. It seems you’ve kept Father’s legacy for yourself—
Watch what you say. Haven’t I given you bastards money and ships?
We praise you for that. But treasure comes easily to you. The other day Lazzaro brought up a certain point. You see, we’ve come to believe that what Father left you—
Measure a wolf’s tail once he’s dead, said Jovo Cirtovich. Now get out.
Again and again, Jovo Cirtovich asked his only friend whether he ought to show the treasure to Tanya. What was he to do with her anyhow? None of his sons possessed her aptitude, but how could a woman command ships? A little shyly, Vasojevic said: It might be given unto her to petition him. She’s a good girl, so sweet and so religious; if she said to him, sainted Lazar, please return to us, how could he deny her? — You’re too kind, said his master, smiling a little, because he believed every bit of it. And then the grimaces of care remasked both their faces, so that any stranger might have said: Two more refugees from the Turks! — But schools of gold ducats swam in; they were more successful every year. Better still, Cirtovich now decoded that papyrus from Heracleopolis, acquired on Vasojevic’s second voyage to Egypt, for a trifling price. Recognizing from the idiosyncratic excellence of the handwriting the geometer called High-Seeing, whose observations had been verified by Ptolemy, and being further reassured by the perfect errorlessness in the Greek, not to mention the later addition of a very specific critical sign before the lemma, which implied that some other careful intelligence had found the treatise worth considering in detail, Cirtovich saw fit to trust it as corroboration of what he had formerly merely hoped for: Nearly every voyage became possible. The night skies were dangerous, to be sure, but certain vibrating chords could speed a ship from orbit to orbit; then there were starry tangent courses, and a spiral way, inhabited by a kind of current, which passed through all the Spheres. The mind that believed itself condemned to a stationary or isolated existence committed a crime against itself. No reason remained not to dare ever higher. That night in the warehouse the two friends quaffed a bottle of Friulian wine, dreaming aloud about stars. Feeling quizzical, the master laid down the dark-glass on one of their astrological maps. The topic had turned to Jupiter, whose inhabitants, wrote High-Seeing, had invented a red fire of superlunary potency. The Great Red Spot was their work. The man who obtained some of this stuff would be invincible in war. So those two rode their hobbyhorse, and envisioned liberating Serbia forever. All the while their companion lay watching them with its electric-blue eye. Sometimes it glowed all through its body, and ever so often it uttered pinpricks of radiance. Rising suddenly, Vasojevic said, upraising his hand like Saint Mikhaiclass="underline" If I ever saw any such monster on the high seas, I’d take an axe to its arms! — Careful, my friend, murmured Jovo Cirtovich.
It was Vasojevic who first proposed (having dreamed strangely, about some distressed ship seeking to forge over a sandbar) that they might be imperiled or polluted, not by their end, of course, but by their means. — No, said his master. We’re getting old, so the world draws in; that’s all. Everything seems uglier as we age.
But why?
They watched each other carefully, to discover how well they slept.
On one occasion, as the two men completed the conveyance of a certain trunk from a fallen favorite of the Sultan to a hireling of the Holy Roman Empire, having rented a stevedore’s skiff, they were rowing toward the Ponterosso when Vasojevic’s gratitude came out; one of Cirtovich’s rivals (I think it was Luca Morelli) stood up at the extreme edge of the working half-bridge of little boats attached to the stone slab on the west side of the Canal Grande, shading his eyes with his hands as he gazed after them: to starboard there was Vasojevic in the red cloak, his silhouetted oar wounding the skiff’s reflection in the blue-black water, while to port sat Cirtovich, himself entirely a shadow, as was his side of the boat; and they passed beneath the Ponterosso without looking back, while on the east side of the canal, obscure within the dark crowd of beggars, idlers, prostitutes, and those who waited for their men to come home (not to mention Cirtovich’s brothers outstretching their longfingered hands), the consignee, which is to say the hireling, drifted slowly toward the sail-furled, forest-masted ships, where on the third gangway he was supposed to receive delivery, all parties well aware that their meeting, once accomplished, would be no more a secret, although since he had prepared, in Cirtovichian fashion, a closed carriage, any reaction of the Triestini would comprise a negligible quantity; and just before they emerged from the Ponterosso’s shadow, the two Serbs, sensing the observation of the man on the bridge of boats behind them, turned not toward him, but, being discreet men, toward each other; and in that instant the work of the thing in the neck-pouch advanced itself: Each found horror in the other’s sight, and knew it. After that, were they friends? They would have said so.