Goran no longer loved me. That was why I refused to go to Japan with him. It had happened quietly, imperceptibly, for no one specific reason. Goran tried his best: he did everything he could to stimulate his heart and quicken his pulse; he didn’t believe that love could simply slip away like that. But little by little the feeling he’d had for me yielded to a feeling of having been slighted. Maybe I have the same feeling; maybe it was hibernating in me. It’s hard to find our own fault lines and sense the taint as it enters our veins.
Goran was of the same stuff as Papa. The moment he scored a victory, he would submit it mentally to his own, personal “town of N.” And the greater his achievements, the deafer the town was to them. The only thing the town cared about was his failures. Those it was willing to hear about because they confirmed it had been right about him. So for both Goran and Papa the country was divided into two opposing, equally passionate camps: the victims and the victimizers. And then for the first time I realized they might be on to something: perhaps that now defunct country had in fact been inhabited exclusively by victims and victimizers. Victims and victimizers who periodically changed places.
How do you find release from the past? I kept wondering…. I had asked my students to make their peace with it as the necessary first step. I had offered them the painless territory of the past, trying to protect them as parents protect their children and children their friends, as my mother had protected me and Goran’s father Goran. But no, there was no release; there was only forgetting. And that came from those miraculous little erasers we all have in our brains. Every one of us drags a closet behind him, and every closet has its skeletons. Sooner or later out they tumble, though in disguise, in a form we feel comfortable with, like the documents that came tumbling down from Papa’s shelf. The past is our “installation,” amateur stuff but with artistic pretensions. With a touch-up here and a touch-up there, here a touch, there a touch, everywhere a touch-touch. (Retouching is our favorite artistic device.) Each of us is curator in his own museum. And we can’t make our peace with the past unless we have access to it, unless we can stick a finger in its dike like Hans Brinker, the boy who saved Holland from inundation. Stick your finger in the dike. Fill your screen with pictures. Keep your life dust free. Make occasional changes. Get rid of a thing or two. Uncover A; cover up B. Remove all spots. Keep your mouth shut. Think of your tongue as a weapon. Think one thing and say another. Use orotund expressions to obfuscate your intentions. Hide what you believe. Believe what you hide.
I grew sick at the prospect of all those repetitions, recapitulations, renewed complaints and justifications, of virus-transmitted misfortune and the umbilical cords that encircle and entwine us, tying us all together into the awful, painful, bloody mess we’re forever flailing in — parents, children, grandchildren, hanged man and hangman, victim and victimizer, guard and prisoner, judge and defendant….
I needed air. I tossed Papa’s notebook onto the floor, pulled on my coat, and went out. I walked along the Zeedijk for a while, then went into De Verdwenen Minnaar, a pub where I had an occasional coffee. I took a seat at the bar and ordered. The hum of human voices and the heat given off by the bodies served to calm my nerves. I needed warm human flesh to put out the pain pounding in my temples as one puts out a cigarette. There was a man sitting next to me. We exchanged a few words, drank a few drinks, looked a few looks, and let our bodies graze against each other: we were working toward a minor transaction of mutual aid involving the commixture of bodily fluids. The transaction was successfuclass="underline" I got what I needed — the consolation of self-humiliation. The pain disappeared.
In the wan morning light coming through the barred window my sleepy eyes picked out a banknote on the bedside table: the man, whose face I had not had time to fix in my mind, had left me a hundred-guilder note. My mouth drew into a smile. Snip voor een wip! as the Dutch say. A hundred guilders for a lay. It had completely slipped my mind I was living in the red-light district!
CHAPTER 3
The complex housing the ICTFY, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, reminded me of nothing so much as Yugoslav socialist architecture of the sixties and seventies, in which functionality took a backseat to the ideals of the radiant future, internationalism and justice for all. It was architecture UN style adapted to the more modest proportions of the Netherlands. The building of the International Tribunal was meant to make everybody feel “at home,” Yugo criminals included. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if the latter were disappointed in the modesty of the interiors.
After showing our passes, submitting to a thorough search, and stuffing our backpacks into the lockers, Igor and I went through one last checkpoint and finally made our way down a flight of metal steps — the kind they have on ships — to the courtroom. The spectator area was divided into two sections, one on the left for journalists, the other on the right for the general public. We picked up earphones on our way in. A small sign informed us of the languages available on the various channels. Channel six was reserved for the language called “Croatian/ Bosnian/Serbian” Our seats faced a glass wall covered by a series of screenlike rolling shutters. There were television monitors hanging in the right and left corners. At nine on the dot the shutters went up and we stood as the judges entered the courtroom. The three judges, dressed in red-and-black robes, took their places on a platform in the very center of the room. Their three assistants, in black robes with white collars, sat just below them. The counsels for the prosecution and defense sat even lower and off to the side. We thus had an unobstructed view of them all. Each had his own computer. The defendant sat next to his lawyer. He was a middle-aged man in a gray suit with lackluster eyes, a potatoey complexion and a kind of lackluster, potato-sack posture to go with it all. I was disappointed, as was, I imagine, Igor. We had expected a criminal and what we got was a man, a man with an eminently forgettable face. Except for one detaiclass="underline" his lips turned downward and his jaw was clamped shut. It was a replica of Miloševi
’s face, but of Tudjman’s, too — the same clenched teeth and thin, crooked slit of a mouth in the form of an upside-down U. The kind of flat face one sees in children’s drawings. An evil face.
The prosecutor had called a witness to the stand. The shutters went down for a time, then back up, all but the one blocking the witness. The witness’s TV image was indistinct, but we could hear his voice. He was reading from a computer screen. There were long pauses between his responses, because he had to wait for the translation of each question to appear on the screen. Every once in a while the cameras would turn toward the spectators and we would see our own faces on the monitors. We could also see the reflections of our faces in the glass wall superimposed on the faces of the people beyond it.
At first we followed the trial through the glass, throwing only an occasional glance at the TV monitors, but more and more I caught my eyes lingering on the screen, as if I found its image more reliable than the live proceedings. The words we heard, switching channels from time to time to hear how things sounded in English, French, or Dutch, were in any case unreal. The reality the glass wall separated us from inspired no more confidence than “real” reality: both of them — the one that churned out lies, lies, and more lies and the one that promised the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth — were equally fantastic, if that is the word for it.