Belgrade Noir

They were healthy and whole, while he was battered and broken; they would leave that park alive, while he would stay dead and buried.

Nevertheless, the man looked at them as if all of this were an ordinary lie. Some of them were ready to admit that it wouldn’t have surprised them if, at the command “Aim!” he had pulled out a weapon and carefully aimed it at them.

But when the command to shoot finally came down and they fired, everything seemed to move in slow motion.

The German officer who commanded the firing squad thought for a moment that time would snap like a strip of film, then darkness would descend and the convict would manage to escape into some quiet Belgrade street, after which they’d lose the war.

At that same moment, apart from thinking as well that the Germans would surely lose the war, Mustafa Golubić noticed how the Russian equivalent for the Serbian word for “finally,” konačno (в конце концов), could very easily be heard in Serbian as na kraju krajeva, or “after all.”

But before that, as if to fulfill his own last wish, he recalled many men, women, and cities, and among them Comrade Mars, from whom he’d received, in this very same park, the directive that until further orders from Moscow he was to do nothing against those who’d prompted his return to Belgrade the year before.

In those penultimate moments, his life lost nothing of its purpose and meaning. He was a committed Communist who’d been given the opportunity to die honorably for his ideas, and he accepted this opportunity without hesitation, not wanting to guess who might’ve been the one to betray him.

For he didn’t see his capture as his downfall.

Sitting on the chair beneath the vast leafy branches, he didn’t just feel strongly, but knew with certainty, that this park was not the site of his death, but the place where the full potential of world revolution would slowly be achieved.

“Any last words?” asked the German commander of the firing squad.

“I wish I could stand.”

The German officer knew how to conduct such conversations, and offered a cigarette to the man tied to the chair.

“Very kind of you, but my ribs are broken. It would hurt to inhale, and there’s no need to suffer anymore.”

Helm had declared something very similar at the end of the final interrogation.

“You need not suffer anymore,” the Gestapo chief, in a spotless uniform, had told him, while his crushed, broken body had tried to arrange itself around the searing stabs of pain that day by day had transformed into a new expression of his undying faith.

I began with hope in anger and physical strength, I continued with great faith and even greater doubt in the spoken word, and I will meet my end believing only in pain. He’d drawn an invisible line under his secret life before fainting as they’d tried to lift him from the floor of his solitary-confinement cell and carry him out into the street.

It was as if the Germans had only then realized that a man in his condition wouldn’t be able to walk to the gallows.

First, they’d wanted to carry him to the park in a blanket, and then someone had suggested tying him to a chair because they could then shoot him like that.

He’d come to halfway between the prison and the park. He’d watched the sidewalk passing under him and first thought that it was all over, that he was already flying; but then he’d felt the ropes.

There was still more suffering to endure.

“Well, you’re going to your death like a king,” said Helm with just a hint of sarcasm, and he smiled back, refraining from saying that he, truth be told, had ceased to exist a long time before, and being invisible was an even greater threat to those he was still preying on.

He considered saying something witty about the king remark, but he bottled those words up forever and waited for Helm to ask him once again if he was Mars, at which he quickly shook his head, looking the gestapo chief right in the tiny metal buttons of his eyes.

And who knows what he would’ve told them had they not beaten him?! Who knows what would’ve bobbed up from the bottom of him in that icy ocean of endless silence in which he’d been floating for one whole day, between the first and second interrogations?