“I’ve come to fetch my homework book,” he said with lowered eyes.
“Is that blood on your clothes?” asked Dog Tattoo.
Milo nodded.
“Whose blood is it?”
Milo shrugged. “Bomb.”
“Where?”
“Omladinska.”
Dog Tattoo seemed satisfied. He would know. Omladinska was five hundred metres from the BiH presidency, a target for the 122mm howitzers from the hills of Mojmilo and Vrace. If people still chose to live in apartment buildings in that vicinity, it was their own fault. The howitzers weren’t accurate and the Serbian gunners didn’t care about collateral damage.
Milo saw the stains and splatters in the dust on their shabby boots and on their trouser legs. They had blood on their clothes too, he noticed. They could be BiH renegades, either Croats or Bosniaks. His father had tried to explain to him the vague dividing line between friend and foe, the complex racial politics, the concept of ethnic cleansing. The two men could also be Bosnian Serbs who had come in search of new targets and were on their way back to their field guns in the mountains. A few nights ago, before he had decided to cross the Vrbanja bridge with a volume of poetry, intent upon pleading the cause of the National Library, his father had told him that searching for an answer to the events in Sarajevo was like searching for a face in a smoke-filled mirror.
“Where’s your father?” asked Rotten Teeth.
“Omladinska.”
“Where the bomb was?”
Milo nodded without looking up.
“Where does your father work?” asked Dog Tattoo.
“Oslobodjenje,” Milo lied.
“The newspaper building?”
Milo nodded again. The Oslobodjenje building was on the west side of the city, far away from here.
“Are you lying?” asked Rotten Teeth.
“Leave him, Zoran,” said Dog Tattoo. “He looks stupid – the bombs must have fried his brains.”
When they had gone, Milo dragged himself up the stairs. At the door he hesitated, took a deep breath and steeled himself to tell his mother about the events on the bridge. Hopefully Kaya would be asleep.
His hand reached for the door but remained hovering in the air when he saw the stains on the doorknob in the dimly lit corridor. His brain reluctant to register that he was looking at congealed blood.
He pushed open the door. His mother did not come to welcome him, neither did Kaya. The apartment was quiet. In the dark, a strange smell lay over the familiar, comforting scents of his home, like an invisible layer of fog. Beneath it he sensed an amorphous harbinger of doom.
“Mama!” he called into the silence.
The dark apartment … His mother would have lit a lamp if there was no electricity. She and Kayla wouldn’t have sat waiting in the dark. Had there been a power cut? No, there’d been a light in the foyer where the two men had questioned him.
He felt for the switch. “Mama! Kaya! Where are you?”
The apartment had two bedrooms, one for his parents and one where his grandparents used to sleep. The three children had slept on the old carpet in the lounge. At night they’d rolled out their bedding and in the morning rolled it up again. After first Grandpa Juro and later Grandma Brana had died, he, Jasmina and Kaya had moved into the second bedroom. After Jasmina had been killed by a bomb splinter, he and Kaya had slept in the second bedroom, often in the same bed.
He found them on his parents’ bed. He stood in the doorway. For a moment his brain refused to make sense of what his eyes were seeing. He had no idea who the naked woman on the bed was. She was frail, her legs and arms like sticks, each rib clearly visible under the milky white skin. Her eyes were open, staring at the ceiling. Bloody mucus had trickled from her nose and the corner of her mouth, down her chin.
No, Milo thought, thank goodness it wasn’t his mother. His mother wasn’t so skinny, his mother spoke to him and comforted him, and when she hugged him, her body felt warm and comfy.
His gaze shifted to the little girl next to the woman. She, too, looked pale and fragile. He found it unbearably sad, this forgotten doll without clothes. Her blonde hair was tousled and on her cheek was a reddish brown smear.
Milo put his back against the wall and sank down on his haunches, then sat down on the floor. From there he saw only the woman’s face in profile, and her hair that was spread over the pillow under her head. Her arm had fallen from the bed and dangled to the floor. He stared at her profile, then up at the ceiling to see what mesmerised her so.
He looked back at the figure on the bed and his eyes followed the arm to the floor. In her hand was the Gospa string, rosary of peace. Her fingers were twined through the beads, the silver Jesus crucifix just touching the floor.
Milo leant back against the wall. Soundlessly began to shake. On hands and knees he crawled to the bed and reached for her hand. Her skin was warm to his touch.
Her eyes open, but she did not speak.
“Mama,” said Milo.
Then he understood. It didn’t strike him like a blow to the chest. Instead, it was as if layers were being peeled away, as his mother used to peel onions, until every layer had been stripped and the full horror of the day lay exposed.
He sat down next to the bed and felt a new sensation. Not sorrow: he had depleted his capacity for sorrow on the long walk from the bridge, his father on the back of his water cart. This new sensation was a dense black shadow descending. It encompassed all the hatred and helplessness he’d felt on the bridge but had been unable to identify.
He removed the rosary from between his mother’s fingers and clasped it in his hand.
Suddenly there was a sound. He raised his head and heard it again: a groan. His mother lay motionless, unblinking.
Then he heard the softest gasp.
Milo jumped up, saw the movement on the bed beside his mother, the lips stirring, the narrow chest rising and falling.
“Kaya!”
He rushed around the bed, pulled the sheet over their naked bodies, clutched his sister’s hand, called through the apartment, his shouts ringing out, through the front door, through the thin walls: “Help! Help!”
They came. Everyone knew the librarian and his family. Someone was dispatched to call Dr Buzuk, while willing female hands tended to the bodies on the bed.
“Poor Milka,” said a neighbour.
“Put a blanket over Kaya and keep her warm,” said another.
“Where’s Tomislav?” asked a third.
“And Milo?
