“What’s going on?” Rotten said, “Some nasty shit’s going on, and only two weeks before we get out of here.”
They tightened their belts, quickly laced up their boots, and at the last minute Anton Kova took the two pens out of Rotten’s shirt and stuffed them in his pants pocket. It wouldn’t be good to have good-humored Major Stankovi stop in front of him again this morning. Then, amid the crowd of men stampeding in the corridor and hopping down the stairs, they made their way out onto the parade ground.
There was an ominous silence on the circle as the last of the men rushed to join their units. A group of officers, led by Major Stankovi, emerged from the officers’ quarters. The duty officer called out: Attenshun! The Major’s heavyset form, which usually radiated goodwill and good humor, now seemed gloomy and dangerous. He walked up to the small podium on the field and the other officers ranged themselves behind him. An intelligence officer, a captain, tried out the mike: one, two, three, testing. Then he withdrew, leaving room for the commanding officer. The Major stepped slowly to the microphone, biting his upper lip, and for a few moments it seemed that he was trying to decide what he should say. A cold September wind from the nearby hills blew over the heads of the silent soldiers.
“We are the Yugoslav People’s Army,” the Major said in a soft voice that the loudspeakers made almost metallic.
“We guard this country and its laws. Our supreme commander is Marshal Tito, who led this army triumphantly through the Balkans in so many bloody battles for liberty and victory.”
He fell silent, allowing the soldiers to digest these phrases.
“And yet, in this army there are people who do not respect what we all hold most holy. Even worse, people who are prepared to sabotage brotherhood, unity, and our freedom.”
The breeze carried his words to the last rows of soldiers. Hands behind his back, he took a couple of steps on the podium.
“We no longer have kings,” he continued unexpectedly. “Kings fell along with the old, rotten Yugoslavia.”
He looked at his intelligence officer, who was as white as a sheet. And he spoke as if that officer was directly responsible.
“Counterrevolutionary graffiti has appeared in our barracks—that is all that I can say for now. Anyone who could write the sort of thing we’ve found—” and Anton Kova knew very well what the Major would say next: “—anyone who could write that sort of thing would be just as capable of planting a bomb in the barracks. Or turning his gun on one of his comrades. We will not allow this. We will track all such men down, and all those who protect them, and we will court-martial every last one. You will receive further instructions in your units.”
The duty officer called out: at ease.
6.
The investigation began. To start with, the soldiers of each unit were asked to sit at the desks in the barracks classroom. A young corporal with supple, twitching fingers placed a piece of paper and a pen in front of each soldier. He lit a cigarette and recited a prepared speech that each man was meant to copy down word for word. It was an old fairy tale that begins with a description of a grassy field across which rides a man on a donkey, and there are other donkeys around eating grass. Then a king goes by accompanied by his retinue—meaning that the words “grass,” “king,” “Yugoslavia,” “donkeys,” and “eat,” were all used on a number of occasions. And every time Anton Kova got to one of those words, his hand shook. You shouldn’t shake, he thought, because a handwriting expert will be asked to come in and determine whose hand shook while writing the word “donkey.” Professor Rotten, completely calm, was sitting right next to Kova and writing down the sentences the corporal was dictating—dictating very slowly and with frequent repetitions, since not everyone in the room could write very well. Anton Kova wondered how many of the guys knew what was going on. Stall 17 was clean and empty, after all; everyone avoided it. He wondered whether Rotten knew, and he was sorry he hadn’t confided in him. At least then the Professor could have testified that Kova was innocent. No one who wrote those words would possibly call attention to himself by asking a friend whether he had seen them too. But then, the intelligence officer would ask why Kova hadn’t reported what he’d seen. Perhaps you don’t love Marshal Tito as much as everyone else? And in fact Anton Kova did not love him. Anyone who loved him would have nothing to fear. He would have quickly reported that hostile and disgusting bit of doggerel. But Kova had remained silent, and therefore had become an accessory.
That night, the horrible inscription appeared again on the bunkhouse wall, and in his rambling dreams it seemed to him that his eyeballs were broiling in his head, that he could not hide from the words that his own eyes were projecting into the night.
7.
The next day there was no more talk about uncovering counter revolutionary individuals or groups on the base. At breakfast Kova heard they’d arrested an Albanian they’d found in possession of live ammunition that he had apparently stolen while on guard duty. Someone said he’d be put before a firing squad, bang, right on the spot. But Anton Kova knew that this was just the usual gossip young soldiers bandied about to pass the time faster. At the circle, just before the morning muster, they heard that an unscheduled military exercise was being organized. This sounded a lot more likely. But still no one said anything about why the investigation was happening at all.
An intelligence officer came by the library in the morning and asked everyone whether they’d seen anything unusual, any soldier who was behaving strangely. He asked what books had been taken out recently and who had taken them. The officer in charge of the library was clearly more frightened than either of his two assistants, and he answered quickly. Nothing could happen here because he never left the library. The officer looked Anton Kova in the eye and asked him how frequently he left the library and whether he ever went to the bathroom. I do go, he said, heart beating quickly, but always with the sergeant’s permission. The sergeant confirmed this and that satisfied the intelligence officer. Then he took some sheets from the pile of papers that lay in front of Professor Rotten. Anton Kova knew there was a Bible underneath. Rotten was calm, gloomy, motionless. When the officer removed the final sheet there was nothing underneath. The Professor had removed the Old Testament and his notes in time. Anton Kova relaxed. They really didn’t need a new scandal because of a Bible on the premises. There was enough going on already.
In the evening there was a surprise drill; the company was turned out in full uniform and under a cold rain blown in by the mountain winds forced to march some ten miles to the rifle range. There they had to put on gasmasks and hurl themselves into a swamp. They didn’t get back to the base until the next morning and all fell right into bed. But at ten A.M. they were up again practicing their marching to the “Hymn of the Artillerymen.” No one was allowed to stay in the classroom or the library. Anton Kova began to think that the ten days that separated him from the end of his tour would last forever. He knew that in exceptional circumstances the term of military service could even be extended.
8.
The sun came out again at noon, and during the rest period he lay in the grass behind the mess hall, stretching his sore legs that were no longer used to marching. He lit a cigarette, looked up at the clouds, and wished he could escape from what was coming, perhaps tomorrow. He imagined the heavyset Major Stankovi walking across the circle, leaning toward him and saying: “Civilization is waiting for you in the depot—you are dismissed.” “Civilization” was another word that wasn’t too clear to the Major: here it meant civilian clothes that had been sent from home. But those were only pleasant midday thoughts brought by the clouds that rushed into the Balkans from the valley of the Morava River on their way either to the Aegean or the Black Sea.
At five in the afternoon they were again chased out onto the parade ground. They marched around the circle and sang: Tito’s a marshal, a genius is he… And the more the boots crunched the more Kova asked himself: Who wrote the bathroom poem? Who will be unmasked? An
d although no one had ever told the company what the investigation was all about, and although none of the soldiers had ever admitted to seeing anything untoward on the bathroom walls, Anton Kova sensed that the words that had so haunted him were flashing too before the eyes of each of the marching men. It was like when someone can’t stop laughing at a funeral: at every step, some letter from the bathroom walls shone on the circle. For every “Marshal” they sang there was the grass that the King of Yugoslavia would eat. For every “genius” there was the donkey who would fuck the King in his ass (a terrible thought), or rather in his fat ass (an even more terrible thought). During the guard duty he had to serve once again by the armory where the 155 mm cannons were kept, as the stars were just winking out in the sky and the first light was coming over the mountaintops, Kova wished that the culprit would be found. Let him be captured at last to put an end to all this uncertainty, let him be caught and brought before a court-martial. Later Anton Kova would be ashamed of having had such thoughts—a court-martial was no joke, but at the time he was such a nervous wreck that he would have been glad to see the idiot strung up, sent to jail, anything. After all, thanks to the “poet,” he was still stuck on the base. Rotten would miss a semester if not a whole year. How was it possible, Kova thought angrily, how was it possible for this unknown writer to issue such a brazen challenge inside this army, this fearsome army—feared by everyone, even by the citizens of its own country, who also loved it precisely because they feared it, just as they feared and simultaneously loved its Commander, Marshal, genius.
9.
Although it seemed to him that he would never get away, it turned out that Kova was able to leave the base only a few days later than scheduled. It seemed the investigation had begun with the men about to be discharged before moving on to the wider population. There were quite a few soldiers at the end of their tours, so things got held up. For Anton Kova, all the years he’d spent at the base now felt as though they’d passed faster than these final days in southern Serbia, when it seemed to him that every hour lasted an eternity. Particularly because he had been so afraid of it, the graffiti lodged itself deep into his memory. Only once did he tell his friends about what had happened to him in the far south. The story was a big success, but he never repeated it—his friends had laughed hardest at the fact that it had been him, Anton Kova, sitting there terrified, holding a newspaper (the Belgrade daily Politika, in fact), his pants around his ankles. People are malicious; they like nothing more than to laugh at someone else’s misfortune, incompetence, or general unhappiness, as for instance when they are made to do “the bicycle.” Who could really understand Anton Kova and his distress in those last days of his tour? And so he was happy to forget the whole thing—he wanted to forget it. And besides, there were new things to worry about: the world was out of joint for a while. The Marshal died and soon after so did the country itself. The army that was supposed to protect it collapsed, and so no one marched on the circle singing the “Hymn of the Artillerymen” anymore. When Anton Kova saw burning Balkan villages on the television screen and heard the roar of 155 mm cannons he sometimes thought about the officers of that glorious and triumphant army. Where were they now, what uniforms were they wearing? He recalled the young corporal with the supple fingers—where was he lighting cigarettes now?—the lazy sergeant from the library—he was probably retired—and then Major Stankovi—whose soldiers was he commanding, to whom was he lecturing from his podium? But it was all so far away, and when the wars were over it all became even farther away and more nebulous, sinking deeper into the mists of memory.
One day on television Anton Kova saw a man with earphones on his head sitting in front of a tribunal and denying that he was guilty of killing civilians. His face seemed somehow familiar. Then the camera showed that same man in uniform. He was heavyset and his sleeves were rolled up. With a pleasant chuckle he was telling some miserable civilians that nothing would happen to them. A group of officers and soldiers was standing near him and then they forced those people onto some buses with their bundles. Anton Kova suspected he’d seen that face before…was it not the good-natured, though sometimes sullen and dangerous, Major Stankovi? Back at the base his hair had been black, but now it was gray. And then, for the first time in years, as if an enormous wave was washing over him, the whole set of events, in every detail, came back to Anton Kova. He was not at all bothered by the clips on television; he was shaken by that old fear from the cold corridors of the army base far in the south.
In the middle of the night, half asleep, he again saw the invisible handwriting on the wall. And he thought that the bathroom inscription had been some kind of prophecy. A prophecy? Mene, mene, tekel…? Now Anton Kova was wide awake. He got up, got dressed, and in the middle of the night went to the library where he worked as a cataloguer. He turned on all the lights in his office and all the lights in his head went on as well. He searched for a Bible, he knew where mene, tekel appeared. In the Book of Daniel an invisible hand wrote Mane, Thekel, Phares—as it is translated in the Vulgate. Anton Kova rifled the pages with a shaking hand: “…and his heart was made like the beasts, and his dwelling was with the wild asses, they fed him with grass…” The King of Babylon was kicked out of his palace, he had to live among donkeys, eat grass, and he had an animal’s heart…And it went on: “…all people, nations, and languages, trembled and feared before him,” the Babylonian King—“whom he would he slew; and whom he would he kept alive; and whom he would he set up; and whom he would he put down.” The King of Babylon, Anton Kova thought, of course, of course, that was the message, the King of Yugoslavia was the King of Babylon…“Then they brought the golden vessels that were taken out of the temple of the house of God which was at Jerusalem; and the king, and his princes, his wives, and his concubines, drank in them. They drank wine, and praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone.” And now, now he saw him, the professor of rotten languages walking down the corridor in the middle of the night or perhaps in the middle of his workday in the army library with his ballpoint pens stuck in his shirt pocket. He greets the guard in the corridor nonchalantly, goes into the bathroom, down to the end of the row of stalls, he sees that no one is around, undoes his belt just in case, and takes out his pen…“In the same hour came forth fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaister of the wall of the king’s palace: and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote…And this is the writing that was written, mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.” Which means, as Professor Rotten knew very well: “God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.” And he also knew the fate that the King of Babylon had been promised in the Book of Daniel: “…they fed him with grass like oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven.” How Anton Kova had hated that fat and dissolute king, and how his friend, that silent librarian, professor of rotten languages, had hated him too. He wrote a prophecy about him on the walls of a bathroom in southern Serbia, he couldn’t do it except in the vulgate, so to speak, mostly to avoid being caught but also so that all would understand. To write something as terrifying as mene tekel could only have been done in those days in the form chosen by his quiet friend Professor Milenko Pani, who could escape from himself only after he’d had a few brandies.
Anton Kova turned off the lights, closed the library door, and headed into the night. He drove around the dark streets of Ljubljana for a long time. Maybe his friend hadn’t hated the King of Babylon, he thought, maybe he was just getting some revenge for his petty humiliation, for the fact that he had become the professor of rotten languages, the much-mocked Professor Rotten. Maybe he just wanted to send the base a message translated from one of his “rotten” languages into their living, soldier’s dialect. Anton Kova looked into the rearview mirror: I have gray hair, and you have gray hair too, Professor Rotten, somewhere in Belgrade or wherever you are, and
Major Stankovi also has gray hair, I saw him on television. Your mysterious prophecy was indeed horrible, Rotten, and true. But all has passed; today all those ancient kingdoms and their armies no longer interest anyone, and by tomorrow we too will be forgotten and no one will understand our stories.
TRANSLATED FROM SLOVENIAN BY ANDREW WACHTEL
[SERBIA]
VLADIMIR ARSENIJEVI
One Minute: Dumbo’s Death
(60) For the last two years he hadn’t budged from this dark corner in the Calle de Colón (59) no one bothered him or drove him away, he became a kind of attraction, a black mark in an otherwise faultless city (58) tourists came every day to take his photograph, they turned off their well-worn route through La Rambla (57) bent down, leaned their hands on their knees and stared at him, talking him over in low voices (56) cameras clicked, flashes flared, lenses hummed (55) art students sat down opposite him with their legs crossed, tucked their feet under their buttocks (54) and took out pads and sketch books and drawing materials, pencils, charcoal, and felt-tipped pens, rapid sketches came into being (53) and the city dogs sniffed him and slunk away in horror without his being aware of anything (52) and once he even ended up on a postcard, though he was oblivious to this, and it was, thank goodness, only a parody made by one of the students (51) in that picture he was lying on the cold stone like a log, like a heap of dead flesh (50) vomit had slid down his rough cheek, followed by thick snot (49) colored with red strands of bloody spit, forming a little puddle on the pavement (48) while above his head there was a shiny sign in several European languages (47) “WELCOME TO GLORIOUS BARCELONA!”
“He always was ugly, honest to God,” that’s what his drunken mother said way back in nineteen eighty-four, in front of family and friends gathered to celebrate his twelfth birthday, shrugging her shoulders with an unusual mixture of love and revulsion as she surveyed the bony face, imposing nose, and small, sunken eyes of her only son, “but how did he get to be so flop-eared, that’s what no one knows!” Everyone round the table roared with drunken laughter. And, indeed, Hasan’s ears were so huge that even in his first year at primary school in his native Sarajevo someone called after him, “Hey, there goes Dumbo!” And it stuck, like a mask that he was never able to pull off, while mocking voices round him echoed, Dumbo, Dumbo, Dumbo, Dumbo…
Best European Fiction 2011 Page 10