I’ll take my editor sightseeing in the park.
I’ll show him where the Germans shot one of the most enigmatic and dedicated of Stalin’s secret agents. Then I’ll show him his grave. Later on, we’ll walk the same path that he and Mars took, and then we’ll head toward Terazije, where he’ll have to imagine buildings that no longer exist, where they interrogated the agent, and where he lay in his wounds, beaten and broken.
“That’s all well and good,” I know he’ll say, after taking his first sip of beer in the garden of some nearby café. “But, man, that part where Stalin is standing at the window saying Mustafa Golubić hasn’t surrendered but rather carried out an order — what does he mean by that?!”
I’ll look him right in the eye for quite a while, and then helplessly shrug. My editor will stub out his cigarette, stand up, put his hand on my shoulder, and leave, and as soon as I get home, I’ll write two more scenes for the ending.
The first will take place in the Kremlin, in the same room where Stalin stood by the window and stared at his reflection in the Soviet glass. This time, behind his back will stand one of his most enigmatic and dedicated secret agents, just returned from Mexico, where he’d laid the groundwork for the assassination of Leon Davidovich Trotsky, the greatest enemy of the world revolution.
The other final scene will take place in a house on the outskirts of Belgrade, which was surrounded by the German police early one morning in June 1941.
Mustafa Golubić will have shaving soap on his chin, but instead of holding a razor, he’ll be holding his revolver.
Weighing his options for escape, he’ll remember the conversation he had with Stalin after returning from Mexico.
“Joseph Vissarionovich, what are my orders?” he asked, interrupting the silence that, in his presence, was more cautious than a wild cat poised to sneak off into darkness.
“There’s only one more,” said Stalin, not daring to turn and look him in the eye.
“Yes?”
“Recognize the opportunity to go out as a hero.”
Here is that opportunity, Golubić will think brightly, already aiming for the body of the first German policeman he can see through the small bathroom window, but then he’ll realize that he’s been given the opportunity not only to die at the enemy’s hand but to be executed and buried in the very heart of the great city.
So I will never be forgotten, he thought as he rinsed the shaving soap from his face and looked in the mirror for the last time.
One could even say he was happy.
Part IV
Kiss Me Deadly
The Touch of Evil
by Verica Vincent Cole
Lekino Brdo
November 1, 2018
Viktor Marković is a dead man.
Why? The world will be a better place without him, that’s why. Or maybe there are other reasons.
I know that there is a bit of evil in all of us. Hidden behind the masks we agree to wear for the sake of civilization, it is balanced by goodness, controlled by the societal conventions. Yet at times, evil turns into Evil, a fairy-tale monster that eats children alive. And with this comes the sign. Most people fail to see it, although the sensitive ones often feel a need to avert their gaze from the faces of those in whom Evil lives. I call it the sign of the beast and I saw it on the face of Viktor Marković the moment I met him.
But I needed time to convince myself of the truth. I was scared, persuading myself for months that I must be wrong. And forgetting, at that, the futility of such exertion: for Evil refuses to forgive weakness. Evil grants no favors. And Evil is contagious.
Am I not the perfect example? To liberate the world from Evil, I have to let it inside of me. That’s the modus operandi of Evil, whether we are talking NATO’s “humanitarian intervention” or me, Neda Adamović. So it is not really a surprise that it is “other reasons” that guide our actions, is it? There’s no place for noblesse in the story of Evil.
Yet, I can’t help but wonder — what would some other people do in my position? Could they really kill another human being? Pull the trigger and put a bullet into someone’s forehead — bang bang, you’re dead! Probably not: most noble, gentle people living in pain would rather kill themselves.
Until yesterday, I considered myself one of them.
Today I decided that “Neda Adamović, Everyone’s Favorite Victim” will not be my epitaph. That it is time for a bang in my life.
April 30, 1999
Whether it’s Jack the Ripper or the armed forces, the pathology is the same: the killer first objectifies the victims to obliterate their humanity, so they are not human beings anymore, just collateral damage, Neda thought to herself, walking through the strangely quiet streets of Lekino Brdo, so innocent and quaint under the April sun as if totally unaware of what could happen to it at any moment. She was still seething at what she’d just seen from her friend Mariana’s thirteenth-floor balcony: Avala — the hill which, with its meager 1,700 feet, qualified as a mountain — without its TV tower! During the night, the precisely guided NATO missile had wiped the tower out, and the resulting scenery belonged in a parallel reality. Like everything else these days, for that matter: how could Serbia, the country which had always been on the right side of history, always the good guy, be bombed by the allies? Maybe because, as the saying went, it was in a habit of winning in war and losing in peace? But who could win over NATO? Martians?
“Making war to get peace is the same as fucking to get virginity,” Mariana had said as they drank coffee made from tepid water from the water heater, since this part of town was once again without electricity.
Neda couldn’t agree more.
Air-raid sirens began their shrill scream while she was entering “the little woods” — a wooded area that covered the block below her old high school — which usually had a calming effect on her nerves. Feeling like she was about to explode without any help from a NATO missile, Neda started singing from the top of her lungs: a song Belgrade Gypsies had sung during World War II, while German Stukas bombed the unfortunate town, which seemed to be everybody’s favorite target.
NATO intervention was the last straw for Neda. A private language school where she was teaching German collapsed under Western sanctions, leaving her without an income. So once again, she was depending on her parents. Upon retiring, her parents had moved to a village in the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina, and once in a while they would send her some cash and homemade goods. Making her feel worthless, if not suicidal.
Neda decided there was no reason to hurry home, to the little house on Todora Dukina Street, where she expected at any moment to turn into collateral damage under its old bricks. After all, it was in these woods where she had had her first kiss. A first kiss, perhaps the last day of life — wasn’t she a proper heroine from some Remarque novel?
The woods seemed empty, save an old man who sat on a bench by the path, staring at nothing as he ignored the sirens. Either deaf, thought Neda, or just didn’t give a shit. Perhaps he found it better to be killed by a bomb than to fade away in some poorly supplied hospital, living on bread with margarine.
The sirens stopped as suddenly as they had started. Knowing what was coming, Neda chose a bench for herself and sat to wait for the hard rock delivered by NATO to overpower the Gypsy lament.