The questioning centered on a carp hatchery. Uroš’s father had been the head of a carp hatchery in a small town in Bosnia. He was being asked about repairs that had been made on the leaky roof of the main building, about the sheet metal that had been used to cover the roof and how much it cost and who was supposed to pay for it, and then about some truck or other and the driver and so on and so forth. The endless, tedious stringing together of details that made no sense whatever to us was intended to show whether Uroš’s father and two accomplices had had enough free time to slip off to a nearby shack where the town’s Muslims were being held, force them to play humiliating sexual games — their favorite allegedly being “father and son”—and then beat them to death with their fetid-carp hands and toss their corpses into the ponds.
All the defendants in the production sounded like amateur actors: all they were doing was reading out prepared statements from the computer screens in front of them. By speaking Robot rather than Human, they turned evil into a mechanical plot line, as mechanical as any other. None of the accused felt the slightest guilt. Of all the people who had destroyed the country — leaders, politicians, generals, soldiers, crooks, murderers, mafiosi, liars, thieves, villains, and volunteers — not a one was willing to come out and state, I am guilty. I had not heard the word “guilty” from them before, I did not hear it while sitting in the courtroom with Igor, nor do I ever expect to hear it. They were all just doing their duty. Do you feel guilty when you hammer a nail into a wall? No. Do you feel guilty when you hang a picture on that nail? No. Do you feel guilty when you beat a hundred people to death? No. Of course not.
I wondered how things stood with the hundreds of thousands of nameless people without whose fervid support there could have been no war. Did they feel guilty? And what about that herd of foreign politicians, diplomats, envoys, and military personnel who had stampeded through the country? Not only had they been liberally paid; they had earned the epithet of savior, to say nothing of promotions in the UN or whatever institutional hierarchy they chanced to represent. (And Croatia and Bosnia weren’t exactly hardship posts: the hotels were quite serviceable, the food decent, the Adriatic close at hand.) Did they feel guilty? They too were only doing their duty. Just like the sniper on the hill who gunned down the woman in the streets of Sarajevo. Just like the foreign photographer who took the woman’s picture (though it never occurred to him to call an ambulance) and won a prize for the best war photo of the year. Even the poor woman writhing on the pavement, the blood gushing out of her, even she, little as she was aware of it, was doing her duty by her authentic representation of war. Who is guilty of the death of Selim’s father? Who of the death of our Uroš? Who is guilty of riveting Igor and me to our seats, hungering for absolution?
There we were, Igor and I, watching television! It was the image of the perverted reality in which all of us, perverted as we were, were accomplices. In a way there was no difference between me, who sat there glued to the TV screen, and Uroš’s father, who sat glued to his screen reading out canned responses in a metallic voice. In a world thus mediated — and mediated so many times over — everyone was guilty. Crime was unreal. Everything was unreal. I felt it would take no more than a single click of the mouse to do away with the judges, the defendants, and us, the spectators. One blissful, conciliatory delete. Only one thing was reaclass="underline" pain. Pain was the speechless, useless, and only true witness. The pain that would surge through Selim’s veins and surface at his temples. The pain that pounded dully in me. And Igor. The deaf, dumb, and blind pain that could suddenly bowl us over, that signaled something was radically wrong.
So there I sat facing the glass wall and musing…. What would happen, I wondered, if all that pain came together in the feeble mind of an Oskar Mazerath and he stood and opened his mouth and let out a scream? I pictured the glass wall shattering into thousands of tiny slivers, the computer screens, the lights, the eyeglasses, the porcelain caps on people’s teeth — all smashed to smithereens. I pictured that piercing, earsplitting voice shooting the gray potato head of Uroš’s father into the air, sending all the heads of all the blood-drenched murderers flying through the air, bursting their hardened eardrums and callous hearts….
I glanced over at Igor. Feeling my glance on his face, he turned and gave me a questioning look. I took the earphones off his ears.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
CHAPTER 4
Leaving the courtroom was like leaving a funeral at which one wasn’t quite sure who was being buried.
“Where to?”
“Home,” I said. “Amsterdam.”
We got onto a tram. The visit to the Tribunal had been a bust: we had come to see instant punishment meted out to Uros’s father and were leaving empty-handed.
“The Hague is no Nuremberg,” said Igor, guessing my thoughts.
“That’s for sure.”
“And the trial is nothing like Eichmann’s in Jerusalem.”
“You’ve made your point,” I said with a snort.
“Hey, what’s got into you? Why are you being so crotchety?”
“Because you shouldn’t make light of institutions of justice.”
“La-di-da! Will you listen to her! Institutions of justice. I didn’t know you were a romantic, Comrade.”
“Well, I didn’t know you were a cynic. And where it least becomes you.”
“Okay, okay. Pipe down.”
“Look, those people are trying to clean up the shit we left behind. Because we don’t feel obliged to do it ourselves. Because it doesn’t even smell so bad to us. But they’re not into American movies, so we didn’t see Uroš’s father strung up the way we’d have liked.”
“They may even set him free,” he said.
“It’s worth it if they sentence anybody.”
“All that exorbitant rigmarole for one crook?”
“What do you care? It’s not coming out of your pocket, is it?”
“Okay. Pipe down, pipe down,” he grumbled. “I’m not Karadži
, am I? Or Mladi.”
“Those people are trying to help us, and we look on from the sidelines, grinning like morons! You and me — we didn’t even have the patience to sit it out a few hours.”
“But it’s a tribunal, not a church.”
“It wouldn’t do us any harm to think of it as a church. And sit through the service for humility’s sake.”
“Well, I wasn’t the one who wanted to leave.”
I blushed. He was right. I felt like belting him one. He gave me a piercing glance. I could feel him reading my mind. People in the tram were looking in our direction.
Just then the tram stopped and Igor pulled me out of my seat.
“Come on. Let’s go.”
“Why did you want to get off?” I protested when we were in the street.
“First of all, because you embarrassed me by talking so loud, but also because I want to introduce you to my girl.”
“You’ve got a girl in The Hague?” I said like a student in a course of Croatian for foreigners.
“What’s so strange about that?” he replied. “It’s no different from saying, ‘I’ve got a girl in Bjelovar.’”
A sudden onslaught of fury lodged like a ball in my throat, and I made several attempts at a deep breath.