As soon as their weakling bloodied his knife, the performance turned into a choral orgy. The main characters disappeared; people lost their names and faces. Everyone grabbed his victim the best he knew how. Some got at those they’d been waiting to get at from the beginning— a child, a pretty girl, or an old man, according to their own impulses and passions. Most often passion doesn’t arise in pure hatred, but comes from something that’s distantly connected to the passion of love, which causes the male member to stiffen. God created it so that he didn’t have to create man anew every time; rather, man could do that himself. But people get lost, forget their scope and the direction they’ve taken, and so instead of giving birth and multiplying, they start slaughtering each other. The explanation is banal but true.
In less than half an hour all their throats were cut, a few breasts, ears, and noses cut off, or people’s eyes and scrotums slid down the rocks. Sometimes the duke spared the life of the youngest child, and it would run off somewhere without a sound. God probably arranged it according to his own plan. Because after every slaughter there had to remain a living image in the eyes of one of the victims.
One morning the protectors of Pavelić’s picture disappeared from Gacko. They left without saying anything to Đuzepe Sikirić, who loved the Leader with the purest heart. The disturbance lasted a few moments. Someone opened all the chicken coops and stalls. The animals ran all over the lanes and the street, but the people were frozen in place. Boss Miloš Davidović came in wearing a fur hat, girdled with heavy bandoliers. He took the picture from the wall of his bar and smashed it over Đuzepe’s head, as in an old silent comedy.
“Boss, don’t, for Christ’s sake!” said a dull visage peering from a wooden frame instead of a cattle yoke. Miloš wouldn’t let him take off the picture frame all the way to the Duhovnjačka ravine, which was covered in scrub below the road to Mostar.
“We didn’t agree to that,” he kept repeating and kicking him in the behind with a heavy boot. Tears were streaming down Đuzepe’s face, though he didn’t know what he had coming. Aware that his ownership of the café had come to an end, he wasn’t even thinking about what else might happen to him. Nothing was more terrible for him than the memory of the years when he’d been a nobody and nothing.
Đuzepe Sikirić became the main character in the performance above Duhovnjačka. Boss Miloš cut his throat with a large butcher knife. He did it expertly and according to the regulations, so the unfortunate wretch gave up the ghost quickly and easily. He hardly flailed about on the rocks at all. Then Miloš broke his neck with his bare hands, cut up his skin and veins, cut off his head, and threw it into the ravine. He left the body to lie at the feet of those whose turn had not yet come, amid the varnished little pieces of wood that at one time had made up the frame of a funny picture.
The news of Đuzepe’s death reached Regina in late 1945. It was a sunny and unexpectedly pleasant day. She was sitting in the yard in front of the house when her neighbor Bartol came along, hugged her, and said:
“I don’t know how to tell you this.” He sighed and held out a piece of paper for her. “He collaborated with the occupiers,” he said, thinking to comfort her and then bit his lip, realizing what he’d said.
She smiled. She rarely did that, and Bartol thought that her smile was a prelude and that at the next moment she would burst into tears. She signed the paper. He quickly put it in his pocket and hurried on, regretting his inappropriate words.
They would torment him to the end of his life. He would think that it would be good to sort it out with her, but there wasn’t ever a good opportunity, nor could Bartol summon the courage. As the times changed and every human suffering, no matter how it was overcome, received its quiet rights, Bartol wouldn’t be able to get over the fact that he’d called Đuzepe a collaborator with the occupiers in front of his sister. He would thereby become the only one who remembered him at all.
Everyone else— the good, the bad and the indifferent, his sister and brothers, the municipal officials, and the state board of statistics for victims of the Second World War— forgot about Đuzepe Sikirić. His name wasn’t written in stone or on paper. The salt of his tears remained on some rocks in Herzegovina.
Đovani went the way of revenge twice with Lazar Kobilović, following the Drina and the towns that had grown up along it. He watched tarbushes and fezzes floating down the river and wondered what made those people, who were blond-haired and blue-eyed, cover their heads with Arab hats and worship God in a manner that was alien to that land and only unnecessarily made them different from their neighbors, to whom they were otherwise so similar. He never killed anyone; he always stood to one side as an observer. He held his hands behind his back and watched the performance unflinchingly or smoked fine Sava tobacco, while his comrades cut throats, gouged out eyes, and flayed captured partisans alive. The victims believed that he was the chief and that they needed to beg him for mercy, and Kobilović believed that someone’s hands, best of all brother Jovan’s, needed to remain clean and unstained by blood because only in that way would he have a witness who knew why and in the name of which justice they’d done what they’d done. He would testify before God and before men that they weren’t animals and murderers but had tried to save their people and land. They had tried to do that at the highest price that living men can pay. They’d lost the peace of their souls— a man whose hands had clutched a knife would no longer caress his own child, grandchild, or a plum tree in the orchard above his house . . . They became monsters among men and could only be understood by those who’d cut throats and killed for the other side. The hatred that Kobilović had felt for the Ustashas when he saw the first burned villages and together with brother Jovan crossed himself before the miraculous little picture of St. Panteleimon, turned into a kind of understanding and in the end a kind of affection. Those on the other side had actually done the same thing as he, only in the name of their people and its right to that land. They probably didn’t have it easy either and feared the nightmares that tormented the Chetniks and their leaders to the end of their lives. When they found themselves in the middle of villages and towns that Kobilović’s battalion had passed through, the Ustashas felt what Lazar felt in the villages and towns that Francetić’s legion had passed through. There was no great difference.
Kobilović’s final belief was that the people and their nations were not to blame, but the times that had driven them to commit evil. It was probably not his alone.
That mystical temptation of blood and slaughter lasted until late 1944, when a miracle occurred, some cosmic forces turned inside out, or something happened in the outside world, the one that hardly ever came into contact with the Bosnian mountains and forests. There were no longer any undefended or unburned villages, nor were there any more tarbushes and fezzes to float down the Drina. And it seemed that there were no longer any Ustashas either. However, bloody struggles and evacuations began, and Đovani finally had to pick up a rifle. The path led across Romanija and back again a few times, through partisan positions and ambushes. There was no longer any free territory, the Orthodox villages were taken over by the communists, red banners started waving on all the towers, and Lazar Kobilović realized that the war was over and that the time had come to sell one’s own skin for the highest price possible. There would be songs that would sing his name, he thought, consoling himself. And at least one living creature would remain under the vault of the heavens who would know that he, Lazar, had done good in evil. Lazar placed his hopes in brother Jovan, who’d scorned his own name, in the soft palms of the eternal student and the gleaming city of Paris, which lent his struggle a higher meaning and harmony.
He was certain that Đovani would survive the war and the partisan revenge that was being prepared without anyone knowing on behalf of which people and for which higher justice the partisans intended to seek vengeance. They wouldn’t touch Đovani because he’d neither cut throats nor murdered; nor did he belong to any of the sides that had comm
itted the slaughter and murder. He was a free man, an angel who’d seen evil with his own eyes and held his hands behind his back, to keep them from being sullied with the blood of God’s creatures. He was pure, just as he’d been when he was born. He would lead these people across a river that was ten times wider than the Drina, beyond which there was something that one should believe in and in which Lazar Kobilović believed with all his heart. In Christ and his unfortunate mother, in Joseph who had worked wood and from whose hands their rifle butts had emerged, in St. Panteleimon and all the visages on church walls, whose upwardly turned eyes resembled the eyes of people whose throats had just been cut as blood filled their bowels. Blood that was bright as the sun and dark as the darkest night above Maglić.
Crazed by the changes that had occurred, Lazar Kobilović mixed the domains of heaven and earth more and more often, and it happened that in his morning prayer he sincerely prayed to Christ and Jovan, expecting salvation from both, without knowing what kind.
On Catholic Christmas in 1944 Kobilović’s battalion, actually the fifteen men that were left of it after all the running, stumbled into an ambush near Ustikolina. The battle didn’t last long. After twenty minutes of bursts of partisan machine gun fire, only two men were left in a watermill surrounded by blazes. They were Lazar and Jovan.
“I’m staying, and you, brother, will surrender,” Kobilović said and shot himself in the head before Đovani could say anything.
He went out of the mill with his hands raised high, a bearded apparition all dressed in black with a fur cap on his head, such that he was completely unrecognizable to those who might have recognized him otherwise. They led him to the staff, before Commissar Hurem Alaga, who briefly questioned him and then ordered him to be shot.
The high command would call Alaga to account and condemn him to death before a court in Sarajevo because he had on his own initiative killed the last surviving Chetnik of Kobilović’s infamous group, whose crimes were the worst, at least in eastern Bosnia. Đovani Sikirić could have told what would forever remain a mystery because Lazar didn’t leave any victims alive to testify. From Sikirić they could have gotten the names of the other butchers, of Chetnik deserters who’d maybe joined the people’s liberation movement. Instead of all that, Alaga asked the prisoner only two or three questions, from which history would have no benefit:
“What’s your name? Where are you from? What’s going to happen to your soul?”
The news of Đovani’s fate reached Regina, Luka, and Bepo in squalls, from different directions, and in the form of open threats. At first someone from the committee reported that one of the Sikirić brothers had been liquidated as a Chetnik butcher, but Regina didn’t believe that, knowing who and what Đovani had been. Besides, how and why would he have left Paris and joined the Chetniks? Then in the Belgrade daily Politika, in a feuilleton about the Ravna Gora movement, it was announced that a few Slovenes and Croats had been in Mihailović’s staff, and Đovani’s name was among them. No one in the city commented on the newspaper story or— which was hardly likely— the comments didn’t reach Regina’s ears. The people evidently expected for a committee first to be set up concerning the shame of the Delavale-Sikirić house, and in the committee they waited for an order or directive to come from above. It was a delicate affair to challenge the honor of a family that had simultaneously produced a partisan hero, Comrade Bepo, whose heroism at Sutjeska and the Neretva was increasingly the stuff of legend. Then rumors came from Trebinje that Đovani Sikirić, a.k.a. Bloody Jovan, was one of the worst murderers of Muslims from Gacko to Bileća, and people heard that he’d gone renegade with Lazar Kobilović, for whom not even Draža Mihailović was enough, and slaughtered and burned his way across Bosnia on his own account and for his own kicks.
Regina fled from such rumors as much as she could, and when someone asked her about her brother, she said that she’d had nothing to do with him for a long time— he’d renounced his family and inheritance, and it was known for a fact that Đovani was in Paris and that coming back was the farthest thing from his mind.
“He’s there because he likes to feel the male member in his ass,” she said; “he’s fucking Frenchmen and doing who knows what else.”
And so everyone who asked anything fled as fast as their feet could carry them, knowing that Regina was capable of describing in detail what male and female mouths don’t say and ears don’t want to hear.
Soon the rumors quieted down, probably because there was nobody to confirm them or because people started saying that Đovani had been seen in France. The driver of the Yugoslav consul had met him and spoken with him. He was a rich and respected man, dealt in real estate, and had already forgotten their language a little. That piece of evidence was stronger than any other and stronger than the wickedness of the city. Fascinated by the fact that someone born among them had forgotten words of his native speech, people also forgot what had been written in the newspapers. Or they believed that there was another Đovani Sikirić who had less brains and luck and wasn’t from their city.
V
On the sixth of May, 1937, the zeppelin Hindenburg, named after the glorious marshal who had handed over power to Hitler four years earlier, burst into flames as it landed in Lakehurst, New Jersey. Thirty-three of ninety-seven passengers were killed, and the tragic end of the largest and most famous zeppelin in history would be the leading story in all the newsreels the following summer.
This disaster was nothing less than the fateful end of an airborne Titanic, and despite all the romantic overtones, it had a more ominous effect on moviegoers than the worsening civil war in Spain, the battles for Guadalajara and Malaga, the Japanese attacks on Shanghai, and even the futuristic predictions that in ten years, at most by 1955, the majority of Europeans would fall victim to alopecia caused by frequent, prolonged undulations. The flaming crash of the zeppelin, after which the development of that kind of airship came to a complete halt, was particularly shocking to moviegoers, especially those who went in the summer because they all dreamed of flying in a zeppelin one day. The images of lounges with stylish furniture in which kings and queens, barons, lords, wealthy European gentlemen, and adventurers drank champagne and laughed at jokes that would never reach the ears of ordinary people were repeated during several summer seasons, piquing people’s imaginations and producing sighs all along the Adriatic coast.
The viewers didn’t notice that there were always the same pictures with the same faces and glasses because from summer to summer people forgot what they’d seen in the newsreels, and all they remembered was their enthusiasm for the luxurious palaces that hung in the air, crystal chandeliers, and string quartets that at a few thousand feet above the earth change one’s image of the world. If it was true that lounges flew and that this same life, just much prettier and richer, was possible in the air, above oceans and mountains, then borders would no longer exist for people, worries would lose their meaning, and death would cease to be a certainty. One needed only to collect the fortune needed to pay for the flight, board a zeppelin, and fly off on the wings of progress with kings and queens. With those who’d be saved first from every known misfortune.
The Hindenburg was magnificent not only because it was announced in the newsreels to be the largest and most powerful zeppelin, but also because its name was as heavy as lead, massive as the steel mills on the Ruhr that belched forth the fires of the strongest industry in the world day in, day out. That name was as if hammered into the earth, louder and more sonorous than all other names. Not even God himself called Himself that. But then that same heavy Hindenburg nevertheless soared up into the clouds, lighter than a chocolate wrapper smoothed flat by a child’s hand. The heaviest word that summertime moviegoers had ever heard floated off into the sky like a little feather!
When the news arrived that the Hindenburg had exploded in flames and that the smiling faces and hands holding glasses of champagne had disappeared in smoke and dust, the viewers were shocked to the core. They sta
red at the screen like children who’d woken up and found that they’d been transformed into unhappy adults.
Regina ran crying out of the Cosmos Cinema before the beginning of the movie Gertrude’s Sin, a German love story set in the snowy Alps that had been the talk of the town. The scenes from Lakehurst were unbearable for her. People in top hats carrying gentlemen’s canes watched the Hindenburg disappear from a polite distance, and they seemed bored. She saw their backs moving more and more quickly to the sluggish rhythm of the moving pictures and the American sky into which the ugly black smoke was billowing. And that black smoke was full of what had been people, their wealth and fame, and what had been the hope of an era. A part of her life was billowing up into the sky because she’d believed in the possibility of that flying world and that it was her future, if today was someone else’s present. It’s always like that, she thought; what the wealthy can have today, the whole world can have tomorrow. One only had to have enough patience and wait, and everything would end up in its place. Cities would soar up into the clouds, together with their poor folk and those who didn’t even have money for bread, in some even larger zeppelins, and in the end the whole world would be free, leave Earth, and fly through spaces bigger than the sky. She imagined such a scenario watching the newsreels and didn’t pay any heed to all the talk about how thirty-two was too old for a woman to be unmarried, and she was about to miss the bus. She watched the zeppelin and didn’t worry. There was something to wait for up until the Hindenburg went down in flames.
And then it was over. At the start she looked at the screen in confusion; the speaker was excitedly speaking of people who were turning into living torches. Death came quickly, before those unlucky people managed to remember God. Luka laughed bitterly at those words and poked her with his elbow. He couldn’t feel all that horror; he was only irritated at the voice that kept talking. He looked at his sister and poked her again— could she hear? She just sat with her mouth slightly agape and stared ahead, as if she were hypnotized or she could see all the stupid things that the voice was talking about.
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