And then came the nineties. And everything changed.
Hate is the feeling most easy to manipulate. And there was a lot of hate in those years. It spilled out over the edges of our television screens, barked at us from our radios, leaked out like the black oil from The X-Files in freshly printed newspapers. It waited for us in places we least expected it. To beat and break us, like those who beat up the boy whose life my colleague and I may have saved.
Hate came from the other side too. The Americans gifted us a parcel of bombs in 1999.
But that didn’t make Dr. Ryan any less significant, any less heroic.
I read my grandfather’s description of him in his journaclass="underline"
I met Dr. Edward Ryan, called Eddie, the head of the American Red Cross in Serbia, in the Belgrade army hospital. A solid, strong man, you didn’t know if you were looking at a soldier or a doctor. He was a little of both. I’d seen him earlier, how he briskly walked down the Belgrade streets while the people cried out, “Viva, Ryan!” He was famous even before he came to the Serbian capital. Somehow the residents of Belgrade got wind of his heroism in Mexico, how when the Mexicans put him in front of a firing squad and accused him of being an American spy, he just smoked his pipe and waited for them to shoot, cool as a cucumber.
And now he was smoking that same pipe, looking at me as though he suspected something. Then he offered me some rakija. On the worktable lay an undetonated grenade.
“I like being around death,” he told me. “So I’m always on the edge. Sharp as a bayonet. Ready for action.”
And he really was.
With him, generally, there was no bullshitting. He knew he’d lock up his closest colleagues if they turned on him. He worked day and night. When he wasn’t in the operating room he was roaming around Belgrade, picking up supplies, food, medicine, and training people amid the ruins.
He came to Belgrade on October 16, 1914, three months after the Austro-Hungarians attacked Serbia and started World War I. He stayed when they occupied it, the first time in autumn of 1914, and the second time in the autumn of 1915. The Germans wouldn’t touch him since he was a citizen of a neutral country. Which he knew, and used to his advantage. He saved the hospital by ordering that an American flag be raised on the roof. The Austrians weren’t allowed to shoot it.
I asked him about the headless body. He shrugged, and then said, rather cynically, “Well, we can rule out natural causes.”
The headless body. Aćim Dugalić.
My grandfather wrote that the deceased had been in a special company responsible for creating diversions. It wasn’t clear who was in charge. But one name did stand out.
Apis.
Dragutin Dimitrijević Apis, the leader of a secret society called the Black Hand — and also the conspirators who, in May 1903, killed King Aleksandar Obrenović and Queen Draga, and put King Petar from the rivaling Karađorđević dynasty on the throne. At the time he was something of a kingpin of all the Serbian secret services. A dangerous man.
My grandfather went on in his journaclass="underline"
That led me to believe that he was our main suspect. It could be that Aćim Dugalić had not been in Apis’s good graces. And that he’d ordered his execution. In a conversation I had with an officer from Apis’s innermost circle, a man from Niš named Vemić, I was informed that Dugalić had been known as someone who had “chosen the rival party.”
“Traitor…” a drunken Vemić told me, sitting at a table in the kafana Zlatna Moruna, the Golden Sturgeon.
“And what does Apis do to traitors?” I asked him.
“Nothing,” he said, agreeing to another glass of rosé.
He looked at me with glassy eyes and added, “He sends Nemanja.”
So there we were. Major Nemanja Lukić. A suspect. Possibly a killer.
“What do you know about him?” I asked my father as he stoked the fire beneath the still.
“Arsenije never proved that Lukić killed Dugalić.”
“That’s not what I asked. Do you have any paperwork on him? Photographs? A dossier?”
“Lukić had been a doctor too. He trained in London. Since he spoke good English, our folks gave him to Ryan to help him out and assist in operations. Lukić had been a member of the Black Hand as well.” He stood, broke a piece of dry wood, and tossed it aside, looking at me anxiously. “Grandpa left the case unsolved on purpose, which you probably know…?”
“Yeah, I know. I just don’t get why.”
“Why? Because some secrets need to stay secret.”
“Is that some kind of Black Hand motto?”
“No, son… Just, Grandpa figured it wasn’t worth the trouble.”
“He figured?”
“I suppose so. Murder during wartime? When so many people were already dying, who was counting one more body? But fuck it… Grandpa was a stubborn guy. Like you.”
“Good to hear it’s genetic.”
“So’s alcoholism. Just saying.”
“Ah, what are you gonna do.”
“I’ll tell you something that isn’t in the journal.”
“I’m listening.”
“One night, about a year before he died, he got drunk — you know how he got. He told me that in 1915, he got a visit from Lukić. Right in the Glavnjača. He’d never come so close to shitting his pants in his whole life.”
I got to thinking, and my old man went back to stoking the fire under the still as though nothing had happened.
I didn’t know a lot about my grandfather. Just what my father had told me and what I remembered through a haze. I was only nine when he died. But there was one thing I was sure of when it came to Arsenije Malavrezić: he didn’t scare easy.
“If you really want to dig through it,” my father piped up again, “there are some documents in the clinic archives.”
The guy had to be nuts.
After all, how with-it could someone be who’d decided to spend their whole life surrounded by books and document registers that no one cared about?
The archivist in the clinic center, a tubby, middle-aged guy, collected vinyl fucking records. For half an hour he blathered on at me about how he didn’t have enough room at home, so he’d brought some of his collection to the archives. He just droned on and on about it. But I had to put up with this idiot, at least until I got what the archive had on Lukić and Ryan. Then I’d tell him where he could stick his vinyl.
He pulled out a file and handed it to me. I started leafing through the documents.
“He’s an interesting guy,” said the archivist. “Dr. Lukić.”
There were photos in the file too. Mostly from the war. Soldiers, officers, nurses, prisoners of war, the sick and wounded… everything to do with misery. War really is hell. That’s why we keep doing it — we’re a hellish people.
There was a photo of Dr. Ryan as well. He’d been the real deal. Dressed in his uniform, a face that radiated certainty, a close-cropped soldier’s haircut, and large, piercing eyes.