by Peter Barry
She lay down beside him, carefully, one hand clutching her stomach, the other grasping her son. She moved gently, as if she was climbing into bed beside him and didn’t wish to disturb his sleep. There, in the middle of the street, in the bright sunshine, she cradled his head against her chest, and she could have been giving him a cuddle in bed last thing at night before he fell asleep. I could see she was screaming or crying, or maybe both, though I obviously couldn’t hear anything over that distance.
It was at that moment, watching this sad little tableau in the distance, I understood how cruel I was being, how much suffering I was causing the woman, allowing her to agonise like this over her own child, the fruit of her loins, the one she’d suckled, and so on and so forth. The pain must have been unbearable, so I decided to put her out of her misery … and I shot her. I finished her off. Then I begged them both to find it in their hearts to forgive me for what I’d done. Amen.
But that wasn’t what happened, not at all. That’s the problem. It’s important to get my story straight, to say what really happened. I’m not writing some piece of fiction here.
So let’s start again. This is what really happened.
I shot the boy and I wounded the mother. That much is true, one hundred per cent accurate. But I didn’t finish her off. That was the bit I made up. The bit about my feeling bad and being considerate enough to put her out of her misery, that never happened. I felt no guilt whatsoever. Instead, I edged back from my vantage point and, when out of sight of any possible snipers, I sat back against a tree and lit a cigarette. I left the woman lying in the street, alive, cradling her dead son, mourning his death while dying herself, while I relaxed and smoked a cigarette. Yes, I knew she’d die soon enough, but that’s not the point. The point is, I did not feel any guilt or pain about what I’d done, none at all. Radomir would have been proud of me. I think I was simply attempting to add a little spice to my life by saying I felt guilty, perhaps in the hope of making it more interesting, and to hell with how I achieved this. Now, with hindsight, I’m not certain this is normal. Possibly it isn’t. I persuade myself that it’s too difficult to worry about things like that, telling small stories: life’s too short. Ask that mother lying in the street. But I still have this nasty feeling in my head, this niggling pain, this nagging doubt.
Towards the middle of the afternoon, I crept back to my vantage point to see that the mother was still half lying across her boy, using him like a pillow. At first I thought she’d died, but then I detected some movement. She half raised her head and moved a hand out towards the dropped container. She was obviously thirsty. Scarcely surprising in this heat: so was I. But there was no water in the container. It had all soaked away into the ground. I could have shot her again, but I didn’t want to waste a bullet. They’re too precious. She didn’t die until later in the afternoon, that’s when I could no longer see any signs of movement. I imagine the two bodies will be removed during the night, although I don’t suppose I’ll bother to check in the morning.
I’m writing this now, later the same day, and I’m thinking, this is the kind of story I’m after, the kind of story that should interest me. It’s unusual, a little off-the-wall, not in the least bit boring. In an artistic or cultural environment where it’s increasingly difficult to be original, a true original, this story does not disappoint. Shooting a mother and child delivers the goods – and leaving her wounded to die in the street, I think that’s the cherry on the top. That’s outrageous, if I’m not mistaken. It’s definitely the kind of high note on which one could end a chapter. It will make people sit up and take notice.
Life, at times, may be stranger than fiction, but war is always stranger, there’s no doubt about that, none at all. And it’s something I’ve now experienced. As publishers, writing teachers and all the other bombastic know-alls always say, write from experience. There will surely be a place for such a scene in my book – possibly the climactic moment – so I’ll file it away with everything else for future use. One day I’m quite likely to be up on stage at some literary festival, trying to describe to my army of fans what it’s like to shoot a mother and child. ‘But didn’t you feel anything?’ some middle-aged, grey-haired maid from suburbia will protest, indignant, nervously hovering on the outer edge of my spotlight. ‘How could you have done such a thing, Mr Zorec? That’s what I don’t understand, how you can live with yourself.’ Everyone else in the auditorium will either applaud her, or hiss to show their support for me, but none of them will remain silent, that’s for sure. It’ll be good for sales, such a story, because it will make me notorious.
Being a sniper – and this is the crux of the matter – being a sniper is an excellent way to define myself as a published author. Everyone understands that the public needs its writers to have a signature, a definition to which they can cling; one that explains, if only on a superficial, almost meaningless level, the person whose book they are purchasing. ‘Ah, look,’ a reader will say to his partner as they wander along the rows of shelves in the local bookshop, ‘Here’s a new novel by Milan Zorec. He’s that sniper fellow. Remember, the one who once shot a mother and child?’ And he’ll buy it, out of curiosity.
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I ask myself if I’ve collected enough material. Do I have sufficient ammunition to create this never-before-seen novel? I’ve already filled one of my blue, A5 Collins 384-page notebooks – the ones I’ve always used for note taking – and am now on my second. I think there’s a lot of good stuff in here, some great stories that could form the basis of an interesting novel. (Like a few days ago, this man walked out of a building down in the city holding a pistol to his head, shouting, looking up at the hills, and a minute later blew his own brains out. He saved us doing it for him. How considerate is that!) And if it doesn’t make a great novel, or if I can’t be bothered to write such a novel, then I could sell the notebooks themselves. Last November Bill Gates paid over thirty million dollars for a Leonardo da Vinci notebook, and that’s definitely set me thinking. I mean, I can’t help wondering, just briefly, if I could interest the computer nerd in purchasing – no, investing in – one of my notebooks, possibly both. I’d be happy enough with a million, in fact I’d be happy with any sum at all so long as it’s greater than £500,000. As the kids in the school playground would have put it, in their crude, juvenile way, raising a rigid digit, ‘Spin on that, Mr Information Man.’
I have to admit I’m becoming increasingly preoccupied with sniping, and increasingly less preoccupied with my writing. Just conceivably, the creativity and artistry of my work in Sarajevo is proving to be more satisfying. It’s certainly more financially rewarding than writing fiction. Soon I could even have enough money to visit Amis’s dentist in the States. Gilhooley, who’s been my partner for a few months now, has started to hint in a blatantly obvious, even mercenary way, that he deserves a percentage of my earnings. He even named a figure: forty per cent of everything I earn, but I suspect that could be a bargaining ploy, an opening gambit. Needless to say, I’m not happy about this. I point out to him that although, financially speaking, my bottom line is extremely healthy (I never forget I’m addressing a headmaster), as yet I’m nowhere near as well off, say, as – picking a name at random –Mr Martin Amis. So he’ll definitely have to wait for any possible remuneration for his services. ‘Anyway,’ I add, ‘I always understood you were a volunteer?’ He doesn’t answer me.
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The days have become hot and dry, a far cry from the snow and freezing temperatures when I arrived. Down near the city, on the outskirts, amongst the bombed-out remnants of the once fine buildings, there’s only dust and the stench of rotting corpses, which sometimes blow my way. Dogs wander wolf-like through the heat haze, all skin and bone, teeth bared in ghastly perpetual grins, yet with a bounce in their step, a cocky confidence that says they’re celebrating the fact they’ve survived another winter – or is it simply another day?
The dogs are often the only sign of lif
e, apart from the small number of people forced by hunger and thirst to leave their hideouts and go to one of the few shops still open for business, or to a well. There are the no-go areas of the city, full of lifeless buildings and empty streets. Rafters, charred and split, stick into the air like the ribs of a skeleton. Rubble lies in piles everywhere. Abandoned cars, riddled with bullet holes, most dismantled, rust on every corner. As I write, black smoke is billowing from a tall building near the Catholic cathedral, tongue-like flames licking the floors about halfway up, on the left-hand side. Yet in the streets that are hidden from the hills, it almost feels as though life’s returning to normal again. A few trams are now running, and the UN presence is becoming more noticeable, with tanks and armoured vehicles on many corners. I’ve also heard that more supplies are being carried into the city through the airport tunnel.
Once the city was very beautiful, with graceful Moorish and Ottoman-style buildings, and minarets rising above the tiled roofs of the old town. Now it is dead and scarcely worth fighting for.
It’s the beginning of August, and word is coming in of Serbs being massacred in the Krajina region. Around two or three hundred thousand have been driven out by the Croatian and Bosnian armies. Many have been killed and thousands displaced. To me it sounds like tit for tat ‘ethnic cleansing.’
Milosevic is now making a show of washing his hands of the Bosnian and Croatian Serbs – my friends – because he can’t persuade them to move to the peace table. Increasingly, he’s retreating from his former position and making noises about wanting to settle the conflict. Meantime, morale amongst the Serbs in both Bosnia and Croatia, certainly amongst those in the camp, is going rapidly downhill and leadership is almost non-existent.
Everyone around me is very worked up and swearing bloody vengeance for the Krajina attacks. It strikes me that they are acting – their posturings, mouthed obscenities and displays of indignation and hurt are put on – with the sole intention of encouraging themselves to continue the battle. It also strikes me how greatly life has deteriorated in the six months since I arrived here. It’s become a snuff movie. There’s no one who can be relied on. Every single person is utterly alone. Clutching my rifle in the night, I’ve taken to slinking amongst the trees of the forest or crawling through the ruins of deserted buildings, on the prowl for prey. It’s back to basics now. I am to kill or be killed; active or passive, victor or victim.
There’s none of your Martin Amis flowery prose here. Plain words, the kind Sir Ernest Gowers would appreciate, are the order of the day. This is what it must have been like for Neanderthal man. I try not to think too much about whether I like this, because thinking is a part of my old life. It has no part in my life now. Possibly I should give up this journal for that very reason. I’ve moved beyond writing, now I only have time for living. Writing is the refuge of the weak, those who are too scared to take up the sword. Writing is dead. Maybe in the beginning was the Word, but it is not there now, not at the end. And the end, as the sandwich man in Oxford Street is always reminding us, is nigh.
I wonder if Amis believes writing is still relevant, if it has a place in the scheme of things. I suspect, for those who have attained his heights, any sense of artistic futility gives way to a sense of purpose when faced with the smothering comforts of success, when the reams of printed paper are drowned in scads of crisp banknotes. Those authors should come out here and see how long their scribblings keep them alive, whether they could hold at bay, with their pen nibs, the crowds screaming for their blood. Would they possess enough dictionaries and thesauruses to barricade themselves against the bullets, enough blotting paper to stem the tides of blood, enough word skills to kill those intent on putting the full stop at the end of their imaginative existences?
They (and I’m not sure I know who they are at this moment in time) talk about the adventure of language, but why, I ask myself, is it an adventure? Is it because one has to discover, put two and two together, experiment, try new phrases, new words – new worlds – work out what can be achieved with this flood of letters in one’s head? So perhaps I haven’t been adventurous enough. Perhaps I’ve been sticking too rigidly to the well-trodden paths, never venturing forth into the thickets of words on either side, never trusting myself to go where no man has been before. Did I lack the courage to go to those still unexplored regions, places that language hasn’t yet reached?
I think I can now admit that The Information makes me feel a little like Salieri confronted by Mozart. The shamelessly extravagant wordplay casts a shadow over me that forces me to stumble around in the gloom, fossicking amongst the half-chewed words, the crumbs of phrases, the carelessly discarded sentences that fall from the Amis table. But then I wonder if I’m even a Salieri. He definitely had some talent, and he’s still talked about and played. He’s survived two hundred years, if only as the joker in the Mozart pack. On the other hand, no one’s ever compared me to Amis. No one’s ever said, ‘Milan Zorec, now he has talent. If only he hadn’t had the misfortune of being born at the same time as Martin Amis.’ I used to believe I hated Martin Amis – and all the others: Barnes, McEwan, Banville, Rushdie, Carey, Updike, Atwood, Proulx, DeLillo – but of course it isn’t true. I admire them too much for that. I love them too much to hate them.
But what if I saw Amis walking through the streets below, would I be tempted to reach for my rifle? Of course I would, without any hesitation whatsoever. And for exactly the same reason that Salieri, as some would have it, poisoned Mozart. So that he, and all the other artists in the world, would no longer be reduced to a state of utter worthlessness. While Mozart was alive, Salieri’s attempts at art were shown up as puerile and shallow, even meaningless. Without Mozart in the world, Salieri and all the others could flourish. If he didn’t poison his friend, he certainly desired to do so in order to further the cause of art. And that’s how I feel about Amis. At the moment he takes up too much space, he’s too in my face.
We’re rivals still, but now in different fields. Like him, I am an artist. Unlike him, I am an artist of ballistics. Balletic ballistics. The bullet possesses a fluency that Amis – and the rest – would envy. Each shot is beautifully composed: the speed of the small, golden missile, the friction as it rides the elements – wind, air or rain – and the curve of its trajectory can be summed up in a mathematical equation.
My .308 Winchester round will travel one thousand yards in a fraction under two seconds. If I aim about ten feet above the target, the bullet will form a beautiful parabola, rising and falling as it spins through the ether and breaking the sound barrier as it does so, before hitting flesh. There, inside a human being, it will tumble head over heels through the skin, organs and bones of the astonished person I have targeted. There is beauty in such destruction, and perfection, the beauty and perfection of figures, of a formula. The distance times the speed, with plusses and minuses to allow for the elements, divided by whatever, multiplied by something else … Take away the number you first thought of … And it would equal … What would it equal? Death? And if death, then hidden there amongst those figures is the formula for life – life with a capital L, the answer. And isn’t that what every artist seeks? Quod erat demonstrandum, I am an artist. Of course, it’s a slight problem that I know neither the right equation nor the right formula, but that’s only a minor hiccup, a matter of time, of a little more research. The thing is, sniping has a precision no novelist will ever possess. It is a message, a communication without equivocation, it is information without risk of being misinterpreted. It is totally objective, absolutely finite. Sniping is everything that writing is not.
The author’s fighting a losing battle. He sends his writing out into the world and has no idea where it’ll end up, nor who’ll pick it up. He doesn’t even know if he has an audience ‘out there’. He then has to hope that whatever he’s written will be understood, that his message will be correctly interpreted. Writing is an inexact science, a shot in the dark without night-vision goggles. More than that, the
gratification, if there is ever to be any, is delayed, possibly for years, sometimes for decades. It’s anorgasmia for authors.
Words, like bullets out of gun barrels, spray across every corner of the globe every day of the year, unceasingly. But unlike bullets, most of those words miss their targets. Bullets are more likely to convey the feelings of the person holding the gun than words are to convey the feelings of the author holding the pen. The marksman communicates his thoughts more effectively than any writer, artist or composer can. And you simply cannot argue with that. If you argue with that, I’ll shoot you.
I have an audience, an audience that’s part of my performance. These fellow performers, those on the receiving end of my communication, play an important part, which must not be underestimated or go unrecognised. They understand the missive that’s been sent to them without equivocation. There’s no need for them to puzzle over this message or wonder if they’ve understood what’s being said. Their choice is then simple: to choose to die with grace, artistically, or, if my shot is imperfect, they can choose to put on a poor, less laudable performance. Yet even those hit less than perfectly can still perform well. Their swan song can be elegant, the steps they take can be beautiful, their gestures noble. When they crash to the pavement, it can be carried out with aplomb, the splattering of their brains on the ground can be done with all the artistry of Jackson Pollock.
There’s no getting away from it, there’s something grand about my achievements. It’s not a book that I write with my rifle, but an opus. It’s death on a grand scale, a magnum opus. Evil, some might say, although I can’t see that myself, but if it’s so then it’s evil that has become a Magnificat. I’m not talking about petty stuff here. Not the cheating of the taxman of a few quid, not borrowing stationery from one’s employer, not riding on the underground without a ticket, not pinching a magazine from the local newsagent. Nothing banal or everyday. No, here we are talking Dante and Milton, we are talking Lucifer, hell and damnation. We are talking hideous evil, the stink of burning flesh, the bursting of boiling eyeballs, the screams of souls suffering indescribable torments, and so on and so on and so on.
