I started smoking in the war. In those crazy days, every cigarette you could get your lips on represented seven minutes of cease-fire, a glimpse of heaven in the midst of hell. After the war it became the opposite: every cigarette brought back seven minutes of shooting and bombing. So I quit. This one here can only bring back my scattered memories: my mother cursing in the kitchen, Hanover fucking Hauptbahnhof, the Winnipeg guy and his bloody wallet, Gunnhildur’s stick-red smile. I smoke it as slowly as possible.
“But why kill me? What’s the purpose?”
“Shut up.”
“I’ve quit. I don’t even travel anymore. I’m just…”
“Shut the fuck up!”
“Sorry. Let me just finish this and then you can…”
As before, we speak in Croatian. You have to picture bright white subtitles flickering across our dark chests.
Once again I inhale, watching the low blue mountains ahead. They must have witnessed a thing like this before. The sky is empty. No cloud, no plain. Somewhere behind me, Reykjavik spreads out in the distance, the fourth city of my life, and further out, at sea, the bright spring sunset must be well underway. Goodbye world. Doviđenja svijete. I exhale and look at the butt. There is about one puff left; less than 1 inch left of my life. My two visiting friends are getting restless. I lift the small cigarette up to my lips and inhale.
Here we go.
I bend forward, pretending to put the cigarette out in the stiff moss with my left hand while reaching into my pocket with my right. Niko immediately shouts and steps forward, pointing his gun downwards, toward my head. Quick as a fox on fire, I dive to my right, rolling on the harsh lava floor, and he shoots. The bullet bouncing off lava rings in our ears. And before he even realizes I’m holding a gun, its bullet is buried in his upper right arm. His scream is muffled. Radovan immediately reaches for his tool, but receives a bullet instead, in his right wrist. He screams out loud. As Niko grabs his gun from the wounded arm with his left one, I’m back on my feet, pointing the pistol at them and screaming:
“DROP IT! DROP THE FUCKING GUN!”
Niko looks at me with bewildered eyes. “What the fucking fuck?” He now has the piece in his left hand.
“I SAID DROP IT!”
Blood drips from their wounded arms. Radovan is still wearing his sunglasses, looking quite ridiculous, like some wannabe mobster in a Russian B movie.
“DROP THE FUCKING GUN!”
For some mystical reason I use the English word “gun” here, instead of the Croatian pistolj. It makes me think of Gunnhildur. The thought distracts me and Naughty Niko sniffs out the weakness expertly. Before I know it, he has raised the gun against me. We strike simultaneously, like the spiritual twins we used to be. My bullet lands in his gun-holding left arm. His scream is less muffled now. I try to swallow mine. A streak of strange warmth shoots down my groin, in the direction of my left thigh. The warmth then turns into fire. It’s like when a match is being lighted. First there is the strike and then there is fire.
It’s a typical left-hander. He aimed for my heart but got the bladder. But mine was on target. He’s as good as armless. As well as Radovan, after another one from the PP9. Suddenly I’m aiming for arms only. I’ve fired fucking four shots and still no one’s dead.
My friends’ faces are tormented by pain, as mine must be too. Their hands hang lifelessly beside them, freshly slaughtered piglets, blood dripping from their hoofs. I have my small gun aimed at their heads now and after some more shouting, Niko drops his big Desert Eagle. I order him to give it a kick and then quickly bow to pick it up. It seems to take me forever to get back up, though. The pain in my groin is of groundbreaking proportions. Holy shit.
I put Niko’s gun in my pocket.
I order Radovan to come closer and open his jacket for me, but he can’t, of course, with his hands. I carefully approach him, my eyes going between him and Niko every two seconds, and open his black Armani jacket with my left hand. His weapon rests in the inner pocket. A silver Smith & Wesson. But as I grab it, the stupid Hulk tries to push me away with his elbow. Niko uses the opportunity for coming at me, head first, like some crazy hornless ram. I put him out with a simple “elblow,” something I perfected in Torture training this winter. With Niko down, Radovan doesn’t risk any more tricks, and soon I have two guns in my pocket and the third one in my hand.
I fish the car key out of Radovan’s pocket and then silently wait for Niko to come back to his senses. I order them both to crawl down into the mini-canyon. This takes some time. Still wearing the sunglasses, Radovan looks more and more ridiculous, heading for a comic death. I tell them to lie down, facedown, biting my lips from the pain. Something is leaking down my left thigh. Feels like I’m peeing with my balls.
This is wartime all over again. Shouting at people in Croatian with a gun in my hand and a leaking leg. The driver’s bulky torso takes up most of the space in the lava coffin. Next to him, Niko looks like a slim virgin wife about to be buried with her husband, eyes screaming: “Please, fuck me instead!”
“FACE THE FUCKING EARTH!” I shout, sounding a bit too nervous.
I lower my gun. I’ve got two asses in sight. Two rectums screaming for lead. There is nothing else to do. Munita’s killers will have to face the fridge. On fucking Fridge Island. I’m about to pull the trigger when there is a sudden breeze in the otherwise still spring night. I swiftly look around but see nothing. Nothing coming, nothing going. There’s just this sudden breeze, blowing across the lunar lava field, pushing up the good moon door…
Amen.
I take a long good look at my former buddies, lying face down in the cleft, like two gentlemen overdressed for a mass grave. I then nod a few times before telling them goodbye with a short little Croatian word:
“Bok.”
I turn away and start limping towards the car. My groin cries, my heart shakes, but my soul says hallelujah.
CHAPTER 35
THE SERBIAN ENTRY
05.12.2007
Driving an Audi you think you should be happy. Success has rewarded you with soft leather seats and a pilot’s dashboard. Luckily it’s an automatic, since I’m losing all feeling in my left leg, as well as the lower half of my torso. My pants are soaked in blood, urine, or some other inner liquid that is about to fill my left shoe. I wonder if the bullet is still inside me somewhere. Feels like it’s resting on the bottom of my bladder, working as a plug in a bathtub.
When I had walked some sixty painful feet away from the two idiots, I turned around and looked them in the eye. They were peeking out of their lava-grave with dumbstruck eyes, looking very much like two sheep stuck in a hole. Why didn’t you kill us? I even sensed a touch of disappointment in their eyes. I turned my back on them and continue towards the car. I threw their guns in the trunk, put mine in my pocket, and managed to pack my pain into the driver’s seat.
I’m driving back the same way we came. I can already see the aluminum factory down by the coast. Some cars drive past it, on the Reykjavik-Keflavik highway. The song contest must be over.
Senka was Serbian, a way-too-beautiful Serbian, a fact I hid from my parents. Her real name was Dragana, the Serbian equivalent of Sickreader, so we decided on Senka, that indicated a Bosnian, even Muslim, background. We went out together for over a year. But then came war and she had to move away with her family.
After our capture of Knin, we were focusing on the region around it, and I was ordered to search some German-looking villas. One of them had a bombed-out roof and broken windows, with scorched walls. It was a huge house on three floors, and I took my rifle from room to room. They were all empty, but when I came down to the basement, I heard some noise. I rushed into a side room, screaming at the Serbian soldier hiding under an ugly old bed. After I’d spread some bullets around the room, he came crawling out. Except he was a she. It was Senka. Dragana Avramovič. She was still too beautiful. Even more so, wearing that awful uniform. Her hair had been cut even shorter, making her look even
more boyish. But the mole was there, and those tempting lips, eyes full of poetry…I wanted to stroke her hard cheek with my finger. We were both dumbstruck. I noticed an ugly scar across her neck.
“Senka?”
“Tomo?”
Before we knew it, we were kissing each other. Two soldiers in enemy uniforms. But then she suddenly stopped kissing and stepped back, holding a gun in her hand, a Serbian made Zastava, pointing it at me with serious eyes. She didn’t trust me? I tried to keep my cool, my AK-47 hanging at my back, strapped around my shoulder.
“You want to shoot me?” I asked her in a very calm way.
“I always wanted to.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re such an asshole.”
“I loved you.”
“Liar.”
“No. I really did.”
“I missed you,” she said with shaking lips.
“I missed you too.”
“You never wrote me back.”
“I did. You didn’t get it? I wrote you to Belgrade. To your aunt’s place.”
“Liar.”
“Senka…” I said with a smile. “You’re still crazy. I remember…You always said you wanted to kill me.”
“Yes. And now I can.”
I suddenly felt like we were back together, arguing in her stepfather’s funky basement in the heart of Split, and without thinking I reached out and touched her army gun with my index finger. I put the finger inside the barrel, as far as it could go, while telling her in the most relaxed voice that kissing was better than killing. I kept on playing with her gun, doing the international sign for “make love, not war” (making my finger enter and exit the barrel a couple of times) until her juicy lips gave birth to the smile I’d been missing for five long years.
And soon we were kissing again. Me and my crazy girl. Me and my Serbian girl.
In a short while we were on the bed, our thirsty hands trying to find their way through five lost years and heavy outfits. Bombs went off outside. The whole house shook like from a bulldozer and there was the sound of broken glass. It only added fuel to our fire. Nothing makes love more exciting than war. We were breathing heavily and I had my fingers on her firm army breasts when two of my fellow soldiers suddenly appeared inside the room, laughing and cheering me on. It had the opposite effect. They noticed and pushed me aside, putting their dirty hands over Senka’s mouth.
I had to watch them. I tried closing my eyes, but it was only worse. I had to fucking watch them. I didn’t want them to kill her so I had to wait until they were done.
You can have two MHMs.
For years I tried to contact her. Every single one of my months in New York, I googled her name and wrote to her family and friends without much success. One of her Split girlfriends wrote me from Italy, telling me she got a postcard from Senka some years back, from Belgrade. Other than that, nothing. Not even our great national cemetery files seemed to contain her name. Only her stepfather’s. He was buried in Novi Sad in 2002. She was probably living outside the reach of the Internet, in a mountain village or some faraway land. I hadn’t typed her name for over three months when this past winter I fucking ran into her.
In Reykjavik.
Of all the places in the world, I bumped into her in the Kringlan Mall, just outside the Penninn bookstore, next to the crazy souvenir shop. It was right before Christmas. The place was buzzing with overstressed Easelanders, and we literally bumped into each other. There was no denying it was her. I’d recognize that birthmark in any mass grave. It took her a few seconds to recognize me. People rushed by as we just stood there frozen, looking at each other without saying much. I’d gone to the mall in search of a Christmas present for Gunnhildur and found Senka. She hid her big scar with a scarf. Her cheeks were still kind of hard and her lips looked soft and juicy, but her beauty had faded. She’d also turned a bit fat. I could tell that she thought the same of me. We sat down for a coffee, and she added some tears to her latte.
“You should have killed me in that basement,” I said in our beloved language.
“No. Then your friends would have killed me.”
“They almost killed me for letting you go.”
“I guess we all died a little in that war. It’s like mother used to say. War kills everybody, including the ones who live.”
The two of them had been in Iceland for more than three years, coming up here after a decade of living all over the place, including a Red Cross refugee camp for over a year, where Senka’s stepfather, the poet, had passed away. Her sister had died in the war, along with her family. Finally they decided to join a group of thirty Serbs and start a new life in a new country. In the beginning of 2003, the group settled down in a small village in the west part of Iceland. There mother and daughter stayed for two years, in a brand-new apartment furnished by the locals.
“The people are really nice up there. But it was like living in a closet, with steep blue mountains all around us. During wintertime you don’t see the sun for almost three months.” Her mother stayed at home gazing out the window, at the ocean—“You could see all the way to Greenland”—while Senka worked in the fish factory. “The most boring job of my life.” But when the old one needed more nursing, they moved to the city down south. At first she worked as a cashier in one of the Bónus’s stores, but just recently she fulfilled her lifelong dream when she landed a job as a “stagehand” at the City Theatre.
How freaky was it all? Of all the cities in the world, we both ended up in this one.
Now the old woman had gone senile, Senka said. “She doesn’t talk about anything other than Greenland. That she has to go to Greenland.” Her mother found the best way to deal with her losses, through Alzheimer’s disease. Me and Senka found a different way.
She’s expecting my baby.
I know. My Torture School degree didn’t come with a minor in sainthood.
I make my way into Garðabær. The black Audi seems to find its way all by itself. Soon I have parked it outside the house of my Icelandic in-laws.
The bullet has made my bladder swell to the size of a Desert Eagle egg. It takes me about four minutes to exit the car. Why did I come here anyway? I should have gone straight to the morgue. That way I’d have saved a lot of people’s time and money. I just wanted to give Gunnhildur Senka’s number so they can have my babies meet.
The groin-pain grows with each step, as I make my way to the front door, leaving behind me a trail of blood. With the sound of silent church bells, I open the door and step over the golden threshold. I’m greeted with music, some flutes and stuff, coming from the living room. As I enter (in my shoes) I can see that they’re all still there, gathered around the loud TV: Goodmoondoor and Sickreader, Torture and Hanna, Ari and Gunnhildur, Olie and Harpa. They seem surprised to see me, staring at me with big eyes, small noses, and open mouths. Eight good snowballs facing a man on fire.
“I didn’t.” I manage to say before I collapse on the floor. “I didn’t kill them.”
They rush to my rescue. Olie’s small golden earring flicks above me like a halo thrown at me from a thousand feet. Torture gets all red in the face, turning his glasses into two half moons. Gunnhildur’s bright face hovers over me like a large sun over a troubled land. She says something, but I can’t hear it. And then more faces appear. Hanna, Harpa, Sickreader…And they all say something, but I can’t hear it for the room is filled with music. I don’t recognize the song, but I can make out some of the words.
“Al Bogu ne mogu…”
“What’s the song?” I manage to whisper.
“It’s the winning song. From Serbia. Serbia’s the winner,” Gunnhildur says.
“Oh? They won? Good for them.” I say.
Then I’m not sure what happens.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hallgrimur Helgason began as an artist, showing his work in galleries in New York and Paris. He made his debut as a novelist in 1990 and gained international attention with his third novel, 101 Re
ykjavik, with praise including an apt description by novelist/critic Tim Sandlin: “Imagine if Henry Miller had written Tropic of Cancer on crack instead of wine.” It was subsequently made into a film starring Victoria Abril. In 2001 he received the Icelandic Literary Prize for The Author of Iceland and has twice been nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize: first with 101 Reykjavik in 1999 and then Stormland in 2007. A film based on the latter was released in early 2011. The Hitman’s Guide to Housecleaning is his only novel written in English. The author’s own translation was published in Iceland in 2008 and became a bestseller in Germany in 2010. A father of three, Hallgrimur divides his time between Reykjavik and Hrísey Island.
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