12–13 DECEMBER 2005
MARIN KATICH was in a locked box. Four storeys up on the western face of the building, part of the E1 wing where all the windows have steel bars and frosted glass. Here the accused were hidden away from the world according to strict codes set by The Registry.
In the late afternoon, Marin could hear the cries of gulls circling over Scheveningen beach. Sometimes they dropped down to perch between the bars and their shuffling forms were shadows behind the glass, quivering in the freezing winds. The North Sea was so close that in the exercise yard he could taste salt in the air. In his closed cell there was only the faint stench that circulated through the air vents: rotting vegetables and something worse. He believed that stench came from the inmates, that it seeped from their pores, and from his own.
Watery light leaked in through the translucent glass, but the winter sun did nothing to warm his blood. At this time of the year the weak glow of the afternoon sun dwindled fast, but he was reluctant to turn on the electric lights, whose tungsten brightness produced in him a wave of despair.
Dr Vladka told him his despair had physical causes. It was all to do with the hypothalamus, she explained—that mysterious gland located above the optic chiasm. The theory was that he had learned to crave bright sunlight when he was a boy growing up in Australia so it was no accident that he found the prolonged northern gloom debilitating. It disrupted his circadian rhythms.
He found it strange that a well-credentialled psychiatrist like Dr Vladka was fascinated by New Age methodologies. As a lifelong sceptic, he had berated her when she made the mistake of suggesting he join the prison’s meditation group.
‘What kind of doctor are you?’ he cried. ‘You seriously think I could reach a higher state of consciousness in a room full of murderers? That’s an obscenity!’
Dr Vladka took his outburst calmly. She liked to provoke him and he didn’t resent her for it. She played the lion tamer with chair and whip while he was the unpredictable, clever predator.
‘It might work for you,’ she said. ‘Something apart from masturbation to help you relax.’
‘But then at least’—he shrugged as he said it—‘you’re always in my thoughts.’
She wrote something in her notepad and he let the silence settle before asking: ‘Your notes on my sanity? Is that meant to be intimidating?’
‘What’s intimidating for you, Tomo,’ Dr Vladka said calmly, ‘is saying anything about yourself, except bad jokes.’
He looked at her for a moment before responding honestly.
‘I’ve got too many secrets.’
•
Dr Vladka—he knew no other name for her—had broad shoulders, heavy limbs and a face with large features. He was not attracted to her, but he liked her soulful eyes, her seductive voice and her sardonic sense of humour.
At first, it had struck him as odd that they would fly in a psychiatrist all the way from Belgrade and, in a rare moment of candour, he had told her how ironic it was that they had placed him in the care of a Serb, given his history, which must surely be set out in his file.
She said there was no irony involved. It was just that the psychiatrists of Belgrade had become renowned for dealing with men like him. During the war and in its aftermath, the city’s psychiatric wards had been overrun by an epidemic of men driven insane by the atrocities they had committed. Their treatment had become a rare Serbian growth industry.
Apart from remaining taciturn, Marin had no alternative but to play games. He could not be truthful with her while he was living a lie. Since his arrest, he had maintained the fiction that his name was Tomislav Maric and, since no one had proven otherwise, he was locked in his false identity as securely as he was locked in the prison.
Nonetheless, he needed to keep Dr Vladka on side, or at least sympathetic to him, since she was the source of his sedating pills. However, when she probed into his past, seeking details about his family or his upbringing, he remained tight-lipped. He had certainly not told her about his ghosts, even when they appeared behind her ample shoulders, demanding attention, distracting him as she spoke.
‘Tomo?’ she said. ‘Are you listening to me?’
He stared at her blankly until it came back to him that this was the name by which she knew him.
‘Sure, I’m listening.’
‘I was asking about your father.’
•
Although Marin had refused to answer any such questions, they were not without effect. Back alone in his cell, thoughts of his father were never far away. Only this morning, in the timeless darkness before dawn, he had had one of his many dreams about Ivo. In the last beats of the dream, the old man had been singing the ojkanje with a terrible passion. It was one of the wolf songs his father had tried to teach them when he and Petar were boys. As Ivo howled its strange cadences, the old man’s face transformed into a yellow-eyed beast, and Marin woke, drenched in sweat and shaking. For a moment, as the last note of the song echoed in the hard space of his cell, Marin had no idea where he was. He fumbled for the pills and swallowed two of them to ward off the panic. He lay trembling, as if waiting out an earth tremor.
This was by no means the first visitation. Long ago his father had joined the others who trailed in Marin’s wake—those who spoke to him in the dead of night, who continued to haunt him. They were always there: the ones he had killed from a distance, the ones he had killed up close, and the ones whose killing he had caused. His brother Petar had been silent for many years, perhaps because he had no reason to blame Marin for his own death. He hoped Petar was not trapped in this purgatory, endlessly punished by the presence of the father he hated.
Marin remembered that, in the dream, before Ivo had started singing, he had spoken to him almost tenderly.
Remember what I told you …
He had noticed Ivo’s fist was closed around something. Then it opened and there was a black cicada, throbbing in his father’s palm like a living engine with alien eyes, red and implacable.
You are like him, Marin. Remember this. This life in Australia is not real. You are deep underground. One day it will be time to come out.
Remembering his father’s words, Marin now sat up on the hard bunk and stepped over to the desk to write them down. There was much he had forgotten. When he was done, he flicked back through the journal to the notes he had written about the last time he saw Ivo alive.
•
His father had been restrained in a reclining chair and propped up with pillows. The curtains were drawn on one side to dissuade him from yelling abuse at the frail old soul in the next cot. Ivo’s wrists were strapped to the chair’s padded vinyl arms. Before the nurse led him to the room, she had warned Marin to prepare himself. The binding, she explained, was to stop the old man tearing out the plastic tube that drained his bladder through an incision in his lower belly. Ivo had managed to do this more than once, spraying piss all over himself and the nearest nurses.
Marin watched from the doorway, reluctant to go in as his father writhed about, trying to free his wrists. Ivo’s fingers clawed at the arms of the chair and his body contorted in fruitless efforts to bite at the straps. All the while he ground his hips, stiffened his legs and arched his back. Marin was reminded of the slow-motion, repetitive movements of a reanimated corpse, and he imagined that this was how Ivo’s precious God had chosen to punish him, confining him like this in an earthly purgatory.
By losing his mind, Ivo had once again escaped justice—or, at least, the trial prepared for him. More than forty years after the war ended, they had indicted him for war crimes and, irony of ironies, they’d done so based on evidence gathered by Anna Rosen. Ivo’s one-woman Jewish conspiracy had finally caught up with him.
Marin had taken a huge risk in flying back to Australia and, when he finally went in to sit beside his father, it seemed there was a glimmer of recognition.
‘I know you,’ said Ivo before his eyes rolled up. After a moment, they returned to refocus on his son. There was cunning in the old man’s face. ‘I know you,’ he whispered. ‘I know you.’
Marin bent in close and pushed greasy strands of white hair from his father’s eyes.
‘Of course you do,’ he said.
The old man flinched at the physical contact and struggled to formulate a question in Croatian.
‘Did … did they send you?’
‘Who?’
‘Belgrade … Or maybe the Jews … Huh? The Jews! I can see it in your face. They have the longest memories.’ Ivo laughed until the exertion produced a hacking cough.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Fool! I know who you are …’
‘For fuck’s sake, Papa. I’m your son, Marin.’
‘Liar!’ Ivo shouted. His eyes were ghastly, protruding as if swollen by the sudden anger. ‘You … you … You I know. You’re the slaughterman!’
Marin reeled back.
‘No! That’s crazy. It’s me, Marin. I heard how sick you were. I came to see you. I came to say goodbye.’
‘Come, then,’ Ivo rasped. ‘Come closer.’
‘What is it?’
‘I’m waiting.’ Ivo tried again to free his arms. ‘See? Tied up like a pig.’ He rolled his head back, exposing the corded arteries and veins in his unshaven, emaciated neck. ‘Go ahead.’
‘Don’t be crazy, Pop!’
‘What are you waiting for? Coward! Waverer! Incompetent! Leftist scum! Don’t think twice. It’s easy, it is, it’s so easy … A knife through butter, then it’s warm on your skin, warm on your chest … I know how that feels, I know.’
Ivo’s tongue flickered across his lips and he smiled at some sickening memory.
Marin’s stomach roiled as his father continued in a hoarse whisper: ‘Take my confession, Father. I’ve done mortal sins. No penance can answer for them. The only recompense is blood … Only blood can answer for blood. Now get on with it! Do it!’
Ivo’s laugh was mirthless. It was like the barking of a seal. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the light in his father’s eyes faded and he returned to the slow writhing attempts to free himself.
•
Marin sat at the desk, the memory curdling inside him, as he thought of the wartime photographs depicting the crimes of the Ustasha—black-and-white images Ivo had always laughed off as communist propaganda. A monstrous library of such photos had been compiled by American prosecutors at Nuremberg, and many of them had been reprinted in Anna Rosen’s book about his father: an Ustashi soldier posing in a group with the severed head of a Serbian Orthodox priest; a man forced to his knees by a crowd of grimly posing Ustashi as they prepared to hack off his head with a logging saw; prisoners at Jasenovac camp whose skulls had been smashed open by steel mallets; others slaughtered like sheep by men wearing custom-made curved blades buckled to their wrists with leather straps. And the image that had leapt into his head as he listened to Ivo’s demented ravings in the hospital: two young, bare-chested men, arms linked in the manner of drunks holding each other up, both howling with laughter, their faces drenched in blood.
A scraping sound at the door brought Marin back to the present. He saw the spyhole go light, then dark, then light again. It was 7.30 am. A key penetrated the lock, the steel door swung towards him, and the guard Zwolsman thrust first his head, then much of his large body, through the door. Zwolsman had the face of a Bruegel peasant who’d been rudely stuffed into a prison guard’s uniform. His was the first face Marin saw each day.
‘Mr M, not a nice day to be out today. I must book first if you wish to use the gym this morning?’
‘No, thank you, Zwolsman. I want to walk outside. I need to see the sky.’
‘Today you will only see clouds and raindrops, perhaps.’
‘I don’t care if it rains.’
‘Dress warm. It is very cold,’ said the guard. ‘I will come and get you at zero nine hundred.’
Zwolsman backed out of the cell, leaving the door open. Marin pulled on winter clothes, grabbed his jacket, gathered up a pile of dirty garments and a sachet of washing liquid, and stepped into the corridor. He headed for the laundry in the communal bathroom.
Behind a closed shower stall someone was singing loudly. Marin stopped, clutching his bundle of clothes, unable to move. The song was Milosevic-era turbo folk, vulgar and taunting—‘porno-nationalism’ they called such music.
Marin’s pill-induced calm evaporated like morning fog. He knew the song well. It was a favourite of the Chetniks in Vukovar: I punu saku olova, i nesto protiv bolova … Leave me a handful of bullets and something for the pain.
When drunken Serbs, their own frontlines only metres away in the ruined city, used to belt this out as a provocation, Marin would order his snipers to wait for one of the intoxicated imbeciles to expose himself. No need for a handful of lead, just one round—that had been the best coda to their shouted chorus.
He knew the singer in the shower. The voice was unmistakable—it was one of Milosevic’s cronies, a dumb, murderous thug. Marin saw himself tearing open the cubicle door, smashing an elbow into the fool’s fat face, forcing him onto the tiles beneath the hot downpour and shoving a cake of soap down his throat.
But he remained standing where he was and the singer kept on singing.
Eventually Marin walked stiffly to the Miele washing machine up against the wall. He knew that this was exactly why they had rules against talking politics, or even discussing your case with other inmates. They were afraid the murderers would start murdering each other.
He shoved his clothes into the front loader and slammed it shut. He ripped the sachet open with his teeth and the bitter tang in his mouth made him wonder if that’s what a bar of soap down the throat would taste like. He poured the blue liquid into the machine, set the dial to Miniwas 40 graden, pressed the start button and heard the water come shushing in. The man in the shower was still singing.
Marin went to a basin and splashed cold water on his face. A death mask stared back at him in the mirror. He noticed a tremor in his right hand. He left the washing churning and walked out, down the corridor to the common room. This long neon-lit space was where inmates in E1 spent most of their spare time. Just inside the doorway a table football game sat idle. Marin hated seeing grown men hunched over this apparatus, twirling the knobs like idiots, as the ranks of tiny players performed backflips. A pool table would have been better, but a game that furnishes you with a lethal weapon would never be approved.
Chess and backgammon boards were stacked in an open cupboard and he thought again of his improbable chess opponent, Slobodan Milosevic. Marin had been playing regular games with the prison’s alpha male until he was carted off to the hospital wing for more tests on his ailing heart.
Two microwave ovens, one on top of the other, sat on a table against the wall. Beside them were two large refrigerators—two of everything to reduce the potential for conflict. At the far end of the room, side-lit by a barred window, was an open kitchen with a gas stove and a white Formica table with eight chairs around it. There were two men seated at the table, huddled together, drinking from matching mugs. They looked at Marin but said nothing.
He walked into the kitchen, smelled burnt coffee and turned to the nearest man.
‘You’ll never learn will you, Mejakic?’
‘Good morning to you too, Maric. What are you whining about?’
Marin stared into the dead eyes of Zeljko Mejakic, set deep in a long, mournful face. During the war, the Bosnian Serb had been the commandant of the Omarska concentration camp. Marin picked up the coffee pot and emptied the dregs into the sink.
‘It stinks in here,’ he said. ‘You always burn the coffee.’
Mejakic’s companion responded: ‘If you’re such an expert, you should get up earlier and make coffee for us all.’
Marin regarded the pair of them. They might have been brothers. Ljubomir Borovcanin was another long-faced Serb, with heavily bagged grey skin under his black eyes. In his pomp, he had boasted the title Republika Srpska Police General Ljubomir Borovcanin. He was under indictment on charges of genocide for the deportation of thirty thousand Bosnian Muslim women and children from the Srebrenica enclave, and for the slaughter of seven thousand of their husbands and sons during one murderous week in July 1995.
Since his incarceration six months ago, Borovcanin had grown a Van Dyke beard. Marin wondered whether it was there to hide the incongruous dimple in his chin, or simply because he imagined that with it he would cut a more impressive figure in the televised courtroom. Whatever the motive, the fastidious beard encouraged in him a nervous habit. He repeatedly ran his thumb and forefinger across his trimmed moustache and down to tug at the thatch of hair on his chin.
‘You’ll pull that silly beard right off if you keep doing that,’ said Marin.
Borovcanin dropped his hand abruptly and Marin turned away to complete his task of cleaning and refilling the coffee pot.
‘That was very rude of you, Maric,’ said Mejakic, his face reddened with indignation. Marin glanced back and smiled, sizing up each man, then he returned to packing the ground coffee into the machine and tamping it down.
‘I’d be happy to make coffee for you, Generals,’ he said when his task was done. ‘But would you really want to drink it without a food taster?’
The two men stared back at him.
‘Are you drunk?’ asked Mejakic, and Borovcanin chimed in: ‘Is that a threat?’
‘I’m just making coffee,’ Marin said as he plonked the steel pot loudly on the stove and lit the gas. ‘I’ll try not to burn it.’
‘What’s up your arse?’ Mejakic demanded. ‘It’s not like you to start fights.’
‘You should apologise,’ said Borovcanin.
Marin ignored them, filled a bowl with muesli and poured milk over it. He sat down opposite the two and began to eat.
‘I mean it,’ said Borovcanin.
Marin stared at the man and slowly munched a mouthful of muesli. A line of milk ran from the side of his mouth to drip on the table.
‘Are you feeling all right, Maric?’ asked Mejakic.
When Marin didn’t answer, Borovcanin abruptly pushed his chair back and stood up. The Serb grabbed his coffee mug off the table and walked to the sink; with rapid movements, he rinsed it out and put it in the dishwasher.
‘I’ll see you later, Zeljko,’ he told his companion as he left the room.
‘Sure, Ljubo. You booked the court, yes?’
‘I did.’
Mejakic turned back to Marin.
‘You’ve upset him.’
‘Why? Does he really think I’d put rat poison in his coffee?’
The coffee pot was bubbling now. Marin wiped his face with the back of his hand and went to pour a cup.
‘You want one?’ he asked Mejakic, holding up the pot.
‘No, thank you.’
‘I didn’t think so,’ said Marin, blowing gently into his coffee before taking a sip.
‘I’m serious,’ said Mejakic. ‘You are not normal. You have me worried.’
‘Worried?’ Marin looked him in the eyes. ‘About what?’
‘You know what I mean. You’ll scare people if you behave like this.’
‘And do I scare you too, Zeljko? Really? I imagine you must understand fear very well, how to nurture it so it grows and grows. How brave you must have felt terrifying those women and children out of their wits.’
‘Maric!’ Mejakic cried. ‘I will have to report you for this.’
Marin leant in close. ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ he said quietly, almost in a whisper, holding the man’s gaze until Mejakic dropped his eyes.
Mejakic stood, grabbed his empty coffee cup and turned to walk out. As he reached the door, he turned back and said loudly: ‘Filthy fucking Ustashi!’
Marin froze. He knew that if he looked up and saw the man’s hideous, mocking face he would have to kill him. It was as simple as that.
But when he left the common room the corridor was empty. He looked down at the steaming cup he was carrying. The black surface was vibrating.
Ustashi. That word had been with him for as far back as he could remember. Then he caught a whiff of something in the air: old tobacco, rakija and decay. Ivo was close by.