"The Graveyard Drifter" is a short story that was written in 2000, in the final months of the author’s life. As in the story "Blessed, Holy", which appeared in the collection "The Hot Breath of the Desert" in 1997, once again
Herling-Grudziński takes up the theme of the war in former Yugoslavia. "The Graveyard Drifter" is about the horrific massacre in Srebrenica, when between 12 and 16 July 1995 armed detachments of Serbs entered a Muslim enclave and murdered more than 7,000 men and boys. The main character in the story, Captain Zdravko Malić, the “graveyard drifter” of the title, is an average person, essentially devoid of any murderous intent; initially he opposes the killing and persuades his commanders to opt for expulsion. However, on the critical day, in a fit of frenzy, he murders about two hundred people. Among them, quite by chance, is his own wife, who was in the fifth month of pregnancy. From then on, haunted by memories, and also by a sentence passed in absentia by the Hague Tribunal, he drifts about Europe, hiding in graveyards by night, and spending his days among the local down-and-outs. In the final stage he reaches Rome, where he has a casual sexual encounter with a drug addict at a railway station and contracts AIDS; later on, while hiding in one of the graveyards, he is found and arrested. His further fate is a reflection of the paradoxes of the post-modern world: he is sentenced to 46 years in prison for his crimes, but as he is so ill, he will probably end up in a hospital, where he will spend the rest of his life in peace and bliss. In this way Herling-Grudziński was trying to say several things. First of all, that evil is universal, occurring when “reason goes dormant”, at the prompting of the irrational side of man. Secondly, that post-modern humanitarianism is useless for dealing with a monster from a past era: if a crime against humanity demands the death sentence, but liberal laws forbid us to condemn the terminally ill, it means post-modernity prevents justice from being reconciled with the law, which causes the seeds of vengeance to be sown among those who have not been avenged, and the seeds of impunity among those who have not been punished. Thirdly, by placing his main character among drug addicts, vagrants and municipal dumps, Herling suggests that the ethnic vindictiveness to which Malić yielded is a historical leftover, a remnant of totalitarianism. Along with fascism and communism the body of Europe was infected with contempt for human life, and that is why any liberal form of opposition to that evil will be doomed to failure, and will be demoralising in its impotence.
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