All kinds of things were going through my head, but slowly it turned into a claim, one short sentence that summed everything up and that my whole body repeated. That sentence was: "I'm a coward. " Da, exactly like that, I have nothing to be ashamed of. I was afraid of Dimitri and I knew that he knew it.
There is one kingdom in the world, friendship reigns in it... We just can't agree on exactly where it is located. Branko Kockica from our childhoods had a good, seductive, somewhat psychedelic vision of that realm, but at least it was charming and certainly didn't harm anyone. But, when you grow up a bit and leave the jurisdiction of Branko Kockica, the System meets you in full, for example through military conscription, then cuts your hair and sends you to Je Ne A, that "forge of brotherhood and unity", as it was expressed in wooden socialist realist language the same thing we remembered from childhood, that is, the promised kingdom where friendship reigns...
In a new, short novel animal Kingdom (Magic book, Novi Sad 2014), David Albahari "recruits" a motley socialite and places him in the Kozara barracks in Banja Luka (let's just say that it's just autobiographical trivia that Albahari was actually there in the army); the time is interesting and in some quiet, invisible way to many, revolutionary: the early seventies, a time when the regime was outwardly stable (stability, we remember, was the very essence of that order), but inside it was eaten away and quite frightened by the cracks that appeared on its facade, and which were perhaps most visible through the "June movements" of 1968, that is, through the student rebellion in Belgrade, on a smaller scale and in Ljubljana and Zagreb.
The novel's narrator - who, ironically, will earn the internal nickname Tiger - is a completely marginal participant in the "June Movements", but also a deeply shaken and frightened conformist who worries whether his brief and almost invisible rebellion will reflect badly on his prospects in life. and career. In the army, he meets again with the Belgrade acquaintance Miša Vrapac, who was one of the stars of the student rebellion, but also with the dark, enigmatic and violent intriguer Dimitrije Donkić, who drags him into his closed group over which he will establish an unyielding "charismatic" rule; it will quickly turn out that Dimitri's real target is actually Vrabac, whom he pursues systematically and will not rest until he destroys him, even if that means killing him. Okay, but why? In a "real" crime story, the range of motives would be familiar, in a classic political thriller, again, somewhat different, but still quite recognizable. With Albahari, on the other hand, things remain rather blurred and fundamentally - I think I can tell you this much - they will not be clarified very much until the very end. Namely, Albaharij is not up to explicit, let alone feuilletonistic, "politicization": neither does it suit his sense of literature nor, after all, would it make much sense to deal in the second decade of the 21st century with some kind of ancient (post)sixty-eighth threes and cucines... What he said would be interested in Animal kingdom is the very mechanism (social, but also psychological) that enables the legitimization of violence, even crime, in the name of ideology or some other group loyalty. Donkić is, therefore, a "villain" whose motives neither the narrator nor the reader can determine to what extent they are a "state matter" and how much they are a matter of some completely private obsession or even a mysterious internal reckoning among the former rebels.
An authoritarian regime, in which everything and anything (we remember) was declared a secret, is a closed environment in itself; The army, on the other hand, is an additional circle of isolation, ideal for plotting of any kind. All in all, laboratory conditions for the germination of unbridled evil under pompous pretexts, and for practicing submission, which the group of soldiers who make up the secret quasi-conspiratorial organization "Animal Empire" (everyone is nicknamed after an animal) is doing very well anyway. But does subjugation have a limit? And if there is, what is on the other side?
Something will happen in the army that will seal the destinies of all the protagonists and mark them permanently. Many years later, Tiger and his Mara are in Canada. And then Mara saw and recognized a man who could be none other than...
Until someone with whom it may be necessary to settle old scores. In the name of justice, revenge, settlement, humility? Only, how can that hopelessly belated courage undo the crucial, fateful moment of cowardly submission? Albahari set out on a slippery slope with this novel, but he overcame it very well. The text is maximally concise, as if every not-quite-necessary word has been sucked out of it, of course again organized into one large "Bernhardian" paragraph, but also with a smartly applied solution that breaks such organization, without actually hindering the reader's passage through the text : almost a fifth of the textual tissue consists of notes (endnotes) placed at the end of the book; someone will read them eventually, but I read them "geekly", constantly keeping one finger on those pages and "rewinding" the book back and forth; this relaxes that "long paragraph" poured out of one piece and enriches and nuances the narrator's monologue with a slightly different intonation.
animal Kingdom is a political novel only and only in that essential sense: it deals with the dark and cowardly regions of the human soul, those that actually make every evil possible (isn't it, after all, also Getz and Mayer was like that?). From them emerges the demon or vampire of History, and sets out on nightly journeys of drinking human blood. When he gets drunk, he will calm down, we think, scared, hoping that he will just pass us by. But he can't get drunk, he's getting thirstier the more they separate.
