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Spark Neven Orhel; translation by Ellen Elias-Bursać Zagreb, 17-18 November 1991
On Saturday at noon, air-raid sirens blared long and loud. Parents with children who were playing at the park on Martićeva Street withdrew to safe shelters. No one noticed the little girl with pony tails swinging on a swing. When her mother came back, the girl was not there. The mother called the Bauerova Street police station immediately. They informed the regional police station. They were given a picture of the child which was immediately circulated. Before nightfall all the officers in the center of the city were keeping a sharp eye out, seeking a tear-stained fouryear-old girl with pony tails wandering, lost, through the Zagreb streets. Night passed. On Sunday morning the frantic mother came into the office of the chief of criminal investigation on Đorđićeva Street and collapsed into the armchair facing his desk. No pleas from the staff could persuade her to go home and wait for news there. The only thing chief Marko Zorić could do was to begin an official search for the child. By the time four o'clock had rolled around, nearly twenty-nine hours after the disappearance, it was becoming clear that the child had not simply wandered off. It was unthinkable that no one would have noticed a little four-year-old girl and informed the authorities. And if a parent had taken her along to a shelter during the air raid, by now they would have been in touch. 2
Twenty-nine hours after the child had gone missing, the grim question inevitably had to be asked. "Was she kidnapped?" moaned the mother. It was four forty in the afternoon. The woman leaned forward, her eyes wide as saucers. "Was she kidnapped? Good god, was she kidnapped?" The chief could not answer. His silence was the answer. The woman collapsed. She suddenly clutched at her heart and began gasping for air. They called an ambulance and took her to the emergency unit. Marko Zorić was finally alone but the sense of the woman's misfortune lingered in his office like a leaden echo. He smoked one cigarette after another and paced up and down the room. His office was on the third floor. Although the light of day held night off for a while longer there, i by five p.m. n November it was getting dark and the ceiling light had to be switched on. The radio tone beeped signalling the hour. The receiver on the cupboard to the right of the desk was always on. The news anchor reported the latest on the fighting. There were clashes around Okućani, fighting in Bilogora, on Papuk and Psunj. Near Voćin our combatants were ambushed. They brought them back to Virovitica in black body bags. They were not for viewing. The weather was sunny and cold. The dead and wounded are listed in black statistics. The war is everywhere. The news is broadcast every half-hour.
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He stubbed out his half-smoked last cigarette in the overful ahstray and stopped between the radio and armchair where the woman had sat. His mind was torn between what was happening at the front and the disappearance of the little girl. Was the child really kidnapped? Was it his malicious nature that prompted him to think of Inspector Marina Burt? A policeman must anticipate the strangest twists. Perhaps his malicious nature nudged him to recall the kidnapping of a child last year and how he had read those six sentences. A year ago, Inspector Mirna Burt had requested a police electrician to fix something wrong with the fuse box in her apartment. She gave him her keys. The electrician went to the apartment when there was no one home. He repaired the fuse box and then the Parker typewriter caught his eye. It was on a small desk by the bed in the only room. There were six sentences on the sheet of paper. The electrician ran his eyes over them. Then he stopped and read them carefully several more times. He had a camera with him. He photographed the text. And took the picture to Chief Marko. He put the text on a slide. Marko called Zvonko Deringaj, her boss. They read and reread the sentences many times. After three days the kidnapped child was found strangled in a wooded area uphill from the crematorium. They poked no further around Mirna Burt. But Marko did do something. He took Mirna's keys and made duplicates for the front door of her apartment. 4
That is where he left it. The case was still open. Like it was yesterday. The dark crept along the Zagreb streets, and Marko mulled, still pacing in his office. He was more and more disturbed. A thought tormented him. He wanted to have a look at Mirna Burt's typewriter. Now.
Zagreb, 18 November 1991, Monday - 2:50 a.m.
It tossed on the rough, choppy waves. The boat crashed headlong into the rocks. He opened his eyes. His wife Mara was shaking his shoulder firmly to wake him. "Hey, it's Zvonko!" He sat up in bed and took the receiver. "Zvonko here." Deringaj's voice reached him through the howling of the wind buffeting the boat at sea. He was still in the grip of his dream. He blinked, slowly getting used to being awake. "What time is it?" "Damn it, two a.m.," he recognized the irritated bass of his colleague and friend. "Marko, I am having trouble up here on Ĺ alata. I have no available staff, none. I have to ask you. I'd like to call in Burt." "What trouble?" 5
"Long story. May I call her?" He was awake. Into his mind swam the fact that Zvonko Deringaj was on duty tonight. "She's on leave," he faltered. "That's why I'm calling." "Well call her then if you have no one else. You woke me for that?" "I had to ask, sorry. You signed off on her free days!" "Damn it! You didn't have to wake me for that!" Why the hell are they all so deferential to her? But then the policeman stirred in him. His brain kicked in. All of a sudden. "Listen..." With his left hand he propped himself up to straighten his back which had started aching. "Šalata, you said?" "Yes, Mesićeva." He hesitated. Only a second. "Once you deliver her to the crime scene... When you are up there, on Šalata..." "Yes?" He felt a rush of adrenaline. "Call me." "We won't know anything yet." "That's not why... call me. On your Motorola." "You want me to call you when she is up on Šalata?" 6
"Yes." He knew Deringaj was perplexed. "Fine, if you like. Bye." Mara was waiting by the bed, telephone cradle in hand. She had carried it in, trailing a long wire from the hallway. He saw his wife's outline in the semidark. The only light on was a small hallway fixture. He gave her back the receiver. He sat up. "Where are you going?" "Where are my camouflage fatigues?" he asked. "What?" "My camouflage fatigues, damn it." Mara stood there next to him in doubt. "Where did you put them?" "In the wardrobe. Why?" He got up off the bed and opened the wardrobe. They were folded in a lower drawer. He donned them in silence. He needed a minute. "Where are you going?" He went off to the bathroom and splashed his face. He came back, slipped on his wristwatch, took his official pistol and the massive Motorola. Mara was by the door. "I'm off to the station." "Something happened?" "I'll be back by morning," he said and left. 7
He took his own car to Đorđićeva. He went into the building and said hello to the officer on duty. He went up to the third floor and flicked on the light in his office. He opened the main drawer in his desk. He took out two keys and put them into his pocket. He sat and waited.
Zagreb, 19 November 1991, Monday - 3:03 a.m.
He held the heavy Motorola to his ear, his fingers stiff from the cold. His brother Krešo at the Main Staff was on duty, too. Their agreement was that Krešo would send Marko news from the war theater right away. Fresh news in wartime really matters. All fifteen inhabitants of the village of Kostrići near Hrvatska Kostajnica had been liquidated. The so-called Kaline Chetnik units the had attacked from Donji Kukuruzari and Meminska. Among the casualties were a sixyear-old and a two-year-old. The village was looted and burned to the ground. "Dario and Tomislav." "Who?" "The kids." When the victims are listed as numbers, they are abstract and easier to bear. Fifteen murdered is one thing. But Dario and Tomislav, that's something else. Shit... And he turned toward the house. Fuck this shit, too. 8
"I have to call Burt. She'll be taking charge." There is no one else, really there isn't. There's a war on. Marko had given him the green light. Zvonko Deringaj punched in the number and waited. He kicked one foot with the other, it was cold outside, an icy wind was gusting, the asphalt was slick with frost. The phone rang, the woman was asleep. Yesterday all day she did not pick up her wireless device. And he had needed to check in with her by phone about administrative things. He knew she was using her free days, but there's no one else. He'd even left her a message, but nothing. That was her formal right. But still. In a way she was humiliating him. She was sleeping, and for her to wake up and focus and pick up the receiver... She'd need time – it was just after three a.m. He'd use her first name to give it the personal touch. He needed her! She finally picked up. "Mirna? Zvonko, Deringaj. I know this is way too early. I have a dead body up on Šalata." And she, with that hoarse, bleary voice of hers that made him think of lead at the bottom of a swamp. "I am on my days off." "But I need you. Can you be ready in twenty minutes? I'm coming by in my car to pick you up." And then from her, after she'd said nothing into the receiver for ten seconds (or it seemed that long to him): 9
"Come up." And click, the line went dead. She'd hung up on him as if he were the pizza delivery guy. But he was her boss. His stomach clenched and he tucked the Motorola grumpily back into his belt. He lit a new cigarette to inhale a little of the joy of the tobacco and then turned again toward the crime-scene site. The house was sitting peacefully in the dark at three in the morning, there were lights on downstairs and on the second floor. The night was chilly, late November, and the air from his nostrils mingled with the smoke from the cigarette, dispersing in bluish-white steam. A little farther stood Cvek and two policemen in uniform. And a policewoman who had planted both hands on her broad behind. The air was foggy, the street flickered in the yellow light of the street lamps. Quiet, not a person on the streets on Ĺ alata at this time of night. He glanced up for a moment into the dark hole of the sky. That was where the Serbian projectiles came from. Mostly during the day, so far, and rarely right here, over Zagreb. But never enough caution. "Back in no time," he called to Cvek and got into the official car. He switched on the motor and pressed the gas. The car rolled, creaking, down the road along a high wall beyond which began the Medical School grounds. It is a pleasure to drive when you are all by yourself on the road, alone in the world. It is soothing at three a.m. Even during a war. And you are alone in the world, even when there is no war on. He drove slowly along Mesićeva, through the hospital complex, and down VonÄ?inina toward the center of town. He ran the film about Burt again. She 10
had hung up on him. Under different circumstances he might have called her back and said something. But now there was a war on and he had no choice. Donat had broken her leg, Kundić lacked the experience, and the men were all off at the front. He was a hundred percent tied up with recruiting. Cvek, who was on duty tonight and had gone to the scene of the crime, was off tomorrow with a group to Vinkovci. Mirna Burt was who was left, whether or not he liked waking her up in the middle of the night. Maybe he should have left her on leave, what with all she had been through around the Vukovar combat zone. She had the right to a long absence. She was the only inspector whom he addressed formally. But, fuck it, a war was on and everything was possible. Even for her to hang up on him. So this Mirna Burt. Female. Female. At the station they referred to her derisively as the Writer. Along with her studies the College for Internal Affairs she had taken a second degree in comparative literature. Who did that? She fought around Vukovar like a man, shoulder to shoulder with the boys. She came back with a pedigree. She'd earned it. The president received her personally. Her husband, partner, whatever, a doc, went off as a volunteer to help out at the Vukovar hospital. Five days ago he was wounded. She was honored with an extraordinary promotion to inspector first class. Formally he may have been her boss, but it was as if he weren't. He drove slowly to give the woman time to pull herself together. And the dead body wouldn't be going anywhere, ha-ha. What he'd seen up there was off-the-charts weird. And his stomach was cramping up more and more from the coffee and smokes and gripes. He is a stomach-type of guy. Men like 11
this are dour, they crack their knuckles and do not gain weight. And they choke everything down, which is bad. So now he was choking down this female and her slamming down the phone, which ate at his vanity and his stomach lining. But, better think instead about the streets. They were so utterly empty, nowhere a single vehicle, nearly idyllic. In seconds he was at her street, BarÄ?ićeva, sooner than he'd meant to be. She wouldn't even have had the time to piss. It is a narrow street, surrounded by old buildings, no view anywhere but a park nearby. She was on the first floor at number twenty-two. He stopped the car and waited a spell. He counted to himself to thirty, slowly. This was not so popular, waking people up at three a.m. And Cvek had rousted him from a deep sleep. And he had done the same to Marko. Well shit, it's a sight better than being woken by a shell blast. There was a light on up on the second floor. "Come on up," it said to him, "pizza guy." There's a war on. So he took the stairs to the second floor. After he'd rung the buzzer there was a long nothing and then he rang again and waited for a full minute. H would have seen this as further humiliation if she hadn't been necessary to him just then and if it hadn't been three a.m. She finally opened the door, with a toothbrush in her foam-smeared mouth, bare to the waist, in just her bra! She did not nod to him in greeting but instead walked back into the bathroom as if instantly forgetting that he, her boss, was there, in the flesh, at the door. He stepped into the apartment,
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without her so much as inviting him to do so. She couldn't be thinking he'd wait for her out on the landing! I've got the pizza now, so scram. But maybe he was being a bit over-sensitive what with everything else that was going on. They'd woken him up so early, on Ĺ alata he had seen what he saw, and the war was going badly so tensions were running high. But, hell, here he was. He found himself in a tiny front hall to a small apartment he'd never been in. She went back to the sink in the bathroom to the right. It felt sort of homey, the half-dark space of the narrow hallway, the low ceiling, the impersonal walls with something or other on them (posters?) and the ceiling lamp hanging low, which would have fit better in a bedroom. He was tall so he almost collided with its glass rim. He looked around. This was sort of a peculiar situation, he realized once he'd stepped into the apartment. A young woman dressed only in her bra, at three and something in the night, in her apartment with her husband/boyfriend far away on the front. Regardless of the fact that this was service, he was also a lover boy, in his prime, just over forty, from a part of western Herzegovina where they knew how a dashing village stud was supposed to behave. But, of course, here and now there could be no thought of such things. And besides, Burt, if she were to want something, though she most certainly wouldn't, and if he were to want something with her, and he most certainly wouldn't, as unlikely as it all was, who knows whether he would even be able to get it on. As far as he was concerned she was an unsightly, gangly creature. In the fraction of a second after she'd opened the door to him he couldn't help but notice how her ribs were outlined by her bare skin as if she'd just 13
gotten back from a concentration camp, and even the small bra was too big, in other words: unstimulating. Better that way. Left was the room, clearly the only room. He scanned it briefly out of habit. He spotted a Parker typewriter on a small desk by the window. The room was not large, there wasn't much space between the bed and the dresser. This is their place, hers and the doctor's. Doctor Ivan whom she always, god knows why, calls Henry. The double bed, their bed, a green armchair, and plenty of books on the shelves leaning this way and that as if they are at odds. This made the room look like a fortress. On the only free wall hung a picture of the doctor. A photograph of him grinning and displaying a fish he'd caught. Dressed in old fishermen's pants with suspenders. From a better time. He looked harmless enough. On the dresser, chaos: she and Henry smiling from another picture, framed in red. Since she had come into the service four years ago he had never seen her smile. Next to that were an empty glass and socks, an undershirt, underpants, spoons and coffee cups, all in no order. And a pipe and a bottle of French red wine, Shiraz, a middling drink, he had tried it. That must have been for someone who was visiting because, as far as he knew, she did not imbibe. Nor did she smoke. She seldom even drank coffee. She was totally sterile along with being totally screwed up. Who could have been visiting her?
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A Croatian tricolor flag on a little metal stand. And a gun, propped on the books. An M-16, from the front. And a small yellowish ball on the carpet and on it someone had written a woman's name with a broad-tip marker. And a little red skirt for a four-year-old and a thick blue V-neck sweater with little
flowers.
Hop! Suddenly he remembered the tragic case with the little girl a year back and how Marko and he had pored over her sentences... "No kids?" he blurted just as she was stepping out of the bathroom. In the cramped space of the front hall she nearly brushed him with her bare belly as she scooched by on her way to the room. There she picked up a shirt and sweater and pulled them on quickly, without a word. She noticed him eyeing the children's clothing. She gathered it up along with the ball and tucked them into the wardrobe. "No kids?" he repeated. In her dossier it was written that she had no children. The question stopped her briefly. She looked at him directly for the first time, as if he were a person. Her two dark eyes sliced his face like icicles. What a gaze! In Vukovar they called her Boy. "You know I have no kids." "I see... the shirt, the ball..." "Shall we?" So, we shall. They went out into the stairwell. He followed her down the stairs in silence. And kicked himself. He had asked a stupid question. Of 15
course he would know that she had no kids. That information was always available in the dossier of a future criminal investigation inspector. And she knew that he knew. What was the point of asking her a stupid question? This strange woman? Damn it, there is a war on. You live one day at a time. Stop kicking yourself, Deringaj! Now they were in the car and he started it and shifted into gear. They drove first toward the INA building and then right, and right again onto Zvonimirova, then straight to the Džamija traffic circle. "I have a dead body up on Šalata, at Mesićeva number thirty-four." "There's an officer on duty," she snapped drily. "Cvek, he's there." "So?" "So Cvek leaves tomorrow for Vinkovci. I have no one else. And the situation is fucked up." He picked up speed a little. Off to the right of the Džamija circle and into the web of little streets headed toward Vlaška. The buildings here leaned one on the next like sardines in a can. Between them there was not even enough room for a worm to inch in. Or at least that is how it seemed in the phantasmal half-dark scribbled with the headlights and the wan city lighting. The windows of the houses they passed were dark, and around the ground level were sandbags in case of aerial bombing. Zagreb was convulsed, chafing at its own too-tight clothes. A state of war did not sit well with this city. 16
He continued speaking while pressing his cigarette into the car lighter. "An ambulance responded to a call about a death, but they found the circumstances suspicious. They called the station. Cvek, who is on duty, went up about two hours ago. He saw the dead body and next to it were this guy in a clerical collar and a woman. The guy introduced himself as a theology prof. The cathedral, the curiae, the whole shebang. Did I say the woman is a nun? Then Cvek got scared when he laid his eyes on the dead guy. A priest, a nun, and a dead guy looking like that. So he woke me up. "What do you mean, looking like that?" "I got up there, shit, it was a little after two. And Cvek told me what he had picked up from the priest. The guy had been there talking with the nun. Before he left he'd slipped and fallen down the stairs. And died. Then the nun phoned the professor. And he came over in a cab. And then they agreed to call an ambulance. The priest managed to explain to Cvek that the guy was originally from Vukovar but had been living for some time in France. His name was Svetozar Filipović. The name stank to Cvek so he probably shot the professor a funny look. Then the professor let on that the guy was a Vukovar Serb. And when Cvek told me the guy was a Serb, and from Vukovar no less, I just glanced at the body. But then Cvek showed me what he had taken from the deceased's coat which had was still hanging on the coat rack by the front door: a French passport. At that point the whole thing began stinking even more. So I dialed your number." "Why?" The car slowed. He turned up toward Šalata along broad Vončinina Road. 17
"The guy looks like someone took a hammer drill to him. There were quarts of blood everywhere. You'll see." "Didn't you say he fell down the stairs?" "That is what they said, see. The priest and the nun." "So, a violent death?" "A dead Serb, a French citizen no less, and the cathedral, perhaps this is not the best combination at this very juncture of wartime diplomacy, Mirna." He surprised himself that he'd said her name. This was a sign of a kind of intimacy. "What am I here for?" "I am non-stop involved in war recruiting. Right now I have no one else." He swallowed, swiveled his head from the steering wheel into her face. And he spat out the words he was having trouble saying. "You will be running this case on your own."
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