John Berger - G.

Nuša’s spoken Italian improved but she left the family and found a job in a warehouse. Bojan went to the School of Commerce in Ljubljana where he earned his living as a waiter by day and studied at night. When he received his diploma he went to work in Vienna for a firm which imported non-ferrous metals. Ever since attending the School of Commerce in Ljubljana he had been a member of a small, clandestine group of students and secondary-school pupils associated with the Young Bosnians.

Two months earlier, in March 1915, he had returned to work in the Trieste branch of the firm.

The sight of his sister sitting on a kind of throne beside an unknown, conspicuously well-dressed man, shocked Bojan. He had not expected anybody else to be there. He had pictured his sister walking slowly by herself among the fruit trees. In addition, this man was morally unprepossessing. He might be an Austrian (Bojan was too far away to hear what kind of Italian he spoke). He was obviously rich. He had a cunning, disenchanted face. Seated together on the carved stone seat raised up on a dais, overhung by a fig tree, the two of them looked like characters in an illustrated story of some cheap Viennese magazine. Their difference of class, compounded with the fact that they were man and woman, precluded any innocent interpretation. The degree to which the man’s clothes were spotless and elegant was an index of his inner corruption; just as his sister’s skirt and blouse and the scarf tied round her head were signs, despite her own will, of her easy availability. Bojan tried to argue that Nuša might have a good reason for talking with such a man; yet the way the man regarded her was too eloquent to be ignored. The fact that his sister could provoke such looks made him angry. He asked himself how she had lived during the years he was away. She was too large, he thought: she filled her clothes too obviously, it was a form of immodesty. Why was she so large? Why did she continue to grow large long after most girls stop? He could not avoid the suspicion that it was a question of will. In accordance with a precept of the Young Bosnians, Bojan had vowed to abstain from sexual relations and he knew how important it was to develop the will. She did not wish sufficiently strongly to preserve her innocence. Her innocence as a girl, when he taught her to read, had become fixed in his mind as an ideal. Caught between his anger and an onrush of tenderness released by the memory of his sister’s soul, which could not have entirely changed, he ran forward into the detestable, cheap, soulless illustration. He ran lightly on his feet, like a messenger who may have a long distance before him. On reaching the steps he did not mount them, but came to a halt, stood like a soldier and addressed the man in formal Italian: You must forgive us, sir, but I and my sister are already late. Then in Slovene he said: Nuša, please come immediately.

She rose and followed her brother.

The Young Bosnians named themselves after La Giovane Italia , formed by Mazzini in 1831 to fight for an independent republican Italy. The aim of the Young Bosnians was to liberate the Southern Slavs (in what is now Yugoslavia) from the domination of the Hapsburgs. Groups were strongest in Bosnia and Herzogovina — particularly after these two provinces were annexed by Austro-Hungary in 1908; but they also existed in Dalmatia, Croatia, and Slovenia. They were terrorists and their principal political weapon was assassination.

The assassination of a foreign tyrant or his representative served two purposes. It reaffirmed the natural law of justice. It demonstrated that even crimes committed in the name of order and progress would not go forever unavenged: crimes of coercion, exploitation, oppression, false testimony, intimidation, administrative indifference. But above all, the crime of denying a people their identity. The crime of compelling a people to judge themselves by the criteria of their oppressors and so to find themselves inferior, helpless, and wanting. The justice of natural law demanded that the innumerable victims of these crimes in the past be redeemed. The act of political assassination might also rouse the living and make them realize that the power of the Empire was not absolute, that death, for once serving justice and not indifferent to it, could question that power. If the example of the assassin was followed by the mass of his people, they would rise up against their foreign oppressors and throw them out. To do this was no more impossible than killing a tyrant in public in the street.

‘There is no duty more sacred in the world,’ wrote Mazzini, ‘than that of the conspirator who sets out to avenge humanity and to become an apostle of natural law.’

On 2 June 1914 Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Hapsburg throne, was shot dead with his wife, as they drove through Sarajevo in an open limousine, by Gavrilo Princip, a Young Bosnian of nineteen.

Six other Young Bosnians were in the crowd waiting to assassinate the archduke. For different reasons five of them failed to act. But the sixth, Nedeljko Cabrinovič, threw a bomb. It exploded behind the royal car wounding several people in the crowd but leaving the heir presumptive unhurt. Cabrinovič tried to kill himself on the spot by taking poison and jumping into the river. The dose of poison was too weak. Hauled out of the river, he was asked who he was. I am a Serbian hero, he replied.

Earlier the same morning Cabrinovič went to a photographer’s shop and had his portrait taken with a school friend. He ordered six prints of the photograph. They would be ready in an hour. He asked his friend to send the photographs later the same day to addresses which he gave him. At the trial — where there were twenty-five accused — the Judge was perplexed by this story of the photographs.

I thought posterity, explained Cabrinovič, should have a photo of me taken on that day.

One of the photographs was sent to a certain Vuzin Runič in Trieste. Cabrinovič had worked in Trieste in a printer’s shop until October 1913. He had left Trieste saying: You’ll hear of me again. Wait and see what happens when certain people with red stripes down their trousers and helmets with feathers on their heads come to Sarajevo!

Shortly after his return to Trieste, Bojan took this photograph out of his wallet and asked Nuša if she knew who it was of. She shook her head. Then he told her his name. And now, Bojan said, he is dying, dying in chains of cold and damp and starvation. The conditions where he is are so bad that even the gaolers fall ill there. His chains weigh ten kilograms. At night there’s ice on the floor of the cell. Gavrilo is there too. But the prisoners are in solitary confinement day and night. Nedeljko was willing to die. We are all willing to die. Why did they not execute him? Because our imperial and royal majesty prefers his prisoners to die slowly in agony.

Nuša saw a photograph of two young men in dark suits and stiff white collars. They wore the same kind of clothes as her brother. Nedeljko was on the left. He had black hair, dark eyebrows and a moustache. His friend beside him had placed his hand on his shoulder.

When the photograph was taken, said Bojan, be didn’t expect to live for more than three hours. Everything was badly arranged — including the poison.

Sometimes Nuša was disturbed by what her brother said; he spoke too quickly of too many things.

The expression on Cabrinovič’s face is grave but calm. It is his friend that looks determined; for Cabrinovič there is nothing more to decide (or so he believes at the moment the photograph is being taken, the moment which he intends to represent his whole life). He has chosen his destiny. And if, in the next hour, he should hesitate, his portrait will be there, already developed, printed in black and white, forbidding him to relent.