Till Kingdom Come

by Andrej Nikolaidis

  “Why did Maria choose that of all songs? ‘Enola Gay’ isn’t a pro-gay hit from the 1980s, as Radovan thought, and as the former BBC1 editors also assumed when they banned it from being aired. Enola Gay was the name of the plane that dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Enola Gay was also the name of the pilot’s mother. Imagine, he named the B-29 Superfortress that would sow fire and death after his mother! ‘What dedication to the mother-destroyer! What a man! What a son!’ Maria exclaimed in a rapture of delight, I told him.

  Goran patted me on the shoulder and trudged inside. I heard him crash onto the bed.

  I poured myself another whisky and stared at the empty streets that Maria and I would reign over with composure one day when everything was finished, when the water receded and the sludge it left behind dried, and the bones of those it had purged from the world were crumbled by the sun and blown away by the wind. My queen slumbered in her chamber while I, the tired ruler, stood a lonely vigil over my kingdom.

  22

  Two years passed, and still I knew nothing more about my mother – and thus about myself. I was still cooped up in my hole in Podgorica. One time Mandušić tried to pull me out of there. An international meeting was being held in Budva, where the participants were to use lofty terms such as ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’ and ‘united Europe’ to explain why complete control of the population was necessary. Mandušić imagined I could attend as a speaker for the Montenegrin police.

  I agreed because the meeting was to be held at Hotel Splendid, and I saw the opportunity for a free binge and for enjoying the luxurious rooms and bars.

  I had planned to write my speech there, in Budva. But I stayed up late drinking on the first night of the conference, and the second as well. On the third day, I decided to talk without a prepared speech. I went up to the rostrum in front of around a hundred police, politicians and activists, and told them the following story.

  Several years ago I met Peter, a Hungarian writer, in a beachside café in Ulcinj. I don’t know what he was doing there. But, as usual when I run into a foreigner wandering our country and desperately searching for a way out of the labyrinth of ugliness and mindlessness they have voluntarily entered, I felt a sense of shame – as if I was somehow to blame for their misfortune.

  Peter was a great guy. He was a misanthrope, but those are the only kind of people who should be allowed to enter Montenegro, where only misanthropes will feel at home and find everything they’re looking for.

  Before I could finish my first espresso, he let fire three politically incorrect, and therefore witty, remarks.

  “Is it true that Russians have bought up half of Montenegro?” he asked.

  “They do literally buy territory, and no one knows how much of the country they already own,” I told him. “Montenegrins are satisfied for the time being. They sell land to the Russians, buy flats and big SUVs, and then drive along the coast and bellyache about the Russians having bought everything. On the way they tank up their fuel-guzzling jeeps at Russian-owned Lukoil petrol stations. Soon all the petrol stations are going to be Russian, people say, because allegedly Lukoil is going to purchase Jugopetrol. Montenegro previously sold it to the Greeks, but they’re unable to make a buck even from selling petrol.”

  “What’s the solution then?” Peter asked me.

  “The solution is universal and always the same,” I told him. “In the end, the Montenegrins will stage a revolution, nationalize everything, and then things will start all over again. Or they won’t. But that’s always an option.”

  Then Peter, who had now drunk four espressos and moved on to Jägermeister, began a nostalgic colonial discourse.

  “Hungary used to have access to the sea,” he told me. ‘The Adriatic was our mare nostrum and Pula – the traditional summer resort for Hungarians. We built Rijeka, and even Naples was once ours.”

  One of the effects of coffee consumption must be the annulment of colonial consciousness, it occurred to me.

  Then our conversation moved on to suicide.

  “The suicide rate in Hungary has always been high,” Peter told me. He was one of those people where you can’t tell from their face if they’re being deadly serious or lucidly sarcastic. “People from elsewhere misinterpret the Hungarians’ predilection for suicide. In Hungary, suicide isn’t to do with depression. It’s a culturological phenomenon, above all. Hungarians are a proud people who love their freedom. To die on your own terms, at a time of your choosing, is the only true freedom.”

  “Listen, Peter, it looks to me as if you Hungarians are the ideal occupiers,” I confided in him. “If you get into gear while we’re driving out the Russians, you could occupy Montenegro. You’d come, build some roads and other infrastructure, and then simply vanish – by killing yourselves. We wouldn’t even have to chase you out.”

  It dawned on me that a true, mature democracy is not one that guarantees a transition of power without civil war and insurrection, or where minorities are adequately represented in parliament through their own elected delegates. Nor is it one with a complete separation of powers, or where the full rule of law has been achieved, or that successfully uses all legal means of repression in the fight against corruption...

  A true, mature democracy is one where the citizens confide responsible public functions solely to people prone to suicide.

  To my mind, the story was short, clear and instructive; what else do you expect of a speech?

  For some reason the audience didn’t share my opinion. There was no applause, not even of the polite, half-hearted variety. People whom I had expected to have seen and heard everything, so that nothing could surprise them any more, looked at me in astonishment, as if I was standing there naked, at the very least. Unable to conceal her uneasiness, the moderator muttered something about it being democratic to listen, even to bizarre and extreme opinions, and hastily called up the next speaker.

  I judged that my participation in the conference was no longer required, so I checked out at the hotel reception, gave a generous tip to the young fellow who drove the car up from the garage, and shot off to Podgorica and my flat, which I hated, but at least I wasn’t surrounded by idiots there.

  23

  The media scandalized the whole thing, but two days later everyone forgot about it because a man in Nikšić killed a neighbour and his three small children, so the masses had a new incident to be horrified at. Mandušić didn’t comment on the event. He didn’t send me to any more meetings like that, though, or to any at all.

  But he didn’t sack me. It seemed that listeners liked the speeches I wrote for him more than they appreciated my ad libbing in Budva.

  He cut my pay by a third, but I didn’t complain. It was easily earned money. After sending the first few speeches to Mandušić I realized it was pointless to invest any effort or inventiveness in the work. Everything politicians said and all they were expected to say was a pile of commonplace and mind-numbing phrases. Therefore I prepared about fifty stock sentences; about parliamentary democracy, the inclusion of minority groups, the importance of a military deterrent for the stability of tolerant societies, the history of Montenegro with emphasis on the so-called Mediterranean foundations of its culture, about multiculturalism, a few quotes from Hegel and a little Plato from The Republic. I arranged all this on a large, B1 sheet of paper and pinned it to the wall of my study.

  It resembled the magic squares the alchemists used to draw in the Middle-Ages. A magic square enchanted the people of the time, just as they have always been fascinated by short sequences containing some pattern, which they like to believe proves the logical order of that large sequence, the biggest one of all, which they call the world. In an alchemist’s magic square, the sum of the numbers along the vertical and the diagonal was always the same. In my magic square, however I arranged the hackneyed sentences and whatever order I assembled them in, the effect was the same: Absolute bureaucrat
ic dimness and liberal-democratic ideological blinkering. Applause for the thinker, please. That’s the crux of it - people once strove for perfection: Now we’re quite satisfied with the least bad of all systems, as its devotees describe democracy.

  24

  Maria and I started falling out of touch. Like a nugget of gold thrown into water, she sank into melancholy. She went down wordlessly, without resistance, and accepted it as her destiny, if what we are frolicking towards can be called that. Maria’s sorrow was more than just a state of mind – it was her own aesthetic choice. Sorrow is so beautiful, she used to tell me, and she only said what she meant. And did what she said.

  Goran got a job at a bank. He became a loans officer and felt he had it good. He bought a new car, helped his father repair the roof and do up the front of the house, and generously supported his sister. Our drinking sprees became a rarity and later ceased altogether, because Goran decided that alcohol must not get in the way of his career. So his career got in the way of our friendship, which continued to be as sincere as before – except that we no longer practiced it.

  As for my investigation, it really ‘got off the ground’, as the journos like to say, when I received an email from an unknown address, wovenhand@gmail.com, drawing my attention to the unusual biography of Júlia Fazekas. I read the life-story of this serial killer with interest and enjoyment but then forgot about it. Two weeks later, from the same address, I received what was supposedly a scan of police records compiled by an Inspector Rešid Spahić from the Bosnian Centre for Public Security in Sarajevo.

  Spahić claimed to have discovered irrefutable evidence that some of the atrocities committed in Višegrad during the war by a unit under the command of the cousins Milan and Sredoje Lukić had not actually been war crimes as qualified by the tribunal in The Hague, but ritual killings. Spahić assumed there had been more such crimes in Bosnia, and he also suspected that the killers were still at large. And not only that, he maintained that because of the nature of the crimes, because occult killers don’t stop until they’re arrested, the investigation was bound to reveal a series of murders extending until today. We were dealing with a well-organized group of psychopaths with influence in the State and police apparatus – influence sufficient to block the investigation and send it in the wrong direction – which had left a bloody trail and an unknown number of victims all through the country.

  In the first months of the war 1,760 people were killed in Višegrad, hundreds of houses burned down and the mosques demolished. Almost two thirds of the population were forced to flee. Long lines of Muslims left the town, and afterwards Višegrad was proclaimed Serbian. Day after day, for weeks, people were killed and their bodies thrown from the bridge into the Drina. On 18th June, a group under the command of Milan Lukić killed twenty-two people. They were tied to cars and dragged through the town, and parts of their bodies rolled along the streets. Survivors later testified that some of the victims had their throats cut, and then their internal organs removed. Spahić claimed he had discovered a house with a shrine, where those organs were offered to the devil. He claimed to have witnesses, whose identity he wasn’t prepared to reveal, as well as photographs confirming his testimony.

  On 28th June 1992 – St Vitus’ Day and the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo – Milan and Sredoje Lukić forced about sixty Muslims into a house in Pionirska Street and threw in grenades. Then they set the house on fire. Some people tried to escape by jumping out of the windows, but the Lukićs were waiting outside, armed with automatic weapons, and mowed down the fugitives. They killed fifty-nine people that day. Seventeen of them were children, one of whom had been brought to the house after being born at the maternity hospital the day before. One of the survivors told Spahić that he had seen pentagrams painted in blood on the walls of the house when he was taken there. Later he managed to climb out through the bathroom window and run away before the Lukićs closed off that escape route too, with a hail of bullets. Before his flight from the bathroom he had seen the dismembered bodies of three children and their hearts lying in the bath. He could still see those three little hearts before his eyes today and hear them beating, Spahić’s witness said.

  I called Todorović. I asked him to enquire about Spahić and try to confirm the authenticity of his report. He came to see me that same afternoon. Yes, Inspector Rešid Spahić did exist. And yes, he had presented his theory about occult crimes in wartime Višegrad to senior staff at the Bosnian Centre for Public Security. It was dismissed as being just another of the conspiracy theories, which Spahić, as it turned out, rather bombarded his superiors with. But he seems to have been particularly fond of this story because he threatened to ‘go public’ with it if the directors of the Centre didn’t agree to open an investigation and grant him the extra powers he was requesting. He was suspended. He went for a long walk on the slopes of Mount Trebević near Sarajevo, from which he didn’t return. His body was never found.

  A person unknown to me was trying to tell me something. I assumed I would receive more messages from wovenhand@gmail.com in the days ahead. The sender obviously wanted to direct my attention to something. It was up to me to discover what.

  What was the link between the biography of Júlia Fazekas and the Satanists who masked their crime in Višegrad as a war crime?

  Who could my mysterious benefactor be? Todorović hadn’t been able to pick up his trail, although I explicitly demanded that of him. Police documents were not accessible to just anyone. If he was a member of the police, or someone who controlled its operations, he would be able to find out all the things I got Todorović to ask his friends from the Bosnian services. It could be someone with an interest in me finding out more. Or a person afraid I’d find out something I shouldn’t, and who therefore set a trap for me and hoped I’d fall into it.

  25

  In my efforts to arrive at some answer to these questions, even an inconclusive one, I returned to the biography of Júlia Fazekas, which my mysterious friend had so kindly recommended to me.

  Júlia Fazekas was vilified after her death. Today she would be glorified as a radical feminist.

  Little is known about her life prior to 1911, when like an angel of death, she appeared in the Hungarian village of Nagyrév, about a hundred kilometres from Budapest. She was a middle-aged widow. The police first took an interest in Júlia in 1911, when an investigation into illegal abortions she had performed did not result in any conviction. Júlia would find herself in court nine more times over the next ten years, faced with the same charge. She was acquitted every time.

  When the Great War began, the men of Nagyrév were drafted into the army. The women remained alone – that is, until a prison camp for Allied soldiers was set up near Nagyrév. How exactly they managed it is not known, but the women of Nagyrév arranged for prisoners to come and spend nights in their beds.

  Problems began when the menfolk started coming home from the war. Their wives, who had got to know the charms of free love and life outside the fetters of patriarchy, were not willing to go back to the old ways. And that is where Júlia Fazekas helped them.

  Júlia had a sizeable supply of arsenic and also of know-how, as people would say today. She selflessly shared both with her sisters.

  The first victim was called Peter Hegedusz. No one remembers the names of the others who were killed – and it seems there were three hundred of them. This would allow us to conclude that the most important man in a woman’s life is not the first one she sleeps with, as is mistakenly believed, but the first one she kills.

  To be fair, the sisters didn’t just kill men. They also eliminated women who reminded them of their former lives of misery; mothers, sisters, aunts and others.

  Júlia Fazekas was the informal village doctor, by fortunate circumstance, so it was she who carried out the post-mortems, if they can be called that. And there was no end to the fortunate circumstances – her cousin was the local clerk in charge o
f issuing death certificates. In Júlia’s opinion, the men of Nagyrév died a natural death. For fifteen years, the menfolk of that Hungarian village dropped like flies – the result of wartime stress, it seemed – before officials started to get suspicious.

  When this brood of vipers had killed off their husbands and male relatives, the sisters got the urge to do a bit of killing in the neighbouring villages, too. In July 1929, a choirmaster from Tiszakürt accused the wife of a certain Ladislav Szabó of trying to poison him with wine. The authorities didn’t react – where would they be if they had to follow up every case of intemperance followed by nausea and vomiting in Hungary? But when the fellow dragged himself to the police station, more dead than alive and started shouting in a delirium that Mrs Szabó had poisoned him, they had no choice.

  They arrested the lady, and she opened her soul to them. Her testimony led the police to Mrs Bukenoveski. She told them that Júlia Fazekas had provided the arsenic used to kill her seventy-year-old mother in 1924. She threw the body in the River Tisza, and Júlia Fazekas pronounced the old woman dead by drowning.

  Eight women from Nagyrév were sentenced to death and seven to life imprisonment. Eleven more were sent to jail. One of these, Mária Szendi, declared in court that she killed her husband because she was fed up with everything always having to be his way. ‘It’s terrible that men have all the power,’ she told the judge, who showed no understanding for her form of struggle for gender equality.

  Júlia Fazekas eluded male power and its institutions. She drank a mug of wine laced with her own arsenic.