The Little Red Chairs (8 page)

‘I’m arresting you,’ the voice says and it is like a thunderclap.
I’m arresting you
. He balances himself against one of the tree trunks and at his most persuasive, like a gentle father talking to an errant child, he remonstrates, saying if he were the type of
person intent on harm he would hardly take fifteen children out in broad daylight. He would take one in his motor car and that under cover of darkness.

‘Dragan,’ the guard repeats, asking if that was an unusual name and is told that there are plenty of Dragans, scattered all over the Balkans, Transylvania and Ukraine.

‘Is it related to Dracula?’ he is asked.

‘No … but that’s an interesting variation,’ and then, with a brazen recklessness, he says, ‘I took the name in honour of a lame shepherd of wolves.’
I took the name, rather than I am that name
, but the blustering idiot didn’t get it. Inside a warning voice is saying
Beware arrogance
, and he is thinking of a recent encoded warning, that his enemies might be closing in on him.

‘Could we not do this in a more mature way?’ he says.

‘What mature way were you thinking of?’

‘I was thinking of the children … the shock it will be, the trauma, seeing me carted away in such circumstances. Why not let me walk them home and drop them off at their houses and then I can meet with the teacher and you and subsequently, we go to the local guard.’

With each passing moment, the noose is tightening.

Very soon he will not be nice Dr Vladimir Dragan, he will be the most wanted man in Europe, with a price on his head. He can see it all with an eerie clarity, both of them going into the local station, Plodder Pat looking up in disbelief, the young pup explaining the gravity of the matter, as his fake identity papers are handed over. One guard will study them, a second will log the information into his computer, then a whoosh as the data goes through cyberspace and reaches a head office in Dublin or Brussels. Within minutes, when the information is
downloaded, checked and found to be false, he will be handcuffed, brought in the back of a car and driven through the green complacent land, where he believed he was safe, to meet his downfall.

Shamelessly now he wrings his hands, berates himself for his carelessness, utters craven apology, saying that there are those in the town who will vouch for him as a healer.

‘What kind of healer?’

‘Quantum energy … radiothesia … human sensitivity to the various energy fields …’

‘Is that so?’ the guard says, totally perplexed.

‘But on Sundays I coach young people in football,’ the doctor answers quickly.

‘So you like the football.’ The fellow is taken aback, and asks what kind of coaching he does.

‘Well, we run, then I sit them down and talk about motivation … their dream of playing for their country one day.’

‘Do you watch the football?’

‘I do. I like it on the flat screen in TJ’s … for all the games … unless of course you are determined to lock me up.’

The thaw has not happened, but something has shifted. He takes out his crystal and waves it repeatedly, lost in prayer.

‘You strike me as a military man,’ he is told and he laughs and says what could be less militant than a man with white hair, a straggling beard and a smock. He plays a last, audacious card, even while recognising the risk. He decides that by openly admitting to having been a cheat once, he will be seen as a man of truth.

‘I avoided military service,’ he says with a colluding smile.

‘How come?’

‘I was eighteen and due to be called up, but they forgot me …
so with money from an uncle who had no children, I took myself off to Japan, where I was lucky to meet a Zen master. It was he who started me on the holy path. I learnt alternative medicine and also studied the language, both written and oral, but I’ve forgotten most of it. A year later I came home and unfortunately, some punctilious clerk noticed the error and I was called up. By now I was determined to devote my life to medicine, not to serve in an army or go to war. I knew from a friend that one way to avoid conscription was to plead deafness.’

‘Go on,’ his interrogator said, his mouth half open in wonder.

‘It was a lengthy examination, lasted all day, they spoke to me, questioned me and then with a vibrating tuning fork tested the middle ear, the inner ear, at which I professed to hear nothing. Then they tapped on the bone of the skull and I knew from my studies that sound travels directly to the bone, independent of the ear and is transmitted to the listener. Had I said I couldn’t hear anything, they would have known I was lying, but they believed me and I was let off.’

‘The way you think I am letting you off,’ the guard says, but not so aggressively.

‘As the elder of the two, may I propose the following – we will both go to the local guard, in his house, and explain everything.’

‘Is that Plodder Pat? He’s more interested in the bungalow he’s building than in the law … You think I’m a sucker.’

‘On the contrary, I congratulate you. You saw a potentially dangerous situation, you stopped your car and you gave me a grilling.’

‘To tell you the truth, I was going to a funeral … I almost didn’t stop.’

‘Is it a relative?’

‘It’s a second cousin. It was sudden … he was serving petrol from his own petrol pump, talking to the guy, and he keeled over … Dead.’ At the word he blesses himself.

They then talk of family ties, blood knots, the necessity of mourning and the folly of taking life for granted. The danger has passed. The guard says he had to do what he did, for the sake of the children, as children are sacrosanct to him.

‘The things I’ve seen, ’twould break hearts,’ he says.

Deliberating for a moment, he decides to go, but not before saying that maybe his mother could do with some of that quantum energy stuff for her arthritis. He is told that she would be given special treatment.

*

Dr Vlad takes the swim in his secret cove that night, a swim he had promised himself to wash away the day’s provocations. Afterwards, he lies on the bank and drifts into a sleep:
Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of
… then falls fast asleep. Soon he is dreaming of the long ago, his mother’s polenta cake, the ice-green rivers that roared down from the gorges, the children in the wood, their voices calling to one another, the chanterelles that they broke and wolfed down, along with the young pup of a guard, licking his biro to squeeze another word out. Suddenly, into the dream there walks his old friend K, not in his usual tweed jacket with the leather elbow patches, but all in black, altered through death.

‘Brother,’ he says, wagging a finger. ‘That was a near thing today, you must have been shitting your pants,’ and uninvited, he sits, and begins to talk.

Townspeople soon followed to eavesdrop – Young Dara, Fidelma, the draper’s wife, the nun with the big thighs and the crabbed sisters. He is paralysed, helpless to send them away, in what he knows to be a dream, yet he cannot haul himself out of it, his limbs are inert. There is K jabbering away and he who was once master is now on the rack.
I am undone
he says, but his words are also clogged up within the dream.

‘That siege’, K began, ‘broke many hearts but not ours, in our fortress in the hills. We could hear the constant rat-tat-tat of the mortars and sniper fire, eliminating
the scum down in the city
. One thousand, three hundred and fifty-nine days and nights of it. The human spirit is indomitable. Such were the sentiments of outsiders who nevertheless could not imagine the carnage, rotting bodies, rotting garbage, dogs roaming wild and a few stalwarts creeping along the alleys to scavenge for bread. Since then they had a celebration, a way of remembering, red chairs erected in our beloved city, your jewel as you called it. Yes, eleven thousand, five hundred and forty-one red chairs in commemoration of the fallen. It is said that tourists only began to cry when they came upon the six hundred and forty-three little red chairs of dead children. Yes, the living, the mangled, the scarified, with the crazed responsibility of remembering everything, everything. The evening we were told of the market massacre we drank a toast, we drank many toasts. No song without suffering, as you said. What a gruesome sight it must have been down below, quite surreal, limbs, arms, heads, torsos, all mixed in with potatoes, cabbages, onions and kohlrabi. A conglomerate. You insisted to the outside world that those dead bodies were mannequins and corpses from wars long past, planted there by our enemies. The waitresses were invited to drink with us. They had the
hots for you, with your thick, black, glossy hair and your voice so deep and so resonating. They wrote billets-doux on your napkin and you pulled the plaits of your favourite one, Helga. Another incident that caught the attention of the world was a little girl of twelve on her bicycle, oblivious, when a shell hit her and soon the blood rippled out, a leitmotif of red rose petals on discoloured yellowish snow. Yes, that caught the attention of the outside world and some foreign intellectuals ganged together and put on a production of
Waiting for Godot
, to bolster the morale of the people. That annoyed you. It stole your thunder. After all, you were the Commander, the supreme leader, the mastermind whom diplomats and big shots came to appeal to, to implore you to call the siege off. How you bamboozled them with your charm and your procrastinations and sometimes your fierce temper. You insisted you were ready to negotiate, while also demanding human rights, placing yourself and your people in the role of victim –
We are mice in the jaws of cats at play
. At the outset, these dignitaries were always given a history lesson, our wronged race, starting with the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. When questioned about the atrocities you always had an answer. Either they never took place, or were fabricated by the enemy, and questioned about corpses down in the square, you insisted they were mannequins, which the enemy had planted there, to delude the world. You even said, “I have an abhorrence of war,” and maybe there was a grain of truth in it. You promised the earth, without meaning it. You promised the siege would be lifted, the shelling would stop and food and aid convoys would be allowed in, except none of that happened. It was all a lie, but lies can be just as persuasive and as palatable as truth in desperate times. So these diplomats and big shots went away moderately reassured and in any case,
they were always in a hurry to get to the airport, lest you might already have ordered it to be shelled. Around that time you stopped writing. It stands to reason, with so much going on you had no time to reflect and maybe no wish to. As I say, I read more while the siege went on. I re-read
Hamlet
and thought for all his protestation of loving Ophelia more than forty thousand brothers, he too was a specialist in the macabre. Things began to get less robust down in the city, which is to say there were fewer corpses. You raved, you ranted, your Utopia, that diamond city enfolded in hills was beginning to slip from your grasp. Everyone was betraying you, the whole world was against you and you resolved on even greater conquest. There were more territories to be taken. Ethnic purification must happen, even if in the end you ruled over a land of ghosts. Shakespeare must have come to your mind – that
tide in the affairs of man
, yet you mastered any doubts you might have had. So came the next bonanza. Srebrenica. A killing spree. Eight thousand Bosniak men boarded onto buses, assured of their safety, driven off and herded into a concrete emporium, where, it is said, the shooting began after dark. We heard that the gunners were so tired from killing, they asked for chairs and chairs were provided. Then replacements took up the grisly task. Four days, four nights of it. Those cries, those screams, those expirations, the apotheosis of all bloodiness, with carrion men groaning for burial. As for the bodies, that was a matter for the engineers, hence the zillions of secret graves that litter our land. A hot night and the blood of so many in such a short space of time. I did not picture it and I did not want to. But as time went on it got to me, befouled by death, the stench of blood, in the mouth and especially on the palate. There was no escaping it. The spree seemed to have paid off, but as happens
down the ages, our fortunes began to wane. We lost whole swathes of land to the east and before long, our enemy got to be as bloodthirsty as us. They learnt, it was said, from our butchery. Soon the diplomats and the bigwigs were not so credulous and there were even whispers here at home of your having gone too far, of maybe your surpassing yourself, because for you, enough was never enough. There was sullenness up in our fortress. You in your shirt sleeves, pacing, shouting, sensing treachery on every side and mouthing your rationale, like all the cast of crazed monsters that have come before you in history. Then other times you sat like a wronged child, silent, biting your nails, biting, biting, down to the quick. I was the one entrusted with talking to you. Why wouldn’t I? After all, between us there was that oath, we were brothers, best friends in our youth and university days, a little competitive in our reverence for William Shakespeare. We loved Goethe and Musil, but Shakespeare was God. You had been christened Young Törless because of the two terribly contrasting aspects of your character, the sane, the reasonable and the other so dark, so vengeful. In summertime we took vacations together, lay on riverbanks, meadows full of flowers, and veins of snow beautifully ridged the mountain caps, while down below we breathed the scent of newborn flowers. In winter, we plunged into ice-green rivers that had flowed from the gorges and lay on our backs braving it, then other times, cycling through snug little towns and to the amazement of people, spouting Shakespeare. We loved our country and vowed to leave it a better place than when we had been born into it. But poetry came first. In the mountain, where we had gone to cram for our examinations, it happened. One night you called me outside, in the snow, and with your little pearl-handled penknife, you slit both our fingers
and we swapped our blood. It almost froze as we tasted it, because the temperature was twenty-eight degrees below zero, up there. Blood brothers from that moment on, the keepers of each other’s soul and each other’s conscience. That was what you said. You said something else that I will never forget. You said we were like mountain climbers with a rope and that if one let go of the rope, the other fell into the abyss. You said that. So I began, as things unravelled up there in our lair, to talk to you, as in the old days, to talk of literature and why not, since we both loved it so. I said, “Do you remember Mr Kurtz?” and you said of course, because that time in the mountain, along with Goethe and Musil and Shakespeare, we read every word of
Heart of Darkness
. Who wouldn’t. We followed the pallet on which the dying Kurtz was carried and pictured the crazy woman, who came abreast of the steamer, with her wild incantations, her necklaces of glass and I said to you, “Do you remember Kurtz’s last words?” and you went silent and I spoke them to you,
The horror! The horror!
and I put it to you if Kurtz was not trying to expiate his own horror and ask for remission of some kind. You looked at me and I trembled because I knew that for you, at that moment, my death was as necessary and as meaningless as all the other deaths that had gone before. You had let go of the rope. As time went on my nausea worsened. That warehouse, with its seven thousand men of reproductive age, kept coming into my mind, along with the leitmotif of the spattered roses on the square. I began to believe that I could breathe better dead than alive. You see, we all became unhinged in our bastion. I would like to dwell for a moment on the manner of my death. It was not for fear of you. It is also said that I was drunk when I blew my brains out, but were we not often drunk in deference to the Kremlin mountaineer? You
never wrote the book you had hoped to write. What a book it would be. For only you knew the full story. A Book of the Night. Those unfortunates, ‘the scum down in the city’, in their apartments, no light, no heat, no water, no hope, no nothing. What a book that would have been, your beloved, Sarajevo, with its eleven thousand, five hundred and forty-one empty red chairs, including the little ones for the children. In our quasi-mysticism, that surely has not completely abandoned you, the book you will never write will be full of cries. The lamentations of the dead, seeking their others in the underworld, not knowing if those others are already dead, or still in the zone of the living. Yes, a Book of the Night. As you exit the world stage, with the Angel of Death waiting to settle your account, or as you put it to the children in the forest, earlier today, for the cosmic payback for evil that has been done, even you will tremble. Goodnight my friend and brother, and Viva Sarajevo.’