Srpski

Tihomir Levajac:
Here We Go on Trial Again

2. The Story of the Škloja

On the day when it was the second Story’s turn to appear before the Court, after several dull days, the courtroom was filled with sunlight, so that the judges, dressed solemnly in red-and-black gowns and wearing funny caps with little horns, looked like cockroaches.
And it was rather warm.
What with the sunlight and the appearance of the judges, the defendant felt ill at ease under the cupola.
The space felt dry, the bulletproof glass on all sides enclosed the defendant like barbed wire, and the crackling noises coming from inside the earphones reminded it of the inarticulate utterances of an apparition.
The Prosecutor’s words were sharp. Venomous, caustic, malicious, they darted through the air like snakes’ tongues.
The Prosecutor charged the defendant with having told a story about a crime the like of which was unknown to man. Not only had it dedicated the story to a monster, it had also justified his acts, which was cynical in the extreme. And that monster, ladies and gentlemen, as one German journalist claimed, had slaughtered twelve thousand Muslims in the town of Kozarac, where four thousand Muslims used to live! And this crazed mind, ladies and gentlemen, had participated most actively when it came to ethnic cleansing in the region of Prijedor, where approximately fifty thousand Bosniaks at the very least had been killed!
The defendant’s lawyer was so incensed by the figures quoted that he jumped up from his seat because he did not know how to react in a civilised manner.
Bounteous Mother Nature had probably economised where possible, and had not endowed the defendant’s lawyer with abilities that he would not normally need. Had it known that one day he would appear before the International Court of Justice defending those accused from injustice, he would not have the character traits that he was exhibiting at the moment.
The Prosecutor, roared the defence counsel in the language of the animal kingdom, was overdoing things concerning those figures! Those figures had a specific appeal of their own, which is why the Prosecutor’s use of them was exaggerated! The reason he was doing it was either to denigrate the Serbian side or to impress the audience! There was no reason for him to act that way, as the Tribeurinal Statemute did not state specifically how many people should be killed for the crime of genocide to be committed!
That is why he, the defence counsel, asked the Tribeurinal Board to take that into consideration when deciding whether the Prosecutor had a case or not!
The Chairman of the Tribeurinal Board, Stefan Josef von Bon Ton dem Offenbach from Austria, thanked the Defence Counsel for the warning and then asked the defendant whether it pleaded guilty. The Story thought that the judge was purposely asking it naive questions to confuse it. Still, it pretended that things were not the way they were and replied that it pleaded not guilty. The Prosecutor’s charge, that it had tried to justify the crimes of a soldier by resorting to philosophy, was not true. Ever since stories and storytelling had begun, the Story had been trying to resolve the mystery of the biped. Ever since then, the Story had been searching for something, it knew not quite what, something that lay at the bottom of man, in his nethermost regions.
At one moment it appeared to the Story that it was the dregs that existed in every man.
If that was death, the Story wanted to divest it of mystery through storytelling.
And to meet the master of death.
To find out whether the lord of darkness, who disposed of human life as he pleased, felt like God.
And, naturally, to find out how the victim died.
To see how it felt to cross from one bank to the other.
To find out, in view of the fact that a whole world died when a man died, what the victim thought and felt while burning in his own fire.
Whether, as many maintained, self-obsession reached the peak of intensity at the moment of one’s demise.
The Story wanted to find out all that because there existed no such thing as experience of death. Since the time of war was convenient for such an undertaking, the Story started its search and eventually found such an experience in the destiny of an individual. The Story asked for permission to tell its story so that the Tribeurinal Board should judge the story and not the defendant’s conduct in doing so.
The session was adjourned for a while so that the Tribeurinal Board, together with the Prosecutor, should decide on this in camera.
In view of the fact that, upon their return to the courtroom, the defendant was allowed to tell its story, it may only be assumed what arguments precisely, and whose arguments exactly, prevailed in this matter.
Be that as it may, the Story waited for the courtroom to become quiet so that its story should reach the ears of everyone present unimpeded.
Some forty-odd volunteers from Slavonia and Baranja, as well as some who had fought in and around Vukovar, the defendant began its story in perfect silence, took part in the short but bloody fighting around Prijedor and Kozarac. They were Croatian Serbs who had been left all alone after the war in Croatia, so that for them war remained more or less the only solution.
War as a means of dying for a higher ideal, or as a possibility for having their revenge for their loved ones killed in the war.
Among those forty-odd soldiers, the Story’s attention was particularly attracted by a harmless-looking soldier who, according to those who knew him, had committed acts most cruel. His name was Svetolik, and everybody called him Holy. He was twenty-four, yellow rather than blond, bony rather than thin, single on top of everything else.
The Story found out somehow or other that he hailed from the area round Slavonska Požega, where he had been living before the war, shy, meek and, of course, good-natured. In the manner of all those living in rural areas, he had ancestors buried in the village graveyard, parents and two houses, relatives and neighbours, marriage witnesses, friends and companions among Croatians, two tractors, one with a harrow attached, two garages, ten hectares of land and everything he needed for a normal life.
When the war broke out, he lost all that.
Just because he was a Serb in an area where Croats were the majority.
Hidden behind a hedge, he watched people who had been his neighbours the day before, now wearing black shirts, slaughter his father and mother on the threshold of their home, and he did not dare utter a word. Then he watched them slaughter his brother, unable to help him because he did not stand a chance against them. Hidden behind the black hedge, he watched the horde of blackshirts letting themselves go on his sister, nine of them tearing into her on the porch, only to slaughter her afterwards, and he could not save her, there was no way he could have saved her.
While hiding in the small house on the hill where they kept the bees, saving his bare life, he watched them rob his house and burn it down, and then he watched them rob and burn down his uncle’s house, having killed everyone there as well, he watched the remaining Serbian houses burn, and was left all alone in the world after the carnage.
From then on, he was from nowhere.
From then on, Holy had no-one in the whole wide world.
Not even a godson.
Not even a dog.
From then on, Holy had no-one but himself.
He neither had nor needed anything.
What would he do with a sixteen-story apartment block, should anyone decide to let him have one for himself, when he had no-one?
The only thing he had left was his own life, which was not much in the way of inheritance. He had only his bare life left and the war, wherein he need not, on account of having survived, be ashamed of inhumanity.
And the forbidden was always, in all epochs, alluring.
When Holy joined the so-called Yugoslav People’s Army, he soon realised that he had, in fact joined the Great Yugoslav People’s Treason, so he hastily left to join the White Eagles. In the course of the fighting around Vukovar and Osijek, he drew attention to himself because he was the only soldier in his company who did not carry a rifle or a revolver, nor any other firearm, but a knife, or more precisely, a collection of knives.
Firearms are carried for the purpose of unemotional account-settling, the defendant maintained, and knives when one is driven by all-consuming passion and great hatred.
Which is why he had got hold of all those lethal contraptions!
As to how and where he had obtained them, not even the defendant could find that out.
When the defendant met him for the first time, he already had quite a number of them. They ranged from death-bringers with plastic and metal handles to a knife with two blades or one with a saw-like blade, a stiletto, a short knife for stabbing, a dagger, switch-blade knife, hide-blade knife and sneak-blade knife.
Never, for a single moment, did he part with them.
As if they, death-bringers, had some sort of magic power.
The defendant maintained that all that had to do with the thirst that had plagued Holy after the slaughter of his family. He always complained that his lips were burning, that his palate, tongue and throat were dry and that there was no way he could assuage his thirst.
No matter what he drank, no matter how much he drank, his hands sweated all the time, and his throat, tongue and palate were dry.
Maybe his thirst would stop, he thought, if only he could slaughter one of the Ustashi who had slaughtered his family. If only he could slaughter one of the Ustashi that the White Eagles had captured alive.
That is how this evil began with him.
When he first came up to a captured Ustashi soldier to do to him what he had set out to do, it seemed to him that it was somebody else approaching, not himself.
It happened the way he had never dreamed it would happen.
He slaughtered the Ustashi soldier hastily, just to get it over with, in some death cellar. He even managed to get his uniform and the Serbian tricolour on his sleeve sprinkled with Ustashi blood.
He thought that he had punished the victim, that he had got his revenge, but in fact, he had tortured himself, so that for a whole day he was plagued by a sense of failure and lack of fulfilment. He felt himself as some odious burden, and decided not to do that again.
However, as his thirst would not let up but only grew, one week later, when the Eagles captured a live Ustashi again, Holy could not resist slaughtering him. In his mad desire to sever whatever connections there were between him and those who had slaughtered his family, he butchered the man so that even his own mother, let alone the identification experts, would not recognise him.
That was when he changed for good.
Whatever was pure and holy, all the values one was proud of, which the world praised and lauded, became hateful to him. Virtue, love, humaneness, friendship and honesty.
What he particularly despised was compassion.
He was capable of anything but compassion.
It was not a crime to kill but to feel compassion for the victim, he maintained to everybody.
It was not a crime to massacre an Ustashi soldier but to feel compassion for the massacred!
Compassion was not mercy but a weakness!
That is why, pursuing some higher principle of his own, some higher morals of his own, he wanted to find out what death hid within itself.
He, who formerly would not tread upon an ant, now became curious in the face of death.
He, who formerly could not slaughter a chicken, started to unshackle his soul with his own hands.
When one is steeped in suffering, as they say, one is capable of anything.
Only a few people from his immediate surroundings could find out what he did to the victim and with the victim in the dark depth of the underworld. Not even the Story could find out what forms of torture the master of darkness resorted to. Whether he humiliated the victim bodily, how he embraced the victim, how he let hiss blood flow, slit his chest open, nursed his wounds and twisted his flesh – God only knew!
God and Holy!
Although the defendant could not find out everything, it sensed that, in dealing with the victim, the poet of darkness dealt with himself.
If he wanted to know himself, he had to peer into the inner world of man. If he meant to discover himself, he had to see who he was dealing with. If he wanted to find out who he was, he had to force his way into their souls, to see whether they had it or not, where it was located and what it contained.
If his next-door neighbours had been able to do that to his father, mother, brother and sister, and all their relatives, he was interested in whether they had a soul or not.
If they did have one, where it was and of what sort.
As to what sort of death he would bestow on them, that did not depend upon himself only, but also upon the one who was dying, as everyone died only once.
In view of the fact that, together with the dying man, a fallacy died as well, he realised that death could be both easy and hard, short and long, of this or that sort, of all sorts or no sort in particular, but that it belonged to the victim only.
To the victim and the victim’s master.
As the tenor of the defendant’s narrative was unacceptable to the audience, they became agitated, sounds of protest were heard, even threats, so that commotion ensued, which was beneath the dignity of an international court.
The most prominent part in this belonged to the judges, who, as a rule and as is generally known, are a rather special sort of people.
Impervious to anything, in particular to the thoughts of others.
No, no, wait a little, the defendant pleaded, do not be so quick to contradict me.
Easy, maestro, easy, the defendant did know a thing or two!
If wars were inexorable, and there was only one life, then the number of violent acts in the adult world was infinite, as was the number of variant forms that man could assume.
Who, outside the story, would ever imagine that Holy did the things he did?
Foul deeds apart, the defendant maintained, he looked like a good-natured, sad-faced fellow with an innocent face, innocent and naive-looking, so that it seemed that every now and then he collided with reality, the times and thought. Taciturn but endearing, God-fearing and calm, quiet and inward-looking, although he would twitch nervously at the faintest of sounds.
As if he was confident and frightened at the same time.
In fact, he was more than frightened.
And lacking sleep all the time.
He constantly felt a certain tiredness, a special sort of tiredness that no amount of sleep could ever dispel.
And he was a diligent, hard-working fellow.
He washed the socks, shirts and underwear of his fellow-soldiers, made coffee for them, aired the rooms, made the beds, swept the floor, tidied up the kitchen.
Whatever others found difficult to do in wartime was easy for him to do.
Always at the ready, the moment you asked something of him he jumped up from wherever he happened to be.
He would do and give everything for his fellow-soldiers.
Should anyone wish him to run three hundred metres in any direction whatsoever, in broad daylight, and see whether it was daylight there as well, he would do it without a word of protest.
But the moment he remained alone, a vague fear and a feeling of hopelessness would grip him.
Therefore, the White Eagles never left him on his own, for they no longer allowed him to fiddle with the knives.
It so happened one night, however, that they forgot about him accidentally.
It should be pointed out, the defendant warned, that the Eagles only went into action at night. Lest they should be visible, they made use of the cover of night. During the day they hid their mad courage and great strength inside houses, and went into action at night.
That particular night, when the Eagles forgot about Holy altogether, he saw the reflection of his face, after quite a long time, with the help of candlelight, in a tiny mirror he held in his hand.
And he saw that his deeds were visible there.
When he saw that, he thought that he would never be able to get out of that mirror, run away from hatred and the smell of blood that had permeated his clothes.
And it seemed to him that he was forever cut off from mankind, things and nature, that he was worthless, reduced to nothing, that he would never again be able to feel the joys of love, pretty girls, laughter, singing and guitar-playing, that he would never be forgiven his crimes.
That night, when he got it into his head that he would never be able to redeem his being because he had lost all vestiges of human dignity and sunk into non-being, he broke the mirror that had revealed all that to him and used the shards to cut his hands and face. He hacked mercilessly at himself as if he was his own worst enemy.
While slashing his face and hands, he saw himself standing in the corner of the room with a knife blade between his teeth, lying on the ceiling with a knife under his head, flying through the room in the darkness with a pair of knives in place of wings.
He slashed himself and his victims advanced towards him, emerging from all the dark corners of the room, their clothes slit in many places and gaping wounds all over their bodies.
When the Eagles found him, he was sitting on a three-legged stool and slashing his face with a piece of the mirror, roaring with laughter and crying at the same time, cursing the Ustashi.
While cursing the Ustashi, he fended off some animals that were jumping through the darkness and across the walls.
Here they come, look at them, catch them!
A fellow from Kikinda by the name of Mile, who had come to join the war effort in a tiny Fiat car, seeing that Holy was cracking up, managed to snatch the glass from his hand.
While Mile was taking him to the car, Holy threatened that he would kill himself, saying that he was not afraid of death, that he was just fine and that, when he died, eternity would ensue.
Mile pushed him into the Fiat somehow or other and drove him to the medical corps, where he was given an injection.
After that event the Eagles never left him on his own again, and as the Almighty never forsakes anyone for good, he managed to find strength within himself again, restored his balance and was his old self again, the one from before the crack-up.
He was even proud of what he had gone through, because he had been where his fellow-soldiers had never been or would ever be.
And it seemed to him that his own life became more precious after that horrendous experience.
And when the war spread from Croatia to Bosnia, Holy volunteered because he could not stand himself in one place for a very long period of time and found himself in the Fifth Kozara Brigade.
In the course of fighting in Krajina, he bore a special grudge against Muslims for having teamed up with Croatians and was even more merciless towards them.
As if he wanted to save himself by way of cruelty.
He had procured a special sort of knife for Muslims, a contraption called the šklopac .
The courtroom buzzed again.
It was evident that the audience was becoming more and more involved as the story unfolded.
Why were the honourable judges so impatient, the defendant asked. Why did they not learn how to listen?
How come, it asked, they did not know what the šklopac was?
Whoever had been to Kozarac would know what the šklopac was! Without going into details, the šklopac was the Serbian equivalent of the čakija , although the čakija was not the same as the šklopac. The čakija was the čakija and the šklopac was the šklopac and the war was being fought in Bosnia! The šklopac and the čakija can never be one and the same! The šklopac, otherwise known as škloja, was rather simple by comparison. The attraction and beauty of the škloja lay in the fact that it was made of natural materials and that its design was rather primitive. The handle was, as a rule, made of raw wood, into which the 13-centimetre blade folded.
If the defendant had been able to grasp that škloja was the diminutive form, a term of endearment, as it were, and šklopac a literary turn of phrase, then, surely, the audience could grasp that much as well!
Using that kind of knife, a knife that had a literary name, no less, Holy was looking for something inside man, he did not quite know exactly what, but something that could only be found at the bottom, in the nethermost regions.
He did not seek it in any simple manner, however, but in an elevated sort of way. He even felt a sort of affection for the victim, a feeling more like spite than love, which could often humiliate a man.
He had decided not to send a single victim to kingdom come in an ugly manner. He was determined, since a whole world died with a man, not to let any victim cross to the other side until he smiled. Until he smiled, be it even in a most general sense of the term. As the coming of a man into this world was crossing from one bank to the other, from nothingness to nothingness, from emptiness to darkness, he would let no-one join his ancestors until he smiled.
He was determined to serve this ideal honourably, with all his heart.
The way an artist served a God-given idea.
The defendant pleaded with the audience not to get angry, because evil exerted a special sort of fascination towards the end of the era of inhumanity, on the eve of the already-beckoning year two thousand, even though it might be immeasurable.
And perverted.
Nothing new could happen in the world, after all, because everything had already happened. And now someone in the audience might ask, out of curiosity or ignorance, how Holy was able to make a victim smile at the moment of parting with his life.
It had better make one thing clear, the defendant maintained, before arguing about it.
Let one thing be clearly understood, Holy took his victims by surprise!
When, after everything else, he stabbed the victim’s throat ever so lightly with the point of his knife, the poor man thought that the master of hell was putting him on trial or that he was joking in a rough, even rude sort of way, and felt glad for a moment. When he stabbed the man again, stab-stab, he surrendered physically. His lips would part, only to freeze in a stilted smile, as if the man was posing in front of a camera.
Both the master and the victim were playing, both cheating a little.
If this trick failed, since all people were different as individuals and psychologically, then the victim participated in his disappearance of his own free will, seeking death by embracing it.
The victim laid himself upon the altar of perfection, so that the enjoyment of agony should give him the joys that real life failed to provide. As dying was part of life, the victim wanted to make himself master of his own destiny. He wanted to punish himself by a volitional act of suicide.
Not even the defendant could reject this proposition, since the connoisseurs of dying maintain that one’s intoxication with oneself is never as passionate as at the moment of disappearance.
As when burning in one’s own fire,
We’re only human, one has to know how to die!
However, the master of death also rose to the occasion in this magnificent ceremony!
He, too, would become possessed of a desire for achieving a union, so that two flowers should make a single blossom, so that two worlds should become one, wherein the invisible forces of life and death hugged and kissed.
It was as if both contained the universal within themselves, thus complementing each other in the architecture of perfection. They were joined by some secret fearsome ties, so that both simultaneously participated in the other’s destiny.
There had to be some sort of connection between cruelty and enlightenment, between meaningfulness and meaninglessness, between life and death.
The victim and the master thought differently, felt differently, wished differently, but were inseparable in tragedy!
Like a shadow and its reflection, for both had no meaning on their own.
This closeness was a sickness of the heart, soul kinship, partnership that both recklessly supported.
They intertwined in desperate embrace the way life and death intertwined and alternated, eternally struggling for supremacy.
This struggle, naturally, was unnatural, since it was natural that death should win.
As it always did.
In this struggle, the executioner thought that he attained eternity, for he felt elevated while towering over the victim like some personal deity.
Maybe God felt that way because He was the only master of life.
And maybe the victim, too, felt elevated!
The defendant qualified this claim with a maybe, since the victim in his most painful hour, in death throes, tried with all his might to disappear in God!
As Holy emerged from this struggle victorious, anyone in the courtroom in his right mind would have thought that he could not be in his right mind. Anyone watching what he did to a sufferer would have thought that his mind was completely dark. That he was deranged, out of his mind, mad, or at least someone on his way to a mental hospital.
But how could one say such a thing when he knew perfectly well what he was doing?
How?
Well, anyone would have said that it was the other way round, but it was not, the defendant maintained, although it could be.
Any opinion to the contrary was tantamount to a lack of knowledge of the biped, his character and the laws that ruled his behaviour.
Lest the Court should misunderstand the defendant, Holy merely presented a picture of man truer than usual.
Of man living inside every one of us.
To say nothing of the rest.
Holy was not an exceptional phenomenon, Nature’s technical error or mankind’s conscience, but all the people together.
He was the monstrous multitude, if you get the defendant’s drift.
Any one man was any other man, that’s who Holy was!
But he was not like that of his own accord. Those who had played with his destiny had made him like that.
Because it was not he who ruled his actions but circumstances.
After all, no-one was a criminal if one took into consideration the reasons that had made him become one. Even those who had slaughtered his family, who knows what impulse, what misery and misfortune had made them do it!
There might have been some higher reason, unfathomable to common sense and the Story.
After all, Holy was a compact whole, even perfect, because he was total reality to himself.
Be that as it may, many natives of Krajina did not quite approve of such a volunteer as Holy was, nor did they approve of what he did with himself and to others, nor of the way he did it. The people around Mt Kozara, who got marital virtues by birth, who were warriors by profession, who killed in battle, be it attack or defence, who shot down whoever wandered into their line of sight, could not slaughter.
They could not do that, nor had they ever been able to do it, or so it seemed to them.
They were warriors who fought fervently for their native soil. With them, dying in battle was a measure of love towards their fatherland.
As opposed to them, the Story was not willing to renounce its hero, not even at moments when he intended, with the help of the škloja and an angelic smile on his face, to send his victim to the other kingdom, although he did not always manage to do so.
He failed in the village of Kamičani, near Kozarac, when fighting with the Muslims had reached its peak.
On the eve of the outbreak of war, there were stories circulating in the region of Mt Kozara that the Muslims were drawing up, under the code name “Silent Night”, lists of prominent Serbs to be liquidated when the war started. It had been decided which Muslim would capture and slaughter which Serb, be it marriage witness or neighbour, and when.
Pits had been singled out for bodies to be thrown into them, and just in case, a furnace in the bakery of a Muslim by the name of Kanifa was adapted so that bodies could be burned in it.
There were also stories that Bejto, a blacksmith from Kamičani, who used to make hoes and pickaxes, pokers, scythes and ploughshares before the war, and switched to wartime production when the war started. He started making daggers, knives and sabres, so that what had occurred back in 1941 and 1942 should occur again.
The Muslims thought that whatever had occurred on and around Mt Kozara in the previous war would occur again, that it would be a repetition of what had happened then.
However, it was the other way round.
Even before the fighting with Muslims started, in Lamovita, Holy had heard of the lists, which Muslim was going to slaughter which Serb, of Bejto the blacksmith and his knives, and had started inquiring about them for reasons of his own.
After the armed conflict had started, ten Kozarans, fully armed and equipped, burst into Bejto’s yard when the summer heat started to let up.
It was a stuffy sort of day, full of arson, hatred and death.
Guns were heard in the distance, there was no-one in the yard except two or three hens, fox-coloured, who had gathered in the shade of the apple-tree. Huddled, they stood on the ground cracked from centuries of pain, in the hot air smelling of gunpowder.
They found Bejto inside the smithy, at work.
He had a black, oily-looking beret on his head. Having lost his natural colour, he had assumed the colour of the background, thus looking like a spot on a dark background.
He was of medium height and thin.
In no way was he like those strapping dark-eyed fellows from storybooks, whose strong right hand beat against the anvil of mankind, or workers breaking up the chains that bound the whole world.
When Ljuban asked him what he was doing, he answered that he was making hoes.
The unit commander smiled a thin-lipped smile.
Who would ever think of digging to the sound of guns!
Who would need hoes while Kozarac was burning, while Kozarac and Kozaruša were burning, while the battle for Jakupovići and Trnopolje was being fought!
He immediately ordered that all the buildings should be searched.
They found nothing at first, but when one of the soldiers opened the door of an old chicken coop, a pile of knives poured out. The soldiers gathered them in their arms, brought them before the door of the smithy and threw them in a heap, so many of them there were!
Bejto shifted his weight from one leg to the other, shaking, although it was very hot.
Who had made those knives, Ljuban asked?
He had, he answered, his eyes darting restlessly around.
Why?
He had been ordered to do so.
By whom?
Bejto remained silent and shook while Ljuban listened to his silence with an inquiring look on his face.
It was at this moment, when everything hung in balance, that Holy entered the scene.
The defendant used the word scene in order to prepare the listeners for what was to unfold.
Holy went up to the pile of knives, bent down, and then took them in his hands one by one, caressing them lovingly before returning each one to the pile. If there was something special about any one of them, he held it for a while looking it over, as if he wanted to take up a blacksmith’s craft. All the while he smiled absent-mindedly, lazily, in the manner of a cat, and with a dose of contempt that Bejto did not notice.
Holy’s face was calm.
Calm in a very solemn sort of way.
He even asked the craftsman, in that very restrained way of his, how each knife was made.
He asked this in a very calm tone of voice, smiling beatifically.
Bejto did not notice that this kindness was dangerous, that it might tear him apart, and readily answered Holy’s questions because he was the only one among the soldiers who did not carry firearms.
All in all, the beginning of their conversation, considering the situation they were in, was very pleasant indeed.
And civil, to boot.
Bejto would explain how a particular knife was made, how hot iron was roughly formed and the edge made thinner and thinner, explaining that the hardest part of this work was making the blade. The edge must be thinned with a hammer, but it mustn’t be made too thin. It mustn’t be either too thick or too thin, just as thin as it took to make a proper blade.
Holy appeared to be touched by the blacksmith’s story, because he asked, while shells kept exploding in the distance, how the iron was tempered.
He asked this in the manner of someone doing research on folk crafts and wishing to find out everything about them from experienced practitioners.
Lest they should, God forbid, take their secret with them to the grave.
While guns sounded eerily in the distance, Bejto bent down every now and then, as if bowing down to someone, took a knife in his hand and showed how the iron was tempered.
And which one, asked Holy softly, for he had a way of asking things almost soundlessly, which knife, he asked in a voice full of reverence for the craftsman’s skill, which knife among all these that he had made was the best?
Holy could turn his face into a mask of kindness and innocence when the occasion required it.
The best one of the lot, answered Bejto attentively, while his crooked yellowish neck shook, was the one he’d made for himself.
And where was it, asked the master of death in a voice that was tender even though his gaze cut in between the words the way light darted over steel.
Where it always was, said Bejto and ran off livelily to fetch the best knife of them all. He thought that Holy inquired about his own knife because he needed a good one, and was prepared to offer it to him as a gift.
When Bejto brought the knife, Holy took it in his hands, looked it over, gripped the handle, turned it left and right, adjusted the grip until it turned into a knife of its own accord, and then, when the afternoon light shone, when a glacier lit up on the blade and its reflection passed over his and the blacksmith’s face at the same time, all of a sudden he shouted in a tender-cruel voice, THIS ONE IS YOURS, grabbed Bejto’s head from behind with his left hand pulling it backwards while pushing the man forward with his hips. When the two of them were joined in a tight embrace, he shouted to the Kozarans to look the other way, and then started cutting Bejto’s throat with his right hand. He pushed him forward with his body while the poor man danced, screeching, in his embrace and blood gushed from his throat in all directions. So tight was their embrace that nothing could separate them now. Embracing thus, they formed a horrible whole moving across the abyss. Holy kept pushing and pushing and pushing, and slashing and slashing and slashing across Bejto’s neck, while the poor man squeaked horribly, like a broken bell. Holy kept pushing the man until they reached the road, and slashing until he severed the head from the body. Then the head fell, in an ugly sort of way, from the height where it had resided for so many years, and rolled into the ditch by the side of the road, and the stumped, headless body fell down flat upon the cracked earth devastated by misfortune, flapping its arms in the dust like a slaughtered rooster.
The way Holy slaughtered Bejto was nauseating.
It seemed to him that, while pushing the man in front of him, he was hanged upon his body.
Therefore, he felt very, very bad.
As if he himself, and not Bejto, was the victim.
Why did Holy, the defendant asked, feel that way?
While the Chairman of the Tribeurinal Board remained silent, a judge from Costa Rica, a dark-complexioned lady who resembled a sprinter from Jamaica more than a judge, rashly answered the question. Holy felt that way, she said, because he had slaughtered Bejto in a hurry, trying to send him to kingdom come as soon as possible.
Another judge, who had also come to The Vague from the other side of the planet, opined, based on the story that had been told, that Holy felt that way because he had sent his victim to the other bank without a smile.
The defendant, however, would not accept such explanations. It thought that Holy felt the way he did because he had divested the victim of his life using his, the victim’s knife, instead of his own.
How would the defendant prove that, the Chairman asked?
By means of the scene that ensued.
When Holy felt sick, he somehow managed to reach the fence while blood dripped from his hand; hanging his arms upon it like rusty knives, he doubled up writhing spasmodically, vomiting a greenish liquid and yellow mucus.
He vomited for a long time, excruciatingly.
As if he were to vomit the entire contents of his entrails.
When, at long last, he stopped vomiting, he shook blood off his hands while telling himself, as if he wished to justify his act, that there was nothing like the šklopac for getting the job done.
Nothing, he kept repeating sadly, nothing, then he would stop, as if to rest, then again, nothing, he would say wiping his hands on the grass, nothing like the škloja! Then again, nothing like the škloja, trying to remove something from before his eyes, as if removing some invisible cobweb, some cobweb he could not see but which prevented him from seeing clearly, nothing like the škloja, he repeated, while the summer sun spilled across the yard and Mt Kozara lay in the distance like a giant cow’s head, severed from its body, without any hope in its eyes under the bloodless sky.
The Story fell silent again, and all-embracing silence ensued. It seemed that everyone in the courtroom was leaning over himself, as if over an abyss, thinking about himself and what was inside, unknown and malign.
The only one not to succumb to the story and the atmosphere created by the defendant was the Prosecutor. He immediately asked for permission to address the Court, wishing to neutralise as soon as possible the impression that the defendant’s story had left upon the audience.
The Tribeurinal Board, he maintained, had made a number of mistakes. Some of the judges had become involved in the story of their own accord, thus supplementing the story in the manner convenient to the defendant. Instead of trying to suppress the natural inclination to join in and take part as storytellers, they gave in to it quite carelessly. They even went as far as offering interpretations of the story’s ending from the point of view of the defendant.
Such acts had no justification in any of the Articles of the Statemute of the Tribeurinal!
The honourable judges had, therefore, forfeited the right to a personal opinion and could only rely on his, the Prosecutor’s!
The defendant would be found guilty of what he had indicted it for!
So there!
It was well known, in any case, who had established this Court and why, who was paying for all this and how much, there was no need to talk about that publicly!
When the Prosecutor showed a yellow card to the judges, none of those present at the trial knew who was who. Who was the Prosecutor and who a judge, who was judging whom and for what purpose, who played what role, so that they all looked at one another in bewilderment.
A real farce, I tell you.