Igor Štiks is no stranger to Asymptote. As his April 2012 interview with us states, he was born in Bosnia, wrote his books in Croatia, and now divides his time between Edinburgh and Belgrade. The title character of Štiks’ soon-to-be-published novel, The Judgement of Richard Richter, is a Viennese writer and journalist who retreats from Paris and a painful divorce to his childhood home of Vienna just as he’s turning fifty, in 1992. In the midst of remodeling the apartment where he’d been raised by his aunt Ingrid, he stumbles on a letter written by his late mother, hidden in a blue notebook, tucked behind a bookcase in a wall he’d been demolishing.
From the unsent letter, he learns that his father was a man Richard had never heard of—someone called Jakob Schneider, a leftist Jewish antiwar activist from Sarajevo. Just then, in April of 1992, the war is breaking out in Bosnia. Moved by this unexpected information about his parentage and the mounting hostilities in Bosnia, Richter decides to go to Sarajevo to report from there as a war correspondent and, while he’s there, to search for more information about his father.
Once he arrives he is quickly caught up in the reality of the war and, at first, he sets aside his search for his father. Instead he finds a student, Ivor, to serve as his guide and translator, and he and Ivor decide to shoot a film about a play which is being rehearsed, amid the terrifying conditions of the siege, by a Sarajevo theater, based on a script adapted from the novel, Homo Faber, by Max Frisch. While working on the play he falls in love with Alma, the play’s leading actress. It is from this love affair and the outcome of the search for his father that he flees with such shame and horror, as described in the opening sentences of the excerpt, which we’re thrilled to present to you today in contributing editor Ellen Elias-Bursac’s excellent translation.
When the United Nations transport aircraft took off from Sarajevo on the morning of July 7, I was convinced that shame would strike me dead right there if I looked back once more at the city. I stayed in the seat I’d been assigned and fended off the desire to gaze one last time through the window at Sarajevo as I fled. I held my face in my hands, dropped my head to my knees, and didn’t even rise to lift a hand and wave to the besieged city I’d arrived in as a journalist in mid-May—only to desert it that day like a coward running from my own personal catastrophe, which had intertwined so strangely with the city’s calamity. Coward-like, I repeat, with no word of farewell. Or better, like a beggar in disguise, because there was nothing left of the old Richard Richter but, perhaps, the name on the accreditation ID that allowed him to board the aircraft as simply and painlessly as if hailing a cab to whisk him away from a war he had no tie to whatsoever.
And the tears that dripped onto the grimy iron deck of the aircraft, finding their way through his tightly squeezed fingers, might be perceived as nothing more than a perfectly reasonable human response to what he’d been through, a reaction to the stress that is invariably a part of the work of a journalist, a release of emotions now that the danger had finally passed, after our famous writer, valiant correspondent, and shrewd analyst of this tragic European war at the century’s end had chosen to withdraw. Perhaps to write a fat new book about his experiences and the bravery it took to be there, on the spot, before anybody else could, to open the eyes of Europe—as long as the honorarium was generous enough. No one knew that the man they took pains to extract from the plane that hot day in Split when the plane had landed was no longer the man listed on the ID attached to his shirt. No longer did he answer to that name.
When I arrived in Sarajevo in mid-May as an analyst for the German papers, a field reporter, a European writer acting in solidarity with the cataclysm ongoing at the center of the continent, my eyes were wide open. Behind the official function that gave me access to Sarajevo, already under siege for several days—a siege that is unlikely to end anytime soon judging by the most recent news coming in as I toil over my final manuscript—hidden from view was the personal piece of my mission: to deliver my mother’s unsent letter to the person she’d intended it for. The resolve with which I set out on this task was shaken from time to time, either by Ingrid’s insistent pleas or my own doubts that this search for a father—undertaken by a man of fifty pursuing only sketchy clues dating back to a long-ago war—was tantamount to madness, an irrational whim on the threshold of old age. But I wasn’t feeling the slightest bit elderly then, as if all the remaining strength I had left was surging inside me, regardless of the cost of seeing this absurd mission through.
I knew there’d be no return to the pre-blue-notebook life that night when, after my words with Ingrid, I dashed like a madman out of the house to wander the streets of Vienna, to cross the square where the central Gestapo headquarters had been and where today there stands an unassuming monument with a yellow star to remind us of all who disappeared into those cellars. There, not for his race, I thought at the time, but for his convictions, might have ended the days of the man who made me. Somehow I found myself by an open newspaper stand and requested the most recent edition of the evening news. The papers, it seemed, were not covering the war in Bosnia much. Only a brief article about a clash between the former federal army and forces of the army of the young state suggested that the situation was worsening in Sarajevo, with alarming news about hostilities and massacres elsewhere in Bosnia.
Sarajevo?
The fate of that city had had an entirely different import for me earlier. Yet now it was . . . what? My own place of origin? The very thought of such a thing was weird. A place where I, in some sense, belonged? Or, perhaps, where I ought to be right now?
To do what?
Find my father.
Who had probably died before I even came into the world. And even if he’d survived and was still alive, to go there, knock on the old man’s door, and declare, “Hello, I’m your son?” What was the point, after all this time, of complicating things, as if it wasn’t enough that a fifty-year-old man had discovered the truth of his background. Wasn’t it his problem, at first, to wrestle with? My father was somebody else, okay, but did that mean that now I needed to go charging into the fray? Ultimately what did I, Richard Richter, being who I am, have to do with all this?
These questions had been spinning in my head since I read Mother’s letter, and they heightened in intensity just at the moment when Ingrid mentioned the news which, at regular intervals, broadcast images of Jakob Schneider’s city. For God’s sake, these weren’t news stories about Wiener Neustadt or Eisentstadt, but about a city that was besieged, a city I knew nothing about! What can I do? I wondered, holding the newspaper with its bits of news about the mounting casualties in Bosnia, completely immersed in my intimate cross-examination, when the news vendor startled me out of my reverie with a wagging finger, pointing to the prominently displayed sign that the newspapers at his stand were to be “paid for, not read.” That legendary Viennese sense of nuance! I smiled with understanding at the vendor and reached for my wallet. Then I remembered I’d left it at home and started riffling through my pockets in hopes of turning up a schilling, but to my surprise instead I pulled out a folded newspaper clipping. Like the vendor, I was startled. But as soon as I saw the text in French, I realized I was holding the Le Monde article I’d read on the train for Vienna, and which I’d forgotten all about the instant I stuffed it into my pocket. I unfolded it nervously and saw again the image of the woman—Sarajevo again, it was cropping up everywhere!—her head pivoting toward something horrific that seemed to be coming from the very heavens, which, as I later learned, was a rain of bullets fired from the Holiday Inn. I flipped over the clipping and there he was again, the unhappy priest whose fate I’d mocked on the train, not for its drama but for the media industry that had made the story their special purview. Why, I’d sneered at the time, is it today a bigger deal to discover your father is Jewish instead of the local postman? It was not easy for me that evening, coming across this Catholic priest who confessed to being part of the same people as our savior Jesus Christ and who, as printed in this little scrap of newspaper on the back of the picture of Sarajevo, understood that nothing would ever be the same again and that life could not go on as it had before. Il faut aller jusqu’au bout! thundered the priest from the crumpled page, and by now I had far more sympathy for his predicament than I’d had on the Vienna train.
I cannot say it was this example that tipped the scales in my predicament, or that I’d decided to take his advice, but when I scanned the story on the back, when I’d once more seen the eyes of the Sarajevo woman, I was astonished by the coincidence, the fact that an unconscious hand had linked in one place these two stories, stories which for the rest of mankind were entirely separate, yet at an exactly chosen moment were conjoined into a precise message, even an imperative for only one person on earth, now standing there by the newspaper stand. My limbs frozen, as if a spider had wrapped me in a web, not a single strand of it spun in vain, I was snared in a mechanism of accursed threads whose purpose would be clear only to the corrupt gods of antiquity. Like a rabbit motionless on a road, its eyes glued to the glare of headlights it sees for the first and last time. To take this to the end, no matter what that means.
Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac
The Judgment of Richard Richter will be out in bookstores this week.
Igor Štiks was born in Sarajevo in 1977 and has lived in Zagreb, Paris, Chicago, Edinburgh, and Belgrade. His first novel, A Castle in Romagna, won the Slavić prize for best first novel in Croatia and was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for 2006. Earning his PhD at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris and Northwestern University, Štiks later published a monograph, Nations and Citizens in Yugoslavia and the Post-Yugoslav States: One Hundred Years of Citizenship. His novel The Judgment of Richard Richter, originally published as Elijah’s Chair, won the Gjalski and Kiklop Awards for the best novel in Croatia and has been translated into fifteen languages. In addition to winning the Grand Prix of the 2011 Belgrade International Theatre Festival for his stage adaptation of Elijah’s Chair, Štiks was honored with the prestigious Chevalier des arts et des lettres for his literary and intellectual achievements.
Ellen Elias-Bursac has been translating novels and nonfiction by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers for thirty years. She is the recipient of the 2006 ALTA National Translation Award, an American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages award, and the Mary Zirin Prize for her book Translating Evidence and Interpreting Testimony at a War Crimes Tribunal: Working in a Tug-of-War. A contributing editor to Asymptote, Elias-Bursac spent more than six years at the ex–Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague as a translator/reviser in the English Translation Unit. Her translation of Daša Drndić’s novel Trieste was short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2013.
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