Quiet Flows the Una Page 7
For me, reality is what happened in the message of the underwater telegram. This telegram. Some of the things in it are enigmatic. What I cannot perceive with my senses is perhaps not real. I know that New York exists, with its capitalist skyscrapers, which from above look like a cemetery for the rich. New York is tangible for some, but for me it’s a transparent illusion, a drawing in the condensation on an aeroplane’s window, or even less than that. If the World Trade Center towers had come down during the war, I would have thought it a good piece of computer graphics simulation. My soldierly mortality stands in contrast to New York, and here it’s embodied in the simplest inanimate objects: an empty cigarette case, but equally the sprayed-painted blue of a plum. That’s what makes life in wartime so sordidly exotic. When you die, your spirit can fit in a cigarette case with a skull and crossbones and the Harley-Davidson logo on the lid. I was brave, and young, and my uniform fitted me nicely. My death could have become pop art, but then again I was far from the lights of any big city.
At Biljevine I read And Eternally Rhythm, a collection of twentieth-century French poetry. Published in Montenegro, it was given to me by a relative staying in a flat that had belonged to a teacher of Serbo-Croat – the teacher had fled from the town where we were now refugees. I kept the book under the tool and ammunition bag on my chest, behind the rifle kit full of golden bullets. The coarse fabric and my breath separated the poetry from the bullets. Poetry was more real for me than any New York: it helped me survive. I memorized Blaise Cendrars’s poem ‘Orion’, which he devoted to the hand he lost in the First World War:
It’s my star
It’s in the shape of a hand
It’s my hand gone up to the sky
During the entire war I saw Orion through a lookout slit
When the zeppelins came to bomb Paris they always came from Orion...
The verses mingled with the rotor noise of a Gazelle helicopter that plastered our positions with guided missiles. The sound of a missile is a synonym for alarm, a racing heart and a cold sweat all over. Months became years, in which I didn’t see or come near the water. I even forgot its colour.
Why deceive ourselves? It was cold and we were at the edge of the world, in such deep loneliness that it crept to the back of our eyes. Or, according to Alija Izetbegović, our ‘melancholic commander-in-chief’ in Sarajevo: it was hot and we were fuel in a machine that demanded more and more dead, a massive pool of victims, until we all, living and dead, merged into one messy ball. We would be as cosy in that mélange as in the womb – almost outside of the perceptible world, safe in the skin of the victim.
Still, it was good sometimes on Padež Hill when a fire crackled in the little sheet-metal stove and the unwritten rule of the night-time truce lasted outside. If you wanted, you could fire a burst or two over the top of the parapet, just to let the others know we were alive, which would frighten the dormice and make them shriek like new-born babies. Your firing would only rend the icy, night-time silence of the nameless forest. Afterwards you spread your horse rug and got into your sleeping-hole. You lit up a Gales, greedily drawing in the aroma as if the rising column of smoke was a fakir’s magic rope that would let you to flee to Las Vegas. You then sank into a deep sleep like colourless water in boots and uniform, with your rifle within reach.
Traumometer
Let us assume that the present is a body of water of particular colour and depth and that our bodies are immersed in it. Every body submerged in water is lighter by the amount of liquid it displaces, according to Archimedes’ principle. But none of us ever come up to the surface, except the mad and the dead. The weight of our individual traumas can therefore be measured by the amount of the present displaced by our bodies. Yet small cracks seem to appear in the present because of all those who refuse to accept Archimedes’ Law – cracks that threaten one day to wedge our dismal present apart, and the amount of frustration (potential energy) generated will deliver the kinetic energy required for a new war. Or, what is more often the case, the cracks implode within an unconscious body. The laws of physics rarely let us down. One such invisible book of the dead takes shape all by itself in the death announcements of the newspapers, listing all those who kill themselves.
Bright Nights
I burned inside like Jan Palach because I was full of energy and nothing could fully satisfy me. ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’ was pounding in my head. Only death, perhaps, could fill and inflate me with breath that would come spouting out through ghastly geysers on my face. Only death could consume me from head to foot and send me speeding towards immortality like a human projectile. Yet despite the attractiveness of death, I was also frightened of it. That’s why I would survive the war: I knew how to keep my poise and control that self-destructive urge. I had to find a reason to live time and time again because the proximity of death was so appetizing and irresistible.
The sun shone through the leaves covered with transparent-green aphids. It rarely reached the ground, where brown leaves lay rotting in the mud and puddles. Imprints of soldiers’ boots plotted pastel labyrinths, with our lives and deaths in the centre. Our camp lay between wet, forested hills in two valleys connected by gravel paths like spilled intestines. We slept in shacks knocked together from sheets of plywood, which we had hauled up from the Šipad furniture factory on moonless nights, afraid of being hit by a stray machine-gun burst of a lonely, drunk Chetnik sitting bored at his guard post.
The wind brought whiffs of shit and piss from the latrines on the sides of the hills, where fat white maggots multiplied in the slush. Mosquitoes slept like brooches pinned to the boards of those outhouses, satiated with our blood. A cow with deformed hips hobbled around in the large clearing where we used to line up for the flag salute in the mornings. Its meat ended up in the goulash we had straight before one raid. The flag with the coat of arms of the medieval Bosnian Kotromanić dynasty on a field of white, now grey and torn, hung from a birch pole. Its design was thoroughly unwarlike, and now it looked like a pauper’s cape to wrap a stillborn child in. We wanted to set fire to the commander’s shack, just so something would happen while hunger dictated our thoughts. One soldier took an axe to it and chopped off the corner. Another suggested we go to Jaziće, where there were huge ponds and we could try to catch frogs, but now we were on combat alert before heading to an unknown battlefield. We killed our boredom by playing poker for cigarettes, lying around or picking mushrooms. I forgot the taste of meat as the diet of watery bean stew and macaroni eroded my palate. The coming of evening promised fragile sleep, wrapped in horse rugs, which I never pulled up over my face. For a moment, an unattainable woman appeared in my head – thirty kilometres of darkness lay between us, while chaos was all around and so close. I would spend the cold, damp night listening to the workings of my stomach and the buzz of mosquitoes’ wings. Beneath our sleeping shack, diligent rats were reducing the plywood to sawdust. I wanted to go far into the forest and scream until my jugulars burst.
Whenever I walked at night towards these ‘barracks’ that we thought of more as a dump or a prison, I felt I could see a huge light away behind the forest or the next hill. That light always came from the direction of my home town, which had sunk into physical and metaphysical darkness. But sometimes I also experienced this optical illusion – a kind of mirage created by my longing for the town – in other parts of the country where there were no towns or villages nearby at all.
But the light existed and shone real out on frozen, snow-covered fields, which the cutting night wind blew over as if tomorrow was Judgement Day. It could have been the stars, because sometimes there were such starry nights that every little twinkle was mirrored in the crust on the snow that our heavy army boots broke with a cloud of tiny ice crystals. It could have been the moon or the forest’s aura, the energy made by unknown sylvan beings in their warm homes under the ground. Or perhaps it was the Una itself, emitting electricity to signal that not everything was irretrievably dead and lost after all.
The Black Sabbath
‘Let’s hang out at the old nursery school a bit.’
‘OK, let’s go.’
Less than a month had passed since the end of the war. We were still nowhere near getting used to being back in our town – realizing we’d retaken it and were now meant to live there again as we did before. Everything was back to square one, and from there we were supposed to head towards the light at the end of the tunnel. What light? It was hard for anyone to say what that was just then, apart from celebrating life with excessive merriment, food and alcohol. That was an easy, all-purpose stopgap.
We set off in the dark. I didn’t mention that the street lights weren’t working because nothing was working. The town looked like a battered film set from a movie about life after the apocalypse. The darkness was intense and as thick as motor oil, like a vein of lignite we were forcing our way through, we – latter-day Partisans in a march of liberation towards the nursery school. It was at the foot of Hum Hill, close to the socialist-style primary school we attended, and right next to the Cultural Centre. The nursery school was built in a beautiful grove stretching up Hum towards Zapadni Vinograd, where long, dry grass waved like in the savannah.
If I stand facing Hum, the primary school is on the left, the Cultural Centre is in the middle – in front of me – and the nursery school is on the right in the wooded part of Hum. Far to the right is the town’s Orthodox cemetery, which I was always frightened of. Moreover, the path leading from the nursery school to Zapadni Vinograd goes past a private family vault enclosed by a metal fence. I never remember the names of the dead there. I was terrified by the physical proximity of the morbid granite. But their decay supported a wealth of carefree plant growth. Nature was so rampant there that for a moment I was seized by the heavy melancholy of the decorative carnations, flowering roses and trees with woody lianas, from which hung traveller’s joy, that cobweb of the plant kingdom; it all looked strangely out of place in our austere continental climate, which not even the Una could attenuate with its moisture and greenery. This tropical melancholy was heightened by the Osage orange tree, whose fruit grew to almost the size of a football, a giant yellow-green pod with a tough and wrinkled skin, concealing a shell that couldn’t be broken even with a hammer: a fruit we called pipoon. That fenced crypt with its crosses and slabs was to the right of the path on a steep site falling away towards the asphalt road to Zalug, and beneath the road was a row of houses and then the Krušnica. The graves of black granite and marble were terrible proof of the death and horror that awaited us. We would be confined in cold, geometric forms. Nature at that miniature cemetery was so wild and rank, with a taste of bitterness, that when I walked there I often felt I was swallowing soil mixed with tears, worms and maggots – the very stuff of melancholy.
We went up the stairs near the Cultural Centre. Busts of socialist heroes once stood alongside the railings, but in the darkness I couldn’t see if they were still there. The birds in the trees hardly made a sound. Clumps of soil had been scattered over the asphalt, and grass was growing out of them. The mayhem of war has a deeper meaning: everything is relaxed to the extreme and gives rise to a new reality – the limitless freedom of the human body and mind.
There were three of us: me, Tiny and Blackey (the tough lass); the adrenalin trio.
‘Is anyone in there? Is it safe?’ Tiny asked me.
‘There’s that idiot who used to drive his little fiat around town like in the video game Super Mario,’ Blackey remarked.
‘No, the top floor’s empty. It used to be for abandoned children, and below the Chetniks held Muslim civilians taken captive at the beginning of the war.’
‘Still, maybe it’s best we not go in. Who wants to sit and drink in that Chetnik calaboose now?’ Blackey argued before tipping back her bottle of Badel brandy.
‘Look how strong I am,’ Tiny quipped, gripping his jaw with one arm and trying to lift himself off the ground. He weighed no more than sixty kilos, without his uniform and weapons.
The tape in my head for recording events was blank for a time and I can hardly remember anything except a fight down in the cellar. I don’t even remember the words that sparked off that nebulous event. We smashed bottles against the black walls of that former prison for Muslim civilians. The walls were thick with soot over the white tiles. The torturers had punctured the walls from the outside and stuck woodstove pipes in through the holes. Then they calmly sat and stoked the fire, like fishermen who have set deep trap nets and are just waiting for the fish. The smoke went straight into the cellar to the prisoners. The Chetniks called that group of civilians and the single soldier interred there The Mötley Crüe and accused them of fictitious criminal plans: a massacre of Serbian children with Serb cutters – metal spearheads and arrow tips from the Illyrian Age ‘discovered’ by their propagandists at the National Liberation Struggle Museum in Jasenica. They also staged a rigged trial in the first days of the war. The Mötley Crüe breathed in all that smoke in the nursery school turned torture chamber. When they were on the verge of asphyxiation, their former friends and neighbours – with respirators over their faces to conceal their identity like in a porno film – would open the door and lead them out. After months of this maltreatment, they were taken and killed in secret locations. Their executors remain unidentified to this day.
To cut a long story short: we had a raging argument in there, broke more bottles and got into a fight with each other. Afterwards we made up by talking about our favourite cartoons and nicely cut ourselves up. I scored my face with a flat piece of glass from the bottom of a bottle. I was the ringleader, and I really wanted to rip myself open. ‘The captain leaves the ship last’ and crap like that, but when it hurts any saying is just a heap of useless words. As blood dripped from my brow into my eyes and spread over my sooty face, someone socked me in the jaw with an iron fist – a Transformer with the physique of George Foreman. Tiny slashed the palms of his hands and Blackey her forearms. We were here, Blackey wrote with her bloody finger in the thick layer of soot and added an autograph: The Templars of the Bosnian Army.
The Layers of Fear Inside Me
In the boy’s imagination, fear is a creaky robot that walks the streets at night and indiscriminately chops people in half. I’m not that boy – I just heard him talking on television. On the contrary, I’m enamoured of robots, as well as androids and spaceships. I extrapolate the boy’s imagination: the creaky robot dismembers people and gulps their arms and legs with relish. It roasts the corpses on a spit like Polyphemus. Human tallow drips from the spit into the fire, causing flare-ups and hisses.
Mr Fear’s voice is the crying of a stillborn child. He is that metal menace, whose glowing eyes demonically splice the night, and the world becomes a raster in all the shades of black. That universal fear, both mine and the boy’s, sometimes grips me in the stairwell at night, whereas during the day it’s hidden between mouldy stacks of firewood, in rubbish bins, and down among the rats. When I’m lucky and someone turns on the light in the stairwell, my fear subsides like a fever passes. The front door of my block is a dark chasm – a yawning abyss between me and the door of the flat. I would call on the street lamp to help, but what use is that if it can’t budge? The shield of luminous words is still incomplete in my imagination, so I can’t take it outside. I stand in front of the building as if bewitched. When I finally manage to overcome my fear, I climb the ten or so stairs and I am quickly in the safe territory of our flat. It’s warm there from the wood I’ve put in the Emo stove, and the little tongues of fire dance behind its glazed hatch.
The street lamp sheds a crippled light. The five luminous plastic spheres are arranged in a flower shape, but the resultant rose is maimed because one of the spheres is missing. We once used to smash them for fun: we would take a stone and coat it with clay, which we smoothed and squeezed until it was round and hard like a perfect snowball. Then we took aim at the plastic spheres of the street lamps. Boyish foolishness and disre
spect for the material world.
The street lamp opposite my block of flats sheds a crippled light. I watch it through the window where bent figures of people go up into town along the empty street. It’s late autumn, and the first snow delivers the final blow, from which it won’t recover, although its departure has been well announced by spectacular fugues of red leaves rotting at the height of their power.