He did this every evening, in the same silent way. Only gradually did he find out things about her: that her name was Dominika, that she was from a neighboring village, that she was twenty-one (his age), and that she worked in the town’s land registry, which was where the Liberation found her. He never brought up the German officer’s uniform, not wanting to dispel the secret that chained her to him, and she volunteered nothing about the man (a lover? a relative?), perhaps because she no longer wished to break that chain. They lived side by side with the secret between them. He left the house in the morning (as she did), ate in the mess, had his laundry done, and only at night, like a stranger, went into her room to perform the ritual of love.
Winter came, bringing winds and blizzards; the streets were deserted. Sredoje spent his free time in the mess, reading the newspapers or watching the chess players. With the arrival of spring and warm weather, promiscuity did not return to the streets with the walkers and idlers: lust had quieted down; young men and women chose more constant partners or else withdrew into their former shells. Nor did Sredoje feel his previous hunger for novelty in love. He still occasionally struck up a quick acquaintance and continued it in the afternoon in his room. But across the hallway was the silent Dominika, and he sensed her presence even as he embraced the other woman. It made him feel, somehow, less the predator, which detracted from his pleasure. He thought about moving again, but then he realized that he would be leaving the very thing that he had been searching for: a lair with his victim assured. He stayed. But he was not satisfied. The monotony ate at him. He had the feeling that his life was over and that there was nothing to look forward to but repetition.
The barracks, where he had to go every day, lay outside the town on the main road; the gray buildings, large and cold, were separated by empty paved courtyards. His duties were the classroom instruction of the first postwar recruits — at the end of their basic training in the surrounding hills in all weather — in the handling of radio equipment, which was relatively easy for him. But the instruction included political lectures and meetings — for Communists, for non-Communists — all of which he had to attend, and they were geared to the low level of understanding of the majority. Moreover, the commissars and secretaries, who had come of age during the war, were not much better educated than the recruits newly arrived from the villages.
At these interminable lectures and meetings, where words were mispronounced and professions of faith were made without substantiation, Sredoje alternated between acute boredom and the urge to shout out, to challenge what was being said. But even his hypocritical silence, he realized, was not worth the effort, since he could not hope for further promotion on account of his dubious past. He began to think of leaving the army, of beginning a new life, perhaps as a student, though he felt that he had lost the habit of intellectual effort.
In the spring of 1947, he put in his application to be demobilized, but it was refused, after a delay of four long months, on the grounds that he was irreplaceable. He decided, in revenge, to stop being irreplaceable. He withdrew into himself, changed from a comrade in arms to a cynical soldier: his instruction became half-hearted, openly ill-humored; he avoided political meetings by vanishing after the roll was called, on the excuse that he had to repair something, or with no excuse at all.
Soon, drawn by his boldness, a group of malcontents began to form around him: Master Sergeant Vukajlović, who for three years now had an unhealed wound on his leg and who had also not been granted a release from the army; Corporal Saboš, from Srem, with the thumb of his right hand missing, many times wounded and decorated, but with poor promotion prospects because of his quick temper and sharp tongue; Junior Sergeant Perišić, big and handsome, homesick for his native mountains; Sergeant Simović, whose older brother had been shot by the Partisans as a Chetnik. Their meeting place was the NCOs’ mess, a converted tavern in the center of Celje. There, with wine brought in from next door (alcohol was not served in the mess), surrounded by cigarette smoke, they discussed the brigade, inveighing against their fellow NCOs and their superiors as oafs, imbeciles, toadies. Each recounted the unpleasantnesses accumulated in the course of the day, and the others waved their arms and muttered in indignation and sympathy. But from this daily airing of grievances, spurred by alcohol, they proceeded to criticize the army and the country itself, where it was no longer courage and ability that were valued but blind obedience and careerism.
Sredoje participated in these discussions, but with only an occasional remark or amusing anecdote, because injustices that did not affect him personally did not interest him, and more and more the subject tended to be not their small circle, but the general situation, all of Yugoslavia. At the same time, as if in counterattack, newspaper editorials and speeches delivered in town squares trumpeted the justification of every decision, every position, and this wave of unanimity, driven by invisible hands, entered the barracks, too. Political meetings became more frequent; many young Communists were accepted into the Party without the usual lengthy procedure — among them Sredoje, despite his obvious indifference.
At last the reason for all this noise and haste became apparent. At a Party meeting, after a short word of welcome to the initiates, the secretary, Major Vukoje, in a hoarse voice, sweating, read out the Cominform resolution signed by Stalin and Molotov and called upon the membership to respond to the accusations leveled at the Yugoslav Party. Several speakers came forward immediately, clearly old-timers; prepared in advance, they refuted, article by article, the lengthy, convoluted indictment, and the meeting concluded, late at night, with a unanimous rejection. But now, those who before had hesitantly asked questions or else suppressed their qualms of conscience were being told, by this, that it was possible and perhaps even necessary to argue. In the mess, instead of half-joking and complaining as usual, Vukajlović and Simović quoted the resolution from memory, Perišić attacked it, and Saboš, almost permanently drunk, stared at the coat of arms on the far wall above the clock and mumbled that perhaps tomorrow they would have to trample what today was sacred.
At first Sredoje found this new intensity entertaining, and he encouraged them, but before long he found his friends’ rigid opinions, their inability to go beyond the level of faith and loyalty, disgusting, tedious. He sat at the malcontents’ table now only out of friendship, but the moment tempers flared, he would take his glass and move to the table of the chess players.
One evening, Vukajlović, Simović, and Saboš failed to appear in the mess. Sredoje asked Perišić, who was gloomily draining his glass, but Perišić didn’t know where they were, so Sredoje went to watch the chess players. The next morning, the duty officer at the barracks gate informed him of the battalion commander’s order that he take over the instruction of Vukajlović’s section, but, inexplicably curt, refused to explain why. In the evening, when Sredoje returned home from the mess (and now Perišić was not there) and switched on the light in the hallway, four men jumped out, two from his room, two from Dominika’s, and put handcuffs on him. They drove him to the local Celje prison and locked him in a cell alone. In the morning, he was taken before the investigating officer, a red-faced young Slovene civilian, who questioned him about his past, particularly his wartime service in the Belgrade police, and then about his participation, as the Slovene put it, in the plot with his fellow conspirators from the mess. Sredoje denied the latter allegation and signed a statement. In the afternoon, he went before a second investigator, a Montenegrin captain, who demanded details about the leaflets he, Sredoje, had received from Simović and distributed. Sredoje denied this allegation, too, at which the investigator, apparently with the aim of confounding him, described a series of incriminating conversations in the mess with great accuracy, though misrepresenting the remarks Sredoje had made, and especially Sredoje’s failure to reject Saboš’s suggestion that the national coat of arms be taken down and trampled.