The Walnut Mansion
Page 18
It wasn’t that Sarajevo pined for the Ottoman Empire and the time of the sultans; no one remembered any of that, but they hadn’t ever liked the whole bit about fighting and pursuing the Turks. They had an instinctive feeling that all those folk songs and tales, in which some Jovan and Ivo were killed by some Sulejman, nevertheless in a roundabout way had something to do with them and any Bosnian who had a Turkish name. If nothing else, it seemed that Bosnians didn’t have a right to their heroic legends because they hadn’t fought against Ottoman despotism, about which one learned in school that it had lasted for five centuries, though the calendar showed that it was only four centuries. So at that time it had barely been five centuries since the Turks had come to Bosnia—but how many years had it been since they’d already been gone?! So many that only the cobblestones remembered a Turkish foot stepping on them. Over in the cemetery in the city center a public toilet was opened so the people would know that not even the dead have the same rights. It would never happen that the smell of shit would waft over Catholic or Orthodox graves, though they contained people who had died at the same time as those who were now bathing in shit.
The market district was softly abuzz with talk, and the Muslim men watched what they said in front of their Catholic and Orthodox neighbors for the first time in a long while because they felt that this opera was a serious thing, on account of which you could lose your life or be sent to do hard labor, though none of these people from the three groups had ever in their lives set foot in the National Theater.
But the Catholics in the market district, who were in the minority (there might be one or two among the clockmakers, cobblers, and tailors) were damned if they weren’t getting ready to go to their first opera. And they weren’t hush-hush about it but called out from their storefronts that they were going to buy tickets, the next day if possible.
No one knew whether they were fooling around or really meant it, nor did anyone ask, because it’s better not to open your mouth about things you’d rather not get asked about. But it was quite possible that a few of them bought tickets and set off that evening for Ivan Zajc’s opera Nikola šubić Zrinski.
By half past six there was a large crowd of people in front of the National Theater. While some looked as if they’d gone to the opera—tall old men with railroaders’ mustaches, leading their little old ladies under the arm who’d just taken their heads out from under hair driers and whose coiffures shone blue with dye like foaming groundswells—the majority of them didn’t look as if they were going to the theater.
Guys with big heads scowled like villains in partisan movies and kept looking back and forth over the crowd, just as if they had cameras instead of eyes and were shooting film. Students came from provincial universities, in mended navy blue or black suits, the kind people buy once in their lives in Kakanj or Doboj for funerals and weddings. They kept to themselves in a few groups and cast glances full of spite at the fatheads. There were also paupers from the Sarajevo basin and Stup, in muddy rubber galoshes; some milkmaids from Ilijaš; and two or three old women in threadbare, stained suits wearing too much makeup and hats. One of them wore a large silver cross around her neck and every so often pulled it out of her blouse because it kept falling in.
The atmosphere, at least from the point of view of someone not from Sarajevo, was as in one of De Sica’s films, but for anyone who was born there or knew the city, it was a place to be avoided. Namely, there was a feeling of danger that you recognized even if you’d never experienced it and had no idea what it actually meant. And the majority of the people had no experience with such danger because years would pass—ten, fifteen, or twenty years—before something similar would happen again. Although the older generations, those from the market district and the city center, knew well that such things always come, like earthquakes, fires, and blizzards. They were impossible to avoid, but you should try to get as far away from them as possible because they were surely going to do someone in, and someone would surely get carried away by his crazy head or crazier heart, let his tongue wag, and the result would be something that would keep the city in fear for years or in the conviction that they were the worst people on earth because a quiet life meant less to them than five minutes of insanity.
And then, of course, what could be expected and what must have been known by whoever decided to stage Nikola šubić Zrinski in Sarajevo? A group of students, there might have been seven or eight of them, formed a circle, joined arms, and sang the aria To Battle, To Battle. They sang as loudly as they could and sang fairly well, except that they turned Zajc’s hymn into something of their own that had echoes of Vlašić, Zvijezda, and Vranica, the howling of wolves and the yell of someone falling into an abyss on the far side of a mountain. Their voices knew nothing of the romantic longing in the songs of the market district; their longing was stronger, harder, and more menacing. Mountain despair and the tragedy of the villages whence they’d come: villages that had lived or died by the sword. And they would probably do both! Slaughter is always forgiven in these parts but never forgotten. And every forgiveness has its expiration date. Some are forgiven for ten, others for fifty or a hundred years, but no one remembers anything, any crime, ever having been forgiven for all time.
If an opera buff had been in front of the National Theater in Sarajevo in 1969 and heard those highlanders singing To Battle, To Battle, he’d have said that Zajc’s aria had never sounded better. Instead of a provincial imitation based on a European model from the nineteenth century, the voice of the people had made itself heard. That wild Balkan folklore that deserved its own Béla Bartók but never got him. But such a figure would have listened to those students who’d decided to die and made some musicological observations. In a few seconds people began to move away from the circle of singers; soon no one was within fifty meters of them, and then, when the area had been emptied, the fatheads scowled, there were certainly thirty of them, and moved in on the singers, surrounded them, and simply swallowed them up.
People swore that they didn’t see them being taken away, and there wasn’t any reason not to believe them because they tried not to see anything, but two days later in the Belgrade Večernje novosti there was an article about a “nationalist incident in front of the National Theater in Sarajevo.” The people didn’t need newspapers because they already knew everything. The premiere was staged without disturbance, with an applause that lasted just long enough for no one to look suspicious.
At the time of the incident Gabriel was setting the stage, and Dijana was in the theater buffet talking to Katarina Katzer, a promising young ballerina to whom she sometimes would complain about life in Sarajevo and with whom she found understanding because Katarina, surely for some other reasons about which one doesn’t speak in polite society, didn’t think this was the nicest place on earth either. To the end of the performance, not one of them had any idea what was going on in front of the theater.
The next day at nine in the morning a black Citroen stopped in front of Gabriel’s house. Two inspectors in civilian dress got out, went in, and took Gabriel away for an interview at the State Security Service. And in no less than the offices of the secret police that dealt with cases of counterrevolutionary and hostile activity. Dijana wanted to go with him.
“Comrade, no one has asked to see you; when they do, we’ll come for you too!” said one of them, a stout blond guy, rebuffing her.
She stayed behind in the house and waited until she completely lost her nerve and went looking for someone to spend time with until Gabriel came back. She called Goga and Musa, but they didn’t answer, and then she walked over to Katarina’s place, told her what had happened, and Katarina didn’t think it was strange at all, as if she’d expected such things to start happening there as well, and went back home with Dijana to wait for Gabriel.
“I have no idea what happened outside the theater,” he told Inspector Jere Vidošević, a dark-skinned man with a Stalinesque mustache, before the man asked him anything.
&
nbsp; “How do you know that’s why we called you?” he said and gave him a dirty look, writing something down at the same time.
“I don’t know, but I suppose that’s why. Why would you call me in otherwise?” Gabriel asked. He still wasn’t too worried.
“To have a talk, like citizens talk with official services. Conscientious citizens. Those who have nothing to hide. Right? Why would an honest man worry when we call him in? That would be just like me going into the theater and worrying whether someone was going to kill me with one of those, whaddya call ’em, fake pistols. But hey, Mack, a pistol can be real. You and I both know that,” Jere said full of affectation, as if he were acting the part of Kočić’s David štrpac.
“What kind of pistol? I don’t get it,” Gabriel said, confused.
“I don’t understand. That’s how you say it: I don’t understand. You work in the theater, but you talk like a bum. Don’t let Comrade Barilla hear you. Or is he a gentleman? Huh, tell me—is Barilla a comrade or a gentleman? So I can know what to call him when he comes over for coffee. We know that he took you on as an actor. The second herald, hah! And he took you of all people! ‘You know, he’s a joiner, but he’s got talent!’ Oh yeah, those guys in acting schools don’t know what they’re doing, but the famed director does, ain’t that so?”
Gabriel thought that they had summoned him there to find out why Barilla had taken him for the performance and that made him angry: “I didn’t ask them to give me a part. He did that because none of the actors would take such a small role . . .”
“That’s right; that’s what I’m saying! And then he gave it to you. He knows what he’s doing,” Jere said, continuing the same tone.
“Why didn’t you call him in and ask him?”
“So you’d like to tell me how to do my job? You know, that wouldn’t help you because as soon as someone starts poking their nose into my job, I get this stabbing pain in this side of my head. You know, it was right here that I took an Ustasha bullet in ’49, when I was chasing holdouts in Herzegovina. I haven’t had any serious consequences from it, except that I fucking lose it when someone tells me how to do my job or when, God forbid, someone in this chair starts bullshitting me. Then, my dear, good, and honest Gabriel, I get really fucked up. And when I’m fucked up, then I take this hand here, grab the guy’s head with it, and slam it into that safe over there a little. Just to calm down. Turn around and look at it; it’s behind you. Hey, turn around when I tell you to and look at the safe! Oh, and then I smash your head into the safe until my head clears and my sequela subsides. Only that tends to take a while, and then fuck it; you just hope your head is hard. If it’s hard, you live, but you walk around like an idiot without knowing what you used to have inside it. If it’s soft, well then you can kiss your ass good-bye along with the state, the party, and Inspector Jere Vidošević! Your head, Gabriel, as far as we know, isn’t Bosnian. Gabriel Ekert—I can tell you right away—that means a soft head, so it’s better for us not to try it out. Right? Ekert’s not a Bosnian surname. It’s a Kraut one. Beg pardon—German! I hope you’re not offended. You aren’t, are you? We know your father, Mijo, a cheerful little man, right, but dammit, you tell me: did your old man have a brother?”
Faced with this question, Gabriel broke and started stuttering, and in a second the innocent man who had ended up there by mistake became a wrong-doer who was covering up his crime. It didn’t matter what he’d done or whether he’d done anything that might give him reason to be afraid of the police. Guilt is proven not about the innocent but the guilty, that is to say, those who are pronounced guilty and start feeling guilty. As soon as you feel guilty, you also start acting guilty. This is why there’s no police force better than a communist one because it never happens that they let an innocent man through the exit door. All are guilty; it’s just that some are punished and others forgiven. From that place it was easy to send someone to do hard labor because there was no one who hadn’t at least once said something that was punishable with five years of prison. And if such a just man ever turned up, he’d heard someone say something and didn’t report him.
“What’s wrong? Is your tongue tied? Oh, what I don’t see in this job! A man comes into my office healthy, whole, and sane, and an actor too. He says hello and asks how I’m doing properly. Look at him—he’s full of himself. He has things to be full of. It’s not a joke that the last row in the theater hears you when you whisper. And then all of a sudden, it’s like he’s thunderstruck. Maybe he’s sick? Want me to bring you some sugar and water? No? Then what, so to speak, the fuck is your problem?”
Gabriel sighed heavily, and then started talking before Jere managed to comment on that sigh:
“Yes, I had an uncle. He died in prison. I never saw him . . .”
“What a shame! You never went to visit him! If he was guilty before the state and the people, if he stole and killed, it’s still not proper for his kin to renounce him,” the inspector continued.
“He didn’t kill!” Gabriel objected. Jere suddenly grew serious and frowned, and on the left side of his brow a hole suddenly opened up; a piece of bone was missing under his skin and one could see his brain pulsating. He leaned over the table, almost right up to Gabriel, as if he were going to pounce on him or hit him in the face: “And how do you know, effendi, that Bruno Ekert didn’t kill? Now you’ll tell me who told you that so we can ask him about his health a little . . .”
“No one told me,” Gabriel whispered.
His knees shook and every muscle on his face was twitching. He expected to get hit and wanted it to happen as soon as possible, for Jere Vidošević to take him down and for what had to happen to happen. Just so it would all be over as soon as possible.
“Aha! So tell me like that so I understand you! So I won’t wonder to myself, what’s this guy talking about, have magpies swallowed my brains, or is he a total asshole? You should’ve told me up front that the Ustashas didn’t slaughter and kill, that there wasn’t any Jasenovac, that they didn’t leave a million some-odd dead people behind. People or Serbs and Jews. Oh, beg pardon, if you please! You all say Yids, right? Yids! No entry for Yids and dogs! Is that what they say, you dog’s führer, or did we make that up too? Talk, you son of a bitch; isn’t that what they say?!” Jere Vidošević howled, and Gabriel kept himself together as best he could, his gaze fixed on the sharp edge of the black office desk.
He was feverishly wondering what he was supposed to do now. Keep quiet or say something? If he kept quiet, this man would beat him on the spot because he was provoking him, but if he said he always said Jews and not Yids, what the hell did that have to do with anything? And he would look like he was talking shit.
But at that moment an elderly little fat man in a gray suit ran into the office: “What’s going on, Jere, what happened? Come here, c’mon, relax a little; Fazila’s brought kebabs . . .”
And before Gabriel raised his head, the little fat guy was already sitting in Vidošević’s seat, and Jere had vanished from the room.
“Forget him, man; he’s crazy. Someday he’ll kill someone. I tell him, ‘Jere, poor Jere, retire, relax, take care of your apiaries; this isn’t for you. The fool; he’s got more years of service than years of being alive, when you count his time as a partisan and his ten years of chasing Ustashas around Herzegovina. But he won’t retire! Be that as it may, tell me, boy, did you see anything yesterday outside the theater? We can be done in ten minutes. Ugh, damn it, how uncultured of me; I didn’t introduce myself, and that’s proper according to the rules of the service and ordinary customs. Martin Barnjak,” the inspector said and extended his hand. That hand was small, like a child’s, and somehow all round, with a wedding band that had been put on long, long ago, when the finger was thinner. Gabriel accepted that hand like the greatest gift he could have been given.
“I didn’t see anything. I was setting up the stage scenery. I went into the theater at four in the afternoon, and at that time there was no one outside . . .”
“The aria To Battle, To Battle. It’s from the opera.”
“I know, I know; I saw Zrinski when I was in Zagreb. I’ll see it here too, to see which version is better, ours or the Zagreb version. Oh, as it happened, the young rabble were singing to try out their voices. And what do you think, frankly speaking, why did they sing that song and not some other?” asked Barnjak, who, both because of the idiotic smile that didn’t leave his face and the way in which he asked questions, reminded Gabriel of an annoying uncle who comes to visit once a year when you’re little, usually for your birthday, gives you a plastic train as a gift, and won’t let you be until he leaves. He holds you on his knee, grabs you by the cheeks, and asks whether you love him more than your father and whether you have a girlfriend.
“Really, I don’t know why they were singing To Battle, To Battle,” he said.
“Right; what an idiot I am! How would you know?!” Barnjak scratched his bald spot in confusion.
“But what would you’ve had to say about that song if you’d been out in front of the theater?”
“What would I have had to say? Nothing—what would I have to say? People sing what they’re going to hear in the opera. Seems normal to me,” Gabriel said, as Dijana returned to his thoughts, the fact that she was left alone in the house and was certainly pissed that he wasn’t there or rummaging through the rooms that no one went into.
“Normal, n-o-r-m-a-l!” Barnjak repeated to get the spelling right as he wrote it down. “Fine; if that’s normal to you, then it’s normal for me too,” he said and left the office.