The Rings of Saturn

4. The Battle of Sole Bay — Nightfall — Station Road in The Hague — Mauritshuis — Scheveningen — The tomb of St Sebolt — Schiphol airport — The invisibility of man — The Sailors' Reading Room — Pictures from the Great War — The concentration camp at Jasenovac on the Sava

The rain clouds had dispersed when, after dinner, I took my first walk around the streets and lanes of the town. Darkness was falling, and only the lighthouse with its shining glass cabin still caught the last luminous rays that came in from the western horizon.

Footsore and weary as I was after my long walk from Lowestoft, I saw down on a beach on the green called Gunhill and looked out on the tranquil sea, from the depths of which the shadows were now rising. Everyone who had been out for an evening stroll was gone. I felt as if I were in a deserted theatre, and I should not have been surprised if a curtain had suddenly risen before me and on the proscenium I had beheld, say, the 28th of May 1672— that memorable day when the Dutch fleet appeared offshore from out of the drifting mists, with the bright morning light behind it, and opened fire on the English ships in Sole Bay. In all likelihood the people of Southwold hurried out of the town as soon as the first cannonades were fired to watch the rare spectacle from the beach. Shading their eyes with their hands against the dazzling sun, they would have watched the ships moving hither and thither, apparently at random, their sails billowing in a light northeast wind and then, as they manoeuvred ponderously, flapping once again. They would not have been able to make out human figures at that distance, not even the gentlemen of the Dutch and English admiralties on the bridges. As the battle continued, the powder magazines exploded, and some of the tarred hulls burned down to the waterline; the scene would have been shrouded in an acrid, yellowish-black smoke creeping across the entire bay and masking the combat from view. While most of the accounts of the battles fought on the so-called fields of honour have from time immemorial been unreliable, the pictorial representations of great naval engagements are without exception figments of the imagination. Even celebrated painters such as Storck, van der Velde or de Loutherbourg, some of whose versions of the Battle of Sole Bay I studied closely in the Maritime Museum in Greenwich, fail to convey any true impression of how it must have been to be on board one of these ships, already overloaded with equipment and men, when burning masts and sails began to fall or cannonballs smashed into the appallingly overcrowded decks.

On the Royal James alone, which was set aflame by a fireship, nearly half the thousand-strong crew perished. No details of the end of the three-master have come down to us. There were eye-witnesses who claimed to have seen the commander of the English fleet, the Earl of Sandwich, who weighed almost twenty-four stone, gesticulating on the afterdeck as the flames encircled him. All we know for certain is that his bloated body was washed up on the beach near Harwich a few weeks later. The seams of his uniform had burst asunder, the buttonholes were torn open, yet the Order of the Garter still gleamed in undiminished splendour. At that date there can have only been a few cities on earth that numbered as many souls as were annihilated in sea-battles of this kind. The agony that was endured and the enormity of the havoc wrought defeat our powers of comprehension, just as we cannot conceive the vastness of the effort that must have been required — from felling and preparing the timber, mining and smelting the ore, and forging the iron, to weaving and sewing the sailcloth — to build and equip vessels that were almost all predestined for destruction. For a brief time only these curious creatures sailed the seas, moved by the winds that circle the earth, bearing names such as Stavoren, Resolution, Victory, Groot Hollandia and Olyfan, and then they were gone. It has never been determined, which of the two parties in the naval battle fought off Southwold to extort trading advantages emerged victorious. It is certain, however, that the decline of the Netherlands began here, with a shift in the balance of power so small that it was out of proportion to the human and material resources expended in the battle; while on the other hand the English government, almost bankrupt, diplomatically isolated, and humiliated by the Dutch raid on Chatham, was now able, despite a complete absence of strategic thinking and a naval administration on the verge of disintegration, and thanks only to the vagaries of the wind and the waves that day, to commence the sovereignty at sea that was to be unbroken for so long. — As I sat there that evening in Southwold overlooking the German Ocean, I sensed quite clearly the earth's slow turning into the dark. The huntsmen are up in America, writes Thomas Browne in The Garden of Cyrus, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. The shadow of night is drawn like a black veil across the earth, and since almost all creatures, from one meridian to the next, lie down after the sun has set, so, he continues, one might, in following the setting sun, see on our globe nothing but prone bodies, row upon row, as if levelled by the scythe of Saturn — an endless graveyard for a humanity struck by falling sickness. I gazed farther and farther out to sea, to where the darkness was thickest and where there extended a cloudbank of the most curious shape, which I could barely make out any longer, the rearward view, I presume, of the storm that had broken over Southwold in the late afternoon. For a while, the topmost summit regions of this massif, dark as ink, glistened like the icefields of the Caucasus, and as I watched the glare fade I remembered that years before, in a dream, I had once walked the entire length of a mountain range just as remote and just as unfamiliar. It must have been a distance of a thousand miles or more, through ravines, gorges and valleys, across ridges, slopes and drifts, along the edges of great forests, over wastes of rock, shale and snow. And I recalled that in my dream, once I had reached the end of my journey, I looked back, and that it was six o'clock in the evening. The jagged peaks of the mountains I had left behind rose in almost fearful silhouette against a turquoise sky in which two or three pink clouds drifted. It was a scene that felt familiar in an inexplicable way, and for weeks it was on my mind until at length I realized that, down to the last detail, it matched the Vallüla massif, which I had seen from the bus, through eyes drooping with tiredness, a day or so before I started school, as we returned home from an outing to the Montafon. I suppose it is submerged memories that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theatre is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?

Just as these things have always been beyond my understanding, so too I found it impossible to believe, as I sat on Gunhill in Southwold that evening, that just one year earlier I had been looking across to English from a beach in Holland. On that occasion, following a bad night spent at Baden in Switzerland, I had travelled via Basle and Amsterdam to The Hague, where I had taken a room in one of the less salubrious hotels near the station. I no longer remember whether it was the Lord Asquith, the Aristo, or the Fabiola. At all events, in the lobby of this establishment, which would deeply have depressed even the humblest of travellers, there sat two gentlemen, no longer in their first youth, who must have been partners for a long time; and between them, in the stead of a child, as it were, was an apricot-coloured poodle. After I had rested a little in the room I was allotted, I went for a stroll, looking for a bite to eat, up the road that runs from the station to the city centre, past the Bristol Bar, Yuksel's Café, a video library, Aran Turk's pizza place, a Euro-sex-shop, a halal butcher's, and a carpet store, above whose display a rudimentary fresco in four parts showed a caravan crossing the desert. The name Perzenpaleis was lettered in red on the façade of the run-down building, the upper-storey windows of which were all white-washed over.

As I was looking up at this façade, a man with a dark beard, wearing a suit jacket over a long tunic, slipped past me through a doorway, so close that our elbows touched. Through that doorway, for an unforgettable moment that seemed to exist outside time, I glimpsed the wooden rack on which perhaps a hundred pairs of well-worn shoes had been placed beside and above one another. Only later did I see the minaret rising from the courtyard of the building into the azure Dutch evening sky. For an hour or more I walked around this somehow extraterritorial part of town. Most of the windows in the side streets were boarded up, and slogans like Help de regenwouden redeen or Welcome to the Royal Dutch Graveyard were graffiti'd on the sooty brick walls. No longer able to decide on a place to eat, I bought a carton of chips at McDonald's, where I felt like a criminal wanted worldwide as I stood at the brightly lit counter, and ate them as I walked back to my hotel. Outside the entrances of the entertainment and dining establishments on the road to the station, small groups of oriental men had now gathered, most of them smoking in silence while the odd one appeared to be doing a deal with a client. When I reached the little canal that crosses the road, an open-top American limousine studded with lights and gleaming with chrome glided past me across the carriageway as if it had come out of nowhere, and in it sat a pimp in a white suit, wearing gold-framed sunglasses and on his head a ludicrous Tyrolean hat. And as I stood gazing in amazement after this almost supernatural apparition, a dark-skinned man shot round the corner towards me, sheer terror in his face, and, swerving to avoid me, left me full in the path of his pursuer, who, judging by appearances, was a countryman of his. This pursuer, whose eyes were shining with rage and blood lust, was probably a chef or kitchen porter, since he was wearing an apron and holding a long, glinting knife in one hand, which passed by me so close that I imagined I felt it piercing between my ribs. Disturbed by the impression this experience made on me, I lay on my bed in my hotel room. I did not have a good night. It was so oppressive and sultry that one could not leave the windows closed; but if one opened them, one heard the din of traffic from the crossroads and every few minutes the dreadful squeal of the tram as it ground round the terminus track-loop. I was therefore not in the best of states next morning at the Mauritshuis when I stood before the large group portrait, The Anatomy Lesson. Although I had gone to The Hague especially to see this painting, which would continue to occupy me considerably over the years to come, I was so out of sorts after my bad night that I was quite unable to harness my thoughts as I looked at the body being dissected under the eyes of the Guild of Surgeons. Indeed, without knowing why, I was so affected by the paintings that later it took me a full hour to recover, in front of Jacob van Ruisdael's View of Haarlem with Bleaching Fields. The flatland stretching out towards Haarlem is seen from above, from a vantage point generally identified as the dunes, though the sense of a bird's-eye view is so strong that the dunes would have to be veritable hills or even modest mountains. The truth is of course that Ruisdael did not take up a position on the dunes in order to paint; his vantage point was an imaginary position some distance above the earth. Only in this way could he see it all together: the vast cloudscape that occupies two thirds of the picture; the town, which is little more than a fraying of the horizon, except for St Bavo's cathedral, which towers above all the other buildings; the dark bosks and bushes; the farm in the foreground; and the bright field where the sheets of white linen have been laid out to bleach and where, by my count, seven or eight people no taller than a quarter of an inch are going about their work. After I left the gallery, I sat for a while on the sunlit steps of the palais which Governor Johann Maurits, as the guidebook I had bought informed me, had built in his homeland whilst he was in Brazil for seven years and fitted out as a cosmographic residence reflecting the wonders of the remotest regions of the earth, in keeping with his personal motto: "Even unto the limits of our world". Report has it that when the house was opened in May 1644, three hundred years before I was born, eleven Indians the Governor had brought with him from Brazil performed a dance on the cobbled square in front of the new building, conveying to the townspeople some sense of the foreign lands to which the power of their community now extended. These dancers, about whom nothing else is known, have long since disappeared, as soundless as shadows, as silent as the heron I saw when I set off once more, flying just above the shining surface of the water, the beat of its wings calm and even, undisturbed by the traffic creeping along the bank of the FHofvijver. Who can say how things were in ages past? Diderot, in one of his travel journals, described Holland as the Egypt of Europe, where one might cross the fields in a boat, and, as far as the eye could see, there would be scarcely anything to break the flooded surface of the plain. In that curious country, he wrote, the most modest rise gave one the loftiest sensation. And for Diderot there was nothing more satisfying to the human mind than the neat Dutch towns with their straight, tree-lined canals, exemplary in every respect. Settlement succeeded settlement just as if they had been conjured up overnight by the hand of an artist in accordance with some carefully worked-out plan, wrote Diderot, and even in the heart of the largest of them one still felt one was out in the country. The Hague, at that time with a population of about forty thousand, he felt was the loveliest village on earth, and the road from the town to the strand at Scheveningen a promenade without equal. It was not easy to appreciate these observations as I walked along Parkstraat towards Scheveningen. Here and there stood a fine villa in its garden, but otherwise there was nothing to afford me any respite. Perhaps I had gone the wrong way, as so often in unfamiliar cities. In Scheveningen, where I had hoped to be able to see the sea from a distance, I walked for a long time in the shadow of tall apartment blocks, as if at the bottom of a ravine. When at last I reached the beach I was so tired that I lay down and slept till afternoon. I heard the surge of the sea, and, half dreaming, understood every word of Dutch and for the first time in my life believed I had arrived, and was home. Even when I awoke it seemed to me for a moment that my people were resting all around me as we made our way across the desert. The façade of the Kurhaus towered above me like a great caravanserai, a comparison which sat well with the fact

that the palatial hotel, built on the beach at the turn of the century, had numerous modern extensions with roofs resembling tents, housing newsagents, souvenir shops and fast-food outlets. In one of these, the Massada Grill, where the illuminated photo-panels above the counter showed kosher foods instead of the usual hamburger combinations, I had a cup of tea before returning to the city and marvelled at a beatifically beaming couple surrounded by the motley host of their grandchildren, celebrating some family or holiday occasion in a cafeteria otherwise deserted.

That evening, in Amsterdam, I sat in the peace of the lounge of a private hotel by the Vondel Park, which I knew from earlier visits, and made notes on the stations of my journey, now almost at an end: the days I had spent on various enquiries at Bad Kissingen, the panic attack in Baden, the boat excursion on Lake Zurich, my run of good luck at the casino in Lindau, and my visits to the Alte Pinakothek in Munich and to the grave of my patron saint in Nuremberg, of whom legend has it that he was the son of a king, from Dacia or Denmark, who married a French princess in Paris. During the wedding night, the story goes, he was afflicted with a sense of profound unworthiness. Today, he is supposed to have said to his bride, our bodies are adorned, but tomorrow they will be food for worms. Before the break of day, he fled, making a pilgrimage to Italy, where he lived in solitude until he felt the power to work miracles arising within him. After saving the Anglo-Saxon princes Winnibald and Wunibald from certain starvation with a loaf baked from ashes and brought to them by a celestial messenger, and after preaching a celebrated sermon in Vicenza, he went over the Alps to Germany. At Regensburg he crossed the Danube on his cloak, and there made a broken glass whole again; and, in the house of a wheelwright too mean to spare the kindling, lit a fir with icicles. This story of the burning of the frozen substance of life has, of late, meant much to me, and I wonder now whether inner coldness and desolation may not be the pre-condition fro making the world believe, by a kind of fraudulent showmanship, that one's own wretched heart is still aglow. Be that as it may, my namesake is said to have performed many more miracles in his hermitage in the imperial forests between the rivers Regnitz and Pegnitz, and to have healed the sick, before his corpse, as he had ordained, was borne on a cart drawn by two oxen to the place where his grave is to this day. Centuries later, in May 1507, the Patriciate of Nuremberg resolved to have a brass sarcophagus crafted for the holy prince of heaven St Sebolt by master smith Peter Vischner. In June 1519, when his twelve-year labours were completed, the great monument, weighing many tons, standing almost five yards high on twelve snails and four curved dolphins, and representing the entire order of salvation,

was installed in the chancel of the church consecrated in the name of the city's saint. On the base of the tomb, fauns, mermaids, fabulous creatures and animals of every conceivable description throng about the four cardinal virtues of Justice, Prudence, Temperance and Fortitude. Above them are mythical figures — Nimrod the hunter, Hercules with his club, Samson with the jawbone of an ass, and the god Apollo between two swans — along with representations of the miracle of the burning of ice, the feeding of the hungry, and the conversion of a heretic. Then come the apostles with their emblems and the instruments of their martyrdom, and, crowning all, the celestial city with its three pinnacles and many mansions, Jerusalem, the fervently longed-for bride, God's tabernacle amongst mankind, the image of an other, renewed life. And in the heart of this reliquary cast in a single piece, surrounded by eighty angels, in a shrine of sheet silver, lie the bones of the exemplary dead man, the harbinger of a time when the tears will be wiped from our eyes and there will be no more grief, or pain, or weeping and wailing.

Night had fallen and I sat in the darkness of my room on the top floor of the Vondel Park Hotel and listened to the stormy gusts buffeting the crowns of the trees. From afar came the rumble of thunder. Pallid sheet lightning streaked the horizon. At about one o'clock, when I heard the first drops rattling on the metal roof, I leant out of the window into the warm, storm-filled air. Soon the rain was pouring down into the shadowy depths of the park, which flared from time to time as if lit up by Bengal fire. The water in the gutter gurgled like a mountain stream. Once, when lightning again flashed across the sky, I looked down into the hotel garden far below me, and there, in the broad ditch that runs between the garden and the park, in the shelter of an overhanging willow, I saw a solitary mallard, motionless on the garish green surface of the water. This image emerged from the darkness, for a fraction of a second, with such perfect clarity that I can still see every individual willow leaf, the myriad green scales of duckweed, the subtlest nuances in the fowl's plumage, and even the pores in the lid closed over its eye.

Next morning, the atmosphere at Schiphol airport was so strangely muted that one might have thought one was already a good way beyond this world. As if they were under sedation or moving through time stretched and expanded, the passengers wandered the halls or, standing still on the escalators, were delivered to their various destinations on high or underground. In the train from Amsterdam, leafing through Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, I had come across a description of the Campos Elyseos, a street in São Paulo where the colourfully painted wooden villas and residences, built at the turn of the century by the wealthy in a kind of Swiss fantasy style, were falling to pieces in gardens overgrown with eucalyptus and mango trees. Perhaps that was why the airport, filled with a murmuring whisper, seemed to me that morning like an ante room of that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns. Every now and then the announcers' voices, disembodied and intoning their messages like angels, would call someone's name. Passagiers Sandberg en Stromberg naar Copenhagen. Mr Freeman to Lagos. La señora Rodrigo, por favor. Sooner or later the call would come for each and every one of those waiting here. I sat down on one of the upholstered benches where travellers who had spent the night in this place of transit were still asleep, stretched out unconscious or curled up. Not far from me was a group of Africans, clad in flowing, snow-white robes; and opposite me a well-groomed gentleman with a golden fob-chain crossing his waistcoat was reading a newspaper, on the front page of which was a photograph of a vast pall of smoke, boiling up like an atomic mushroom cloud above an atoll. De aswolk boven de Vulkaan Pinatubo read the headline. Outside, on the tarmac, the summer heat was shimmering, tiny trucks were beetling to and fro, and from the runway aeroplanes with hundreds of people aboard rose, one after another into the blue air. For my part, I must have dozed off for a while as I watched this spectacle, because presently I heard my name from afar, followed by the injunction Immediate boarding at Gate C4 please.

The small propeller plane that services the route from Amsterdam to Norwich first climbed toward the sun before turning west. Spread out beneath us lay one of the most densely-populated regions in Europe, with endless terraces, sprawling satellite towns, business parks and shining glass houses which looked like large quadrangular ice floes drifting across this corner of the continent where not a patch is left to its own devices. Over the centuries the land had been regulated, cultivated and built on until the whole region was transformed into a geometrical pattern. The roads, water channels and railway tracks ran in straight lines and gentle curves past fields and plantations, basins and reservoirs. Like beads on an abacus designed to calculate infinity, cars glided along the lanes of the motorways, while the ships moving up and down river appeared as if they had been halted for ever. Embedded in this even fabric lay a manor surrounded by its park, the relic of an earlier age. I watched the shadow of our plane hastening below us across hedges, fences, rows of polars and canals. Along a line that seemed to have been drawn with a ruler a tractor crawled through a field of stubbled, dividing it into one lighter and one darker half. Nowhere, however was a single human being to be seen. No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding. One sees the places where they live and the roads that link them, one sees the smoke rising from their houses and factories, one sees the vehicles in which they sit, but one sees not the people themselves. And yet they are present everywhere upon the face of the earth, extending their dominion by the hour, moving around the honeycombs of towering buildings and tied into networks of a complexity that goes far beyond the power of any one individual to imagine, from the thousands of hoists and winches that once worked the South African diamond

mines to the floors of today's stock and commodity exchanges, through which the global tides of information flow without cease. If we view ourselves from a great height, it is frightening to realize how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end, I thought, as we crossed the coastline and flew out over the jelly-green sea.

Such were my reminiscences concerning my visit to Holland a year before, as I sat on Gunhill that evening. Now, with an advancing chill in the air, I sought the familiarity of the streets and soon found myself outside the Sailors' Reading Room, a charitable establishment housed in a small building above the promenade, which nowadays, sailors being a dying breed, serves principally as a kind of maritime museum, where all manner of things connected with the sea and seafaring life are kept and collected. On the walls hang barometers and navigational instruments, figureheads, and models of ships in glass cases and in bottles. On the tables are harbourmasters' registers, log books, treatises on sailing, various nautical periodicals, and several volumes with colour plates which show legendary clippers and ocean-going steamers such as the Conte di Savoia or the Mauritania, giants of iron and steel, more than three hundred yards long, into which the Washington Capitol might have fitted, their funnels so tall they vanished into the low-hanging clouds. The Reading Room in Southwold is opened every morning at seven (save only on Christmas Day) and remains open until almost midnight. At best, it attracts a handful of visitors during the holidays, and the few who do cross the threshold leave again after they have taken a brief look around in the uncomprehending way characteristic of such holidaymakers. The Reading Room is thus almost always deserted but for one or two of the surviving fishermen and seafarers sitting in silence in the armchairs, whiling the hours away. Sometimes, in the evenings, they play a game of pool in the back room. Apart from the muffled sound of the sea and the clicking of the balls there is nothing to be heard then, except perhaps, from time to time, the slight scratching noise made by a player priming his cue and the short puff when he blows off the chalk. Whenever I am in Southwold, the Sailors' Reading Room is by far my favourite haunt. It is better than anywhere else for reading, writing letters, following one's thoughts, or in the long winter months simply looking out at the stormy sea as it crashes on the promenade. So on this occasion too I went to the Reading Room the morning after my arrival in Southwold, intending to make notes on what I had seen the previous day. At first, as on some of my earlier visits, I leafed through the log of the Southwold, a patrol ship that was anchored off the pier from autumn of 1914. On the large landscape-format pages, a fresh one for each new date, there are occasional entries surrounded by a good deal of empty space, reading, for instance, Maurice Farman Bi-plane N'ward Inland or White Steam-yacht Flying White Ensign Cruising on Horizon to S. Every time I decipher one of these entries I am astounded that a trail that has long since vanished from the air or the water remains visible here on the paper. That morning, as I closed the marbled cover of the log book, pondering the mysterious survival of the written word, I noticed lying to one side on the table a thick, tattered tome that I had not seen before on my visits to the Reading Room. It turned out to be a photographic history of the First World War, compiled and published in 1933 by the Daily Express, to mark the past tragedy, and perhaps as a warning of another approaching. Every theatre of war is documented in this compendious collection, from the Vall' Inferno on the Austro-Italian Alpine front to Flanders fields. There are illustrations of all conceivable forms of violent death, from the shooting down of a single aviation pioneer over the Somme estuary to the mass slaughter in the swamps of Galicia, and pictures of French towns reduced to rubble, corpses rotting in the no-man's-land between the trenches, woodlands razed by artillery fire, battleships sinking under black clouds of petroleum smoke, armies on the march, never-ending streams of refugees, shattered zeppelins, scenes from Prszemysl and St Quentin, from Montfaucon and Gallipoli, scenes of destruction, mutilation, desecration, starvation, conflagration, and freezing cold. The titles are almost without exception bitterly ironic—

When Cities Deck Their Streets for War! This was a Forest! This was a Man! There is some Corner of a Foreign Field that is Forever England! One section of the book is devoted to the chaos in the Balkans, a part of the world which was further removed from England then than Lahore or Omdurman. Page after page of pictures from Serbia, Bosnia and Albania show scattered groups of people and stray individuals trying to escape the War by ox-cart, in the heat of summer, along dusty country roads, or on foot through drifting snow with a pony half-dead with exhaustion. The chronicle of disaster opens with the notorious snapshot from Sarajevo. The picture has the caption Princip Lights the Fuse!

It is the 28th of June 1914, a bright, sunny day, ten forty-five in the morning. One sees a few Bosnians, some Austrian military personnel, and the assassin being apprehended. The facing page shows the tunic of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's uniform, holed by bullets and soaked with blood, which must have been photographed for the press after being stripped from the body of the heir to the throne and transferred by rail to the capital of the empire, where it can be viewed to this day, together with his feather bushed hat and trousers, in a black-framed reliquary in the army museum. Gavrilo Princip was the son of a Grahovo valley farmer, and until recently had been a grammar-school pupil in Belgrade. After being sentenced he was locked up in the Theresienstadt casemates, and there, in April 1918, he died of the bone tuberculosis that had been consuming him since his early youth. In 1993 the Serbs celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of his death.

That afternoon I sat alone till tea time in the bar restaurant of the Crown Hotel. The rattle of crockery in the kitchen had long since subsided; in the grandfather clock, with its rising and setting sun and a moon that appears at night, the cogwheels gripped, the pendulum swung from side to side, and the big hand, bit by bit, in tiny jerks, went its round. For some time I had been feeling a sense of eternal peace when, leafing through the Independent on Sunday, I came across an article that was related to the Balkan pictures I had seen in the Reading Room that morning. The article, which was about the so-called cleansing operations carried out fifty years ago in Bosnia, by the Croats together with the Austrians and the Germans, began by describing a photograph taken as a souvenir by men of the Croatian Ustasha, in which fello w militiamen in the best of spirits, some of them striking heroic poses, are sawing off the head of a Serb named Branco Jungic. A second snap shows the severed head with a cigarette between lips still parted in a last cry of pain. This happened at Jasenovac camp on the Sava. Seven hundred thousand men, women and children were killed there alone in ways that made even the hair of the Reich's experts stand on end, as some of them are said to have admitted when they were amongst themselves. The preferred instruments of execution were saws and sabres, axes and hammers, and leather cuff-bands with fixed blades that were fastened on the lower arm and made especially in Solingen for the purpose of cutting throats, as well as a kind of rudimentary crossbar gallows on which the Serbs, Jews and Bosnians, once rounded

up, were hanged in rows like crows or magpies. Not far from Jasenovac, in a radius of no more than ten miles, there were also the camps of Prijedor, Stara Gradiska and Banja Luka, where the Croatian militia, its hands strengthened by the Wehrmacht and its spirt by the Catholic church, performed one day's work after another in a similar manner. The history of this massacre, which went on for years, is recorded in fifty thousand documents abandoned by the Germans and Croats in 1945, which are kept to this day, according to the author of the 1992 article, in the Bosanske Krajine Archive in Banja Lua, which is, or used to be, housed in what was once an Austro-Hungarian barracks, serving in 1942 as the headquarters of the Heeregruppe E intelligence division. Without a doubt those who were stationed there knew what was going on in the Ustasha camps, just as they knew of the enormities perpetrated during the Kozara campaign against Tito's partisans, for instance, in the course of which between sixty and ninety thousand people were killed in so-called acts of war, that is to say were executed, or died as a result of deportation. The female population of Kozara was transported to Germany and worked to death in the slave-labour system that extended over the entire territory of the Reich. Of the children who were left behind, twenty-three thousand in number, the militia murdered half on the spot, while the rest were herded together at various assembly points to be sent on to Croatia; of these, not a few died of typhoid fever, exhaustion and fear, even before the cattle wagons reached the Croatian capital. Many of those who were still alive were so hungry that they had eaten the cardboard identity tags they wore about their necks and thus in their extreme desperation had eradicated their own names. Later they were brought up as Catholics in Croatian families, and sent to confession and their first holy communion. Like everyone else they learnt the socialist ABC at school, chose an occupation, and became railway workers, salesgirls, tool-fitters or book-keepers. But no one knows what shadowy memories haunt them to this day. In this connection one might also add that one of the Heeresgruppe E intelligence officers at that time was a young Viennese lawyer whose chief task was to draw up memoranda relating to the necessary resettlements, described as imperative for humanitarian reasons. For this commendable paperwork he was awarded by Croatian head of state Ante Pavelić the silver medal of the crown of King Zvonomir, with oak leaves. In the post-war years this officer, who at the very start of his career was so promising and so very competent in the technicalities of administration, occupied various high offices, among them that of Secretary General of the United Nations. And reportedly it was in this last capacity that he spoke onto tape, for the benefit of any extra-terrestrials that may happen to share our universe, words of greeting that are now, together with other memorabilia of mankind, approaching the outer limits of our solar system aboard the space probe Voyager II.