by Peter Barry
Already I’m becoming used to the continual bombardment, the sounds of traffic and factories in any normal city replaced here by gunfire. It never stops throughout the daylight hours. Cannons boom in the surrounding hills, and when the shells explode in the streets below, everything shakes, even the ground on my side of the river. This shaking must do more damage to people’s heads than the shells themselves. It must wear them down. There’s also the hammering of machine guns and the whistle of artillery shells flying overhead, both punctuated by the flat crack of rifle fire from the snipers ringing the city. I always hear the report first. It can be from the mountains behind me, or in front, or to one of the sides. The city is surrounded by mountains – it nestles.
We all watch and wait, those in and around the city, each wondering if a particular missile has our name on it. That’s an interesting expression: this missile has your name on it. John Smith, Flat 3, 54 Elm Walk. Who decides which name goes on the missile, then addresses it, writing the name and address neatly on the cone before posting it? God, is He the addressor? The waiting doesn’t take long in reality, before a building in the city erupts in smoke and dust, exploding with varying degrees of impressiveness, flames sometimes shooting skywards moments later.
After advice from Santo, I now have a balaclava, a black one, which I stuff daily with an article of clothing, affix a pair of dark glasses to, and then, with a small forked stick I keep specially for the purpose, slowly raise a few inches above the window ledge. I call this ‘head’ after the headmaster who made my job as a school janitor so miserable. My feelings towards Mr Gilhooley are ambivalent. While wishing someone would put a bullet through his cotton-filled brain because of the way his namesake treated me, I also appreciate the fine job he’s doing on my behalf. Because of this, I hope and pray he’ll not be spotted.
‘Come on, Gilhooley,’ I say as I expose him slowly to the enemy, ‘let me know what you can see out there.’ It has to be admitted that he volunteers for this dangerous work without hesitation, and I have nothing but admiration for the way in which he conducts himself. He is both selfless and patriotic, never once complaining or requesting a change of duties. So far he’s been fortunate: no one has taken a shot at him. When I eventually lower him back onto the floor, uninjured, and take his place, I can almost hear him give a sigh of relief. Mission accomplished, without mishap.
My days are dominated by two activities: trying to keep warm and trying to shoot people. I wish shooting people was a more strenuous activity. I’m perpetually numb with cold, my hands and face blue. Lying prone on the ground, scarcely moving for most of the day, doesn’t help. Although I wear so much clothing I can’t imagine a bullet ever penetrating so many layers, some part of my body will still go into cramp on a fairly regular basis. I try to flex my muscles while remaining still. I make minute adjustments to the rear sight to allow for elevation and to the side sight to allow for windage, persuading myself that such tiny movements help to move blood through my veins, even though it’s already acquired the consistency of thick syrup. I pray for a target to appear, and it does, every so often. But it’s a challenge. We’re talking about someone who’s usually several hundred yards away, visible only for seconds and, to make it even harder, doubled up and running. It’s similar to a funfair shooting gallery: the target pops up and drops back down, or flashes across your line of vision. You don’t get much time. You have to be quick, instinctive. And that’s what saves me.
I didn’t have time to think about shooting my first victim, my first real victim. It was a man. He was running across an intersection. I fired. He fell. He didn’t move. I didn’t either. I remained staring through the sites, stunned. I’d killed someone, and I’d done it without a moment’s thought. It could have been a training exercise. I just had time to spin around and spew onto the bare floorboards behind me.
When I turned back, the man lay crumpled on the pavement, face down, one arm reaching out above his head, the other squashed beneath his body, his legs neatly together and quite straight. Electrical activity in his brain must have fizzed and crackled to a halt. His blood was creeping, slow as lava, towards the edge of the pavement. He was dead. I was numb. Time passed.
No one was to be seen. This was scarcely surprising. I’ve heard sniper victims are often left for hours where they fall, until someone decides an incident happened sufficiently long ago for it to be safe to venture out into the street to retrieve the body. If someone is obviously dead, it does seem pointless risking a sniper’s bullet in order to go out and claim a corpse. This is understandable behaviour. Human nature being what it is, this isn’t surprising. I wish it were. I’d like to see someone behave in a manner that did surprise me, that made me say, ‘Now, I’ve never seen anyone behave like that before.’ But I can’t see it happening. The predictability of human beings is all too predictable.
I lay on my stomach looking down on the scene, again aware of the cold and the taste of vomit in my mouth. I forced myself to lie still. I expected something to happen, but nothing did. I peered through the telescopic sights at a concentrated area, then lowered the Steyr an inch or so and took in the broader view. All remained quiet. Eventually I edged back from my vantage point. When I was out of sight I rolled over and sat up. I was stiff with cold. I couldn’t stop shivering. I lit a cigarette, leant against the wall at the back of the room, hugging my knees to my chest, my rifle propped at my side.
And that’s how it happened. That was number one. I was no longer a virgin.
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I told Santo that night back at camp. I’m ashamed to say I felt a little boastful – proud of what I’d achieved, yet guilty at the same time. He insisted on toasting my first kill with several glasses of Slivovitz, and shouting at anyone who’d listen that the Englishman had shot his first Muslim. My back was slapped by many people, including some I’d never seen before. I saw Nikola sitting a few yards away. He didn’t congratulate me, just sat and smirked as if he didn’t believe a word of it. I ignored him. I watched Santo instead. He’d wrested my rifle off me, placed it across his knees and, with the blade of his knife, was busy scratching a small line, the first one, about half an inch long at the end of the butt. ‘I do it near the base,’ he said, ‘because you must leave room for all the others.’
Now that I have number one carved into my rifle – a whitish scar against the green stain of the plastic butt – and supposedly the person who’ll always have a special place in my heart, I have become like all the others. I am reassured. Now we are brothers.
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Most days there are wounded in the camp. They’re passing through, being moved to Pale or, in the more serious cases, to Belgrade. I feel I’m not the only one who doesn’t like having them around. Being forced to listen to their moaning, their groans of pain and the way they sometimes scream makes me feel uncomfortable. I prefer the wounded to remain at the far end of my telescopic site, several hundred yards away. Here, they often lie on their camp beds, motionless, as if they’re already dead. One of them was being carried past me on a stretcher the other evening, and he suddenly reached out and grabbed my arm. I tried half-heartedly to shake him off, but he clung all the tighter. It was in the middle of a downpour. A bloody bandage was wrapped around the top of his head, and the rain was causing rivulets of blood to run down his face. His eyebrows were arched, his eyes staring and he said something I didn’t catch, or couldn’t understand. It sounded like a question. He hung onto me, waiting for an answer. The rain was drumming on the canvas that had been thrown across his body, and I stood in the mud, cursing under my breath, wanting to escape. I looked at one of the orderlies carrying the wounded man for help, but he only shrugged. He didn’t seem to understand either. I didn’t know the answer the wounded man was looking for, so I tore my arm from his grip, almost yanking him off the stretcher and onto the ground, and the stretcher bearers carried him away through the curtain of water. It made me feel sick.
Amongst those who hav
en’t been wounded, there’s a definite camaraderie. I think this is because we’re all beyond the pale, outside the bounds of civilised society. Having the rest of the world against us brings us closer together. It’s certainly something I’ve always found appealing: having everyone hate us has never bothered me. The truth is, I like that. It makes me more determined than ever to thumb my nose at them. Yes, I like having the whole world against us, and having the opportunity to play the part of the bad guy. None of us cares what they think. Again and again I hear men saying, ‘They can fuck off!’ ‘Fuck them!’ ‘To hell with that lot!’ Sometimes they’re talking about the people of Sarajevo, but most of the time they’re talking about the UN, the representatives of those on the inside. Although the men were suspicious of me at first, they now believe I’ve betrayed their enemy, which amounts to virtually everyone else in the world. I’ve changed sides, or that’s how they see it. In their eyes I’m a fellow collaborator.
Often the talk that is carried on in the camp is between two people. It’s whispered, like a confession, often earnestly, and can’t be heard by anyone else. There’s also a lot of grunting. Many of the men will grunt rather than speak. They’ll grunt when they take their plates of food off the cook, grunt at the person sitting next to a vacant spot by the fire to find out if it’s free, grunt instead of answering yes or no to someone’s question.
Is that what they’ve become, animals living in the forest, grunting, eating, sleeping, fornicating, lying down in the mud, warming themselves by the fire, barely communicating with each other, concentrating solely on the basics, cut off from the world, doing what they’re doing for no reason other than that they’ve been told to do it? By Milosevic, I suppose.
Sometimes there’s singing around the campfire. It can be just one man with a guitar, or it can be everyone present. In the main they’re folk songs, some of which I recognise from childhood. When everyone sings, an air of maudlin sincerity descends, the men either closing their eyes, lowering them to the ground as if overcome by emotion, or raising them to the pitch-black sky as if seeking an answer to their struggles here on earth. Occasionally they’ll dance the kolo, a local dance. I don’t join in. They dance in the mud because there’s no grass in the campsite. They dance, not in celebration, but in order to give themselves comfort.
The campsite is the focus point for the surrounding area. Old friends greet each other, soldiers who haven’t met for awhile clasp hands or shoulders and shout affectionate obscenities at each other, standing eyeball to eyeball. Others sit in silence by the fire, brooding, clasping their bottles of Slivovitz, being consumed by the alcohol and the flames. The crackle and whine of patriotic music on Radio Belgrade fades in and out in the background. A few of the men hunch over the transistor like relatives around a death bed, hoping to catch some final words of wisdom, an explanation for what’s happening in their lives. Some information.
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If I am to fathom my presence here, then I must make sense of my past, no matter how improbable it might seem. If I cover enough pages of this journal, will everything become clear? If I write about my parents, Bridgette, my childhood, my life as a janitor and my writing, if I put it all down on paper, black scribbles on a white page, will a pattern begin to emerge? That’s one of the reasons I’m writing this – but not the main one – to explain to myself how I got here, and why. Is there a pattern in my life, in anyone’s life, or is it all meaningless and pointless? I stumble through this existence and all the peaks and troughs of my past, so prominent and intense at the time they were experienced, become flattened with the passing of each year. Everything assumes the grey mantle of unimportance, and the person living this life now, me – in the fleeting present – wanders in a daze of incomprehension through it all, struggling to find my bearings.
Martin Amis writes about this conundrum, this question without answer. He says there is no structure to life, there are no patterns, and that’s precisely why he writes: to create a structure, an understandable reality. Or that’s how I interpret what he writes. If he’s correct, then by writing a journal maybe one can step back far enough to see a pattern, to discern a thread weaving through all those experiences. But creating a link that connects everything feels too rational to me. It’s been thought up by someone sitting in front of a computer.
Why am I doing this? My need to escape the stifling conformity and boredom of London doesn’t explain anything. Possibly there is no reason, no motivation. There are many authors – and Martin Amis is just one of them – who don’t believe in motivation, who think there is no A plus B equals C to life. They say a person will lie for absolutely no reason. Their characters don’t act because of something that happened in their past; their actions are random. This, those authors claim, reflects life. So they feel they’re perfectly within their rights to impose order on chaos. Someone has to. Quite bluntly and without shame, they manipulate. They don’t even try to hide this from their readers, in fact they do everything possible to make sure their readers never forget it, and make it a feature of their novels. They’re more than happy if the reader sees them pulling the strings in the background, like the puppeteer at some Norfolk beach, behind the curtain in the Punch and Judy tent, making little attempt to hide himself from the kids.
In The Information, Martin Amis drops in and out of the story, making little comments here, there and everywhere like some one-man-band Chorus from a Greek tragedy supplementing the performance of the actors on stage, and telling the reader what he thinks about the various characters and events. I imagine him writing a novel about the chaos of this war, of the siege of Sarajevo. He wouldn’t be able to help himself. He’d be in there, pushing his Mladics and Karadzics around like a chess grandmaster, even manipulating the UN and NATO, pretending he had some control over these events that no one else has any control over.
Who is more delusional, I wonder, the Author or the General, neither of whom – and this is the reality – has the ability to understand, let alone encapsulate, what’s going on in his world. It’s no different to the ant I can see in front of me now, struggling across the debris on the forest floor. To make a point, I reach forward and squash it beneath my thumb. Did it understand what was happening to it, did it have any control over that critical moment? I think not. But then it’s possible, I guess, that he may only have been an army ant.
So maybe I should start with Bridgette, try to make sense of her, too – although, with hindsight, I don’t feel she’s provided me with quite as much novelistic material as I might have hoped for at the beginning of our relationship. Something of a disappointment in that respect, I’d say.
Although I’m a little hesitant to compare myself to the dashing Vronsky in Anna Karenina – to hell, why not! – who rushed off to this part of the world in order to help the Serbs free themselves from Turkish rule and to forget the pain he felt over Anna’s death, the similarities are startling: I’m here to help the Serbs free themselves from Bosnian rule and to forget the pain I feel over Bridgette’s death – yes, yes, yes! I don’t wish to be too melodramatic about this but, for me, Bridgette has died. She’s rigor mortis dead, like Sharon Stone the cat. She may as well have thrown herself under a train, too, like Anna. There again, perhaps it’s Sergei Koznyshev, Lenin’s half brother, I should compare myself to. He accompanied Vronsky, having just spent six years writing a book on government and having it published to virtually no acclaim and only one – negative – review. What’s more than obvious is that both men volunteered to further their own ambitions rather than to altruistically help the Slavs. And that reminds me of a certain someone too.
The first thing that comes to mind is that she doesn’t appreciate how I’m doing something different with my life by coming here. She can’t even understand why people want to travel – ‘What do you want to go and see other countries for; what’s wrong with where you are?’ If I read her this journal she’d say, ‘That’s nice, Milan.’ That’s one of her favourite words – whi
ch just happens to be my least favourite word. Nice. I loathe its prissy, spinsterish meaninglessness. I’d say it was the antonym of fuck or something. ‘You have a nice way with words, Milan,’ she always said. ‘I wish I could write half as well as you.’ And I’d mentally retch.
I called her to say I was going to Sarajevo. Even though we weren’t together any longer, I think, in a moment of weakness, I’d hoped for tears. You know, celluloid emotions. Weeping mothers and wives on the steam-covered railway platform as their men leave for the Front. Granite statues of women in an autumnal cemetery, heads bowed beneath their hoods and falling leaves, hands clasped against heaving bosoms, awash with rain and tears, that kind of thing. But no, not our Bridgette. She seemed downright indifferent, displaying an authorial distancing I’d have been proud of. She was more intent on telling me she’d gone out with one of the so-called creatives in her advertising agency a couple of times. Already! Had I been forgotten so quickly, cast aside with such speed? ‘I like him. He’s nice.’ That word again. But it made me think, much against my will, of her already spreading her legs for someone else. It also made me reminisce – which is rarely advisable in situations like these.
