by Peter Barry
All of the books in our house were my mother’s. And they’re still there, fiction mainly, but also biographies, poetry and non-fiction, on shelves that line every room. Most of them were bought from library sales or at second-hand bookshops. They were all dog-eared, with broken spines, loose pages and worn edges. In the front they sported ex-libris and library stickers. Few had covers, and those that did were torn or had pieces missing. The margins of many were covered in my mother’s notes in pencil or biro, and often had whole paragraphs underlined; most of them were from her youth. Only rarely in my life have I held a new, spotless first edition, and when I did their unblemished state and special smell, their purity and originality made my heart beat violently with excitement. It was a very precious thing.
It’s strange that my father was never seduced by the thousands of volumes that he walked past every day. The house was, and still is, more like a bookshop in Hay-on-Wye than a home, and it touched me, influenced me, but never him. For me, it’s a museum of my reading history. Those are the books that have shaped me from when I was young. I read many of them again when I was older. In my youth I read The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland, Robinson Crusoe and Tom Sawyer … I could tick them all off. When I was older I read Tolstoy, all of his books, and Dostoevsky, just some of his. I read bits of Dickens, lots of Shakespeare, most of Jane Austen, Goethe, Mann, Joyce (but neither Finnegans Wake nor Ulysses), Balzac, Zola and Flaubert. Some of these books were borrowed from the local library, others came off my mother’s bookshelves. I read many when I was far too young and didn’t fully appreciate their artistry. I’d put Crime and Punishment and Madame Bovary into this category. I thought I was being adventurous in my reading at the time, but looking back now I see that it was nothing but conservative. They were the books one was expected to read. I didn’t venture far off the well-trodden path of the classics.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Catch-22, The Naked and the Dead, Steppenwolf, Confessions of Felix Krull, The Counterfeiters … Those are the titles that come to mind now, but the list is endless, as are the shelves on which the worn, well-read (‘much loved’ is probably what they’d say today) books gather dust. These are the books that have touched my soul in the past and now accompany me through life. They’ve left an indelible mark on my being and influenced my every thought and action. I haven’t read them, then put them away to forget them; I haven’t been able to. They’ve stayed with me.
I’ve read modern authors, too, like Banville, Proulx, Updike, DeLillo, Bellow and, of course, Amis. I’ve read all of them, and some of that talent and artistry must surely have rubbed off on me. I can’t have been impervious to it, can’t have been immune.
My mother has always been a great reader. The fact that my father has never read at all possibly explains why he’s so bigoted and narrow-minded. It’s obvious to me now, in Sarajevo, that he’s typical of his countrymen, unable to see any point of view but his own. He’s little different to Santo in that respect, who, after I’d been in Sarajevo only a week, told me with great enthusiasm how the Serbs had bombed the majestic, Egyptian-style National Library with incendiary grenades for three days – three whole days. ‘Two million books went up in flames,’ he said. ‘You should have seen it, Milan. The sky was black with ashes. Sheets of burning paper floated upwards, blotting out the sun, then descended like black snow.’ He let his hands drift through the air, his fingers piano playing to some wintry tune in his head, eyes wide with the wonder of the scene. ‘It was like confetti falling on a newly married city.’
He gave his machine-gun laugh, as if embarrassed by his eloquence, his hands settling onto his lap, while I wondered where the metaphor had come from. It surely can’t have been his.
‘Now they have no history,’ he said, ‘now they have no past. Without that, they cease to exist.’
At that moment I think I truly hated Santo. I wanted to shoot him.
Mordo, sitting on the other side of the novel hater, periodically and vigorously rubbing his bald head, leant forward to say to me: ‘It was Nikola Koljevic who ordered us to destroy the library. He’s Karadzic’s deputy, but he is also our most famous Shakespearean scholar. He’s a professor, and much respected in academic circles. What do you make of that, Milan, a writer destroying all those books?’
I could make nothing of it at the time. It was beyond my comprehension. I was disgusted and, the more I thought about it, horrified. I imagined my mother’s reaction. She, also, would have been appalled, and doubtless disgusted to see her son sitting around the fire with such men, talking to them like old friends. She’d have hated them and their ignorant vandalism – perhaps me too, now.
I wondered if Amis’s books had been in the library – translations. It was possible. Along with all the rare manuscripts which the library doubtless owned, his words would not have survived. His ideas would have gone up in smoke, disappeared from this part of the world, his art expunged.
Mordo, giving me the quickest of glances, as if he thought it would be rude to stare for too long, added: ‘They burnt their own books after that. They did our work for us. Now there’s not a book left in the city, except for those they’ve used to build shelters, to stop the shrapnel. Books are good for that, to stop shrapnel.’
‘They burnt the books to heat their homes,’ Santo explained. ‘Mainly novels,’ he added, winking at me as if I’d find this news particularly amusing. But I felt sick. Hearing those words, the proximity of the men who’d helped perform the deed and were now telling me this tale – yes, it was a story about the murder of stories – made my stomach turn.
‘And after they burnt all their books, they burnt all the trees,’ said Mordo. I could tell he was excited because he was rubbing one of his hands across his bald head, backwards and forwards, as if trying to build up enough friction to also start a fire. ‘They have little else to burn now. They have burnt everything.’ And he threw a small branch onto the campfire as if to emphasise their deficiency.
From those ashes, from those blackened pages, I told myself, a work of art would arise – mine. I’d show my father, whose pessimism dogged my life, whose lack of belief in me killed my every dream, how wrong he’d been. Nor would I disappoint my mother.
I will write, I can write, I’d succeed in doing a Martin Amis, even if I haven’t got the word ‘Art’ buried in my name.
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Forests at night, I feel, contain men who howl in their sleep and then do Everything. It’s everything. Just primordial. Or something like that … Staggering out of the slime, with bulging eyes, shuffling gait, long arms swinging loose from barrelled chests, the lackwits, lackbrains, lunatics emerge blinking into the moonlight, to wreak havoc on civilised citizens.
Avram stood before me, grunting who knows what, scarcely able to control the vowels and consonants that dribbled messily, like diarrhoea, in streams and spurts, from between his rubbery lips. I suspect he’d had four or five too many – at least. His baggy khaki trousers – an attempt at a military disguise – were tucked into army boots, so dirty, scuffed and uncared for as to turn any self-respecting sergeant major apoplectic. Barely embracing the vast overhang of his stomach was a grey T-shirt, which appeared to double as a mechanic’s hand cloth, so stained was it with oil, dirt and grime. A hawklike nose and deep-set eyes dominated his loose jaw, clouded with several days’ stubble. I remembered that he was the man who’d come up to Santo and me on my first day in camp, long ago. I wondered if, as before, he was going to stand before me and fart. He gazed in my general direction, unfocused and unseeing, as he extended his invitation. Stevan and Ranko, a psychopath, had also sidled up to stand silently before me. It was a delegation from hell, stepping forward out of the flames of the campfire, inviting me to the devil’s playground.
Why I agreed to go with them to the farmhouse that night, when I’d refused on so many other occasions, I don’t know, nor do I care to question my motives too deeply. Perhaps i
t was simply to find out what went on up there. Perhaps it was because I was suddenly overwhelmed by the number of people in front of me – for the lawyer, Nikola, realising that something was in the offing, had also joined our little gathering. Radomir, the man who once trained to be a priest, also attached himself to our party as we left the campsite. I was a little surprised. He smiled at everyone. He was so relaxed and chatty he could have been setting off with friends for a picnic. I wondered if he knew where we were going. Did he think we were simply going for a walk in the woods? Did he believe we were going fishing? It seemed unlikely when we had no rods.
It was a calm, clear night. For a moment one could imagine there was no war, it was so quiet and peaceful. There was a canopy of stars overhead. The trees didn’t stir. Lining either side of the path, crowding in, pushing tentacled branches out towards their timbered friends across the way, they watched us pass in silence. The moon illuminated the well-trodden path with a white light. Each man in the group was alone with his thoughts, imagining, perhaps, what pleasures were about to come his way, and how he would satiate himself. They were all led by their lust, like dogs straining on their leads. Nikola held a bottle of beer, which he raised to his mouth at regular intervals, as though oiling the machine that kept him in motion. He was quiet, even by his standards. He had retreated into himself, like the rest. He made a comment now and again as if to maintain standards of politeness, and once told a joke which I didn’t understand. The others barely turned towards him when he spoke, and said nothing; they were in a different world. Suddenly Nikola hurled his empty beer bottle at the black wall of trees that lined the path, and it exploded against a trunk. This display of violence momentarily stirred his companions to raise their heads and snort approvingly.
See, now, the next day, I write ‘his companions’, as if I were not one of them. I didn’t feel one of them, that’s the truth. Even there, even then, I was an observer, an outsider, scarcely part of the action. If this means I’m an author, what then? Who’s writing my life, who’s writing my story? Who set me in motion along a path at night, near Sarajevo, through a forested blackness, with men of ill repute, towards a house of infamy?
Nikola started to sing. It was a song unknown to me. His voice was weak, high-pitched. It seemed out of character for him to break into song. One could scarcely imagine him warbling in the shower. His showers would be practical: a quick soap here, soap there, a cursory shampoo, rounded off with a bracing, healthful, tap-full-on, cold deluge. But there was no escaping the fact that he was singing. Ranko and Stevan joined in, the latter sidling into the lyrics in much the same way that he progressed along the path: obliquely, attempting to be unobtrusive.
Avram, to my astonishment, then performed a little jig. And it was little – abridged, transitory, extemporaneous, like a flash of out-of-character behaviour that he could no longer contain. He took half a dozen steps, lifting himself briefly onto his toes before falling ponderously back to earth, causing his stomach and breasts to rise, then fall, like a jackhammer in the street, three balletic blancmanges in perfect harmony. I felt moved and privileged to witness such a performance. Radomir laughed good-naturedly, and patted Stevan in a friendly way on the back, as if they were outside a church on a Sunday morning and sharing a joke after the service.
As our group progressed towards the old farmhouse, this singing and dancing lapsed, then died out completely. The effort had exhausted our giant friend, and the lawyer showed no enthusiasm to perform alone. Ranko was dangerously silent. It was important they all preserved their strength: they had strenuous exertions looming ahead in the gloom. So they stopped dancing, they stopped singing, they concentrated on breathing. For the giant, that was enough exercise. ‘Stentorian’ was the word that sprang to mind. His breathing was stentorian.
Approaching the farmhouse, there was little light. From within curtainless windows I saw flickering candles. It could have been a church at Christmas; carols wouldn’t have been out of place. Some of the windows downstairs were covered in cardboard, but many were uncovered, as if the occupants in the house either didn’t give a damn who walked up and peeked inside, or because they wanted everyone to know what was going on. But there was barbed wire too, great rolls of it all around the house, situated a few yards from the building itself. There was no sound of celebration or laughter from inside. I expected laughter, the clink of glasses, the sound of animated chatter, but there was only an eerie silence, an oppressive, uncanny silence, as if the house were empty or abandoned.
Outside the front door, there was a guard. He didn’t seem to take his job too seriously. His rifle lay at his side, and he was sitting on an upturned milk crate, smoking a cigarette. He barely looked up as we approached, although he acknowledged Avram in much the same way that a waiter in a restaurant will acknowledge a regular customer.
The door opened and we were sucked into the maelstrom. It enveloped us, drew us in like a woman, the door closing behind us like a vulva. It was dark, noir. Shadows and candlelight. There were candles everywhere, on the floor, on mantelpieces and window ledges, on the edge of the stairs, on the few pieces of furniture. Between the candles there was deep gloom, the impenetrable gloom of a black hole. Who’d gone to all this trouble? It was as if someone had intended to make the setting romantic. What was it about candles? Black masses, devil worship, virgins spread on marble altars surrounded by hooded, robed and menacing men. But also found in churches, white and pure, before the statue of the Virgin Mary. They’re adaptable, candles, that’s for sure. But why not electric lights? Too bright, too all-seeing, leaving no shadows into which one could retreat and hide, was that it?
What I remember most was the smell. A rank odour. Of sweat predominantly, but also sex. Like the warm smell between the sheets of a couple who have just made long and passionate love. But there was no love here, no love at all. This was fucking, rooting, rutting, not the coming together of bodies, but the clash of animals in the wild, not commingling but brutal separation. This was subject and object, dominator and dominated. There was also the smell of alcohol, and something else, which at first I couldn’t place but, later in the evening, realised was the cloying smell of blood – or was it death?
My eyes had a problem penetrating the gloom. There was penetrating going on all around me and me, I was having problems penetrating the gloom. It was amusing, kind of. People moved from light to shadow, some clung skulking to the shadows as much as possible, as if reluctant to show themselves, and some moved brazenly in the flickering light. It was like viewing some old camera obscura, frame by frame, the images jumping and, at times, hard to discern.
What did I see? The images from that night also flicker and die, indistinct, interrupted, indecent. There was sound, but not very much. It came in snatches.
Snatches.
On a table in the centre of the room, hard to miss even in that poor light, lay a figure. It was a woman, although not obviously so at first. Her hair was short and black, her face, arms and hands also black. The rest of her body shone white by contrast. (Many women in this war try to hide their sex from the enemy by cutting their hair short, blackening themselves as much as possible and strapping their breasts flat beneath their clothes. Anything to avoid the inevitable humiliations and suffering brought on by detection.) She lay on her back, not moving, her legs hanging off the end of the table, her eyes closed – although it was hard to tell in these surroundings, with her face in shadow. For all I knew she could have been dead, she lay so still. A man, older than most of us, squat, fat and balding, with his trousers around his ankles, stood swaying between her bare legs. He was pallid, flaccid, drunk. He was attempting to arouse himself, his hands before him tugging forlornly, even desperately, at his cock. A younger man, holding a bottle of beer, stood next to him at the table watching, waiting until it was his turn. Suddenly he grew impatient and shoved the older man aside, sending him sprawling onto the floor, feet caught up in his trousers. The younger man, the bottle of beer still grasped i
n his hand, undid the front of his trousers and, with a grunt, brutally heaved the figure off the table and turned her over. She could have been a sack of potatoes. She lay with one arm caught beneath her body, like a discarded puppet. He entered her from behind and she never flinched. The older man stumbled to his feet, cursed the figure now engrossed in thrusting between the thighs of the sprawled, motionless woman, and, pulling up his trousers, made off across the room in search of uncontested prey. They were like vultures squabbling over carcasses. The younger man continued about his business dispassionately with as much feeling as if he were ploughing a field.
It’s a man’s world, I thought, primeval and stupid, where brute force reigns supreme. It’s a serious world. War allows men to look serious. It’s a serious game, war. When war comes, the women stop laughing at the men. They’re too scared to laugh then, too appalled. They, the women, know they no longer count. Cunts that don’t count. Men reign in times of war, and all contact between the two sexes is terminated. Relationships are dead, between man and woman, between man and man. War is a solitary activity, and best carried out alone. Destruction is everything, the name of the game, to kill before being killed. Survival.
