She’d tell that to everyone, since we were surrounded from all sides, and we wanted to escape the siege, that is, to travel abroad. “Glad tidings from afar,” that would usually mean a girlfriend who happened to be outside the noose when the siege started, or relatives who lived in Germany and sent money.
I’ve laid down a hierarchy of things:
1 war
2 alcohol
3 poetry
4 love
5 war again
Favourite ditty: Bed, you wonderful device, sleeping in you feels so nice.
Stupidest quote: War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it, Erasmus of Rotterdam.
Favourite colour: Blue, all shades of.
Favourite book: Plexus by Henry Miller.
Favourite beverage: Home-distilled rakia.
Favourite weapon: Hungarian Kalashnikov, ser. no. SV3059.
Favourite dish: A bottle of rakia and a packet of fags.
Favourite quote: To become immortal, and then die, Jean-Pierre Melville.
Unfulfilled wish: For shrapnel to scar my face, so I look like a badass when I walk into a bar.
Then I fell asleep under the muddy quilt.
2.
‘Fiver says Steelio will make it across the field.’
‘Does it count if ’e’s wounded, or does ’e ’ave to be unscathed?’
‘As long as ’e makes it to that white ’ouse.’
Steelio, thus nicknamed on account of his studded heavy metal leather bracelet, is lying behind an openwork concrete fence. He’s covered his head with his hands. Fine concrete dust is settling on his hair. He’s made it exactly halfway to cover. Bullets from an M-84 machinegun hit the concrete posts, whizz through the gaps, stick into the ground. Steely gets up, takes a running start and is brought down by a burst. The gamblers are sitting underneath a quince tree deep in the lee of a four-storey house.
‘Steely, you alive?’
‘Alive my arse, ’e’s not movin’, ’e’s not even groanin’.’
‘Well it’s ’is own bloody fault, nobody made ’im dash for it in daylight, coulda waited for nightfall,’ the third observer gets a word in.
Steelio gets up again, moves his stumpy legs with all his might. It looks like he’s running on the spot, but then he finally takes off from his starting position. His mullet wafts in the wind. The M-84 is doing its thing, but Steelio finishes like Ben Johnson.
‘Go on, give us the fiver.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘Well, did ’e make it or what?’
‘’E did, yeah.’
‘Fair and square?’
‘Fair and square, yeah.’
‘Absolutely romantic?’
‘Absolutely romantic.’
Steelio, leaning on the cold wall of the house, takes broken cigarettes out of his pocket. With his shaky fingers he puts half a cigarette in his mouth and lights up. Fixes his hair. Flicks dust and soil off his fatigues. Blood returns to his face. Night falls like a trump card.
3.
Zgemba is flicking bits of human brain off the filo pie with his fingernail. He’s tearing pieces off with his right hand, dipping them into salt and putting them in his mouth. With his left he’s noshing on cottage cheese, from a white plastic bag splattered with a mixture of blood and brains. His mug is sooty from cartridge gas. In his lap he has a 7.62 mm light machinegun. Five minutes ago this trench was occupied by the autonomist rebels. A still warm corpse is hanging over the breastwork. A burst blew half of his skull off. I turn him on his back. From the inside pocket of his army green jacket I take out his wallet. I look at a passport-size photograph of him. He had a receding hairline. Large, melancholy eyes. With the sharp edge of the photograph I floss out bits of apple from between my teeth.
* * *
In the middle of the operation Deba lit a fire behind one corner of a house to dry his socks. He had left his rifle leaning against the wall at the other end of the house. The autonomists counterattacked. They caught Deba alive and unarmed. Tied his hands behind his back with steel wire and shot him behind the shed.
* * *
That evening, after we were relieved, we went to a kafana. We drank at the expense of the Fifth Corps, meaning for nothing. Zgemba chucked blue diazepams into a pitcher of rakia. We lapped it up from large tumblers. The landlord brought meze – pastirma and cheese – on the house. He had a good-natured mug. He seemed a seasoned host and caterer. The waitress, a Romanian, complained to him that we were drinking for nothing. He reassured her. Her teeth protruded from under her lips, with large spaces in between like on a rake. She said she used to date a bloke from our brigade, whom they used to call Pekar. After a few litres of rakia we started trashing the place. We shot the mirror and the shelves lined with bottles above the bar. Muffled by the noise, a turbo folk number was cheeping from the stereo. I tried to hit a fly swatter that was hanging from a nail in the wainscoting. In the beer garden we scattered the plastic chairs and tables. We butt-stroked a few locals who spoke up against our actions. We disarmed three policemen, lined them up in front of a hairdressing salon. The landlord drove us in his Lada to the schoolhouse where we were stationed, ten kilometres from the kafana. It started pouring outside. The wipers were sliding across the windscreen like pressure gauge pointers. Nothing else of note happened that evening.
From the Haiku Diary
I got drunk and fell asleep on the wooden stall where Jagoda displayed her groceries, in front of the Austro-Hungarian residential building in which I lived.
I was wearing light shorts and a T-shirt.
Mother saw me from the toilet window.
They brought me in holding me by the arms.
Washed my face over the tub.
I felt like a foreign object within a foreign object.
I looked like a weary robot.
* * *
My hands were shaking as I drank coffee.
Opposite the house.
At pizzeria Amfora.
It was completely normal that my hands were shaking.
Common alcohol tremors.
The coffee slid down my throat.
Rinsed the smell of last night’s beer and cognac.
It was day six of the war.
For the first time in my life I was a refugee.
* * *
In the toilet of the Café West I took off my Levi’s and sold them to the owner for a hundred million dinars.
The one million note had Nikola Tesla on it.
The five hundred thousand one had Josip Broz Tito.
Beer soon ran out.
One beer cost half a million.
We drank whisky.
The barman poured it from a five-litre bottle.
We didn’t notice when night fell.
Outside, cold water was pouring from a crude drinking fountain.
Soaking the hot asphalt.
The smell of linden blossom.
Honey