MEDVEDNICA

SEBASTIAN BARRY

PREAMBLE TO THE HUBERT BUTLER ESSAY PRIZE 2021

Scene: The ‘nature park’ of Medvednica, near Zagreb, in Croatia. Two men walking, one an Irish writer ignorant of Croatian history (and many other things), the other a young interpreter/guide, who (like any Irish person moving through Irish history) has inescapably been threaded through the needle of Croatian history, and the thread of his life hanging from that, and the patchwork of his imagination fashioned from that; history, and even more so, memory’s bending of history.

The trees along the great scimitar of the mountainside are stretching up to the sky, the sky stretching up to the heavens, to heaven, possibly. Dense, elegant, old European trees. And down in the city, those rumbled boulevards caught out in their Austro-Hungarian architectural attire. Places made more curious, if anything, by my ignorance. I don’t share much with my guide, it would seem, except I do recognize the banked fire in him of youth -- at least I remember that. It’s probably 2015. A first topic is French Bulldogs, in my case ferocious Millie, at home in Ireland. My guide also has one of these animated, humanlike dogs. We do have that in common then. I would class him as a nice young man, a lazy assessment no doubt. He tells me he has a huge collection of Lego in his house, and that Lego collecting is popular in Croatia, and there is a great trade in really rare things, early things, things from the history of Lego that are still in good condition, relicts of old childhoods. French bulldogs, Lego. Odd topics maybe. Our voices small in the green hush. The trees don’t care much, I would wager. Mostly yew, but not like you see in Irish churchyards, where they were grown to keep cattle out, being poisonous to ruminants. The birds that I am finding hard to name. The droppings of deer and wild boar that my guide points out. A sense of many sudden, violent events, in the dark, in the moon-light, when there are no souls near. Scuffles, endings, upturnings, routs, rallies, victories, Pyrrhic defeats. The beauty of the forest somewhat weighs down on us, as if the thinning air is being matched by a thickening atmosphere. The multiple greens and browns and yellows of the trees solidifying, as if there is a painter with a wide brush suspended over us. We press on upward and I notice a resolute unchangingness in the forest. As if we might not be moving at all. Or making any progress. At the top we will actually be still, no doubt, but also always moving up the mountain, dragging the walk in a parabola of memory behind our heads. Flies caught in the amber of a Croatian afternoon. A genre subject. Two men, one young, one old. What are they talking about now?

Well, the young man is saying that the forest is forty five thousand years old, that Neanderthals lived here long ago. The old caves that were their dwellings are now the haunts of rare bats. This is good tourist info and I am fairly gripped by it. My son Merlin loved bats as a little boy, I tell my guide, we used to go to witness them, he and I, in the twilight of a certain Wicklow wood. A fog of midges everywhere. The bats ate the midges and the midges ate us.

Now the young man is telling me what at first sounds like a sort of folk tale, proper to a forest like this, of the kind that provided the shadows and rustlings for countless European proto-stories, harvested say by the Brothers Grimm, even Hans Christian Andersen in the far North. I am listening, and wondering what were the lost stories out of the old forests of Ireland, which like many other Irish things, are all the more cherished for having been erased. The Irish mind abroad keeps wandering back to Ireland. But now he is telling me about a man who killed huge numbers of people with a strange knife – I am struggling to understand his description of it -- one that fitted, by means of a leather holder, onto his hand, to be all the more effective, says my guide. A knife that was used normally by harvesters in the countryside, suggesting again a genre painting, to divide the sheaves of wheat before they would be trampled by teams of horses. I had seen just such stone threshing circles in Greece, so I thought I knew what he was talking about. Huge coins of yellow stone, for the vanished yellow grain, and the vanished horses. Eternally going round in Einsteinian time. But the knife. A busy, firmly-held, flashing, effective knife, by no means lessening the effort of the work, but quickening it all the same. The man my guide is fashioning into being, however, was using his knife to kill prisoners in a concentration camp, and he is remembered by everyone in Croatia, says my guide, because his fame was that in one day he killed 1,360 souls -- men, women, and children, all gathered for him, lined up in some unimaginable way. In a sort of competition with other killers. To see who could kill the most, and reach the perch of a nation’s memory. Become the bogeyman. And this man, my guide is saying, was actually a Franciscan monk, bathed in blood, day after day, and my guide is saying that the killing was always described in terms of joy and ecstasy. By the killers themselves, that is. I was ignorant enough to think of the battle frenzy of the hero Cuchulainn, as described in the Táin Bó Cúailnge , where his head is depicted as swelling and rotating, and he grows a hundred arms, and no one can withstand his ecstatic whirlwind of death. I can’t make out if my kindly guide is talking in praise of this person. I think he is calling him Peter, did he even say Peter Scissorhands, he might have? This murderous friar, is it a folk tale or a real creature in actual history?

Yes, it seems to be history. My guide is smiling, amused by my interest maybe, my shock, maybe also just happy to be out of the city, with this old Irish writer. A young Croatian in old Croatian history. Somewhat removed, too far from the horror, as Irish people sometimes are from the penitential stations of Irish history. Too quick to take sides retrospectively in ancient quarrels, that wrought havoc, that killed, but are unlikely to kill us. Where, though, where did this happen, I ask him? Jasenovac concentration camp, in the forties, some sixty miles south-east of Zagreb, oh not too far from these beneficent trees, this climbing path, the notes and cries of the birds. The sunlight blundering in, here and there, interrupting and disturbing shadows and darknesses. Mossy, fern-filled ditches and depressions. Fascists killing non-Catholics, did he say? Serbs, Jews, Gypsies? 1,360 in a day. Slashing, cutting, stabbing, dispatching, in competitive uproar. The knife even has a name, the Serb-killer. Or did he say Serb-cutter? In this Croatia, no, another Croatia. I am simple-minded enough to think of the worst stories from the Irish Civil War, men roped to barrels which were then blown up, ruthless mutilations, old comrades falling on each other with what might have been a sort of ecstatic abandon, to take a hint from my guide. A new thought. But also, I am thinking, we are in the halfpenny place in the league of atrocious events, maybe. This Croatian history is sounding much larger in its horror even than our own. With its Cromwells, its 1798s, its 1641s, its famines, its brute indifferences. Here is another league we could never win, like the European football. I am looking at my blithe guide, asking him subsidiary questions, his steps steadily ascending, ascending – he offers all his information with an even, friendly voice, very respectful of the prelate trees, and the approaching cohorts of new, higher light that is beginning to herald the summit.

We finally come to that summit and look over the landscape that lies on the other side of that mountain, invisible from Zagreb, like the dark side of the moon is from Earth. My guide is quiet now, and, I can sense, overawed, proud, curiously poised and at home, aglow before the beauty of the countryside. His own country. I am ignorant enough to think of that Greek farmer on his terraces below my father’s house in Christou Dassous, on the island of Paros, coming out in the very early morning, thinking himself unseen I suppose, and just standing there, among the waking cypresses, night-sleepy like myself, before the great daylong fire of the cicadas begins. Just standing, in all that humanless beauty. Loving his homeplace despite all the labour of fashioning it. Ecstasy of a kind, in the hour before the sun claims his greater world. Ecstasy, humanity, peace, incipient violence of the heat. The human soul. Dark, appeasable, responsive, destitute. I am thinking of the friar and the flashing knife. And I am wondering how I have come so far in my life and yet have preserved the essence of my ignorance. A tragic mea culpa. So that everything told to me on Medvednica mountain is new, atrociously so, and all the landscape stretching below me is a fraud of innocence and benignity.

 ***

I might have called the account above, On Not Being Hubert Butler. If by 2015 I had read The Invader Wore Slippers and his other Balkan Essays, I might as least have climbed with the gift of his penetrating knowledge in my head. Here we have now a beautifully conceived and important essay prize in his name, not only to honour him, and bring some homage to the very act and art of essay writing, but to honour this year’s winner, whose essay is moving, deeply engaged, fundamentally heroic, and unashamedly positive. In a time seared by negative and negating information, it lights up some nearly derelict synaptic circuits. This singular triumph is by Alison Williams. I am privileged to present her with the Hubert Butler Essay Prize for 2021.

Sebastian Barry