Srpski

1. Story
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Verdict

On Monday morning, in the Vague suburb of Shabbyningen, where the indicted Stories were imprisoned, two policemen appeared and put the fourth Story in a bottle, the sort of bottle where genies are kept, then placed the bottle inside an armoured van, the sort of armoured van used to transport valuables, and drove it to the Court through the city, protected by two tanks and six armoured troop carriers. Only when the Story was ushered into the courtroom and placed in the dock did they remove the handcuffs from its mouth.

It was only then that the defendant noticed that the Tribeurinal Board was arranged in a chevron-like formation. Naturally, the most prominent position was occupied by the Chairman, Uncle Meinfatzen von Bismarck-Strumpf, while the other judges were at equal distance from one another. As the gaze of each judge was fixed, they all kept all the other judges, spaced out at equal distances, both left and right, within their field of vision.

Like a flock of wild geese in flight.

The Prosecutor, naturally, was positioned a little to the side, in a place kept specially for him. As usual, he sat there with an arrogant expression on his face, and when the Chairman granted him permission to address the Court, he rose imperiously from his seat and spoke in a contemptuous tone of voice.

In the course of the very first sentence he accused the defendant of the crime of intolerance. The defendant, he said, had been telling a story wherein it advocated contempt towards a person of different nationality and hatred towards other peoples.

There existed, of course, proof of this.

Their secret police had caught the defendant at it. A videotape had been recorded of the defendant telling its story with the obvious aim of stirring among its own people hatred and intolerance towards other peoples living in Bosnia.

Lest any time should be wasted, he suggested that the video cassette be played and the judges see for themselves.

The Chairman, Baron von Meinfatzen, immediately accepted the Prosecutor’s proposal, as was envisaged by the script.

The members of the Press then settled back in their chairs, as if inside a cinema, which is what this actually was, to see the giant screen better. They looked like idle people who had come to the courtroom for a bit of fun, to listen to all sorts of stories about the wild peoples living in Bosnia.

The screen blinked first, and then the defendant really appeared on it. It was obvious that it went from one person to another, pouring words into their ears.

At the time when Yugoslavia was being prepared for dismemberment, the defendant’s voice was heard, with the aid of domestic traitors and foreign powers, in the name of the New World Chaos, Vučko’s wife started complaining about him. Without any particular reason she started complaining that he snored in his sleep so that she, Lukrecija, could no longer sleep in the same room as him but had to move to another one.

As if, before Yugoslavia started bursting at the seams from the Vardar River to Mt Triglav, he hadn’t snored in his sleep.

A few days later she started reprimanding him for reading Serbian newspapers!

After a while, she started nagging at him for watching the Serb-Četnik news programmes on TV every evening, programmes that were filled with lies and lies only.

After nagging at him for several evenings in succession, she simply switched channels. From that day onwards, the order came, only Croatian news programmes would be watched in their home! From that day onwards, they would watch only those news programmes telling the truth!

And then, while watching the reports of heavy fighting broadcast by Croatian Television, Lukrecija kept accusing Vučko of being guilty of all the devastation and suffering brought about by the war.

As she came up with fresh accusations every night, they gradually evolved into a theory of hers.

One evening she maintained that the Serbs were a wild people, primitive and backward, smelly and unclean, still reeking of urine. The Serbs were unkempt, sloppy, all beard and goat’s hide, as if they had arrived in the twentieth century straight from the late Stone Age!

The next day she would go on about the Serbs being the way they were because they belonged to the Byzantine type of culture, whereas the Croats belonged to an entirely different type, the European one: those were, admittedly, two different civilisations.

Two civilisations at different levels of development!

Although the Serbs did make the sign of the cross, the real Christianity began where the Croats were, on the outskirts of Christendom, Madame Lukrecija would say proudly.

What the Serbs preached was no religion but heresy, Lukrecija said with disgust.

Then, after a few days of rest, Lukrecija would nag at him again, claiming that the Croats were not only different from the Serbs as regards civilisation, culture and religion but were also better-looking!

The Croats were, on average, thirteen centimetres taller than Serbs, thus being physically superior as well!

While a Serb’s head was pointed, triangular and small, the head of a Croat was of regular shape, well-proportioned and, of course, of greater circumference. The Croats had more grey matter and strong, elongated frontal cranial bones, as well as skulls of a highly specific shape so that, in that respect, a Croatian brain functioned rather differently from a Četnik one, was that not so?

Of course, it had been scientifically proved at a newly-established Institute for Croatian Brain Research in Zagreb, had it not?

When, after a few weeks, the war shifted from Croatia to Bosnia, Lukrecija went on daily about how difficult it was to live with Serbs in the same town, let alone in wedlock!

She nagged one day, the next day, the third, fifth, tenth day in succession, only to announce solemnly at long last that their marriage was artificial, that is to say, that it was a failure.

While listening to her, Vučko felt his eyelashes grow and split into a hundred tiny particles each in the pupils of his eyes.

When they met, started dating and eventually got married, their marriage was not a failure since love was not a matter of choice but something that just happened to people. It was not a failure when they moved from one town to another, as if on a package tour of sorts, while he worked on the construction sites of one Yugoslav Army factory after another. While their life together unfolded in this way, while Lukrecija followed her husband everywhere, putting up with the shortages and troubles of the post-World-War-Two period of reconstruction and development, as well as the occasional clashes that inevitably occurred in marriage, it was not a failure. It was even more meaningful when she got pregnant and they started thinking about their future child together, about whether it was going to be a boy or a girl, what colour his or her eyes and hair were going to be, what name they were going to give him or her. It was no less meaningful when a son, Miroslav was born to them, when they brought little Miruško up together and lived for him and him only. It was not at all artificial then. Nor was it artificial when, following her wish, they settled down in Bugojno, as she was born in one of the nearby villages. It was not a failure when they saw their son through school, nor was it a failure when, having grown up, he married Lucija, a local nurse. When a grandson, Blaž, was born to them, it was not a failure either. It was not a failure when their son and daughter-in-law went off to work in Germany, leaving the two of them to look after their grandson, their Blaž.  It was not a failure when, having worked in Germany for six years, their son and daughter-in-law managed to save enough German marks to be able to buy a plot of land on the outskirts of town and have a Bavarian-style house built there over a period of two years.

While the two of them were Yugoslavs, their marriage was just like those of most Yugoslavs, but when Yugoslavia started falling apart, their marriage became a failure; now that the Serbs and Croats were engaged in a deadly struggle, it was a total failure.

Having said whatever she had to say about marriage in general and their own in particular, Lukrecija ended with a story about Bugojno as a Croatian town.

Little Rome had been, she said, was and would remain Croatian, and in view of that Serbs had no place there.

Neither Serbs in general nor he as an individual.

What once used to be was no more.

The two of them could not go on living together!

And Bugojno being a Croatian town, he had to go!

He should go to his Četniks, he should join his Serbo-Communists, he should go back to his barbaric roots!

He should go to Belgrade, to that fascist who had started all this, he should go anywhere, she did not care provided that he left for good!

Everyone was alone in this life anyway, especially now!

He could take his Skoda and drive away in it, and she could help him get out of Bosnia and Herzegovina without the papers required, from then on he should manage on his own!

That was as much as she could do for him now!

Tomorrow, she wouldn’t be able to do even that!

She would be neither able nor willing!

While he was listening to his wife, it seemed to Vučko that he had not spent so many years together with this woman, whom he knew or thought he knew, but with some other woman. It was as if their past was not what it had been but some new past.

Past he had no knowledge of.

Despite all the bitterness he felt welling up under his tongue, he felt like shouting: Go on a bender, my rose so tender, but somehow refrained from doing so. Why protest when he had sort of seen it coming? It was only natural to feel that way because the atmosphere in the town was already full of unhealthy animosity towards the Serbs.

He was grappling with old age already, but from time to time, as he walked through the town, somebody would hit him with a rifle butt from behind and mumble: What are you waiting for? Every now and then somebody, he did not know who, Lukrecija had three brothers living in the countryside and relatives he didn’t even know, would prod his side with his elbow in passing, be it in the street or in the market place, and say: What, you’re still here?

Why were they picking on him?

Why did his neighbours, both Croats and Muslims avoid him? Why wouldn’t they communicate with him? Why did his former colleagues, friends, shop assistants do likewise?

He was left almost without any wishes whatsoever. He had seen and lived through so much that he had no further questions to ask.

His eyes had grown dim, his wit had thinned out and his soul had shrivelled.

Were his hands not shaky? Why, he even found it difficult to urinate, let alone live!

And why should he live on when life paid no attention to him any longer!

He was through with the ordinary sort of life!

He hung on to life just a little, here and there!

In fact, he was not afraid of death but of life, because the only thing he was good for was a scarecrow in somebody’s garden!

Why should he be such a nuisance to them?

Now that he was a useless old man!

Even that was a lesser evil than the other one bothering him.

Why, he would be left all alone, the way he had been left all alone as a boy, when the Ustashi had killed his whole family in a village at the foot of Mt Kozara. They’d killed his father, mother, brother and sister. At the beginning of his life he knew of no home, fireplace, home cooking and family life but only of orphanages.

His destiny was to be repeated, then.

Whatever life had given him, his old age would take away from him.

As it was too late to start anything in the way of a new life, he would have to wander from one place to another, going from pillar to post, homeless, living on the dole and not on his hard-earned pension! Who knows where he’d be, in whose bed he’d sleep and what he’d eat!

It was as if destiny was taking revenge on him! As if birth and death did not differ all that much, as if death was an accomplice of birth!

Vučko spent the day and night struggling with suchlike thoughts. The next day his wife went off to town without telling him where she was going nor when she would come back, and came back a little before noon.

She had, she said without looking at Vučko, made all the arrangements for him to leave the town. He could get out quite safely without any papers! He wouldn’t be able to take the main road, but would have to cross the Vrbas River and take that road! In any case, the man she’d dealt with had drawn the route for her, so all he had to do was stick to it!

There were three checkpoints on that road, she said.

But no-one would stop him at those checkpoints, the Croatian ones!

She paused then, took the sheet of paper with the safe route and Croatian checkpoints drawn on it with her veined hands and placed it on the table in front of Vučko without a word.

He couldn’t take many things with him, she said, lest he should draw attention to himself! He could take one pair of trousers, one shirt, one sweatshirt, a pair of socks and underpants, and he could drive away in his Skoda!

That was all she had to say to him!

The hour had come, then, when the lady with whom he had spent thirty-seven years, whose bed he had shared for thirty-seven years, would drive him away from the doorstep! He was to take the road to nowhere, and she was to remain in her own house!

Well, then so be it, as life was hell in itself!

If many great things could be built upon great love, the same went for great hatred!

While Lukrecija was getting out of his life, he was paralysed by his weakness. He'd better get up and get ready to leave, as told, but he couldn't summon the strength.

How could he summon any when he was losing everything!

His son, daughter-in-law, grandson, flat, block of flats, the neighbours he’d visited, the colleagues he used to work with, the street he lived in, the factory where he had earned his living, the town he used to belong to and the river where he’d go fishing.

Although he was aware of all this, he somehow managed to get up, enter the bedroom and find some things. Then he sat down on the bed to rest for a while, feeling the whole weight of his body. It was as if he had stepped onto some sort of scales to have his weight measured. He got up again somehow, found a bag and pushed the things he’d gathered into it, then sat down to rest again. Afterwards, he looked for some documents for a while, resting upon his elbows, and then sat down to rest yet again.

He was sitting as if he were the last remaining man, with no-one else in this world, having no strength to feel, remember or think.

The things inside the room were floating, as it were, as if made of air. He looked absent-mindedly at the cupboard, the table, the armchairs, the couch, but did not see them clearly, only their contours, so it seemed to him that the pieces of furniture were dying.

He finally got up with difficulty, went out into the hall, put on his shoes, took his raincoat in one hand and the bag in the other, and then entered the dining-room to say goodbye to his wife.

Lukrecija was standing by the window, her forehead resting on the window-pane. Around her head, in-between the inner and the outer window-pane, flies kept flying about and dying for some reason.

Although he clearly saw the flies, he could not see his wife very clearly. She looked like a egg stain that someone had spread across the window-pane.

Little by little, he started making her out, recognising, out of the corner of his eye, her plump figure, her faded chintz dress with black spots that looked like scorpions.

All of her rear side was framed by the dim light coming in through the window-pane.

He stood there looking at her back and the back of her head, as if he were looking at some final scene.

As if the two of them had not been living together, breathing the same air, but had only met for a day to part without saying goodbye.

Since her back had told him everything there was to say, there was no point in his saying anything either.

He had read somewhere that there came moments in the lives of married couples when no words would suffice.

This might be one such moment!

He finally managed to get his feet off the floor, turn around and go out through the hall, dragging all of his miserable past life behind him. When he finally got out of her life, he closed the door through which he had been entering the flat for many years without a sound.

It took him about a year to climb down the stairs, carrying the few possessions he had with him, and reach his Skoda, which was sixteen years old, parked in front of their building, right next to the pharmacy, looking like fatigue on wheels.

He was barely able to unlock the door, throw the bag inside, enter, sit down in the driver’s seat: then he rested his head and millennial fatigue, as a deeply unhappy man, upon the driving wheel.

In the manner of someone resigning himself to his destiny.

His wife had gone out of his life, so that he and his little life were on their own again.

He could not say goodbye to his son because he was on the front line. As he was not a pure Croat, the Croats had been pushing him forward ever since the fighting with Serbs had started. They pushed him forward and he was willing to fight on their side because he felt like a Croat.

Therefore, he had a son he did not really have.

As for his daughter-in-law, there had never been any love lost between them. When he came to their flat to see Blaž, his grandson, she would not even look at him.

As if he were, God forbid, invisible.

She exchanged a word or two with her mother-in-law, but not a single one with him!

Only his grandson was the way he should be. It was his grandparents, anyway, who had taken care of him and brought him up while his parents were in Germany, stashing German Marks away.

He was particularly fond of his grandfather, which had to do with the very strong bond that existed between them. As was the way in the good old days, he would tell his grandson stories. He told him about himself and his childhood, the war, Mt Kozara and the suffering of Kozaran children. He told him how he had been left all alone, an orphan, and how he had struggled through life homeless, finally to become a man.

When he started going to school, Blaž knew only of school and his grandfather. If his grandfather accompanied him, he would go behind the building to play marbles or to the field to play football. Otherwise, he would not go. If Vučko went fishing in the Vrbas, Blaž would go, too.

If he was merry, so was Blaž, if he was sad, Blaž was sad as well, only in a different sort of way.

Remembering all that, he could not leave without giving the son of his son a hug at parting.

This thought enlivened him, got both himself and the Skoda started, so that, after two turnings, he arrived in front of the school that Blaž attended.

He got out of the car, stood by the broken fence and watched the children.

The children, out in the schoolyard for the break, were running around, pushing and shoving and teasing one another, jumping and shouting, laughing and screeching, as children are wont to do, each one holding something to eat in his or her hand.

The mere fact of being alive made them feel glad.

While muffled explosions kept sounding somewhere in the distance, Vučko stood by the broken fence, thinking how only children were still pure and innocent in this rotten and merciless world.

Innocent and pure, and always the same!

Only children were not evil yet.

Only they still had hope!

He stood there thinking such thoughts when he heard a voice shout: Grandad!

When his grandson had spotted him and how, which way he had come running to him and where from, he had no idea. He only heard him shout: Grandad, and then he saw his bright eyes and happy face.

Blaž ran up to him and stood next to him, as if he had to defend him from someone or something.

Vučko turned in the direction of Komar, then in the direction of Vilenica, but they could not be clearly seen through the haze in the distance.

He wanted to touch Blaž’s head with his fingers, to feel his hair and the top of his head, but he couldn’t. His fingers had gone rigid.

Grandad, chirped the poppet under his grandfather’s raincoat, Grandad, where are you going?

Away.

Why?

For reasons he wouldn’t understand.

When was he coming back?

He wasn’t.

He was leaving Grandma?

He was.

And him, Blaž?

Him, too.

Forever?

Forever.

When they fell silent, Blaž started sobbing.

He, Blaž, chirped the poppet in-between sobs, was not going to part with him! He wanted, he kept on sobbing, always to be with his Grandad!

To his grandfather, his words and shaky voice felt like a balm being placed on his aching forehead.

There, he thought, he wasn’t, as he had thought, all alone in the world after all!

He had a grandson who was glad to see him, who had clutched his raincoat and would not let go!

But his books and school bag were here, his clothes and things at home, and if he took him along with him, who would know what had happened to the boy? If he took the boy with him, how would he get out of town, pass through the barricades? After all, if they managed to get away, where would the two of them live and how? Who would cook, wash and clean for them?

While Vučko kept struggling with all sorts of dark thoughts, the poppet hanging on to his raincoat begged him to take him along. Persistently, standing there like a little cricket with his ears in the grass, he begged Vučko to take him along. He begged and begged, promising that he would be a good boy, that he would listen to his grandfather, that he would love him and be with him only.

Vučko turned quite resolute then, and without a moment’s hesitation took his grandson by the arm and led him towards the car. Having put him on the floor behind the driver’s seat, he covered him with a crumpled blanket.

He should remain there, hidden, until they got out of town!

He sat in front of the driving wheel with a youthful exuberance and took the route that he had been ordered to take.

On the outskirts of town he came upon the first checkpoint, the one with a hedgehog-type obstacle.

The policeman who was standing to the right of it waved him on.

Having crossed the bridge and the river, he came upon the second checkpoint. He flashed the turn signal to indicate a left turn and passed this checkpoint without stopping.

He drove both fast and slow, meeting rust-coloured army vehicles that were hurrying somewhere while the chequered flags on them fluttered in the wind.

When he approached the third checkpoint, where the asphalt gave way to a country road branching off uphill, a policeman looked at the piece of paper in his hand and, having compared the registration number of the Skoda with the one on the piece of paper, waved him on smiling wildly.

Vučko could not bring himself to believe that he had passed all three checkpoints without being stopped, and thought it was in the nature of a bad omen.

He could not believe that it would be possible to reach the Serbian lines without stopping.

He was doing fine so far, and it wasn't a good thing when one was doing fine!

Just a few hundred metres from that last checkpoint, when the road entered a wood and grew narrower, after a sharp turn Vučko saw a branch lying across the road. He pulled up before it although he had not intended to stop. Something made him do it, something he could not resist. A hunch or something like that.

Blaž got up from the floor and asked what had happened while Vučko sat watching the branch through the windscreen. It was rather small, with lots of fresh-looking leaves on it.

When he got out of the car and went up to it, he saw mines under the leaves.

They’d been placed there a short while ago judging by the look of things, and intended for the first one who happened to come along, which turned out to be himself.

After all, how could that ever be, a Serb leaving Bugojno without being stopped at any of the three checkpoints, and no mines to welcome him on the road!

No way, brother, no way!

As he knew everything there was to know about mines, having been making them for years, maybe he had even made this one himself, he quickly dismantled them, then returned into the car and drove on.

The road he was driving along was unknown to him, but he used the Vrbas River, which ran parallel to it, to orientate himself. From time to time he turned towards his grandson, towards Blaž’s face, which reflected the whole road, waiting impatiently for the Serbian defence line to come into view.

After a period of great uncertainty, he finally saw Lower Vakuf in the distance, the ramp and the tricolour flag fluttering proudly high up in the sky: feeling elated, he started singing, and his grandson joined in.

Two paupers, two orphans who were cast adrift by the interests of others and the demonic powers of this world, sitting inside a sixteen-year-old Skoda which was panting and coughing and mumbling, singing their hearts out.

Embracing each other tightly.

Tears welled up in Vučko’s eyes, so that he did not see the road they were driving along very clearly.

Tears were flowing down his face and the ten-year-old pool of joy next to him was radiant with happiness.

His grandfather’s eyes shone through the tears.

Tears of joy.

Two eyes of the world shone ever more brightly, so brightly that, when the car crashed into a post, they burst apart like two stars in a firework display.

The picture on the screen suddenly trembled, then disappeared, as did the sound, so that the screen turned into a thousand sparkling spots.

It was clear to everyone present that the story was finished and that the trial could get under way now. No sooner had the viewers resumed the position they had had before the video recording was played than the Prosecutor’s question resounded in the courtroom.

Had the members of the Tribeurinal Board, he asked, seen for themselves the validity of the indictment? Had they seen the defendant going around, whispering its story into people’s ears as if pouring poison into them, so as to stir up hatred and intolerance towards other peoples living in Bosnia and Herzegovina? Had they seen that with their own eyes? Had they finally understood the truth of the accusation?

Yes, answered the judges in unison, the way children answer their teacher’s questions at school; although they were dressed in funny clothes, solemnly funny, they had kept their human form.

Suddenly, when no-one expected it, the Defence Counsel asked for permission to address the Court. Everybody in the courtroom, the Prosecutor and the judges, journalists, cameramen, attendants, cleaning ladies, turnkeys, electricians, knew that he had been brought there merely for the sake of form and nobody took him very seriously.

While the Defence Counsel frequently scratched the thick fur on his belly, which reflected a range of breathtaking colours, from dark red to yellow-brown, they simply forgot that he was there.

The Defence Counsel extended a paw from under his heavy cloak and placed it on his mouth. It looked as if he was holding a microphone, a soft, cuddly sort of microphone, and speaking into it.

Was it more important to the Tribeurinal Board, he grumbled in one of the five thousand languages used for the purpose of conducting trials at the International Court of Justice, whether the defendant had been spreading the story or whether the events in the story had actually taken place? From a legal point of view, the truth of the matter was more important than the form it was presented in. The event that the defendant had talked about had really taken place. It was talked about a lot in their world because it had occurred in a town right next to the mountain where his tribe lived. He could even bring ten witnesses or so to confirm the things he had said, and he had the right to do so in accordance with the Statemute of the Tribeurinal!

Nobody in the courtroom had expected such an outburst from the Defence Counsel. Therefore, a commotion ensued. Sitting in their chairs, the judges started falling on their backs, one by one, the way some bugs do when sprayed with insecticide. The way potato beetles do when potatoes are sprayed, when the poison enters vital organs such as the brain, or any other organ for that matter, their legs and belly being up, not down.

They were falling on their backs in the manner described in a song originating among common folk:

Potato beetles to tubers they fly,

When I spray them, belly-up they lie.