Veljković looked at me with a weasel-like gaze and continued: “Rather, in your case, whether or not your dad’s dad is Jewish, you fall under Article 19. Look — look what it says: In the same way, a Jew is a Jewish mutt married to a Jewess. And there we are! What am I to do? You are married to a Jewish woman. No, no, I have to oust you from the National Theater. You’ll put on one more performance, and that will be the end. Let your Old Testament god save you, my esteemed Dr. Hetzel.”
Barbara, my dear wife, what a strong and murderous rage I felt in that moment. I thought I would become a killer that very day, as soon as I clenched my hands around the neck of that Veljković. Instead, I didn’t join the trade until 1942.
That same year, Miodrag Mika Golubjev was the detective on the job. He wore a pinstriped suit with an always starched shirt collar. He gnawed on a toothpick and had an unfilled cavity in his upper molar, which didn’t smell too bad. He was careful not to show his stubborn dandruff on the shoulders of his dark suit, which could ruin his reputation. With his mediocre education, Miodrag Mika had been known as a clever policeman even before the war. He turned down an offer from his cousin Sergei Golubjev — the Belgrade police chief Dragomir Jovanović’s right-hand man — to transfer to the Special Police Department and become “Mr. Officer who chases Communists.” Instead, he chose to stay with the Criminal Investigation Bureau, affirming: “Never will the time come when people are killed for their Communist ideas; rather, crimes of passion will rule in the new social order.”
The track record of Detective Miodrag Mika Golubjev in 1941 was as follows. He solved two murders-for-hire at the open market, one particularly cruel family homicide in the home of a former upper-class Belgrade family in the Dedinje quarter, and the murder of an old lady on Krunska Street, committed by an insane provincial student on the basis of some philosophical ideas. His feats during the first year of the German occupation included catching two arsonists, a woman who’d committed infanticide, one pedophile, and one pillager.
“He was lucky,” his colleagues gossiped when he was promoted and assigned the most difficult case in 1942. “It will rain on his parade,” jabbered less successful detectives from the crime division, and it appears that — at least at first — they were right.
The following article that ran in the local paper Opštinske Novine attests to this:
The Criminal Investigation Bureau, every day throughout all of Belgrade, prevents violence, arson, and vile homicides that many believe could be committed today and go unpunished, under the veil of war, poverty, and limited access. Nothing can surprise the well-prepared detectives from all seven of the Belgrade quarters. They’ve seen all sorts of riffraff and vagabonds, even before the Germans seized control of Belgrade. And yet, one brutal and ferocious murder before the eyes of hundreds of spectators surprised even the most seasoned police officer of the First Belgrade Precinct.
The drama Elga by Gerhart Hauptmann was staged at the newly reopened National Theater. In one scene, a confirmed bachelor, played by the actor Miodrag Marinković Baća, alias Dude, is waiting for his sweetheart, but there is no sign of her. The bachelor twiddles his thumbs, smooths the lapels of his frock coat, and, in the end, dozes off. The bride is due to appear, trailed by a flood of audience laughter, and poses many daunting questions to which the snoring bachelor has no answers. This is how it happened, except that the bachelor did not snore as written in the script, rather he fell “dead asleep.” One after the other, her questions went unanswered. Silence. According to the script the bachelor is supposed to startle and jump — but he didn’t move. The prompters were puzzled, the stage manager didn’t know what to do; the actors started improvising, until suddenly, Dude fell from the chair, blood running from his lips, completely soiling his coat.
As a result, the National Theater audience certainly witnessed the most vile murder of 1942. As we have been informed, the case was assigned to the best detective in the First Belgrade Precinct, Miodrag Mika Golubjev, who arrived at the crime scene in no time and forbade spectators from leaving the grand hall of the recently reopened theater. Word has it that throughout the night he questioned the audience — member by member — and only in the wee hours did he begin interrogating the actors.
The set designer Vladimir Žedrinski, a refugee from Russia, muttered something in Russian and the composer Mihovil Logar, a refugee from Slovenia, said something in Slovenian. The others rattled on in some unknown language. Out of those potentially involved in the crime, only the director, Dr. Erich Hetzel, was missing from the scene. Thus, this experienced policeman immediately had a suspect; he tossed away his toothpick, called it a day, and went home to get a few hours of sleep.
We will inform our loyal readers as to how the event unfolds.
I, Erich Hetzel, killed Dude. What a moron — he is not guilty of anything. I have a plan to kill — one by one — all the actors in the National Theater. I’ll do it because of my wife Barbara, who has drawn me into Judaism. I am banned from further work at the theater. Elga, by Gerhart Hauptmann, was my last performance. They believe that I’ve fled to a village like a protagonist in some Russian drama, but I am still hiding in the theater building. I descend floor by floor. I am now closest to the bloody stone of the Turkish gallows upon which the National Theater was built. In old times, the Turkish Stambol Gate stood here — the starting point of the road to Istanbul — but it was also the place where criminals and rebels were hung as a warning to travelers entering and leaving the city.
No one knows as well as I do the passageways and doors of the National Theater. One of the doors is quite peculiar…
It is now 2019. The actors have just ended a big strike and replaced one director with another, who is just as disliked as the previous one, so they wonder what to do: should they go through directors like Kleenex or take charge of the situation? But how? From that deep and fruitful thought, a forgotten event (although recorded in the nation’s theatrical history) stirs them. Someone was murdered onstage.
In 2019, the role of Nikolai Ivanov, a long-standing member of the Council of Peasant Affairs, in the Chekhov drama Ivanov, was played by Svetolik Beložanski, also known as Dude. Toward the end of the play, the Dude from 2019 spoke his lines:
IVANOV: What do you mean, come on? I’ll put an end to all this here and now. I feel like a young man again, it’s my old self that’s speaking. [Takes out his revolver.]
SASHA: [Screams] I know what he wants to do. Nikolai, for God’s sake!
IVANOV: I’ve rolled downhill long enough, it’s time to call a halt. I’ve outstayed my welcome. Go away. Thank you, Sasha.
SASHA: [Shouts] Nikolai, for God’s sake! Stop him!
IVANOV: Leave me alone! [Runs to one side and shoots himself.]