Zone by Mathias Enard Page B

hadn’t been attached to anything, theoretically I was answerable to the Croatian army but we were supposed to have resigned and left for Bosnia so as not officially to embarrass Croatia, I went to see the captain then the major I said I’m leaving I can’t stand it any more they replied but we need you I said think of me as having fallen in battle Blaškić gave me a funny look and asked me are you OK? I answered can’t complain , then he gave the order to sign my travel papers and I left, I crossed the lines to go back through Mostar then Split whence I reached Zagreb, I moved into a shabby boarding house I bought sneakers that were too small for me I remember I had only combat boots, I didn’t know where to go, I remember calling Marianne crying like a baby I don’t even know anymore if I was drunk, I felt guilty for abandoning my comrades, guilty for my share of the destroying, the killing, I dreamed for hours and hours on end without really sleeping, I dreamed of funeral ceremonies where Andrija blamed me for having abandoned his body I walked for kilometers in the mountains to find him to put him on a tall wooden pyre and burn him, his face was outlined then in the smoke that rose to the heart of the spring sky—all that came back to me all of a sudden as I saw Blaškić in his box at The Hague among the lawyers the interpreters the prosecutors the witnesses the journalists the onlookers the soldiers of the UNPROFOR who analyzed the maps for the judges commented on the possible provenance of bombs according to the size of the crater determined the range of the weaponry based on the caliber which gave rise to so many counter-arguments all of it translated into three languages recorded automatically transcribed 4,000 kilometers away from the Vitez Hotel and from the Lašva with the blue-tinted water, everything had to be explained from the beginning, historians testified to the past of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia since the Neolithic era by showing how Yugoslavia was formed, then geographers commented on demographic statistics, censuses, land surveys, political scientists explained the different political forces present in the 1990s, it was magnificent, so much knowledge wisdom information at the service of justice, “international observers” took on full meaning then, they testified to the horrors of slaughter with a real professionalism, the debates were courteous, for a time I would have volunteered as a witness, but neither the prosecution nor the defense had any interest in having me appear and my new occupations imposed discretion on me, for a long time I thought about what I would have said if they had questioned me, how would I have explained the inexplicable, probably I too would have had to go back to the dawn of time, to the frightened prehistoric man painting in his cave to reassure himself, to Paris making off with Helen, to the death of Hector, the sack of Troy, to Aeneas reaching the shores of Latium, to the Romans carrying off the Sabine women, to the military situation of the Croats of central Bosnia in early 1993, to the weapons factory in Vitez, to the trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo that are the father and mother of the one in The Hague—Blaškić in his box is one single man and has to answer for all our crimes, according to that principle of individual criminal responsibility which links him to history, he’s a body in a chair wearing a headset, he is on trial in place of all those who held a weapon, he will be condemned to forty-five years in prison then to nine years on appeal and today he must be taking advantage of his early release near Kiseljak, not very far from the villages where the burnt bodies of civilians for whose deaths he was blamed lie, those people who are still waiting for a justice that will never come, in the very Dutch Hague there was such a procession of ex-Yugoslavs that it was a headache to arrange their court appearances without all those people meeting each other in