I hereby wish to thank my co-citizens who have joined so unreservedly
in this small, marginal, and apparently not particularly significant campaign
against me. Although marginal, it will change and mark my whole life. Which
is, of course, totally irrelevant in the context of the death, destruction,
devastation, and blood-chilling crimes within which our life now goes on.
This is happening, however, to the one and only life I have. It seems
that I've been chosen for some reason to be the filthy rag everyone uses
to wipe the mud off their shoes. I am far too desperate to embark on a
series of public polemics in the papers. I do, however, feel that I owe
myself and my city at least a few words. Like at the end of some clumsy,
painful love story, when you keep wanting, wrongly, to explain something
more, even though you know at the bottom of your heart that words are wasted;
there is no one left to hear them. It is over.
Listening to my answering machine, to the incredible quantities of
indescribably disgusting messages from my co-citizens, I longed to hear at
least one message from a friend. Or not even a friend, a mere acquaintance,
a colleague. But there was none. Not a single familiar voice, not a single
friend. Nevertheless, I am grateful to them, to those noble patriots who
kindly promise me a "massacre the Serbian way"; and to those colleagues,
friends, and acquaintances who, by remaining silent, are letting me know
that I cannot count on them any more.
I am grateful also to all my colleagues in the theatre with whom I played
Drzic, Moliere, Turgenev, and Shaw, I am grateful to them for their
silence, I am grateful to them for not even trying to understand, let alone
attempting to vindicate, my statement concerning my appearance at the BITEF
Festival in Belgrade, the statement in which I tried to explain that taking
part in that production at that moment was for me a defense of our profession
which must not and cannot put itself in the service of any political or
national ideas, which must not and cannot be bound by political or national
limits because it is simply against its nature, which must, even at the
worst of times, establish bridges and ties. In its very essence it is a
vocation which knows no boundaries.
I know that all this talk about the cosmopolitanism of art seems
inappropriate at a moment like this. I know that it may seem out of place to
swear to pacifism, to swear to love and to the brotherhood of all peoples
while people are dying, while children are dying, while young men are
returning home crippled and mangled forever.
How can I say anything which won't sound like an ill-fitted
nonsense at the moment when, for absolutely unfathomable reasons, Dubrovnik
is being threatened, the city where I played my favorite role, Gloria?
But I have no other way of thinking. I cannot accept war as the only solution,
I cannot force myself to hate, I cannot believe that weapons, killing,
revenge, hatred, that such an accumulation of evil will ever solve anything.
Each individual who personally accepts the war is in fact an accessory
to the crime; must he not then take a part of the guilt for the war, a
part of the responsibility?
In any case, I think, I know and I feel that it is my duty, the duty
of our profession, to build bridges. To never give up on cooperation and
community. Not the national community. The professional community. The
human community. And even when things are at their very worst, as they
are now, we must insist to our last breath on building and sustaining bonds
between people. This is how we pledge to the future. And one day it will
come. For my part, until recently I was willing to endure all manner of
problems in transportation, communication, and finances to trek the 20
hours across Austria and Hungary between Zagreb and Belgrade. I was willing
to use risky, even dangerous modes of travel, just to keep holding my performances
in the two warring cities, to appear at precisely 7:30 on stage with my
Zagreb or Belgrade colleagues and to alternate Corneille and Turgenev for
the sake of professional continuity, for the sake of something that would
outlive this war and this hatred which is so foreign to me. Time and time
again I was willing to make my life a symbol of a pledge to the future
which must be waiting for us, until that day when some ardent patriot finally
does slaughter me as so many have promised to do.
I was willing and I would still be willing to undertake all and any
efforts, if the hatred hadn't suddenly overwhelmed me with its horrendous
ferocity, hatred welling from the city I was born in. I am appalled by
the force and magnitude of that hatred, by its perfect unanimity, by the
fact that there was absolutely nobody who could see my gesture as my defense
of the integrity of the profession, as my attempt to defend at least one
excellent theatre performance outside the BITEF Festival, as I stated in
my letter. BITEF as an international theatre event attended by the English,
Russians, French, Belgians, and even one Slovene seemed to me worth participating
in, especially because any decision not to participate would have meant
betraying a performance I had worked on under the most difficult circumstances
during the March 9th Belgrade tanks, daily threats of a military coup,
etc., etc.
It is terribly sad when one is forced to justification without having
done anything wrong. There is nothing but despair, nausea, and horror.
I no longer have any decisions to make. Others have decided for me. They
have decided I must shut up, give up, vanish; they have abolished my right
to do my job the way I feel it should be done, they have abolished my right
to come home to my own city, they have abolished my
right to return to my theatre and act in my performances. Someone decided
that I should be fired from my job. Thank you, Croatian National Theatre;
thank you, my colleague Dragan Milivojevic, who signed my dismissal slip.
I know that lots of people are losing jobs, that I am just one of many,
simply part of a surplus work force. I constantly ask myself whether I
have any right, at this moment of communal horror, to make any demands
of my own. One thing seems certain: I plan for quite some time (how long?)
not to perform on any stage in this crumbling, mangled land. Perhaps they
needn't have hurried so in firing me. Perhaps this would have simply taken
care of itself. With more decency. And dignity. Not so crudely. Of course,
this is not a moment for tenderness. But won't someone out there have to
be ashamed of this? And will this someone necessarily be me, as my fellow
actors try to convince me in their orthodox interviews? Can the horror
of war be used as a justification for every single nasty bit of filth we
commit against our fellow man? Are we allowed to remain silent in the face
of injustice done to a friend or a colleague and justify our silence by
the importance of the great bright national objective? I ask my friends
in Zagreb, who are now silent, while at the same time they condemn Belgrade
for its silence.
It is hard to write without bitterness. I would like to be able to do
that, because we should "Love Our Enemy." I wish we all could.
Herein perhaps lies the solution for all of us. But I fear that we are
very far from the ways of the Lord. His is the way of love. Not hatred.
To whom am I addressing this letter? Who will read it? Who will even
care to read it? Everyone is so caught up by the great cause that small
personal fates are not important any more. How many friends do you have
to betray to keep from committing the only socially acknowledged betrayal,
the betrayal of the nation? How many petty treacheries, how many pathetic
little dirty tricks must one do to remain "clean in the eyes of the
nation?"
I am sorry, my system of values is different. For me there have always
existed, and always will exist, only human beings, individual people, and
those human beings (God, how few of them there are !) will always be excepted
from generalizations of any kind, regardless of events, however catastrophic.
I, unfortunately, shall never be able to "hate all Serbs," nor
even understand what that really means. I shall always, perhaps until the
moment the kind threats on the phone are finally carried out, hold my hand
out to an anonymous person on the "other side," a person who
is as desperate and lost as I am, who is as sad, bewildered, and frightened.
There are such people in this city where I write my letter, the city my
love took me to, a feeling it seems almost indecent to mention these days.
Nothing can provide an excuse any more, everything that does not directly
serve the great objective has been trampled upon and appears despicable,
and with it what love, what marriage, what friendship, what theatre
performances!
I reject, I refuse to accept such a crippling of myself and my own life.
I played those last performances in Belgrade for those anguished people
who were not "Serbs"; but human beings, human beings like me,
human beings who recoil before this monstrous Grand Guignol farce in which
dead heads are flying. It is to these people, both here and there, that
I am addressing my words. Perhaps someone will hear me. The punishment
meted me by my city, my only city and my theatre, my only theatre, the
only theatre I felt was mine, is a punishment I feel I do not deserve.
I was working in the way I have always felt I had to work, believing in
people and our vocation which is supposed to bring people together, not
tear them apart. I will never "give up my Belgrade friends"; as
some of my colleagues have, because I do not feel that these friends have
in any way brought about this catastrophe which has afflicted us, just
as I will not turn my back on my Zagreb friends, not even those who have
turned their backs on me. I will try in every way possible to understand
their panic, their fear, their bitterness, even their hatred, but I plead
for the same dose of understanding for me, that is, for a story which is
different than many others, for a life which has deviated, due to the so-called
destiny, from the expected and customary. Why must everything be the same,
so frighteningly uniform, leveled, standardized? Haven't we had enough
of that? I know this is the time of uniforms and they are all the same,
but I am no soldier and cannot be one. I haven't got it in me to be a soldier,
soldiering just isn't my calling.
Regardless of whether we will be living in one, or five, or fifty states,
let us not forget the people, each individual, regardless of which side
of this Wall of ours the person happens to be on. We were born here by
accident, we are this or that by accident, so there must be more than that,
mustn't there?
I am sending this letter into a void, into darkness, without an inkling
of who will read it and how, or in how many different ways it will be misused
or abused. Chances are it will serve as food for the eternally hungry propaganda
beast. Perhaps someone with a pure heart will read it after all.
I will be grateful to that someone.
