: he pulled the plug on Yugoslavia, after all. Nobody else had the nerve. And everybody was dying for it.”
“But what about the aftermath? The responsibility for it all.”
“What concern is it of yours?” And what good are questions like that? Look, in a year or two nobody will remember Vukovar. Or Sarajevo for that matter. Not even the people who live there. So don’t get all hot and bothered. It’s not worth it, believe me.”
“But I do.”
“Tell me, have you ever met any of the émigrés who left after World War Two? Or even the ones who left after the crackdown on the nationalists in ’71? Well, I have. I’ve got an uncle in America, and he introduced me to them. It was like meeting ghosts. They’d go on and on about things that hadn’t the slightest relevance to our lives. It was their perception of time that did it. You change more than your space when you leave; you change your time, your inner time. Time in Zagreb is moving much faster now than your inner time. You’re stuck back in your own time frame. I bet you think the war took place yesterday.”
“But it did!” I said heatedly. “And it isn’t over yet.”
“Well, it is for the people who stayed behind! Your ‘yesterday’ is their ancient history. Remember the émigrés who rushed back from Canada, Australia, Western Europe, and South America after Croatia declared its independence? Croats tried and true. The crooks and legionnaires and hitmen and losers who responded to Tudjman’s clarion call.”
“Exhibits from a provincial museum.”
“Precisely. Well, in a few years we may look like them to the people who stayed behind. So the thing to do is forget, forget everything.”
“Then who will remember?”
“Why do you think people invent symbolic surrogates? To get others to suffer and remember for them.”
“I don’t know if I…”
“Well, let me tell you. Our story is not an easy one to tell. Even numbers tell different stories to different people. What we experience as a deluge, others experience as a shower: a few hundred thousand killed, a million or two displaced, a fire here, a bomb there, a bit of plundering…. Mere bagatelles! More people lost their lives in the floods in India this year.”
“You must be mad!”
“People have no bent for misfortune, believe me. They can’t identify with mass disaster. Not for long, at least, and not even if the disaster is their own. That’s why they’ve come up with the surrogate solution.”
“I don’t understand.”
“More people know that Elvis Presley is no longer with us than that the Sarajevo Library is no longer with us. Or the Muslim victims of Srebrenica. Disaster puts people off.”
“It’s horrible what you’re saying.”
“You ain’t heard nothing yet. Once I get going, you’ll be itching to ditch me…”
He was interrupted by a stewardess announcing the descent into Amsterdam.
“Saved by the bell,” he said with a cordial smile.
I feel more comfortable in Dutch, said Nevena, as if Dutch were a sleeping bag.
“I feel more comfortable in the air,” I said.
My fellow passenger overlooked the remark, as if finding it slightly off-color.
Visibility was perfect — the air clear, the sky blue, the sun shining brightly. The land beneath us was like a matzoh, divided into thin, regular segments. The Netherlands. Malevich’s White Square in tens of thousands of cheap reproductions. All at once I realized I had not one single picture of Zagreb in my head. I tried hard to conjure something up, but all I could muster was a series of fuzzy and, oddly enough, black-and-white images. My subconscious had for some reason whisked my Zagreb files back to the precolor era.
“Tell me,” I said, turning abruptly to my neighbor, “is that Varteks shop still in Republic Square?”
“You mean Governor Jela
i Square.”
“Whatever.”
“Hmm. I don’t know.”
“Nor do I. I was there yesterday and I can’t remember whether I saw it.”
“I’ve never bought anything there,” he said. “How come it bothers you so much?”
“It just does,” I said.
PART 3
CHAPTER 1
A hand grenade fell smack in between
The little boy and his pa. What a scene!
Of the poor little lad precious little was left,
And Papa was of both arms bereft.
They tried to stuff the lad in a bag,
But were soon cursing God in despair.
Because no more of him could they snag
Than a shoe and a tuft of hair.
The day after I got back to Amsterdam I paid a visit to the Department. Classes didn’t begin for a week, but I thought it best to check in.
“I hear one of your students has killed himself,” the secretary said in a voice she might have used to inform me of a change in the teaching schedule.
“What are you talking about?” I managed to come out with.
“That’s what I hear.”
“Which student?”
“How should I know?”
I could have strangled her.
“Who told you?”
“Another student of yours. Just now.”
I rushed downstairs and over to the café, where I found Nevena and Igor. From the expressions on their faces I could tell there was something wrong.
Yes, they’d heard that Uroš had killed himself. No, they didn’t know how it had happened. They’d heard that Uroš’s brother had come to Amsterdam to take care of things. Oh, and that Uroš’s father was suspected of war crimes and was currently under interrogation at the Hague Tribunal. No, they’d had no idea, no idea about his father. Uroš was so reserved.
I had noticed that, too. And like me they had never seen him outside class.
“It was the shame of it, Comrade,” Igor said simply.
The war had brought a rash of suicides in its wake.
Mama told me the story of a soldier back from the front — a boy, less than twenty — who had paid a visit to his former school. He apparently spent the whole day in the schoolyard, plying the kids with sweets and showing them what a hand grenade looks like. The next morning his remains were scattered all over the place. Parts of the body had landed in a tree and were still stuck to the branches. He had blown himself up a few hours before classes began. The staff didn’t know — how could they? — so the kids came trooping in on the bloody remains.
Yes, a whole rash of suicides. Quiet, peaceful, unobtrusive suicides, because there was too much misfortune and death in the air for people to have much compassion for them. Suicide is a luxury in wartime, compassion in short supply.