Glimmer of Hope, Glimmer of Flame: a documentary novel by Ag Apolloni

Author:Ag Apolloni [Apolloni, Ag]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Elbow
Published: 2023-04-05T17:00:00+00:00

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather

The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

Making the green one red.

He moves towards the director, hands like claws drenched in blood. Lights, lights! yells the director. But the actor can’t look at the light; he’s afraid of the public and their applause, and he tries to slip away. He stops. He seems to see Ferdonija in the audience, applauding him sarcastically. Who can play a criminal better than a criminal? The performer races around the stage, but cannot leave it. On four sides are her four sons. He stops still in the middle of the stage, falls to his knees, clutches his head and stares in terror as if someone has appeared on the steps. Is it Duncan? No, it’s Halim, coming near him oh so softly. He lowers his head, cries out, trembles. He feels an unexpected hand on his shoulder. It’s the director’s hand: Vuk, are you all right?

Of course, this rehearsal never happened, but it could have happened if the killers hadn’t killed their consciences. Ferdonija points the finger in vain. Nesrete points the finger in vain too, and Vjollca with her son. On the television he denies the crimes, defends himself and his brother-in-arms Dragan. Having stood up for his friend, he speaks for himself: I wouldn’t hurt a fly. What are you up to these days? asks the journalist. I work on TV, as an actor… a comedian. It’s no surprise that a criminal makes the public laugh. After all, in the classical tetralogies, after the tragedies there was a comedy. That’s how it was in the lost Niobe of Aeschylus. That’s how it is today. History repeats itself.

One fine day, not long after Vuk took away her lambs, a fisherman from the Serbian village of Tekija went fishing in the Danube, and he saw something big. It wasn’t a fish, or a shark, or a whale. So what was it? A truck. A refrigerated truck containing eighty corpses.

A few days later, in Lake Perućac, another truck appeared with corpses from Kosova. And some time after that the psychiatric hospital at Toponica admitted a militiaman of section 87 of the Special Police Units, who’d been overcome by a spirit of darkness so deep it couldn’t even be alleviated by the light from the lamp he’d made out of an Albanian’s skull.

Far from the river, far from the lake, far from the hospital, Ferdonija sat and waited in her museum-home. The hallway is lined with the shoes of her husband and her children. She gets up and touches the smallest. On a shelf is a copy of the Quran. Through God in whose hands my soul is, the miscarried child would pull his mother with his umbilical cord to paradise if she was patient. The mother endures for twenty years. She endures, she waits. Hope is the bridge connecting her to her children and her husband. Sometimes a visitor arrives with the intention

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