Kermin sighed. He was about to put away the radio when he struck upon an eerily clear broadcast at twenty meters. A chorus of drummers. African, perhaps. The beats were syncopated, hypnotic, the sum of their collective polyrhythms emerging and converging, conjuring a high-pitched harmonic tone that sounded like a wet fingertip traveling along the edge of a singing bowl. The harmonics hovered and bobbed and faded away again into the continuous lurch of the drumbeat. Kermin found himself pressing the radio to his ear and closing his eyes. A vision of whales surfacing on a vast ocean, brackish spray exploding into the air. The weightlessness of the sea.
“They’re noaidi drums,” said a voice.
Kermin opened his eyes and saw a perfectly round head. Their host was leaning casually against the porch rail, like a cowboy in the late afternoon. In one of his palms he held a handful of orange berries. He casually tossed one into his mouth.
“Do you want one?” he said, offering a berry to Kermin. “It’s a cloudberry. Very important up here. Cures all ills — even those you didn’t know you had.”
Kermin shook his head. “No, thank you.”
“The noaidi is like a shaman for the Sami people. He plays the drum to transcend this world and enter into the spiritual realm of the gods. The skin of the noaidi drum is painted with a map of this alternate reality. The shamans use the drums to open the avenues to ascendance.”
“And they broadcast this?”
“The Sami are modernizing. They’re still the subjugated people up here, but they’re not stupid. There’s a lot of territory in the north, and not everyone can make the noaidi ceremonies. Radios collapse distance.”
“Radios transmit across distance. Distance cannot collapse.”
“I suppose it’s all in the perception, isn’t it? The world is as we perceive it. During the war, a radio was the most precious commodity. It was how the underground communicated. It was how a family could hear news from the mainland. The Nazis knew this — whoever controlled the radio waves controlled the means of propaganda. So they seized all the radios in Norway. Except we found ingenious ways of hiding them. . Disguised as an iron. Or a bedpost. We would hollow out a log and put one inside and then stick it in the woodpile. You just had to remember which log contained the radio before you burned it.”
“My father was radioman in the war,” said Kermin.
“The most valuable man in the company.”
Kermin was silent.
“You don’t like me, do you, Kermin? You think I want to harm your child.”
“I don’t know you, so there is no way to like you or not.”
“I didn’t force you to come here.”
“You are not connecting Radar to your machine,” said Kermin. “So stop thinking about this.”
Leif smiled. “Would you like to go for a walk?”
“No, thank you,” said Kermin.
“Oh, come now, you’re leaving tomorrow, you came all this way — why not let me show you around a little? I promise, it’ll be worth your time.”
Kermin considered this. “I will only go for two minutes,” he said. “Then I come back.”
“However much time you can spare. Are you sure you don’t want a cloudberry?”
Kermin took the berry from his host. It had a sharp sweetness, a soft pinch on the tongue like the white currants back in Croatia, which he would pluck and squish between his fingers before popping them into his mouth. A wisp of memory he could not quite place sifted across his brain.
“It’s not so bad,” he said.
“Not so bad?”
“Comprehensive.” Kermin volunteered the word that Charlene often used with her smells. “Thank you.”
“Comprehensive? Okay. Kermin, I like it. You see? Would I lie to you? The cloudberry is comprehensive.”
Kermin followed Leif down a path lined with large triangular stones that looked like the oldest objects in the world.
“This place was so different during the war,” said Leif. “I used to think that war only changes us. But it also changes the land. It changes the rocks and stones around us.”
“I was child in the war.”
“Your father was a Chetnik, was he not?”
“Yes,” said Kermin. “So what?”
“I was simply stating a fact, not making a judgment.”
“My father was good man,” said Kermin. “He was fighting for his home. He was radioman, not this general making decisions for all of Chetnik army. He did what they tell him.”
“I’m sure he did.”
“You cannot blame small people for big problems.”
“I’m not suggesting your father was a bad man.”
“If my father did not fight for Chetniks,” said Kermin, “we would not have to run, and we would not go to Bergen and I would not get on this boat to America and then I would not meet Charlene. I would not have Radar. So this all good things.”
“And there would be no RGBNN.”
Kermin stopped and stared at his host. “How did you know about this?” he said.
“You thought no one was listening, didn’t you? We are always listening.”
The RGBNN. Kermin had not thought about these letters in some time. A lantern was lit in the recesses of his memory. How we forget! How we forget everything!
Kermin had been in America only six months when his father, Dobroslav Radmanovic, brave radioman for the vanquished Chetniks, collapsed and died while waiting in line at the A&P, ground chuck in hand. A brain tumor had been slowly filling the soft space beneath his skull, an artery had burst, and Dobroslav had unceremoniously surrendered his ticket, at the age of thirty-seven leaving his son orphaned and alone in a strange land.
Luckily, the bureaucratic beast that was the Bergen County Department of Human Services had sent Kermin to the Simics, a well-meaning Serbian-Australian couple who lived in a diminutive row house a stone’s throw from exit 13 of the New Jersey Turnpike.
Luka, Kermin’s new foster father, was quick to denounce the “Chetnik savages,” who he believed had given Serbs a bad reputation abroad.
“No offense to your father, but those men are wicked,” he said in Serbian. “The only reason to grow your beard this long is because you are shipwrecked. Otherwise, you have something to hide. The Chetnik is the devil sitting on the Serb’s shoulder, whispering everything we do not need to hear.”
“In English,” said Weema, Luka’s wife, emerging with cocktail and spatula in hand. “Otherwise, the little rooster will never learn.”
“In English, in English,” Luka agreed. “Everything is clearer in English. Do you know, my little rooster, that it is impossible to tell a lie in English even if what you say is not true? The opposite is true in Serbian: everything you say is a lie, even if what you say is true. And that is the truth.”
The Simics had done their best to give Kermin a Normal American Childhood. They had indeed taught him English. They had sent him to school. They had brought him to St. Sava’s each Sunday. They had tolerated his strange radio habits. And yet, as Kermin tried to settle into this new life he had inherited, he could not help feeling a great chasm opening up around the question of his father’s legacy. Until the day he died, Dobroslav had never once spoken a bad word about either Dujic or the Chetnik cause. Such unequivocalness left his son balancing a degree of cautious reverence for his father’s memory with a growing mistrust for the Chetniks themselves, whom he had increasingly come to understand as collaborationist, disorganized, and potentially genocidal. How, then, to reconcile the participation of someone you loved in what was most probably a very bad thing? Could his father still be a good man who had also participated in evil deeds?