Evil announces itself with the sound of a crackling motorcycle. You are then halfway through the new novel by Drago Jancar and you now feel at home with the eccentric characters he has drummed up for you.
It is spring, 1961. The newspapers are full of news about the Soviet Union’s first manned spaceflight. Marshal Tito, the Yugoslavian leader, is revered as a demigod, especially by those who fought alongside him as partisans during World War II and cannot free themselves from that heroic past. They regularly meet to drench their memories with booze, but also to swear at their fellow townspeople who treated the German occupiers on a friendly basis. The latter is not surprising, because the city of Maribor, where the novel is set, is located near the border with Austria and has quite a few ethnic Germans, some of whom have sided with the Nazis during the war or were conscripted by them.
The protagonist of the novel is the little boy Danijel. He is at an age when a child begins to explore the world and wonders why the adults do what they do. Sometimes he can’t follow their behavior, especially when something terrible happens. But then he unleashes his rich fantasy on reality to soften it.
At the beginning of the novel, which is not accidental At the origin of the world is called, Danijel anticipates events and draws the conclusion ‘that it was about the great story of life, which has played out in countless variants since the creation of the world.’ You immediately understand why Jancar goes back to stories from the Old Testament to make the events in his novel universal.
Hence the name Danijel, which refers to the book of the same name in which Daniel explains to King Nebuchadnezzar that his dream about a collapsing image with a head of gold, a breast and arms of silver, legs of iron and feet of clay heralds the downfall of his empire .
Hence the local priest, Father Alojzij, who encourages the boy to fight against sin (of lust) based on the story of David and Goliath. And don’t forget the retired history teacher Professor Fabijan, who tries to explain to Danijel in his study, which is crammed with maps and books, the riddle of the world and what power does to people.
Sensual woman
In Danijel’s imagination, that world riddle consists of the experiences of the sensual Lena, who one day becomes his downstairs neighbour. From the moment she arrived in the city from the countryside with her two suitcases, he has been fascinated by her mysterious beauty. He likes nothing more than to spy on her, as David did with the beautiful Bath-sheba. And soon he appropriates Lena in his mind.
When one day a troublemaker appears in the form of Pepi, a plumber with shoe size 48, his imagination is disrupted. In his fantasy he imagines himself as King David, who gives the order to send his ‘competitor’ to Auschwitz, the Yugoslav army in Macedonia, or, even further away, to the Foreign Legion in North Africa.
The situation becomes even more complicated for Danijel when a second admirer of Lena shows up, the high-spirited womanizer Guido. Lena succumbs to his charm, with dramatic consequences that unfold over the next six months.
You already know that things go wrong from the first pages of this novel, which points you to the core of human existence through a simple drama. This drama not only encompasses Lena’s derailing love affairs, but also everyday life in Maribor, where the legacy of the Second World War determines relationships. With his new book, Jancar (1948) therefore provides an almost philosophical sequel to his two earlier novels, translated into beautiful Dutch by Roel Schuyt. That night I saw her (2018) and And also love (2020). Was it about betrayal and collaboration during the German occupation of Slovenia, in At the origin of the world the after-effects of this are discussed.
These are expressed most clearly by Professor Fabijan. When he talks to Danijel about the possible return of Jesus to earth, he says that this will never happen in Slovenia, “because the people here hate each other so much.” When Danijel asks him if this isn’t the same in Russia, Fabijan replies: ‘Yes, there too. But they can forgive and forget. With us they never forget anything.’
Disappearance
From that moment on, a crack appears in the idyll of national unity created by Tito. This becomes apparent when the house of Fabijan, who taught at a German school during the occupation, is turned upside down by a ferocious mob of former partisans and he himself disappears shortly afterwards. In his imagination, Danijel tries to soften Fabijan’s fate with the thought that he has left for Patagonia, which the teacher has told him about in detail before. In reality, Fabijan is in one of Tito’s concentration camps.
Danijel should have known better, also because Fabijan told him before that when a person becomes a ruler, he is no longer who he was before. “Then his bad sides come to the surface and Stalin is living proof of that.” When Danijel asks if this also applies to Tito, he gets no answer.
The mutual hatred of the Slovenes is also reflected in Danijel’s parents. For example, during the war, when she did not yet know his father, his mother had a loved one who died on the Eastern Front. His father regularly calls her Gestapo hookers, as he thinks all women Gestapo hookers, because they lived on during the occupation and sometimes had a chat with Slovenes who had been conscripted into the German army.
Characteristic is that Danijel’s father wants to blow up his own war past with that swearing. For in the eyes of his comrades he is not a real hero, because as a partisan he did not dare to shoot a German soldier at a decisive moment, which was not necessary to fulfill his mission. But his comrades only think in terms of bloodshed and that’s why he doesn’t count, even though he was in a German concentration camp.
In turn, Danijel would have thought it tougher if his father had shot. That is also why he thinks the father of his friend Franci, who lost a leg in a burning German tank in Russia, is a hero, ‘even though he fought on the wrong side and lost the war as well as his leg.’
By merging this great suffering of the war with the small, of Lena and her worshippers, Jancar lifts their daily lives to a higher level. The slightest event takes on meaning with him. The beautiful use of language with which he expresses Danijel’s imagination does the rest. For example, Danijel’s older half-brother, who serves in the navy and drowns while fishing, transforms into a large Danube salmon in the boy’s comforting imagination. It’s just one of the many moments in this novel where a dire event is softened by a combination of desperation and humor.
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