David Albahari (1948–2023)

Meyer even confessed to me that he felt his heart beat faster and that later, when he recalled those days, he would shiver. Look at this: I am beginning to imagine myself talking with people whose faces I don’t even know. I knew precious little, indeed, about the faces of most of my kin, but in their case I can at least look at my own face in the mirror and seek their features there, whereas with Götz and Meyer I had no such help. Anyone could have been Götz. Anyone could have been Meyer, and yet Götz and Meyer were only Götz and Meyer, and no-one else could be who they were. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that I constantly had this feeling that I was slipping, even when I was walking on solid ground. (p. 45).

Nothing easier than to stray into the wasteland of someone else's consciousness. (p.45)

In the morning, while I dressed, I’d be Götz and Meyer. I did not allow myself to be distracted by details, for instance: wondering whether German soldiers wore short-sleeved undershirts, or dog tags with their personal details round their necks. I always wore singlets, cut high under the armpits, important because I sweat so much, and nothing was going to make me stop wearing them. This was about something else. I would look at myself, let’s say, in the mirror and say: Now Meyer is combing his hair, and then Götz would ask Meyer what he’d be having for breakfast. Once I got up in a foul mood, as Götz, and when asked that same question, told Meyer angrily: bananas. Lord, how Meyer laughed. His razor bounced around in his hand! Later, when he rinsed off the foam, he noticed a little nick on his left cheek, but that only reminded him of Götz’s reply, and then he burst into guffaws again. Götz didn’t say anything, because by then he was already in the kitchen, where he watched as I made coffee. Quite the bright one, that Götz, never to put the cart before the horse. As they drove towards Belgrade, he never carped to Meyer, possibly Götz, about speeding. It is important to tend to State property entrusted to your care, but even more important to tend to good relations with your work colleagues, since your success in completing any assignment depends far more on that than on anything else. (pp. 46-47)

Now I realise that I was actually evading talk of reality and that everything that happened to me during those spring months six years ago - plunging into the shadowy world of mystical phenomena - was a form of self-deception, a form of solace or, more precisely, escapism from our reality at the time. The encounters with the unbridled nationalists were so surreal that I didn't feel them to be a part of reality. I was wrong, of course, because they, the violent young men, were just as real as the blows they dealt me, and just as real today, perhaps not quite so numerous, but certainly louder and more bold. Furthermore they are still where they were then, in a place they feel to be theirs alone, while I am somewhere else, it doesn't matter where, and words are all I have left, and this attempt at fashioning from them something that will have at least a semblance of permanence.