"The only good Serb is a dead Serb."

“The only good Serb is a dead Serb” is a maxim reported by Amparo during a gathering of Nazi fugitives, where one attendee admits to killing Jews and Serbs in a camp and says his father taught him that hatred. The phrase makes inherited prejudice audible as a justification for murder; its force in the story comes not only from what it says, but from the gathering’s attempt to suppress the confession and keep its crimes concealed.

The confession at the gathering

Amparo tells the narrator that the man described himself as a murderer and criminal like the others, said he had killed many Jews and Serbs in a camp whose name she could not remember, and claimed to have enjoyed the work. He had received two medals for doing it well. His father, she reports, had taught him the maxim about Serbs. The wording reaches the reader through Amparo’s shaken account, rather than as a direct speech reproduced from the gathering.

The confession did not stop at self-incrimination. The man asked the others why they had fled and whether they had ever entered a house at night to drag children from their beds. His questions made the crimes concrete and implicated the other fugitives, even as they tried to silence him. Amparo describes the episode as horrible; she leaves the dining room, stands twisting her hands, then embraces the narrator and hides her head against his shoulder.

What the maxim reveals

The sentence presents hatred as a lesson passed from father to son, and murderous violence as its intended conclusion. In the gathering, that inheritance is joined to professional pride: the speaker says he liked his work and was rewarded for carrying it out. The medals and the maxim together expose a moral world in which killing is not merely excused but treated as an accomplishment.

Its appearance also punctures the fugitives’ effort to manage what can be said about their past. The others tell the speaker to be quiet, but he insists that no one had told him he needed to lie. His defiance does not undo the crimes; it makes their concealment visible. The maxim thus serves as evidence of the ideology behind the gathering and of the violence its members would prefer to keep unspoken.

Consequences for the narrator

The reported confession bears directly on the narrator’s later decision to kill the real Adrián Gallardo. He understands Adrián’s existence as a lethal threat to his friend Manuel, whose assumed identity would be exposed if the truth emerged in Buenos Aires. He also sees Adrián as endangering the Burnstein committee, the people who answer his letters to Miss Murray, his political cause, and the future he hopes to share with the woman he loves.

On 29 December 1949, the narrator kills Adrián, knowing that a court would not accept his claim of self-defense. He does not describe himself as a revenger or a justiciar: he believes he acted as an ordinary man defending what he loved. Yet he recalls photographs of heaps of bodies in an Estonian forest, including corpses burned together with timber, and recognizes that he has killed a murderer. The maxim’s place in this moral reckoning is indirect but decisive: the novel has already made the violence Adrián represents legible through a fugitive’s confession, while showing that confronting such violence does not leave the narrator untouched by the act of killing.