“And how were these Chetniks dressed?” At the witness table, Rincic himself wore weathered twill trousers, a collarless white shirt, a dark vest, and a yellowish porkpie hat, which none of us had thought to tell him to remove in the courtroom. All of it—his long crooked nose that appeared to have been broken several times, his hat, and his thick black mustache, which might have been a smear of greasepaint—made Ferko resemble a lost child of the Marx brothers.
“Army uniform. Fatigues. Flak jackets,” Ferko said.
“Were there any insignia or other identification on their uniforms?”
“Not so I remember.”
“Were you able to see their faces?”
“No, no. They were masked. Chetniks.”
“What kind of masks? Could you make out any of their features?”
“Balaclavas. Black. For skiing. You saw only the eyes.”
“Were they armed?”
Again Rincic nodded. To reemphasize the need to answer aloud, Judge Gautam created a broadcast thump by tapping on the silver microphone stalk that rose in front of her, as well before Rincic and me, and at forty other seats in the rows of desks ringing the bench. Those spots were normally reserved for defense lawyers and victims’ representatives, but they had no occupants for today’s pre-trial proceeding, in which the prosecutor was the lone party.
The large courtroom was a pristine exercise in Dutch Modern, perhaps a hundred feet wide, with a bamboo floor, and furnishings and wainscoting in yellowish birch, the color of spicy mustard. The design impulse had favored the basic over the grand. Decorative elements were no more elaborate than wooden screens on the closed fronts of the desks and on the wall behind the judges, where the round white seal of the International Criminal Court also appeared.
Once Ferko had said yes, I asked, “Did you recognize the weapons they carried?”
“AKs,” he answered. “Zastavas.”
“Would that be the Zastava M70?” It was the Yugoslav Army version of the AK-47.
“And how is it that you can recognize a Zastava, sir?”
Ferko raised his hands futilely, while his face once more swam through a series of bereft expressions.
“We lived in those times,” he said.
Goos called up a photo of the weapon on the computer screens, which rose around the courtroom, beside the microphones. It was a Kalashnikov-style assault rifle with a folding stock and a long wooden handguard above the curved ammunition magazine that projected with phallic menace. I had first seen Zastavas years ago in Kindle County, when I was prosecuting street gangs who were frequently better armed than the police.
“Now when the Chetniks arrived, where were you situated? Were you in your house?”
“No. I was in the privy.” I already suspected the translator, with her upper-class accent, was significantly enhancing Ferko’s grammar and word choice. Based on my very brief impression of him, I was fairly certain he had not said anything remotely like ‘privy.’
“And why were you in the privy?”
When this question finally reached Ferko, he jolted back in surprise and slowly lifted his palms. Laughter followed throughout the courtroom—from the bench, the registry staff seated below the judges, and my new colleagues from the Office of the Prosecutor, a dozen of whom were at the desks behind me to watch this unprecedented hearing.
“Let me withdraw that silly question, Your Honors.”
Goos, with his ruddy round face, was smiling up at me in good fellowship. The moment of comedy seemed to have suited everyone well.
“If I may lead, Your Honors: Had a need awakened you, Mr. Witness, and brought you to the privy in the middle of the night?”
“Va,” said Rincic and patted his tummy.
“Now, if you were in the privy, sir, how were you able to see these Chetniks?”
“At the top of the door, there is a space. For air. There is a footstool in the privy. When I first heard the commotion as they came into the village, I opened the door a slice. But once I saw it was Chetniks, I locked the door and stood on the stool to watch.”
“Was there any light in the area?”
“On the privy, yes, there was a small light with a battery. But there was some moon that night, too.”
“And were you alone in the privy throughout the time you saw or heard the Chetniks?”
Several people around the courtroom giggled again, thinking I had once more stubbed my toe on the obvious.
“At first,” Ferko said. “When the running and screaming started, I saw my son wander by. He was lost and crying, and I opened the door very quick and brought him in there with me.”
“And how old was your son?”
“Three years.”
“And once you had grabbed your son, what did you do?”
“I covered his mouth to keep him quiet, but once he knew he couldn’t talk, I stood again on the stool.”
“I want to ask you about that point in time when the screaming started. But before I do, let me turn to other things you might have heard. First of all, these Chetnik soldiers, did they speak at all?”
“Va.”
“To the People or to themselves or both?”
“Both.”
“All right. Now how did they speak to the People?”
“One had an electronic horn.” He meant a power bullhorn.
“And what language did that soldier speak?”
“Bosnian.”
“Do you speak Bosnian?”
He shrugged. “I understand. It is somewhat like they speak in Kosovo. Not the same. But I understand mostly.”
“And did he sound like other Bosnians you had heard speaking?”
“Not completely. Right words. Like a schoolteacher. But still, on my ear, it was not right.”
“Are you saying he had a foreign accent?”
“Va.”
“And did the Chetniks speak to one another?”
“Very little. Mostly it was with the hands.” Ferko raised his own slim fingers and beckoned in the air to demonstrate.
“They used hand signals?” There was a pause overhead. The term ‘hand signal’ apparently did not have an obvious equivalent in Romany. Eventually, though, Ferko again said yes.
“Did you hear the soldiers say anything to one another?” I asked.
“A few whispers when they were near the privy.”
“And these words—what language was that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was it any dialect of Serbo-Croatian? Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian? Do you understand those dialects?”
“Enough.”
“And were the words you heard in any of those tongues?”
“No, no, I don’t think so. To me, I thought it was foreign. Something foreign. I didn’t recognize. But it was very few words.”
“And the man with the horn. What did he say first in Bosnian?”
“He said, ‘Come out of your houses. Dress quick and assemble here. You are returning to Kosovo. Gather the valuables you can carry. Do not worry about other personal possessions. We will collect them all and transport them to Kosovo with you.’ He repeated that many times.”
“Now, you say screaming started. Tell us about that, please.”
“The soldier continued yelling into the horn, but the other Chetniks went from house to house with their rifles and electric torches, waking everyone. They were very well organized. Two would enter, while other Chetniks made a circle outside with their rifles pointed.”
Judge Gautam interrupted. She was about fifty, with a pleasant settled affect and long black hair in a contemporary flip. I had been warned, however, that she was not nearly as mild as she appeared.
“Excuse me, Mr. Ten Boom,” she said to me.
“Your Honor?”
“The witness has just testified that the soldiers were speaking a foreign language and that it was not Croatian, Bosnian, or Serbian. That surely does not sound like Chetniks, does it?”
“I wouldn’t know, Your Honor. I never heard the word before today.”
Again the sounds of hilarity cascaded through the courtroom, most heartily behind me from the prosecutors. Both of the other judges laughed. Gautam herself managed a bare smile.
“May I ask the witness a question or two to clarify?” she said.
I swept a hand out grandly. There was not a courtroom in the world where a lawyer could tell a judge to keep her thoughts to herself.
“You testified, Mr. Witness, that the soldiers were in fatigues. Was that camouflage garb?”
“Va.”
“The same for each soldier or different?”
Ferko looked up to reflect. “The same, probably.”
“And over the years in Kosovo and Bosnia, had you seen many soldiers in camouflage fatigues?”
“Many.”
“And had you noticed that different armies and different military branches each had their own fatigues, with distinctive camouflage patterns and coloring?”