by Nicol Ljubic
Later, Šimić is sleeping next to him. He tries to turn the light on, presses the switch, but nothing happens; he wants to get out of bed and struggles with the duvet. It ensnares him and however hard he tries, he cannot free himself. Šimić pulls him close and puts a hand over his face.
It’s the middle of the night. He gets up and gropes his way through the dark to the bathroom, where he pushes the mat in front of the basin with his foot to have something to stand on. He holds his hands under the rushing water from the cold tap.
The mirror reflects only darkness. Once back in the room, he cautiously opens the fridge to check that nothing is missing.
Ana knew from the start that he doesn’t drink. And she was right that he was afraid of letting himself go. Perhaps afraid of life itself. He grabs a small bottle at random. Unscrews the top and drinks the contents in one go, without knowing what it is. It burns his throat. “Živeli”, she said. And “Živeli”, he repeats.
Then he goes back to bed.
“What’s your problem, lad?” It’s Šimić who asks him this. He’s still there, at the table, with his legs resting on the other chair. “You know, sitting stiffly in the courtroom all day, that’s not for me. Anyway, what do they want of me? They don’t know me. All these people so busy sitting in judgement over me – it’s crazy, don’t you think? They should be asking you the questions. I mean to say, you’re the one who knows me – right?” He fetches another miniature from the fridge, drinks it standing up and breaks the empty against the wall. “I loved him. As God is my witness, I loved him. I would’ve loved you. Clearly, I’m fated to lose my sons.”
“I saw myself speaking with God and the Devil.”
Those words, more than any others, never leave him in peace. Why did Šimić say that? To order his confused thoughts? What had been plaguing him, what had been tugging him this way and that between two extreme moral positions? Were his actions a burden on his conscience? When Šimić spoke of dialogues with the Devil and his witches, was this yet another sign of his own tragedy? Or was it Shakespeare? Perhaps Šimić was broken and mentally disturbed – or did he only imagine all this in retrospect?
The judge had to tell him twice to sit down, because Šimić just stood there, seemingly unaware of where he was. “Mr Šimić, please sit down.” As far as Šimić was concerned, this was a voice from another world and it didn’t quite reach him.
Where had his thoughts drifted? Did he recall that image of the bridge? Or a vision of the people who had been relying upon him, all in one long line – the old folk, the women and the children? People who had wanted nothing more than to leave the town, to get out, regardless. Did he dread their faces? Did they haunt him, night after night? You couldn’t live with yourself afterwards. Could you ever be free of all these faces?
There was nobody there to hold him, take his hand and whisper his name. Zlatko, you are here because they were hungry and you did not feed them. They were thirsty and you gave them nothing to drink. They were strangers and you did not invite them in. And now the highest court has sentenced you, and you will be punished for eternity.
Šimić didn’t defend himself. He didn’t teeter. He didn’t collapse. “Mr Šimić! Please sit down.” He sat down. Then he turned towards the public. He looked at them, all those faces behind the glass, one by one. But his eyes never met anyone’s.
He had spoken to Ana about the court. They had even argued about it for a while. At breakfast time, he had seen it mentioned in the newspaper and read the piece out to her. Vojislav Šešelj, charged with very serious war crimes, had gone on hunger strike and now the court was doing all it could to keep him well enough for trial.
“So what? Why read it aloud?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I thought it might interest you.”
But why should it interest her? Because it had something to do with the war? Because the accused was a Serb?
“Do you want to know what I make of it?” She pushed her cup away and looked straight at him. “I can understand him,” she said. “The court is prejudiced against him. It has nothing to do with justice.”
At first, he couldn’t work out if she was serious or said it to provoke him. He still isn’t sure. She was in an edgy mood. She might have expected him to start speaking about the court and was ready to release the tension that had built up inside her. It was obvious that the court was on her mind. At the time, he had no idea of just how much that particular court of law mattered to her. But he sensed her anger.
“How can you tell?” he asked.
“If it were true that the court is as unbiased as everyone says, they would’ve put Clinton and Schröder on trial and all the other western politicians as well. Everyone who was responsible for bombing a sovereign state. Which is what Serbia was, you know.”
He said nothing.
“Do you realise what it was like? No, how could you know? You’ve never experienced bombs falling on your home town. It’s not like on television.”
This sounded like an accusation. It wasn’t his fault, but he felt complicit. How could she blame him for observing the war from afar? Did this mean that he wasn’t competent to speak about it? “I’ll never forget when it began,” she said. “I was in the cinema. The film kept running as if nothing was happening. But when I went outside, I saw that the sky was red. Red with fire, because the bombs had hit the oil refinery in Pančevo, which is some twenty kilometres from Belgrade. People were running in the street, but I just stood there. I didn’t know what was going on. I just watched people and the cars jamming the street. I spent the night in a metro station, together with lots of other people, and went back home in the morning. Later on, I didn’t leave the flat for days on end. Friends came and we sat around talking and watching the telly whenever the power was on. At one point I had to sit an oral exam. The professor was questioning me while the air raid sirens were blaring. Three months of terror, but no one has been held accountable. Do you think that is right?”
What could he say to her? Yes, I think it is? For the first time, she had told him what it had been like for her when they bombed Belgrade. And what about him? He felt hurt. Hurt, because she had excluded him, because she insinuated that he couldn’t engage with her past and denied him any capacity for empathy.
Hadn’t he tried to understand her right from the start? Hadn’t he read books to get a grasp of her history? Hadn’t he endlessly reflected on his own history and, because of her, felt ashamed at being so ignorant of his origins? He had thought of his aunt, who lived in Karlovac and of how little concern he had felt for her fate when the war broke out in Yugoslavia and the mortars began to hammer the town. The war had just begun when his father phoned his sister to ask her if she would like to come and live with them in Germany. His mother didn’t think much of this idea and his parents rowed about it. Who knows how long this war will last, his mother argued, for all we know your sister might be stuck here with us for months, maybe even years. He, too, felt uneasy, because his aunt would have had the use of one of his two tiny rooms. His father said that when all was said and done, she was his sister and if she wanted to stay with them, they had to take her in. Then brother and sister talked briefly on the phone and when his father put the receiver down, he said: “She doesn’t want to. She’d rather stay where she is. ‘If a bomb hits me it’s meant for me. That’s life,’ she says.” His mother was visibly relieved and he felt the same, although he couldn’t imagine why his aunt should want to put herself in harm’s way. She could have been safe, staying with her brother’s family in Germany in a room of her own, instead of accommodation for refugees. At the time, he couldn’t grasp why she should be so attached to her little flat. To that one room she had shared with her husband until his death and where, when their two children were still at home, the four of them had lived together. The few times he and his parents had gone to Karlovac to see her, she had hardly ever stirred from that room of hers – she had just sat on her sofa all day long. Presumably
she spent the war years on that sofa.
Looking back, he feels ashamed at how distant he once felt from his aunt and her fate. But Ana was different. He wanted to know about her life. She had nothing to reproach him with on that score. Quite the opposite. She was the one who held back, who even resented hearing him read from the morning paper. Yet he couldn’t help feeling that someone forced to leave her childhood home and endure being shot at in her new one might feel persecuted by fate.
“Your wartime experiences,” he said, “don’t confer moral superiority, you know.” The look in her eyes was steely when they met his. Her lips moved, and he realised that she had been about to say something, but changed her mind. She shook her head in disbelief, glanced at the window and got up to leave.
Uncertain what to do next, he stayed in the kitchen after she closed the door behind her. He observed her cup and a spot of dried coffee close to the rim. Later, the brownish stain on the white china would regain its shape in his mind and stand out clearly, so very clearly that the rest of the memory would appear to materialise around it. He would want to get a cloth and wipe the rim clean, but the mark would not be shifted.
He observed the plate covered with breadcrumbs, and next to it a knife with its blade thinly coated with strawberry jam. Her indoor shoes were under the table by her chair, where she had pulled them off. The left shoe looked forlorn, lying on its side near a table leg.
He sat in the middle of her kitchen, trying to find a source of strength. It frightened him that she had left. He feared that the woman who returned would be someone he wouldn’t know. He soon lost all sense of how long he had been sitting there. He blamed himself for being so insensitive, and tried to find the right words. He wanted to apologise. He longed for the sound of a key turning in the lock, of her footsteps on the floorboards. He longed for the familiarity of homecoming. He long for those reassuring noises: coat hangers being handled, outdoor shoes being put away and keys being placed on the shelf. His wait lasted for an eternity.
When she came into the kitchen, she stood by the table and he saw in her a weariness he did not recognise. Her skin was drained of colour and her eyes somehow sat deeper in their sockets. Had the light changed? Or his perception of her? She held her cup with both hands, as if it were a heavy weight, glanced into it and emptied it in one gulp.
Yet again, he thinks about Ana’s words. He wonders if Ana would have interpreted the behaviour of the judges and counsel for the prosecution differently. The judge on the left, who kept his arms crossed on his chest most of the time, the prosecutor’s assistant who shuffled notes across the table with such indifference, the presiding judge who regularly interrupted the defendant in a tone of voice one might call brusque, directing him to make sure that he paused before answering, to avoid making the interpreter’s job unnecessarily difficult, … as I told you before. Would she have thought them arrogant? Would she have perceived these people as representing victors’ justice and their gestures as humiliating? What about him? As an onlooker, is he part of this other world which conspires against hers? No, she couldn’t think that, of course he has never conspired against her, he has loved her, he loves her. He would do anything for her. Ana, you know you’re wrong.
“Well, it’s tragic,” the professor said, “but it’s a historical fact that Serbia is, it seems, the only country that hasn’t faced up to the need for national catharsis. By now, it has been left alone with its guilt complex, isolated from the rest of the world, for almost twenty years. The end of the war didn’t offer a new beginning for the Serbs: the same old war leader still held office and, even after his fall, they had only a brief glimpse of hope before Djindjić was shot. Try to imagine what it all meant for the young in Serbia. They suffer to this day. In their generation, they’re the only ones who aren’t allowed to travel freely in Europe, because Europe rejects their country.”
One week after the last time he saw Ana, he talked once more to the professor. He didn’t tell him about what he’d found out about Ana. He didn’t admit that he could hardly sleep because of the thoughts forever turning over in his head. He didn’t explain that he felt betrayed and constantly had to ask himself what had really happened. He didn’t mention that he hadn’t eaten for days and spent most of the time in bed, longing for reassurance that it would turn out to be a misunderstanding, that one day the doorbell would ring and she would stand outside. He hoped she’d at least phone or write him a letter.
To this day, he has been waiting for her to tell him about herself and to try, for the sake of their love, to make him understand.
Counsel for the defence seems to speak in a different tone of voice now. He sounds gentler than the previous day, when he was examining Šimić. Mr Nurzet speaks more slowly, more calmly and pauses frequently, as if he wants the woman in the witness stand to take her time, to think before she answers and take care not to say anything rash.
“Mrs Šimić, try to recall April 1992 and tell us where you were at the relevant time.”
When he stepped into the public gallery that morning, he had no idea that Ana’s mother would enter the courtroom just a little later. He saw an elderly woman come in through the door to the right of the judges’ bench. She was visibly ill at ease. For a short while, she stood looking at the judges, until one of them gestured to the table and the court attendant escorted her to it. “Mrs Šimić, please sit down.” It was only when the judge spoke her name that he realised who she was. He went rigid for a moment. It hadn’t occurred to him that Ana’s mother would be summoned to appear in court. But now she’s there, sitting some two metres away from him, with just a sheet of glass between them. She wears a white blouse and a black ankle-length skirt. Her hair is grey, unlike Šimić’s. He didn’t think of her looking like this; he imagined her to be younger and less plump.
It feels unsettling and improbable to see Ana’s parents in this place, isolated behind a pane of glass. He can observe them, nothing else. In his mind, Ana joins them: father, mother, daughter – and, for the first time, he’s glad that she isn’t here. It would be unbearable to watch the whole family, in this place, all three of them united in the courtroom. The daughter would have come because she believes in the goodness of this man who allowed children to die in a fire. He doesn’t want to imagine her appearing as a witness for the defence in this courtroom, facing her father and protecting him. How obligingly she would answer the defence lawyer’s questions, describe her father as loving and recall her childhood memories. Not here, in front of all these people – the judges, the prosecution, the defence and the public. He would feel so helpless. He could do nothing but sit there and listen. She would be so close and yet behind that glass. And he would be just another onlooker.
Ana’s mother starts to speak twice before her voice picks up enough strength to reply to the defence lawyer’s question.
“In April 1992, we were in Belgrade. We had to flee from Višegrad. They started setting houses on fire and everyone who had children had left the town.”
“Frau Šimić, you’ve said: ‘We had to flee’. What do you mean by ‘we’? Which members of your family came with you?”
“I took my daughter, Ana.”
“You said earlier that everyone left the town because houses were set on fire. What do you mean by ‘everyone’?”
“At that time, women with children left because they were frightened.”
“Are you suggesting that to stay in Višegrad at that time was unsafe? Or do you mean something else? Something more specific?”
“If you had children to look after, it wasn’t safe to stay in town. They threatened us. Some of these people had occupied the dam. They wanted to dynamite it and flood all the villages on the Drina.”
“Who were the people you’re referring to?”
“They were local Muslims. They wanted to flood the town and drown us all.”
“In the beginning, you said that houses were set on fire. Please tell the court whose houses they were.”
&n
bsp; “The Savić house was burnt, I think. Branko’s place. That’s it, his name was Branko Savić.”
“The people whose houses burnt, what ethnic group did they belong to?”
“They were Serbs.”
“Did Zlatko, your husband, come with you to Belgrade?”
“No, he stayed behind in our house.”
“Had he agreed that you and your daughter should leave?”
“Yes. It was his idea. He said we had to go, because he feared that something would happen to us if we didn’t.”
It’s clear to everyone how very uncomfortable Ana’s mother feels about being in the courtroom. She doesn’t know where to look, meeting the lawyer’s eyes only rarely and fleetingly. She speaks so softly that the judge often has to urge her to come closer to the microphone. She seems frightened of this black device and doesn’t touch it, so the lawyer has to walk across and point the microphone towards her mouth.
She has probably never spoken in front of such a large audience. The distress, the sleepless nights, and the journey to a strange place, she has dealt with these things for his sake. In order to see him again? For love? He would have liked to know if they touched each other when they met. Here, in the courtroom, she avoids looking at her husband. Šimić, on the other hand, does not take his eyes off his wife for the entire time.
“What can you tell us about Zlatko’s family? Does he have brothers or sisters? And if he does, who are they? Where do they live? Are they younger than him, or older?”
“Zlatko is the firstborn. He has two younger sisters, a brother and a half-sister. One of his sisters lives in Belgrade and the other in Banja Luka. The brother lives in Vardište.”
“He has one half-sister, you tell us. Was she on his mother’s side or his father’s?”
“His father’s side.”
“So, did Zlatko lose his mother, or did she and his father separate?”
