“I lost my voice so I couldn’t tell them anything. I opened my mouth but the volume was switched off. Mind you, I’d have told them whatever they wanted to hear, just as long as they didn’t reach for their knives. Except I couldn’t, for the love of God. D’you think I’m being punished for having a tongue that’s quicker than my brain? How unfair! Just when life depends on it, my tongue gets knotted up.”
“Tell me then,” said Mijo, “what story can I make up so I don’t have to lead them to the weapons?”
Izet considered the question, licking his dry lips. He knitted his brow for a moment and then suddenly opened his eyes wide as if he could see the story he was about to invent.
“Here’s what you’ll tell then, Mijo: all the guns you talked about were picked up by that guy Zvonko who worked as a bouncer at the Lav nightclub. They won’t be able to check the story, because Zvonko has escaped with his wife and mother to town, to stay with that smalltime crook who owns the jewelry shop on Slatko corner. Then you tell them that the jeweller used to be a Ustasha, and that he always acted against Yugoslavia, and that he more or less brainwashed Zvonko. You can say that he spent time as a political prisoner on the island of Goli Otok because it was alleged he had ties with the Russians, and that he sent his mother to an old-people’s home, even though he owns three villas in Sarajevo and Split. Tell them it’s easy to recognize the guns by the sound of the bang — it’s kind of dull, like you were using a silencer but it wasn’t fitted correctly.”
“And what’s this dealer of Zvonko’s called?”
“Make something up on the spot — a Muslim name, though, so they get the idea that Zvonko has links with both sides, and that’s why he wouldn’t have told an out-and-out Croat like you what they were planning to do with the weapons.”
Soon afterwards the Chetniks came and took Mijo away for more questioning. Izet never saw him again. But when his turn came to be interrogated again — would you believe it? — his throat seized up again and he found that he was unable to speak a word. Three times the soldiers beat Izet until he was unconscious, only to revive him and start the questioning again. In the end they decided that Izet was a big-shot. “Well, he must know a lot if he’s not talked yet,” they reasoned. So they didn’t sling him back into the cellar. Instead they put him in a room with a bed, fed him well and gave him enough to drink — and then they took him to Lukavica. He was questioned there by several colonels, but they didn’t bind his legs or his arms, and they even offered him coffee and cigarettes. After a while Izet got his voice back. Now he could tell the Serbs whatever he wanted, except they were no longer interested in guns: they wanted to know his rank and various troop formations. As Izet had never served in the army, he didn’t know anything about the latter, but self-importantly he proclaimed that his rank was that of colonel of the Green Berets. And as for military plans, he went on, they might as well kill him because he wasn’t going to reveal any secrets. Of course he wasn’t lying in that respect — he couldn’t invent things about a subject he didn’t understand.
The officers smiled at Izet, almost out of a sense of camaraderie, but they didn’t press him anymore about the troop formations. Instead they began a friendly conversation about other things. Izet talked knowingly about the political situation, though he was careful not to say anything to annoy his inquisitors or to give them any reason to suspect that he was trying to suck up to the enemy, or that he wasn’t in fact a colonel who was prepared to give up his life in order to safeguard military secrets. Izet played with words and swayed like a pelican on a wire. He talked nonsense but it sounded ambiguous and therefore wise. You utter a word, you weave it backwards and forwards, and at the end of the sentence you stand it on its head. You’re not making any sense, but you’re the only one who knows that.
The next day a colonel came into his room and announced that Izet was going to be released in exchange for ten Serb prisoners of war. Everything was agreed with the Croats, who wanted to know the identity of the war hero held by the Serbs. It was just a formality. The other side had to guard against swapping ten Chetniks for a nobody who was merely lying about being a colonel in the Green Berets.
Izet panicked. If he didn’t come up with a meaningful lie to tell his own people, the Chetniks would take great pleasure in slitting his throat, whether he confessed to stringing along the interrogators or continued to protest his high military rank. Hundreds of stories flashed through his head in a moment but each was as unconvincing and as complicated as the next.
At last he blurted out, “Tell them that you have captured the Condor from Treskavica.”
The Serb colonel looked at him blankly, then took a pen and paper, wrote it down and went out. That night was the longest in the whole of Izet’s life. All he wanted was to die without suffering, to fade away or disappear, so that he wouldn’t have to face the morning and the knife of his neighbor Spasoje.
At dawn three privates came to get him. One of them said, “Condor, it’s time!”
Izet left the army camp at Lukavica with a heavy heart. His knees were trembling. Outside, the door of a yellow Golf was open, and as Izet huddled in the back seat, he realized that he’d lost his voice again. Only this time nobody was asking any questions. Instead of taking him all the way to Spasoje, they just drove him to the bridge, where he was released. Halfway across the bridge he passed a group of men whose lives had been exchanged for his own.
As soon as Izet came clean and admitted that he wasn’t the Condor of Mount Treskavica, he was given a violent beating by his own people. The soldiers kept him locked up for days and threatened to shoot him or to give him back to the Chetniks. With each blow of the rifle-butt they shouted out the names of all the prisoners whose freedom would have been negotiable in exchange for the ten Serbs. They could have liberated war heroes instead of ending up with a sad case like Izet, who was only good at talking nonsense. In the end they let him go — fuck it! — it was their own fault for watching too many films and believing in stories about condors.
Sooner or later Izet recovered from the shock. He forgot about his episode in prison and went back to telling safer and more intelligent stories.
Having recovered from his wounds and his nightmares, the only painful memory that stayed with Izet concerned Mijo, the butcher, whose throat was slit by the Chetniks in Vraca. He couldn’t help wondering if Mijo had been killed for spouting the lie that Izet invented for him, or if the poor man had simply lacked the ability to use the right words at the right time. Perhaps there really are occasions in life when it’s best not to say anything.
The Gardener
People can be pathetic when they’re dying. Sometimes they try to make you feel guilty. Jan Palach doused himself in gasoline and then lit the touchpaper. Take the eighty-year-old guy who can’t bear to stop breathing. He’s having a tube inserted in his throat while his relatives sit in the waiting-room whining. Hospitals are full of people who grab hold of their souls. They fight over them like women fighting over bread in a bakery line while the mortars fall outside. In the end, of course, some playboy living a dolce vita announces that suicide is the only real philosophical question.
We were coming home with our water when the shells began to fall, so we ran into the nearest building. The hall was already full of people. Ivanka leaned against the wall and put her canisters down, but I didn’t let go of mine. She lit a cigarette, and then the place just exploded. People fell to the ground, and then one by one they stood up again. All except Ivanka, that is — she didn’t get up. At first, because there was no trace of blood, I thought she’d simply fainted out of fear. I lifted her head but it didn’t feel right; it was as though her neck was made of rubber. Her hair was covered in dust from the ceiling. I cleaned it off with my fingers. The emergency doctors rushed up in white coats and a boy with a face like Kafka’s tried to find the pulse on her neck. He was slow and methodical, as if he was playing the piano. I saw his fingers dance on Ivanka’s neck — it made me angry. I just wanted him to stop, but there were lots of people around, so I didn’t say anything. I think I was jealous. They put her on a stretcher and carried her away. Nobody spoke to me all the time I was there.