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

In an atmosphere resembling more a press conference than a trial, the Prosecutor charged the sixth Story with having committed a crime against humanity. The Story, maintained the Prosecutor, glorified death in its story, promoting the war that blossomed throughout Bosnia, and thus endangering mankind as a whole through its story.

The defendant laughed at the Prosecutor’s accusation.

What was he babbling about? How could it, as an individual, endanger all of mankind? What was he on about, did he know how large mankind was?

The second part of the accusation, however, the Story treated with due seriousness, although it had to correct the Prosecutor on that count as well. It did not praise suffering or glorify death, but spoke about it all with melancholy.

Since war was nothing else but keeping death company, it spoke about that in its story. It spoke of the forces that annihilated everything and of pointless suffering.

Lest it should have to defend itself by means of theoretical postulates only, the Story suggested to the Tribeurinal Board that it should retell the incriminated story, so that the Board members could see for themselves who was in the right.

Itself or the Prosecutor.

OK, the Prosecutor addressed the Court again without being granted permission to do so, he would allow it to retell its story, but should it fail to prove its claim, it would be pronounced guilty. Should it fail to provide justification for its artistic impulse, as it continually resorted to poetic licence, it would be punished! Should it fail to observe the aesthetic criterion, it would be sentenced!

Even though the defendant was well aware of the attempt at blackmail on the part of the Prosecutor, it would not change its decision. So certain was it of the beneficial effect of its story that it plucked up courage and embarked upon the adventure known as the torment of creation.

That is why it began its story immediately, somewhat clumsily, without anything in the way of an introduction. It told of a group of soldiers fighting in a suburb of Gradačac at the beginning of the war, fighting day after day for every house, garden, post, kiosk, wall, fence, pavement and tree, death preying upon them at every step.

They did not fortify their positions but used whatever they could for shelter as they went along: cellars, walls and concrete blocks they came across in that part of town.

When their artillery fired shells above their heads, they would follow them, sweeping the area clean.

On the day the Story described them, however, their artillery just couldn’t seem to get round to shelling the enemy lines.

The soldiers spent some time in the cellar of an unfinished house, then went out in front of the house and settled down beneath the concrete shelter.

They felt safe there, with the wall behind them, the concrete staircase and ceiling above them and high roofs to the side.

All that shielded them from Muslim eyes and shells.

Holding their weapons in their hands, some were standing, leaning against the wall, some squatting, while most of them were sitting under the staircase, chattering away as if they were on a picnic. As if they had come there to pick strawberries, and were resting after the first round of it, joking to pass the time, but joking in a rather serious sort of way.

The front line was ahead of them, they were where they were, and laughter and death were always close companions in war. For thirty-five days they had been going from one action to another without anyone getting killed, for thirty-five days they had fought the Muslims from Obudovac to Gradačac, and only three of them had suffered slight wounds.

During that time they had become aware of one another, for there is nothing that brings people together like the uncertainty and insecurity of war. That is why they surrendered themselves wholly to the fight, so that each of them thought of the others more than of himself.

As if they had lent one another their lives.

The ties binding them were stronger than marital ties because wartime togetherness and camaraderie raise one to a higher level, so that one experiences things rather more forcefully than under normal circumstances.

Everybody becomes part of the lofty ideal they are fighting for, part of something that, in many respects overshadows them.

Although danger threatened at every step of the way, they looked like grown-up children engaged in something that they were not up to. They looked like a group of people seeking adventure, rushing forward blindly, unaware that they were fighting against nothingness.

They were walking straight towards the enemy guns, as it were, and joking.

There is no better cure for fear than laughter, as they say.

They kept asking Stojan, the youngest one among them, for the umpteenth time how and why his girlfriend had left him for another, while Radoslav went round asking each one of them for a cigarette.

He could not believe that nobody had a cigarette and sulked, while Zoran, a pale emaciated fellow with black shining eyes and short stubbly beard, did not believe Radoslav.

He cadged cigarettes from others, Zoran said in a self-assured tone of voice though it was mere guesswork on his part, although he had cigarettes aplenty! He had to have them because he couldn’t do without them! Others smoked, too, but none like him. He could do without anything but cigarettes! He could do without water, bread and air, but not without cigarettes! If he was a real sport, he would bring over the pack he had stashed away somewhere for a rainy day! Now, when everybody else was left without cigarettes, he should offer his own to the others!

Zoran only wanted to tease Radoslav a bit, but was proved right because Radoslav went red in the face.

Unable to will the tell-tale red off his face, he went downstairs, head bowed down, into the cellar where his backpack was.

No sooner had he descended into the dark cellar than a shell hit the house, and then another one almost simultaneously.

The explosion was so strong that the blast lifted Radoslav off the concrete floor, throwing him against one wall, and then against another.

He immediately ran up the stairs to see what had happened to his friends.

When he ran out into the light of day, it was as if he had entered the ninth circle of hell. Unfortunately, it was no circle that he entered. What awaited him there was reality. Moans, bodies strewn around, blood.

The shells, honourable judges, had come over the rooftops somehow, don’t ask how, probably flying along a curved trajectory, carrying with them horror that lasted briefly but left horrendous consequences, and fell right under the stairs, with precision that was almost loathsome, among the soldiers, one metre apart.

What the two shells had done to the soldiers could not be seen even at a death exhibition.

Twisted heads, smashed skulls, gaping jaws, dislocated shoulders, protruding ribs, broken clavicles, torn limbs, maimed torsos.

As opposed to those who were strewn all around and massacred, one soldier sat in the centre of hell on some boards, as if on some sort of throne in the underworld, leaning against the wall, his body whole. Where he sat, the two blasts had collided, so that his head was no bigger than a clenched fist. Compact, made into a lump, a snowball, not having lost a single drop of blood, it was soft like a ripe melon because not one bone in it had remained whole.

To the right of the throne lay Stojan, the one whose girlfriend had left him. He lay next to the wall, his arms cut off at the elbows and his legs at the knees. Bones protruded from the stumped limbs, white and irregularly shaped, and the scraps of flesh hanging from them made them look like a wall sprayed over with paint.

To the left was Zoran, from whose abdomen flesh had been torn by the shell fragments, and next to him Miloš, a strapping fellow whose loins had been torn by the shell so that all his inner organs had spilled out.

Next to the limekiln was a poor fellow whose three cervical vertebra had been dislocated by the blast, and next to him a torso with half a head. The forehead, eyes and nose were gone, there remained only the jaws grown into the chin.

So many forms of death and dying provided by only two shells in a single spot, turned into unprecedented tragedy!

If reality was the realisation of the possible, then that which happened, which had happened and would happen was the most that people could achieve and did achieve.

Both individuals and nations.

When Radoslav ran into the death exhibition, he ran among former lives. He ran from one poor fellow to another, from empty eye sockets to eyes staring at him fixedly without seeing him, from the maimed Stojan, who, although he was bleeding, was still conscious, who begged him to stop his bleeding so that he wouldn’t die, to Miloš, who begged him to shoot him because he could no longer stand the pain.

Radoslav thought that he would go mad.

He was desperately alone, never having communicated with nothingness, so he rushed head over heels while Stojan begged him to stop his bleeding and he shouted, how am I to stop your bleeding when I don’t have anything to do it with, then rushed again, crying and shouting, I can’t shoot you, and Stojan called after him and begged again, then Miloš called after him and begged again, so Radoslav slipped his revolver into his hands shouting, here you are, you shoot me because I can’t shoot you, but Miloš couldn’t do it, so Radoslav ran away from him, sobbing and tearing the shirt off himself, trying to tie up Stojan’s stumped limbs with pieces of it, but blood flowed through them and they fell off, Stojan getting paler and paler, begging Radoslav again to stop his bleeding, and he had nothing to do it with, he watched the youngster die before his very eyes, then rushed around again, trying to dispense with sanity, running from one poor fellow to another, hoping to help them somehow and not being able to, and then, seeing his helplessness, he turned his head away, nauseated by his inability to do anything to help, then ran up to Miloš again, looked into his eyes, seeing how light slowly left them never to return, thought he would go mad, cursed himself for being forced to see so many deaths at once, to watch so much suffering without being able to help, and then a hand grenade exploded by the limekiln, somebody had ended his misery that way, and then the medical corps arrived from somewhere, preceded by the sound of trampling footsteps, the orderlies started lifting the casualties onto stretchers in order of priority and carrying them away from there.

When they had taken away twelve seriously wounded soldiers and seven dead ones, Radoslav ran after the medical corps, carrying a load of rifles and submachine guns on his back. He ran, not feeling any weight until he came to a wall that was white as a child’s conscience and a human eye hanging upon it. It hung there, staring straight at him as he ran with a load of arms on his back.

The eye transfixed Radoslav at a glance, so that he stopped abruptly, standing quite still like an animal, about a metre away from the eye, his boots dug into the ground. He stood there and stared at the eye as if into the pupil of his own eye, the pupil of a fellow-soldier’s eye, of some other man’s eye, of an enemy soldier’s eye, a soldier whom he wanted to kill but had no idea what his head looked like.

While he was staring at this eye, his own conscience was watching him like a third eye, watching his actions, wondering why he was there and whither he was going loaded with so many rifles and submachine guns.

His conscience watched him like a third eye, wondering why he was standing there and what he was thinking, and he watched the eye on the wall, whereas the eye on the wall, in its turn, as if it were the eye of mankind, watched him and his third eye.

He felt that the eye of mankind was directed against him, the way every war, all carnage and devastation were directed against life in general.

While staring at the eye on the wall, he remembered his father, whose only guide through life had been suffering. He remembered his father, who had attained wisdom through pain, and what he, having survived the previous war, had said when Radoslav himself went off to war.

All his father’s words came back to him then.

What his father had said was that war brought nobody any good, only evil and misery. And when that happened to him, he’d better remember those words, when misery befell him, and that would happen to him every day, he should just cry out loud and move on.

Let him cry out loud, his father had said, to relieve his heart, to get rid of the pain, and then he should think about saving his life because only one who survived was a true warrior!

Let him cry out with all his might, his father had said, whatever had happened had happened, whoever had got it had got it, then let him run and save his life because life was the greatest good of all.

Let him save his life as it was better to be alive than dead!

One didn’t even know, while one was alive, how fortunate one was!

There was no other life save this one!

Death was something definite!

There was nothing after death!

That was the moment of reckoning!

Let him, therefore, run and save his life, because even if all of them were to get killed, life would go on, as ever!

Radoslav remembered his father, his face and his words, and embraced his words as his greatest allies: he ran before the eye of mankind, by the wall that was white as a child’s conscience, letting out a blood-curdling scream. He rushed past them and then ran on and on and on like an eternal speck of dust, running between rows of houses towards his army and his people.

To the exalted union of life and death.

The moment the defendant uttered the last word, the cameras stopped humming. A dreadful silence swelled up from somewhere, like a natural disaster and menace, spreading an inexplicable atmosphere of fear through the courtroom. The judges, the Prosecutor, the Defence Counsel, the journalists, the cameramen, the bad lot of curious onlookers, they all leaned their heads to one side, as if before a storm.

Then a light flashed through the courtroom, and a thunderbolt struck the eye-shaped cupola of the courtroom; it struck so suddenly and with such mighty force that the judges and the Prosecutor writhed spasmodically on their chairs, raising their arms above their heads in order to protect themselves from some higher power.

When another thunderbolt struck the Court building, the cupola was split in two.

Through the crack in the ceiling, from above, a giant eye, an eye as big as the sky, an eye bigger than all of mankind, watched sternly.