by Nicol Ljubic
At the Baltic seaside, he recalls, he pulled off his shoes and socks, and rolled his jeans up to his knees. The cold gripped his feet in an instant, but he still attempted to breathe calmly, took one step out into the water, then one more until he stood with both his feet up to the ankles in seawater. He closed his eyes. His blood pumped rhythmically through the arteries in his neck; he had to force himself not to gasp for air. He felt the cold creeping high up into his legs and in under his jeans. He curled up his toes in the sand and they sank in deeper with every wave. He thought of the Adriatic, of the warm, alluring Adriatic, flowing in gentle eddies around his legs. He heard the distant cries of children struggling for possession of a lilo, the spluttering engine of a fishing boat, then a woman calling, a voice he knew well. Afterwards she laughed as he tried to warm his feet, first by rubbing them with his hands and then trying to push his feet between her legs, which was a struggle, as she was pressing her thighs together as hard as she could. He had come dashing along from the sea, full of glee, run around her a few times and then allowed himself to collapse on the sand, crying, “Hey, who says you can’t bathe in the sea.”
The last time he’d been on the Adriatic coast was as a child, more than twenty years earlier. He could hardly remember anything of where he’d gone with his parents, or where they’d stayed. The only image that remained in his mind was that of an old colour photograph of a pebbly beach, his grandfather sitting on a deckchair, his mother stretched out on a towel and himself, naked and holding a fishing net, silhouetted against a deep-blue sea.
He knew that Ana and her parents used to go to the Adriatic every summer and always stayed in a place called Lumbarda. Ever since she’d told him that, he’d wanted them to go there together. “Let’s go,” he said. “Then you can show me what you used to do on your holidays.” “Maybe we will, one day,” she replied. That was where the matter ended.
He thinks about this now, as he stands watching the waves which, for the first time since his arrival in The Hague, have white, foaming crests. Perhaps he should ask her just one more time. Summer will come again and it might be good for her, good for both of them, to go together to an untroubled place from her childhood, back to somewhere free from ghosts of the more recent past. After all that had happened in the last few weeks, he would dearly like to go there with her.
She must feel, he thinks, that Lumbarda is somewhere from another time, uncontaminated by what would happen later and free from thoughts of war, guilt and crime. Surely she can have only happy memories of that bay with its small offshore islands, as he has seen it in a travel guide – a bay in which the sea, a solid blue mass of water, lies so still like that its peace will never be broken by winds and currents. But was it really possible to keep these memories apart from all that has happened since? Memory can be fatally impaired by a single event, which casts its shadow over everything and drives away all peace of mind.
Ana fell in love for the first time in Lumbarda; she was ten years old at the time and the object of her desires already a young man, an actor from Sarajevo. She told him this story when the two of them were playing spinning-the-bottle. They did this sitting opposite each other on bare floorboards in her room with an empty wine bottle between them. He had to spin it several time before the neck of the bottle pointed towards her. She could choose between action and truth, and she chose the truth. He asked her who her first love was.
“Macbeth,” she said.
The young man had recited Macbeth, perched on a cliff by a small inlet. She’d watched, listened as his voice rose above the sounds of the sea and seen him check the book he held in his hand, when unsure of his lines.
In a deep voice, accompanied by sweeping gestures, she mimicked him:
“Who can be wise, amazed, temperate and furious,
Loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man:
The expedition of my violent love
Outran the pauser, reason.”
And she laughed because, in retrospect, it was so obvious that she would fall for the first man who could recite Shakespeare. Did her father read Shakespeare aloud to her when she was little? “To my father, Shakespeare was life.”
He wanted to know what had happened in this, her first affair of the heart, and she said the end was tragic. She continued with her story, which amused her greatly, of how her father, once he had realised what an impression this actor had made on his daughter, had ordered him to stop acting in front of the girl. And then, when her Macbeth asked her father who he was, her father had replied, “Titus Andronicus.”
To her, this was a mere anecdote, a moment of paternal craziness, which demonstrated how much he cared for her and to which she clearly attached no deeper meaning. And to him, too, it came across as a burlesque scene featuring an eccentric father. It was only later that he looked back and tried to extract from this story an early insight into her father’s inscrutable character. A man who called himself Andronicus – wouldn’t that carry some weight with his prosecutor? Members of the Court, consider that the man who stands before you had named himself after the most brutal avenger ever created by Shakespeare. Might it not be evidence of an evil streak which, long before his crime, had lain undisturbed deep inside him and only surfaced when the rules of civilisation were set aside and replaced by the anarchy of war?
After listening to her anecdote, he decided to read that most miserable of Roman tragedies: fourteen murders, culminating with Andronicus arranging a meal for the Emperor’s wife, at which she is served the flesh of her own sons. To say “I am Titus Andronicus”, was this not an attempt to be something more than a mere onlooker? Was it not a frank expression of his desire for greatness, the ability to fashion a tragedy with such an impact that it would condemn not only himself to ruin, but also others. Surely such thoughts must have occurred to Ana, too?
You told me of your Sundays together. Sunday was when you and your father would go for a walk along the banks of the Drina. You always ran along after him, trying to keep up with his long strides by stepping on the same tussocks and patches of gravel. You watched his rucksack as it bounced up and down, making the tackle rattle a little. You sat next to him while he fished and kept an eye on every twitch of the float. And when it started to dance about furiously and disappear under water, you were so excited and keenly observed your father’s calm movements as he played the fish, each time pulling it in a little closer. You waited for the moment when the fish would finally emerge from the water, fly wriggling through the air and land with a splash on the stones. Then he would hold it firmly against the ground with his fingers inserted into its gills until the tail and fins stopped flapping. To please him, you tried to kill a fish, but couldn’t bring yourself to do it. Although you realised that a fish must be killed before it is eaten, you couldn’t rid yourself of the vague sensation that there was an alien side to your father, that for a moment he had turned into another man, as if you had caught sight of him in a distorting mirror.
Wasn’t that how you felt? I did. Surely you remember me telling you of when I found two puppies dumped in a wood? They were whimpering softly and huddled together inside a cardboard box. One puppy had a cute black spot around one of his eyes. I carried them home and intended, first of all, to give them something to drink, and then buy them dog food and find a blanket to cover the box. My plan was to put the box next to my bed. As I was walking along, I speculated about what to call the puppies, but when I got home and went into the kitchen to look for a small dish, I heard my father say to my mother, “We can’t keep dogs. Dogs are a pain in the neck.” He filled a plastic bucket with water and held the puppies under until they were both dead. All the time, I stood in the doorway and simply couldn’t take my eyes off him. Even now, this image is sharp in my mind. The ground seemed to have suddenly split open, allowing me to look down into an abyss, into a dark rift. I’m not sure if this was the reason why I could never again bear to drink from his glass.
I clearly remember you raising the white mug to yo
ur mouth, the mug with a small chip off it – it’s absurd to recall the chip, but I do, perhaps because at the time I worried about the sharp edges of the crack catching and cutting the lips I loved so much. You held the mug with both hands while I asked you about your relationship with your father. You stared at me in disbelief, or so it seemed to me, at the suggestion that one could have a bad relationship with one’s father. “I love my father,” you said, with just a hint of incomprehension. And perhaps you also felt it was a challenge, I’m not sure, as if I had doubted your love for him. But what reason would I have to doubt?
Do you know what I thought the first time I saw his photograph? I thought that you were lucky to have a father like him. And that you must have many good memories of this man. I liked him in that photo, with his slightly sceptical look, though there was nothing cold or distant about him. The scepticism, I felt, hid a kindness that made him always ready to reach out to his fellow men.
When you hung the photo next to your desk, it was enough to convince me that he meant something special to you. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to put my father’s picture on the wall, even if he were dead and the image held a particular memory. But your father wasn’t dead. Or possibly he was, even though he lived.
That was when I got this idea in my head. Perhaps he was lost to you, in another way, that’s true – but nonetheless, a sense of loss drove you to put his likeness on the wall.
You’ve told me how it amazes you that I discuss my father so coolly, that any son could speak of his father in that way. I tried to explain that I had always wanted him to show some weakness – even something like breaking his ankle when he went hiking. And that I even used to wish I’d been hurt in a car accident he’d caused. I dreamed of how, standing by my bedside, he would be forced to admit his guilt, since he’d been in the driving seat. I grew up in his shadow and lacked the strength to move out of it.
He was so full of life, always loud and always strong. As I’ve told you, he used to call me zeko; for a long time I didn’t realise that the word meant “little rabbit”. He liked to tell me stories about his early years in Germany, how he started out with empty pockets and went on to make something of his life, how he would often stay late in the garage to work on the cars to give me a better life than his own.
One of his workmates once knocked into a jack and released the safety catch when my father was lying underneath. Everyone expected to find him dead. He said that the doctors couldn’t get their heads round the fact that all his internal organs were undamaged and that they had to let him go after just an hour in the hospital. Another of his stories was from his boyhood in the Pioneers, when he was sent off to spread tarmac on the coastal road during a summer holiday in Dalmatia. He was already apprenticed at the age of fourteen and had a trade at sixteen, while I was still sitting at a school desk at eighteen.
I did not tell you that whenever there was something to celebrate, especially within the family, he drank too much and started shouting at my mother; once we even went outside to sleep in the woods until he sobered up. I have often thought that this is why I don’t care much for alcohol and why I’m unenthusiastic about the prospect of family holidays. And I also wonder whether my father is the reason why I never learnt his language and have resisted, consciously or not, everything else to do with his share of my origins.
Even if one’s father has been a constant source of irritation, it seems that, for reasons I cannot comprehend, his voice will echo in one’s mind well into old age. My relationship with my father is still far from good, but all the same – or perhaps precisely because of that – I cling to the good memories that always exist when you long for them so much.
I never forget the time we played football in the garden, just because we fancied it at the time, and both of us stumbled at the same time and ended up side by side on the lawn. To this day, whenever I think of that afternoon, I hear the sound of his heavy breathing, and to this day, I can sense the happiness of the seconds spent lying next to him on the grass.
Mr Nurzet, Counsel for the Defence, rose to speak, but first looked quickly at his colleague to the right. She acknowledged his glance with a brief nod.
“Zlatko Šimić was born into a poor, honest farming family. He learnt independence early. He helped his parents on the farm and looked after the cows and the pigs. Generally, he was very fond of animals. He once brought up two piglets and pleaded tearfully for their lives until his father weakened. He loved to go riding. Ever since his earliest years, it made him happy to sit astride a horse. He was his father’s pride and joy. Zlatko Šimić was the first in his family to attend a secondary school and he went on to study English at the University of Sarajevo. Later, he became a professor at the same university and an internationally recognised expert on Shakespeare. He started a family, saw his two children grow up in a house he had built for them. He never had any conflicts with Muslims.
“His life changed in 1988. That was the year he lost his beloved son. The boy was sixteen when he died in a skiing accident in Slovenia. They spent two days searching for him. He had frozen to death when they found him. I believe that every one of you can imagine what losing a son must mean to a father. Even today – and this event took place twenty years ago – I honestly believe that you will respond to the pain you can still see in his eyes. That was when he started to drink. There were a few hospital admissions and he occasionally underwent psychotherapy. You will hear witnesses confirm that Zlatko Šimić was sometimes so drunk that he would hold himself responsible for the tragedy.
“Since the death of his son, Zlatko Šimić has been a broken man. As you get to know him better, you will realise how unimaginable it is that this man, who appears before you, would have committed the crime you have heard him charged with in this court. It is true that he was in Pionirska Street on the day of the 14th of June 1992. He happened to be walking along the street in the direction of the town centre, when a group of women, children and elderly people were moving into the House by the Stream. He was also about in the street in the afternoon, but at quite a distance from the house in question. Walking past, he had spotted a horse in an abandoned yard. He went to get the horse and later rode it through the centre of Višegrad. It had rained that day and the streets were slippery, which may or may not have been the reason why the horse fell. Zlatko broke his shinbone in the fall.
“There were witnesses present and you will hear them describe what happened. One of them called the ambulance and Zlatko was taken to the hospital in Višegrad. A doctor examined him and referred him to the hospital in Užice for an X-ray of his leg. They took Zlatko to Užice by ambulance, but broke the journey in Vardište, a place on the road to Užice, where Zlatko’s cousin owned a café. They stayed in the café for a while. Because of the cold, Zlatko was given a blanket. He remained in the ambulance all the time. They continued the journey and reached the hospital around ten o’clock in the evening. It was already getting dark.
“Zlatko Šimić could not have participated in the murder of the women, children and old folk. He didn’t even know of the fire that killed the Hasanović family during the night of the 14th of June 1992. Zlatko Šimić cannot even comprehend that there are people capable of doing something so dreadful.”
The defendant seems to be moved by his counsel’s words. While the lawyer speaks, Šimić is once more sitting up straight, breathing deeply and occasionally scratching his nose with his index finger. He closes his eyes, letting his chin rest on his chest, and, as his head tilts forward, a lock of hair slips out of place, strays down his temple and ends up hanging in a narrow fringe over his forehead. He makes no attempt to tidy his hair or get his comb out.
As the trial progresses, he gradually loses the conceit that he knows what’s going on. Perhaps this is all part of the tactics adopted by the defence. He asks himself if he was right to return to The
Hague. But he wanted to be there when the defendant took the witness stand, wanted to hear the man’s voice and find
out how Šimić would defend himself against the prosecution’s arguments. Of course, he couldn’t have stayed on in The Hague for weeks on end and had to return to Berlin by the end of the first week. He assumed that his own impression of the man would be formed by then, but the first two days were enough to prove him wrong. He was quite unable to detach Šimić, the man, from the place where he observed him and from the accusations against him, even though he has a right to be considered innocent until proven guilty. It seemed likely that the dozens of witnesses and experts, as well as an incredibly large mass of evidence, meant that a whole year could pass before the court reached its decision.
Why has he returned? Perhaps because to him, Šimić is the Black Man of the bridge over the Drina, and he can’t stop himself from staring into the dark slit. He is obsessed by the thought that he might have something in common with Šimić. He can’t work out what it is and wishes that he could simply get the man out of his mind. They both love Ana. What does Šimić know about him? he asks himself. What has Ana told him? He knows that she has been writing to her father. Has she sent him a photo?
He fears that Šimić might recognise him, pick him out among the members of the public. Look straight at him and smile.
When the counsel for the defence has finished speaking and sits down, the presiding judge addresses him.
“You have indicated that X-ray images were taken in the hospital. However, no X-rays have been included in the list of evidence presented to the court. They could be very important.”
The lawyer rises once more and, as he stands, strokes the folds of his robe with his right hand. “Your Honour, I agree that the X-rays would have been very important evidence. We would have greatly preferred to present them to the court. However, in Yugoslavia, the practice was to hand over the films to the patient and, unfortunately, the defendant no longer has them in his possession. When he had to leave his home, he could only manage to take a few things with him. The X-rays were not among them, because he assumed that he would never need them again. However, Mr Šimić will state that such films existed.”
