The Question of Bruno (4 page)

    On one copy of
The Forestry Bibliography, 1900–1948
, kept in Zagreb, there is the following handwritten remark: “Since the day I was born, I have been waiting for the Judgment Day. And the Judgment Day is never coming. And, as I live, it is becoming all too clear to me. I was born after the Judgment Day.”

    Alphonse Kauders told the following: “When Rex and I had a fight, and that happened almost every day, he would stray and would be gone for days. And he would tell me nothing. Except once. He said: ‘The stray-dog shelter is full of spies.’ “

    On the eve of World War II, in Berlin, Alphonse Kauders said to Ivo Andric: “A firm system still exists only in the minds of madmen. In other people’s minds, there’s nothing but chaos, as well as around them. Perhaps art is one of the last pockets of resistance to chaos. And then again, maybe it isn’t. Who the hell cares?”

    On the eve of World War I, Alphonse Kauders said to Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s pregnant wife: “Let me penetrate a little bit, just a little, I’ll be careful.”

    
On one of Alphonse Kauders’s seven tombs, it is written: “I have vanished and I have appeared. Now, I am here. I shall disappear and I shall return. And then, again, I shall be here. Everything is so simple. All one needs is courage.”

    Alphonse Kauders wrote to one of his seven wives letters “full of filthy details and sick pornographic fantasies.” Stalin forbade such letters to be sent by Soviet mail, because “among those who open and read letters there are many tame, timid family people.” So then Alphonse Kauders sent his letters through reliable couriers.

    Alphonse Kauders said: “I—I am not a human being. I—I am Alphonse Kauders.”

    Alphonse Kauders said to Richard Sorge: “I doubt there exists an emptiness greater than that of empty streets. Therefore, it is better to have some tanks or bodies on the streets, if nothing else is possible. Because Anything is better than Nothing.”

    Alphonse Kauders, in the course of time, put a revolver on Gavrilo Princip’s temple, for he had burned a bee with his cigarette.

    Alphonse Kauders, in the course of time, said to Stalin: “Koba, if you shoot Bukharin ever again, we shall have an argument.” And Bukharin was shot only once.

    Alphonse Kauders said to Eva Braun—in bed, after seven mutual, consecutive orgasms, four of which had gone into the annals—Alphonse Kauders said to Eva Braun: “One should find a way of forbidding people to talk, especially to
talk to each other. People should be forbidden to wear watches. Anything should be done with people.”

    It is widely believed that the little-known pornographic work
Seven Sweet Little Girls
, signed by pseudonym, was written by Alphonse Kauders.

    Alphonse Kauders told, in the course of time, about the first days of the Revolution: “We killed all mad horses. We set empty houses on fire. We saw soldiers weeping. Crowds gushed out of prisons. Everybody was scared. And we had nothing but a bad feeling.”

    Albeit Alphonse Kauders hated folk from the depths of his soul, almost as much as he hated horses (Good God, how Alphonse Kauders hated horses!), he was the creator of a folk proverb: “Never a bee from a mare.”

    Joseph
V.
Stalin, talking about the winds of Alphonse Kauders, said: “Many a time, in the course of our Central Committee sessions, Comrade Kauders would, well, cut a wind, and a few moments later, all comrades would be helplessly crying. Including myself, as well.”

    Alphonse Kauders owned the revolver used to murder Lola, a twelve-year-old prostitute from Marseilles.

    Ivo Andric, talking about Alphonse Kauders, said: “His in-sides were removed by a secret operation. All that remained was a sheath of skin, within which he safely dreamt of a bibliography of pornographic literature.”

    
Alphonse Kauders spent the night between April 5 and April 6, 1941, on the slopes of Avala, waiting to see Belgrade in flames.

    Alphonse Kauders killed his dog Rex with gas after Rex had tried to slaughter him in his sleep because Alphonse Kauders had set mousetraps all over their place to take revenge on Rex for having pissed on his new, pristine uniform.

    Alphonse Kauders, in the course of time, was engaged in painting. The only painting that has been preserved, oil on canvas, is called
The Class Roots of Tattooing
and is kept in the National Museum in Helsinki.

    Alphonse Kauders said to Josip B. Tito: “A few days, or years, hell, ago, I noticed that a tree under the window in one of my seven rooms had grown some ten goddamn meters. There aren’t many people who notice trees growing at all. And those who do are likely to be lumberjacks.”

    Gavrilo Princip, talking about the winds of Alphonse Kauders, said: “They sounded like this: Pffffffuuummmiiuujmmsghhhss.”

    Alphonse Kauders had two legal sons and two legal daughters. The rest were illegal. One son was shot as a war criminal in Madona, Lithuania; the other was a distinguished member of the Australian national cricket team. One daughter was an interpreter at the Yalta conference; the other discovered, in the Amazon rain forests, a hitherto unknown species of an insect resembling the bee, labeled eventually Virgo Kauders.

    
Alphonse Kauders said: “Literature has nothing human in itself. Nor in myself.”

    Alphonse Kauders never finished work on the bibliography of pornographic literature.

J. B. TITO
was the Yugoslav communist leader for thirty-five long years. My childhood was saturated with histories of his just enterprises. My favorite one has always been the one in which he, at the age of twelve, found a whole, cooked pig’s head in the house pantry, hoarded for Christmas, and, without telling his brothers and sisters, gorged himself with it on his own—an ominous act for a future communist head of a state. He was sick for days afterward (fat overdose), and was additionally punished by being banned from the Christmas dinner. Later on, he lost interest in Christmas, but never lost passion for pigs and heads.

ROSA LUXEMBURG
was a German communist who attempted, with Karl Liebknecht, a socialist revolution in Germany after the end of World War I, and then withered with it. Rosa Luxemburg was a terribly nice name for a revolutionary.

KING ALEXANDER
was a Yugoslav king and was assassinated in Marseilles, in 1934, by a Macedonian nationalist, with a generous support of Croatian fascists. Rickety propaganda machinery of the first Yugoslavia sermonized that his last words were: “Take care of my Yugoslavia.” The likely truth, however, was that he gobbled and bolted his own blood, while a sweaty French secret policeman was protecting, with his own body, Alexander’s ex-body, corpse-to-be. I always thought that the fact that an Alexander was assassinated by a Macedonian was as close as you can get to a nice touch in a farce.

RICHARD SORGE
was a Soviet spy in Tokyo, undercover as a journalist, eventually becoming a press attaché in the German embassy. He informed Stalin that Hitler was going to attack the Motherland, but Stalin trusted Hitler and disregarded the information. The first time I read about Sorge I was ten and, not even having reached the end of the book, decided to become a spy. At the age of sixteen, I wrote a poem about Sorge entitled
The Loneliest Man in the World.
The first verse: “Tokyo is breathing and I am not.”

GAVRILO PRINCIP
was the young Serb who assassinated the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand Habsburg and Sophia, his pregnant wife, thus effectively commencing World War I. He was eighteen at the time (I think) and had the first scrub over his thin lip and dark ripples around his eyes. He was incarcerated for life, which lasted only a few more years, and died of tuberculosis, blessed by repeated beatings, in an obscure imperial prison. In Sarajevo, by the Latin Bridge, at the corner from which he sent those historical bullets into the fetus’s brain, his footprints were immortalized in concrete (left foot W-E, right foot SE-NW). When I was a little boy, I imagined him waiting for the Archduke’s coach, waiting to change the course of history, stuck up to his ankles in wet concrete. When I was sixteen, my feet fit perfectly into his feet’s tombs.

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE USSR
is a book whose different editions are innumerable and often obscure. Historical characters (like Stalin’s Secret Police chiefs) would be praised in one edition and then would be vanished in another. There are countries whose precious minerals (with annual production in parentheses) would be minutely listed by the encyclopedia’s sanguine world map, and in another edition they would be
swallowed by an ocean, much like Atlantis, without the bubble-burps ever reaching the surface of the map world. This great book teaches us how the verisimilitude of fiction is achieved by the exactness of the detail.

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF YUGOSLAVIA
,
on the other hand, was never even close to being entirely published, because of so many conflicting histories involved, so there really isn’t any encyclopedic Yugoslavia, which by a snide turn of history, couldn’t matter less, since Yugoslavia is not much of a country anymore.

NIKOLAI BUKHARIN
, dubbed by Lenin “the darling of the Party,” was a member of the Politburo and probably the main Soviet ideologue (save the great Stalin) in the thirties, for which he was rewarded with an accusation of spying, simultaneously, for the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany. No one was surprised, but everyone was terrified when he was sentenced to death, for that was the beginning of one of Stalin’s greatest purges. From his death cell, he sent a letter to Stalin, beginning with the words: “Koba, why did you need my death?”, which Stalin is believed to have kept in his desk drawer for a long time. Bukharin voluntarily cooperated with his inquisitors and refused to be used as the martyr of Stalin’s tyranny. If he is in a Dantesque inferno, he’ll eternally bang his porcine head against the walls of hell’s pantry.

IVO ANDRIC
, a Bosnian, was the only Yugoslav author who has ever been awarded the Nobel Prize. In 1941, he worked in the Yugoslav embassy in Berlin, and helped organize trysts of cringing Yugoslav politicians with Hitler. He was a gentleman and wrote novels about the ways people are entangled
with history. At the acceptance ceremony, he talked about the importance of bridges. In his youth, he was involved in organizing the Archduke’s assassination.

On
APRIL
6, 1941, at dawn, Belgrade was relentlessly bombed by the Luftwaffe. That was the beginning of the German attack on the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which lasted for eleven more hapless days.

AVALA
is a breast-like mountain near Belgrade, with the tomb-tumor for the Unknown Serbian Soldier, built after World War I.

THE YALTA CONFEREN CE
brought together Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin. The end of the war was in sight and they appeared to be the victors (“I’d like some Germany.”) When I was thirteen, I saw a photo of those three great men in Yalta, sitting in three wicker chairs, against the background of standing people whose names were as insignificant as their deeds. The three heads of the free world had something like a dim grin on their round faces, as though they had done a good, hard work (“Have some Germany.”) When I was thirteen, I thought that the picture was taken right after their lunch, because—as my father claimed—right after lunch is the best time, for people are “full and happy.” I thought that behind their dim grins they were trying to get out last bits of food from between their teeth. They gaze at me, full of borscht, sweet Crimean wine, and plans for the world. Within a few moments Churchill will be asleep, and I’ll be old, lacking significance, but not memories.

Now keep reading the book.

T
he book was auburn, with black slanted letters on the spine reading “Spies of WWII,” and, impressed onto the front cover, black letters, tiny trenches, with golden brims, reading:
The Greatest Spies of World War Two.
The book was big and weighty. I’d put it on my knees, but then its weight would spread my legs and the book would close itself and slip to the floor. And I’d lie on my belly and rest my head on the scaffold of my hands and read. When my elbows would begin to ache, I’d recline my cheek on the thicker half of the book, incline the other half, feeling the sticky moisture connecting my cheek and a spy’s face, secrets of WWII just inches away from my absorbing pupils.

There were lots of black-and-white pictures: a five-man column—surrounded by soldiers pointing rifles—with their hands on the napes of their necks; when I would narrow my eyes, they’d look like black-and-white butterflies; the head of a chubby member of the
Rote Kappelle
,
¹
, with an asymmetrical face: nose slightly on the left side, right eye hardly opened and
seemingly asleep, mouth kept shut with effort, as if there was a spring of blood behind the feeble lips—I just knew from his face that his hands (swollen wrists, bloody, burning trenches under the cuffs) were handcuffed; a picture of General Montgomery standing, arms akimbo, turned sideways, looking at the upper-left corner of the page, with the timeless beret parallel with his gaze: General Montgomery’s doppelganger, just the head, looking at me with odd pensiveness, as if painfully aware that he could never be General Montgomery; a row of blindfolded people in white in front of the ready firing squad and a smiling officer, his right arm raised, pointing at the upper-right corner of the picture. And, near the end, there was Sorge—”at the outset of his mission in Japan”
²
—framed by a door behind his back, standing legs apart (left foot NW, right foot NE) in a dark trenchcoat, one hand pocketed, the other somewhat clenched, holding
a purse or a camera case; and his head: fiendish ears, large and ill-shaped; lips shut tight, as if his teeth were biting the inside of his lower lip; the wide base triangle of his nose, its top angle connected, by two deep furrows, with two dark dots in the corners of his mouth; lightless twin-holes, at the bottom of which were his eyes; and the black-inked helmet of hair.