The evil around us is deeper than politics, Captain Baldo told a group of communists who used his palace for meetings. Captain Baldo is one of the sacred characters of Yugoslav cinema, the town lord from "Occupation in 26 Pictures" who is killed by the Ustasha at the decision of screenwriter Kovač. The same Mirko Kovač to whom Danilo Kiš dedicated the first chapter of the novel Grobnica za Boris Davidovič, in which a certain Mikša appears, a tailor's journeyman and a bully very skilled with a needle, knife and various tools. That Mikša skinned a living ferret before the eyes of the readers, and Kiš is a rare writer of our language who could endure such a scene as a steadfast witness.
...puts a rusty wire through the ferret's nostrils, ties its paws and hangs the animal on the doorpost. The stench is terrible. First make one cut around the throat, like a crimson necklace, then two more at the very root of the paws. Peeling back the skin around the neck, he cut two more slits for the fingers, similar to buttonholes. (GBD, Rosewood Handle Knife, page 10, BIGZ, 1995)
On an unknown day last week, some Mikša from the neighborhood skinned a dog in Herceg Novi. The case was reported to the police based on the statements of people who saw the dog with its head cut off and the dog hanging to drain. About ten days earlier, someone set a dog on fire in the vicinity of Podgorica. The animal was first tied with a chain, then they poured gasoline over it and watched it burn. Some journalistic sources say that the dog bonfire was the work of a minor. However, petting a dog, like the one from Herceg Novi, requires a skill that develops with age and experience. Animal skinning is a trade that, like any other, is learned by trial and error - who knows how many creatures he skinned before he decided to show off his skills at Spanish Fort, where the tracks were removed before the police moved. Could it be that the executioner noticed the commotion on Facebook and removed the evidence himself? Possibly. The one who barks at dogs probably has Facebook and is known by many in Herceg Novi.
Originally from Herceg Novi, the actor Zvonko Lepetić was also known for his role as a butcher in "Occupation in 26 Pictures". The old master presented the character of the pathological killer as a repentant Catholic, a regular small-town citizen from the region, one who, until the madness of war, showed no willingness to cry out, let alone gouge out his eyes. Rarely has anyone portrayed Lepetić in the role of Raven the banality of evil. The diagnosis of war executioners as peaceful people from the neighborhood has even become classic. Be that as it may, the sick began to wake up, here they are every now and then with an animal victim, all over Montenegro, which brings us to a new general point: history is full of serial killers who began their pathological journey by surviving on dogs and cats.
American Brenda Spencer, for example, famous for killing children, used to rivet kittens when she was a child herself. The "Boston Strangler" Albert de Salvo locked dogs and cats in boxes and shot them with arrows. Before killing his mother and eight other women, Edmund Kemper slaughtered cats, decapitated them and displayed their heads on poles. And so on, these are at least well-known psychiatric patterns - there are people around us who are ticking time bombs and they should not remain anonymous. The Montenegrin police must not consider investigations of crimes against animals a waste of time, on the contrary, the reaction should be lightning fast. Never ignore the zeitgeist - new and new ISIL videos are ideal to fuel the sick imagination, recruit one's fantasy and lead it to action.
When I was little, in the mid-eighties, there was a guy in Bar who made a name for himself by slaughtering cats. There was talk of catching a feral cat and giving it a caesarean section. Such characters are harbingers of great evil to come, which was confirmed a few years later. I don't want to predict the end of the world or a new Balkan war based on a couple of examples, but I remember the previous one too well to be calm. So far, only one man in Montenegro has been convicted of abusing an animal, and the law treats the crime lightly, so ritual torture, slaughter and strangulation are punishable by several thousand euros.
I knew a good dog who was killed a few days ago in Podgorica near the city stadium - and I know how tame and beautiful he was. I gave him hot dogs once, I must say, he patiently waited for me to remove the nylon and ate without the gluttony characteristic of a hungry streetwalker. That dog, whose name I did not know, was the color of cake, with wrinkled skin and a wound on his chest, but I remember his movements best. It was a kind of dog trot that only breeds with big paws and elastic joints are capable of. Witnesses claim that he died tied up, after surviving a group of young men.
And Mikša from Grobnica for Boris Davidović? Well, he ends up killing a human being, the Polish woman Hana Krzyzewska, by stabbing her with the same rosewood-handled knife he used to stab animals. And indeed, is there a man who does not understand the path of the knife that passes from a tied dog to a man.
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