I sought vengeance, and now I dream of forgiveness. My friends, let me explain how this came about. I want to lay it all out. I hope this last journal of mine will reach you, so you can be with me, with my thoughts, as long as it takes you to read it, and I can be with you as long as it takes me to write it, and beyond, though I am not sure there is much beyond.
On St. Vitus Day, a sunny day early in the summer, it was muggy, with all the steam and coal smoke from trains sitting in the valley. I sweated as I rushed to a photo shop so my friends and historians would have an image of me after I was gone; maybe it was vain of me to imagine they needed anything like that, but on the other hand, I had friends and a sister who loved me, so who was I to think that they would not want my photo? It would be selfish of me not to leave them a part of myself. I paid extra to have the picture done in an hour in several copies; it was expensive, but soon I would not need money, so I didn’t care. I marveled that it could be done so quickly. Who knows what else soon could be speedily done in this world of ours—I regretted getting ready to depart it without seeing the technological miracles to come. Maybe one day letters would be sent without our having to lick stamps. Now I chuckled as I licked the backs of the dull images of sagging Franz Josef with mustaches fit for a walrus for the letters and humorless Franz Ferdinand for the postcards. Sure, soon there won’t be any need for these images one way or another, I would help that. I sat down at a park bench a few blocks away from the river Miljacka and wrote to my friends—and I wanted to say good-bye to my sister, Jovanka, and to a girl I loved, Jelena. I varied what I said; to my sister I wrote, I must go far away. Good-bye. We will never see each other again. I wept when I wrote that.
To a friend I wrote: Tomorrow I will not be alive anymore; I am dying of an unspeakable pulmonary illness. I loved our walks. (I hadn’t imagined at the time how true that would be; I thought I was lying when I wrote that about the illness. I had expected execution, maybe being shot on the spot without a trial, but here I am, while recalling all this, afflicted with a bloody cough, shivering from TB, but let that not distract me from recalling that day.) I had not imagined I would be so emotional about saying good-bye. My dog, Vuk, followed me everywhere as though he knew we wouldn’t see each other again. I petted him, even pulled out a fat dark tick from his ear and crushed it with my leather sole on the cobbles, and heard it pop. He licked the reddened cobblestone, finding his own blood tasty, and then he licked my chin. Although I would have preferred a different sequence, first my chin, then the tick, I let him. I did not need to fear disease now, and why be disgusted? I was not a Viennese or Parisian noble or burgher to indulge squeamishness, though I was tempted to yield to it, such is the power of culture and slavish indoctrination that we provincials adopted. Vuk gave me the last lick and then shadowed me down the street. I shouted at him to go back, and he pretended to, after curling his tail, but when I rounded the next corner, there he was. I carried him back, and as I was closing the wooden gate, he still managed to get out, so I pushed him back in and kicked him hard in the chest. I could hear him even a kilometer away, howling. I felt miserable. I was tempted to go back and give up the business of making history. What good would a place in history books be compared with the real life and love of such a creature as a German shepherd? I didn’t blame him for being called a German, though I hated everything German; he had nothing to do with them, he only had that name, poor soul, they managed to colonize even animals. Now I didn’t like the idea of never again. But no, this would not be the matter of personal feelings, I should be able to transcend those.
I had expected crowds to throng along the river boulevard, Appel Quay, awaiting the archduke’s parade, and they did, but where I stood, next to a gas lamppost, there was plenty of space. In my sagging jacket, my hands were getting clammy and cold, and the grenade metal was warmer than they were. I wished I had a Browning like the rest of them; that would have been more straightforward, but I proved to be such a bad shot, and I skipped practices. My hand always trembles a little, which makes it hard to concentrate. Now, that is not a problem when I swing something like a stone or a grenade. As a child in Trebinje I loved throwing stones. I could do it for hours, aiming at trees and lampposts, and I was the best thrower in my street. Even now as an adult in late-night walks in Belgrade in Kalemegdan Park, I would for no reason at all pick up stones and throw them at lampposts. I was an atheist, yet I admired the story of David and Goliath. After reading it in my grandmother’s crumbly Bible in Cyrillic, I walked out and filled up my pockets with stones, and challenged the biggest bully in the neighborhood. He ran after me. I turned around, and aimed at his head, released the stone, and hit him in the middle of his forehead. For years later he had the scar. I feared that one day he would beat the hell out of me, but he did not. He had ceased to be a bully. So I chose the grenade, thinking I would be a kind of David, but all of a sudden my hand shook too much. Actually, I should have felt privileged to have the bomb. A couple of days before, when I chatted on a train with strangers, Gavrilo, who thought I was being indiscreet, took my bomb away. I could have strangled him for that; I was no doubt stronger than he, but he had the support of our group, and they all gave me hell for talking too much. Only a few hours before standing in the street did I get back the bomb from my arrogant and bossy friend, in a sweets shop. We didn’t drink, but we all loved cream pies. I don’t even know how I managed to still consider him a friend.
Now I couldn’t back out. What would my friends think of me? Gavrilo would laugh. Well, now I thought I was cowardly, but nobody else must know it. And what if I didn’t do it? Suppose that in fact I went over to a gendarme and told him about the whole plot. I could save the future monarch. I would have wanted to save his wife, who was a Czech, and at least she should be spared, but she was married to him, so she was a traitor as well, and if she went, so be it.
I imagined the monarch would continue to oppress Bosnia, and all the Slavs in it. Everybody who wanted to advance would still have to study in German, and bow to the pasty and cheesy Germans as though they were higher beings. I’d have to bow even to the drunken Hungarian slobs. Anyway, if I told a policeman of the plot, I would get no credit, but would be jailed for being a conspirator. It would be a different matter if they gave me a nice apartment in Paris and a pension for the rest of my life. But of course, they wouldn’t do that, they would jail me. Even if they gave me an apartment, what kind of life would that be? Somebody from the Black Hand or Mlada Bosna would kill me as a traitor.
And what if I just quietly slunk away, walked over the bridge to the other side of the river, and up the mountain all the way to Pale, to enjoy the fresh air, the beautiful views? Who was to say that the other comrades could actually kill the archduke? I had no confidence in the whole lot. So if I didn’t do it, who could?
However, if I succeeded, wouldn’t I be sorry to die? I have never made love, nothing that would count, anyway; I have not yet finished reading Crime and Punishment. But so what? What kind of life do I have to wait for? Work, and shrieking children who’ll be starving to death, while I slave twelve hours a day in some miserable printing press outfit, sorting out letters and poisoning myself with lead, and if I get tired of that, what else could I do? Go into coal mines to feed the Austrian trains, so the gentlemen and the soft women with garters could frolic all over our rails? Plus, what’s left in the novel—I got stuck in the middle, and suddenly it grew boring with all the conspiracies and confessions and weeping.
But now was no time to get lost in thought. The six cars were glimmering, reflecting shafts of prickly sunlight, so it looked like thin swords flying at me. What if I didn’t notice the archduke in time? What if I mistook the general Potiorek for him; the general was imitating the duke. I looked around. There was a gendarme some ten paces away from me. Did he notice I was looking at him? Should I have been scared of him? Well, now that I glared at him, he would be aware of me, and the best way then was not to be stealthy. I was tempted to tell him what I was about to do, just to amaze him. I wasn’t that foolish, though. I walked up to him, and said, Sir, could you please tell me in what car His Highness is?
Oh, yes, in the second one, over there. He pointed out the shiniest car.
Thank you for the directions, I said.
Oh, don’t mention it. We are all excited—such an incredible privilege to see the next emperor right here!
I moved away from the gendarme, and noticed the pea-cocky feathers above the duke’s head. I tore off the bomb cap. It was louder than I expected. I saw the driver in the approaching first car shrink back and look over and accelerate. Did he suspect what it was? Now it would definitely go off. I was stuck. What should I do with the bomb now? Throw it in the river behind? What would that do? Kill a few fish feeding on an Austrian clerk’s dung? How long could the bomb wait in my hands? Ten seconds, I knew that. I squeezed the bomb tightly in my pocket. My teeth chattered as though cold winter winds had suddenly begun to blow through my thin clothes.
The second car was close, approaching from my left, slowly, some twenty paces away. Very few policemen stood at the sidewalk. I had expected more of them; maybe there were many undercover agents around? But maybe not. The archduke boasted that he did not need high security; he wanted to appear brave. Maybe he was brave. It was easy to be brave with so much army at your command, even if the army was away.
Eight seconds. It looked unbelievably easy. I would never have such an opportunity again. Maybe just one strike, and I could liberate the Serbs—Austrians might get the message that they were not wanted, or there would be war, but at any rate, freedom from foreigners would come sooner or later. Maybe many people would die, but then the rest would live. Now, nobody lived.
Six seconds? The car was twelve yards or so from me. The duchess smiled, basking in the hazy sunshine. She had moist lips, gleaming teeth, looked fresh, that’s what having underlings does for you. I knew that she hardly ever took trips with her husband, and she never rode with him in parades in Vienna because she was not of royal birth and therefore was not allowed to, but this time she must have done him a favor, or he had perhaps told her of the quaint beauties of the Balkans, and she could not resist the tourist temptations. She looked comfortable, pleasant, but what right did she have to her happiness?
I pulled out the bomb, with maybe three seconds left, still sort of hiding it with my palm. At that moment the archduke shot me a glance, a steady, cold glance. For a second our eyes were locked, and I hated that calm, the superiority in his gaze, which analyzed me as though I were a specimen in a zoo. I thought he could read all my intentions, and that he derided me, convinced that I couldn’t do it, that he was so much above me that I was fit only to crawl at his feet and lick the shoe polish off his boots, and that even that would be a great favor to me. You will pay for this, I thought, and lifted my arm high and flung toward those eyes. But I had been too eager, and the metal slid from my clammy skin a little too soon. The bomb was flying in an arc above the archduke’s head. The duke, obviously understanding the bomb was flying at his wife on the other side of him, lifted his arm, and the bomb deflected from it, hit the car roof cloth, which was drawn back for the good weather, bounced off it, and fell on the pavement under the third car, where it exploded, with shrapnel whistling, and then ensued the screams of the struck pedestrians. The second car sped away, and a dozen men were running toward me. I took cyanide, wrapped in a newspaper, from my left pocket and stuffed it into my mouth, together with a bit of the wrapping, so I wouldn’t spill the powder, more than enough to kill me, but my throat was so dry I could not swallow. I pulled out the paper, and tried to make spittle in my mouth to swallow. By no means did I want to be caught by the police; now I’d have to die. I jumped over the fence and into the river, into the shallow water, which trickled among the rocks. I sprained my ankle, but no matter, why worry about that now?
A dozen civilians and policemen jumped after me into the river. I did not run away, did not resist, but threw myself prostrate into the cold water. The policemen grabbed me, pulled me up, twisted my arms, hit me with their clubs over the head. I felt a trickle of warm urine in my pants—even if I thought I was not afraid, I was afraid, but didn’t have enough mind to pay attention to it; something in my body was afraid. Why did I have so much water down there, and so little in my mouth? My throat was still choking dry. The hits blazed in my head, they were hot.
Don’t bother beating me, I said. I’ve taken poison and have only a minute to live. So don’t waste your time!
As they dragged me away, I felt nauseated. The poison is working, I thought. Am I ready to die? Yes, I am ready. That’ll be easier than dealing with the police and the trials, and they’d kill me, anyway. How? Would they hang me on the gallows, in a public performance? Would they shoot me with my eyes covered in black cloth? Would a crowd gather? Would they all cheer, even those who hated the Austrians, would even they cheer, so they would not be suspected of wanting the end of Austria? Would they cheer the loudest? Would mothers bring along their children, so they would learn to obey and fear the authorities? Would Jovanka come out, and die from grief?
I felt like vomiting, but could not vomit.
Who are you? What is your name? a short policeman shouted into my nose, as though it were my nose that should have been able to listen, his breath stinking from rotten teeth and plum brandy.
I am a Serbian hero! I shrieked. And that was true, at that moment I realized it was true; my words worked faster than my mind. It felt good to say that. Now everything seemed worth it. I even straightened up, and my head and spine and shins all tingled—from a mixture of pain and pride.
Name, what is your name?
What’s in a name? I told you. Names come from fathers, but a heroic deed from deep inside. (I was thinking it wasn’t such a bad throw—I was just a second off, and considering I didn’t have a stopwatch, and didn’t really count, that was not bad; actually, the car would have been past me in a second or two—so I did pretty well. They certainly knew they were not welcome!)
Name! the officer said, and kicked me below the kneecap, so I suddenly lost balance as my muscles jerked.
They gave me blows as we went along. Old men with walking sticks jabbed at me. People hollered, spat. Blood flowed down my head and glued my eyes. I did not mind that warm feeling on my face; it felt as though it were enveloping me, protecting me, healing me. As long as there was blood on me, I felt safe. It doesn’t make any sense, but what can I tell you, that is how I felt. Actually, I even felt happy. I had done my job. I was free now. They could jail me, kill me, but I had done what I had set out to do. I had not believed I could do it. I smiled from joy. No matter what they did to me, they could not take away my heroic deed. I didn’t need to accomplish anything anymore. This was it. This was better than getting a doctorate or an Olympic medal.
I don’t know how much time elapsed in a dark room in the military barracks, where I sprawled on a wooden bench along the wall, or whether the room was dark or only my vision failing. Several officers came in and interrogated me during the day, and again they came at night, and kept repeating the same questions, to try to catch me lying. I was lying at first, but later, it made no difference, except I did not want to give them any names, such as where I slept, because I knew that could get the people I knew into trouble. It seemed to me they were gullible, and I could tell them anything, and they would write it down and believe it. So, when they asked me whether I worked alone or with an organization, such as Black Hand, more for a joke than anything else, I said, I am working for the International Free Masons.
I knew nothing about the Free Masons, except that Catholic Austrians were scared of them and believed in all sorts of conspiracy theories involving the Masons. I told them we were trying to create a world without monarchs, monarchies, and countries, just one peaceful world.
Strange enough, they believed this and, from what I heard later on, kept bringing it up for months, in courts, in the newspapers—just one little joke threw them off so much. I wish I had given them more silly lies, but they kept harping on this one so much, without ever getting it, that I grew bored. They were not a fun bunch at all.
The lamplight was right in front of me on the table, so I saw nothing beyond it, and the police voices came from behind it, from the dark. Not that I wanted to look at the ugly men, but having voices like that just coming at me was spooky.
Who worked with you?
Nobody, I answered.
But that is not true, we know it is not true. Several men after you drew their guns and took shots at the crown prince. He is dead. Are you glad?
I did not know what to think. I was glad, and I was not glad. So, someone else managed to do it! I thought I was the only one who could, and just trying was good enough, but someone actually did it, on His Majesty’s way back on the Quay.
Did they kill anybody else? I asked.
Yes, His Majesty’s wife.
Who killed them?
Gavrilo Princip. You know him?
I knew of him. But I didn’t know he planned to do this.
Strange to say, I felt jealous of Princip. I’d never expected him to succeed. So, he would be glorious, he would be a Serbian saint, and I would die in obscurity. But I was happy, too. I had many emotions, as much as I could in my dazed state. The tyrant was gone. We did it. After all, it was a beautiful plan, to have several men, one after another, shoot, and maybe none of them would have, if I hadn’t started it all, showed how possible it was. But how did the archduke even get the idea to drive again down the Quay? My bomb must have confused everybody and made the real assassination possible.
The interrogations went on interminably. Sometimes they had to repeat a question two or three times because I just could not think and concentrate. They thought I was spiteful, and they pulled my ears as though I were a schoolboy, but they no longer hit.
They manipulated me and toyed with my emotions. Don’t lie, a policeman said, we know Gavrilo is one of your best friends. But do you know what? He confessed he was tempted to shoot you after you threw your bomb and failed to kill yourself. He said if you hadn’t been so far he would have shot you and then himself, so nobody would find out about the plot, how do you like that?
Of course, I didn’t like that. Just to think of it, the gall that boy had. He certainly made better friends with ideas than with people. Any moment, if he became a political leader, he’d shoot off his friends, if he thought the ideas called for it. I was disgusted. I guess he had what it took to become a great leader. But maybe they had lied to me.
Are you sorry for what you did? They repeated that question many times.
I certainly was not, and if I was, it had to do only with my failure to accomplish the deed. And I felt sorry for all the pedestrians I wounded. They were now in the hospitals, bleeding, maybe feverish, and considering our health care system, which was not ours, of course, but Austrian, some of them might get gangrene and die slowly, painfully, all because of my imprecision. I should have controlled my emotions better: I had thrown too hard in my zeal and rashness. Just one more second of aiming and self-control would have done it. I was a second or two too fast for history, or history was too slow for my nervous temperament.
I was sick for a couple of days, vomiting. I could not keep any food down. The cyanide was working, to some extent, enough to burn my throat. I think it was old and stale. It would have been better if the explosive had been too old, and the poison fresh. I still hoped to die, but could not die. I was too weak to die. In my room, I slept terribly; my throat and nose burned. I shivered, though it was not cold, but then, my health was never robust. Whenever I turned in sleep, the chains clanked and clattered and rang dull. They were cold and heavy. Still, I managed to move around during the day. There was terrible shrieking and wailing coming out of the yard. I peeped through the window and saw the police clubbing dozens of men, Serbs. It was sunny and hot, and those who were not beaten were forced to look at the sun; many of them had their mouths open from all the heat and no water. There weren’t that many people who had anything to do with us. This mass beating was totally arbitrary and irrational. The wailing, the pain, echoed from the walls, grew stronger, and the echoes and the original screams mixed up in a dizzying, pulsating sorrow. There, we wanted freedom for our people, but this was a far cry from it. Some of the men doubling over were old, some weren’t men at all but children. I didn’t know what to do about it—clearly, I could do nothing but look. And I couldn’t even do that. When the gallows were raised, and men were being hanged—for what? for who they were?—a gendarme shot at me. He narrowly missed. The glass above my head shattered, one fragment cut into my cheek, and others splashed on the floor in smithereens. So now I could not watch, but I could hear even better through the broken glass.
After the hangings, the following day, more beatings went on for hours. I was sorry for causing this grief, but at the same time this strengthened my hatred for the monarchy, and I wished I had managed to kill the monarch and the general.
It was terribly lonely in the cell. I could not talk to my friends. I did come up with a system of messages—I wrote at the bottom of my plate, and the plates went from one room to another. Princip and Ilic caught on, and we exchanged drawings, jokes, and so on. We also tapped messages through the wall, with sharp and dull thuds—we had learned the code for each letter beforehand, we had got ready for this part; that had been my idea, from a Russian manual. One day I tapped a code into Ilic’s wall, but he did not respond. I was sure he had hanged himself. So I tapped the message to Princip, who tapped back that he was saddened by the news. The next day Ilic tapped to me—I was overjoyed that he was alive, and so was Princip when I communicated the news to him. I had certainly jumped to conclusions too easily; I was so nervous and jumpy. But communicating through the wall in code was not good enough for me to have a sense of community, and I was lonely. If nothing else, I knew that tapping for a while would bring an angry Austrian guard, who would shout at me to stop. After he went, I continued, and then he’d come in again and shout. I was amazed that they could not decipher our code—maybe they didn’t even know we were communicating.
WE WERE ALL GATHERED for the trial in the court and examined and cross-examined sometime in October. By now we all had small beards, goatees, from not shaving. None of us had firm black beards, we all looked Chekhovian. This was the first time I saw my friends since the end of June, so for a while I didn’t pay any attention to what the judge was saying. I giggled from happiness at being with my friends. After all we were just boys; and if only we had stuck to being boys. It felt like we were ignoring a lesson at school, and the fat judge’s bad temper made it only all the more entertaining.
Princip was proud and belligerent. His nose was broader than before from the beatings he got in the streets upon his arrest, but he spoke clearly, in a strong and sonorous manner. I wondered where he had strength for such a voice. I was much bigger than him, yet my voice was weak, it could never ring.
What hurt me most was that I heard that a kind man, with a large family, who had let us sleep in his house on our way to Sarajevo, was executed. I did not let them have his name, maybe Princip did. What bad luck for him. He did not even know what we were up to, and now his children would have to grow up without him. The prosecutor used that as an example of how we should not get off easy if a man like that had to die for what we did. For that I was truly sorry.
And my sorrow deepened when the prosecutor said, Do you know what the archduke’s last words were? “Sophie, dear, please do not die. Our children need you.”
Can you imagine that? You orphaned three children! You certainly deserve to die, underage or not.
I had not known that the archduke had children. And that as he was dying he thought of his children, as no doubt did his wife, that did something to me. I was totally unprepared for this, and for my reaction. Maybe it was the last blow in the accumulation of sorrowful news. I am sure my father wouldn’t bother to think of me. Those children had been lucky to have parents who loved them, but they were also unlucky to have us.
The prosecutor showed us the pictures of the lovely children. One boy had thick black hair, wavy, shiny, it was parted just like mine, from right to left, with a thick wave; the older one had short hair and a serious look, the same angle of brows as mine, almost the same mirthless expression as mine, as though he had been posing for history as well. If you took the two boys and mixed up their features, you would get me in my boyhood; I felt a strong kinship with them. How could they look like me? How did they get stuck in the royal family? The girl, with a white bow on her pate, had wonderfully rich hair draped over her shoulder into her lap, and she, too, looked serious and beautiful. They all looked at the camera, but the mother, from whom they must have inherited the beauty, looked at them, mostly at her daughter, in a posture of pride and worry, as though she had a premonition. Nobody was smiling here. And why not? Shouldn’t children be happy? Maybe they had never been happy. I felt sorry for them that they had such a father. Maybe that’s why they could not laugh although they were just children. Maybe they would grow up to be monsters, maybe not. They were pretty and soulful, that must have been their Slavic side.
Sophie, dear, please do not die. That line kept sounding in my head, and I could not stop it. It was driving me insane. I could not listen to the interrogation after this, and I jumped out of my seat and shouted, We are sorry for what we did, we are sorry that we orphaned children…. I know I gave a whole speech, but now I don’t remember what exactly I said, except that everybody listened to me for a while. Damn it, I was a good speaker.
Speak for yourself, Princip cut in. I am not sorry. They have orphaned many of our children, why aren’t you sorry for them! Don’t ever talk in my name!
I am deeply sorry. I am surprised he isn’t. I…I—At that point my voice choked from tears that went backward, not down my nose, but into my throat. Only if I’d had that salty liquid when I had tried to swallow cyanide—maybe I wouldn’t have had to face what I did to these children, wouldn’t have had to quarrel in court with Gavro.
He just wants mercy, Gavrilo said.
You stay quiet, I said. What do you know about me? What do you know about people? You know only books and ideas. No, I don’t want mercy. In fact, I want punishment. All I want before I die is that the children forgive me. But how can they forgive me? No, it’s better that they not forgive me.
Sophie, dear, our children need you. Please don’t die. I imagined the children next to the casket, trying to reach for their mama, to kiss her; they couldn’t, maybe they would be struck by fear of death, maybe disgust, maybe they would not be allowed. That must have already happened. What did they do? Did they break down and cry out, in shrill screams, the world breaking down in shafts of cathedral light, through stained glass, full of vermilion, lit up by their tears? Or did they stay quiet, stunned, with the grief too deep for tears, their voices subdued, muffled; perhaps they could not utter a word; maybe they could not breathe. Maybe they felt pretty much the way I did, when the police showered me with blows to the head and groin? Maybe they lost control, wetted, from terror and grief, lost the feel of their bodies?
I could not control my emotions. I wept right there in the court for the family I had attempted to kill. I did not care what people thought. And the fact that I was the only one in our group weeping made me think I should weep even more, for the hard-heartedness of my comrades.
I would not have minded just wasting their father. In fact, I think that would have been a favor to them. I had hated my father, and he’d hated me; he beat me daily. And when I grew bigger and stronger, and he couldn’t easily subdue me, he had me jailed once when I had a quarrel with our maid; he’d come home with a gendarme. I’d asked her to undress for me, and she refused, and shouted at me to get out. I hadn’t even touched her. I don’t know why that made such a big impression on my father. Maybe he’d been interested in the maid, and he thought we competed. I would not be surprised if she’d been his mistress; the bastard had no moral backbone. He’d sent me to apprentice as a blacksmith because he did not like my grades at school. And there, the master blacksmith, just for fun, put a hot iron to the back of my neck. I still have a scar there. The back of my neck is pretty hairy, but nothing grows in the diagonal of the burn. That’s all because of my father, I am sure; I don’t think anybody liked him. He ran a tavern, and since he couldn’t pass up on opportunities to make money, he’d become a police informant. What better job for an informant than to ply guests with brandy? He was a regular spy for the Austrians, and he adored the Hapsburgs. I even played a joke with him; I had got an Austrian flag to put on our house on the day of the assassination, so people would not suspect me for being an assassin. Anyway, if for nothing else, I wanted to kill the emperor to get at the father. I don’t know, I just couldn’t bring myself to kill my father, that would have been too personal, but killing the emperor, well, the archduke was to be emperor, that would have been perfect. Without my father’s odious influence on me, I would not have become a member of such a subversive group. I was glad about dead fathers. However, that their mother was killed, that was terrible. Maybe it was even terrible that their father was killed; maybe they liked him, maybe he was even a good father. I am not the one to judge that, the children only could.
I could no longer listen to the trial. I was imagining three children, spoiled, true, but children, and children are so pure that even if they are spoiled they can’t be held responsible for that, they are still innocent…. So these children would not see their parents again, they would not sit on their laps and listen to bedtime stories, Red Riding Hood and Robin Hood…. Well, maybe they would not have heard the Robin Hood story. Probably not. They will hear the story of the assassination, however. They will hate Princip and me. They could never forgive us.
IF THEY LIKED to drink hot chocolate with their mother, they will not drink it again.
The judge surprised me by ordering us to be imprisoned rather than executed because we were not twenty years old yet. Several people who were over twenty, even though they had hardly anything to do with the conspiracy, were to be executed, hanged, and several already were, in our yard, and in Trebinje, my native town. In a way, I would have preferred summary execution. Now I would spend years in prison, I would not even be allowed to read the newspapers. If I could follow the course of the war in prison, that would be a different matter, I would not have minded it that much, especially if the Allies won. Then whatever we had aspired for, the collapse of the Hapsburgs, the emancipation of the south Slavs, would happen; then it would have been worth it. We were transferred to the prison in Theresienstadt, three of us: Princip, Grabez, and I. That was a miserable journey in the cold train; we were chained to our benches, our bones were rattled and, after all the clanking, felt broken.
In Theresienstadt, the bed was hard, flea-infested, cold. There was no heat at night, and I was chained in shackles and chains weighing over ten kilograms, which conducted all the heat out of my body. The water in the jug sometimes froze overnight. If it hadn’t, I would not have known whether it was all my imagination that it was cold, but there was no doubt, it was. It took me several months to realize that if I put the ball, which I could barely lift, under covers, together with the chains, that I would lose less heat and wouldn’t be so cold. By then, I had got the chronic chills, so it did not matter anymore that I had figured out a way of protecting my heat.
I got TB somehow. I found out that Gavrilo also had it. Maybe we all had TB even before the assassination. I know Princip said he probably had it, and Grabez thought he might have it, and maybe that is why they were willing to die. I coughed every winter, but it did not mean I had TB. I believed I did not have it. How could we all have TB? I think the Austrians gave it to us, intentionally; they gave us contaminated food and stale water, I am sure, in prison. They were not allowed to execute us by law, but they would do it stealthily by implanting disease in us. I am quite certain that they did it. Once they found out we had TB, they did nothing to save us. They could have sent us to the mountains. They could have heated our rooms. They did not. That was their way of killing us.
I haven’t had much will to live lately. The walls in the prison are so thick I cannot tap codes to Gavro and Grabez. I am terribly lonely, so lonely that I even accept visits by a priest. The priest can be a bore; he wants me to confess, to pray with him, and he doesn’t know any jokes. I told him one, and he did not laugh. It was the only decent joke I knew. Two Montenegrins stand on the pier and notice a boat sinking and hear men screaming for help.
One Montenegrin says, Look at that, men are drowning, and we are just standing.
You are right about that, says the other. Let’s sit down.
Instead of laughing at the joke, the priest wanted to pray with me. And so we prayed. I meant it all, and still do. I pray with him for forgiveness for what I have done to the three children.
And just today, it seems the prayers are working. The priest has brought me a letter in a beautiful handwriting. Dear Nedjeljko: We forgive you. We feel sorry for you that you have to suffer so much. We know you were misguided. May God forgive you, too, and bless you. We know you are a good soul, you have repented.
THAT WAS A LETTER from the archduke’s children! I did not know how to react; I was purely amazed. I kept rereading the letter, admiring every curl and slant in the calligraphically drawn letters. I had always loved letters—it was no accident that I’d become a typesetter—but none were quite as beautiful as these. I smell the page—it smells of lilac and ink. I am swooning as I inhale. Maybe I would be swooning, anyway. I am not even aware when the priest left. Maybe he has not left. Maybe he is here to bury me. Maybe I am dying. Is that a real letter? I ask. Suddenly I doubt. I need to see the envelope. If it doesn’t have a stamp, how will I know where it came from? Maybe the priest wrote it. Maybe that was one little benevolent lie he came up with out of compassion for me, but I doubt it; he isn’t capable of such beauty, such handwriting. I feel around the table with my fingers, and pick up a fine beige envelope. There is a blue seal, which says, Wien. So it’s true, it’s a letter from them, the beautiful souls whom I have injured. Suddenly, I notice Franz Ferdinand is gazing from the envelope, from under the green feathers of his hat, with his cold, hateful concentration, looking straight into me, just the way he did at the moment I was flinging the grenade at him, in that awful contemptuous manner! I don’t want to look at the image. Is this a ghost? I cover the image with my thumb, and feel the fine wavy ribs of the stamp. No, I won’t let him lurk like this. I am tearing the stamp and his image into small pieces, and I am eating it, relishing the glue and ink in my throat.
This confession in the form of a letter, apparently written in the authentic trembling hand of Nedjeljko Cabrinovic in his prison cell in Theresienstadt in January 1916, was recently found in the loft of a long-deceased priest, N.M., before his house was to be torn down in order to create expansion space for the world-famous beer brewery in Plzen. For a while, D.M., the CEO of the brewery, kept the letter and reread it to various dinner guests as a prize, but when he read it to Sacerby, the Bosnian minister demanded that the letter be given over to the Bosnian government in Sarajevo for the archives. Whether the letter had been destroyed in the Sarajevo siege, or whether it still exists in some private hands, or in public hands, remains a mystery, and the confession above is a reconstruction, done by a dozen brewery guests, as the closest possible approximation to the original.
The writing ceases here, at the bottom of the mouse-chipped page of the vanished original. The story, or rather, the history, does not end here, nor for that matter with the addendum, which follows:
The Sarajevo police department demanded from the Theresienstadt military prison that Cabrinovic’s corpse be beheaded and his skull sent to Sarajevo, where it would be preserved and kept in a museum, in a jar, for future generations. After a lengthy exchange of letters among various departments of the Austrian government, it was decided that Cabrinovic’s corpse should be left intact. Many people schemed to get his and Princip’s bones; it would not have been the first case of a missing skull. The skull of Bogdan Zerajic, who had attempted to assassinate a provincial governor in Bosnia in 1910, was displayed in the Sarajevo Criminal Museum. The chief police inspector in Sarajevo occasionally used Zerajic’s skull as an inkpot to threaten those he interrogated, saying that unless they confessed everything, their skulls would serve the same letter-writing purpose. In 1919 Zerajic’s skull was put back together with his body, but in 1920 when the body was exhumed to be placed in a common grave, the skull was missing again, and thus his headless body was placed with those of Princip (whose corpse was whole, except for a missing arm, which TB of the bones had destroyed), Grabez, and several other conspirators, including Cabrinovic, in the common grave.