Slobodan was exemplary in most respects, but he used to get very irritated if somebody addressed him by a nickname such as Boban, Sloba or Boba. Often he would stand in the middle of the road, clench his fists with childish anger and howl at the culprit, “Slobodan! Slobodan! Slobodan!” In a flash the neighborhood rogues pinpointed his weak spot, and as a result poor Slobodan was taunted endlessly. He became the local idiot. Small children ran after him in the street. Idle young men standing under the café awnings with bottles of beer in their hands poked fun at Slobodan mercilessly, until perhaps an older and respected member of the community decided to chase the rowdy layabouts away – and to take Slobodan home.
In the end Slobodan came to resemble any other madman dressed in rags and always hungry. Nobody really knows how he managed to survive after his mother’s death. Did the neighbors feed him? Or was he intelligent enough to scavenge for a crust of bread in the rubbish bins?
One of the first CNN bulletins from Sarajevo contained footage of Slobodan wandering aimlessly through the city as dozens of shells exploded on all sides. The camera followed him for about seventy yards, no doubt because the journalists were expecting to capture the moment when the Serb onslaught destroyed an innocent life in Sarajevo. Slobodan very casually sauntered over to the cameraman and gave him a warm smile. You half-expected him to launch into a series of questions about family trees, but he didn’t stop. He just went on his way as the shells continued to fall. That night the reporter, with some disappointment, informed viewers that there were insanely brave people living in Sarajevo.
Trout
At night only the sky glows. It lights up houses, skyscrapers and telegraph poles, illuminating the branches of trees and casting the long shadows of a few passersby – a generous sky that protects us from darkness. A young man stands on the roof, smoking a cigarette and hoping to see the landscape. His choked-up view of the city makes it hard to imagine the waterfront or the neon sparkle of a leaping fish, not to mention the voices of water fairies, a time-honored curse (“May your mother have to dredge up your corpse from the bottom of the lake!”), a shout from the other bank, the sound of a distant folk song amid the echo of breaking glasses from a bar twenty miles away.
Fifteen years ago he had escaped from his own part of the country – it was the only lake district in Bosnia – and settled in a city whose light and dark were to become more important to him than anything in his old life. At first he was comforted by the distant sounds – the hoot of a train leaving the station half a dozen miles away, the noisy rhythm of machines in the sock factory, the rattle of late-night trams, the shimmering light over Mounts Igman and Bjelašnica, the frozen grind of the first snow, the ice crunching underfoot, the sound of axes hacking away at the snowdrift in front of the garage door. Soon the noises began to fade away and his impressions of the lake became unreliable, almost fake. In spite of himself, he grew accustomed to the other world that was separated from the world of his childhood by a distance of only fifty miles and yet was utterly different.
The loud blast sounded like a final explanation; it made the lights go out, restoring to the world the peace and tranquillity that was behind his closed eyes. The young man stood on top of the house, on the edge of its flat roof, swaying gently in the wind. That morning, unfamiliar voices from the lake had brought news of his father’s death. But how reliable was the information? Of course he couldn’t be sure, not when all the phones were down. In any case, reliable messengers only entered Sarajevo by accident.
There was nothing he could see (or hear) from his gloomy vantage point to confirm (or deny) the existence of the ugly voice that had been audible for only a second or two. He had been standing there since the lights went out across the city and now he couldn’t think what to do next. One false move, like going back to bed or playing the cool guy, would only upset him even more. Shaking in the night wind, he gave in to his fear of the coming madness, hating nostalgia and the crystal lake.
He was seven years old when he first held a live trout in his hands. He couldn’t help thinking that the fish, cruelly separated from the water and thrashing its tail angrily, wriggling helplessly, was almost as big as he was. He felt there had to be something else, a reason to throw the fish back into the lake, and as far away from him as possible, before the creature had no option but to use a secret weapon – its spikes perhaps, the ones his father said it didn’t have – and to fill him with a dreadful pain in order to get away. Growing up, the boy sometimes watched films in which these aquatic beings managed to escape from the grasp not only of children but also of experienced anglers, just at the point when the fishermen were beginning to congratulate themselves on vanquishing the trout. He had come across the widespread belief that fish were slippery for a reason – and that reason was the constant need for a last-minute escape – but he no longer believed this old-wives’ tale. It was more likely, he reckoned, that the unfortunate fishermen who let the trout slip through their hands were frightened of its dark and watery strength, knowing it could trick and destroy ordinary mortals right now or in a hundred years.
The father used to go fishing at the weekend. The rest of the time he was a miner who worked at the colliery next to the lake. The pit was as muddy and dirty as every other mine in the world, but his father was proud of his job. Being tall, handsome and blond, he spoke up at parents’ meetings on behalf of all the other fathers, and whenever they travelled anywhere by train he would tell his fellow passengers in the carriage that he was a miner. On such occasions the boy would often feel embarrassed and prod his father with his foot, but his father just laughed as if the boy had cracked a good joke. Many years later in some Balkan hotel, the young man tricked a naïve and vulnerable girl, by means of a series of flirtatious glances, into believing that he too was a miner. The girl looked at him and observed cautiously that only uneducated people go to work under ground. The young man smiled with a kind of insouciance, but she just responded with a stupid grin. At that moment he envied his father, who had always been able to choose the right place and the right way to fascinate people with his stories about the life of a miner.
As the old saying goes, you can see the whole world from the roof, or at least you can see the parts you’re really interested in. The young man strained his eyes until they began to hurt, and yet he still couldn’t see anything. At that moment the only thing he wanted was to forget the bad news, and to pretend that nothing had happened – except he had already told his girlfriend and most of his friends what he had heard. In the end it was their sympathy and kindness, and acts of spurious compassion, that made it impossible to forget his bad news. His friends suggested that maybe his father wasn’t dead after all – perhaps it was just a terrible mistake – but none of them really believed he was still alive. He was the only one. He continued to believe – or to disbelieve, as the case may be. He didn’t expect very much in return. He would have settled for the average presentiment, however low-key, or indeed anything else that was likely to persuade him to come down off the roof and go back to bed.
Just then it looked as if it might rain, a heavy thunderstorm. Perhaps it would flood the valley, he thought, with the moonlight reflecting in the water. Under the surface the gasping city would be sure to drown. The only things to escape would be the Serb rockets bombarding the city – and the disbelief surrounding the young man’s father, who was perhaps even at that late hour sitting in a rotting boat and waiting for the trout to bite.
Beard
Juraj’s head lay in the mud like an empty dish into which the raindrops fell. But the soldiers marched past without giving him a second look. A few steps away his neighbor Šimun, who was digging a two-yard trench, stared at the iridescent clay with a peculiar feeling of emptiness in the back of his neck and also perhaps with a kind of premonition, as opposed to fear, that soon his own head would be cut off and used for slopping out as in a prison latrine. Once in a while he glanced out of the corner of his eye at the trench which Juraj had been
digging an hour before. Šimun imagined a person measuring the hole through which Juraj’s brain had seeped on to the ground. He admired its geometrical shape and reflected to himself that such a thing could have been molded by a skillful potter rendering God’s creation with ease as if it were nothing but dust and water.
Dinka came with two other women just before nightfall. They were led up the hill by gloomy bearded men in uniform. One of the soldiers turned over Juraj’s body with his foot and mumbled out of the side of his mouth, “Is this him?” Dinka nodded and then looked away. The women departed immediately without glancing back, leaving Juraj in his new position. Now it was possible to see his lifeless staring eyes and the tiny hole in his forehead. His arms were folded on his chest, and his mouth was open, as if he had seen the trail of a jet plane in the sky for the first time. His look suggested that he was about to ask timidly, “What is that?” Šimun would have liked to go over to the body in order to close his friend’s eyes – anything to stop the raindrops welling there like tears – but he wasn’t sure how the soldiers would react, and who knows if Juraj would have looked any better with his eyes shut, or what kind of impression it would create and how much it would continue to haunt the prisoner who was still alive and digging.
Before his capture Juraj had spent four months hiding in cellars, refusing to abandon hope that one day something unexpected would happen to make the Chetniks go away – or perhaps he dreamed of suddenly waking up one morning in a strange country far away, or, at any rate, on the other side of the river. Every day he was visited by Dejan, a poet friend from the Writers’ Club, who had taken to wearing a Serbian cap and letting his unkempt beard grow down to his navel. Dejan was permanently drunk – in honor of the war. Sometimes he gave Juraj a hug and whispered (or burped) in his ear that he intended to sort things out and that the longed-for day would soon arrive when Juraj could once again walk through Sarajevo without shame or fear, like an honorable and decent man. But drunks have an unfortunate habit of suddenly changing their outlook on the world. And so, having consoled his friend, Dejan would often go on to observe in the same tone of voice how excellent it would be if he the Serbian poet were to use his knife to slit the throat of Juraj the Croation poet right here and now on the shag carpet. Out loud he began to imagine Juraj’s death rattle or the blood seeping across the room, or perhaps the fetid smell of his soul escaping from his body and wafting from wall to wall in search of an open window. The monologue usually came to an end with Dejan imagining the ode to slaughter he would write to commemorate killing his friend. Juraj never rose to the bait. He just kept his mouth shut and smiled innocuously like a lamb. Dinka, on the other hand, looked petrified as she stood in the corner of the room, yearning for Dejan to leave and for the next chapter in her life to begin.
Dejan soon got bored anyway. On the way out he’d shake hands with Dinka as well as Juraj, and leave yelling, “Your Dejo’s looking out for you, so don’t worry! He’ll save you, goddamit! A true friend ain’t just a button, see, and his wife’s not a zipper, either!”
As soon as he’d gone, Dinka would begin to cry, and so Juraj would stroke her shoulder with the tips of his fingers, because there was nothing to be said. The couple had a sneaking suspicion that one day Dejan would honor one or the other of his promises, and yet it was hard to know if he was more likely to rescue them from murderers or to deliver the fatal blows himself.
One day a gang of bearded men whom they didn’t know burst into the cellar. These anonymous thugs proceeded to beat up Dinka and to “draft” Juraj into what they called “the labor platoon.” As a result, he spent months on the front line, and only ten yards or so from the Bosnian line, digging trenches. Often he would recognize a soldier on the opposite side by the color of his eyes or the way he walked. Out of delight he would open his mouth to speak to his comrades, but they just ducked their heads, so he was left having imaginary conversations with their gun barrels. At first he panicked in case the warring armies opened fire, but as time went on he came to realize that the killing would not begin unexpectedly. There would have to be a kind of advance warning, he was sure, a portent in the sky, or perhaps a dawn chorus prophesying death, in order to distinguish the day of slaughter from the others that had preceded it.
Dejan continued to visit Dinka. He brought her food and claimed drunkenly that only he could save Juraj, and that he knew Juraj would do the same for him if, heaven forbid, the tables were turned and the Ustashas were defeating the Chetniks. Dinka merely nodded her head, looking forlorn, so Dejan tried to get around her by telling jokes.
One day he asked her, “Tell me, Dinka, would you let me fuck you if I managed to get Juraj out of the shit?”
Dinka looked away, her lips trembling with fury, but she remained silent.
“Listen, sweetheart, I didn’t say I wanted to or anything. I’m just curious – would you let me? Don’t you see that I have to know what kind of person you are and how fond you are of Juraj? Take me, for example. I couldn’t be more fond of him than I already am. If I thought it’d save his bacon, I’d let you fuck me. Honest! Without a second thought. So it’s really a question of who cares more about your husband – you or me?”
Dejan left the house volunteering to go to Pale, if necessary, in order to save Juraj. He warned her not to get upset about his teasing. We’re human beings, after all, not animals, he said.
Dinka couldn’t help remembering that conversation as she was coming down the hill with the other women after identifying Juraj’s body. She was still trying to comprehend that her Juraj was no more, and that nothing was left of him except a hollow skull. As she wiped her eyes she saw Dejan beaming at her in the distance. He was running up the hill and waving a piece of paper above his head. Dinka prayed that he would just vanish into thin air. He stopped in the middle of a sentence but she couldn’t bear to look at him or to listen to what he was saying about headquarters . . . orders from the very top . . . the real important people . . . the necessary papers. . . . All she could think was, “How on earth does he wash that beard – does he shampoo it or does he just wash his face in the morning like everybody else?”
Chico the Seducer
On a clear day, if you look hard enough, you can see a neat line running horizontally across Mount Igman as if it had been drawn with a pencil. From the line upwards the mountain is covered in snow, but a pale green forest grows on the lower slopes. Armin spends most of his time above the line, in the white, so to speak, because he’s fighting the enemy and a guy named Mitar Kalpoš in particular, not to mention that innkeeper from Vogošć who has a tattoo of Zagor the cartoon hero on his left shoulder and is known as the Beast. Sometimes in the course of a battle, however, Armin goes down the mountain as far as the green, though he claims never to notice the white becoming green or vice versa. It’s just a question of perspective, because whenever Armin comes over here, and especially when he climbs to the top of Budaković, near Kožara, he can plainly see the clear line on Igman. After all, he’s not stupid or blind, is he?
Once I asked him, “Have you really been above the line on Mount Igman?”
He replied, “As God is my witness.”
“And below? Have you been there too?”
Armin looked exasperated. “You idiot!” he exclaimed. “How on earth could I have been above the line if I hadn’t also been below it?”
“Were you ever on the line itself?” I asked.
He didn’t reply at first, and then he just muttered that he couldn’t remember. He’s a bit eccentric, you see. Put it this way: he’s twenty-seven, right, and he’s fighting against the Serbs, but when he talks about the enemy he doesn’t call them Chetniks or anything like that. Instead he calls them damn raving Redcoats, or Comanches, or robbers from the Rio Grande. He reckons that way it’s easier to make sense of the war. Mind you, I’m not convinced. I think he just describes the war in terms of a comic strip because he thinks it’ll help me to understand what’s going on. “Harun,” he says, “yo
u’re only twelve. You don’t know what it’s like to be wounded and still have to kill twelve more Redcoats. Let me give you some idea: it’s your last few moments of consciousness, so you grab one of them by the legs and wave him over your head, then you knock out the other eleven before you finally black out.”
Armin has been wounded hundreds of times, and yet he only has one scar. He boasts he has others which you can only see when he takes his clothes off, except he doesn’t want to undress. I think he’s lying, because I saw him once as he was washing in the yard. He’s intact.
Once I voiced my suspicions, but he just got angry. “Boy Wonder!” he yelled. “We’re finished! Because you’ve betrayed me, and that’s unforgivable – you know that Robin never betrayed Batman, don’t you?”
Armin sat on the wall and lit a cigarette. He refused to look in my direction for several minutes. Then he asked me, “Do you know what happens when the wolves from Ontario cry?”
I didn’t reply, so he asked the question again. I felt awkward. I didn’t know what he wanted. How could I? I’ve never read a comic with crying wolves from Ontario, “Armin,” I said, “I don’t know that cartoon.”
He motioned with his hand and sighed, “You’re dumb, Boy Wonder,” then he fell silent and just stared at Mount Igman.
The next day he went back to the mountain, climbing up through the green at first until he reached the line and crossed over into the snow. He was going to fight the Serbs who were under the command of the innkeeper with the tattoo of Zagor on his left shoulder. A long time ago Armin promised me that if he ever captured this enemy leader he would peel the skin off his shoulder and give me the tattoo as a present. I was planning to frame the scalp and hang it up on the wall. It would be so much better than any other spoils of war.
Sarajevo Marlboro Page 6
