SCHEVENINGEN PRISON HOSPITAL, THE HAGUE
24 DECEMBER 2005
MARIN PROPPED on his elbow to watch Rachel leave the ward, then collapsed back onto the pillow. She was his daughter. His daughter! The thought was overwhelming: the unheralded miracle of her existence, her hallucinatory presence, and now his breathlessness in her wake. When the pain flooded back, he hit the morphine button again and again, but he soon reached the self-dosing limit. He rang for a nurse and complained that his pain had become unbearable. She returned with a fentanyl lollipop, raspberry flavoured, and he sucked it like a child down to the stick.
Marin lay staring up at the demon’s eye in the ceiling and, as the narcotic high came on him, he felt the flush rise from his neck to his scalp and render him weightless. The red light of the eye pulsed on and on and he was pinned down under its implacable gaze. As his eyelids fluttered and closed, he was imagining what Rachel would say to her mother, and then in this dream state his thoughts drifted naturally to his own mother, Samira.
•
Marin knocked on the door of his mother’s old limestone house in Mostar. He had waited for the muezzin’s call and watched her husband—a handsome, upright, elderly man—leave the house at midday for salat al zuhr.
The door opened and there was the woman he knew only from childhood memories and a single photograph. Samira had aged well, but her beautiful face was bemused.
‘Hello, Mother,’ he said. ‘It’s Marin.’
After a moment’s hesitation, Samira pulled him inside, but before she could say anything he blurted out, ‘I’m in bad trouble. I need your help.’
Marin was then twenty-one and a fugitive, on the run from Tito’s security forces. Samira was silent, and one hand came up to cover her mouth as if she could not allow herself to utter a single word. Marin saw her wide, startled eyes and their familiar colour. He saw in them the moment of recognition, too, and the wash of calm that seemed to go through her body. Samira dropped her hand then and spoke to him for the first time:
‘Come, I’ll make tea and you can tell me what has happened.’
She took him to the kitchen and sat him down, staring at him from time to time as she performed the well-practised ritual of preparing mint tea.
‘I knew you would come one day,’ she said, pouring the sweet herbal infusion into his cup. ‘I have much to tell you, Marin, but your story is more urgent.’
He explained in a rush that he had been sent to Bosnia by his father, one of twenty men, to start an insurgency against Yugoslavia’s communist regime, an operation planned and financed in Australia. He and a companion had split off from the others and escaped a massive dragnet, but his friend had been killed by a farmer. He had no idea of the fate of the others, although he thought most of them must have been killed or captured. He was sure that agents would be waiting for him at every border crossing.
‘I will help you, of course,’ said Samira. ‘We will tell my husband, Ali, only that you came here looking for me. He is a good man. He will understand. Now, I’m sorry Marin, but I must tell you some things about your father. They will be hard for you to listen to and maybe hard for you to believe. Let me first ask: did you get any of my letters?’
‘No,’ said Marin. ‘Not one.’
‘I left a long letter for you and Petar when I ran away …’
‘I never saw it.’
‘This is what I feared,’ said Samira, and Marin saw in her face what the years of guilt and shame had cost her. ‘I can’t imagine what you must think of me. For some time after I left, I wrote you both every week, and telephoned as often as I could. Your father became very angry with me when he picked up the phone. He said he would hurt me if I kept trying to contact you, but I didn’t stop—until one day a man came to my house here in Mostar. He told me that Ivo had sent him. He forced his way inside. He had a gun. He warned me that if I continued to make trouble for Ivo by calling and writing to you boys then he would shoot me dead, but first he would kill Ali …’
Samira paused then, remembering something important.
‘Marin, please wait here for a minute.’
While his mother was gone, he sat still in the old kitchen in which every object—the waxed wooden benches; the patterned tiles; the beaten copper pots and pans; the fine plates on the wall; the jars of spices and coffee and tea—seemed effortlessly placed to set one at ease … And yet his emotions were roiling as the missing pieces in his life began to fall into place. Samira soon returned with a large, beautifully carved wooden box. She put it down on the floor in front of him and knelt beside it.
‘After that man came, I did not try to call you on the telephone, but I still wrote letters to you both. Since I was sure that Ivo was destroying them, I kept copies. They’re here in this box.’
Samira took his hand, then, and looked up at his face, still on her knees as if begging his forgiveness.
‘You can read them if you want. I have kept them all these years, hoping that one day you would come to find me.’
•
Over the next few days, when they were alone, Samira told Marin the story of her violent marriage to Ivo Katich. She had been just a teenager when she met Ivo, one of many thousands of refugees in the Bagnoli Displaced Persons camp on the outskirts of Naples. It was 1947 and her own father had been forced to flee from Tito’s communists with his family, accused of collaboration with the wartime Ustasha regime and complicity in its crimes. There were many such men in the camp: collaborators, Ustashi officials, fighters, and they lived under the constant fear of deportation to face summary justice in Yugoslavia. The Allies ranked them black, grey or white, depending on the severity of the allegations made against them. Those designated ‘black’ were accused of war crimes.
Among that group were Samira’s father and the young Ivo Katich. Unlike her father, Ivo seemed sublimely sure he would not be sent back. He was a top dog in the camp: handsome, self-assured and dapper in his fine Italian clothes, and when he turned his full attention on the young Samira he was a charming, thoughtful and apparently kind suitor. Months into their courtship, Samira discovered the source of his confidence. Ivo Katich had a protector, a man he referred to as ‘my angel’. In human form, this angel was an American intelligence officer, Colonel Lewis Perry. It was Perry’s job to recruit Nazis deemed capable of building anti-communist networks behind the Iron Curtain. Samira would learn that her itinerant boyfriend had multiple aliases and travelled freely under forged papers between Naples, Rome and Trieste. Only after they were married and he moved her to an apartment in Rome did she come to understand that Ivo was building for his angel a guerilla force of former Ustashi known as Križari—the Crusaders—and that he was undertaking missions to coordinate with Križari networks inside Yugoslavia.
Due to his clandestine work, Samira saw little of Ivo in the first years of their marriage. From time to time, she got word that he had been arrested by one of those branches of the Allied occupying force who still believed their job was to bring Nazi war criminals to justice. On each occasion, the angel Perry intervened to have him freed. By 1950, Belgrade had put a bounty on Ivo’s head. He could no longer travel into Yugoslavia and UDBA assassins were after him in Italy. But his angel saved him again: the American spymaster saw to it that Ivo Katich’s war crimes were ‘cleansed’ from his record and organised for Ivo and Samira to emigrate to Australia.
In the new country, Ivo Katich immediately set about building his own network of crusaders, a secretive organisation known as the Croatian Brotherhood. Samira bore him two sons and soon understood that, as far as her husband was concerned, her own mission in life was complete. They would never be her sons, only his. Ivo became totally dismissive of her and progressively more violent, worse when he drank—and he drank more and more. There were too many incidents for Samira to recount, but she told Marin one story that he would never forget.
One summer’s night Ivo had been sitting in the backyard, engaged in a long drinking session with his mate Branko Kraljevic. The two men, old comrades in the wartime Ustasha and disciples of the great Poglavnik, were telling each other stories as they downed glass after glass of Ivo’s hypnotically potent rakija. They were laughing uproariously in a way that Samira found sickening. At one point, she crept outside and stood concealed behind the edge of the house to listen. It was only by such subterfuge that Samira had learned many of her husband’s secrets. In this way, she heard the two men recalling atrocities they had witnessed or perpetrated, as fondly as old friends might tell tales about a football final they had both played in as young men. They joked about the last moments of men, women and children, and the methods of their killing. Samira refused to describe the details except to say that, as with the slaughter of spring lambs, they favoured the knife.
When Branko finally stumbled off into the night, Ivo came to their bedroom, filling it with his huge and brutal presence. Her husband stank of his homemade rakija, the rancid, sweet sickness leaking from his pores. Samira knew she should stay quiet, pretend to be asleep, but she could not hold inside her what she had heard. She switched on the bedside lamp and saw her husband blink like a wild animal in a spotlight as she confronted him with his own drunken confessions of crimes beyond imagining.
Samira told her son that she wondered if, at some deep level, she had wanted to be punished for her own complicity in marrying a monster, but still she could not have imagined the consequences. Hearing this, Marin had instinctively known what was coming and he wanted to cry out: ‘For God’s sake, don’t blame yourself! He is to blame. Only him.’
Ivo beat her savagely and as she lay there, battered and bleeding, he ‘had his way with her’. Had his father been close by at that moment, Marin had felt he would have been capable of beating him to death.
Samira escaped the house the next day and borrowed money from friends who helped her evade Ivo’s searchers and leave the country. She went back to Mostar, the city of her birth, and a place where many of her extended family still lived, and they embraced her and took her in as a prodigal daughter. In time, she met Ali, a gentle man who treated her with deference and great kindness. Ali was older than her, a widower, and he brought her to live in his elegant house with its Ottoman arches and ancient rugs, and the courtyard where she and Marin now sat with its flowering lemon tree and murmuring fountain, and this house became her sanctuary and place to heal.
When she finished her story, Marin came and took her in his arms for the first time.
‘Mother,’ he said, and she wept on his shoulder long and hard.
•
It was pain that woke Marin from the dream of his mother. His eyes opened to darkness. The red light in the ceiling winked compulsively, and he imagined he could still feel the weight of Samira’s head on his shoulder. Despite the fluids still being pumped into his arm, his mouth was parched, and he took a long draught of water. The pain spread from the side of his chest up into his left arm and shoulder, thumping pain worse than the stabbing blows that had nearly taken his life. He hit the morphine button again and again until the regulator stopped him overdosing.
As he lay there waiting for the pain to subside, he remembered clambering, dusty and sweating with other rescuers, through the ruins of that once-gracious Ottoman house and digging out from the rubble the battered bodies of his mother and her gentle husband. He remembered the unbridled rage that overcame him as he led his men that night up the steep mountainside to attack the Serbian artillery position which had rained death onto the old town. He remembered the scattered bodies on the hillside of those Serbs who had tried to defend themselves and he remembered the faces of the men who had been dragged from their tents, still drunk on the raki they used to numb themselves. These were lined up, shaking in their boots, on the cliff edge. He remembered only one of them, a blue-eyed, redhead, a Montenegrin conscript, a boy from the Black Mountain.
Marin had paused in front of him, smoke drifting from the barrel of his gun, and asked him: ‘Do you have anything to say?’
‘Fuck you all,’ said the boy.