“Don’t you ever come looking for me again. For you, I’m dead. If you try, I have all the evidence; are you listening? The locations, the photographs, everything you’ve done; stored in a safe place. As you know, these times will, one day, be behind us. I’ve protected myself, and if anything happens to me or my mother, you’re done for.” Then he shoved the pistol muzzle once more against the roof of Velimirović’s mouth and, without a sound, left as he’d come. Velimirović didn’t fear violence, but he did fear a sharp mind, and he had no doubts about Marko’s. After that night, he pretended the two were strangers, though both of them went on living in the city and crossed paths now and then. When the Croats began moving back to the city during the peaceful reintegration, Velimirović stepped into the role of leader of the Serbian side. He was complicit enough in war crimes that his electorate trusted he wouldn’t be able to turn his back on their complicity. He was also eloquent enough to stand in front of TV cameras and on the city council.
Since the end of the war there’d been no moment as lucrative as this: the kerfuffle over the installation of signs throughout the city in the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet and the enraged response of local Croats, who defiantly tore down the Cyrillic signage.
The story behind the signs was a simple one. The law requiring that signs be installed on all municipal buildings in both the Croatian and Serbian alphabets had been passed some ten years after the return of the Croats to the city, at a moment when the government was being run by the right-wing Croatian political party. The party leader was an obsequious bureaucrat, while almighty Josip Ilinčić hunkered, powerful, in the shadows. When city hall began to roil with corruption scandals, evaporating renovation funds, wholesale nepotism, it became clear that the local government was about to lose the next election to more liberal Croatian parties. This was when the right wing devised a cunning plan: they’d create a coalition of their party and the party of the Serbian ethnic minority, whose ranks still included veterans from wartime paramilitaries. In exchange for joining this coalition, the Serbs demanded concessions, and the Croatian right wing was in no position to refuse. One of the concessions was that if the day should come when the number of Serbs living in the city were to top 33 percent of the population, Cyrillic signs would be installed on all the municipal buildings. This gave Serbian voters the impression that they’d won an important battle, while the Croatian right wing had no intention of ever actually following through.
Neither of the brilliant coalition partners anticipated, of course, that the day would ever dawn when they’d have to implement the law. When it did come, and when, again, demonstrations erupted, Velimirović and Ilinčić found ways to profit. The entire city was seething, and the mayor wasn’t handling any of this well, distracted as he was by having to buy support for his upcoming mandate.
The social unrest in the city turned out to be manna from heaven. The national government was searching for ways to distract attention from a third year of recession, so they spiced things up with the time-tested formula of inciting interethnic strife. Every morning when he scanned his newspapers and portals, Velimirović rubbed his hands with glee at the multitude of political manipulations that were suddenly possible. When he and Ilinčić bumped into each other in the corridors of city hall during those days, their nods to each were like silent high fives. After so many people had been killed in and around the city, stoking the situation to the white heat of conflict would be a breeze, wouldn’t it? The most recent flash point Velimirović knew of was the trouble facing the Croatian-language teacher who’d supposedly threatened schoolchildren on Facebook. This reminded him to call his media expert, a promising young reporter at Izbor, the local periodical for the Serbian ethnic minority, funded by the national budget but run directly from Velimirović’s desk.
“So, Nikola, how goes it?”
“Brilliant, Boss, I’m working on the new issue; we go into layout tomorrow. And how’s by you?”
“Splendid, Nikola, splendid! Thanks for asking . . . Any updates on that teacher?”
“Teacher? Oh, the one with the Facebook scandal? Sure, a few words, but to tell you the truth, I don’t see much there.”
“Nikola, my boy, if you write a strong text, something will surface. Get my drift?”
“Sure. You think I should?”
“I do.”
“Fine, I’ll have a look.”
“There you go, my boy; we don’t want our children being victimized in their classrooms,” chuckled Velimirović, and Nikola got the drift. The last text to be laid out the next day had as its headline: “The Street Spills Over into the Classroom.”
ÄÄÄ
We’re sinking
I’m not here
not there not here
This beggared belief. If only there were a way for her to wake up from this nightmare. It was morning, and Kristina was curled up in bed on her side, wide awake, her eyes closed, listening to Ante getting ready to leave. Recently he was going off to meetings bright and early: first a stop at the local bar, then to a shift spent guarding the municipal offices against the Cyrllic signs, then to the Veterans’ Association offices, then back to the bar, and then someone would roll him home in the dead of night. The night before last he was delivered in an ambulance; they carried him, only barely conscious, to his bed. First he’d drunk himself into a stupor and engaged in a fistfight with a policeman, and he ended up at the psychiatric ward. With him in the ambulance was Svetlana, a nurse, who worked on the ward and was also a neighbor in their apartment building. Although she was a Serb, Ante respected her; he’d grown accustomed to her and the homemade doughnuts
