The Lady from Zagreb

Twenty-two

Occupying some high ground a couple of kilometers north of Banja Luka, the Franciscan monastery in Petricevac was easy to see. Umbilically attached to an imposing Roman Catholic church whose twin spires soared over the surrounding countryside like the tall hats of two ancient wizards, the monastery itself — with a hip roof and two large dormer windows — was more elegant country mansion than medieval cloister. A couple of old cars were parked on the gravel driveway and the general absence of any agriculture was evidence that these were monks for whom contemplation did not involve looking at a spade or tending a vineyard. The few trees served only to obscure the little road that led up to the monastery, which meant I drove around the place several times before finding an approach to the entrance. No one — not even a chicken or a dog — came to greet us. Perhaps they already knew better than to speak to three SS men.

I sounded the horn and stepped out of the car. Geiger lit a cigarette and leaned back in his car seat to angle his debauched face in the last of the day’s sunshine. I looked up at the many windows of the monastery without seeing so much as a single curious head. The place appeared to be deserted. And yet there was a vague smell of cooking in the air.

“Perhaps they’re Trappists,” said Geiger.

“These are Franciscans,” I said. “Not Cistercians.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Don’t ask me, but there’s a difference.”

“Like the SS and the SD, perhaps,” offered Oehl.

“Well, whatever they are,” said Geiger, “maybe they’ve taken a vow of silence.”

“Let’s hope not,” I said. “Otherwise we might be here for some time.” I collected the file of photographs of Father Ladislaus and walked toward the main door.

“If all else fails,” said Geiger, following me, “I could fire this in the air.”

I turned and saw that he was still carrying the daddy.

“For Christ’s sake, leave that thing in the car.”

“Believe me, when it comes to ending a vow of silence, you can’t beat one of these bastards.”

“Nevertheless. Please.”

Geiger shook his head and handed the daddy to Oehl before following me up a short flight of limestone steps to a set of black wooden double doors with an elliptical transom. On the wall by the doors was a large iron cross and a picture of a sleeping monk holding a skull whom I took to be Saint Francis with a putto playing a lute above his head. I hauled twice on a large bellpull and at the same time peered through some light green sidelights.

“That’s not my idea of a vision,” said Geiger, looking at the picture. “I don’t often doze off with a skull in my hand.”

“I think the point might be that we’re all going to fall asleep and die one day. Like that kid you shot on the road today.”

“While we’re here I’ll light a candle for him, if it will make you feel any better.”

“You do that. But it certainly won’t make that boy feel any better.” Seeing movement behind the glass, I added, “We’ll want to see the abbot.”

The door opened to reveal a muscular-looking man wearing a brown habit with a bald head and a large gray beard. Speaking fluent Shtokavian — which Geiger had explained to me is a dialect of Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, and Montenegrin — Geiger told him we urgently needed to see the abbot.

The monk bowed politely, asked us to accompany him, and we entered the monastery. This was an uncomfortable, hollow place of long echoes, semidarkness, hidden eyes, tangible silences, and the sour smell of baking bread. We walked the length of a long, uncarpeted corridor — which looked and felt more like a prison than a place where men lived by choice — that ran between damp walls painted two institutional tones of green and beige and past doors of plain wood that were without adornment of any sort. Bare lightbulbs hung from the plain ceiling. Another monk was sweeping the unvarnished floorboards with a rush broom, and somewhere a small bell in a clock was striking the hour. A door in some faraway chamber banged shut, but as Geiger and I marched behind the bearded monk our jackboots were the loudest thing in that building and sounded almost profane. We passed by the open door of a barely furnished refectory where forty or fifty men were silently eating bread and soup, and in a distant room a man began to loudly recite a monotonous prayer in Latin, which felt more superstitious than holy. I did not get the impression I was in a place of retreat and contemplation, more like some cold anteroom of purgatory that was a very long way from heaven. I shouldn’t like to have stayed there. Just to be in that place was to feel you were already dead, or in limbo, or worse.

The monk showed us into a plain room with a few comfortable but threadbare armchairs, bowed again, and asked us to wait while he went to fetch the abbot. He did not return. Geiger sat down and lit a cigarette. I stared out the grimy window at Sergeant Oehl, who appeared to have gone to sleep in the backseat of the Mercedes. After a while I sat down beside Geiger and lit one as well. If in doubt, smoke; that’s the soldier’s way.

Finally the abbot came to us. He was a largish man in his sixties — possibly older — with long gray hair, frosted eyebrows that were as big as fur stoles, a bloodhound’s face, and a boxing glove of a black beard. Keen blue eyes regarded us with justifiable suspicion. The SS may have been supporters of the Croatian fascist state — which itself supported the Roman Catholic Church — and yet no one who’d given his life to serving Christ could seriously have believed that serving Adolf Hitler was a better alternative.

He raised his hand in benediction, crossed the air above our heads, and said, “God bless all here.”

I stood up politely. Geiger stayed smoking in his armchair.

“Thank you for seeing us, Father Abbot. My name is Captain Gunther. And this is Captain Geiger.”

“What can our humble order do for you gentlemen?” he asked in impeccable German. His voice was measured and quiet and lacking all human emotion, as if he were speaking patiently to children.

“I’m looking for a priest who I believe is one of your order,” I said. “A monk called Father Ladislaus. Also known as Antun Djurkovic. I have an important letter for him that I have been ordered by my superiors in Berlin to deliver into his hands, personally. We have today driven all the way from Zagreb just to be here now.”

“Zagreb?” He pronounced the name of the city as if it had been Paris or London. “It’s many years since I was in Zagreb.”

“It’s much the same as ever,” said Geiger.

“Really? I heard there was a mosque now in Zagreb. With minarets. And a muezzin who calls the faithful to prayer.”

“True,” said Geiger.

The Father Abbot shook his head.

“Could I trouble you for a cigarette?” he asked Geiger.

“Certainly,” said Geiger.

The abbot puffed a cigarette into life happily and sat down.

“Those pistols you are carrying, gentlemen,” he said, clearly enjoying his cigarette very much. “I assume they are loaded.”

“There wouldn’t be much point in carrying them if they weren’t,” said Geiger.

The Father Abbot was silent for a minute or two and then said, “Cigarettes and bullets. Both of them so small and yet so efficient. If only we spent more time using one more than the other, life would be so much less complicated, don’t you think?”

“It might be less dangerous,” said Geiger.

“But. To answer your question. It’s true that for a while there was a man here called Father Ladislaus. And I believe his given name is Djurkovic. Happily he is no longer a member of our order and he has not lived in this monastery for several years. Even by the standards of this unhappy country, his views were extreme, to say the least. Most of us in this order practice our Catholic faith with prayer books and a cross. I’m afraid that Djurkovic believed it was necessary to practice it with bullets and bayonets, which is why I asked him to leave this monastery and also why any mail that was received for him here I ordered destroyed. Consequently he is dead, to us. Certainly his life as a priest is over.

“To the best of my knowledge he joined the Ustaše after he left us and his present whereabouts are unknown to me, as is his current occupation. I suggest that your best course would be to inquire after him at their headquarters in Banja Luka. To find the Ustaše building in the center of town you need only look for the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, which is currently being demolished by a punishment battalion of Jews, Serbs, and Roma using their bare hands.”

“Demolished?”

“You did not mishear me, Captain. Race and religion is a vexed issue in this part of the world, to put it mildly. Following some damage that was inflicted on the cathedral by a German fighter aircraft, the Ustaše government decided to finish the job and ordered it to be destroyed, completely. And if that was not bad enough, the bishop of Banja Luka, Platon Jovanovic, was taken away and murdered in cold blood. Yes, that is what I said. In this country, a Christian priest was martyred for the way he chose to worship God.”

“On the journey here from Zagreb I saw some Ustaše forces shelling a Serbian Orthodox church,” I said. “Why?”

The Father Abbot spread his hands as if this question was beyond his understanding.

“At Petricevac we try to keep ourselves to ourselves and take no interest in politics. But a certain fanatical element in the former Yugoslavia regards the Serbian Orthodox Church and its pro-Russian adherents with unremitting hostility. Doubtless they are partly motivated by the fact that this monastery was itself destroyed by Ottoman Serbs during the middle of the last century. I am myself Croatian but I am not one of those who believe in an eye for eye. As Saint Francis himself reminds us, there are many ways to the Lord, and we pray for all those who are so cruelly oppressed and for their deliverance from bondage. If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will also have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.”

“Amen to that,” I said.

“I’m glad you say so, Captain Gunther. You and your two friends will stay to supper, of course.”

“We’d be delighted,” I said.

“And if you have driven all the way from Zagreb it may be that you are also seeking a place to sleep. You are welcome to stay the night in our humble quarters. This is the true monk’s duty. For the Bible reminds us to ‘be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.’ Hebrews chapter thirteen, verse two.”

“I promise you, we’re a very long way from being angels,” I told him.

“Only God knows the truth of a man, my son,” said the Father Abbot.

We stayed for supper at Petricevac but we did not spend the night there. In spite of the Father Abbot’s civilized words, there was something about the place — and him — I didn’t like. The man was as forbidding as the north face of the Eiger. He had the world-weary air of a Grand Inquisitor and, in spite of what he had said, I would not have been surprised to have found him in charge of a rack or a set of thumbscrews. Then again, I just don’t like priests very much. Most of them are fanatics for a different, less worldly deity than Adolf Hitler but they are fanatics nonetheless.

As soon as we had finished eating we climbed back into the Mercedes and set off for Banja Luka and, as the Father Abbot had promised, we quickly found the Ustaše headquarters building we were looking for. It was a large, cream-colored, square building with Ottoman features — all Corinthian pillars and arched windows — that resembled a theater or an opera house. An Ustaše flag hung limply above a main door that was busy with men wearing black uniforms and even blacker mustaches. On the other side of the main road older men wearing flat caps and carpet slippers were playing chess in a little park that was what you might have found on a summer’s evening in almost any provincial European town. But it’s not every provincial town that has a punishment battalion of its own citizens tasked with the destruction of a cathedral. At this particular hell on earth an iron cloud of barbed-wire fence had been erected around what remained of the cathedral’s walls to ensure that the poor people detailed to their slave labor did not escape. Work had not yet ceased for the day, however, and from behind piles of loose rubble the emaciated faces of walking caryatids, drooping under their yellow brick burdens, stared hopelessly back at me as I stepped out of the car. Horrified fascination held me rooted to the spot, and I don’t know why but I snatched off my cap as if part of me recognized something about this heap of stones that was still a church. Or perhaps it was the sight of so much human suffering that made me do it — respect for people who were obviously not long for this world. But I did not stay very long to look at what was being done to one church in the name of another in this miserable, godforsaken place; an Ustaše guard advancing on me with a rifle in his hands persuaded me to turn away and go about my business. But man’s inhumanity to man had long been a matter of small surprise to me and I might as easily have turned away because I had become callous. I have to confess all I cared about now was finding Father Ladislaus, giving him his daughter’s letter, and then getting away from the Independent State of Croatia as quickly as possible.

“I wouldn’t get too upset about that if I were you,” said Geiger, following me inside the headquarters building. “If you ever saw what their side has done to ours in this war you wouldn’t pity them for a minute.”

“I expect you’re right,” I said. “But all the same I do pity them. I rather think that without pity, we might as well be animals.”

“It beats me how you ever joined the SD.”

“It’s a mystery to me, too.”

In the headquarters building, which was full of polished marble and crystal chandeliers, I presented my credentials to a sullen Ustaše intelligence officer whose intelligence did not run to speaking any German and who seemed to be more interested in picking his nose and finishing the elaborate doodle on his blotter than in listening to me. Looking at the drawing’s Gordian knot complexity, upside down, it seemed like a perfect image for the impossible-to-unravel politics of Yugoslavia.

Having secured transport for himself and Sergeant Oehl, and established the latest whereabouts of the SS Prinz Eugen Division captain, Geiger now came to my aid and further established that the man formerly known as Father Ladislaus was now better known as Colonel Dragan.

“It’s a sort of joke, I think,” he said. “Colonel Dragan. It means the dear colonel. The joke being that from what this fellow says, the colonel is much feared around these parts and quite notorious. He’s currently to be found at a place called Jasenovac, about a hundred kilometers back up the road we were just on. It’s a place where they make bricks.”

“Bricks? My God, I’d have thought they had plenty of those outside.”

“You’d certainly think so.”

“How does a Franciscan monk get to be a Ustaše colonel?” I wondered aloud.

Geiger shrugged. “There’s only one way in this country,” he said. “By being an efficient killer of Serbs.”

“Ask him what else he knows about this Colonel Dragan,” I said.

Geiger spoke again and gradually the Ustaše officer became more animated.

“This man you’re looking for, Gunther, is a great hero,” said Geiger, offering me a simultaneous translation. “Adored even and something of a living legend in Bosnia-Herzegovina. He was sick with fever for a while — apparently, the marshes at Jasenovac are full of mosquitoes — and it was feared he would die. But lots of good Catholics prayed to God and lit many candles, so now he is back to full health again and, if anything, stronger than before and more feared than ever. But even the Ustaše fear the colonel and for good reason. Because he can’t be reasoned with. That’s what his men say. Once his mind is made up there’s no changing it. His mind is impregnable — that’s what this fellow says. But that you can’t judge a man like Colonel Dragan the way you would judge an ordinary man. He’s anything but ordinary. Perhaps that’s because he used to be a priest, like Father Tomislav, who is also attached to the Ustaše troops in Jasenovac. It may be that it is God who gives the colonel the strength to do what he does. Which is to be a man who can do such terrible things. Perhaps it’s his special relationship with God that makes him strong. That makes him so resolute and a source of inspiration to his men. To all Ustaše who would see this country free from the threat of Communism and the Jews and Muslims, and the peasant stupidities of the Serbian Orthodox Church.”

“And I thought the Nazis had the monopoly on this kind of goat’s shit.”

Geiger opened his cigarette case and offered me one. Then, taking me by the arm we went outside for a smoke. The summer sun was low behind the clouds now and the sky over Banja Luka was the color of blood. At the Serbian Orthodox cathedral, demolition work had stopped for the day but not the cruelty. I could hear a woman crying. Why had I come to this infernal place?

“You know, it seems to me that I’ve heard about this fellow, Colonel Dragan, on my first tour of duty down here. About both these men. Your Father Ladislaus and this Father Tomislav. I heard some pretty terrible things. The sort of things that could only happen here in Yugoslavia. This country is full of hate — the Father Abbot was right about that.”

“What did you hear, Geiger? What kind of things?”

“Terrible things. Something about two monks who were working with the Ustaše. Just a name, really. They used to call them Ante Pavelic’s twin priests of death. That’s right. The priests of death. I heard they killed a lot of people. Not just in battle. And not just partisans — people who need killing — but women and children, too.”

“Because they were Serbs?”

“Because they were Serbs. Look, Gunther, it’s none of my business what you do. But in this country, you’re a fish out of water. In Berlin you probably know what you’re doing, but down here, wearing that uniform, you’re just another target. My advice to you is to stay away from this Colonel Dragan, and from Jasenovac. Leave the minister’s letter here with this fellow, drive back to Zagreb, and get on the next plane home.”

“I’ve thought about that. Don’t think I haven’t. But I’ve a personal reason for making sure the letter gets into his hands. Besides, the minister won’t be too pleased with me if I tell him I could have met this fellow and then funked it. He might not sign my expenses, and then where will I be?”

“Alive. Look, I’m not kidding you. This colonel is a real monster. The fact is that even the SS don’t go to Jasenovac if we can possibly avoid it. The place used to be a brickworks, before the war, but now it’s a concentration camp. For Serbs. I believe there were some Jews in Jasenovac, at the beginning of the war, but they’re all dead now. Murdered by the Ustaše.”

After Smolensk, I wondered how bad things could be in Jasenovac. And after all, I was only delivering a letter. Surely I could do that in next to no time. Besides, I’d met the devil before; in fact I was pretty certain I used to work for him. Heydrich was my best guess as to what the devil was really like. And I could not conceive that Croatian mass murderers could be any worse than German mass murderers like him, or Arthur Nebe. But what was I going to tell Dalia Dresner? That her father was a monster? I didn’t think she was going to be pleased to hear something like that.

“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’m tougher than I look.”

“No, you look tough enough. That’s not the problem. The problem is that I’ve seen inside your soul, Gunther. There’s still a sliver of decency left in there. There’s your fucking problem. What does Nietzsche say? A man might think he can stare into the abyss without falling in but sometimes the abyss stares back. Sometimes the abyss exerts a strange effect on your sense of balance. Take it from one who knows.”

I shrugged. “I’m still going to Jasenovac. Besides, like you said, it’s on the way back to Zagreb.”

“I like you, Gunther,” said Geiger. “I don’t know why, but I do. Maybe it’s that sliver of decency in you. I envy you that. Me, I’m up to my elbows in blood. But you. You’re different. I don’t know how you’ve managed it in the SD but you have and I admire that. So, you give me no alternative but to go to Jasenovac with you. Think about it. You don’t speak Croatian. Or Bosnian-Serb. Besides, suppose you run into some Proles? Or some hostile musclemen?”

Musclemen was what Oehl was in the habit of calling Muslims.

“I told you. These bastards like to make you suck your own dick. You need me and the sergeant riding shotgun on the road with you. Besides, we’ve got another car now. With a driver. So you’ll be even safer than you were before.”

I had to admit he had a point.

“What about rejoining your SS unit?” I said.

Geiger shrugged. “There’s plenty of time to do that. Besides, now we’re here in Banja Luka, I know a good place to eat and to stay. Tonight you’re my guest. And we’ll leave first thing in the morning.”