He considered saying something witty about the king remark, but he bottled those words up forever and waited for Helm to ask him once again if he was Mars, at which he quickly shook his head, looking the gestapo chief right in the tiny metal buttons of his eyes.
And who knows what he would’ve told them had they not beaten him?! Who knows what would’ve bobbed up from the bottom of him in that icy ocean of endless silence in which he’d been floating for one whole day, between the first and second interrogations?
While he sat in his cell and ate the lunch that the waiter, Mladen, had brought from the Ero Gurman kafana along with a message from his best friend Čedo to hang on, he felt for the first time in all those years of uncertainty and conspiracy something that could have been a hint of real fear. But he wasn’t shaken by the fact that his friend had done a stupid thing, as friends do, and ultimately paid with his head for wanting his buddy to “stuff himself with the finest ćevapi even under the Krauts.” While he swallowed the last bite, he was barely able to keep from shaking at the discovery that all the torture devices had been forged for nothing.
A man should simply be left to himself and the flow of time.
What if they abandoned him to oblivion? What if they left him in peace? What if no one ever gave him a second thought? What if his terrible secrets were covered in spiderwebs and became worthless?
Fortunately, the very next day they took him from the prison and brought him once again to Helm’s office on the first floor of the police precinct across the street, right by Terazije Square.
“Are you Mars?” Helm asked him, and he told him the truth.
And as soon as they beat him in the same way he’d beaten his own victims so many times, he knew he was safe.
Instead of time killing him, he would kill time — he would have enough of it to remember, at his leisure, what was most important. Alongside Helm’s investigation, he would finally have the opportunity to investigate himself, but not in order to discover where he’d erred (because he’d made no errors), but in order to revel for the last time in everything he’d accomplished.
“I’ll ask you again,” Helm said resolutely. “Are you Mars?”
“No.” He gave the truthful answer intending, while he received all those professionally inflicted punches, to remind himself of the events in his life that had made him worthy of such an end.
That everyone must die doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone has lived. But he had lived, and always at least two lives at the same time.
For while the Germans were convinced that the man they’d beaten was a black-marketeer and supplier of counterfeit passports who was stubbornly refusing to admit that he was Mars — he recalled his only meeting with the man who, under this pseudonym, had come to Belgrade in the late spring of ’41 carrying a message from Moscow about the postponement of Walter’s liquidation.
The Germans had, with the help of local scoundrels, already established their rule, but his life hadn’t changed at all. The shadows he lurked in were even deeper now, the secrets safer, but the goal remained the same.
What had changed was the world aboveground, the scenery in which he constantly moved, changing roles and clothes. For most people, losing one’s life was indeed easier than living it, but this could only help the world revolution.
The old world had literally crumbled and shown people its diabolical underside, but because of this, there were more women who experienced a completely different kind of change.
They revealed their slender necks in a novel way; they took slower sidelong glances; and their short, almost inaudible breath said more than a dozen of the most common impertinent words.
Such was the woman he’d followed home right after he’d said goodbye to Mars. Such were all the woman he’d been with, and he tried keeping the number of women he kissed higher than the number of men he killed.
“And how do you do that?” asked one of the Kamarić sisters, whose house had been his first refuge upon arrival in Belgrade.
All three of them were young, pretty, and cheerful; all three knew that Gojko Tamindžić surely wasn’t his real name and he surely wasn’t a locksmith. But they felt that this tall, powerful man who’d been brought to the house by their father’s acquaintance, a prominent Belgrade attorney, had in no time unlocked hearts in which he could leave whatever he wanted.
The lawyer told their father that he was a war buddy from Kaimakchalan, that he had a nervous disorder he was seeking treatment for in Belgrade. But it was instantly clear to everyone in the house that if someone was crazy, it was the rest of the world, and if there was someone who could heal, it was their new tenant, whom they soon stopped charging rent because his stories about Moscow, Mexico, Spain, Turkey, and Herzegovina were more valuable.
He told them about the Russian winter, the Mexican sun, the Spanish bullfights, and the Herzegovinian stećak tombstones.
And about women.
“So how many have you had?” asked Vera, and he replied that he’d left a piece of his heart with each one.
“Do we know any of them?” Nada asked, snickering, and he asked whether they’d heard of Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich.
“And how do you do that?” asked Ljubica, but their father entered the kitchen and said that an unfamiliar man had inquired as to whether they perhaps had a tenant.
Five months later they arrested them all.
It wasn’t the first time the police had surrounded a house where he’d been hiding.
He could’ve snuck out through the basement, quietly overpowered the two agents standing guard there, and found another safe haven by evening.
“Why did you surrender?” Helm asked him near the end of the final interrogation, knowing that a beaten man in his condition couldn’t answer him even if he wanted to.
“Why did he surrender?” Makhin asked Stalin as soon as he read the last page of the interrogation notes.
Stalin stood at the window and Makhin saw in the glass the reflection of his motionless face.
“He didn’t surrender,” Stalin said under his breath, and then, generously permitting the readers to imagine a newborn silence, pulled on his pipe and exhaled a fragrant cloud that soon vanished into the shadows of the chamber’s high ceiling.
“He di… didn’t?” Makhin stuttered, lacking the courage to put a simpler question behind these simple words.
“Didn’t,” repeated Stalin, looking his reflection right in the eye. “He merely carried out an order.”
“I understand,” said Makhin, though to him, as to most of us, it wasn’t at all clear what the hell that was supposed to mean.
My editor even flew into a fit.
“Man, you can’t ruin a good story like that!” He was almost screaming when I decided to respond to his call.
“You really think it’s good?” I asked after a few moments of silence.
“Excellent. But it will be mediocre rubbish if you don’t change the end,” he said in a calmer tone, justifiably afraid that I’d hang up, remove the SIM from my cell phone, delete the file, and never write another sentence.
“Listen, man…” He waited to see if I was still there.
“I’m listening.”
“Let’s meet somewhere and figure it out.”
So here I am in Pioneer Park, where I arrived ten minutes prior to our agreed-upon time. It’s a sunny day; children are playing; pensioners are sitting on the benches, reading the paper. Cars and buses speed along the boulevard, behind which sits the National Assembly building, and at the curb on the park’s edge stands an open double-decker bus that will soon take visitors on a sightseeing tour of the city.