by Ivan Srsen
In elementary school, with a name like that, he must have been sitting at the back of the class with his friends teasing him, maybe even the teacher. Maybe she was the one who gave it to him for his efforts in, say, math. The Horse would have to stay after class as punishment and write out countless fractions on the board, snorting with helplessness and pawing at the linoleum with his school slippers. That is what Pero the Horse would have been like in elementary school. As commander at the Donja Mahala camp, however, Pero the Horse is a much more fucked-up character.
I turn to the side and block his view with my elbow. With the damp bottom of my glass I press one more Olympic circle onto the headline of the newspaper in front of me, blurring the big print and bloated, pixelated profile into a leaden blob. The paper is from last week, but the news is fresh. Raped, murdered, buried, who knows in what order. The body, it says, was washed out of a shallow grave in the Sljeme hills by a freshet of rapidly melting snow. This is followed by a catalog of injuries and speculation about the tools used to inflict them. Pliers, handcuffs, a razor, a bottle, cables, a rifle butt. The identity of the woman is still unknown. There is a search on for the perpetrator, or there will be once all this is over.
* * *
Pero Vidović a.k.a. the Horse first sat with me and my mother at Jelačić Square in Zagreb in the midnineties; the war had only just ended for us down on the coast. As if we were celebrating, we sat on the sunny terrace of a café and ate cream pie in the shade of the tail of the Jelačić statue of a horse. We were laughing (there is at least one photograph that shows this), he had this accent that made everything sillier, even when it wasn’t funny at all. As we parted he pressed my hand firmly. He may have even given me money, I can’t remember anymore. Mother laughed and waved, she was in love, for real, for the first time ever—she had met Pero’s brother in the war. She was a doctor at the front, he a commander or a deputy commander—anyway, something important, high up, and powerful. There was love galore.
* * *
Through the misted-up front window of the bar, the awning is now barely visible. Dark blue, it merges with the gray air dense with droplets of water that seem, after days of anticipation, about to explode. And sure enough, like an orchestra of rocket launchers, the sky bellows, cracks open wide, and with the grunts of a sumo wrestler the rain sluices down onto the pavement, the ground, the treetops, and the broad Voljeni Vukovar awning. Leaves and plastic bottles swirl on all sides across the empty multilane road. There used to be summer storms like this in Zadar. Everything would cascade down onto the ground for fifteen minutes, all the demons would slosh down their buckets. That was the right moment to leap into the sea. Water is the best cure for water, and saltwater heals all wounds.
* * *
The second time we sat with Pero the Horse and drank and ate and laughed was in the late 1990s at the seaside. The Horse was spending the summer in Kožino near Zadar with his mistress. His wife was in Posavina, in Orašje, with the kids. The Horse and his mistress (whose name and nickname I cannot recall for the life of me, but I do know she was Miss Slavonia and Baranya and in the moonlight in the shadow cast by the Venetian blinds she looked like Kim Basinger in 9 1/2 Weeks) had rented an apartment in Kožina on the cheap from Mother’s friends Emila and Zlatko, a comfortably retired middle-aged couple. Otherwise frugal to a fault, they always welcomed Mother with unfeigned glee. Emila would bring out a platter with store-bought prosciutto and cheese, and Zlatko would produce his most recent blood and urine test results and the shivery printouts from his EKG. With passion they would pore over his physical and psychological symptoms, the side effects of the medications, prescribed and otherwise, and with horror and thrill would soak up Mother’s diagnoses and advice. So Mother’s friends could always summer there at a discount, even if Emila and Zlatko did not approve of their lifestyle.
That summer the sun was closer than ever to Kožina. My brother and I rowed out in an inflatable rubber boat, far from conversation and all shelter, on that vast sea mirror that infinitely multiplied the sun’s rays which bounced off us. Having long since lost touch with the sea, my skin blossomed instantly with blisters. Pero the Horse lounged in the shade in fatigues, unshaven and bare to the waist, smoked, and laughed. He said I should put yogurt on it, but Emila and Zlatko only had processed cheese which was already sweating profusely in the sun and was no longer good for anything. It was Sunday and the nearest grocery store was kilometers away, but Pero the Horse said, “I’ll go.” He came back an hour later with a liter of fruit juice, melting chocolate, and two cups of yogurt. We sat in the garden, on the carpet of dry pine needles smelling of healing herbs. He scooped the yogurt from the cups and carefully slathered it over my shoulders and back. Tenderly. He didn’t spill a drop. The fried skin soaked in the yogurt with the desperation of someone drowning and after a time my body finally relaxed. Maybe I would even sleep. While the sun smoldered over the horizon, the Horse once more laughed from the bottom of his throat, patted me on the thigh, and said, “There, there. There are plenty of worse things in life.”
After everyone had gone to bed, the Horse and Zlatko stayed out late that night, sitting on the veranda drinking wine. The Horse talked about fighting in Corsica, in Rwanda, in Ghana, in Chad. He showed Zlatko his medal for valor which he had earned before he was twenty. Zlatko, who knew more about disease than most doctors and more about the sea than most sailors, was speechless for the first time ever. He too had dreamed as a boy of the Legion, the cruel and exalted choreography of boot camp, the powerful, bare landscapes, the salty deserts, the boys from all sides of the world joined by a superhuman bond, a brotherhood that, born in jousting, hand-to-hand, sprouts like an oasis in an adrenaline downpour.
* * *
Beyond the steamed-up Voljeni Vukovar windowpane a fleet of stranded buses blinks in panic. The waitress buzzes once more between me and him, her hair pulled back, her face taut from exhaustion. Just as I am about to order another round I see the Horse get up and come over to pay. I watch him live and near for the first time in fifteen years. The time has added nothing to him except a few gray hairs and wrinkles and some new scars. I glance back at the newspaper, but he is standing uncomfortably close and this time he zooms in on my face. I do not look back at him, but I also do not move, as I do not care. He is some ten years older than me, but the years have not pampered me and this difference, which used to be obvious, is no longer visible.
“Have we met before?” he asks.
I shake my head.
He doesn’t believe me but he can’t remember where he knows me from, and clearly he doesn’t much care. He shrugs ever so slightly and gives up. I am no threat. He is taller than me by at least a head, and broader. Now when he stands up straight right next to me I see his fatigues are hanging at a slant. As if something is dragging them down, as if his pelvis bone healed crooked. As if his pocket is full of rocks, or iron. He pays the waitress for the drinks and pinches her behind, absently, out of habit. She doesn’t even seem to notice. The sky is still exploding outside, the rain continues to pound oxen-like into the ground, foaming at the storm drains. Clouds heavy as a mound of peed-on pillows smother the light. There is some hopeless justice, I think, in the fact that the darkness has finally spread over the entire city (even the luxury residences up in the Sljeme hills, the glassed-in embassies with pools, the painters’ studios uptown), and not just over this out-of-tune neighborhood, cut off from the world by an arc of tram tracks.
Idly, as if in a slow-motion film sequence, the Horse moves toward the door. I pull the largest bill out of my pocket and lay it on the counter, not waiting for my change. It’s time.
* * *
Pero the Horse surfaced in my life for the third time while we were smashing glasses, breaking dishes, and toasting at my brother’s wedding. In an interlude between the drinking and the sobering up, a local paper made its way into my hands and in it, an item about an armed robbery at the home of Emila and Zlato Š. in Kožina. Two masked robber
s tied up the elderly couple, silenced them by taping their mouths shut, and then beat them unconscious. They stole some gold jewelry and a few thousand kuna in cash. They were captured on film by a surveillance camera at a nearby gas station where they stopped after the robbery to fill up. The judge said the savagery and apathy during the commission of the crime were aggravating factors for the perpetrators, with the mitigating factor that the older of the two, Marco Vincetić, confessed to the crime, had no previous convictions, and had fought in the Homeland War.
“It was strange to see Marco Vincetić (36) from Orašje in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” wrote the Slobodna Dalmacija reporter, “in the courtroom as a defendant. He had spent his life, after all, fighting crime. He was in the Foreign Legion, fought in Corsica, Rwanda, Ghana, and Chad, where he was decorated for valor. During the Homeland War he was deputy chief of the Central Bosnian military police, and, as far as the records show, has no previous convictions.”
Pero the Horse was not partial to the written word, but during his rare free time in Corsica he had developed a taste for adventure novels, using the French he had mastered over three years. In them, poor but noble young men with exotic names defied destiny and a superior enemy with their sheer tenacity and fighting spirit (and plenty of gall), finally conquering the riches of the world and the heart of the woman they most desired. The Horse figured out in Corsica that “Marco” or “Victor” would have a far better chance with the French and Italian ladies, and the same, he found, applied to the border police.
With his weak heart, Zlatko nearly died during the armed robbery. Emila spent three months in a psychiatric ward. Mother testified in court about Marco Vincetić’s otherwise sterling character, and after the wedding she wrapped the shattered glass and gnawed bones in that issue of Slobodna Dalmacija.
* * *
Pero the Horse pulls the door open, and as he goes out the filthy torrent gushes into the place, lapping at his boots. He shakes them and steps out onto the wet square of green indoor-outdoor carpeting in front of the café. I catch the door and lurch through, before it closes again. I stand under the awning, a few steps from him. The only car in the parking lot is a big black Audi. A flash of orange headlights and the click of unlocking. It’s his. Again he eyes me, but less curious. This time he only asks if I need a ride. I nod. We run through the downpour to the car; I open the door and slip into the passenger seat. The leather upholstery squeals as I sit. He starts the motor, and I point in the direction of Maksimir while fastening my seat belt. The Horse ignores his and the beeping and the red light on the dash. Because of the beeping, the gale-force wind, and the thick stream of rain on the windshield, I hear the question only when he has asked it a third time.
“Got anyone?”
I know he is no poet or all that metaphysical and that Pero the Horse wants to know whether I am fucking anyone, but his question gets me thinking.
After a moment of silence I admit to him that, no, I do not. That I’ve got absolutely no one left. The Horse grins, turns off the main street, drives away along a narrow, washed-out road, down to the edge of a wooded area. The car bounces, the tires spray and slip. He finally parks in the mud somewhere, while all around us branches are whipping and treetops are swaying. He rests his hand on my shoulder in consolation. My skin is burning from summer and lack of sleep, his palm is soft and cool. It smells of yogurt. He drops his hand to my thigh. He runs his palm over my pants and murmurs compliments. They sound unnatural, almost like curses. He leans over to me, takes me by the head, and sticks his tongue into my mouth.
When Pero Vidović and his fellow fighter Mato broke into the house of a local teacher in Orašje in May 1992, the Horse showed her his revolver, stabbed his knife into the table, and ordered her to take off her clothes. When she refused, she got a few slaps and they did the job themselves. They spent the whole night taking it out on her. They raped her, beat her, forced her to wash herself, and then did it all again. Yanking a whole lock of hair from her scalp, the Horse demanded that she tell him how exciting this was for her.
I lift his T-shirt and unbuckle his belt. I pull his pants down his thighs, past his knees. He takes my head and pushes it toward his crotch. He grabs me by the hair and steers me firmly toward his prick. I run my hands down his naked thighs and finally I feel it—hard. Rigid and cold. Pero the Horse shuts his eyes, his mouth twisted in a grimace of pleasure and scorn, the rain splattering the hood of the car, and the whole living world at the nearby zoo bellowing and howling. The Horse does not see me pull it out of his pants. He does not hear when I cock it. He still notices nothing when I rest the barrel on his right knee. But when I pull the trigger and his kneecap shatters, Pero the Horse snorts and writhes. And screams and screams and screams.
At the camp in Donja Mahala people knew what was what. Pero Vidović the Horse, the camp commander, was very experienced by the age of twenty-five; he had learned from the finest world warriors, he had saved whole companies of lives in Africa and many times they saved his. He learned how to shove a pipe down someone’s throat and run the water through him for hours while still keeping him alive. He knew tricks with a cassette-player power cord that would stop you cold; he could tie a person up using hardly more than three feet of cable and then beat him to death with the end. In Donja Mahala, in Mirza’s shed, he joined what should not be joined—when he knocked a guy to the ground with a water bottle and it occurred to him, as the man lay there, that he could staple the man’s fingers to his ears. While the man’s blood poured into his eyes and onto the ground, he pleaded with the Horse to kill him, and the Horse flogged him with his belt and stamped on him with his new boots.
Barefoot, only in his underwear, his knee smashed, Pero the Horse staggers through the mud and howls. I am several steps behind, cocking the revolver and driving him along with it toward the woods. He stumbles, I am walking on water. If you don’t sleep, your reflexes fail when you drive and you often slam on the brakes too late, but all your chakras are blooming. And you see everything that was, is, and always will be. When you don’t sleep, only then are you really awake. The rain drums on my temples and pours into my eyes, but it doesn’t bother me. The water is clear and bright like the sea at Zadar during those few years after the war before the tourists discovered it again. Then we went diving more, and deeper than ever before, with no masks or snorkels, we were fish for those few years of freedom.
Pero the Horse trips and falls and gets up and walks through puddles, over rises and soggy leaves. He falls into the mud and leaves pools of blood behind him which I step around. He comes to the edge of a bog. Because of his leg he can’t cross it. His boxers are torn, bloody, and mud-streaked. His face is unnaturally pale, his throat hoarse from screaming. He tries for a foothold for his good leg, but he slips on the edge and sinks into the muck up to his knee. Below are roots and branches, inextricable forest cables. The water is rising, and where the bog is now there will soon be a lake. I look up at the deranged sky and ask myself again, just in case, whether I’ve got anyone.
I take the stapler out of my pocket.
With my hand in my pocket pressing against the revolver, I walk all night to the hotel. Along the empty road, for kilometers, there are no vehicles. The houses cast light seldom and shakily, as if expiring. The rain does not let up even for a second, a watery curtain after the last act of the play. I enter the hotel quietly, as if anyone cares. I unlock the small room behind the front desk, push the chair over by the safe, place myself squarely in the frame. I shift the revolver from hand to hand. It fits me like a glove. How did that slogan go? Maybe she’s born with it.
Through the little window the red neon letters blink: HEL.
It All Happened So Fast
by ROBERT PERISIC
Črnomerec
Translated by Stephen M. Dickey
I tossed my bags into the room. Sat down on the bed, lit a cigarette. Surprisingly, it hadn’t changed at all in the last two and a half months.
I loved that
room in a way, probably because of the price, though objectively speaking it was a tight little room on the ground floor that had once been a kitchen. A faucet came out of the wall above the bed. Above the faucet there was a wall cabinet. I slept where the sink used to be. I couldn’t spend much time there without becoming antsy or claustrophobic.
I went up to the third floor of the building, but no one was there. Not everyone had left, had they?
After thinking and listening for a bit I went off toward Črnomerec. To Blanka and her roommates; there was always something going on there.
As I crossed the tracks by the Pliva pharmaceutical factory, the siren sounded.
When I finally made it to Blanka’s, all the blinds were down. I knocked. Tapped on the dusty window. Nothing.
There was nothing to do but go down Ilica Street to the center. Darko was now living near Britanski Square—I would go there. Everyone else was going in the opposite direction—I didn’t know why.
On my left was the Yugoslav National Army barracks. It seemed empty. No sentries were visible. Nevertheless I crossed over to the other side of the street.
I walked and cast glances at the barracks: for a moment I caught sight of a muzzle poking out, reflecting the sunlight. I thought about going into a café—there was the Ace Café-Bar in the recessed ground floor of the long building, in the shadows behind columns of concrete that supported balconies above. As I walked over to go inside, I saw that behind each column there was a member of the National Guard hiding with a Kalashnikov.
Aha, I was walking along the front line.
“Get out of here!” one of the guardsmen bellowed.
I kept going. To the left, the barracks; to the right, the guardsmen, behind the columns, a long, level path. I didn’t think of running and disturbing the stillness. You could hear birds chirping in the line of trees in the barracks. I kept walking as if I hadn’t seen the guardsmen. They’re only keeping one another in check, I told myself.