“Plum rakija,” he said. “Homemade.”
“You’ll never get that fire started,” I told Geiger. “Not without smaller sticks or some wood shavings.”
Oehl opened one of the bottles and tasted it, let out a gasp and handed it to Geiger. “Fucking hell. This is good stuff. I reckon there’s more alcohol in this than was inside my old grandpa on the day he died.”
“Nonsense,” Geiger told me, “I’ll get this going in just a few seconds,” and without a moment’s hesitation he took a huge mouthful of spirit and then gobbed it all into the fireplace, at which point the whole wall and some of the floor—not just the fireplace—went up in a ball of fire as if a flamethrower had fired blazing oil and petrol into an enemy trench.
I jumped out of the way but not soon enough as I felt my eyebrows scorch, much to Geiger’s loud amusement.
“What are you trying to do, you lunatic?” I yelled. “You’ll set the whole place ablaze if you’re not careful.”
“I told you I’d get that fire going, didn’t I?”
Oehl smiled and handed me his flask. “Here, Captain,” he said, “sit down and have a drink. Welcome to Croatia. This is proper rakija. Not that milky whore’s piss we were drinking earlier. Best you’ve got a real drink inside you when we cross the River Sava.”
I took a drink to calm my nerves and stop me from punching Geiger in the mouth.
“You’re right, Sergeant,” he said, still laughing. “This is the good stuff. Must be eighty proof. You give an army enough of this, you could conquer the world.”
“Or just burn it down,” I said.
Geiger frowned. “Same thing.”
Twenty-one
The River Sava was faster and bigger than I’d expected, at least thirty meters across and as brown as my leather belt. The bridge—the only one for miles that hadn’t been destroyed—was a through-truss iron bridge on which a large Ustaše checkpoint had been erected, complete with two 20-millimeter Flak guns and a German-built half-track. From some of the ten or fifteen men lounging in the sun on top of the sandbags surrounding the 20-millimeters, Geiger and Oehl learned that there was a band of Bosnian Muslim partisans operating along the Prijedor Road—which was the more direct, southerly route to Banja Luka—and they strongly advised us to go east, along the road to Gradiška, before turning south.
“Bosnian Muslim partisans,” I said as, taking the Ustaše’s advice, we drove across and then away from the bridge toward the east. “Shouldn’t they be on our side? If they’re Muslims?”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” said Geiger. “But they’re not. You’d think they hated Jews, like us. But they don’t. Nothing down here is what it should be.”
“Nothing,” said Oehl.
“So, if we see any fucking Muslims between here and Banja Luka, we shoot first and ask questions later. Got that?”
I might have argued with them about this until both men opened the bolts on their daddies and pointed them over the side of the Mercedes. When you’re a long way from home you get to know when it’s best to keep your mouth shut. Even so, Geiger seemed to sense my discomfort and felt obliged to offer an explanation.
“Last week the sergeant and I were in Berlin-Babelsberg, helping to train the Handschar. A Bosnian Muslim SS Division that’s supposed to be under the control of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Only it’s not. That pie-head couldn’t control his own wind. You see, a lot of these Muslim bastards don’t even want to be in the SS. And they certainly didn’t want to leave their homes in Bosnia. Half of them only volunteered so they could pawn the boots and the uniform. They’ve gone to France now, most of them, for further training, but in our opinion they’re not to be relied on. None of them are. They’ve got no love for Catholics, and they’ve got even less for the Ustaše. That mosque you mentioned. It means nothing. The Poglavnik—that’s what Ante Pavelic calls himself; it’s a bit like your Führer—he made that mosque just for show, really. To try to win the Muslims over and because he and Himmler thought they were pure Aryans, and because they hated Jews. But they’re not and they don’t. What’s more, there aren’t any Muslims in the Ustaše administration and there are not likely to be, either. A lot of Ustaše units have burned Muslim villages because some Muslims sided with the Serbs. The Muslims know that. Which is why a lot of them now fight with the partisans.”
“Don’t trust anyone who’s not wearing a uniform,” muttered Oehl, “that’s what I say.”
Geiger patted the submachine gun on his knee. “But we’re ready for them if they want us to send them to heaven. That’s what they believe, you see, Gunther. If they get killed in action, fighting for Allah, they are ushered immediately into God’s presence. Into Paradise. A Paradise with delicious food and drink and seventy-two female companions.”
“After that week in Babelsberg I’ll be happy to oblige any one of them who wants his ticket upstairs,” said Oehl. “And that’s the truth.”
“Maybe the captain here doesn’t believe in heaven,” said Geiger. “How about it, Gunther? Do you believe in Paradise?”
I thought for a minute. I couldn’t think of a better definition of Paradise than one that involved being given a bath by Dalia Dresner in a negligee.
“Oh yes,” I said. “I’ve been there. As a matter of fact, I was there just the other night. But there was only the one female companion. Frankly one female companion in Paradise is enough for me. And I rather think that if God does exist, he’ll look like her. At least he will in my heaven.”
“Lucky you,” said Oehl. “Me, I’ve never even been in love. And it sounds like you are.”
“He’s a typical German,” sneered Geiger. “A romantic fool if ever I heard one.”
“Right now I think I’m more fool than romantic,” I admitted.
“That’s fucking Bosnia for you,” said Oehl.
Geiger laughed. “We’ll see just how romantic you are when you’ve been here a week. This country is enough to make anyone feel repulsive and uncaring. Just look at Sergeant Oehl. He used to write poetry, didn’t you, Sergeant?”
“That’s right. I did. Had a gift for it, so my schoolteachers said.”
“Hard to believe, I know,” said Geiger. “And it seems his gift for killing is even greater than his gift for verse.”
Oehl grinned. It was the first time I’d seen him smile, and I was struck with how regular and white his teeth were. In that gray head his pink mouth and white teeth were decidedly lupine.
Going east now, with the River Sava on our left, thick woodland on our right, and the road not much more than a dirt track, our progress slowed again. You would not have thought the road to nowhere could be so flat or so straight. And yet in spite of all that I had seen, I couldn’t have felt less cynical. I tried to remind myself that with each kilometer I traveled I wasn’t getting farther away from Berlin and Dalia, but nearer her continuing good opinion of me, for wouldn’t she be grateful when at last I found her father and gave him his long-lost daughter’s letter? Even more grateful than she had been on the night before I had left Berlin to fly to Zagreb? You might even say that I was a little bit in love with her even then, for what else is love but the constant occupation of one person’s mind by the thought of another?
It was very quiet now. We seemed to drift through the thick heat like a mote in a beam of bright sunshine. Everything was still. But it was not a stillness that made you feel at peace. It was a preternatural stillness, as if the forest or some hidden creatures were eyeing Hansel and Gretel hungrily. All you could hear was the sound of the car’s engine and the occasional curse from one of us as the car’s wheel hit another pothole. Which was probably how we ended up with a flat tire. I steered to the side of the road, although there was no other traffic we could have impeded.
“Shit,” I said, switching off the engine and glancing around. There was a smell of burning wood in the air that seeme
d to indicate some human presence thereabouts, but through the thick curtain of trees no one was visible. And not even a breath of wind to cool things down. The leaves on the branches above our heads stayed quite motionless, as if everything around us was holding its breath. Even the birds had grown silent.
“Better make it as fast as we can,” said Geiger. “This is not a good place to change a wheel.”
“It’s never a good place to change a wheel,” I said, getting out of the car.
Instead of helping me to remove the spare from its snug place on the lid of the trunk, the other two men walked about thirty paces along the road in opposite directions, lit a cigarette and, kneeling down on one leg, kept careful lookout with submachine guns at the ready, leaving me to get on with changing the tire. They didn’t need to say anything. It was better that one man changed the wheel and the other two remained on watch.
I took off my shirt and set quickly to work, hoping that the sound of the bees might help me to stay as calm as they seemed while they collected pollen. But my heart was thumping in my chest. I knew my companions were right. This was no place to stop. You could have hidden a whole division of partisans in the trees by the road. Even now I felt unseen eyes on the small of my bare back.
It had been a while since I’d changed a tire but I managed it in double-quick time. I was just about to shout out that I’d finished when I realized that both Geiger and Oehl were gone and that I was alone on that quiet road. Where were they? In the trees? Down by the river? I waited for a long moment, hardly daring to call out in case I alerted any partisans to our presence. But after a while I fetched my pistol and walked quickly down to the riverbank to wash my hands and fill a canteen. I was almost back at the car when I heard a loud burst of gunfire up ahead. Whether it meant we were under attack I couldn’t tell so I knelt down by the car and waited. A minute passed and I decided to get back in the car and start it up in case we needed to make a quick getaway. After another minute I put the car into gear and crept slowly up the road, to where the gunfire had come from.
Geiger saw me before I saw him. He and Oehl were standing in a small forest clearing, staring at something in the bushes.
“It’s all right,” he said. “False alarm.”
I stopped the engine and got out to look. The bodies of two men lay untidily in a bush, like lost items of laundry drying in the sun. Large red stains in the center of their chests seemed to be getting bigger by the second. Neither of the two was older than sixteen and both were extraordinarily handsome, which seemed to make their accidental killing even worse. It was only gradually that I perceived them to be identical twins. Next to their bodies a dog was whimpering with grief and trying to lick one of the twins back to life. An ancient-looking, single-barreled shotgun lay on the ground a few meters away.
“False alarm?” I said. “What about the gun?”
“Just hunters, I reckon. Out for their pot. Not Muslim partisans, that’s for sure.”
I stared at the twins; there was nothing about their dress that distinguished them in any way from the men I’d seen working on the new minarets in Zagreb.
“How can you tell?”
“The dog,” said Oehl. “No Muslim would keep a pet dog.”
“Poor bastards were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Probably fell asleep hiding in the bush, waiting for a pigeon, and then we happened along. I heard something in the bushes, saw the gun, and opened fire. Simple as that.”
“Pity,” observed Oehl. “Nice-looking lads. Twins, I reckon.”
Then while we still watched, miraculously one of the twins shifted and groaned at the same time, as if the dog had worked some kind of blasphemous miracle. But not for long. Some residually civilized part of me was just about to suggest that he wasn’t beyond help when Geiger killed both man and dog with another short burst from his submachine gun.
“He was just a kid,” I said.
“Come on,” said Geiger. “There’s no time to waste with stupid sentiment. Let’s get moving again before the shots bring someone to investigate. With any luck we should make Banja Luka before dusk.”
Twenty-two
Occupying some high ground a couple of kilometers north of Banja Luka, the Franciscan monastery in Petricevac was easy to see. Umbilically attached to an imposing Roman Catholic church whose twin spires soared over the surrounding countryside like the tall hats of two ancient wizards, the monastery itself—with a hip roof and two large dormer windows—was more elegant country mansion than medieval cloister. A couple of old cars were parked on the gravel driveway and the general absence of any agriculture was evidence that these were monks for whom contemplation did not involve looking at a spade or tending a vineyard. The few trees served only to obscure the little road that led up to the monastery, which meant I drove around the place several times before finding an approach to the entrance. No one—not even a chicken or a dog—came to greet us. Perhaps they already knew better than to speak to three SS men.
I sounded the horn and stepped out of the car. Geiger lit a cigarette and leaned back in his car seat to angle his debauched face in the last of the day’s sunshine. I looked up at the many windows of the monastery without seeing so much as a single curious head. The place appeared to be deserted. And yet there was a vague smell of cooking in the air.
“Perhaps they’re Trappists,” said Geiger.
“These are Franciscans,” I said. “Not Cistercians.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Don’t ask me, but there’s a difference.”
“Like the SS and the SD, perhaps,” offered Oehl.
“Well, whatever they are,” said Geiger, “maybe they’ve taken a vow of silence.”
“Let’s hope not,” I said. “Otherwise we might be here for some time.” I collected the file of photographs of Father Ladislaus and walked toward the main door.
“If all else fails,” said Geiger, following me, “I could fire this in the air.”
I turned and saw that he was still carrying the daddy.
“For Christ’s sake, leave that thing in the car.”
“Believe me, when it comes to ending a vow of silence, you can’t beat one of these bastards.”
“Nevertheless. Please.”
Geiger shook his head and handed the daddy to Oehl before following me up a short flight of limestone steps to a set of black wooden double doors with an elliptical transom. On the wall by the doors was a large iron cross and a picture of a sleeping monk holding a skull whom I took to be Saint Francis with a putto playing a lute above his head. I hauled twice on a large bellpull and at the same time peered through some light green sidelights.
“That’s not my idea of a vision,” said Geiger, looking at the picture. “I don’t often doze off with a skull in my hand.”
“I think the point might be that we’re all going to fall asleep and die one day. Like that kid you shot on the road today.”
“While we’re here I’ll light a candle for him, if it will make you feel any better.”
“You do that. But it certainly won’t make that boy feel any better.” Seeing movement behind the glass, I added, “We’ll want to see the abbot.”
The door opened to reveal a muscular-looking man wearing a brown habit with a bald head and a large gray beard. Speaking fluent Shtokavian—which Geiger had explained to me is a dialect of Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, and Montenegrin—Geiger told him we urgently needed to see the abbot.
The monk bowed politely, asked us to accompany him, and we entered the monastery. This was an uncomfortable, hollow place of long echoes, semidarkness, hidden eyes, tangible silences, and the sour smell of baking bread. We walked the length of a long, uncarpeted corridor—which looked and felt more like a prison than a place where men lived by choice—that ran between damp walls painted two institutional tones of green and beige and past doors of plain wood that we
re without adornment of any sort. Bare lightbulbs hung from the plain ceiling. Another monk was sweeping the unvarnished floorboards with a rush broom, and somewhere a small bell in a clock was striking the hour. A door in some faraway chamber banged shut, but as Geiger and I marched behind the bearded monk our jackboots were the loudest thing in that building and sounded almost profane. We passed by the open door of a barely furnished refectory where forty or fifty men were silently eating bread and soup, and in a distant room a man began to loudly recite a monotonous prayer in Latin, which felt more superstitious than holy. I did not get the impression I was in a place of retreat and contemplation, more like some cold anteroom of purgatory that was a very long way from heaven. I shouldn’t like to have stayed there. Just to be in that place was to feel you were already dead, or in limbo, or worse.
The monk showed us into a plain room with a few comfortable but threadbare armchairs, bowed again, and asked us to wait while he went to fetch the abbot. He did not return. Geiger sat down and lit a cigarette. I stared out the grimy window at Sergeant Oehl, who appeared to have gone to sleep in the backseat of the Mercedes. After a while I sat down beside Geiger and lit one as well. If in doubt, smoke; that’s the soldier’s way.
Finally the abbot came to us. He was a largish man in his sixties—possibly older—with long gray hair, frosted eyebrows that were as big as fur stoles, a bloodhound’s face, and a boxing glove of a black beard. Keen blue eyes regarded us with justifiable suspicion. The SS may have been supporters of the Croatian fascist state—which itself supported the Roman Catholic Church—and yet no one who’d given his life to serving Christ could seriously have believed that serving Adolf Hitler was a better alternative.
He raised his hand in benediction, crossed the air above our heads, and said, “God bless all here.”
I stood up politely. Geiger stayed smoking in his armchair.
“Thank you for seeing us, Father Abbot. My name is Captain Gunther. And this is Captain Geiger.”