Having become shamans, arbitrators, and witch-smellers, my fellow writers and scholars bit into my flesh. In their patriotic trance they denounced me, and then it was open season. At the start — when many came running to burn me on the media bonfire; when the telephone rang at all hours of the day, vomiting threatening messages in my ear; when those same writers and scholars performed their pathetic, third-rate pantomime (a head that turns away in disgust, a glance suddenly lowered on meeting mine), demonstrating — less to me, and more to the milieu — that I had been cast from the circle; when everyone sought a way to perform his or her loyal duty to the new regime, and it was easiest to spit on a “witch”—I still interpreted their hatred as an indirect call for dialogue. But pragmatic, powerful, and efficient, the machinery of hate picked me up and launched my broom on a powerful tailwind. And I flew.
Today, like a dreary re-run twenty years later, everything has been reduced to a photograph of an old man monkeying around and thumbing his ears at me. Now I finally understand: my “deformed perspective” was to blame. I overestimated my “milieu.” Its volume is much smaller and its substance less distinctive than I thought. I underestimated its resistance: it’s much stiffer and stronger than I thought.
So, what really happened? I abandoned my milieu, I left willingly, and it poked its tongue out at me, the only thing it knew how to do. It didn’t bother reading my books — that would have meant dialogue, and I might have believed that, in spite of everything, I’d actually managed to “knit” something its size. But it had always valued its own “mainstream,” oral literature, and that’s why it believed the rumors produced in its own factory. So, really, nothing happened. And not a damn thing is happening — even that telephone is always broken. .
So, my fellow tribesmen, let’s give it one more try, loud and clear this time: Yes, I left willingly. No, you didn’t chase me away, I abandoned you. No, you didn’t part company with me, I did with you. You didn’t disqualify me, you disqualified yourselves. You didn’t fire me, I fired you, yes, you. And Professor, as far as you’re concerned, I have no qualms in saying what you somewhere already know yourself: No, I didn’t fail the exam; you did.
In the twenty intervening years many people have disappeared, many have had their biographies burned, many live elsewhere, many lives have been stolen, many lie under the earth, many live buried alive, many of the guilty still walk free, but the majority of my fellow citizens are still around. My fellow citizens still pick their noses and “break wind,” still sit around in cafés, slag off and suck up to one another, drink their coffee, spend their Saturdays loafing about the town square, which has of course changed its name, but even that doesn’t really change anything. They scuttle to the market, bargain and barter, buy fresh cottage cheese and cream, read the papers, blink in the sun, mix and mingle, flip each other the bird, nod their heads, exchange air kisses, and good-naturedly feed the pigeons that are strutting around the square. For a few crumbs both people and pigeons are ready to get off their backsides, flap their wings and flash their beaks, all for a crumb more. But that’s nothing new; life continues on much the same as it always has.
15. Penis-Snatching
Sometimes I have a laugh imagining how I’d respond if my former immolators — professors who thumb their ears, colleagues, merry rodent exterminators, jokesters, intellectuals, rabble-rousers, witch-smellers, armchair critics, informers, ridiculers, smart-asses, amnesiacs, patriots and patriotesses — would just ask. .
“Why did we singe you a little back then?”
And I think about how to respond; I’m a writer, I should know what might inflame the ears of my pyromaniac people.
“You’d fallen into a national collective trance. Koro. .” I whisper into the ear beside me.
“Koro!?” the person frowns.
“In some parts of Africa men succumb to a collective hysteria. They’re convinced that their penises have disappeared, that someone stole them. And so the angry mob of supposedly dismembered men sets off to hunt down those who are suspected of mutilating them.”
“I don’t understand a word you’re saying. What have Africans got to do with you? Or with us?!”
“I’m speaking in metaphors. Back then, twenty years ago, you accused me of making off with your collective, national thing. Your symbolic thing, naturally. .” I whisper to the person beside me.
“But it can’t have been just about men? What about the women?”
“As protectors of the national virtue, the women were also involved in stringing up the suspected thieves.”
The people in the chain start to grumble.
“C’mon, get it together! We haven’t got all day!” they yell impatiently.
“Well, what shall I tell the person beside me?” he asks, genuinely confused.
“Now I don’t even know anymore. .”
“Why did you end up on the bonfire? Tell me, just make it quick,” he said.
“Because I stole your penis,” I whisper.
The owner of the ear nods his head, he understands, and he tells the person next to him, and the words are whispered from ear to ear. It’s a long chain.
“Because I stole your pride!” yells the last person finally.
It seems that the only remaining channel of communication — the broken telephone — actually still works.
“Yes, because I stole your pride,” I confirm.
My pyromaniacs almost laugh their heads off.
The wind gently licking my face, I take my broom and silently steal away. I look down and my countrymen wave happily, their smiling leaf-like faces turned skywards. From this height they look like cabbages left to grow in an abandoned field. Beneath them, in the dirt, human corpses are rotting. They help the cabbages grow bigger and shinier. Or is that just how things appear to me? I admit, it’s all a question of perspective, and we’re all responsible for our own. And, light as a feather, I ride the wind.
April 2010
[1]A game also known as Telephone, Chinese Whispers, Grapevine, Whisper Down the Lane, Gossip, Le téléphone arabe, Stille Post, and Gioco del Telefono.
[2]Sometime later, the mayor of Zagreb from the time confirmed that the alarms were just a sort of drill to mobilize the people against the enemy. The mayor’s casual revelation never reached the collective ear, and to this day, like many other such revelations, it remains forgotten. Why? Because in other places, the alarms were for real. People in Zagreb obviously didn’t want to hear that the “threat” they took to be real was in fact a simulation game. The warnings in the daily papers that people be on the lookout for Serbian snipers were a part of this same game. The snipers would apparently ring the doorbell disguised as postmen, or peer from the roofs of Zagreb, disguised as chimney-sweeps. Not a single one was ever caught, neither did any evidence (even false!) of their existence ever materialize. This is but one example of the sea of lies that swamped us. But by the time the lies were finally exposed, no one was prepared to believe the truth anymore.