After all seven installments were broadcast, I recorded the whole thing continuously, reading it with my mumble-voice (which is still fondly remembered by my friends as one of the worst to have ever graced the airwaves of Bosnia), providing some audio effects: Hitler’s and Stalin’s speeches, the chanting of obedient masses, Communist fighting songs, “Lili Marleen,” the pernicious sound effects for the twentieth century. We broadcast the whole thing straight through, for twenty-some minutes with no breaks — a form of radio suicide — on Zoka and Neven’s show, whereupon I was introduced as their guest in the studio, still pretending that I was a historian. I instructed my friends not to laugh under any circumstances (I’m afraid it’s a very funny story). They read the listeners’ letters, all of which were written by me, a few imitating the angry diction and spirit I had become familiar with after the infamous party. One letter demanded that I and people like me be strung up for defiling sacred memories. Another demanded more respect for horses (as Alphonse Kauders hated horses), because horses taught us the values of hard work. Another objected to the representation of Gavrilo Princip, the assassin of the Austro-Hungarian archduke, and asserted that Princip absolutely did not pee his pants while waiting at a Sarajevo street corner to shoot the heir to the imperial throne.
Then we opened the phone lines to the listeners. I’d thought (a) that nobody really listened to the Kauders series and (b) that those who did found it stupid and (c) that those who would believe it was true consisted of potheads, simpletons, and demented senior citizens, for whom the lines between history, fantasy, and radio programs were hopelessly blurred. Hence I was not prepared for questions or challenges nor was I intent on any further manipulation of false and dubious facts. The phones, however, were on fire, for an hour or so, live on air. The vast majority of people bought my Kauders story, and then offered many a tricky question or observation. A physician called and claimed that one cannot take out one’s own appendix, as I claimed Kauders had done. A man called and said that he had in his hand the Encyclopedia of Forestry—where Kauders was supposed to have been featured extensively — and there was no trace of him in it. I came up with plausible answers, never laughing for a moment, inhabiting the historian character completely, fearing all the while that my cover might be blown, fretting — as I suspect actors do — at the possibility of the audience seeing the real, phony me behind the mask because my performance was completely transparent. I did manage to dismiss the fear of the good cop or the bad cop (probably the bad cop) calling in and ordering me to instantly come down to State Security headquarters again.
But the weirdest fear of all was that somebody might call in and say: “You liar! You know nothing about Kauders! I know far more than you do — and here is the true story!” Kauders became real at that moment — he was my Virgin appearing in the soundproof studio glass, behind which there was an indifferent sound engineer and a few people sparkling with the electricity of transgressive excitement. It was an exhilarating moment, when fantasy ruptured reality and overran it, much akin to the moment when the body rose from Dr. Frankenstein’s surgical table and started choking him.
For months, even years, people would stop me and ask: “Did he really exist?” To some of them I said yes, to some of them I said no. But the fact of the matter is that there is no way of really knowing, as Kauders did exist for a flickering moment, like those subatomic particles in the nuclear accelerator in Switzerland, but not long enough for his existence to be physically recorded. The moment of his existence was too short for me to determine whether he was a mirage, a consequence of reaching the critical mass of collective delusion. Perhaps he had appeared to me just to let me understand that I’d been irreversibly irradiated by his malevolent aura.
I don’t know where Herr Kauders might be now. Perhaps he is pulling the strings of fact and fiction, of untruth and truth, somehow making me write stories that I foolishly believe I imagine and invent. Perhaps one of these days I am going to get a letter signed A.K. (as he liked to sign his letters), telling me that the whole fucking charade is over, that the time of reckoning has come.
LIFE DURING WARTIME
In February 1991 I took an editorial position with the Sarajevo magazine Naši dani (Our Days), and instantly left my parents’ home, where I was still embarrassingly lodging at the age of twenty-seven. With Davor and Pedja, two friends who also got jobs with the magazine, I rented a three-bedroom apartment in the old neighborhood Kovači. I had a full-time job and lived on my own — a major, adult accomplishment in a sadly socialist society where people grew old living with their parents, perpetually underemployed.
My previous and limited working experience had been in radio, where, apart from very short and baffling fiction, I wrote opinionated pieces on film, literature, and general stupidity. Hence I became the culture editor of Naši dani, and I somehow managed to negotiate thirteen pages for culture (whatever that was) out of the magazine’s forty-eight. Convinced that the previous generation of journalists was tainted by the idiocy of comfortable communism, I refused to publish in my pages any writing by anyone older than twenty-seven, which required frequently fighting off the rest of the editorial team, still forgiving to some press veterans. I also wrote short, acerbic pieces for the satiric two-page spread and a column called “Sarajevo Republika,” which I conceived of as “militantly urban.” I was constantly high with being young and radical, reveling in the space of fuck-you-ness I carved out for myself.
The rest of the editorial team also came from radio, where we had shared contempt for the old socialist regime as well as for the politics of rabid nationalism, which was busy at the time dismantling the sorry remnants of Communist Yugoslavia. Our employer was the Liberal Party, which came out of what in the previous system was called the Association of Socialist Youth. (I wrote, for a fee, the culture part of the Liberal Party’s platform.) We were hired, after the previous editorial team was fired in its entirety, for reasons I cannot really remember; I’d like to think that it was because our employer wanted a radical break—Naši dani had a forty-year history of publishing, largely marked by obedience to whatever was supposed to define socialist youth.
We had to learn quickly how to produce a biweekly magazine with a punch of immediacy. Alas, we soon had a chance: one of our first issues was largely devoted to (and supportive of) anti-Milošević demonstrations taking place in Belgrade, which he eventually crushed with the help of the Yugoslav People’s Army’s tanks. The blood of two young students was the first spilled by the army; we knew the flow would not stop there. By the spring, war was in full swing in Croatia. Reports of atrocities started coming in; we published photos of decapitated corpses and an interview with Vojislav Šešelj, a Serbian militia leader (now on trial in The Hague), who had famously promised to gouge Croatian eyes with rusty spoons. Somehow regular spoons were not bad enough.