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for abandoning my comrades, guilty for my share of the destroying, the killing, I dreamed for hours and hours on end without really sleeping, I dreamed of funeral ceremonies where Andrija blamed me for having abandoned his body I walked for kilometers in the mountains to find him to put him on a tall wooden pyre and burn him, his face was outlined then in the smoke that rose to the heart of the spring sky—all that came back to me all of a sudden as I saw Blaškić in his box at The Hague among the lawyers the interpreters the prosecutors the witnesses the journalists the onlookers the soldiers of the UNPROFOR who analyzed the maps for the judges commented on the possible provenance of bombs according to the size of the crater determined the range of the weaponry based on the caliber which gave rise to so many counter-arguments all of it translated into three languages recorded automatically transcribed 4,000 kilometers away from the Vitez Hotel and from the Lašva with the blue-tinted water, everything had to be explained from the beginning, historians testified to the past of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia since the Neolithic era by showing how Yugoslavia was formed, then geographers commented on demographic statistics, censuses, land surveys, political scientists explained the different political forces present in the 1990s, it was magnificent, so much knowledge wisdom information at the service of justice, “international observers” took on full meaning then, they testified to the horrors of slaughter with a real professionalism, the debates were courteous, for a time I would have volunteered as a witness, but neither the prosecution nor the defense had any interest in having me appear and my new occupations imposed discretion on me, for a long time I thought about what I would have said if they had questioned me, how would I have explained the inexplicable, probably I too would have had to go back to the dawn of time, to the frightened prehistoric man painting in his cave to reassure himself, to Paris making off with Helen, to the death of Hector, the sack of Troy, to Aeneas reaching the shores of Latium, to the Romans carrying off the Sabine women, to the military situation of the Croats of central Bosnia in early 1993, to the weapons factory in Vitez, to the trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo that are the father and mother of the one in The Hague—Blaškić in his box is one single man and has to answer for all our crimes, according to that principle of individual criminal responsibility which links him to history, he’s a body in a chair wearing a headset, he is on trial in place of all those who held a weapon, he will be condemned to forty-five years in prison then to nine years on appeal and today he must be taking advantage of his early release near Kiseljak, not very far from the villages where the burnt bodies of civilians for whose deaths he was blamed lie, those people who are still waiting for a justice that will never come, in the very Dutch Hague there was such a procession of ex-Yugoslavs that it was a headache to arrange their court appearances without all those people meeting each other in the planes, trains, or cars before finding themselves all together in the luxurious cells of the detention building or the antechambers of the hearing rooms, the vanished country was reconstituted one last time by international law, Serbs Croats Bosnians of all kinds Montenegrins fell into each others’ arms or pretended they didn’t recognize each other, they were there to speak about their war to air their dirty linen in front of judges who of course could be neither Serbs nor Croats nor Bosnians nor Montenegrins nor even Macedonian or Albanian or Slovenian, only their defenders were, and this international community that judged them indirectly watched with a remote air all these barbarians with unpronounceable names, hundreds of thousands of pages of trials became a distressing ocean, a tidal wave of justice in which the victims who had come to testify floundered, the displaced the tortured the beaten the raped the plundered the widows usually cried behind closed doors in a room with lowered blinds and their stories didn’t leave the glassed-in cages of the interpreters, consigned to court reports in English or French for posterity, without the judges hearing the accents the dialects the expressions of their voices that traced a real map of pain—they all took the plane home afterwards with a taste of bile in their mouths for having returned seen their enemies their torturers or their memories without their hatred or their love or their loyalty or their suffering serving any purpose at all, characters in the Great Trial organized by international lawyers immersed in precedents and the jurisprudence of horror, charged with putting some order into the law of murder, with knowing at what instant a bullet in the head was legitimate de jure and at what instant it constituted a grave breach of the law and customs of war, referring endlessly to the rulings of Nuremberg, Jerusalem, Rwanda, historical precedents recognized as such by the status of the court, retracing customary international law in the interpretation of the Geneva conventions, peppering their verdicts with flowery, apposite Latin expressions, devoted, yes, all these people were very devoted to distinguishing the different modes of crimes against humanity before saying gentlemen I think we’ll adjourn for lunch or because of repairs in Hall 2 the Chamber requests the parties to postpone the hearings planned for this afternoon until a later date, let’s say in two months, the time of the law is like that of the Church, you work for eternity, at least all this palaver offered a distraction to the defendants, they listened for months on end to the story of their country and their war, interested as you’d be by a good film, or maybe bored by its repetitiveness, I stayed for three days in The Hague I wondered if someone was going to recognize me and shout police! police! when they saw me but no—my name must have appeared somewhere in an investigative report though, buried there with the others, lying black on white among the dead and the survivors of our brigade, maybe with the list of our civilian victims on the facing page, intentional or accidental, as accidental as a mortar shell can be when it buries a family under rubble, I feel as if I’m floating all of a sudden, the train is passing over a series of switches and is dancing, the lights of the countryside pirouette around us in a random ballet that makes me nauseous or is it the memory of the war, I took advantage of the trip to The Hague to go as far as Groningen, to see the multicolored houses lining the canal that surrounds the city center, the main square had a magnificent tower, the sea and the islands quite close, Germany a few kilometers to the east, an average quiet city with a glorious past, I strolled at random in the streets downtown before finding a very handsome hotel near the canal in a seventeenth-century building with the evocative name Auberge du Corps de Garde, Inn of the Guard Corps, just like that, in French, which led me to think that they spoke that language, the first thing I did after settling in was to rush to the phone book, there were two Gerbens, initials A.J. and T., one living a little outside the city and the other near the venerable university south of the center, according to the map, if Harmen Gerbens the old Cairo-dweller had had two daughters they had probably gotten married and taken the name of their husbands, the receptionist at the Guard Corps was nice but suspicious, what did I want with these Gerbens, I asked her if the name was common she replied no, not really, I decided to explain the story to her, in Cairo I had met an old man from Groningen named Harmen Gerbens who had asked me to say hello to his family for him, a white lie the old drunkard would rather have spat on the ground, she suddenly looked moved and decided to help me, to pick up the telephone and ask for me if the first Gerbens in the phone book knew a Harmen residing in Cairo, I couldn’t understand a scrap of the conversation but the young woman was smiling at me and nodding her head as she spoke, before putting her hand over the receiver and explaining to me—it was his nephew, he in fact did have an uncle named Harmen who left for Egypt after the war, she was all excited about it, ask him if I can meet him, please, she took up the telephone again and her Dutch conversation—this first Gerbens in the phone book was a doctor and received visits in the afternoon, I made an appointment for four o’clock and went to eat herring in a passable restaurant by the water, fortunately the weather was nice, a pale autumn light and a sea breeze perfumed the landscape, what questions was I going to ask this doctor, what attracted me in Harmen’s story, in the shadiness I thought I discerned in it, my head full of war memories rekindled by The Hague, pursued by the impenetrable face of Blaškić on the accused bench, heroes, fighters, the dead, feats of arms, it’s time I kill as I walk along the canal, a few moored canalboats remind me that from here you can reach the Rhine then the Rhone leading to the Mediterranean and thus reach Alexandria, the Venetian tradesmen brought back furs from Holland that they exchanged for spices and brocades, according to my illustrated guide Groningen was a prosperous trading city where they imported tobacco from the colonies, it’s almost time, the pleasant receptionist showed me how to reach the nephew’s office: as four o’clock strikes I’m facing a man in his fifties in a white lab coat, he knows English, he is polite, somewhat surprised to hear about a relative he’s never met, I thought he was dead, he says, if I remember right my aunt said he was dead, she died a few years
