Into the Bottomless Pit

Cory Oldweiler reviews Ellen Elias-Bursać’s new translation of Croatian author Damir Karakaš’s “Celebration.”

By Cory OldweilerSeptember 12, 2024

• Fiction

ABOUT TWO HOURS south of the grandiose architectural amalgam that is Zagreb lies the equally impressive natural wonder of Plitvice Lakes National Park, a network of waterfalls and lakes serenely carving its way through the lush limestone plain. The park, at the northeastern edge of Croatia’s largest and least-populated county, Lika-Senj, is one of the most popular tourist attractions in the region, and also the site of the first casualties of the succession of Balkan wars in the aftermath of Yugoslavia’s disintegration in the 1990s.

Lika-Senj, and indeed much of the region, had been on edge for almost a year when, on Easter Sunday, March 31, 1991, a group of rebellious Serbian forces ambushed a bus full of Croatian police officers sent to reassert control of Plitvice. Two men were killed in the shoot-out—one Serb and one Croat—and seven weeks later, the Croatians took a page from the Slovenians and overwhelmingly voted to secede from Yugoslavia. Implementation of the independence declaration was delayed until October, in a futile attempt to avert escalation of the conflict, but by the following year, the half-century experiment that was Yugoslavia remained in name only, as the lingering union between Serbia and Montenegro.

In 1992, the all-out war between Croats and Serbs was fought largely in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but for the remainder of 1991, the frontlines remained in Lika-Senj and other locations nearer today’s Croatian borders. These battles led to large-scale relocations and homogenizations of ethnic groups as well as horrific incidents of targeted violence, including massacres in Lika-Senj—of ethnic Croatians at Široka Kula and of ethnic Serbians at Gospić. Many of the bodies of those killed during this time have never been recovered because they were dumped in the numerous chasms and pits in the karst bedrock beneath the uninhabited wilderness of Lika-Senj’s dense forests.

That first year of the Homeland War, as the War of Independence is called in Croatia, was not Lika-Senj’s first experience with or involvement in martial violence. Fifty years earlier, on April 10, 1941, the Nazi satellite known as the Independent State of Croatia was established, governed by the homegrown fascist Ustaše. Days later, the Ustaše opened the first of its two dozen concentration camps at Jadovno, 10 miles northwest of Gospić. Another camp opened in Gospić proper in June. The two Lika-Senj camps would close by the end of August, but in the months they operated, they were the deadliest in Croatia, murdering tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Romani, and others. Only the notorious Ustaše camp at Jasenovac, which operated for nearly four years until the end of the war in 1945, killed more people. As with so many victims of the Homeland War, untold numbers of the bodies of those killed by the Ustaše were never found because they got dumped into the region’s pits. And in the end, many of the retreating Ustaše would meet the same fate after Tito’s victorious Partisans hunted them down, rounded them up, and executed them.

Croatian author Damir Karakaš was born in Lika-Senj almost exactly halfway between the end of World War II and the start of the Homeland War. Growing up in the tiny village of Plašćica, in the north of the county, he lived, like many in the region, in a house with oxen and cows downstairs and family quarters upstairs. When he wanted to get away, he went to the forest, where he has said he spent his entire childhood. He was a volunteer (“dragovoljac rata”) during the Homeland War, believing that he was fighting for an honorable (“poštenu”) and just (“pravednu”) country. Today, his stance has changed. He feels that Lika-Senj, like much of Croatia, remains “poisoned by politics,” but personally, he has moved past it all, having grown disillusioned and apolitical (“nisam nijedne političke”), content to say and write nothing more than what he thinks.

In his 2019 novella Proslava, newly translated into English by Ellen Elias-Bursač as Celebration, Karakaš portrays a region and a country still haunted by the legacy of 20th-century violence it endorsed, enabled, and endured. He has written about and reported on his personal story and his country’s path for more than 30 years, but Celebration is the first of Karakaš’s works to appear in English. A film based on the novella premiered at this year’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival, in the Czech Republic, and hopefully it will make its way to US audiences soon. The novella is a deceptively slim volume, particularly for anyone unfamiliar with the scope of Croatian history outlined above. The book can easily be read in a single sitting, but it will burrow into your consciousness with both what it says and, especially, what it steadfastly refuses to say.

Narratively, Celebration has the simplicity of a four-part fable told out of chronological order. It opens in 1945, with an Ustaše soldier named Mijo hiding in the forest from Partisans who, his wife Drenka tells him during a nighttime visit, have “dug up the whole village” looking for him. Mijo soon crawls into a more permanent hiding spot in a dugout beneath the muck heap outside his home where Drenka is raising their two young sons alone. He plans to remain inside this nightmarish hybrid of womb and tomb until the day he can be “born again” into a world where “enemies would no longer be enemies and he would no longer be somebody on the run.” The next scene takes place 10 years earlier, in 1935, with the unmarried Mijo and his parents living in the same house Mijo’s family will later occupy. After a local cop is bitten by a dog, the federal government—helmed by the newly installed Serbian prime minister—decrees that the ownership of dogs in Lika is forbidden, and Mijo is sent into the forest to kill the family’s pet. The story then jumps to 1941, on the day the Independent State of Croatia is declared. Mijo accompanies Drenka, to whom he is not yet married, and her blustering brother Rude to an independence celebration in a nearby village. The book ends in 1928, with a young Mijo growing up so impoverished that the family’s lone cookpot is also used as a chamber pot. Mijo’s father resigns himself to carrying his ailing, elderly father, Mijo’s grandfather, into the woods, where custom dictates he must throw him into “the maw of the bottomless pit.” Mijo knows that he, too, will have to shoulder the same burden when it is his father’s time to die, and out of his desire to imitate his father “in every detail,” the boy follows his ancestors into the mountains.

What readers might normally expect from a story like Celebration is a buildup to some definitive inciting incident, some reason why Mijo ends up where he does at the beginning of the book, fearing for his life due to his collaboration. But easy answers are not what Karakaš is interested in, and the closest he gets to providing them is a vague declaration from Mijo that “it all began with the celebration.” But readers never learn what exactly happened there, as the 1941 chapter concludes with Mijo, Drenka, Rude, and the rest of the crowd closing in, “faster and faster,” on the “small town of G.” The imagery is of both siege and vortex, the citizenry at once invading the town and being inexorably drawn toward the spectacle. The only hint readers have as to what occurs at the event is Mijo’s recollection, while lying in the woods, of being taken in by the celebration’s “learned” speaker, in his top hat, and the three-pronged message he laid out: “Anybody who threatens the survival of our country will be put to death”; “They are threatening our future”; and “Communism, that’s when a brother fucks his sister.” The boilerplate fascistic rhetoric—nationalistic, xenophobic, othering, mocking—reveals nothing.

Mijo insists to himself, perhaps to assuage some niggling guilt, that he “never slaughtered nor killed, except maybe when he shot at those who were shooting at him,” but he also imagines telling his grandchildren about what he did. He desperately wants to be a part of his children’s lives, which he seemingly hasn’t been because he and Drenka weren’t even married just four years earlier when the war began. He’s afraid that “in a matter of days, or hours, or minutes, his children would have grown up, becoming men he would no longer know.” Mijo’s own father is shown as distant and cold in 1928, doing little except raging against his desperate straits. He forbids crying, sees abundance only in “evil and trouble,” tells his wife to put her hair up or he’ll “chop it off with [his] axe.” And he both envies and loathes his more fortunate neighbor Toma, who refuses to lend him anything, and refuses to let him become further indebted. Drenka’s father, whom we meet briefly in 1941, is less angry and more messianic, telling Mijo that the day’s celebration “matters more than any wedding could, [because] for the first time in a thousand years we in Croatia finally have our own independent state.” That this independent state is being propped up by the Axis powers and used for their own ends is either unknown or unimportant to the man; all that matters is the symbolism of “freedom.”

Though we never get to the celebration itself, the journey toward it, through the forest and over the mountains, provides ample clues to the futures of Mijo, Drenka, and Rude. For his part, Rude reveals himself to be all talk. He tells his father that he’s not worried about the day’s journey because “if we’re scared off by someone now that we have our own state, we have no right to be here.” And once they’re in the wilderness, he continually asks Mijo if they’re lost. When they stop to cook lunch, he taunts Mijo by saying that “anyone who can’t butcher a rooster, can’t defend his country,” but then refuses to kill the animal himself because he’d “rather not get blood on [his] clothes.” Drenka, as she will do later in 1945, attends to Mijo, having noticed a patch of fungus on his neck. She is ultimately the one who grabs the rooster, holds it down to be slaughtered, and then carries it off to dress it. And in an eerie premonition of the forthcoming violence, she also gets obsessed, à la Lady Macbeth, by a damned spot of blood on her sleeve that she can’t get out.

When the book opens, Drenka is in mourning, dressed all in black, because Rude has been killed beneath Pasji Vrh, the same mountain in whose shadow the three had lunch en route to the celebration. Pasji Vrh, which translates to “dog top,” is also, “according to tales told by the village elders,” surrounded by “the graves of people who were slain in battles against the dreaded dog-heads of myth.” According to at least one scholar, “pasoglavac” (“a man with the head/snout of a dog”) is likely a slur for the Turks who ruled over the Balkans for centuries. The name of the mountain also serves to emphasize the importance of dogs in Lika-Senj, and, consequently, the devastating impact of the 1935 decree banning them. Again and again, Karakaš emphasizes this point. In 1928, Mijo’s father wears a coat made of dog hide. In 1935, when Mijo sets off to kill the family dog, his mother recounts all the prior pets they’ve had over the years. And Mijo, revealing his nonviolent nature, frets over the most humane way to kill the dog: he thinks about shooting it but realizes that their only gun, an old musket, was “more of a danger for the person doing the shooting than for whoever was at the receiving end of the shot.” Many villagers throw their dogs into the “bottomless pit,” but Mijo can’t bring himself to do that either. His ultimate decision feels motivated less by concern for the dog than by his underlying wish “that nothing that was going on around him had anything to do with him.”

Unfortunately for Mijo, he cannot surmount or ignore the consequences of humanity’s actions. That indifference is reserved for the natural world, for the centuries-old trees and the virgin forest that is “unaccustomed to people” and later grows “denser, more silent, as if with a life of its own.” Elias-Bursač’s careful attention to lexical nuances throughout the book helps highlight its subtle messages. One of those is the fact that, despite his collaboration, Mijo doesn’t really change. In both 1935 and 1945, there are moments when he cools the “nape of his neck,” rests the axe on his shoulder, and eats his food in a rush. Elias-Bursač deftly displays the book’s omnipresent natural imagery too: a “sudden wheeze of wind […] soon died down”; a sun beam gets “snared in a spiderweb.” When Mijo is lying with “the ache of isolation” in the forest, a fly buzzes “around his head, making tangled crazy eights as if sending secret signals.” And on the way to the celebration, Drenka looks like a “forest queen” in her white dress, “as if enveloped in snowy foam, among all those quivering leaves, bright flowers, gaudy butterflies.”

While Mijo, squirming in his yellow-brown Ustaše uniform, is an easily identifiable target, there are “people in the village who, eager to ingratiate themselves with the new authorities, might turn him in: there have always, he thought, been folks among us who, when they look in the mirror, see two faces.” These people could also have been collaborators, but their guilt can only be found in their hearts, not in anything visible to the outside world. This unaccountable and unidentifiable culpability is one of the most insidious dangers of being poisoned by politics, of succumbing to a disease like fascism or jingoism. Celebration brilliantly contrasts this human frailty with the impregnability of the natural world, which also erases any overt traces of violence and guilt, in part by swallowing so many bodies in that maw of the bottomless pit. Even with no one, or everyone, to blame, the evidence will remain—as Mijo realizes while he muses on “all the human bones that would be carried off by beasts for years after the war.” The passage of time makes assessing or assigning guilt ever harder as the search for answers grows cold. And without answers, it is much harder to stop history from repeating itself. As fascism and other belligerent ideologies reassert themselves across the globe, Karakaš’s novella is both timely and sobering. It doesn’t provide any simplistic solutions, but its appearance in English, thanks to Elias-Bursać, is unquestionably a cause for celebration.