We come across a body folded over the breastwork like a sack of flour. He’s wearing former Yugoslav People’s Army olive green coveralls. He is 30–35, has a long blond moustache and a new battle harness, which now has no bearing on his appearance. Blood is trickling down from his nostrils, as if he were a minor character killed in the first minutes of a cheap karate film. His wide open eyes stare at the rutted ground.
Thirty metres further on, we discover another corpse. This one is barely 19. He’s lying on his back. His underpants are around his knees. With dignity or without, the man is dead. No one flies off into the sky. The earth attracts bodies and lead.
* * *
An hour later, Pađen and I are prone behind a long berm. We’re controlling a hundred-metre stretch of the meadow. Shells stick into the soil in front of and behind us. I feel one is about to splash onto my back any moment now. Their artillery covers every inch of the ground. I wish I were a mole now. Chickenly panic creeps into me. I wish I could slough off my body, become ethereal. Rid myself of flesh, blood and reason. Become a thin translucent zero.
In fear dwelleth God.
I don’t pray to him, as the war has rendered his existence pointless. He is now most certainly in another galaxy. Snivelling in safety and solitude. Missing not a hair off his head. He’s stacked himself up a breastwork of metal planets. Repeating his creation experiment, because solitude is nasty and he wants to socialise. He needs some new creation: Manotaurs. He’s sick of humans. He has failed. Appalled, he has given up on the Earthlings. Shabby artist, that lad. Still, he did invent evil. If he ever existed.
Pieces of shrapnel, like Chinese stars, whizz all around us. If I saw myself in the mirror now, the shock would kill me. I change cover every now and then. I hop into a small depression, I get scratched in the wild brambles. Shells are landing there, too. Pađen is calm. He’s lying on his stomach, observing. From the rucksack on his back juts out the sword of a chainsaw. Below it, he tied a ghetto blaster to the rucksack straps.
‘’As that piece of rubbish got any batteries?’
‘I wouldn’t be luggin’ it to battle if it didn’t, would I now?’
‘Find us some music, so we don’t ’ear when a shell drops on us.’
Pađen turns the radio on. He twists the plastic knob. Goes through stations playing classical music: Bach, Beethoven, Rachmaninov. Piano, organ, violins, bassoons and clarinets drive me schizo. Horror has an agent in every cell of my body.
‘Fuck off with that jangle!’ I shout to Pađen.
The plastic dial moves on. Bowie’s Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide brings me to tears. I can see before my eyes a massive bar of solid wood. And a pint of foamy beer. A fluorescent lamp swaying above the bar, creating a sense of hovering. Everything is slowed down. Her greenish eyes sparkle, her lips swell pinkly before the kiss. I look at her face as we’re kissing. It becomes deformed with beauty. Give me your hand…, Bowie sings. The flashback to peacetime is cut short like when the film snaps in the middle of the screening. The dial travels on. The search for salvation is a soap bubble. Radio Korenica is playing a song with the following lyrics:
Dvor na Uni, Dvor na Uni, quaint little church upon a hill
That’s the place where, that’s the place where Serbs are breeding still…
The song is ideal for both laughter and tears. But shells are still dropping, stretching the mind. Now and again we are reduced to a state of feeble-mindedness. The belts connecting the drive wheels in our heads keep falling off. The clatter of the tanks a kilometre ahead is the most unnerving sound on earth. It’ll be the same thing again: squeeze your anus tight, shrink your brain to the size of a marble. We are lovely, innocent vowels spat out from the Devil’s mouth. Carry out the orders with the precision of a guided rocket. Act by inertia like a stray bullet. Be part of a stained glass window where the dominant colour is that of human mince. Hail to the homeland! Eyes right! The thud of the marching step. Ironed flags fluttering. Polished pips on the epaulettes gleaming. Hearts tick-tocking like clockworks.
‘Something’s well dodgy. They should’ve relieved us yonks
ago. Maybe they’ve pulled back and just left us ’ere?’ Pađen thinks out loud.
‘I suggest we slowly slope off. No point anyway…’
‘Fuck the point! And fuck whoever invented it.’
‘So, where do we go now?’
‘No idea.’
‘Crawl up our mums’ fannies.’
‘Best place to be.’
‘What if they’ve counterattacked?’
‘Then we’re fucked.’
* * *
Baldie takes down the muster roll. Troop strength: nine men plus pen-pusher. Absent: one at barracks (pen-pusher). Wounded: two fighters. Dead: one. On med leave: one in psych ward (recruit). At muster: five fighters.
We drink rakia and smoke in silence. Outside, fog captures acres of territory. Statistics reigns supreme. With great confidence it handles surplus and shortage. It measures morale, weighs men like heads of cattle. Standard deviation, plus/minus infinity.
Now We Get a-Rude and a-Reckless
1.
We’re digging up an Autonomist. Our razor-sharp shovels slice through the sloshy snow and stick into the makeshift mound. The soil is sodden sludge. The sound of metal stabbing the loamy clay breaks the winter silence. Around us, stunted spruces, dishevelled like Gremlins. They are slowly stripping off their overwhites as the snow thaws and falls to the ground with a thud. A southerly blows, but it’s still cold. The hands dry and crack, the fingers tingle. A magpie, in his black and white kit, zig-zags overhead. We lean onto the shovels to get the unpleasant business over with. Half of the mound is gone, and the rest looks like a scab torn up by a surgeon’s tweezers. Now and again, Beardo looks skywards, gets momentarily lost in thought, and then continues to dig. As if to apologise to the heavens for what he’s doing.
‘It’s all the same to ’im now, nothin’ bothers him anymore,’ mumbles Beardo.
‘’E’s not even a ’uman bein’ anymore. Just a corpse,’ I add. ‘Just some body, arms, legs, neutralised in accordance with the SOPs.’
The SOPs contain an explanation for everything under the sun in both war and peacetime. The definitions are clear, concise and precise, as if written by mediaeval scribes destitute of all inspiration. Ready! Aim! Fire! Eliminate enemy personnel with three short bursts. Reload! Discharge! Heel! Fetch! Dive to the right! The assault rifle is effective up to 400 metres, in case of co-ordinated fire by two or more firers up to 800… The SOPs are the finest encyclopaedia of the insanity of pedantry, SCH in tactical boots.
‘Ain’t easy bein’ alive, going about in the world in this body,’ laments Beardo.
A week ago, last time we were on duty, we buried the corpse where it lay. A bullet had ripped up the tendons on his right wrist. They poked out like severed power cords. Another bullet, the one which killed him, hit him below the left breast, near the heart. The blood was partially encrusted there, gelatinous. Above the entry wound, on his camo vest, hung a hunter’s pin badge, silver-coloured, slightly rusty. On the pin were two doubles, a hunter’s hat and an oak twig.
He lay on his back when we found him. Birds had eaten his eyes and the soft parts of his nose and ears. His eyelashes looked monstrous, trimming two empty eye sockets like sunflower petals bordering the pistil. His neck, swollen with decay, was locked by the collar of a camo shirt. I took the vest off him, in spite of the soldiers’ superstition that says never to take anything off the dead. He was thickset, with short, Teutonic-blond hair. About twenty-two. A sturdy village lad. The cold had conserved him, stopped further decomposition. Soon he was in his underwear and boots. After that we buried him. Nothing