Tihomir Levajac:
Here We Go on Trial Again

1. What if ...

After an inquest held in accordance with the law, the first Story was brought before the Tribeurinal and placed inside a hermetically sealed see-through cupola.

Having settled down, the Story looked around and saw that those present were looking at it as if it were some kind of freak. The judges, journalists, cameramen with their cameras at the ready, as well as various disreputable characters from all over the world. Their heads were pincushion-shaped, and out of those pincushions their eyes stared at it with an unhealthy sort of curiosity and with a certain amount of pity that smacked of bloodthirstiness.

It was presumably, thought the defendant, a case of love at first sight.

However, when the Prosecutor spoke, when everything about him, his stance, facial expression and tone of voice spelled accusation, when he charged the Story with spreading a story wherein it was said that in a war everything was allowed, it realised that it was not a case of love at first sight but of bare-faced lying.

As had happened so many times during the inquest, the defendant was saying one thing and the Prosecutor something entirely different. The defendant had, therefore, decided that, should anything of that sort happen at the trial, and it was happening, it would defend itself by remaining silent, as it had the right to do in accordance with one of the Articles of the Statemute of the Tribeurinal.

The Story was thinking this to itself while the Prosecutor went on and on and on.

The defendant, he said, had been telling a story wherein Serbian soldiers tore down, destroyed, set fire to and looted everything in sight, and persecuted and killed those who were of a different faith.

The defendant justified the acts of the heavenly soldiers, he cried out in astonishment, by saying that they did what they did in the name of the people, that is, for the general good of their people!

The defendant even justified this destructiveness of the Serbian army, part and parcel of the doctrine of establishing Greater Serbia, by saying that they behaved in that way because they loved life so much that they could not resist it!

Mein Gott!

Then, when the Prosecutor started appealing to the Lord above for help, the defendant decided it had had enough.

Why should it not defend itself by telling that very story? Why should it not tell its story, which quite obviously condemned war as such, to the whole Tribeurinal Board so that the judges should see for themselves that its attitude was valid? It could not be that everybody in this Court was immune to justice, as was the case with the Prosecutor!

It could hardly wait, therefore, for the Prosecutor to finish reading his bill of indictment, and for the Chairman of the Tribeurinal Board, the Egyptian Abu Dhabu Abdel Marvel el Salaam to grant it permission to address the Court.

And when that did come to pass, the defendant said that the Prosecutor’s indictment was entirely groundless because the story it had been telling meant precisely the opposite of what he had been trying to prove.

Which the honourable judges of the Court would see for themselves when they heard the story.

And the story began like this.

At the beginning of the war, the Serbian army broke through the Muslim-Croatian line of defence in front of Kotorsko, and the local population hastily fled towards Derventa together with their army. An offensive-purpose brigade chased them, followed by long-range Serbian artillery and a light infantry unit that cleansed the area.

The commander, whose one-year combat experience had been gathered in Slavonia, had arranged his men in groups of five and six, spread in a dispersed combat formation about one hundred metres in length, so that they advanced through the town side by side, as much as the configuration of the terrain allowed. They advanced intoxicated by victory, rushing on ahead, sweeping the area like some giant-sized moving rake.

Every house, as soldiers say, had to be thoroughly searched, every stable, shed, barn, pen or garage had to be ransacked, every grove or bush had to be combed lest some armed enemy group should be hiding there and emerge unexpectedly, wreaking havoc behind the frontline afterwards.

The commander expressly warned his soldiers against mines that the enemy had left, scattered, tied up in places one would least expect, in ways one would not even dream of.

The commander was, of course, right, the defendant said. For when it came to disabling, maiming, crippling or at least killing someone, human imagination and viciousness always proved equal to the possibilities offered by reality.

Few of them, however, listened to the commander, for every victory blinds and success intoxicates, bringing about a daze that can be fatal in war.

These rough fellows rushed forward randomly, recklessly, as if death were nothing serious to worry about. Carried forward by their youthful strength, they advanced forcefully and arrogantly. Fingering the trigger, they burst into empty yards and abandoned houses with an air of superiority, shooting at everything, whether it moved or not.

In order not to lose any time over mines, one of the men would aim at the area around a house, two would cover the doors and windows on the side of the house they were approaching, the fourth would spray the doors and windows with bullets from an automatic rifle while the fifth would throw a bomb into the house without bothering to ask if there was anyone inside.

They were doing things they had never imagined they would be doing.
The houses rarely caught fire from a bomb thrown in, which usually left a circle of soot around the doors and windows. When they wanted to set a fire to a house, they entered it and placed a burning piece of cloth or newspaper under a bed: when the bedclothes caught fire, the house invariably burned to the ground.

While one of the groups was leaving a yard having finished its work there, one of the soldiers stopped by the kennel. He peered into this dog abode as if he had forgotten something inside.

Not having found anything, he, Zdravko, set about leaving.

He had barely made three steps when something totally unexpected happened.

From under a shed, behind some planks piled up underneath, a boy emerged like an apparition.

The defendant assumed that the boy had been left there by his parents or relatives, who had completely forgotten about him when shells were flying over the village instead of birds, when people hastily gathered the belongings they considered essential and fled in a disorderly manner. Or maybe the boy had got afraid of the heavy fire and hidden, so that his mother, grandfather or grandmother were unable to find him when they fled their home.

As they said, the defendant said, all sorts of things happened in a war.

Being married, Zdravko thought he saw his own son, named Bojan, aged eight. The boy looked like Bojan, had trousers and a T-shirt like Bojan, even walked like Bojan: Zdravko’s shoulders sagged and the automatic rifle fell out of his hands.

It could be none other than Bojan.

Why, it was Bojan, Bojan!

While Zdravko approached Bojan overwhelmed by a feeling of unreality, Bojan’s eyes grew, spreading in all directions, so that the boy became all eyes.

Zdravko had never seen such a big blue sky, not even in an adult’s eyes.
Never.

And nowhere.

Only when the boy spoke, when he said, terror-stricken, you’re-not-going-to-slaughter-me-are-you, did he see that it was not Bojan.

Bojan never spoke like that.

In a moment, Zdravko leapt towards the boy, grabbed him with trembling hands holding him tightly, then lifted him above his head and lowered him, hugging and kissing the boy the way he hugged and kissed his own son when he came home from the front.

What was the matter with him, whatever was he afraid of, he was saying while the boy trembled in his arms, taut like a sling. Why was he twitching, why did his muscles tighten spasmodically, he said to him, he wouldn’t hurt, let alone strangle him!

He hugged and kissed the boy again, called him a lamb, lifted him towards the sky, spinning him around and whispering words of endearment to him, while the boy’s heart jumped like a frog in a woven basket.

And right then, when the Serbian soldier had gone all tender, the arrow hit in the flash of an eye.

Like a killer bursting into a flat through the door to kill the household members and rob the flat, a thought entered his mind unexpectedly.

What if it had been the other way round? What if the Muslims had been stronger than the Serbs, what if they had forced their way from Kotor-town by way of Čelinac and had come upon his own son, Bojan, guilty of nothing, forgotten, helpless, left all alone in his yard?

He asked himself this looking at the boy the way he looked at his own son whenever he came back home from the front. The moment he showed up at the door, entered the kitchen or the living-room, the moment Bojan saw him, wherever he happened to be, he would jump to his feet, rush to the table, sweep everything off it with a single stroke of his hand, climb onto it and sit there with arms crossed, staring wordlessly at his father, whom he did not see for twenty days or so on end, without taking his eyes off him.

The way his own son looked at him, that was the way this boy, whom he had found alone and deserted in somebody else’s yard, looked at him as he swirled him round so that the house and the yard, the buildings and the trees, the fence, appeared to be flying in circles like passing shadows.

As the boy’s eyes were fixed on him, filled with terror, Zdravko kept asking himself, while still seeing intermittent flashes of Bojan, what would have happened had the Muslims driven the Serbs away and come across his son the way he had come across this boy?

While he pondered on this, tears he could not hold back, big and warm, soft, started flowing of their own accord.

What would have happened, what would have happened, what would have happened, he kept repeating until a certain thought prevailed. And when it did, that was the moment when everything came into question.

It was then that Zdravko started looking at the war, and at himself within that war, from a different angle, looking for the justification of his participation in it.

Without finding any.

The defendant maintained that, from the day he found a boy resembling his own son in somebody else’s yard, the Serbian soldier took a different view of everything.

All the zest with which he had gone to war, all the resentment that had welled up inside him when he felt that his very being was at stake, all the pride he had wanted to live with, the awareness that he had wished to possess while living an upright sort of life, independent and free, not in shame, appeared false to him.

The resoluteness with which he wanted to defend his home, family and people, the determination to defend Orthodox Christian faith, without which, as he thought, there could be no morality, joy and gentleness, nor the firmness and national unity required to defend the inviolable Serbian sacred things, appeared to him as fallacy.

All the values worthy of ideals, even ideals themselves, including those higher than life, all of a sudden vanished into smoke. Whatever was grand, beautiful, holy and noble became miserable and wretched to him.

His view of the world, religion and nation, the established notion that some peoples were good and others evil, the conviction that Croats and Muslims only killed while Serbs only fought, all this appeared to him as a fallacy of sorts.

As for the leaders, in particular the national leaders, who had started this war, they appeared to him as dangerous swindlers.

Who had swindled their own peoples.

So clear was the vision he had, of the peoples following false leaders.

The defendant maintained that at that moment, in somebody else’s yard, Zdravko felt that he was being used. Used as part of someone’s dream. Used and abused by someone he did not even know.

That he had been made to serve something he did not know the purpose of!

That he was fighting in a war whose objectives were not his!

The string of Serbian victories on the battlefield appeared to him as not having any future! All the victories of the Serbian army he saw as tomorrow’s defeats!

For if he thought about it all resorting to common sense, then he had to ask himself what he was doing and why. And who had given him the right to take the lives of others when he knew that human life in itself was an inviolable value? Who had given him the right to kill another unique human being, thus throwing in such an ugly way the gift of God and Nature back into their faces? Who had told him that his own life was defended by destroying another’s?

Who had given him the authority to violate the spirituality and civilisation of other peoples, to destroy their holy objects, to pull down their homes, built with so much hard work, and to kill the people inside them, people just like himself, kill them without any proof that they deserved to be treated that way?

Who had convinced him to fight for a faith that he loved but essentially did not follow?

Who had done that to him when he knew only too well that he believed in nothing but life?

Who had convinced him that he was an exemplary patriot, who had told him that reality was ugly and patriotism beautiful, that the present was unbearable and only the future appealing?

Who had done that when it was well known that one could only place in the future that which could not be, and which, for the most part, would never to come to pass?

That is why this war which had been spreading through Bosnia like the plague, which was rolling across Bosnia like some wild destroyer foaming with hatred, bringing untold misery and inconceivable suffering to individuals and nations, ruin and destruction on a vast scale, appeared to him quite pointless and senseless.

After all, every war was primarily directed against man and his dignity! Every war destroyed in every human being that which was eternal and infinite! The divine principle of giving birth, building and creating, instead of devastating, destroying and killing.

For tomorrow, when this madness stopped, and it had to stop, sometime or other it had to stop because nothing in this world lasted forever, when life began to look like what it really was and people began to look like themselves, then, of course, reality would be right again, old man!

Lest he should torture and tear himself apart with these thoughts any longer, still holding the boy in his arms, Zdravko let out a blood-curdling scream. It was not merely a scream, however, but a moan and cry, rage, suffering and pain!

After this scream, the sunlight’s tricolour descended on the soldier’s horizon like a screen, the light grew dim, the horizon shook and the sky contracted. All of a sudden all strength drained from him, and it seemed to him that he was cut in two in the blackness under the sun. All weak, disjointed and loose-limbed, he barely managed to carry the boy to a log beneath a nearby apple-tree, where he sat down, exhausted and broken.

When he started ranting, at times leaning forward and then smashing the back of his head against the tree he was leaning on, he looked like someone whose brain had started dissipating. When he howled, smashing his head against the apple-tree, when he tore at his hair, taking off his equipment and clothes and throwing them around, he looked like someone in an advanced state of brain dissipation.

When his comrades-in-arms returned for him, after he had failed to rejoin them, they came upon a ghastly sight.

Zdravko sat on the log, his belt undone, hair tousled, an awkward, dishevelled figure, holding the boy on his knees, head held back, smashing it against the tree, mouth wide open, thin-necked, rolled-up eyes staring through himself, outside time, space and the story, looking as if his gaze had been steeped in nothingness.

The automatic rifle, bomb, dagger, magazine, belt, uniform shirt and tricolour cap lay nearby in the grass.

When his fellow soldiers somehow managed to get through to him, gradually restoring him to consciousness, he refused to take arms again and go on with them, he wanted no more of the war, nor did he want to leave the boy at the headquarters but took him home to Čelinac.

And that is the end of the story.

And of storytelling.

There was silence after the story, so that for a while it seemed that the defendant had managed to impose its frame of mind on those who had been listening, judges in particular, but the defendant was wrong as it turned out. The Prosecutor was already asking for permission to address the Court, and when he did so, it normally signified that midnight was soon to come.

The defendant had ostensibly declared itself against war in its story, claimed the Prosecutor sternly. But the Tribeurinal Board should bear in mind that the hero of the story, the so-called Zdravko, behaved the way he did but his fellow-soldiers did not! The Serbian aggressor continued to fight this war, simultaneously and everywhere, without Zdravko and despite Zdravko. Irrespective of the fact that he had left the war, events would unfold the way they would unfold, the country would be devastated, houses would be destroyed, people would get killed!

Why did every other Serbian soldier not follow Zdravko’s example, the Prosecutor asked, waving his words about like a cane.

The Story could not believe that the Prosecutor could think in those terms, that he could be so biased, so that it did not want to communicate with him at that level. When it suddenly fell silent, it seemed that the Prosecutor’s facts had defeated it.

However, the Defence Counsel suddenly stood up on his hind legs, mumbled something ugly-sounding, incomprehensible, inarticulate, and then asked loud and clear why the Prosecutor demanded of the defendant to account for the failure of the other Serbian soldiers to leave the battlefield? Why did he not demand to know how it was that Croatian and Muslim soldiers had not acted in that way? He knew only too well that in a civil war peoples were pitted against each other, so the same question should be put to those on the other side of the weapon sights.

Since the question was quite logical, one female judge, who, so it appeared, had not had her common sense operated on, started panting, shivering and finally fell sidewise off her chair to the floor, in full sight of everyone present.

There was commotion in the courtroom. Many came to her rescue. Some slapped her in the face, others poured water over her, massaged her...

A real song-and-dance it was, one-two-three, one-two-three...

Tihomir Levajac: Here We Go on Trial Again

1. What if ...

Tihomir Levajac:
Here We Go on Trial Again