STEPHEN MAGIC


Benno Jacob is sitting at a table outside a café on the north side of the town square in Jastrebarsko. Although he looks much younger, I can tell that it is him. I recognise his impassive stance, his faraway stare. His clothes seem shabby; a shapeless suit, old fashioned, ill-fitting. He is much too slight. His hands are partly hidden by the sleeeves and the scruffy cuffs of his shirt. The trousers are too short, however, they show his bare ankles. His shoes are clogs, heavy and large. They look too big to allow him to walk comfortably. He surveys his surroundings as if he is taking in the details to examine more closely at a later date.



Benno had come to Jastebarsko with his mother, Rosa, as a child, from Trieste. His father was an Italian Jew, but no one had ever seen him. Benno Jacob and his mother haad arrived together, alone, and settled here and he had attended the same school as my father. He had the reputation of being a loner. His mother had died when I was a child. My picture of her is a collage made up of glimpses of him from my memory, and what I have been told. I am no longer sure where my own memory of her ends and what others have told me begins.



My picture of her is that she was tall. Always in a greeen dress. She had long brown hair. In my mind it is wavy. Her eyes are blue. But she must have been an old woman when I knew her. She would have had grey hair. So, whose memories are these?



Perhaps her son, Benno, was not a loner. Maybe this is what I have heard and accepted. But, whenever I see himm he is alone. A young man like my father was during the thirties and forties – before Tito. Before Yugoslavia. When Croatia had been a country. That is how my father and grandmother refered to that time. They never mention the Pavelic regime, the war. Only that the maps were differnet then, that they showed our borders.



Benno Jacob was already living here then. I cannot be sure if he ever lived elsewhere in the Balkans. All I know is that he lived in Jastrebarsko as a boy, as a young man, and later in the early 1990’s. he worked fort he government in the local records office. I imagine that he waas the person who people went to in order to register the births, marriages and deaths in the region.



I see him sitting upright. His right arm is resting on the table beside him. His left hand clasps his knee. He looks across the square at the women hanging from the makeshift gallows among the trees that are bunched together in the middle of the square. Urine drips from their bare feet. Flies dart about, panic-striken. The dusty earth heaves gently, then shudders, breathing its last. The ground is sticky underfoot in places. Pools of bloodgurgle under the eye of the sun. In the distance a rainbow streches and flexes its bow towards heaven.



Sometimes I see Benno Jacob standing on the banks of the Kupa. He is looking into the water. There are dead fish floating past. Their eyes stare back at him. He is young-looking then, too. But it is definitely him. His hair is black, not thin and grey as it was later.