Coming

by Andrej Nikolaidis

  Zevi spent his days in Ulcinj in writing and prayer. He carved the Star of David into the wall of his tower and there he spoke with God, whom he’d never renounced. Zevi left Ulcinj only twice: once he went to Bojana River to try and find Dolcino’s book in the ruins of the Franciscan monastery; the other time he travelled to the Archdiocese in Bar to try and find some trace of the book or at least rekindle his hope that the search would bear fruit.

  Zevi would have gone to the very ends of the earth to find Dolcino’s book: his thoughts probed the distance in search of it. But the whole time it seems to have been right under his very nose.

  Twenty years after Zevi’s death, the Morean War was raging. A Venetian fleet assembled in the sea off Ulcinj. It was 10 August 1696. Historical documents state: ‘The aim of the attack was to take the town and destroy the pirate nest because all attempts by the Venetians to wipe out the pirates in battles at sea had been unsuccessful.’

  The blatant lies of history! As he was deploying his ships before Ulcinj, General Providur Daniel Dolfino IV thought back to the day his uncle told him Fra Dolcino’s secret. His uncle had spoken slowly, and he, still a boy, had stared wide-mouthed and absorbed every word. The air around them had burned on that serene, summer day, just like today, when he and his army were finally so close to the book he’d sworn to retake for Christendom.

  The General Providur believed he’d find the book hidden in the wall of the church which the infidel had turned into a mosque. When the monastery by Bojana River had been destroyed, one of the Franciscan friars, who knew Dolcino’s secret, had taken the book and hidden it in the church in Ulcinj’s Old Town. But Ulcinj fell to the Mohammedans. Today people captured on pirate raids are sold as slaves in the church square, Daniel Dolfino thought with disgust. And there, overlooking the square, is the tower where the Jewish prophet who became a Mohammedan lived until his death. Pah, work of the infidel! With God’s aid, order would soon be returned to that part of the world: shipping in the Adriatic would be free of the infidel threat, Ulcinj would be Christian again, and he would finally get hold of the book which had fired his imagination for so many years – the book he believed to contain the answers to so many questions humanity could only ask with fear.

  It’s noon, and a mistral from the sea fills the sails of the Venetian ships. Standing beside the general, I can see the deadly determination in his eyes. Fire! he commands his troops.

  The siege of Ulcinj lasted almost one month. In the end, the Venetian troops re-boarded their ships and returned to the Bay of Kotor. They’d managed to take the town of Ulcinj and well nigh raze it to the ground; they’d also blocked off the aqueduct. But the pirate stronghold had not fallen.

  Rain beat against the windows of the Venetian headquarters in Perast. In the library, General Providur Daniel Dolfino wrote his report to his superiors: ‘We were unable to take Ulcinj, but if the main goal was to punish the audacity and arrogance of the pirates, we have at least taught them a lesson.’ History books would describe his campaign as a partial success. But he alone knew how immense and utter his defeat was. All the honour and glory of this world would be worthless to him after that. Until the end of his earthly days he’d dream of the former church – now a mosque – up in the unassailable Ulcinj fortress; he’d dream of opening the book whose words would take him by the hand and lead him to where only the elect may go.

  Back in his Smyrna days, Zevi arrived at the idea that all books and human knowledge are not only superfluous but a diabolical burden on humanity’s shoulders. He was completely obsessed by this idea during his ten-year stay in Ulcinj. Knowledge, he told his followers, prevents us from hearing the clear message of God. We may thus assume that Zevi was familiar with the teachings of Thomas Müntzer. ‘Bibel, Bubel, Babel – Bible-babble and Babylon: all that clutter has to be discarded so we can turn directly to God,’ Müntzer wrote. ‘The scholars think it’s sufficient to read the Word of God in books and spit it out raw, like a stork spits out frogs for its young in the nest.’

  Müntzer was Luther’s student: a brilliant intellectual who burned with hatred towards everything that in the slightest way resembled intellect. Not inappropriately, they dubbed him the Apostle of the Ignorant. In his reckoning with books, Müntzer elevated the illiterate masses to authorised expositors of Scripture. The weakening of the authority of the Catholic Church also weakened its Truth, which at that time was the backbone of the world. Now, in place of that backbone, doomsday movements embedded implants fashioned in smithies and sheds, forests and caves. Their peg-legged Truth was crooked, crippled and lame. The common people took the matter into their own hands and Europe was ravaged by myriad groups guided by grotesquely distorted ideas. The people intervened in the corpus of the Christian idea, carrying out their operations with butcher-like precision. After this surgery by the ‘popular experts’, Christian Europe resembled Frankenstein. All across Europe, cities blazed, outlaw communities replaced liturgy with sexual perversions, cannibalism took over from Communion in places, and the ground was soaked with blood. Under the rule of millenarians, one contemporary wrote, ‘the world is awash in a torrent of blood which will rise as high as a horse’s head’.

  Unlike Müntzer, who rejected all books, Zevi recommended the world one title – the one he himself authored and titled The Book of the Coming. But it will only be read when he arises and brings the Truth. For the interim, he left a fake book in this world of lies: The Glory of the Return, which he wrote by candlelight during the long nights in his tower, before the Star of David. Zevi considered that this book, which explains his teachings and the future of his people, contains just about as much truth as the world can bear. He bequeathed a difficult task to his followers, who would pass his words from mouth to mouth through many generations up until today: they must destroy his fake book, as well as that of the false messiah Fra Dolcino, before he can return and bring with him the real Holy Book. His followers had to find and burn those two books, otherwise his coming would be prevented and his people would continue to roam the world without peace and without a home.

  Zevi left Ulcinj in the same way he arrived – spectacularly. Back when he disembarked on the beach below the fortress, black birds had risen up to meet him. On his last day he was strolling through the town in the company of two followers. They came across a group of people gathered around a fig tree, crying. A woman held in her arms a lifeless boy who’d fallen out of the tree. Then Zevi said: ‘O Lord, send back this child and take me instead!’ The boy opened his eyes and started to cry, while Zevi fell down dead on the cobbles. As the people lifted up his body and bore it away in wonder and gratitude, a murder of crows circled above them.

  Now you know it all. The Ulcinj Library was burned down because Dolcino’s book lay hidden there among all the worthless titles. Daniel Dolfino IV had been right – Dolcino’s book really was hidden in the wall of the former church, now a mosque, in the Old Town. Workers renovating the church after the cataclysmic earthquake of 1979 found it, after which it was kept at the Ulcinj Library. The staff there didn’t know its value and consigned it to a depot for old books no one wanted.

  About a hundred of Zevi’s followers had gone with him to Ulcinj. Although they’d all formally adopted Islam, in their hearts they’d never renounced Judaism. After Zevi’s death, they scattered to all parts of the world: some returned to Smyrna, while others went as far away as Australia. They in turn died, but their descendants learned to preserve the secret of their faith about what lay buried in the hill cemetery above Ulcinj. Where did the devotees come from to carry out their assignment and await the coming of the Messiah? Who’ll ever know? – perhaps from Turkey, where they’re called Dönmeh, or from California, where Yakov Leib HaKohain of Galata in Istanbul went to gather the faithful and prepare them for Zevi’s return.

  When Zevi had felt his end drawing near, he crept out of the fortress and climbed up to the cemetery with a group of his disciples. There his Book of the Coming was buried in a tomb, foll
owing ancient rites. The Messiah would thus have his Holy Book nearby when he arose at his burial place in Ulcinj.

  Zevi’s fake book, The Glory of the Return, was stolen from the house of the Vukotics, who’d bought it at auction in London. Zevi’s followers are fiendishly cunning: they burned down an entire library to cover up their burning of one book. And in order to conceal their theft of the other, they killed an entire family and left misleading clues.

  From the Vukotićs’, they went straight to the old Jewish cemetery where The Book of the Coming lay waiting in deep, sylvan oblivion. There, on the grave of Zevi’s true book, they performed a ritual according to rules laid down by the Messiah himself and burned his fake script.

  The first book had been destroyed in the library fire. The second was burned at the cemetery. The third was now dug out of its tomb: the Messiah could come again.

  Chapter Seven

  in which we briefly enter a public house, venture into a dark marsh and hear of self-pity and grace as Lazar tells his story; we meet singing nuns, and a company of drunken friends confess their sins

  What drove Lazar to kill the Vukotićs that evening? Or rather: what stopped him from killing them before that?

  If I hadn’t lived through the war here, I wouldn’t know. But I saw what happens when the safety net of social relations fails and social masks are dropped – when the truth about us gets out. I saw the collapse of the world in which we’d played our little roles as good people and friendly neighbours. Like when a dam bursts, the water floods through, and the peaceful valley of the world we knew is suddenly swamped by the deluge of our desires. All the dead of the wars of the 1990s are a bodycount of the fantasies and deepest desires of our neighbours and fellow human beings.

  A man lives with his neighbours in ‘peace and harmony’ for decades. Ask anyone in the local area about him and they’ll tell you he’s a peaceful, friendly guy. Isn’t the crime news in the papers always the same? Don’t people always describe their neighbour in the same way, and then – out of the blue – he commits a terrible, bloodthirsty crime? He conforms to social conventions for years and years. But then comes a day when he follows his own desires: he goes into the house of people he’s lived alongside in peace and love for decades and kills them all. Who is the man living next door? Who is the criminal from our wars? An ordinary man, a good neighbour of forty years’ standing, who under the sway of ideology, religion or whatever, blows a fuse and commits the crime? No: he’s a killer who wished to see his neighbours dead for forty years and one day finally did what he’d always wanted.

  It’s the same with sincere friends. My good friend is drunk: he comes up to me and insults me; he tells me he despises me – no, he hates me, a hatred I deserve for things I’ve done, some of them in the distant, common past, which he enumerates and describes with what feels like the inhuman precision of a surveillance device. When I see him again the next day, he stands before me with his head bowed and apologises. ‘Please forgive me, I was drunk,’ he says.

  What is my friend actually apologising for? Not for what he thinks and feels, but for having said what he thinks. He apologises for truth having punctured the condom of interpersonal consideration under the influence of alcohol. His apology is a request for me to reject the obvious: yes, that is what he really thinks about me. Hypocrisy is at the very heart of so-called good interpersonal relations. It’s the very core of our everyday forgiveness. Usually we forgive what is done to us and manage to ignore the fundamental question of why it was done to us. Even if we forgive from the position of a good Christian, we do so in the full knowledge that there’s a final arbiter, our God, who considers the claim for clemency once again. What’s more, we forgive in full awareness that we have to forgive for our own sins to be forgiven. So that the outcome of the trial in which we are being judged be favourable, we have to relinquish our authority in the trial where we are the judge and transfer the matter to the ‘Supreme Court’. We forgive, fully aware of the existence of the Heavenly Bank of Sin, in which every transgression counts. Our interests in the Bank of Sin render us fundamentally incapable of forgiving: a person can only truly forgive if their grace is disinterested. Ours never is, therefore it isn’t grace.

  *

  One of the Vukotićs’ neighbours told me he’d seen Lazar drunk several times at the Lonely Hearts bar, where I didn’t go because it was frequented by the local working class. An essential precondition for joining the struggle for the rights of the working class is that you not know the working class. After all, ignorance is the precondition for every struggle: as soon as we get to know something well, we can no longer imagine fighting for it.

  The local proletarians met at the Lonely Hearts to dream of better days and drink away their wages. Despite the flood and snowstorm, the place was packed that night. The owner of the Lonely Hearts was nicknamed Pasha. No one remembered his real name any more. He was a petty crook from Bosnia who came to Ulcinj like so many others to escape the war. The natives of Ulcinj are wise: they know that current adversities will be replaced by the adversities to come. One occupier will replace another – one despot will be deposed by the next. This makes them paragons of patience, in no hurry to replace their current misfortune with the next in the sequence of misfortunes. In fact, if the misfortune lasts long enough you become so used to it that you can’t imagine your life without it. The natives of Ulcinj know how to get on with people like Pasha: they let them live next door and just don’t allow their bars, quarrels and shams to affect their lives.

  Pasha owed me a favour, like many other people in town. His problem was that he treated people like idiots. That’s not a bad basis for success in life, in principle, as long as you’re not an idiot yourself. Pasha was.

  Things were bound to blow up in his face sooner or later. I made sure he survived the blast. Therefore, when I entered the Lonely Hearts, I expected that I’d just need to do a bit of the mandatory, folksy not-on-your-life-mate haggling, and that Pasha would then tell me where to find Lazar.

  In 1999, long lines of Kosovar refugees poured into Ulcinj, fleeing from the Serbian troops or NATO’s bombs. Many of these displaced people dreamed of making it to Europe. Pasha offered to help them achieve that dream.

  Serious criminals sailed from Montenegrin harbours for Italy in boats full of refugees. Some of the vessels made it to the other side of the Adriatic, others sank and took with them many a dream of good wages, second-hand Mercedes and savings for building garishly painted villas near Prizren and Priština with decorative plaster lions on the balconies.

  Of all the human traffickers, Pasha was the cheapest. This was partly because he operated with the lowest overheads and partly because people paid him to take them to Italy – but he didn’t take them there. Pasha would load his clients into a truck and cart them through Montenegro all night: from Ulcinj to Kolašin, from Kolašin to Nikšić, from Nikšić to Risan, then round the Bay of Kotor, via Budva, and back to Ulcinj. The others all used boats, but he stuck to good old terra firma, Pasha boasted. At dawn he’d unload the people on the sandy beach of Bojana Island near Ulcinj, at the southernmost tip of Montenegro. The refugees looked around in confusion because they couldn’t see a single structure or anything that might have confirmed to them that they were really in Italy. ‘Just keep walking a bit, and when you meet someone, wish them Buon giorno!’ Pasha instructed them, before hopping back into the truck and speeding off.

  The refugees would roam along the beach with suitcases in hand until they came across a local watchman who, to their astonishment, would reply to their Buon giorno with obscenities in Albanian.

  Pasha’s plan had only one flaw: it overlooked what would happen next. The refugees would realise he’d ripped them off and would then have no other goal in life than to kill him. I’m a well-informed man: as soon as I heard they were after Pasha I sent him to a friend’s place in Bar, where he hid until the furious refugees had returned to Kosovo.

  While I waited for Pasha to fam
iliarise some new female staff with the house rules, I realised that the Lonely Hearts had extended its range: along with the terrible drink, guests could now pay for hideously ugly prostitutes. One of them, a wench with part blonde, part black hair and a few missing teeth, offered me the services of one of the beautiful girls, she emphasised.

  ‘No thanks, I’ve already got a full collection of STDs,’ I said.

  ‘Then at least buy me a drink,’ she insisted. She was obviously thirsty, and a gentleman always helps a damsel in distress.

  ‘Aren’t you the local Sherlock Holmes?’ she asked as she was quaffing her brandy.

  ‘More like Philip Marlowe,’ I corrected her. ‘Holmes keeps women at an arm’s length, whereas Marlowe takes them under his wing, only to destroy them later.’

  ‘I love Holmes films,’ she avowed, determined to continue our cultured conversation. ‘What I like most is when he shows how clever he is: you know, when he just looks at someone, and the next instant he can tell you everything about them after having seen just a few details, which only he has noticed. Can you do that too?’ she wondered.

  ‘I could give it a try,’ I said. ‘Since you don’t stink of sweat like the other whores in this joint, I infer you weren’t working today. Therefore I assume Pasha has set you aside for himself because only his mistresses are entitled to days off. I see you’ve swabbed two inches of powder on your face and also note that you’ve washed your hair. That means you want to appeal to Pasha and be attractive for him. That, in turn, means that you hope to stay his mistress. Who knows, with a bit of luck he might even marry you. After all, doesn’t every man ultimately want to settle down with a good woman by his side? But that’s not going to happen: even if we live to see tomorrow, the day will bring a girl younger than you. Then Pasha will give you the boot. You’re afraid of that, and it’s on your mind. Warm?’