The logic of dreams differs from the logic of reality. This logic ought to be investigated so that one knows how to behave in their dreams, or so that a good police investigator can investigate his own dream.
During these six months he didn’t say a word to his wife. She, of course, noticed that Ilija wasn’t sleeping. At first, she urged him to see a doctor, but he didn’t want to, so she got him sleeping pills, which he took, though they didn’t do a thing to help him sleep. Finally she started to suspect that her Ilija was having an affair. This suspicion generated domestic hell, which, besides the two of them and their four children, involved the neighbors, her parents, her brother and sister-in-law. He derived a strange pleasure from this since it distracted him from his dream and the futile investigation he was leading, becoming ever more convinced of the difficulty of carrying out an investigation from afar. Is there a greater distance than the separation of dreams from reality in the very same head?
After six months, the investigation led him to the following conclusion: the only place where he could fall asleep was the Hotel Majestic; everything around that hotel, Belgrade, Zagreb, the whole world, was the space where his insomnia dwelled. At night, as soon as his head hit the hotel pillow, after a few hours of deep and empty sleep, similar to being in a coma, he had the same dream; in the middle of that dream was the police case from the beginning of April 1941, most likely from Friday, April 4.
He went to the Croatian State Archives, then to the Zagreb national and university libraries, digging through newspaper documents, searching in vain for the name Hinko Ajzler. He also asked about him in Belgrade; through his police connections he requested that Serbian colleagues look into the name, but they likewise found nothing. Finally, by complete accident — most great discoveries are made by accident — he discovered on the Internet that the Archives of Serbia had digitized their entire collection of the daily newspaper Politika, from the very first issue, printed on January 12, 1904, to the very last, printed on April 6, 1941, a few hours before the German bombing of Belgrade. It took him ten minutes to find an unsigned article with the headline “Mentally Disturbed Clerk Poisons and Hangs Himself,” appearing on the tenth page of the issue from April 5, 1941. The text described his dream word for word, while the accompanying photograph showed Hinko Ajzler looking just as he had in the dreams, perhaps slightly younger.
Ilija Soldo was tremendously relieved. So, the case had existed in reality, although that reality was imprisoned in the depths of the past, in the year 1941. This completely freed him of the fear that had tormented him from the start, so unspeakable that it couldn’t even be mentioned in this story — that he had gone insane and that his dream and the persistence of his insomnia were only symptoms of a serious and irreversible psychological disorder. If everything was as real as in this article from Politika, then he couldn’t be crazy. Especially since there was no way he could have known about this article before he’d first had his dream.
He came upon a detail in the article that would, it seemed, lead to the unraveling of this case. The murder, or suicide — as it had already been suggested in Politika’s headline — took place on April 4, 1941, on the fifth floor of a building located at 30 Kosmajska Street. Easily, without anyone’s help, and using only the Internet, he found out that in 1941 Maršala Birjuzova was called Kosmajska. On the virtual map of the city, intended for tourists and those who easily get lost in Belgrade, he was pointed to the gray and damp street that he’d taken to the Hotel Majestic’s garage on his first visit. That perpetually quiet, empty, and gray street, that clouded-over street, while Obilićev Venac, which the main hotel entrance opened out onto, was always bright and sunny.
Although he only arrived at this great discovery on the third day without sleep, by early morning the next day he was already on the bus to Belgrade. As he approached the border between Croatia and Serbia, at one time two warring countries whose mutual intolerance was turning into some sort of cultural tradition, his wife, whose name has been omitted here to avoid putting her in an awkward position, was packing up herself and the children, firm in her decision to get a divorce. But in Ilija’s crazed euphoria he didn’t care about anything anymore, because it seemed he was on the verge of cracking the greatest case of his police career.
Before he went to the hotel, Ilija Soldo walked up and down the short street called Maršala Birjuzova — named after the Soviet general and one of the liberators of the city, who was killed in a plane crash on his way to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the city’s liberation — and recognized that the building in which Hinko Ajzler had lived no longer exists. It was most likely destroyed during the bombing during World War II, perhaps even by April 6, 1941. He peeked over a tall wall which surrounded a synagogue and peered furtively at a police officer, who had come out from the little glass house to monitor the man who kept crossing back and forth in front of him. But he let him pass, which is how the young Belgrade police officer by the name of Perica Utješanović — the son of Jova Utješanović and Stoja Utješanović, née Ćopić, who came to Serbia in August 1995 in a long line of Serbs expelled from Croatia during Operation Storm, the last major Croatian war operation, settling in Borča, the poorest suburb of Belgrade, now married, a father of two-year-old twins, a little girl and boy — would never find out that he had failed to identify a senior Croatian police officer, who in the subsequent days and months would be in the headlines of all of Belgrade’s tabloids.
Ilija Soldo suffered a serious brain hemorrhage that night and fell into a coma from which he has not awoken to this very day. For the next seven days he lay at the Military Medical Academy Hospital in Belgrade and was then secretly airlifted back to one of Zagreb’s hospitals. The Zagreb media have not reported this event, nor have they said what happened to the chief of homicide investigations in the largest Croatian police department, and what kind of a secret mission led one of the most recognized Croatian officers to Belgrade. In Zagreb, the revelations published in the Belgrade tabloids were taken as yet another, though this time quite bizarre, expression of Serbian hostility toward Croatia.
Phantom of the National Theater
by Aleksandar Gatalica
Translated by Nada Petković
Republic Square
My name is Dr. Erich Hetzel. I am a theater director. I am German, an evangelical Christian, but because I married a Jewish woman, I found myself on the Nazis’ list of seven artists at the National Theater to be eliminated in 1941. I remember it was a hot day, shortly after the German bombing of Belgrade on April 6, when our interim director Veljković summoned me to his half-destroyed office above Republic Square and said: “My dear Dr. Hetzel, you, a pure-blooded Aryan, why did you need this affair with a Jewish woman…? Well, what should I do now? You, so to speak, ‘dug your own grave.’ Here, look at Articles 18 to 20 in the decree of General Förster, the military governor of the German-occupied territory of Serbia. In Article 18 it reads clearly: A Jew is considered any person descended from at least three Jewish ancestors (this assumes the parents of both one’s father and mother).”