Till Kingdom Come

by Andrej Nikolaidis

  26

  I drew a parallel between Júlia’s killings and the ‘Višegrad crimes’ pointed out by Spahić. These, too, were committed in wartime and went undetected at first. For those with killing in mind, war is the best time. Submerged in a sea of blood and surrounded by so much other killing, crimes committed in wartime have a good chance of going unnoticed. Some set of statistics would show them in the end, but they would most likely be included in the long list of war crimes, just as Spahić claimed.

  I needed to go for a walk to air my mind. I headed off along Saint Peter Cetinjski Boulevard towards Podgorica’s Block 5, which I passed through without noticing the monstrosity of that Socialist-era estate built for teachers from the villages and the workers of the aluminium smelter. I cut through the leafy Tološi neighbourhood and continued on towards agreeable Mareza, only to find myself the very next moment in Oxford Street, London. I didn’t feel a bit of surprise or slow my step. As if they had a will of their own, my legs led me on to Red Lion Square.

  I sat down at one of the plastic tables at the small café at the entrance to the park. A Moroccan family – a father and his two teenage daughters – were serving couscous, tahini and soup with meatballs and cinnamon. I wasn’t hungry. I ordered mint tea. Smoking cigarette after cigarette, I drank a whole pot of tea, and then ordered another. The head of the family came over to me and sat down at the table. He claimed to know me, and that I had been his guest once before. As far as he could remember, I had slept at the October Gallery, in a comfortably appointed apartment the size of a matchbox located just around the corner.

  “You asked me to tell you about Cromwell, remember?” he asked. “You were fascinated by the story about the publican, a follower of Cromwell’s, who hid the leader’s body from soldiers here on the square. When Cromwell was buried in Westminster Abbey in 1658, he gave them the body of an unknown man he had dug up at the paupers’ cemetery. So when the Royalists decided to desecrate Cromwell’s tomb in 1660 and take revenge on his remains, it was actually quite a farce for those who knew the secret; the body they dug out of the Westminster tomb, clapped in chains and posthumously beheaded wasn’t Cromwell. Do you remember? You wrote down what I told you in a blue notebook with a golden emblem on the cover, just like the one poking out of your rucksack. That’s how I remembered you – it’s not every day that someone listens to the story about the hidden grave as if it was the greatest secret in the universe. More tea?” he asked as he shook my hand and apologized for having to leave me. “Work calls.”

  Feeling poisoned by all the nicotine, I walked to the other end of the Square, passing a Korean, who must have been a singer and was posing in a white shirt for a photographer and his numerous assistants. I jumped the fence and headed to the left. I strolled into the Conway Hall as if I was a regular there, passing workers unloading old pianos from a truck. There was no one at the reception. Just like last time, I thought. I went up the winding stairs to the second floor, where, as I expected, I found the door of an office with the sign ‘Istros Books - Independent Publishing House’. I went down to the first floor and sat on the balcony of the hall where I remembered watching – or someone else remembered watching – Slavoj Žižek and Srećko Horvat talk about the future of the European Union. The hall was now full of pianos that would soon be sold by auction; a monthly event at the Conway Hall.

  I went down a badly lit corridor, passing the office where the person whose memory this was had spoken with an urbane old lady, an intimate friend of Lucian Freud’s, and heard her story about the New Year’s Eve party where she and Lucian danced. And then I left the building and bought a box of Walker’s shortbread at the corner shop. Wandering aimlessly westwards and enjoying the sweet, buttery taste at the top of my mouth, I chanced upon the Wallace Collection.

  The poster at the entrance announced that Dürer’s Melencolia I was on exhibit. An anonymous buyer had apparently acquired the copperplate for 72,500 pounds at Christie’s and later decided to donate it to the Wallace Collection, a museum that had played an important role in his life, he confided to the management.

  Dürer was on show as ‘Treasure of the Month’. Despite that pompous billing, the public didn’t care much for the German genius. As in every other gallery or museum, they thronged in front of the Dutch Masters, who were more popular in England than all other painters except Turner, I was so bold as to presume, not knowing if I was presuming it now or back then. The Dutch Masters reminded people of Gobelin tapestries with their quaint or bucolic scenes, except that Gobelins were somehow more cheerful, without the unnecessary dark tones the Dutch plastered their canvases with.

  I arrived in front of Melancholy in the middle of a presentation. I – for my memory tells me it was I – was now standing beside a curator and two old men, who were crying and holding each other’s hands. What a brilliant curator, I thought (now, when I’m remembering this, or back in the gallery?). He was better, in fact, than most of the cultural commentators whose books I used to waste my time on. He spoke with a devotion and passion that are rare today, and which here in the Balkans are only found in zealots who elaborate to people with the same mind-set the reasons for attacking a neighbouring village with murder in mind.

  “As Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl correctly emphasize,” the curator explained in a steady voice, “Dürer develops the idea of Geometria succumbing to Melancholy and Melancholy inclined towards Geometria. He unites two figures in this picture: The brilliant mind of Geometria and the destructive seductiveness of Melancholy... Panofsky claims elsewhere that this is actually a spiritual self-portrait of Dürer himself”.

  The curator then turned our attention to the magic square in the upper right-hand corner of the engraving. The artist’s contemporaries, he explained, considered the harmony of the magic square, whose numbers always give the same result, regardless of their arrangement, to symbolize the harmony of the Creator’s works.

  To my mind, however, the key to understanding the picture was the scrawny dog lying sprawled at Melancholy’s feet. In it, I saw the figure of the cynic, that dog among people. Surrounded by all manner of paraphernalia for measuring and discovering the laws of the universe, oppressed by numbers and geometric patterns, disillusioned by both people and angels, he no longer has the strength to warn about the madness of so-called wisdom. He lies there with indifference, waiting for everything to collapse and for that which he rationally warned about to be confirmed, which the others just heard as a bark.

  But I didn’t stop in front of Dürer for long because my attention was attracted to a pen-and-ink drawing to the left of Melancholy. It showed a barefoot man in tatters, accompanied by an old woman in rags. The figures were represented in a realistic manner. The burdens they carried on their backs clearly set their existence apart from the sublime Melancholy. I forgot about Dürer and devoted all my attention to studying the symbols the artist had placed around his two sad heroes. The barren tree could represent winter, but I preferred to see it as a genealogical dead end; a withered and poisoned family tree, which all the names had fallen from like yellow leaves. The old woman warmed herself at a brazier, which revealed her vocation - it was an accessory for black magic. A piece of parchment with a hexagram and other magical symbols lay on the ground next to her. From that woman, his mother, there was no escape.

  “The owl you see –,” I heard the curator’s voice, and turned around towards him, noticing that we were now alone in the hall, with him standing unusually close to me, ‘does not just symbolize night, solitude and ill omen. Here, too, we profit greatly from Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl, without whose work no serious interpretation of Melencolia I and Dürer’s imitators would be possible. They point out that the owl also stands for studio d’una vana sapienza, vain wisdom, which is precisely what the Church Fathers accused goddess Minerva’s winged servant of. Now look at the cobweb. In the Renaissance, the spider’s weaving was considered opera vana, labour in vain. That’s righ
t, all the labour of the man in the picture is in vain. He is totally under the power of this femme fatale, and that he will remain. All he can do is resign himself – to her and to melancholy.”

  “The author of this mid-sixteenth-century drawing was a German, perhaps from southern Germany, perhaps from Switzerland; sometimes the work is mistakenly considered French. What attracted me to it, and the reason I devoted a considerable amount of effort to having it here in the complementary collection of Dürer’s followers’ works, is a seemingly minor detail; the hedgehog. Just look at the cute little creature, which has made its nest right in the barrel the melancholic person is sitting on. Did you know that the female hedgehog keeps putting off the birth of her babies for fear that their spines could tear open her womb? The longer she waits, of course, the bigger and sharper the spines will be, and the greater the pain – that’s the price of procrastination. That’s how it is with melancholic people, too. Whatever they intend to do, their inhibitions prevent them from doing it and they keep putting it off. But some things just need be done. The melancholic person therefore has to do them in the agony that comes at the end, after all the delay. Think about that,” the curator said, patting me on the shoulder and then disappearing into the labyrinth of the Wallace Collection’s rooms.

  27

  When I came round, it was night-time. I was sitting on a beer crate beside the main road to Nikšić with a circle of cigarette butts around me, ten or so kilometres from home. I felt a terrible weariness. With the greatest effort I raised my hand to hail a taxi.

  After that, I snored away on the back seat. The angry driver woke me up when we arrived at the address I had managed to mutter. As if I was hauling a whole foreign life behind me, I trudged to the lift, which took me up to my flat. Instead of immediately going to bed, I sat down in front of the television and goggled at a horrendous political debate, where a pack of dim-witted reprobates in the studio were trying to convince the dim-witted viewers to vote for them. This concentrated idiocy shook me awake, and in that tired and irritable state I waited for morning.

  My body ached as if someone had been thrashing me all night. Sluggish and half-asleep, I made coffee, sat down at the computer, opened the search engine and typed in ‘murders at Red Lion Square’. Nothing. Then I typed ‘death at Red Lion Square’. I opened a short newspaper article from 1980, which told me that a certain Jovan Plamenac, aged sixty, fell asleep at the wheel of his car, broke through the fence on Red Lion Square and crashed into a tree. He died at the scene of the accident. The report was accompanied by a small photo of the deceased.

  Jovan Plamenac, I found out when I searched further, was a prominent figure in Chetnik émigré circles in London. He had joined Draža Mihailović’s Serbian quisling movement as a young man and was rapidly promoted, owing to his cruelty towards the enemy. After the war, he fled via Slovenia to London. The Yugoslav authorities tried Plamenac in absentia for the shooting of twelve Partisans in central Serbia, where he had been commander. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. The British authorities refused to extradite him.

  From the moment I began to doubt my origins up until that day, the only pattern in my investigation was that nothing was as it seemed. By the same logic, I could assume that Plamenac’s death had not been an ordinary traffic accident, either.

  Let’s say Plamenac was killed. Poisoned, for example, like Júlia Fazekas’s victims, and that his death was later attributed to the wrong cause as with Júlia’s victims, and with those Inspector Spahić wrote about in his report. How did that relate to my mother and me? The conclusion was improbable, alarming and unwelcome, but inescapable: What if my mother had killed Plamenac, and she did it in such a way to make it look like an accident? Why would she have done that? Why did the Yugoslav secret service take care of her child, me, then give me a false mother, the police clerk Olga Pavlović, and a false identity with the surname Hafner? Was it because my mother worked and killed for the Service? And the Service looked after its own people? That meant that, by my very birth, I had become part of the Service. Is that why Mandušić employed me and tolerated my frankly disgraceful behaviour?

  I shared my doubts with Todorović. He looked visibly uneasy while I was speaking and could hardly wait for me to finish.

  “You’re crazy, quite crazy. Where you’re heading is just madness,” he said. “Stop before it’s too late,” he added and left in a hurry.

  Something told me my contact with Todorović had come to an end.

  That was no longer important. The crazy story I had discovered, or constructed – I still had to find out which – needed to be resolved. I got myself an express British visa and took a plane to London, where the trail led.

  28

  Fuck this for a joke, I thought when I sat down at the Moroccan café on Red Lion Square. I ordered mint tea and lit a cigarette. I must have been really been staring at the Moroccan, because he came up to me.

  “Do we know each other?” he asked politely.

  “No, not at all,” I replied. “Forgive me. You see, a friend told me about you.”

  “Say hello to your friend,” he chuckled and was about to go back to the kitchen to make more food for the guests who were coming in droves now it was lunch hour. I decided to play the game to the end and beckoned him to take a seat.

  “I see things are hectic –,” I apologized, “but I have to ask, where exactly on this square was Cromwell buried?”

  A minute or two later, I came across the piano carriers in front of Conway Hall. I followed the winding stairs up to the second floor and peeked into the office of Istros Books. A blonde woman was working at a computer: “Hello, can I help you?” she asked. Then I went down one floor and took a photo of the pianos that were here to be auctioned.

  It suddenly occurred to me that I could visit all the places I had seen in my visions and take photos. That way I could take control of my memory, and also of time. These photos would guarantee that it was my memory of my time. Later, by comparing my own memories with others’ memories of the same places, I would try to discover some kind of trail to follow. Where would it lead me? Probably nowhere, but what else could I do? In my situation, every move, however crack-brained it was, seemed an equally rational choice.

  I stayed the night at the October Gallery. The rooms were indeed comfortably appointed and the size of a matchbox.

  29

  I travelled to London once more that year, too.

  The trip came after the birth of an idea that was truly bizarre, but as such not far from the truth. And that idea, in turn, came after another email from Wovenhand.

  He had sent me a link to an article about the murder of Stjepan Djureković, one of the Croatian managers of the Yugoslav State oil company INA until he came into conflict with the country’s Communist leadership. He fled to Germany and there, seeking safety from his powerful enemy and any allies he could find, he joined up with the Ustashi émigrés. In Yugoslavia he was accused of plundering INA in league with the German secret police.

  Djureković was killed in 1983 in the town of Wolfratshausen near Munich. The German media immediately blamed the Yugoslav secret service. They claimed the plan to kill him was code-named ‘Operation Danube’. That brought an involuntary smile to my lips. I thought back to my school years and the Geography lessons with a senile teacher, whose name was Melisa. She had a habit of eating chocolate in class and ended every lesson with digressions on the Thracians and Illyians. The Thracians called the lower course of the Danube, which flows through the Balkans, Istros.

  I gazed at the article I had been sent. It was old hat. I had already made the connection between my mother and political murders by the Yugoslav secret service without Wovenhand’s assistance. So what was my secret friend trying to tell me? Maybe he didn’t mean to tell me anything new. Perhaps he just wanted to confirm my doubts and encourage me to keep developing my conspiracy theory.

  One
mystery still begged to be solved: Olga Pavlović’s photos. What was the point of all those trips she never went on? Why all those fake destinations? Why didn’t they simply take a pile of photos in Ulcinj? Especially since it was rather unlikely that my make-believe grandmother, who lived modestly and taught me modesty, could have had the money for all those trips abroad. What if the Service itself had left a trail on those photos that they expected me to find, I suddenly thought?

  What if I was expected to investigate the locations on those photos?

  I sat down at the computer and started an extensive search. By evening I had linked all the places in Olga’s photos with the bizarre deaths of members of the Yugoslav diaspora.

  At the end of it, I believed Olga’s photos were a secret map of the political murders ordered by the Yugoslav secret service. Murders that I now believed – couldn’t not believe when faced with the evidence – had been committed by my mother.

  Independent investigations in the different countries had declared that the deaths were due to ‘natural causes’ or ‘accidents’. But I no longer had any doubt as to what Wovenhand wanted to tell me through those emails. By now I was able to recognize the murderous signature of my mother, who was evidently a virtuoso of death, a master assassin who went undetected, although the murders took place under the very nose of the police.

  A pre-war banker and post-war financier of the Ustashi émigrés, who had returned to Zagreb in his old age when he thought he was no longer important to anyone and that no one would want to take revenge on him any more, who had hoped to spend the evening of his life in the city where he was born, was found dead in his flat in Ilica Street.

  Then there was a Kosovar, the owner of several patisseries in Brussels, who died in a room of Le Plaza Hotel, where he had checked in accompanied by an eye-catching lady, whom the receptionist didn’t doubt was a prostitute – a lady who disappeared without a trace before the police arrived. The investigation confirmed the obvious; that the gentleman suffered a heart attack while having sex. It had been too much excitement for him. He should have borne that in mind, because his medical record card noted that he had had a serious heart condition for many years.