Till Kingdom Come

by Andrej Nikolaidis

  “I need to think it over.”

  “Just what I expected you to say,” he replied. “I wouldn’t employ a gutless yes-man.”

  He saw me to the door, and before we parted he added:

  “You know, after every meeting, however important it was, I don’t think about what else I could have said. My only thought is what would best have been left unsaid. Remember that when you write for me.”

  Goran later told me I came out of the Minister’s office a different man – that’s how he put it.

  I was silent all the way home, as if I was thinking about something important. Actually I had fallen into a torpor, equally distant from all thought and all emotion, a state where I felt exceptionally at ease, so much so that I wanted it to last forever. I waited in the car until Goran had sold his weed, and then we travelled on home without a word. I invited him in for a drink, but he had promised to take his sister to the shops. He would see me that night, he said.

  I went into my room and studied it; the rickety double bed with its stained blankets that cried out for a dry-cleaning; the threadbare plush armchair; the wooden desk; the ashtray full of cigarette butts; the glasses with the remains of the previous night’s drink; the pictures on the spotty walls. Everything was in its place. Everything was the same.

  But nothing was the same any more.

  8

  The newspapers reported on my appointment for weeks. Columnists wrote reams about the relationship between intellectuals and the system and about me betraying the principles of free journalism. NGO activists issued lengthy statements expressing abhorrence at the idea of a journalist working for the police. And one writer, wanting to explain the dimension of my fall, told an anecdote about Goethe and Beethoven. The two of them were walking along a forest track, he wrote, and a duke’s coach was coming from the other direction. Goethe, if I remember correctly (or was it Beethoven?) stepped aside to avoid the horses that were bearing down on them with frightening speed. Beethoven (or was it Goethe?) refused to get out of the way. When the coach had passed, Beethoven (or perhaps it was Goethe after all?) blamed his friend for stepping aside to let the nobleman and his horses pass. The world is full of bigwigs, Goethe said, or was it Beethoven; one of them was definitely Goethe – or was one of them definitely Beethoven? I sent that idiot an email to thank him. I’m not sure if you consider me Goethe, or perhaps Beethoven, I wrote, but either way I’m eternally grateful: no one has ever made me a nicer compliment.

  If I was able to see myself as a victim, if only for a moment, I would have called the whole thing a media lynch. But I refuse to be a victim, and there’s nothing I dislike more than people who complain all day about their rights being threatened. That’s why it’s hard for me to live in this world, where everyone seems to just want to be a victim.

  Since that’s the way things are, I viewed the media’s sudden concern for my humble self with utter contempt. It felt like a bucket of slops had been tipped over me by the two tycoons whose newspapers I wrote for before accepting Mandušić’s offer. Whether they had nothing better to do or it was ordinary human malice, those two criminals acted as if they were offended by me no longer wanting to work for the pittance they paid. Minister Mandušić gave me more than just moral support – he furnished me with a list of people in the ‘public eye’ who were overtly or covertly in the pay of the two-mentioned crooks. Interestingly, the names on the list coincided with names of the people who had disparaged me in the papers, and more importantly still, with the names on a list of public figures that were also on the payroll of Mandušić’s secret police. Public intellectuals were secret agents and vice versa: Free journalists were spies, and vice versa. Independent media were really secret-police bulletins, and papers were edited by police officers, while newspaper editors did police work. Who on earth could make head or tail of this? I was ultimately glad about my decision to no longer participate in public life, which was nothing but the meanest brothel, where people careless enough to open the papers or turn on the television picked up deadly viruses and nasty contagions and carried them back to their homes.

  If you have the misfortune to be written about in the papers, people descend on you like flies are drawn to shit. One day your name is mentioned in the press or on the TV news, and the next you won’t be able to walk down the street for all the creeps who want to speak to you. Whether they criticize you or offer what they think is well-meaning advice, it leaves you feeling equally polluted and smelly. There is nothing that can remove that horrid, stinking aura from you except anonymity. And that is hard to regain, especially in a small country like Montenegro, where unfortunately people have good memories, are idle, and above all prone to malice. If you once become famous, or if you disgrace yourself, it doesn’t matter which, you have to carry that stigma for the rest of your life.

  But when that big, black blowfly came thumping on my door one morning at the crack of dawn, before the dustmen had even collected the rubbish, and introduced itself as Great-uncle Tripko, your grandmother’s brother – don’t you remember me? Things had really gone too far.

  9

  The night before, Goran, Maria and I had knocked off two bottles of Cardhu that Mandušić had sent me. The whisky ran out before midnight and unfortunately I didn’t have anything else in the house except beer. The shops were closed at that hour in winter, so I had no choice but to call my neighbour Ramiz to help. He was someone you could rely on in an emergency. And we didn’t need to wait a thousand years for our saviour. Before five minutes had passed, Ramiz burst into the house with a box full of Rubin brandy.

  “Let me give you young ’uns a word of advice –,” he said with a slur, “whisky is good but always in short supply.”

  Ramiz received a small Swedish pension or regular social-security payment, I never found out exactly what. He claimed to have ‘earned’ these means for a comfortable retirement simply by being in Stockholm. When he saw an open manhole, he seized the opportunity and jumped in, and later he sued the Government. He wore a leather waistcoat all year round with two letters emblazoned on it: MR. That stood for Master of Rubin. He proudly bore that self-awarded title, and that was how he lived – and died, after having sent truckloads of Rubin brandy through his liver.

  Anyway, where was I... Great-uncle Tripko, my grandmother’s brother, woke me from my drunken slumber. I had never seen the fellow in my life, and that’s how things should have stayed. He burst into the house, demanded coffee, and while a huge pneumatic hammer was pounding in my head, he began a monologue about why he had lugged his old arse all the way from Višegrad, Bosnia.

  He blathered away for a good half hour, but it was clear from the first sentence, no, from the first word, no, from the first grim smile illuminated by a golden tooth (in place of the second left upper incisor, if I’m not mistaken), that Tripko wanted money.

  Gruesome war crimes were committed in Višegrad. Anyone who’s interested, although that’s not many, can learn more or less everything about those crimes today. But one thing is never mentioned when people talk about the war crimes, and I can’t help but put it down to hypocrisy. The terrible thing to do with the war crimes is not just that some people were killed, but that some others weren’t – Uncle Tripko for example, I thought that morning.

  I bet he watched and applauded while Muslims were being butchered on the bridge over the River Drina, if he wasn’t assisting the killers already. No doubt about it: That’s the sort of mug he was. One look at Tripko and you could reconstruct his entire life with all the details of that worthless existence: a junior officer in the Yugoslav People’s Army, who took early retirement and was now as fit as a fiddle at the age of seventy because he never had to work hard, his wife bore the load of the labour for him, and he beat her and cheated on her with waitresses and cashiers until she died of a heart attack. This beast had now read in the paper that a relation of his, ‘a bosom relative’ as he put it, had landed himself a
n important position, so now he came rocking up to get his share of the booty. “Who can help each other if not family?” he philosophized as he slurped his coffee.

  “Listen,” I finally said to him, “I’m not sure we know each other, but that doesn’t change a thing. Money is not an issue – there is no money. Even if I had any I wouldn’t give it to you. If it makes things easier for you, take a look around. Do you see the hole I live in? Do you think some moneybags lives here?”

  Then my uncle reared up and transfixed me with a gaze of primordial hatred.

  “You little shit,” he thundered, “do you think you can get rid of me like you shake a tick off your trouser leg? No money, eh? a cushy position but no dough? Do you think Tripko’s an old duffer? You don’t know Tripko, sonny. Uncle Tripko will teach you to mess him around! This house you live in, this hole, as you call it – is mine. You think it was left to you by your grandmother, do you? But your grandmother wasn’t your grandmother. My kind sister, bless her soul, brought you up like her own son because she had a heart as big as Russia, though you weren’t kith or kin. But I won’t have you loafing around here by the sea in my house while I rot away in a thirty-square metre hovel by the Drina. I go to sleep at night not knowing if I’ll be kidnapped and wake up downstream! And to see you here like this!”

  As strong as a bear, he grabbed me by the throat and pinned me against the wall: “This is my house, you’re the stranger here, and you dare to fuck me around!” he hissed. “You think you’re a clever Dick, don’t you. You think you’re better than me – you, a whore’s little bastard, the son of that monster!”

  Thus spoke Tripko, and he was a man of the old school: He honestly believed that every argumentation, however logical and rhetorically powerful, became even deadlier when backed up by a degree of brute physical force. Finally he threw me onto the bed like a stuffed toy and stormed out of the house like a huge, retarded boy in a huff, slamming the door behind him.

  “You’ll be hearing from me. Start packing and get out of my house quick smart!” he shouted from the terrace.

  I lay on the bed and closed my eyes. All I could think of in the moment before sleep took me was what an utter scourge he was.

  10

  I never saw Uncle Tripko again. His solicitor didn’t call me, and no letter with a court summons or eviction notice ever came.

  Nor did Tripko ever arrive home in Višegrad.

  It seems his neighbours alerted the police two weeks after he left for Montenegro, where, he told them in confidence, he had some important real-estate business to attend to. The papers reported that his car was found near Lake Piva, in front of a tunnel on the road from Plužine to the Bosnian border. Although divers were unable to locate his body, the investigation established that Tripko committed suicide by jumping into the lake. No farewell letter was found. The details of his visit to Montenegro were not known, the police announced.

  Tripko disappeared, and with him the danger of me losing the house. What a lovely and apt happy ending, I thought at first. Alas, there is only one happy ending – the Apocalypse – even if it is only a promise. Everything else is just an open ending, a continuous series of open endings, whose resolution not only resolves nothing but further complicates already unbearably complicated things. Whenever someone says to me, ‘That’s simple’, I think: Sure, mate, everything’s simple if you’ve got no idea. To an ignoramus, everything seems self-explanatory, and ‘obviously’ is their favourite word.

  In fact, everything that exists is complicated beyond our power of comprehension. If you think twice about things, if you re-examine your own assumptions and convictions, everything you think you know will turn out to be as enormous and mysterious as the Sphinx.

  I tried my very hardest, but I couldn’t forget Tripko’s words. The fire belched by that ireful prophet-of-doom swept away the serenity of my world. All that remained of my peace and calm was the cold smoke rising from the scorched landscape I had lulled my existence into.

  What the hell did he mean about me not being my grandmother’s grandson? Was that undeniably vile man really such a rotter as to openly hate his sister’s daughter? What could my unfortunate mother, whom my grandmother always spoke of as a saint and martyr, have done to offend him? Why did the papers write about the disappearance of Tripko Pavlović – not Hafner, but Pavlović? The man in the photos, which accompanied the articles, was Uncle Tripko. Right man - , wrong surname.

  Why did my grandmother never mention that she had a brother? Why the mix-up with surnames of close relatives? What else did that good woman keep secret from me?

  11

  After Tripko left my house and vanished into the void, I slept the whole day and the next night. I woke up beside my grandmother’s grave. There were two very well-paid, lazy gravediggers, whom I felt were taking absolutely ages to do the job. I hadn’t informed anyone about grandmother’s death. I remember I didn’t have an obituary notice printed, and of course I didn’t permit the outrageous perversion of announcing her death in the newspaper. Although the cemetery was unfamiliar, I knew I was in Bar. I didn’t know anyone in that city and had her buried there so I could be sure nobody would come along and spoil things – those were my thoughts as I prepared the details of the funeral, I knew.

  I had paid the workers well. They misunderstood the gesture and considered it their duty to pretend to be deeply touched by her death. When we’d buried her I couldn’t make them leave the grave. They just stood there, crossing themselves ceaselessly in compensation for the lack of mourners. “The poor woman; to die so alone and for no one to come to the burial,” one lamented. “May the dark earth rest lightly on her after such martyrdom,” the other said. I desperately wanted to be alone but they refused to go. Instead, they came up with new and ever more pathetic folkloric creations. This introduced an element of the ridiculous, which was superfluous because funerals are ridiculous as they are, in common with all situations where people feel obliged to be serious and dignified. I was reminded once again that the nicest thing we can say about a person is that one day they will die and cease to bother us. In the end, I had to pay the workers double before they finally agreed to leave. At a cemetery, surrounded by the dead, we’re at the source of cognizance. At a cemetery we learn at first glance all we need to know about life - that we’re going to die. I sat down on the dry-stone-wall by my grandmother’s grave and lit a cigarette.

  The wind blew several snowflakes into my face. I looked around and saw that I was alone in the cemetery, which extended out to all four corners of the world. Row upon row of stone crosses marched to the horizon, where threatening black clouds were mustering. War is the father of all things, I remember thinking: An army of dead against a heavenly army. Thunder rumbled through the valley. Both the cemetery and I witnessed those sound effects of nature in impassive silence. Wherever I looked, I saw graves mounted with crosses, upright and dignified, marking lives spent in humiliation and submission.

  All around me, and as far as the eye could see, stretched the future in crystal-clear memory that was not mine.

  When I finally saw the familiar world of my room, I quickly got dressed and ran out into the bright day. I rushed to the cemetery below the Old Town here in Ulcinj, where I had really buried my grandmother in the presence of two gravediggers and several of her old friends, who in the meantime had also died. Grandmother was buried here on 5th August, not in the winter and not in Bar; not on a squally day but in the suffocating heat; not with indifference but with all the pain I was capable of feeling. The old ladies, her friends, gave speeches and I cried all the way through, which they found touching. Even the gravediggers felt it appropriate to comfort me because I was crying so persistently. I remembered all that. But at the same time I wasn’t sure about it all because the memory that gripped me that morning was suddenly purer and more powerful than my own.

  I ran to the cemetery in the hope of finding out what I really
did remember. I stood in front of my grandmother’s grave and heaved a sigh of relief. The gravestone did give her name: Olga Hafner, born 9th May 1930, died 5th August 2003. Erected by her loving grandson, was carved in the marble.

  12

  When I got home, I tipped all the photos of my grandmother onto the floor and started looking through them again, searching for some detail to support the suspicion I was unable to shake off. I went through the family history for myself again and again, like a student preparing for a crucial exam.

  Apparently, my mother had ignored my grandmother, who begged her not to go with that man. She fell in love with my father, a good-looking officer, who was a thrice-decorated piece of shit. It was his bravery that killed him. He went to Libya and died there in circumstances that were suspicious, to say the least. When he found out my mother was pregnant, he quit the army and vanished. He was a man who feared no enemy and saved two comrades from a burning tank (his first medal); who boldly intercepted assassins sent into the country by Croatian Ustashi émigrés (his second medal); and who shielded a general with his body when a crazed soldier from Kosovo fired at him (his third medal). And yet he fled head-over-heels from me, who wasn’t even born. He heard I was due in five months’ time and knew instantly what he had to do. He discarded everything – status, friends and the wife he claimed to love – and moved to Greece, where he enlisted in an American paramilitary outfit. They sent him to Libya, from where he never returned. His name was rarely mentioned in our house. Grandmother made sure of that. She told me terrible tales about that man, so I grew up grateful that I’d never have to meet him.

  My mother was killed in a traffic accident in Germany soon after my birth. Grandmother then resigned from her job in the police force, where she worked as an office clerk, and devoted her entire life to me. From Visoko in Bosnia, where I was born, we moved to her family’s house in Ulcinj. Her ancestors were originally from Izmir, she told me, and had come to Ulcinj following the Messiah – Sabbatai Zevi. They were in Zevi’s company when he and his devotees put ashore at the quay, here at the end of the Ottoman Empire; for the Sultan had banished them when the Messiah’s prophecies became too irrational, and the man himself too mad to be bought off and too famous to be executed – thus the danger to the throne. As Jews, this was just another station of exile for them. Zevi died ten years after coming to Ulcinj. His followers remained here to guard his grave, waiting for him to fulfil his prophecy that he would be resurrected. Grandmother told me that her distant ancestor, the one who first raised a house here, on whose ruins ours was built after the 1979 earthquake, was among the chosen ones who lowered Zevi into the earth, from where he had not yet arisen.