[Alex Linder]

"But you said you weren't a Croat."

"I am not. I am a Serb. From the Vojvodina."

"But you can translate their language?"

Tezich chuckled. It is the same language, Mr. Karp. We are the same people, divided by a common language, as I believe Mr. George Bernard Shaw said about the Americans and British. This is why it is called Serbo-Croatian."

"Huh!" Karp said. "Then what's Yugoslavian?"

The associate professor chucled again. "Well, this is difficult to explain in one breath. There is a joke in Yugoslavia that we have two alphabets, three religions, four languages, five nationalities, and six republics. But Serbo-Croatian is one of the languages and two of the alphabets. You see, we southern Slavs became literate rather late in history. The Church gave us our writing, and those who were converted by Catholic missionaries took up the Latin script, and those who were converted by Orthodox missionaries took up the Cyrilic script."

"Like Russian?"

"Very like Russian. The Catholic south Slavs became Croats; their Orthodox cousins, you might say, became Serbs. Since then, of course, the history of the two peoples has been very different. Which causes many problems. And one of them has come to rest on your doorstop, I think."

"The case, you mean?"

"Yes. You could say that this case began in 1389. That was when the Turks crushed the Serbian empire at the Battle of Kossovo. Thus began five hundred years of appalling slavery for the Serbs, and centuries of nearly unending combat for the Croats, who found themselves on the front line of European resistance to the Turks. As a result of this . . ." Terzich stopped abruptly and smiled a sheepish smile. "Forgive me, Mr. Karp, I am carried away by my subject. The occupational disease of all professors is to lecture at the slightest provocation."

"No, that's OK," Karp said. "It's just hard to believe you would think that the motives for a crime could be traced back to things that happened so long ago."

"Yes, this is what Americans believe generally. You have abolished history, have you not? Your Henry Ford says, 'History is bunk,' and you nod, yes, the past is dead, only the future is real, and we can change this as we like.
Perhaps this is true for you, though I doubt it. But in Yugoslavia we breathe history like the air. We cannot escape it, even when it carries, you might say, traces of poison.

"And so must you, because, believe me, there is no way to keep this history bottled up inside Yugoslavia. You are surprised it escapes and kills one policeman? Sixty years ago, it started a war that killed ten million people and changed the world. Perhaps even your life was changed by this little event, Mr. Karp. The First World War? Perhaps someone got shot instead of married. Perhaps someone decided that Europe was no longer healthy and made the voyage to America. So it is possible that you owe your existence to something that began inside my country."

Terzich paused and nodded his head in the direction of the Croatians. "These people are living out a kind of historical dream. The defendants you are prosecuting they consider heroes. They were all raised on tales of dashing Croat warriors in red cloaks, killing Turks, killing Austrians, killing Serbs, all for the freedom of Croatia and the glory of its holy church."

Karp shook his head. "But it wasn't any blow for freedom. They failed. It was a screwup from the start. They killed an innocent man for nothing."

"An innocent man. In a five-hundred-year war, Mr. Karp, believe me, the notion of innocence does not survive. In Yugoslavia we have a monument honoring the man who started the First World War, the greatest slaughter of innocents that history records. And failure does not matter, either. The Serbs failed for nearly five hundred years and won in the end. At what cost you can have no idea. You have an expression in this country for someone who habitually uses foul language: 'He curses like a priest's son?' That cannot be right--"

"Curses like a preacher's kid," Karp volunteered.

"Just so! Very colorful and very American. He curses like a preacher's kid. In Yugoslavia we say instead: 'He curses like a Serb on a stake.' This is from the Turkish practice of impaling rebels on stakes. The sharpened pole is inserted between the victim's legs, up through the body cavity, and out just under the shoulder, the skilled impaler being careful not to hit any organs or blood vessels that would cause a quick death. Then the butt of the stake is stuck in the ground, and the condemned man is left to die in sight of all his friends and relatives, who, of course, are prohibited from helping him, on pain of suffering the same fate. Such a death can last for days. The expression I referred to tells enough about how our heroes of that time responded: they did not pray, or beg for mercy.

"But still, failure upon failure, the revolts did not stop. At Nis, south of Belgrade, the Turks built a tower ten meters high out of the heads of Serbian rebels. How many heads is that, I wonder? It would be an interesting calculation. And why did they rebel? So that they could have a flag and king of their own? Not at all. Mr. Karp, do you know what a janissary is?"

"Some kind of soldiers, weren't they?"

"Not exactly. Imagine this, Mr. Karp. Imagine that you have a son, a beautiful, strong son. You nurture him, you teach him all you know, you love him more than your own life. At the age of nine, he is the strongest and bravest and most intelligent boy in the village, the natural leader.

"Then one day, the thing happens that you always knew would happen but are powerless to prevent. A squadron of Osmanli cavalry rides into the village. The spahis dismount and race through the houses, driving all before them with their whips. Holding back the villagers, they line up the boys of nine and ten. Their beg walks down the line, inspecting them like cattle. Of course, he picks your son, puts a collar around his neck, and drags him off to become a janissary, to be circumcised and converted to Islam, to fight for the sultan, to rule over provinces. A brilliant idea, actually. To strip the conquered people of their best stock and use these men as soldiers to keep the subjects pacified. Perhaps you will see your son again, as a proud man in a green turban, ordering your friends and relatives to be impaled. Can you imagine it? And this went on for five centuries.

"So when the Serbs finally got their own nation, they fought for it like demons. Serbia lost a higher proportion of its sons in the First World War than any other nation. In that war and in the two Balkan wars before it a third of the population perished."

"And what about the Croats?" Karp asked.

"Ah, the Croats, our cousins. They were heroes, too, but of a different kind. They became cannon fodder for the Austrian empire in its great struggle against the Ottomans. Perhaps we would be wearing turbans and speaking Turkish right now, Mr. Karp, had it not been for the brave Croats. The Germans kept them on a tight leash nevertheless. There is a monument in Zagreb that commemorates the execution, in 1573, of the Croat peasant rebel Matija Gubec. The Germans seated him on a red-hot crown. A typically witty German response to the Croat desire for independence.

"And after the danger from the Turks was past, they remained useful to the Germans. Croat troops crushed the revolution of 1848 in Vienna. As a reward, the Germans gave their country to Hungary. Another witty comment. The Croats fought the Hungarians, though, and later they fought the Serbs for the Austrian empire during the First World War. Why not? Fighting was all they knew.

"And when at last, after so many centuries, the Slavs in the Balkans had a nation they could call their own, the Croats kept fighting against Yugoslavia. They did not want to share a nation with ignorant Serbians and dirty Bosnians. Perhaps they had learned too much about a certain kind of pride from living so long on the German leash. And perhaps they learned too much treachery from their German masters. So that they welcomed these masters when they returned in 1940 and crushed Yugoslavia. And then they had their precious Croatia, a fascist puppet state that the Nazis set up for them. And all the good Croat nationalists put on black uniforms and became ustashi, little Slav brothers of the S.S., and went out to massacre the Serbs, Jews, Moslems, and anyone else who polluted the precious soil of Croatia."

[From Depraved Indifference (1990), by Lawrence Tenenbaum, pp. 178-183.]