Tihomir Levajac:
Here We Go on Trial Again

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Verdict

At the beginning of today’s session the Prosecutor spoke for a long time, several hours. His speech was exaggerated, impassioned, rousing, and his face shone with a diseased awareness of power. For a while, he spoke of crime in general, then about the war in Bosnia, going on to maintain that there would be no lasting peace in Bosnia until the question of responsibility for war crimes had been resolved.

Which was why this Court had been established anyway. That was why the judges were here and why those trials were being held.

According to a Turkish reporter, the Prosecutor maintained, only one side in the Bosnian war had been perpetrating crimes, the Serbs. In a planned, organised, systematic fashion, with a view, naturally, to realising the doctrine of Greater Serbia!

For which, certainly, the Prosecutor maintained, incontrovertible evidence existed.

When he had confronted the defendant with the evidence, it had wanted to defend itself by remaining silent. However, when he had put together a veritable mountain of evidence, informing the defendant that one who declined to answer thereby proved one’s guilt, only then did it decide to speak.

Which is why he suggested that the Chairman should allow the defendant to address the Court immediately, thus enabling everyone present to see the truth of his accusation.

Since the Prosecutor’s words held the Tribeurinal Board under a magic spell, the Chairman did as he had been told and asked the defendant to tell the incriminated story.

At that moment the Defence Counsel entered the scene in the manner of someone whose intention it was to interfere with the smooth running of a theatrical performance. He got up, big and strong as he was, with muscles bulging in his hind legs and neck, and opening his mouth wide, started howling.

The defendant, honourable judges, did not wish to cooperate with the Prosecutor in the course of the inquest because he wouldn’t let it tell the story it had been accused of spreading the way it wanted to but insisted on its telling it the way he wanted it to. There was no mountain of evidence, that was a load of rubbish!

And just how did the defendant wish to tell the incriminated story, the Chairman asked.

Backwards, the Defence Counsel replied.

Everybody in the courtroom was stunned by what the Defence Counsel said because they had never heard that a story could be told backwards. The Chairman’s mouth was wide open with wonder, as were those of the other judges, which made the Tribeurinal Board look like a school choir preparing to sing a song about a duck and a frog.

And why would the defendant wish to do so, the Chairman finally remembered to ask.

There were stories, the Defence Counsel explained as if he were a court expert on matters of literature and not someone who had but recently been picked up in the wilderness, that had to be told backwards and that, when told that way, meant what they were supposed to mean.

How was that, the Chairman exclaimed again in the manner of someone who didn’t have the foggiest notion about anything whatsoever.

Just like that, the Defence Counsel replied without hesitation.

The Court ought to know that there existed upside-down stories and should not be constantly surprised at this and that.

And when such a story was told, it gave the listener the impression of circular motion, left one with the impression of cyclical repetition of events in the world.

The prosecutor knew that and would not allow the defendant to tell its story backwards for that reason.

In a nutshell, either the Court would allow the defendant to tell the incriminated story backwards or the defendant wouldn’t tell it!

The choice was theirs!

Following the Defence Counsel’s speech, a very unpleasant scene ensued. The Prosecutor insisted that the Defence Counsel’s request be rejected as groundless, whereas some judges, out of pure unadulterated curiosity, wished to hear something they’d never heard before.

A story told backwards.

Naturally, it was the Chairman who was in the most awkward position of them all. He did not quite know which side to favour or how to deal with the conflicting requests.

After a long inner struggle, he himself eventually succumbed to curiosity.

Despite the Prosecutor’s angry, vociferous protests, the Chairman allowed the defendant to tell the story it had been indicted for backwards.

The Story then had to return from Pudin Han to Banja Luka, and start anew from Banja Luka. From the moment when the Minister of Information of the Serbian Republic received foreign journalists and took them to the scene of the crime. The journalists had heard that the Serbs had committed some crime or other at Pudin Han and wanted to inform the world of it straight away. Whenever the Serbs did something wrong, foreigners swarmed like flies.

While they were driving along the road leading from Kjuč to Pudin Han, the Minister told the foreign journalists about the events that had taken place in the area they were driving through the previous summer. The war there had lasted through the summer only, but it had brought great changes. Nothing was as it used to be, he said. Not in Ključ, nor in Krajina, nor in the whole of Bosnia. The road they were travelling along, for example, was no longer the so-called AVNOJ[1] road, which connected the two towns, but a road which separated them.

Just as the Minister spoke those words, Pudin Han came into view.

For instance, the Minister continued, Pudin Han, which they were just approaching, was no longer called Pudin Han but Ravna Gora.[2] Neither was it called what it used to be called nor did it look the way it used to look. Until the events of the previous summer, it was predominantly populated by Muslims, whereas now there was not a soul living there. Not even cats or dogs had started returning to their former homes, he claimed, although more than two months had passed since the heavy fighting.

As there were no more converts to Islam in Pudin Han, the driver spoke up unexpectedly, a man of dour face from the area around Ključ, one found it much easier to breathe, and the air in the whole area was very much clearer than it used to be.

The Minister spoke sharply to the man and told him that he was not to join the conversation without being specifically asked to do so.

Indeed, the first thing the foreign journalists could see entering the town was the new board bearing the name Ravna Gora; after that, they had a look at the houses and remnants of houses. They looked at single- and double-storey houses, neat-looking white houses and pulled-down, burnt-down houses. Some of them, blackened, resembled the remnants of a decaying tooth. Some had a roof on, others were roofless, with a chimney protruding from amidst the rubble, painfully calling the former household members back.

While the journalists were looking at the devastated town, the Minister reminisced about the report of a foreign journalist, who had described the villages around Trnovo, which, before the war, had been populated by Serbs, who had been driven out of them by Muslims, as Muslim villages, which, naturally enough, had been looted and burnt down by Serbs. As if the Serbs had done all that to themselves!

That journalist had been ordered to incriminate the Serbs and had done so although the situation there did not exactly correspond to the content of his report. Wherein, naturally, he had represented the Serbs as barbarians, so wolf-like that all they did was spread around the spirit of the wilderness!

Fortunately, Pudin Han used to be a Muslim settlement so that the journalists were not forced to blame the Muslims for the devastation brought down upon it.

The driver slowed down as they were passing a large rectangular two-storey school building with a lot of windows and machine-gun graffiti on the walls, and continued slowly towards the ruins.

Until this summer, the Minister was saying in an earnest-sounding voice, there had stood a mosque there, exquisitely built and richly furnished, in accordance with all the rules of the Muslim religion. The mosque had had many arch windows, a few cupolas of varying sizes and a slender-looking minaret.

They had already reached the ruins and pulled up in front of them when the Minister said that, following the fall of Pudin Han into the hands of the Serbs, the mosque had been pulled down by a miner who was a member of the Serbian Army, a Catholic, a Czech or Croatian by origin.

The foreign journalists merely exchanged glances upon hearing this and then looked aside, because this particular bit of information was not in accordance with what they’d been assigned to write.

Finally, they all got out of the bus and went up to the ruins. They all stood there, their hands upon their backs, looking at the remnants of the mosque. They looked at the remnants first, then at one another.

Indeed, the miner in question had pulled the mosque down in such a way that not a single brick, stone or beam had fallen sideways; everything had simply been lowered down to the ground.

Even the cupolas, covered with copper, which were supposed to represent the sky, had remained intact; it was just that they were not where they used to be and where they were supposed to be, closer to Allah, but down.

Upon the ground.

Following the war, the sky over Pudin Han had been lowered to the ground. It was not up but down, but it was intact. It could even be used again should the need to do so arise again.

The journalists were undoubtedly fascinated by the miner’s work but they kept their impressions to themselves. However, when the Minister mentioned that the miner, returning from the front line in the Bihać area by car, skidded off the road for no apparent reason, crashed into a post and was killed some twenty metres away from the mosque only twenty days after pulling it down, they were taken aback.

When they heard that, the assembled journalists immediately shuddered from some non-existent chill although it was a bright sunny day, turned around and hurried towards the bus, frowning.

They had no sooner started when the driver pulled up again, this time in front of a huge pile of bricks, tiles, stone, beams, planks and rubble; without a word, the Minister got up from his seat, got out of the vehicle and went towards the ruins.

The journalists followed him, looking like a herd of sheep because they were dressed in white suits, carrying name-tags on their lapels, and soon found themselves in front of a mysterious scene.

The Minister’s face was grimmer than at the beginning of their journey. He was silent, but his eyes spoke volumes. He looked like a concerned, but at the same time determined man.

When he finally spoke, he said that that was the place they’d come for. That was the scene of the crime they wanted to write about.

After a long silence he spoke again.

Before they asked any questions, he would inform them of the following facts.

In 1941 the Muslims of Pudin Han invited prominent Serbs from the neighbouring villages to come to Pudin Han for the purpose of discussing how jointly to defend the place from the Ustashi. The Serbs, good-natured and simple souls, naive and meek, showed up. Seventy-eight of them came, trusting the Muslims’ word. Upon their arrival, the Muslims locked them up in the local primary school building. There, between the desks where they’d studied together, they tortured them. There they killed them, the way only torture-brothers and slaughter-brothers knew how! And then they killed them anew by hanging them upon hooks already prepared for that purpose.

Although many people had a father, brother, uncle, wedding witness or neighbour among those who were slaughtered there, no-one could talk publicly about that hideous crime. For the sake of the newly-established common state that the Serbs were making together with those that had slaughtered and killed them during the war, with those that had thrown them into deep pits, the Ustashi and Bosniaks, it could not be mentioned publicly. For the sake of brotherhood and unity, which had served to mask a carnival of lies for fifty years, this bloody orgy could not be mentioned.

Sad but true.

Or so it used to be.

But ever since the time of Cain and Abel, nothing hurt one more than having an eye gouged by one’s brother.

And when it so happened that some poor devil could not stand the pain tearing him inside, he would get drunk in a corner of some local inn. And when his fear was overcome with the help of alcohol and he started muttering something about the Serbs that had been slaughtered at Pudin Han, the police would arrive forthwith, Serbian police, no less, take the wretch whose memories were bleeding to the police station and beat him black and blue.

He would be released afterwards without anything in the way of evidence of his having been detained and beaten by the police.

That summer, however, fifty-one years later, as evil was short-lasting but remembered for a long time, when the Muslims thought that they would stage another orgy of Serb-slaughtering, the way they had done back in 1941, ancestral voices were heard. The dead rose from their graves to demand that justice be done. That summer, fifty-one years afterwards, when war broke out anew, the dead rose from their graves, stormed into Pudin Han, caught seventy-eight Muslims, precisely seventy-eight of them, and killed them in that same school building where their own fathers, uncles and neighbours had been slaughtered.

The Serbs did not torture the Turks, the driver’s voice was heard again unexpectedly; he had been standing a little to the side. No, they did not kill them the way they had been slaughtered themselves back in the good old days of ’41! No, the Serbian blood was pure! The Serbs’ eyes were not blood-thirsty the way the Turks’ eyes were, and they were not deceitful the way the Turks were. They merely broke into the town, caught seventy-eight Turks, including women and children, took them to the school where they’d slaughtered their ancestors and killed them.

And then they pulled the school building down!

When the driver stopped talking, it was as if he had stopped breathing. His face turned hard, stone-like, resolute, so the Minister had to warn him not to speak without being spoken to first.

What was the gentleman’s claim that the blood of the Serbs was pure and that of the Muslims impure based on, a journalist asked at long last, a man who had an artificial arm, the right one, and how come the eyes of the Muslims were bloodthirsty and those of the Serbs were not?

The Minister had expected such questions as a consequence of the claims the driver had made, and had to provide some justification or other.

He said that there existed among the Serbs a conviction that the Islamic religion was inextricably mixed with and based on blood because Muslims practised sacrificial rites. In the course of Bairam, for example, Muslims performed the ritual slaughter of oxen, an act witnessed by the whole family! Including even children! Even at such an early age they insisted on getting them used to the sight of blood! Even then they taught them how to draw blood!

Why was the Minister beating about the bush, the driver protested again, why didn’t he say loud and clear that blood could only be avenged by blood and death by death? Why didn’t he tell them that instead of all that nonsense? An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, just the way the Jews preached and practised! Why didn’t he tell them that instead of all that palaver and lame Christian piety?

The Minister had to offer justification for the driver’s words yet again: he mentioned how the Muslims had treacherously killed the man’s son when the war broke out in Croatia. He was a young soldier doing his national service in Zadar; when the Yugoslav Army was evacuating its troops from Croatia by buses, the Muslims ambushed them on this very road, attacked the convoy from a wood and killed six soldiers. That was why the driver was speaking in such a way.

Whereupon the journalist with the artificial arm spoke in a rather strange way, as if he were talking to himself. His mind, he said, could not fathom either crime. He was unable to justify any crime and could not acquiesce to what he was being shown! All that reminded him of were Balkan tales from the past!

To be quite truthful about it, it put him in mind of primitive tribal retribution.

Why, what sort of people, he wondered, as if genuinely puzzled, would that make you?

Why couldn’t you turn, for once, to the possible reality and possible future instead of the past, which nothing could be done about anyway? Wasn’t it all too clear to each and every one of you that you had so much of this past that you could live on it for centuries, that you almost had no need for any future!

It was the driver’s turn then to wonder what made the honourable journalist so puzzled about it all. Why did he wonder what sort of people the Serbs were like, why didn’t he wonder what sort of people the Muslims were like? It was not the Serbs who had slaughtered the Muslims first but the other way round!

The journalist, who was from Germany, pale-faced and slightly bent, seeing that the conversation had turned into a clash of opinions and attitudes, asked the driver whether, as a man, he felt that his fellow-countrymen had been justified in countering evil with fresh evil, that they had resorted to crime themselves.

What crime, the driver wondered? The Serbs had committed no crime, they’d merely punished those who had done so.

He begged to differ, the crime that the Muslims had committed came first!

And the one who was forced by circumstances to punish the wrongdoer was no wrongdoer himself!

One could not draw such conclusions from this, said the German journalist, expressing his disagreement in a civil, restrained manner. The Serbs had picked an evil way of getting rid of the burden of the past! They had not killed the actual culprits, those who had slaughtered their fellow Serbs, but innocent people, even women, as far he gathered! The Serbs, his tone became sharp at this point, had killed innocent people, people free from guilt!

That was the poison of the past that prevented the Serbs from moving onwards!

This attitude so incensed the driver that even the Minister of Information of the Serbian Republic could not calm him down.

What right had he, a foreigner, from Germany, no less, from a country that had done so much evil to the Serbs and caused them so much suffering in the past, to speak in the name of the victims? Didn’t the victims themselves know best how to settle their blood debts? It was not a question of punishing the culprits but taking revenge for the victims! The dead always had the right to participate in contemporary events!

But no crime could be justified by another crime, maintained the German journalist tenaciously. Crime only begot fresh crime! There was no stopping it merely by killing someone!

Yes, yes, he was right, the driver couldn’t agree more himself, he had only forgotten to mention that crime that remained unpunished only begot fresh crime! That was the essential thing about it! Had the Muslims been punished for the crime they’d committed, this later crime would probably never have occurred!

The journalist would not agree with this view and addressed the driver again. The gentleman should not forget, he said, that, according to his logic, this war was at the same time the source of the next one! That, my dear sir, this being Bosnia, meant a virtual perpetuum mobile.

So be it, the driver shouted in the heat of the argument. And did the gentleman know what our people said?

What?

One’s path to consecration led through retaliation!

Was there an end to that evil law then?

Why, of course, it was in the very ruins the gentleman was looking at!

The Minister had to cut this most unpleasant conversation short, to break in on them and explain to the German journalist in a kind tone of voice just exactly what the driver had intended to say. And he had meant to say that the Serbs had settled their debt and then pulled down the school building so that no more crimes could be committed in it!

Although the conversation had proceeded along such divergent lines of argument, the Story did not get involved in it in any way but watched the ruins from the courtroom as if they were a holy fire. It had felt that holy flame starting inside it and burning against its will.

Storytelling was an innate quality to it.

Something like a way to exist.

That was why it could not remain indifferent having heard this story unexpectedly.

If the theory of cyclical history, the cyclical progression of historical events, was valid, then that which had happened had been bound to happen. The revenge had had to happen because nothing in this world happened only once. History liked repeating things after a while, at a distance.

Nothing could happen now if it hadn’t happened before!

Never!

It could neither happen nor exist!

As every war was inexorable reality, the revenge had had to happen, the Story finally said aloud, startling the foreign journalists and judges in the courtroom.

None of them, naturally, could know what the Story had meant. None of them had any idea that the Story had taken the side of the story, that it had started examining its boundaries, searching for its secret. No-one knew that it was already running a temperature, that its tongue was getting hot, that it had been engulfed by the great spiritual current, the creative unrest that was to turn what it had heard and seen, that untamed reality, into a thing of beauty.

That was a very difficult thing to achieve.

The visible was a good starting point for a story, but at the same time a hindrance because it tended to impose limits upon it. Reality provided an impetus to the original idea but hemmed it in at the same time.

A story should not appear to be true, and it should not be something that did not explain anything. The relationship between reality and what was to happen in the story usually proved to be the other way round.

It should not, as the International Court of Justice believed, imitate reality! It should create reality anew although it was well aware that made-up reality was never up to the everyday reality of this world.

Even though there existed this primordial tendency in every man to express and paint everything by means of words, it was difficult to capture reality using words. Who could find the right words and put them in their right places within the framework of sentences when there were thousands, indeed tens of thousands such words and places these words aspired to occupy! And if it so happened that those words were dazzling, then they tended to mean something precisely the opposite of what was being said through them!

Words did not give themselves up easily!

If a balance were not struck between reality and fiction, between the facts and the message, then the story would come to nothing! In reality, every event tended to mist over the truth somewhat, whereas in a story it was supposed to shed light upon it. It was supposed to be an authentic representation and not some form of inorganic matter.

Also, a story should not be clear as far as meanings were concerned because the world it inhabited was far from clear.

But who could say where a story would take the Story?

Should it insist on seeking the truth rather than the possibility of truth, then the Story and its story might commit a more serious crime than the one perpetrated in reality.

And it had to create a story and preserve the event in question! It just had to because everything existing outside stories was prone to deterioration.

But how to create a story that would outlive the mouth that was telling it, a story that would last because mouths did not last?

How, the Story asked again, aloud.

Again, all the journalists, both those in Pudin Han and those present in the courtroom, turned like one towards the Story, wishing to fathom its silence rather than the few words it spoke. Since they simply could not manage to do that, the Story appeared to them to be ranting and raving like a feverish old woman.

While they were looking at it, it kept looking at the story, as if it were all alone in front of the ruins.

Whatever it had heard and seen should be extracted from the chaotic reality and implanted somehow into the course of history, provided with a beginning and an ending. It should provide with a beginning and an ending something that had no beginning or an ending.

Who could say when all that had started!

Had it been when the Turks came to Bosnia? Or when the local Serbian population was forcibly converted to Islam? Or when the Turks left Bosnia and the converts to Islam remained to share the fate of the conquerors? When the converts did not stop being what they had been for centuries but, deliberately or not, adopted the ideology of the conquerors, identifying with them even when they were no longer in Bosnia, identifying with them by becoming oppressors themselves?

As there could be nothing without a beginning, it had to start the story somehow. Having provided it with boundaries, from the back and front alike, it had to concretise it. It had to relate it to concrete details so that every detail should have energy of its own.

Having done that, it had to find a means of expression that would be neither below or above the events themselves, and use the said means of expression to fill all the parts of the story so that no cracks, let alone loose ends should remain.

To achieve that, it had to work on its storytelling technique and expression. It had to alter and improve its sentences, expand and contract them, although it should not make any excessive alterations lest the sentences should get twisted out of shape.

Finally, when all that was done, it should tighten the story, tighten it so that it should reverberate within the listener the way violin strings do.

To achieve all that, to do all that, it said aloud for the public again, was a creative problem of the highest order.

When the defendant, all of a sudden, brought its story to an abrupt close, the judges did not know where they were within the story. They had no idea whatsoever where the story began, why it had been interrupted at that particular point, or what the Story was doing in it.

However, a black lady who was sitting at the far end of the Tribeurinal Board, exhibited a certain degree of composure. She quite shrewdly remarked that the defendant had pointed out before telling the story that there existed stories which could only be understood if told backwards. As the story in question had been recorded by a video camera, she suggested that the VCR should be switched on and the cassette played backwards.

Her proposal was so logical and practical that no-one could resist it, not even the all-powerful Prosecutor, so that it was unanimously accepted by the Tribeurinal Board.

The big screen in the courtroom lit up with thousands of shiny little arrows, then started pouring out upside-down words and meanings.

Chaos ensued in the courtroom.

Although the judges were watching the video recording very carefully, they could not make out the words. No-one could make out the story they had just heard, let alone understand its upside-down meaning.

In the general chaos, the Defence Counsel jumped to his feet and started pointing at the screen with his furry paw, shouting, laughing, roaring and holding his stomach. He jumped about on his hind legs, shouting and cheering, clapping his front limbs as if he was watching a circus performance.

He was, after all, merely exhibiting, in his own way, some rudimentary human characteristics.