Tihomir Levajac:
Here We Go on Trial Again

1. Story
2. Story
3. Story
4. Story
5. Story
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7. Story
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Verdict

Finally, after the long journey covered so far, the last Story was brought into the courtroom.

When the Prosecutor started his usual tirade, claiming for the umpteenth time that this was not a political trial, that it was not a case of putting a whole nation on trial, but that specific individuals were being tried, individuals with a first name and a family name, those who had, in a systematic and organised fashion, ordered, aided and abetted, incited or themselves committed war crimes, etc., etc., the defendant was sickened by the Prosecutor’s arrogance and babbling, by the judges and their funny pronged caps, by their stiff, glum demeanour, by what was happening to it, the Story, and by the fact that the spirit of a whole people was being tried before the International Court of Justice, by the way things were going, so that it felt as if it was suffocating, not in any physical sense but in a purely abstract sort of way. When, on top of everything else, a flock of sparrows, which had been perched on the sickly-looking trees under the roof of the Court building, flew into the courtroom and started repeating whatever the Prosecutor said, that the Serbs were the aggressors, etc., something powerful stirred inside the defendant and brought it into a state of being filled with truth to the point of overflowing, so that it interrupted the Prosecutor and said to him openly that things were precisely the opposite of what he was saying. That in this particular case a whole people was being tried, namely, the Serbian people.

Until that moment no defendant had ever interrupted the Prosecutor or addressed the Court of its own accord, telling the Prosecutor to his face what it thought of him.

That was why the defendant’s act had the effect of a pistol shot. Two guards threw themselves upon the Prosecutor to protect him, thinking that he had, indeed, been shot at.

Why was there no mention of crime against peace in the Statemute of the Tribeurinal, shouted the defendant, why was crime against peace exempt from the jurisdiction of this Court?

This question, too, resounded like a pistol shot, better to say, like two pistol shots aimed at the same target.

Because those who had started the war in Yugoslavia would have to be tried then, that was why! Because the international community, which had planned and contributed to the break-up of Yugoslavia, would have to be tried! Even this Court, before which the Stories were being tried, would have to be tried!

Yes, indeed, it would, let them not roll their eyes and wonder!

What a shame it was for mankind that those who had robbed and conquered half the world should talk about justice and judge others!

A general commotion ensued, shouts and protests filled the courtroom, but through it all, the Prosecutor’s voice was heard, demanding arguments in support of those claims, corpus delicti, if you please, and right away!

It was a crying shame, the defendant just wouldn’t be stopped, so overwhelming was its feeling of disgust, that those who were defending their country should be indicted before this Court rather than those who had brought about its disintegration!

Arguments, arguments, please, moaned the Prosecutor, all red in the face.

There were arguments aplenty to support its claims, the defendant said in a murderously calm tone of voice.

Should it fail to produce arguments to substantiate its accusations against the international community and this Court, the Prosecutor threatened, let it beware!

Whereupon the Story warned the Prosecutor, in a tone of voice that was even calmer, not to threaten it. No Article of the Statemute of the Tribeurinal gave him the right to threaten it, and it demanded that this threat should be entered in the Court records, to be recorded for the centuries that would come after this shameful century! And he really shouldn’t use that tone of voice when addressing it! He should know that its people used to say, even as far back as during the Turkish rule, that the high and mighty could do as they pleased but not as long as they pleased! Their rule would pass, the way everything in this world passed. Nobody’s candle, as they said, burned until dawn!

The Prosecutor warned the defendant once again not to try to teach him and the judges a lesson but to offer proof of its accusations of the Court and the international community. Following that, he would offer proof of his charges against it!

OK, OK, the defendant agreed.

It would do so, on one condition only: it was not to be interrupted!

The evidence required was to be found in an event that took place in the Posavina corridor, in a house where a company of soldiers had put up.

One evening, the Captain sat inside that house with his soldiers, in a room filled with palpable tension, a sharp musty smell and gloomy thoughts. That evening, the Captain sat with his soldiers in a room filled with heavy, stuffy air, gazing at the magical eye of the TV set.

The picture wobbled a bit because the Potato pact had threatened to bomb Serbian positions throughout Bosnia because the Serbs wouldn’t sign the Vance-Owen plan. The picture wobbled because the Serbs weren’t obedient enough, because they’d had the temerity to turn down the plan of foreign manipulators.

That was why the Potato Pact would show them, because the Serbs were no longer as naive as they should be, or as the world wanted them to be!

And how were the Serbs supposed, the defendant asked the Tribeurinal Board, to accept the unacceptable?

Why should they accept the Vance-Owen plan when its makers did not envisage a passage through the Posavina region for the Serbs?

The Captain’s brigade, as well as brigades from other corps, defended this narrow passage from Šamac through Brčko with the utmost difficulty, the defendant maintained, because the Croatian artillery kept shelling them from above, from the forests of Slavonia, whereas the Muslim artillery kept shelling them from below, from Gradačac. And now the high and mighty wanted to bomb their positions because the Serbs refused to sign their own death warrant!

That was even qualified as a crime, this refusal of theirs to die voluntarily!

The Captain’s brigade and brigades from other corps barely managed to defend this gorge, through which the two Krajina regions, the lungs of Serbia, received oxygen from Serbia, enabling them to breathe through this windpipe as if through a piece of straw. The world’s ogres wanted to bomb their positions because the Serbs wouldn’t agree to a plan which separated them from their home country both physically and spiritually, delivering them into the hands of the Ustashi and the Muslims!

The fact that the scoundrels of this world threatened the Serbs, the defendant took the liberty of phrasing it in this way, that they wanted to bomb their allies from the previous war, made it feel scornful rather than angry. They wanted to bomb a people whose aspirations in the past had always coincided with those of the best and greatest part of mankind.

That the Serbs had paid a terrible price in the previous war for defending the world from fascism was a worn-out, banal truth, as interesting as last year’s snow! But to think that the ex-fascists, Ustashi and Muslims, had disguised themselves as the Serbs’ allies, that was like snow falling out of season.

On account of the threats emanating from it, the Captain regarded the TV screen as a bottomless pit, a hole that could not be hidden or filled up.

The more this hole glittered, the more his thoughts darkened, so that he felt like spitting on this glittering-nauseating illusion, attractive in a blasé sort of way.

He felt like kicking it to switch it off!

What prevented him from doing so was the calm with which his people suffered all the threats, dirty tricks and humiliation. Only a people that felt with all its heart and soul to be in the right could be so proud.

This people would bear anything because they were in the right.

The people and the army.

Only the Captain knew what his soldiers were like, what they had gone through and what they were worth. Only the Captain knew what hardships and suffering they had borne in this war beyond reason and beyond compare. He was with them every day, every day he spoke with some of them, either on the front line or in the headquarters, where they submitted their daily reports to him.

Although an order had come from the First Krajina Corps that the Brigade Commander and the Chief of Staff should not go to the front line to inspect the troops, the Captain disobeyed the order.

What soldier would listen to his commanding officer if he didn’t know the man personally? If a soldier did not see his commanding officer in the trenches, then the latter could forget about his orders being obeyed!

The Captain knew perfectly well that that was the basic army rule.

And when he went to inspect the troops in the headquarters vehicle and climbed down into a trench, then the soldiers felt they were on an equal footing with their commanding officer.

The Captain first checked if the roadblocks had been set up as he had ordered, whether patrols were sent out at regular intervals, if the equipment was in working order and whether they had enough ammunition.

Having checked that, he talked about other things with his soldiers. When he offered them cigarettes, they really loosened up and were willing to talk about anything whatsoever.

Why wouldn’t the Captain wear a bullet-proof vest?

Because he was hot in it!

But all the other commanding officers wore one!

Perhaps they weren’t hot in it.

But a bullet-proof vest could save your life!

He knew it could, but his life wasn’t in any way worth more than theirs! Anyway, to cut a long story short, inside a bullet-proof vest he felt as if he had armour on. He felt that he wasn’t free, as if he were in chains! As if he were a turtle and not a man!

In another trench, they talked about their families, about their land, about the factories where they worked at their machines.

And while they talked, he saw that they dreamed of their families, that they imagined themselves ploughing their land or working in their factories.

While they talked, they kept asking him for something or other, but they never asked for much. They only wanted him to listen to them and to understand them like people, to sympathise with their troubles, to feel their suffering and hardships as his own, to help them if he could while they complained to him in the trench or when they came to the headquarters to submit their reports.

When he saw how little they asked for, and that, often enough, he couldn’t do even that much for them, the Captain was saddened. Lest they should notice it, he gathered his strength, pulled himself together and went on listening to them for hours.

He didn’t want to disappoint them.

A soldier was prepared to open his heart only to a commanding officer he trusted.

A soldier could sense very keenly which officer was a real commander and which one was not.

A Serbian soldier either accepted his commander or not.

There was no third way about it.

What was it that the Serbian soldier had in him, the Captain asked himself that evening, sitting in front of a TV set, when he so selflessly placed the most precious thing in his possession, his very life, before deadly rifle barrels?

He wasn’t getting paid for it, he couldn’t work and earn a living when he went home either, and yet he fought.

He didn’t have proper army clothes or shoes, and yet he fought! Some of them had already managed to wear out two or three pairs of their own boots, sports shoes or peasant shoes on the front line, and yet they fought.

Food – awful! Beans, then beans again, followed by yet more beans, sometimes they ate rice with water for seven days, and yet they fought!

What was it that the Serbian soldier had in him if he defied the monsters of this world, world public opinion, death, rain, frost and mice, sleep, blackmail and winds, betrayal, stupidity, false brothers and the hot sun, the Captain asked himself while a little, sickly light bulb shone above his head.

Just as he asked himself that question, the Captain’s gaze fell upon Bogdan’s absent-minded face. He was sitting at the same table as the Captain, staring through the TV screen with an empty gaze.

How could his gaze be anything but empty when he had lost his only son in the war!

The year before, his son had disappeared in the fighting around Brod as if the earth itself had swallowed him. No matter how persistently he asked around, he couldn’t find out anything about the destiny of his only son. He thought that the boy had been captured, that he had managed to escape in some miraculous way, that he had found shelter someplace or other, withdrawn into a shell, but those hopes were nothing but pure wishful thinking.

A month before he had found out that some mass graves were being opened in Brod, so he asked the Captain to let him go there.

The Captain obliged.

Of course, Bogdan had found his son in one of the mass graves. He recognised him by the tooth that he himself, being a dental technician, had fixed before the boy joined the army.

Only the Captain knew what Bogdan had looked like when he returned to the unit after his son’s funeral.

His face had the look of a purple shell.

Looking at him from the side, the Captain would have said that the man now lived merely for the sake of living, but it wasn’t so. Despite the pain that fate had inflicted on him, he used his remaining strength to fulfil all his obligations; all the tasks entrusted to him he performed on time and without a word of complaint.

While he did that, his eyes radiated emptiness.

While the Captain watched Bogdan’s absent-minded face, its shadow outlined on the wall, which had bullet marks upon it, souvenirs of the battles fought for the corridor, Stojan appeared in the doorway, a young, handsome man, commander of the reconnaissance platoon. Coming from Mt Kozara, from the Kozaran rocks, as it were, he had melancholy eyes and a pale face.

Like Jesus Christ.

A mild-looking face, without a trace of soldierly sternness.

Last autumn, in the course of fighting around Gradačac, his reconnaissance platoon, constantly harried by the Muslims, penetrated deep into the Muslim rear and captured some civilians, among them a girl. Zlatana was as slender as a vine and as supple as flames dancing in the fireplace; her complexion was white, almost enamelled. She was so timid as to be almost invisible, so he took it upon himself to protect her. He didn’t hand her over to the headquarters together with the other prisoners of war, as he should have done, but kept her for himself, as a war trophy.

For a while, he hid her, with the help of the locals, in the village of Obudovac; at night, when he sneaked away to visit her there, he enjoyed the subdued cannonade coming from the constellation of Sagittarius, and then took her to Kozara, to his own home. On finding out that she was a Muslim, his father, a highlander, felt like killing him first, and then her.

Was he mad, had he taken leave of his senses, whatever was the matter with him? His family had never had anything to do with Turks, not even remotely, and now, when they were fighting the Turks, that was what Muslims had always been called in the Kozara region, and what they were called these days, he had brought a Turkish girl into the house! Was he quite in his right mind to have done so?

What would people say?

And what about their relatives, neighbours, marriage witnesses?

Stojan found his father’s words hard to take. They were exactly the opposite of what he felt with all his being. It seemed to him that his father and family, his relatives and the people he belonged to, were so old-fashioned, primitive, even vulgar!

As if he had committed a crime!

How could love be a crime?

As his father was an irascible man, he had to bear his threats as best he could, and then to play up to him, fawn on him and mollify him.

Dad, he said to him, then Daddy, Father, asking him not to get angry or do anything rash. To wait a little and see what Zlatana was like.

If she wouldn’t obey him, if she turned out to be no good, he could always do her in.

He would do that personally, he promised.

Having settled that with his father, he left Zlatana at his father’s home; every once in a while he asked the Captain to let him pop over to his house to see whether his beloved was behaving herself, although the Captain knew that he asked for leave because he wanted to enjoy his new-found love.

He let him go occasionally since he knew that Zlatana’s charms were only now beginning to blossom.

The Captain stopped thinking about Stojan and his gaze shifted to the squat, dirty furnace, the mould starting from the corner of the room and spreading across the blackened dirty wall, and came to rest upon Milenko, the tank driver.

The pupils of Milenko’s eyes were narrow, his face was devastated and dark, bereft of all illusion.

During the fighting in the vicinity of Bijelo Brdo, inside the tank, where nobody could see him, but from where he could see everything through the observation hole, he was unaware that the gun barrel on the tank’s cupola had got stuck and that his fellow crew members had opened the cupola right there, in the middle of the front line, intending to get the barrel unstuck manually. He didn’t see it but the Ustashi noticed them. With a nauseating degree of precision, they sent over a rifle grenade which, having travelled along its arc-like trajectory, exploded inside the cupola, killing all three of them. Milenko didn’t get to see any of that because he was separated from the rest of the crew by a partition, and he only heard a hollow thud above his head.

Only when he got out of the tank did he see the charred remains of his comrades-in-arms and understand what had happened.

As he hadn’t yet become familiar with the sight of dead bodies, the sight of the charred corpses of his fellow-soldiers had an overwhelming impact on him.

He kept seeing them before his eyes while walking, eating, dreaming, sitting, reading, watching TV. It seemed to him that he would never manage to get the image out of his mind.

Time does not cure everything, as the old saying goes. It does not cure all wounds! That’s just what they say. Mere hearsay.

Wounds that have gone cold hurt the most.

He would have to learn to live with what he had gone through.

And Milenko was not the only one to have gone through an experience of that sort.

Take the case of Gojko, a tank gunner, for example. His brother, having been wounded during the fighting around Teslić just before New Year’s Eve, spent forty-seven days in a coma. When Gojko had all but given him up, he came round and started recovering. Even though he had seen all sorts of things in this war, when he saw his brother just after he had been brought home from the Military Academy Hospital in Belgrade – pale as death, his head shaven, a large zipper-like thing on his skull, he realised he hadn’t really seen anything before.

Although the destiny of every man in a war was unique, one tended to think differently about one’s brother’s destiny.

Since Gojko was quite apathetic after that experience, the Captain had to talk to him almost every day, to try to get his willpower going, although he knew that it was very difficult to rekindle one’s willpower.

The Captain’s melancholy gaze continued to roam about the room.

In front of the wall covered with mould there was a bench. Three soldiers were sitting on it, neatly arranged like rifles in a rifle rack.

The first one was Miloš, an infantryman, a healthy, strapping fellow on the outside, with a soft, warm Slavic soul inside. The Captain had never met a man so big and so soulful. If one looked at his eyes, one could see in them strength and sadness, resolve and compassion at the same time.

He grieved over everyone’s suffering, everyone’s death, but there was one death, which he often talked about, that he simply couldn’t get over. No death, he said, had affected him as that of an old woman killed by the Ustashi in a Serbian village near Derventa, during the battle for the liberation of Derventa; she was killed, together with a few other civilians, next to a wall in the centre of the village. He came across her body coming along the village road: lying in the dust, one side of her face turned towards death, she was holding a box of “Persantin”, a medicine that his own mother used as well, in her outstretched hand.

An thin, old woman in black, clean and neatly dressed, the way Serbian women usually dress when life becomes too much for them and they become resigned to misfortune, misery and poverty, lying face-down in the dust, her hand holding the medicine raised towards the sky, the Almighty, the invisible God. From the execution ground, lying face-down next to a wall, her body in the netherworld, she raised her pure hand holding the medicine for the heart towards the Eternal Father-of-All.

As if yearning for some unattainable world.

Although the essence of death is the same, everyone dies in his or her own way; this old woman had died in a way that the Serbian soldier could not forget, and the memory of her death irrevocably gnawed away at his being.

Next to the overly sensitive soldier sat Mithat, a young man with feminine facial features. Having completed his national service, he had to remain in the army because the war had broken out. When the battle for the corridor was at its fiercest, his father, Enver, died of diabetes. After they had buried him, his mother, Stojanka, remained all alone in their house below Šibovo, in Močila, fretting over the outcome of some battle far away that her son was fighting in.

Even though his mother never knew when he would come home on leave, whenever he came home he found her waiting for him in front of the door or in the doorway.

Even when he arrived there at midnight.

Mithat just couldn’t understand that, he had even discussed it with the Captain.

Next to Mithat sat Ratko, the oldest soldier in the brigade.

On Monday, he had come to the Captain and asked him to let him go home although he had been on leave five days before. On that occasion, just when he was about to leave for the front, having spent a week with his wife and three children, his wife had a seizure. Before his very eyes, she went all stiff. He had barely managed to get her to the Emergency Hospital and leave her there. She remained there, lying on a trolley in the corridor, and he had to hurry back to his brigade lest he should be late.

If one arrived late, then one would be punished by having to spend two successive shifts on the front line.

The Captain would never have punished him had he been late, but he didn’t know that. That was why Ranko came to him and asked the Captain to let him go home to see what had happened to his wife. To find out why she had gone stiff and whether she had recovered after his departure. Whether she had ended up in hospital or returned home to their children.

But how could he let the man go home when he didn’t have enough soldiers to man the front line?

In the corner behind the bench where the three soldiers were sitting, a soldier whose face looked like that of a cashier had settled on a tripod. His face was dark and wrinkled, as if he was wearing a copper brooch on his head.

He sat with his legs together, in the manner of someone trying to cover up his tracks, which made him look like a minor, anonymous character from a story.

The Captain knew that his fellow soldiers had rejected him because he had traded, out of desperation, with the Muslims on the front line in the Doboj theatre of war.

As there had been a great shortage of cigarettes among the Muslims, he had arranged with a Muslim soldier to send him a pack of cigarettes tied to a defused rifle grenade from his trench. When the grenade reached his client, he would untie the pack of cigarettes, tie a 10-mark banknote to the grenade and send it back in the same way, along the same trajectory.

After he had been caught at it, he was punished by being transferred to the Captain’s brigade.

There being no foreign trade in that unit, he turned to domestic trade.

Having found sixty litres of brandy in an abandoned house, he sold it secretly to soldiers who belonged to other companies of the brigade. When they found out about it, his fellow soldiers beat him up. As a rule, the Captain’s soldiers started fights over brandy.

Although the Captain’s feelings towards the hapless soldier were mixed, he still had to take care of a soldier of his, even one who was busy seeking his puny, pitiful profit, talk to him the way he did with any other soldier and help him if need be.

The poor soul was a man after all, and men were, as a rule, tiny, brittle things.

The Captain, he would have to admit, had a soft spot for tiny, brittle things.

When a soldier said to him that his child had got ill, he let the man go without a word.

Occasionally, his soldiers told him that a fellow-soldier of theirs had lied about his child being ill just to get himself leave, but the Captain refused to check such stories.

If a man was able to lie, using those who were dearest to him for that purpose, then shame on him!

When a message was sent to Ranko, a soldier from Bistrica, near Banja Luka, that something had happened to his seven-year-old son, the Captain immediately let him go home to find out what had happened.

When he arrived home, he saw that his son had gone dumb.

The Potato Pact planes had broken the sound barrier while flying over their district, and the sound explosion terrified the boy. Due to this shock, the boy lost his power of speech. The planes, which were supposed to protect the free sky above the warring sides, caused a sound explosion above the district and the boy momentarily forgot how to speak. Having all that expanse of the blue sky at their disposal, the planes chose to fly low and frighten little children.

So Ranko came to the Captain, his face twisted as if it wasn’t his own, and asked where he could take his son and whether anyone could help him get his son’s power of speech back.

Just at the moment when the Captain was thinking about Ranko and his son, in came Nikola, a soldier with an elastic face. His face continuously contorted and relaxed of its own accord, spreading in all directions.

Nikola spun round twice, made to go out, then returned to where he had been originally.

Ever since he had taken part in the fighting on Kupres, he just couldn’t stay in one place very long.

While the Serbian Army had been preparing to recapture the Kupres plateau, word had been going round that the Ustashi had committed terrible crimes against civilians who had remained in their homes.

Truly beastly crimes.

The crimes committed in Lower Malovan, which had been the furthest Serbian outpost towards the Independent Republic of Croatia in the Second World War, were particularly heinous. All the conflicts between Serbs and Croats in the past had been decided right there, in Lower Malovan.

Which was why the place had always been a thorn in the Croats’ side.

While he fought in the Serbian Army, Nikola, quite naturally, worried about his family. He worried about his father and mother, his wife and son, who had remained in the house.

When the Serbs’ onslaught had crushed the Croatian Defence Council line of defence, the Croatian soldiers took flight towards Šujica and Mt Cincar. Nikola then made for his house through the fields and across the mountain crests. Worried sick, he went across the bare mountainous terrain and the dark, fertile soil, which seemed to him darker than ever that day. Many houses were damaged or even destroyed; he caught sight of his own house having turned round a bend in the hard macadam road. He saw the house, the small porch in front of the main entrance covered with sheet iron, the stable behind the house, an added structure, built behind the stable, where the sheep were kept, and the pen in front of the house.

Everything was in its proper place, intact.

But he couldn’t see any member of his family. Not in the yard, not in front of the yard, not by the haystack, nor by the woodpile, although it was noon.

He had a nasty premonition, walking towards the house.

When he entered the yard, he found no traces of anyone having entered the place, let alone of any fight having taken place there.

He rushed into the kitchen through the wide-open door but found no-one there. He returned to the yard, ran around the house, only to find the sheep grazing peacefully on the small plateau below the pen.

Then he started calling household members by name but only got the sound of his own voice in reply.

There was not a sound, everything was ominously empty, and his voice resounded hollowly through the place.

He ran wildly into the stable, then into the cellar, which served as a pantry, being built of stone.

Not a soul.

A living soul.

He returned into the house, entered his parents’ room. The furniture was where it had always been.

When he opened the door to his bedroom, a stench struck him.

On a low cabinet next to a wall, about a metre above the floor, the heads of the household members were lined up, honourable judges. They were cut off below the jaws, honourable judges, Mr Prosecutor and reporters, and lined up one next to another, at regular intervals, as if they were busts inside some museum.

First there was the head of his father, then his mother’s head, followed by his wife’s head, and at the end of the cabinet, there lay the tiny head of their five-year-old son.

Nikola did not feel any pain, he didn’t moan or feel faint. In a flash, whatever his being had been made up of had gone numb; it seemed to him that he had turned into a piece of wood all of a sudden. He had the impression that he wasn’t going through what he was going through, that it was all happening to someone else while he stood watching, immeasurably distant.

He didn’t lose his head or power of reasoning.

He couldn’t bury them like that, without the bodies; he had to find their bodies and join the heads and the bodies together, in accordance with Christian custom.

He had to bury them whole.

So he went about the house and around the house, looking for their bodies, searched the yard, entered the shed, the pigsty, the pen, but couldn’t find them anywhere. Not only was he unable to find them, he couldn’t find any evidence of the crime having been committed either.

Then he went about the village, asking the survivors of the massacre, but he couldn’t find out anything – neither who had committed the crime nor how or when, so that he buried the mortal remains of his family in the local cemetery, placing their heads so that their faces were turned eastward.

Having done all that, he suddenly remembered that he still existed.

The first thought that occurred to him was that he was normal, that he was still normal, which appeared abnormal to him.

For, those who can survive reality that is less real than a dream and remain normal – are abnormal.

However, when time somehow resumed its normal course, it began to gnaw away at him as well.

By the time Nikola reached the Captain’s brigade, he had already cracked up.

When the Captain found out what had happened to him, he did everything in his power to relieve Nikola of the pain that was killing him.

To no avail.

Nikola waged his own personal war with the Ustashi. He would think up something, then equip himself with bombs, knives, ammunition, arms, and head for the enemy lines, contemptuous of reason, not caring about his own life, not thinking about tomorrow.

Off he went to defy death, to put his destiny to a test, to make it call out and reveal itself to him for once, or to trick it somehow.

He would be away for a day or two.

When an explosion sounded somewhere, everybody knew that it was his doing.

He would return to the unit afterwards, settle down in a corner and sit there silently, his face devoid of any expression.

On one occasion, unarmed, he walked through no-man’s-land full of land mines; he walked as if he was strolling across a meadow full of flowers in bloom, carrying a guitar on his shoulder. He passed through the minefield, containing both Serbian and Croatian mines, without stepping on a single one of them.

When the Ustashi captured him, they soon came to the conclusion that he was not in his right mind and decided to use him for their own purposes.

He was to go in front of Ustashi soldiers when they set out on a raid and point the way through a minefield.

But even then, when he was virtually sacrificed, death wouldn’t have him for reasons of its own.

Although he tripped over a piece of rope while going through a Serbian minefield, activating two mines simultaneously, not a single fragment touched him. He got through unscathed whereas two Ustashi soldiers were killed on the spot and another two badly wounded, so that the survivors gave up the raid altogether.

Once again, destiny chose not to intervene.

Once again, destiny chose not to finish him off at once but to go on doing so gradually, on a daily basis.

As time went on, the Captain watched the effects of unbridled madness run their course.

Nikola’s handsome face had become disfigured by suffering. The forehead was shrivelled, the eyes sunken, the lips turned whitish, the bones threatened to stick through the desiccated skin.

When he smiled, his smile resembled more a plastic ashtray than a smile.

The Captain thought that no-one and nothing could either hurt or save the man now, so he gnashed his teeth vehemently, so vehemently that it seemed to him as if his eye-teeth were swelling.

His eye-teeth were swelling, as was the sound coming from the dormitory. It grew progressively louder until it stopped in front of the door of the TV room. There it wailed, going in circles, vibrating for a while, then burst into the room through the door. That was the time of day when Stanoje rode his motorcycle through the dormitory, winding among the bunk beds all night long. He revved the engine, started, switched on the sidelights, braked, pulled up, reared up on the back wheel, roared when tackling a bend, the horn wailing, everything wailing. His fellow-soldiers had got so used to the sound of the engine that it no longer bothered them, they paid no attention to him whatsoever. They no longer minded the constant wailing and rumbling, the horn, the sidelights or the headlight. The real problems started when the engine stalled. When that happened, Stanoje woke up his comrades-in-arms in turns and made them push the motorcycle to get the engine started again.

When Stanoje had thundered through the room on his motorcycle, the Captain raised his gaze towards the Almighty and sighed heavily.

Would the day come when the Almighty should deign to look at the Serbs for a change?

The Captain sighed while the fellow who made coffee, emptied ashtrays and washed coffee cups and glasses approached his table. Jovica did that every day and liked it, doing the job in an enviably elegant manner although he had never worked as a waiter.

Having collected the coffee cups, he took the shallow ashtray full of cigarette butts and ash. He glanced at it, then lifted it to his nose.

How strangely, he said to the Captain, the ashtray smelled!

The Captain took the ashtray himself and smelled it, then his face assumed an expression of disgust.

Indeed it did, he said, then threw it into a corner to get rid of the foul smell.

The moment the ashtray was smashed to smithereens, Jovica threw the tray with the coffee cups on the floor. The cups broke, spilling the grounds all over the floor.

When the Captain got up from his chair, Milenko got hold of it and smashed it against the wall, but it only bounced off. Then Stojan took hold of it and smashed it against the wall, then again, and yet again, but the chair remained in one piece.

The Captain slowly retreated towards the door, lest he should be grazed by the chair, then went out into the night.

The Captain stood in a spot without a definite shape to it, offering no view, under a sky without any stars; like a shadow being, he stood and listened as his soldiers, behind his back, broke and smashed anything they could lay their hands on.

He clearly recognised the moment when they smashed another chair, when they finished off the bench, when they put paid to the table. When they had finished with the window-panes, they switched to the window frames. First one, then another, then all the others. Then the TV set smashed against the floor. Once, then again. The first sound was that of glass breaking, the other a hollow thud. Since the cathode tube just wouldn’t break, they finally threw the wreck out of a broken window, thank God.

The Captain stood in the darkness like a commonplace, feeling the night to be his sorrow’s companion. He felt the cool night crawling across his hot forehead. He smoked calmly, looking at the darkness and seeing in it a spectre that had given him birth.

It never occurred to him to go back in and stop his soldiers from wreaking havoc.

Never mind, let them give vent to their feelings! Now they were breaking and smashing things, the next day they would be dying for that which they were breaking and smashing.

That was the inexplicable something that a Serbian soldier had inside him!

Those were the Captain’s thoughts as he stood calmly in front of the house, which shook like a giant rattle being shaken by somebody’s giant hand, the sounds of its being broken and smashed resounding through the night and the quiet covering the Posavina plain under the dark sky.

He stood in front of the house in the night, which had sunk deep into the Posavina plain, staring at some point as if at a light, a light flying motionlessly like some mysterious bird. So clear and all-encompassing was the light that he perceived it as a general phenomenon.

If the whole world was doing their damnedest to crucify them, then justice had to be on the side of the Serbs!

If they had crucified Christ first and later accepted him as God, then justice should come the Serbs’ way eventually!

After a while, lasting no-one knew how long exactly, a military police personnel carrier arrived, with the lights on, and pulled up beside the Captain.

What’s happening here, asked the military policeman who got out of the vehicle first.

The Captain replied that he didn’t know.

Let’s take a look and see!

When they entered the room with their flashlights switched on, when they entered the thoroughly demolished room, there was nobody in it, just broken glass, pieces of furniture and general chaos.

And when they entered the dormitory, all the soldiers were in their beds, sleeping soundly.

Only Stanoje was up and about, riding his motorcycle among the smelly mattresses strewn across the floor, roaring when he tackled a bend in the road.

No sooner had the defendant uttered this last sentence than Stanoje burst into the courtroom on his motorcycle. He drove his motorcycle at breakneck speed, the way one drives in a circus performance, among the judges and the dock where the defendant was, the whirring cameras, reporters from all over the world and the Prosecutor, who watched the spectacle with his eyes wide open. Whenever it seemed that he would run somebody over with his two-wheeler, when people saved themselves by jumping to one side, screaming, Stanoje managed to retain his balance and roared on.

For a short while, he kept chasing the judges and made them scatter all around the courtroom, like a flock of sparrows.

Then he started knocking down people and chairs, and nobody seemed to be able to prevent him from doing so.

It was a most amusing scene that day, at the International Court of Justice, the so-called Vague Tribeurinal.

It was very much reminiscent of a commedia del’ arte.

Even the Prosecutor, who normally appeared to be all-powerful in the courtroom, looked helpless now.