in which we briefly enter a public house, venture into a dark marsh and hear of self-pity and grace as Lazar tells his story; we meet singing nuns, and a company of drunken friends confess their sins
What drove Lazar to kill the Vukotićs that evening? Or rather: what stopped him from killing them before that?
If I hadn’t lived through the war here, I wouldn’t know. But I saw what happens when the safety net of social relations fails and social masks are dropped – when the truth about us gets out. I saw the collapse of the world in which we’d played our little roles as good people and friendly neighbours. Like when a dam bursts, the water floods through, and the peaceful valley of the world we knew is suddenly swamped by the deluge of our desires. All the dead of the wars of the 1990s are a bodycount of the fantasies and deepest desires of our neighbours and fellow human beings.
A man lives with his neighbours in ‘peace and harmony’ for decades. Ask anyone in the local area about him and they’ll tell you he’s a peaceful, friendly guy. Isn’t the crime news in the papers always the same? Don’t people always describe their neighbour in the same way, and then – out of the blue – he commits a terrible, bloodthirsty crime? He conforms to social conventions for years and years. But then comes a day when he follows his own desires: he goes into the house of people he’s lived alongside in peace and love for decades and kills them all. Who is the man living next door? Who is the criminal from our wars? An ordinary man, a good neighbour of forty years’ standing, who under the sway of ideology, religion or whatever, blows a fuse and commits the crime? No: he’s a killer who wished to see his neighbours dead for forty years and one day finally did what he’d always wanted.
It’s the same with sincere friends. My good friend is drunk: he comes up to me and insults me; he tells me he despises me – no, he hates me, a hatred I deserve for things I’ve done, some of them in the distant, common past, which he enumerates and describes with what feels like the inhuman precision of a surveillance device. When I see him again the next day, he stands before me with his head bowed and apologises. ‘Please forgive me, I was drunk,’ he says.
What is my friend actually apologising for? Not for what he thinks and feels, but for having said what he thinks. He apologises for truth having punctured the condom of interpersonal consideration under the influence of alcohol. His apology is a request for me to reject the obvious: yes, that is what he really thinks about me. Hypocrisy is at the very heart of so-called good interpersonal relations. It’s the very core of our everyday forgiveness. Usually we forgive what is done to us and manage to ignore the fundamental question of why it was done to us. Even if we forgive from the position of a good Christian, we do so in the full knowledge that there’s a final arbiter, our God, who considers the claim for clemency once again. What’s more, we forgive in full awareness that we have to forgive for our own sins to be forgiven. So that the outcome of the trial in which we are being judged be favourable, we have to relinquish our authority in the trial where we are the judge and transfer the matter to the ‘Supreme Court’. We forgive, fully aware of the existence of the Heavenly Bank of Sin, in which every transgression counts. Our interests in the Bank of Sin render us fundamentally incapable of forgiving: a person can only truly forgive if their grace is disinterested. Ours never is, therefore it isn’t grace.
*
One of the Vukotićs’ neighbours told me he’d seen Lazar drunk several times at the Lonely Hearts bar, where I didn’t go because it was frequented by the local working class. An essential precondition for joining the struggle for the rights of the working class is that you not know the working class. After all, ignorance is the precondition for every struggle: as soon as we get to know something well, we can no longer imagine fighting for it.
The local proletarians met at the Lonely Hearts to dream of better days and drink away their wages. Despite the flood and snowstorm, the place was packed that night. The owner of the Lonely Hearts was nicknamed Pasha. No one remembered his real name any more. He was a petty crook from Bosnia who came to Ulcinj like so many others to escape the war. The natives of Ulcinj are wise: they know that current adversities will be replaced by the adversities to come. One occupier will replace another – one despot will be deposed by the next. This makes them paragons of patience, in no hurry to replace their current misfortune with the next in the sequence of misfortunes. In fact, if the misfortune lasts long enough you become so used to it that you can’t imagine your life without it. The natives of Ulcinj know how to get on with people like Pasha: they let them live next door and just don’t allow their bars, quarrels and shams to affect their lives.
Pasha owed me a favour, like many other people in town. His problem was that he treated people like idiots. That’s not a bad basis for success in life, in principle, as long as you’re not an idiot yourself. Pasha was.
Things were bound to blow up in his face sooner or later. I made sure he survived the blast. Therefore, when I entered the Lonely Hearts, I expected that I’d just need to do a bit of the mandatory, folksy not-on-your-life-mate haggling, and that Pasha would then tell me where to find Lazar.
In 1999, long lines of Kosovar refugees poured into Ulcinj, fleeing from the Serbian troops or NATO’s bombs. Many of these displaced people dreamed of making it to Europe. Pasha offered to help them achieve that dream.
Serious criminals sailed from Montenegrin harbours for Italy in boats full of refugees. Some of the vessels made it to the other side of the Adriatic, others sank and took with them many a dream of good wages, second-hand Mercedes and savings for building garishly painted villas near Prizren and Priština with decorative plaster lions on the balconies.
Of all the human traffickers, Pasha was the cheapest. This was partly because he operated with the lowest overheads and partly because people paid him to take them to Italy – but he didn’t take them there. Pasha would load his clients into a truck and cart them through Montenegro all night: from Ulcinj to Kolašin, from Kolašin to Nikšić, from Nikšić to Risan, then round the Bay of Kotor, via Budva, and back to Ulcinj. The others all used boats, but he stuck to good old terra firma, Pasha boasted. At dawn he’d unload the people on the sandy beach of Bojana Island near Ulcinj, at the southernmost tip of Montenegro. The refugees looked around in confusion because they couldn’t see a single structure or anything that might have confirmed to them that they were really in Italy. ‘Just keep walking a bit, and when you meet someone, wish them Buon giorno!’ Pasha instructed them, before hopping back into the truck and speeding off.
The refugees would roam along the beach with suitcases in hand until they came across a local watchman who, to their astonishment, would reply to their Buon giorno with obscenities in Albanian.
Pasha’s plan had only one flaw: it overlooked what would happen next. The refugees would realise he’d ripped them off and would then have no other goal in life than to kill him. I’m a well-informed man: as soon as I heard they were after Pasha I sent him to a friend’s place in Bar, where he hid until the furious refugees had returned to Kosovo.
While I waited for Pasha to familiarise some new female staff with the house rules, I realised that the Lonely Hearts had extended its range: along with the terrible drink, guests could now pay for hideously ugly prostitutes. One of them, a wench with part blonde, part black hair and a few missing teeth, offered me the services of one of the beautiful girls, she emphasised.
‘No thanks, I’ve already got a full collection of STDs,’ I said.
‘Then at least buy me a drink,’ she insisted. She was obviously thirsty, and a gentleman always helps a damsel in distress.
‘Aren’t you the local Sherlock Holmes?’ she asked as she was quaffing her brandy.
‘More like Philip Marlowe,’ I corrected her. ‘Holmes keeps women at an arm’s length, whereas Marlowe takes them under his wing, only to destroy them later.’
‘I love Holmes films,’ she avowed, determined to continue our cultured conversation. ‘What I like most is when he shows how clever he is: you know, when he just looks at someone, and the next instant he can tell you everything about them after having seen just a few details, which only he has noticed. Can you do that too?’ she wondered.
‘I could give it a try,’ I said. ‘Since you don’t stink of sweat like the other whores in this joint, I infer you weren’t working today. Therefore I assume Pasha has set you aside for himself because only his mistresses are entitled to days off. I see you’ve swabbed two inches of powder on your face and also note that you’ve washed your hair. That means you want to appeal to Pasha and be attractive for him. That, in turn, means that you hope to stay his mistress. Who knows, with a bit of luck he might even marry you. After all, doesn’t every man ultimately want to settle down with a good woman by his side? But that’s not going to happen: even if we live to see tomorrow, the day will bring a girl younger than you. Then Pasha will give you the boot. You’re afraid of that, and it’s on your mind. Warm?’
‘You have no idea,’ she snorted and demonstratively relieved me of her company. I wouldn’t want to sound pretentious, but I’m pretty sure I managed to drive her to tears.
Half an hour later I was in the boat, passing what remained of the petrol station. Pasha had done me a favour: I now knew that Lazar lived in one of the stilt houses on Saltern Canal and had done so ever since coming to Ulcinj.
The canal had once been navigable. When King Nicholas of Montenegro captured Ulcinj, he named the canal Port Milena in honour of his wife. Princely sailboats would moor there. The establishment of the nearby salt works turned the canal into a giant fish pond because the salt it released into the water attracted the fish. Dozens of stilt houses sprang up on the canal; local fisherfolk would lower nets into the water, and when they raised them again they were full of catch. Later the canal devolved into a cesspool because the houses which grew up all around discharged their sewage straight into it. Soon there were no more fish in the canal. The people left too. Punting on the canal had once been a favourite pastime of the Montenegrin royal family. Now going to the canal meant venturing deep into a marsh.
My trusty boat cut the calm water, which was topped with floating pieces of furniture from submerged houses. Two crows were riding on the carcass of a cow and blithely pecking at its entrails. Drowned people drifted past, too, their bodies grotesquely rounded like blow-up dolls. I pulled my scarf over my face and tried not to inhale the stench. Whenever the boat bumped into them I’d use the oar to push aside those bodies – their hearts now home to beetles and worms, not love – and then continued on my way. Just like a slice of bread always falls butter-side down, drowned people always float with their face in the water, it occurred to me.
I paddled along the former boulevard leading to Velika Plaža. The roof of a truck protruded from the water in the parking lot in front of the shopping centre. There had been no power in the region for weeks. The metal lamp-posts swayed in the wind. The billboards still announced summer fun: a buxom singer performed on a terrace by the sea, a tanned brunette advertised sun cream promising protection from skin cancer, and there was a new line of fruit ice cream which took care of your children’s teeth. I passed abandoned auto repair shops and bakeries. Restaurant terraces where cheerful tourists had bobbed and skipped to folk dances from home were now swimming pools for ducks.
Large snowflakes descended silently from the dark sky. It was frigid in the marsh, the kind of damp cold which really gets into your bones. People kept saying this was the cold of the End, but I remember well the cold of the beginning, from my childhood. On the coldest of winter days, when the salt works’ canals turned to ice, I’d go there to hunt ducks. I’d creep through the snow-covered dunes and, small as I was, hide in the reeds around the edges of the frozen ponds. I tied rags or strips of hessian around my boots. That allowed me to run on the ice and gave me a decisive advantage – it made the hunt possible in the first place. A duck on the ice is slow. It has trouble taking off because it needs a run-up, which is difficult on the ice, and its clumsy legs let it down. A duck on the ice is like Ollie in the Laurel and Hardy films: fat and ungainly. It falls over a few times before getting the forward motion needed to take off, and that gave me the chance to reach it and kill it with my stick. I remember the duck would sometimes get airborne, and then I’d hit it with my stick like a baseball player slams the ball.
A lamp was on in one of the stilt houses – like a lighthouse showing me the way, I thought. I turned off the motor, trying to sneak up on Lazar unnoticed.
I found father and son there in the small, cluttered space, huddled up to an old woodstove. The old man was sitting in an ancient armchair with springs sticking out, one of those communist replicas of 1950s American design which were once used to furnish hotels on the coast.
He sat there calmly, like Abraham Lincoln in his Washington memorial.
‘He’s blind and deaf – he has been for twenty years,’ Lazar said in a low voice.
But the old man was nodding to a rhythm only he could hear.
‘I know who you are, and I know why you’ve come,’ Lazar whispered. ‘I’ve been expecting you. The police or someone else. As soon as I killed them I knew I’d be punished. I’m not afraid of punishment. Look where I live and how I live. Punish me – it’ll be my salvation.’
I sat down on a stool close to the stove to warm my frozen toes. I pulled the bottle out of my coat pocket and took a good swig.
‘Why did you do it?’ I demanded.
‘The real truth, sir, is that I don’t know. Back then I thought I knew: I was furious and felt I had to kill them all that instant. But when I look back at what I did, and I have time to look back at my actions – what else is there to do here? – I realise I didn’t have a reason. At least none which people would understand.’
‘Still, if we tried, you’d be surprised what I can understand,’ I encouraged him.
He explained that he’d come to Ulcinj from Vojvodina in northern Serbia, where he’d lived with his family and his father.
‘It feels like he’s always been old,’ he said, pointing at his father. ‘Look at him: can you believe he was once young?!’
Back home, in the plains of Central Europe, Lazar had been a repair man: people would call him, and he’d go and get their things running again.
‘It was an honest job, but honest jobs don’t earn much money. I got used to poverty, and I always knew I’d die poor. But my family wanted more, so I became the scapegoat for their miserable lives, as they called them. Have you ever felt the contempt of your own children?’ he asked. ‘Do you know what it’s like when your children say to your face that you’re a loser, a coward, a weakling, a sucker? That your father is an old vampire who refuses to die and make us happy? For days on end, even on Sundays, I’d be rushing from house to house, eternally tired and dirty, but that wasn’t good enough for them. No sirree, they always wanted more. My father and I became unwelcome in our own home – the house I’d built with my own hands.
‘That’s why we left. I’d heard there was a lot of building going on in Montenegro on the coast and that tradesmen were in demand, so we moved here. And it worked out: I got a job at a building site. We were doing well, me and the old man. Until I took a fall from the scaffolding. Now I’m lame in one leg and drag it behind me like a club-foot. There are lots of strapping young men looking for work, so who needs an old limper?
‘Just when I thought I couldn’t earn a crust here any more – just when it looked like the two of us would have to hit the road again – the Vukotićs gave me a job. Madam Vukotić opened the gate and immediately took pity on me. She asked me inside, gave me a good meal, and I started work there the very next day. She was a kind woman, Senka – soft-hearted, and that went to her head. It’s not good to pity people. Don’t mind me saying so, but you look like someone who understands that. It’s not good even to pity oneself. I’m inclined to self-pity, you see, and that’s really made my life hell. It’s a great evil: I’ve killed people, but I still feel sorry for myself.
‘We moved into this stilt house here. How should I put it – it’s not exactly five-star luxury, but at least it’s rent-free. My pay at the Vukotićs’ was substantial. We lacked nothing, and we two old boys could have gone on like that for years. But I kept thinking about my wife and children and the house, as much as I tried not to; every night my thoughts flew back to Vojvodina and I’d cry the whole night through when I thought what grief and injustice had befallen me. It was driving me nuts, and I started drinking and gambling at the Lonely Hearts…You know how it is: when you gamble drunk you lose, and then you need another drink.
‘My pay at the Vukotićs’ was good, like I said. But I needed more, and the Vukotićs had enough. I thought I could take from them without them noticing. A little for them was a lot for me.
‘So I stole from them. Nothing big, you know: a tenner or twenty from the purse Senka used to leave on the kitchen table when she came back from shopping and went up to her room to get changed. A vase or two, or a piece of jewellery.
‘One day when I was painting the tool shed Senka brought me out a cold glass of lemonade. And then she said nonchalantly, like just in passing: “I’d ask you not to steal from us any more.” She didn’t wait for an answer but simply turned and went back into the house.
‘That night I thought I’d die of shame. There was no one for me to confide in, so I sat here with my deaf father almost through till dawn, even though he was mostly sleeping in his armchair like he’s drowsing now, and wrung out my heart. I’d become a good-for-nothing in the eyes of the people who’d been so good to me, people whose kindness meant we still had work and a roof over our heads and weren’t forced to wander the world in misery as a cripple and a geriatric.
‘I tried to apologise to Senka and promised it wouldn’t happen again. She told me with a compassion which hurt, as if I was a lowly creature crawling the earth, that no explanation was needed and that she knew very well what extremes people can be driven to by poverty. She said she didn’t hold anything against me and that, as far as she was concerned, nothing had happened: “We’ve taken you in and decided to help you – we’ll give you another chance.”
‘But not one month had passed, and I took to stealing again. The Lonely Hearts may be the cheapest bar in town but it was still too expensive for me. This time Senka invited me into the house, served me some chocolate cake, and then raked me over the coals in front of the whole family: although they’d already forgiven me once, I kept on stealing from them. They were disappointed, she said, but they realised I had it hard and knew I’d have nowhere to go if they gave up on me, so they wouldn’t send me away. But I should be aware that it was truly deplorable how low I’d fallen – those were the words she used.
‘Instead of vexation and regret, this time I felt anger. When they saw me out into the garden and Senka gave me instructions for mowing the lawn, I was brimming with hatred towards her. Yes, they’d helped me when I was in a tight spot. But did that give them the right to humiliate me, what’s more in front of the children? I often told stories to them about the olden days and they seemed truly happy listening to them. What would the children think of me now? My transgression is one thing. Please punish me, Madam Vukotić – I seethed inside as I turned on the lawnmower, but don’t put me down in front of the children. Perhaps you think I’m so wretched that I don’t even deserve punishment. Is that what you want to say, that even punishment is too good for me? Don’t those who are punished, even those who are punished most harshly (especially them!) warrant a modicum of respect? Don’t those who are punished at least regain their dignity in the end? Isn’t it a terrible crime to rob the punished of their human dignity, bigger by all means than the one I committed in stealing? Did you employ me to work for you, Madam Vukotić, or for you to practise your kindliness on me? When I trudge off home in the evenings, do you stand in front of the mirror and admire your own virtue?’ Lazar foamed with rage, squirming in his chair.
‘I kept on working as best I could. I pruned the orchard, hoed the garden, repaired the water heaters and pipes, but I was determined not to put up with any more humiliation. For days on end I quietly practised a speech to give to Senka, one she’d have to listen to. Oh yes: no one would interrupt Lazar mid-sentence any more. You have my gratitude but that doesn’t mean you can look down on me. I work for you, but I’m not a lesser human being, I was going to tell her.
‘One day I was in the tool shed making a new handle for the axe, when she popped in to look for an improvised watering can. “Madam Vukotić –,” I spoke in as decisive a voice as I could muster. “Not now, Lazar!” she snuffed, rummaging on the shelf. Fed up with everything and white-hot with anger, I stormed up to her and grabbed her by the arm. She wheeled around abruptly: I felt her sweet breath on my face, and the tips of her large breasts brushed me.
‘She hadn’t expected this. For the first time since we’d known each other it wasn’t pity she felt. I could see fear in her eyes. What now? What’s he going to do to me? she was thinking.
‘For a few seconds I stood before her, proud, enjoying that superiority. Then she pushed me aside, moved away, and declared in that same condescending, matronly tone, which drives me mad even now when I think about it, that her husband wouldn’t find out what had just happened. I should be ashamed of myself. She hadn’t expected this from me, but she’d forgive me one more time. As she left, she added: “You don’t need to worry about your job. You’re a walking disaster – you don’t need punishment when you’ve got yourself.”
‘I left their property, determined never to go back again. I sat and drank at the Lonely Hearts until evening, muttering to myself: Lazar may be poor, but he still has pride. He’ll make sure no lady looks down on him again.
‘Drunk, humiliated and livid with rage, I went back up the hill to their property. I had the key to the gate, so I entered the grounds without being seen. I took my tools from the shed: knife, spade and axe. I put my work gloves on. When I look back at that night, I don’t think I intended to kill anyone. I just wanted respect. But why then did I put the gloves on, you may ask? I have no answer to that, at least none people would understand. I rang the doorbell, determined to speak my mind to Senka, say thank-you for her kindness and leave with my head held high.
‘I had to ring three times before she came down and opened the door. As soon as she saw me, the browbeating began: I’d really gone too far now. Did I know what time it was? I couldn’t wake them this late, and I was drunk as well. She told me to go home and sleep it off, and they’d decide what to do with me the next day. I tried to speak, but she went on and on, bombarding me with words which came down on my head like a hammer.
‘I shut my eyes and swung the axe,’ he said.
‘But the children and her husband: why them?’ I asked.
‘They were woken by the noise. If only I’d killed her with the first blow…But she staggered and knocked over the vase before falling to the floor. It smashed damn loudly, like a gunshot. That’s what woke them. It’s all because of the vase that they’re now dead.
‘Pavle was at the stairs and saw me kill her. He went for the shotgun. I had no choice. I had to go all the way and get rid of them all,’ he said calmly. ‘I’m pedantic – when I start a job I always finish it. Then I removed all the traces, or so I thought. I threw the knife into the marsh. Only then, drunk with alcohol and blood, did I realise that I’d forgotten the axe. Since then I’ve been living in anticipation of the police coming to get me.
‘It was hardest with Helena. I’d got on with her the best, and I’ll miss her the most. I took her to the couch and switched on the television for her. She liked watching programmes about animals. I sat down beside her and, to tell you the truth, I started to cry,’ Lazar said.
I lit a cigarette and knocked back a good swig from my bottle. I looked at the old man. He muttered in his sleep and his dry lips moved quickly. It looked like he was praying.
‘Are you going to take me to the police station now?’ Lazar asked.
‘She was right,’ I said.
‘Who?’
‘That woman, Senka – she was right: we don’t need punishment when we’ve got ourselves.’
On the way out I turned to look at them once more: the killer and his old father by the stove. ‘How much money did you take from the safe?’ I asked.
‘What safe?’ Lazar replied, startled, as if shaken from deep thought. ‘The Vukotićs were prudent: they kept their money in the bank. If there was a safe in the house, I didn’t know about it.’
I got back into the boat and left the marsh as quickly as I could. Like people say, trouble never comes alone. As if the cold and the snow blowing in my face weren’t enough to make me miserable, I’d run out of whisky. I disembarked at the town council building’s parking lot, broke into the first café and deposited a bottle of Jameson in my coat pocket. I stood in the dark, leaning against the bar, calmly watching Christmas turn the streets white. Many people had turned off the lights in their houses. They stood at the windows waiting, or knelt by their beds and prayed for mercy. Maybe they lay with the blankets over their heads and talked about the past. I went round behind the bar, poured myself a drink and switched on the radio. A witty DJ put on the Sex Pistols and Johnny Rotten screamed No Future. I looked at my face in the mirror and sent myself a sincere, warm smile. Fucking hell, those were good times, I sighed.
Then my phone rang and shattered my moment of nostalgia like a harbinger of doom. Dragan Vukotić still wanted to avenge his dead brother. What should I tell him – that I had Lazar, and he was longing to be punished? That I had an excellent story with just one unresolved detail: a safe, whose existence I couldn’t vouch for because the house had burned down? No thanks, I thought, and hurled the phone out into the snow. I went outside. A howling came from the maternity hospital: a dog had been shut inside and now stood in the dark amongst the empty cradles yowling for someone, anyone, to come.
A group of nuns stood at the traffic lights and called on the occasional passers-by to embrace Christianity. ‘Accept Jesus now, the End is nigh!’ they shouted. It was like when market stallholders yell, It’s all gotta go! The group had a well-defined division of labour: some did the hard sell for salvation while the others sang. Their song brought a lot of things home to me, like that they’d actually had no choice but to join the monastery. They certainly wouldn’t have made it as a rock band, I told them.
‘You mean you don’t believe even today?!’ I was asked by the most inquisitive – or maybe the stupidest.
‘No,’ I said, ‘but you know how it is: I will as soon as I get cancer.’
Our parting feelings for each other couldn’t exactly have been called love. Each of them spat after me three times and then hurriedly crossed themselves. Dealing with an old-fashioned gentleman like me is one thing, I thought, but what are they going to do about these fellows who are at least as fervent as them? Six bearded men strode angrily towards them, gesticulating aggressively and going ballistic with umbrage.
As they passed me, heading for the nuns, one of them pointed to the Jameson I was carrying: ‘That’s haram – you’ll burn in hell!’ he promised.
‘Cheers,’ I seconded.
If any pub is open tonight, it’ll be Johnny’s, I reckoned. I got into the car. It started up straight away. Then the shape of a man emerged from the snow, approaching with mighty strides. It was Salvatore.
‘Get in,’ I told him.
‘How are you tonight?’ he asked politely.
‘Same as ever. When you look at it, it’s a day like any other, don’t you think?’
‘I was up at your place. When I didn’t find you, I told myself to go for a walk through town, thinking that perhaps I’d meet you. And there you go: I run smack bang into you. It’s a small world. Anyway, you know why I’m looking for you. I thought that by now you could perhaps tell me who killed my son, and why. My wife is waiting for me at home – it’s she who sent me to look for you. She said: “Go and ask him so at least we can wait in peace for whatever this night will bring.”’
There was nothing for it, I had to improvise. Salvatore listened in silence as I explained what I’d learned: his son had been killed by a madman – an escapee from a mental hospital in Kotor:
‘The doctors and nurses left the hospital and a horde of lunatics is now free to roam the country. I pursued the killer for days. Tonight I finally caught up with him in the marsh. It was either him or me. I couldn’t get him to give himself up, so I had to shoot. He was swallowed up by the dark water. Now he’s lying there somewhere in the mud.’
Salvatore buried his head in his hands and sobbed. ‘I knew it,’ he said after wiping away his tears. ‘What sane person would do that to a child?’
‘You can go home,’ I told him. ‘It’s over. It’s all over now. I’ve done what there was to be done. Go back and tell your wife that everything’s in its place again.’
He shook my hand firmly and looked at me with tearful eyes full of gratitude. I watched him in the rear-view mirror running off through the blizzard to take the good news home.
I arrived at Johnny’s just in time to witness a collective confession. My regular drinking mates were preoccupied with the looming Apocalypse, which they now took for granted. Alcohol was flowing in hectolitres and Johnny was handing out bottle after bottle from behind the bar without a break, obviously determined to have the pub drunk dry by the end of the evening. As they used to say in Partisan films: Not one grain of wheat should be left for the invaders! In this final hour, the drunken gang felt the need to let out its deepest secrets and worst sins. They demanded that Father Frano hear their confessions.
‘I can’t, guys: most of you aren’t Catholic, let alone christened,’ he said in his defence. This pragmatic country priest had come from Dalmatia thirty years ago and had had to learn quickly how to get on with the wily local flock which gathered in his church on Sundays. He knew that God had no need to listen to the garbage these drunkards would confess. ‘We’ll do it like this –,’ he proposed, ‘you’ll confide in one another because the most important thing is to be frank with your neighbour and with yourself. God is satisfied with that.’
It really must be high time if even Catholic confessions have become like AA meetings, I thought.
Božo was the first to open up his heart. There was silence while he spoke, apart from the sound of clinking glasses. He made a dramatic pause after every act of adultery he admitted, and Father Frano gave him an indulgent look to embolden him to continue. When Božo finished, his listeners were mildly disappointed: infidelity, drunkenness and domestic violence – all in all, Božo had lived an ordinary, mainstream life.
Frowns crept over the men’s faces when Zoran began to tell his sins: ‘I’m a poof. Johnny will probably tell you himself when it’s his turn, but he’s one too: we’ve had something going for fifteen years. The wife and the kids don’t suspect anything, neither mine nor his. I can see in your eyes that you condemn me. I knew it’d be like this, and that’s why I never told you. Now you’re probably asking yourselves: How many times did the bugger look at my backside? I know you are – there’s no need to be ashamed. The answer is: not once. I want you to know that – you’ve always just been friends to me. Before you reject me, ask yourselves if I’ve ever betrayed you…Now that you know the truth, I just want to ask you one thing: please don’t turn your back on me.’
An ambiguous request, to say the least! I’d always found him pretty unbearable: his macho pose, easy rider and cowboy boots – what a put-on! I could imagine him wearing red lace knickers under his leathers.
Then it got even worse: Fahro admitted that he’d been sleeping with Božo’s wife for years. Even Father Frano seemed bewildered – he was obviously losing control of this little nightly collective confession. It was as if someone had opened Pandora’s box and now people, one after another, were saying things which in different circumstances would cause friendships to be broken off and blood to flow.
When Johnny recounted having been raped by three young men at high school in Bar, Father Frano began to cry. Is there anything more unbearable than the moment when people open up their heart, as the expression goes? I’d rather watch open-heart surgery than be around at times like this when the toxic waste of human lives leaks out.
In tears, Father Frano described the day he stopped believing in God: ‘Nothing spectacular happened that day, I just woke up in the morning and realised that I knew nothing about all the people I had advised on how to lead their lives. I didn’t understand the souls I had to give pastoral care to, nor did I respect them. I was just the guy that peddled God,’ he blubbered.
‘That morning I opened my eyes and my whole dismal life flashed before me, right up to its unavoidably wretched end. But I didn’t have the strength to throw off the cassock and put an end to the lies. Above all, I didn’t have the courage to appear so naked before my family. My vocation as a priest was a great source of pride for them, and leaving the priesthood would definitely be the ultimate disgrace. I thought: if I tell the truth I’ll hurt many, and if I keep lying I’ll only destroy myself,’ Frano said.
Fuck this life! Is this ordeal ever going to end? I screamed to myself. I downed shot after shot of whisky, getting absolutely plastered in the hope of falling unconscious from inebriation and escaping this hell of cheap sincerity – that bastard born of despair from an illicit liaison with fear.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Gogi kneel in front of Frano and lower his head into the priest’s lap.
‘I killed a man,’ he said, and an icy draught flowed through the room. ‘I’ve killed a man,’ he repeated and stood up, tears running down his face. ‘I’ve killed more than once,’ he shouted, drawing a revolver from his pocket and pointing it at his temple.
I couldn’t stay a second longer. I felt sick from all the whisky I’d drunk and all the repulsive things I’d heard.
‘Stupid, bloody fools!’ I yelled and stormed out into the blizzard. Now everything’s fallen apart, I’ve just lost all my friends. As I was striding swiftly towards the car, I heard the shot. That was the seal on our doom.