TE23 Double Feature

The President Shop

Vesna Mari ć

stories, or at least to read them.

teach it to the rest of the inmates; everyone in the cell was, in his words, “a bit of a clever clogs, so it was hard to teach.” And it had fallen upon him to give a lec-ture on the topic of cosmogony, and here, he said, “I got pretty mixed up. The topic was too tough to understand!” He also learned languages in prison, including English and Esperanto. In 1934, he was released and became a member of the Central Communist Party. The President was soft, jolly, wise, practical, tough, fair, fo-cused, and, frequently, funny. Mona admired the President’s determination and his sense of fairness and loyalty—he nev-er betrayed his comrades, even when tortured—and she loved his sense of humor. Ruben thought these were the qualities that any person of quality, so to speak, had to possess or work toward possessing. It was part of his problem with Diogen. Dio-gen did not hold those traits— or the stories—in great esteem. He had tried to get Diogen to listen to the President’s

“This is how character is built,” said Ruben.

But Diogen wanted none of it. All he wanted, he said, was to be his own person.

“Whether you like it or not, brother, is none of my concern.” Diogen also said, “The President wasn’t so kind to his ene-mies, from what I’ve heard.” To which Mona answered, to Ruben’s delight, “The Pres-ident hated violence, but he understood that in the case of fascism, force can only be fought with force. I imagine it’s quite hard to just ignore a Nazi and pretend he doesn’t exist.” “There are no more Nazis, it’s over, why can’t we just move on into the future?” said Diogen. “Better than all this constant revisiting of the past!” 305

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