XVII
shut up in this car my ears blocked by the tunnels and the weird compression of air they cause, the Florence-Rome direttissima line is nothing but a long corridor dotted with open passages, you forget that air is a substance except when there’s not enough of it or when it stiffens against your eardrums, no matter how accustomed to them you are explosions always shake you like an old tree, you tremble, you tense up despite yourself your arms hug your body your chin jerks up and makes you bite your tongue your fingers quiver and become flesh tuning-forks, you crouch down when you hear the shrapnel whistling, then the air comes back along with silence, silence which is even more terrifying since you’re always wondering when the next shell will arrive, where it will fall, if it will hit its target and scatter you into the azure like the clod of earth and leaves you’ve just seen flying up during the last impact, you wait, and the explosion surprises you again, the same bright yellow flash, the same compression of the atmosphere, the indescribable striated racket of metallic throbbing, that one didn’t fall far away, you had to be drunk or drugged or both to endure this tension for long, this powerlessness that made you feel like a blade of grass or a mole beneath the hoe of some divine gardener: the only one who didn’t seem affected was Andrija, we never saw him tremble, he only crouched down when it was strictly necessary, he remained perfectly calm in the storm, waiting for the lull to go back on the attack, his helmet resting high on his forehead with an air of defiance, it was as if he knew he was protected by Zeus master of lightning, immune beneath the thundering aegis, Andi the brave was not a braggart, his courage was linked to a perfect innocence, for him the bombs were nothing but noise and pieces of metal, not much more than artillery practice, that’s all, he wasn’t picturing the effect these explosives could have on his body, not even unconsciously, and yet he had seen what it was like, guys pierced with smoking shrapnel, amputated disemboweled or just grazed, but he had such faith in his destiny that nothing could touch him, and nothing did—the shelling over, he carefully prepared his gun, his ammunition, ready to confront the tanks, ready to defend our blockhouse or our trench like a lion, whereas for Vlaho, Sergeant Mile, or me the end of the bombing signified the beginning of another, different fear, but at least equally intense: that of the assault, the assault you sustain or the one you launch, and in our position, with no men or equipment, it was hard to decide which was more terrifying, waiting for the tanks or going to meet them, we launched a counter-offensive to liberate Vukovar we were going to have to fight like lions to retake first the village of Marinci on the road to Vinkovci, my first large-scale battle, and it was the same for Andrija—he compensated for his own inexperience with exceptional courage and waited bravely under the rain of shells while I thought I was going mad, my mouth dry, deaf, thinking soon we’d have to go, go oust the Yugoslav army from its positions and leap onto their tanks in little groups armed with a few RPGs, confront their machine guns their mortars their rifles, we were ready, our boots well-laced like Intissar the courageous, ready to drive back the Serbs great tamers of mares to the ramparts of Belgrade, I trembled under the cannon fire, the 3rd regiment of the Yugoslav artillery was bombarding us at the rate of one salvo every twenty or thirty seconds, the dawn was rising over the extraordinarily flat fields opposite us, mud and corn rotting underfoot, lying flat, a brownish plain in the grey of the sky still warm that early fall, not at all the dreamed-of day for dying, not at all, in the distance straight in front on the other side of the road the battle had already begun and the surprised JNA were falling back, we had to advance to cut off their retreat and allow our flank to take Marinci before continuing on to Vukovar, I looked at the checkerboard patch sewn in haste onto Andi’s shoulder to give me courage, at least we knew what we were fighting for, for a country for a surrounded city for liberty and it’s very strange to think today that I contributed to the liberation of a country that is starting to matter less and less to me, distant, hazy, where I almost never go hey that’s it I could settle on the coast or on an island, rent a little house and wait quietly for the end of the world, in Hvar or Trogir, my dead would come to nibble at my feet at night, I’d sleep poorly there too many ghosts in that neighborhood, what I need is a new place with no memories no ruins underfoot, a virgin sky crossed by an airplane a fragment of azure where everything remains in suspense, higher up, higher up than the trajectories of shells that exploded around us in that trench we never wanted to leave, except Andrija who champed at the bit like a good wild horse, weapons in hand, all prepared, all ready, the devil himself was going to dash forward, the devil or the army of angels, depending, at the order of the boorish Sergeant Mile we left, forward, forward, and my brain suddenly turned white like the flag of someone surrendering, naked, empty, giving way to the body thrust out of its shelter by sheer courage and the noncom’s kick in the pants, go on, Andrija the courageous sparkled in the grey-fingered dawn, his rocket launcher on his shoulder, we wanted to shout roar cry out but we had to keep silent, run like lightning to sprawl down into the mud at the place where we thought we could intercept the trajectory of the T55 silhouetted on the horizon like a toad in the corn, at full tilt, one, two, three, four, five tanks are approaching the ground vibrates slightly this one is mine, this one is mine and they’re not expecting to find us here, hope makes us feverish, they’ve fallen into the trap, I help Andi arm his rocket, I rise up quickly to observe the movement of the tanks, ten seconds more, Andrija the brave straightens up aims calmly and lets loose his line of fire, above all do not stay standing up waiting for the result of fire, back to the ground to the insects your nose against the earth a 12.7 volley cuts through the corn around us, we crawl to the right as fast as possible, as fast as possible, everything becomes a game everything becomes a game we hear the impact of the RPGs the shouts the engines the disordered fire of the tanks we reload we reload quick we glance over three tanks are burning the one we got is immobilized Andi got it, a caterpillar tread in the air its turret is damaged the trap is open Serbs are trying to extricate themselves from the doomed vehicle, a wounded horse, I’ll finish it off, I raise the viewfinder, I have the joint of the turret in the middle of the target it’s off, this time we watch the trajectory of the shot, straight line of fire, one of the occupants half-outside sees the trajectory heading straight for him, paralyzed, go on, move I think get out two seconds the missile skids onto the bottom of the tank and explodes, tatters of flesh and uniform streak the pure yellow of the flame and project a long red and blackened spray, the tail of a rooster in a summer light, Andi looks at me, stunned, and mumbles shit, bullseye, I don’t have time to reply, a bomb explodes a few meters away from us, we have to move again, under cover through the corn, towards the trench to move to the left, the tanks have changed their course to come around from in front, more are on the way, more and more, dozens of tanks trapped in the fields, trying to escape, a band of mules or a herd of buffalo, they blunder into invisible barriers, mines and anti-tank batteries, they know they can’t make a U-turn, they have to go through, so they advance despite everything among the carcasses of their predecessors, that’s the only victory I remember, the only real victory in the middle of an endless series of defeats, we had retaken Marinci, the road to Vukovar was open, who knows what would have happened if Tuđman hadn’t immediately stopped the offensive, we didn’t understand a thing, not a single thing, not one, our first victory and it was useless, our fear and our dead were all to no purpose, the gods were protecting the Serbs, Troy would take a very long time to fall, Zeus had decided thus, and we were shaking our weapons beneath the Scaean Gates in vain, like someone brandishing a broom against a wall, we had won a battle and the next day or the day after that Hector son of Priam kicked us in the nuts again, into the very bottom of our ditch near our vessels, the agony of Vukovar would last one more month, hard, brutal, a city turned into a cellar, a rat-hole, a cage that would give way as soon as General Panić took the trouble to strike it effectively, on October 14th Marinci was
retaken, the road cut off again, the city surrounded for a month of hell and a few thousand corpses, today the strategists and historians state that the sacrifice of Vukovar saved a lot of time, time needed to train and prepare the Croatian army, that’s possible, we however saw in it mostly the command of Zeus, Andrija groused like a child, kicked empty cans, he would have preferred to be inside the besieged city rather than fifteen kilometers away in the middle of wiped-out farms and hamlets, hunting for pigs, I was having my first nightmares, I heard bombs all night long, I saw over and over again the Serb soldier exploding on top of the T55 turret, so precisely that I could have drawn his frozen face, paralyzed with terror before the rocket rushing towards him to propel him into death, all those faces are superimposed on each other now, the terrified the decapitated the burned the bullet-pierced eaten by dogs or foxes the amputated the broken the calm the tortured the hanged the gassed, mine and others’ the photographs and memories the heads without bodies the arms without bodies the dead eyes they all have the same features, it’s all of humanity one icon the same face the same sensation of pressure in your eardrums the same long tunnel where you can’t breathe, an infinite train a long march of the guilty of victims of terror and revenge, an immense fresco in the Church of No One, and the divine Andrija in the middle, furious beneath the ramparts of Ilion the well-guarded, shot by a bearded man surprised at discovering a soldier crouching around the edge of the woods, one more dawn, a dawn of saffron rose or tar it’s all the same, the day before we had drunk a lot, we had drunk too much, I got up in a bad mood, him too, Andi couldn’t find his knife, his bayonet, he had a headache, he blundered round in circles looking for them, he moved all his things, so I handed him my own, just so he’d stop griping, that doesn’t matter so much today, that dawn, those movements in the mist, I would have killed the whole earth to avenge Andi and recover his vanished corpse, pillaged and mutilated no doubt, bury it burn it or return it to his people, the world was beginning to crack, the fissure got wider in Venice, it got even bigger in the years of shadow on the Boulevard, a tunnel today a tunnel to Rome, think of something else Francis, think of Yvan the mad, think of the New World, of those nice sexagenarians on vacation knocking back Chianti and laughing, think of the endless landscapes, the lakes, the bears and infinite forests there are in their lands, lose yourself in the immense night of Tuscany pierced by the railroad like a shield by a spear, by a gaze, the way you calmly scrutinize a canvas, the head of Medusa on the wall in the Uffizi
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