Tihomir Levajac:
Here We Go on Trial Again

1. Story
2. Story
3. Story
4. Story
5. Story
6. Story
7. Story
8. Story
9. Story
10. Story
11. Story
12. Story
13. Story
14. Story
15. Story
16. Story
17. Story
18. Story
19. Story

Verdict

At the beginning of the trial, the Prosecutor proclaimed the thirteenth Story to be a war criminal because it had told a story wherein individuals of other nationalities were psychologically harassed and intimidated. The harassment, gentlemen, had systematically been performed in Bosnia by one side only, the Serbs, naturally, as part of the ethnic cleansing campaign, that is, the realisation of the doctrine of Greater Serbia.

Every so often the Prosecutor mentioned Greater Serbia, so often that even the sparrows perched upon the rickety trees under the courtroom windows were familiar with this particular phrase and sang it from time to time as if it were the current No. 1 hit in the hit parade.

The defendant wouldn’t give in, it disputed the Prosecutor’s claim. It had, indeed, taken a non-Serb for the protagonist of its story, but not for the purpose of psychological harassment or intimidation, its aim was to penetrate the person’s soul.

Being very stubborn, the Prosecutor wouldn’t let his claim be brought into question; the defendant wouldn’t give in either, it wouldn’t let its artistic credo be altered so easily.

As this verbal contest could not bring the conflicting views to anything in the way of a reconciliation, the Defence Counsel interceded. He slowly got up onto his hind legs, proudly raising his very own fur collar.

Although he had an elongated, flattened head, he did not give the impression of being an empty, dull creature, but one with a well-developed sense of justice.

This was confirmed when he addressed the Court and said that the Court had at its disposal a court expert on all theoretical problems pertaining to story-telling. Why not use his services in order to settle any dispute over the matter?

Let the defendant tell its story and then let the court expert decide whether the defendant or the Prosecutor was in the right.

When the Tribeurinal Board agreed to this, the Defence Counsel starting dancing all over the courtroom in the manner of a drunken sailor in a harbour bar, mumbling, grumbling, rumbling, grunting, whistling and barking. From time to time, he even yodelled like a yokel while shaking his fur collar all around.

The guards intervened, asking the Defence Counsel not to behave as if he were in his natural habitat but to observe the rules of civilised behaviour.

This interlude was useful to the defendant, enabling it to concentrate, gather its wits and bring itself into a state of creative tension.

The Assistant Headmaster of a well-known school, it finally spoke, did nothing all day but walk all around the school holding papers in his hands. All day long he went from classroom to classroom, from the teachers’ room to the bursary, from the secretariat to the cabinet, from the reception to the teacher on duty for the day, gathering information. Every now and then he needed a figure, percentage or statement, record or table.

When talking to people, he was businesslike, stern-looking but civil. In a nutshell, an efficient clerk, neat and pedantic.

Pedantic the way only those with an ulcerous condition can be.

After the break, he entered a classroom where the pupils were sitting as if planted at their desks.

He stopped in front of the teacher’s desk with a paper-like expression on his face and, naturally, a sheet of paper in his hands.

First he apologised to the teacher for taking some of his time, but he had to conduct a poll among the pupils. In his hands he held a list of the pupils from the class he had just entered. Each pupil was to write down his or her nationality next to his or her name. That was the purpose of his visit.

Following these words, the defendant claimed, there was a commotion in the classroom.

While some of the pupils joked about it, others examined their hearts and feelings, and some looked very worried indeed.

The noise made the Assistant Headmaster raise his eyebrows. The poll was not his doing, he said, nor was it the Headmaster’s whim, and the School Council or the Teachers’ Council weren’t behind it either. It was an order coming from above that had to be carried out no matter how one might feel about it.

Kindly let them waste no time, let each pupil write down his or her nationality next to his or her name, and that would be the end of that.

After some hesitation, the list of pupils started being passed from one desk to another. Some wrote down their nationality not taking any time at all, but those from mixed marriages took their time, fretting over it. They even vaguely suspected that this poll was imposed precisely because of them.

They did not know how to declare themselves, what to write down, because they were afraid that it might do them harm.

At school, that is.

In these evil times.

Therefore, if their father was a Croat or a Muslim and mother a Serb, they declared themselves Serbs, adding in brackets that it was on account of their mother being a Serb. If, on the other hand, their father was a Serb and mother of another nationality, they were, thank God, Serbs anyway.

On account of their father being a Serb, of course.

They were Serbs, but in brackets.

The one who was in the most difficult position of all was Jasenka, whose father was a Croat and mother a Muslim.

She was a frail, almost transparent-looking girl, with a pair of bright, gay, inquisitive eyes and fair hair.

Hers was the sort of beauty that could not be discerned just yet, it wasn’t yet defined or formed, but it was nascent.

When the list containing the names of all the pupils reached her desk, everybody turned towards her and her inquisitive eyes looked all around, as usual.

How was she to answer that question when that particular lesson had never been taught at school?

How was she to say what nationality she was when she didn’t have a definite opinion about it?

They wanted her to declare her nationality, and there she was, still absorbing the outside world!

Could she remain undecided, she finally asked.

No, she couldn’t, the Assistant Headmaster answered curtly and, as usual, nervously. She had to decide one way or the other!

Those words made the girl feel even more afraid.

How was she to decide, where should she place herself when she belonged nowhere?

She’d never before asked who she was or what she was, she simply let herself be what she was. She was something boundless, all-encompassing. Someone who was a part of everything that existed, someone who was one with the world surrounding her, thus unconsciously wishing to be imbued with the substance of pure space.

If she couldn’t remain undecided, she said again, looking at her teacher as if she was seeking help from him, could she declare herself a Yugoslav?

No, she couldn’t, snapped the Assistant Headmaster even more nervously. The world didn’t recognise Yugoslavia, so it didn’t exist!

There was no more Yugoslavia or Yugoslavs!

The most beautiful country in the world was gone!

That was why the bastards had destroyed it! That was why they had destroyed the most beautiful dream in the world!

Out of wickedness, malice and spite!

And in order to build the New World Order!

For one couldn’t build anything new without pulling the old order down!

If whatever he might be doing should encounter any sort of hindrance, the Assistant Headmaster immediately got incensed and started speaking in a vehement, angry, raised, shrill tone of voice while his eyes sort of jumped all over the classroom.

In the manner of a pair of tiny black toads.

Whereupon Jasenka concluded that she had done something wrong, that it was her fault that Yugoslavia had fallen apart, that she, at her tender age of fifteen, had contributed to the break-up of Yugoslavia, so that Yugoslavia and Yugoslavs were no more, and burst into tears.

The Assistant Headmaster got the impression that she was merely pretending, that her indecisiveness and tears, the way she shook her head, as if in a dream, was only aggravating the problem at hand, so he really exploded then.

The way only those with an ulcerous condition exploded.

It was not his fault, he said, his cheeks already blazing in an unhealthy shade of red, that there was no Yugoslavia any more, that there were no Yugoslavs either, that the peoples living in it had brought this upon themselves. This war that they were waging against one another! It was not his fault that the pupils of this school had to declare their nationality! He had been entrusted with a job to do, and he was merely doing his job as conscientiously as he could! He had seven more classes to deal with, and there she was, getting overly sensitive about it all! He had already wasted two whole hours at it, and he hadn’t managed to dispose of more than three classes because of the likes of her! He had neither time nor nerves for this foolishness, he said, speaking faster and faster, words spilling out of his mouth.

Was it his fault that her parents belonged to those particular nationalities in the Serbian Republic at this moment in time? What did he care who had fallen in love with whom and for what reasons, who married whom without thinking about the nationality of the children to be born in such marriages!

He quite simply had not one second more to spare for her! What did she think she was doing, shilly-shallying like that, not declaring her nationality! Let her make up her mind immediately! She could declare herself a Gypsy for all he cared!

What was such a simple thing for those who had thought up the poll and for the Assistant Headmaster proved an insoluble problem for a girl who was born in a mixed marriage.

They demanded of her to declare publicly who she was and she didn’t know herself yet! Nor did she know the world she lived in! Nor about this bloody war either! She knew not who was fighting against whom, nor did she know why!

Looking back, it appeared to her that she’d come out of nothing and that, little by little, she’d entered time and space as her natural environment. She’d developed out of her own nature by following herself and her own nature within herself.

While she was turning into a girl, it appeared to her that she was gathering momentum, that she was becoming immersed in a symphony of movement, climbing up some stairs leading to heaven.

To the stars.

It seemed to her sometimes that she was a fairy-like being, that she could leave her body and come back into it at will, that she could go through closed doors without encountering any resistance.

As if she were magic, a phenomenon beyond compare.

Why, she resembled something that resembled nothing at all!

She was in love with mysterious sounds and crystalline distances! Her dreams were made up of a thousand trinkets that meant nothing but represented everything!

That was who she was, not a member of a nation that meant nothing to her!

While dealing with herself and her place in this world, Jasenka failed to notice that the Assistant Headmaster almost burst with pent-up anger, then calmed down much to everyone’s surprise and advised the girl, speaking in a gentle, fatherly tone of voice, to rely on her senses as she obviously could not think.

Advising her thus, he had no idea that it was precisely her senses that prevented her from thinking the way she was expected to think, not from thinking what she felt. That was why she suffered so much trying to find out who she was. Whatever she thought, whatever came to her mind, everything seemed pointless and stupid at the same time.

Still, she made up her mind suddenly, wrote something next to her name, but thought better of it and crossed it out immediately, with several swift strokes of her ball-point pen, the way pupils usually did.

When the Assistant Headmaster saw her cross out what she’d just written, when he saw the big blot she made with her ballpoint pen, a doodle in the shape of a scorpion, he lost his patience altogether.

Everybody kept saying, he began to shout, that he was a nervous man!

Nervous, he shouted while his jaw trembled.

Nervous, he shouted, punctuating his words by banging on the teacher’s desk with his hands.

Nervous, he shouted even louder, banging his fist nervously against the blackboard.

And what about her wasting his time, getting on his nerves, crying like a baby, that was nothing, right? That had nothing to do with it, it was just that he was a nervous man!

Nervous, he shouted while the ceiling shook, him?

The pupils, startled, fell silent altogether. They didn’t dare breathe. When the Assistant Headmaster stopped shouting, there was total silence in the classroom. Jasenka, too, had stopped crying and sobbing, she merely hid her face under her hair so that it looked as if a yellow rose, not her head, lay on her desk.

Had she finally decided what she was, asked the Assistant Headmaster in an unrecognisably soft, even mellifluous voice.

Whereupon Jasenka raised her head, wiped her tears and said in a self-assured tone of voice that she was nothing.

Nothing, that was what she was.

That was how she felt, that was what she was going to write down, and let them do what they liked with her!

Indeed, next to the blot she had made she added: nothing.

The Assistant Headmaster winced, then assumed the pose of an orator. He put his right foot in front of the left one, raised his arm, arched his right eyebrow, opened his mouth and assumed a posture reminiscent of a drawn bow; in that pose, looking like a statue possessed of a single motion, he petrified for all the future generations that were to attend this particular school, for all time.

That, the defendant said, was the story, and now it was up to the Court to decide whether it or the Prosecutor was in the right.

As opposed to the Story, which let the Tribeurinal Board decide, the Prosecutor exhibited a higher degree of democracy. He demanded that the defendant be pronounced guilty at once and sentenced because it had been spreading a story advocating psychological harassment and intimidation, something that only one side in the Bosnian war was guilty of, the Serbs, naturally, as part of the ethnic cleansing, that is, the establishment of Greater Serbia.

And so on and so forth; the sparrows perched under the roof of the Tribunal building were heard twittering the words that the Prosecutor reeled off parrot-like.

When the defendant disputed the Prosecutor’s claims again, their dialogue resembled that from the beginning of the trial, a clash of words and attitudes, which, admittedly, led nowhere in particular.

Finally, a court expert had to decide, as the Defence Counsel had required.

The pale-faced Englishman delivered a lecture first, and when he began to apply his theoretical postulates to the story they had heard, he found he just couldn’t decide. Both the prosecutor and the defendant were in the right! There was as much to support the claims of one as there was to support the claims of the other, which made it impossible for him to decide! It was just incredible! Neither side could prevail even in the slightest!

The match could not end in a draw, the outcome had to be settled somehow.

As the court expert was unable to decide, the Defence Counsel spoke again, let him take a coin out of his pocket, an ecu, and toss it. Heads – the Prosecutor was in the right, tails – the defendant was in the right.

The Tribeurinal Board found the Defence Counsel’s proposal acceptable.

Indeed, the court expert took the Defence Counsel’s advice.

He positioned himself in the middle of the courtroom, put his right foot forward for the sake of balance, placed a coin on the nail of his right-hand thumb and tossed it upwards.

What followed was a scene very much like what one could see in a circus. The eyes of everyone in the courtroom were fixed upon the trapeze, upon the acrobat standing there, about to perform his famous jump, the jump of death. He was supposed to make ten somersaults and land upon his feet.

Everyone watched the ecu turning in the air and then succumbing to the force of gravity and falling down.

Excitement in the courtroom reached its peak when the coin fell upon the floor, that is, when it did so defying the laws of physics. It fell down flat, bounced off and remained standing upright, the head-side turned towards the defendant, the tail-side towards the Prosecutor.

The Defence Counsel was so excited by the ecu’s escapade that he immediately jumped to his feet and started dancing round the coin, weaving his feet as if he were dancing a kolo[1], yelling inarticulately as if he were at the autumn fair in Derventa.