Coming

by Andrej Nikolaidis

  The boy lived from begging and found great enjoyment in mendicant ways. Schwob describes how, one summer day, the townsfolk were cruel to the boy and his brethren. Hungry and thirsty, they took refuge from the heat with their empty baskets in an unfamiliar courtyard. Here the boy experienced a miracle – the first of many great miracles which years later would lead him to believe he was the chosen one. A curtain of grapevine formed before his eyes, and leopards and other wild animals from faraway lands frolicked behind it. Young women and men in bright raiment played violas and lutes. When the boy lowered his gaze to his basket, it was full of fragrant loaves of bread, reminiscent of the time Jesus fed the five thousand with five loaves and two fish.

  Fra Dolcino’s biographers note that Dolcino was falsely accused of theft – in Vercelli, by all accounts. Although innocent, he was tortured. Humiliated by his mistreatment, he fled to the city of Trento, where he came across a sect whose name sounded so pure: the Apostolics. Later, in 1300, he was to don the white robe and become leader of the Apostolic movement. Now Dolcino was indoctrinated with the esoteric teachings of Gioacchino da Fiore. Thomas Aquinas refuted Da Fiore’s ideas in Summa Theologica. Nevertheless, Dante placed Da Fiore in Heaven. In his Inferno, Dante also mentions Fra Dolcino, whom Mohammed warned to prepare well for the conflict with the Novarese.

  Under the influence of Da Fiore’s teachings, Dolcino would turn the Apostolics into a brotherhood known as the Dolcinians. Night after night, Dolcino listened to the stories of the older brethren about Da Fiore’s wisdom and kindness, and also about the history of the world, which Da Fiore divided into three ages. There by the campfire high up in the mountains, in the empty lands where neither merchants’ caravans nor soldiers pass and the Apostolics were safe, a lamb appeared to Dolcino in a dream. It came down the hill towards him with a flight of tiny red birds hovering above it.

  Dolcino wakened his followers at dawn and told them the revelation which had come in his dream: there had been the age of the Old Testament, he said, when people were created to settle the land; there had been the age of our Lord Jesus Christ and his apostles with their modesty and poverty; then there had been the age of decay and disaster caused by the Church and its greed. ‘But an age will come, the age I am bringing –,’ he proclaimed, his eyes streaming tears and his voice trembling like a sparrow in the January frost, ‘an age of modesty and poverty, when the sword of worldly power and might will no longer hang over our heads. The lamb said to me: You are my word and my promise, I am coming with you to stay for ever.’

  Now Dolcino and his band of revolutionaries wandered the Novara area. They were joined by the poor and the ignorant, inebriated not so much by the promise of a better world to come as by the prospects of plunder. The Dolcinians, who after their teacher’s ‘sermon on the mount’ no longer doubted they were the beloved of God, gave themselves over to forbidden bodily pleasures. Churches burned late into the night in the lands they passed through, as did the houses of any who refused to renounce the authority of the Pope and were promptly slain. Dolcino absolved the marauders, rapists and killers of their sins. The Dolcinians knelt before him, ragged and filthy, with the dried blood of yesterday’s victims under their nails. ‘To the pure all things are pure, but to the corrupt and unbelieving nothing is pure,’ Dolcino recited the words of Paul the Apostle. And no sooner had his followers crossed themselves than they were ready for new misdeeds.

  A certain Father Tomaso hung from an oak in front of one of the many churches the Dolcinians committed to the flames. When he’d seen the rabble carting away the pewter, candlesticks and fabrics from his church, he turned to Dolcino and thundered: ‘You call for a return to Christ, but you’re blind to his works and deaf to his words! Does not our Lord say: For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many…And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many…Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not. For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect. Are those not his words?’

  Challenged to a theological duel, Dolcino decided to withdraw without loss. Instead of parrying the presumptuous priest with a sagacious response, which his followers keenly awaited, Dolcino just muttered: ‘Kill him.’

  The Church soon set about hunting down Dolcino with all the means and forces at its disposal. The Statutum Ligae contra Haereticos was passed in Scopello on 24 August 1305. This amounted to Fra Dolcino’s death sentence: from that day on, his end drew rapidly nearer like a stone falling into a well.

  The most interesting period in Dolcino’s scarcely documented life, from the point of view of your and my story, is the time between 1300 and 1303. Fleeing the wrath of the Church, he spent these years ‘somewhere in eastern Dalmatia’, the sources say. But we can assume that Dolcino didn’t feel safe even there, at the ‘edge of the world’. I can see him now at a marketplace in the hinterland of Split and running into one of the Franciscan friars who he’d begged with as a boy. The meeting was cordial and their friendship deep. Torn between loyalty to the Church and loyalty to his old friend, the friar chose the latter. He was journeying to the Franciscan mission in Ulcinj, which had been extended into a monastery in 1288 by the kindness of Helen of Anjou. Since he was continuing on his way at dawn, he suggested to Dolcino: ‘Why not come along? Your secret will be safe with me.’ And Dolcino thought: Ulcinj is terra incognita indeed – they’ll never find me in that land of dragons!

  The fugitive Dolcino and his friend travelled south through Dalmatia. Several weeks later they arrived on the banks of Bojana River in the town which would be marked on Venetian etchings over a century later as Dolcigno in Dalmatia.

  Dolcino spent his days by the river. He carved pipes from the reeds that grew there, and with their music he charmed the fish of the water and birds of the air. But Dolcino had a mission, and he couldn’t build the Kingdom of God on earth while hiding in Ulcinj. The night before departing back to his home region, where he would once again head the Dolcinians by Lake Garda, he had another dream. He saw that he’d die at the stake. But that wouldn’t be his end: he dreamed that he’d be resurrected. He entrusted this dream and the date of his resurrection to only one person – his good and faithful friend, the Franciscan friar. He took down Dolcino’s words and locked the manuscript into a chest, which he secretly immured deep in the walls of the monastery.

  One peaceful evening by Lake Garda, Dolcino met Margaret of Trento, who before dawn would become his lover. He’d led his followers all the way to Mount Rubello, there to dig in and await the final battle. One year later, the army of the Church would come against them with all its might. A thousand of his followers would be killed, while Dolcino and Margaret would be captured and burned at the stake. Schwob writes that Dolcino ‘asked just one favour of their executioners: that in the hour of their suffering they be allowed to keep on their white robes like the apostles on the lampshade in the church of Orto San Michele’, where his mother had taught him faith. But he begged in vain – he was forced to watch his lover burn to death. Before his own turn came, he was castrated, blinded, and had his nose, ears and fingers cut off.

  As his head blazed like a torch, Dolcino remembered the day as a boy when he was driven by hunger, thirst, heat and the absence of human clemency – and saw leopards and heard the song of happy people. Before he breathed his last, he had a vision of himself descending from the mountain bringing baskets of pane dolce to the people of the valley: a gift to the poor from his master, the Saviour.

  Chapter Five

  which tells of trust, a lie under pressure, proud pregnant women and an old liaison, and the demands of the murder victim’s brother for revenge in this world or the next

  Salvatore finished his story. He sat there with his elbow on his knee and fist on his chin, staring into the emptiness before him. He stayed like that in silence for a while, like Rodin’s Thinker who�
��d just reached the end of all thoughts. I thought I saw tears in his eyes. But Salvatore was a tough guy. He jumped to his feet, downed his – or rather my – whisky, and said in a very businesslike manner: ‘So that’s agreed, then?’

  Like everyone who approaches me, Salvatore didn’t trust the police. And quite justifiably so, because even if the police found the killer, his tracks could be covered again for the right price. If the police failed to protect the felon in any way, there was always the court: the criminal could rely on its corruptibility even if the case he’d paid to cover up was taken all the way to the Supreme Court.

  Salvatore therefore wanted me to find the killer.

  ‘You’re a wreck of a man: you don’t need anything any more, you don’t want anything any more, not even money. I can trust you,’ he told me. I took that as a compliment.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll do it, I know.’ He smiled and shook my hand.

  Salvatore’s story didn’t surprise me because he’d been dogged by misfortune all his life. His first and greatest misfortune was to be born in this country. As with the majority of things which cause us lifelong suffering, he had his parents to thank. We’re all victims of our parents’ inability to resist the reproductive urge. We’ve all been at the receiving end of the fascism of nature, whose casualty count far surpasses that of any criminal regime or system we’ve seen – and every single one of them has been criminal. Instead of pictures of Hitler and Stalin, textbooks which teach schoolchildren about the greatest enemies of humankind should show a picture of a forest in spring.

  His parents went one step further in crime against their son: they decided to raise him in this country. Salvatore’s father, Simone, had been stationed in Ulcinj when fascist Italy fell. Enchanted by the natural beauty of the town, and even more by the beauty of its women – one of whom would later become his wife, this cheerful and ever primped-up stereotype Italian decided to stay on. They say he left an olfactory trail of hair grease and aftershave behind him so that when you went downtown you’d always know where he’d been that morning. He came to Ulcinj as an occupier and ended up as the object of town jokesters and the jealousy of many a husband.

  Simone lived in Ulcinj more or less peacefully. What occasional bother he had was mainly of his own making – at least up until the Trieste Crisis. Then anti-Italian demonstrations were organised throughout the country. Party leaders came from Podgorica to ensure that the ‘spontaneous expression of popular rage’ in Ulcinj went off according to plan. One of them heard there was an Italian living in town. The people of Ulcinj said in Simone’s defence that he was good-natured – a harmless clown, whose only flaw was being a Casanova. But the Comrades from Podgorica were unyielding: Simone was Italian, therefore he was suspicious and had to be punished.

  And punished he was: he had to march at the head of the demonstrations and carry the biggest Trieste is ours placard – him, of all people!

  *

  I laughed at that anecdote again as I parked in front of the house. The muezzin’s call came up from town once more. I didn’t have much time – this night was going to be short. I planned to read the peculiar mails again and try to find some clue in them. While reading, I’d help myself to some whisky: there’s nothing wrong with a man enjoying his work.

  One day you open a mail and, whoom, you find out you’re a father. All your life you’ve refused every possibility of fatherhood – the very thought is repellent. You’re doing just fine, you think. You don’t have time for anything more and everyone else can just jump in the lake. Your liver is a write-off and every next bottle could kill you, if your heart doesn’t get you first. They’ve prescribed heart tablets but you don’t take them properly. You fervently hope the doctor was right when you asked: How much longer have I got? and he replied: With a lifestyle like that – a few years at best.

  You’ll go for sure, but not in peace (not that you deserved it, but you hoped for it all the same). And then the twist: you get a mail and suddenly you’re a father. You of all people, who was overcome by despair and anger because of neighbourhood children toddling around all summer’s day on the terraces of their parents’ houses too close to yours, waddling about and tirelessly repeating their ga-ga-ga, which sufficed to evoke applause and ovations – at least from their parents – who always channelled all their interpretative potential into trying to tell who their unsightly child took after. You of all people, who was struck and horrified by the uniquely proud gait of expectant mothers, who with every step seemed to want to say: Look, I’ve fulfilled my function, I’ve justified my existence, I’m a mother. As if she’d written Anna Karenina rather than getting pregnant! As if she was going to deliver the ultimate explanation of human misfortune rather than just reproduce, as nature has done for thousands of years and will do after her, too. You of all people, who felt nausea around men who, with the help of the whole feeble-minded community, convinced themselves that their lives were meaningful when they became fathers; these were men who got married when they didn’t know what to do with themselves, and when they didn’t know what to do with the marriage – they had children, and later they didn’t know what to do with the children; in the end they died, but only after they’d become religious and turned for help to the world’s oldest breakdown assistance service: the Church. You of all people, who maintained that the most intelligent, sophisticated and sensitive people doubted, re-examined and repented: they bequeathed us art and philosophy, but not progeny. It was the others who multiplied. Creatives died in loneliness, while the others produced herds of offspring. Humankind was thus the product of the careful selection of the worst. Yes, you of all people, who said and believed these things.

  When I first saw the woman who I’d eventually conceive Emmanuel with, fatherhood was the last thing on my mind. She strode into my office briskly and proudly, with an air of ceremony. Just like Dragan Vukotic came strolling in some twenty-five years later. Unlike her, he immediately offered me money: he threw an envelope full of large banknotes onto the table and delivered me a speech he’d obviously painstakingly prepared. He told me he had the means – money wasn’t an issue – but he expected me not only to find out who his brother’s killer was but also to catch him before the police did. I was to bring the killer to him, and he’d mete out justice himself. There was no doubt in my mind that he meant what he said. And from what I knew about this unpleasant new client, it wouldn’t be the first time. One of his building sites would be the tomb for his brother’s killer: he’d throw their body into the foundations and cover it with concrete, or he’d brick them into the attic of one of his buildings. He was a tireless developer, as if he hadn’t already raised dozens of buildings and earned tens of millions of euros. Why do people who have fifty million to their name work hard to earn another? I remember thinking as I slipped the bulging envelope into the pocket of my jacket.

  She didn’t offer money, but she offered what I desired much more – herself. And she did so in a stylish, discreet way by telling she had a lot to offer. The next morning she woke up in my bed. As soon as she opened her eyes, she woke me too. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten: you have a lot of work today,’ she said, and turfed me out of my own house.

  I went into town, had two or three drinks at the Port and then got down to business. The case seemed simple: one of those leading to an explanation which ultimately no one is satisfied with. The explanation of the death of loved ones is usually quite banal, and for some reason people find that hard to accept. I’ve never had any problem with banality. For me it’s always meant convenience.

  Her father had disappeared and it was my job to find him. He was in love with this town and had spent his summer holidays here for thirty years already, she told me. In fact, he lived in Ulcinj for more than half the year: he arrived as early as April, when the shad fishing season begins, and went straight from the plane to Bojana River, where his fishing crew was waiting. He didn’t leave until December, after th
e mullet season. At first she thought he might have drowned because he’d been known to go out in heavy sea with a sirocco blowing: she imagined he’d tried to return to the river but the swell capsized him in the estuary. But his boat was moored by his cabin and all the fishing gear was there. She checked his bank account: he’d withdrawn a certain amount before he disappeared, but nothing significant.

  I went out on Bojana River by boat and had a talk with fishermen who’d known him. What they had to tell me was of no help: A peaceable sort of guy, great to have as a neighbour. We were so surprised when he disappeared, who’d have thought – but there you go, these things happen. So I puttered down to his cabin. I’d forgotten to bring the key, so I forced the door.

  Inside it was like a pharmacy: spick and span and orderly. Jars stood in file like German fusiliers at inspection. The bed was made and tucked in, barracks-style. His clothes were all on coat-hangers in the wardrobe and he’d tied sprigs of lavender to them to keep away the moths. That was a first warning sign for me – I don’t trust orderly people. You can only expect the worst of someone who worries about things so diligently. I decided to search the cabin.

  When I found photographs of a boy in the sleeping bag under the bed, I realised where this was heading. The boy was only ten, with black hair and a face full of birthmarks. The photos showed him naked on a sandy beach – they’d obviously forced him to pose. One of the photos had a phone number on the back: it began with the calling code for Albania.

  If the old pervert had gone to Albania, there was only one person who could have taken him there: Johnny. After a few years in Germany, Johnny had come back with a hoary, moneyed Teutoness and a powerboat which was the fastest on the coast at the time. The old woman died soon afterwards and left all her money to him; Johnny soon drank and whored it away, and now all he had left from the whole German episode was the powerboat – still fast enough to smuggle goods and people to Albania.