Infidelities Page 4

  Princip was proud and belligerent. His nose was broader than before from the beatings he got in the streets upon his arrest, but he spoke clearly, in a strong and sonorous manner. I wondered where he had strength for such a voice. I was much bigger than him, yet my voice was weak, it could never ring.

  What hurt me most was that I heard that a kind man, with a large family, who had let us sleep in his house on our way to Sarajevo, was executed. I did not let them have his name, maybe Princip did. What bad luck for him. He did not even know what we were up to, and now his children would have to grow up without him. The prosecutor used that as an example of how we should not get off easy if a man like that had to die for what we did. For that I was truly sorry.

  And my sorrow deepened when the prosecutor said, Do you know what the archduke’s last words were? “Sophie, dear, please do not die. Our children need you.”

  Can you imagine that? You orphaned three children! You certainly deserve to die, underage or not.

  I had not known that the archduke had children. And that as he was dying he thought of his children, as no doubt did his wife, that did something to me. I was totally unprepared for this, and for my reaction. Maybe it was the last blow in the accumulation of sorrowful news. I am sure my father wouldn’t bother to think of me. Those children had been lucky to have parents who loved them, but they were also unlucky to have us.

  The prosecutor showed us the pictures of the lovely children. One boy had thick black hair, wavy, shiny, it was parted just like mine, from right to left, with a thick wave; the older one had short hair and a serious look, the same angle of brows as mine, almost the same mirthless expression as mine, as though he had been posing for history as well. If you took the two boys and mixed up their features, you would get me in my boyhood; I felt a strong kinship with them. How could they look like me? How did they get stuck in the royal family? The girl, with a white bow on her pate, had wonderfully rich hair draped over her shoulder into her lap, and she, too, looked serious and beautiful. They all looked at the camera, but the mother, from whom they must have inherited the beauty, looked at them, mostly at her daughter, in a posture of pride and worry, as though she had a premonition. Nobody was smiling here. And why not? Shouldn’t children be happy? Maybe they had never been happy. I felt sorry for them that they had such a father. Maybe that’s why they could not laugh although they were just children. Maybe they would grow up to be monsters, maybe not. They were pretty and soulful, that must have been their Slavic side.

  Sophie, dear, please do not die. That line kept sounding in my head, and I could not stop it. It was driving me insane. I could not listen to the interrogation after this, and I jumped out of my seat and shouted, We are sorry for what we did, we are sorry that we orphaned children…. I know I gave a whole speech, but now I don’t remember what exactly I said, except that everybody listened to me for a while. Damn it, I was a good speaker.

  Speak for yourself, Princip cut in. I am not sorry. They have orphaned many of our children, why aren’t you sorry for them! Don’t ever talk in my name!

  I am deeply sorry. I am surprised he isn’t. I…I—At that point my voice choked from tears that went backward, not down my nose, but into my throat. Only if I’d had that salty liquid when I had tried to swallow cyanide—maybe I wouldn’t have had to face what I did to these children, wouldn’t have had to quarrel in court with Gavro.

  He just wants mercy, Gavrilo said.

  You stay quiet, I said. What do you know about me? What do you know about people? You know only books and ideas. No, I don’t want mercy. In fact, I want punishment. All I want before I die is that the children forgive me. But how can they forgive me? No, it’s better that they not forgive me.

  Sophie, dear, our children need you. Please don’t die. I imagined the children next to the casket, trying to reach for their mama, to kiss her; they couldn’t, maybe they would be struck by fear of death, maybe disgust, maybe they would not be allowed. That must have already happened. What did they do? Did they break down and cry out, in shrill screams, the world breaking down in shafts of cathedral light, through stained glass, full of vermilion, lit up by their tears? Or did they stay quiet, stunned, with the grief too deep for tears, their voices subdued, muffled; perhaps they could not utter a word; maybe they could not breathe. Maybe they felt pretty much the way I did, when the police showered me with blows to the head and groin? Maybe they lost control, wetted, from terror and grief, lost the feel of their bodies?

  I could not control my emotions. I wept right there in the court for the family I had attempted to kill. I did not care what people thought. And the fact that I was the only one in our group weeping made me think I should weep even more, for the hard-heartedness of my comrades.

  I would not have minded just wasting their father. In fact, I think that would have been a favor to them. I had hated my father, and he’d hated me; he beat me daily. And when I grew bigger and stronger, and he couldn’t easily subdue me, he had me jailed once when I had a quarrel with our maid; he’d come home with a gendarme. I’d asked her to undress for me, and she refused, and shouted at me to get out. I hadn’t even touched her. I don’t know why that made such a big impression on my father. Maybe he’d been interested in the maid, and he thought we competed. I would not be surprised if she’d been his mistress; the bastard had no moral backbone. He’d sent me to apprentice as a blacksmith because he did not like my grades at school. And there, the master blacksmith, just for fun, put a hot iron to the back of my neck. I still have a scar there. The back of my neck is pretty hairy, but nothing grows in the diagonal of the burn. That’s all because of my father, I am sure; I don’t think anybody liked him. He ran a tavern, and since he couldn’t pass up on opportunities to make money, he’d become a police informant. What better job for an informant than to ply guests with brandy? He was a regular spy for the Austrians, and he adored the Hapsburgs. I even played a joke with him; I had got an Austrian flag to put on our house on the day of the assassination, so people would not suspect me for being an assassin. Anyway, if for nothing else, I wanted to kill the emperor to get at the father. I don’t know, I just couldn’t bring myself to kill my father, that would have been too personal, but killing the emperor, well, the archduke was to be emperor, that would have been perfect. Without my father’s odious influence on me, I would not have become a member of such a subversive group. I was glad about dead fathers. However, that their mother was killed, that was terrible. Maybe it was even terrible that their father was killed; maybe they liked him, maybe he was even a good father. I am not the one to judge that, the children only could.

  I could no longer listen to the trial. I was imagining three children, spoiled, true, but children, and children are so pure that even if they are spoiled they can’t be held responsible for that, they are still innocent…. So these children would not see their parents again, they would not sit on their laps and listen to bedtime stories, Red Riding Hood and Robin Hood…. Well, maybe they would not have heard the Robin Hood story. Probably not. They will hear the story of the assassination, however. They will hate Princip and me. They could never forgive us.

  IF THEY LIKED to drink hot chocolate with their mother, they will not drink it again.

  The judge surprised me by ordering us to be imprisoned rather than executed because we were not twenty years old yet. Several people who were over twenty, even though they had hardly anything to do with the conspiracy, were to be executed, hanged, and several already were, in our yard, and in Trebinje, my native town. In a way, I would have preferred summary execution. Now I would spend years in prison, I would not even be allowed to read the newspapers. If I could follow the course of the war in prison, that would be a different matter, I would not have minded it that much, especially if the Allies won. Then whatever we had aspired for, the collapse of the Hapsburgs, the emancipation of the south Slavs, would happen; then it would have been worth it. We were transferred to the prison in Theresienstadt, three of us: Princip,
Grabez, and I. That was a miserable journey in the cold train; we were chained to our benches, our bones were rattled and, after all the clanking, felt broken.

  In Theresienstadt, the bed was hard, flea-infested, cold. There was no heat at night, and I was chained in shackles and chains weighing over ten kilograms, which conducted all the heat out of my body. The water in the jug sometimes froze overnight. If it hadn’t, I would not have known whether it was all my imagination that it was cold, but there was no doubt, it was. It took me several months to realize that if I put the ball, which I could barely lift, under covers, together with the chains, that I would lose less heat and wouldn’t be so cold. By then, I had got the chronic chills, so it did not matter anymore that I had figured out a way of protecting my heat.

  I got TB somehow. I found out that Gavrilo also had it. Maybe we all had TB even before the assassination. I know Princip said he probably had it, and Grabez thought he might have it, and maybe that is why they were willing to die. I coughed every winter, but it did not mean I had TB. I believed I did not have it. How could we all have TB? I think the Austrians gave it to us, intentionally; they gave us contaminated food and stale water, I am sure, in prison. They were not allowed to execute us by law, but they would do it stealthily by implanting disease in us. I am quite certain that they did it. Once they found out we had TB, they did nothing to save us. They could have sent us to the mountains. They could have heated our rooms. They did not. That was their way of killing us.

  I haven’t had much will to live lately. The walls in the prison are so thick I cannot tap codes to Gavro and Grabez. I am terribly lonely, so lonely that I even accept visits by a priest. The priest can be a bore; he wants me to confess, to pray with him, and he doesn’t know any jokes. I told him one, and he did not laugh. It was the only decent joke I knew. Two Montenegrins stand on the pier and notice a boat sinking and hear men screaming for help.

  One Montenegrin says, Look at that, men are drowning, and we are just standing.

  You are right about that, says the other. Let’s sit down.

  Instead of laughing at the joke, the priest wanted to pray with me. And so we prayed. I meant it all, and still do. I pray with him for forgiveness for what I have done to the three children.

  And just today, it seems the prayers are working. The priest has brought me a letter in a beautiful handwriting. Dear Nedjeljko: We forgive you. We feel sorry for you that you have to suffer so much. We know you were misguided. May God forgive you, too, and bless you. We know you are a good soul, you have repented.

  THAT WAS A LETTER from the archduke’s children! I did not know how to react; I was purely amazed. I kept rereading the letter, admiring every curl and slant in the calligraphically drawn letters. I had always loved letters—it was no accident that I’d become a typesetter—but none were quite as beautiful as these. I smell the page—it smells of lilac and ink. I am swooning as I inhale. Maybe I would be swooning, anyway. I am not even aware when the priest left. Maybe he has not left. Maybe he is here to bury me. Maybe I am dying. Is that a real letter? I ask. Suddenly I doubt. I need to see the envelope. If it doesn’t have a stamp, how will I know where it came from? Maybe the priest wrote it. Maybe that was one little benevolent lie he came up with out of compassion for me, but I doubt it; he isn’t capable of such beauty, such handwriting. I feel around the table with my fingers, and pick up a fine beige envelope. There is a blue seal, which says, Wien. So it’s true, it’s a letter from them, the beautiful souls whom I have injured. Suddenly, I notice Franz Ferdinand is gazing from the envelope, from under the green feathers of his hat, with his cold, hateful concentration, looking straight into me, just the way he did at the moment I was flinging the grenade at him, in that awful contemptuous manner! I don’t want to look at the image. Is this a ghost? I cover the image with my thumb, and feel the fine wavy ribs of the stamp. No, I won’t let him lurk like this. I am tearing the stamp and his image into small pieces, and I am eating it, relishing the glue and ink in my throat.

  This confession in the form of a letter, apparently written in the authentic trembling hand of Nedjeljko Cabrinovic in his prison cell in Theresienstadt in January 1916, was recently found in the loft of a long-deceased priest, N.M., before his house was to be torn down in order to create expansion space for the world-famous beer brewery in Plzen. For a while, D.M., the CEO of the brewery, kept the letter and reread it to various dinner guests as a prize, but when he read it to Sacerby, the Bosnian minister demanded that the letter be given over to the Bosnian government in Sarajevo for the archives. Whether the letter had been destroyed in the Sarajevo siege, or whether it still exists in some private hands, or in public hands, remains a mystery, and the confession above is a reconstruction, done by a dozen brewery guests, as the closest possible approximation to the original.

  The writing ceases here, at the bottom of the mouse-chipped page of the vanished original. The story, or rather, the history, does not end here, nor for that matter with the addendum, which follows:

  The Sarajevo police department demanded from the Theresienstadt military prison that Cabrinovic’s corpse be beheaded and his skull sent to Sarajevo, where it would be preserved and kept in a museum, in a jar, for future generations. After a lengthy exchange of letters among various departments of the Austrian government, it was decided that Cabrinovic’s corpse should be left intact. Many people schemed to get his and Princip’s bones; it would not have been the first case of a missing skull. The skull of Bogdan Zerajic, who had attempted to assassinate a provincial governor in Bosnia in 1910, was displayed in the Sarajevo Criminal Museum. The chief police inspector in Sarajevo occasionally used Zerajic’s skull as an inkpot to threaten those he interrogated, saying that unless they confessed everything, their skulls would serve the same letter-writing purpose. In 1919 Zerajic’s skull was put back together with his body, but in 1920 when the body was exhumed to be placed in a common grave, the skull was missing again, and thus his headless body was placed with those of Princip (whose corpse was whole, except for a missing arm, which TB of the bones had destroyed), Grabez, and several other conspirators, including Cabrinovic, in the common grave.

  Night Guests

  A loud knocking. I stumbled out of bed and to the door. I lived in Wayne National Forest in Ohio, near a little-traveled road, with the nearest neighbor half a mile away, and I should have had the policy of not answering the door or of having a gun handy. But that was the risk I usually took, to answer the door, with no bad consequences except a lot of boring conversations with the Mormons, who, of course, visited only during the day, in the most beautiful, heavenly weather.

  But now it was terribly dark out there. The silhouettes in the door, I thought, looked familiar; it was probably Mimi with John, my former house sitters, who might have needed something. My dog didn’t bark but sniffed their crotches; maybe they had been somewhere interesting. They were giggling. I opened the door, and a splash of cold air and the images of complete strangers, two women, one tall and long-haired and the other chubby and short-haired, woke me up enough to realize that I was not entirely decent.

  I was not entirely indecent either, so I didn’t apologize or shut the door as I stood in my cotton underwear. At least it was American underwear, which was pretty big, certainly not meant to please the eye, but to cover the skin. I had just got back from Italy, from a research trip, where I could buy only tiny Italian underwear at a shopping mall, or thongs, suitable for carnivals and gigolos. I used to wear that kind of underwear as a child, growing up in Italy, but as a grad student in the States I first made do with what I could find at the shops, and then I got used to it, actually liked it. Now I was still aware of my underwear, as the tall woman spoke, in a beseeching tone.

  Could you help us? We just drove off the road into the ditch!

  She straightened with her hand her curly, fluffy, light brown hair. She had a thin straight nose, full lips, and a shine in her eyes. She looked happy even though she was clearly in trouble.
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  I wish I had a truck to pull you out, I said.

  Could we come in and use your phone?

  No problem, I said, and led them into the living room, with a large red Persian carpet that felt good under my bare feet.

  I went to the bedroom and pulled on my jeans and came out.

  The tall woman dialed three times, while I put a log in the stove and stirred the embers, admiring how they still had plenty of body and glow. The flames licked the log almost instantly, and with satisfaction, I closed the door.

  I can’t get through, the tall one said.

  Try again later. How would you like a cup of coffee?

  I’d love it. By the way, my name is Marietta.

  I ground some Italian espresso beans (Illy), and dripped a strong brew, which with a bit of Swiss chocolate wafted an intoxicating wakeful aroma of delight and pleasure, to which hardly any caffeine addict could remain indifferent.

  How did you get into the ditch? I asked.

  We was drivin’ around, and out of nowhere, this fuckin’ big deer jumps on the road. I swerved and ended up in your ditch.

  That seems a good choice, better ditch than deer—safer, too, I think. How’s your car?

  Just a little banged. The right headlight’s smashed is all.

  I didn’t tell them that just the other day I had hit a big deer with majestic antlers. I was rubbing my eyes, after a long day at the library, and trying to defrost the window, when all of a sudden his majesty leaped into my hazy vision. I braked and swerved to the left since he was already moving to the right. There was a thump. What did I hit? His legs? His hoofs, which may have been in the air after a leap? Whatever it was, the car kept going, and I was sure the deer was alive. I was not going to try to hunt him. As it was deer-hunting season, someone would get him no matter what, and should I feel sorry for him now, now that I lost all the light in the car? I couldn’t see the odometer, and I drove shedding such dim light onto the asphalt as though using lanterns. When I got home, I saw that the hood was busted. It didn’t seem a big deal, but the man in the cheap body shop said it would be three hundred bucks. I realize, buck was an unintended pun, at the expense of the poor buck on the road. Since it was an old Sentra, I could get the job done more cheaply if I found the headlights with the assembly trinkets in a junkyard, but all the junkyards I visited along the way were out of the parts.