Europe in Sepia. Dubravka UgrešićЧитать онлайн книгу.
have easily transformed her into an old woman. I didn’t need a guide, chaperone (I was only going to be there twenty-four hours), or translator (her English was an incomprehensible shriek in any case); it was she who needed me. As she explained, she was studying philosophy and literary criticism, working the literary festival was a good way to earn a little on the side. Inter alia, she’d been assigned to me to discreetly suggest a hierarchy, one of which she was naturally oblivious.
The festival organizers never showed their faces; we writers and our local fixers—my young student among them—fronted the media and festival public. The expectation was that we were to praise the organization of the festival (which I dutifully did); to express our delight that the festival had given us the opportunity to hang out for a bit in an unexpectedly charming city (our cultural tourism merrily financed by the EU); to express our joy at the chance to mix and mingle with other writers and chat about important literary matters (an absolute whopper—at literary festivals writers avoid each other like the plague). Several interviews later I told the girl, who was patiently playing wallflower, that I was going to head off and find something to eat. She kindly offered to accompany me, and a few minutes later we were seated in a restaurant. The girl, who to that point had been like a mouse peeking out from a sack of grain, quickly livened up and ordered a meal in a self-assured voice, as if she were intending to pay for it. I paid, for myself and for her. And it was then I noticed a detail that shook me to the core. It was hard not to notice, because the girl didn’t make any real effort to conceal it. Her nimble fingers spirited the bill from the saucer and discretely slipped it in her handbag, all the while staring blankly at me through the quaint verticals of her eyelashes. There was really nothing there, no apology, no unease, nothing at all, and this, I guess, was what winded me. I don’t even know how to explain why it hurt so much. The girl had obviously received some kind of allowance from the festival organizers (take her out to lunch if that’s what she wants, just keep the bill). She’d squirreled a little tip away for herself, no big deal, just the crumbs from the table. It was a mouse’s theft, and in any case, there was a kind of justice in it all. In her eyes, I belong to the “upper class.” I could have explained to her that at these kinds of events I feel like an itinerant actress on a fairground circuit, performing my routine for a hot meal, and, if fortune smiles, a coin or two—but the girl wouldn’t have believed me. I belonged to a different social orbit, between us an irreconcilable gulf. She took what was hers; she didn’t need my or the organizers’ blessing, her conscience was clean. And in her, in a moment of premonition, I caught a glimpse of a potential “executor.” The image scurried past me like a mouse’s thin shadow. Yes, one day she’ll be sitting in a publishing house somewhere, deciding whether to acquire my book, or she’ll work at a newspaper, if there are still newspapers, and ever so sure of herself pass judgment on my work (didn’t she say she was studying literary criticism?). The girl looked at me with her vacant stare, and I asked myself how it was I hadn’t noticed it before, the mouse’s shadow. Look, how many there are, everywhere . . .
At the airport, waiting to go home after my twenty-four-hour jaunt, I watched a young airport worker inadvertently inspire a group of female travelers to put on an unusual show. The women were lit up like Christmas trees, adorned with garish earrings, necklaces, and rings. The young guy asked each of them to remove their jewelry, place it on a plastic tray, and send it through the scanner. The first woman obediently removed hers, but the second—having figured the whole process was going to drag—decided to have few laughs along the way, and took her jewelry off as if performing a striptease. The kid went as red as a peasant bride. Some of the other women proved more imaginative still, one opening her mouth and pointing to a gold crown, gesturing to the kid to see if she should take that off too. Their infectious bonhomie sprayed the airport like frothy beer. From one of them I learned that they were all old friends, that they were from Israel, and that they’d come to have a look around “the country of their forebears,” which, by and large, meant visiting ashes sprinkled through Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka . . .
I waited in front of the Hotel Flanders as if hypnotized, not knowing how long I’d been waiting—five, ten, twenty minutes? I remembered a visit to Moscow (Moscou!) thirty years before and the feeling of “hunting a taxi” (ohota na taksi), the moments of sheer panic when a taxi seemed the last refuge, the only salvation from the threatening cold of Moscow’s public spaces; from a square or street preparing to swallow us up; from a desperate sense of there being no escape; from the turbid ugliness of the urban landscape, when a taxi seemed the only remaining beacon of hope . . .
“No, this can’t be!” I mumbled, looked at my watch, and returned to the reception. The receptionist’s youthful face peered out from behind the counter: A tuft of hair raised on his forehead like a little horn, high fine cheekbones, a pointy nose, that same gray hue . . .
“Are you sure you called a taxi?” I asked, catching my breath.
He gave a start and opened his mouth to reply, but at that moment a taxi pulled up in front of the hotel and I, completely forgetting him, hurtled off toward it.
“To the station!” I cried breathlessly. Sitting down, I felt the accumulated tension in me clear like a fog. I just need to get to the station as soon as possible, just to take a seat in the train, I thought. The taxi driver was a Turk from Konya. He’d been here for four years. He likes it, he’ll stay, of course he’s going to stay, he hasn’t the slightest intention of going anywhere else, or, heaven forbid, going back . . .
A fairy with a tricolor flag emerged from the sea before them, declaring: “Croats! You are few, and yet you want the most beautiful country in the world! I’m here to help. You shall have many enemies and shall wage war many times for this country. This is why your flag is red. Red from the blood you shall spill to defend her. And white is your flag too. So white and pure must your souls remain. Be truthful. Do not hate. Believe in one God!” That’s what the fairy said to our ancestors. And instead of the deep blue sea, she submerged into the blue of the Croatian flag.
(Dinka Juričić, “The Croatian Fairy,” Happy Steps 4: Croatian Language Primer for Fourth Grade, 2011)
1.
This is how our story begins. Apparently it happened sometime in mid-November 2012. But I was after the exact date. I printed off ten newspaper reports, but to no avail. Useless temporal references such as “three days ago,” “two days ago,” “for days now,” “on Friday,” left the reader to do the math. I couldn’t stop myself hammering “When was the brutal rape in Podstrana?” into Google. But only got reports headed “What happened in Podstrana?”
Podstrana is a place in Croatia near Split, on the road to Omiš, one of those sprawling settlements along the coast where begining and end are unclear. The unrendered façades are the defining feature of the many half-finished houses; residents of the sprawl are unperturbed by raw concrete block. Like many other coastal settlements, Podstrana is a joint criminal enterprise of humankind against sea and shore, one that will naturally go unpunished; firstly, because the crime is communal, and secondly, because communal consciousness of it doesn’t exist. Some students had a party in one such house sans façade, drinking three bottles of whisky and a bottle of mead. One of the girls was admitted to Split Hospital at 6:30 P.M., where doctors spent four hours fighting for her life. The papers first reported that the twenty-year-old had been raped with a broken beer bottle, then that it had been a blender, and finally, that she’d been raped by the hand of Roko Šimac, an otherwise model student—as his father told the papers. The doctors said they’d never seen anything like it in their lives; internal organs completely massacred, gaping wounds to the vagina and intestine, wounds that could have only been inflicted by the violence of a human hand. The girl is recovering in Split Hospital, and doesn’t remember anything. Doctors will need to perform several more operations. Roko Šimac is being held for questioning; he can’t remember anything either. The remaining partygoers have been released. Apparently they left Roko and the girl in the living room to make love. Some went into another room to play computer games, others out into the yard. They said they didn’t hear any screaming, and had there been any,