Anticipating an Assassination
by Phoebe Neel
Tenth Grade, Classical High School
Providence, RI
LAZAREVAC, SERBIA. 1914. Men poured out of the train in a slippery
cascade, silent as the icy air assaulted their faces. It was that
uncomfortable period of restlessness before drinks and dinner, the
restive lull with no niceties yet to observe. Restlessness did not suit
them well: they were powerful men, in every sense, with bear-like
bodies and impatient energy. They emerged from the hibernation of
the train, shaking off the oppressive stupor of their inevitably muggy
quarters. They stood huddled in small groups for companionship more
than conversation, layers of voluminous mink swathing their pink,
flabby faces and rendering small talk impossible. No one was getting
on or off here in Lazarevac: Svetlana doubted if anyone in Lazarevac
noticed the train, silent and waiting, absorbed into the endless starless
sky. They soaked in the silence of a hushed engine, the unaccustomed
quietude shaking the station to its very core. The men, looking like
overstuffed porpoises in their swaths of fur, drank in the night air in
big bursting gulps.
“Is so overheated, this train, it’s a thing terrible,” one of them said in
broken Hungarian to no one in particular, taking another breath to
flush the stale hot train air out of his lungs. He lit a cigarette and took
a grateful drag. The other men followed his lead, and seven cigarette
lighters all clicked on, like a group of orange fireflies. No words were
spoken, but in unison they blew the white smoke into the infinite black
plane of sky. The silence saturated them and their entire beings—their
movements magnified in the enormity of the barren platform.
Svetlana blew air into her cupped hands, her white-blonde hair
cloaking her face. She had the curious skill of rendering herself
invisible, being present but unnoticeable, being another fixture in a
crowded room. She was transparent, now even more so because of the
uniform and her new rank. She imagined who wore it last, she
imagined the person before her who didn’t have the train fare and had
to work for the passage across, who paid taxes to the rich and got
shafted in the grand economy of things. She mused over this until she
heard the footsteps, the clang of steel-toed boots on concrete. They
heard the footsteps before a man approached; with a cigar, fat like a
sausage, clamped sideways between his teeth. He walked to the first
man and took his cigar out of his mouth, wiping it on the beaver fur
draped round his neck.
“Cold night,” he said in Serbian. The first man nodded, relieved from
his burden of Hungarian.
“It will get colder yet,” said the first, his words as chilling as the air.
Svetlana started. Imagine, familiar words amongst the ugly babble of
Hungarian! She crept towards them, heart awaking from a painful
slumber. Hearing Serbian was proof that she had not dreamt up a
homeland called Serbia, that the long years had not been the product
of her imagination. She loved her Serbian tongue, an impossible garble
of mixed-up consonants that rearranged themselves into strong, good
words. She was dreading speaking Hungarian: but tomorrow she
would speak it for the rest of her life, for tomorrow she would be in
Austria-Hungary.
“You are Gavrilo, I think?”
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“The only. It has been long since I have seen you, Nedjelko.” There
was a pregnant pause. Go on speaking, Svetlana wished she could tell
them. Speak so I can remember your voices; remember the sound of
these words.
“Do you have a light?” Nedjelko one asked, gesturing to his unlit cigar.
Gavrilo obliged and they sat in silence, pensively blowing tobacco
smoke.
“It is nice to be out of that train. You are anxious to see Austria, yes?”
“Yes. Beautiful country.”
Nedjelko laughed, a harsh laugh, his voice worn bitter by life and
tobacco. He had eyes like jackknifes, and they glinted in the darkness.
“I will be happy to be out of this damned country. Once we get to
Sarajevo, once we get there…”
“It will all be over,” said Gavrilo helpfully.
“Then the damn operation is over,” said Nedjelko, grinding his cigar
beneath his foot. “If I stay here longer I will die, I am sure. I can
already feel the filth of this country infecting my body.”
“Serbia,” said Gavrilo wistfully. “That is what I want. My Eden, my
home, my homeland before Austria-Hungary—”
“Before Austria-Hungary! Before Austria-Hungary, those d_afte
kuravte—”
“If I could be back at home before all of this, I could die happy,” said
Gavrilo, and Nedjelko believed him. Nedjelko, the one with eyes he
inherited from tigers, wanted them dead. Once the Austria-Hungarians
were dead, he could think about dying happy.
“Everything they touch turns to dust. They are poisoning my Serbia…I
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just want Serbia, that is good enough for me,” said Gavrilo sadly. Yes,
Svetlana thought. I just want Serbia, the inexplicable smell and touch
of Serbia. Oh, I am trapped on this train to nowhere, listening to bitter
old men because their sour Serbian sounds like home. Serbian, whose
words unfurl like roses in the mouth…
“No, that is not it! We want them dead, Gavrilo! Are you in the same
organization I am?”
“Narodna Odbran,” he whispered as softly as could be. “Yes, I believe I
am.” The blackness of the words was swallowed up by the blackness of
the night. The Black Hand. She knew the name better than her own.
But who knew what terrorism was anymore, in this muddled, mixed-up
world of ours, where homelands are nothing but borders to be fought
over? Who were terrorists, but angry, desperate men? Who knew what
was the good, the right, the just, whose side? Shock, confusion,
upheaval, swirled in the pit of her stomach, loneliness, with its icy
fingers, gripping hard on her heart. She took one last breath of the icy
air, the driver lifted the brake, and passengers filed in, hit with blasts
of recycled heated air.
The dining car was full, and bustling. Invigorated by their wait in the
cold, the men yelled for refreshment, and she served round after
round of drinks to them. Loud combinations of German and Hungarian
that she couldn’t understand scarred the air. Their faces got redder
and redder and their jokes got louder, their bragging more and more
outrageous. They noticed her for the first time, their beefy faces
leering at her, their hands lingering on her. She hated them, hated
Austria-Hungary and the people that lived there, and balled her hands
into fists to keep from screaming. Svetlana was choking on words.
They were flying at her fast and thick from all directions, and she could
hardly fight them off. The words built up into a mindless, angry buzz,
the words spinning faster and faster around her head, escalating into
angry hate. They pushed themselves through the pores of her skin and
swam through her bloodstream, flooding through her to the nucleus of
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her soul. She could feel them polluting her head, crashing around the
walls, disrupting the neat organization of her thoughts, and she fell to
her knees.
Svetlana groped in the darkness for the handle to her compartment,
wearied to the bone. She was divinely grateful that this was the only
train passage in her life. Men were draped over stiff couches back in
the lounge car: canasta decks came out along with fat wallets and
cigars. The perennial clack clack of train wheels lured her to a neutral
place. Somebody celebrated: fortunes were being won and lost. She
dreamt.
Four a.m. Svetlana’s heart pounded so heavily she woke herself up.
The train had stopped again, maybe to refuel, and it was a vacuum of
silence so intense that it was deafening—it flooded her ears, powerful
and all consuming. The silence was so crushing if she waited another
moment she was sure she would scream, and somehow, out of the
darkness, a match flared. The white-hot globe of light ate away the
blackness around her, and she froze.
“Are you ready to talk?” said a voice. Whose voice was that? Oh yes,
that Serbian man—Nedjelko his name was, she remembered.
“Shhh! Whisper.”
“Don’t shhh me. Think of tomorrow, we must plan.”
“There is so much already planned. Nedjelko, I’m not sure…violence
for violence is…”
“What they deserve, the disgusting bloodhounds! We must be careful.
Have you the bombs?”
“Yes,” said Gavrilo so quietly she could barely hear him. What!
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Svetlana screamed inside her head. What! Are they going to kill me?
Am I going to die here? Who would want to kill me?
“Tomorrow—it will be so risky. How will we pull it off?” he whispered,
his baby face crinkled up with fear.
“It is all set in motion. We will not fail,” Nedjelko hissed.
“I feel as if I will die before we get there. Ay! My lungs—they are on
fire!”
“The tuberculosis or the cyanide, whichever kills us first.” He spat the
ugly words at Gavrilo, hideous words that tainted the very air.
“We will die. We have to die. From their hand or our own. This is our
last train ride. Oh God, to spend my last time in Serbia on a train with
a stranger.”
“Stop that. We are no longer in Serbia, anyway. We just stopped in
Salzberg.”
Gavrilo began to cry, big silent crocodile tears.
“Oh, my God! Go back to your mother’s teat,” Nedjelko said,
exasperated. “I will see you in the morning. Pull yourself together!
Tomorrow, we liberate Serbia of Franz Ferdinand, the devil’s own
conspirator.”
“Tomorrow…” Gavrilo began, but could not finish. Silently, Nedjelko let
himself out of the compartment.
Franz Ferdinand. She could not believe it. She could not believe it.
They were going to kill him. She was shaking, her bed was shaking,
her mattress. She knew Gavrilo lay underneath her; he could feel her
body and her bed quaking. He would know she knew. And he would kill
her. He would kill her. She could not stop. She could not stop shaking.
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They were going to kill Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne.
They were going to kill Franz Ferdinand, the man cursed behind
Serbian doors, bulls-eyes drawn over his smirk. They were killing
Franz Ferdinand. But yet—if they succeeded, she could go back to
Serbia. Serbia would be the same. Would she be the same? Could she
let these two men, who hours ago she served filet mignon to,
assassinate arguably the world’s most important man? Important does
not mean good, she tried to tell herself. He is killing Serbia by each
piece he steals. And imagine! To go back to Serbia, to go back to her
old world and family and comfortable place in the world. For this
nightmare to be over—for her to run, run, away from Austria-Hungary
and the eternal hate that burned so steadily inside her, hate for Franz
Ferdinand, the man who they are so conveniently going to kill… But
yet, if they did kill him, there would be retaliation, maybe, or maybe
not. But still! He was a man, a human like she, who later this day will
be brutally murdered…but who would she tell? There was no one to
tell—she was on a train in the god-forsaken wilderness! And Gavrilo
would kill her! He knew she knew! He would slit her ankles as she
climbed down the ladder, slash her to ribbons. He would have no fear
of killing her if he was going to kill Franz Ferdinand! Franz Ferdinand!
Only the most important man in Europe! They might not be able to,
she tried to tell herself. She did not convince herself. She was selfish.
She hated how weak she was. She could not make the decision she
must. Her feet would not move. They would not take her to the
conductor, to tell anyone. She couldn't. She felt the tug of sleep on her
eyelids and she succumbed. Even drifting to sleep, she knew she was
trading Franz Ferdinand’s life for her own life. There’s nothing I could
do, she whispered to herself, and almost without knowing it, she fell
asleep.
She was riding on crinkling, dizzying sheets of newspaper, papery
wings that let her soar gently through the icy air. The words on the
page hummed in her ears, a steady buzz, a white-noise drone. Below
her, on the misty grey gentle hills lay miniscule specks. The words in
the background grew louder, louder, the words nastier and nastier. On
her newspaper wings, vicious words clawed at her...
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Assassination…Death…War. She lost control of her wings, picking up
speed, faster and faster, hurling her into the valley of the fallen
bodies. A battlefield, of men dying, dying, their lives draining from
them. She lost control. The headlines on her newspaper screamed at
her, thrust her down until she was free falling, alone, limbs crashing
through space, on top of the one man she had declared to hate: Franz
Ferdinand, her enemy, with eyelids ice-white and shut. If only, if only,
the newspapers sung softly in unison. If only he hadn’t been
assassinated, if only the bloodiest war the world had yet known hadn’t
begun. If only there had been someone there, someone who knew,
someone who could’ve stopped it…
Gavrilo, faint, hobbled out onto the platform at Sarajevo. The sunlight,
violently brilliant, burned his eyes, and his stomach threatened to
heave again. He clutched his suitcase, sweat dripping down his meaty
arms, through the cracks in the leather, his sweat dripping onto the
bombs so carefully concealed inside…Nedjelko strode ahead, defiant
face challenging the sky, and Gavrilo watched, he watched…he
watched as policemen materialized out of shadows, he watched his
dreams crumple into pieces, he watched…he saw a very long, long
time in prison.
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