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Austrian Heads

By Ferid Muhic*

It was during the dying days of World War I, and the Austrian army was retreating from the Thessalonica front, up through the mountains of northwestern Macedonia. The fate that befell them remains almost unknown today, with the author’s chance conversion with an elderly Italian man in 1970 representing perhaps the sole remaining source attesting to it.

In this imaginative literary retelling of what occurred at an isolated mountain plateau near the Kosovo frontier almost a century ago, Macedonia’s foremost philosopher, Ferid Muhic, reveals the unsettling legend of the affair at Austrian Heads.

…………………………

Captain Franciscus Trackle, beloved leader of the 6^th Hill’s Regiment, was the first to gaze upon the mountain plateau early that morning. Behind him were 162 men stretching back in a long file up a sloping hill. The soldiers near the front, who were close enough to see him, had the impression that their “Franci� – dignified in demeanor, his broad and straight back captured in silhouette, high in the saddle of his muscular Kulash – had somehow sunk down into the light blue that stretched across the dark edge of the crest, that he had sunk abruptly and irrevocably down, as do those who will never come back, or like the undreamt dream that is broken off suddenly and without a sound.

His horse crossed the shadow’s verge at the very edge of the hill, itself sharply outlined by the purple dusk, as the ocean’s indigo outlines the island’s edge and separates it from the darkness of the depths below. And so Captain Trackle was suddenly submerged in the blinding splendor of the outstretched plateau. He forgot about the difficult four years of waging war that were barely behind him. And he forgot all about the company of men he was leading into this unknown.

The captain harnessed the reins and the horse halted. Indeed, so synchronically with his movement did it halt that an onlooker, had there been one, might have been forgiven for imagining that the horse too was mesmerized by the wonder unfolding before them, and even that it had halted a nanosecond prior to his command.

For it was not just any plateau! An ocean of green grass shone in the morning sun, clean and bright and heaving gently, all the way to the horizon’s edge. Only the far-off mountain crests flecked with white stones differentiated this oceanic presence, while complementing it, the stones like the foaming crests of waves. As his eyes grew accustomed to this, Captain Trackle noticed that the silent blissful wasteland was strewn with thick galaxies of meadow flowers – blue mirrors, small lakes, darker and bluer than the rest of the surfaces, which reminded Trackle of Kornati in the Adriatic, where the dark stains of a peaceful sea shimmer under the mild strokes of the mistral, amidst the grayness of a surging sea furrowed like elephant’s skin. The captain was taken somewhat by surprise that he did not miss the absolute absence of any traces of people, civilization, culture or history in this silent place. And then the gentle smile that had always so attracted his lovers passed over Captain Franciscus Trackle’s face. He was astonished by a thought, one that was at once clear and already inscribed, as if it had been read somewhere before.

Yes, undoubtedly, there is nothing of Vienna or Salzburg, nothing of Venice or Prague here. But this is not a human world either. All of these four elements, which rule so lavishly over this great plateau, the transparent, brisk mountain air, the crystal clear water of streams and the sparkling small lakes, these and the flame of this eternal Sun which reigns over everything and everybody, all must have looked like this long before people had ever been created. How? I will never know that. However, I now know for sure what it will look like after our extinction!

……………………………………………

At the surface of this immense, timeless ocean, quietly and purposefully, like a saint walking on water, came Lieutenant Musil, commander of the reconnaissance patrol. He approached the captain through the long and mild green waves, with four people from the patrol coming down, with the same calm and sovereign gait of a saint, like in a prayer or in a dream.

When he had saluted him, Lieutenant Musil briskly made a report.

“Everything is alright, my captain! No traces of people, or of any blocks of flats, walls, trenches or other proofs of a human presence.�

Afterwards, he let himself make a comment:

“All seems unreal, timeless to me; as though I have been dreaming for the entirety of my life up to now. It seems to me as if we, those of us now standing before all this, had never existed before, as if we had never actually been anywhere!�

Captain Trackle and Lieutenant Musil had been friends since the time of the Military Academy. Such informality between them was not unusual, and their friendship resisted all temptations of strict military subordination.

“I agree, my old chap. Although I’d like to add that I am impressed by the other, complementary point: as though we came to being just now and as though we had just arrived where we would forever remain. We passed from time into everlastingness, from darkness into light, from illusion into reality.�

Franciscus Trackle was an experienced soldier. As one of the three best cadets of his generation at the Militarsiche Akademie, he had all the prerequisites for a brilliant soldier’s career. The war took him by surprise and postponed those prospects, but for the time being, nearing the end, all could be started again. It could even be sped up, since after such a defeat the country would need every able-bodied accomplished man.

Frequently preoccupied with plans for the future, the captain was taken aback by the curious feeling that had fallen over him, one of carelessness, peace and an almost complete indifference regarding any thoughts of making plans. His unit was withdrawing from the Thessalonica Front, up from the mountainous Kajmakcalan region, after long years of trench warfare. Through wise decision-making, by understanding the unique logic of the battlefield and with his excellent knowledge of tactics, Captain Trackle had preserved his unit, suffering almost no losses during the three years of endless war.

The captain was very close to all of his men, which was why he was beloved by them. He shared their concerns, hopes, interests and dreams. In the 6^th Hill’s Regiment, there were one professor of philosophy, two painters, four musicians (one of whom was a composer and one a violin player from the Wienner Filharmonische orchestra), two physicists and so on… and each of them was astonished by the thorough knowledge and spiritual inventiveness of their captain. No matter whether the discussion was about the aesthetic concepts of Mark Plank, or of painting in the periods of Quattrocenta and Cinquecenta, Ticiano and Rafaello, or about the subtleties of modern music, the captain was at ease and equally qualified to speak. And not only that: Franciscus Trackle even had such a wonderful command of the violin that at the age of seventeen he was offered a place in the Conservatorium.

Yet the captain was also capable of getting on with every member of his company, regardless of their level of education. He could be found, say, partying and carousing with three tailor’s assistants, or cracking dirty jokes with a dozen factory workers. And then there were the pair of professional wrestlers in the regiment; Trackle had found a way to entertain them as well.

……………………………………………

Franciscus Trackle was born in Innsbruck, but his family wintered in Bolsano. This was how, when still very young, he had learned to speak Italian immaculately. Later, at the age of fifteen, he met and befriended an Italian boy, an assistant at the Bolsano hotel where the family regularly stayed. His name was Martin Lupino, and he was also fifteen. Some time later, when the war began, Martin joined Captain Trackle’s unit. Probably the discrete intervention of the captain himself could be detected behind this; but he neither left a single trace, nor ever touched upon the matter in conversation.

Their friendship did not stop with the fast-receding war, which they had both survived. And they were together at this very moment, too. Martin had been appointed as the captain’s personal adjutant, and during these three years their friendship developed into that kind of immediate, nearly instinctive and telepathic understanding one encounters only rarely. In fact, Martin had once joked about this, remarking, “The unfavorable side of our understanding is that we actually don’t need to talk anymore. First, we already know what the other one thinks; second, because by keeping silent we better express our own thoughts than when we blend them into speech!�

At that moment the echo of this old remark reverberated in Trackle’s mind. He abandoned the enthralling silence and his gaze fell upon a mild hillside, naturally framed and cast in an almost perfect amphitheater facing the southeast. His soldiers were exhausted by the daily marches. After so many months in the mud of the rainy and snowy trenches, he thought, an intensive dose of sunshine will do them good. He issued an order that, as soon as everyone had descended onto the plateau, rations should be distributed, and the men would be granted a full four hours of idle rest and leisure. It was the usual guard-roster that finalized the order which Lieutenant Musil conveyed further on.

“Entre nous, my dear Captain, it looks to me as if we are very safe here in this primordial region of eternal silence- even safer than we would be in our military barracks in Lindz,� said the lieutenant while they were slowly walking to the place they chose to rest.

“Are you thinking of the order for setting up a guard?� asked Captain Trackle.

“Yes, I think that any other reason for setting up a guard other than the rules of the service would be a true miracle!� Musil explained.

Captain Trackle smiled. “Meine Lieber Hauptmann! I believe in miracles. It is part of my job!�

……………………………………………

Martin Lupino, Captain Trackle’s orderly, took a seat next to his supervisor. Although in their communication Trackle never used any tone of subordination, even when he was giving instructions to him in front of others, Martin had a feeling of enormous respect for him, even of admiration. Perhaps, the difference in their social status was not an insignificant factor behind this. Yet even if it had a certain influence, it had only been when they met first – when the young Lupino served tea for Trackle’s family, respectable guests of the hotel where Martin worked as an assistant and occasionally as a waiter.

Very handsome, of gracious stature, Martin was an agile young man, with a fighting spirit, and on the very same afternoon the slightly older Franciscus Trackle and he were fiercely competing in foolhardy downhill races on the steepest ski runs in Bolsano. Since then, the social barrier between the two young men fell by the wayside. Yet Martin still was fascinated by whatever Trackle said or did afterwards. And so his admiration for his friend found an excellent outlet in their work relationship, without insulting his conceit and without imposing any extorted obligations. The closeness of their souls remained untarnished.

At that moment Martin got the feeling that his friend, the beloved captain, was entering into some very particular mood never before shown. Something was happening with Trackle, and something contagious, for Martin felt it happening with himself too, and with all of them in the enchanted space of this heavenly island of green plunged into blue. Something was hovering over the one-hundred-and-sixty souls lying carefree in the deep, sweet-smelling grass, dozing amidst flowers on the warm slopes of a natural amphitheatre, a place which the captain himself had chosen for their resting point, a place cut out for the dream that is not meant to cease.

“There are some conditions of state, Martin,� Trackle began. “Conditions of state that seem to be coming from nowhere. They fall upon a certain spot as fog; they capture people in such a manner that their thoughts become thick, sticky presentiment. All plans stop, all differences are erased, all sense disappears.�

……………………………………………

The captain was not looking at Martin. His gaze was wandering somewhere far away, focused somewhere in infinity, perhaps a few centimeters above God’s forehead. He knew that Martin understood him better than he was capable of understanding his own thoughts.

“On such occasions,� continued the captain, “it is what such a condition of state bears within itself that happens to us, and not what we want, nor what we yearn for. We clutch at that feeling, set apart from ourselves, give in to something that is indifferent to us, and which determines us – just as a sun-shone landscape gives in to dusk without grumbling, not knowing and not asking what it brings, and…�

The Italian was looking at his friend intently, waiting for the conclusion he already knew.

“That is when both fortune and accident most easily happen to us,� said Trackle, gazing off somewhere past the endless horizon. “This is what grips me now.�

Stretching out on the gentle slope, leaning on bundles of clothes, shirts unbuttoned, barefoot, resting their legs and airing out their boots, Trackle’s soldiers soon found themselves asleep.

All of a sudden, while all around his soldier were giving in to the radiant sun and to this otherworldly beauty, the captain recognized his destiny. Although he was still standing, he again forgot about all that preceded this moment, as when in a dream the second dream descends, and with the soft wing of oblivion envelops both the sleeper and the first dream.

Martin, already comfortably reclining, surrendered to the hypnotic power of sky tint glistening in the morning, clear as if having fallen from the first drop of God’s quill pen. And he counted them: seven great eagles that were soundlessly circling in gyres, ascending towards the blue precipice opening before them as a gigantic bell. It looked as if with every new circle they were opening further a huge sack, tied with invisible laces they carried in their beaks; and out of the sack poured bulks of golden yellow, cyanic blue, white, gently pink flowers, as big as stars, and all that like a thick swarm of flakes inaudibly covered the stupefied desolation.

“Now I have come to understand those stories where the soul of the main hero hides in the eagle,� said the captain, in a murmur. “The body would never accede to abandon such mortal beauty. The eagle – it is the soul which atones for its craving for immortality by sacrificing everything that is not beautiful. This is because beauty dies and one must pay for it with life.�

Martin didn’t respond. He knew that his friend, Captain Trackle, together with him, was watching the eagles, which were moving away from the majestic allegory of this world, and that he hadn’t expected a reply, but only expressed the joint trembling before what shook both of them to the very bottom of their souls.

……………………………………………

At the peak of the turquoise mountain crest, like a mass of towers with the color of lichen in hazelnut’s shadow, was a dark, subdued reflection of green, taken from the trembling of heated murky granite; underneath, a couple of rocks shimmered like purple and pink crystals. Where the mountain crest changed into a plateau, the streams of the mountain river heaved joyfully and in erratic motions struck the deep passage with the color of young meat. To Martin, it seemed like a gigantic green horse with a snow-white tail, flogging his own thighs while waiting for his rider, a giant who would ascend into the saddle, holding the reins tight.

All over the magnificent plateau, a deep melancholic symphony echoed incessantly, yet quietly; the splendor of innumerable galaxies woven of flowers, blended into the green waves of the grassy open space, all changing through lucid accords, in the sporadically drawn shadows of high lonesome rocks, like on some kind of a death wreath prepared for someone who is still not here, but is expected to be brought in any minute. All around, a serene, tranquil aura trembled, turning the visible world into exalted existence. Captain Franciscus Trackle sighed and eventually lay down amidst the vale of flowers, as though lying in God’s hand.

He flinched; there was some indistinct omen. A graveyard silence hung tightly everywhere. The sun was still high and was shining with that pleasant mountainous warmth that leaves the air fresh and easy to breath. His clear-cut soldier’s instinct was saying that something was wrong- something big. Trackle could simply sense the smell of danger – and what was happening now was more than a danger.

He once again thought of the sunny landscape giving up to the dusk at the end of the day, as a lamb surrenders to the knife. He felt like he was very far away from his past, from all he could remember, from all that was important to him. Captain Trackle realized that he was not in control of anything anymore, that a kind of a decision had been already made, that such a decision was in fact a verdict, and that the verdict was irrevocable. And that the very hour had come.

The very matter of his soul – Europe! – it disappeared completely from his deepest memory, was set apart and separated from himself and became less real than any of the blades of grass in which he was still immersed, lying motionless, just transferred from a dream, and still, surprisingly, wide awake. It disappeared just as the desire for a woman, for company, for a glass of cognac might disappear. And though he could still touch and feel it, he knew that even his own life was already far away from him, that it resembled a distant sight; we run our hand across it and conceal it from ourselves. The veil of silent beauty was already falling upon him and his men, covering them and almost separating them from this world.

“The guards have been killed!� he shouted, and simultaneously felt it, without knowing how come he knew!

Martin jumped at this shout from his captain. It was too late. Guns roared from all sides. Franciscus Trackle gazed upon his soldiers getting up, enveloped in dreams, and immediately falling back in the thick grass and the flowers, shot down by bullets from every direction. He reached for his carbine, leaned on some thick clump of earth, almost like a trench, and surveyed the situation. Rifles roared incessantly, but none of the attackers could be seen. The natural amphitheater, so fit for sunbathing and luxuriating, now became a doomed trap whose edges were occupied by invisible attackers.

Trying to rally into groups, Trackle’s soldiers were getting up, running a few steps, or not even a single one, and falling like flies in swathes. The meadow clearing did not offer any shelter. To stand and fight meant to become a target. But not standing up meant missing one’s final chance to face the world in a standing-up position and on one’s own feet. At least for a short while, it was safer to lie down, but the situation demanded action instead of passivity and inevitable death.

A little later, it became clear that neither the former nor the latter had an impact on the final outcome. The rifles of the 6^th Hill’s Regiment resounded less and less, with only a few shots here and there. The captain could recognize the individual carbine of every one of his soldiers. This is Herman! This is Thomas now! Coming from the stream, it is Marcello! It must have been Werner!

He himself was also firing, of course. Trackle was aware of the fact that his soldiers also recognized the sound of his carbine. As a first-class shooter, and winner of many military competitions, Captain Franciscus Trackle was very careful in how he used every single bullet. He was shooting at places from where, an instant earlier, a cloud of gunpowder smoke had risen, where, according to the field logic, an attacker could be hiding. Only twice did he think that after his firing, the shots from those places he had fixed as a target stopped coming; the tall, thick grass was indeed hiding the truth about whether he had cut down any of the invisible snipers for which he had aimed. A few steps further down, it was only his oldest friend Martin Lupino remaining along with him, and he was shooting ravenously cocking the rifle and reloading in a futile struggle to stave off death.

At one moment Trackle noticed them: the dark figures swiftly coming out of the grass and changing positions, coming closer and closer, already very deep into their lines. Trackle pointed his officer’s binoculars at one man who was crossing over the open space at that very moment. He wanted to make sure he would get him and waited for the man to stop at the new position he would precisely locate, even if he shot at the place in the grass that could hide the man from the eye but not from the bullet.

In the glass there appeared the sharp, dry face of the highlander, complete with a thick moustache. Neither his gaze nor his expression revealed anger, avarice or the ardent need for struggle, nor the glee that comes with accomplishing a great feat. No, the highlander was shooting at a speedy pace, as though carrying out a command. It was not an ordinary, soldier’s command, but more the calm resoluteness of a martial trance. As if an execution, an order issued by destiny itself, a sentence, as if being on a duty given by the angel of death in person.

Trackle let the binoculars down, and reached for his rifle. No one here hates anybody, he thought. It seemed to him as if all of them had been in a field of gravitation that determined their acts in the same way as the earth’s gravitation determines the path of a heavy rock, which breaks, ruins, and crushes all things standing in its way, mute and without reason, indifferent, hating no one and not caring about whatever disaster might occur.

The captain let the binoculars down. That figure which only Captain Trackle’s naked eye could see now looked extremely minute and unexpectedly distant. He was completely overwhelmed by the strong urge of the hunter resolute to kill the game, so precious even for a confirmed warrior.

He rose a bit above the line of the grass and fired. At the same instant, while the echo of his shot was still roaring in his ears, Captain Franciscus Trackle felt a hot stroke from his breast, a sudden warmth in his cheeks, a murmur in his ears. And a very mild fatigue.

Softly, more like he was getting down rather than falling, the captain returned to the cozy delight of the fragrant grass. He held on to one of his knees. His face touched the flowers that were caressing him, very close to his eyes. He then let the other knee go to ground. He clung still to his carbine, an award from the all-army competition held in Graz in the summer of 1912, more or less right at this time, perhaps on the same day as today; he remembered vividly the moment when he received that carbine from Colonel Stall’s hands, when sweet Paula had smiled with her shining eyes, golden hair, snow-white top and dress with straps as red as wild strawberries, standing in the first row, in the company of her dear and respected mama and papa, who will become, in the very autumn of the same year, his mother-in-law and father-in-law, and everybody sincerely and merrily applauding him…

Captain Trackle stretched his arms as never before; they were stretched so much that he himself was surprised; as though all were made of rubber, or without bones and ligaments. In his eyes, his outstretched arms reached farther and farther away, across the boundaries of the battlefield, and straightforward reached to the horizon itself, which, it seemed to him, he could easily embrace, only should he desire it. He felt he was heading for somewhere, he felt that it was the way one departs from one’s own life.

Now, he could still do all he wished. His mouth gently touched the mouth of his beloved, simultaneously aware that that feeling would never repeat or replace any other. All sensitivity gradually perished, extinguished, like when the hand becomes numb when the elbow rests on too soft a pillow. As though he had brought his own life to a halt. Again, he had had enough composure to perceive himself, in a state of wonder, clearly following the ever more distant flight of those eagles, starkly outlined against this transparent sky, as if the air itself had been sucked out of it.

He was bewildered by the fact that, despite the stronger and stronger feeling that he was himself sinking into the heavenly abyss, and that he had already become one of those infinitesimal, distant points the eagles turned into, nevertheless perfectly clear and from the immediate vicinity of his eyes, he could see the flower petals of blue cyan, the golden reflection of mountain buttercups, the rich bouquet of the heavenly messenger, which like a floral ikebana pierced through the cloud of lichen. He could very clearly recognize the pervasive, bitter smell of hellebore.

Captain Franciscus Trackle then realized that his sudden coveting for the future faced the sudden discovery that here, in this wonderful meadow, he would soon lie dead! Or that he was already laying dead… all the senses through which he felt his body – joy, courage, hunger, passion, thirst – disappeared, just as the pus rushes out of the pressed wound. He felt like he was becoming fragile, abruptly but carelessly, like butterflies become fragile in early autumn.

He thought his senses sharpened beyond whatsoever comprehensible limit, grabbed and shaped the light, smells, sounds… with plentitude and magic by means of which secrets hidden in earth were revealed through the crown of the cherry tree in blossom. A lightning struck the superb crown of the April cherry tree, which had an instant earlier appeared in front of his inner eye. He was battered by a terrifically severe feeling of pain. It seemed like the pain was not going to cease, that such a pain could not pass away till the end of time and the world, it was so deep, harsh, as though made out of some pre-matter, which would never disintegrate and which nothing could destroy.

No pain lasts longer than life! – It dawned on him, with a feeling of relief.

A little afterwards, the pain unexpectedly diminished, and then completely passed away. The perfect, relieving strength of the realization that life had passed, took the burden of every other thought away from Captain Franciscus Trackle.

……………………………………………

Martin Lupino was lying behind a big boulder, high above the battlefield. Sweating but not injured, he was still catching his breath while motionless he gazed upon the scene of the catastrophe. The entire regiment was destroyed. All of his friends were dead. He saw Captain Franciscus Trackle, his dear friend Franci, sink into the grass slowly after having knocked down one of the attackers by shooting precisely – and bravely – Franci, one of the few who had dared run out of the shelter, a leader to the end.

Now one of the bandits was shouting something in an unfamiliar language right from the spot where the captain was lying down. Stooped in the grass for a while, the bandit stood up and joyfully, in triumph started waving the captain’s dolman. Human figures, in dark garments of raw woolen texture, were walking all over the battlefield, occasionally bending over the dead. They stripped the uniforms from dead bodies, searching their pockets, collecting weapons and ammunition with the seriousness, concentration and indifference with which they had just shot them. It looked like they were at their work posts executing everyday tasks from which they made a living.

When darkness crept over the stricken plateau, Lupino set off. He never did find out where exactly was the place he was so sadly running away from, on the way to Restelica. He remembered at some point having fallen into a ditch so narrow that for a while he had fully reconciled himself to the idea that he would die there. In those horrible moments, he felt the feeling of narrowness, the fear of closed space, the claustrophobia, he thought, that probably came from the unconscious remembrance of the horrors of birth. The man that was born, who managed to get through the narrowest strait they would ever get through and, if the birth was particularly long, would be consumed with tunnels, ditches, and straits for the whole rest of his life.

However, Martin was luckier. He extricated himself, somehow, and managed to reach, late at night, a remote mountain village over 1,800 meters above the sea at Salonika.

The first person who found the lost Italian staggering up the steep path accepted him wordlessly. He didn’t talk; he had lost all speaking capability. And they did not bother him with questions. They had obviously seen strangers in similar states before.

Martin was given dinner at the same table with his host and spent the night in the room where the whole family slept. The next day, while he was at the village’s only tearoom trying to get along with the local people, some of the attackers entered. To buy food.

The one who was wearing Captain Franciscus Trackle’s tunic, the very leader of the highland bandits, approached the man who had escaped death at his hand. Smiling amiably, in a friendly way the bandit leader tapped Martin on the shoulder. He even gave him three golden coins.

Nothing personal against anybody. This is simply my trade. I make a living from it. And in this way you can neither live easy nor long. Since you survived now, you really will live. You will certainly outlive me, too. Here you have three ducats. Just in case. For luck. So that you can remember me when you learn that I am no more.

Laughing noisily, the highlander rode away along with his three escorts. In the saddle and on the horse which had until very recently belonged to Captain Franciscus Trackle.

……………………………………………

Martin understood all this later. He spent whole three years in Restelica. He worked as a country cook. Indeed, some of his Italian recipes have been kept right up to the present day. “La cuisina Italiana di Restelica,� Martin sometimes used to joke, explaining to the passers-by what those strange dishes were that none of them had ever seen or tasted before. But the local inhabitants, the people from Restelica, got accustomed in no time and accepted some of his specialties. Still, most of the time they would just ask for their nomadic shepherd’s dishes.

Long after the plateau and Restelica, Martin disclosed what he had learned there: that an audacious group of thirty-eight Albanian bandits had planned the attack for three days, and secretly followed the Austrian regiment as it happily retreated homewards from the Salonika Front. The bandit leader wouldn’t have decided to attack if it hadn’t been for the two other army companies that gave themselves away to him – a total of 94 men – and he had to promise his comrades in advance that the share of the spoils would be strictly apportioned according to the number fighters, the same for each of them.

The fatal ambush on that beautiful warm day occurred in that valley, encircled by Crni Kamen, a little above Veselova Mountain and Menuglova Tower, at the very boundary of Restelica, 2,200 meters above sea level, wreathed by abundant and clear springs. Until that event, this deep valley did not have a name, but was only called Rupa (Hole). By the following summer it became known as Austrian Heads, and has kept that name ever since.

Always in a hurry, permanently pursued, hunted by military and police, the bandits did not even try to bury the soldiers they had killed. They had only one casualty among their own people (Martin believed it was exactly the one Captain Trackle fired at in the moment when he himself was shot), whom they swiftly buried near a spring (so that his soul wouldn’t be thirsty!), and four wounded, whom they took to the villages in the Ljuma region, where was their base and their own accomplices. One hundred and sixty two men, i.e. the entire company minus him, Martin Lupino, remained in the grass and in the flowers, at the disposal of beasts, birds, and gradual organic decay.

The rare passers-by, mainly shepherds, avoided that place for a long time. It was not for a couple of years afterwards that a very few of them dared to pass through this area covered with already whitened, scattered bones. They would hurriedly turn their eyes away when they chanced upon a shattered skull peeking out of the thick grass and the abundant flowers.

So no one took their cattle there to graze, and since then the “Austrian Heads� toponym took on the more general connotation of marking a place that you crossed when only in the direst of circumstances, when pressed by the greatest of needs, and even then you did so swiftly, without words, in humble and fearful piety.

……………………………………………

When he had earned some money and when the news of the stabilization of the situation came to Restelica, remote and solitary, Martin prepared a big lunch for all the village, said goodbye to the people and said he was going home to Italy. Bolcano had waited for Martin with anxiety. In his thoughts he embraced all those dear places where he was in the company of Franciscus Trackle, overcome with a grief that tore at his heart at the thought of all those places where now his captain would never again see.

And so Martin didn’t want to be employed in the same hotel where they had first met, so many happy winters before and, a while later, he moved to Abrusa and the Marema region. He did this for two reasons. One was to avoid meeting Franciscus Trackle’s parents and unmarried widow. Martin felt that his former friend and captain would not have wanted them to know anything other what the official army report had said: that somewhere in the mountains of northwest Macedonia, Captain Trackle and the 6^th Hill’s Regiment had simply and irrevocably disappeared.

Then there was that elusive and captivating energy of that region of such fearsome, fatal beauty. It seemed to Martin such a significant part of the destiny they both shared that he believed the inevitable future encounter with Franciscus Trackle and all those comrades who had died there could only recur in a place of similar beauty. To him, it seemed that Central Italy, most probably Gran Sasso, was the place of greatest similarity. And so he went.

……………………………………………

For the remainder of his long life, Martin Lupino would have two recurrent dreams. Once, he even jotted down some notes about them, in a rare waking moment when he could perceive their distance.

Dream one:

“I saw her, by the waterfall there, pretty, ominous, so enticing, like the slender deadly nightshade mushroom glistening in the May morning dew. I’ll be waiting for you in the Dervish Teke. In the oak forest, she was riding a bay horse. And all of a sudden I found myself in the middle of the beautiful, heavy hair, as when a man is engrossed in the dense smell of the forest floor, abundant in secret sprouting plants.�

As for the meaning of that note, something perhaps could be grasped by the dim fact that an unknown amount of gold from a foreign country kept coming, for many years, to the address of Mursel, whose pretty daughter for a long time resisted marriage.

Dream two:

“I see it once, I dream for an entire lifetime!

In their heads they have the dreams of Croce and Hegel; the paintings of Rafael and Titian, Michelangelo and Leonardo, they hover…

big bears, noiseless shadows of wolves; smart foxes come, ravens croak, eagles flap their powerful wings, the bearded vulture flies in circles! And with their ghastly jaws they tear Newton’s theories apart and crunch David’s sculptures into pieces. They boil the frescoes from the walls of the Sistine Chapel in a bath of diluted digestive acids. The paint of Renaissance masters leaks from their bloody beaks; Pico della Mirandola flies to the guts of the griffon vulture.

I see it once, and I dream for an entire lifetime! And I know that those beasts and big birds suffer pains and groan to start speaking, to make it easier for themselves; I know that all of a sudden before their eyes, or in dreams, while copulating or amidst hunting, the painters’ canvases and the sculptures and the pages of many books start to dance.

I listen to what they listen to, in my ears I hear an echo while Hegel and Leonardo shout with their howl and roar, croak and shriek, through the bear’s jaws and the wolf’s sharp forehead, through the fox’s snout, through the horn-shaped beak of ravens and eagles. There’s no hope for us, there’s no hope for them either, unless I go there. Since it is only I who can understand the mute language of souls transformed into beasts…

And then I go there and collect the remnants of those paintings and books, fragments of cries and music, and take them back to museums, to the library shelves. All is in its ordered place again, and they are alive again; the agreeable masters shake hands with me, the pleasant philosophers stroll and then go somewhere to sleep in peace, while animals and birds bless me and joyfully chirp, and croak and cheerily cry in their mother tongues.

Then I wake up. And wide awake I see all that, exactly the same.�

This, the second dream, exceeds us. Only Martin Lupino could perhaps say the right thing about the whole idea of this note. Mursel received both notes by mail many years later and, in suspicion as to what they might mean, shoved them into a hole between two stones, in the wall of a sheep’s pen where in late autumn they went wintering along with the flocks of sheep, in the house in Restelica, as usual taking the longer way through Dedel Beg and Zendel Beg, bypassing the open space of Austrian Heads.

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*Ferid Muhic (born 1944) is a professor of philosophy at Skopje’s Cyril and Methodius University. He has taught at numerous universities around the world and published many books of philosophy, poetry and literature. More information about him can be found here.