by Ismet Prcic
“Do I look like a doomed man?” asked Mustafa in a voice that pushed the limits of a private-officer relationship. The captain let it slide, though obviously miffed.
“You’re in shock,” the captain said. “We’ll play poker and get your mind focused.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” Mustafa said. He laughed, uncontrollably opening and closing his fists.
“Put a gun in those hands and you’re a liability.”
Mustafa tried to stop fidgeting and found it impossible. He chuckled, looking at his hands, sprightly entities with minds of their own.
“I’ll deal first,” the captain said in a deliberate monotone.
“What are we playing for? You can’t play poker just for shits and giggles.” It was apparent that Mustafa couldn’t help talking that way. There was so much energy just being wasted off him. The captain swallowed.
“We can play for smokes.”
“Yeah! I don’t even smoke, man, but you won’t either by the time I’m done with you! You won’t have any cigarettes.”
He laughed a little too hysterically and a little too long. The captain did his best to hold in his annoyance, but what came out still sounded harsh.
“Pay attention here!”
He slammed his palm on the wooden surface, attracting Mustafa’s gaze to it, and dealt.
7.
An hour later the tire was replaced, they were on the road again, and the captain had lost all his cigarettes and his deck of cards. There was nothing to be done about the muffler, and sitting in the back of the van was like being inside a jackhammer. The captain’s forehead was ridged with irritation as Mustafa kept looking at him and shrugging as though apologizing for his good luck. The captain turned his head away and reached for a nonexistent pack in his pocket.
“I need a smoke, Private,” he said.
“Too bad you lost them all,” Mustafa replied, dismissing the captain’s outstretched hand, which presently started to tremble.
“What did you say?”
“I said too bad you lost.”
The captain’s eyes shrank, squeezed down by his overactive brow, suggesting waves of pain issuing from somewhere within his skull. For a long moment he was speechless. His military demeanor left him and he suddenly looked like a salesman or a high school teacher. Mustafa was cool and detached, acting like his superior.
“But you don’t even smoke,” was what he said, “and look at my hands.”
Mustafa rolled up his sleeve and showed him his arm.
“Look. I got all goose-bumpy from how much I care,” he said and watched the dumbfounded captain soundlessly open and close his mouth.
8.
When the racket of the van with the busted muffler got replaced by the far more dangerous clamor of the front line and thunder, when the giddy energy became plain horror as the shock caught up with him, when he marched in a line into a cluster of faceless houses with their eyes gouged out and their brains spilled, the debris of their caved-in skulls all over the grass, Mustafa knew that he really did smoke but just didn’t know it yet. The rain fell in self-perpetuating ropes that looked like you could climb them all the way up to God’s leaky basement; the soldiers’ faces drooped, as well as their mismatched uniforms. The captain had his power back, barking over the explosions, not flinching as the wandering bullets zinged into drainpipes and thudded into brick. He designated which house was the preliminary command post and started calling the names of the first shift of soldiers to replace the ones in the trenches. Mustafa expected his name to be found on that list, after every thing that had happened, but it turned out he was wrong.
The captain had a different plan. He ordered the second and third shifts to take cover in the houses until it was their time to man the trenches, pointing specific groups to specific houses. When it came down to Mustafa, he personally led him to a roofless, shelled-to-shit summer kitchen right between the rest of the houses and the trenches up the hill, its walls eroding from rain and projectiles.
“You’re in here!” the captain yelled over the explosions. “Alone!”
Mustafa looked through the empty socket of a window and saw a knee-deep pond of water covering the entire floor. It was deafening in there from the sound of water hitting water. He turned to the captain.
“I wasn’t issued a tarp, sir.”
The captain smirked, rolled up his sleeve to reveal his nonexistent goose bumps; he showed him how much he cared.
9.
By nighttime, leaning against a wet wall in his heavy, wet uniform, Mustafa was coughing a heavy, wet cough. There was something wrong with his mind, too, and he kept mumbling songs that wouldn’t leave his head and dozing into hallucinatory dreams. He kept seeing scenes from someone else’s life intermixed with his own, confusing him: two mothers, two fathers, a sibling, a watercolor of an overcast day above a swollen Russian river on the dining room wall, the corner of its frame chipped. His lips were chapped from fever and he kept licking them. In the midst of all that water, and being chiefly made of water himself, Mustafa was feeling dry.
“Third shift!” someone yelled into the night. He came to and peeled himself from the wall, shivering.
10.
He slept in the trench, sitting on a birch log, his rifle across his knees, dreaming of a play he was in, how something was wrong with the rigging and how the lighting fixtures kept crashing down. He woke up every once in a while when the other three soldiers in the trench with him fired an occasional burst up the hill and swore at the enemy. They mostly left him alone, seeing the state he was in, and kept playing cards under a tarp. Refa, the guy in charge, gave him an aspirin and a swig of a deadly alcoholic beverage out of a flask, something homemade and terrible.
Around three in the morning Mustafa hallucinated a man with a beard jumping into the trench. Only when he closed his eyes and opened them again, the man was still standing there, pale like a limestone slab, trembling. His eyes were raw and he was holding his rifle by the barrel, sniffling in the cold air. Mustafa didn’t know what to make of him, so he just looked on, flabbergasted.
“I came to give myself up,” the man said. The sentence lingered. Slowly, Mustafa’s brain kicked into gear.
“Are you a Chetnik?” he asked without moving.
“Yeah,” said the man.
Mustafa jumped to his feet, fumbling to flip off the safety. A huge head rush made him blind for a second and he almost lost consciousness. When the world faded back in, the man was holding him up, helping him.
“I came to give myself up.”
Mustafa brushed away his hands and regained balance on his own. He turned the rifle on the man and just stood there, not knowing what to do. His heart drummed fast, pounding in every part of his body, it seemed.
“Where do you want me?” the man asked, still trembling.
Mustafa didn’t know, so he ushered him at gunpoint to Refa and the other two. Refa was hammered. The other two were almost there. They didn’t even notice their approach.
“Refa,” Mustafa called and swallowed. He barely found any voice.
“What’s up, rookie?”
“Look here.”
Refa turned around and noticed the man. There was a dumb silence all around.
“Who’s that?” he asked, holding his hand against his chest, hiding his cards.
“A Chetnik,” Mustafa said.
“Where did you get him?”
“He just jumped in.”
“I came to give myself up,” the man said. Refa looked at him like he was insane.
“What’s your name?”
“Nebojša.”
“Nebojša what?”
“Nebojša Banjac.”
“How did you get here, Nebojša?”
“I crawled.”
“Through the minefield?”
Nebojša’s eyes grew wide and glassy. He had no idea. Refa started to laugh and turned back to the other two soldiers and their game. They laughed, shaking their heads,
and continued playing as if nothing had happened, as if there were no enemy combatant in their trench, holding his gun by its barrel and trembling. Mustafa stood there fighting an urge to vomit. His heart pounded circles around itself.
“What now?” he managed.
“Take him down to the command post,” Refa said without turning. At the prospect of really doing this, Mustafa couldn’t hold it in anymore and started to spew a pale, acidy liquid.
“That man is sick,” Nebojša said. “He’s in no state to do anything.”
“What are you, a doctor?” asked one of the gamblers with a sneer.
“Yes I am, as a matter of fact.”
Refa put his cards facedown on the trunk in front of him and stood up. He swayed over to Mustafa, looking like a man who was told that he had to take out the garbage right in the middle of his game on TV.
“Hey rookie, you want another aspirin?”
Mustafa dumped another load of vomit into the mud.
Refa sighed, pinched the fabric of Nebojša’s uniform at the shoulder, led him to the trench leading downhill, and pointed into the night.
“Okay, Dr. Banjac. This is what you’re gonna do. See that big house that looks a little bit like a skull? The white one? That’s the command post. You’re gonna go down there, you’re gonna find the officer in charge, and you’re gonna tell him that Refa sent you and that you’re giving yourself up. Okay?”
Nebojša swallowed hard. Even the little color he still had in his face was now gone.
“By . . . myself?”
“Don’t be afraid. It’s gonna be fine.”
“I’ll get shot.”
“You’re not gonna get shot. Just tell them that Refa sent you.”
He gave him a little push in the back. Nebojša made a timid step and halted again.
“What should I do with my gun?”
“Just bring it with you. What am I gonna do with it?”
“But they’ll kill me if they see me with a gun.”
There were tears streaming down Nebojša’s face now. He tried to hold them in but couldn’t. A glob of snot oozed out of his right nostril and he sniffled it back in.
“They won’t kill you. Trust me. Just tell them that Refa sent you.”
This time he had to push him a little harder to get him going. Nebojša headed down, focusing on the skull and sobbing. He held his rifle with two fingers only, as far away from himself as possible, and kept on sobbing.
Refa returned to the game and Mustafa puked again.
11.
The next day Refa, Nebojša and Mustafa were reunited. The truck that brought the food to the trenches also brought two military policemen, who proceeded to arrest Refa for being drunk on duty and needlessly endangering fellow soldiers’ lives by sending an armed enemy into the command post without prior notification.
“I told him to tell them that I sent him,” Refa said, defending himself in a raspy voice while being led, handcuffed, onto the truck. “He could have killed us all in the trench if he wanted to. But he didn’t. He wanted to give himself up, man. Tell them!”
But by then, Nebojša, who was already on the truck in his own pair of handcuffs, sitting like a God-fearing man before an altar, with his hands interlocked, crushed by the vise of his knees, didn’t feel like talking much. He moved his pale face a little to the left, as if considering whether or not to look at Refa and respond, then sniffled, and went on staring down at his boots. He looked like he was dead already and waiting for the afterlife.
The MPs brought the unconscious Mustafa on board on a stretcher, his rifle between his legs, his face ablaze with fever; you could light a cigarette on his cheek. They set him down like a repossessed dresser and gave the driver the green light to go. Refa kept demanding justice, demanding to be heard out, explaining himself. His face was bloated with hangover, his wrinkles fat and deep, his sense of self-preservation relentless. The MPs told him to save it for the judge, that if it had been up to them he would have already been wearing his wooden kimono.
They went back and forth like that, the decibel level increasing: who would do what to whom if they weren’t handcuffed, who would do whose mother, how and in what location. It would have probably ended in blood had Nebojša not screamed for them to shut up. They turned to him with their faces suddenly vacant and agape.
“This man is dying!” Nebojša said. “If we don’t bring down his fever he’ll suffer brain damage.”
It took the MPs several seconds to regain their attitude.
“What do you know, cunt face?” snarled one of them.
“No, no,” Refa interrupted. “He knows. He’s a doctor.” They all looked down at Mustafa’s burning face and his cracked, gibbering lips, telling them, in their own hallucinatory ways, perplexing accounts of what was new in the borderlands.
12.
What was to be his introduction-to-combat week turned out to be just a week, one spent in a squeaky, collapsible bed, one spent without electricity, with nothing to read, and with insipid lentil soup. He slept there among the amputees, whose phantom limbs itched, and among crazies, who screamed and screamed and screamed. It was there, in the swarming military hospital, that Mustafa started to smoke, and no nurse or doctor discouraged him or stopped him from doing it; nobody gave a shit about that.
13.
On a Saturday afternoon, a letter in an official army envelope came by a courier and Mustafa didn’t realize it was for him, even though he found it lying on his pillow. Nobody wrote to him ever and he naturally assumed it was some kind of a mistake. He tossed it onto the mangled crate serving as his bedside table, meaning to tell the nurse to take it to its rightful owner. Then he went out into the corridor for a smoke. He didn’t have to do that—everybody smoked in the room—but the guy next to the window had started screaming again, yelling for someone named Steamboat not to leave him behind, for God’s sake not to leave him behind. Mustafa felt much better with a width of the door between him and that sound.
When he came back the soldier on the bed next to him with a shrapnel hole in his cheek and no left hand shook his head slowly, fearfully, and said:
“You’re fucked, man. I’m sorry.”
This came out somehow wet and muffled, as most of his teeth had been shattered by shrapnel. The lines of his face were deep, pointing downward, disfiguring him. He made a movement, like a shrug, and it looked so grotesquely saturated with pity that it froze Mustafa at the door. The man’s elbow and what was left of his forearm were bandaged so heavily it looked like he had a hand puppet on, one with a turban atop which a blood-colored fez was showing through.
“Apaches are sent to the worst fronts. Their life expectancy is like two weeks. Look at our screamer. He was an Apache,” the amputee went on, his stump bobbing through the air, trying to help out the words.
“What are you talking about?” Mustafa asked, still at the door. The guy next to the window abruptly stopped screaming and somebody thanked God.
“The letter. You’re transferred to the Apache unit.”
“That’s not my letter.”
14.
Apaches were young and crazy. They wore bandanas and rock ’n’ roll T-shirts and their faces were like warrior masks, painted in swirls of green and black and brown. Their eyes were blank from the things they saw, from experience, and there was dirt under their fingernails, and blood, and war. Some of them were nothing but bone and gristle; others still had baby fat in their cheeks and on the back of their necks. One they called Ninja carried a samurai sword across his back and never said a word. Another one called the Claw had a small crossbow and couldn’t shut up. Sooty always had his hand inside his pants. Steamboat was like an old American gas hog packed inside a European two-door sedan. They were all like something.
Apaches didn’t salute and the captain couldn’t make them. They didn’t have to stand at attention or be neat or shave or button up—none of that mindless discipline bullshit. All they had to do was complete insane missions or
die trying.
“What’s this?” the Claw asked the captain, standing in front of Mustafa, looking right at him. His irises fluttered upward, and he blinked several times in order to bring them down again; it was a tic. Mustafa’s gaze fell to the barn floor littered with sheep bonbons. The Claw’s breath was rancid.
“That’s my present to you,” the captain said without even a slight nod of the head toward Mustafa, like he wasn’t worth even that much. He was hunched over what seemed to be an old refrigerator encased in a shoddy wooden box and tipped on its side. There was a map on top of it.
The Claw shook his head disgustedly and his tic took control of his face again. He looked like an android taking a second to process new information. Mustafa felt obliged to say something since the Claw was in his space, standing too close, breathing out clouds of rottenness.
“I’m Mustafa,” he said, trying to sync his breath with the Claw’s, so he didn’t have to smell him.
“No you’re not,” the Claw whispered into his ear so matter-of-factly that Mustafa seriously reconsidered whether he really was who he claimed to be. He wanted to back up, but the space behind him was occupied with something solid, a barn wall. The Claw came so close that at one point his lip touched the shell of Mustafa’s ear, sending a peculiar shiver down his leg.
“Mustafa is the name of somebody who’s either dead or alive. My grandfather’s name was Mustafa. He’s dead. Right now you’re neither. Your name is Meat. All the rookies are called Meat until further notice. My name was Meat. If and when you survive your first two weeks you’ll get your proper Apache name. We don’t want to get, you know, attached to a cadaver-to-be. If you’re wondering, why me, how did I end up with these lunatics, what did I do to deserve this, those are all legitimate questions which you have to ask the command or God or yourself. All I can tell you is I’m sorry, that’s how your beans fell.”
