The Lady from Zagreb

Twenty

Factories, garages, scrap-metal yards, and lumberyards gave way to houses that were half finished or half destroyed, it was hard to tell which. Villages, centuries old, that were all but deserted. The car jolted along the empty road. I did my best to steer around the potholes and sometimes what were obviously shell holes. After a while the road narrowed and deteriorated in quality so that we were soon making no more than thirty kilometers an hour. We drove on, past small holdings, goats tethered to fences, and men plowing fields or digging ditches. Here and there we saw road signs, all of them punctured with bullet holes, but mostly there was just the dusty road through this godforsaken country. The few people we saw paid us little or no attention. My mission was a universe away from the lives of those who eked out an existence here. Now and then a cart, impossibly laden with grass, or watermelons, or corn, provided a fleeting contact with reality. It was drawn by a knackered horse and steered by men who seemed only vaguely human, their faces covered with ant colonies of stubble and almost expressionless, as if they had been carved from the very oak trees that lined the road. These people wanted no justification for being there, no creed or warped ideology to excuse their unfenced existence in this place. This was their home; it had always been their home and it always would be. Men like me and Geiger and Oehl were just passing through on our way to a private hell that we had created for ourselves. I enjoyed seeing these lean, stoic men; they made me think I belonged in a world where something as straightforward and honest as growing tobacco and sugar beet, and animal husbandry, still existed; but this feeling never lasted long. From time to time Geiger would discharge his daddy at a cow in a field and frighten it off like a rabbit, and once a Focke-Wulf 190 flew low over our heads, ripping open the sky in a great salvo of oil and metal.

Nobody said much until we came across the carcass of a horse lying next to a burned-out Italian tankette. From the look and smell of the dead animal it was days old; but my two companions insisted on taking a closer look, with guns at the ready, of course. While Oehl walked off to scout the road up ahead, Geiger looked at the saddle on the horse and declared it had belonged to a Serb.

“How can you tell?”

“Only a Serb would be stupid enough to put a saddle on like that. Besides, there’s something written in Cyrillic on the leather.”

“I don’t understand why you seem to hate the Serbs so much. It can’t just be that they were part of the Ottoman Empire, otherwise why would the Ustaše have built that damn mosque in Zagreb? You even speak the same language.”

“Who told you that?”

“Lieutenant Waldheim.”

“What the fuck does he know about it?” said Geiger. “The languages are similar. I’ll grant you that. But with important differences. Serb is written in Cyrillic and Croatian in the Roman alphabet. And Serb just sounds more fucking stupid than Croat.”

“Yes, but why do you hate each other?”

“History. It’s the main reason anyone hates anyone, isn’t it? History and race. Serbs are stupid and lazy and deserve to be consigned to the racial rubbish heap.”

“That’s not exactly Hegel.”

“You want Hegel, then go back to Berlin. Here there’s just killing.”

“Believe me, I will, just as soon as I can.”

“All right, then, Serbs are backstabbers and assassins. How’s that for you? There’s Stjepan Radic, a Croat who was shot in the federal parliament by a Serb member — Puniša Racic — in 1928. And before that there was the Archduke Ferdinand, of course. But for the fucking Serbs, we might not have had a Great War. Think about that, Gunther. All of the good fellows you once knew back in Berlin who might still be alive today were it not for one dumb Serb called Gavrilo Princip and his Black Hand. That’s right. If you could ask your dead pals what they think about Serbs, I bet you’d get a dusty answer. You see, the Serbs have a habit of starting wars they don’t finish. They’re always on the wrong side. They were on the Russian side in the last lot and we Croats were on your side. Croats are more like you Germans and some of us are Germans, of course. Serbs are just peasants and communists. If you showed a Serb a lavatory he’d probably wash his hands in it. We hate them because they always stick together with the Slovenes regardless of where the interests of the country might lie. Brother Slovene, Brother Serb, that’s what we Croats say. You want more reasons why we hate them? Then there’s just this: they’re double-dealing bastards. You can’t trust Serbs any more than you can trust a fucking Jew. You can always rely on a Serb to let you down.”

“I’m glad I asked.”

He frowned. “What the fuck are you doing down here, anyway, Gunther? Captains in the SD don’t normally come out into the field like this. At least not without a special action murder squad at their back. Fritzes and Fridolins like you normally prefer to leave that kind of thing to volunteer SS like me and Sergeant Oehl.”

“Murder’s got nothing to do with why I’m here, Captain Geiger. I’m on a special mission for the Reich Minister of Truth and Propaganda. There’s a priest in Banja Luka I have to find so I can deliver a letter to him from Dr. Goebbels.”

“That gimpy little rat. What does he want with a fucking priest? He hates priests. Everyone knows that. It’s why the last Pope issued an encyclical against the Nazis.”

“He doesn’t tell me why he’s hungry, just to bring him breakfast.”

“And you aren’t just a little bit curious why he’s sent you to find a priest in Banja Luka?”

“When I was with the SD back in Smolensk I learned that it’s usually best not to question my orders.”

“True.”

I went back to the car and fetched some of the photographs of Father Ladislaus.

“But since you’re interested...”

“No,” said Geiger. “I don’t recognize him. All priests look alike to me. But I’ll tell you one thing. If he’s a priest in Banja Luka, he’s got his work cut out. Things were very bloody there a while back. And that’s saying something in this country, believe me.”

We drove on, through strangely named villages that were not much more than a couple of ruined houses. Ahead of us the sky was as gray as a dead mackerel. On either side of the road stood tall fields of ripening maize with ears that were longer than beer glasses and almost as thick, piles of still-steaming manure, plum trees, hazels heavy with nuts, then trees and more trees. A flock of starlings swooped up and down above our heads in the shape of a biblical pestilence. A herd of cows was seated so casually by a river I half expected them to have brought a picnic basket. A trio of ponies stood in the shade of an ancient oak. This was rich farming country and yet we might have been in the previous century.

We saw a trail of smoke on the horizon and caught the slight scent of cordite in the air. Then we heard the sound of artillery fire from somewhere up ahead. I slowed to a stop and we listened for a moment.

“Ours?” I asked.

Geiger looked at Oehl, who nodded and said, “Hotchkiss,” and then lit a cigarette as if this was all that needed to be said.

A Hotchkiss was a French-made tank and after 1940 we had more than five hundred of them.

We drove on and into a small village close to the Bosnian border and here, in the playground of an empty school, we saw the Hotchkiss and stopped to watch as the two-man Ustaše crew fired the thirty-nine-millimeter gun of the French tank at a semi-ruined building on a distant hillside. A few Ustaše soldiers lay sleeping in a field at the edge of the playground as the tank fired over their heads, which added a touch of madness to what was happening. Others seemed to be taking bets on the marksmanship of the Hotchkiss gunner. They all looked like they were in their teens. None of them paid us the slightest attention.

“Who are they shooting at?” I asked. “Proles? Chetniks?”

Oehl said something to one of the tank’s bearded crewmen and, grinning broadly, the man said one word: “Gadanje.”

“Target practice,” said Oehl.

Geiger handed me some binoculars, and as the tank fired again I looked in horror as an inadequate French-made round whistled feebly through the clear blue sky and hit the building, smashing some of the red-and-yellow brickwork.

“It’s a church,” I said, horrified.

Worse was the fact that there had been people inside the church; two bodies lay in the rubble. One of the Croats cheered and began to clap and the man sitting next to him handed him a banknote as if he’d won his bet.

“Why the fuck are they using a church for target practice?”

“It must be a Serb Orthodox church,” said Geiger. “They certainly wouldn’t be shooting at a Catholic one.”

“But a church is a church,” I insisted.

Oehl laughed cruelly. “Not in Yugoslavia it isn’t.”

“But can’t we order them to stop?”

“That wouldn’t be a good idea,” said Geiger. “Believe me, you wouldn’t want to spoil their fun. Just because we’re on their side doesn’t mean they couldn’t turn nasty. It’s only in Zagreb and Sarajevo that your rank makes a halfpenny’s worth of difference between you and them. Out here on the black earth of Slavonia it makes no difference at all. Things like the Geneva Convention and the rules of war only mean something back in Berlin. Down here they don’t mean shit. The one rule when it comes to dealing with the Ustaše in the field is that you don’t get between these lads and their play.”

Oehl was asking one of the men on the grass verge a question. Then he turned to us and said, “He says there’s a sort of hotel at the end of the street. We might get some coffee there.”

Leaving the Ustaše to their amusement, we drove a short way up the street to the Hotel Sunja, where my impression of the place was severely affected by the fact that immediately in front of the hotel, and hanging from the only gas lamp in the village, was the body of a man. At least I thought it must have been a man; there were even more flies on his head than there had been on the dead horse. Geiger and Oehl paid the hanged man no attention at all, as if it were hardly unusual to see a man hanged in front of a hotel, and went inside and, after a minute or two, I followed.

It was dark in the hotel. One of the small windows had been blocked up with a piece of timber. Gradually I made out a few dust-covered tables and chairs and a bar of sorts where Geiger was banging the counter with the flat of his hand and shouting for service. Eventually a man appeared from a back room. He was wearing a black felt hat with a red carnation on the brim, a filthy white shirt, and a black waistcoat. The red carnation struck me as a ludicrous embellishment for an innkeeper to be wearing when there was a hanged man decorating his doorway.

Geiger addressed him three times and on each occasion the man shook his head before finally he said something that Geiger seemed to think was very funny; he was still laughing when he came back to the table where Oehl and I were waiting, and sat down.

“Three times I asked that Slovenian bastard for coffee,” he said. “Once in Croatian, kava. Then in Bosnian, which is kahva, and the third time in Serbian, which is kafe. And each time he says no, right? Like you saw? By now I’m thinking he hates Croats, or hates Germans. Maybe that’s his fucking brother hanging on the lamppost outside, right? So I said to him, ‘What’s the problem, why is there no fucking coffee? I’ve asked you nicely, haven’t I, you bastard?’ And he said, ‘We’ve got coffee, all right, we just don’t have any water with which to make it.’”

Geiger started laughing again as if this were the funniest thing he’d heard in a while; and, judging from his face, maybe it was. I’d never met a more unpredictable man. His smile seemed just as likely to presage something awful as something amusing or pleasant. I lit a cigarette and said nothing. By now I was starting to realize the price that was going to have to be paid for my night with Dalia Dresner. It was the price that Faust pays, perhaps, for a night spent with Helen of Troy.

“See if you can find something to drink, Sergeant,” said Geiger. “I’ll make some light in this Neanderthal’s cave so we can see what we’re doing.” And while Oehl disappeared into the back of the hotel Geiger stood up, smashed the chair he was sitting on into many pieces, and tossed them into the fireplace alongside some old newspapers. He lit a match and tried to make a fire, but without success. He was still trying to light it when Oehl came back with some bread and cheese, and three tall stoneware bottles.

“Plum rakija,” he said. “Homemade.”

“You’ll never get that fire started,” I told Geiger. “Not without smaller sticks or some wood shavings.”

Oehl opened one of the bottles and tasted it, let out a gasp and handed it to Geiger. “Fucking hell. This is good stuff. I reckon there’s more alcohol in this than was inside my old grandpa on the day he died.”

“Nonsense,” Geiger told me, “I’ll get this going in just a few seconds,” and without a moment’s hesitation he took a huge mouthful of spirit and then gobbed it all into the fireplace, at which point the whole wall and some of the floor — not just the fireplace — went up in a ball of fire as if a flamethrower had fired blazing oil and petrol into an enemy trench.

I jumped out of the way but not soon enough as I felt my eyebrows scorch, much to Geiger’s loud amusement.

“What are you trying to do, you lunatic?” I yelled. “You’ll set the whole place ablaze if you’re not careful.”

“I told you I’d get that fire going, didn’t I?”

Oehl smiled and handed me his flask. “Here, Captain,” he said, “sit down and have a drink. Welcome to Croatia. This is proper rakija. Not that milky whore’s piss we were drinking earlier. Best you’ve got a real drink inside you when we cross the River Sava.”

I took a drink to calm my nerves and stop me from punching Geiger in the mouth.

“You’re right, Sergeant,” he said, still laughing. “This is the good stuff. Must be eighty proof. You give an army enough of this, you could conquer the world.”

“Or just burn it down,” I said.

Geiger frowned. “Same thing.”