Laughter in the Courtroom

For eleven years I have typed the transcripts at the court in Livno. I have entered in them quarrels over boundary lines on Livno Field, sheep that strayed onto someone else's meadow, and two brothers who for six years could not agree whose walnut tree it was. I am used to people in the courtroom shouting, crying and lying, and to all of it fitting into three dry words in the transcript. But only once, on a single page, did I type four times: laughter in the courtroom. It was in October, at the hearing of Bagarić versus Bagarić.

The divorce had been over in March, in ten minutes. The house was not. Zvonko and Božena Bagarić had spent twenty years building it at the edge of town on the road to Kupres: he with the money he made driving his truck, she with her pay from the dairy, where for twenty-three years she had salted and turned Livno cheese. Zvonko wanted the whole house. In the lawsuit it was put politely, but in the bar he said it openly: a woman who has another man has no business in the house she walked out of. And that she had another man, all of Livno knew. On Sunday mornings people saw her in the white Niva of Darko Tokić, a widower and photographer who took people up Cincar to watch the wild horses.

The hearing was open to the public, and Zvonko made sure everyone knew it. Both his brothers came, his mother from Glamoč, half the regulars of the Stone Lion bar, the neighbors from his street and, I do not know why, the man who sells chestnuts in front of the post office. The women from the dairy came too, all in the same blue work coats. Judge Magdalena Jozić looked over the glasses on her chain and said she had seen this many people only when the hunting club went to court with the municipality over a cabin. She asked them to sit wherever they could and to keep quiet. They sat. They did not keep quiet.

Zvonko's lawyer, old Kristijan Dodig, spoke first about the law, briefly and dully, and then about custom, at length and with relish. Around here it has been known, he said, for as long as Livno has existed: the woman who leaves for another man leaves with one suitcase. The judge cut him off and said that in this courtroom custom was not a source of law. Then Zvonko stood up, red to the ears, and said he wanted it on the record. Let it be known that for two years his wife had said she was going to her sister's in Split, and she had gone up Cincar with Tokić. That he had been the last one in Livno to find out. The judge sighed and nodded at me. I wrote it down.

Božena had come without a lawyer. She sat alone at the defendant's table, in a blue coat, her handbag on her knees, and while Zvonko spoke she looked out the window at a single cloud above Kamešnica. The judge asked whether she denied the claims. Božena stood up. "I do not deny them," she said. "I rode up Cincar with Darko Tokić, and not only up Cincar, and I was never once at my sister's. I will not lie about what the whole town has already counted, Sunday by Sunday." The regulars from the Stone Lion murmured with satisfaction, as if they had won the lottery. The women from the dairy lowered their heads.

"But I have two questions, if the court allows." The judge allowed it, because, as she admitted to me later, she wanted to hear them herself. "The first is for Mr. Dodig. Who wrote that rule about one suitcase?" Dodig spread his hands and said no one had written it, it belonged to the people. "To the people," Božena repeated. "I was born in Livno, I have lived here forty-seven years, and no one has ever asked me what I think of that suitcase. They did not ask my mother either, or hers. The rule was thought up by men at a table in a bar, over their third brandy, and now they would like me to carry it." The women from the dairy laughed first, then a few of the neighbors. I typed: laughter in the courtroom.

"The second question is for my former husband, and I ask the court to remind him that he must tell the truth." The judge reminded Zvonko. Božena turned toward him for the first time that morning. "Zvonko, in twenty-three years, did it ever happen that you came home and supper was not waiting for you? That you asked for a shirt and it was not ironed? That you told me your mother needed her medicine taken to Glamoč and I did not take it? Did you ever ask me for anything and not get it?" Zvonko was silent for a long time. He was a rough man, but he was not a liar, and that day it was his misfortune. "No," he said at last. "Never. I cannot say that."

"There," Božena said to the judge. "Everything he asked for, he got. And he asked for little, Your Honor. Supper at six, silence while he watches the evening news, and that I never ask him anything about the truck. That took an hour of my day, maybe two. The rest of the day was left to me. The rest of me. What was I supposed to do with it? Throw it to the dogs on Livno Field? I thought it wiser to give it to a man who asked for it and who knows what to do with it. Who asks me what I think of the clouds over Kamešnica and waits for me at the foot of Cincar with a thermos of coffee." This time the whole courtroom laughed, the Bagarić brothers, the chestnut man, and the Stone Lion, which a minute ago had been cheering for the other side. Zvonko's mother laughed into her handkerchief. I typed: laughter in the courtroom. And then once more, because it would not stop.

The judge took off her glasses and said she would remove anyone who went on laughing, but her shoulders were shaking as she said it. Dodig stood up and said this was not a defense but a performance, and that morals still meant something in Livno. The judge replied that the answer, after all, had come from his own client. Then she pronounced what the law had been saying from the start: the house was acquired during the marriage and would be divided into two equal parts, and the custom about the suitcase would stay in the bar, where it was born. For the fourth time I typed the same sentence. Zvonko walked out first. At the door his younger brother asked him, "So why did you ask her in front of all of Livno, man?"

That afternoon Judge Jozić handed the transcript back to me to sign, and her finger stopped on my lines. She said it was enough to enter laughter in the courtroom once. I told her there had been four and that I enter what I hear. She looked at me over her glasses, picked up a pencil, paused, and put the pencil back in its cup. "Let it stay," she said. "That is how it was." Through the window of her office I saw the white Niva slowly pull out of the court parking lot and turn toward Cincar. Božena was sitting in front, beside the driver. On the back seat there was no suitcase at all.

By evening the story had gone around the town. At the dairy they left Božena a cake in the locker room, and my husband, who plays cards at the Stone Lion three times a week, brought home the news that the regulars had amended the rule. From now on it applied only to women who leave for money. For the rest there would be no suitcase; the house would simply be split down the middle. I asked him whether anyone had voted against it. He said no one had, because Zvonko was not there that evening, and the others were afraid the women from the dairy would hear about it.