Zbornik Mednarodnega literarnega srečanja Vilenica 2003 - Ljudmila

line. If he had decided to break off with me, he could have found a better reason for
it. If he was acting, surely he would not keep me in suspense for long. But this time it
was serious. D. said we should meet in the coffee bar of the Park Hotel the following
day, at a time when no one would expect us, and have our first exchange of
information then.
"We have to be careful. We're being followed. Now to work, I have to get ready", he said
rising from the table, and he departed.
All I could do was get ready myself and show up for our meeting. I augmented my
paltry knowledge of intelligence services with equally paltry facts from the General
Encyclopedia. I arrived at the appointed time and found him sitting at a table, looking
demented, red in the face, nostrils flaring.
"What's the matter?"
"Look at him over there", he said. "That pig is shadowing me. I'm so mad I can't think
straight. And you, you're dangerous, you could pull a fast one on me."
Sitting at a table was a smallish man, about thirty maybe, with a swarthy complexion
and thick, curly hair. He was sipping a lemonade and watching us. Suddenly D. angrily
rose from his chair and marched over to the man's table. He asked him on whose
orders was he following him, when had he been assigned to the case and what were
they waiting for, why didn't they liquidate him? The man looked at him in
astonishment, not understanding a thing. He was a guest at the hotel, a Greek. D.
briefly calmed down, later saying that Greece was strategically important to them,
especially since it was an Orthodox country.
The next day we met at Kalemegdan park. It was getting dark already. D. took a small
transistor out of his bag and put on some music. He looked around and even walked
a twenty-meter radius around the park bench. We had just sat down, huddled together
to exchange our information when, as chance would have it, and chance always favours
the narrator, a policeman stepped out of the bushes and asked for our I.D.s. D. was
shocked and shook his head.
'To choose a public park of all places!", said the policeman. "Beat it!"
We headed down the slope to the train tracks. D. suggested that we get on the tram to
cover our trail.
'or a moment there I was in a cold sweat", he said. "I've got two letters to Brezhnev in
my bag. But there's also a gun inside. If that ass had told me to open my bag, I would
have killed him!"
We got onto a half-empty tram. D. told me to sit behind him. or him, natural everyday
occurrences were traps. There was no such thing as happenstance, or the unexpected.
In nature, everything was connected. or him the world was coded, but he had the gift
of being able to decipher the signs, and hence was always tense and mistrustful. Riding
the tram I wondered: am I getting caught up in a dangerous game with a lunatic? When
the tram stopped at the aculty of Economics, he suddenly got up, signalling me to
follow. We jumped off the train and hurried towards the steps that lead up Kamenita
Street to the Zeleni Venac Market. He said we had to split up; we could give them the
slip under cover of darkness. And then suddenly he disappeared, I never even noticed
how. or two weeks he was nowhere to be seen; to be honest, I did not try very hard
to find him. I reproached myself for abetting a sick man.
One morning I saw him in front of my building. He was pacing back and forth
nervously, chain-smoking. I went down and invited him in, but he refused, saying that
my flat was bugged just like his and suggesting that we meet at the Russian cemetery.
He explained how to find it and which path would take me to the grave of Boris
Aleksandrovich Chistogradov, where there was an open book in marble with the name
26
Ana Smirovna Vassilyevna inscribed on it.
"Wait for me there", he said.
He seemed to have gathered flesh in the fifteen days that I had not seen him. He had
huge circles under his eyes and his face was puffy. When we met at the cemetery I told
him that he had changed, that he looked pale and tired. He waved my comments away
as irrelevant.
"My health doesn't matter', he said. "I couldn't care less about life. What I want us to
do here is to discuss global strategies. You know that the Soviet Union watches
Yugoslavia with one eye, and winks at what it is doing with the other. or us Yugoslavia
is a prisoner whom we allow freedom of movement. We monitor only the areas your
service supports. All your generous handouts go into pockets we have already ripped
open. What we want is to block the other side, not to change the situation in the
country. Neither of us cares how this system works, just which of our two sides wins
or loses. You want some kind of federalist revolution here, and we want an October
revolution. Now tell me the methods you use to neutralise our influence and kill our
chances?", he asked, his eyes fixed on me as he stood glumly at the grave of one Boris
Aleksandrovich Christogradov. "I know you think I'm crazy", he went on, "and you're
not the only one. If it makes you feel any better, I can be that too. But the fact is that
I know too much and that it cannot be erased from my memory."
"l'm sure you do", I said. "I just don't know why you picked me for the other side."
He smiled as warily as a fox, training his eyes on me like an interrogator waiting for
the suspect to change his statement.
"Apart from being close to Mrs. Trevisan, a British subject from a bourgeois family,
with a Serb father and a Croatian mother, you also see a CIA agent", he said.
"And who's that'?", I asked.
He ripped open the seam of his jacket lining and took out a tiny notebook; this was
where he kept a coded record of my meetings with foreign correspondents. He had
something to say about each and every one of them; all of them were in the employ of
one intelligence service or another. He pronounced Dan Morgan, the Washington Post
correspondent, a double agent. Even ranco Petrone, Unita's Belgrade correspondent,
was not spared. As far as D. was concerned, West European communist parties had
sold out to the ruling bourgeoisie anyway.
"If you refuse to see me and collaborate with me, then all I can do is put a bullet
through my head", he said.
This man of keen observation and bold gesture, this great admirer of literature,
raconteur and conversationalist, was now weighed down by international worries as
well. Was it that or something else which had aged him so quickly that you could see
him deteriorate by the day? All I could do was persist in the role of a sick man's
accomplice.
"Now then", he said, "tell me briefly about your strategy."
"Our goal is destabilisation, it is not to destroy the system, at least not for now", I said.
"We undermine the foundations of your influence by encouraging national communism
and weakening the monolithic party. Loosen its hold, and you're half-way there. We stir
things up, you put them back the way they were; it's an interesting game. We work
systematically and with a view to the long term, financing the press to develop the kind
of criticism that is bound to bear fruit one day. We have been saying for ages that Stalin
was a murdering maniac and that communist mythology is turning a thick-skulled
leader into a genius. Student newspapers have no compunction about calling Brezhnev
a rhinoceros."
"Yes. yes," he almost groaned. He kept chain-smoking. He wiped away the sweat, but
27