“Demolished?”
“You did not mishear me, Captain. Race and religion is a vexed issue in this part of the world, to put it mildly. Following some damage that was inflicted on the cathedral by a German fighter aircraft, the Ustaše government decided to finish the job and ordered it to be destroyed, completely. And if that was not bad enough, the bishop of Banja Luka, Platon Jovanovic, was taken away and murdered in cold blood. Yes, that is what I said. In this country, a Christian priest was martyred for the way he chose to worship God.”
“On the journey here from Zagreb I saw some Ustaše forces shelling a Serbian Orthodox church,” I said. “Why?”
The Father Abbot spread his hands as if this question was beyond his understanding.
“At Petricevac we try to keep ourselves to ourselves and take no interest in politics. But a certain fanatical element in the former Yugoslavia regards the Serbian Orthodox Church and its pro-Russian adherents with unremitting hostility. Doubtless they are partly motivated by the fact that this monastery was itself destroyed by Ottoman Serbs during the middle of the last century. I am myself Croatian but I am not one of those who believe in an eye for eye. As Saint Francis himself reminds us, there are many ways to the Lord, and we pray for all those who are so cruelly oppressed and for their deliverance from bondage. If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will also have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.”
“Amen to that,” I said.
“I’m glad you say so, Captain Gunther. You and your two friends will stay to supper, of course.”
“We’d be delighted,” I said.
“And if you have driven all the way from Zagreb it may be that you are also seeking a place to sleep. You are welcome to stay the night in our humble quarters. This is the true monk’s duty. For the Bible reminds us to ‘be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.’ Hebrews chapter thirteen, verse two.”
“I promise you, we’re a very long way from being angels,” I told him.
“Only God knows the truth of a man, my son,” said the Father Abbot.
We stayed for supper at Petricevac but we did not spend the night there. In spite of the Father Abbot’s civilized words, there was something about the place — and him — I didn’t like. The man was as forbidding as the north face of the Eiger. He had the world-weary air of a Grand Inquisitor and, in spite of what he had said, I would not have been surprised to have found him in charge of a rack or a set of thumbscrews. Then again, I just don’t like priests very much. Most of them are fanatics for a different, less worldly deity than Adolf Hitler but they are fanatics nonetheless.
As soon as we had finished eating we climbed back into the Mercedes and set off for Banja Luka and, as the Father Abbot had promised, we quickly found the Ustaše headquarters building we were looking for. It was a large, cream-colored, square building with Ottoman features — all Corinthian pillars and arched windows — that resembled a theater or an opera house. An Ustaše flag hung limply above a main door that was busy with men wearing black uniforms and even blacker mustaches. On the other side of the main road older men wearing flat caps and carpet slippers were playing chess in a little park that was what you might have found on a summer’s evening in almost any provincial European town. But it’s not every provincial town that has a punishment battalion of its own citizens tasked with the destruction of a cathedral. At this particular hell on earth an iron cloud of barbed-wire fence had been erected around what remained of the cathedral’s walls to ensure that the poor people detailed to their slave labor did not escape. Work had not yet ceased for the day, however, and from behind piles of loose rubble the emaciated faces of walking caryatids, drooping under their yellow brick burdens, stared hopelessly back at me as I stepped out of the car. Horrified fascination held me rooted to the spot, and I don’t know why but I snatched off my cap as if part of me recognized something about this heap of stones that was still a church. Or perhaps it was the sight of so much human suffering that made me do it — respect for people who were obviously not long for this world. But I did not stay very long to look at what was being done to one church in the name of another in this miserable, godforsaken place; an Ustaše guard advancing on me with a rifle in his hands persuaded me to turn away and go about my business. But man’s inhumanity to man had long been a matter of small surprise to me and I might as easily have turned away because I had become callous. I have to confess all I cared about now was finding Father Ladislaus, giving him his daughter’s letter, and then getting away from the Independent State of Croatia as quickly as possible.
“I wouldn’t get too upset about that if I were you,” said Geiger, following me inside the headquarters building. “If you ever saw what their side has done to ours in this war you wouldn’t pity them for a minute.”
“I expect you’re right,” I said. “But all the same I do pity them. I rather think that without pity, we might as well be animals.”
“It beats me how you ever joined the SD.”
“It’s a mystery to me, too.”
In the headquarters building, which was full of polished marble and crystal chandeliers, I presented my credentials to a sullen Ustaše intelligence officer whose intelligence did not run to speaking any German and who seemed to be more interested in picking his nose and finishing the elaborate doodle on his blotter than in listening to me. Looking at the drawing’s Gordian knot complexity, upside down, it seemed like a perfect image for the impossible-to-unravel politics of Yugoslavia.
Having secured transport for himself and Sergeant Oehl, and established the latest whereabouts of the SS Prinz Eugen Division captain, Geiger now came to my aid and further established that the man formerly known as Father Ladislaus was now better known as Colonel Dragan.
“It’s a sort of joke, I think,” he said. “Colonel Dragan. It means the dear colonel. The joke being that from what this fellow says, the colonel is much feared around these parts and quite notorious. He’s currently to be found at a place called Jasenovac, about a hundred kilometers back up the road we were just on. It’s a place where they make bricks.”
“Bricks? My God, I’d have thought they had plenty of those outside.”
“You’d certainly think so.”
“How does a Franciscan monk get to be a Ustaše colonel?” I wondered aloud.
Geiger shrugged. “There’s only one way in this country,” he said. “By being an efficient killer of Serbs.”
“Ask him what else he knows about this Colonel Dragan,” I said.
Geiger spoke again and gradually the Ustaše officer became more animated.
“This man you’re looking for, Gunther, is a great hero,” said Geiger, offering me a simultaneous translation. “Adored even and something of a living legend in Bosnia-Herzegovina. He was sick with fever for a while — apparently, the marshes at Jasenovac are full of mosquitoes — and it was feared he would die. But lots of good Catholics prayed to God and lit many candles, so now he is back to full health again and, if anything, stronger than before and more feared than ever. But even the Ustaše fear the colonel and for good reason. Because he can’t be reasoned with. That’s what his men say. Once his mind is made up there’s no changing it. His mind is impregnable — that’s what this fellow says. But that you can’t judge a man like Colonel Dragan the way you would judge an ordinary man. He’s anything but ordinary. Perhaps that’s because he used to be a priest, like Father Tomislav, who is also attached to the Ustaše troops in Jasenovac. It may be that it is God who gives the colonel the strength to do what he does. Which is to be a man who can do such terrible things. Perhaps it’s his special relationship with God that makes him strong. That makes him so resolute and a source of inspiration to his men. To all Ustaše who would see this country free from the threat of Communism and the Jews and Muslims, and the peasant stupidities of the Serbian Orthodox Church.”