Tihomir Levajac:
Here We Go on Trial Again

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Verdict

In the interests of justice, the Prosecutor made use of an Article of the Statemute of the Tribeurinal which enabled him not to bring charges against the tenth Story until the very day the trial began.

Then he charged the Story with having committed a crime against art.

And this, gentlemen, was the crime in question.

In the course of the inquest, driven into a corner by the mountain of evidence that the Prosecutor had amassed, when asked who its literary model in creative terms was, the Story answered that it was the Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andrić. From among so many writers in this world, could the honourable judges but imagine, the defendant had taken Ivo Andrić as a model! Since it had chosen that particular author, since it had chosen his work, work whose artistic impulses had nothing whatsoever to do with striving to improve the quality of life, the defendant had to be held responsible! Also, it had to be responsible in view of the fact that Ivo Andrić, although he was born and brought up in Bosnia and devoted his work entirely to Bosnia and its past, was very much disputed as a writer in his native Bosnia. His literary merit was disputed by two thirds of the local population, that is to say, by the Croats and Bosniaks. The Croats disputed him because, although a Croat by origin, he declared himself a Serb, that is, a Serbian writer; the Bosniaks disputed him because he depicted Muslims in very dark tones. In the opinion of a famous scholar from Bosnia, whose name was not known, apart from the fact that he was a Bosniak, Andrić’s works had done more harm to Bosnia than all the armies that had passed through it from its establishment to the present day.

The Prosecutor’s own view of the matter coincided with that of the unknown scholar, even though he, the Prosecutor, had never read Andrić.

There existed evidence to support all his claims!

The war, gentlemen, had hardly even started when the Bosniaks pulled down a monument to Andrić in the town of Višegrad: they smashed his bust to pieces with a sledge-hammer! They wouldn’t have done such a thing without a very good reason. The Tribeurinal Board should also have the following in mind when sentencing the defendant. After the war had begun, when the Serbs surrounded Sarajevo and kept it in a blockade, shelling the city from the surrounding hills, the local Muslims brought out Andrić’s works, Andrić’s collected works, Andrić’s books and burned them in front of their houses and blocks of flats.

They burned them at the stake, as it were.

And why would a civilised people do such a thing?

Because, gentlemen, in his works Andrić depicted Bosnia as a land of hatred. In many of his works, particularly the short story entitled “A Letter from the Year 1920”, he claimed that there was no love, brotherhood or unity among blood-brothers who spoke the same language. He went on to say that Bosnia rested upon almost inbred, allegedly unconscious, invisible hatred as if upon dynamite, just waiting for it to be activated!

Some of you, gentlemen, might say now that, since hatred had boiled over anew in Bosnia and blood-brothers were mercilessly slaughtering one another, Andrić turned out to have been something of a prophet! No, gentlemen, he did not! The actual war was brought about by his manner of writing and thinking!

Through his work, he led many astray!

After these words, the Chairman of the Tribeurinal Board, the Italian judge Totto Ciotto Betto conte di Tritoretto, asked the defendant whether it had understood the bill of indictment.

Yes, the defendant replied without hesitation.

In its entirety?

Yes, in its entirety.

Did it still consider Andrić to be its model?

Yes, it did!

Why?

Because Andrić had told the truth about Bosnia!

Where?

In the story that had taken place during this war.

As far as the Chairman knew, Andrić had died some twenty years before, so it was not quite clear to him how Andrić could have told a story that had taken place in this war!

He couldn’t have told it, he had merely shaped it, and the defendant had told it publicly.

This was even more of a mystery to the Chairman; all he could say was that the defendant’s mental powers seemed to be deficient! Possibly, it had got it into its head that it was Andrić, a Nobel Prize winner, so he asked it questions trying to find out whether his theory was correct.

And what did Andrić speak of in the story that he had not written?

About a follower of Allah from Večić, a certain Dževad, and Gavrilo, who were godfathers to each other’s sons.

Would the defendant be kind enough to tell the Court how the story began, the Chairman kept asking simple questions, as if to confuse it.

Why, simply enough, the Story replied.

The Serbs expected Dževad to appear with his Green Berets one evening under Stolački kamen, on the road connecting the Muslims from Večić with the Croats from Viševica, Jakotina and Sokolin, so they set up an ambush at the crossroads where three roads intersected!

Was that correct, the Chairman continued to confuse the defendant by asking the simplest of questions.

Well, some said that it wasn’t true, the Story admitted, but claimed that a Muslim from Dževad’s group had not quite known how to give himself up to the Serbs or had not had an opportunity to do so, and had decided to betray the group to the Serbs. He had somehow managed to inform the Serbs that the group would pass that way, under Stolački kamen, at dusk. It had seemed to him then, at the beginning of the war, that the Muslims of the Kotor-Varoš area stood no chance against the Serbs in the war, so he didn’t want to get killed in vain. But he dared not say that openly to anyone, least of all to his commander, who was a very, very stubborn sort of fellow.

So the only thing that had remained for him to do was to betray his own side.

Lest he should get killed in vain!

When the Chairman saw that the defendant had got carried away with telling the story, he did not interrupt it any longer, hoping that it would contradict itself in the course of the narration, which could be used against it as an aggravating circumstance when it came to the presentation of evidence. Indeed, the defendant went on weaving the story, at dusk, a group of armed Muslims walked into an ambush set up strictly by the book. The Serbs let them walk into it deeply enough, then closed the circle around them by shooting from all sides.

Shooting in the air, that is.

The leader and three other soldiers threw themselves into some bushes, the rest fell down on the ground where they happened to be when the shooting started.

The commander of the Serb forces, well sheltered, invited Allah’s soldiers to give themselves up. They were surrounded, the Serbs had them in the sights of their rifles and could shoot them down like rabbits.

When Dževad answered this by firing from his rifle, the Serbs immediately showered the stubborn group leader with a halo of tracer bullets, firing from a nearby hill.

The moment the Muslims reared their heads, the bullet-shower would start.

The first one to get up from the ground, throw his rifle away and give himself up by raising his arms was the man who had betrayed the group. When the others saw that the Serbs had not shot him down, they started getting up, too.

One after another, they gave themselves up.

Until it was Dževad’s turn to do so.

Ostoja finally called him by name. As he did not answer, they combed the bushes firing from automatic rifles.

In between two bursts of automatic fire, Dževad got up from some underbrush, cuts all over his skin. He got up all tense, ready to pounce like a wild beast, his black eyes flashing in all directions, then went up to the pile of arms step by step and started disarming himself.

Naturally, he did this in the manner of an irritated lynx.

When he had put aside the firearms, there came a warning shout from the hillside.

The rest, too! The bombs, the dagger. The noose and the wire coil he’d used for torturing Serbs, too! Each and every single weapon!

When they had disarmed the Muslims, the Serbs locked them up inside a cellar under the house of a Croat who had fled his home already; as for Dževad, whose eyes were bloodshot, they tied him up, took him to a stable where cattle were kept, and left him there with two guards to keep an eye on him.

Until they decided what to do with him, he must not escape alive, Ostoja said threateningly, and it was up to them to see to it!

Although the ambush had been set up by the book, the commander had not even in his wildest dreams imagined that they would capture and disarm so many people just by firing in the air, without any casualties, and was almost afraid of the unexpected success. He did not know what to do with so many prisoners, in particular with the dangerous murderer and torturer, of whom there were scary stories circulating among the Serbs.

Stories told at second hand had Dževad committing crimes in many Serbian villages, crimes for which he was notorious. According to stories spread by word of mouth, he had killed his own brother before the outbreak of war because he had advised him not to take arms into Večići, and was merciless towards the Serbs afterwards. It was  said that he had tortured the captured members of the special police force by cutting off their ears, noses and tongues, that he had extinguished cigarette butts on their bodies, especially their sexual organs, that he had shaved them with a welder, that he had strangled them using a coil of wire with a noose at one end and a winch at the other, that he had stuck the muzzle of his rifle into their anuses, then fired blanks into them so that the hapless victims died suffering terribly, their insides filled with noxious gases, that he had even barbecued some victims alive, the way a lamb would be barbecued, under a rock in Večići bearing the inscription “Long live comrade Tito”, recording their cries of pain on a cassette recorder and playing them later on the PA system of the local mosque, under Crkvište, which the Muslim priest used to broadcast his prayers and sermons, so that his people could enjoy listening to Serbs moaning in pain.

All those stories, of course, were unverified. They might be true, but on the other hand, they might be fabricated or exaggerated. Who could say what the truth was! After all, who could have known what was happening on the other side of the front line, beyond the borderline of madness, across the Vrbanja River. Who could have found out what Dževad did to the captured Serbs there, beyond the plains bordering the river, the most fertile land and the alluvium, in his archaic village with streets intersecting at right angles, where houses and stables were so thoroughly mixed that the reek of ammonium filled the air any time of the day or night. Who could have found out the truth when it was so difficult to reach even when there wasn’t a war going on, when one had to climb nine steep mountains and sail nine faraway seas and still not be assured of getting closer to the truth!

As Ostoja, too, had heard a number of horrible stories about Dževad, he sent one of the soldiers to Kotor-Varoš as a courier. Let the Headquarters decide what to do with him and the other prisoners.

Meanwhile, the guards had already started talking to the captured slaughterer because all three of them were from the same area.

One of the guards, Gavrilo, and Dževad were even godfathers to each other’s sons.

Dževad and Gavrilo used to be teachers, teaching children in the neighbouring villages, and then they left the teaching profession.

As his father had a lot of horses, Dževad started loading spruce and fir-tree logs on the mountainside and transporting them down to Vrbanjci; at the same time, Gavrilo started a sawmill, bought the logs from Dževad and turned them into planks, beams, struts and boards.

They cooperated just fine and got rich.

And when it so happened that sons were born to both of them, when both had turned forty, on the very same day, each became godfather to the other’s son. Then their families started visiting each other, entertaining and treating each other, trying to outdo each other’s hospitality.

When the war broke out, however, each one stuck to his own side and followed the course his own people had taken.

The goddess of destiny, the forces of evil and chance, the well-known comedian, as described by Miloš Crnjanski,[1] saw to it that the two should meet face to face on life’s hard road. And when they met that night on life’s rocky shore, an opportunity arose for them to settle their accounts in that smelly stable, late at night, barely making out each other’s faces in the dim light.

They started talking about the past, about the way the two of them used to be and the way they turned out to be later on, when the war began.

Had either one betrayed that core of humanity within himself in the meantime?

Had either one, perhaps, stopped being a human being?

The more they talked, the more awkward their conversation became. It was obvious that the war had poisoned them both, had changed them to such an extent that it seemed to both of them that life in this beautiful but unfortunate country was starting anew, different from what it used to be.

And when, engulfed by the darkness and the smell of manure, they started talking about who was fighting for what kind of state and whose faith would eventually prevail in Bosnia, they got stuck again.

Did he remember, Gavrilo asked, that meeting in Vrbanjci, when the Muslims had brought the priest from Večić and placed him at the head of the table? Did he remember how the Serbs had asked them to declare their loyalty to the Serbian Republic, and how they had remained silent? They remained silent while the Muslim priest kept fiddling with his rosary. The Serbs waited for an answer and the Muslims for the priest to speak on their behalf.

Did he remember what the priest had told them then?

As Dževad remained silent, Gavrilo had to tell him what he had heard from the priest, something he had never heard until then.

The priest said then that the Muslims were an exemplary people of the Lord and that they could not accept the rule of ungodliness! He remembered well that the priest had said they were an exemplary people, not one of the ungodly and infidels. They could not, therefore, accept the rule of infidels because with the Serbs, power did not belong to God but to people who did not believe in God! The Serbs were infidels, the priest mumbled, but Gavrilo had heard him well, because they denied God’s unity!

The priest had even turned magnanimous, Gavrilo claimed, and offered help to the Serbs. As they denied God’s unity, he said, the Serbs should be freed from this fallacy even against their will!

The priest’s sermonising made Gavrilo quite incensed, so he asked Dževad to ignore the priest, not to follow his lead, to give up the Koran and the Islam faith, and to take the side of the Serbs.

When Dževad started talking, Gavrilo hoped that what he had to say would be different from what they’d heard from the priest. Unfortunately, he was wrong. Dževad expressed his support for the priest’s holy endeavour to follow the Prophet’s path! He went on to claim that he, too, had been enlightened by Allah, that Allah had advised him to keep to the path that was theirs.

And which path was that, Gavrilo asked, as he hadn’t known about any such path.

Unfortunately, the priest spoke first again, not Dževad, because with the Muslims the priest always spoke before anyone else did.

That was the path, mumbled the priest indistinctly, fiddling with his rosary all the time, that divulged the glory of Allah's name! The path of the struggle for the truth, for the Prophet's faith! Only Islam was the truth, said the priest, extolling the virtues of his religion, and all the rest were lies! And since the truth and lies could not coexist, a conflict with infidels was inevitable.

Whoever should oppose the spreading of the truth based on the Islam faith, the priest threatened, would be punished! That was a vow that all Muslims observed and should observe, because Islam knew not of nation but of faith only. Every Muslim should be Allah’s servant and should do for his faith whatever he could. Their state, the Serbs should know and bear in mind, was based on the principle of a religious community uniting all the Muslims of the world at the expense of all non-Muslims.

Finally, when the priest claimed in the presence of all those Serbs that some time or other all the Muslims of the world would most certainly unite with the Bosnian Muslims through their joint struggle, Gavrilo saw that things had gone too far and addressed Dževad, referring to their godfather-bond, and asked him not to listen to the priest and his theory of biological fundamentalism, to ignore the priest waving the flag of Islam over Serbian fire, to surrender their arms and go on living together with the Serbs the way they had done until then!

Dževad refused to do so.

Should the infidels resort to the use of force, he threatened, the Muslims would strike back!

For it said in the Koran that force, should it be used once, would be used in retaliation!

Gavrilo begged him not to speak about the use of force.

No, he’d remain true to his word! His skin, he claimed angrily, would cost dearly!

Inside the smelly stable, Gavrilo mocked Dževad’s intonation when he’d said that his skin would cost dearly.

Since the turning down of the Serbian offer was, in effect, an invitation to the Serbs to revolt, things had gone along their inexorable course. And so it came to pass that the two of them met in this stable where cattle were kept and that Gavrilo asked him to his face whose skin would cost more dearly. He circled Dževad in the barely penetrable darkness like an apparition, referring to their godfather-bond, grinning at him straight in the face like a demon, asking whose skin would cost more dearly tonight. He kept asking that and Dževad kept flashing the whites of his eyes in the darkness.

At one point, when Gavrilo asked for the umpteenth time whose skin would cost more dearly, when his grinning face and breath had almost merged with Dževad’s, the latter spat in his face; predictably enough, Gavrilo reacted by cutting Dževad’s lip with a primordially instinctive movement of his hand, so that a dark trickle of blood flowed from the cut.

A fight of sorts ensued, although the participants were not in an equal position for fighting. Dževad’s arms and legs were tied up while Gavrilo’s were free, so that the latter could swing freely and hit his opponent with his hands, fists, elbows and the rifle-butt. He hit Dževad with all of the above, wherever he managed to land a blow. He hit the other’s head, jaw, teeth, chest, ribs, loins and below, and when Dževad fell down amidst the manure and straw, he continued by kicking him with his boots.

He kept kicking Dževad with all his might; he didn’t dare even think how Dževad would kick him and what he would do to him if the circumstances were different and the roles reversed.

He beat Dževad the way people beat each other when their godfather-bond is broken and trampled underfoot. He went about it in a bloodthirsty manner, the way only brothers who are, in fact, brothers but can never manage to be brothers bash each other. He beat him the way only those who are of the same origin and speak the same language beat each other, those who know each other only too well but are so divided by religion that they are no longer under the sway of reason but of blind instinct and fierce passion.

Not for nothing did they say that there was no war until brother turned against brother.

Had the Prosecutor and the members of the Tribeurinal Board been in a position to see, be it through a door or through a keyhole, one of them bashing the other’s ribs, teeth, joints and vertebrae, they would easily come to the conclusion that the war had completely destroyed the country wherein, as Andrić had observed, hatred had always been the predominant emotion, that it had destroyed an era and a way of life, and magnified the natural differences that existed between peoples out of all proportion, magnified them to such an extent that they had resulted in crime. If only they could have watched Gavrilo beating Dževad, they would have easily come to the conclusion that the two were so steeped in hatred that they no longer knew each other.

It was as if both had emerged out of the lies of the past, the past having taken on quite a different aspect in the meantime, as well as the two of them.

As if they hadn’t been living in the same country, forming a single whole, but in a fictitious one.

Or as if they had been living in a transitional sort of country, waiting for the moment to arrive for them to say what they truly thought and felt. To manifest the hatred that they hadn’t been aware of, not that it was so intense anyway, to manifest mutual animosity that had been totally unmotivated.

For, in the era of peace, the defendant claimed, as the Tribeurinal Board members knew, and the Prosecutor, naturally, no nation in Yugoslavia, let alone Bosnia, had lacked freedom, nor had any religious or national rights been violated, not even ever so slightly, or the living and working conditions, for that matter.

Anyone claiming that the contrary was true was a liar, the greatest liars of all being those who had contributed the most to the break-up of Yugoslavia.

Things had been totally different, but now individuals who used to be related through a godfather-bond, as well as the peoples those individuals belonged to, fought savagely, killing and slaughtering each other.

As if in the dismal state of Bosnia, as Andrić used to say, there was hatred buried somewhere deep beneath the ground, in the bowels of the earth, so that in this country bursting apart at the seams, a country of different nations, religions and laws, where laws were turned upside-down, people were not given birth to by mothers but by hatred.

It was all very well for them from sterilised Europe to condemn hatred, but down there, on the spot, things were different. To the people down there, it seemed that only those who hated, whose hatred was hereditary, who hated whether aware of it or not, that only those who fought fiercely, killed and slaughtered in the name of hatred, only those who fed on blood had any chance of survival.

Be that as it may, whether out of hatred or because of the broken godfather-bond or the stories about Dževad’s crimes circulating among the Serbs, Gavrilo mauled Dževad so badly that he remained lying in a heap on the floor of the stable, bloody and bruised, the only sound coming from him being something in the nature of a snarl.

Even that sound faded after a while, so that only silence remained, a huge silence completely filling the stable.

Night had already descended onto the surrounding hills when the nocturnal wayfarer appeared on one of the hills, coming from the direction of Mt Vlašić, accompanied by the Pleiades.

At first, the son of the sky looked like a wax candle shining from on high above some giant grave.

Then, little by little, it climbed upwards until it reached the top of the sky and shone its clear bright light, standing solitary above the hills that had been suffocatingly hemmed in. The hills, which had suffered due to an inexplicable feeling of being cramped, were finally lit by moonlight pouring down from the sky in cascading streams.

It was a unique sight indeed: liquid silver flowing downwards across the entire width of the sky.

At midnight, the courier who had been sent to Kotor-Varoš returned, walking through the nocturnal silver, the moonlight carrying an air of unreality about it, and imparted the terse, crystal-clear order. The captured Muslims were to be taken to the Headquarters in Kotor-Varoš that same night, whereas the evildoer was to be shot forthwith, without delay or a hearing.

When the Serbs somehow helped Dževad to his feet, untied his legs and got him to stand, then took him away from the stable in the glassy moonlight, underneath all that heavenly beauty, when they took him up the hill to a plateau, towards the sky, into the transparent night, beautiful in a valedictory sort of way, Dževad immediately realised that he was being taken to his execution. Although battered and bloody all over, his face covered with bruises, with cut lips and a burst angular vein, he walked proudly and energetically, exuding a sort of animal smell. His face was dark as he walked, and from time to time he flashed the whites of his eyes angrily.

Having taken but a few steps towards death, he stopped of his own accord. He stood there, looking at the surrounding hills, bathed by the moonlight pouring down on them from above like a cascade, a hymn to the night.

He wanted to look for the last time at the hills covered by huge sheets of light and the night shadows cutting across the seething hills. He wanted to take a long last look at the hills he knew so well, the moonlight shining so brightly upon them, the beautiful moonlight, the fairy light giving the whole landscape an air of unreality; then his gaze slowly turned upwards, driven by infinite longing. The longer he looked, the more exalted he became.

His soul ascended together with his gaze, finally blending with the Moon that shone so brightly and so clearly.

Then his face took on an unusual colour, a mixture of the contours of being and the contours of nothingness.

Why, did they see, he finally spoke in a gruff voice, how big the sky was, and yet there was but one Moon in it! Only when there was a cross up there, he went on while his face turned the colour of petrol with a pearly sort of sheen, only then would they, the Četniks, rule Bosnia!

Only then, let them mark his words, and never again!

Never, upon his word!

His executioners stood still and looked at his blood-shot eyes and petrol-coloured face in silence.

They could go ahead and shoot him a thousand times, he continued with a victor’s pride in his voice, but they would never win because they didn’t have the support of the Maker of the World!

The Serbian people could only become refined if Islam were to be presented to them, he cried while the moonlight poured down from the common sky like a magical, unearthly optical symphony.

Allah il Allah, he cried while the Moon shining brightly out of time, events and history, beyond crime and death, hatred and passion, poured beauty so sublime as to defy description down onto small, brittle, tiny, real earthly people, nullifying whatever differences existed between them.

When the defendant spoke that last sentence, the silence in the courtroom was louder that the story itself.

Even those who dispensed international justice turned out to be human sometimes.

The silence did not last very long, however, because the Prosecutor, Uncle’s Uncle of the Potato Pact’s Uncle, regained his breath first and said that he would not drop his charges. For, when one sorted out one’s thoughts and ignored one’s emotions, and took a closer look at the story, it proved to offer nothing but hatred. The parts of the story dealing with the moonshine, with some symphony or other, ostensibly from the sky, only served to confuse the mind of the listener, mist over his eyes and thinking, but underneath that moonlight, behind that symphony, there was nothing but hatred. And the story must not contribute to the spread of hatred, even if the latter should prove to exist in reality!

Both the Story and the Story’s story, together with the Story’s model, Ivo Andrić, the exemplary priest from Bosnia, he threatened, were criminals who should be sentenced!

He warned the members of the Tribeurinal Board to bear his words in mind when they passed the sentence.

They knew only too well, after all, although the Court was independent and perfectly free to decide as it saw fit, who had established the Court and why!

They knew only too well who was paying them and how much!

Unexpectedly, the Defence Counsel asked for permission to address the Court. They often forgot about him as he had been chosen by the Court for the sake of form, to provide legal aid to the defendants.

Having been granted permission to do so, he addressed the Court just as unexpectedly.

Although he was from Bosnia, he wasn’t familiar with Andrić’s work. It was unheard of in the animal world to evaluate works of art. Having been chosen by the Vague Tribeurinal to defend the accused, he felt it his duty to warn the Tribeurinal Board that, in the capacity of the Defence Counsel, he had the right to use all the necessary literature, technical manuals and archive materials. In accordance with one of the Articles of the Statemute of the Tribeurinal, it was the duty of the Court to provide him with all the manuals, encyclopedias, maps, historical and archive materials, as well as Andrić’s works referred to by the Prosecutor, unless the Court had burned them at the stake here, at the Vague, the way that the Muslims had done in Sarajevo, the way they used to burn books in the Middle Ages.

Failing that, he was going to boycott the trial!

By going on hunger strike!

As the Defence Counsel’s request was legally grounded, the trial had to be adjourned until he had studied those aspects of Andrić’s work that the Prosecutor had used to bring up charges against him and decided for himself who was in the right – the Prosecutor or the Nobel Prize winner.