Listen to this:
"Ivan stood close to the tracks, elbowing an old man with medals and a woman smelling of garlic, with silver teeth and silvery eyes; everything looked silvery to Ivan through his tears. He surprised himself; he had understood himself so little. He had thought he couldn’t care less about Tito, and now this–awe, reverence, grief, a solemn sense of tragedy."
This, as the funeral train carrying Tito’s body comes through the towns where crowds, caught up in the pomp and circumstance of a state funeral line the streets. What you need to know about Ivan’s previous experience with Tito is that he meets him, smokes a cigar with him, when Tito and Indira Ghandi are visiting the labor camp where Ivan is serving four years for his being accused of threatening the assasination of Tito when Ivan and a fellow medical student back at the university were heard in idle discussion while Tito was traveling through.
The meeting with Tito back at the labor camp in Ivan’s youth was a humorous, very tense, near unbelievable meeting. Ivan is singled out by Tito when Ghandi gives Ivan a fan to cool him in the horrid heat and the sweating hard work of the rock piles. The dialogue is at once tongue in cheek and unbelievable, yet pathetic in its possibilities of fact.
Strange twists in Ivan’s life lead him into strange lands, both physical and mental. A week after the funeral cortege goes through, Ivan wonders why he would feel anything like grief for a man whose life had in fact, impacted his own to near ruin. It is another example of Ivan’s struggles to find his passions, to develop himself to his own dreams even as he questions himself and the world around him.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology