by Peter Barry
After paying my money to the spruiker – I don’t think it was a very high admission fee, I’m sorry to say – I had to shoot down as many of your teeth as possible with the bullets allotted to me. Every time I hit a tooth it fell backwards with a satisfying clunk, leaving a black, gaping hole. I was working my way along the upper and lower rows, having a great deal of success – from memory I’d hit a couple of incisors, a canine and three or four premolars – when the rifle started to shake in my hands. I found it more and more difficult to control. Then I realised I was weeping. I was sweating with the effort of controlling the rifle, which had suddenly grown unbearably heavy, and weeping with pain and anguish. The spruiker, standing nearby, his arms folded across his chest, a cigarette dangling from his bottom lip (he looked a bit like you, too), was regarding me with indifference, or was it disdain? He was dressed in a white coat. Perhaps he was your dentist? Great sobs continued to well up inside me. How could I do this to you? My body was shaking so much, I dropped the rifle. It exploded as it hit the ground, and I woke up. In the distance a mortar was fired.
Outside it was pitch black. It could have been the end of the world, or at least how one imagines it, and I could have been the last person left on earth.
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Earlier this evening, I was sitting by the campfire writing my journal, when Stevan joined me. This man is not like other people. A normal person will walk up and sit down next to you, or approach with a smile and a cheerful greeting, but Stevan’s much too sly for that. He likes to circle his prey, waiting for the opportunity to sidle up unseen. My guess is that his suspicious nature makes him worry that exposing himself to view too soon may mean his overtures (the most repressed overtures I’ve ever witnessed) will be repulsed before he has a chance to put them in motion. Instead, he lopes around his prey trying to look as if he has other things on his mind, as if he has absolutely no desire to sit down next to you and chat. And then, when you’re least expecting it, he swoops.
He sat hunched up next to me, almost lying forward on his knees, taking quick, furtive glances in my direction with increasing regularity. He’s a weaselly individual with a quivering, ratlike nose, which he continually wipes with the back of his hand. Finally he spoke. ‘What are you writing?’ He was staring at the open journal on my lap.
‘About my experiences,’ I answered. ‘That’s what I’m thinking of calling it: Experiences.’
‘I hope it is favourable to us?’ He laughed nervously, but continued to study my reactions with sidelong glances.
‘Of course it is. Why should I write anything unfavourable when I’m fighting on your side?’
‘That is true.’ He said it without conviction, perhaps indoctrinated in the idea of no one in the world having anything good to say about the Serbs.
I should be more careful. Although not too many people here speak English – and among those who can, even fewer can read English – I must be careful my journal doesn’t fall into anyone’s hands.
‘You can tell the world about Tudjman and Boban. Not enough people know about them.’
‘I’m not writing this for publication, Stevan. It’s only for me. It’s like a diary. But tell me, what should the world know about those two men?’
‘They have killed hundreds of thousands of Serbs and thrown them out of their own homes. Everyone says how bad we are, but the other side, they are much worse, and no one says anything. Look at what happened at Pakrac and Ogulin. Many Serbs were slaughtered in those places. People should be told about that too.’
He took another of his sneaky looks at me and, grinning broadly to reveal a fine array of blackened, crooked teeth, launched off on a completely different subject, as if the slaughter of his people no longer concerned him. ‘I am going up to the farmhouse.’ And he quickly, almost instantly, put on a tired, satiated air, in exactly the same way that a man will choose a certain necktie in the morning to let the world know how he feels. He wore this look blatantly, proudly, as if he wanted people to clearly understand where he was off to, what he was going to do when he got there, and how it would affect him.
‘Good for you,’ I said. He contemplated the ground at his feet, or possibly his coming exploits in the farmhouse – it was hard to tell – and we lapsed into silence. I closed my journal. I wasn’t comfortable writing in front of him.
There’s a lot of talk every night about this farmhouse. The men talk about it more than they talk about the city they’re besieging. It’s where they keep the women they’ve captured, the young girls and wives of their enemies. Rather than being brought down to the battery or to the camp, they’re kept locked up in a big farmhouse on the edge of the village. They come from distant places, new areas captured by the rampaging Mladic. Some of them are no more than girls, from what I’ve heard, most of them Bosnians and Muslims.
Many of the men go up to the house after they’ve eaten, some before, just as men in England will visit their local for a leisurely pint before or after their Sunday roast. There’s another group that goes up to the farmhouse every night, and sometimes even during the day. They’re the hard-core group. They relish every moment of their visits and afterwards love to recount their adventures in endless detail – half of which I fail to understand – to anyone who’ll listen. There’s no shame to be found there, quite the opposite. They’re mightily pleased of what they’ve done and boast openly of fucking, buggering or being fellated by the wives, mothers, daughters and sisters of their enemy – quite possibly a woman who only recently lived right next door to them.
I suspect some of the men are in the war only because it allows them to visit the farmhouse. If I mentioned the word ‘patriotism’ to them, I think they’d wonder what I was talking about.
Nikola, the one who claims to be a lawyer, wandered up at this point. He addressed Stevan: ‘Is he coming with us?’
Stevan shrugged. He turned to me. ‘Do you want to come to the farmhouse?’
I answered no. ‘I’m tired,’ I explained. Like Nikola, I addressed this remark to Stevan. He’d become a kind of instant go-between.
Nikola laughed, and said in his smarmy way, ‘A man is never too tired for that.’
He was trying to play the part of a man, or how he imagined a man to be, and he wasn’t being too successful, or not in my opinion. It was too obvious he was playing a part. Although he was holding himself like a cowboy in a western, I was only able to see the lawyer with a bumbag around his stomach. I shrugged.
‘They have some new ones up there,’ he said, now addressing me for the first time. ‘They were brought in today. It’s good when they’re new; you know that every man and his dog have not been there already.’
I still refused. At the time, I didn’t bother to ask myself why I refused to go, but I think it was something I wouldn’t be happy to either observe or take part in. Also, I dislike Nikola. But now I think that maybe I should have gone, just for the experience. Everything should be of interest to me here, absolutely everything. That is why I’m here.
Stevan was particularly puzzled by, or suspicious of, my refusal to accompany them to the farmhouse, and asked – much to Nikola’s amusement – if I liked boys. He said they could get me boys if they were more to my taste, and I could see that he was talking about himself. He leant forward, half his face crimson from the flames, his nose twitching in the half-light, and suggested that, because there were no boys, I could use the women like boys. I pushed him away and said no. He frowned at me, then shrugged, feigning indifference.
Nikola said something to Stevan under his breath that I didn’t catch. They both laughed, staring at me and nodding their heads. I asked him what he’d said. ‘Nothing.’ He was grinning. I insisted, and there was a sudden, expectant silence, as if the men around us could sense the possibility of trouble. But Nikola was so pleased with his little joke he repeated it to me anyway. ‘I said that you are more interested in reading books than fucking. That is all.’
I said nothing. There didn
’t seem any point.
‘Reading books and writing in your notebook,’ he added. Although I’ve made no effort to hide my notebook from anyone, I was surprised. He saw that. ‘What are you doing – spying on us?’
‘I’m fighting for you, Nikola. How can I be a spy?’
He sneered. ‘I don’t believe you are here to help us. I think it’s because there’s something in it for you.’
‘What’s in it for me?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t worked that out yet.’ And a moment later the two men went off and left me in peace.
Can you be left in peace in a place like this?
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I stare down at the city from my hiding place. Going round in my head are the words, ‘If you can see the hills, the hills can see you.’ I’m told it’s how they think down there, those citizens of Sarajevo. It’s drummed into the heads of schoolchildren and office and factory workers like a lesson in road safety. ‘If you can see the hills, the hills can see you’ is a warning against snipers.
It works both ways, of course – or that is what I suppose: a good view of the city means a good view of the hills or the Grbavica apartment blocks across the river. There could well be a sniper in position, watching, waiting for my muzzle flash. In a book I read before coming out here, it stated that the enemy will have an idea where a sniper’s shot came from to within twenty or thirty degrees and one hundred yards. So firing that first shot is a little like waving a flag and shouting ‘I’m here, I’m over here’.
Before the UN became involved, there was much less likelihood of anyone shooting back at us. There was usually just the one enemy, probably a civilian, so as long as you hit your target, they weren’t going to retaliate. But snipers are becoming more numerous in the city now, and certainly there are enough for me to know that I can’t afford to be careless.
I now understand why we receive 500 Deutsche Marks for each victim we kill. There’s the danger of enemy snipers, yes, but claiming a victim is also not as easy as I thought it would be. On some occasions it’s particularly hard. What’s strange is that there’s no system for proving a kill: they simply take our word for it. Such trust, in these surroundings, in this chaos and with these people, is absurd. It seems out of place, especially when there’s so much room for error. Mordo, the man who used to shoot at his brother and sister-in-law in the city, told me it’s been calculated that, in one week, over nine hundred people can be hit by our snipers, but it’s usually only a little over a hundred of those who are declared killed. One in nine doesn’t seem a high success rate, until you consider the challenging circumstances. There are the easy ones, of course, the suicidal ones, those who, with pig-headed obstinacy, amble across the road or down the street as if they were strolling along Oxford Street on a Sunday afternoon. They at least allow me to scratch another notch on my rifle butt. I can thank them for that. I can now feel the notches against my cheek when I raise my rifle, and the number is reassuring. The marks on the rifle butt show I’ve left my mark on the city, and it’s not yet the end of May.
Most days I kill.
I look at the statement, which I wrote down with scarcely a moment’s thought, and I’m stunned. ‘Most days I kill.’ That ‘I’ is me, Milan Zorec, school janitor, would-be writer, son of Pavle and Betty Zorec, British citizen. I wrote that. And if it’s true – which it is – then the fact that I kill on most days means I’ve become a mass killer – no, not murderer, killer. There’s a difference. I kill, I don’t murder. I simply do whatever I do on a large scale. These kills, my victims, the people behind the notches on my rifle butt, are scarcely known to me, but I do sometimes make an attempt to imagine their lives so that I can feel I know them. I want to know them, it feels like it should be part of my task. To be involved with these people, to take an interest in their lives, is the least I can do. It’s important if I want to be a writer. You can’t avoid people if you write books, that’s the truth of it. All novels are about people, so I can’t suddenly stop taking an interest in them, however much I might want to at this moment in my life.
The only changes in my daily routine are the locations I choose, and the weather. I like the fact that every morning I choose where I go to work. Now that the days are warmer, I like to leave the dirty, dusty apartments and head up into the hills. Often I sit amongst the trees and write this journal, smoke cigarettes, or simply stare into space and think. I may not bother to shoot at all. It’s like a holiday, a spring or summer holiday. Sometimes I lie on the grass, my eyes closed, basking in the warmth of the sun on my face and feeling the pulse of the earth beneath my back. For the briefest of moments, I can almost believe that life is good, perhaps the best I’ve known. It can be a real effort at such times to find the motivation to get up and go back to shooting people.
I find myself less keen to write about my victims now, to even think about them or their lives. Having always literally been distant to me, they have now become distant to me figuratively. I’m removed from them. I look at them through my sights, but they don’t come any closer. They’re magnified by the scope, but still remain distant. I’m forced to keep a tally of the number of kills, so that I can later claim my 500 Deutsche Marks (paid directly into my bank account in London), but I now notice that I have to make a note of each victim immediately it happens, otherwise, at the end of the day, I find myself thinking, ‘Was it three I killed today, or two, or maybe four?’ It’s sometimes almost impossible to remember, they blur together so.
People’s lives do blur together when you play God: they become too small and insignificant to bother about. I’m aware of this tremendous, God-like power I possess. Real power, more than a headmaster, a CEO of an international corporation or even a publisher will ever possess, more than I have ever known before. With an almost imperceptible movement of my finger, so tiny, so insignificant that even God might miss it, I can choose to snuff out someone’s life – or not. The power of life and death. Possibly it is no different to how a publisher feels about the would-be authors that pester him every day. ‘Was it twenty manuscripts I rejected today, or fifteen, or maybe thirty?’ Neither of us feels any guilt, I’m guessing. For both publisher and sniper, it’s a job, routine, the only people who may get a little upset are the rejected author and the wounded citizen. Or the wounded author and the rejected citizen.
I re-read a letter I’d received from my mother. She, too, has become distant, as if I’m looking at her through the wrong end of my rifle scope: she’s decreased in size and importance. It’s not even as if I miss her. And the letter, her letter, bored me, that’s the truth of it. It was inconsequential, as if she wanted to avoid saying anything that might cause a reaction. She’s been living with Dad too long, and maybe she thinks I’m no different to him. That would be something. I almost threw the letter away, but told myself not to. If I want to be a writer, I should study it. I should be able to copy her style. It’s all grist to the mill, or whatever the expression is. And what is grist, a grain or something? I miss my dictionary at times, most days in fact. I miss books, full stop. I imagine wandering down into the city in front of me, down to the main library to spend time in its reference section, or amongst the novels and biographies. The library’s gone up in flames, so there seems little point in such idle speculation.
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Writing has always been an effort. It’s painful. Having my toenails pulled out would be a welcome alternative; to die of the Ebola virus, seeping blood from every orifice, would be a relief. When I’m confronted by the blank page, I suffer. And yet, despite the suffering, despite everything, I have always dreamt of being a writer. It’s all I’ve ever thought about, a thought that’s been with me every moment of every day; my religion. The truth is, writing’s been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. I mulled over plots as I mopped the school corridors, puzzled over what motivates a character as I walked home in the evenings, tried to decide on the importance of various scenes as I cooked myself a meal.
I’d wake up in the middle of the night and write an idea or a line in the notebook I kept by my bed. People talked to me, but I didn’t hear what they said; they waved to me in the street, but I didn’t see them; they stopped in front of me, but I walked right past them. Writing involved me body and soul. Sometimes it caused the outside world to cease to exist.
Many times Bridgette accused me of not listening to her, and went home in a huff because I didn’t give her enough attention. And it was all, this total absorption with writing, with one aim in mind: to be published. Yes, I know people say that once you’ve achieved your goal in life, no matter what it is, you won’t be satisfied. I don’t believe that. If I walk down Oxford Street one day and pass a Waterstone’s bookshop and in the window see my novel – hopefully even several copies of it – I swear I’ll be happy. I’ll be in heaven. Being published will give meaning to my life, to an existence which increasingly strikes me as being without meaning. It’s all I’ve ever dreamt of, all I’ve ever wanted. To see my name in print has always been my sole ambition.
It’s my destiny to write, that’s what I feel. It’s why I’m here on earth, as well as in Sarajevo. It may have taken Van Gogh thirty years to get around to realising that he wanted to be a painter, but I’ve wanted to be a writer from the time my mother started reading me bedtime stories at about the age of three. I remember sitting on the bed, snuggled up next to her, her arm around me, as I listened to her quiet, soothing voice. And the point I’m trying to clarify, sitting here now against the bare wall of an apartment in a deserted city in a foreign country, is that I remember those stories. They continue to give me comfort even today, they are what’s important. And when I was little, leaning against my mother in bed all those years ago, I thought I’d like to write stories such as those. Whoever wrote the stories, whoever magicked me away to strange and wondrous worlds – through wardrobes or down rabbit holes – was clever, and they made me want to be like him or her. Imagine making up a story, weaving all those words together into a tempting trap in which to catch a reader. To hold power like that over another being and make them follow your path, your will, that would be quite something. I thought, when I grow up, that’s what I want to do. That feeling has never left me. It is part of my being, an ever-present dream. And for a time – certainly when I was young – it was my mother’s dream too. She encouraged me, in her bookish way, to be a writer, to pursue my dream. And I think she did so because she believed in me, that I would succeed. It was only many years later, I’m not sure when, that she stopped believing in the dream and started to try to encourage me to follow more conventional careers. I think my father had finally won her over to his view, and she then deserted me.
