we shout.
Metres seem like kilometres in a marathon race.
Time stretches like the rubber strips on a catapult.
Tracers fly every which way.
Enemy fire slows us down.
We just lie on the ground, without any cover.
That’s it. Golo brdo. A dying range.
Hit the deck, graze the grass.
‘Baldie, me gun’s jammed, come over ’ere!’ yells Faćo.
Baldie kicks his gun clear. Faćo puts the rifle’s wooden stock in front of his face to shield his forehead.
‘Fuckin’ ’ell, it’s a tough one!’ I hear Hafura.
‘Tits up, this. Pull back!’ bellows Baldie.
No time to talk. We’re rolling downhill towards our line. We’re shielded from the bullets as we’re just below the shoulder of the hill. Hand grenades explode in the place we were a second ago. The blasts ring out like in a well. We reach the forest. None killed, none wounded. The recruit hangs his head, stares at the ground. His pale complexion lends him the appearance of a zombie. His aquiline nose, hanging from his face like an upside down butcher’s hook, turns him into a walking caricature. He bends over at the waist as he walks, as if to measure his insecurity with strides. To have a raw recruit in your unit is to be blighted by bad luck. It’s incredible how death sticks to them. At times I was convinced I could make out the sigil of doom on their faces.
‘All the king’s ’orses couldn’t take this fuckin’ ’ill,’ Hafura says.
‘Yep, it’s a tough one, fuck.’
‘Night raids are a lottery,’ Merva makes himself heard.
‘Everything’s a lottery: breakin’ the lines, holdin’ the lines, goin’ about in mufti on leave, you can catch death wherever.’
‘Nasty fuckin’ business, this,’ Baldie speaks up.
‘To top it off, me gun keeps jamming’, complains Faćo.
Baldie winks and smiles. We descend to the asphalt road.
‘Right lads, see ya, then,’ the guard from the dugout far left takes his leave of us.
We move in a group. We footslog like tin robots. We’re going back two hundred metres towards our rear. When we get there, the house we’re quartered in emerges from the murk. Merva and I take first watch. The others go to bed. We’re standing in front of the door looking at the green in front of the house. To our right gapes a large hollow. Our positions are some half a kilometre up the mountain. For all intents and purposes, we’re a picket. The dark thickens, like when a train suddenly flies into a tunnel.
‘Tomorrow, I mean in the mornin’, we’ll be attackin’ again, it seems.’
‘Gettin’ fucked is what we’ll be doin’!’
‘They’ve dug in down to the centre of the Earth, can’t scratch ’em,’ Merva moans to himself.
In the distance, a drunk is shooting tracers into the sky. I piss on the corner of the house. Live to fight another day. Me wanger.
2.
Same thing again. Only this time we’re attacking by day. What was the sky like? Was it sunny? I don’t remember. The uniform has a uniform unisex smell. The grass is wet and grey-green like the walls of a public lavatory. It is perfectly quiet those few minutes before the attack. The sounds of nature, too, die down. Or the brain doesn’t register them, focused as it is on one thing only: staying alive.
My body is like a sweaty clenched fist. The firing of the Zolja. Some shooting and shouting of Takbirs. We’ve cracked their line with unexpected ease. Hopped into their empty trenches. A twitch crumples up my face. Expanding bullets are popping like popcorn. Redžo Begić is kneeling on my right. Stalks of straw jut out from under an army blanket. We rummage through some army bags we find there. The owner of the one I’ve got is called Duško Banjac. His name is written in pencil on a piece of paper from a graph pad. We stuff cardboard packets of ammo into our pockets. A jet of thick blood spurts from Redžo’s mouth. He gurgles. His face assumes the hue of lye. At first I thought the bullet had gone through his mouth. We get him out of the trench and further, some ten metres below it, to cover. His death took only a few seconds. We didn’t even have time to bandage him. The bullet went through his chest from above. Ripped up his heart. We covered him with a shelter-half – when you see a dead man you’re reminded of your own mortality.
The recruit retches and chucks up slimy morsels of undigested food. We leave him with the casualty to wait for casevac to come from the rear and pick up the body. Fighters from the adjacent brigade have broken enemy lines on the right flank and burst into some houses level with Golo brdo. We’re making our way through short stalks of un-harvested maize. A shell lands between Hafura and Husin. Both go airborne, together with mown off maize stalks. Husin is wounded in the left shin, a wound worth three or four months of leave. Hafura is blast-injured. Baldie radios in that we have two wounded and one dead.
There is no worse feeling than having to press on with the operation after a situation like this. Sickness and fear reach superhuman proportions.
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
