which tells of books and a conversation in Saint Anna’s Hospital, presents the multiple murder from a different angle, and shows us Fra Dolcino fleeing the wrath of the Church and finding refuge in the Franciscan monastery on Bojana River
from: emmanuel@gmail.com
It was the article about the library fire which finally opened my eyes. The papers and Web portals were full of headlines about the killing of the Vukotić family, which is why I didn’t notice it earlier. I find it unforgiveable that such a tragedy is reduced to a spectacle to be served with morning coffee. All the pain and fear of the murder victims, and all the sorrow and despair of those who survived them, is transformed into a product to increase newspaper circulation – a topic of conversation to while away the time and be utterly forgotten as soon as the front pages scream in bold about a new murder. Every day we do and say unforgiveable things, without our hand or voice trembling. We defend our right to the unforgiveable with the utmost decisiveness. Doubt and trepidation only come when fear takes over and when our lives, which we once claimed a sovereign right to and defended at whatever cost, have slipped completely from our control.
That terse report in the ‘Community’ column told me that the Ulcinj Library was set on fire the very same evening that the killers broke into the Vukotićs’ house. As I’m sure you know, the library fire was started a few hours before the murder. Although the fire station is just twenty metres behind the library and right next to the police station, the report in the paper suggests the firefighters arrived late. They didn’t set about extinguishing the fire until the damage had become irreversible and the flames had engulfed the roof of the building. By then, the book which the fire was meant to destroy lay in cinders.
The chaos in the centre of town facilitated the work of the Vukotićs’ killers. I can see them now, driving towards the house along a little-used track in the dark, without headlights. They kept off the busy road to avoid detection. Although they had done an efficient job with the library, these well-organised and devoted zealots remained cautious and used the narrow dirt road leading up to the property from the back. There were no houses there, whose lights might give away those coming with evil intent – only scrub and forest between there and Cape Djerana. And forest is a good keeper of secrets.
Four men in black balaclavas opened the narrow, ground-level window and crawled through it into the cellar. The ease with which they moved and their noiseless steps showed they were adept at crime. They didn’t want to wake the residents before the task was done. They quickly found the safe hidden beneath the floorboards under a thick, sumptuous carpet which, even in the dark of the house, they could be sure was Persian. One of the intruders knew the combination for opening the safe. It clicked open and he withdrew a thick book with a hard, leather binding. As he leafs through it, I can see it was written by hand in a language unknown to me. The writing seems scattered, and the pages are yellowing and battered at the edges. It was as if the paper didn’t absorb the ink – the letters and words are just lying on the pages, ready to flutter up and away at need.
The burglars made certain that this was the book they were looking for. But their work wasn’t yet done. One of them lifted up a vase from the kitchen table and smashed it on the floor with all his might. As intended, the noise roused the residents. The woman of the household came first, running down the stairs and shouting Who’s there?! While one of the burglars inflicted fatal wounds on her, the others ran up to the first floor, where they overpowered her husband and mercilessly killed the children. They then left the house through the front door, which they intentionally left ajar. This was meant to mislead investigators: if you hadn’t witnessed the crime you’d think the woman opened the front door and let the killers into the house.
I spoke about this with Doctor Schulz today. He was particularly interested in the part of the story about the burning of books.
‘Why did they burn down the library?’ he wanted to know, and above all: ‘Which book burned in the library? And which was stolen from the Vukotićs’?’
Dr Schulz often reminds me of my childhood: people like him are becoming steadily rarer. It’s as if they belong to a different time and disappear with it. He sits patiently in his armchair beneath the large portrait of Lacan and listens to me with the greatest attentiveness. Sometimes he takes notes of what I say. These are obviously of no real significance because all our conversations are tape-recorded, he just jots them down to add a dash of pop-psychological flavour. But he plays his role flawlessly, with no intention of adding to the interpretation – without innovations, which would destroy everything. Rereading is the vogue term: people produce rereadings of rereadings and in doing so only conceal their inability to read the text in full. Dr Schulz reminds me of Bruno Ganz and his playing of Thomas Bernhard: if you go to the Burgtheater to see The Ignoramus and the Madman, be it the première, the second showing, or the second season, you’ll see the same actor playing the same role in the same way. Even the vanilla-scented tobacco Dr Schulz smokes in his pipe is always the same.
‘I wonder what could be written in the book you’re talking about?’ he said. The question was rhetorical, of course, but it served well as an introduction to what was to come.
‘So you’re studying the case of a burned book – I must admit I also find this a fascinating topic,’ he began his most instructive and interesting discourse. ‘My fascination goes back to an event during my studies. Its elusive implications have accompanied me up until this day. You are…how should I put it…our conversation here was portended that day, so many years ago.
‘The event I’m taking about occurred in 1977. I came here to St Anna’s towards the end of that year to attend a seminar given by Lacan. Even back then I found its title threatening: The Time of Conclusions. One morning we gathered in the amphitheatre; we were all young and full of faith in ourselves and our mission. We listened with bated breath as he, brilliant as ever, outlined the seminar he was going to hold. “Now I’d like to hear your questions,” he said after his introduction.
‘You may not have noticed, and maybe it’s imperceptible today, but my greatest failing is vanity,’ Dr Schulz told me. ‘When we’re young, our vanity is simply ludicrous, but no less dangerous. If you’d known me back then, you could have been sure that I’d be the one to ask the first question. And not any old question: it had to be one which told the teacher that this pupil had mastered his lessons. It was intended as a kind of declaration of loyalty: this pupil wanted to tell the teacher that he’d remain true to his teachings although he knew their weak points.
‘“What is your greatest desire: to bequeath your work to the world?” I asked him.
‘You haven’t understood anything. On the contrary, before I die I want to completely destroy my work,’ Lacan stated, and he meant it. This wasn’t a threat or a vow, and even less a confession, but a cold conclusion. Back then we didn’t believe our teacher would destroy every hope that we could help humanity and destroy our last illusion about the practical value of the discipline we’d devoted ourselves to.
‘Why did our teacher want to destroy his work? Attempting to understand this led me on to the question: Why does an author destroy his book? Did you know that Kafka wanted to have almost his entire work destroyed? He entrusted the task to two friends. One, a woman, complied with his wish, while the other, a man, betrayed his friend’s trust. It’s the latter, Max Brod, who we have to thank for having Kafka’s writing today.
‘Destroying a book is the culmination of the drama of fatherhood,’ Dr Schulz said, getting up from his armchair beneath the portrait of Lacan. ‘And of the drama of sonship, if you like,’ he added. He looked out the window and continued speaking, which created the strange impression of him talking to me and ignoring me at the same time. ‘A son who burns a book is staging a revolution against the Father and his Law conveyed in that book. But a Father who burns his work deprives the son of his name and his Law. A burned book is the spot where the bond between father and son is severed.
‘In Totem and Taboo, Freud goes back to the primal horde, only to find the tyranny of the father there too. The primal father imposes tight restrictions on his sons and punishes them harshly for any disobedience. The sons desire freedom and therefore band together to kill and eat their despotic father. Here we have the first of many revolutions, which will all run according to the same Oedipal scenario. But, as usual, remorse comes instead of freedom and leads the sons to resurrect their father’s ban. All this is accompanied by the posthumous veneration of the father. Here, of course, we note the root of religion,’ Dr Schulz said.
‘Oh, if only it were so simple that a murder, even the murder of the father, could resolve things…The catch is that neither the actual death of the father nor the proclamation “God is dead” really brings liberation. The Law remains when the Father is gone. Since freedom can’t be attained by patricide, one tries to achieve it by destroying the Law – the book which civilisation and culture are based on. To burn a book means to kill one’s father, as poignantly described by Gérard Haddad, whom I met back at the seminar. But even if the father is killed twice, he still returns.’ Then Dr Schulz suddenly turned towards me: ‘As far as I can tell from the brief description you’ve given, those book-burners of yours must belong to a millenarian movement. The history of those movements is the history of book-burning and contempt for the Law.’
After those words, Dr Schulz paced the room in circles several times and then stopped at the bookshelf. He took out a book and laid it on the table, then sat back in his armchair. I memorised the title: The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn. When he was sure I’d registered it, he added: ‘But, like I say, I was more interested in the figure of the father who deprives the son of himself – the father who feels revulsion towards fatherhood.’
That same evening I asked my corrupt fallen angels, the paramedics, to get Cohn’s book for me. I had it the very next day, hidden under my bed. The book would turn out to be irrefutable proof of the ‘butterfly effect’: a work written by a British academic, which an unconventional Central European psychiatrist discreetly showed his Vienna patient in a solitary clinic in the Alps, would lead to the solving of a murder mystery in a town on the Adriatic.
Everything is interrelated, I say to myself, repeating that worn-out phrase. The signs are a sure guide, but it’s so damn hard to read them correctly and even just recognise them…Given the preoccupation or even obsession with health which I grew up in, I ask myself today if I couldn’t and shouldn’t have recognised the sign that everything would end in illness? You see, if maman et papa were dedicated to something, it was so-called physical health. They therefore perceived my asthenia as a punishment of God, while my corpulence, which they fought against in vain, must have seemed a heavy blow of Providence indeed. Every morning papa washed himself in ice-cold water. That superfluous and painful ritual had been part of family tradition ever since his grandfather, an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, had served in Sarajevo. He washed that way for the first time and realised that the absence of civilisation, which in his case began and ended with the absence of warm water, certainly toughened a man. Mother’s morning toilet, on the other hand, lasted longer than it took to create some twentieth-century artworks. Jackson Pollock could have finished a painting in the time it took maman to do ‘all that was necessary for a lady to be ready to leave the house’, as she put it. This would be followed by a slow breakfast – cereal, yoghurt, fruit – and a schedule of morning gymnastics designed to keep her eternally healthy and young. My priorities were different: chocolate cake, for example. It and everything else I truly desired only became attainable in my parents’ absence.
Hedvige had a good heart and, equally important for this anecdote, a good appetite. No sooner would maman et papa leave the house and I sadly blink my little eyes, than Hedvige would whiz down to the neighbourhood baker’s to get some pastries, which we proceeded to devour in the pantry. We chose that secluded spot for our secret little ritual as if to highlight the gravity of our transgression. And that just whetted our appetite.
Hedvige was with me for days on end. She’d practically only leave the house when she went out on errands or was called to the school which her daughter, Marushka, attended.
The time I had to spend alone was particularly hard for me. I’d stand by the window, with black thoughts populating my little head. Everything that entered my mind spoke of the End and of irretrievable loss. Schikanedergasse would suddenly turn into a street being swallowed up by a swamp: I saw a flood of water coming and pushing in through the doors of the houses. Reeds started to grow among the parked cars and bent in a black wind bearing fallen leaves. Huge brown leaves rotted while still in the air and fell to the ground like dust. It was as if the whole world had turned into a grave, with the undertaker shovelling earth into it. We’ll be buried alive, I thought as my heart slowed its beat, we’ll perish beneath the water and dust with nothing to show that we ever existed.
I was obsessed at that time by an article I read in the paper about a rifle which had passed from hand to hand and circulated through the Balkans for almost a century. It so happened that every owner of the rifle was shot and killed – but not before he himself had killed someone with the accursed gun. Belgrade historians made a list of the various owners of the rifle and also those killed by it. They then fed all the available genealogical data into the computer. It turned out there was a certain order to all the killing which had at first looked so random and indiscriminate. For example, a grandson of the rifle’s first owner was killed by his grandfather’s weapon. The great-grandson of his killer shot a man from Herzegovina with the same rifle. The dead man’s son later took possession of it and, without knowing that he was using the rifle which had killed his father, shot a certain Perović from Nikšić, who was a descendant of the rifle’s first victim. When the Belgrade historians joining the dots on the rifle’s huge, ramified family tree designating those who killed with it and those who were killed by it, they ended up with an outline of a butterfly with spread wings.
I concluded back then that everything I do, and everything I think, can have terrible consequences for people I don’t even know. A sequence of events unfolds, unforeseeable for me but entirely logical in itself, which can forever change the lives of people, even those who’ll come after me. For the first time, I clearly formulated the idea which has possessed me up until today: if I could comprehend the pattern by which the actions of people in one place and time impact on the lives of people in another, I’d be able to understand how the world works. I’d be in possession of the matrix which governs the unfolding of history. Then I’d be able to make sure that none of my actions caused sorrow or pain to others.
After that, maman et papa would enter my mind. I’d see their car racing along a winding forest road at night. The car’s headlights would illuminate the huge trees which stood by the roadside like grim sentinels lining the travellers’ way to a secret and sinister destination. Another time I’d see them crossing an intersection, with a busload of schoolchildren inexorably speeding towards them from the side. Or I’d see their car breaking through the crash barrier and plunging over a cliff into the sea, which beat and foamed against sharp rocks far below. The ending was always the same and had them dying in the crushed body of the car.
Those visions were so real, so convincing, that I’d instantly be overcome by a fear that they really were dead. No one could dispel my fear, not even Hedvige when she returned to the apartment. She’d come running up to me: ‘Master Emmanuel, it was all just a dream!’ she’d say. I’d spend the rest of the day glued to the window in fear and trembling incessantly. I’d stare down the street and wait for the only thing which could bring relief: my parents’ return. But fear wasn’t the worst. Along with it there came a paralysing guilt. The feeling that I was to blame for their death was all-powerful and pervasive, and inseparable from the fear. I think you could say that I feared my thoughts and acts had evoked their death. An unbearable weight pressed down on my young shoulders like a boulder determined to crush me: not their death itself but the thought that they’d only died because of me.
By the time they finally returned I’d be a trembling heap on the floor. They’d reprimand Hedvige, who each time, rightfully, perceived that as the worst injustice and withdrew downcast into the kitchen. I’d be taken to my room and put to bed, as usually happened when they didn’t know what to do with me. Through the bedroom door I’d hear my mother crying. The realisation that she was miserable because of me dealt yet another blow to my tormented body.
Later, when the voices in the apartment died down and the streetlights were on outside, Hedvige would slink into my room, sit at my feet and read me stories from her hidden book. ‘As we agreed, no one is to hear a word about this,’ she’d whisper and put her fat finger to her lips. That was another of our rituals: she’d take the book from her apron, wink to me – her accomplice – mutter ‘Now, where did we stop last time?’ and start reading me the latest adventures of the Son of God, who asked Father, father, why have you forsaken me? as he suffered to save us all, me included.
Dr Schulz knows the things I’ve told you about myself. He knows a lot. But there’s one thing he doesn’t know, the most important thing, and I’m going to tell it only to you because it’s the key for you to unlock the secret of the Vukotić murders: there’s a third book – one which its author called The Book of the Coming. It is the reason for all this happening.
For you to understand, we have to go far back into the past.
I first found out about the author while reading Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives. And as these things usually go, I discovered that book coincidentally and indirectly via Borges, who turned out to have read Schwob before he was even twenty and went on to virtually become his pupil.
One of the twenty-two literary portraits Schwob wrote is the story of the heretic Dolcino. The historical Fra Dolcino was born around 1250, we can assume. We have to be more careful when trying to determine his place of birth: most researchers consider that he might have been born in Novara. Schwob’s Fra Dolcino pursued his sacred studies at the church of Orto San Michele, ‘where his mother raised him so he’d be able to touch the beautiful wax figurines with his little hands’. The boy grew up with the Franciscans, and the friar who instructed him claimed he was accepted into the order by Saint Francis himself. I see myself standing beside the sweet boy as he learns to speak with the birds, which aren’t afraid of him and often come to land on his shoulders. The boy snaps out of his daydreaming and remembers he has to go to the monastery, where Schwob says he ‘sang in a sonorous voice with the brethren’. Barefoot, he rushes like a whirlwind through the crowded lanes and markets.
The boy lived from begging and found great enjoyment in mendicant ways. Schwob describes how, one summer day, the townsfolk were cruel to the boy and his brethren. Hungry and thirsty, they took refuge from the heat with their empty baskets in an unfamiliar courtyard. Here the boy experienced a miracle – the first of many great miracles which years later would lead him to believe he was the chosen one. A curtain of grapevine formed before his eyes, and leopards and other wild animals from faraway lands frolicked behind it. Young women and men in bright raiment played violas and lutes. When the boy lowered his gaze to his basket, it was full of fragrant loaves of bread, reminiscent of the time Jesus fed the five thousand with five loaves and two fish.
Fra Dolcino’s biographers note that Dolcino was falsely accused of theft – in Vercelli, by all accounts. Although innocent, he was tortured. Humiliated by his mistreatment, he fled to the city of Trento, where he came across a sect whose name sounded so pure: the Apostolics. Later, in 1300, he was to don the white robe and become leader of the Apostolic movement. Now Dolcino was indoctrinated with the esoteric teachings of Gioacchino da Fiore. Thomas Aquinas refuted Da Fiore’s ideas in Summa Theologica. Nevertheless, Dante placed Da Fiore in Heaven. In his Inferno, Dante also mentions Fra Dolcino, whom Mohammed warned to prepare well for the conflict with the Novarese.
Under the influence of Da Fiore’s teachings, Dolcino would turn the Apostolics into a brotherhood known as the Dolcinians. Night after night, Dolcino listened to the stories of the older brethren about Da Fiore’s wisdom and kindness, and also about the history of the world, which Da Fiore divided into three ages. There by the campfire high up in the mountains, in the empty lands where neither merchants’ caravans nor soldiers pass and the Apostolics were safe, a lamb appeared to Dolcino in a dream. It came down the hill towards him with a flight of tiny red birds hovering above it.
Dolcino wakened his followers at dawn and told them the revelation which had come in his dream: there had been the age of the Old Testament, he said, when people were created to settle the land; there had been the age of our Lord Jesus Christ and his apostles with their modesty and poverty; then there had been the age of decay and disaster caused by the Church and its greed. ‘But an age will come, the age I am bringing –,’ he proclaimed, his eyes streaming tears and his voice trembling like a sparrow in the January frost, ‘an age of modesty and poverty, when the sword of worldly power and might will no longer hang over our heads. The lamb said to me: You are my word and my promise, I am coming with you to stay for ever.’
Now Dolcino and his band of revolutionaries wandered the Novara area. They were joined by the poor and the ignorant, inebriated not so much by the promise of a better world to come as by the prospects of plunder. The Dolcinians, who after their teacher’s ‘sermon on the mount’ no longer doubted they were the beloved of God, gave themselves over to forbidden bodily pleasures. Churches burned late into the night in the lands they passed through, as did the houses of any who refused to renounce the authority of the Pope and were promptly slain. Dolcino absolved the marauders, rapists and killers of their sins. The Dolcinians knelt before him, ragged and filthy, with the dried blood of yesterday’s victims under their nails. ‘To the pure all things are pure, but to the corrupt and unbelieving nothing is pure,’ Dolcino recited the words of Paul the Apostle. And no sooner had his followers crossed themselves than they were ready for new misdeeds.
A certain Father Tomaso hung from an oak in front of one of the many churches the Dolcinians committed to the flames. When he’d seen the rabble carting away the pewter, candlesticks and fabrics from his church, he turned to Dolcino and thundered: ‘You call for a return to Christ, but you’re blind to his works and deaf to his words! Does not our Lord say: For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many…And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many…Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not. For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect. Are those not his words?’
Challenged to a theological duel, Dolcino decided to withdraw without loss. Instead of parrying the presumptuous priest with a sagacious response, which his followers keenly awaited, Dolcino just muttered: ‘Kill him.’
The Church soon set about hunting down Dolcino with all the means and forces at its disposal. The Statutum Ligae contra Haereticos was passed in Scopello on 24 August 1305. This amounted to Fra Dolcino’s death sentence: from that day on, his end drew rapidly nearer like a stone falling into a well.
The most interesting period in Dolcino’s scarcely documented life, from the point of view of your and my story, is the time between 1300 and 1303. Fleeing the wrath of the Church, he spent these years ‘somewhere in eastern Dalmatia’, the sources say. But we can assume that Dolcino didn’t feel safe even there, at the ‘edge of the world’. I can see him now at a marketplace in the hinterland of Split and running into one of the Franciscan friars who he’d begged with as a boy. The meeting was cordial and their friendship deep. Torn between loyalty to the Church and loyalty to his old friend, the friar chose the latter. He was journeying to the Franciscan mission in Ulcinj, which had been extended into a monastery in 1288 by the kindness of Helen of Anjou. Since he was continuing on his way at dawn, he suggested to Dolcino: ‘Why not come along? Your secret will be safe with me.’ And Dolcino thought: Ulcinj is terra incognita indeed – they’ll never find me in that land of dragons!
The fugitive Dolcino and his friend travelled south through Dalmatia. Several weeks later they arrived on the banks of Bojana River in the town which would be marked on Venetian etchings over a century later as Dolcigno in Dalmatia.
Dolcino spent his days by the river. He carved pipes from the reeds that grew there, and with their music he charmed the fish of the water and birds of the air. But Dolcino had a mission, and he couldn’t build the Kingdom of God on earth while hiding in Ulcinj. The night before departing back to his home region, where he would once again head the Dolcinians by Lake Garda, he had another dream. He saw that he’d die at the stake. But that wouldn’t be his end: he dreamed that he’d be resurrected. He entrusted this dream and the date of his resurrection to only one person – his good and faithful friend, the Franciscan friar. He took down Dolcino’s words and locked the manuscript into a chest, which he secretly immured deep in the walls of the monastery.
One peaceful evening by Lake Garda, Dolcino met Margaret of Trento, who before dawn would become his lover. He’d led his followers all the way to Mount Rubello, there to dig in and await the final battle. One year later, the army of the Church would come against them with all its might. A thousand of his followers would be killed, while Dolcino and Margaret would be captured and burned at the stake. Schwob writes that Dolcino ‘asked just one favour of their executioners: that in the hour of their suffering they be allowed to keep on their white robes like the apostles on the lampshade in the church of Orto San Michele’, where his mother had taught him faith. But he begged in vain – he was forced to watch his lover burn to death. Before his own turn came, he was castrated, blinded, and had his nose, ears and fingers cut off.
As his head blazed like a torch, Dolcino remembered the day as a boy when he was driven by hunger, thirst, heat and the absence of human clemency – and saw leopards and heard the song of happy people. Before he breathed his last, he had a vision of himself descending from the mountain bringing baskets of pane dolce to the people of the valley: a gift to the poor from his master, the Saviour.