LITERATURE: April Fool’s Day

Ah, after controlled prosaic and refreshing bluntness in his story, Josip Novakovich gives us some wonderful poetry:

"In the morning, loud rain knocked many yellow leaves off beeches and oaks.  Drops hit the mud, splashing it.  The wetness carried the smells of poisonous mushrooms and old leaves, not only of the leaves that had just zig-zagged to the ground but also of the leaves from the last year, and from thousands of years ago, with mossy, musty whiffs of old lives in the soil, and new lives that slid out of the cloudy water and soiled eggs:  snails, frogs, earthworms.  When the rain let up, the leaves sagged, and a cold wind swayed them, and water continued sliding down in large, slithering drops, which hung, growing luminous, glittering, before falling onto the men below, into their shirts, down their hairy necks.  Most men sat beneath green tents, and some, including Ivan, sat beneath oaks.  Water darkened the bark.  Ivan wondered why the oak bark was cracked–beech bark stretched like rubber, but the oak bark burst open, shaggy and jagged."

Ivan is now a reluctant soldier in an army fighting against his own Croatian forces.  The narrator is beginning to show us an Ivan who cares a bit more about what is going on around him, less reluctant to go with the flow, a trait that has held him up through the traumatic changes in his life that mimic what is going on within his country as well.  He seeks normality, and has managed through attitude alone to make whatever situation he finds himself, be the normal for him. 

In the bit of eloquence quoted above, we see the difference:  the beech that adapts, the oak that is wounded by its own growth.