Dan Fesperman - Lie in the Dark

“Which is why, in telling you of the transfer file, I must first go back to the spring of 1945, at the wretched end of yet another wretched war. So we’ll start there, if you don’t mind.”

“Please do.”

Glavas eased forward on the couch, shifting the rough blanket about his shoulders, collecting himself again with another deep breath.

“It was a hell of a lot worse then than now, I will tell you,” he said. “And that’s not just the generational carping of an old man determined to prove he’s had it worse than anybody nowadays. I sit here now under a pile of blankets with no heat and maybe two hours a week of running water, and that’s on a good day. And by God this is luxury compared to that war. The food now is the same every day, but it is food. The walls now are full of shrapnel, but they are still standing. The enemy shoots at us but he at least stays in the hills. This is a bad game of roulette. That war was one massacre after the other. You want to learn about some real ethnic cleansing? Then go back and read about that meat grinder. Or better still, ask your father, or your uncle.”

Vlado didn’t need to ask anyone. He’d heard most such tales in all their gory detail. And while the more glorious tales of heroism tended to be exaggerated-just ask Damir’s father, for example-the stories of hardship and horror had if anything been toned down. Croats killing Serbs, Serbs killing Muslims, Communists killing royalists, the Germans killing practically everybody-and for the survivors the old anger and mistrust had never been far from the surface. From their memories had come the embers that now burned so brightly across Bosnia, as if the fire had only gone underground for half a century.

“My village was gone, burned to a cinder, a small place in the east, barely a dozen houses altogether,” Glavas said. “Wiped out by the Nazis and those nasty Croats in the Ustasha. I’d been a university boy before everything shut down, an art history major with dreams of someday running a state museum, and I’d just won a curator’s internship in Belgrade when the fighting started. All that was over then, of course. And the village was gone in about the time it took you to buy your groceries. By the time the soldiers came I’d made it out of town on a farm wagon with four other boys my age. Then we ran from a roadblock and through the woods until I reached here. None of the other three made it. Shot while we ran, though I never once looked back. Just felt them falling around me, going down as if they’d suddenly gotten tired and given up on the spot. Amazing I wasn’t hit. For three days I lived on snow and a single heel of bread, and I spent the rest of the war holed up in cellars and back rooms, hiding from what passed for the authorities then.”

Glavas went on for another twenty minutes about those times, his voice rising with a passion as if the events had occurred just last week. Vlado sought a way to steer him back toward the subject at hand, but it was obvious Glavas was going to have his say. A man like this didn’t get much in the way of visitors anymore. So let him talk it out, Vlado figured, glancing at his watch. By the sound of it, Glavas was finally nearing the end of World War II.

“By the time you survived something like that you not only had the fear of God worn out of you, you also had the fire of revenge burning in your belly, and you were ready to take this revenge any way you could get it. My chance would come through art. A few months after the war ended I was invited to join the delegation going to Germany to recover the items that had been plundered from the new nation of Yugoslavia during the war. I say delegation, which makes it sound grand, but it was actually just me and one other fellow. If so many museum people hadn’t been killed or taken off to the camps, I never would have been chosen. But as it was I was an easy choice for them. My training made me stand out, and when I heard they were looking for help I jumped at the chance. I could extract revenge canvas by canvas. And let me tell you, from the very beginning I had no intention of sticking by anyone’s rules. I was full of zeal, ready to claim anything and everything that wasn’t tied down, particularly if I suspected it was a piece that really belonged in Germany. My chief worry was how I’d be able to keep my boss from finding out-Pencic, the museum director from Belgrade. And then, of course, I’d also have to deal with the Allied officers in charge of the operation. The Monuments officers, they called themselves. Americans, mostly.

“But Pencic was way ahead of me. When we met to go over our battle plan before leaving he showed me all the documentation we’d be taking. Every available certification and stamp and insurance form for every item we knew to be missing, several thousand items in all. Amazing what all had been taken, the complete thoroughness of it.

“Then he pulled out a stack of blank certification forms. Blanks! And what are these for, I asked, as if I hadn’t already guessed. For whatever we might also be able to bring back, he said, and I knew that I had found my master. These were the tools of careful larceny before us, and he had not been content with planning on taking a dozen, or twenty, or even fifty. If he was going to risk fraud and deception, then he was by God going to do it full throttle. He had two hundred blank forms. Two hundred! And we would use these wisely, not for just any claimable piece of trash, and nothing for our own personal gain. We were on a mission for God and country.”

Glavas paused, sighing.

“Have you got another Drina-this one’s running low. Thank you.” Outside a screaming whistle was followed by a huge explosion. The building seemed to tremble. Glavas glanced toward his plastic-covered windows.

“Ah, the skies are clearing. A noisy afternoon ahead, most likely. So, then. We left for Berlin on a Monday in June. In a captured old Fokker, repainted white. My first time in an airplane, and I still remember the marvel of it. We left from here, and it occurred to me how beautiful the city was. Before, even when visiting here as a wide-eyed country boy, I’d always seen Sarajevo as some scar upon the mountains, a great gray gash in the green. But from up there it became a living thing, a long graceful body settled into the valley for a nap after a terrible night without sleep, smoke curling up out of the chimneys. And the river-it was early morning when we took off, in a brilliant sun-the river was like some lovely gold necklace on a very elegant woman. A wonderful moment. Then, up, over the mountains, and onward to Germany “Berlin. My God, Berlin. If you want to see the wastage of war you should have seen Berlin. Even after all that had happened I pitied those people. Whole blocks turned to bricks, except now it was becoming neat. Everywhere were these Prussian stacks of bricks, and everywhere these stout women in kerchiefs were making more of them, stacking them higher and higher, passing them in long assembly lines, some of the women actually quite young and pretty, wispy from the lack of food, widowed ghosts roaming the rubble. And if you think women here will do anything for cigarettes, well … But what I remember most is the stench. Heaven help you if you ended up downwind of the grand River Spree. It was a giant sewer, and still full of bodies, swollen like dead rats, black and bloated, the size of small whales.”

He paused for a drag on the cigarette. Already Vlado could see why this might take a while, so he nudged Glavas back toward the topic at hand. “And then you began your search. For the looted art.”

“Yes. We settled in and checked in with the authorities. First with the Russians, over in their occupation zone, which was mostly fruitless. It was all we could do to find anything at all in their zone without them carting it off for Moscow. They were looting the looters, and certainly the way we were thinking we didn’t blame them a bit, especially after what they’d gone through. Although by the end of the first week I was as disgusted with them as with the Germans. Strutting around in their boots and greatcoats, rolling their tanks over the rubble, checking everyone’s papers. Making silly arrests. And helping themselves to half the female population over the age of ten. They really were beasts, although their art people were top notch. Knew exactly what to take first.”