a map. I knew even less about what had happened there, on the night of 13 November 1991, at a time when Dusha and I were already living in Ljubljana. But I felt guilty all the same, and this feeling grew stronger now that I was nearing it.
‘Anything else?’
‘Sorry? Uh, no... no thanks.’
‘Twelve kunas.’
It seemed that my time at the Javori Restaurant had come to an end.
This was the first time I had come to the country of my birth and also my first contact with Croatian citizens, if you set aside the encounters on the streets of Ljubljana, and the customs officer in the nice light blue uniform at border control
I thought of Nadia, whom I hadn’t even managed to inform of my departure. When I set off, she was still in sweet dreamland, and I couldn’t bring myself to wake her. I would have been able to concoct a story that would plausibly mask my true intentions and travel plans, which was full of holes anyway and unpredictable in every way, including its duration. But when my phone rang for the third time in thirty minutes, I knew I couldn’t ignore her any longer.
‘Hello.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Nadia... something’s happened.’
‘What?’
‘My father’s... aunt... Milosava. She’s dead.’
‘Really? Where are you now?’
‘I’m going to the funeral. Driving.’
‘Where to?’
‘Bosnia.’
‘Bosnia?’
‘Yes. Now I’m here... in Croatia.’
‘And why didn’t you tell me? Why did you just drive off to Bosnia? Is everything okay?’
‘Everything’s fine. It’s just... I’m not sure when I’ll be back.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yeah. Long story.’
‘I don’t get you.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Yeah. Whatever. Call me.’
Nadia hung up and I got this irresistible urge to call her back and continue our conversation. I couldn’t put my phone down, but I also had no idea what else to say to her. She certainly didn’t deserve my lying to her from a parking lot in front of the Javori Restaurant about my supposedly deceased Aunt Mirosava, my only relative on my father’s side, who had unexpectedly passed away, aged ninety-two, while cutting down an apple tree in the garden of the only nursing home in eastern Bosnia. I had invented my aunt’s life story in such detail that, without any hesitation, I could have recounted stories of Milosava’s stuffed peppers that she used to pack, every winter, into vacuum containers and take to the bus station, along with a letter for my mother and twenty Deutschmarks for me, and give them to the driver of a bus destined for Ljubljana. I could have also told her about my aunt’s husband, Slavko, who had sadly died of stomach cancer, which she had always blamed on her unhealthy home cooking, resulting in her turning to organic food at the age of eighty-five, which led her Bosnian neighbours to assume she suffered from dementia, causing them to put her in a nursing home and take possession of her house.
My imagination was vivid, and I liked to indulge it when it came to the ladies, but this time, I’d reached an impasse. Nadia’s voice numbed me, and I stopped midway through my first invented sentence. I could feel how much good an honest conversation with her would do me now. I could use an ally in this unexpected and harshly true story in which I found myself. I missed her attentive listening. I missed her rational summary of my incoherent words, her sharp conclusions, which I was too blunt to draw myself. Nadia was a whole lot smarter than me: Younger, more naïve, but cleverer. I even thought, for a second, about turning around and driving back to her. But I was too stubborn. I wasn’t the kind of person to give up before the end of a story.
The information on what exactly had happened at Višnjići was sparse, even online. There was probably a lot more detail in Croatian newspapers back in the ‘90s, and certainly there were people around who knew a lot about it, but I had no idea who to ask, and how much they might want to tell. From what I had managed to piece together I knew that on 13 November 1991, the Third Corps of the Yugoslav People’s Army, under the command of General Borojević, looted and burnt down the village of Višnjići, near Vukovar. In the process, they had murdered thirty-four unarmed villagers, including children, women and old men. They had buried the bodies in a mass grave that had been found in the forest a few kilometres away. I also learned that the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia had issued an indictment from The Hague against Nedelko Borojević years ago, but that he was still at large. The court charged him with a commander’s responsibility for the war crimes perpetrated in Višnjići. In the course of my search, I also came across a number of theories about where the runaway General Borojević might be hiding within the vast territory of the Serbian Entity, and how he, like many Hague defendants, was being protected by members of Serbia’s secret intelligence service. In the comments section below one article, someone claimed that Borojević had been living in a fortified house in the vicinity of Užice, southern Serbia, for years. Other anonymous commentators upheld this theory, and added that his protection was by direct order of the political elite of Serbia, and was well-known among foreign intelligence services, being the responsibility of the Serbian army.
I had last seen General Nedelko Borojević in the restaurant of the Bristol Hotel in Belgrade, in the summer of ’91, when he was still a colonel. Looking back now, I guess I’d never really known this person who had played the role of my father so well, during my childhood in Pula. I had no doubt that I had loved him as any child loves a father, and when my mother told me that he was gone, I grieved. I sometimes indulged myself with the idea that I had never really got over losing my father, and there was some raw form of comfort in thinking that I never would. My childhood memories of him had faded away, and washed like water over watercolour paint, blurring the colours over the years. The most telling thing for me was that I could no longer remember his face. It only came back to me through photographs, but its direct image had been scraped out of my memory. I recalled him now through several black and white photographs from various birthday parties, or his driver’s license picture, which featured a boyish, tender face, at a time when he barely resembled himself. Back then he didn’t have the bushy brows that met in the middle when something confused him. I couldn’t recall his dark eyes that strained to see the TV without glasses. I didn’t see his full, mobile lips, which pushed and prodded pieces of food while my mother incoherently regurgitated details of her day’s work, every lunchtime. I couldn’t picture how he would pinch himself with impatience at the Arena cinema, waiting for the Partisan film of the week to start, yet I knew he did it every time.
In my memory, I only saw him from afar, a distant humanoid figure appearing on the horizon, like a brazen statue. I saw his elegant officer’s uniform hanging in front of the mirror at home, just before Yugoslav People’s Army Day; saw his body in a bathing suit, lying on a towel that was too short, telling me to come out of the water because my lips were turning blue. I saw his white parade shirt, bought in Trieste...
I knew that, on the road I was taking, I could reach Vukovar, and also Višnjići, in
