Philip Kerr - The Lady from Zagreb

“I rather liked him,” I lied.

“He pointed us in the direction of the Ustaše headquarters in the town,” explained Geiger. “And there they told us you were most likely here. In Jasenovac. Making bricks.”

“Forgive me, gentlemen, you’ve come a long way. Would you like some lunch, perhaps? Some beer? Some rakija? Some bread and sausage?”

I was about to decline when Geiger answered. “That would be very kind of you, Colonel Dragan.”

The colonel went off to order his men to bring us something and, presumably, to read his letter. I sat on the sofa again. And when, another twenty minutes later, the food and drink arrived, Geiger fell on it hungrily. I watched him eat with something close to contempt but I said nothing. I didn’t need to. My face must have looked like a letter from Émile Zola.

“Not eating?” asked Geiger. He grinned horribly as he ate.

“Strangely enough I don’t seem to have brought my appetite with me.”

“A soldier learns not to pay much attention to appetite. You eat when there’s food, hungry or not. But as it happens, I am hungry. And nothing gets in the way of me and my grub.” With his mouth full of bread and sausage, he got up to inspect the photographs. “Not even those heads and this little wall of Ustaše heroes. Never seen a man having his head sawn off before. You know, lumberjack-style. I’ve seen some terrible things in this war. Done one or two, as well. But I’ve never seen anything like that.”

He turned and stared out the window.

“Why don’t you ask Colonel Dragan if you can have a demonstration?”

“You know, I just might do that, Gunther. Should be easy enough. I don’t suppose those people who were on the train have anything better to do than provide me with some amusement. After all, I imagine they’re all going to die anyway.”

“You mean there are people in those wagons?”

I went to the window and looked out. As Geiger had said, the goods wagons were now open and several hundred people were climbing down from the train and were being herded toward the river and a barge that was already coming to ferry them to their most likely fate.

“Serbs?” I said.

“Probably. Like I said, all the Jews in this part of the world are dead. But there are still plenty of Serbs left to kill.”

From his tone it was hard to determine if Geiger approved of what was happening at Jasenovac or not.

I picked up the bottle of rakija the Ustaše guard had brought and helped myself to a brimful glass. It wasn’t nearly as strong as the stuff in Geiger’s hip flask but that hardly mattered.

“The sooner we’re away from this godforsaken place, the better,” I said.

“I tend to agree with you, Gunther. Although I rather think God might disagree. It’s not God who forsakes us but man who forsakes God. His presence would be more obvious here, of course, if instead of a high wall to imprison and then torture human beings, they’d built a great cathedral. As a celebration of God’s glory and the dignity of man. Just as other men like these men — perhaps their great-great-grandfathers — created a fine cathedral from bricks in Zagreb. On this occasion, however, they built this place to mark where and what man has been. To testify to what we all have within us — that capacity for death and destruction which all men possess. You see, for every Sistine Chapel there are a hundred places like this one, Gunther. And let me ask you this: Truly, is one any less valid as an expression of human endeavor than the other? No, of course not. Personally, I think God’s never far away, even from this shameful horror. Perhaps, ultimately, that’s what makes horror truly horrible. The knowledge that God sees it all, and does nothing.”

A couple of days later, with Colonel Dragan’s letter to his daughter, Dalia, in my tunic pocket, and Geiger’s cynical words still ringing in my ears, I was back at the Esplanade in Zagreb and, with nothing better to do with myself until I could fly gratefully back to Berlin, I became a German tourist. I might just as easily have stayed in my room at the Esplanade and drunk myself into oblivion with the flask of rakija I had brought back with me. It’s what I felt like doing. I would have done it, too, except for the fear that once I’d started to drink like that I would never stop. Among so many others who were intoxicated with cruelty, who would have noticed one man intoxicated with drink? So, I begged the loan of a map from the concierge and went to explore the city.

In Zagreb it seemed there were more Roman Catholic churches squeezed into one small space than in the Vatican telephone directory. One of these, St. Mark’s, had a fairy-story roof that was seemingly made of thousands of Haribo candies. On the façade of every other building were Atlantes, as if the place were weighed down with its own history. It was. Between them, the Habsburgs and the Roman Catholic Church had crushed all the tomorrows out of this place so that all that remained was the past and, for most people, a very uncertain future. It was the kind of place you expected to find a Dr. Frankenstein listed in the telephone book, although the last time the scrofulous citizenry had rioted it wasn’t to burn some mad scientist’s castle but the shops and homes of innocent Serbs. Most of the swivel-eyed locals still looked as if they kept a burning torch and a pitchfork behind the kitchen door. I walked along uneven cobbled streets lined with mustard-colored houses, up and down vertiginous wooden stairways and past steep garden terraces with urban vineyards, through open squares the size of Russian steppes with public buildings, many of these a forgotten shade of yellow, like old icing sugar. Approaching the old city gate, I heard a low, human sound, and when I turned the corner I found myself in a vaulted archway where a hundred or so hawk-faced women and potbellied unshaven men stood mumbling their adoration of a shrine to the Virgin Mary, which occupied a place behind a baroque iron fence. But to me it looked and sounded like a satanic mass. Later on I saw a gang of loud young men approaching. It gave me pause for thought when I saw they were all dressed in black. I thought they were Ustaše thugs until I saw their collars and realized they were all priests; and then I asked myself, “What’s the difference?” After what I had seen at Jasenovac, Catholicism didn’t seem like a faith so much as a kind of curse. Fascism and Nazism were bad enough but this more ancient cult seemed almost as wicked.

I walked along to the city’s cathedral and found other German soldiers already there seeking respite against the heat of the day, or perhaps, like me, they were looking for something spiritual. As he came in through the door, one soldier crossed himself reverently and genuflected in the direction of the altar. A pinch-faced nun told him sternly to roll down his shirtsleeves out of respect for God, and meekly he obeyed, as if God actually cared about such observance in a country where, less than a hundred kilometers away, his priests were butchering women and children. Having delivered her rebuke, the nun took herself off into a chapel that was a little Gethsemane of twinkling candles and set about cleaning Christ on the cross with a long feather duster. He didn’t bat an eyelid. I expect it made a welcome change from a Roman spear in his side. I wondered what either one of them — Christ, or the nun — would have made of what I’d seen at Jasenovac. For all their pagan cruelty, I doubt the Romans could have devised anything more bloodthirsty than the scenes I’d seen in that swamp. Then again, maybe the Ustaše belonged in a much older tradition of persecution than I had imagined.

Before we’d left the malarial insanity of Jasenovac, Colonel Dragan had proudly shown me his special glove — more of a leather mitt, really, and properly used for cutting wheat sheaves — with a razor-sharp, curving blade sewn onto the underside so that he might cut throats with greater speed and efficiency. With this Srbosjek — his Serb cutter — the unspeakable colonel had boasted to us of having cut more than thirteen hundred Serbian throats in a single day.