Diary of Interrupted Days

by Dragan Todorovic

  Boris suddenly felt tired. So this is how they had read his call: the black sheep wants to go blond again.

  The General continued his monologue, but Boris stopped listening. He finished his coffee, waited for a pause long enough to insert an apology, then stood up.

  At the door, he stopped, turned around, and said, “Father, thank you for this.”

  The General, standing by the table, smiled. “No problem, son.”

  Vanilla in the air. Sweet and bitter. Switter. Closing the door gently behind him.

  The stairs.

  The exit.

  The street.

  ONE SECOND AFTER. December 9, 1992

  Outside the big window of the bookstore café on the Square of the Republic, people moved fast, driven by the northern wind. The majority of passersby were in dark coats, as if Boris was watching an old black-and-white movie.

  “Where is he now, do you know?” he said.

  Sara shook her head.

  Johnny’s gathering point was in a camp outside of town, on the highway to the south. He had called a few times during the first week, but now silence.

  “It’s my fault.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Boris.”

  “No, it is, it really is. First I took you both to that stupid party where they spied on us. Then I was too stubborn to ask the only person who could do something for help.”

  “Let’s just try to find him. I’ve heard all these stories.”

  “What stories?”

  “That they say they are just doing a military exercise but then they smuggle some of the men across the border to fight.”

  Johnny understood now why everyone around him was drinking. When his brain was not bleary with drink, he needed no other enemy.

  He was lying under a barren tree, covered with dry leaves. The mud caked on his uniform and his face made him invisible to anyone who did not know where to look. He was aware of the irony: he looked like a hardened soldier but only because he had tripped and fallen. How long ago, he was not sure. If he could only lie here for several months, it would be over.

  He had taken a cab to the gathering spot. The man who drove it was Johnny’s age, knew his music well and was delighted to have him in his car. His adulation soothed Johnny, and when he got out of that cab, he thought he was ready for their stupid military games.

  The feeling kept him going for the first few days. Everything was as they had promised: there were no photographers, no obvious propaganda being made, just serious-looking officers doing the drill. Not many people had been drafted, though, and the barracks were half empty.

  Strange things started happening late in the evening of the eighth day, just as everyone expected to be released. A Jeep and a black car arrived at the camp after dinner and the officers disappeared from the cantina. An hour later, the men reported to their barracks, and their officers read the instructions for the next day. They were to perform an emergency exercise. In the case of a sudden attack from Croatia, reservists were to be transported to the area around the Danube as quickly as possible. That would be the aim of tomorrow’s exercise—to clock the time needed. All reservists were expected to adhere to the emergency rules, which meant, among other things, that communication with the outside world was forbidden from that moment on. The lines from both public phones in the camp had been cut.

  They were dismissed and went to bed immediately afterwards, but no one in Johnny’s room fell asleep. In the dark someone said what everyone was thinking: “This might be it, brothers. They’re lying to us—we’ll end up in Bosnia.” That’s where the slaughter had moved to.

  The next morning, they got up early, did some funny gymnastics, went to breakfast, and reported for weapons practice. They remained on the range until late afternoon. When they got back, they cleaned their weapons and packed their rucksacks. There was a break before dinner, but instead of using it to get some rest, most reservists stood around in groups, tense, smoking and discussing various options of running away. Dinner was at seven. Half an hour later, a siren sounded. The officers started yelling and everyone ran to their barracks, grabbed their bags and their weapons, and gathered before a line of trucks that had entered the yard. Ten minutes later, Johnny was sitting on a wooden bench in the back of a truck, swaying and bumping as the small convoy turned off the main highway onto a poorly lit local road. But they did drive northwest, towards Croatia, where a ceasefire had held for most of a year. Those near the tailgate kept peeking out from under the tarpaulin, reading out the names of the towns they passed: Indjija, Karlovci, Palanka, Deronje.

  “They can’t do that to us, send us to Croatia,” the man who sat next to Johnny said.

  “Why not?” said another. “We’re already conscripted. If we run now it would be deserting and we’d end up in front of a military court.”

  “Yes, but we’re not at war with Croatia. We’re only sending weapons to the Serbs who live there so they can defend themselves. If someone saw us, Milosevic would have to admit Serbia was taking part, and it would mean huge troubles for him.”

  “Well, my ass tells me that nobody will see us, comrades,” said the company joker. “If they continue driving us across fields like this, I will come off this truck walking like John Wayne.”

  Nervous laughter.

  Johnny kept silent. His gut was telling him to jump off the truck the next time it stopped, but his brain kept reassuring him—there was no way they were being driven to the front. The night was now silent and the villages they passed through were asleep. Some of the soldiers around him laid their blankets on the wooden floor of the truck and tried to nap. Johnny wadded his blanket against the metal bars behind his back and closed his eyes. He drifted in and out of sleep, his dreams short and feverish.

  “Apatin,” said someone. “Surely we’re almost there, wherever it is.” The trucks kept driving.

  “We are entering the swamps,” said a harsh voice several minutes later, as if commenting a football match on the radio. A short while later, the truck stopped.

  “Fuck,” said the same harsh voice again.

  “What?”

  “Boats are waiting for us. Croatia is on the other side.”

  A second later the tarpaulin at the back of the truck was yanked aside. Three men stood looking up at them. One of them had a few stars on his shoulders.

  “Good evening, soldiers,” he said. “I am Captain Pap. You might be asking yourselves what is going on. In short: you are needed here, so we brought you here. We won’t stay long, only until the local Serbs get organized and secure the area. That’s the good news. As usual, there is more bad news than good. First, we do not exist here. You cannot tell anyone where you are. Not now, not ever. Second, we don’t start anything—whether we fight does not depend on us but on the madmen on the other side, and there are plenty of them. Third, I am your commander. Wake up now, but stay silent, and keep your heads low. We are about to cross the river. You will get ammunition on the other side and then we will continue on foot for several miles. No talking until I tell you. No lighters or cigarettes. We are entering the war zone and joking around could cost you your life. All clear? Good. We’ll head out in five minutes.”

  The canvas fell, cutting off a piece of night and leaving it inside.

  It was half past four when they got to their camp, which consisted of a group of tents in a glade deep in the forest on the Croatian side of the Danube. Pap ordered several of them to stand guard and sent the rest to sleep. Like the others, Johnny fell asleep in his uniform.

  He did not know how long he’d been out when someone shook his shoulder, but judging by the weight of his eyelids, it was probably no more than a couple of hours. In silence, they were led out of the camp. Johnny could hear the distant crowing of roosters. Two hours later, they came to a small clearing around a shack and Pap gave them the at-ease signal. Most of them sat down under the trees, laid their equipment on the ground, and tried to get some more sleep. Pap and the two sergeants who had joine
d them went into the shack and stayed there.

  Johnny had an idea where they were. When he was in high school, he had played at a festival where he met a girl with whom he’d had a brief long-distance relationship. She lived in Beli Manastir, a small town that had to be nearby. That meant they were in a pocket close to the Hungarian border. He tried to remember if he had heard something about the fighting in this area. Perhaps it was true what Pap had said, that they were here only for security.

  He found a spot at the edge of the clearing, behind a birch tree, and soon fell asleep again.

  He woke up around noon to the cawing of a crow in the tree above him. As soon as he moved it flew away. He tried to remember where he was, and why, and found a wobbly answer for the first question only. Some of his platoon were awake, sitting around in small groups. There were new people among them, all dressed in black uniforms, all cleanly shaven with military haircuts, and Kalashnikovs. Some special unit. Then he noticed that some of them wore sneakers. Some had bandanas. Paramilitaries?

  Johnny got up, stretched, brushed the leaves off his uniform, and went to the shack. He knocked.

  “Come in!” barked a voice from behind the door.

  Pap was sitting at the table in the corner. One of the sergeants was making coffee on a small burner, and the other was cleaning his gun. A fourth man was sitting with Pap at the table. He wore battle fatigues and had black aviator sunglasses on the top of his head. He looked vaguely familiar.

  “Hello, gentlemen,” Johnny said. One of the sergeants nodded in his direction.

  “I wanted to talk to you, Captain,” Johnny said to Pap.

  “What about?”

  “It’s private.”

  “There is not much privacy in war, I’m afraid,” Pap said.

  “I am—”

  “I know who you are.”

  Johnny remained silent.

  “You are here by mistake. Or, wait, perhaps we were not allowed to bring you here?” Pap waited for Johnny to nod, and when he did not, the captain’s face relaxed slightly. “Would you like a coffee, Johnny? Come, join us.”

  Pap pushed a chair over with his boot, and Johnny took it. He waited to be introduced, but Pap had no such intention. A sergeant brought the coffee to their table and poured it into three metal cups. There was a long silence.

  “I’ve seen a few new people outside,” Johnny said.

  “Locals. We’re here to help them.”

  Silence.

  “What’s the time, artist?” Pap said.

  “I don’t have a watch, Captain.”

  “Forgot it at home when you went to war. I see.”

  “I never went to war.”

  “Don’t get entangled in nuances. The war came to you, as it did to us. It always does. So, if I order you to commence firing at sixteen hundred, when will you start shooting, artist?”

  “One second after someone with a watch.”

  One of the sergeants laughed. The captain said, “Boys, leave us alone,” and they did, the door slamming behind them. The other man stayed where he was.

  “So, what is your problem, then?”

  “Well,” Johnny said, “I was drafted for the exercise. The draft said five days. It didn’t say anything about a week and there was definitely nothing about the war. In which, by the way, Serbia is not taking part. I mean—wouldn’t it be dangerous if someone from the foreign media were to learn about us being here?”

  Pap looked straight into Johnny’s eyes, but Johnny was accustomed to people looking at him. He also knew that avoiding the captain’s sniper stare would mean submission. Not to this man. His basic strategy had been to get some sense of whoever was running this show, and then get away from here as fast as he could. There was not much left of his plan.

  “Ah,” the captain finally said, “you got me there. I told you to avoid nuances but they are important, of course. It’s true that Serbia is not at war with anyone. But you are not in the Serbian army, are you? We are the Yugoslav People’s Army and this is still Yugoslavia until the politicians decide it’s not. We can have our exercises wherever we please, including the combat zone. And we can exercise with live ammunition to our heart’s content. So we’re legit here. Regarding the foreigners, who cares what they think? It’s our country that’s falling apart, not theirs.”

  Johnny waited a few seconds for him to go on, and when he didn’t, he said, “There were rather large protests against the war in Belgrade just recently. I took part in them. Am I being punished for that?”

  The third man got up. “I’ll be back later, Captain,” he said, “after you put the babies to sleep.”

  Johnny stared after him as he left.

  Pap took a notebook out of his leather officer bag. “It’s good that you didn’t get into an argument with him.”

  Johnny felt a change in Pap’s tone.

  “His face seemed familiar.”

  “To you, Interpol, and several tens of dead men.”

  “Ah,” Johnny said. “The Candyman.”

  “The men outside, they are his private army. They call themselves the Black Lions. Actually, they seem to be the advance guard. He’s just told me they have around sixty more fighters coming tomorrow and three tanks. They’ve got Uzis, they’ve got Magnums, and they have a few cannons available. They’ve got more than I do.”

  “What do you think my chances are of getting out of here?” Johnny said.

  “Right now, none. Stay put and keep a low profile. This is apparently getting out of control—that’s what the Candyman’s arrival means. Our secret service has employed criminals for decades, and now it’s payback time. They must have opened the prisons and let the worst out.”

  Johnny looked at him. Was he afraid of the gangster?

  “Would you like a drink?” Pap asked.

  “Why not?”

  The captain poured two shots and pushed one towards Johnny, then raised his, waiting for Johnny to do the same.

  “Cheers,” he said, “and may we survive this shit.”

  Johnny was suddenly aware of birdsong outside the cabin walls. It was not pleasant, sounding more like short screams, but anything was better than gunshots.

  “Make no mistake, artist: I, too, don’t want to be here. I know, I am a professional soldier, I chose this uniform, but those were different times: brotherhood and unity. Then this started. My colleagues chose their sides fast. I am where I am because my parents were Serbs. There is no choice in that.”

  Johnny drank a little from his glass. The brandy was strong and sharp, probably made that same year. The captain lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.

  “I once fucked a girl in Zagreb when I was serving there. She was ugly but she was a nymphomaniac so what the hell. Ideal for a soldier. We were next to a yard gate and when she bent over, I could see a tattoo on her lower back. The letters were old German, hard to read. Small print, three lines. Had someone passed by, he would have seen us, screwing like dogs at the gate, but it still took me an hour to come. Well, maybe I had a cheap watch, but it was the best fuck of my life. You know why it took me that long? Because I kept trying to read the tattoo. See? At first, I thought it was so kind of her to have something for people to read while they were fucking her. Years later I realized it was her neat little trick to squeeze the best out of her riders. How is that related to this now? This uniform on us, my friend, is the tattoo on our asses. Think about it. Lay low, and stay low.”

  Johnny’s hand was already on the latch when Pap waved at him to wait. He opened a drawer in the desk, pulled out a watch, and threw it to him. “Here. You never know. Keep it, I have more here. They are a gift from the Candyman for our boys.”

  Johnny looked at the watch. It was a Rolex. He looked at Pap.

  “No blood on them. They are from a truck that was parked on the wrong side of the road somewhere in Austria, I’m told.”

  Johnny went outside to sit under his birch tree again. Not noticing a root hidden in the leaves, he tripped over it and
fell. He cursed, rolled over, and decided to stay where he was. He looked at the sky. It was low and claustrophobic. The flatlands in the distance were his country, which he and others like him wanted to keep together, but he felt only coldness coming from there. He didn’t want to die fighting for this place.

  He tried to block the wisps of quiet conversation drifting towards him. He thought of Sara … She was probably trying to find him, trying to do something about his being here. And Boris—he must be accusing himself now, as he always did. He was desperate when he returned from meeting his father. But he’d be there for Sara—she could count on him.

  After a while, the wind seemed to carry all the sound away. And then, just as his eyes were closing, he was certain he could actually hear the silence. It was dark, and gentle, and it fell in flakes, like black snow. A thought accompanied him into the blackness: my whole world is freezing now.

  NOTHING GOING ON. December 13, 1992

  More people joined the camp, some of them in civilian clothes and without any visible arms, some of them apparently Black Lions. They moved to an abandoned socks factory, which—in spite of the broken windows and the stink of bird droppings—gave them much better protection than the few tents they’d had in the clearing. Someone had even fixed the water so they could use the showers and toilets, though there was no electricity.

  Johnny was grateful when Pap gave him a spare notebook and a pencil. He started jotting down fragments of conversation, a verse here and there, some notes. He’d had music in his head as far back as he could remember. It was fully orchestrated and grandiose when he was happy, edgy and fragmented when he felt bad. Now all he heard was the echo of his shredded thoughts. Perhaps it was time to write a book. He had wanted to write one for the past—how long? Six years? Eight? At first he thought that maybe he would write a memoir but realized that too much had happened to him—his memories were overgrown and dense, like jungle. Once, during a dinner party, he had sat next to a well-known writer and confessed his desire. “Of course you want to write a book,” the writer said. “And I dream of making a record. We all want to jump out of our skins, but in the end only a few do it.”