“Here in Bosnia?”
A pause.
“In the beginning, yes, here in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Silence.
“Was it in any place we know?”
“No”, Jure growls. “I told you that before.”
“Did you kill people?” Eva asks in a quiet voice.
“What do you think soldiers do? Of course I killed people.”
“Women and children and old people?”
“Never. Only Fascist soldiers.”
“Oh”, she sighs. “That’s good.”
“So, there we were, after we went north to join the new JNA, driving the enemy hard through Slovenia. Along the way, we caught tens of thousands and shot them. But most got through to Austria because they wanted to surrender to the British, not to the Soviets, and certainly not to us. They were terrified of us. We were always finding bodies of people who had killed themselves when they couldn’t keep up with the rest. Most made it into Austria, and when they got there the British told them to come on in, you’re safe now. So, there they were, hundreds of thousands crowded into a little valley, like ducks at slaughter time—”
Jure pauses. He is drinking from the bottle. Josip knows this because a moment later the bottle is hurled to the bedroom floor and rolls around.
“There they were—just like ducks. Ducks nobody could feed. So, the Brits and Americans guaranteed their safety, if they surrendered to us. They ran up white flags and we ‘accepted’. Then we just shot into the crowds, all bunched together, the idiots, and we emptied our guns into them. They had nowhere to go, and they didn’t shoot back because they didn’t have anything to shoot back with.”
“You shot too.”
“Who wouldn’t shoot! That was Bleiburg, a little place southeast of Klagenfurt. It was great. The Brits just stood by, watching it all. Didn’t stop us. Just watching. Good old Brits. Our new Allies. At Maribor it was better. We finished off about forty thousand there. Whenever we ran out of ammunition, we used knives and truncheons and hatchets. After that, we loaded everyone that was left onto trains and shipped them back across the border.”
“What happened to them?”
“That’s what you don’t want to know.”
“You can tell me.”
“No, I can’t. Orders. Nobody is to know.”
“You killed them too, didn’t you. Men and women and children. Soldiers and non-soldiers.”
“The Ustashe killed thousands in their camps. Now it was our turn.”
“You took all those people to camps?”
“Don’t ask me again. I told you, no one is to know.” Another bitter laugh. “You can’t even begin to guess.”
“If you don’t tell me the truth, you will never see me again. I can’t live with secrets.”
“All our married life you’ve been living with secrets.”
“What do you mean by that!”
“You don’t want to know.”
A loud slap.
“Do that again, Eva, and you won’t see me again. Or anything else.”
“You’ll kill me, like you killed those people?”
“Those people were class enemies. It was war.”
“War? An army of civilians without guns? That’s war? Is that what we sacrificed for?”
“Sit down. Shut up.” Squeaking bedsprings.
“It’s time to choose, Eva. You can grow up, or you can pretend it’s all going to be nice and safe from now on. What happened at Bleiburg and Maribor was commanded by the people who control our future. This is their country.”
“But you helped them.”
“I started to grow up. It’s a hard world. Everyone dies in the end, some sooner, some later. And it’s better for some to die early so that the rest, the majority, have a better life.”
“You’re saying you can do anything, as long as it helps the majority?”
“That’s correct. Call it a democracy.”
Silence.
“I don’t believe you. You’re making this up. It’s propaganda.”
“I was there. And at other places. We went back with the trains. British troops helped us strip the Croats and Slovenes. Underwear only. I wish you could have seen all those nice boys from England with plundered wristwatches from wrist to armpit, guarding the trains as they went by, making sure nobody jumped out. Then, when we had the ducks back in our territory, we unloaded them and marched them into the forest. In the forests there were pits we’d prepared. For days and days we executed, filled the pits, covered them over. Then more pits. Pits upon pits, a great harvest. I was at one cave where we threw in thirty or forty thousand bodies. After a while you lose count. After that, we marched the survivors farther south to camps. Most died on the way. We shot villagers who tried to give them food or water. We shot anybody who got in our way. We killed anyone we wanted to kill. And we’re still doing it.”
Eva’s voice is choking, shuddering. “The people will not let you go on with it.”
“The people don’t know about it. People are blind. And no newspaper is ever going to write about this, because anyone who talks about it is going to disappear. Besides, law and order has come to Yugoslavia. Now the police, the courts, and the prisons will clean up whatever remains.”
After that, no more words. Just a man’s curse, and the faint sound of his aunt sobbing into her pillow.
Josip does not sleep. He is frozen, unable to run. He sees blood and fire now, even though he is not sleeping.
Perhaps from exhaustion he dozes a little toward dawn. He hears his aunt getting up, going out to work. She is sniffing and groaning. She does not try to wake him because he lost his job at the factory during his month of illness.
He is alone with his uncle. Jure is snoring in the bedroom.
How can a man who has killed so many people sleep so deeply? Does rakija drug him beyond the reach of nightmares? It must be so; it must be why he drinks so much.
Josip gets up as quietly as possible, dresses, but does not put on his shoes. He can’t find his socks in the dark. The floor is cold but bearable. He stuffs the book about the sea inside his jacket and tiptoes to the doorway of the apartment. Now he will fly. Now he will escape the terror that has afflicted him for many weeks and the dreams of blood and fire that the terror has reawakened. He does not have any idea where he will go. He knows only that he must go, lest he be shot and thrown into a pit, a river, a cave, a hole, because all life is now valueless, leaving only the rights of power. Of power he desires nothing. He wants only to live a little longer; he does not know why, but something within him will not permit him die. If he can fly, he will not cease to be. The Lastavica of the Sea has helped him know this in the heart of his soul, though his thoughts and feelings are rioting.
Can it be true what he heard in the night? Can a man really do such things? Though his uncle is a cruel and angry person, and he perhaps killed people at Pačići, it is nearly unthinkable that he has really done the things he says he has done in the north. After all, he did not see his uncle kill anyone at Pačići—it was the others who did the killing. And his uncle spared his life.
Faces always reveal something of what is inside. He will look at the face of his uncle, and he will know the truth about what is inside. He tiptoes back to the bedroom door, which is open a crack. He pushes it wide and steps inside. Jure is still snoring. His clothes are heaped beside the bed. Josip stands a pace or two from the bed, examining the face. It is an ordinary face. Though there is darkness in it, he is sure it is not the darkness of a monster. His uncle did not do those things he said he did. He must have said it because he was angry, wanted to make Eva fear him or respect him, though it did not work. His uncle tells lies. Thus, he may have lied about everything.
There is the gun leaning against the wall. There is no blood on it. His ammunition straps are rolled up neatly beside it on the floor. Beside these, leaning against the wall, is a hatchet. Josip remembers that in Pačići his uncle wore a hatchet hanging from his belt. That day th
ere was blood on everything, but so much happened at once that he had not looked at the hatchet for more than a split second.
He knows this hatchet, in a way that reaches beyond Pačići. He kneels and peers closer. He picks it up and turns it over in his hands. Again and again he turns it over, even after he knows where it has come from. It is Petar’s. The blue stripe on the handle, the initials “PD” scratched in the steel. His chest heaving, Josip gasps and attempts to rise, accidentally dropping the hatchet to the floor. He picks it up without thinking.
“So, try it”, says the deep voice of a man. “Kill me. It’s what you want to do.”
Jure is awake, observing him, his eyes all wolf, his mouth sneering with contempt.
“Go ahead, try.”
“My Mamica, my Tata”, Josip whispers. Jure utters a single cold laugh. Josipa. Petar. Fra Anto . . .
Josip is too stunned to cry. All thought is erased by the shock of knowledge.
“We came through the old pass out of the north”, Jure murmurs drowsily, still smiling. “Down into Rajska Polja. At first, I did not know what place it was. Because it was small it had no name on maps, it was just another village of Catholic Croats. Many men of my ceta were Chetniks, sent down to join us, with a chief among them. We were the remains of three cetas, fused into one, and not easy in each other’s company. I had to prove myself. By the end, I knew where we were, after we had our fun.”
Jure closes his eyes, still smiling. Josip has never in his life seen such a smile. It is terrifying in its calmness, its acceptance of all that is behind the eyes.
“You can kill me. A blow to my skull will do it.”
Josip’s grip closes around the handle of Petar’s hatchet, and a black surge of vengeance rushes through him. He sees his friend’s amputated hand, sees the skulls of his parents burning in the embers of his home.
“Go ahead. I won’t stop you”, says his uncle.
Josip’s teeth are bared. Then his teeth bite into his lower lip, and it begins to bleed.
He drops the hatchet and runs. All the way down the stairs his uncle’s laughter chases him, until he is out in the street and flying away.
For three days and nights he lives in the alleyways of Sarajevo. He eats nothing, drinks once each night, bending over the river and sucking at it like an animal. He is visible to other human beings only as a fleeting shadow after sunset or before dawn. A shadow among shadows. He is barefoot because he left his shoes behind in the apartment. It is now late autumn and winter is approaching in the mountains. He crawls into cracks between apartment buildings, where no light enters and no eyes peer. A little heat radiates from the bricks, and the wind cannot enter. He shivers and dozes and wakes in terror, only to shiver again. His uncle will search for him and find him and then he will die slowly under the razor.
One evening, he is caught by a gang of alley boys who, like Josip, have no home. They pummel him, take his book, and knock him to the ground. They would strip him bare, too, except that he fights back with rage, hurls splinters of brick and concrete at his assailants, and smashes at the shins around him, the feet kicking him. Then he scrambles upright, punches and draws blood, and with a cold and desperate fury continues to punch. He does not relent, does not give way under their blows, giving blow for blow with the last milligrams of his strength until, one by one, they run off in search of easier prey. He has kept his clothes, though he has lost some blood. He licks the blood from his hands, swallows it. With the palms of his hands, he wipes the blood from his face and licks it down too. Is it theirs, is it his? He does not know.
Throughout the fourth night, he forages alongside cats for scraps of food thrown out by people into the back lots of apartment buildings. These items are few indeed, and mostly rotten, but there are bits and pieces that can sustain life: potato peelings, carrot tops, fish heads, bones with sinew on them—once a thick bone with marrow inside. It smells bad and gives him trouble in his gut, but it also increases his energy a little. It will give him strength so that he can fight again, if attacked. Gradually, he learns that the pickings improve as he forages higher in the hills of the city, where there are better homes. It is also more dangerous there, with watchdogs and watchgeese, and sometimes a human guard who is quite willing to shoot blindly into shadows.
The following night, there is a sprinkle of snow, so cold that it freezes Josip’s toes, even within the rags he has wrapped around his feet and secured with twine. Realizing that he could die in this weather, he makes his way by stealth to the factory, where he knows there will be warm coals glowing in the smelter behind the main building. Though there is a risk of being captured, he will sleep at last, and he will command his mind to wake him up before dawn, in order to flee back into invisibility.
Josip knows where the hole under the fence is to be found, and it lets him into the compound. No adult could enter this way, but he is just skinny enough to slide under, scratching his back on a wire. No matter, he will be warm for the night. The front vent on the smelter furnace reveals a quiet inferno inside; though dying down, it will radiate heat until morning. Behind it is the cubbyhole, and into this shadow-within-shadows he crawls, curls into a ball, and falls asleep.
He is yanked brutally into light and terror. A hand grips him by the collar of his jacket, swinging him in the air, his feet dangling inches above the ground. It is the foreman, a burly man of great strength who can toss a sheet of steel without help and without sweat. Now he holds a bird by its neck and is growling at it, demanding to know how the boy got in.
Josip’s collar is choking him; he can only open and close his mouth; nothing comes in, nothing goes out. The foreman, seeing this, throws him upward a few inches and lets him fall to the ground.
“Lasta!” he snarls. “You good-for-nothing! What are you doing here? Your aunt has been worried sick over you all week.”
He gives Josip a kick in the hind end for good measure. “Answer!”
He cannot answer. My uncle killed my family and my friends, but my auntie does not know and soon my uncle will cut me into pieces, and nobody will know. This cannot be said, and the soundless scream crams the words farther down inside. The foreman curses, grabs the boy by the scruff of the neck, and pulls him upright. He hauls him across the back lot, throws him inside a storage shed, then closes and locks it.
“Stay there, and don’t move!” he yells, banging on the metal door with his fist. “Don’t even think of trying to get out. When your aunt arrives for work, she’ll give you what you deserve, running off, not letting her know where you went. You made her crazy, and not a lick of work have we had from her these past five days. She sits at her desk crying. Crying, I tell you! All day long she cries. What kind of boy are you, wretched ingrate, breaking a woman’s heart—”
And so forth. Josip is so sore in body and numbed in mind that his emotions do not register the insults. He sinks down and sits in the dark with his chin on his chest, forehead on knees. In fact, he dozes.
Eva does not come. He knows the day is passing because the crack of light at the bottom of the door slides sideways. He watches it move, hour after hour. Then it slips outside entirely, leaving only a faint glow. Then nothing.
Now the door is unlocked. The foreman throws it wide open, and shouts, “Get up!” Josip cannot make his legs obey. Once again, the man lifts him by his collar. It is dusk outside, and under the yard-light men are heading homeward through the open gate.
The foreman shakes him and says, “Well, she didn’t show. No doubt she’s sick in bed because of you. Well, I’m not going to miss my supper.”
Fist on the boy’s collar, he half drags, half leads Josip out onto the street and stomps along it in the direction of the apartment where Eva lives. Josip’s feet barely touch the ground and spin like wheels trying to keep up.
“If she’s in bed, your uncle will deal with you”, growls the foreman, so angry about wasting his free time over this runaway that he cannot resist an occasional shake.
Now the a
partment looms, and Josip is in agony, paralyzed with the dread of his impending death. One strong man will hand him over to another, and the other will take him away by force to a very private place and slice pieces from his body, until every part of him is meat.
Josip is howling with wide-open mouth, though these are not sounds that can be heard by any ears. His eyes are crazed, and he cannot even struggle to escape. The foreman drags him up three flights of stairs and comes to a halt by the apartment door. He kicks on it with his shoe.
No one answers from inside; no one opens the door.
“Poor Eva”, mutters the foreman. “See, she’s so worn out she’s gone to bed. And where’s your uncle? No matter, he’ll soon be back, I wager.”
He waggles the door handle. Finding it unlocked, he pushes the door open and steps inside, pulling Josip along.
“Eva! Wake up! Look, I’ve got your boy. Come and get him, I can’t stay and babble.”
The room is dark, but a dim light comes from the open bedroom door.
“Eva? Wake up, girl, I haven’t got all night.”
They enter the bedroom, and by the light of a bedside candle they see that she is there, awake, sitting at the foot of the bed, with her back to the door. She is rocking her body forward and backward.
Jure is there too, sleeping on his back, eyes closed, arms by his sides. Eva is holding one of his hands. Jure’s mouth is wide open. The muzzle of his rifle is inside his mouth, the gun lying lengthwise from his chest to his groin. One hand droops over the firing piece, and a finger lies limply on the trigger.
“Oh, God”, groans the foreman, and lets go of Josip.
The top of Jure’s skull is gone, the thick blond hair at the crown is a mass of gore. The wall above the bed is splattered. The pillow is entirely red; the bed also is soaked with blood.
Memory erases from the mind of the young certain details that in old age they strive to remember, if they live to old age. Ever afterward, Josip will be unable to recall a single detail of what occurs during the following two or three days before his uncle is buried. It does not matter. The moment of knowledge was enough. The killer is dead. Killed by what hand is uncertain, though all the evidence points to suicide. Years upon years of analyzing the details observed that night extract from the single searing image nothing more than what is seen. How the death is explained, what his aunt says, if anything, what is done with the body, when the bed and walls are cleaned, when or how it is decided that Josip will return to live with his aunt—all is gone. Not a trace ever again surfaces.