“Perhaps he couldn’t get back because the sniper was shooting at the bridge,” she whispered at last.
The man shrugged his shoulders and continued to stare at the glass. His wife watched him hopefully or pleadingly for a matter of seconds, then stood up and went to the bathroom. Outside, in the dark, there was an explosion not very far away. The sleeping woman awoke with a jerk. She smiled. The man looked at her and the smile lingering on her face. It remained for several minutes like the expression of a wax figure. At first the smile looked warm and friendly, but it changed and soon became insanely frightening. The man’s gaze returned to his self-portrait in the window.
The older woman stretched out on the sofa, whose springs played a few notes. She turned over to face the wall and didn’t move again. After a while her breathing became regular and maintained its steady rhythm until dawn.
The man left the room on tiptoe, stopping to pick up another cigarette and the lighter on his way out. He stood under the eaves; it was no longer raining; the wind shook the raindrops from the trees. The man believed that the winter might really pass without snow. He lit a cigarette, inhaled and remembered that silly adage about not smoking outdoors at night, because a soldier could easily mistake the cigarette for the infrared sight of a sniper’s gun. The bombing had stopped. Several minutes would elapse before a melancholy watchman discharged a round of machine-gun fire. The shots sounded rather inoffensive but not very far away. It was a reminder that not everybody was asleep. There were still people with mad, unhappy and worrying thoughts who were on duty. The cigarette had burned down to his fingers as the man threw a last glance at the sun rising over the hills. He closed the door behind him and went back into the room. Everything was just as he’d left it. He lay down on the bed and closed his eyes.
The man and the two women were asleep when the bright daylight streamed into the room for the first time in ten months. They were like children in a hospital ward struggling not to wake up.
Duke
You could spend your whole life searching around Bosnia and not come across another person who was so evil. He was moody and he wore an expression of such disgust that nobody would look him in the eye in case he made something of it. On one occasion a boy was kicking a football against this man’s house. Jovan, alias Musa, opened the door and hissed, “Get away from here.” When the boy refused to stop, Jovan ripped off one of his fingers. The boy’s father shrugged his shoulders. “What can you do?” everybody said. “That’s Musa for you.” And it didn’t even occur to them to look at the culprit reprovingly. Whenever he got drunk, the villagers hid in their homes, because he’d prowl around the village like a rabid dog, shouting: “I’ll show you. I’m gonna skin you alive!” When he was ranting like this, he used to beat the shit out of anyone who accidentally got in his way. He wasn’t discriminating – he’d beat up a relative just as soon as a total stranger. If your travels brought you to the village of D——, the well-meaning villagers made sure to warn you about Musa as if declaring the risk of a natural disaster. If it had been possible, the local people would probably have signposted a warning at the entrance to the village.
D—— is the only Serbian village near the Muslim town of Zenica, but this fact only became relevant when the Yugoslav National Army began withdrawing from the area. The villagers were then given numerous cannons, rifles and machine-guns – at least three guns per inhabitant. They were instructed to defend their homes and told that the army would remain nearby to help out. They even appointed a village commander or “duke” – Musa. He appeared in front of the villagers, wearing a number of cartridge belts and a traditional black fur hat with a Serbian cockade. Some of his neighbors were still terrified of the madman, but there were others who looked at him with a new glimmer in their eyes. Zenica lay sleepily below in the valley, somehow tempting the villagers to shell it as a way of proving themselves to Musa after years of being afraid to look him in the eye.
For ten days Musa didn’t sober up or leave the headquarters, which were located in an old shop. The guards at the entrance were regularly changed, and the Duke appointed, then canned, a new deputy every morning. At daybreak he always summoned the deputy he had appointed twenty-four hours earlier and the person who was due to replace him. Both men would stand to attention in front of the Duke, staring at the top button of his military coat.
“You imbecile.” he always began, addressing the first subordinate. “Did you know, imbecile, that I could skin you alive?”
“Yes, I did,” the unfortunate deputy would reply, causing the Duke to jump out of his chair and punch the man in the teeth with a mighty blow.
“You’re an imbecile and you don’t know anything until I tell you!” he’d bawl.
The following day the next soon-to-be ex-deputy would perhaps try the other tack, answering, “No, I didn’t,” to the same question not that it would make any difference – he’d receive a blow just the same.
“If you didn’t know, imbecile, whether or not I could skin you alive, how dare you come before me?”
If the people of Zenica had not decided to capture D——, obliging the Duke to sober up finally, it is more than likely that, sooner or later, the entire male population would have served as his deputy, being patted on the back one day, and the next with a mouth full of blood.
D—— came under fire from rifles and hunting guns, and the occasional mortar bomb. Duke Musa gave the attackers an ultimatum: either they withdraw or he would raze Zenica to the ground. They stopped firing, and Musa went back to drinking. One night he ransacked the headquarters and tore off the guard’s ear. He gave orders to the villagers not to shoot without his command, and it didn’t occur to anyone not to obey.
The villagers were equally fearful of Musa and the people from Zenica. But they firmly believed that when Musa gave the word, Zenica would simply disappear. If his own neighbors were so afraid of him, they reckoned, the Muslims and Croats must be shitting themselves.
The inhabitants of Zenica, however, were rather confused by Musa’s behavior. He declined to open fire – but he also refused to negotiate. Whenever the military command in Zenica tried to make contact with D——, hoping to persuade the villagers to surrender peacefully, the Duke would scream down the telephone line, swearing and cursing so terribly that the blood would freeze in their veins. You couldn’t talk to him or threaten him or try to bribe him with a few thousand Deutschmarks to surrender D—— and go his own way. In any case, his curses were not just empty words: it was hellfire and brimstone, as if somebody had opened the gates of the underworld. Here was evil for its own sake, unwilling to compromise, impossible to deceive, a malevolence to which it was unwise to submit, because it wanted nothing and expected less.
The attack on D—— village finally began a month later. This time it was decided not to pay any attention to Musa’s threats – it was time to go the whole hog. The grip was being tightened, Musa howled. People died with guns in their hands, but they were not allowed to shell Zenica. Nobody could understand what sort of idée fixe had taken hold of the Duke, but it was still preferable to die from a bullet wound than to ask the wrong questions and thus become a victim of Musa’s wrath.
On the third day of attack the Duke nevertheless fired three cannons at the town, but he forgot (or omitted) to activate them. The cannon-balls happily bounced along the streets of Zenica and then quietly came to rest. That night Musa assembled all the men in the village and threatened to rip their heads off unless they immediately brought all their weapons to the headquarters. He then phoned the commanders in Zenica and invited them to enter D—— the following day at noon.
Everybody heard the gunshot, but none of the villagers were brave enough to enter the headquarters without Musa’s permission. At midday the troops from Zenica passed through the village and opened the door to find the Duke lying on the floor, with a bullet hole in his temple, a bottle of brandy in his left hand and a picture of St. Sava, the patron saint of Serbia, in his righ
t. The villagers were still afraid of him, even though he was dead, so they whispered to the soldiers from Zenica that they were not Chetniks and that the Yugoslav National Army had forced them to take the weapons. Nobody, however, understood why Musa had refused to fire on Zenica.
A Diagnosis
No other place has threats and curses like the ones in Bosnia. They have been dreamed up over a long period of time, not in order to hurt or scare anybody, but to prove the value of imagination. The best curses and threats chart the development of a particular culture. For example, with the electrification of Bosnian villages came the following curse: “May your child be cut up with a chainsaw and stored in the cellar for winter!”
Salih F. saw with his own eyes his wife and two daughters being cut up with an electric saw by the Chetniks. Later imprisoned in Manjača, he was expected to die there, but instead he was released in exchange for some other prisoners. He was transferred to Gradiška, then to Karlovac and finally to the Czech Republic, where he ended up in a refugee camp among unknown, but mostly Bosnian, people. Illiterate and a bit slow, he was the ideal figure of fun. Salih F. spent days trying not to rise to the bait. Sometimes he made the effort to come up with a quick retort or to think of an original reply, but it didn’t really work. He only ended up looking even more stupid than before. It was as though he had been dropped into a machine for mincing his nerves. The only way to escape was to put the heat on the next sucker, or else to sort it out with his fists.
One day Salih F. fought with half the camp. He had the shit beaten out of him, at first by the Bosnians and then by the Czech police guards. Afterwards, still bleeding and now tied up, he was presented with an official order banning him from all the refugee camps in the country. He packed up his things, swore at the Bosnians and the Czech guards and set off for Prague. After walking over fifty miles, he entered the city in triumph and was immediately arrested. He had no documents in his pockets except for the banning order.
The police threw Salih F. into prison, but after keeping him locked up for a night, they couldn’t think what to do with him. They wanted to expel the vagrant, but no country would take a Bosnian who was prone to fighting. The most straightforward thing to do would have been to send him back to Manjača, but this was impossible in practice, because such a move would have contravened the international declaration of human rights.
In the end the problem was solved by a quick-witted bureaucrat from the Bosnian embassy in Prague. He recommended that the police dispatch Salih F. to a psychiatric hospital to be pronounced insane. That way, he couldn’t be expelled from the country – it was again a matter of human rights. After listening to the prisoner’s life story, the authorities decided that the psychiatric option was really quite a good idea.
In the hospital Salih F. was treated like a king. He was given his own room with a television, a tape recorder and a comfortable armchair. The doctors were thrilled to have such an opportunity to study a human guinea pig who had witnessed his next of kin being cut to pieces – legs first, then the arms, and finally the heads. At regular intervals the men in white coats used to check on Salih F. by peering through the spyhole. Most of the time he sat quietly in the armchair, watching television, changing channels and munching grapes lazily. He looked no different from everybody else in the world who follows the latest news from Bosnia with a lack of interest.
The doctors concluded that Salih F. was actually in a state of shock. They drafted long and pedantic reports about him, wrote papers for psychiatric journals, discussed various prognostications and waited patiently for Salih F.’s battered and bloody soul to recover. But over the next few months his condition did not change. Salih F. lived from day to day without fuss, always replying politely to the doctors’ questions but making no special requests and apparently displaying no interest in the hospital’s plans for his future. The doctors attempted to bring Salih F. out of shock by providing him with a hobby. They offered him singing lessons, drawing paper or a course in photography. Just choose which you’d prefer, they said, and he thanked the men in white coats, adding that he didn’t need or like any of those activities. But the doctors insisted – and so in the end Salih F. agreed to take up drawing. He couldn’t sing and was scared of photographs.
Salih F. used to draw obediently whenever it was time for his drawing practice, but at the end of a session he would go back to watching television and munching grapes. Predictably the doctors sat up late at night analyzing his drawings. He used a brown wooden pencil to draw a hut, a green one for the grass and a yellow one for the sun. He drew eyes and a mouth on the sun; it was a copy, he said, of a picture he had seen as a child. Sometimes he had to explain to the doctors the nature of a particular drawing. The men in white coats used to smile as they listened to his explanations. But sometimes they asked follow-up questions that were too confusing for the interpreter to translate.
The day finally came when a decision had to be made about the future of Salih F. The doctors had prepared only one question. “What would you do,” they said, “if you caught the murderers of your wife and daughters?” Salih F. replied that such a thing was unlikely to happen. By now the Chetniks responsible were far away, across many borders and barbed-wire fences and lines of battle. But the doctors insisted, assuring him that many things were possible even if they seemed unlikely at first. And so, recognizing that his questioners were like small children, and that it was necessary for them only to imagine a situation in order to make it a reality, Salih F. replied, “I would kill them,” adding, “or I would give them a pen and paper and tell them, as you tell me, to DRAW!”
The doctors’ faces lit up. They took their pens and papers and pronounced Salih F. insane.
The Colony
Down there the devils multiply . . .
Djordje Balašević
The Colony was built by the Austro-Hungarians a few years after they came to Bosnia. The bungalows were laid out in two rows with military precision. In the tiny gardens only wild marigolds grew – and the odd lettuce perhaps. In front of every house there was a little wooden table and two or three stools. In the summer evenings the smell of coffee and rakija wafted everywhere; both drinks were served in Turkish cups with a gold star and crescent moon in the bottom. Even the shrieks of playing children couldn’t disturb the peace. For almost a hundred years the miners and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren have lived here, descendants of those who had left other parts of the empire and turned up one morning with their cardboard suitcases at the Kakanj railway station. They set up home in the Colony and lived lives without hopes and expectations, perhaps, but with a kind of inner peace that sometimes creates the illusion of happiness. And the pattern of life was upset only on those black days – which did occur, however, with demonic regularity, about every four years or so – when the siren blasted the news that some of the miners had not returned from the pits alive.
On the other side of town was a Catholic church – and nearby a mosque. As if by some tradition, the Orthodox people didn’t live in the Colony, nor did they go down the mines. Communism barely affected the lives of the miners. The pits were too dark to foster any rethinking of ideological views. Decades passed, and the organized diplomatic tours avoided the Colony. The inhabitants weren’t affected by the passage of time or by other worldly fashions. And so they continued to be ignorant of such things as traffic pollution, neon lights and synthesized muzak. Only the thick layers of dust, which turned into mud during the autumn, and the increasingly dirty façades suggested that life was about to change – or perhaps it was just returning full circle: the young folk looked back to a period when their grandfathers roamed up and down Bosnia looking for mines, but they also looked forward to the day in the not too distant future when the pits and the Colony would cease to exist.
As soon as war broke out, nobody went down the mines any more. People carrying weapons and flags marched through Kakanj. Some of the inhabitants left, never to return. Others wasted a lot
of time in bars, cursing too loudly. In other words, fear entered the Colony – mostly fear of other people, of strangers, of spies, of messengers bringing bad news, but also fear of the night. At daybreak somebody would start shooting, and of course there would be a response from the hills. With the dawn chorus many frightened and tired faces would look out of the houses. Now, every night was like those nights in the past when the siren broke the news of a mining accident.
On such a morning Rudo L. packed his things in a case, locked the front door and the gate, left the keys with his neighbor and, without much explanation, set off toward Vareš on foot. When he reached the church he crossed himself and swore that he would never tell anybody what had happened that night, in his thoughts or his dreams, to induce him to leave Kakanj. Vows seldom have any rational basis. Often they are just ridiculous and pointless, but they can seriously burden a person. Sometimes a vow ends up costing a life. But as the folk in this part of the country are obstinate by nature and thus, in an odd way, rather devout, they seldom break their vows. All around Bosnia people cautiously tell one another stories about horrors that befall those who break their promises. The commitment of a Bosnian who has made a vow can be glimpsed in his face or read in his eyes. It often makes you want to question him or to put temptation in his way or to subject him to other kinds of torture. His persistence makes him appear unstable in other people’s eyes.
When the people in Vareš asked Rudo L. what had occurred that night to make him leave, he refused to say, and so everybody concluded that it must have been something terrible. But as the imagination is always provoked by secrecy, the questioning just intensified; it became more probing and more organized, until it was taken up by those in authority. The police questioned Rudo L. for days, but he stubbornly remained silent. He didn’t even attempt to lie, but nevertheless objected repeatedly to the idea that he was suffering from amnesia as a result of the horrors he had witnessed. Rudo L. no longer knew which was worse: being pressured to break a vow or perhaps being certified insane. In any case, he regretted ever having left Kakanj. Yet it was too late to return. He didn’t worry that he would probably be killed if he ever went back. He was more disturbed by the idea that, in a manner of speaking, his return would be tantamount to breaking his vow. Such a move would only revive the horrors that played on his mind the morning he left the Colony.
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