Tihomir Levajac:
Here We Go on Trial Again

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Verdict

When the cupola, whose central part had been damaged by a thunderbolt, was repaired and the trial continued, among the Stories being tried by mankind there appeared one female Story, so brittle and feminine a Story that it was as womanly as it could possibly be.

This Story was also indicted by the Prosecutor, Uncle’s Uncle of the Potato Pact, as a war criminal. He accused the Story of telling a story wherein it openly supported ethnic cleansing, acts of which were committed by one side in the conflict only, naturally enough – with a view to establishing Greater Serbia.

Hardly a session passed without the Prosecutor’s mention of the doctrine of Greater Serbia.

The moment he opened his mouth, Greater Serbia rolled off his tongue.

Naturally, the defendant attached no particular importance to such accusations, saying that they were nothing more than propaganda, lies, rumours, fabrications, cock-and-bull stories spread for the purpose of divesting the Serbian people of the right of self-determination.

What the Story’s story was all about, the defendant maintained loud and clear, was not ethnic cleansing but beauty! The story, honourable judges, was not about ethnic cleansing but about the beauty of a woman! Yes, yes, kindly do not shake your heads in disbelief, it really was about beauty!

Such conflicting attitudes caused quite a stir in the courtroom. Even the impartial media liars perked up, particularly the SkiNN and SkiveNews correspondents, showing unusual curiosity.

For ethnic cleansing and beauty just didn’t go together! The notions were so contradictory that no international court of justice could reconcile them.

They were as different as heaven and earth!

The trial was on the verge of turning into a scandal.

The Defence Counsel, however, saved the day.

Lest justice should turn out to be unjust, he said, let the defendant tell the incriminated story and the Tribeurinal Board have a say upon hearing it. Let the Tribeurinal Board decide then whether the defendant or the Prosecutor was in the right.

What the Prosecutor was afraid of most was that the Story should be allowed to tell its story; however, the Chairman of the Tribeurinal Board, Mumbo Jumbo Carambo Bhutu Tutu of Nigeria, would not listen to the Prosecutor due to some deep atavistic motive of his, but decided of his own accord to let the Story address the Court.

As a child, he liked listening to the stories of his native tribe, a habit he had kept to this very day.

The Prosecutor gave his assent most unwillingly, on one condition. The members of the Tribeurinal Board must promise not to succumb to the story’s charm! He warned the Board members in advance of the perils of listening to the story! He warned the judges of the colours that the defendant resorted to, particularly some Byzantine colour that he had never heard of!

That colour, he said, had a sort of magical effect in the story!

Naturally, all the members of the Tribeurinal Board had to promise to the Prosecutor that they would obey him, whereupon the Story was, at long last, granted permission to address the Court.

The defendant started its story without any hesitation, ignoring the hostile audience.

Although the heroine of her story had given birth to three sons, the story began, she had remained almost the same as when she was a young girl. The freshness of youth just wouldn’t leave her, and her beauty, which, like everything in this world, has its natural span, did not wane but gradually matured, so that at the age of thirty-three it had reached maturity and the heroine of the story looked the way the story had it.

Slim and agile, she moved about audibly. Her complexion was radiant and translucent like the moist whiteness inside a seashell, her skin firm and well scrubbed. Her eyes were dark-green velvet. Looking about and seeing things as if in a trance, they left no-one indifferent, neither herself nor the one being looked at. Her lips were full and sensuous, and their smile was of the sort that made life more enjoyable. Her hair was thick and heavy, so that she could let it hang down thickly beside her face and then throw it back with a single move of her head.

As chance would have it, this beauty met her husband Aleksandar in Travnik, where he was doing his national service.

They met suddenly, fell in love at the same time, and got married without giving it a thought.

In any case, the defendant sighed, the honourable judges knew full well how it was when a dream fell in love with another dream!

Although, like all young people, they brought a lot of passion into their marriage, their aim was not just to have sex without any responsibility attached but to form a happy, healthy family.

Although life together brought a lot of obligations, there were never any unkind words between the spouses. Not when their honeymoon had passed, nor when their children were born, was there ever any disagreement, tension, suspicion or quarrel. Nor later, for that matter, when they had to bring up their children: there were never any conflicts.

Their marital problems began when the war in Bosnia broke out.

One September evening when they entered their bedroom, Aleksandar closed the door behind him and then told her that he had something very important to tell her.

Her pretty face was marred by a grimace, as if a mockingbird had alighted upon it.

When they went to bed, he blew out the candle and then told her in a very worried tone of voice that he had been thinking for a long time whether to tell her what he was about to tell her or not. She had no idea what he was going through inside! He could stand it no longer! Something had snapped, he had to tell her of his torment!

Such a long introduction only served to confirm her premonitions, and the air in the room grew perceptibly thinner.

Leaning upon his elbow, cigarette in hand, Aleksandar stared into the dark, then started whispering to her, as if he wished to tell her something that nobody knew about, that there was a civil war going on in Bosnia, that there was a religious and civil war being fought in Bosnia. Then he spoke of the three nations in conflict exterminating one another, the three besotted peoples destroying one another so as to gain more living space for themselves.

Then he spoke of how they were all behaving in the same way.

They even competed among themselves, trying to outdo the others when it came to killing and persecuting those who were of different faith in as cruel and merciless a manner as possible.

And then he spoke of how the world behaved.

How the world looked upon the situation in Bosnia with great concern, or so they said, how the world ostensibly condemned the bloodshed and, naturally, offered its good services and humanitarian aid while playing hide-and-seek behind the facade of diplomacy and doing its utmost to prolong this madness and infamy indefinitely. None of the great powers really cared about ending the misery of the Bosnian peoples, they only wanted to further their own interests.

He spoke about the world bitterly in the darkness of the bedroom. How Serbs, Croats and Muslims were mere pawns in a game that was bigger by far than they knew. Very disappointed, he claimed that something was very wrong with the world.

That the world drifted along aimlessly.

That it was led by a procession of madmen.

That the world was a madhouse, and that Bosnia was a madhouse within a madhouse.

And that, speaking of Bosnia, it could not be said with any certainty whose madness was the greater.

That of the world at large or that of the peoples whose misfortune it was to live in Bosnia.

Why, the world acted in a truly criminal fashion!

While Aleksandar spoke thus, or in any case something to that effect, his marital companion could not quite make out what the night held in store for her.

As she remained silent, he lit another cigarette and went on in that very sad voice of his.

He told her of what he’d heard, in strict confidence, naturally, about the things they were doing in Prijedor. He told her how this man had told him that the Serbs were driving the Muslims out of Prijedor. They were doing so because the Muslims had treacherously attacked them the previous summer at dawn, when they raided the local hotel, the police headquarters and the Town Hall. Coming from the direction of Hambarin, they had crossed the Sana River under cover of the fog and attacked at dawn, while a group of Muslims dressed in the uniforms of the Yugoslav Army emerged out of the local mosque and joined the attack and civilians shot from their flats, so that they killed twelve policemen in the wink of an eye.

Only when they had defeated them in battle did the Serbs realise that there was no living together with the Muslims. If they were capable of shooting at the Serbs from their flats, if they were capable of using the mosque for the purpose of attacking from it, then there was no living with them!

Now the Serbs were making them leave the town willy-nilly.

Even those who were living in mixed marriages had to leave!

If the husband was a Muslim, so the man had said, and the wife a Serb, then he had to go. If it was the other way round, then it was she who had to go to Travnik, Zenica or Tuzla.

If something like that happened in their town, if the Muslims attacked the Serbs, the same thing would happen!

How were they to save their marriage, he finally asked, very worried, when they lived at a time when madness reigned? How were they to survive as a family, which had been the world’s focal point since time immemorial, in this world out of joint?

They had better do something about it before it was too late!

He had been thinking about it for a long time, and had come to the conclusion that she should convert to Christianity and change her name.

He would take her to his birthplace, to the church where he himself had been baptised, and she would do it there. He had already been there and made all the arrangements with the local priest.

There was no other way!

When Meliha realised what her husband intended to do to her and with her, it was as if a thunderbolt had struck the part of the bed she was lying in, so that she was left breathless and speechless.

She did not know where she was.

Until that evening she had thought that she was a happy wife, mother and woman, and now it seemed to her that she had been deluding herself.

It had never occurred to her to convert and change her name. But she had never regretted marrying Saša[1] either. It had never bothered her that her husband was a Serb. She had not received a religious upbringing or a nationalist one, so that it was all the same to her.

She had never regretted giving birth to three sons, three sons who had Serbian names and had been baptised in church at her husband’s insistence.

She had not protested when, following the outbreak of war in Croatia, her sons’ national feeling awakened, when they started drawing flint-strikers and two-headed eagles[2] upon their books, notebooks, the concrete around the house and the stairs, when they sewed a Serbian national flag by themselves and placed it inside their room, when they sang nothing but Serbian nationalist songs.

It had not bothered her that her sons considered themselves Serbs, as opposed to herself and her husband, who had remained Yugoslavs.

None of that had bothered her, nor did it bother her on account of the religious war was being fought in Bosnia, but now, when everything was being put to a test, he wanted her to change her name and religion!

Did she not deserve a better fate, the Story asked, while Meliha tossed and turned in bed sighing painfully.

What she found particularly difficult to take was that he told her all that just before they were to fall asleep. If one was ever alone, it was at that moment.

When one’s ego was bared.

And how was she, the Story asked, to fall asleep then?

Thinking that she was guilty of something, that she had done something wrong, so that now he had the right to do with her as he pleased?

That their marriage was just a pleasant but distant memory?

That their relationship, no matter how this conversation turned out, would no longer be as it used to be?

That it would never be the same again?

That the two of them had fallen in love for the wrong reasons and entered marriage blindly, both making a mistake?

While she was thinking thus about her husband, herself and their marriage, it seemed to her that she was inside a train going in the wrong direction. It was as if she were in the last car, which was going in the opposite direction, leaving the Town Amidst the Rolling Hills with the green peaks and Šehitluci in the background irrevocably behind.

How was she to tell him that without being misunderstood?

That is why she strove to suppress her thoughts and feelings like a plant, lest she should make their trouble worse. That is why she strove to think dispassionately, in order to be able to stand his words somehow, anyhow.

In the midst of this internal struggle, she fell asleep.

When, the next morning, she saw her husband off to work, the eldest son, the one who was born on Christmas Day, to grammar school, the middle son, the one who just wouldn’t listen to her and made trouble for her every day, to the vocational school where he was learning his craft, and the youngest one, her favourite, to primary school, when she was finally left alone, she felt sudden relief and tears started rolling down her face of their own accord. She kept sighing all the time, as if her sorrow was beyond repair.

She felt powerless, but in this powerlessness she felt that she should not obey her husband, irrespective of the war and persecution of people of different nationality and faith, and his heartfelt wish to preserve their marriage and family.

But how was she to do that without hurting him?

He was about ten years older than her and her manner of thinking was somewhat simplistic compared to his. He was a university graduate whereas she was only a secondary school graduate, so her way of thinking was somewhat limited compared to his.

Despite being equal in love, despite their intimacy and mutual understanding, despite the fact that he always tried to understand, protect and support her, he was always superior to her, always above her.

Always a little beyond her reach.

At every moment, in every situation, he knew who and what he was, what he wanted and what he did not. He always managed his affairs forcefully, and therefore hers as well, but he did not judge her. He watched over her thoughts and actions, controlled and followed them, but he did not decide alone.

He reigned in love and marriage, but he did not rule over her.

In addition to that, she never noticed that he was hiding anything from her, keeping things secret or leading any kind of life that was unknown to her.

He was serious, determined, humane and manly, very much so, just the way a real man should be.

In spite of all that, she felt that she should not obey him. There was something inside her that resisted this but she did not know what it was, nor could she put a name to it. This resistance originated from some part of her that was unknown to her, not from that part where consciousness and reason prevailed.

That is why she started confessing things and complaining.

His request had penetrated that part of her being which no-one had the right to enter! Not her son, nor her father or mother, let alone her husband!

He had posed a threat to her inner freedom!

He demanded of her to be something she had never been! He wanted to depersonalise her, make her uniform! He wanted to uproot her, to leave her without anything of her own!

And when one took everything away, there would be nothing left!

No, no, she must not remain without her self by any means!

She must not allow that to happen at any cost!

She wanted to be the one to make decisions about the most essential part of her being, not him!

She had, the defendant maintained, the age-long right to it!

But how was the faithful wife to tell her husband that without upsetting their marital relations, without spoiling their love in this miserable world?

That was why she waited for her husband’s return from work restlessly and joylessly, with tears welling up inside, at the back of her head. That was why she’d cried her eyes out, that was why her lips were moist from deep sighs.

And when Aleksandar came home from work (Meliha herself had been out of work for four months due to redundancy) and the two of them were left alone, he started the same story all over again. What he had been saying in their conjugal bed, in the darkness of the bedroom the night before, he said again, the same things or very much alike. He spoke again of Bosnia as a madhouse, of the world and a procession of madmen, of the Muslims, who had committed some atrocities somewhere that day as well, and she watched him in the daylight, her eyes heavy from the tears she’d cried, trying to think up sentences to oppose him.

She thought of saying that, not having come into this world of her own free will, she couldn’t very well have asked God to make her a Muslim. Nor could she have chosen her father, mother or time of birth. And when she did come into this world, she had to be brought up in accordance with the customs and religion of her own people.

Whatever she thought up inside her mind she put into words somehow, but those words she could not pronounce for the life of her.

Not at all.

She felt bewildered when she realised she’d gone totally numb.

Maybe she couldn’t speak because she wanted to say so many things at once, so she started thinking what she ought to say first.

Why didn’t she admit to him that, if she did what he wanted her to do, it wouldn’t be in good faith? She wouldn’t be the same person any longer, she wouldn’t be who she’d always been, the one he’d met and fallen in love with while doing his national service in Travnik, the one he’d seen as an angel and called not by her own name but by that angel’s name.

If she were to do that, what would her parents say? What would her father say, her mother, their relatives, although she hadn’t had any news from them for several months. She didn’t even know whether they were still alive in Travnik, let alone how they were!

If she were to do that, she would renounce her family, her people, her parents and her relatives – everything that she’d been and that she was.

And why should she do what she didn’t want to do and be what she was not? Why be what she was not when she was already not what she was?

Unfortunately, although she somehow managed to put her thoughts into words and turn those words into sentences, still they wouldn’t come out. All her throat muscles strained to form a single sentence, but to no avail. A word would start from her bosom and get stuck in her throat, so she had to swallow it as a clot of dumbness.

It was as if he overshadowed her with something invisible, so that every word of hers had to wither.

So she sat through her husband’s monologue again.

The next morning, when she was left alone in the house, Meliha did not cry but steadied herself for the afternoon talk with her husband.

She concentrated, waited until her breathing was even, then thought up sentences that she would say to him when he got home from work. When she put them together, she ran into the hall, in front of the mirror that reflected her entire figure, and said them aloud. She repeated the same thought several times to pluck up courage.

Little by little, her confidence grew, both confidence and self-assurance, so she started feeling better, the way she used to feel before.

Once again her soul rejoiced at her being in this world.

However, as the moment of his return approached, she grew increasingly faint-hearted.

When he entered the house, everything inside her turned upside-down, so that she no longer knew what she had had been intending to say, nor could she repeat the sentences that she had practised in front of the mirror in the morning. While he was changing his clothes, she was left without a single thought she could call her own.

Over lunch, like the day before, he began the same story anew and she remained silent. She wanted to answer him, but could think of not a single sentence from among those she’d composed in the morning. She strained to answer him, but they just wouldn’t come. If she could think of just one sentence, just one of those she’d been reciting in front of the mirror, but her memory remained blank.

No matter how hard she tried.

When he became aware of the struggle she was going through, he finally demanded of her, in-between two mouthfuls, that she come out into the open.

To say, for once, just where she stood.

His words were pure horror to her because it seemed to her that he had violated her personal integrity more than ever before.

Threatened her own personal world, her inner being.

She got up from the table to get a dish from the cooker, and the veins in her temples swelled, grew, pulsated. It felt as if they were going to burst. Her head felt like a tiny hardened ball, and she heard a sound similar to the whistling of the wind in the distance. Her head was like a sphere under pressure, a ball full of energy threatening to blow her apart.

Maybe she would make it easier on herself if she just banged that ball against the wall?!

The moment she thought this, her head flew towards the wall, the dish fell out of her hands and the food spilled onto the floor with a bang.

She kept banging against the wall as if she was beside herself. She did it in such a frenzy that she felt no pain whatsoever. She did not even feel it when she cut her temple and blood started flowing.

Aleksandar was taken aback. He thought that his wife had gone mad all of a sudden, jumped to his feet, put his arms round her waist and started carrying her towards the couch. However, as she struggled to get free, waving her limbs wildly in all directions, he slipped, fell onto his knees, but managed to hold on to her, drag her to the couch and, with tremendous effort, make her lie down. He called out her name, asked her what was wrong, trying to overpower her, but she wouldn’t surrender easily.

After struggling for a while, Meliha started calming down and, little by little, became quiet.

By the time she had calmed down completely, she had already left her body. She was no longer inside it but somewhere nearby.

She was all ethereal, floating in the air like some transparent capsule.

She both existed and did not exist, as she occupied no real space.

From above, as if she were some focused light, totally calm, relaxed, she watched her husband open the first-aid kit and take out cotton wool, gauze, iodine and alcohol, wipe the blood off her face and hair and put compresses on the cuts.

She felt no pain while he was doing that, nor from the iodine or the alcohol either, as if he was doing it to somebody else.

She saw her husband holding her lovingly, trying to console her, heard him call her, not by her own name but by the name of the angel after whom he had named her, call her saying words he had forgotten during the war.

She heard him telling her words that every woman likes to hear.

It was those words that summoned her back to herself, so that she returned instantly and reunited with herself.

As if her own body had sucked her into it.

Then she sat up on the couch, gazed into his eyes, and told him never to mention conversion, change of faith and name to her again.

Did he understand?

Never ever!

This she uttered effortlessly, with determination and threateningly, and then got up, recovered, as if nothing had happened, and began to clean the food off the floor, then went on to take care of the children towards the end of the day.

When she was done with the housework, she went to bed early as there was no electric power for the tenth day in succession, fell asleep in his arms very fast and started dreaming even faster.

In her dream, she was inside a church, the very church where he wanted her to be converted to the Christian faith. She was alone in the church, looking it over from the inside.

She was dreaming and knew it, but she could not wake up. She dreamed and dreamed, only it seemed to her that she was not dreaming but awake. She watched herself and what she was doing and how she looked, what she was looking at and how that which she was looking at looked.

As if she was living a double life.

She saw herself in the church, and she saw the many pictures there. The walls, vaults, cupolas, arched windows, skylights, they were all covered with frescoes and old gold.

What was inexplicable was that, in the dream, she knew the saints who were painted on the walls although she neither knew nor had she ever known anything about the Christian religion. She knew nothing about the Muslim religion, let alone about the Christian one.

Nonsense.

First of all, in the highest cupola, under the vault, she saw the Lord of Sabaoth together with Jesus Christ and the angels, all bowing down, clad in long white gowns made of light and air.

Inside the left cupola, which was smaller, was the image of the Mother of God, melancholy, all pearly white. It seemed to her that the Mother of God was wider than the sky because on her bosom floated a medallion containing the image of Jesus.

To the right, inside a similar cupola, there was Christ’s image. A pretty round face, pretty the way girls’ faces are pretty, shining from above like a celestial lens.

The most prominent place was taken by a fresco depicting, along with various pastoral elements, the birth of Christ. In the fresco, from one segment of the starry sky a star flew towards the newborn child. Next to this one was the scene of Christ’s baptism in the river of Jordan. Jesus stood in the water, fish swimming in-between his legs. There was also a picture depicting the Messiah’s arrival in Jerusalem. This scene took place upon the walls of the city, and the cycle ended with the scene of Christ’s appearance before the apostles. Both the Master and the apostles were shown standing, but depicted as if all the figures were in the foreground. The ones at the back were even larger than the ones in front.

What was totally inexplicable to Meliha was that in the dream she knew precisely who was who among the apostles. She knew exactly who was Peter and who Paul, who was Jacob and who Thomas, and which one was John, Simon or Luke, which apostle was narrow-shouldered and which one looked down humbly.

She knew exactly from whom Christ demanded honeycomb and from whom fish.

She was particularly fascinated by the Last Supper.

A long table with priceless see-through bowls wherein fish and olives were served, and the moment when Christ announced that one of his disciples would betray him. Meliha knew that the one leaning towards Christ, almost laying his head upon his bosom, was John, and that the one who’d leaned all the way across the table to get the fish was going to betray him.

Judas.

Her gaze shifted to the western side, which contained a cycle of frescoes depicting the Passion of Jesus Christ: it was a cycle with a lot of tragic overtones. They accused the Son of God first, then humiliated him with a lot of lively gesticulations. Some ridiculed him, others spat at him, but nothing could disturb his peace.

Not even the taunts of the mischievous crowd.

The cycle ended with Christ’s crucifixion on Mt Golgotha, his resurrection and ascension. Four angels carried the Son of God towards the heavens gesticulating excitedly.

The participants of the scenes depicted on all the frescoes were solemn-looking but definitely alive.

The lower parts of the church walls were taken up by the pictures of Serbian holy fathers from St Sava to Dušan the Mighty.

A stately court interior. Luxuriously furnished rooms with tables made of marble from Studenica: upon the tables dishes and cutlery in unusual shapes and colours.

Noblemen dressed in sumptuous-looking clothes decorated with crosses, white eagles inside red circles, and sprinkled with golden ornaments in the shape of precious stones inlaid with flowers.

Noblewomen were graced with fine aristocratic faces and star-shaped earrings, while their dresses shone with heavenly light.

Beauty and nobility at the same time.

There was no floor or anything to support these figures. They floated in mid-air like some sublime civilisation.

Meliha had never seen such beautiful people anywhere.

Not even in a dream.

And the colours!

Flowing, but vivid and sensuous.

Particularly the ruby red, then the colour of annunciation, Mother of God’s colour of overripe cherry, and finally the colour of exquisite azure.

That blue was beyond any blue she had ever seen.

It was a mystery blue. It was deep blue, ultramarine or navy-blue, even cobalt-blue and enamel-blue.

Why, it was deep-space blue!

In a word, it was Byzantine blue.

And beneath that blue shone the sparks of old gold. In fact, the frescoes shone because of the gold and azure, the ultimate echo of perfection and immaculateness.

In her dream, standing in front of the frescoes that were a blend of light and shade, in front of pictures where emotions were coloured and moods self-explanatory, in front of frescoes where religious themes and historical motifs were unravelled in a lyrical manner, in front of pictures emanating an unearthly sort of beauty, Meliha was overwhelmed by a mystical mood.

Solemn, joyous, fulfilling, wonderful, exalted.

It was as if she had entered a covenantal temple, and it was just a dream.

Finally, she lit a tiny eye-sized candle and put it on the altar; when she wanted to leave the church, heavenly soldiers with gentle, mellifluous voices started coming down from the walls. Enveloped in golden auras, holding golden candles, they wanted to see her off. They were singing beautiful psalms by way of valediction.

Wondering how all the angels looked exactly the same, Meliha went out of the church walking backwards, making the sign of the cross and muttering a few incomprehensible words under her breath.

When she made for her house, starting from the Green Bridge, underneath Poljokan’s Park, the pictures followed her. She walked along mesmerised, the pictures in front of her, so she trod on them. Walking towards the house, whenever she turned the church shone in the distance like a light. Every now and then she turned, and it burned in the distance like a fire, so that everything seemed immersed in its light.

Even when she entered her house, she still saw the church from her room: it was shining in the distance like a midnight sun. She saw the church alight in the distance like a world torch, burning like an all too real vision of reality.

It was this excessive amount of light that finally woke her up.

When she found herself on this side of the dream, there was darkness all around her and her snoring husband next to her. The darkness was perfectly still, heavy, sepulchral, so she got out of bed and walked towards the window or, in any case, where she thought the window was. She felt for the curtain and removed it from her eyes, but the darkness remained. As if it was boundless. Darkness everywhere, so that the eyes became darkness as well.

There was no church nearby, neither far nor near, nor was there any light burning.

Just this immense darkness and her, all alone in the huge Bosnian night. Just her and the darkness the colour of darkest thoughts, her husband who wanted to convert her to a different faith, and the dream shining above her consciousness like a lantern. The spooky darkness, the husband who wanted to save the family from harm, and the dream hanging above her mind like a lantern. The darkest of darknesses, the husband who wanted to change her name, and the dream whose meaning was far from clear.

In the manner of every dream, she thought, hers must be ambiguous as well.

What was there at the bottom of it, she wondered.

She came back to bed and in the darkness that surrounded her searched for an answer to the question she had asked herself.

No, no, she must not fall asleep at any cost!

He would convert her while she was asleep, without her knowing it.

That was the message her dream had imparted to her!

That was it!

That was why she kept her eyes open in the dark, struggling with all her might not to lose herself in the shadow of dreams even though the voracious darkness devoured her gaze, her soul, her insides.

As if it wanted to swallow her.

That is why she struggled to keep her eyes open although she saw nothing but darkness. That is why she impatiently waited for the morning to deliver her, for the promised dawn to come, for the darkness to disperse into nothingness, for the room, and herself inside it, to fill with light, but it just wouldn’t happen.

The night was long, as long as a wound that hurt. It passed slowly, like a funeral procession, going away somewhere with its distant sounds.

She did not know how long she had struggled with the monotonous darkness, sleep and fear in the dark, when finally the darkness started flowing away into nothingness.

With it, she flowed somewhere as well.

First there was that vague, colourless light, and the furniture appeared, unnaturally stiff.

She greeted the dawn as relief-bringing reality, with an absent-minded expression on her face and the morning freshness on her hands.

When she had got dressed and washed her face, she lit a fire in the kitchen stove and put a small pot of water onto it, then pulled the withered plants out of flowerpots one by one.

While she ground coffee in the coffee mill, she looked around herself with eyes full of tiny prickly needles from last night’s dream.

How come she’d dreamt such a dream and what did it want from her? To torture and haunt her, gnaw her heart away, thus destroying her morning and day?

How come that church had appeared in the dream, those three cupolas upon it, all those frescoes inside it, where had all that come from when it did not exist in reality?

Where had all that beauty come from, those colours and the light she’d never seen?

Were the dream, church, frescoes, colours and light the future that lay ahead of her, the inevitable that would come to pass whatever she thought and did?

When she heard her husband moving about in the bathroom, she made coffee for him the way he liked it, a bit on the strong side, with just a touch of sugar.

Aleksandar entered the kitchen without a single word, sat down at the table without a word and drank his coffee without a word, with a selfish expression on his face.

He drank, not speaking his mind, a look of menace on his face.

She cast surreptitious glances at him, thinking to herself that he was no longer the Aleksandar she knew but some other one.

As if he had turned into a different man.

He didn’t ask her how she had slept, nor whether she’d dreamt anything, whether the cuts on her temples hurt, whether yesterday’s wounds hurt, he wasn’t the old Aleksandar but a new one, one who would carry through what he had set his mind on.

Sometime or other.

She knew him all too well! When he got it into his head to do something, he didn’t give up easily!

Nothing could persuade her to the contrary, no sir! The way she felt about him, she must have lost all feeling of closeness!

How strange all that was!

In her soul she felt hemmed in, and all around her was loneliness as vast as the sea, a sea she could never swim out of.

The morning became particularly hopeless when he finished his coffee, got up from the table without a word or glance in her direction, went through the kitchen, his face looking like a sword, and left without saying goodbye.

After he had left Meliha went about the house feeling both poisonous and poisoned, bumped into things feeling abjectly deserted, woke up her sons and made breakfast, French toast with jam she’d made the previous summer, dropping the fork repeatedly.

When her sons had left for school, she felt as if she had been emptied so that only a shell remained of her. The way she felt, one word only, a single decisive word could break her.

But she mustn’t allow that to happen!

How could she surrender now that she had won?

No, she was going to remain what she had always been!

To prove that, she would make green vegetable pie for lunch! She’d always enjoyed making pies out of thin layers of dough she made herself.

She jumped to her feet, found herself a large dish, then went into the pantry and sifted flour through a sieve, which looked almost unreal as it wobbled in her hands.

She took a little salt and oil, added hot water and boiled the dough. While she was kneading the dough, it was as if she was kneading silence coming from some impenetrable distance, swelling and overwhelming her.

As if it was going to sweep her away.

In the dead silence, the parcelled out stillness, he might enter the house, even the kitchen, without her noticing him! He might just appear by her side out of nowhere, take her by the hand and take her to church without a word to have her name and her faith changed!

But she would have none of that!

Lest he should sneak up on her, she would go and get some flour and disperse it on the floor in the kitchen, the hall, on the porch, the stairs and the concrete path leading to the gate.

He would not be able to enter without leaving telltale footsteps behind him!

There, she would take precautions!

She did what she had set out to do and turned back from the gate to go back into the house.

But whatever was the matter with the stairs? They weren’t leading up but down! Not a moment ago, when she’d got out of the house, she had gone down the stairs, and now, going back in, she was going down the stairs again! How very strange!

Was it mere absent-mindedness?

Or was she a split personality?

Or a multiple personality?

Were there other personalities passing through her, as the focal one, with all their diverse characteristics?

Why, no, there must be something or other wrong with the stairs.

When she entered the kitchen, a strange sight greeted her.

The dough had swelled and assumed the colour of eyelids. She’d kneaded it and left it there, and it had swelled. How was that possible when she hadn’t added any yeast? Had it gone mad?

Or was it her?

But, no, there must be something wrong with the dough!

Surely, there had to be a reason for what was happening!

But with the dough having swelled, why didn’t she make lepinje[3], she asked herself hesitating, holding a large rolling-pin in her hands. But, no, she would roll it into thin layers for the pie, after all!

She cut the swollen mass into equal pieces with a knife, then rolled each one into a thin layer all across the table. While doing that, she kept looking over her shoulder, through the curtains, lest she should miss his arrival.

She gasped for breath momentarily when she mistook a passer-by for him. She rushed to the window, her arms hanging by her side, and peered through the holes in the curtain, breathless.

She was wrong, the poor dear! She thought it was him but it was not! Her eyes were playing tricks on her!

The next moment she heard a voice: there he was!

But it was nobody’s voice, just her thought.

But when the door creaked, when she heard somebody’s breathing behind her back, when she saw his grey sleeve, something pulled her through a dark tunnel abruptly, through empty darkness, through a closed space out of which air had been pumped out.

It felt as if some monster were pulling her, so she started hitting the monster savagely on the head with the rolling-pin. When she had smashed the monster’s head, she let rip on the dough on the table, then switched to the glasses, plates and dishes. Then came the flowerpots, jugs, the clock on the wall, pictures, jars – whatever had hemmed her in. Nor did the window-panes and the mirror, big enough to reflect her whole figure, remain intact.

Pieces of glass, plastic, porcelain and wood flew in all directions.

She smashed things to smithereens.

When she had broken the rolling-pin and realised that she hadn’t managed to smash everything to bits, all the strength drained from her momentarily and right there, in the middle of the courtroom, in front of all the judges, the Prosecutor, the Defence Counsel, the journalists and cameramen, she slumped into the bits and fragments of things, the garbage, shards, earth strewn all around, broken stems, flour, dough, the stuff she hadn’t managed to smash but had knocked down to the floor, the chaos, jumble, shambles, litter, mess, clutter, mish-mash, disarray and havoc as if into the lap of God.

Helpless, desolate, all beat-up, defeated and wounded, but at the same time divine, with a lovely agile figure and skin as white as the moist inside of a shell, full, sensuous lips and rich, heavy hair, Meliha caved in and fell out of the Story’s embrace into the courtroom, shaking her head as if in a dream.

When the heroine of the story fell down in the middle of the courtroom, the trial had to be adjourned until the attendants lifted the hapless woman off the floor and took her away somewhere, and until the litter, leaves, earth, shards, light bulbs, pieces of window-panes and jugs were removed and the courtroom restored to order.

The trial had to be adjourned until proper conditions for normal court procedure, as befitted an International Court of Justice such as the Vague Tribeurinal, could be re-established.