When a person finds himself in a state such as mine, everything around him takes on a different aspect: people seem to laugh differently, walk differently, react to you differently, and you, for that matter, react differently to them. In a word, the world and the people who walk in it appear hostile to you. I would like it not to be so, but that’s how it is and now I don’t know what I can do about it, apart from describe it. Somehow, I say, everything changes, which means that even the landscape around you seems to change as well. In keeping with all that hatred and that disgust, my life had in store for me an event that would contribute to the further development of those fundamentally negative feelings, which are more a reflection of a man’s inherent weakness than the consequence of any repressive social system. Here, with the aforementioned event, I am already nearing the end of my story, because after it things moved quickly, leading right to our exile. Briefly, this is what happened:
The machinery of war had not really gotten going yet when about ten soldiers moved into my parents’ house. It had become the custom at that time for the army to take shelter in private houses, while their owners put up with this honor without a word. Well, those ten of ours were the most utterly vile individuals imaginable, and drunkards to boot, so the house resounded with banging and crashing all day long. None of my family had ever been particularly quick to anger— they were always mild people. My father, but particularly my mother, put up with various insults at first—admittedly, still on the edge of the tolerable, but eventually developing into something really unpleasant. Up until the moment that I’m about to describe to you, right up to that moment—or, more exactly, right up to the third day after it—I knew almost nothing about what was going on in that house. I too had been mobilized and billeted in someone else’s house, and I considered it my duty to endure that burden silently as well, although the knowledge that soldiers were occupying my parental home was never far from my thoughts… (I even carried the key to the locked room in which I still kept most of my books and other personal effects, with me, just in case some stranger found his way in there.) It turned out that those soldiers did whatever they liked. They turned the house into a real pigsty. A certain Brekalović particularly excelled at this—a true alcoholic with a pale, drawn, ghostly face. Only the thin, blue veins on his nose disturbed the eerie pallor of it. He was particularly talented, I say. And he had several serious quarrels with my folks. You can imagine, I suppose, that they were about politics. He didn’t fail to mention, during every argument— for he had presumably heard me talking during one of my visits home—that their son, despite being in the army, was a traitor to his nation. Brekalović wanted, also, in the name of said nation, for my room to be unlocked so that he could personally see what I was hiding in it and what kind of books, if you please, the philosopher reads. Mother demanded that Brekalović leave the house. God only knows all the things she’d already learned about Brekalović—but, in any case, she didn’t dare share any of this with father and me. One evening, finally, that loathsome figure from our nightmare life broke down the locked door of my room and found himself among my things, among the books and papers of my philosophical work and essay-writing. He stood, the obscurantist, in the middle of the room with Kadare’s The Castle in his hands, God knows how he managed to hit on that, of all things, among all the works by Nietzsche, Kant, Spinoza, or Hegel… The author’s name was probably just what he was looking for—Albanian—for, at the height of the war and its atrocities, he was looking for a straw to cling to, and then… do what he did. Seeing him there, my mother screamed, and my father wasn’t at home just then, and I don’t think that I’ll ever forgive him for that. “Bitch, you spawned one treacherous bastard!” hissed Brekalović before he set about raping my forty-nine-year-old mother, who, apart from anything else in her life, had married her very first boyfriend, I mean the man who later became my father.
I stopped by three days after Brekalović’s crime and found the house in silence. The soldiers had left, and my mother was sitting hunched up on her bed with a pillow clutched to her stomach. My father, broken. He was crouching in the corner of the room. Silent. Hardly fifteen minutes passed from the moment I heard what had happened till I found Brekalović in front of a nearby bar, led straight to him by some animal instinct. I beat him senseless. His injuries were severe enough that he will never be able to walk normally again, and the four months he spent in hospital are a testament to what happened that afternoon. I admit, I was wholly out of control, there was no voice of reason left in my consciousness then to point out the barbarity of my action. I’m writing this to you today, God help me, to report that a sentence kept resounding in me that day, as in an empty church, a simple, harsh sentence, as though read in some cheap novelette: “So you thought you could fuck an old woman and not pay for it, did you? Well, guess again!” And, over and over again, that sentence filled me, completely, with hatred. I had avenged my mother, and remained just aware enough not to take my action to its ultimate end. I left Brekalović alive and later I told the police and the judge the truth, down to the last word. What happened then, however, simply confirmed some of the attitudes I’ve already expressed over the course of this letter, I mean about our people and our country. It turned out that Brekalović was related to the dean of the school where I taught. There followed pressure, telephone calls. Soon I was summoned to have a “talk” with my superior. Briefly, I was told that if I did not withdraw my accusation of rape, I would lose my job. Which would be fatal for my family and myself—or so I was told. After all, I no longer lived in my parents’ house, which meant that I could hardly know what went on there in every detail. If I retracted my claim, they would, they said, for their part, do what they could. (In the office at that moment, I should say, in addition to the dean and myself, was Brekalović’s lawyer.) I repeat, they would, for their part, do what they could. As though it was I who had raped Brekalović’s mother, as though my mother had not been so viciously, cruelly humiliated! We did not withdraw the accusation. But now, thanks to you won’t believe what pressures, here we are, my wife, my children, and I, in Szentendre, outside that country—although, I have to say, not far enough away from those people there. At a certain moment my mother demanded that we go, because the threats and blackmail could no longer be borne. The judicial process is still going on and will continue to go on, no doubt, for a while longer yet. As long as it takes, I hope, for Brekalović to see the inside of a prison. And then, of course, I know that one day he will get out of jail. As though nothing had happened, he’ll stroll along to the first bar for a double brandy, he’ll knock it back, maybe pinch the waitress’s behind, or tell some drunk that he’d done time just because he humped some traitor’s mother. That his beloved country had punished an innocent man; that it was he, in fact, who was the victim and not that stinking old whore who could have given him a nasty disease. But there we are! Everyone gets what he deserves. He’ll go to prison, while I’m already in exile. Voluntary or not—that’s a different question. Besides, I am not myself blameless as regards the country in which I spent virtually all my life up to now.