Till Kingdom Come

by Andrej Nikolaidis

  When Maria came back from the toilet, I grabbed her by the arm and said, “Take me away to where there are no people.”

  38

  She insisted I stay at her place for a few days.

  “We have to visit the grave. We’ll do up that gloomy mound a little,” she said. “His father won’t notice – that swine won’t be going to the cemetery again until he dies himself.”

  I raised no objections. That was what I had secretly been hoping. I needed Maria’s company.

  We ate dinner in silence. Tereza had cooked swordfish, which was just perfect and afterwards she served cake, although we didn’t touch it. I couldn’t take my eyes off her huge belly. She noticed, but it didn’t bother her; she seemed to enjoy the attention it brought. It was only one more month until the baby was due, and Maria offered that she could move into the outhouse where her father had once lived. She could live there with the child, and her obligations at the villa would be reduced to a sensible minimum. “You’re a good worker, and it’s hard to find the like of you,” Maria told her. Tereza gladly accepted and called Maria her patron. She was constantly giving her new crosses from Ostrog Monastery, which Maria put away in a drawer of her wardrobe.

  “We haven’t seen each other for such a long time,” I said to Maria when she had sent Tereza off to bed. “There are so many things I’ve been meaning to tell you, but now I just want to sleep. My strength is giving way and my head is empty.”

  “And your heart?” she teased. “No, no, off you go. I’m tired myself. There’s always tomorrow. Everything will be better in the morning.”

  39

  She lied so I wouldn’t feel guilty. She didn’t go to bed herself. When I came down for breakfast, I found her sleeping on the sofa in the drawing room with an empty bottle of wine beside her.

  Tereza was waiting for me in the kitchen with an excellent espresso and freshly made croissants. She didn’t stay for long because the bell with ‘Mama Elletra’ on it rang. The lady was awake and needed the assistance of the servants. Tereza darted off upstairs like a whirlwind.

  Wovenhand wrote again. Like his previous emails, this one too concealed a real pearl inside a shell of worthless commonplaces. That morning, he wrote to me about Ed Gein. I skimmed over his biography, which I knew down to the last detail. After the death of his dominant mother, Gein tailored his world and his house in Plainfield, Wisconsin, to match his madness. There were just two murders, meaning he didn’t fit into the FBI classification, which presumes that a serial killer has slain three or more people. He dug up graves, snatched the corpses and took them to his house. There he made furniture with the body parts, as well as dresses that he wore, especially on the nights with a full moon. He peeled the skin off the faces of the dead women, covered his own body with it, and long stood gazing at her, at himself, in the mirror. Everything Gein ever wanted was to be a woman. One particular woman - his mother.

  Together with Gein’s biography, Wovenhand sent me an excerpt from an article by Aleksandar Bečanović, the Montenegrin film critic:

  Paul Cronin’s book Herzog on Herzog mentions a less-known fact about Gein: Herzog filmed his depressing description of the ‘American dream’, Stroszek (1976), in Plainfield, of all places. ‘What is exceptional about Plainfield,’ he emphasizes, ‘is that five or six mass murderers emerged there in the space of just five years. There is no clear explanation for the phenomenon. It sounds crazy, I know, but that’s the way it is. There’s something very bleak and evil about Plainfield, and even during the filming the police found two dead bodies just ten miles away from us.’ One of Herzog’s friends at the time was the director Errol Morris, a passionate researcher on everything to do with serial killers, who had even done an interview with Gein. Morris discovered that the graves the body snatcher dug up formed a perfect circle, in the centre of which was the grave of his mother. Morris wondered if Gein had also dug up his mother’s grave and Herzog, always prepared for an adventure on the verge of reason, suggested that he and Morris meet soon afterwards and dig up the grave. But when the time came around, Morris got cold feet and didn’t turn up. Herzog’s comment: ‘Later I also realized it was better that way. Sometimes it’s best to just have a question, not the answer.’

  Clearly, my stay in Ulcinj was going to be shorter than I had planned. This time, the pointer I had received was unambiguous: Go and see, find your mother’s grave. I called the travel agency and bought a ticket for a flight from Podgorica to Frankfurt the next day.

  It had been blatantly obvious the whole time, and yet I hadn’t realized – the key to the mystery could be mother’s grave and what I would find there. Or what I didn’t find. Poe was right when he wrote, in ‘The Purloined Letter’, the best way to conceal a thing is to make it obvious.

  40

  The villa suddenly seemed as confined as a prison cell or even a grave, and I was too excited to wait for Maria to wake up. Especially since the chances of her getting up before the afternoon were negligible.

  I decided to go for a walk through the Ulcinj olive groves where Goran and I used to go and hide from the unbearable crowds that gathered in the town in the summertime, during the tourist season. I went down into town and then up through the suburb of Nova Mahala to the olive groves.

  “People have told me – serious people, mind – that they’ve met spirits up here,” Goran once said. One of them, whose words he had no reason to doubt, told him what he had experienced late one evening while returning from a walk to Valdanos Bay. Night had more or less fallen, and even in the gentle settings of an olive grove the night can seem threatening out among the trees. He could hear the yapping of jackals in the distance, but what worried him were the sounds that came from closer at hand. Somewhere half way from Valdanos to town, he heard voices speaking Italian. There in the clearing ahead of him a group of people dressed in the fashion of the 1930s were listening intently to two Italians who were demonstrating how best to prune olive trees, if his rudimentary grasp of the language was any guide. One of the instructors was sitting on a bulge in an olive tree and demonstrating how and where to cut it, while the other spread a net out on the ground, which the mature fruit were meant to drop onto. He fled head over heels and didn’t stop until he reached the first lamp-posts, where he made sure he was safe.

  I recalled the kindness and naivety of my friend, who himself seemed not to be of this world, as I walked deeper into the olive grove. I stopped next to a dry-stone-wall to light a cigarette. Turning, I happened to see an unusual tablet on the wall. A Star of David had been carved into a stone together with Latin letters that, to my mind, meant nothing.

  The owner of the property, whom I hadn’t noticed before, saw me taking photos on my phone. He greeted me amiably.

  “Are you Olga’s son?” he asked.

  I nodded. There was no point denying it.

  I offered him a cigarette.

  He told me he had bought the property quite recently. It had once belonged to a family that moved away to Shkodër in Albania after the Montenegrins captured Ulcinj in 1878. Now he had fixed up the property, cleared the scrub and built walls. Here, behind the stone-wall I photographed, he had discovered the narrow entrance to a cave. It had been covered with a stone slab, and when he scraped the moss off he saw an inscription he couldn’t read and ‘the Jewish symbol’, as he called it.

  He realized it had to be something sacred. Although he was a Muslim, he respected what was holy to others. He therefore decided to have the sign and the letters transcribed from the slab onto the tablet I had photographed.

  I asked him what the inscription meant. He didn’t know, and he didn’t want to risk his luck by offending whatever the inscription at the cave’s entrance was dedicated to.

  “It’s been here for centuries. Who am I to change things now?” he said

  I suspected that a poorly educated stonemason may have miscopied the inscription, so I asked him t
o show me the old slab.

  “It broke,” he told me. “It fell and crumbled to pieces when workers were moving it. But I remembered the inscription and noted it down on a piece of paper, which I later gave to the mason.”

  He took me to the cave’s entrance – a shaft now sealed with a heavy metal plate and locked.

  “Have you ever been into the cave?”

  “God forbid, not for anything in world.”

  “Would it bother you if I did?”

  He looked at me as if I had taken leave of my senses.

  “I’m serious,” I said to him. “Who knows what might be inside? I’m amazed you were able to curb your curiosity.”

  “I was never curious –,” he shuddered, “just afraid.”

  It took some time, but finally I managed to persuade him to open the shaft for me. He gave me a torch and a length of rope he found for me on the property. Before I descended into the cave, he called one of the workers who were planting the olive trees.

  “This man is a witness,” he told me. “If anything should happen to you, it was your own decision to go in. I tried to talk you out of it, but you wouldn’t listen. Alright?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  What he called a cave was actually a tunnel, almost two metres high and one metre wide. At first I thought it was some kind of underground storeroom that had been dug for the tools needed for work in the olive grove. But the end of the tunnel could not be seen. I kept going deep underground, until I could no longer hear the voices calling me to come back. Soon the light from the tunnel entrance had disappeared too. A sensible person would turn back now, I thought. Where is this leading me? Whoever dug this subterranean passage did so for a good reason. Why else would they have invested so much effort? It must have taken years to dig. And above all - the stone with the inscription undoubtedly had religious significance...

  I must have been going for a good hour when the torch began to flicker. Soon I’d run out of light, and there seemed to be no end to the tunnel. What now? I thought. In order to save the battery, I turned off the torch and went on, holding on to the wall of the tunnel with my right hand.

  Soon I was sick of roaming through the dark, and yet I was completely indifferent to my own destiny. I felt that if this was to be my end, I would be entirely satisfied with it.

  I sat down and leaned my back against the wall. I hunched up and hugged my knees to my chest. It was warm and cosy in the tunnel. The air smelt sweetish, like the caramelized milk Olga used to make for me as a child when I had a cold. You have your qualities, I said to myself, but bravery is not one of them. All your strength always came from indifference and the thought that you had nothing to lose. That’s why you’re not afraid even now, although you’re in serious quandary. I felt my body flag and all the strength drain from me. The torch fell out of my hand and sleep came over me, quiet, comforting, like mist at the scene of a terrible crime.

  When I woke up I was saved. Or doomed. In any case, I had a butt-end of life left to think about that.

  A ray of light came from my right; it gradually spread until it blinded me and stabbed me in the brain. I screamed with pain. Tears welled up in my eyes, which soon saw that the way out was just an arm’s length away.

  The tunnel led to Balšić Tower, the tallest building in Kalaja. I crawled to the exit, which was hidden by an antique chest that I easily pushed aside. I found myself in the building that was raised in the fifteenth century, if I remember correctly, and today serves as a gallery.

  Everything was clear now: The tunnel and the inscription at the exit were no longer a secret. On the wall of the narrow tract in Balšić Tower, for those able to read it, lay the answer to all the questions I had asked myself while wandering along the tunnel.

  I would later write several articles about it, and even an essay for Channel Three of the Croatian Radio - about the Star of David that was carved into the wall of Balšić Tower by Sabbatai Zevi, the self-proclaimed Messiah, whom Olga had told me about with so much passion. Or rather, it was her favourite of all the lies she used to tell me. The lies of a woman whose love I can’t deny and which was all the more precious because she was assigned, not born, to the role of my grandmother. The anger I felt at having been lied to, receded over time. In the end, I felt only love and respect for her. She played her role perfectly and died on stage without a single gesture giving away the fact that she was acting.

  Zevi was born in Smyrna, now Izmir, on 9th August 1626, on the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple. That was a Sabbath. He died in Ulcinj on 30th September 1676. That was Yom Kippur. He was forced to change faiths and died as an exile, but he was not forgotten, as Olga used to say. Olga herself seemed ultimately to believe the lies she had been taught by the authors of my life story, and she cherished the most tender sympathy for the false Messiah – she, the false Jew.

  What else did I learn about Zevi from my former grandmother? There was the story about the grandiose promise he gave his many followers, who poured into Izmir from all over Europe, in anticipation of the great day: In 1666 he would lead his people back to Israel.

  In the twenty-fifth year, Zevi announced he was the Messiah. He declared the abolition of God’s Law. His followers grew more numerous by the day because people need hope in times of trouble – what time is not like that? – and now he called on them to eat the forbidden fruit. He publically wedded the Torah, only to later tear it up and trample on it.

  In 1666, instead of fulfilling his prophecy, he converted to Islam under threat of death.

  From then on, his name was Aziz Mehmed Efendi. The Sultan expelled him to Ulcinj, where he put ashore with several dozen devotees, and this was the foundation of the lie about my Jewish origins. (Or perhaps it was not a lie, for I had not learnt the truth of my background.) I have always been intrigued by Ulcinj’s lack of a Jewish cemetery – and of any marked Jewish graves at all. But actually there is one: Zevi’s. He was buried in the Old Bazaar, in the courtyard of an Albanian family home; the Manas. But can we be sure that it is really Zevi in that grave, I often asked myself, without having a proper answer.

  Zevi spent the last years of his life in Kalaja, in Balšić Tower, where he set up a small shrine with the Star of David carved into the wall. That secret place of prayer is irrefutable proof that Zevi never really changed his faith. His spirit didn’t leave Ulcinj. Even for a small town that didn’t want to remember him, it was too great to push it away to the margins of its insignificant history.

  Even today, the people of Ulcinj suspect one another of being descended from Zevi’s Jews, who, like their master, only pretended to convert to Islam and secretly went on practicing their own religion. The townsfolk whisper about Russian Jews who have built houses in nearby Liman Cove, with a wonderful view of Balšić Tower. You can hear people arguing in the cafés that the Jews have settled in that part of town so as to be close to the Messiah, in whom they still believe, in spite of all that occurred. People in Ulcinj are dour and monosyllabic when asked questions about Zevi. The tourist guides and signs don’t mention him, although he was the most important person ever to have lived in the town.

  It was doubtlessly Zevi’s followers who dug the secret tunnel from his final residence to the olive grove. Was the tunnel used by Zevi to leave the fortress without being noticed? Or used by his devotees in order to secretly visit him? Or was it not dug until after Zevi’s death, for some unimaginable reason? Was my coincidental discovery in any way linked to my investigation about my mother and to the fact that Olga, and thus I, were given a rare Jewish surname?

  The gallery was shut, so I jumped out through a window. A pack of dogs was standing there in front of me as if waiting for me. I picked up a stone and threw it at the big, black one that was the leader of the pack. It hit him on the back. The dog didn’t growl or move but just stared at me, like the rest of his motley but disciplined army. To the left of me was
a stone-wall, a good two metres high. The dogs’ jaws wouldn’t reach me there, I reasoned, so I ran to the wall and climbed to the top. I looked back and saw that the dogs were still motionless and looking at where I had been a few moments earlier, as if I still lingered there. I jumped down from the wall again, went through the narrow, urine-sprayed alley between two houses and made off into Ulcinj’s labyrinth of steep lanes; so like a living organism, a creature constantly changing shape.

  41

  Maria was waiting for me in the garden. In her white summer dress, with her long black hair down, looking rested and fresh, and with her bare feet up on a chair, she looked like someone who had never known sorrow and had no way of knowing it because she had just come running out of the Garden of Eden. The illusion was broken when she spoke in a voice still heavy from the night’s drinking spree and ordered Tereza to make us a carafe of mojito. That was the Maria I loved - wounded, wild and dangerous – allusions to innocence only detracted from her charm.