They had various ways of doing the deed: they would drink themselves to death — that was the cheapest way — or take an overdose (as a result of the war the borders were wide open, and drugs fairly flowed in), or simply “die of a broken heart,” the euphemism for the untreated heart attacks and strokes that spread like wildfire during the war. Other diseases left untreated could likewise come under the rubric of suicide. Then there was the case of the student daughter of a Serbian general war-criminal who took her own life out of shame. Or of the elderly Belgrade woman who slipped and fell just as a bus pulled up before a waiting crowd. The crowd stampeded onto the bus, trampling the body beneath their feet. No one thought to help. The doctors managed to patch the woman up, but soon after they sent her home she threw herself out of a fourth-floor window. Shame again.
There were suicides among people who had escaped the war, too. We heard all kinds of stories in Berlin. About a Bosnian woman who had hanged herself in a psychiatric hospital the day before she was to be released. About a Bosnian refugee who had hanged himself in a refugee asylum after smothering his wife and two-year-old with a pillow. Here in Amsterdam a Croatian woman at one of the asylum centers had turned on the gas and then burned herself to death. They did it out of humiliation, despair, fear, loneliness, and shame. Quiet, anonymous deaths, the lot of them, war victims, though absent from the statistics of the war dead.
We learned the details from Darko, who showed up at the café before long. Darko was the only one who had maintained a more or less personal relationship with Uroš. He told us that Uroš had shot himself in the temple with a revolver. He’d had no trouble getting hold of the weapon: all he had to do was make contact with Yugoslav mafia circles. Amsterdam was awash with Yugo weapons: the police were constantly running across discarded grenades in the parks. Two children had recently perished after stepping on one.
Uroš had given his flat a thorough cleaning before pulling the trigger. He threw away everything he owned — books, clothes, everything, including what he had been wearing just before the fatal shot. He left behind only a black plastic bag. On the bag he had stuck a Post-it with his brother’s name and address in neat block letters. He had killed himself on Saturday or Sunday, when his landlady was out of town. She had found him on Monday evening and immediately notified the police. He was lying in the middle of the room stark naked. His body had risen to the occasion: except for a few drops of blood and urine, it was pristine. It was flanked by seven cardboard children’s suitcases, the kind sold at Blokker’s. Each one had the same contents: an unused toothbrush, a pad, a well-sharpened pencil, and a yarmulke.
“Was Uroš Jewish?” Nevena asked.
“Not that I know of,” said Darko. “His father was a Bosnian Serb. That you all know.”
The setting of Uroš’s death as described by Darko seemed infantile, yet at the same time cold as a knife. The children’s cardboard suitcases were the baggage Uroš felt necessary for his journey: yarmulke, toothbrush, and pad and pencil seven times over. They were likewise Uroš’s will in hieroglyphs for anyone who wished to decipher it.
“Oh, and one more thing,” said Darko. “He had a bullet in his mouth.”
“What for, I wonder,” Nevena said.
“I don’t know.”
“Right,” said Igor distractedly. “What for?”
“Like I say, I don’t know. But what if — once he’d cleaned up the place and stripped and put the gun to his head — he realized it was going to hurt. He might cry out. Somebody might hear him. Maybe he thought of a scene in a war film where they put something hard between the teeth of a wounded man they had to operate on with no anesthetic. To keep the man from screaming. And for a second he panicked because there was nothing left: he’d set everything in order. But then he took a bullet out of the revolver, put it between his teeth, and shot another one into his head.”
Darko could scarcely get the words out. He seemed on the point of tears the whole time he was trying to reconstruct the scene. It was as if he were simultaneously thinking how senseless Uroš’s death was, protesting against it — there was such a thing as a noble and meaningful death, after all; why was Uroš’s death meaningless? — and in the end sympathizing with Uroš, precisely because his death was so meaningless. But I was only guessing at what had gone on in Darko’s mind. The protest was in fact my own.
Igor showed us a short article in the NRC Handelsblad dealing with the trial of three war criminals, one of whom was Uroš’s father. They were among the first to come before the Tribunal, mere small fry. The big guns wouldn’t make their appearance for a few years.
“Shall we go and have a look at him?” he asked, meaning Uroš’s father.
“You mean the trials are open to the public?”
“I got two passes today at the Department.”
“Like for a movie.”
“They think of it as language practice,” he said ironically. “Free of charge.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow, if you like.”
Nobody said a word. I had forgotten about the war during the course of the semester. So had the students. Uroš’s death had sent me back into the fray, the nightmare. I was beside myself. How could I have failed to know? Because I had never asked. And I’d never asked because I’d been afraid to. Now that it was too late, I was tormented by the questions I could have asked.
“Uroš’s brother has taken care of everything. He’s got friends who’ve lived here forever, and they helped. There isn’t a thing that you or any of us could have done. We can’t even go to the funeral.”
“We can drink to his soul, can’t we?” said Nevena, moving in the direction of the bar. “My treat.”
We sipped our Dutch rakija in silence. I was no longer thinking of Uroš I was thinking of a sequence I had seen on television early in the war. It showed a young man Uroš’s age, a Slovene in the uniform of the Yugoslav National Army, who had been taken prisoner by the new Slovenian Territorial Defense force. There he stood — his hands up, the tears running down his cheeks — shouting, “Don’t shoot, guys! I’m one of you!” A few seconds later the Slovenian “guys” shot their own “guy.”
Our drinks duly downed, Nevena, Darko, Igor, and I went our separate ways. That day Amsterdam looked like the set for Fellini’s Amarcord. The snowflakes had an unbelievably Extra Large look to them.
CHAPTER 2
Now and then someone
Will dig up rusty arguments
From under the Bushes
And take them to the dump.
I didn’t know what to do. I paced the cramped space of my flat, shivering with a mild fever. I couldn’t concentrate on anything, the thought of Uroš’s death having taken over like a migraine. And then my eye lit on a notebook, one of the three Papa had just given me in Zagreb. I’d left the other two with Mother, knowing I’d have neither the time nor the inclination to read them. If I took even one, it was to assuage my conscience. I plucked it off the shelf and started leafing through it.
The text had been typed single-spaced with virtually no margins. The print was fuzzy. He must have given me the third or fourth copy. He had stapled the sheets together, covered them with light green cardboard and written “Memoirs of a Small Town Schoolmaster” on it in his own hand. He called the notebooks “books.” I don’t know the title he gave to “Book One,” which presumably dealt with his early childhood. “Book Two” may have been called “School Days, School Days, Good Old Golden Rule Days.” I had “Book Five,” which bore the dedication “To my future progeny.” Papa had little hope of “future progeny,” the progeny being merely a romantic excuse, but since he had made several copies of this, his life’s confession, he apparently did hope that somebody else would eventually read it.