The captain summoned Sredoje several times a day: first he waved the confessions of others before his eyes, though he never allowed him to read them; then he threatened to widen the inquiry to include Sredoje’s treachery during the Occupation. After three weeks, worn out and fearing worse, Sredoje gave in and made a full confession of his participation in the plot against the people and the state — with the exception of the leaflet episode, about which he indeed knew nothing. The inquiry was now reduced to the rounding out of his statements; he could breathe again.
One December morning he was shaved, given a fresh shirt and a jacket without stripes of rank, and driven to the military court, where he saw Perišić, Vukajlović, Simović, and Saboš for the first time, their faces pale and lined, as was his own, though he was not aware of it. The accused were escorted into the courtroom: at the far wall, the captain awaited them, and two majors and a lieutenant colonel sat at a raised table. One of the majors read out the charges. The main charge against Sredoje was based on his irreverent statements in the mess; only Simović and Vukajlović were charged with distributing the leaflets. Simović and Vukajlović were sentenced to five years in prison, Sredoje to one, Saboš to eight months, and Perišić to only three, the duration of the inquiry. They were taken back to prison together but then separated, and Sredoje never saw any of them again.
After ten days, he was transported by truck to Lepoglava. There he spent the winter in a cell with sixteen other prisoners, freezing and eating poor food. At the beginning of April 1949, he was taken by train, with one other prisoner, a gold smuggler, to Sremska Mitrovica. There they were given sufficient food and sent to work in the fields, and Sredoje quickly recovered. At last, on October 12, he was released and given a train ticket to Celje. At nine in the evening, he arrived at the house in the cul-de-sac. Dominika was not there. The housing authority had moved her out a few days after his arrest, but the new occupants, a large family, knew her address and gave it to him, staring with curiosity. Sredoje found her on the outskirts of town, in a small house that belonged to a retired teacher and his wife. Dominika had been allocated a room on the ground floor. She was already in bed, asleep; she came out drowsy, in her nightgown, but showed no hesitation about taking him in. So he began to live with her again.
Early in the morning, she would go off to work, while he stayed in bed. He would get up much later, eat what she had left for him, read the newspapers, smoke, listen to music on the small old radio. When Dominika came home, they would eat a meal together; then she would do the housework, which made him feel out of place in her single room. After the housework, Dominika cleaned herself, combed her hair, applied creams to her skin, washed her underclothes. He didn’t like watching all these activities having to do with her body, which he was accustomed to possess at night in all its naked simplicity. And it annoyed him that her personality extended beyond that body, a personality he was only just discovering: her neatness, thriftiness, the way she examined every object with a prudent, careful eye, as if she were near-sighted, even every mouthful of food, before accepting it and using it. Impatient, he wanted to shout at her, but restrained himself, believing that it was not she who upset him but the claustrophobic memory of his stay in prison, from which he had not completely recovered.
Another problem arose: once the teacher and his wife got over the surprise of Sredoje’s arrival, they became unpleasant, and one day the old man confronted Dominika when she returned from work and threatened legal action unless her lover — an unauthorized lodger— moved out. They thought about what to do. Dominika was ready to risk going to court, but Sredoje found that he did not want the circumstances under which he had come to live with her to be held up to public scrutiny. He decided to move to a rented room nearby, from which he could easily come to see her. She agreed, but it quickly became apparent that she could not afford to pay for two lodgings. He promised to look for work. But he could not look for work any more than he could go to court, and for the same reason: it would require him to give an account of his past, of his ridiculous disgrace, to strangers. Time passed, the deadline set for them drew near. Then both came up with a solution that each had been thinking of in secret: to get married.
The necessary documents were assembled, and Dominika arranged for the registry office to make it official without delay, so she could show the teacher the marriage certificate, which would keep him quiet. But the legal bond left them, apart from a sense of relief, with a bitter taste in their mouths. Sredoje suspected that he had been lured into a trap, while Dominika was disappointed that he, as soon as their difficulty was resolved, dropped the idea of looking for work. She let him know, at first in a roundabout way, then openly, that she had no intention of supporting him all his life; he, infuriated by her nagging, mentioned the German officer, whom she had certainly put up with. The spell of their mutual secret, broken, no longer restrained them. They quarreled, looking at each other with hatred, their faces distorted, amazed that they could ever have thought of spending their lives together.
Now they avoided each other. The minute Dominika got home from work, Sredoje would leave the house, returning late in the evening, when there was little time left for arguing. But it was winter, he had no money, and the streets of Celje, through which he sloshed in low shoes and the coat Dominika had bought him when he first arrived, were far from hospitable. He frequented small taverns, and if he had a dinar or two — extracted from Dominika in their less strained moments — he would order a glass of wine and sit over it for hours. If his pockets were empty, he would hide in a corner, preferably at an already occupied table, where the waiters would not notice him for a while. He felt that he was rapidly going downhill; his clothes, which he never changed, were crumpled and worn thin; his face and hands had grown furtive, coarse.
But the thought of looking for work, of explaining to personnel officers why he had been in prison, was unendurable and he pushed it aside. He considered an earlier idea: to return to school. A diploma, a profession, a new life free of the past. He began to read the announcements of the different universities in the newspapers, wondering which one would suit him best. But what was the use of selecting a school? To study, he needed money — enough, at least, to begin with, for traveling to Ljubljana or Zagreb and renting a place. His plans, wreathed in tobacco smoke and alcoholic vapors, moved into the purely financial realm. He thought, in turn, of a well-organized robbery, of buying a lottery ticket, of asking for a substantial loan from simple-minded people who would be moved by his story, of an unexpected inheritance.