In Musafirhana, A.H. flexed his muscles
and lifted a pig, a pink and stinky thing.
Joseph edged alongside and Olivia snapped the picture.
To his parents' strange delight, the market was much worse here,
littered and smelling of rot, aisles
packed with country people swathed
in odorous wool, shit smeared pigs and lambs
bleeding from the beds of rusty trucks.
Joseph felt annihilated and begged to return to the hotel.
His parents agreed.
They bought a prayer rug they loved.
And now they were hungry.
After lunch, the Robinsons climbed the streets
of the old quarter to a cool museum of icons,
painted Saints with jewels stuck to the canvas
for their eyes and one that made Joseph look away,
Mary, the mother of Jesus.
Her divine nipples were pearls.
Boarding the bus to Ropotovo,
the Robinsons were patted for weapons.
When two soldiers with machine guns
took seats behind the driver, Olivia quickly
rose and led the family to the back.
Turbid with tobacco smoke, the bus
bounced through countryside until Joseph
began to think of vomiting.
But he was able not to when he saw how sick his father seemed,
leaning forward and grimacing, checking his watch
every minute.
In their hotel at last, A.H. said it was agony to piss.
As he lay groaning on a bed, knees drawn up,
clutching his crotch, he explained to Joseph
that his urinary tract felt like the bore of a flamethrower.
Joseph turned away to align his guys on the windowsill,
secretly touching himself to see if he hurt, too,
while Olivia searched through her envelope labeled
Emergencies.
Ropotovo had an American Center.
She got the administrator on the phone.
Then A.H. stopped groaning and took the receiver with,
to Joseph's amazement, a chuckle,
that which all men must, he said in a jocular new voice,
he found himself disabled from doing.
The administrator said to walk right over.
The American Center was near the hotel,
so the Robinsons slowly did, stopping for A.H.
to lean against buildings and grin at the sky.
When they entered the administrator's office,
a sudden proud American flag and then the president's
signed photo made Joseph feel safe.
The administrator's easy American voice,
how well he spoke English, seemed miraculous.
His smiling secretary brought cold cans of Coca-Cola
and a bowl of popcorn.
On the basis of Professor Robinson's symptoms,
the administrator had already sent down for a broad spectrum
antibiotic.
He handed a vial across his desk and A.H. washed a capsule down
with Coke.
"Things are starting to happen quickly,"
the administrator said.
"You left Most Begova when?
They have just closed the airport.
You three were on my list this morning."
He flourished a pen and whirled an oval,
sectioning a column of names.
"The state department wants you out."
Then he turned to Joseph.
"You never learned this in school.
A country can die, just the same as a person."
Joseph thought of them all trapped in Great Slavia's
huge, dead body.
But Olivia explained that they were
traveling with the greatest care and had only a week to go.
Then they'd fly home from Kalemegdan
which was still secure.
This would be a trip that their son would remember always.
And AH said, "It's a story he needs to know.
He'll remember it when all of this is gone.
As long as he remembers, it happened.
That's why people have children."
It sounded like one of his father's jokes,
but Joseph wasn't sure.
He'd often wondered why his parents had him.
[LAUGHTER]
"Be inconspicuous," the administrator said.
[LAUGHTER]
At the seaside resort of Pag,
Joseph's bed shook.
Something glass fell and broke.
When he opened his eyes, both his parents were at the window,
dark against the moonlight.
"Joseph, this is fantastic," said his mother.
"We're having an earthquake."
[LAUGHTER]
It seemed to be over.
Olivia asked whether he'd felt it, what he'd felt exactly,
and suggested he write the entire experience down.
But it was A.H. who swung his arms and said
he planned to work all night.
The next morning, he was still propped up,
his bedside lamp enfeebled by daylight, his lap
cradling his notebook and pen like elderly pets.
"A trap, a trick," he said, "a hoax, a whore."
Earthquakes were nugatory.
Disaster was profoundly silly.
There had been nothing to write about at all.
After breakfast, Joseph's parents
sprang a surprise like a punch in the chest.
The day was gorgeous, great for the beach,
they both insisted heartily.
Joseph loved the beach.
And when they told him this was a nudist beach,
he felt sickened and betrayed.
[LAUGHTER]
Olivia said he could wear his suit.
"Bring a book," A.H. advised.
"The secret is, it's boring."
Where you paid to get in, there were signs, cameras with X's
drawn through.
The path followed a rocky shoreline in and out
of clumps of trees.
Bodies lay on the blankets, but Joseph couldn't see much.
Then, two men and two women, as though by some plan,
all were fat, passed them walking the other way,
in sandals and sun hats, the men's pricks bobbing benignly,
all of them talking and gesturing
as if, like Joseph himself in dreams,
they didn't realize they were naked.
[LAUGHTER]
Just looking at the women felt like taking photographs.
Their black tangles patched with pink
looked like aerial shots of undeveloped land.
Soon, more people were passing.
Joseph saw three girls his own age talking together
in what might be German.
These weren't as bad.
Their hairless bodies looked reassuringly simple.
Just beyond a restaurant with naked patrons
at outdoor tables, the Robinsons came to the main beach.
People lay on towels and blankets, on shed clothing.
Some stood in the water.
Others had waited or swum to an island,
whose rocks Joseph had to squint,
were a rookery of sunbathers.
They spread their towels, and Joseph's parents
started to undress.
A.H. folded his clothes carefully.
"Is something wrong?"
Maybe it was the sunlight or the fleshy Great Slavians
and Germans, but AH seemed inhumanly thin and pale,
as though he'd been stripped by a mugger.
Last of all, he removed his glasses
and slid them into a shoe.
Olivia had turned to undress and now
faced Joseph with an embarrassed smile.
He was shocked by her breasts, no longer round,
but hanging half depleted, like birthday balloons
the next morning.
[LAUGHTER]
Her vagina, if that was what it was,
looked weird to him, like something
from space that you saw in a movie.
"Are you coming?"
she asked.
Joseph shook his head.
He watched his tender footed parents, leaning on each other,
wobble down the pebbly beach to the water.
Where the foam broke, they dipped their toes.
They walked in knee deep, waist deep,
and then he lost them in the distance
and the crowd of bathers.
Joseph lay on his stomach, thinking
how clothes showed it was you.
He took guys out of his pockets.
It was their armor and weapons that distinguished them.
Otherwise, they were identical, pale pieces of plastic.
They had no faces, just indentations
to suggest the shapes of heads.
Joseph felt his own face.
He was like a plastic guy.
The only things that made him Joseph
were things that could change at any time, things
that could easily be removed, shoes and socks,
a pair of pants.
There was a roar, and three jets hurtled from seaward,
passing low over the beach.
An old lady quickly covered herself
with a fold of her blanket, and a young man leaped to his feet,
shouting and throwing seaweed at the sky.
Then Joseph's parents were standing
above him, hair matted to their heads, wet flesh glistening.
"Can we please leave?"
Joseph asked.
For a minute, he thought he might cry.
He imagined them running, bullets stitching the sand
all around.
But he didn't know whether either of his parents
was actually able to run.
"It's an attempt to frighten," Olivia said, toweling herself.
"The local people aren't leaving.
And Joseph, you must go in.
The water is fantastic!"
A.H. was already over his open notebook,
head tilted back, as though he still had his bifocals on.
His mother was right.
No one was leaving.
In fact, more naked people were arriving.
The beach wasn't being attacked.
Joseph, who was wearing his bathing suit underneath,
removed his outer clothes.
"Can I swim to the island?"
"You may," Olivia told him, then said to be careful,
it got deep.