Father Panic's Opera Macabre (14 page)
Neil's face was raw and the cold air grated painfully across his skin. He couldn't tell whether the mask still clung to him or not. In certain places it seemed to be gone, but he felt a lingering tightness and weight around the eyes and mouth. Nonetheless, it hardly seemed to matter anymore. Real or not, there or gone, the mask was almost irrelevant to his situation now. The guards had him and could do whatever they wanted with him. He thought about resisting, struggling, perhaps breaking free and fleeing, but he sensed that it was useless to try. He would simply wander around in il morbo until he fell off a cliff or they caught him again.
Then they were on a smooth wide path, and a high stone outcropping in the side of a hill appeared before them. The guards force-walked Neil to a cleft in the rock, and then inside. Within a few yards the path turned, and they emerged in a large, roughly circular open area. A limestone massif ran through the Marches, Neil knew, and limestone lent itself particularly well to the formation of caverns.
They were in the grotto Marisa had mentioned to him. It was lit by mounted torches and banks of candles. There was a simple wooden altar on raised ground. Behind it stood a rusty iron cross that was taller than a man. A few plain benches served as pews. A narrow stream of water bubbled out of the rock and flowed in a cut channel through the makeshift chapel. There were several plaster statues of the Virgin Mary around the place, the largest of which stood beside the source of the stream. Mary's robes were blue and white, and her face was painted with unnaturally bright enamel colors-red lips, blue eyes, shiny white skin.
Several people sat on the benches and another group stood in a tight huddle behind the altar. Neil recognized Father Panic and other members of Marisa's family. Then he noticed a third group of people, in a side area that was not as well lit. They were the workers and farmhands, dressed in rough clothes or rags, kneeling submissively on the damp bare rock. There were a couple of dozen of them. Their heads were bowed, their hands clasped as if in prayer. He saw the dwarf woman. She was the only person in that group who knelt with her head up, looking around calmly. When she saw Neil she grinned maniacally at him, and then shook her head.
Guards were posted all around, but they looked relaxed and they had their pistols holstered. They stood, watching, waiting.
Neil was brought to the area between the benches and the altar, and forced to kneel beside the fast-moving stream of water. His hands were tied behind his back, and then his ankles as well.
The same lunacy again, Neil thought. A conversion and baptism, but then what? His only fear was that they might cut his tongue out, as he'd seen them do with others. Could he pre-empt it-if he recited the Apostles' Creed, for instance, demonstrating that he was already a Catholic? Neil was not even sure that he remembered all of the Apostles' Creed anymore, and he knew it only in English. But if they would listen to him again, if he had a few seconds to explain, appeal...
The circle of people behind the altar fanned out a little and gazed at him. Father Panic in his vestments, Marisa in a black blouse and black skirt that reached just below her knees. Her lover, also in uniform. A few guards and older people stood with them. She looked so young and beautiful-but the sinister black uniform made her look like a girl scout from hell.
Neil watched her hopefully. When Marisa finally looked directly at him, her expression showed no flicker of recognition, or even of interest in who he was or what was happening. She turned her head and spoke quietly with the young man, who smiled, nodded and replied to her. Neil opened his mouth to address her by name, but a guard immediately shoved a thick rag between his teeth, rammed it halfway down his throat. A bitter alkaline taste filled Neil's nostrils and lungs-it was the same hideous fungus that he had experienced in the box room. He began to gag, trying desperately to spit, push and force the cloth out of his mouth. His body jumped wildly but the guards held him in place.
The handsome young man turned slightly and reached down to pick up something from the floor behind him. It was a wooden box with leather straps and metal bolts. He came forward and shoved the strange device over Neil's head. The straps were cinched tight under his throat. The bolts were turned-and Neil felt flat metal plates tighten against the sides and back of his skull. He could hardly breathe, his lungs were in extreme distress. His brain reeled. Then men were grunting close around him as they turned the bolts forcefully, relentlessly.
The last thing Neil heard-before he felt the bones in his head begin to crunch and splinter-was the sound of men and women laughing.
Notes
1.
In an apparent attempt to ape the Germans, the [Croatian] Ustashas set up a number of concentration camps. Being far less disciplined and organized than their mentors, and lacking the technology, they often resorted in these camps to knives with which to murder Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, Muslims and undesirable even Croats. The most infamous camp was at Jasenovac on the Sava river, on the border of Bosnia. Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth & the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Yale University Press, 1997).
2.
Seven hundred thousand men, women and children were killed there alone in ways that made even the hair of the Reich's experts stand on end, as some of them are said to have admitted when they were amongst themselves. The preferred instruments of execution were saws and sabres, axes and hammers, and leather cuff-bands with fixed blades that were fastened on the lower arm and made especially in Solingen for the purpose of cutting throats, as well as a kind of rudimentary crossbar gallows on which the Serbs, Jews and Bosnian Muslims, once rounded up, were hanged in rows like crows or magpies. Not far from Jasenovac, in a radius of no more than ten miles, there were also the camps of Prijedor, Stara Gradiska and Banja Luka, where the Croatian militia, its hand strengthened by the Wehrmacht and its spirit by the Catholic church, performed one day's work after another in similar manner. The history of this massacre, which went on for years, is recorded in fifty thousand documents abandoned by the Germans and Croats in 1945 ... W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, translated by Michael Hulse (New Directions, 1998).
3.
In Kaputt, his memoir of World War II, the Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte recounts the following incident, when he and Raffaele Casertano, then the Italian minister in Zagreb, met Ante Pavelic, the Poglavnik (fuhrer, or leader) of the Croatian forces:
"While he spoke, I gazed at a wicker basket on the Poglavnik's desk. The lid was raised and the basket seemed to be filled with mussels, or shelled oysters- as they are occasionally displayed in the windows of Fortnum and Mason in Piccadilly in London. Casertano looked at me and winked.
"Would you care for a nice oyster stew?'
"'Are they Dalmatian oysters?' I asked the Poglavnik.
"Ante Pavelic removed the lid from the basket and revealed the mussels, that slimy and jelly-like mass, and he said, smiling, with that tired good-natured smile of his, 'It is a present from my loyal ustashis. Forty pounds of human eyes.'" Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt, translated by Cesare Foligno (E. P. Dutton, 1946).
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