to wash off the blood. The water took on the colour of rotting cherry with streaks of clay, the tub was a brimming blood bath. I left the pin in the drawer as a memento. I wasn’t thinking about soldier’s superstitions. Everything was happening to me for the first time.
Mum washed and darned the vest. I put it on like a proper frontline fop and went back on duty. Sometimes you think you’re invisible in camo, and therefore also indestructible. The better the camouflage pattern, the more invisible you are, and the longer you’ll live.
After ten minutes of vigorous digging we struck the corpse. We didn’t see any maggots, the soil was too hard and cold for them to do their thing. Only the bacteria of decay were patient and relentless. We wrapped him in a shelter-half and took him to the line. It was one of those specious ceasefires during which a sniper could easily send you to the happy hunting ground.
Between the lines, in a barn full of rotting hay, we met with the Autonomists. We rolled the corpse in on a wheelbarrow. They brought two sacks of flour, ten litres of cooking oil and a sack of sugar. A small fortune. We transacted the exchange, smoked a fag, shared a few words and went our separate ways. In war, when barter is practised, even a dead man has a price.
2.
Miki procured a matchbox of weed. We scrounged together a tenner. Bought a bottle of rot-gut. Some call this rakia powderpiss, because there’s a story going round that it’s made with soluble powder. That’s of no concern to us, what matters is that it hits you in the brains.
In the park, by the primary school, we’re smoking the weed, washing it down with rot-gut. Dusk rises like dark dough. The stars are twinkly flakes of bran. The dark matter is made of rye. Above the school entrance there is a placard: Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina – the guarantor of your survival. In the deep grass, humanoid statues are randomly arranged for display. All that culture is suffocating. It’s like peacetime.
Mama statue is holding a baby in her arms. Baby statue sleeps on the mighty tits that are green with mould. Its head is the size of a football. The weed and the rakia make the world twice as good. They bombard the brain with cluster bombs of rapture. The statues grow turquoise wings and soar to the sky like Wenders’s angels. My legs are full of lead. Miki is moving stars with his gaze. He’s really good at it. He’s rearranging the constellations. We sink into the dumps as if into a black hole. There’s also the reeds, when you snap like one.
‘Did ya see me bring that star down?’
‘Fuck it, let it suffer,’ I say to Miki. ‘Rock ’n Roll all night!’
‘Fuck a fighter that ’asn’t been wounded. ’old on a sec, mate, am I right or wot?’ Miki slams his fist on the ground, fixing my gaze, his eyes agoggle.
‘Right as pie,’ I reassure him. ‘The dumps and the reeds – brothers.’
Miki sheds tears the size of white small-grain beans. We share the last fag. The rot-gut is as sweet as kiwi juice, and there’s still some left. Puff, puff me, puff, puff Miki, right down to the filter. There’s always things that piss on your parade. Why not make half-metre fags? You smoke till you become tired, flick the ember off, take a little break then light up again. Absolute bliss: death by smoking. You’re going to get killed anyway, lung cancer or no lung cancer, who gives half a fuck?
‘I’m off to take a piss,’ says Miki. ‘Alcohol and weed/making spirits bright/what fun it is to drink and smoke/and piss whilst high as a kite,’ he sings.
‘Take one for me, too. And see that ya don’t step on a mine!’ I shout after him.
His gigantic shadow lags behind his body and turns the corner of the schoolhouse. A cuckoo is calling in code understood only by madmen. The rhythm of his elegy is akin to the tick-tocking of a clockwork bomb. Above the park is a road on which cars seldom travel. Their lights illuminate the schoolhouse windows and façade like searchlights in a concentration camp. We’re on leave for two more days, it’s as though we had two gold ingots in our hands. Nothing else matters: news from the front, or whether or not there’s going to be any food and ammunition. The weed and the rakia make the world twice as good. And the future, that syphilitic whore, promises riotous revelries.
The street lamps are out of order. I can’t think of a reason why they should work anyway, it’s more intimate like this. Only the priority facilities have electricity. And the homes of priority citizens. The darkness swallows us. Chews us up as we dream. It chucks us back up in the morning. Hung-over like wraiths, we set out in pursuit of a refreshing drop of alcohol, fantasising about a dewy pint bottle of Karlovačko beer.
3.
On 20 March 1994, a combined arms artillery/infantry attack commences at 09:50. Dugout 1 has eight wounded. On Hasin Vrh tasty ramsons grows. It tastes like garlic. It lowers the blood pressure. Ramsons is medicinal, it slows down ageing. It makes for excellent salad to accompany a plate of bean stew. On Hasin Vrh, dugouts are made of rocks. They aren’t even proper dugouts, more like sangars with very thin roofs. Makeshift weekend cottages for meditation in conditions of imminent danger to life and health. For nature lovers: clean mountain air, organically grown food. UNHCR’s reinforced plastic sheeting offering protection from the rain. It filters sunshine, removes the dangerous ultra-violet spectrum. Everything is the result of improvisation. The sky is improvised. Weapon systems, trees, rocks, insects and beasts, too. Around seven dead and thirty-five wounded is another product of improvisation. Only one dale has been lost. In it grows magically scrumptious ramsons. Shells, let off from mortars, whistle through the air like fatwas.
Amir carries me down the country road. I’m wounded in the left foot. In front of us a rifle grenade lands near a group towing a fighter wounded in the spine. His legs drag lifelessly behind him as if they weren’t his. We dive onto the forest floor from the road. Fifty metres to the left of us their battle cries ring out. Our line cracked like a china vase. Gone up the devil’s mother’s fanny. In my Kalashnikov I’ve got some five or six rounds. Enough to blow my brains out and end the war forever.
Forcing the River
‘We’re all gonna get killed here, down to the last man,’ says Zica.
Rotting pears squish under our boots. In the fruit, sugar turns into alcohol. I’ve never got drunk on a dry line. The crown of the pear tree, like an old lady, leans over the narrow ginnel we’re traversing at double time. The magazines in my tactical vest bounce like Rambo’s breasts when he jogs. In daytime this street is covered by an eight-four. It’s always safer at night. That’s why we’re fuckin’ running. We are in enfilade along the length of the alley, some fifty metres. The feeling is so intense you can’t think, you just rush headlong like a wildebeest.
We are sitting ducks until we reach the sheltering lee of the next house. Once there, we light up, gasping for breath. The wind brings the echoes of gunfire from the canyon, expanding bullets pop as if in a chain reaction. A torn curtain is hanging through the broken window. The TV shelf is covered in dust. The house has been looted. Home appliances fetch good prices. In the rear, a TV set is worth 100–200 marks, depending on the make. Those with flat screens are the best. Trinitrons. Like some kind of aliens from Star Trek.
Žile is fascinated by Trinitrons. Because the word sounds good. I guess. One time Juso Longcock and I commandeered an electric motor from a construction company. We wrapped it up in a humanitarian aid blanket and dragged it for almost twenty kilometres to the village of Gnjilavac. Juso sold it there and went to the nearby town of Kladuša with the money. There are people who like to steal bars of soap, chainsaws, transformer oil from substations, or designer furniture. Others look for gold or hard currency. Žile has a penchant for coffee. Paški for Levi’s 501 jeans. Bijeli loves glasses and cutlery. He was a waiter before the war.
I’m lying. On one operation against the Autonomists I stole an Ambassador blanket, still in the original packaging. On the next operation, after I’d taken a pocket watch off an elderly corpse, with a relief of a capercaillie on the lid, I was wounded in the left foot. A piece of shrapnel the size of a marble crushed the first metatarsus, which is attached to the big toe, and lodged itself somewhere in the fleshy part. The pain was unbearable