English sample translation of W by Igor Štiks

Igor Štiks

W Novel Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać

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© Velija Hasanbegović

IGOR ŠTIKS (Sarajevo, 1977) is the author of the novels, A Castle in Romagna and The Judgment of Richard Richter (originally published as Elijah’s Chair), which have won numerous awards and have been translated into 15 languages. He earned his PhD at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris and Northwestern University and later worked and taught at the University of Edinburgh and the Faculty of Media and Communications in Belgrade. He is also the author of Nations and Citizens in Yugoslavia and the Post-Yugoslav States: One Hundred Years of Citizenship (Bloomsbury, 2015) and, with Srećko Horvat, Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism: Radical Politics after Yugoslavia (Verso, 2015). He was honored with the prestigious French distinction Chevalier des arts et des lettres for his literary and intellectual achievements.

PRAISE “W is a novel about the inevitability of struggle and love, about the necessity of storytelling. Through the turmoil of historical events and the curse of geography, narration glides like cutting edge.”

– Tomislav Bogdan “Ready, steady, go! Fasten your seatbelts. W is a crazy drive full of all kinds of reversals, roll-overs and deceits.”

– Ellen Elias Bursać

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WORLD RIGHTS AVAILABLE 320 pages Hardcover ISBN 978-953-358-167-5 Date of publication: 2019

Igor Stiks’ fourth novel, mysteriously titled with only one letter (W) is his most elaborated—and definitely his most exciting—novel so far. It opens with a murder of a right-wing French philosopher Walter Stikler on a Dalmatian island. The main protagonist, named Igor Stiks is a Parisian scholar and left-wing activist to whom Stikler narrated his extraordinary life before being killed. Stiks, the character, was born in Sarajevo that he had to leave during the war in the former Yugoslavia never to return home. Now, after 25 years he travels to Croatia to hear the content of Stikler’s testament. There on the island, he’ll find out that another person is also mentioned in the will. Mysterious Tessa Simon turns out to be a Belgian radical leftist who, unlike Stiks, does what she preaches and actively engages in the struggles across the globe, from Chiapas to Kurdish Rojava. Is she somehow involved in the murder of Walter Stikler blamed on left-wing extremists?

As instructed by Stikler himself in his testament, Stiks will narrate Walter’s life to confused Tessa. On that very island two boys met back in 1962, Walter and Wladimir. They will escape from Yugoslavia dreaming of Paris as the centre of intellectual world in the mid-1960s. Two of them would then be fully involved in the revolution of 1968 and will later engage in left-wing urban guerrilla in the early 1970s. Their Group W will become famous for striking the capitalist system and right-wing regimes across Europe. Walter and Wladimir split in 1974 after the publication of Gulag Archipelago, the event that will announce the long decline of revolutionary struggles and the political Left. Walter will become a vehement critic of communist ideology and move towards the right, whereas Wladimir will 7

continue fighting in Western Europe. His involvement with the Red Brigades hides the shocking secret of Tessa’s birth.

Walter Stikler’s testament will require from Tessa and Igor to travel to Sarajevo as well. All that Tessa and Igor thought they knew about Walter Stikler would be turned upside down after they find there another Walter Stikler, an almost 100year old revolutionary who found in a freshly liberated Yugoslav town in 1945 an abandoned boy and gave him his own name. In a meantime, the French anti-terrorist police will follow them and warn Igor that Tessa is indeed the main suspect in the murder of Walter Stikler. While faced with difficult choices, Tessa and Igor will develop a passionate relationship. The entire mystery of Walter Stikler’s death, Tessa’s life and Igor’s trauma will be revealed in a break-neck finale.

This short summary—that carefully avoided to reveal too much—cannot do justice to the complexity of W and its numerous twists and turns. It is at the same time a murder mystery and a reflection on one century of revolutionary struggle for a better world. It is an action novel in which nothing is as it seems and where we can’t know the truth until the last page. At the same time, it asks some of the crucial questions of our era: what are the lessons of the entire century of heroic struggles for the world of equality and freedom, followed by tremendous disappointments and tragic failures? How to understand that in the immediate aftermath of socialist regimes we witnessed extreme violence in places like Bosnia? Finally, what can we do today faced with contemporary horrors?

Stiks’s novel is a feast of narrative fiction in which the horrors of history are mixed with humour and erotic passions. The novel vividly brings to life the period between the early 1960s and today with all its contradictions, disasters and hopes.

By its literary technique and atmosphere W reminds of the novels by Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy and Leviathan), Roberto Bolaño (2666) or Javier Cercas (Soldiers of Salamina). Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient is an obvious reference for W’s fine play between historic events, human complexity and passions, whereas the murder mystery and constant action reflect some of the best Scandinavian noir or a TV series like Babylon Berlin.

PRAISE “W is a Don Quixote of our time. His antagonist is the modern capitalist civilization. W sets traps, land mines that destroy the enemy. However, like in a fairy tale, the hero cuts the dragon’s head off, but it grows three new ones. We must ask ourselves whether the struggle makes sense if there are more and more dragon heads. It does, because it more clearly shows that the adversary is a monster.”

– Boris Liješević 8

Part One

Archipelago Can a Communist write a novel? I am not convinced: he does not have the right to make himself the accomplice of his characters.

Jean-Paul Sartre on the novel The Conspiracy by Paul Nizan Situations I

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1.

The captain announced we’d begun our descent. I felt a surge of panic. I cinched my seatbelt, eyes shut, teeth clenched. I couldn’t bear to look out the window. I knew we were flying just then over an archipelago in whose waters I’d swum the last time as a boy, twenty-five years ago, as the war had begun nearby, not far inland. On my lap lay the manuscript of the novel W, several chapters, notes, and fragments assembled from things Walter Stikler told me. He’d recently been found dead, riddled with bullets, in the waters down below the plane. I hadn’t expected to be summoned to the Island. I’d never thought I’d be back.

His corpse, perhaps caught in an underwater cave for several days, floated finally to the surface, decomposing before the eyes of the terrified fishermen.

Nobody had reported him missing. Who’d have noticed? Walter lived in isolation, mid-Island, a recluse. His purchase of the house in Dalmatia in the late 1990s was not the move of an aging West European on the lookout for hot yet affordable sunshine. No. I was maybe the only one who knew why he’d chosen this particular place.

The closer we approached the landing strip, the more the memories came back to me of a life now long gone, a childhood that ended too soon with no option for negotiation, delay, or goodbyes. All of that had been submerged in memory, shattered, distorted by what came after. Flooding back were recollections of everything I’d taken for granted, as a fourteen-year-old, what life would have in store for me, what time would surely bring, a future I’d felt was already mine, a time I could see so clearly back then with no clue whatsoever that what had defined my life till then would all soon be gone. The countryside was now coming into view, ever unchanging, unsullied by what people had perpetrated there, innocent and so familiar that Dalmatian words began to return to me, which I’d used, long before, with ease, in the childhood utopia the archipelago was for me, with all its atolls, islands, canals, fortifications, and inlets.

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I felt as if I were falling, like the plane that was fast losing altitude, into everything I’d left behind quite deliberately, feeling I’d deserved a life without losses, or at least a life on which my losses would have no impact, a life I’d forge myself without allowing others to dictate it for me. And I thought I’d done it.

Seldom did I think back to earlier times. Sometimes I’d retrieve a detail, or something would float to the surface of its own accord, summoned by who knows what. All else seemed forever buried. This allowed me to live a new life in the world, in a new language, a new homeland. I thought I’d found my home in Paris, not the home others make for us but the home we choose, the one for which we ourselves have sketched the blueprint and built it with our own hands. My home was supposed to enjoy special protection from the corrosive impact of memories.

And so things seemed, until recently, and my encounter with Walter Stikler.

I left Sarajevo during the war and went first to Zagreb as a refugee to stay with relatives. Then I went to France for my studies, and after that I no longer visited.

I finished my schooling, published a short novel that received scarcely any notice, at times I loved and was, at times, or so I believed, loved in return. I defended my doctoral dissertation in political science and began to work as an expert in leftwing ideologies, attended demonstrations and planned protests, edited a journal, and sometimes with my colleagues wrote and published pamphlets inciting rebellion. But once Walter Stitler had sauntered, uninvited, into my home, I was no longer able to push him out. Walter’s stories outshone the political unrest in Paris in the spring of 2016. Maybe because the Paris spring felt so paltry and ineffectual as compared to Walter’s life. Or maybe because the past had grabbed me by the throat and suddenly I found myself no longer in the Paris of the here and now.

So who was this Walter Stikler? Even anyone who hadn’t already heard his name in the 1970s and 80s—when he attracted media interest for his role among the new philosophers, speaking out as a caustic critic of communist ideology and the regimes of real socialism of the time— must have heard of him when he was abducted in November 2015 and then, after a spectacular police operation, was found alive in the cellar of a house that an explosion had reduced to rubble. The abduction was thought to be the brainchild of a man named Wladimir, a once famous left-wing terrorist, who, as Stikler testified, after having survived, had abducted him and kept him shut up in the cellar and then, when cornered, detonated a vast quantity of explosives.

Walter Stikler’s abduction had been the first terrorist action undertaken by Wladimir since the early 1980s. Despite his retreat, experts in security studies, former members of the secret services, and journalists intrigued by revolutionary 12

terrorism all claimed that Wladimir had in fact never stopped taking action but that he, or someone very much like him, stood as instigator and organizer behind many of the radical groups that proliferated at the turn of the new century. There were also claims that he had been a secret guest of Latin American leftist governments, especially the Castro brothers and José Mujica, but also of Brazilian President Lula, and that it was he, and no one else, who, with Subcommandante Marcos, sparked the Zapatista rebellion of 1994. Rumors abounded about how his influence on Marcos was so penetrating that Wladimir actually wrote the man’s most famous speeches. Still, and all the newspapers—whether conservatives or liberals or progressives—concurred on this point, after the legendary actions around Western Europe immediately after ‘68 and during the 1970s, the act of the abduction of an intellectual could freely be called the move of a desperate man, totally out of line with the spirit of the new times.

The media latched onto the opportunity to stir up a storm about the brief attention span of the public and their sadly wanting awareness of the perils of left-wing terrorism and the psychopathology of its actors, and all due to the obsession of Islamic fundamentalists, who, as certain aging new philosophers claimed, were linked to the leftists with their taste for totalitariansm and their hatred of western liberal ideas. The abduction of Walter Stikler was seen as a possible new dangerous strategy: targeted murders or abductions not just of statesmen or prominent capitalists but also of intellectuals who had created and were sustaining, in the terrorists’ opinion, the hegemony of the ruling ideology.

The financial crisis that hit in the fall of 2008 shook the capitalist order, but did not bring it down. What was needed was a direct blow—as the motives of the new radicals conveyed—to the head. After the miraculous deliverance of Walter Stickler and Wladimir’s disappearance once and for all in the flames of the dynamited building, many asserted with confidence that all the mindless violence coming to the democracies from the margins of the political spectrum simply had no purchase.

I met Walter Stikler in early April 2016. On the night of March 31st, a group of activists decided to bring the calendar to a standstill and spend the night on the Place de la République. Nuit debout! Thus began the long night with people on their feet, while the reformed calendar went on with March 32nd, then the 33rd, the 34th… Popular assemblies, concerts, graffiti, makeshift libraries, debates, public speeches, prominent figures, the inevitable clashes… A carnival atmosphere soon won out with trumpets, drums and songs about battles, freedom, and the victories of the oppressed, about the conflicts we’d won and the others yet to come despite strife and graves. The rendezvous those days was always the same: 13

evening at the Place de la République, not far from my rooms on the Rue du Château d’Eau. I ran with a broad circle of people we thought of as friends, a crowd of artists of greater or lesser talent living largely hand to mouth, musicians, journalists, doctoral students, international visitors on generous American stipends, aspiring museum curators, waiters by necessity, militants from any number of groups, legal and illegal migrants, freelancers of all sorts, the sons and daughters of regime politicians, and the euphoric activists of the most recent radical left-wing parties. We marched under the black-red banners of the anarcho-syndicalists with the insignia of the arching black cat, kept up our ties with communist fractions, elbowed our way through the pro-Palestinian groups, handling the inevitable encounters with disappointed members of the vast unions, socialist or green, and there were also left-wing Catholics, feminists, fighters for anti-racist groups as well as the Human Rights League, now fading what with the advanced age of its members.

This was one of the things, I believed, that made Paris feel so much like home, this willingness of people to take to the streets, their determination, also often their naiveté, their fervor for political debate evening afer evening, even when the talk was superficial, all the passion pouring into the discussions over café tables, at the university, in the metro, The likelihood, each day, of meeting someone who’d been drawn to the city by necessity, dreams, or love. I felt I was among my own people and that here, in Paris, my past could not overshadow my present, that it could not dictate my life, that I had fled the curse of geography with my decision to stay here. Paris allowed me to be someone closer to whom I felt I really was. I’d forged my own life. I birthed myself.

One of those evenings, I’d arranged to meet with members of the editorial board of the journal to discuss what we could do to contribute to the groundswell. I arrived at our favorite bistro a little early. No need to place an order; there was Momo the waiter with my glass of wine in hand. I savored the brief respite from the world before my friends came, surrounded by the noise of voices and clinking glass, resting my eyes on the quickening events out on the street where a stream of young men and women was moving toward the Place de la République.

“I used to be like you are now,” I heard a person say as he took the bar stool next to mine. I couldn’t be sure to whom his words were directed. I turned toward him briefly, but was reluctant to pay much attention to the man, apparently in his late sixties, until he repeated, “Yes, indeed, just like you, young man.”

“Pardon?” I said. “Are you speaking to me?”

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“Yes, you,” he answered with a sharp look. “You, indeed.”

I thought he must be a drunk or an oddball who could hardly wait to snare someone in conversation. I turned away, hoping he’d leave. He’d already ruined my pleasure at my few solitary moments. I took out my cell phone as a clear sign that there would be no further talk between us.

“Yes, I was just like you then, even before ‘68, then in May, and then again, later ‘Il est interdire d’interdire... Vivre au présent... Soyez realiste, demandez l’impossible...’”—he recited the slogans from ‘68 with a tinge of irony—“or what about that silly conjugation that amused every foreigner like you in your Intro to French class. How did it go? Je participe, tu participes, il participe, nous participons, vous participez – ils profitent!”

He laughed out loud. Now I was certain that he was a maniac who liked harassing people in cafés. I don’t know whether he managed to maneuver me onto thin ice with his derision or by showing that he could tell I was a foreigner (my charmant petit accent was always there to be heard, though I’d only uttered a few words).

“And then you saw the light and knew your radicalism was nothing but growing pains,” I answered curtly with the cynicism, too familiar, of ex-renegades, “and you found a place in the system you either cannot or do not desire to change.

Please, spare me your clichés!”

“My, my! Do forgive me if I have angered you. Perhaps it’s that you’re already worn down by so many nights… on your feet.”

He chuckled softly, hissing through his teeth. I turned.

“You’ve seen right through me. I admit!” he said, putting up his hands as if in surrender. I spotted scars on his wrists.

“You do not, sir, interest me whatsoever. Please leave me alone!”

He grew suddenly serious. “My apologies for disturbing you.”

“Fine,” I said in a conciliatory tone. “If I may enjoy my wine in peace, I’ll be grateful.”

“Why of course, of course.” He leaned toward me. “You were undoubtedly stung by the little conjugation I recited for you. Forgive me. I know your French is superb. Far too superb. You wish too ardently to show that you’re better, better yet than the natives.”

“You miss the point!” I shouted, irritated.

“How interesting that here in France you so quickly aligned yourself with the radical leftists. Whence the appeal? As far as I know, where you’re from socialism was over and done with years ago. And it’s not as if anything very serious is going on in that arena anyway. A few students make noise now and then. Fine. People

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assemble at what they call plenums. Fine. And then it all quickly blows over. There seems to be no left-wing there at all any more, am I right?”

He looked at me, feigning curiosity, as if he knew something about me, impermissibly more than what a sharp-eyed person sitting at a bar could possibly discern. I dismissed this as crackpot. Or perhaps he’d read a text of mine that was published with my photograph, so he recognized me? I tried to fend off paranoid thoughts.

“I am waiting for friends and I’d rather return a call I just missed. I wish you a pleasant evening, sir.”

I turned my back on him and tapped nervously on my phone. I felt him continue to stand there next to me, watching the back of my head.

“Same to you,” he said calmly. I waved to him without turning. After a moment of indecision, the pesky stranger—as if meaning to add something—finally walked away.

The next day I’d agreed to meet Emilie for lunch at Le Basile café on the corner of Rue de Grennelle and Rue Saint-Guillaume, next to the Sciences Po, where we’d both defended our dissertations. We were interested in writing something about what was going on at the Place de la République, trying once again to address the eternal question, What is to be done? I took a seat under an impressive photograph of Bob Dylan from his 1965 English tour at a microphone in dark glasses, a cigarette dangling from his lips. After a few moments someone stopped by my table and sighed audibly, gazing at Dylan.

“And then, only a few months later, he picked up an electric guitar and made history. I heard him live at L’Olympia in 1966. What times those were! I could talk about them for days.”

I was astonished when I realized that this man was that same stranger from the night before, but before I had the chance to say a word, he spoke. This time in the old language.

“Maybe we didn’t get off on the right foot,” he said, looking me straight in the eyes. “Perhaps things will go more smoothly this way.”

Instinctively I recoiled. He smiled at me gently, as if trying to reassure me.

“See, I, too, am a foreigner here, although slightly less foreign than you what with the years I have spent in this country. Over half a century! You have been here, what, twenty years?”

I didn’t answer.

“Yet the practiced ear can still pick up your Balkan accent. Don’t lose it as I have.”

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“Look, what do you want?” I shouted, feeling anger, even fear. “Who are you anyway?”

He bowed and extended his hand with a theatrical flourish. I refused to clasp it, so, uninvited, he sat at my table, leaned forward as if he feared being heard, and whispered: “Walter.”

“Your name, sir, matters nothing to me,” I said, leaning away from his face.

“First that business last night, and now this… Listen, all I care about is for you to leave me alone.”

“Stikler,” he said, again in a whisper, as if he had hardly been able to wait for this moment, knowing what sort of an impression his surname would leave on me. He seemed to be reading my thoughts, my agitation at his name.

“What?”

“You heard right.”

I went silent.

“Forgive me, I pronounced my name the way they pronounce it here. Where we’re from, in our native city, I used to be entered into the registry as, of course…” and again he leaned toward me and whispered, “Valter Štikler.”

Not only had the man confirmed that he was, indeed, Walter Stikler, recently abducted and then retrieved from the rubble of the building where Wladimir was killed, but he’d said, as now shot through my mind, if I’d heard him right…

“What do you mean, where we’re from?”

“Why, Sarajevo!” he said, without a trace of artifice, enjoying my astonishment. I felt my upper lip tremble. Obviously I was ashen.

“Slow now,” he said, still smiling. “No call for panic. Is it so strange to run into a compatriot?”

I was petrified. The smile vanished from his face.

“I realize all this must seem a little odd, confusing, threatening even. But our encounter couldn’t have happened any other way.”

He turned away and leaned on the table; he asked the waiter to bring him a glass of Brouilly.

“Wladimir…” he inhaled after he’d taken his first sip. “I am quite sure that you know the entire story and that you have formed your opinion about it. Since I know about your convictions, I also know what you think of me, my work and my positions. You are not particularly original here, many people think as you do, even here among us, and especially at those evening seances. Some among them also think I am to be blamed for Wladimir’s death and for that I’ll have to pay. With my head, of course. I have been so warned.”

“No surprise there.”

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“Yes, as I presumed, you concur. I did not expect, of course, that we’d agree on matters of politics. Still, for you, as a writer, it might be interesting for you to hear that Wladimir and I had known each other for many years.

“I can hardly be called a writer.”

“Really? How odd. Perhaps I misunderstood something.”

Later, after I’d met with Walter several times, I’d get used to this sentence which he’d drop in passing, and which exploded simultaneously at any number of neuralgic points. “Please tell me, what is it you want?!”

Walter didn’t blink. He watched me calmly and sipped his wine. Then he gave a ‘no need for concern’ gesture to the waiter and the people at the adjacent tables, as if we were old friends who’d just had a little spat. “You see you’ve created a disturbance. People are alarmed. Let’s talk.”

“Leave!” I repeated, though now somewhat more softly.

“Fine, fine… .” He straightened his rain coat and finished his drink. He was elegantly dressed in a suit, no tie, a turquoise silk shawl around his neck, face impeccably shaved; not balding, his hair was carefully combed. I’d later learn that he was in his early seventies. He was a striking man who’d aged well, at peace with himself, and, clearly, comfortable financially.

“I have never seen someone take so badly to being told he is a writer. Not only is this not an insult, but it is also not a secret, although you don’t boast about it.

Why you published your romanzo yourself, what was it called… Castello! I bought it at the Morpurgo book store in Split. Not bad. You abandoned our famous little language and, surprise, surprise, did not write another word. Finding it a challenge to write in French, eh? Well it’s not so easy. You embraced academic work. Laudable, but a tad on the dry side, n’est-ce pas?”

He stopped as if waiting for my answer. When none was forthcoming, he said, “Fine. I see you aren’t in the mood for conversation today, as you weren’t yesterday.

I just have one thing to tell you. I have a story for you. A hot topic.” He winked.

“I am not interested in your story or in you, no matter who you are!” I barely spat out. “I have plenty of my own work,” I pointed to my laptop on the table.

“Ah, yes, la lutte continue!” with derision he raised his right fist halfway.

Emilie arrived just at that moment.

“So sorry I’m late.” She glanced over at Walter. “Are you alone?”

“No. This gentleman took a seat at my table.”

“Hey, are you okay?”

I didn’t take my eyes off Walter, who had stood and was donning his hat. “Did something happen?” asked Emilie.

“Everything is perfectly fine. Precisely as it should be,” said Walter as he left.

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“Who was that?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, sighing with relief. “But I am very glad to see you.” “Štiks!” his voice thundered across the café. Walter was standing by the open doorway. Everyone turned to him.

“Perhaps you would like to know that during the war,” he added before vanishing, “I made the acquaintance of your father.”

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2.

When I breathed in deeply it hurt. The remembered smells gnawed. Can this be?

And after so many years! The smells of the end of a summer in Dalmatia. Time passes, people come and go, even the countryside changes, whether by human hand, or of its own accord, but not the smells. They stopped me in my tracks, with a gust of wind, right as I stepped off the plane. I stopped and shut my eyes.

A hurrying traveler behind me knocked on my shoulder. I turned, mechanically, to follow the others. I brought out my French passport. The policeman said Hello.

I answered Hello, unwilling to be anything but someone holding French papers.

Welcome to Croatia, he said. Thank you, I answered.

In mid-September 2016, the news of Walter Stikler’s murder on an island off of Dalmatia shocked people in France and around the world. “Anarchists and neo-Communists, if that’s what they’re to be called, are summoning Armageddon, much like the Islamic state, a cataclysm that would finally allow the social revolution they couldn’t pull off in the 1960s and 70s,” said James Stevenson, a regular professor at the London School of Economics, an expert on left-wing extremism and author of a groundbreaking book on Wladimir. “I’d even go so far as to say that the threat of these groups is all the greater because they have no flag to plant somewhere in a desert, nor are they requiring visible conversion of their followers. Many of them are among us, angry, desperate, and, finally, after ten-twenty years, girding themselves for action.”

The cultural and media elite did not hesitate to condemn the brutal murder of the man who had opened our eyes to the horrors of utopian ideology, who had known it intimately, even as a follower in the 1960s, but then, having seen the light, distanced himself from it in the mid-1970s. The nature of the ideology, they were forever repeating, showed its true colors in the Gulag concentration camps and the Cambodian killing fields, facts so far from today’s younger generations.

Blame for the murder of Walter Stikler was laid at the feet of Wladimir’s collaborators or a group out for vengeance. Secret services reported to local

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authorities, months in advance, that Stikler was seen, within the radical left, as directly responsible for collaborating with the state apparatus, sending them the information they needed, after three decades of fruitless searches, to nab Wladimir. According to them, the story about the “abduction” and the fumble in his handling of the explosives or the deliberate, suicidal detonation were a cover-up masking a ruse by the police. The goal was to demonize for the public every form of effectual resistance and, at the same, once and for all, to destroy the legend of the bold revolutionary who, after his retreat from the public eye, went on inspiring the next generations. Yes, Wladimir was the Che of the generation that had politically come of age in this century; a Che with no face, but with a crystal-clear signature.

Nobody took responsibility for the Stikler murder. The investigation by the Croatian police, backed by Interpol, went nowhere. Walter Stikler was found dead, floating in the waters near the Dalmatian island where he had a house and where he was killed—as the three gunshot wounds on his body confirmed beyond doubt—maybe a full seven days before the corpse was discovered. Documents were found on the already decomposing body which proved that this was Walter Stikler, a seventy-one year old French national. Ballistic processing spoke the technical language of 9 mm bullets fired from a Walther P99. Experts claimed this to be the favorite firearm of the international criminal world, but also of terrorist gangs.

I followed every twist and turn of the story obsessively. Others speculated about his life, always referring to his reclusive nature and ascetic lifestyle hidden from the eyes of the public and the lenses of cameras, “in marked contrast to the pompous French intellectuals whose notoriety is in negative proportion to their intellectual depth” (British sources). They tried to pinpoint his background and life story, this “drama of the century which he personified” (French sources), “confirming the moral imperative of facing the past” (German sources), concluding only that “one doesn’t need a lot of imagination to know who the person could be who was born as Walter Stikler in the midst of World War II, somewhere in the European East” (American sources). But all the while, with all of them struggling to decipher the person who was behind such an influential phenomenon and works, I, and I claim this without any desire to boast of my own importance, only I knew, or believed I knew, who Walter Stikler really was. And not only that; at that moment I, only I, I repeat, knew who Wladimir really was.

Over a few months, from the spring to the summer of 2016, before Walter’s retreat to the Island (a retreat that was all the more urgent in light of the threats he’d been receiving), I came to know him and met with him often. Friendship would be too strong a word for our relationship, whose rhythm he alone dictated 22

in a most unpredictable way, the same way he’d come into my life. It was difficult to understand why he was telling me all this, and only the further course of events could explain why he did so and opened up to me of all people.

Soon I began to write a novel based on his stories, a tale that hardly anybody could remain indifferent to, “the stuff of literature,” as he claimed while urging me to use it. And then just as I was outlining the chapter on Wladimir’s abduction, when I was at the point of the police blockade tightening around the building before the detonation brought a full stop to Wladimir’s life, I was devastated by the news of Walter’s murder. Another surprise came soon after. I received an email from the Šupe & Šupe law office in Šibenik, summoning me, as I read, breathless, to come to Dalmatia without delay regarding a matter pertaining to the estate of Walter Stikler and to pay my “last respects to same.” The law office was responsible for expeditious execution of the will of the “tragically deceased,” and all this should be conducted in the greatest secrecy, “as per the delicacy of the situation, and in keeping with the instructions issued by the decedent himself.” I was to arrive only a few days hence, and the airplane ticket for Split was immediately forwarded to me electronically. All the details, the message said, will be explained upon my arrival.

The Šupe & Šupe law office sent a taxi to the Split airport to bring me to Šibenik.

The driver was waiting for me, holding a Mr. Stiks sign. He said hello and pointed to the name. “Yes, that’s me.” He said he spoke no English. I shrugged. He gestured for me to follow. In silence we drove along a hillside toward a new highway. There had been no highway there in my childhood. Along the way I could see islands in the distance, the names of the towns on traffic signs, and, finally, as we reached the exit from the highway, there was Prukljansko Lake before us. We entered Šibenik, through streets I’d run around on as a boy so often, losing my way as if in a labyrinth, and finding new ways through each time where lurked cats, and the occasional druggie. What joy when I’d burst out from the semi-darkness and find myself by the Cathedral from which those famous busts watched me with their piercing eyes and broken noses. Among them, or so went the legend etched in my mind, was the bust of beautiful Jelena, daughter of the Cathedral’s builder, Juraj Dalmatinac, whose father broke her nose himself to protect her from spells and envy. “Šupe,” said the cabdriver, pointing to a gentleman pacing restlessly along the waterfront in a cloud of tobacco smoke, puffing frenetically on his cigarette as if, or so I imagined, he were thundering in a local courtroom, fighting for a few feet of land for a backwoods client; theatrical virtuosity before a public who had no way of appreciating it. Šupe was a heavy-set man in his sixties and was 23

sweating heavily in his suit over which fluttered his poorly knotted tie. The wind kept slapping it onto his back. He hid from the sun behind a straw hat and sunglasses. In his other hand was his briefcase. He raised both arms high in the air—as if zapped by a small electric shock—when the cabdriver honked.

“Welcome to Dalmatia!” he shouted. “Have a nice…?”

“No need for English,” I said.

“One of us?”

“Yes. One of us,” I said.

“Why didn’t you say so? Screw Ingliš.” He hopped off to pay the bill. “Let me pay the man.”

And after I’d surveyed the scene, from Mandalina, across the mouth of the St. Ante Channel to Martinska and on toward Most and Zaton, there he was in front of me. He was suddenly peering anxiously for something. “Where’s your suitcase, for God’s sake?!”

“All I have is the backpack.”

He was startled momentarily, then exclaimed, in the same electrified fashion.

“Of course, of course! Who wants to bother with luggage! Off we go!”

I set off after Šupe, struggling to keep up. For such a portly man he moved along spryly, pulling another cigarette and a lighter from his pocket. Then he stopped so suddenly that I nearly bumped into him. “Aaaah…” he exhaled his first puff, as if lost in the blessed state of nicotine relief, until an unpleasant thought brought him back. “Do you smoke?” he asked with drama. He didn’t wait for my answer. “Without tobacco I cannot live. Ah yes.”

I nodded, and Šupe offered me one of his Walter Wolf cigarettes, surely magic if his long sighs of pleasure were any measure. Then he spun around, almost running: “Faster, faster, get a move on! We’ll miss the boat!”

That same old boat that used to ferry us out to the archipelago was still in service.

Thousands of scouts from all over Yugoslavia used to clamber on board on their way to the Island, where they’d spend the summer working on public projects.

I called the whole area an archipelago, perhaps not quite the right definition for the network of estuaries, medieval cities, lakes, the serpentine shoreline, deep bays, channels, fortresses overlooking the sea, and a sequence of peninsulas and islands or rock formations jutting from the sea, peaks of underwater hills, from them beaming the green or red lights of lighthouses, cutting through the dusk.

For me this will always be the summer archipelago of my youth which I spent on board boats through June to September until I was fourteen. My father would steer our small craft, always on the lookout for yet undiscovered details, always entranced by the colors, always prepared to take me to explore caves beyond 24

dense pine forests, on searches for bunjas, dry stone wall huts scattered amidst the abandoned olive groves, and the wrecks of stranded boats or the abandoned dwellings of hermits. My mother’s family is what tied us to these parts, but Father embraced them as his own, despite his deep Middle Europe roots from along its riverways. Our family had two kingdoms, this Mediterranean one and the one hidden beyond the Dinaric mountain range; one at sea level and the other, a thousand feet above, among the wreaths of mountains. Ours was a fertile homeland. Now the soil might have been the same, but the homeland disappeared with the war. First hit was the archipelago, and after it, our “winter palace,” as we called Sarajevo.

While the boat ferried us through the Channel, Šupe brought us both coffee.

“My apologies for the great rush. I’ll explain everything when we land. This is how Mr. Stikler requested.”

This first mention of Walter Stikler made him freeze. His hand flew to his mouth. “How awful.” Quickly he regained his composure, a professional doing his job. He straightened his suit and did what he could to rein in his tie. After a spell he resumed speaking, at incredible speed, as if trying to break the sound barrier of both language and comprehension. Šupe was a man of the past, this much was clear. He came across as the antipode of the new breed of corporate lawyers, although he did try to imitate them with intermittent glances at his smartphone, clearly a headache for him. He came from a family of local functionaries and officials (“You know how it was, the Commie bourgeoisie, see. Dad in the Party, a director, all that. Mother, a teacher of the Croatian language at the Maritime Secondary School”). He set up his law practice in his native town after many years spent knocking around Zagreb as a student (“The parents shelled out the money, first one girlfriend, then a second, and off to Trieste for a cappuccino and other such nonsense, took my time, I did, dammit… but I couldn’t make a go of it up there”). Things went fine at first (“Listen, when you know the doors to knock on, everything moves along smartly, don’t you know”). But the war put an end to all that. He was called up, mainly sat in the National Defense office and handled “legal” matters (“As you can see, I am not much of a Rambo”). After the war getting back on his feet was not easy (“The new system, the new regs, the new people up top… move your kids through school, satisfy the wife, dammit, who can keep up with everything”). But, “Things are better now, I sit at the registry of deeds all the livelong day, digging away… whose great granny left which shed in the middle of which stretch of barren rocks to thirty heirs, some living, some not, who now think they’d sell it to the English, but only if they can stab each other in the back in the process! There, that’s my gig these days, my friend.” And then he caught himself, with horror: “Good god, 25

I’m going on and on about myself! You probably have things to ask. There, be my guest.”

“Yes, I actually do have a question. Who is the other Šupe?”

“Scuse me?” “Šupe & Šupe. That’s what your law firm’s called, right?”

“Ah, that!” he shrugged this off. “Listen, I put the other Šupe there so it would look sharper, see. You know, like New York, tradition, family business… I was kind of hoping my dunce of a son would earn his las degree. What was I thinking!

He’s off spinning disks at the Hacijenda. That’s a dance bar over there in the hills above Vodice. Don’t ask.” I chose not to say that I knew, because the Hacijenda was already there before the war. “Artist! Give me a break!” he went on, bitterly.

“My daughter, she did get her law degree, gotta say, more power to her, she even passed the bar. She works with me, don’t know what I’d do without her. But, dammit, she’s married, so she’s not a Šupe any more. It looks a little silly to call the office Šupe and Pivac. People would snicker. No point, see. So there it stands, Šupe & Šupe, with the date under it, since 1983, underlined. Let the world know!” Šupe suddenly fell silent, staring out to sea, lost in thoughts about his struggle.

This unexpected pause sent me back to thinking about the predicament I now found myself in and the question of how I had found myself here with this man on board this boat, so familiar and so beloved, repainted countless times, its name changed.

Walter appeared in my life again just a few days after we’d met at Le Basile. I felt a mixture of fury, excitement, panic, but also curiosity when I saw how he was sitting and reading a newspaper in a corner of my favorite café, along the Canal Saint-Martin, where I often came for an espresso and to read. He was not, of course, surprised to see me. Calmly he folded his paper (Le Figaro) and offered me a seat. “Here we’ll be able to talk. Last time there was rather a lot of sound… and fury, was there not?”

I took a seat, wordless, and kept my eyes on him, my chin slightly raised, questioning and scornful.

“I understand that all this must come as a shock for you. I, too, would be incensed. But I wish to ask you for one simple thing.”

“And that would be?”

“To hear me out. No more.”

“Why me?”

“You’ll learn, or catch on as we go along.”

“Maybe I’d rather not.”

“What would we rather, and what would we rather not? Hard to tell. Perhaps 26

I can make this easier for you, I propose a simple method: you listen. If you wish to ask a question, please do so, but even that is not necessary. Shall we proceed?

Believe me, I am offering you… pure gold.”

I said nothing.

“Fine. I wager there are questions roiling your mind. Let’s start with one, perhaps that will be easiest. First two related questions: who am I? And what is Wladimir to me? Commençons par le commencement, as the French are wont to say.

Shall we?”

I still said nothing.

“Or perhaps not right from the very beginning.”

Now we could already see the Island, verdant, forested densely with pines. The boat was bringing everything the island required, people, food supplies, cement or furniture or appliances. When we drew near, the islanders began pouring out of houses and side streets to greet the boat, whose arrivals measured out their time for them. I had the feeling that I’d catch sight, somewhere, of Father and Mother on board, bent over the railing, the way they’d looked twenty-five years ago, when they were still young. Or suddenly a crowd of boy and girl scouts in green shirts and bright-colored scarves indicating some sort of hierarchy I couldn’t divine would course out onto the Island as its summer colonizers. They’d would put up their tents and huts, line up their little army, clean the narrow roads and goat paths, file by in march step, socialize with other kids their age from distant parts of their shared country, swill cheap local wine and fall in love to the twang of out-of-tune guitars. They’d never forgotten the archipelago, no matter where they were today. Walter Stikler came to the Island on this same boat for the first time. He was seventeen.

The motors went still and we slid now toward the landing dock. I heard a hurried breath behind me. Šupe put his hand on my shoulder.

“Listen, friend,” he said. “There’s something I haven’t told you.”

“Yes? What?”

“Having to do with the will,” he looked at me with a serious expression with his hand still resting on my shoulder.

“Spit it out, Šupe.”

The starboard side bumped up against the dock. The brief thud jolted the boat and rocked the passengers.

27

A. The Island

The starboard side bumped up against the dock. The brief thud jolted the boat and rocked the passengers. From the upper deck an enthusiastic Hurrah! was heard. The girl and boy scouts prepared to disembark while groups of welltanned youth, whose stay on the Island was now coming to an end, waited patiently to come on board. The boat would ferry them back to the continent and then they’d proceed by train from Šibenik, on through the many railway junctions (Perković, Knin, Ploče…) into their republics, provinces, cities and villages. While the boat was still in the port of Šibenik, Valter had found his way to the lower deck, the floor below, where travelers usually gathered in the winter months to evade the bura winds, and there he settled into the farthest corner. He didn’t mind the heat in the lower deck or the rumble of the boat’s engines. All he cared about was being by himself. He opened his book. The Myth of Sisyphus.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

He’d been given the book by Eržebet Kon, who ran the Sarajevo Center for Children in Need of Care. It had recently been published in Sarajevo by Veselin Masleša in a translation by Nerkez Smailagić, with an afterword by Vanja Sutlić. Eržebet gave him the book, recommending that he read it carefully,

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and then she told him he’d be spending the summer on the Island.

“On an island?” he asked.

“Yes, at a youth center.”

“Why?” he didn’t understand.

“Because it will do you good. Get ready. You leave the day after tomorrow on the night train. End of discussion.”

Eržebet was the person Valter had known the longest in his life, ever since he had any memories at all. What he didn’t remember, but documents showed, was that he’d been brought to the orphanage in 1945. Eržebet Kon had been appointed to manage the center for orphans and children in need of care. She signed the papers and assumed responsibility for the child. He was delivered to her by a Captain Walter Stikler. This was also chosen as the child’s name, spelled Valter Štikler, as Serbo-Croatian has no W in its alphabet, although the baby was not a relative of the Captain’s.

I decided to give you his first and last name. What other name would have suited? Valter Štikler is as good a name as any. Captain Stikler had come across him during the push to liberate the country, abandoned in a freight car at a local train station.

All she knew—for she’d asked the Captain when he brought her the child—was that he had been from Vienna, and this she told the child. Like her, Stikler had joined the Partisans and even rose to the rank of captain. And that is worth something, Valter. Most of your friends have no idea where they come from, or where they were found, or who found them. Walter Stikler left Sarajevo with his military unit after a brief conversation with her. What if she never saw him again. What an interesting man, she thought at the time. She startled herself with the decision to give the little boy the Captain’s first and last name. She made the decision in a split second. She told him: You found him. You saved him. Who knows what will become of you. The war is still on. Why doesn’t he carry your name. In case something happens to you, at least your name would live on. He thanked her and left. She was startled to find herself thinking of Walter Stikler again the next day.

So this is how Walter Stikler became the person closest to a father that Valter Štikler ever knew. Eržebet was the 30

closest he had to a mother. She was kind to him, although never any more than she was to the other children. Stern and attentive. To be on equal terms with all of them seemed to be her personal ideology, and they were her life’s work, her contribution to the newly founded society. You are the future, reverberated her voice, with a noticeable Hungarian accent, through the dining hall at the Center, washing over the drowsy heads of the war orphans. You are the future, because you have no roots.

The whole way to Šibenik he was restless. The youth brigades were noisily joyous to be going to the seacoast, but the brandy they’d smuggled in with them, their twanging on guitars, and having their company foisted on Valter made the trip unbearable from the beginning. He looked for a place to hide on the train, but it was packed. In the end his only solution was to retreat to the stinky toilet where he could read and trundle along with the train.

Suicide has never been dealt with except as a social phenomenon. On the contrary, we are concerned here, at the outset, with the relationship between individual thought and suicide. An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art. The man himself is ignorant of it. One evening he pulls the trigger or jumps.

Pulls the trigger or jumps, he said aloud, thrilled by what he was reading. The train thundered through Pazarić.

Valter read on furiously, delving—or, rather sinking— into the paragraphs from which sentences hammered like the ratatat of a machine gun. …in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. his exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land.

Valter lowered the window. The train, along the narrow-gauge tracks, passed through Raštelica and had already begun the challenging ascent up Ivan to the old tunnel. A 31

lost home? A promised land? Only the gloom of the mountain.

The eternal night of the tunnel. But Camus had an answer for that, too (Valter would come across it once they’d begun their descent, after Konjic, on their way to Jablanica lake).

What is, in fact, the absurd man? (…) Assured of his temporally limited freedom, of his revolt devoid of future, and of his mortal consciousness, he lives out his adventure within the span of his lifetime. That is his field, that is his action, which he shields from any judgment but his own.

Over and over he read that passage until it had crept into his heart like a seed pressed into loam. Before dawn, physically drained, but mentally reborn, he returned to his compartment. He was barely able to pick his way among the scouts, girls and boys, intertwined on the seats and floor. When he finally dropped onto a seat by a window, he couldn’t take his eyes off the Herzegovina landscape that was slowly emerging from the dark. It was true, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. his exile is without remedy. Caught up in these troublesome thoughts pressing down upon the mind of this young man who had just embraced the absurd, he was brought out of his reverie by a quiet signal—the sound of knuckles cracking—that drew his attention to a boy sitting across from him. Valter glanced over at him. The boy, on whose lap a girl lay sleeping, winked at him. Valter didn’t understand what this meant. The boy used his eyes to point at his hand, unbuttoning the girl’s blouse. Valter gestured to him not to. Still smiling, the boy spread open her blouse. Big breasts appeared there in front of Valter, cupped inside her bra. Still watching Valter, somewhere between Bačevići and Žitomislići, with his spry fingers as the girl squirmed ever so slightly, the boy eased her breasts out of her bra and now they stared straight at Valter through the half-dark. Then the boy slipped them back into the bra, buttoned up the girl’s blouse, and winked again.

Hmm, thought Valter, struggling with the excitement the scene had stirred in him, ending the chapter on absurd

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freedom with the words: But the point is to live. Was this what Camus had in mind? Valter was perplexed.

Valter was relieved when he finally found his hiding place on the hot lower deck where he knew he’d be left alone— everyone else was, after all, up on the upper deck, thrilled by the very existence of the sea! The girl and the boy who’d shown him her treasures was among them. At one moment, as they were walking onto the boat, she exclaimed: Isn’t this wonderful! The boy said: You are wonderful, and then he looked over at Valter, and added, Am I right? Valter looked away, determined to hide himself from this superficial world of the innate absurdity both of his very existence and of the sun and the sea and the breasts, no matter how captivating they might be.

His happiness, on the lower deck, did not last long. With a burst of laughter that rocked Valter, a new boy and a new girl came tumbling down the stairs. Valter wondered whether there’d be any end to this and if he’d be spending the entire summer fleeing the lust of fools. At the bottom of the stairs they kissed and were obviously looking for a good place. He could only see the boy from behind: well-built, disheveled dark hair, shirt untucked and a three-day stubble making him look older and more mature. Valter wondered what their intentions were and how he might thwart them.

The boy whispered in the girl’s ear and she giggled. Then there was silence while the boy gently pressed his lips to hers and continued kissing her very very slowly. His hand now freely found its way between the girl’s legs. When it slipped under her skirt, the girl leaped up. The boy was startled; she smoothed her blouse and skirt, staring at Valter.

She turned away from them. “We aren’t alone.”

Valter didn’t know whether or not he was expected to apologize for having been there before them. He waved his book as if raising his hand in surrender. The boy glared at him. “I was just… reading…” stuttered Valter. At that the boy grinned, winked at him, and burst out laughing. The girl was surprised, insulted, and stomped up the stairs.

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“See you later, honey,” the boy said to her, he glanced at Valter and shrugged. “Babes, what can you do. So what are you reading?”

Valter smiled. “Albert Camus.”

“Aaaalberrr Kaaaamuuuu,” said the boy, aping Valter’s stab at the proper French pronunciation of the famous writer’s first and last name. Then both of them laughed. “So what does this Albeerrrr of yours have to say?”

“He says suicide is an essential philosophical question.”

“And so it is. When you kick the bucket, there’s no more philosophy. We knew that without him.”

“And that rebellion is the essence of life.”

“Well there I have to agree with Comrade Camus. And what are you doing here, in this furnace? It must nearly at boiling in here.”

“I’m not one for socializing. I wanted to read.” Valter waved the book again.

The boy paced around the lower deck, nodding as if this sounded like a good reason to him.

“And you, what are you doing here? I mean, on the boat?”

“Well orphans like me also have a right to a summer vacation!”

“What?” Valter jumped, surprised, to his feet. “You are…”

“An orphan. From the war. They found me at some camp.”

“And me on a freight train!”

“You’re kidding!” Vladimir’s whistle shrilled.

“I am Valter. From Sarajevo.”

“And not from the freight train?”

“From a Sarajevo center for people like us.”

“Is that your war name? Valter, I mean?”

“If you like. What about you? What’s your name?”

“Vladimir, from a Belgrade center for people like us. They sent me to the seacoast to separate me from some buddies I was doing dumb things with around town, right? The social worker told them it would be good for me. What fools.”

“They sent me so I’d make friends.”

“Well, Valter, you’ve come to the right place!”

Valter grinned. “We’re here! Let’s go,” said Vladimir.

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“We’ll have a blast on this island. And not just with the boy scouts. Give me your hand!”

Valter shifted his book to his left and extended his right.

Vladimir clasped it with a grin, and then drew it in to him sharply, slung it over his shoulder, and pulled the surprised Valter onto his back. Up the stairs he carried him, shouting “Let’s goooooo!”

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