down, I felt the accumulated tension in me clear like a fog. I just need to get to the station as soon as possible, just to take a seat in the train, I thought. The taxi driver was a Turk from Konya. He’d been here for four years. He likes it, he’ll stay, of course he’s going to stay, he hasn’t the slightest intention of going anywhere else, or, heaven forbid, going back . . .
A fairy with a tricolor flag emerged from the sea before them, declaring: “Croats! You are few, and yet you want the most beautiful country in the world! I’m here to help. You shall have many enemies and shall wage war many times for this country. This is why your flag is red. Red from the blood you shall spill to defend her. And white is your flag too. So white and pure must your souls remain. Be truthful. Do not hate. Believe in one God!” That’s what the fairy said to our ancestors. And instead of the deep blue sea, she submerged into the blue of the Croatian flag.
(Dinka Juričić, “The Croatian Fairy,” Happy Steps 4: Croatian Language Primer for Fourth Grade, 2011)
1.
This is how our story begins. Apparently it happened sometime in mid-November 2012. But I was after the exact date. I printed off ten newspaper reports, but to no avail. Useless temporal references such as “three days ago,” “two days ago,” “for days now,” “on Friday,” left the reader to do the math. I couldn’t stop myself hammering “When was the brutal rape in Podstrana?” into Google. But only got reports headed “What happened in Podstrana?”
Podstrana is a place in Croatia near Split, on the road to Omiš, one of those sprawling settlements along the coast where begining and end are unclear. The unrendered façades are the defining feature of the many half-finished houses; residents of the sprawl are unperturbed by raw concrete block. Like many other coastal settlements, Podstrana is a joint criminal enterprise of humankind against sea and shore, one that will naturally go unpunished; firstly, because the crime is communal, and secondly, because communal consciousness of it doesn’t exist. Some students had a party in one such house sans façade, drinking three bottles of whisky and a bottle of mead. One of the girls was admitted to Split Hospital at 6:30 P.M., where doctors spent four hours fighting for her life. The papers first reported that the twenty-year-old had been raped with a broken beer bottle, then that it had been a blender, and finally, that she’d been raped by the hand of Roko Šimac, an otherwise model student—as his father told the papers. The doctors said they’d never seen anything like it in their lives; internal organs completely massacred, gaping wounds to the vagina and intestine, wounds that could have only been inflicted by the violence of a human hand. The girl is recovering in Split Hospital, and doesn’t remember anything. Doctors will need to perform several more operations. Roko Šimac is being held for questioning; he can’t remember anything either. The remaining partygoers have been released. Apparently they left Roko and the girl in the living room to make love. Some went into another room to play computer games, others out into the yard. They said they didn’t hear any screaming, and had there been any, they wouldn’t have heard it because the music had been up so loud. Before the party, Roko Šimac had posted a picture on his Facebook profile, of himself and a girl (presumably not the one he raped), his attendant comment: Why sweep her off her feet when a smack will do the trick?
2.
My frantic reaction to the missing date is defensive; a reaction against the madness of the surrounding reality, a helpless attempt to bring it to heel. Soon I am to head south, first for a brief stay in Budapest, then on to Zagreb. As my entry into a different time zone grows imminent, panic has taken hold.
In Zagreb it’s as if all clocks stop. Maybe the problem is with me, imagining things that aren’t there, maybe the geography bears no relation to my sense of temporal numbness. In any case, the more clocks there are, the more our sense of time dissipates. The media fabricates events rapid-fire, according each equal value, after all, news is news: a girl brutalized, a parliamentary session, a corruption scandal, tits and ass—just repeat in a different order: a parliamentary session, tits and ass, a corruption scandal, a girl brutalized. At some point reality itself gets caught in the tumble, as if competing with the media, and we, bowed and battered consumers, sell the media devil our souls at cut rates. He lures and enchants them, like a cat toying with a half-dead mouse. Technological innovations are syringes of temporal adrenalin, fueling the sense that time is surging irreducibly ahead. Once we killed time chin-wagging over coffee, today we kill it texting and tweeting. Gossip is the last form of concern for our fellow man—that’s how one journalistic wit put it. Perhaps it’s our final and only form, which explains our jostling as we wade the oceans of digital gossip. From screens and displays, from smartphones large and small, the human soul flashes a cheesy grin.
3.
In mid-November 2012, the beloved face of Croatian general Ante Gotovina beamed from Croatian TV screens, front pages, and posters. Tens of thousands gathered in Split on November 16 to celebrate his release (along with that of the relatively media-friendless Mladen Markač) from a prison at the Hague war crimes tribunal, his touching down on homeland soil. The same day a hundred thousand gathered in Zagreb’s main square. There were prayers, tears of joy, candles, streamers and firecrackers, singing, hugs and embraces—a spectacular display of collective (male!) national hysteria. The two generals had been exonerated of their roles in a “joint criminal enterprise” to ethnically cleanse some 250,000 Serbs from Croatia during a 1995 offensive code-named Operation Storm. Many Serb houses were burned to the ground (20,000 the best estimate), Serb property ransacked and looted, and around 600 Serb civilians murdered. Pressure from the international community initiated a restitution process that never got off the ground. It was thus that the dream of Franjo Tuđman, “the father of the Croatian nation,” came true. The number of Serbs in Croatian has shrunk from 12 percent before the war to 4.36 percent in 2011. The mass sackings, harassment, expulsions, the extorting of their houses and apartments, the discrimination and terror—all of this and a lot more besides—began before the war itself, and long before their “humane” and “voluntary” resettlement. (No one, of course, will ever acknowledge this, and even if they did, and it turned out to be true, it happened twenty years ago—so who cares.) The columns of Serb refugees, American ambassador Peter Galbraith sitting briefly in solidarity with them on a horse-drawn cart, were captured and broadcast on global television.
The acquittal of the two Croatian generals, particularly that of Ante Gotovina, a figure pregnant with symbolism, closes the file on what Croats call the Homeland War, absolving the homeland of any lingering guilt, declaring it an innocent and brave victim, wiping clean every stain from its defensive war, and returning, for a moment, the shattered honour of a long roll of murderers, looters, arsonists, and thieves. The Hague verdict triggered a long pent-up national orgasm. Like Franjo Tuđman, who was fond of a pigeon or two, Gotovina released birds of peace, appealing to Croats to look to the future, calling to the “self-exiled” Serbs to return, and, in light of his acquittal, again affirming that his testimony to the Hague judges had been beyond reproach: “I live with a sense of satisfaction that my actions were those of an honest and dedicated military officer who gave his all in difficult circumstances.”
4.
Who is this Gotovina fellow? It depends on your sources. Glancing at the Ante Gotovina Foundation’s website, you won’t find much more than a handful of bank accounts soliticing donations. All these years the Foundation has been “fighting for the truth,” meaning Gotovina’s release. His wife, also a member of the Croatian armed forces, heads the Foundation. For the most part, the Croatian Wikipedia entry confines itself to Gotovina’s military role in the Homeland War. Other sites offer more eye-opening biographical details: that at sixteen Gotovina ditched school, and at seventeen made his way to France, where he joined the Foreign Legion. Having trained as a paratrooper, he served his unproblematic duty in problematic African countries. He then
