She rose and followed her brother.
The Young Bosnians named themselves after La Giovane Italia, formed by Mazzini in 1831 to fight for an independent republican Italy. The aim of the Young Bosnians was to liberate the Southern Slavs (in what is now Yugoslavia) from the domination of the Hapsburgs. Groups were strongest in Bosnia and Herzogovina—particularly after these two provinces were annexed by Austro-Hungary in 1908; but they also existed in Dalmatia, Croatia, and Slovenia. They were terrorists and their principal political weapon was assassination.
The assassination of a foreign tyrant or his representative served two purposes. It reaffirmed the natural law of justice. It demonstrated that even crimes committed in the name of order and progress would not go forever unavenged: crimes of coercion, exploitation, oppression, false testimony, intimidation, administrative indifference. But above all, the crime of denying a people their identity. The crime of compelling a people to judge themselves by the criteria of their oppressors and so to find themselves inferior, helpless, and wanting. The justice of natural law demanded that the innumerable victims of these crimes in the past be redeemed. The act of political assassination might also rouse the living and make them realize that the power of the Empire was not absolute, that death, for once serving justice and not indifferent to it, could question that power. If the example of the assassin was followed by the mass of his people, they would rise up against their foreign oppressors and throw them out. To do this was no more impossible than killing a tyrant in public in the street.
‘There is no duty more sacred in the world,’ wrote Mazzini, ‘than that of the conspirator who sets out to avenge humanity and to become an apostle of natural law.’
On 2 June 1914 Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Hapsburg throne, was shot dead with his wife, as they drove through Sarajevo in an open limousine, by Gavrilo Princip, a Young Bosnian of nineteen.
Six other Young Bosnians were in the crowd waiting to assassinate the archduke. For different reasons five of them failed to act. But the sixth, Nedeljko Cabrinovič, threw a bomb. It exploded behind the royal car wounding several people in the crowd but leaving the heir presumptive unhurt. Cabrinovič tried to kill himself on the spot by taking poison and jumping into the river. The dose of poison was too weak. Hauled out of the river, he was asked who he was. I am a Serbian hero, he replied.
Earlier the same morning Cabrinovič went to a photographer’s shop and had his portrait taken with a school friend. He ordered six prints of the photograph. They would be ready in an hour. He asked his friend to send the photographs later the same day to addresses which he gave him. At the trial—where there were twenty-five accused—the Judge was perplexed by this story of the photographs.
I thought posterity, explained Cabrinovič, should have a photo of me taken on that day.
One of the photographs was sent to a certain Vuzin Runič in Trieste. Cabrinovič had worked in Trieste in a printer’s shop until October 1913. He had left Trieste saying: You’ll hear of me again. Wait and see what happens when certain people with red stripes down their trousers and helmets with feathers on their heads come to Sarajevo!
Shortly after his return to Trieste, Bojan took this photograph out of his wallet and asked Nuša if she knew who it was of. She shook her head. Then he told her his name. And now, Bojan said, he is dying, dying in chains of cold and damp and starvation. The conditions where he is are so bad that even the gaolers fall ill there. His chains weigh ten kilograms. At night there’s ice on the floor of the cell. Gavrilo is there too. But the prisoners are in solitary confinement day and night. Nedeljko was willing to die. We are all willing to die. Why did they not execute him? Because our imperial and royal majesty prefers his prisoners to die slowly in agony.
Nuša saw a photograph of two young men in dark suits and stiff white collars. They wore the same kind of clothes as her brother. Nedeljko was on the left. He had black hair, dark eyebrows and a moustache. His friend beside him had placed his hand on his shoulder.
When the photograph was taken, said Bojan, be didn’t expect to live for more than three hours. Everything was badly arranged—including the poison.
Sometimes Nuša was disturbed by what her brother said; he spoke too quickly of too many things.
The expression on Cabrinovič’s face is grave but calm. It is his friend that looks determined; for Cabrinovič there is nothing more to decide (or so he believes at the moment the photograph is being taken, the moment which he intends to represent his whole life). He has chosen his destiny. And if, in the next hour, he should hesitate, his portrait will be there, already developed, printed in black and white, forbidding him to relent.
I despise the dust of which I am composed: anyone can pursue and put an end to this dust. But I defy anybody to snatch from me what I have given myself, an independent life in the sky of the centuries.
Nuša thought the photograph was like a photograph on the head-stone of a grave. She had never seen any of these in the village cemetery. But in the Cimitero di S. Anna in Trieste there were many. The only difference was that being out in all weathers they were more faded. Looking at the photograph she knew that whatever her brother or his friends asked her to do, she would do, because they were heroes, and because, flowing through her large body, mixed with her blood, there was something unchanging, which each of them loved, not in her but in itself, and which each of them was prepared to die for.